We waited awhile at the wharf by the minister’s house in Bressay, for Jim Sinclair, who at length appeared in his boat to convey us to Lerwick.  “He is a noisy fallow,” said our good landlady, and truly we found him voluble enough, but quite amusing.  As he rowed us to town he gave us a sample of his historical knowledge, talking of Sir Walter Raleigh and the settlement of North America, and told us that his greatest pleasure was to read historical books in the long winter nights.  His children, he said, could all read and write.  We dined on a leg of Shetland mutton, with a tart made “of the only fruit of the Island” as a Scotchman called it, the stalks of the rhubarb plant, and went on board of our steamer about six o’clock in the afternoon.  It was matter of some regret to us that we were obliged to leave Shetland so soon.  Two or three days more might have been pleasantly passed among its grand precipices, its winding straits, its remains of a remote and rude antiquity, its little horses, little cows, and little sheep, its sea-fowl, its larks, its flowers, and its hardy and active people.  There was an amusing novelty also in going to bed, as we did, by daylight, for at this season of the year, the daylight is never out of the sky, and the flush of early sunset only passes along the horizon from the northwest to the northeast, where it brightens into sunrise.

The Zetlanders, I was told by a Scotch clergyman, who had lived among them forty years, are naturally shrewd and quick of apprehension; “as to their morals,” he added, “if ye stay among them any time ye’ll be able to judge for yourself.”  So, on the point of morals, I am in the dark.  More attention, I hear, is paid to the education of their children than formerly, and all have the opportunity of learning to read and write in the parochial schools.  Their agriculture is still very rude, they are very unwilling to adopt the instruments of husbandry used in England, but on the whole they are making some progress.  A Shetland gentleman, who, as he remarked to me, had “had the advantage of seeing some other countries” besides his own, complained that the peasantry were spending too much of their earnings for tea, tobacco, and spirits.  Last winter a terrible famine came upon the islands; their fisheries had been unproductive, and the potato crop had been cut off by the blight.  The communication with Scotland by steamboat had ceased, as it always does in winter, and it was long before the sufferings of the Shetlanders were known in Great Britain, but as soon as the intelligence was received, contributions were made and the poor creatures were relieved.