FEBRUARY 35 



were touched by the intense dreariness of the near 

 landscape and the mysterious gloom which so often 

 hangs over the sea. It was a sense of the overwhelming 

 forces of nature that has caused their English-speaking 

 descendants to twist the old Norse name of the head- 

 land lying to the west of Thurso Bay into one expres- 

 sive of the implacable storms which rage there in 

 winter. Cape Wrath, we call it, but the Norsemen 

 named it Hvarf, which means the ' turning-point ' ; for 

 it was here their black kyuls turned southward in 

 sailing to the Sudrey the southern isles now called 

 the Hebrides. 1 After all, perhaps the most reasonable 

 explanation of Thurso may be that the river was named 

 after a harmless fisherman called Thor. 



XVI 



There is no word to describe the climate to-day so 

 fitly as the Scottish one 'snell.' Man and beast must 

 be cowering under the humble roofs dotting 

 the wayside and the fields, for we have day in 

 driven three miles along the dreary road Caitlmess 

 to Westerdale without encountering either. A string 



1 The histories of some names are curious. This one Sudrey, the 

 southern isles has disappeared from our maps, where Sutherland, 

 originally conferred by these same invaders from the north, still 

 remains ; but to this day we continue to talk of the diocese of Sodor 

 and Man, by reason that it once consisted of Man and the Hebrides. 

 The name Hebrides took its rise from a copyist's blunder. Ptolemy 

 and the earliest geographers wrote it Kbudse or Hsebudse. The i 

 character carried uo dot till the eleventh century, so there was some 

 excuse for the copyist, who mistook u for ri. Hsebudae was, there- 

 fore, written Hebrides in a manuscript from which an early edition of 

 Pliny was printed ; the name took root with us in that form, and was 

 carried by Captain Cook to the southern hemisphere. 



