I have witnessed many Sundays in Iceland and each one impressed me with the peace and happiness of its people, the devotion of worship and the value of the plain and simple life as a factor in contentment. To the young men who enquired about the customs of America and its advantages I had little to offer and my advice was to stay where the customs of centuries had ingrained habits of simplicity and instilled contentment. After all, what more do we wish in this world than contentment? Given enough to eat and to wear, protecting shelters, books and an occupation, the influence of right living and an absence of the craving for money and position, and man may be truly happy,—no matter under what sky his tent is pitched. In _Reykjavik_ with its sprinkling of foreign merchants and its few people who ape the customs of the continent in dress and in vice, yes and in idleness the mother of most of the vices, conditions are different. As in America, so in Iceland, the boy, who leaves the paternal roof and the occupation of his ancestors, who scorns the opportunities of the farm and seeks his fortune in the metropolis, soon puts aside his home-taught virtues, lapses into ways of idleness, acquires the idea that the world owes him the same living as that won by the ceaseless energy of toil, and it is not long before he becomes a derelict upon the ocean of humanity. At breakfast we were treated for the first time in our Icelandic experience to the national dish of skyr, curdled milk. My first experience was not pleasant but I have since learned to relish it. It was necessary to eat a goodly portion of it in order not to offend the mistress who had taken considerable trouble to prepare it for us in the best fashion. _Skyr_ has been a national dish from the earliest days of the _Vikings_ but the method of its preparation has been kept secret. On our second return from Iceland we were accompanied by an Icelandic maid, who frequently prepared for our table Icelandic dishes, but we could never persuade her to prepare this dish nor to tell us how it was made. Another dish set before us was cheese made of sheep’s milk; it was nearly chocolate in color and resembled mild roquefort in flavor. I needed no repeated trials to acquire a taste for this delicacy. It was set before us at every farm but it varied a good deal in quality. If one does not relish a rich, full-flavored cheese then the Icelandic cheese of sheep’s milk would not appeal to his taste. The country around _Ljósavatn_ is of considerable geological interest. The lake is of glacial origin and around it are several small drumlins of ashes and rubble which are now being transformed into conglomerate. The lake has the form of the Scottish inland _lochs_ and was formed by the filling in of one end of a glacial valley with glacial debris. Since the formation of the lake there has been a lava outflow across the east end of the valley and scores of small craters are along the banks of the _Djúpá_.