Читать книгу "Gamle Norge": Rambles and Scrambles in Norway онлайн

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Next we inspected the loom, where a daughter was hard at work. There were a fine old bed, with inscription, and many spinning-wheels, highly coloured (green, red, and blue and white, with black). It is a pity an illustration of this room cannot be given in colour. We descended into the dal: the heat was intense, no air below, and a pandemonium of flies. Bathing under the wheel of a mill was a temporary relief: our torment was renewed at lunch. But we were out to enjoy ourselves; so we did, in spite of mosquitoes. At lunch we cooked some of the trout our chief had killed en route, which that day numbered thirty. We were immensely amused here by noticing the very comic and inquiring expression in a magpie while listening, for the first time probably, to the English snore with which one of our party favoured us on this occasion, putting his head first on one side and then on the other, then taking a hop, and, when the music broke into a staccato bass passage, hopping back still more interested, until it finally flew off. Magpies are the sacred birds of the land, and are regarded as the private property of his Satanic Majesty.