While the others talked, I sat and thought of a fishing expedition when she was with me, out among the Vaette Rocks at home, in our little six-oared boat—­what a different kind of day, what a different kind of boat, what a different experience!  Yes, how unromantic, poor and grey, life is down here among the rich, loamy, corn-producing hills, or on the fjord of the capital, sooty with steamboat smoke, or even in the town itself, compared with that at home!  But if I uttered this aloud, how these superior people would open their eyes!

They talk here of fishing, and are pleased with a few poor cod and whiting.  A Nordlander understands by fishing a haul of a thousand fish; he thinks of the millions of Lofoten and Finmark, and of an overwhelming variety of species, of whales, spouting through the sounds, and driving great shoals of fish before them, as well as of the very smallest creatures of the deep.  The only fish that I know down here worth noticing—­and I always look at them whenever I come across them—­are the gold and silver fish, that you keep in a glass-bowl, just as you keep a canary in a cage:  but then they are from another fairyland in the south.

When a Nordlander speaks of birds he does not mean as they do here, only a head or two of game, but an aerial throng of winged creatures, rippling through the sky, flying round the rocks, like white foam, or descending like a snowstorm on their nesting-places; he thinks of eider-duck, guillemot, diver and oyster-catcher swimming in fjord and sound, or sitting upon the rocks; of gulls, ospreys and eagles, hunting in the air; of the eagle-owl, hooting weirdly at night in the mountain-clefts—­in short, he means a whole world of birds, and has a little difficulty in confining his ideas to the poor capercailzie, surprised and killed by a sportsman in the midst of a love-frolic, when the sun is rising over the pine-clad hills.

Instead of the fruit-gardens here, he has the miles of cloudberry moors at home.  Instead of a poor, uniform shore with nothing but mussels, he remembers a grand beach strewn with myriads of marvellously tinted shells.

All natural conditions are intensified in Nordland, and are far more powerfully contrasted than in the south of Norway.  Nordland is a boundless stone-grey waste, as it was in primaeval times before man began to build, but in the midst of this there are also countless natural treasures; it has a sun and a summer glory, whose day is not twelve hours only, but an uninterrupted period of three months, during which, in many places, one must wear a mask as protection against the swarms of mosquitoes; but, on the other hand, the night is a time of darkness and horror, lasting nine months.  Everything there is on a gigantic scale without the gradual transitions between extremes, upon which the quiet life here in the south is built; in other words, there are more occasions for fancy, adventure and chance, than for calm reasoning, and quiet activity with certain results.