BACK TO TOWN. 75 recollections of the “ Argo ” as they had of the other yachts that had visited the island. A curious people are these Icelanders, and the more curious the more you know about them. A people with a wonderful history, whose island was a brilliant seat of learning and cultivation when all Europe was in darkness profound. Always a mere handful of folk, sparsely scattered about, and never gathering into towns, but with great deeds of valour performed by individual heroes. And then all these deeds were cherished and told from generation to generation till they became part of the life of the people, the very breath of their nostrils. The Sagas, first of all oral, then committed to writing, and now translated into half a dozen different tongues, make the life of the Icelander during the first five hundred years of the island’s history quite familiar to us. His love-makings and marriages, his savage murders and blood-feuds, his com- bats and lawings at the Althing, how he “ went a-viking” to Norway and Denmark, to Ireland and Scotland, how he enlisted in the Emperor’s guard at Constantinople, how he became a Christian, and how he wrote poems and printed books ; of all these things we have photographic pictures and can see him doing them. But the glory has departed never to return. The climate has undoubtedly grown steadily worse. We read of trees and corn in the old Sagas. Now nothing but grass and lava. What possibly can be expected from a people who have to import every ear of corn for their bread, every plank of timber for their houses, and who have not even the lime wherewithal to put stones together for a wall ? Their sheep, their wool, their ponies, and their dried cod-fish are all they have to

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