deal despotically enough with the
love affairs of other people. Side by side with the letter of Mary there
were several not less peremptory documents of the times of the
Commonwealth, addressed to the Sheriff of Orkney and Shetland, in the
name of his Highness the Lord Protector, and that bore the signature of
George Monck. I found them to consist chiefly of dunning letters,--such
letters as those duns write who have victorious armies at their
back,--for large sums of money, the assessments laid on the Orkneys by
Cromwell. Another series of letters, some ten or twelve years later in
their date, form portions of the history of a worthy covenanting
minister, the Rev. Alexander Smith of Colvine, banished to North
Ronaldshay from the extreme south of Scotland, for the offence of
preaching the gospel, and holding meetings for social worship in his own
house; and, as if to demonstrate his incorrigibility, one of the
series,--a letter under his own hand, addressed from his island prison
to the Sheriff-Depute in Kirkwall,--showed him as determined and
persevering in the offence as ever. It was written immediately after his
arrival. "The poor inhabitants," says the writer, "so many as I have
yet seen, have received me with much joy. _I intend, if the Lord will,
to preach Christ to them next Lord's day_, without the least mixture of
anything that may smell of sedition or rebellion. If I be farther
troubled for yt, I resolve to suffer with meekness and patience." The
Galloway minister must have been an honest man. Deeming preaching his
true vocation,--a vocation from the exercise of which he dared not
cease, lest he should render himself obnoxious to the woe referred to by
the apostle,--he yet could not steal a march on even the Sheriff, whose
professional duty it was to prevent him from doing _his_; and so he
fairly warned him that he proposed breaking the law. The next set of
papers in the collection dated after the Revolution, and were full
charged with an enthusiastic Jacobitisin, which seems to have been a
prevalent sentiment in Orkney from the death of Queen Anne, until the
disastrous defeat at Culloden quenched in blood the hopes of the party.
There is a deep cave still shown on the shores of Westray, within sight
of the forlorn Patmos of the poor Covenanter, in which, when the sun got
on the Whig side of the hedge, twelve gentlemen, who had been engaged in
the rebellion of 1745, concealed themselves for a whole winter. So
p