RAMBLES OP A GEOLOGIST*. 389 



ties as those permitted by the Member ; and so I met with 

 a prompt rebuff, that at once set me down. I was evidently 

 a big, forward lad, who had taken a liberty with the master. 

 It is, I suspect, scarce possible for a man, unless naturally 

 very superior, to live among boys for some twenty or thirty 

 years, exerting over them all the while a despotic authority, 

 without contracting those peculiarities of character which 

 the master-spirits, our Scotts, Lambs, and Goldsmiths, 

 have embalmed with such exquisite truth in our literature, 

 and which have hitherto militated against the practical rea- 

 lization of those unexceptionable abstractions in behalf of 

 the status and standing of the teacher of youth which have 

 been originated by men less in the habit of looking about 

 them than the poets. It is worth while remarking how in- 

 variably the strong common sense of the Scotch people has 

 run every scheme under water that, confounding the charac- 

 ter of the " village schoolmaster" with that of the " village 

 clergyman," would demand from the schoolmaster the clergy- 

 man's work, 



We crossed the opening of the Pentland Frith, with its 

 white surges and dark boiling eddies, and saw its twin light- 

 houses rising tall and ghostly amid the fog on our lee. We 

 then skirted the shores of South Ronaldshay, of Burra, of Co- 

 pinshay, and of Deerness; and, after doubling Moul Head, and 

 threading the sound which separates Shapinshay from the 

 Mainland, we entered the Frith of Kirkwall, and caught, 

 amid the uncertain light of the closing evening, our earliest 

 glimpse of the ancient Cathedral of St Magnus. It seems 

 at first sight as if standing solitary, a huge hermit-like erec- 

 tion, at the bottom of a low bay, for its humbler compa- 

 nions do not make themselves visible until we have entered 

 the harbour by a mile or two more, when we begin to find 

 that it occupies, not an uninhabited tract of shore, but the 

 middle of a gray straggling town, nearly a mile in length. 



