friends, I would persuade myself that urgent reasons
alone can have induced this poor man to leave us. Were we not
ourselves constrained to forsake two of our number several days back,
though with the full design of returning to them to aid them when it
should lie in our power? Thus I cannot blame the Icelander without
more knowledge of his intent, and so let us push on still and trust
in God to deliver us, as he surely will."

And, sure enough, the next day after they came upon a man who
undertook the place of the guide who had forsaken them. He was a
priest and a very learned man, but poor as the poorest farmer. He
spoke in Latin, and in imperfect Latin Adam made shift to answer him.
His clothes were all but worn to rags, and he was shoeing his horse
in the little garth before his door. His house, which stood alone
save for the wooden church beside it, looked on the outside like a
line of grass cones, hardly higher to their peaks than the head of a
tall man, and in the inside it was low, dark, noisome, and noisy. In
one room to which Chalse and the seamen were taken, three or four
young children were playing, an old woman was spinning, and a younger
woman, the priest's wife, was washing clothes. This was the living
room and sleeping room, the birth room and death room of the whole
family. In another room, to which Adam was led by the priest himself,
the floor was strewn with saddles, nails, hammers, horseshoes, whips,
and spades, and the walls were covered with bookshelves, whereon
stood many precious old black-letter volumes. This was the workshop
and study, wherein the good priest spent his long, dark days of
winter.

And, being once more fully equipped for the journey, Adam ordered
that they should lose no time in setting out afresh, with the priest
on his own pony in front of them. Two days then passed without
misadventure of any kind, and in that time they had come to a
village, at which they should have forsaken the coast line and made
for the interior, in order that they might cross to Reykjavik by way
of Thingvellir, and so cut off the peninsula ending in the Smoky
Point. But a heavy fall of snow coming down suddenly, they were
compelled to seek shelter at a farm, the only one for more than a
hundred miles to east or west of them. There they rested while the
snowstorm lasted, and it was the same weary downfall that kept Greeba
to her house while Red Jason lay in his brain fever in the cell in
the High Stre