or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive

figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part

of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls,

and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.

Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But how much better it

was to hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob

Bain among the roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat

coiling a wet rope and shouting orders - not always very wise -

than to be warm and dry, and dull, and dead-alive, in the most

comfortable office. And Wick itself had in those days a note of

originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it much. The old

minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate times, for

an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone from

their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women

tending their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off

their coarse potations; and where, in winter gales, the surf would

beleaguer them closely, bursting in their very door. A traveller

to-day upon the Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloud of

smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite openly, it marked a

private still. He would not indeed make that journey, for there is

now no Thurso coach. And even if he could, one little thing that

happened to me could never happen to him, or not with the same

trenchancy of contrast.

We had been upon the road all evening; the coach-top was crowded

with Lews fishers going home, scarce anything but Gaelic had

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