Nearer shore than the gannets the kittiwakes are fishing, when suddenly there glides among them a dusky skua, who forces the luckiest fisher to drop his spoil, which the ravager catches in mid-air and bears off. A true pirate of the air is the skua, and reminds me always of those low, dark feluccas so dreadful and so dear to the sailor on the high seas of romance. Far up in the blue ether a peregrine falcon sweeps round, circling wide on motionless, outspread wings, or a raven goes croaking from the cliffs to seek a prey, as he may have done for years unnumbered. If the tradition of his longevity may be believed, that dark corbie who flies croaking over the kelpers toiling in the morning sunlight, and sees the white smoke rise from their harmless kilns—what fires may he not have seen upon these beaches, and what strange smoke of sacrifice go up from forgotten altars to the unchanging heavens? Give him even a shorter lease of life than that which tradition assigns him, and still he may remember the blazing beacons leap up to carry from isle to isle a warning of the coming of Norse invaders. Allow him only two short centuries, and yet he must have watched the smoke of many a burning homestead in the days when the followers of the “Wee, wee German Lairdie” avenged their private wrongs in the name of their king. The older men among the kelpers still tell tales of the Jacobite lairds who lay hid like conies in the clefts of the rocks till these calamities were overpast. The old stories—the folk-tales of the isles—linger fragmentary among the kelping people. One may hear from them how all the fairies were seen to leave some island riding on tangles, and how they all went down in the windy firth, never to be seen again of mortals. Here is a man, bowed and crippled by rheumatism, who will tell how he was shot in the back by a “hill-ane” when ploughing. He saw not his assailant, but only the shadow of him on the earth. Another old man remembers having his side hurt as a boy, and going to a “wise woman” to be cured. She told him he had been “forespoken”—that is, bewitched—by a woman then dead, and made him drink water mixed with earth from the “fore-speaker’s” grave. She then put a hoop covered with a sheep’s skin on his head, a basin of water on that, and poured melted lead through the head of a key into the water, giving the patient a piece of the lead in the form of a heart as a charm. The cure wrought by this modern Norna was not, however, effectual.