moral level than the fly-fisher, more steadfast and patient under adversity: trolling is a moral discipline in quiet endurance; of such discipline there is none in the spasmodic incoherent excitement of the fly-fisher. The question might be argued by a comparison of pleasures, and pleasure is the end of sport. The appeal must be to him who, like the writer, has had experience of both: he will content himself with affirming that the pleasures of trolling are, though different, not inferior to those of fly-fishing. Finally, pleasure we know is relative, and that is the sum of the matter. If the troller is pleased he is happy, and from this position no arguments can dislodge him. The charm of trolling is difficult to analyze or describe. To sit in a boat, with two rods stuck out on either side of it, trailing long lines with minnows at the end of them, waiting for fish to come-what could seem to be less interesting or afford less opportunity for skill, more irrational than that, unless you were paid to do it? Every kind of amusement might be so described as to appear idiotic. What could be more unworthy of a rational being, accountable for the employment of his time, than to hit a ball as far away as he can, and then run between two sets of sticks? Or to put a little ball into a number of holes, by hitting it with a stick "ill-suited for the purpose," as a cynical professor said, when you might have dropped it in with your hand with much less trouble? Yet cricket and golf give pleasure, and pleasure is a reasonable end, to many persons not fools. And dancing, the delight of all women and some men! it could not be described in words which would not make it seem tomfoolery. As to skill or excellence as an art, trolling, it must be confessed, is inferior to fly-fishing-to fly-fishing at least in its highest form, say on some clear English stream, a trial of cunning between man and fish, demanding great delicacy of hand and eye, the caution and stealthiness of a Red Indian. Yet in trolling there are many things to know, which combined form no contemptible "body of doctrine," and the ignorance of which is fatal to success. You must know in what depth of water to troll-a few yards it may be from the shore, or five hundred, according to the configuration of the lake, and the distribution of the feeding-ground. You must know how to take advantage of islands, wooded banks, the mouths of streams where trout lie feeding; to troll deep if they are "stiff and dour;" to appeal to their caprices by wise and frequent change of minnows, offering them a blue "Phantom" if a brown "Angel" fails to please;-finally, to be vigilant, with hands on the rods ready to strike; and if a big fish comes, careful to keep the lines from crossing, for that means disaster. These and other precepts which it would be tedious to mention must be remembered and practised by the troller if he is to do excellently, not merely well. The novice, especially if he is a fly-fisher, is surprised to find that the experienced troller, in the same boat and under the same conditions, catches three fish to his two; or two to his one, if they are fishing in different boats. But the writer must not be carried away by the odium piscatorium. He only seeks to show that knowledge and practice are needed to troll well, as they are needed for excellence in any game, from golf to spillikins. In the beginning of August I found myself in a little inn, at the Back of Beyond, some five hours' drive from Fosheim in the heart of Norway, in the middle of the backbone of high land which runs parallel to the western coastline from 2000 to 4000 feet above the level of the sea. Here is a purer and keener air than is to be found in the Fiords, which, to tell the truth, are, despite their exquisite beauty and grandeur, somewhat relaxing and depressing. The Naerödal, for instance, near Gudvangen, is like a prison: the lofty walls of rock seem almost to meet 2000 feet above your head, ready to fall on you or close, should you be in a gloomy or fanciful mood, as you easily may be if you tarry long in these wild chasms. Some reader may have felt even in a Devonshire lane a craving to see and breathe more freely: let him imagine this feeling intensified to any degree he pleases, and he will understand the effect of fiord scenery on some persons-not on all, for the average tourist in the gloomiest surroundings shows an elasticity of spirits which might with advantage be abated. At Nösen (for why should I conceal the name after the fashion of jealous anglers?) one had room to breathe. The inn-and Nösen is only a geographical expression for an inn and a farm-stood in the middle of a large moor or rolling prairie, if one might call it so, of rock and bog and grass and juniper. It needed only heather to have been Rannoch or Glenisla, but on a larger scale, for on the west, eight or ten miles off, ran a range of hills 5000 feet in height; while to the north in farther distance stood the Jotunheim, the peaks of which are more than twice as high as Schiehallion or Mount Blair. The two lakes, connected by a short river of broken water, in which there is good