little tremulous laugh that was
half a sob, and in the confusion of getting the boat brought up
alongside Marjorie felt a lover's kiss upon her cheek.

FOURTH COUSINS.

BY GORDON STABLES, M.D., R.N.

In the early summer of 1860 I went upon a visit to a distant relative of
mine, who lived in one of the Shetland Islands. It was early summer with
myself then: I was a medical student with life all before me--life and
hope, and joy and sorrow as well. I went north with the intention of
working hard, and took quite a small library with me; there was nothing
in the shape of study I did not mean to do, and to drive at: botany, the
_flora_ of the _Ultima Thule_, its _fauna_ and geology, too, to say
nothing of chemistry and therapeutics. So much for good intentions,
but--I may as well confess it as not--I never once opened my huge box of
books during the five months I lived at R----, and if I studied at all
it was from the book of Nature, which is open to every one who cares to
con its pages.

The steamboat landed me at Lerwick, and I completed my journey--with my
boxes--next day in an open boat.

It was a very cold morning, with a grey, cold, choppy sea on, the spray
from which dashed over the boat, wetting me thoroughly, and making me
feel pinched, blear-eyed, and miserable. I even envied the seals I saw
cosily asleep in dry, sandy caves, at the foot of the black and beetling
rocks.

How very fantastic those rocks were, but cheerless--so cheerless! Even
the sea birds that circled around them seemed screaming a dirge. An
opening in a wall of rock took us at length into a long, winding fiord,
or arm of the sea, with green bare fields on every side, and wild,
weird-like sheep that gazed on us for a moment, then bleated and fled.
Right at the end of this rock stood my friend's house, comfortable and
solid-looking, but unsheltered by a single tree.

"I sha'n't stay long here," I said to myself, as I landed.

An hour or two afterwards I had changed my mind entirely. I was seated
in a charmingly and cosily-furnished drawing-room upstairs. The windows
looked out to and away across the broad Atlantic. How strange it was;
for the loch that had led me to the front of the house, and the waters
of which rippled up to the very lawn, was part of the German Ocean, and
here at the back, and not a stone's throw distant, was the Atlantic! Its
great, green, dark billows rolled up and broke into foam against the
black breastwork