THE GOLD AND SILVER SHIELD! 
139 
“ Christian—and another to plod over the same forty 
miles, drenched to the skin, seeing nothing hut the 
dim, grey roots of hills, that rise you know not how, 
and you care not where,—with no better employment 
than to look at your watch, and wonder when you 
shall reach your journey’s end. If, in addition to this, 
you have to wait, as very often must be the case, for 
many hours after your own arrival, wet, tired, hungry, 
until the baggage-train, with the tents and food, shall 
have come up, with no alternative in the mean time 
but to lie shivering inside a grass-roofed church, or 
to share the quarters of some farmer’s family, whose 
domestic arrangements resemble in every particular 
those which Macaulay describes as prevailing among 
the Scottish Highlanders a hundred years ago; and if, 
finally—after vainly waiting for some days to see an 
eruption which never takes place—you journey back to 
Reykjavik under the same melancholy conditions,—it 
will not be unnatural that on returning to your native 
land, you should proclaim Iceland, with her Gey sirs, 
to be a sham, a delusion, and a snare! 
Fortune, however, seemed determined that of these 
bitternesses we should not taste; for the next morning, 
