had identified him for a Pict, as, by some singular confusion of name, they called the dark and dwarfish aboriginal people of the land.  Immediately the obscure ferment of a race-hatred, grown into a superstition, began to work in their bosoms, and they crowded about the house and the room-door with fearful whisperings.  For some time the schoolmaster held them at bay, and at last despatched a messenger to call my grand-father.  He came:  he found the islanders beside themselves at this unwelcome resurrection of the dead and the detested; he was shown, as adminicular of testimony, the traveller’s uncouth and thick-soled boots; he argued, and finding argument unavailing, consented to enter the room and examine with his own eyes the sleeping Pict.  One glance was sufficient:  the man was now a missionary, but he had been before that an Edinburgh shopkeeper with whom my grandfather had dealt.  He came forth again with this report, and the folk of the island, wholly relieved, dispersed to their own houses.  They were timid as sheep and ignorant as limpets; that was all.  But the Lord deliver us from the tender mercies of a frightened flock!

I will give two more instances of their superstition.  When Sir Walter Scott visited the Stones of Stennis, my grandfather put in his pocket a hundred-foot line, which he unfortunately lost.

‘Some years afterwards,’ he writes, ’one of my assistants on a visit to the Stones of Stennis took shelter from a storm in a cottage close by the lake; and seeing a box-measuring-line in the bole or sole of the cottage window, he asked the woman where she got this well-known professional appendage.  She said:  “O sir, ane of the bairns fand it lang syne at the Stanes; and when drawing it out we took fright, and thinking it had belanged to the fairies, we threw it into the bole, and it has layen there ever since."’

This is for the one; the last shall be a sketch by the master hand of Scott himself: 

’At the village of Stromness, on the Orkney main island, called Pomona, lived, in 1814, an aged dame called Bessie Millie, who helped out her subsistence by selling favourable winds to mariners.  He was a venturous master of a vessel who left the roadstead of Stromness without paying his offering to propitiate Bessie Millie!  Her fee was extremely moderate, being exactly sixpence, for which she boiled her kettle and gave the bark the advantage of her prayers, for she disclaimed all unlawful acts.  The wind thus petitioned for was sure, she said, to arrive, though occasionally the mariners had to wait some time for it.  The woman’s dwelling and appearance were not unbecoming her pretensions.  Her house, which was on the brow of the steep hill on which Stromness is founded, was only accessible by a series of dirty and precipitous lanes, and for exposure might have been the abode of Eolus himself, in whose commodities the inhabitant dealt.  She herself was, as she told us, nearly one hundred years old, withered and