If I had been out of luck, it is needless to say the fish would have got clear away, as it was—

With thirty pounds of salmon in the birch leaves which are picked fresh for each fish before putting it into the basket, I conversed didactically and sententiously with Anders on the subject of the fetish. I pointed out, first, that it was a bad day. He shook his head, laughing, as he fingered his empty pipe. It became necessary to explain the difference between an apparently bad day, an unpromising what-afool-I-was-to-come-out sort of day, and a really bad day; that is, a blank day.

He evidently understood me, for he said appreciatively, "No blank-not bad luck that"; whereat I handed him my pouch, and upon the soft grassy bank of that little sandy bay where we had landed, in a temple of woodland saplings fit for the great god Pan himself, we solemnly and silently burned the perfume of the sacred plant before the unseen shrine of the Goddess of Luck, feeling within us

"A peace above all earthly dignities.”

XXI.

A Flood.

"Oft expectation fails, and most oft there
Where most it promises; and oft it hits,
Where hope is coldest, and despair most sits."
All's Well that ends Well.

RAIN at last! Rain like that produced by the twelve fakirs all praying at once-swishing, washing, deluging, delightful rain; misty on the mountains, drifting in masses through the pine-tops on the nearer hills; drenching in the valley rain all night, rain at dawn, rain all morning, all afternoon, all evening. It is not only in the tropics that the variations of moisture are sudden and considerable.

:

The splendid, passionate river rose with astonishing rapidity, and its translucent emerald and amber pools were united in one roaring brown torrent of muddy water, crested here and there with small angry-looking breakers.

The spirit that had seemed to sleep so calmly by the "rocks in rest," as Ruskin calls them, was roused like some furious giant from his slumbers, and dashed along with uncontrollable impetuosity over the path by which he had been content to meander so peacefully a few short hours before.

Clumsy, buoyant, country-made boats were torn from their moorings, or filled with water and emptied of oars and gear; huge pine logs, that had been stranded high and dry all summer, were now "bumbling in the water like some calf," in the patois of the boatmen ; the pools were filled with drift-wood and wreckage; and all the beds of stones which mark the currents and eddies at low-water were overwhelmed and buried as though they had never been there.

When it rains in Norway, it does rain.

It is needless to say that we wanted it badly; for it was the end of August, and there had been a serious drought, amounting almost to a water famine in some parts of the country, and we would willingly have employed any number of fakirs if we could have found them;

but there came a time when, like those Indian villagers who punted about on barn doors in the ruined streets of their native town, we thought the thing was being over-done. On the third day, however, the waters abated, the rain ceased, the sun shone out brightly, and the metaphorical dove returned with the legendary "olive leaf pluckt off."

The first day after a flood is not one to choose for fishing, for, however ready and willing the salmon may be, they complain with mute pathos that they really cannot see a fly at a reasonable distance when the water is like an infusion of chickory, and tree-roots are their portion to eat; so we decided to postpone our operations until noon, when we hoped that some degree of subsidence of the suspended matter might have taken place. It was a forlorn hope, but, being the best we had, we made the most of it.

Kings it makes gods, and meaner creatures kings."

I drove seven English miles up the valley, past the stolid haymakers setting out with constitutional patience the sodden hay, past dripping stooks of barley piled on tall poles,

past the painted homesteads, and through the well-known pine woods, glittering in the welcome sunlight with their encrustations of watery gems, to the precipitous cliff which overhangs the farthest pool of all. How I love the memory of that fairy pool! It seems like wearing one's heart upon one's sleeve even to describe it. The comfortable farm, that gives to it that soft, enchanting, little name, which I will not write for strangers' eyes, stands so far above it on the crag that, as the angler creeps down the hillside through bush and bramble to the water, he feels that he has left humanity far behind, and is coming face to face with the eternal solitude of Nature. The spell that draws us from the city to the desert is strong upon him, and the consciousness of his utter insignificance, the clear vision that he is but a passing shadow and will be cut down like the flower he crushes, softens him involuntarily into a strange humility. He feels, like St. Peter on the mountain, that it is good for him to be there, and, unless I am strangely mistaken, it is for a similar reason; but there comes no vision to make him sore afraid."