IN THE SHETLANDS 5 
out. The centre of the island, which is the gulls’ 
especial sanctuary, presents these conditions. It forms 
an extended grassy basin, ringed in with low, swelling 
peat-hills, above which—for the intervening space 1s 
invisible—rise the tops of hills far higher, belonging 
to islands of some size which lie spread about this 
little one, hiding it from all the world. Through 
dips in these, and in the rim of one’s own brown 
basin, one gets the sea—dull, cold grey lakes of it, 
engirt by dimmer islands, far away. No human sight 
in it all; no sail, for hours, upon the sea—only the 
gulls which, in their thousands and their all-possession, 
seem to have subdued the world. Men are gone, and 
gulls now take their place, become ennobled for want 
of a superior. Like snowy-toga’d Roman senators, 
they stand grouped about, or walk over the grassy 
amphitheatre—their natural senate-house—and it is 
wonderful with how slight an effort of the imagina- 
tion—or indeed with none—the dissonant cries and 
shrieks, the clang and the jangle, become as the digni- 
fied utterance, eloquent oratory, to which one has sat 
and listened, spell-bound, in the gallery of the House 
of Commons. ‘Such tricks has strong imagination.” 
“‘ How easy,” indeed, as Shakespeare tells us, “is a 
bush supposed a bear!” 
It is curious how the gulls cling to their breeding- 
places long after the breeding-time is over. Summer 
—or say July—is now fast waning, yet in the way 
they stand amidst the heather, rise as I approach, and 
float, shrieking, above me, it is just as it was last time 
