w and
other refuges of the Picts and Troglodytes.

At Lerwick two of the boatmen who took us to shore from the steamer
surprised me by quotations from my old book--even the common folk being
full of literature. They are so separate from the great world, and have
so little to do, that they cannot help being hard readers,--even of me.
A haberdasher told me that though there are in the short summer plenty
of simple wild-flowers, there is naturally a dearth all the year round
of the brighter and more highly-coloured cultivated kinds; and so these
being scarce and female vanity rather common, there is a large trade in
artificial fuchsias, pinks, and roses, &c., thus constantly making
chapel and church quite gay; the same ladies who so bedizen themselves
on the Sabbath going about all the week carrying burdens of peat,
bare-footed and kilted to the knee on account of the bogs, among which
they have to chase those small shaggy equines, the Shetland ponies. By
the way Mr. Balfour at Oronsay had a special breed of his own, and
showed us a pair of little darlings which he valued at L100 apiece. The
true race, stunted and shaggy from climate, is rare in these days; and I
suspect may be picked up cheaper at Aldridge's than at Shapinshay.

On our return voyage we skirted the whole north of Scotland, having had
the rare chance of the steamer which once a year is chartered to take
back the herring-fishers from Thurso to the Hebrides. But first Sir
George Sinclair most hospitably entertained us at Thurso Castle, whose
grim battlements frown flush over the Arctic Sea: all within the walls
luxurious warmth, and without them wrecks and desolation. So also with
the garden; on one side of the high wall greenhouses and flower-beds in
the Italian style,--on the other, in strange contrast, the desolate wild
ocean, which you see through windows of thick plate-glass let into the
walls. At Thurso town I conversed with the local genius, Robert Dick,
made of world-wide fame since by that kind-hearted and clear-minded
author, Samuel Smiles, the said genius being a noted self-taught
naturalist, who as a small baker struggled with poverty through life, to
be inconsistently rewarded after death by a national monument; his
fellow-townsmen let the living starve to deify him when dead. Cervantes
and his like have met the same fate elsewhere. Leaving Thurso for the
Hebrides, in company with no fewer than 700 Gaelic fishermen, we passed
the magnificent cli