[Gutenberg 35918] • Dry Fish and Wet: Tales from a Norwegian Seaport

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!