90 St. Kildafrom Without. 



At such times it is wholesome to remember, even if 

 with little hope of ever seeing it, that there is still in 

 British waters one island at least where the population 

 never increases, where the post comes in only once 

 or twice a year, and where the conditions of human 

 existence are much as they were a hundred if not a 

 thousand years ago. 



The hills and valleys which gives so much of its 

 picturesqueness to the North West of Scotland do 

 not end at the coast line, but are continued, as sound- 

 ings show, under the sea some eighty or a hundred 

 miles beyond the Hebrides. At the extreme western 

 edge of this underwater, mountainous tract which 

 contains, perhaps the best fishing grounds in Europe 

 just before the bottom settles down to ocean 

 depths in the open Atlantic, is a small oval bank of 

 shallow water, from which rises abruptly, like the 

 peaks of a submerged mountain, a little cluster of 

 precipitous islands. 



Until a year or two ago, when summer excursion 

 steamers began to visit it more regularly, St. Kilda, 

 or, as the natives still prefer to call it, Hirta, the 

 chief and only inhabited island of the group, was 

 comparatively unknown. 



Every now and then it emerged for nine days from 

 its obscurity, when a corked bottle or toy ship, carry- 

 ing a message on which life or death depended, was 

 washed ashore somewhere on the opposite coast, 

 announcing, as in 1877, that an Austrian ship had 

 been lost on the rocks, and that, with the extra 

 mouths of the rescued crew to be filled, provisions 

 could not hold out long, or, as in 1885, that a storm 

 had swept the Island and destroyed the crops. Once 

 in its history St. Kilda has been honoured with a 

 Parliamentary Debate to itself. 



