THE SANDS OF NIGG. 311 



shall we spend our days together ? and where ? I 

 breakfasted at Inverness with a very happy couple, a 

 Mr and Mrs T , and, more for our comfort, the hus- 

 band is fully twice the age of the wife ; I, you know, 

 am only ten years older than you. The match was a 

 love one on both sides in reality, whatever the world 

 may think, the most prudent matches of any. I saw in 

 my journey a second and still more striking proof of 

 this. J. S has several aunts who prudently married 

 men in rather easy circumstances, and one aunt (Aunt 

 Barbara), who was so foolish as to marry a man who 

 was poor -merely because she loved him ; and who had 

 little else to recommend him in the eyes of the un- 

 prejudiced than the possession of more sound sense and 

 sterling worth than fell to the share of all the other 

 husbands put together. The match, as you may think, 

 was very rationally deemed a bad one ; but, somehow, 

 circumstances are less fixed than the characters of men, 

 and it has so chanced that Aunt Barbara's husband holds, 

 at this time, a rather higher place in society than the 

 husband of any of the others ; the match has in con- 

 sequence become a good one. What if ours, you im- 

 prudent, foolish girl, should yet become a good one too ! 



' Manse of Kilmuir, half-past seven o'clock. 



f I was on the way to the ferry this evening, but 

 John impressed me to accompany him on a visit to Mr 

 M . We crossed the sands of Nigg together a long 

 dreary flat, roughened by the cord-like hillocks of the 

 sand- worm, and speckled with shells. Barren and 

 dreary as it may seem, I know no part of the country 

 busier with life. Myriads of sea-cockles have grown up 

 and perished in it, age after age, till the shells have so 

 accumulated, that in some places they form beds many 



