IN THE SHETLANDS 257 
sexes, that there is, or is thought to be, amongst 
savages. But this is enough of /a haute philosophie. 
How snug it is, now, whilst I write this by the red 
fire in the little sentry-box, on the great lonely ness 
that the wind howls over, whose head-gear are the 
wreathing mists, and whose skirtings the sea and the 
sea-birds! There is no one within near three miles, 
and I myself am alone. On the “ great lonely veldt,” 
as city journalists like to call it, you have your boys, 
the fires, and the oxen sitting by the waggon-chain, 
and chewing the cud—a picturesque, a romantic and 
interesting scene, but not a lonely one. Here it is 
real aloneness—yet I wish I had not to say, with 
Scipio, that ‘I am never less alone than when alone.” 
True solitude should imply no fleas. 
During the time that this large bottle-nosed seal 
was away, a small common one—the same that lies on 
the rock in this sea-pool every day from before it is 
uncovered to the flowing in of the tide—came and 
disported himself—as usual I had said, but it was not 
quite the same. He first began to dive and reappear, 
at regular intervals, as does the great one, and I soon 
found that he was behaving like him in all things, 
even to the standing on end in the water, like a peg- 
top, with his nose straight up in the air. As his 
body, however, is not so bladdery, and his nose not 
so extraordinary, he did not present so strange an 
aspect. He differed, moreover, in the length of his 
immersions, which was not more than five or six 
minutes, whilst those of the other one—the great, 
s 
