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 £100 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 ocean, which you see through windows of thick plate-glass let into the walls. At Thurso town I conversed with the local genius, Robert Dick, made of world-wide fame since by that kind-hearted and clear-minded author, Samuel Smiles, the said genius being a noted self-taught naturalist, who as a small baker struggled with poverty through life, to be inconsistently rewarded after death by a national monument; his fellow-townsmen let the living starve to deify him when dead. Cervantes and his like have met the same fate elsewhere. Leaving Thurso for the Hebrides, in company with no fewer than 700 Gaelic fishermen, we passed the magnificent cliffs of Cape Wrath in a pleasant calm,--which next day when we had reached Stornoway turned to a furious storm: had we encountered it with those 700 loading the deck it would infallibly have wrecked us,--as it did many other vessels on that night.