and answering, said, "Of a truth such was my errand hither, but what with the din and bustle about me, I doubt shall never pluck up heart to find a purchaser." Premium was gone, and that Stagman had fled as Discount drew nigh, they seized upon Scapegrace, and began to flout him at first with fair words and pretences, but at last more rudely and openly. "So, friend!" cried one, "you will buy nothing of us, it seems? Mayhap you have something to sell." "I have in my scrip a few Eldorados, for which I expected a premium," answered Scapegrace. "I fear, neighbor Littlefaith," said Plausible," thou art in the right, and let me tell thee that same scrip of thine is little in favor here; how beit, for the sake of old acquaintance, I would not have thee return empty-I will buy thy wares of thee. Thou canst not expect of me much profit, but here are twenty crowns, which will defray thy travelling charges-and leave thee a something over beside. Mayhap I may be able some time or other to find a purchaThere is the money. Give me the scrip quickly; for I see a certain friend of mine, Mr. By-ends, who beckoneth to me," and cannot wait." ser. Don't you wish you may get it?" said the other sympathetically.. "Does your mother," said a third, with a look of sympathy, "your venerable mother, know that you are abroad at the Fair?" "Perfectly well," answered Scapegrace; it was mainly in consequence of her pecuniary distress that I came hither." "Distress, indeed!" answered the other; Then did Littlefaith take the crowns, and give unto Plausible the scrip, which when" thou wouldst not have us believe that she he had put into his bosom, he smiled and has sold her mangle yet?" hastened away. When Littlefaith came back to Stagman, he told him what he had done. "Thou faint-hearted fool!" said Stag man. "Better is a bird in the hand than two in the bush," said Littlefaith; and so saying, he departed. But while Stagman was thus gibing Littlefaith for throwing away his wares, suddenly Scapegrace uttered a cry, and said 66 Mercy on us, what hath become of Mr. Premium! I only turned my head for a moment to look at yonder Prospectus of the Grand Equatorial and Tropical Junction, and, lo! he slipt his arm from mine, and I saw him no more." "Oh, woe is me!" cried Stagman; "what I foretold has come to pass, and now I fear a worse thing will yet befall us.' And, as he spake, behold there drew near a lean and ill-favored person, clad in ragged and sad-colored attire, whose doublet was much out at the elbows, and who looked ever towards the ground; and no sooner did Stagman see him drawing nigh, than he threw his scrip on the ground, and, hurrying through the crowd, he was seen no more. Then I knew that the man's name was DISCOUNT. "I said not that she had," replied Scapegrace; "but she would gladly have parted with it if she could." "How are you off for soap?" said another in a compassionate tone. "Very indifferently, friend," answered Scapegrace; "for my lodging has been but poorly supplied of late, and I think of changing it." Lodging, quotha! You sha'n't lodge here, Mr. Ferguson, I promise you." My name is not Ferguson," said Scapegrace meekly; "neither have I the least intention of lodging here." "What a shocking bad hat!" cried a voice from behind, and in a trice was Scapegrace's hat knocked over his eyes, and his pockets turned inside out; but finding nothing therein but scrip, they were enraged, and falling upon Scapegrace, they kicked and cuffed, and hustled him up one row and down another, through this alley and across that court, till at last, being tired of mocking him, they cast him out of the Fair altogether, and shut the gate against him. visible fading away of the cherished image beIn the case of illness, the gradual dying, the fore our eyes, slowly accustoms us to the thought of death-it is the soothing twilight preceding the night; whereas in the other case, the sun sets at once, without twilight. Yes, the greatest the learned Kircher, who was quite delighted sorrow is the beholding the blooming countenance behind the pale ghastly lace of death. And when the men of the Fair saw that Richter. From Frazer's Magazine. MANNERS, TRADITIONS, AND SUPERSTI- royal children. But with this animal, and the two extreme points I have mentioned, the probability is that his knowledge of the country and its inhabitants-historical, geographical, zoological, and statistical terminates. Ir Regina will permit an Ultima-Thu- Ask him about Foula, or Burray, or lian, a dweller in the solitary isles of the Bressay, or Papastour, or Whalsey, or Yell, Caledonian archipelego, to offer an occa- or Fetlar, or Unst, the Out Skerries, the