Page:The Life of William Morris.djvu/301

280 any bad news in the simplest form: though indeed the eleven letters at first glance did somewhat cure my terror, for there was no one dead at least.

"So home I went soberly to another lodging than last time, and thence, after reading my letters, with not more than the usual amount of disappointment and wondering at people's calmness I suppose, to Mrs. Maria's house again, where was dinner and the courtly old carle Sir Henry Holland, whose age (eighty-four) I thought was the most interesting thing about him. I was rather low after all, and cowed by the company, and a sense of stiffness after our joyous rough life just ended."

The "Diana" came in that night, and after three days at Reykjavik in the wind and wet, busy with selling the horses and seeing the museum and dining with the Governor, they sailed for home on the last day of August. As on the outward voyage, the "Diana" put in at Berufirth for a few hours. "At noon the signal gun was fired, and we were off presently, the pilot's boat towed alongside of us; I watched it going through the water, cold green under the shadow of our sides: the pilot's son sat in the stern, a tall, handsome-looking youth of about eighteen, 'wide-faced, grey-eyed, and open-eyed,' the very type of a northern youth, as he sat looking dreamily out to sea: his father went over the side into the boat presently, and they cast off, and soon even the shadows of the rocks faded into the mist, and I had seen the last of Iceland." The voyage back was uneventful. In the evening of the 6th of September, a soft warm grey day, the "Diana" came along the pier at Granton in time for Morris to catch the night mail for London. "I was curious to see," he writes on the last page of his diary, "what effect the trees would have on me