So now, every night, around the galley fire, songs were sung and stories told, and by day many a jocund laugh around the fo’c’s’le mingling with the scream of the circling sea-birds told of light hearts and minds that were free from care.
Everything in these seas was new to young Douglas and Leonard. They passed the strange-looking Faroe group of islands to the north, and in good time Iceland to the south, and bore up, straight as a bird could fly, for Cape Farewell, the southernmost point of Greenland.
Those Faroe Isles, as seen from the sea, are indescribably fantastic and picturesque. Let me see if I cannot find a simile. Yes, here it is: take a number of pebbles and stones, with a few good-sized smithy cinders. Let these be of all sizes. Next take a broad, shallow basin, which partly fill with water stained dark blue with indigo; now place your stones, etc, in this water, with one end of each sticking up. Paint these ends and tip them and streak them with green, with white, and with crimson, and lo and behold! you have a model of the Faroe Islands.
The Fairy Queen called at Reykjavik, and the good people of that quaint wee “city” came trooping on board. Even the Danish parson came, carrying in his own hands—for he was not proud—a string of firm, delicious-looking rock cod as a present for the captain.
Almost every boat brought a gift of some kind. Well, I daresay they did expect some presents in return, and it is needless to say they got them. This was, after all, only a very pleasant and very justifiable way of doing a barter; much better, in my opinion, than if they had lain on their oars and said,—
“We have fresh fish, and mountain mutton, and eggs and game for sale; how much tobacco, biscuits, knives, hatches, and cooking utensils have you to spare?”
The good little clergyman innocently inquired whether the war betwixt England and France was still going on, and was astonished to be told it was over years ago.
But nothing could exceed the kindness and hospitality of these people to our young heroes when they went on shore. Had they eaten and drunk a hundredth part of what they were pressed to partake of, they would have been cleverer far than the Welsh giant I used to read of in my boyhood in “The Wonderful Adventures of Jack the Giant-killer.”
The Fairy Queen lay at Reykjavik—having to take in water—for three days, and then sailed away. But would it be believed that in this short time Leonard and Douglas won so many hearts among old and young, that there was hardly a dry eye in the village the morning they left, so primitive and simple were those people then?