The coast is among the most picturesque in the world, bearing a strong resemblance to the coast of Maine. The reader, perhaps, has never seen the coast of Maine. Then let him do so speedily, and he will know, as he sails along its bold headlands, and its seamed walls of rock rising here and there into mountains, how the coast of Caithness looked to one of the noblest men that ever lived in it, Robert Dick, baker of Thurso. Thurso is the most northern town of this most northern county. It is situated on Thurso Bay, which affords a good harbor, and it has thus grown to be a place of three or four thousand inhabitants. From this town the Orkney Islands can be seen, and a good walker can reach in a day's tramp Dunnet Head, the lofty promontory which ends the Island. Here lived, labored, studied, and died, Robert Dick, a man whose name should never be pronounced by intelligent men but with respect. He did not look like a hero. When the boys of the town saw him coming out of his baker's shop, in a tall stove-pipe hat, an old-fashioned dress coat and jean trousers, they used to follow him to the shore, and watch him as he walked along it with his eyes fixed upon the ground. Suddenly he would stop, fall upon his hands and knees, crawl slowly onward, and then with one hand catch something on the sand; an insect, perhaps. He would stick it upon a pin, put it in his hat, and go on his way; and the boys would whisper to one another that there was a mad baker in Thurso. Once he picked up a nut upon the beach, and said to his companion:-- "That has been brought by the ocean current and the prevailing winds all the way from one of the West India Islands." He made the most astonishing journeys about that fag end of the universe in the pursuit of knowledge. We read of his walking thirty-two miles in a soaking rain to the top of a mountain, and bringing home only a plant of white heather. On another day he walked thirty-six miles to find a peculiar kind of fern. Again he walked for twenty-four hours in hail, rain, and wind, reaching home at three o'clock in the morning. But at seven he was up and ready for work as usual. He carried heavy loads, too, when he went searching for minerals and fossils. In one of his letters we read:-- "Shouldering an old poker, a four-pound hammer, and with two chisels in my pocket, I set out.... What hammering! what sweating! Coat off; got my hands cut to bleeding." In another letter he speaks of having "three pounds of iron chisels in his trousers pocket, a four-pound hammer in one hand and a fourteen-pound sledge-hammer in the other, and his old beaver hat filled with paper and twine."