being due to the too frequent drowning of whole boat’s crews:  hence, one often sees women at the oar.  A pleasanter thing to mention is the Fair Isle hosiery, the patterns whereof in the woven worsted are distinctly Moorish, just like those at Tangiers; said to be a survival of some wreck from the Spanish Armada cast upon the shore, with of course its crew and contents, the local manufacture of said patterns having been kept up ever since, with dyes derived from seaweeds, and from flowers.  I frequently observed how diligent in knitting the island women were (reminding me of those notable spinsters of Herodotus) working the needles all the while they tended cattle, and with the pile of some costly shawl upon their heads while they fidget at the fringe; its various devices being of natural unstained wools, white, grey, or brown.  In those interesting islands I can dimly recall many other noticeable things and people, everywhere having received the warm welcome which is usually the privilege of a bookwright all the world over; visiting the Stones of Stennis with Mr. Petrie, the Celtic tower of Scalloway with Aytoun, and divers similar antiquities, as Maeshow and other refuges of the Picts and Troglodytes.

At Lerwick two of the boatmen who took us to shore from the steamer surprised me by quotations from my old book—­even the common folk being full of literature.  They are so separate from the great world, and have so little to do, that they cannot help being hard readers,—­even of me.  A haberdasher told me that though there are in the short summer plenty of simple wild-flowers, there is naturally a dearth all the year round of the brighter and more highly-coloured cultivated kinds; and so these being scarce and female vanity rather common, there is a large trade in artificial fuchsias, pinks, and roses, &c., thus constantly making chapel and church quite gay; the same ladies who so bedizen themselves on the Sabbath going about all the week carrying burdens of peat, bare-footed and kilted to the knee on account of the bogs, among which they have to chase those small shaggy equines, the Shetland ponies.  By the way Mr. Balfour at Oronsay had a special breed of his own, and showed us a pair of little darlings which he valued at L100 apiece.  The true race, stunted and shaggy from climate, is rare in these days; and I suspect may be picked up cheaper at Aldridge’s than at Shapinshay.

On our return voyage we skirted the whole north of Scotland, having had the rare chance of the steamer which once a year is chartered to take back the herring-fishers from Thurso to the Hebrides.  But first Sir George Sinclair most hospitably entertained us at Thurso Castle, whose grim battlements frown flush over the Arctic Sea:  all within the walls luxurious warmth, and without them wrecks and desolation.  So also with the garden; on one side of the high wall greenhouses and flower-beds in the Italian style,—­on the other, in strange contrast, the desolate wild