A dreary sky, a dreary fall of rain. Long low

flats covered with their own damp breath, through which the miserable cattle loomed like shadows. Everywhere lakes and pools, its thickly sown through the land as islands in the Pacific waters. Huts wretched and chilly, scarcely distinguishable from the rock-strewn marshes surrounding them. To the east the Minch, rolling (banal waters towards the far-off heads of Skye ; to the west the ocean, foaming at the lips, and stretching barren and desolate into the rain- charged clouds.

Such was the first view of list, and such indeed is Uist during two or three days out of the seven. It is the land of Utgard-Loke, a lonely outer region, not dear to the gods. There arc mountains, but they do not abound, and lack indeed the softer colours which beautify the inner and more southerly isles. There are no trees, and few flowers. Two - thirds of the herbage is tormentil, which, though its yellow flower looks sweetly,

lacks the exquisite softness of true pasture. The peat bog supplies the place of the meadow, the grey boulders strew the hills in lieu of red heather. The land is torn up every- where into rocky fjords and desolate lagoons. Where the sea does not reach in an arm, the fresh water comes up and deepens in countless lakes and pools. There are few song birds, even the thrush being rare; but the wild goose screams overhead, and the ice-duck haunts the gloaming with its terribly human '° Callon! calloo !"

To the mind of Hamish Shaw, the pilot, who has been here many a year herring fishing, these features of the land are quite without interest or excuse. "It's a poor, miserable country," he avers, " little use to man !" And this, by the way, is the standard by which Shaw measures all the things of this world—their greater or less utility to the human. He has a sneer for every hill, how- ever high, that will not graze a sheep. A seagull or a hawk he would destroy pitilessly, because it cannot be converted into food. He is angry with the most picturesque fjords, until it can be shown that the herring visit them, or that the bill burns feed them with good trout. All this is the more remarkable in a man so thoroughly Celtic, so strangely spiritual in his reasonings, so pure with the purity of the race. There is a fresh life grafted on his true nature. Inoculated early with the love for commerce, he most admires cultivated land scenery of any kind ; but that original nature which delights in the wild and picturesque, is still unconsciously nourished by the ever various sea whereon he earns his bread. To hear this man speak directly of any scene he has just visited, you would not credit him with any insight. But he sees more than he knows ; his life is too full to take in separate effects or wonder anew. His speech is full of water and wind. Ile uses a fine phrase as readily as nature fashions a bud or a leaf. He speaks iu natural symbols, as freely as he uses an oar. His clear fresh vision penetrates even into the moral world, quite open and fearless even there, where the best of us become purblind.

Hamish Shaw's charge against Uist is substantial enough ; the country is poor, and neither fat nor fertile. A square yard of corn is a rarity ; the very potatoes seem poor, and not plentifully scattered.

The people, on the first view, seem slow and listless,—over- shadowed, too, with the strange solemnity of the race. There is no smile on their faces. Young and old drag their limbs, not as a Lowlander drags his limbs, but lissomly, with a swift serpentine motion. The men are strong and powerful, with deep-set eyes and languid lips, and they never excite themselves over their labour. The women are meek and plain, full of a calm domestic trouble, and they work harder than their lords. "A poor, half- hearted people !" says the Pilot ; " why don't they till the land and fish the seas?"

Here, again, the Pilot has his reasons. The people are half- hearted—say, an indolent people. They do no justice to their scraps of land, which, poor as they are, are still capable of great improvement. They hunger often, even when the fjords opposite their own doors are swarming with cod and ling. They let the ardent east-country fishermen carry off the finest hauls of herring. Their work stops when their mouths are filled, and yet they are ill content to be poor.

All this, and more than this, is truth, and sad truth. The Pilot has a true bill against both country and people. But there is another and finer side to the truth. The watery wastes of Uist gather powerfully ou the imagination, and the curious race that inhabit them grow upon the heart.

At the first view, as we have said, all is dreary—sky, land, water ; but after a little time, after the mind has got the proper foreground for these new prospects, the feeling changes from one of total depression into a sense of peculiar magic. Instead of dull flat pools, the lagoons assume their glory of many-coloured weeds and innumerable water-lilies; out of the dreary peat bog rise delicate vapours that float in fantastic shapes to the hillside ; the sun peeps out, and the mossy but sends its blue smoke into the clear, still air ; all changes, and every nook of the novel prospect has a beauty of its own.

Standing on Kenneth Hill, a rocky elevation on the north side of Loch Boisdale, and looking westward on a summer day, one has a fine glimpse of Boisdale and its lagoons, stretching right over to the edge of the Western Ocean, five miles distant. The inn and harbour, with the fishing boats therein, make a fine foreground, and thence the numerous ocean fjords, branching this way and that like the stems of sea-weeds, stretch glistening westward into the land. A little inland, a number of huts cluster, like beavers' houses, on the side of a white highway ; and along the highway peasant men and women, mounted or afoot, come wandering down to the port. Far as the eye can see the land is quite flat and low, scarcely a hillock breaking the dead level, until the rise of a row of low sandhills on the very edge of the distant sea. The number of fjords and lagoons, large and small, is almost inconceivable; there is water everywhere, still and stagnant to the eye, and so constant is this presence that the mind can scarcely banish the fancy that this land is some floating, half-substantial mass, torn up in all places to show the sea below. The highway wanders through the marshes until it is quite lost on the other side of the island, where all grows greener and brighter, the signs of cultivation more noticeable, the human habitations more numerous. Far away, on the long black line of the marshes, peeps a spire, and the white church gleams below, with school-house and hovels clustering at its feet.

