66 The Shetlands in the 



may have been who first designed the castle and bur- 

 rowed their dwellings in the green slope behind it, 

 must have been a race much smaller than the better 

 fed man of the nineteenth century. It was only at 

 some risk of being set fast, like a too keen fox-terrier 

 in a rabbit's hole, that a pair of shoulders of not much 

 more than average breadth could be pushed a little 

 way through some of the most roomy of the galleries. 



They, poor people, and the Norsemen who robbed 

 and exterminated them, have their successors now in 

 the Rock Pigeons, who have made a dovecote of the 

 castle, and the Falcons who prey upon them. In the 

 enclosed court lay the clean picked bones and feathers 

 of a Pigeon killed a day or two before our visit, and 

 just inside the entrance to the staircase, in a hollow 

 under a stone, a naked nestling lay dead beside a 

 cold egg, in which was another young bird, which, 

 when the mother left the nest to return no more, 

 must have been within an hour or two of hatching. 

 In the corner of one of the chambers crouched a pair 

 of young birds almost ready to fly. As we climbed 

 the stairs a second pair, full grown but still unedu- 

 cated, fluttered before us, and as we came out on the 

 top of the tower, a Peregrine poised himself for a 

 moment, and circling once or twice without any 

 visible movement of the wing, sailed off magnificently 

 to the north-west, probably to join his mate on the 

 Noup of Noss. 



There is a herd of Shetland ponies on Mousa. 

 They are kept for breeding purposes only, and lead 

 a life as free as the mustangs of Mayne Reid's stories. 

 All the mares, with a single exception, had, when we 

 saw them, foals beside them, and were kept well in 

 hand by their shaggy lord and master, who, when he 

 thought we had looked long enough, gave the order to 



