hey are pleasant tokens of free-labor genius. No
land tilled by slaves could produce them. I saw many large and
highly-cultivated farms on these last miles of my walk. The country
was proportionately divided between food and fuel. Oats and barley
constitute the grain-crops. The uncultivated land interspersed with
the yellow fields of harvest, is reserved for _peat_--the poor man's
fuel and his wealth. For, were it not for the inexhaustible
abundance of this cheap and accessible firing, he could hardly
inhabit this region. It would seem strange to an American, who had
not realised the difference of the two climates, to see fields full
of reapers on the very threshold of October, as I saw them on this
last day's walk. I counted twelve women and two men in one field
plying the sickle, all strongly-built and good-looking and well-
dressed withal.

The sea was still and blue as a lake. A lark was soaring and
warbling over it with as happy and hopeful a voice as if it were
singing over the greenest acres of an English meadow. When I had
made half of the seventeen miles between Wick and John O'Groat's, I
began to look with the liveliest interest for the first glimpse of
the Orkneys; but projecting and ragged headlands intercepted the
prospect. About three p.m., as the road emerged from behind one of
them, those famous islands burst suddenly into view! There they
were!--in full sight, so near that their grain-fields and white
cottages and all their distinguishing features seemed within half a
mile's distance. This was the most interesting coup d'oeil that I
ever caught in any country. Here, then, after weeks and months of
travel on foot, I was at the end of my journey. Through all the
days of this period I had faced northward, and here was the Ultima
Thule, the goal and termination of my tour. The road to the sea
diverged from the main turnpike, which continued around the coast to
Thurso. Followed this branch a couple of miles, when it ended at
the door of a little, quiet, one-story inn on the very shore of the
Pentland Firth. It was a moment of the liveliest enjoyment to me.
When I left London, about the middle of July, I was slowly
recovering from a severe indisposition, and hardly expected to be
able to make more than a few miles of my projected walk. But I had
gathered strength daily, and when I brought up at this little inn at
the very jumping-off end of Scotland, I was fresher and more
vigorous on foo