第13章 LETTER VI(4)

Of the rooms and the interior arrangement of the house,I do not know that I have anything particular to tell you;they seemed to me like those of a good old-fashioned farmhouse,the walls wainscoted with deal,and the doors and staircase of the same material.A few prints,a photograph,some book-shelves,one or two little pictures,decorated the parlour,and a neat iron stove,and massive chests of drawers,served to furnish it very completely.

But you must not,I fear,take the drawing-room of Bessestad as an average specimen of the comfort of an Icelandic interieur.The greater proportion of the inhabitants of the island live much more rudely.The walls of only the more substantial farmsteads are wainscoted with deal,or even partially screened with drift-wood.

In most houses the bare blocks of lava,pointed with moss,are left in all their natural ruggedness.Instead of wood,the rafters are made of the ribs of whales.The same room but too often serves as the dining,sitting,and sleeping place for the whole family;a hole in the roof is the only chimney,and a horse's skull the most luxurious fauteuil into which it is possible for them to induct a stranger.The parquet is that originally laid down by Nature,--the beds are merely boxes filled with feathers or sea-weed,--and by all accounts the nightly packing is pretty close,and very indiscriminate.

After drinking several cups of coffee,and consuming at least a barrel of rusks,we rose to go,in spite of Miss Thora's intimation that a fresh jorum of coffee was being brewed.The horses were resaddled;and with an eloquent exchange of bows,curtseys,and kindly smiles,we took leave of our courteous entertainers,and sallied forth into the wind and rain.It was a regular race home,single file,the Rector leading;but as we sped along in silence,amid the unchangeable features of this strange land,Icould not help thinking of him whose shrewd observing eye must have rested,six hundred and fifty years ago,on the selfsame crags,and tarns,and distant mountain-tops;perhaps on the very day he rode out in the pride of his wealth,talent,and political influence,to meet his murderers at Reikholt.And mingling with his memory would rise the pale face of Thora,--not the little lady of the coffee and buscuits we had just left,but that other Thora,so tender and true,who turned back King Olaf's hell-hounds from the hiding-place of the great Jarl of Lade.

In order that you may understand why the forlorn barrack we had just left,and its solitary inmates,should have set me thinking of the men and women "of a thousand summers back,"it is necessary I should tell you a little about this same Snorro Sturleson,whose memory so haunted me.

Colonized as Iceland had been,--not,as is generally the case,when a new land is brought into occupation,by the poverty-stricken dregs of a redundant population,nor by a gang of outcasts and ruffians,expelled from the bosom of a society which they contaminated,--but by men who in their own land had been both rich and noble,--with possessions to be taxed,and a spirit too haughty to endure taxation,--already acquainted with whatever of refinement and learning the age they lived in was capable of supplying,it is not surprising that we should find its inhabitants,even from the first infancy of the republic,endowed with an amount of intellectual energy hardly to be expected in so secluded a community.