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have reached the fishing grounds, they let the sails drop; the hooks are baited, and the lines are flung overboard. Those who have had nets set over night haul them in and row home, returning later in the day; for in order to give the deep line fishers a chance, the law prohibits the encumbering of the sea with nets during the daytime.

There are now government signal stations along the coast, which give warning of the probable state of the weather. But for all that, scarcely a year passes without a multitude of accidents. As we all know, such official "probabilities " are extremely fallible, often weakening whatever confidence people might repose in them by prophesying storms which fail to make their appearance; and failing to prophesy those which make widows and orphans by the score. Only recently a calamity of this sort made havoc in many humble homes in the north of Norway. Day after day and night after night every knoll and

Hun Dalt -By Hans Dahl.

rock about the fishing villages would be crowded with anxious women, spying along the horizon for a glimpse of the well-known sail which they were never to see again.

At the end of a week or two an arm or a leg with a seaboot on would perhaps drift ashore and would be recognized by some mark by one of the many mourners And then a funeral would be held over that ghastly remnant; and hymns would be sung and tears shed, and a lugubrious feast prepared in honour of the dead.

It is, in fact, regarded as a normal death to end one's life in the waves. I remember, as a boy of fourteen, visiting a relative of mine who was a clergyman in the north of Norway. Being greatly struck by the small number of graves in the cemetery, and those, as the headstones showed, nearly all of women and children, I asked my kinsman, jocosely, if the men were immortal in his parish.

"No," he answered gravely;

"but the greater portion of them are buried without benefit of

clergy."

"How do you mean?" I asked, much mystified.

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"There," he said, pointing with his stick toward the ocean, there is their cemetery."

As I am in the chapter of personal reminiscence, I may as well relate in the first person my impressions of the queer little malodorous village in which I spent two weeks of almost ecstatic delight. In the first place the sea-booths were an enchanted realm; and to be hoisted up from the first to the second floor by a pulley, sitting astride a barrel, was an excitement of which I never wearied. And the rats, of which there was an abundant supply, invested the place with an added charm. To see them scurrying from corner to corner, or watch their domestic economy through cracks in the floor, was an unending source of entertainment.

On

the slope above the village was a kind of scaffolding with roofs, but without walls, used for drying and curing the salted cod, and there were times (though not during my visit), when all the rocks for half a mile would be covered by split fish.

There were a physician, a country dealer in all commodities, and a smith, who was also carpenter, watchmaker, and dentist; and each one of them was a pronounced and interesting character. The physician, I remember, had a grievance against the Government because it did not suppress quackery with the strong arm of the law. For, he confided to me, there was a cer

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tain "wise woman who professed to cure by charms, incantations, and herbs that had grown under the gallows-tree or on the grave of a beheaded murderer. And whether I would believe it or not, the people in their gross superstition went to consult her even in the gravest cases; and accepted it as the inscrutable will of God when she killed them.

My vividest recollection, however, is the quaint old church where I sat with the pastor's family in the "genteel pew" and listened to the most solemnly discordant singing that ever assailed a sensitive ear. The schoolmaster, who was also sexton and cantor, tried his best to keep the straggling voices together; but his own voice, though powerful, was neither true nor melodious; and its only virtue was a hearty sincerity and devotion which in a measure made up for its musical shortcomings. Mr. Gladstone, who some years ago attended service in a Norwegian village church of this order, declared himself greatly impressed by the harsh solemnity and earnestness of the worship.

The query frequently occurs to me, when considering rude and simple lives like those of the Norwegian fishermen, whether they ought to be condoled with or congratulated on the smallness of their wants, the fewness of their demands and their fatalistic acceptance of their lot, be it hard or easy. As I always answer this question in accordance with my mood, I shall have to refer its final decision to that agreeable figment of an author's brain, "the gentle reader."

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It is a striking line of coast, full of fascination in itself to the lover of the picturesque; but more: on every crowning summit stands a castle olden, looking seaward with its hoary facades and battlemented towers perhaps inhabited, perhaps crumbling still slowly away, as it has been crumbling for centuries. At every lovely harbour is an oldworld village, or a great town with clanking hammers, the one rich, the other poor, but both dowered with aspects of antiquity. There are villages along this wild Welsh coast of an ancientness to be equalled hardly anywhere else in Britainvillages which in some cases have undergone little change of aspect during the past five hundred years. Remote from railroads, primitive in all their ways, they are of the old world, olden. Time has hardly disturbed them since the days when London was a village, too, with thatched roofs and winding lanes. In the caves and chasms hewed in the cliffs by the long rollers of the Atlantic thundering in a thousand storms have been found traces of primeval man-his bones, his implements, the bones of the beasts. he ate-in great abundance. The very land is older than the land of the English, Scotch and Irish. Ages before the solid parts of earth on which the rest of Britain was built

had risen above the wide waste of waters covering the world, this land, now called Wales, stood alone in its glory, an island by itself, where strange monsters dwelt, and misshapen birds and reptiles wandering left the tracks of their feet, which are found to-day in the solid rock where they were imprinted countless ages ago.

The cruel rocks of the Welsh coast have been the scene of many shipwrecks in times both ancient and modern. Many a vessel has been thrown against their rugged fronts and angles, and so mauled and broken that every soul on board has gone down to death, eager-eyed crowds on the shore beholding their fate, unable to save life, even when willing to attempt it. Numberless legends are related-stories fit to freeze one's blood-of the wicked old days when infamous wreckers lured ships to their doom with false lights on this shore. Like stories are told of many coasts in many countries. In the old days the superstitious dwellers by sea-shores deemed shipwrecked folk the abandoned and cast-out of heaven, it is said. When the sands were strewn with his cargo, the unhappy sailor found no mercy from the wretches who made his goods their spoil. It was not alone the peasantry in the old days; the ancient lords of

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many a castle claimed as a right the spoils of wrecked ships which came ashore within the limits of their manor. All this is now happily a thing of the past. A lighthouse throws its broad glare far out to sea, and if people now cluster on the shore to watch the labouring of a vessel in the remorseless grasp of storm and wave, it is in sympathy and not in greed.

There are few more striking pictures in Europe than St. Donat's Castle. It is not a lonely ruin; it is inhabited by the surviving representative of the Norman paladin who built it, a gentleman of schol-. arly tastes and acquirements.

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This key lets me through fortyeight doors," he said to me, jocularly, as he turned a huge key in its lock. The remark spoke eloquently of the extent of this mediæval military mansion, with its four and a half acres of roof. He pointed out to me the place on his lawn where John Wesley stood and preached to five thousand people who were gathered on the broad terraces which drop down gracefully to the shore on the seaward front of the castle. Standing in a great bay

window, and looking out on this southern terrace, the ocean seems a stone-toss distant. As you walk in the lower part of the gardens, the ships that slide westward down the sea seem to be sailing in the sky.

An old man I talked with in an inn could remember the time when the Beltane fires (he did not call them that) were lit on Midsummer Eve, and the people jumped over the embers, for the good of the crops.

Along the entire coast of Wales certain striking characteristics are observed in the churches. Here is a group of Welsh churches; look at their towers, each more ponderous than the next. It needs no argument to convince us they were meant for strongholds as well as campaniles. They could almost defy the waves of ocean like the cliffs; have done so, indeed, in certain instances when the seas have risen in storm and fury, and plunged roaring inland to to the church doors. The aspect of these places of worship is well in keeping with the shore scenery to which they give character. The rough weather they are often doomed to encounter

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