There are many quaint and even beautiful turns of speech among these hard-working crofters. Their faces shine on my memory red like setting suns through the white reek of the kelp pits. Here is one whose fathers fled from Perthshire after “the ’45,” and who thinks that some day he would like to go back to see the old place again—the “old place” which none of his have looked upon for one hundred and forty years! He toils night and day in summer cultivating his croft, fishing for lobsters, and making kelp. His rent is perhaps seven or eight pounds. Books, you would think, must be unknown to him; yet he will tell you he has “always been a great reader of Sir Walter Scott’s works,” and under the spell of that mighty wizard his hard life has budded and wreathed itself with romance. At the next pit is a man of a very different type. Quiet and slow, this man has led an honest life, with an eye ever to the main chance. Pressed once for an answer to some question important to the settling of a kelp dispute, after vain attempts at evasion, he burst out, “Gie me time, Mr. Blank, to wind up me mind.” Across the bay the pits are watched by an old bachelor—a _rara avis_ among the kelpers—a little, clean-shaven, mouse-like man, who has “money in the bank.” He holds a croft where his ancestors have dwelt longer than the memory of man extends. The peat fire smouldering on his hearth has, to his certain knowledge, burned unquenched for two hundred years. How much longer ago it was kindled tradition recordeth not. Every night his last work is to “rest” that precious fire, and every morning it claims his earliest care. All his life he has toiled, gathering a harvest both from land and sea, and a harvest of content and happiness as well, such as few crofters know how to reap. “When I come oot on a fine simmer morning at four o’clock wi’ never anither reek but me ain, I’m laird o’ a’ the land as far as I can see.” He has the secret of the lordship of the eye, which can give to a penniless man more profit of the pleasant earth than to the greatest lord of land among them all. Look at this fellow, gaunt, black, and shaggy; he might be one of _Punch’s_ Scotch elders. Asked if he remembered some event of thirty years ago—“No, sir,” he said. “Ye see, I wasna at hame then; I was divin’ in the face o’ the sea for a livin’.” He had been a fisherman, and quite naturally chose to say so in this poetic phrase.