everywhere for unconsidered trifles of fish, and the whole atmosphere of
the place, physical, mental, and moral, was pervaded with fish. It was
Sheila's soft, sing-song Highland speech that we heard through the long,
luminous twilight in the pauses of that friendly chat on the balcony
of the little inn where a good fortune brought us acquainted with Sam
Bough, the mellow Edinburgh painter. It was Sheila's low sweet brow, and
long black eyelashes, and tender blue eyes, that we saw before us as
we loitered over the open moorland, a far-rolling sea of brown billows,
reddened with patches of bell-heather, and brightened here and there
with little lakes lying wide open to the sky. And were not these
peat-cutters, with the big baskets on their backs, walking in silhouette
along the ridges, the people that Sheila loved and tried to help; and
were not these crofters' cottages with thatched roofs, like beehives,
blending almost imperceptibly with the landscape, the dwellings into
which she planned to introduce the luxury of windows; and were not these
Standing Stones of Callernish, huge tombstones of a vanished religion,
the roofless temple from which the Druids paid their westernmost
adoration to the setting sun as he sank into the Atlantic--was not this
the place where Sheila picked the bunch of wild flowers and gave it to
her lover? There is nothing in history, I am sure, half so real to us
as some of the things in fiction. The influence of an event upon our
character is little affected by considerations as to whether or not it
ever happened.

There were three churches in Stornoway, all Presbyterian, of course,
and therefore full of pious emulation. The idea of securing an American
preacher for an August Sabbath seemed to fall upon them simultaneously,
and to offer the prospect of novelty without too much danger. The
brethren of the U. P. congregation, being a trifle more gleg than the
others, arrived first at the inn, and secured the promise of a morning