It roused in me a curiosity I felt it would be pleasant to gratify, and so a little while after I began this story, I wrote to a London newspaper man and asked him to send me some of his Orkney exchanges. I have a habit of trusting newspaper editors and I found this one as I expected, willing and obliging. He sent me two Orkney papers and the first thing I noticed was the prevalence of the old names. Among them I saw Mrs. Max Grant, and I thought I would write to her and take my chance of the lady turning out to be the old Sunna Vedder. It was quite a possibility, as we were apparently about the same age when I saw her. It was only for an hour or two in the evening we met, at the Ragnor house, but girls see a deal in an hour or two and if I remembered her, she had doubtless chronicled an opinion of me. In about five weeks Mrs. Grant's letter in answer to mine arrived. She began it by saying she remembered me, because I wore a hat, a sailor's hat, and she said it was the first hat she ever saw on a woman's head. She said also, that I told her women were beginning to wear them for shopping and walking and driving, or out at sea, but never for church or visiting. All of which I doubtless said, for it was my first hat. And I do not remember women wearing hats at all until about this time. I suppose [she continued] thou wants to know first of all about the Vedders. They were _the_ people then, and they have not grown a bit smaller, nor do they think any less of themselves yet. My grandfather married again and was not sorry for it. I don't know whether his wife was sorry or not. I took Maximus Grant for a husband for, after Boris Ragnor died, I did not care who I took, provided he had plenty of good qualities and plenty of gold. We lived together thirty years very respectably. I took my way and I usually expected him to do the same. We had four sons, and they have nine sons among them, and all of the nine are now fighting the vipers they have been coddling for forty or fifty years. Some are in the regular army, some in the navy, and some in the plucky, fighting little navy, patrolling England and her brood of coastwise islands. They are a tough, rough, hard lot, but I love them all better than anything else in this world. There are a good many Vedder houses in Orkney, and they are all full of little squabbling, fighting, never clean, and never properly dressed little brats, from four to eleven years old. So I don't worry about there being Vedders enough to run things the way they want them run. The Ragnors are here in plenty. All the men are at the war, all the women running fishing boats or keeping general shops, to which I like to see the Germans going. They are told what kind of people they are as they walk up to the shops; and they get what they want at an impoverishing price. Serve them right! Men, however, will pay any money for a thing they want.