pungent smoke partly stifles odors that are worse; but, since a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds of peat are required to do the work of ten pounds of coal, we need not be surprised that food is often but half cooked.

Before I went to Háls I had some misgivings about the food I should find there; but I really fared much better than I had sometimes done on an American farm. My usual breakfast began with boiled eggs, for which, by the way, I was provided with an egg cup and egg spoon. Then came fried mutton, cold salmon, and cold lamb, with brown bread, large, thin crackers, fresh butter, cheese, and tea or coffee, with a pitcher of cream. Supper was much the same, with the eggs and warm meat left Dinner always consisted of two courses: first, a thick, sweet soup, much like a pudding, containing tapioca and flavored with wine, raisins, and cinnamon, or a handful of Iceland moss, which has a pleasant but indescribable taste; for the second, there was lamb or mutton, baked or boiled, and, for a change, a boiled fish, with boiled or fried potatoes. Other vegetables and fruits were conspicuously absent. One fact that especially impressed me was that no one but the father and one of the sons ever sat down to eat with me. Kristín would generally bring in the food to the sitting room and indicate, by a curt "Be so good," that the meal was ready; but the women and all the rest of the household ate in the kitchen. In table manners Thorbjörn and his father were irreproachable; but I could tell moving tales of the confusion in many Icelandic minds as to the functions of a knife, a spoon, a finger, a fork, and a toothpick.

With the living at Háls I could find little fault; and I appreciated it more highly while making my trip across country, when I had to put up at any farmhouse that appeared. Now and then I was treated to delicacies of a somewhat doubtful character-large, round, black pancakes, as tender as leather; black bread, that cut like hard cheese; raw, dried codfish, salted and beaten with a stone hammer till the shreds were well separated. A few trials of this convinced me that one night as well chew a handful of salted twine. My most amusing meal was at a farmhouse on the south coast. In the center of the table was the food-a great round heap of codfish, fried in huge chunks. Beside the platter stood a cup containing a mysterions liquid,

which proved to be melted tallow, evidently intended as a faint imitation of drawn butter. At one of the farmhouses a heap of blubber for table use lay just outside my bedroom, and by its fragrance entirely satisfied my appetite. Taken as a whole, the food of an Icelandic farmer of the poorer class is not remarkable for variety; but anyone who is fond of skyr, and black bread, and butter that has been melted and kept for several years, and who likes hammered codfish and fried codfish and boiled codfish and baked codfish and chopped codfish, will get on very well.

Thus far we have looked, for the most part, at the externals of the farm life, and have, perhaps, left too little space for considering the people themselves. Yet externals have so much. to do with making the Icelanders what they are that we can hardly understand them without having a definite picture of their surroundings. It is difficult to see an Icelander at his best. The country people meet so few strangers that they are painfully timid. For the first two or three days of my stay at the farm I was let alone almost as severely as if I had brought the plague. The farm hands would scurry around a corner to avoid observation, and blush and tremble at being caught in their everyday clothes. The children, especially, would vanish with an elvish shriek if I ventured near them. Little Helga and the boys would climb without fear to the ridge of the barn or cling in sport to the mane of a galloping horse; but not until the newness had worn off would they come near enough to take a stick of chocolate out of my hand. Most of the family, except the father, seemed taciturn, though not ill-tempered. With the daughter I read Icelandic several hours a day. She would answer all my questions pleasantly enough, but she never volunteered a syllable of information and never relaxed her impassive face, except for a half-suppressed laugh. Yet she had spent a year in Copenhagen and was by no means lacking in intelligence. The second son, a boy of sixteen, who was studying at the Latin college in Reykjavik, rarely spoke except when spoken to, and then very briefly. The third son, a lad of fourteen, would often come into the sitting room and stand stock still in a corner for fifteen minutes at a time, without uttering a syllable. He was not sullen-he was only making his manners.

