388 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



an undress of cloud and spray, that showed off their flat low 

 features to no advantage at all. The bold, picturesque 

 Hebrides look well in any weather; but the level Orkney 

 Islands, impressed everywhere, on at least their eastern 

 coasts, by the comparatively tame character borne by the 

 Old Red flagstones, when undisturbed by trap or the primary 

 rocks, demand the full-dress auxiliaries of bright sun and 

 clear sky, to render their charms patent. Then, however, 

 in their sleek coats of emerald and purple, and surrounded 

 by their blue sparkling sounds and seas, with here a long 

 dark wall of rock, that casts its shadow over the breaking 

 waves, and there a light fringe of sand and broken shells, 

 they are, as I afterwards ascertained, not without their ge- 

 nuine beauties. But had they shared in the history of the 

 neighbouring Shetland group, that, according to some of the 

 older historians, were suffered to lie uninhabited for centu- 

 ries after their first discovery, I would rather have been 

 disposed to marvel this evening, not that they had been un- 

 appropriated so long, but that they had been appropriated at 

 all. The late member for Orkney, not yet unseated by his 

 Shetland opponent, was one of the passengers in the steam- 

 boat ; and, with an elderly man, an ambitious schoolmaster, 

 strongly marked by the peculiarities of the genuine dominie, 

 who had introduced himself to him as a brother voyager, he 

 was pacing the quarter-deck, evidently doing his best to exert, 

 under an uninterrnittent hot- water douche of queries, the pa- 

 tient courtesy of a Member of Parliament on a visit to his 

 constituency. At length, however, the troubler quitted him, 

 and took his stand immediately beside me ; and, too san- 

 guinely concluding that I might take the same kind of liberty 

 with the schoolmaster that the schoolmaster had taken with 

 the Member, I addressed to him a simple query in turn. But 

 I had mistaken my man : the schoolmaster permitted to un- 

 known passengers in humble russet no such sort of familiari- 



