The Icelanders have no flowers; they know of their beauty only by the tales of their countrymen who have seen them on their travels; but every one who looked into little Helga's beautiful face thought that flowers must look like that, and thus she was called "the Flower of Iceland." Fair Helga loved her grave father, but she loved still more her beautiful and gentle mother, by whose side she spent most of her time. Every spring the father set out for the coast with a few servants to get fish for the year's household provisions; for though he dearly loved Marietta and his home, the sea still exercised the old spell on his heart. In summer and autumn he was accustomed to go to the distant trading places along the coast, there to exchange the wool of his large and well-conditioned flocks for the valuable products of foreign lands, with which he loved to please and adorn his dear ones. At such times Helga would sit at her mother's feet, listening as she told in the soft, sweet sounds of her native tongue about the blue sky and the warm golden sunlight of Italy, of the beautiful flowers and evergreen woods, and of the fine mild nights when the young girls would dance in the moonlight to the sound of the mandoline, and pleasure and melody reigned over land and sea. Ah! how beautiful that country must be; and here everything was so different. No dance, no song, either from human lips or from the throat of a bird. Helga had never even heard the sheep give a cheerful bleat; everything was stupid and grave; the silence of death was Nature's language here. Then Helga's dark eye would wander away over Iceland's wide and desert heaths, over the lava-fields that stretched for miles, and which had buried the freshness of nature under their stiff mantle of mourning. She gazed on those giant ice-mountains, untrod by human foot, which rise like monuments of death, with thick mist-veils about their brow. Even when a sunbeam happens to pierce the cloudy covering, the colossal piles of ice shine in the pale light like sarcophagi in a vault. Then Helga would shudder and think with ardent longing on her dear mother's native land. And she? Ah, her husband had been right. In spite of her love for him, she pined for the sunny valleys of her childhood, all the more as she never told her husband of the grief that gnawed at her heart, for he placed his Iceland before all the paradises of the world. Ten years had scarcely gone by till Marietta's warm heart lay still beneath the sod. Helga thought her heart would break when they carried her loved mother out towards the hill, whence she had so often looked longingly out over the sea, watching the blue waves as they hastened towards the beautiful but distant south. "When you bury me," said the dying woman to her husband, "lay me so that my face may look towards Italy." And they did as she wished.