482 RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 



in life, but over whose erect form and handsome features the 

 years seemed to have passed lightly, and whom I met at the 

 Free Church of Stromness, to which, at the Disruption, she 

 had followed her respected minister. It seemed a fact as cu- 

 riously compounded as some of those pictures of the last age 

 in which the thin unsubstantialities of allegory mingled with 

 the tangibilities of the real and the material, that the sister 

 of one of Byron's heroes should be an attached member of 

 the Free Church. 



On my return to the inn, I found in the public room a 

 young German of some one or two and twenty, who, in mak- 

 ing the tour of Scotland, had extended his journey into Ork- 

 ney. My specimens, which had begun to accumulate in the 

 room, on chimney-piece and window-sill, had attracted his 

 notice, and led us into conversation. He spoke English well, 

 but not fluently, in the style of one who had been more ac- 

 customed to read than to converse in it ; and he seemed at 

 least as familiar with two of our great British authors, 

 Shakspeare and Sir Walter Scott, as most of the better- 

 informed British themselves. It was chiefly the descriptions 

 of Sir Walter in the " Pirate" that had led him into Ork- 

 ney. He had already visited the Cathedral of St Magnus 

 and the Stones of Stennis ; and on the morrow he intended 

 visiting the Dwarfie Stone ; though I ventured to suggest 

 that, as a broad sound lay between Stromness and Hoy, and 

 as the morrow was the Sabbath, he might find some difficulty 

 in doing that. His circle of acquirement was, I found, rather 

 literary than scientific. It seemed, however, to be that of 

 a really accomplished young man, greatly better founded in 

 his scholarship than most of our young Scotchmen on quit- 

 ting the national universities ; and I felt, as we conversed to- 

 gether, chiefly on English literature and general politics, how 

 much poorer a figure I would have cut in his country than 

 he cut in mine. I found, on coming down from my room 



