It must be remembered that in many districts there has been, as has already been said, a great dearth of good sires, so that selection of suitable breeding stock has been difficult, and mating has often been carried on, of necessity, very much at haphazard. It is thus all the more remarkable that the pony, so long neglected and so little cultivated in its home, should display so high a degree of excellence as it does. Much of the credit of this belongs to the Marquis of Londonderry, whose stud in Bressay, under the charge of Mr Brydon and Mr Meiklejohn, developed a strain of ponies which fixed many of the best qualities of the breed and became a potent centre of its improvement; and no account of the Island ponies would be complete which did not mention the successful activity of Messrs John Anderson & Sons of Hillswick, the late Mr Bruce of Sumburgh, Mr Anderson Manson, and the Messrs Sandison. Notable throughout Shetland, the fine quality of the pony is specially conspicuous in Unst, which still retains the superiority which “The Druid” found in it in 1865. “The best ponies come from Unst; but both there and everywhere the breeders are far too indifferent to the points of a sire, as long as they are foal-getters. About a quarter of Unst has a skeleton of red sandstone and serpentine, with a thin soil studded with large red stones and the knobs of rock sticking up. Yet among these rocky incumbrances one sees scores of ponies picking the green grass, which the light of Heaven and the breath of the Gulf Stream force up from so barren-looking a bed. Still, Unst may be regarded as the heart of Shetland; and a sunny, genial-looking spot it is, when other parts of the country are dismal enough, in the late northern spring. The heather and the bog-grasses elsewhere do not make much milk, and the mare ponies sink so much in condition that they are invariably barren every other year. If well kept they reach 44 inches; but the average is from 38 to 42. Their owners frequently lose sight of them for a couple of summers, and recognise them when wanted, not by any formal ‘Exmoor Brand’ on the saddle place or the hoof, but by a peculiar slit or bits of tape, clout, or leather tied through a hole in the ear. Each cottar has generally a few ponies on the hill, and when the May and October sales at the different stations are at hand they circumvent them for a selection by the dealers with a line of forty or fifty fathoms. Still, the hard-working Shetlander is little more than nominal lord of his pony: poverty is his lot from the cradle to the grave, and, as the phrase goes, he is ‘still in tow.’ In his dire need the merchants become his mortgagees, just as the curers are to the herring-fishers: they advance money on the security of his foals, and he doesn’t get the best of it with ‘halvers’ mares.”[36]