fidelity and honesty as well as the good sense of this man rendered him an useful servant, and often an amusing companion. The various climates he had visited, and the hardships he had suffered, from his earliest youth, enabled him to endure alike heat and cold, and to bear the greatest fatigue without ever uttering a single complaint. In his broken English he not unfrequently relieved the wearisomeness which attended travelling over the long and dreary moors of Iceland, by relating the adventures that he had met with in his many voyages and travels, particularly in a journey that he had made from Petersburgh to China. By birth he was a German, but could talk English and Danish, and, besides acting as interpreter, he. was of considerable use to me as a butcher, as well as in cooking, and occasionally in washing for me. I certainly experienced great inconvenience from my ignorance of

These few remarks, which I have thought due to the short but faithful services of this man, were scarcely written down (July, 1810), when I received from Mr. Phelps the unwelcome intelligence, that he was no more. A vessel from Iceland brought the information, that he, together with another of the crew, who after the loss of

the Icelandic language, as, except in a very few instances, I could only obtain information from the natives through the medium of two interpreters; my question being put in English to Jacob, who translated it into Danish to my Reikevig guide, and he, again, in Icelandic, made it intelligible to the person I wished to address. The answer, also, was necessarily returned by the same circuitous way. It was half past six in the evening, before Jacob and myself set out, when we travelled as fast as the roads, which are better in the immediate vicinity of the capital than almost any where else, would permit us; stopping only to admire, and to gather specimens of, the elegant Saxifraga Hirculus, which adorned, in the greatest profusion, the numerous springs of water that we met with near our road. It was in this journey, for the first time in my life,

the Margaret and Anne, had remained at Reikevig, and married and settled there, had gone out one day to sea on a shooting excursion with Mr. Savigniac, when the boat was unfortunately overturned, and the two sailors perished. The body of poor Jacob was thrown on shore the next morning, but that of his companion had not been found.

that I saw its beautiful yellow blossoms, and I thought I could never gather enough of the plant. In about three hours we overtook our luggage horses and guide: despising, however, a conductor in a tract of country,' over which we had twice travelled before, we hastened forward on our way, but had scarcely lost sight of our company than we saw reason to regret our precipitancy; for we found ourselves so encompassed by bogs, that we were at a loss how to proceed. In urging my own horse through a swamp, he floundered and threw me, and I had great difficulty in extricating him from his unpleasant situation. Jacob, by a more circuitous route, reached me in safety, and we continued our journey till about ten o'clock, when we arrived at the foot of Skoul-a-fiel, and fixed upon a little verdant plain by the banks of a wide and extremely rapid torrent for the situation of our tents, which did not come up to us before twelve o'clock. about half a mile from us was a peasant's house, called, if I recollect right, Skykeaster, to which I dispatched Jacob, according to my usual custom, for some fuel to boil our

At

kettle and some milk *. In the owner of this house, for the first and only time in

* For the convenience of having the milk brought down to me, I always sent bottles to the cottagers; but it never came into my mind to inquire what means were employed to convey the fluid into such a vessel from the large and shallow dishes in which it is kept by the natives; in a country, too, where funnels cannot be supposed to be in use among the poorer class of people. I should, probably, to this day, have remained in ignorance of the method, had I not, a little previous to my leaving the country, been informed, as well by the Danes at Reikevig, as by some natives (persons worthy of credit, and whose names if necessary I could now mention), that the milk is first taken into the mouths of the women, and then spirted into the bottle.-Let it be remembered, that I do not mention this circumstance as one to which either Jacob or myself was a witness, neither could this well have been the case, for the bottles were always carried into the house by the women, and returned to us filled; but, from the respectability of my informers, and the simplicity of the mode, it really appears deserving of credit.-Linnæus, on the Lapland Alps, partook of Misseen, a kind of whey, under circumstances equally filthy. "Its flavor was good," he observes, "but the washing of the spoon (which was done by spirting water upon it from the mouth) took away my appetite, as the master of the house wiped it dry with his fingers, whilst his wife cleaned the bowl, in which milk had been, in a similar manner, licking her finger after every stroke." Lach. Lapp. vol. 1. p. 293.

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the island, I met with a deviation from that genuine hospitality which so strongly characterises the inhabitants of Iceland. In all my other excursions I was furnished with milk, fuel, or whatever the house afforded, with the greatest cheerfulness, and with the strongest marks of welcome; and, even if I remained for some days in one spot, I never thought of making a return, except it was in the trifling articles of snuff and tobacco, until I was about to take my departure from the neighborhood. It is therefore single instance of avarice and mistrust that I mention the owner of Skykeaster, who, on coming down to my tent with a few birchen twigs that were not sufficient to boil the kettle, and about a pint of milk, demanded two marks and eight skillings *. This I paid him immediately, letting him know at the same time that, had his conduct been different, he would have been better recompensed; at which he was so much vexed that he offered to return the money, and furnish me unconditionally with as much more of the milk and fuel as I wanted. A strong

* About one shilling and eight-pence of our money. VOL. I.