A VISIT TO BRESSAY. If Charles Lamb and Herbert Spencer had been sent to Lerwick and Bressay to write a report on what they saw, I daresay the difference of their accounts would have astonished every reader. Lamb would probably have swilled porter in the _Ultima Thule_ Refreshment Bar and written a most interesting account of Bressay without ever crossing the Sound. The ribs of a big uncouth Dutch boat, square, cumbrous, shell-fretted, and tilted up on the beach, would probably have bulked more in Lamb's narrative than the modern steam-trawlers that abound in these waters. His politico-economical reflections on the rise in price of peppermint lozenges, consequent on the annual arrival of the Dutch fishing crews would, I am sure, have furnished excellent reading. Spencer's report would have dealt, I fancy, with the rotation of crops, the cause of the different currents, the varieties of pigmentation (with percentages) among the islanders, and the evolution of fishing gear from its rudimentary forms--in sum with the definite combination of heterogeneous changes both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences. No two out of a hundred visitors see the same things, a fact which may help to prove Bishop Berkeley's theory that the universe is subjective entirely. I went over to Bressay with a genial and erudite clergyman to visit the schoolhouse and inspect the ruins of an eighth century church. Three Shetland women rowed us over the Sound and handled the oars splendidly. The minister, a plump, jolly be-spectacled gentleman, who has not "perpetrated matrimony," declared with a sigh that he was an unprotected male, and on our arrival at the Bressay beach, he called aloud to the oarswomen to lift him out of the boat. These muscular dames shrieked with laughter and proceeded to unship their oars as if to buffet him: he, thereupon, leaped lightly enough on the strand and, turning round, would have improved the occasion by a word in season had not the tittering Nereids begun to splash him as he stood on the shingle.