word in season had not the
tittering Nereids begun to splash him as he stood on the shingle.

Innumerable sheep pasture on the Bressay slopes, and on the sky-line of
some of the hills one can discern companies of rollicking Shetland
ponies. My friend, the minister, who is writing a book on Darwin, got
into conversation with Mr. Manson, the Bressay pony-breeder. The latter
spoke thus about his tiny steeds: "Pony-breeding is a more puzzling
business than anything else in God's universe. The parents,
grandparents, and great grandparents of a given pony have all been
perfect in every point. Good! You naturally expect that a pony with such
exceptionable ancestry will itself be without a flaw. But is it? No,
often it is not. Too frequently you get bitter water from sweet, and
thistles instead of grapes. Just look at that tricky, mischievous,
ill-tempered, wall-eyed little rascal. Where did he get his evil
cantrips and his wall-eye? I have known his ancestors for four
generations back and they were all without a blemish." The minister made
a note of this fact within the book and volume of his brain: it may be
useful in the pulpit, and I expect to see it in print when he publishes
his book on Darwin.

The eighth century church was at last reached. It is about three miles
from the landing-place and quite near the water. Every point was most
lucidly explained by my ecclesiastical guide. To the outer eye the place
consisted of some low, ruined walls enclosing various species of rank,
wet grass. Such remains of olden piety are provocative of gloomy
reverie, which the rushing of the inconstant tide close by only serves
to deepen. Immediately after the Crucifixion and long before this church
was reared by saintly hands, the little Christian communities thought
the kingdom of God would shortly be established and all sin and
suffering be banished from the world. But the apostles died, and so
successively have

"Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white
With prayer, the broken-hearted nun,
The martyr, the wan acolyte,
The incense-swinging child"--

the bishop, the church-builder, and the patriot in all those
generations, and the kingdom of God is not with us yet, seems, indeed,
to be as far off as ever. When the world has been at peace for a while
and the millennium seems imminent, all of a sudden a perverse,
stiff-necked, _wall-eyed_ generation supervenes, and evolution gives way
to deterioration!

Lightly bo