The poverty of the clergy corresponds with the meanness of their churches. The best living in the island is that of Breide’-Bolstadr, where the nominal stipend amounts to 180 specie dollars, or about £40 a year; and Mr. Holland states that the average livings do not amount to more than £10 for each parish in the island. The clergymen must therefore depend almost entirely for subsistence on their glebe land, and a small pittance to which they are entitled for the few baptisms, marriages, and funerals that occur among their parishioners. The bishop himself has only 2000 rix-dollars, or £200, a year, a miserable pittance to make a decent appearance, and to exercise hospitality to the clergy who visit Reykjavik from distant parts. [Illustration: 58. THE PASTOR’S HOUSE, THINGVALLA.] It can not be wondered at that pastors thus miserably paid are generally obliged to perform the hardest work of day laborers to preserve their families from starving, and that their external appearance corresponds less with the dignity of their office than with their penury. Besides hay-making and tending the cattle, they may be frequently seen leading a train of pack-horses from a fishing-station to their distant hut. They are all blacksmiths also from necessity, and the best shoers of horses on the island. The feet of an Iceland horse would be cut to pieces over the sharp rock and lava, if not well shod. The great resort of the peasantry is the church; and should any of the numerous horses have lost a shoe, or be likely to do so, the priest puts on his apron, lights his little charcoal fire in his smithy (one of which is always attached to every parsonage), and sets the animal on his legs again. The task of getting the necessary charcoal is not the least of his labors, for whatever the distance may be to the nearest thicket of dwarf-birch, he must go thither to burn the wood, and to bring it home when charred across his horse’s back. His hut is scarcely better than that of the meanest fisherman; a bed, a rickety table, a few chairs, and a chest or two, are all his furniture. This is, as long as he lives, the condition of the Icelandic clergyman, and learning, virtue, and even genius are but too frequently buried under this squalid poverty. But few of my readers have probably ever heard of the poet Jon Thorlakson, but who can withhold the tribute of his admiration from the poor priest of Backa, who with a fixed income of less than £6 a year, and condemned to all the drudgery which I have described, finished at seventy years of age a translation of Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” having previously translated Pope’s “Essay on Man.” [Illustration: 59. THE PASTOR OF THINGVALLA.]