Family Party

Denmark's towering Christian X kings it over two separate realms. The second is a subarctic island covered with glaciers and boiling volcanoes, vast lava beds, gravel deserts and eternal clouds of sand and pumice dust. This is Iceland, whose 115,000 proud citizens are chiefly crowded in the lowlying southwestern corner of their grim island. Iceland won home rule in 1874, independent sovereignty in 1918. To show Icelanders that he takes his job as King of Iceland dead seriously, King Christian learned some Icelandic. Last week, for the first time in six years, King Christian paid Iceland a royal visit.

When the royal yacht Dannebrog put in at Reykjavik, Iceland's metropolis, it flew not the white-crossed red flag of Denmark but Iceland's own royal flag of red, white & blue. This time King Christian had made a Slesvig - Holsten -Sonderborg -Glikksborg family party of it, bringing his retiring German Queen Alexandrine, his second son Prince Knud and Knud's cousin-wife Princess Caroline Mathilde. Chief greeter was Iceland's 35-year-old Premier Hermann Jonasson, who led his Icelandic sovereign to a round of dinners, automobile trips, state council meetings and the signing of six years' laws.

In the midst of thefestivities, King Christian had to be told that an electric iron leftswitched on overnight had set fire to the Bernstorffshoej 'Castle in Denmark of his first cousin, Prince Axel, burning it to the ground.

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