Hard was the struggle that we had at home, after the first weeks of mourning and grief that followed the loss of my father and uncle.  We had now no regular source of income, beyond the few shillings every week that my mother and sister earned by the straw-plaiting industry.  This was work that was common in Orkney at that time; but the English hat manufacturers, for whom the straw was plaited, were not always liberal in their payments, nor prompt; and it was only by very hard work that these few shillings could be earned.

My father had been thrifty, and had saved some little money; but when we came to calculate the full measure of our resources, we discovered that several alterations would have to be made in our mode of living.  Not the least important of these changes was the necessity of an early removal to Lyndardy.

Lyndardy farm had been leased conjointly by my father and my uncle Mansie; and when there was no occasion for them to be out in the boat, the two men were in the habit of working together in the fields, as most of our neighbours worked.  It was from Lyndardy that we were supplied with all our oatmeal, our eggs, cheese, butter, and vegetables.  Fresh fish we could always procure in abundance from the sea and the lochs, and I was able sometimes to add to the general stock of provisions by the aid of my gun.  The feathers and oil from the wild sea fowl I shot were sold or bartered for other commodities; and the wool of the few sheep we kept, and the flax we grew, were helpful in supplying us with clothing and other necessaries.

It was not long after my father had “gone before” that we removed from the old house in the Anchor Close.

Much of our familiar furniture was sold.  My boat, too, was disposed of.  Many a heart pang it cost us to leave the home at the waterside, but we all took kindly to the new life at the farm and its various duties.  Jessie soon became skilled in the work of attending to the cows; and as for myself, I readily learned how to mend a gate, to dig potatoes, to look after the sheep, and even to follow the plough.  Thus I busied myself until, in after-time, I was able to take to the sea.

When the warm weather came round, the boys and girls of Andrew Drever’s school were dismissed for their holidays.  Sometimes, when I saw some of them passing along the cliffs with their climbing ropes over their arms, I confess I felt some twinge of regret that I was no longer a schoolboy, and that my duties on the farm no longer permitted me to join in the pleasures of a bird-catching expedition.  My fowling piece was now hung up in the barn, and few were my opportunities of taking it down.  What sport it would have afforded me had I been still a schoolboy!

On a certain fine morning, soon after the holidays commenced, I was very busily employed at the work of helping in our sheep shearing—­not that I myself ventured to handle the shears; my part in the business was simply to carry the wool into the loft, and to assist in bringing out the sheep from the pens as the shearers required them.  My mother, who had been born and brought up on Lyndardy farm, was, however, an expert hand at sheep-shearing, and I believe there was no other woman in the whole parish of Stromness who could do the work with such speed and neatness.