e best things I got from my education as an
engineer: of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with
sympathy. It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about
harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to
wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it
supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his
ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one)
for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries
him back and shuts him in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet
thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk, and with a
memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining
pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of
drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of
consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one
part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls,
and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.

Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But how much better it was to
hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob Bain among the
roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat coiling a wet rope and
shouting orders--not always very wise--than to be warm and dry, and
dull, and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office. And Wick itself
had in those days a note of originality. It may have still, but I
misdoubt it much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, in these
degenerate times, for an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies
must be gone from their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the
women tending their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off
their coarse potations; and where in winter gales, the surf would
beleaguer them closely, bursting in their very door. A traveller to-day
upon the Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloud of smoke among
the moorlands, and be told, quite openly, it marked a private still. He
would not indeed make that journey, for there is now no Thurso coach.
And even if he could, one little thing that happened to me could never
happen to him, or not with the same trenchancy of contrast.

We had been upon the road all evening; the coach-top was crowded with
Lews fishers going home, scarce anything but Gaelic had sounded in my
ears; and our way had lain throughout over a moori