RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 411 



curiously charged with what had once been intellect and emo- 

 tion, hopes and fears, stern business and light amusement. 

 I saw, among the other manuscripts, a thin slip of a book, 

 filled with jottings, in the antique square-headed style of no- 

 tation, of old Scotch tunes, apparently the work of some 

 musical county-clerk of Orkney in the seventeenth century ; 

 but the paper, in a miserable state of decay, was blotted crim- 

 son and yellow with the rotting damps, and the ink so faded, 

 that the notation of scarce any single piece in the collection 

 seemed legible throughout Less valuable and more modern, 

 though curious from their eccentricity, there lay, in company 

 with the music, several pieces of verse, addressed by some 

 Orcadian Claud Halcro of the last age, to some local patron, 

 in a vein of compliment rich and stiff as a piece of ancient 

 brocade. A peremptory letter, bearing the autograph signa- 

 ture of Mary Queen of Scots, to Torquil M'Leod of Dun ve- 

 gan, who had been on the eve, it would seem, of marrying a 

 daughter of Donald of the Isles, gave the Skye chieftain " to 

 wit" that, as he was of the blood royal of Scotland, he could 

 form no matrimonial alliance without the royal permission, 

 a permission which, in the case in point, was not to be 

 granted. It served to show that the woman who so ill liked 

 to be thwarted in her own amours could, in her character 

 as the Queen, deal despotically enough with the love affairs 

 of other people. Side by side with the letter of Mary there 

 were several not less peremptory documents of the times of 

 the Commonwealth, addressed to the Sheriff of Orkney and 

 Shetland, in the name of his Highness the Lord Protector, 

 and that bore the signature of George Monck. I found them 

 to consist chiefly of dunning letters, such letters as those 

 duns write who have victorious armies at their back, for 

 large sums of money, the assessments laid on the Orkneys by 

 Cromwell. Another series of letters, some ten or twelve 

 years later in their date, form portions of the history of a 