sional mite to her great metropolitan treas- Noup, the Sneug, or any other locality beury of knowledge, I flatter myself I could tween Lamba Ness and Quendal Bay, and "submit to public inspection" (as a fash- he will turn a bewildered stare of amazeionable modiste newly returned from the ment in your face, or, perhaps, exclaim, spring markets would say) some facts new with a shrug of his shoulder, that he does to our modern periodical literature. Vigi- not understand Gaelic. We venture to say lant and far-searching as the spirit of lite- he never heard of the Grind of the Navir, rary enterprise now is, it has scarcely turned or the Villains of Ure, or the " Doreholm a thought to the fields of curious and inter- of Northmaven," or those sublime caverned esting information that bound the northern rocks that present a mural front of porphyextremity of our own empire. An adven- ry, with arched doorways, to the wild fury ture in Tahiti or New Zealand, a ramble of the Atlantic, roaring in the wintry blast, in the Marquesas, a tiger-hunt in India, "a and battering the weatherworn rampart dinner in ancient Egypt," a legend of the with the force of artillery. Were I to tell twelfth century, is devoured with avidity, him about the Drongs of Hillswick Ness and admired, however trivial in itself, be- and St. Magnus Bay, towering above the cause it is associated in the reader's mind waves like the ruins of Thebes or Palmyra, with the idea of rarity or distance. Like and carved by the storm into ten thousand the fruits of warm climates, the knowledge shapes, more fantastic than castles in the that is dug from antiquity or transported air, or the cloud-built palaces that adorn across the Pacific is often more prized than the horizon in a gloomy November eventhe observations which we could gathering, he would, probably, inquire if I was from the study of society around us, and at describing to him the mountains of the the small cost of a few days' sail from the moon, or had newly arrived from the last metropolis of the kingdom. discovered planet. Take him to the Stones It is for this reason, probably, and be- of Steffs, or the precipitous cliffs of Noss, cause it does not require the writer to en-rising perpendicularly from the sea, where counter savages or circumnavigate the a tremendous chasm is traversed by a globe, that our cluster of islands, lying be- wooden trough named a "cradle," slung tween the parallels of the fifty-ninth and across the abyss from rock to rock, and sixty-second degrees of north latitude, are merely large enough to ferry over one man a sort of terra incognita in the current lit- and a sheep, his head would turn giddy at erature of the day. An Englishman knows the sight, or he might imagine himself more of Australia or China, of the Oregon making a first voyage to the north pole in or the Punjaub, than he does about any one Henson's aerial machine. It would puzzle of the Shetland Isles, though they are above him to understand flinching a whale, or ninety in number, and cover a space of skyleing a lum; nor could he say with old seventy miles from south to north, and more Basil Mertoun, "I know the meaning of than fifty from east to west. If he has read scat, and wattle, and hawkhen, and hagalef, Sir Walter Scott's Pirate he may, perhaps, and every other exaction by which your remember the name of "Sumburgh Head," lords have wrung your withers." Sights the southmost promontory of the group; or and sounds would arrest his senses droller of the "Fitful Head," rendered classical than any to be met with in the modern by the same pen as the residence of Norna. Babylon, where you Londoners have no If he has chanced to be at Windsor, or days two months long, and cannot like us Brighton, or Buckingham Palace, he may shave by the light of the sun at midnight. have seen a little hirsute quadruped called But I could tell him of other wonders in a shelty, or Shetland pony, about the size our islands besides those peculiar to our of a Newfoundland dog, and imported ex-natural scenery, strange and picturesque pressly for the equestrian amusement of the though our coasts and headlands appear. A great proportion of our inhabitants (they he viewed our bleak and bold scenery, are reckoned about 30,000) are amphibi- scaled our stupendous cliffs, studied our ous; the men, like the old sea-kings, spend- manners, which he has so admirably portraying more of their lives on the water than ed in the Mordaunt, the Magnus Troil, the the land, "rarely sleeping under a roof or Minna and Brenda, the Norna, the rustic warming themselves at a cottage fire." The Yellowley, the pedlar Snailsfoot, and other