A TOUR TWENTY YEARS AGO. BY UMBRA. LONDON: PRINTED BY F. SHOBERL, 37, DEAN STREET, SOHO, W. 1863. 208.1.99 A TOUR TWENTY YEARS AGO. CHAPTER I. ONE summer evening, twenty years ago, our party sate on the hummocks through which crawled a twisting brook. The setting sun was streaming with intense yellow lustre on the grassy plain that stretched far, far away. Snowy hills, one hundred miles distant from one another, made themselves clearly visible through the diaphanous ether. Close to us, and to and fro, paced cattle such as Claude Lorraine or Poussin might have placed in the foreground of their pictures; but one additional feature was here, which neither Claude nor Poussin ever dreamed of inserting in a landscape. From the ground rose bursts of steam, such as are seen to issue from factories in crowded manufacturing towns; and the cattle, as they occasionally walked through the intervening vapour, loomed large, assuming a strange, weird, unnatural aspect. Yet was there no house or shieling near, and these jets of steam rose not from any subterranean smithies, or work of inventive man. These were the hot springs of Reykjavik-time, ten o'clock at night-summer in Iceland. We were a party of six-twenty years ago-but through that space my memory reverts, and brings to me all distinct as though it happened but yesterday. Again I breathe the pure fresh air, again I seem to know the tent my home, my plaid as my |