fly-fishing, must be, taken together, eight or ten miles in length. Close to the larger lake is the inn. An angler must be prepared to rough it at times in a saeter (farmhouse), and to live, as will be good for him, on very simple food, and to sleep in strange places. At Nösen no such hardships had to be encountered. The inn was far from luxurious, but it was clean: "the negative catalogue of provisions was very copious," as Dr. Johnson said of his Highland inn; but on trout and eggs and milk-to say nothing of the strange flesh of an unknown animal which seems to roam over the whole of Norway from Christiansand to the North Cape -a sensible person can subsist with great contentment, if the fishing be good. I have no story to tell of lakes "stiff" with fish; of baskets filled in a few hours with trout eager to be taken, and competing for the fly or minnow as soon as the line is in the water. Alas! an angler is generally a liar; at the best careless about truth and highly imaginative; apt to exaggerate some golden hour in which fish were on the feed into a golden day of continuous voracity. At Nösen four or five hours' trolling generally produced about a dozen fish; but these were large, averaging 1 pound or 14 pounds. A keen enthusiast fishing for a basket-who started early on a favorable day and fished till dusk; who disregarded the strange hours for meals, and suffered no claim of friend, or child, or work to interfere with fishingmight have made a basket of twentyfive or thirty trout, and among them would have been five or six of 2 pounds or more. "On a favorable day." What happy memories the words recall! A warm and gentle wind rippling the surface of the water; sunshine, which even an angler might endure with equanimity, for it lighted up the somewhat sombre moor and loch, and made the snows sparkle on the big mountains with hopeless names which rose on the west, and on the Jotunheim cluster seen thirty miles off to the north, "the home of giants," where fancy pictured Thor and Odin living in dignified retirement, beyond the reach of Max Müller and Andrew Lang, and their ingenious speculations. "Far off the old hills ever new, Not Keats nor Wordsworth could have felt the beauty of nature more profoundly than a happy angler, with some good fish in his basket, and expecting more. Happiness, philosophers tell us,. is a free and vigorous play of all the faculties, not least of the aesthetic faculties. A golfer "three up at the turn " has been known to wake suddenly to the beauty of St. Andrews across the bay, or of Oxford in the vale below, and to express his admiration to his opponent, eliciting a response at the best dubious. But suddenly! a jerk of the rod, making the dreamer start and thrill from head to foot, for the heavy strain and the music of the reel show that this must be The Fish--the Auto-fish, of which those in the basket are Phenomenal Adumbrations. The handsome young Viking who is rowing cries," Stor fisk (big fish), and breaks into a pæan of unintelligible Norsk. Fifty yards off is seen a swirl and splash dangerously near the left-hand line. Distressing visions arise of an entanglement, which would be well-nigh fatal; but by a happy chance the monster runs out into the depths clear of immediate danger, and his fate is sealed, for the tackle is strong, carefully tested a few hours before. Never did the writer more bitterly reproach himself for his ignorance of Norsk than when, imploring the bewildered Eric to reel up the other line, he was compelled to use a fatuous gibberish of English, German, and broad Scotch, which last he had heard, without believing, could " carry you through Norway." The language of gesture was more successful-the danger is averted, and after ten minutes' struggle a handsome fish, not the monster he would have been had he escaped, is within reach of the landing-net. It is difficult in cranky boat to hold a rod in one hand and land a good fish with the other; but a great crisis calls forth great powers, and fish and angler find themselves in the bottom of the boat: the former is after all only 3 pounds. Let not the salmon-fisher smile: all things are relative, and a good trout is as good as a good salmon. There are lights and shadows in a troller's life. The next day-the last, alas! before my return homeward-furnished one of those experiences which every angler must expect on a lake in Norway. We were three miles from home when the storm began-a strong cold wind with driving rain, in the teeth of which we had to cross a broad stretch of "dark and stormy water." Disagreeable reminiscences came into my mind of "the chief of Ulva's isle" and "Lord Ullin's daughter," as I sat drenched and shivering, unable to take an oar; for, strange to say, in Norway, the land of the Vikings, most boats are built with two rowlocks only, and these immovable, so that two men cannot row together. The young boatman, a slim Hercules, for whom Cambridge in its present sore need would be wise to find a scholarship, rowed heroically, refreshed from time to time by doses of whiskey, for which even the total abstainer would have found excuse. In the absence