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of Stennis,' says Mr. David Vedder, the sailor-poet of Orkney, ' is a 

 beautiful Mediterranean in miniature.' It gives admission to the sea 

 by a narrow straight, crossed, like that which separates the two pro- 

 montories in the middle, by a long rustic bridge ; and, in consequence 

 of this peculiarity, the lower division of the lake is salt in its nether 

 reaches and brackish in its upper ones, while the higher division is 

 merely brackish in its nether reaches, and fresh enough in its upper 

 ones to be potable. Viewed from the east, in one of the long, clear, 

 sunshiny evenings of the Orkney summer, it seems not unworthy the 

 eulogium of Vedder. There are moory hills and a few rude cottages 

 in front ; and in the background, some eight or ten miles away, the 

 bold, steep mountain masses of Hoy ; while on the promontories of 

 the lake, in the middle distance, conspicuous in the landscape, from 

 the relief furnished by the blue ground of the surrounding waters, 

 stand the tall gray obelisks of Stennis, — one group on the northern 

 promontory, the other on the south, — 



' Old even beyond tradition's breath.' 



" The shores of both the upper and lower divisions of the lake were 

 strewed, at the time I passed, by a line of wrack, consisting, for the 

 first few miles from where the lower loch opens to the sea, of only 

 marine plants, then of marine plants mixed with those of fresh-water 

 growth, and then, in the upper sheet of water, of lacustrine plants ex- 

 clusively. And the fauna of the loch is, I was informed, of as mixed 

 a character as its flora, — the marine and fresh-water animals having 

 each their own reaches, with certain debateable tracts between, in 

 which each kind expatiates with more or less freedom, according to 

 its specific nature and constitution, — some of the sea-fish advancing 

 far on the fresh-water, and others, among the proper denizens of the 

 lake, encroaching far on the salt. * * * But the change induced 

 in the two floras of the lake, — marine and lacustrine, — is considerably 

 more palpable and obvious than that induced in its two faunas. As 

 I passed along the strait, through which it gives admission to the sea, 

 I found the commoner fucoids of our sea-coasts streaming in great 

 luxuriance in the tideway, from the stones and rocks of the bottom. 

 I marked, among the others, the two species of kelp-weed, so well known 

 to our Scotch kelp-burners, — Fucus nodosus and F. vesiculosus, — 

 flourishing in their uncurtailed proportions ; and the not inelegant 

 Halydrys siliquosa, or ' tree in the sea,' presenting its amplest spread 

 of pod and frond. A little farther in, Halidrys and Fucus nodosus 



