sh country very
northern to behold. Latish at night, though it was still broad day in
our sub-arctic latitude, we came down upon the shores of the roaring
Pentland Firth, that grave of mariners; on one hand, the cliffs of
Dunnet Head ran seaward; in front was the little bare white town of
Castleton, its streets full of blowing sand; nothing beyond, but the
North Islands, the great deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole.
And here, in the last imaginable place, there sprang up young outlandish
voices and a chatter of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the
coach with its load of Hebridean fishers--as they had pursued
_vetturini_ up the passes of the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto
under Virgil's tomb--two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian
vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one with a hurdy-gurdy,
the other with a cage of white mice. The coach passed on, and their
small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was left to marvel how
they had wandered into that country, and how they fared in it, and what
they thought of it, and when (if ever) they should see again the silver
wind-breaks run among the olives, and the stone-pine stand guard upon
Etruscan sepulchres.

Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident is somewhat lost.
For as far back as he goes in his own land, he will find some alien
camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or Mexican half-blood, the
negro in the South, these are deep in the woods and far among the
mountains. But in an old, cold, and rugged country such as mine, the
days of immigration are long at an end; and away up there, which was at
that time far beyond the northernmost extreme of railways, hard upon the
shore of that ill-omened strait of whirlpools, in a land of moors where
no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an
antiquary to decipher runes, the presence of these small pedestrians
struck the mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather
or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to
their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee on
the Fair Isle.

III

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

The past is all of one texture--whether feigned or suffered--whether
acted out in three dimensions, or only witnessed in that small theatre
of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long, after the
jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed i