that we saw before us as
we loitered over the open moorland, a far-rolling sea of brown billows,
reddened with patches of bell-heather, and brightened here and there
with little lakes lying wide open to the sky. And were not these
peat-cutters, with the big baskets on their backs, walking in silhouette
along the ridges, the people that Sheila loved and tried to help; and
were not these crofters' cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives,
blending almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into
which she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these
Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished religion,
the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their westernmost
adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the Atlantic--was not this
the place where Sheila picked the bunch of wild flowers and gave it to
her lover? There is nothing in history, I am sure, half so real to us
as some of the things in fiction. The influence of an event upon our
character is little affected by considerations as to whether or not it
ever happened.

There were three churches in Stornoway, all Presbyterian, of course,
and therefore full of pious emulation. The idea of securing an American
preacher for an August Sabbath seemed to fall upon them simultaneously,
and to offer the prospect of novelty without too much danger. The
brethren of the U. P. congregation, being a trifle more gleg than the
others, arrived first at the inn, and secured the promise of a morning
sermon from Chancellor Howard Crosby. The session of the Free Kirk came
in a body a little later, and to them my father pledged himself for the
evening sermon. The senior elder of the Established Kirk, a snuff-taking
man and very deliberate, was the last to appear, and to his request for
an afternoon sermon there was nothing left to offer but the services of
the young probationer in theology. I could see that it struck him as a
perilous adventure. Questions about "the fundamentals" glinted in his
watery eye. He crossed and uncrossed his legs with solemnity, and blew
his nose so frequently in a huge red silk handkerchief that it
seemed like a signal of danger. At last he unburdened himself of his
hesitations.

"Ah'm not saying that the young man will not be orthodox--ahem! But ye
know, sir, in the Kirk, we are not using hymns, but just the pure Psawms
of Daffit, in the meetrical fairsion. And ye know, sir, they are ferry
tifficult in th