Chapter 20

seething rather than rough, patched with smooth areas that look much more innocent than they are. Your line will get drowned somewhat until you know the tricks of the under-currents and eddies. From the boat you often have a chance of casting right and left as you drop ever so slowly down, and it must be a good man who knows how to keep on rowing without advancing faster than the stream.

It is in such a pool that I make my last cast for salmon in this delectable valley, and it fully satisfies my chief ambition of this ten days' fishing; humble enough in all conscience, being nothing higher than to finish up knowing that I have not once returned at night with an empty bag. Even that is something, and it is something done. In the last two hours I get a 12-lb. salmon, a 2-lb. sea trout, and a leash of 1/2-lb. brown trout, all on the same No. 3 Jock Scott.

On one of our days we see a procession of carioles proceeding up the valley, and all the natives are in a state of agitation, if such sober-minded people ever are agitated. _The Midnight Sun_ is in the fiord, and these ladies and gentlemen are ashore for the day bound for the glacier. We dine on board at night with the captain, who is a brother angler, and who makes light of a sea trout of 10 lb., which he has caught in the afternoon. Well; I have met many anglers in Norway who feel disgusted at such game; they want salmon, and think themselves hardly used if sea trout intrude. But I thank the gods (when I suppose I ought to sit in sackcloth for perverted taste) that up to this present Salmo trutta, great or small, evokes my fervent gratitude, and I can only say that, while I paid my five gaffed salmon the highest respect, I recall with no less satisfaction my seventeen sea trout; and, while serving this week on the grand jury at the Old Bailey, sketched the best of them one after another on the margin of the prisoners' calendar, and found a true bill for at least the fine fellows of 11 lb., 9 lb., 8 lb., and 7 1/2 lb., which headed the list. They are good enough prisoners for me, anyhow. However, I really believe our captain was after all secretly proud of his ten-pounder, as he sat at the head of the table in the palatial saloon of the magnificent steam yacht of oceanic size. The passengers seemed entranced with their luxurious life and the charms of the fiords they were visiting, and we heard a concert on board that was really first-rate. A fortnight of this sort of yachting for twelve or fifteen guineas is, verily, one of the privileges of this age of enterprise.

On my way south I broke the journey to spend a couple of days upon another river, but only added a few sea trout to my achievements. The salmon were plentiful enough, but they were waiting, sullenly yet restlessly, for a rise of water, and I left the two anglers, owners of the river, who were living in a snug Norwegian home of their own, waiting, too, with patient resignation. There they were amongst the fishing tackle, guns, cartridge cases, dogs, and miscellaneous paraphernalia essential to noble sportsmen who, poor fellows, in these hard times, can only spend a few months every year with a lovely fiord under their noses, and a few hundredweights of salmon, and odds and ends of reindeer, blackcock, and ryper now and then to engage their attention. I wonder no more that English sportsmen go a little mad about their beloved Norway; and that hard-working judges, bishops, university dons, and professional men of all sorts and conditions, find their best balm of Gilead amongst its picturesque valleys and hills. Of course the sportsmen are not always happy. If in the smoking-room on our homeward passage A. was able to remark that he had finished up, two days previously, with a 30-lb. salmon, and B. stated the heavy totals on a few favoured rivers, there were C. and D. to bemoan deplorable blanks, and tell of anglers who had gone home disgusted before their term of tenure expired; indeed, one fellow passenger whispered me near the smoke stack that a gentleman of his acquaintance had paid close upon 400 pounds for a river that yielded him just thirty fish for the entire season.