lly to have been imperilled. A very little
man of a swarthy complexion, he came ashore, exhausted and unshaved,
from a long boat passage, and lay down to sleep in the home of the
parish schoolmaster. But he had been seen landing. The inhabitants had
identified him for a Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they
called the dark and dwarfish aboriginal people of the land. Immediately
the obscure ferment of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began
to work in their bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the
room-door with fearful whisperings. For some time the schoolmaster held
them at bay, and at last despatched a messenger to call my grandfather.
He came: he found the islanders beside themselves at this unwelcome
resurrection of the dead and the detested; he was shown, as adminicular
of testimony, the traveller's uncouth and thick-soled boots; he argued,
and finding argument unavailing, consented to enter the room and examine
with his own eyes the sleeping Pict. One glance was sufficient: the man
was now a missionary, but he had been before that an Edinburgh
shopkeeper with whom my grandfather had dealt. He came forth again with
this report, and the folk of the island, wholly relieved, dispersed to
their own houses. They were timid as sheep and ignorant as limpets; that
was all. But the Lord deliver us from the tender mercies of a frightened
flock!

I will give two more instances of their superstition. When Sir Walter
Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my grandfather put in his pocket a
hundred-foot line, which he unfortunately lost.

"Some years afterwards," he writes, "one of my assistants on a visit
to the Stones of Stennis took shelter from a storm in a cottage close
by the lake; and seeing a box-measuring-line in the bole or sole of
the cottage window, he asked the woman where she got this well-known
professional appendage. She said: 'O sir, ane of the bairns fand it
lang syne at the Stanes; and when drawing it out we took fright, and
thinking it had belanged to the fairies, we threw it into the bole,
and it has layen there ever since.'"

This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the master hand of
Scott himself:--

"At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called
Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped
out her subsistence by selling favourable winds to mariners. He was a
venturous master of a vessel