"He
Is A Noisy Fallow," Said Our Good Landlady, And Truly We Found Him Voluble
Enough, But Quite Amusing.
As he rowed us to town he gave us a sample of
his historical knowledge, talking of Sir Walter Raleigh and the
settlement of North America, and told us that his greatest pleasure was to
read historical books in the long winter nights.
His children, he said,
could all read and write. We dined on a leg of Shetland mutton, with a
tart made "of the only fruit of the Island" as a Scotchman called it, the
stalks of the rhubarb plant, and went on board of our steamer about six
o'clock in the afternoon. It was matter of some regret to us that we were
obliged to leave Shetland so soon. Two or three days more might have been
pleasantly passed among its grand precipices, its winding straits, its
remains of a remote and rude antiquity, its little horses, little cows,
and little sheep, its sea-fowl, its larks, its flowers, and its hardy and
active people. There was an amusing novelty also in going to bed, as we
did, by daylight, for at this season of the year, the daylight is never
out of the sky, and the flush of early sunset only passes along the
horizon from the northwest to the northeast, where it brightens into
sunrise.
The Zetlanders, I was told by a Scotch clergyman, who had lived among them
forty years, are naturally shrewd and quick of apprehension; "as to their
morals," he added, "if ye stay among them any time ye'll be able to judge
for yourself." So, on the point of morals, I am in the dark. More
attention, I hear, is paid to the education of their children than
formerly, and all have the opportunity of learning to read and write in
the parochial schools. Their agriculture is still very rude, they are very
unwilling to adopt the instruments of husbandry used in England, but on
the whole they are making some progress. A Shetland gentleman, who, as he
remarked to me, had "had the advantage of seeing some other countries"
besides his own, complained that the peasantry were spending too much of
their earnings for tea, tobacco, and spirits. Last winter a terrible
famine came upon the islands; their fisheries had been unproductive, and
the potato crop had been cut off by the blight. The communication with
Scotland by steamboat had ceased, as it always does in winter, and it was
long before the sufferings of the Shetlanders were known in Great Britain,
but as soon as the intelligence was received, contributions were made and
the poor creatures were relieved.
Their climate, inhospitable as it seems, is healthy, and they live to a
good old age. A native of the island, a baronet, who has a great white
house on a bare field in sight of Lerwick, and was a passenger on board
the steamer in which we made our passage to the island, remarked that if
it was not the healthiest climate in the world, the extremely dirty habits
of the peasantry would engender disease, which, however, was not the case.
"It is, probably, the effect of the saline particles in the air," he
added.
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