IN THE SHETLANDS 53 
breaks the spell with a “gugea, gugga, gugga!” or, 
right over your head, says “er” with a stress and 
feeling that amounts almost to solemnity. | 
How lonely and yet how populous! Does life, 
other than human life, around one, in any way diminish 
the sense of solitude? I do not think it does myself, 
except through human association, and for this, human 
surroundings are more or less requisite. Thus wood- 
land birds seem homely and companionable in woods 
near which one has a home, and gulls upon the roofs 
of houses take the place of pigeons or poultry in the 
feelings they arouse. So, too, as long as a natural 
alacrity of the spirits prevails over that dead, void 
feeling which prolonged solitude brings to the most 
solitary, the wildest creatures in the wildest and lone- 
liest places may seem to cheer us with their presence. 
But the feeling is a false one, dependent on that very 
condition, and treacherously forsaking us—even to 
the extent of making what seemed a relief, an accentua- 
tion—when it fails. How often, as I have wandered 
over this little, noisy, thickly crowded retreat, has all 
the fellowship around me served but to remind me of 
my own exclusion from it—as from that of fairies, 
ghosts, elementals—but what all this life could not do, 
the cheerful firelight on the bare stone walls of the 
solitary shepherd’s hut did at once for me, and with 
bacon in the frying-pan I had all the companionship 
I wanted. A dog—one’s own or that knew one—or 
even a cat, might do more by its own personality 
than such inanimate objects by association merely, to 