women, too, brave the dangers of a sailor- personages that seem to move and breathe faring life; for they will navigate boats, as in his fascinating pages. These are all set a northern chronicler says, "through terri- forth in his novel and his diary. His visit ble seas with the utmost skill and ability." is not forgotten, and his Pirute is still the And I verily believe our Arctic Grace Dar- delight of our youths and maidens. lings would surpass the heroine of the Fern Islands in deeds of generous intrepidity, should it happen that distressed humanity required their aid. No part of the country is more than six miles distant from the sea, and some of our islands (or holms) are not larger than an ordinary drawing-room. We have "horses," and "warts," and "old men," hundreds of feet in height, but they are hills of peculiar shape. Our crows build their nests of fish-bones, for lack of sticks; and as trees and hedges are rare with us, our birds, instead of being inhabitants of the air, must become denizens of the soil. Our eagles are worth five shillings a head to any that can shoot them: we can buy a young calf for eighteenpence, and sell a pair of knitted stockings for four guineas. We are believers in magical arts and preternatural creatures, in the great kraaken and the sea-serpent, in mermaids and mermen, in witchcraft and the evil eye, in the power of invocations and maledictions, in amulets and spectral illusions and occult sympathies, in trows and elf-arrows, in "healing by the coin," "casting the heart," curing by rhyme or rowan-tree, or cow-hair, or a darning-needle stuck in the leaf of a psalm-book. We believe in the possibility of abstracting, by certain charms, "the profits" of a neighbor's cow, or transferring the butter from one woman's churn to another woman's dairy; and all by the "devilish cunning" of spells and cantrips. That such marvels in nature and humanity should exist in the broad daylight of this omniscient age, and yet so little be known about them by the millions who devour monthly articles, is a fact scarcely credible. It is true we have been visited from time to time by tourists, and naturalists, and moralists, inspectors of education, commissioners of light-houses, &c. The Great Unknown delighted us with his presence in the summer and autumn of 1814, to gather materials for one of his immortal fictions, if fictions they can be called which represent life and nature in the mirror of truth. Here VOL. VIII. No. IV. 66 I pass over the old missionary Brand, who came about the beginning of last century on a religious errand, by order of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; and I need merely allude to the Tour of Dr. Patrick Neill in 1804, to the excelleut Description of Dr. Samuel Hibbert in 1822, and to the more recent steam-voyage of Miss Catherine Sinclair, about five or six years ago. This lady performed a whole volume out of a flying visit of forty-eight hours; and undertook to give a description of the country without stirring from Mr. Hay's drawing-room in Lerwick, and on a misty Sunday, when she could not see across the narrow bay opposite her window. But then she had Mr. Hay's chart obligingly spread before her," on so large a scale that three inches are given to each mile, and not a single peat-stack seemed wanting; so we made a leisurely tour over this wide expanse, pausing occasionally to hear elaborate descriptions of the curiosities we ought to have seen, and of the accidents we might probably have met with; all very interesting, but also rather tantalizing." From an hour's inspection of this spacious map, this ingenious lady contrived to manufacture a Journal of a Two Days' Residence in Shetland, with a Full, True, and Particular Account of the Hubits, Manners, and Language of the Natives; their Dress, Appearance, and Costumes; also, New and Original Discoveries respecting the Geography, Astronomy, Natural History, and Geological Structure of these Islands, &c. This may be intended as a "right merry jest," but it was rather too much to make the public pay seven and sixpence for it. In my communications I can promise no exploits by land or water to rival this. But if any of the thousand and one contributors to Regina, or even her great accoucheur himself of 215 Regent-street, should take a fancy to adventure upon an excursion to our Scottish Cyclades, I can promise a welcome reception from our resident landlords, and udallers, and clergy, whose hospitality is not the less warm though it may have a modation of railways, or post-chaises, or contracted field or limited opportunities for turnpike-roads, he will be disappointed; but its exercise. I