half feet in diameter, but which some unlucky herd-boy, apparently in the want of some better employment, has considerably mutilated and widened, opens at the inner extremity of the excavation to the roof, as the hatch of a vessel opens from the hold to the deck; for it is by far too wide in proportion to the size of the apartment to be regarded as a chimney. A gray, rudely-hewn block of sandstone, which, though greatly too ponderous to be moved by any man of ordinary strength, seems to have served the purpose of a door, lies prostrate beside the opening in front. [Illustration: _The Dwarfie Stone._] And such is the famous Dwarfie Stone of Hoy, as firmly fixed in our literature by the genius of Sir Walter Scott as in this wide valley by its ponderous weight and breadth of base, and regarding which—for it shares in the general obscurity of the other ancient remains of Orkney—the antiquary can do little more than repeat somewhat incredulously what tradition tells him—namely, that it was the work many ages ago of an ugly, malignant goblin, half earth, half air, the elfin Trolld—a personage, it is said, that even within the last century used occasionally to be seen flitting about in its neighbourhood. I was fortunate in a fine, breezy day, clear and sunshiny, save where the shadows of a few dense, piled-up clouds swept dark athwart the landscape. In the secluded recesses of the valley all was hot, heavy, and still; though now and then a fitful snatch of a breeze, the mere fragment of some broken gust that seemed to have lost its way, tossed for a moment the white cannach of the bogs, or raised spirally into the air, for a few yards, the light beards of some seeding thistle, and straightway let them down again. Suddenly, however, about noon a shower broke thick and heavy against the dark sides and gray scalp of the Ward Hill and came sweeping down the valley. I did what Norna of the Fitful Head had, according to the novelist, done before me in similar circumstances—crept for shelter into the larger bed of the cell, which, though rather scant, taken fairly lengthwise, for a man of five feet eleven, I found, by stretching myself diagonally from corner to corner, no very uncomfortable lounging-place in a thunder-shower. Some provident herd-boy had spread it over, apparently months before, with a littering of heath and fern, which now formed a dry, springy couch; and as I lay wrapped up in my plaid, listening to the raindrops as they pattered thick and heavy atop or slanted through the broken hatchway to the vacant bed on the opposite side of the excavation, I called up the wild narrative of Norna and felt all its poetry.