t a foot and a half above the
surface of the stream, and was the largest salmon I ever saw, weighing,
I should think, between fifty and sixty pounds. If sharks inhabit the
Faedde river, I would not pledge my word it was not one. I yield,
however, my opinion to that of my gallant friend, who is a better
sportsman than myself and asserts, without any mental reservation, that

"It was a salmon, sir,--a salmon."

Be it as it may, the difference of classification has nothing to do with
my story.

The Norwegians, I know, are a bold people, but may sometimes be taken
unawares, as well as other men, and though they live and think in the
simple and primitive manner of the Mosaic era, they express the signs
and feelings of apathy and surprise, with similarity of silence and
spasmodic gestures to Indians and Englishmen. This world, too, is
certainly a world of incongruities, and the more I see of it, the more I
am biased in that way of reflection; and if any one will take the
trouble to look at things as they are, abstractedly, and observe how
good, bad and indifferent, black, white and blue, are jumbled together,
he will not deny me his assent. It so happened, throughout our travels
in Norway, and, indeed, whenever we went on these fishing excursions,
that R----, who gave little expression to success in his pastime, nor
felt annoyed at failure, invariably obtained the services of the most
expert boatmen, while P----, who threw heart and soul into everything he
undertook, and always swerved under discomfiture, secured with the same
invariableness the aid of the most consummate clowns; and the rewardless
termination of his toil, or tact, has been mainly attributable to the
thick-headedness of those who should have assisted him with their
sagacity. Scarcely, then, had this bulky salmon shown his mouth,
literally an ugly one, above the water, than P----'s boatman, instead of
keeping silence, and subduing his fears, as any reasonable being would
do, raised an immediate shout of horror, and during the paroxysms of
dismay, dipped his two sculls negligently into the stream, and in his
anxiety to make a few rapid strokes towards the shore, caught, what is
nautically called, a couple of crabs, that caused him to lose his
balance, and fall, legs uppermost, with a loud crash backwards to the
bottom of the pram. His aspiring feet, taking P---- in the flank with
the purchase of a crow-bar, raised him from the diminutive poop-deck of
the pr