In the middle of the dining-room there is a large table on which is spread an incredibly diverse collection of dishes. We counted them one morning: there were forty-eight; all manner of cold meats, all manner of cheese, all manner of _hors d’œuvres_. And there are shrimps, and prawns, and lobsters, and fish puddings; there are egg omelettes and ham omelettes, curious cold game, and fruit and jams and marmalade. Breakfast was a very great adventure. You were, in addition, served with a boiled egg and a beaker of cold milk. We never quite knew whether it was intended to be drunk as a cocktail or a liqueur or a table wine. We tried it in all three ways; and it was in each equally delightful. The Norwegian breakfast is the finest type of meal that I have, I think, ever eaten; and I was delighted to find certain personal peculiarities endorsed by Norwegian taste. I always, when I lunch at home, eat marmalade and cheese, preferably gruyère cheese, together. It is a protective taste developed gradually since the days when I was made to eat at my preparatory school milk-pudding every day for four years. It was doubtless a very admirable form of discipline. But I have not since eaten any pudding of any kind, and have instead developed what is, my brother tells me, a disgusting habit, but one which the Norwegian would apparently approve. At any rate, they place side by side on their middle table mountains of gruyère cheese and basins of marmalade. _Coldt bord_ they called it, that centre table, and we thought of inscribing a ballad to it, in whose every line should be the name of some new dish. A noble foundation, that breakfast, for a long day in the open; and when evening came one was glad to sit and talk quietly; one’s brain fresh and one’s body tired. It is no part of my intention here--and I half hope that it never will be--to draw pictures of my friends. Enough to say that the evenings passed very happily in such casual intermittent talk as can only be exchanged between two friends who know each other so well as to have left scarcely a secret from one another.