At eight in the morning I awoke and was scarcely out of bed when the door opened and in came the maid, Kristine, with coffee, sugar, cream and cakes for our first meal. I tried to have her leave it outside the door and motioned her away but it was of no use. In she came with the air of one who knew her duty to her master’s guests and intended to fulfill it. She placed the tray on a stand, turned quickly to our clothes, gathered them up and was about to take them away when I protested as vigorously as I could with signs that they were necessary for my immediate use, but to no effect. I did succeed in pulling from her grasp my trousers but she fled smilingly with all the other items of wearing apparel even to the hats and riding boots. We were prisoners. After the coffee had been drunk the maid returned with the clothes nicely brushed and folded and the boots polished. Ever after this I slept with my trousers under my pillow and my extra pair of shoes hid in the room; otherwise I would have often been deprived of an hour of delightful strolling about the farm before the real breakfast. [Illustration: _Fording a Shallow Arm of the Mývatn. Turf Cottage in the Distance._ _Contorted, Twisted and Crumpled Lava at Skútustaðir._] The _Mývatn_ region is the most fascinating, the most weird as well as the most beautiful place in all Iceland. I believe it to be the fairest spot in all that land of sun-kissed and wind-swept enchantment. The lake is twenty miles long and its deepest place is not over twelve feet. There are places where the water is hot and others where the water flows from under the lava in ice-cold streams into the lake. At the entrance of these streams there is excellent trout fishing. The lake is dotted with islands, each a small crater, each fringed to the edge of the water with the fragrant _Angelica_, each clothed with grass nearly to the summit and each summit black and red, scorched, blistered and horrent. Hundreds of these low craters fringe the southern end of the lake and are scattered over the adjoining farms, especially the farm of _Skútustaðir_. They are an exact representation of the mountains of the moon as viewed through a powerful telescope. To the geologist the _Mývatn_ craters are of rare interest, for nowhere else on the earth are they duplicated in the numbers and in their peculiar formation. They rest like huge ant hills on a level plain, each is circular in form and many of them are confluent at the base. The slopes of many of the mounds are covered with bombs and of characteristic type. The character of the bombs on the slopes of widely separated craters is different, indicating a different period of eruption and a different composition of lava which entered into their formation.