A prospect neither magnificent nor beautiful, yet surely full of fascination ; its loneliness, its piteous human touches, its very dreariness, win without wooing the soul. And if more be wanted, wait for the Rain—some thin cold " smurr " from the south, which will clothe the scene with grey mist, shut out the far-off sea, and brooding over the desolate lagoons, draw from them pale and beautiful rainbows, which come and go, dissolve and grow, swift as the colours in a kaleidoscope, touching the dreariest snatches of water and waste with all the wonders of the prism. Or if you be a fair-weather voyager, afraid of wetting your skin, wait for the Sunset. It will not be such a sunset as you have been accustomed to on English uplands or among high mountains, but something sullener, stranger, and more sad. From a long deep bar of cloud, on the far-off ocean horizon, the sun will gleam round and red, hanging as if moveless, scarcely tinting the deep watery shadow of the sea, but turning every lagoon to blood.

There will be a stillness as if Nature held her breath. You will have no sense of pleasure or wonder,—only hushed expectation, as if something were going to happen ; but if you are a saga-reader, you will remember the death of Balder, and mutter the rune.

Such sunsets, alike yet ever different, we saw, and they are not to be forgotten. Then most deeply did the soul feel itself in the true land of the glamour, shut out wholly from the fantasies of mere fairyland or the grandeurs of mere spectacle. The clouds may shape themselves into the lurid outlines of the old gods, the mists on the margins of the pools may become the gigantic witch- wife, spinning out lives on her bloody distaff, and croaking a pro- phecy ; but gentler things may not intrude, and the happy sense of healthy life dies utterly away.

Pleasant it is, after such an hour, to wander down across the bogs and marshes, and come down on the margin of a little lake, while the homeward-passing cattle low in the gloaming. You are now iu fairyland. With young buds yellow, and flowers as white as snow, floating freely among the floating leaves, the water-lilies gather, and catch the dusky silver of the moon. The little dab- chick cries, and you see her sailing, a black speck, close to shore, and splashing the pool to silver where she dives. The sky clears, and the still spaces between the lilies glisteu with stars, whose broken rays shimmer like hoar-frost, and touch with crystal the edges of leaves and flowers. You are a child at once, and think of Oberon.

Indeed, the place is full of attractions, directly the vulgar feeling is abandoned, and the mind, instead of waiting to be gal- vanized by some powerful effect, quietly resigns itself to the spirit of the scene. Sight-seeing is like dram-drinking, and the sight- seer, like the dram-drinker, is not particular about the quality, so long as the dose of stimulant is strong and stiff.

The typical tourist, who goes into ecstasies over Glencoe and crawls wondering under the basaltic columns of Staffs, would not, perhaps, be particularly stimulated at first by a pull up one of the numberless fjords which crawl their winding way into the eastern coasts of Uist. The far-off hills around Skiport and Maddy are not t:►ll enough for such a modern, and the sea is dull, not being sensational, but old-fashioned. We, on the other hand, who find it unnecessary to rush far for wonders, and who are apt to be blind to nature's inure obtrusive beauties, have a greater liking for these quaint old fjords than for the showy Trossachs or the splendid Glencoe. To float through them alone, in a small boat, on a quiet summer gloaming, is marvellously strange and eerie ; for they are endless, arm growing out of arm just as the bourne seems reached ; winding and interwiuding, sometimes only a few feet in depth, at others broad and deep,—and at every point of vantage there is something new to look upon. Some idea of the windings of the tides may be gained from the statement that

Loch Maddy in North Uist, although covering only ten square miles, possesses a line of coast which, measuring all the various

islands, creeks, and bays, has been calculated to ramify for three hundred miles. For picturesque sea depths, swarming with rare aquatic plants, and for variety of strange sea-birds, these fjords are unmatched in Britain ; and they are haunted by wonderful effects of sun and mist, rainbow apparitions, fluent lights and shadows. Fine it is, in still weather, to lean over the boat's side and watch the crystal water-world in some quiet nook, coloured with various rocks, and weeds, and floating tangle, and haunted by strange images of life. You are back in the great crustacean era, when man was not. Innumerable shell-fish, many of rare beauty, surround you, wondrous monsters, magnified by the water, stare at you with their mysterious eyes, till Humanity fades out of sight. When you raise your head, you are dazzled, and almost tremble at the new sense of life.

Ever and anon, in the course of these aquatic rambles, you meet a group of kelp-burners gathered on a headland or promontory ; and a fine study it would make for an artist with some little Rembrandtish mastery over the shadows. Clouding the back- ground of cold blue sky, the thick smoke rises from their black fire, and the men move hither and thither, in and out of the vapour, raking the fire together, piling the dry sea-weed by arms- ful on to the sullen flame. As they flit to and fro, their wild Gaelic cries seem foreign and unearthly, and their unkempt hair and ragged garments loom strangely through the foul air. On the hill slope above them, where a rude road curves to the shore, a line of carts, each horse guided by a woman, comes creaking down to the weed-strewn beach to gather tangle for drying. The women, with their coarse serge petticoats kilted high and coloured handker- chiefs tied over their heads, stride like men at the horses' heads and shriek the beasts forward.

The manufacture of kelp, although depreciated infinitely in value since Government took the duty off Spanish barilla, is yet carried on to a large extent. The process is very simple, that of burning the sea-weed in stone ovens until it leaves the solid deposit .called kelp in the raw state ; but care and experience are required to produce the best article. The vast coast lines of Uist produce unlimited material, and to increase the crop by catching the drift, stones are planted everywhere along the shores.

Of Uist and its people more will be said in another paper.