LETTER VI. 



REYKJAVIK — LATIN CONVERSATION — I BECOME THE PROPRIETOR OF 

 TWENTY - SIX HORSES — EIDER DUCKS — BESSESTAD — SNORRO 

 STURLESON — THE OLD GREENLAND COLONY — FINLAND— A GENOESE 

 SKIPPER IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY — AN ICELANDIC DINNER — 

 SKOAL— AN AFTER-DINNER SPEECH IN LATIN — WINGED RABBITS — 

 DUCROW — START OF THE BAGGAGE-TRAIN. 



Reykjavik, June 28, 1856. 



Notwithstanding that its site, as I mentioned in my last 

 letter, was determined by auspices not less divine than those 

 of Rome or Athens, Reykjavik is not so fine a city as either, 

 though its public buildings may be thought to be in better 

 repair. In fact, the town consists of a collection of wooden 

 sheds, one story high — rising here and there into a gable 

 end of greater pretentions — built along the lava beach, and 

 flanked at either end by a suburb of turf huts. 



On every side of it extends a desolate plain of lava that 

 once must have boiled up red-hot from some distant gate- 

 way of hell, and fallen hissing into the sea. No tree or 

 bush relieves the dreariness of the landscape, and the 

 mountains are too distant to serve as a background to the 

 buildings ; but before the door of each merchant's house 

 facing the sea, there flies a gay little pennon; and as you 

 walk along the silent streets, whose dust no carriage-wheel 

 has ever desecrated, the rows of flower-pots that peep out 

 of the windows, between curtains of white muslin, at once 

 convince you that notwithstanding their unpretending ap- 

 pearance, within each dwelling reign the elegance and com- 

 fort of a woman-tended home. 



Thanks to Sigurdr's popularity among his countrymen, by 

 the second day after our arrival we found ourselves no longer 

 in a strange land. With a frank energetic cordiality that 

 quite took one by surprise, the gentlemen of the place at 



