By the way Mr.Balfour at Oronsay had a special breed of his own, and showed us a pair of little darlings which he valued at L100 apiece.

The true race, stunted and shaggy from climate, is rare in these days; and I suspect may be picked up cheaper at Aldridge's than at Shapinshay.
On our return voyage we skirted the whole north of Scotland, having had the rare chance of the steamer which once a year is chartered to take back the herring-fishers from Thurso to the Hebrides.

But first Sir George Sinclair most hospitably entertained us at Thurso Castle, whose grim battlements frown flush over the Arctic Sea: all within the walls luxurious warmth, and without them wrecks and desolation.

So also with the garden; on one side of the high wall greenhouses and flower-beds in the Italian style,--on the other, in strange contrast, the desolate wild ocean, which you see through windows of thick plate-glass let into the walls.

At Thurso town I conversed with the local genius, Robert Dick, made of world-wide fame since by that kind-hearted and clear-minded author, Samuel Smiles, the said genius being a noted self-taught naturalist, who as a small baker struggled with poverty through life, to be inconsistently rewarded after death by a national monument; his fellow-townsmen let the living starve to deify him when dead.