of hot coffee, which Sir Wilfrid Lawson would have us believe is more wholesome, more invigorating, and more enduring in its effects than alcohol, but which under the circumstances it was impossible to prepare, we found whiskey an excellent substitute. Nor could I help speculating whether that apostle of temperance, had he been with us, would have refused the accursed thing, and what humorous excuse he would have devised for taking it. After three hours of discomfort and some little danger, for the boat was leaky and cranky, we reached the landing-place, and Eric received, if not a "silver pound," yet a reasonable number of kroners for his pluck and endurance and good boatmanship. It is to be hoped that the kroners will be saved to help to form a fund for the venture to Canada or the States which he, like most of his young countrymen, is bound to make. There the Norwegian saves enough in six or seven years to enable him to return to his country and start in a saeter of his own. seldom settles permanently abroad; for, like all natives of the mountain and the glen-like the Swiss, and, pace Dr. Johnson, like the Scots-he finds it hard to live away from them, even in the land of Goshen. He He The impressions of a tourist who has only thrice, and for short periods, visited Norway, are of little value; but some things lie on the surface. would be blind, for instance, who could not see that in personal appearance, and in some points of manner, the Norwegian and the Scot are very like each other. In the fish-market at Bergen you might fancy yourself to be on the pier of Aberdeen or Montrose, or Lowestoft or Yarmouth. In the northeast of Scotland especially you find the Scandinavian complexion, the ruddy skin, and fair, often reddish hair, the rough but not irregular features, the gravity, passing often into grimness, which mark the fisherman of Bergen or the farmer of the Valders. In Norway most faces, and nearly all complexions, are of one type. A mixture of Celtic blood in Forfarshire or Aberdeenshire, of many bloods in Norfolk or Suffolk, modifies the Scandinavian strain; but across the water, in the home of our forefathers, the women are as fair-haired and pink-and-white, and the men are as red and stalwart, as were the heroines and heroes of the Sagas. The voices and intonation, at least of the lower classes in Norway (who will invent some better phrase than "lower class"?) are like those of the same classes in Scotland. While listening, against my will, for I would fain have slept, to high jinks" in the kitchen, celebrated by my boatman, a belated Stolkjærre driver, and the two maids who, with great vigor and efficiency did the service of the inn, I seemed to myself to hear again the voices and the laughter I had heard on similar occasions in my own country. Of the Norwegian character a very limited experience can justify only the scantiest and most diffident "appreciation." Simplicity, sedate courtesy, and unmistakable independence and self-respect are its chief notes-at least in the only class the writer knows, the hotelkeepers, hotel-servants, fishermen, and drivers. Only such qualities could resist the corrupting influence of tourists, among whom the British tourist seems to be the worst. The extravagant gratuities of the rich, the meanness, rowdiness, and insolence of 'Arry and 'Arriet, who swarm in Norway, have not as yet made the Norwegians extortionate or sour. But who can tell how long their virtues will endure? For the present your boatman or driver is obliging and respectful, while behind his respect is the ever-present sense that "a man's a man for a' that." He belongs to the He belongs to the most democratic country in the world, and exhibits the best aspect of democracy, inoffensive independence. He would be offended if you did not shake hands with him when you paid him at the end of a drive or boating day, nor is the warmth of his grasp proportioned to the amount of your donation. It would be interesting to know something of Norwegian society in the ordinary sense, and to investigate the problem of Ibsenism. I saw the great man at Christiania. He has a broad, placid face, with a suggestion, however, of grimness about the mouth. He looked like a respectable elderly gentleman of the bourgeois type, dressed in black with something of a clerical or scholastic aspect. In early life he was a schoolmaster, and that marks a man indelibly. He is said to be fond of admiration, and to like being accosted by strangers; but I contented myself with watching him drink his beer, as is his custom, at the café of the Grand Hotel, and wondered how this old man, in outward appearance so benevolent, and, it must be said, so commonplace, could have invented the grisly horrors of "Ghosts" or the dreary hypocrisies of "The Pillars of Society." It must have been the natural desire to write in his own language and for his own countrymen that made him lay the scene of his dramas in Norway. The cupboards of Munich or Rome or Dresden must surely contain more skeletons than the cupboards of Christiania. Ibsen lived long in Southern Europe, and must have learned his pessimism there, and