232 SIR WILLIAM RAMSAY 



fashion, and were entertained with the hospitality of Iceland 

 in one house after another. 



Of adventures there were few ; the whole thing was adven- 

 turous enough for travellers who had never been there before 

 and who had to find out for themselves what an Icelandic bridle 

 track was like ; who had ne\er before ridden a pony down the 

 side of a basalt slab (it might be lava) or through many rivers. 



I remember one evening (at B61sta5arhli5) when Ramsay 

 found a lot of mushrooms and with difficulty persuaded our 

 hosts to have them cooked for us. I trusted Ramsay in this, 

 but the people of the house took no responsibility and would 

 not eat. They made me think of the islanders watching St. 

 Paul after he had shaken the serpent off : " howbeit they looked 

 when he would have swollen or fallen down suddenly." In 

 our case, however, unlike that of Melita, the failure of the experi- 

 ment left the original prejudice as strong as ever. 



The country we travelled through was not very remarkably 

 different from our own ; the valleys were like the glens we know, 

 except that there was a want of granite and mica schist and 

 such-like nobler creatures among the rocks. There were some 

 splendid places, like the Skagafirth country, looking down to 

 the sea ; Grettir's island of Drangey showing. It was a great 

 thing to find oneself riding over the moor, which is called Holt- 

 beacon Heath in the story of Burnt Njal ; this takes you down to 

 the head of Northwater Dale and so to the passage of Hvamm 

 (or Quam, as it is in the Lanarkshire form of the name), where 

 we spent a pleasant evening talking to Sira Gisli Einarsson, and 

 were sped on the next morning to North Tongue. That day 

 offered a problem to the curious traveller, which even Ramsay 

 was slow in solving. We could not make out the meaning of 

 a number of fires, as they seemed, scattered over a plain that 

 opened before us ; little clouds of smoke rising. The truth was, 

 we had got so used to our familiar Iceland, a natural country of 

 hills, glens, uplands, lowlands, and clear rivers with only 



