126 
WILD NORWAY. 
evening feed with a few half-pound trout, and after¬ 
wards (being rather in arrears with sleep) we coiled 
ourselves up on the beams of a ruined hay-shed, which, 
at any rate, afforded protection from the rain, and slept 
for a couple of hours, with an orchestra of the big 
divers, whose weird laughter is about as unearthly as 
any bird-note I know, ringing in our ears. 
In hopes of being able to find a boat on the larger 
Solaas-vand, we set out thither across a wild tract of 
birch-forest and brushwood, much intercepted with 
abrupt ravines and gullies, two or three hundred feet 
deep, and studded with lakes, large and small, but 
all abounding in trout. In one quite small pool we 
observed a fine fish, apparently of 3 or 4 lbs., repeatedly 
throwing himself out of water; but though we waited 
and set up a rod, neither fly nor worm would coax him. 
Hard by, we sprang a dunlin from her nest of four 
eggs, hard-sat. The variety of plant-life on the fjelds 
is striking, even though, as in my case, botany is a 
sealed book. There was the pink marsh-andromeda, 
drossera, and equiseti, of various kinds ; butterwort,. 
bog-asphodel, and cotton-grass, with purple and pink 
saxifrages, variegated mosses, lycopodium and trailing 
shrubs in infinite variety—their recumbent growth 
eloquent of the severities of winter in these uplands. 
Here and there the growing shoots of dwarf-birch 
tunnelled through superincumbent snow, or forced a 
way with the black oozy water from beneath its margin. 
In more sheltered spots grew purple vetches, mouse-ear 
forget-me-nots, harebells, and the pretty Cornus suecica . 
The cloudberry (moltebser) was still in bloom, and at 
midnight I noticed that the windflowers had all gone 
