The Faroes present a wild topography. Each island rises abruptly from the sea, often almost sheer to one or two thousand feet; little scat-villages and towns seem to cling with difficulty to the whose tops are seldom free of mist green slopes, because of the prevailing mountain sea fog. It is a desolate treeless wet land, but magnificent fiords, in which there is remunerative whale-hunting, thread the mountains from north to south, and the fishermen-farmers in their croft-villages are hospitable people. In the small outer isles life is more primitive, but none the less courteous and hospitable; the inhabitants spin their own wool and make their clothes, and they are almost self- with their potatoes and cows and sheep, fishing, bird-snaring, and peat-cutting. The potato has made possible a great increase of population where previously there was often famine on the failure of the rye and oats.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.