i86 THE HOME OF A NATURALIST. 



heads, and cracked china. I mean fragments of 

 Scandinavian language, poetry, history, religion, super- 

 stitions. Would that I were learned enough to make 

 a proper use of the numberless legends, bits of song, 

 idioms, words — all once so familiar. Fortunately I have 

 preserved a few of those " remains," which may serve 

 as broken links that some one wiser than I can weave 

 into a connecting chain between the modern Shetlanders 

 and the Norsemen, whose blood is still the reddest drop 

 of that mixed fluid which permeates British veins — or, 

 as a Shetlander would express it, " Wir yatlin-blod 

 comes frae da Nome stock " ( " Our reddest, readiest 

 blood comes from the Norse ancestry " ). 



I am indebted to the experiences of a sick-room for 

 a great portion of my folk-lore ; among the rest, for an 

 incantation which nearly killed me ! Having " supped 

 on horrors" of Mam Kirsty's concocting, it was not 

 wonderful that I was attacked by nightmare of an 

 aggravated description. Evidently the old nurse did 

 not believe that the scream I gave proceeded from 

 physical causes, for she immediately set to work to 

 exorcise the demon steed. Pulling from my head the 

 longest hair it possessed, and then going through the 

 pantomime of binding a refractory animal, she slowly 

 chanted this spell : — 



Da man o meicht The man of might 



He rod a neicht, He rode all night, 



We nedder swird With neither sword 



Nor faerd nor leicht. Nor food nor light, 



He socht da mare, He sought the mare, 



He fand da mare, He found the mare, 



