Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/567

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TRIP AROUND ICELAND
561
Anstur St., Reykjavik.

the agreeable impression that Reykjavik was becoming popular. Photographers are kept busy flattering the vanity of its handsome sons and fair daughters; book-stores supply you with literature of all ages. from "Uncle Tom's Cabin" to the last verses of Thorsteinson; a public library of seventy thousand volumes (in which the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History may be found) will furnish the visitor with undreamed-of learning, and a cathedral with an organ, a bishop and a choir will save his feet from erring on Sunday; while his incredulous eyes will be shown a public school, a Latin school, a ladies' seminary and a literary club. The last touches of modernity are given in a theater and a jail. Surely those long winter nights, which scarcely leave any day at all, must approach, in the autumn months, shorn of some of their worst terrors. And then there is the coffee house, where coffee, only excelled in Arabia, can be obtained, and languidly sipped to the accompaniment of popular songs on the piano, or in the companionship of garrulous friends. And there is the chess club, which meets on Athalstraeti!

There are two museums in Reykjavik: one a museum of natural history (open one hour a week) and a museum of antiquities—the