ST. KILDA FROM WITHOUT 183 



Husker but I 'm ten times worse and worse here.' And 

 yet she writes earlier in her long letter ' He was my 

 idol ! He told me he loved me two years or he gott me 

 ancLwe lived twenty five years together few or non I 

 thought so happy ! ! ' 



Lady Grange seems to have been about eight or nine 

 years in St. Kilda before she was allowed to return, 

 and then only to die soon afterwards in banishment 

 scarcely less complete, in Skye. 



In many ways the solitary little group is of excep- 

 tional interest. 



Antiquarians and students of men and manners may 

 find subject for congenial speculation in the doubtful 

 origin of the inhabitants and their four-horned sheep, 

 and the identity of their patron saint, unnamed in any 

 calendar, and may read a curious illustration of the 

 almost infinite gullibility of humanity in the story of 

 the impostor Roderick begun by Martin and finished 

 by Macaulay who, towards the end of the seventeenth 

 century, for six years or more ruled supreme in the 

 island, robbing the men wholesale, and debauching the 

 women in the name of St. John the Baptist and the 

 Virgin Mary. 



Advanced politicians may study, in a pure democracy, 

 the working of a code of game-laws as absolute and 

 perhaps more rigidly enforced than in the most aristo- 

 cratic country in Europe, even the minister, who, until 

 his retirement ten or twelve years ago, was powerful 

 enough to put a stop to whistling in the island, and to 

 decree the observance of two Sabbaths weekly, being as 



