y is
with us. From the stones of the sea-shore will I pay the Long-legged a
hard seat.' There is certainly no trace to be detected, in this dark
story, of a golden age of the world: the golden age is, I would fain
hope, an age yet to come. There at least exists no evidence that it is
an age gone by. It will be the full-grown _manly_ age of the world when
the race, as such, shall have attained to their years of discretion.
They are at present in their froward boyhood, playing at the mischievous
games of war, and diplomacy, and stock-gambling, and site-refusing, and
it is not quite agreeable for quiet honest people to be living amongst
them. But there would be nothing gained by going back to that more
infantine state of society in which the Jarl Einar carved into a red
eagle the back of Halfdan the Long-legged.

CHAPTER XIV.

On Horseback--A pared Moor--Small Landholders--Absorption of small
holdings in England and Scotland--Division of Land favorable to
Civil and Religious Rights--Favorable to social Elevation--An
inland Parish--The Landsman and Lobster--Wild Flowers of
Orkney--Law of Compensation illustrated by the Tobacco
Plant--Poverty tends to Productiveness--Illustrated in
Ireland--Profusion of Ichthyolites--Orkney a land of Defunct
Fishes--Sandwick--A Collection of Coccostean Flags--A Quarry full
of Heads of Dipteri--The Bergil, or Striped Wrasse--Its Resemblance
to the Dipterus--Poverty of the Flora of the Lower Old Red--No true
Coniferous Wood in the Orkney Flagstones--Departure for Hoy--The
intelligent Boatman--Story of the Orkney Fisherman.

While yet lingering amid the Standing Stones, I was joined by Mr.
Garson, who had obligingly ridden a good many miles to meet me, and now
insisted that I should mount and ride in turn, while he walked by my
side, that I might be fresh, he said, for the exploratory ramble of the
evening. I could have ventured more readily on taking the command of a
vessel than of a horse, and with fewer fears of mutiny; but mount I did;
and the horse, a discreet animal, finding he was to have matters very
much his own way, got upon honor with me, and exerted himself to such
purpose that we did not fall greatly more than a hundred yards behind
Mr. Garson. We traversed in our journey a long dreary moor, so entirely
ruined, like those which I had seen on the previous day, by belonging to
everybody in general, as to be no lon