It is perhaps, however, for the student of human nature that Shetland has the greatest attractions. Here he will find a simple, kindly, primitive set of people, of Norwegian descent, but now anglicised in language and usages. They are, however, fond of old legends and stories. Mrs Saxby, the authoress of _Rockbound, a Story of the Shetland Isles_, in a pleasantly told narrative introduces us to this primitive people. We have for the scene of the story an island called Vaalafiel, five miles long, and a little over two in width, with a tiny harbour, and gray old mansion-house set in a strip of scraggy pine-wood. Vaalafiel, Mrs Saxby tells us, 'is coiled upon the sea much in the way a kitten rolls itself together on the hearth-rug--the creature's paws being represented by the narrow belts of land overlapping each other and forming the arms of our voe (fiord), whose crags are very suggestive of claws. Rising abruptly from the shores of this harbour, the island becomes a hill, whose eastern side is a precipice dipping into the German Ocean. The north point terminates in a bold headland, from whence the hill slopes gradually southwards, until it ends in a beautiful stretch of sand, kissed white by the broad waves of the Atlantic. The neighbouring islands cluster north and south, leaving deep narrow channels, where the two great seas keep up a perpetual warfare; and he is a daring sailor who ventures to cross those tideways when their "dark hour" approaches.' Under the old house of Vaalafiel and the cliffs adjacent to it were wide underground caverns, such as in the 'good old smuggling times' were no uncommon adjuncts to country houses, and even manses, if they happened to be conveniently near the shore. This smugglers' cave was the scene of a tragedy, such as was of no unfrequent occurrence among desperate men in these lawless days. A hasty blow struck in sudden passion hurried one rash soul to its last account, and darkened as with the brand of Cain the lives of many others. There is an old nurse, full of well-nigh forgotten Norse superstitions, and a little lonely child, the heiress of the rockbound islet, whose dearest pleasure was to watch the sea on the serene summer evenings when the sky became like a poet's dream, and earth and sea put on the glory of the clouds. Mrs Saxby describes 'the Shetland summer night as not dark at all; it is merely a twilight, which is prolonged sufficiently to assume a character of its own. Not dark, not light, not a brief uncertain mingling of both, but a quiet earnest period of rest, when Nature dreams but does not sleep, and yet is not awake. We call it "the dim," and you can discern objects quite clearly while it broods over the earth.' The wild winter nights have a grand storm-driven beauty of their own, when the Aurora Borealis shoots forth a fitful light, and the nursling of the gray North 'catches glimpses of the beauty dwelling in colour.' The solitary child Inga, bearing in her brave little heart