A Girl's Ride in Iceland. By Ethel B. Harley (Mrs.
Alec Tweedie). (Griffith and Farran.)—This brightly written little volume will amuse the reader, and may perhaps induce him to under- take a similar excursion. Iceland is not troubled with tourists, yet a voyage of four days in a well-appointed steamer will carry the tourist from Leith to Reykjavik, the capital of the island. The expedition has the charm of novelty for an Englishmen, and still more so for an English lady, as Mrs. Tweedie can testify. A country more than one-third larger than Scotland, with- out vehicles, without trees, with but one jail, and blessed apparently with but one newspaper, has at least the merit of freshness for the jaded Continental traveller. The paucity of the population, too, is another feature of interest. Akureyri is a considerable town for Iceland, and the population is under 1,000, while the capital has but 4,000. In the race of life, the Icelander has everything against him, and Mrs. Tweedie noticed a look of indifference. and depression on the faces of the common people. But if apathetic, they are singularly honest, and the prison " rarely has an inmate." The Icelander is, and always has been, well educated. It is said that there is not a man or woman who cannot read and write, and the author states that on visiting the farmhouses, she never failed to notice a Lutheran Bible, many of the " Sagas " by native poets, and trans- lations of Shakespeare, Goethe, and other famous writers. Reykjavik, which has not a cart or carriage in its silent streets, possesses a free library. Mrs. Tweedie and her companions made an expedition to the Geysers, in which she learnt to ride man- fashion, and found the fatigue of a long journey much lightened in consequence. " The crooked position of a side-saddle," she writes, " for one must sit crooked to look straight, is very fatiguing to a weak back, and many women to whom the exercise would be
of the greatest benefit, cannot stand the strain For corn- fort and safety, I say, ride like a man." The writer, by-the-way, refers us to a map of the Island, " with a red boundary line marking the course of the steamer, and her usual halting-placese- but the map given in the volume contains no such line of route.
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