_"
Having heard all about the war, the natives show an eagerness for
sweets, of which they are inordinately fond.

The natives are expert cragsmen, and much of their time is occupied in
collecting birds' feathers. The oil of the solan goose is also a source
of wealth. Rough tweeds are now woven in many of the houses. The factor
informed me that, for some unknown reason, everything that comes from
the island is impregnated with a heavy odour that is most disagreeable.
Means have been tried to neutralise this smell, but success is only for
a time: by and by the odour returns, as bad as ever, to fabric and
feather. Merchants, both at home and abroad, are loath to purchase such
unfragrant wares.

In Dunvegan Castle are to be seen several of the little letter-boats
employed by the St. Kildeans to convey news to Scotland in the winter
months. The tide is watched, and the letter-boat cast into the sea.
Usually the message is washed ashore on some part of the Long Island.
Natural superstition supplements, in a small degree, the lack of mails:
when the islanders, for example, hear _the notes of the cuckoo_, they
are convinced that the Macleod is dead. Happily the cuckoo is rarely
heard breaking the silence of the seas so far west.

LADY GRANGE.

To this day there are in the possession of the Macleod family certain
old accounts of the years 1744 and 1745, that recall one of the most
diabolical and continuous pieces of cruelty recorded in history. I refer
to the accounts paid in these years to the Laird of Macleod for the
board and burial of Lady Grange. No one who knows the history of that
ill-fated lady can look at these time-stained documents without a
knocking of the seated heart at the ribs.

Everyone who has enjoyed the light and graceful poetry of Ovid, has
sighed over the relegation of that city man to the barbarous horrors of
the Black Sea. As Gibbon exquisitely phrases it: "The tender Ovid,
after a youth spent in the enjoyment of wealth and luxury, was condemned
to a hopeless exile on the frozen banks of the Danube, where he was
exposed without remorse to those fierce denizens of the desert with
whose stern spirits he feared that his gentle shade might hereafter be
confounded." The banishment of Lady Grange to St. Kilda, in 1734, by her
rascally husband, is to me fully as pathetic as Ovid's expatriation to
Tomi. She, a refined and beautiful woman, the light of Edinburgh
drawing-rooms, was hustled off to a lonely