Birds of the Arctic Regions. -- Effect of Continuous Daylight. -- Town of Tromsöe. -- The Aurora Borealis. -- Love of Flowers. -- The Growth of Trees. -- Butterflies. -- Home Flowers. -- Trees. -- Shooting Whales with Cannon. -- Pre-Historic Relics. -- About Laplanders. -- Eider Ducks. -- A Norsk Wedding Present. -- Gypsies of the North. -- Pagan Rites. -- The Use of the Reindeer. -- Domestic Life of the Lapps. -- Marriage Ceremony. -- A Gypsy Queen. -- Lapp Babies. -- Graceful Acknowledgment.
We have said nothing about the feathered tribes of Norway, though all along this coast, which is so eaten and corroded by the action of the sea, the birds are nearly as numerous as the fishes. They are far more abundant than the author has ever seen them in any other part of the world. Many islands, beginning at the Lofodens and reaching to the extreme end of the peninsula, are solely occupied by them as breeding places. Their numbers are beyond calculation; one might as well try to get at the aggregate number of flies in a given space in midsummer. They consist of petrels, swans, geese, pelicans, grebes, auks, gulls, and divers; these last are more particularly of the duck family, of which there are over thirty distinct species in and about this immediate region. Curlews, wandering albatrosses, ptarmigans, cormorants, and ospreys were also observed, besides some birds of beautiful plumage whose names were unknown to us. Throughout all Scandinavia the many lakes, so numerous as to be unknown by name, also abound with water-fowl of nearly every description habitual to the North. These inland regions afford an abundance of the white grouse, which may be called the national bird of Norway, where it so much abounds. The author has nowhere seen such fine specimens of this bird except in the mountains of Colorado, where it is however very rarely captured. In Scandinavia it changes the color of its plumage very curiously, from a summer to a winter hue. In the first named season these birds have a reddish brown tinge, quite clear and distinctive; but in winter their plumage becomes of snowy whiteness,--a fact from which naturalists are prone to draw some finespun deductions.
As we advanced farther and farther northward our experiences became more and more peculiar. It seemed that humanity, like Nature about us, was possessed of a certain insomnia in these regions during the constant reign of daylight. People were wide awake and busy at their various occupations during all hours, while the drowsy god seemed to have departed on a long journey to the southward. The apparent incongruity of starting upon a fresh enterprise "in the dead vast and middle of the night" was only realized on consulting one's watch.