So, for instance, the priests always inquired if I spoke Latin, and seemed much surprised on finding that I was unacquainted with the language.

The common people requested my advice as to the mode of treating divers complaints; and once, in the course of one of my solitary wanderings about Reikjavik, on my entering a cottage, they brought before me a being whom I should scarcely have recognised as belonging to the same species as myself, so fearfully was he disfigured by the eruption called "lepra." Not only the face, but the whole body also was covered with it; the patient was quite emaciated, and some parts of his body were covered with sores.

For a surgeon this might have been an interesting sight, but I turned away in disgust.
But let us turn from this picture.

I would rather tell of the angel's face I saw in Kalmannstunga.

It was a girl, ten or twelve years of age, beautiful and lovely beyond description, so that I wished I had been a painter.