can imagine that a denizen he will find our rude climate, and our barof London, accustomed to the luxuries of ren soil, tempered by the warmth of a cabs and coffee-houses, of coal-fires, easy friendly greeting, and lighted up with a glochairs, and first-class carriages, may have rious luminary that for three months scarcegrave objections to risk the perils of an ly quits the horizon. During that period Arctic tour of pleasure. He will likely pic- darkness is unknown, the short absence ture to himself seas swarming with mon- of the sun being supplied by a bright twisters, the leviathan of the deep spread light. To use the words of a native histoover many a rood like a vast continent- rian, "Nothing can surpass the calm sethe marine snake, trailing its wavy length renity of a fine summer night in the Shetalong the surface for miles, his neck cov-land Isles, the atmosphere is clear and unered with a flowing mane, his cold glaring clouded, and the eye has an uncontrolled eyes shining like carbuncles, and his head, and extreme range; the hills and the headwhen looking out for a victim, elevated mast lands look more majestic, and they have a high, with a mouth capable of swallowing a solemnity superadded to their grandeur; one hundred and forty horse-power steamer. the water in the bays appears dark, and as He may dream of billows like mountains, smooth as glass; no living object interrupts of precipices and headlands, sunken reefs, the tranquillity of the scene, unless a solidark caverns, boiling foam, currents, eddies, tary gull skimming the surface of the sea; tempests, and the whole category of Shet- and there is nothing to be heard but the land horrors sung by Norna of the Fitful distant murmuring of the waves among the Head to the trembling Brenda :rocks." Surely such a picture of tranquil grandeur as this, is enough to put heart into the most timid, to scare away all the traditionary perils and monstrosities with which ignorance and superstition have surrounded our northern archipelago. "By beach and by wave, By stack and by skerry, by noup and by roe, And the northern tides lave." Another drawback to tourists has now been removed by the facilities which steam His nerves, like poor Dame Yellowley's, has supplied; the passage from Leith to may be shaken at the thought of the hurly- Lerwick, a distance of ninety-six leagues, burly of our rousts, or the ungovernable can be made as regularly as her majesty's fury of our elements. He may be no ad- mail, and in as short space as Roderick mirer of the fey folk, or of the Satanical Random's post-wagon took to travel from ponies the neagles, who gallop off with tra- York to London No doubt the case was vellers whom they have allured to mount very different before this great revolution in them, over lank and bog, casting the rider smack and packet navigation was introfrom some promontory into the sea, and duced. Then our means of communicathen vanishing in a flash of light. He may, tion with the rest of the world were difficult perhaps, have no great confidence in the and few. A letter from Shetland to Orkney prayers of Bessie Millie, who sells favorable had to go round via Edinburgh; or if any winds to mariners for the small considera- of our enterprising merchants wished for tion of sixpence; and he may regard with early intelligence, he had to despatch a vesstill greater suspicion the humanity of our sel of his own for the purpose, and after all consuetudinary laws, which attach a sort of might find the post-office authorities refuse retributive punishment to every native who for his convenience to interrupt the ordinashall rescue a drowning stranger or assist ary means of correspondence. We were shipwrecked crew. But if such chimeras often half-a-year behind in our information, haunt his imagination, I fearlessly bid him dismiss them. The tourist is in no danger of casting anchor on a kraaken, or being dragged by the multifarious claws of some gigantic polypus to the bottom of the ocean. These legendary monsters exist only in our popular creed, and disturb the repose of none but the superstitious fishermen. which led us into the commission of ridiculous anachronisms and irregularities. Our clergymen prayed for kings and queens, months after they were dead and buried. A young prince, or princess, might be weaned, or walking, before we were apprised of its birth. The greatest national occurrences, the wars of the Commonwealth, the perseIt is true if the visitor expects the accom-cutions of the Stuarts, the change of one ed us. dynasty for another, were events known at him put himself under my tutelage, and the extremities of Europe before they