In the warm water of the fiords the herring schools have a fine recess until a whale or a fisherman comes along.

The northest city in the World is in Norway and the name of this city ends in est, too. It is Hammerfest. The Gulf Stream seems to end at Hammerfest and it dumps on the shore sticks of wood, some of which have floated like toy boats in a river all the way from the Gulf of Mexico. The people gather this “driftwood” and use it to make fires. Ordinary wood burns with a yellow flame, but wood that has drifted for a long time in the sea-water gets filled with salt from the water and when dried and burned gives off flames colored blue and green and purple, so that driftwood makes especially beautiful fires in open fireplaces.

You have probably tasted cod-liver oil—and hated it—but you were told it was very good for you, and it is. The cod is a much bigger fish than the herring, but of course not nearly as big as the whale. One of the playgrounds of the cod is near Norway, round some islands called “The Lofodens.” Fishermen catch shiploads of cod, press the oil out of their livers, and bottle it for your good health. The bones of the cod they have no use for, so they take them out—and this is quite a job, for there are a great many—and then they dry the flesh of the cod to make food. Here is a sentence that sounds funny unless you put in a period where it belongs, and then it makes perfect sense: “A codfish was swimming round the Lofoden Islands a month after all its bones had been taken out.” Where would you put the period to make sense?