"I think I shall," she answered, with a little tremulous laugh that was half a sob, and in the confusion of getting the boat brought up alongside Marjorie felt a lover's kiss upon her cheek.
FOURTH COUSINS.
BY GORDON STABLES, M.D., R.N.
In the early summer of 1860 I went upon a visit to a distant relative of mine, who lived in one of the Shetland Islands. It was early summer with myself then: I was a medical student with life all before me—life and hope, and joy and sorrow as well. I went north with the intention of working hard, and took quite a small library with me; there was nothing in the shape of study I did not mean to do, and to drive at: botany, the flora of the Ultima Thule, its fauna and geology, too, to say nothing of chemistry and therapeutics. So much for good intentions, but—I may as well confess it as not—I never once opened my huge box of books during the five months I lived at R——, and if I studied at all it was from the book of Nature, which is open to every one who cares to con its pages.
The steamboat landed me at Lerwick, and I completed my journey—with my boxes—next day in an open boat.
It was a very cold morning, with a grey, cold, choppy sea on, the spray from which dashed over the boat, wetting me thoroughly, and making me feel pinched, blear-eyed, and miserable. I even envied the seals I saw cosily asleep in dry, sandy caves, at the foot of the black and beetling rocks.
How very fantastic those rocks were, but cheerless—so cheerless! Even the sea birds that circled around them seemed screaming a dirge. An opening in a wall of rock took us at length into a long, winding fiord, or arm of the sea, with green bare fields on every side, and wild, weird-like sheep that gazed on us for a moment, then bleated and fled. Right at the end of this rock stood my friend's house, comfortable and solid-looking, but unsheltered by a single tree.
"I sha'n't stay long here," I said to myself, as I landed.
An hour or two afterwards I had changed my mind entirely. I was seated in a charmingly and cosily-furnished drawing-room upstairs. The windows looked out to and away across the broad Atlantic. How strange it was; for the loch that had led me to the front of the house, and the waters of which rippled up to the very lawn, was part of the German Ocean, and here at the back, and not a stone's throw distant, was the Atlantic! Its great, green, dark billows rolled up and broke into foam against the black breastwork of cliffs beneath us; the immense depth of its waves could be judged of by keeping the eye fixed upon the tall, steeple-like rocks which shot up here and there through the water a little way out to sea: at one moment these would appear like lofty spires, and next they would be almost entirely swallowed up.