Iceland. The
best room, or rather house--for every room is a house--is set apart
for the accommodation of travelers. Another cabin is occupied by some
members of the pastor's family, who bundle about like a lot of
rabbits. The kitchen is also the dog-kennel, and occasionally the
sheep-house. A pile of stones in one corner of it, upon which a few
twigs or scraps of sheep-manure serve to make the fire, constitute the
cooking department. The beams overhead are decorated with pots and
kettles, dried fish, stockings, petticoats, and the remains of a pair
of boots that probably belonged to the pastor in his younger days. The
dark turf walls are pleasantly diversified with bags of oil hung on
pegs, scraps of meat, old bottles and jars, and divers rusty-looking
instruments for shearing sheep and cleaning their hoofs. The floor
consists of the original lava-bed, and artificial puddles composed of
slops and offal of divers unctuous kinds. Smoke fills all the cavities
in the air not already occupied by foul odors, and the beams, and
posts, and rickety old bits of furniture are dyed to the core with the
dense and variegated atmosphere around them. This is a fair specimen
of the whole establishment, with the exception of the travelers' room.
The beds in these cabins are the chief articles of luxury. Feathers
being abundant, they are sewed up in prodigious ticks, which are
tumbled topsy-turvy into big boxes on legs that serve for bedsteads,
and then covered over with piles of all the loose blankets,
petticoats, and cast-off rags possible to be gathered up about the
premises. Into these comfortable nests the sleepers dive every night,
and, whether in summer or winter, cover themselves up under the
odorous mountain of rags, and snooze away till morning. During the
long winter nights they spend on an average about sixteen hours out of
the twenty-four in this agreeable manner. When it is borne in mind
that every crevice in the house is carefully stopped up in order to
keep out the cold air, and that whole families frequently occupy a
single apartment not over ten by twelve, the idea of being able to cut
through the atmosphere with a cleaver seems perfectly preposterous. A
night's respiration in such a hole is quite sufficient to saturate the
whole family with the substance of all the fish and sheepskins in the
vicinity; and the marvel of it is that they don't come out next day
wagging their fins or bleating like sheep. I wonder they ever