re had been given it at the
expense of the cheeks, and of lateral shavings from off the chin. The
hard Duke-of-Wellington face is illustrative of this type. But in the
aquiline type of Orkney the countenance is softer and fuller, and, in at
least the female face, the general contour greatly more handsome. Dr.
Kombst, in his ethnographic map of Britain and Ireland, gives to the
coast of Caithness and the Shetland Islands a purely Scandinavian
people, but to the Orkneys a mixed race, which he designates the
Scandinavian-Gaelic. I would be inclined, however,--preferring rather to
found on those traits of person and character that are still patent,
than on the unauthenticated statements of uncertain history,--to regard
the people as essentially one from the northern extremity of Shetland to
the Ord Hill of Caithness. Beyond the Ord Hill, and on to the northern
shores of the Frith of Cromarty, we find, though unnoted on the map, a
different race,--a race strongly marked by the Celtic lineaments, and
speaking the Gaelic tongue. On the southern side of the Frith, and
extending on to the Bay of Munlochy, the purely Scandinavian race again
occurs. The sailors of the Danish fleet which four years ago accompanied
the Crown Prince in his expedition to the Faroe Islands were astonished
when, on landing at Cromarty, they recognized in the people the familiar
cast of countenance and feature that marked their country folk and
relatives at home; and found that they were simply Scandinavians like
themselves, who, having forgotten their Danish, spoke Scotch instead.
Rather more than a mile to the west of the fishing village of Avoch
there commences a Celtic district, which stretches on from Munlochy to
the river Nairne; beyond which the Scandinavian and Teutonic-Scandinavian
border that fringes the eastern coast of Scotland extends unbroken
southwards through Moray, Banff, and Aberdeen, on to Forfar, Fife, the
Lothians, and the Mearns. These two intercalated patches of Celtic people
in the northern tract,--that extending from the Ord Hill to the Cromarty
Frith, and that extending from the Bay of Munlochy to the Nairne,--still
retaining, as they do, after the lapse of ages, a sharp distinctness of
boundary in respect of language, character, and personal appearance, are
surely great curiosities. The writer of these chapters was born on the
extreme edge of one of these patches, scarce a mile distant from a
Gaelic-speaking population; and yet,