I have made the acquaintance of many dear little children in Iceland. My first friends were the children of a pastor at Thingvellir, thirty miles from Reykjavik, and as it is the first stage to many places, I have stayed with them very often – since Inga, the eldest daughter, was a little baby. Now she is a tall, clever, useful girl, with two brothers and two sisters, and is her mother's right hand. Hermann, the eldest boy, is a bit of a pickle, but very quick and handy; since he was quite small he could do anything with the ponies, and loves to take a troop of them to pasture, or round them up when wanted. Icelandic children are very well taught, though there are no schools out in the country. Their parents teach them a good deal; also there are travelling teachers who go from farm to farm. When they grow older they are sent to school in Reykjavik, and if the boys are destined for a profession they are sent to college at Copenhagen.

The children seem to have a happy time. Summer is a long holiday, and they are out all day, with the cows or the sheep or the ponies, or making hay, or gathering wild berries. They have not many playthings; one of their toys is the shank-bone of a sheep, called "leggi," to which they tie a bit of rope and pretend it is a pony. They have games, however, something like ours, and I spent a merry evening once, when it rained outside, playing "general post" and "forfeits" with the Thingvellir children, in which their father and mother and another dear old friend – a kind big man who loves children – joined; and a very jolly time we had, though the "forfeits" were all "cried" in Icelandic, and the post "fared" from some of the recent stages of our journey.