VI.] A FARM-STEADS G. 27 



colour, with admirable action, and sure-footed enough to 

 walk downstairs backwards. The Doctor was not less well 

 mounted ; in fact, the Icelandic pony is quite a peculiar 

 race, much stronger, faster, and better bred than the High- 

 land shelty, and descended probably from pure-blooded 

 sires that scoured the steppes of Asia, long before Odin 

 and his paladins had peopled the valleys of Scandinavia. 



The first few miles of our ride lay across an undulating 

 plain of dolorite, to a farm situated at the head of an inlet 

 of the sea. At a distance, the farm-steading looked like a 

 little oasis of green, amid the grey stony slopes that 

 surrounded it, and on a nearer approach not unlike the 

 vestiges of a Celtic earthwork, with the tumulus of a hero 

 or two in the centre ; but the mounds turned out to be 

 nothing more than the grass roofs of the house and offices, 

 and the banks and dykes but circumvallations round the 

 plot of most carefully cleaned meadow, called the " tun," 

 which always surrounds every Icelandic farm. This word 

 "tun" is evidently identical with our own Irish " town- 

 land" the Cornish "town" and the Scotch "toon" — terms 

 which, in their local signification, do not mean a congre- 

 gation of streets and buildings, but the yard, and spaces 

 of grass immediately adjoining a single house ; just as 

 in German we have "tzaun," and in the Dutch " tuyn" 

 a garden. 



Turning to the right, round the head of a little bay, we 

 passed within forty yards of an enormous eagle, seated on a 

 crag ; but we had no rifle, and all he did was to rise heavily 

 into the air, flap his wings like a barn-door fowl, and plump 

 lazily down twenty yards farther off.- Soon after, the district 

 we traversed became more igneous, wrinkled, cracked, and 

 ropy than anything we had yet seen, and another two hours' 

 scamper over such a track as till then I would not have 

 believed horses could have traversed, even at a foot's pace, 

 brought us to the solitary farm-house of Bessestad. Fresh 

 from the neat homesteads of England that we had left 

 sparkling in the bright spring weather, and sheltered by 



