TROUTING FOR TOURISTS. 
153 
I watched him, our friend killed a dozen, in poor con¬ 
dition it is true, yet several exceeded a pound. Gladly 
for a few coppers he half filled my creel, for fare was 
scant, and sizable trout a welcome haul. Meat, in 
those parts, is unknown, and eggs, fladbrod and blae¬ 
berry jam, make but a poor feed after a long day on 
fell or riverside. 
The incident conveyed a lesson. Reflection brought 
the conviction that success in this northern land is a 
question of time as well as of place. Rivers in Norway 
have their own special conditions, and their season, 
dependent in each case on the nature of the watershed, 
but always far later than at home. Here, in a region 
surrounded by high snow-fields and ice-brses, we were 
still much too early. It was the second week in June. 
Two months before we had enjoyed abundant sport on 
our Border streams at home, yet here the fly was still 
useless and the lowly worm (in big waters) I abjure. 
That the trout were there, abundant and heavy, we 
had had ocular evidence ; and returning five weeks later 
(in July), we enjoyed on those dark eddies and erst 
recusant streams one of the finest fortnight’s trouting 
that has ever fallen to our lot. Details are not needed 
if the moral has been made clear. 
Another class of stream which affords some of the 
best river-trouting in Norway, may be described as 
salmon-rivers in miniature, and are, in some cases, the 
head-waters of salmon-rivers obstructed lower down by 
foss or fall. In Norway, I imagine (though I am very 
far from asserting it as a fact), salmon are not invariably 
so resolute in pushing up to the very spring-heads 
(where their ova would almost certainly be destroyed 
