ey were _the_ people then, and they have not grown
a bit smaller, nor do they think any less of themselves yet. My
grandfather married again and was not sorry for it. I don't know
whether his wife was sorry or not. I took Maximus Grant for a
husband for, after Boris Ragnor died, I did not care who I took,
provided he had plenty of good qualities and plenty of gold. We
lived together thirty years very respectably. I took my way and I
usually expected him to do the same. We had four sons, and they
have nine sons among them, and all of the nine are now fighting
the vipers they have been coddling for forty or fifty years. Some
are in the regular army, some in the navy, and some in the plucky,
fighting little navy, patrolling England and her brood of
coastwise islands. They are a tough, rough, hard lot, but I love
them all better than anything else in this world. There are a good
many Vedder houses in Orkney, and they are all full of little
squabbling, fighting, never clean, and never properly dressed
little brats, from four to eleven years old. So I don't worry
about there being Vedders enough to run things the way they want
them run.

The Ragnors are here in plenty. All the men are at the war, all
the women running fishing boats or keeping general shops, to which
I like to see the Germans going. They are told what kind of people
they are as they walk up to the shops; and they get what they want
at an impoverishing price. Serve them right! Men, however, will
pay any money for a thing they want.

There has not been such good times in Orkney since I was born, as
there is now. We have an enemy to beat in trade and an enemy to
beat in fight at our very doors, and our men are neither to hold
nor to bind, they are that top-lofty. War is a man's native air.
My sons and grandsons are all two inches taller than they were and
they defy Nature to contradict them. I never attempt it. Well,
then, they are proper men in all things, a little hard to deal
with and masterful, but just as I wish them. My grandfather died
fifty years ago, he might have lived longer if he had not
married. His widow wept in the deepest black and people thought
she was sorry.

The Ragnors are mostly here and in Shetland. Conall Ragnor never
really settled down again. Rahal and he lived in Edinburgh or
London, when not travelling. I heard that Conall wrote books and
really got mone