Earl Einar it was, as the story goes, who first taught the Orkneyman to make the turf into peats—Torf Einar, as he was called in memory of this fact. If the story is true, he did a great work for the islands,—not quite treeless in his day, perhaps, but yet in a bad way for fuel in the long winter evenings,—and he deserves a monument almost as splendid as that of Earl Magnus. The wood fires went out long ago, and the peat fires will, no doubt, follow in due time. True, the peat-mosses are not yet exhausted, but year by year they recede, and the road to “the hill” grows longer. There is less time to spare now for peat-cutting than there used to be, for our modern methods of farming require more constant labour. But through our trade with other lands money is circulating more freely, and coal can be bought to take the place of peat. The change means more money and less time, and that is just the great difference between this century and those which have gone by. But the peat-moss is not yet deserted, and in the early summer it is still a busy scene in many places. Harvest has ever been a time of joy, and peat-cutting is the harvest of the moss. The flaying-spade and the tuskar are not mere toys, nor is “taking out” the newly-cut peats a holiday task; but there are few scenes where more cheerfulness and wholesome mirth can be seen than at many an Orkney peat-cutting. Let us approach one of these familiar “peat-banks,” not necessarily to share in the fun, and certainly not to take part in the labour, but to find out what we can about the substance which we call peat. Here is a bank where the moss is deep enough to give three lengths of peat, one above the other, besides the surface layer, which is cut off and thrown down on the old peat ground. This top layer, we see, is, like ordinary turf, full of the roots of growing plants—heather, rushes, sedges, and grasses of various kinds. Filling up the spaces between them is a tangled mass of spongy mosses. These mosses are the most important plants of all in the formation of peat. The most common of the bog-mosses is the _Sphagnum_, a small branching plant with thin, scaly leaves. Where there is plenty of light it is of a vivid green, and the tops of the sprays look like tiny emerald stars. Lower, where less light comes, the plant looks yellow and sickly, while still lower it is black and decaying. The black substance which we call peat is really a mass of decayed sphagnum moss. The upper part of our peat-bank, just below the turf which has been cut away, is more loose and fibrous than the under part. The roots of the larger plants may still be seen in it. The second and especially the third peat are much closer in texture and of a deeper black colour. The vegetable matter is more completely decayed, and if we were to compress it sufficiently it would look very like coal.