Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/430

424

usual wall or palisade of lava flows, with green grassed slopes at its foot.

The town, containing about 3.000 people, consists of sizable frame houses, some quite large. The public school is commodious, and there is a hospital and a hotel. The streets are named and the houses numbered. Here trailing along the roadsides and dotting the fields in color patches were the wild pansies (Viola tricolor).

The next stop was in the Skagafiord at Saudarkrokr, where a remarkable raised beach suggested geological themes. If I was not mistaken in my notes on the conversation between a fisherman and the steward of our steamer, the fisherman was induced to furnish us with good herring at about a farthing a pound, which same fish sell for almost twelve cents a pound in Copenhagen. Fish were all about us and the herring nets, floated by buoys, seamed the water, with fishermen moving slowly to and fro gathering them in. The Icelander peasant fisherman is very poor, and, clad in rough clothes, with hairy bristling whiskers and worn eyes and shock hair, has sometimes quite an aboriginal appearance. He wears a sheep-skin slipper on his foot and heavy encasing woolen socks underneath leggings, and has no scruples about