Dry fish and wet

Translated from the Norwegian by W. Worster, M.A.
Dry Fish and Wet
Tales from a Norwegian Seaport
BY ELIAS KRÆMMER
GYLDENDAL 11 HANOVER SQUARE, LONDON, W. 1 COPENHAGEN · CHRISTIANIA 1922
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The last census showed a population of 19,991 inhabitants, but if anyone asked Holm at the Corner how big the place was, he would say between twenty and thirty thousand —a figure he considered reasonable enough, counting the annual increment in the families he knew.
The town had its own traditions. Natives could speak with pride of the days, now long passed, when the firms of C. B. Taline and Veuve Erik Strom had great cargoes of coffee coming direct from Rio, while Danish vessels by the dozen lay alongside the warehouses discharging corn, and unwieldy Dutchmen took in baulks large enough to cut up into arm-chair sections—ay, there was proper timber in those days, not like the thin weedy sticks that come down the river now!
And the place had other memories, apart from trade and commerce. There was a whole gallery of clerics whose brilliant names cast a glow of distinction long after they themselves were dead and gone; old men remembered them, and the town could feel itself, as it were, related to episcopal sees all over the country. Great trading houses of old standing came to ruin, fortunes were shattered, and crisis after crisis came and went, but every such period merely added a fresh chapter to the history of the town, making new stories for fathers to tell their sons. In course of time, a whole collection of such stories had grown up about these merchant princes, for trade was, after all, the chief interest of the place and so remained. When the old men got together, talk would invariably turn upon such matters as Nils Berg's grand speculations in the Crimean War, or the disastrous failure of Balle & Co.; while the younger ones, who were in the swim, enlisted further shareholders in their factories and ship-owning concerns. It was a town with plenty of grit in it, no lack of young stock to carry on the work.