It was in the year 1845 that Madame Pfeiffer began her northward journey.  She left Vienna on the 10th of April, and by way of Prague, Dresden, and Altona, proceeded to Kiel.  Thence the steamer carried her to Copenhagen, a city of which she speaks in favourable terms.  She notices its numerous splendid palaces; its large and regular squares; its broad and handsome promenades.  At the Museum of Art she was interested by the chair which Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, formerly used; and at the Thorvaldsen Museum, the colossal lion executed by the great Danish sculptor.  Having seen all that was to be seen, she took ship for Iceland, passing Helsingborg on the Swedish coast, and Elsinore on the Danish, the latter associated with Shakespeare’s “Hamlet;” and, through the Sound and the Cattegat, entering upon the restless waters of the North Sea.  Iceland came in sight on the seventh day of a boisterous voyage, which had tried our traveller somewhat severely; and at the close of the eleventh day she reached Havenfiord, an excellent harbour, two miles from Reikiavik, the capital of Iceland.

Her first impressions of the Icelandic coast, she says, were very different from the descriptions she had read in books.  She had conceived of a barren desolate waste, shrubless and treeless; and she saw grassy hillocks, leafy copses, and even, as she thought, patches of dwarfish woods.  But as she drew nearer, and could distinguish the different objects more plainly, the hillocks were transformed into human habitations, with small doors and windows; and the groups of trees proved to be huge lava masses, from ten to fifteen feet in height, entirely overgrown with verdure and moss.  Everything was new, was surprising; and it was with pleasurable sensations of excitement and curiosity that Madame Pfeiffer landed on the shores of Ultima Thule.

[Reikiavik:  page135.jpg]

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At Reikiavik she found the population inhabiting two very different classes of habitations.  The wooden houses of the well-to-do are of a single story, she says, with five or six windows in front.  A low flight of steps conducts to an entrance in the centre of the building; and this entrance opens into a vestibule, where two doors communicate with the rooms on the right and left respectively.  In the rear is the kitchen, and beyond the courtyard.  Such a house contains four or five rooms on the ground-floor, and a few small chambers under the roof.  The domestic or household arrangements are entirely European.  The furniture, much of which is mahogany, comes from Copenhagen, which also supplies the mirrors and cast-iron stoves.  Handsome rugs are spread in front of the sofas; neat curtains drop before the windows; English engravings ornament the whitewashed walls; and china, silver, and cut-glass, and the like, are displayed upon the cabinets or corner-tables.