i8o THE HOME OF A NATURALIST. 



aald tom^ue for any other ; " and having thus claimed 

 sisterhood, we were soon engaged in talk of the beloved 

 Faderlaund. 



Very frequently I make the acquaintance of other 

 Shelties in the same way, for they never altogether 

 lose their peculiar accent — an accent quite unlike that 

 of Celtic races, but nearly approaching the Icelandic, I 

 am told. 



It is surprising how few people seem to know any- 

 thing whatever about the Shetland Islands. One who 

 had travelled over the length and breadth of America 

 and Australia remarked, when I said that I was a 

 Shetlander, " Then you must be quite familiar with the 

 scenery of Skye ! " And a genius, to whom the Hebrides 

 is as a nursing mother, expressed surprise on learning 

 that the Shetlanders do not speak Gaelic. This strange 

 ignorance must be the excuse for prefacing my fragments 

 of our folk-lore with a few remarks about our dialect. 



When Shetland became a portion of Great Britain 

 the Shetlanders adopted the language of their new 

 mother as she presents it in books ; consequently they 

 did not acquire Scottish accents, nor many ungram- 

 matical vulgarisms. But though the English language 

 seems to have become rapidly universal in the islands 

 the natives continued to cling with loving tenacity to 

 their Norse nouns, and in some localities Norse idioms 

 were so well preserved that they are used in the present 

 day, so slightly altered as to be easily recognised by 

 the expert philologist. A custom among the fishermen 

 has evidently been greatly instrumental in keeping 



