Note 184 — SECTION V. ANTHROPOLOGY.

Thus the islanders preserve the memory of a “beautiful fiend,” one amongst many, who, after a very human fashion, began life as a coquette, and ended it as a dévote, being the first to learn psalm-singing, and to take the veil in the new convent. This hyperborean Ninon de L’Enclos deserves forgiveness for one of the cleverest sayings uttered by woman—a revelation of its kind. When asked which of her half-a-dozen lovers and husbands she preferred, her wise and witty answer was, “Theim var ek verst, er ek unnti mest”—“Whom I treated worst, him I loved most;” alluding to Kjartan Olafsson, murdered by her behest. In old days, Gudrún and John answered to the “M. or N.” of our Catechism, and to “those famous fictions of English law, John Doe and Richard Roe.”