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 aërial 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 primæval 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