WITH NATURE AND A CAMERA. 



The married women are distinguished from the 

 unmarried ones by a white frill which is worn in 

 front of the head-shawl or handkerchief and serves 

 the part of a wedding ring, which is unknown in 

 St. Kilda. 



As illustrative of the love of gaudy- coloured 



apparel existent amongst 

 the women of this lonely 

 isle, Seton says, " When 

 the Rev. Neil Mackenzie 

 went to St. Kilda 



in 



1830, his servant-maid, a 

 native, asked permission 

 to take the hearth-rug to 

 church by way of a 

 shawl. Regarding her 

 proposal as a joke he 

 innocently assented, and 

 to his infinite astonish- 

 ment he beheld the girl 

 in his own pew enveloped 

 in the many - coloured 

 carpet, the envied of an 

 admiring congregation ! 

 All the women in the 

 island were eager candi- 

 dates for the ' shawl ' 



on the following morning, some of them offering 

 to give ten birds for its use." 



Side by side with much that was picturesque 

 and delightful in its primitive simplicity, we came 

 across things of appalling modernity: such as a 

 woman wearing a Piccadilly fringe, a piece of barbed- 

 wire stretched round the minister's garden, and a 

 youth sporting a dicky. It is wonderful to think 

 that within the confines of the British Isles on the 



IRON LAMP. 



