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304 endurance—one day they were fifteen hours in the saddle—but no one was the worse for it in spite of much cold and rain. Except Lithend, no place famous in a Saga was visited, though from a northern mountain they saw Drángey, Grettir's island, lying below them down the long reach of Skagafirth. But the land itself, apart from the particular associations of places, had grown in his mind into a strange fascination. Even more now than two years before, the touch of Iceland was something that stirred him with an almost sacramental solemnity. "The journey," he writes of it after his return, "has deepened the impression I had of Iceland and increased my love for it. The glorious simplicity of the terrible and tragic, but beautiful land, with its well-remembered stories of brave men, killed all querulous feeling in me, and has made all the dear faces of wife and children and love and friends dearer than ever to me. I feel as if a definite space of my life had passed away now I have seen Iceland for the last time: as I looked up at Charles' Wain to-night, all my travel there seemed to come back on me, made solemn and elevated, in one moment, till my heart swelled with the wonder of it: surely I have gained a great deal, and it was no idle whim that drew me there, but a true instinct for what I needed."

In a lighter vein, but yet with a touch, at the close, of the same feeling of awe and breathlessness, he writes to Mrs. Baldwin on the 14th of September:

"Dear Louie,

"I came back safe and well last Friday, and I am sorry to say without the pony for your little lad: this was not laziness on my part, but was because I found the price of ponies gone up so much since I was last there that they are quite as dear there (for what