: Dry Fish and Wet: Tales from a Norwegian Seaport by Nilsen Anthon Bernhard Elias Worster W J Alexander William John Alexander Translator - City and town life Fiction; Norway Social life and customs Fiction

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DRY FISH AND WET

THE TOWN

The last census showed a population of 19,991 inhabitants, but if anyone asked "Holm at the Corner" how big the place was, he would say "between twenty and thirty thousand"--a figure he considered reasonable enough, counting the annual increment in the families he knew.

The town had its own traditions. Natives could speak with pride of the days, now long passed, when the firms of C. B. Taline and Veuve Erik Strom had great cargoes of coffee coming direct from Rio, while Danish vessels by the dozen lay alongside the warehouses discharging corn, and unwieldy Dutchmen took in baulks large enough to cut up into arm-chair sections--ay, there was proper timber in those days, not like the thin weedy sticks that come down the river now!

And the place had other memories, apart from trade and commerce. There was a whole gallery of clerics whose brilliant names cast a glow of distinction long after they themselves were dead and gone; old men remembered them, and the town could feel itself, as it were, related to episcopal sees all over the country. Great trading houses of old standing came to ruin, fortunes were shattered, and crisis after crisis came and went, but every such period merely added a fresh chapter to the history of the town, making new stories for fathers to tell their sons. In course of time, a whole collection of such stories had grown up about these merchant princes, for trade was, after all, the chief interest of the place and so remained. When the old men got together, talk would invariably turn upon such matters as Nils Berg's grand speculations in the Crimean War, or the disastrous failure of Balle & Co.; while the younger ones, who were in the swim, enlisted further shareholders in their factories and ship-owning concerns. It was a town with plenty of grit in it, no lack of young stock to carry on the work.

True, there were times when it seemed to languish, to be dwindling away, when periods of crisis had swept away what appeared to be its chief support; but a breathing space was all that was needed, and soon the old spirit was awake once more, and life went on as bravely as before.

And so it went on for generation after generation, while the river flowed, broad and smooth as ever, down the valley, pouring its ice-water into the fjord each spring. Up the hillsides on either hand the roads turned up and curved among thicket and bush, and the higher one climbed the clearer showed the town below with its rows of houses and its churches.

Those who were born in the town and had spent their youth there, but whom fate had later moved to other parts of the country, made it a practice, when they came home, to climb the hillside and look out over the town, as it lay there rich in memories. And the longer one had been away, the stronger they seemed to grow; for there is a strange power in such memories of a little, old town.

KNUT G. HOLM

Knut G. Holm had had his ups and downs; no one knew exactly how he stood. Failure and crisis had raged about him, and many a time public opinion had given him but a short while to keep above water himself, but he always managed to get through somehow, though there were times when he had not credit for five shillings, when the commercial travellers gave his corner premises the stealthy go-by, in the confident belief that he would put his shutters up next day. But he never did. And at last it grew to a proverb, that Knut G. Holm was like a cat; you might throw him out of a top-floor window, but he would always land on his feet in the end!

In the little office behind the shop there was always a little gathering before dinner-time, between one and two, to hear Holm holding forth; for he was a man with an unusual gift of speech, and whatever might happen in the place, he was always the first to get hold of it.

Dealer Vagle was a fool to pay ?1600 for that dairy farm--Knut Holm had no hesitation in saying as much; nor was he afraid to make public his opinion that Jorgensen the hatter was not such a fool as he looked in selling the property referred to. Everyone knew Holm's "gossip-shop," as the office was generally called, but no one took offence at his extravagant talk, for all knew he meant no harm, but was really one of the kindliest of men.

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