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 foot than at any previous stage of the journey.

Having found to my great satisfaction that they could give me a bed for the night, I went with two gentlemen of the neighborhood to see the site of the celebrated John O’Groat’s House, about a mile and a half from the inn.  There was only a footpath to it across intervening fields, and when we reached it, a rather vigorous exercise of the organ of individuality was requisite to “locate” the foundations of “the house that Jack built.”  Indeed, pilgrims to the shrine of this famous domicile are liable to much disappointment at finding so little remaining of a residence so historical.  Literally not one stone is left upon another.  A large stone