have proved the scene of the childhood of one of the heroes
of Byron,

"Torquil, the nursling of the northern seas."

The reader will remember, that in Byron's poem of "The Island," one of
the younger leaders of the mutineers is described as a native of these
northern isles. He is drawn by the poet, amid the wild luxuriance of an
island of the Pacific, as

"The blue-eyed northern child,
Of isles more known to man, but scarce less wild,--
The fair-haired offspring of the Orcades,
Where roars the Pentland with his whirling seas,--
Rocked in his cradle by the roaring wind,
The tempest-born in body and in mind,--
His young eyes, opening on the ocean foam,--
Had from that moment deemed the deep his home."

Judging from what I learned of his real history, which is well known in
Stromness, I found reason to conclude that he had been a hapless young
man, of a kindly, genial nature; and greatly "more sinned against than
sinning," in the unfortunate affair of the mutiny with which his name is
now associated, and for his presumed share in which, untried and
unconvicted, he was cruelly left to perish in chains amid the horrors of
a shipwreck. I had the honor of being introduced on the following day to
his sister, a lady far advanced in life, but over whose erect form and
handsome features the years seemed to have passed lightly, and whom I
met at the Free Church of Stromness, to which, at the Disruption, she
had followed her respected minister. It seemed a fact as curiously
compounded as some of those pictures of the last age in which the thin
unsubstantialities of allegory mingled with the tangibilities of the
real and the material, that the sister of one of Byron's heroes should
be an attached member of the Free Church.

On my return to the inn, I found in the public room a young German of
some one or two and twenty, who, in making the tour of Scotland, had
extended his journey into Orkney. My specimens, which had begun to
accumulate in the room, on chimney-piece and window-sill, had attracted
his notice, and led us into conversation. He spoke English well, but not
fluently,--in the style of one who had been more accustomed to read than
to converse in it; and he seemed at least as familiar with two of our
great British authors,--Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott,--as most of the
better-informed British themselves. It was chiefly the descriptions of
Sir Walter in the "Pirate" that had led him into Orkney. H