The Pentland Firth, stormiest of any and all firths in Scotland, is eight miles wide. What are its peculiarities of behavior, during centuries, when hectored and goaded by the winds, may be realized from the great storm of 1862. Then the waves ran bodily up and over the vertical cliffs, two hundred feet in height, lodging portions of the wrecked boats, stones, seaweed, etc., on their tops. This attrition, continued during ages, effecting the destruction of the cliffs and heaping up torn rock masses by sea action, proves, say the geologists, that many of Nature’s ruins along the coast of Scotland are the work of the sea when agitated by storms, rather than that of icebergs. The spring tides of the Pentland Firth run at the rate of over ten nautical miles an hour, and are probably by far the most rapid marine currents around the British Islands. When aided by powerful winds, these undersea forces lend incredible force to the breakers in the northern sea. Still farther north, beyond the Orkneys, are the Shetlands, on which are bred the little ponies, known by the name of “Shelties.” With Americans born in a city, among the first childish impressions of any other animals than the average city horse, cat, and dog, are those of Shetland ponies, with which they are enraptured when a visiting circus company makes a street parade. In old days the ponies were regarded, on the island on which they were born, as common property for all. This primitive stage of communal society having long ago passed away, the hardy little creatures are reared in large numbers, chiefly for export into England. There most of them have to leave the sunlight and live down in the darkness, being made very useful in hauling coal in the narrow galleries of the mines underground. The Shetlands, or Zetland group of islands, are the most northerly British possessions in Europe. The name “Shetland” is supposed to be simply a modernized rendering of the old Norse “Hjalt-land,” the meaning of which is given as “high-land”; or, “Hjalti’s land,”--after a man whose name occurs in ancient Norse literature; or, “Hilt-land,” in allusion to an imagined resemblance of the configuration of the archipelago to the hilt of a sword. Many remains, in the form of stone circles and “brochs,” are still to be seen. The people were converted to Christianity in the sixth century by Irish missionaries, but the Norse language and customs survived in Foula till the end of the eighteenth century. Besides the remains of old Scandinavian forts, there are ruins of twenty ancient chapels. Fitful Head is the Ultima Thule of the ancients. Unst is the most northerly island of the group. Near Lerwick is the largest and best-preserved of the old Pictish towers, so numerous along the coast and which long served for beacon fires and signals.