Though Muirs had come from Scotland in the sixteenth century, Muir once insisted that he was "not Scotch" but an Orkney man, a good Scandinavian whose "true country is Norway, or Denmark, or Iceland." Speech was a mixture of Norse and Scots and Irish Gaelic. The five years at the Bu remained for Muir among the happiest in his life. He loved the world of farm animals (especially horses), gentle, cooperative farmers, the long light of summers in a northern latitude. He assimilated century-old patterns of thought and feeling. He was frail and so was not sent to school. Perhaps the only disadvantages to this idyllic seed time were that it was so brief and that it included indoctrination in one of the harsher forms of Calvinism. The Muirs belong to the United Presbyterian Church, a conservative offshoot of the Church of Scotland which united Covenanters and Seceders. As Elgin W. Mellown has observed, "Though the daily lives of the Orkney farmers were patterned by timeless nature, their religious attitudes were dictated by strict Calvinism. They knew Hell and Salvation from it for the Elect as real entities, and they accepted without question the authority of the Bible, which they interpreted literally.
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