When I came to know the farm hands a little better I found

that they had considerable grim humor; but their faces always seemed to be mourning. They concealed under a stolid exterior a keen curiosity with regard to everything and everybody new. Notwithstanding their apparent taciturnity, they were inveterate gossips, familiar with the scandal and the tattle of remote districts that they had never visited. Whenever a horseman from a distant region dismounted at the door he was mercilessly questioned till he had yielded up all he knew. He in turn cross-examined his questioners. Chance visitors largely supplied the place of the newspaper. After spending a few days at the farm I could easily pardon this irrepressible inquisitiveness; for the daily round was dull enough and afforded small. incentive to the household to come out of themselves. Of attempted amusement there was exceedingly little. The children did not even quarrel, as children should; but as they had no marbles or jackstraws or other toys they could hardly be blamed for being good. Kristín used often to play chess with one of her brothers, and she would now and then attempt a little music on the family accordion. The most ambitious entertainment was a dance one Sunday afternoon in the large upper room. This was active exercise enough to keep one warm even in Iceland; but the most partial admirer could hardly call it graceful.

The most constant source of quiet entertainment was reading. Even the farm hands would now and then listen while one of them read aloud the story of Njál or Frithjof or Egil. The farmer and the older children would often pick up a book from the table and busy themselves till some duty more pressing required attention. None of the family spoke English except one of the sons, who had learned a few phrases; but the daughter and two of the sons understood Danish and read Danish ballads and novels and Danish translations of Tolstoi, Daudet, Zola, and Guy de Maupassant, to say nothing of Icelandic stories, histories, and poems. The father was fond of Samuel Smiles's Thrift, Herbert Spencer's Education, and John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty-all of which he had in Icelandic translations.

My final impressions of the farm life were more favorable than I had dared to expect. I realized, in my fortnight's stay, the charm of a civilization strangely isolated and

primitive, and yet pervaded with much that is best in the thought of the world. But, after all, why should not the Icelanders be civilized? Their ancestors came from Norway and were own brothers to the Normans-perhaps the most brilliant people that Europe saw in the Middle Ages. The first settlers of Iceland were among the best of their race. They produced a literature which, in variety and beauty, was the rival of the French and the Italian. Strange would it be if the Icelanders should utterly forget such ancestry and sink into barbarism. Centuries of privation and of political dependence have left their stamp upon the people and partly broken their spirit. Yet time and again I was impressed with the essential unity of the old life, as I found it in the sagas, and the new life, as I found it on the farm. The family at Háls used in their everyday talk almost the very language of the sagas, and they unconsciously showed that it would be perfectly possible, by making slight verbal changes, to construct from the literature of centuries ago a tolerably accurate picture of the life of the country as it is to-day.

Willian Edward

mead

ART. II.-A DOCTRINE OF CIVIL LIBERTY. THE briefest exposition of civil liberty must include a statement of the source of governing power, of the relative rights, under law, of the subjects of government, and of the principle of limitation upon governmental authority. I quite agree with Professor Burgess, in his work on Political Science and Comparative Constitutional Law, that "mankind does not begin with liberty," but "acquires liberty through civilization." Hence, as he also asserts, "the higher the people of the State rise in civilization the more will the State expand the domain of private rights." Our own recent history strikingly confirms this, in the action of the nation overthrowing slavery. Dr. Lieber declares:

That civil liberty, or simply liberty, as it is often called, naturally comes to signify certain measures, institutions, guarantees, or forms of government by which people secure, or hope to secure, liberty-unimpeded action in those civil matters or those spheres of activity which they hold most important-appears even from ancient writers.

This comes about as near a definition of civil liberty as his book on the subject contains, though, upon another page, the "conclusion" is reached that "liberty, applied to political man, practically means, in the main, protection or checks against undue interference, whether this be from individuals, from masses, or from government." No aid is given here by the truly great work of President Woolsey on Political Science.

For the purposes in view, however, it is sufficient to say that civil liberty is the liberty which comes from, or is found under, civil government. In part, it is created by the civil authority, the remainder arising out of the fact that the civil power exists. To illustrate: civil law confers the right of saying to whom one's property shall go after the owner's death, while its mere existence enables one to pass from place to place unmolested; or, as Professor Burgess states, in discussing the "idea" of "individual liberty," it "has a front and reverse, a positive and negative side. Regarded upon the negative side, it contains immunities; upon the positive, rights." According to this view, then, civil liberty becomes coincident with civil right, in the two forms the latter may assume, of positive