y the longest fasts; and fasting, too, was an exercise I seldom escaped,
as I could touch few Icelandic dishes. The cookery of the Icelandic
peasants is wholly confined to the preparation of dried fish, with which
they eat fermented milk that has often been kept for months; on very rare
occasions they have a preparation of barley-meal, which is eaten with
flat bread baked from Icelandic moss ground fine.

I could not but wonder at the fact that most of these people expected to
find me acquainted with a number of things generally studied only by men;
they seemed to have a notion that in foreign parts women should be as
learned as men. So, for instance, the priests always inquired if I spoke
Latin, and seemed much surprised on finding that I was unacquainted with
the language. The common people requested my advice as to the mode of
treating divers complaints; and once, in the course of one of my solitary
wanderings about Reikjavik, on my entering a cottage, they brought before
me a being whom I should scarcely have recognised as belonging to the
same species as myself, so fearfully was he disfigured by the eruption
called "lepra." Not only the face, but the whole body also was covered
with it; the patient was quite emaciated, and some parts of his body were
covered with sores. For a surgeon this might have been an interesting
sight, but I turned away in disgust.

But let us turn from this picture. I would rather tell of the angel's
face I saw in Kalmannstunga. It was a girl, ten or twelve years of age,
beautiful and lovely beyond description, so that I wished I had been a
painter. How gladly would I have taken home with me to my own land, if
only on canvass, the delicate face, with its roguish dimples and speaking
eyes! But perhaps it is better as it is; the picture might by some
unlucky chance have fallen into the hands of some too-susceptible youth,
who, like Don Sylvio de Rosalva, in Wieland's _Comical Romance_, would
immediately have proceeded to travel through half the world to find the
original of this enchanting portrait. His spirit of inquiry would
scarcely have carried him to Iceland, as such an apparition would never
be suspected to exist in such a country, and thus the unhappy youth would
be doomed to endless wandering.

June 20th.

The distance from Kalmannstunga to Thingvalla is fifty-two miles, and the
journey is certainly one of the