ded hour, of which time is unable to cancel the memory.

LOCAL TALES.

The evening was a glorious one, and we _walked_ back some miles of the
way. The Cunningsburgh minister was full of stories. He alluded
laughingly to one of his flock who, when under the influence of drink,
was powerful in prayer. "_When he gets a dram he goes to his knees at
once._" The anecdote seemed to me to run counter to the views of the
hymnologist who says "Satan trembles when he sees, the weakest saint
upon his knees." Another of his stories had reference to two old
crofters, both over eighty, who began one evening to talk of the follies
of the young fisher-lads when they took to dram-drinking. One of the two
remarked: "I wonder now what folly we two old men would commit if we
chanced to get intoxicated, say at a funeral." "Well," said the other
hoary-headed and infirm octogenarian, "I have no idea what you would do,
but I am certain of this, that if I ever got the least bit touched, I
would go and make love to the lasses at once." Thereupon the two feeble
old fellows skirled a wicked laugh, and nearly gasped out their slim
residue of life in unseemly merriment.

Both ministers assured me that the belief in fairies still lingers on
among the Shetland peasantry. Up on the hill-side the trow is supposed
to wander about, and the little fellow can be seen skipping on the
moon-light sward, by all who have eyes and the necessary faith. It is
believed that he haunts the road-side even when the moon is not shining:
consequently, when the crofters have to go out of doors at night, they
protect themselves from his spells by carrying with them a blazing peat
gripped with tongs. This smokes and sparkles in the darkness and the
trow does not like it. It is easy for the electric-lighted citizens of
Glasgow and Edinburgh to laugh at the simple folk-lore of fisher and
crofter; but no one, however learned and sceptical, can quite escape
from the mystic influence of fairy-lore if he lives through a winter
among believing dalesmen. Let him look on the long silvery glimmer of a
sea-voe, and hear the natives tell of trows chasing the ebbing Neptune
down there on the dim sea-strand in a night of haze, before he says
(with Theseus, in the _Midsummer Night's Dream_):

"I never may believe
These antick fables, nor those fairy toys."

To the ear and eye of the philological Jakobsen, the Shetlanders both in
speech and looks are rema