[9] “Quick, here, with the boat! and so you shall have some money for drink.”
[10] One of the wild ideas of Scandinavian mythology is, that the sun is the eye of Odin, and that he once had two like other people; but, that coming one day to the well of Mimiver, the waters of which are pure wisdom, he bargained for a draught, and bought the horn gjoll full at the price of one of his eyes; no such great quantity either, if gjoll be the original of our English gill. However, this fully accounts for the fact that the moon is not now so bright as the sun, which it probably once was. It must be confessed that the whole of this story is entirely inconsistent with the theory of the sun and moon in the prose “Edda,” where these are represented as separate and independent divinities, the son and daughter of the giant Mundilfari,—the sun being feminine and the moon masculine; a tradition contrary to the notions of our poets, but fully borne out by our English peasants, who invariably speak of the moon as “he,” and the sun as “she.”
[11] Full-grown salmon have two or three ranges of very small teeth, whereas grauls (Scoticè, grilse) have only one. It is this distinction which, on the Erne, is technically termed “the mask,” and not the size, which determines the difference between a graul and a salmon.
[12] An ort, or mark, is the fifth part of a specie-daler, equivalent to ninepence or tenpence of our money. A skilling is about the same as an English halfpenny; the word, however, is pronounced exactly the same as our English word shilling, the k being soft before i; a circumstance which rather perplexes the stranger in his calculations.
[13] Since the abolition of capital punishment in Norway—a measure that does not seem to answer at all—murderers are confined, like other criminals, in the castle at Christiania. They may be seen in dresses of which each sleeve and leg has its own colour, sweeping the streets and doing other public work; and a very disgusting sight it is. The average of crime is very high in Norway—perhaps higher than in any country known, and particularly crimes of violence. This may be accounted for, partly by their wonderful drunkenness, and partly by the very inefficient state of the Church, and the almost total absence of the religious element in an education which is artificially forced by state enactments. In Norway there is a very great disproportion between intellect and religion.
[14] Manchester has its faults, and a good many of them, but among them all its Anglo-Saxon virtue of order and capacity for self-government come out in strong relief.
“Where are your policemen?” asked the Duke, as he glanced at the masses that thronged the streets during the Queen’s visit,—perhaps the largest crowd that had ever been collected in England. The streets of the Borough of Manchester were not staked and corded off, and guarded by men in blue; but thousands of strong, active warehousemen and mechanics formed, by joining hands, a novel barricade. And in the evening, when numbers beyond computation were assembled in the streets to witness the illumination, amidst all the confusion there was nothing but good-humour.—Fraser.
[15] Alluding to a custom in Norway, of mixing the inner rind of the birch tree with their rye meal, during times of scarcity.
[16] The fisherman is very much recommended to tie his own flies for the Tay, or to get them at Edmondson’s. The author bought a good many pretty-looking specimens in the country, by way of patterns, all of which whipped to pieces in half-an-hour’s fishing. The fact is, there is a cheap way of tying flies, which it is impossible to detect by the eye; and it is just as well that the young fisherman should ask the character of his tackle-maker before investing his money in such very ticklish wares; the worthlessness of which he will not find out till he reaches his fishing-ground. The author, a fisherman of some experience, has tied a good many flies in his time, and has had a good many tied for him by his attendants and other professionals on the river’s banks; but the only tradespeople he has ever found trustworthy, in all points, in such matters are, Chevalier, of Bell-yard, London, and Edmondson, of Church-street, Liverpool. Their flies have never failed him, whether in their hooks, their gut, or their tying. All that the fisherman will want in their shops will be a little science, to enable him to choose his colours, and a little money to enable him to pay his bills.
[17] The real scene of this piscatorial exploit is on the Mandahl river. There is a Hell Fall on the Torjedahl also; indeed, the name is common in Norway, and in Sweden too, so as to become almost generic for a dark, gloomy rush of waters; but the Hell Fall of the Torjedahl is inaccessible to salmon, which, notwithstanding all that Inglis says to the contrary, are unable to surmount the great falls of Wigeland about a mile below it. It is, therefore, worthless as a fishing-place; and, the author suspects, altogether too dangerous to be attempted without good reason. When the water is low, the fall of the Mandahl may be fished in the ordinary manner from a boat, and it is well worth the trial; but if the river be full, the birch rope will be found necessary.