not in Norway. The question is a difficult one and delicate. No men look more respectable than Norwegian gentlemen; no women look more domestic-the writer means no impertinence more wholesomeminded, and sedate than Norwegian ladies, or less likely to be Doras or Hedda Gablers. Of the two hypotheses-that Norwegians are deceivers accomplished to incredible perfection, or that Ibsen uses them merely as pegs or vehicles for characters and situations more common in Southern than in Northern Europe -the latter is the easier and more agreeable to adopt. The respectable villain is an old favorite of novelists and playwrights, and is becoming increasingly popular among them-among those especially who are "in revolt against conventionalities, whose aspirations for freedom are expressed for them, according to Mr. Kipling, by Mr. Thomas Atkins with a simplicity and directness which may be recommended to some lady novelists: "Place me somewhere east of Suez where the best is like the worst, Where there ain't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst." The Ten Commandments are most efficiently attacked by representing the observance of them as for the most part outward only, and conducive to the most lurid of hypocrisies. But in the fierce competition for supremacy or existence which awaits the world, when political economy shall have been summed up in Malthusianism, the fittest to survive will not improbably be the nations who have remained "west of Suez." I have, of course, no right or wish to attribute to Ibsen any dark designs on morality. He may be its champion: he alone knows-perhaps not he-what Ibsen means. Such reflections carry us far away from trout and lakes and hills, where problems are of a more wholesome kind than Ibsenism, though quite as difficult. Fish are strange creatures—as strange as men and women. Just as no ethical generalization holds good under all circumstances, so there is no piscatorial maxim, at least in Norway, which even a limited experience has not found falsified at times. I had my best hour just before and during a violent thunderstorm. I caught fish-not manywhen the water was like glass, and the sun was shining from a cloudless sky as mercilessly as in Central India; I caught fish between 1 and 3 P.M., a time when anglers find them very dour: but bitter cold-and in the latter half of August it can be very cold among the hills in Norway-was uniformly fatal, were the day ever so cloudy, and the ripple ever so promising. Trout are peculiarly sensitive to temperature as sensitive as a Londoner to the east wind, and are sulky and "upset" when the wind is blowing from the snows. More irritating and depressing to the angler than the bitterest of winds is the sight of the "otter" and the net at work on every lake in Norway which lies within three or four hours' journey of a hotel, indeed, of any human habitation. The Norway lake-trout are pink-fleshed like those of Lochleven, and as good or better eating. The demand for them is great: the voracity of the tourist, foreign or Norwegian, will not be contented unless trout form part of his middag and aften. To the net peasant they bring a good price if he carries them to the hotel in summer; and in the late autumn, when they are spawning, they are not spared, but taken in large numbers and salted for consumption in the winter. The reasonable angler would hardly claim that he and the wildfowl alone are to fish in Norway waters; but he may point out that hotel-keepers and peasant-farmers and tourists alike will suffer if the trout are exterminated-or, I should rather say, if their number is seriously diminished; for, happily, the lochs have depths which no can reach, and nature is careful of the type. The country, too, will suffer, for the tourist traffic is each year becoming a more fruitful source of wealth to Norway, and among the tourists are many anglers, who will not cross the seas for no better fishing than they may get at home. A young and hardy angler can now, and for some time will, find good sport in lochs inaccessible save to a vigorous walker, who will carry his provisions with him, and sleep in a saeter or a hut, sometimes in very miscellaneous company; but such delights are not for his senior: he must fish in the valleys, say, of Vestre or Östre Slidre, where chains of fine lochs allure only to disappoint, for they have been half emptied of their fish by reckless netting. The folly of this improvidence is coming to be recognized by intelligent Norwegians, and it is believed that Government has in contemplation measures for protection of the fish; but Government in Norway, as in some other countries, must give more time to political manoeuvres than to practical legislation.* The question is certainly difficult and thorny: by law or custom every dweller on the border of a lake has the right of netting it, and to limit or buy up the rights of several thousand tenacious peasant-farmers is, we in the United Kingdom know, an undertaking from which the strongest Government may shrink. Something has been done by a few enterprising hotel-keepers in the way of pisciculture, and in some |