53 had fallen in battle. Another traveller tells us that the mountain in his day was guarded by a number of strange black birds, resembling crows, with beaks of iron, with which they received, in a very ungracious manner, anyone who might presume to infringe upon their territory. Accord- ing to these authorities, the first eruption took place in 1004, and was brought about by a man throwing a casket into the crater at the summit, which awoke “the sleeping lion.” In Iceland there are many sleeping and active partners in the great Volcano Company of the world (which now consists of some 300 members), but few are of such an excitable nature as Hecla. Its eruptions have averaged three a century, but rarely in historic times has such an outbreak taken place as in 1783, when red-hot lava flowed from Kkaptar Jokul for weeks, and reached the sea, sixty miles distant, in a broken breadth of thirteen miles. Innumerable fire spouts were seen leaping and flaring through the dense canopy of smoke and ashes that enveloped the land. So great was the ruin caused by the outbreak that 9,326 men, 28,000 horses, 11,461 cattle, and 190,000 sheep—a large proportion of the wealth and population of the island—were swept away. Mrs Oswald well describes the action of the Icelandic volcanoes :—If you make up a hot fire, and put on a kettle of water, and then heap up the fire so as to conceal all bid the smoke ; if you then pile ice on the lid of the kettle,and add a pipe to drain it downwards, you will produce a condi- tion of what chemists call unstable equilibrium— in short, there will soon be a great splutter of some sort. Keep piling up the ice, and do not let the fire go down, and the whole will fairly represent the condition of the mountain system of Iceland just now. You can hardly tell whether ice, or boiling water, or ashes, or molten metallic substances, or some or altogether will be the next destructive agent or agents liberated. Some- times the internal heat causes whole glaciers to precipitate themselves into the valleys, and sometimes there is an eruption of water only. All sorts of things may happen so as to make it a nice stirring sort of country for a picnic on a summer’s day. Leaving our post of vantage, and seated once more in the bonder’s house, we had much food for TTfTTTffTftfTTI

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