In some parts of the island lava is used instead of stones, and instead of wood the rafters are made of the ribs of whales. A horse’s skull is the best seat provided for a visitor. Too often the same room serves as the dining, sitting, and sleeping place for the whole family, and the beds are merely boxes filled with feathers or sea-weed. There are, however, a few houses of a superior character, in which the arrangements are not much unlike those of a good old-fashioned English farm-house; the walls being wainscotted with deal, and the doors and staircase of the same material. A few prints and photographs, some book-shelves, one or two little pictures, decorate the sitting-room, and a neat iron stove, and massive chests of drawers, furnish it sufficiently. From the houses we turn to the churches. In Reikiavik the church is a stone building, the only stone building in the town; but this is exceptional: most of the churches are not much better than the houses. We will be content, therefore, with a visit to the Reikiavik sanctuary, which is a neat and unpretending erection, capable of accommodating three or four hundred persons. The Icelanders are not opposed to a “decent ritual,” and the Lutheran minister wears a black gown with a ruff round his neck. The majority of the congregation, here as everywhere else, consists of women; some few dressed in bonnets, and the rest wearing the national black silk skull-cap, set jauntily on one side of the head, with a long black tassel drooping to the shoulder, or else a quaint mitre-like structure of white linen, almost as imposing as the head-dress of a Normandy peasant. The remainder of an Icelandic lady’s costume, we may add, consists of a black bodice, fastened in front with silver clasps, over which is drawn a cloth jacket, gay with innumerable silver buttons; round the neck goes a stiff ruff of velvet, embroidered with silver lace; and a silver belt, often beautifully chased, binds the long dark wadmal petticoat round the waist. Sometimes the ornaments are of gold, instead of silver, and very costly. Towards the end of the Lutheran service, the preacher descends from the pulpit, and attiring himself in a splendid crimson velvet cope, turns his back to the congregation, and chants some Latin sentences. Though still retaining in their ceremonies, says a recent traveller, a few vestiges of the old religion, though altars, candles, pictures, and crucifixes yet remain in many of their churches, the Icelanders are stanch Protestants, and singularly devout, innocent, and pure-hearted. Crime, theft, debauchery, cruelty are unknown amongst them; they have neither prison, gallows, soldiers, nor police; and in the manner of their lives mingles something of a patriarchal simplicity, that reminds one of the Old World princes, of whom it has been said, that they were “upright and perfect, eschewing evil, and in their hearts no guile.”