Of the human life that pulses intermittently along our road there is not space now to write. Boy and girl, youth and maiden, man and woman, day by day, year in, year out, they follow the winding line, till for each in turn the day comes when it leads them to the kirkyard or to the sea, and the roads of Orcady know them no more. DUNCAN J. ROBERTSON. (_“Longman’s Magazine.” By permission._) [Illustration: _Kirkwall Pier—a midnight photograph._] A LOCH IN ORCADY. It is one among many, in an island where the lochs lie scattered like fragments of the sky fallen among the hills—one among many, and one of the least known of them all. On it the fisherman casts no fly, or casts it in vain, for fish have never prospered in its waters. It can never be an ideal trout loch, for it is not fed, like its sister lochs, by the innumerable small burns that channel our low hills. One surface-fed streamlet indeed flows into it, a streamlet hardly worthy of the courtesy-title it bears; but for the most part its waters are drawn from the secret sources of the springs. Its placid surface mirrors no hillsides purple with heather and green with waving fern, but from its margin the land rolls back in low billows, squared with fields that year by year darken under the plough and smile again in due season with the homely crops of the isles. Yet the little loch has charms of its own for those who know it—charms that its wilder and more romantic sisters cannot boast. Not a quarter of a mile from its western shore the Atlantic billows boom and thunder upon the cliffs, or roll in, great and green, to burst and spread in a whirling smother of foam upon the sands; and the quiet of the inland water is thrice welcome to eye and ear when these are dazzled and wearied by the ceaseless turmoil and tumult of the sea. The valley in which lies the loch runs down to a deeply curved bay, swept and scoured out by the sea, where there is a breach in the great cliff rampart that guards our island’s western coast. Up this valley the wind has, through the ages, heaped a huge sandhill which rolls and ripples under its greensward down to the lip of the bay. Between the sand and the clay lies the loch, narrowed by the rising slope of sand that forms its northern bank. At its eastern end is the germ of a village. A little shop, a post office, the long, low building which was a school before these days of school boards—these and a few cottages stand between the loch and the sunrise. Close to the water’s edge runs the highroad leading from a steep little seaport town, away through the quiet country, luring men to the sea and the great world of adventure beyond it. For with us isles-folk the tune that sings itself in the dreams of youth is not “Over the _hills_,” but “Over the _seas_ and far away.”