nsumption is utterly unknown.
While I was at Stornoway, an old woman had just died in the workhouse
considerably over a century old. As to agricultural operations, they are
conducted on a most primitive scale. A few potatoes may here and there
be seen struggling for dear life; and as the hay is cut when the sun
shines, it is often in August or September that the farmer reaps his
scanty harvest. You miss the flowers which hide the deformity of the
peasant's cottage in dear old England. It seems altogether in these
distant regions, where the wild waves of the Atlantic dash and roar;
where the days are dark with cloud; where you see nothing but rock, and
glen, and moorland; where forests are an innovation, that man fights with
the opposing powers of nature for existence under very great
disadvantage.

CHAPTER VII.
TO STORNOWAY.

A fine day came at last, and we steered off from Portree, leaving the
grand Cachullin Mountains, rising to a height of 3,220 feet, and the
grave of Flora Macdonald, and the cave where Prince Charles hid himself
far behind. On the right were the distant mountains of Ross-shire, and
on our left Skye, and the other islands which guard the Western Highlands
against the awful storms of the ever-restless Atlantic. Here, as
elsewhere, was to be noticed the absence of all human life, whether at
sea or on land. It was only now and then we saw a sail, but, as if to
compensate for their absence, the birds of the air and the fishes of the
sea seemed to follow in a never-ending crowd. More than once we saw a
couple of whales spouting and blowing from afar, and the gulls, and
divers, and solan-geese at times made the surface of the water absolutely
white, like snow-islands floating leisurely along. Just before we got up
to Stornoway, at a great distance on our right, Cape Wrath, more than a
hundred miles off, lifted up its head into the clear blue sky, the
protecting genius, as it were, of the Scottish strand. It was perfectly
delightful, this; one felt not only that in Scotland people had at rare
intervals fine weather, but that by means of steamers and yachts and
sailing vessels of all kinds, the people of Scotland knew how to improve
the shining hour. It was beautiful, this floating on a glassy sea, clear
as a looking-glass, in which were reflected the clouds, and the skies,
and the sun, and the birds of the air, and the rocks, with a wonderful
fidelity. It seemed that you had only to pl