reach- accompany me on the imaginary voyage. And if we were unwittingly guilty of high treason, in praying for one monarch when, by a fiction of the law, we were understood to have sworn fealty to another, the fault was not ours, but in the want of steamboats. Like good Mrs. Glass, who presumes her hare to be caught before it is skinned, I stipulate that my friend be in Edinburgh before starting. He must be at the North Bridge Duty-house by half-past five o'clock in the morning of any given Friday in the Tradition says, that the Revolution of spring, summer, or autumn months. There 1688 was not known in Shetland for six he will find cab, hackney, minibus, omnimonths after it happened. Brand, the mis- bus, or railway at his service, to set him sionary, states, that "it was the month of down at the nether extremity of Granton May thereafter before they heard any thing pier, where he has to pay twopence for his of the late revolution, and that first, they pierage, and where he will observe the say, from a fisherman, whom some would Sovereign steamer, of two-hundred horse have arraigned before them, and impeached power, rocking and roaring, casting forth of high treason, because of his news." Mar- volumes of black smoke, with various other tin, in his History of the Isles, repeats the symptoms of a determination to be off. story with some improvement. He says, The last bell rings at six precisely, the "The Shetlanders had no account of the luggage is stowed on deck, the driver and Prince of Orange's late landing in England, coronation, &c., until a fisherman happened to land there in May following, and he was not believed, but indicted for high treason for spreading such news." the porter are paid. You muffle yourself up in cloak or Codrington, look out for a conversable visage among the crowd, make up your mind to be desperately sea-sick, cast a parting gaze on the friends left behind, and away you go full boil. The broad Firth, studded with islands, the shore on either hand planted with towns, and verdant with forests and green fields, diverts your attention from certain disagreeable inward emotions that begin to turn your countenance yellow, and threaten a premature separation between your stomach and your breakfast. Sternwards lie the small isles of Crammond and Inchcolm, and ten miles in the distance the Firth is land-locked by the strait at Queens-ferry, with its projecting rock and promontory. The bay presented to the eye in this direction is picturesque and beautiful. On the right is seen Edinburgh, with its castle, steeples, monuments, hills, blue-slated roofs, and long terraces of streets. The opposite coast of Fife is sprinkled with dwellings, and lined with fishing villages, the nearest of which are Burntisland, Kinghorn, Kirkaldy, and Dysart. This is the common report, which, however, is exaggerated, and not quite correct. The news of the landing of the Prince of Orange in England had reached the island of Unst within little more than a month after it took place-the 5th of November, 1688. The intelligence was evidently accidental, but the fact is stated in a letter written by one of the ancestors of Mr. Mowat, of Garth, and dated 15th December, 1688, which thus concludes: "I can give no account of news, save only that the skipper of the wreckt ship confirms the former report of the Prince of Orange his landing in England with ane considerable number of men, bot upon what pretence I cannot condishend." Though the fact of the prince's landing was known, it may be true that months elapsed before the Shetlanders learned the event of the Revolution. Now all this has passed away. We are no longer reckoned out of the circle of Christendom, or to be on visiting terms with any Half-an-hour's sailing brings you under thing more civilized than shuas and bottle- the lee of Inchkeith, where there are an nose whales. Every week we hold com- elegant lighthouse, a rabbit warren, and a munication with the Scottish metropolis, few agricultural donkeys. Beyond this islthe three winter months excepted; and I and the Firth expands. Bounding the view see no reason why this interruption should southwards are Musselburgh and Prestonbe, for if steamers ply all the year round pans, the hills above Haddington, the highbetween New York and Liverpool, why not cone of North Berwick Law, and the stubetween Lerwick and Leith? pendous Bass-rock, the solangoosifera BasSuppose, then, one of your literati smit-sa of old Drummond of Hawthornden, the ten with the curiosity to penetrate this ex-friend and host of Shakspeare. To the treme verge of her majesty's dominions, let north the range of fishing towns (most of |