od the Father turns a school-divine."

What would the great Augustan have thought of verse in which God the
Father is likened to a cosmic Crofter?

"Dis Universe is Gued's grit croft,
It's His by richt, wis never koft
Frae gritter laird
And ne'er sall be, laek laand o Toft
Wi' idder shared."

For those who have the patience to pierce through the husk of Rasmie's
dialect, much amusement and delight is in store.

A VISIT TO BRESSAY.

If Charles Lamb and Herbert Spencer had been sent to Lerwick and Bressay
to write a report on what they saw, I daresay the difference of their
accounts would have astonished every reader. Lamb would probably have
swilled porter in the _Ultima Thule_ Refreshment Bar and written a most
interesting account of Bressay without ever crossing the Sound. The ribs
of a big uncouth Dutch boat, square, cumbrous, shell-fretted, and tilted
up on the beach, would probably have bulked more in Lamb's narrative
than the modern steam-trawlers that abound in these waters. His
politico-economical reflections on the rise in price of peppermint
lozenges, consequent on the annual arrival of the Dutch fishing crews
would, I am sure, have furnished excellent reading. Spencer's report
would have dealt, I fancy, with the rotation of crops, the cause of the
different currents, the varieties of pigmentation (with percentages)
among the islanders, and the evolution of fishing gear from its
rudimentary forms--in sum with the definite combination of heterogeneous
changes both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with
external coexistences and sequences. No two out of a hundred visitors
see the same things, a fact which may help to prove Bishop Berkeley's
theory that the universe is subjective entirely.

I went over to Bressay with a genial and erudite clergyman to visit the
schoolhouse and inspect the ruins of an eighth century church. Three
Shetland women rowed us over the Sound and handled the oars splendidly.
The minister, a plump, jolly be-spectacled gentleman, who has not
"perpetrated matrimony," declared with a sigh that he was an unprotected
male, and on our arrival at the Bressay beach, he called aloud to the
oarswomen to lift him out of the boat. These muscular dames shrieked
with laughter and proceeded to unship their oars as if to buffet him:
he, thereupon, leaped lightly enough on the strand and, turning round,
would have improved the occasion by a