old lady in a Ronaldsay hut. Her hut, which
was similar to the model described, stood on a Ness, or point of land
jutting into the sea. They were made welcome in the firelit cellar,
placed "in _casey_ or straw-worked chairs, after the Norwegian fashion,
with arms, and a canopy overhead," and given milk in a wooden dish.
These hospitalities attended to, the old lady turned at once to Dr.
Neill, whom she took for the Surveyor of Taxes. "Sir," said she, "gin
ye'll tell the King that I canna keep the Ness free o' the Bangers
(sheep) without twa hun's, and twa guid hun's too, he'll pass me threa
the tax on dugs."

This familiar confidence, these traits of engaging simplicity, are
characters of a secluded people. Mankind--and, above all,
islanders--come very swiftly to a bearing, and find very readily, upon
one convention or another, a tolerable corporate life. The danger is to
those from without, who have not grown up from childhood in the
islands, but appear suddenly in that narrow horizon, life-sized
apparitions. For these no bond of humanity exists, no feeling of kinship
is awakened by their peril; they will assist at a shipwreck, like the
fisher-folk of Lunga, as spectators, and when the fatal scene is over,
and the beach strewn with dead bodies, they will fence their fields with
mahogany, and, after a decent grace, sup claret to their porridge. It is
not wickedness: it is scarce evil; it is only, in its highest power, the
sense of isolation and the wise disinterestedness of feeble and poor
races. Think how many viking ships had sailed by these islands in the
past, how many vikings had landed, and raised turmoil, and broken up the
barrows of the dead, and carried off the wines of the living; and blame
them, if you are able, for that belief (which may be called one of the
parables of the devil's gospel) that a man rescued from the sea will
prove the bane of his deliverer. It might be thought that my
grandfather, coming there unknown, and upon an employment so hateful to
the inhabitants, must have run the hazard of his life. But this were to
misunderstand. He came franked by the laird and the clergyman; he was
the King's officer; the work was "opened with prayer by the Rev. Walter
Trail, minister of the parish"; God and the King had decided it, and the
people of these pious islands bowed their heads. There landed, indeed,
in North Ronaldsay, during the last decade of the eighteenth century, a
traveller whose life seems rea