5O The S he t lands in the 



noticed in a reed bed till he was close by it. It 

 snapped at him as it rose at his feet and frightened 

 him. After that, excepting in his mother's carriage, 

 and sometimes in the train, he would not go back- 

 wards any more, but began to go forward instead, and 

 when he went to school was soon head of his form. 



The feelings of the little boy in the story when in 

 his backward journeys he found himself with palaeozoic 

 surroundings, must have differed in degree only from 

 our own when, on Whit-Tuesday last, with the din of 

 London scarcely out of our ears, and recollections 

 of flowers and uniforms and ladies' dresses on the 

 Foreign Office stairs fresh in our minds, we found 

 ourselves on a remote promontory in Shetland face 

 to face with living examples of life, under circum- 

 stances which almost everywhere else in the British 

 Islands have long since passed away. 



The green of the turf at our feet was broken with 

 patches of thrift and pink campion, and starred in all 

 directions with dwarfed blue squills in full blossom. 

 On the opposite side of the Sound, to our left as we 

 looked southwards, a mile or so off, lay the Island of 

 Mousa, with its almost perfect Broch in full view. To 

 our right lay a little land-locked bay, a perfect 

 anchorage for a Viking's boats, with deep water 

 still as a pond, though a stiff breeze was blowing, 

 and both open sea and Sound were white with 

 breakers. On the narrowest point of the isthmus 

 were the ruins of a second Broch commanding the 

 promontory and bay ; and on the mainland opposite, 

 within twenty yards, stood a crofter's homestead, built 

 with stones from the Broch, not many degrees re- 

 moved from the bee-hive huts, of which the outlines, 

 and in more than one case the stone foundation walls, 

 clustering round the castle, were still to be seen. 



