ate of a penny a letter; six and eight
weeks often elapsed between opportunities, and when a mail was to be
made up, sometimes at a moment's notice, the bellman was sent hastily
through the streets of Lerwick. Between Shetland and Orkney, only
seventy miles apart, there was "no trade communication whatever."

Such was the state of affairs, only sixty years ago, with the three
largest clusters of the Scottish Archipelago; and forty-seven years
earlier, when Thomas Smith began his rounds, or forty-two, when Robert
Stevenson became conjoined with him in these excursions, the barbarism
was deep, the people sunk in superstition, the circumstances of their
life perhaps unique in history. Lerwick and Kirkwall, like Guam or the
Bay of Islands, were but barbarous ports where whalers called to take up
and to return experienced seamen. On the outlying islands the clergy
lived isolated, thinking other thoughts, dwelling in a different
country from their parishioners, like missionaries in the South Seas.
My grandfather's unrivalled treasury of anecdote was never written down;
it embellished his talk while he yet was, and died with him when he
died; and such as have been preserved relate principally to the islands
of Ronaldsay and Sanday, two of the Orkney group. These bordered on one
of the water-highways of civilisation; a great fleet passed annually in
their view, and of the shipwrecks of the world they were the scene and
cause of a proportion wholly incommensurable to their size. In one year,
1798, my grandfather found the remains of no fewer than five vessels on
the isle of Sanday, which is scarcely twelve miles long.

"Hardly a year passed," he writes, "without instances of this kind;
for, owing to the projecting points of this strangely formed island,
the lowness and whiteness of its eastern shores, and the wonderful
manner in which the scanty patches of land are intersected with lakes
and pools of water, it becomes, even in daylight, a deception, and
has often been fatally mistaken for an open sea. It had even become
proverbial with some of the inhabitants to observe that 'if wrecks
were to happen, they might as well be sent to the poor isle of Sanday
as anywhere else.' On this and the neighbouring islands the
inhabitants had certainly had their share of wrecked goods, for the
eye is presented with these melancholy remains in almost every form.
For example, although quarries are to be met w