As a town, Stornoway is an immense improvement on Portree. It rejoices in churches, and the shops are numerous, and abound with all sorts of useful articles. The chief streets are paved. It has here and there a gas lamp, and the proprietor of the chief hotel boasted to me that so excellent were his culinary arrangements, that actually the ladies from the yachts come and dine there. Stornoway has a Freemasons’ Hall, and, wandering in one of the streets, I came to a public library, which I found was open once a week. On Saturday night the shops swarmed with customers, chiefly peasant women—who put their boots on when they came into the town, and who took them off again and walked barefoot as soon as they had left the town behind—and ancient mariners, with a very fish-like smell. On Sunday the churches were full, and at the Free Church, where the service was in Gaelic, the crowd was great. In a smaller church I heard a cousin of Norman Macleod—a fine, burly man—preach a powerful sermon, which seemed to me made up partly of two sermons—one by the late T. T. Lynch, and the other by the late Alfred Morris. I strayed also into a U. P. church, but there, alas! the audience was small. In Stornoway, as elsewhere, the couplet is true—
“The free kirk, the poor kirk, the kirk without the steeple, The auld kirk, the rich kirk, the kirk without the people.”
On the Monday morning we turned our faces homeward, and as the weather was fine, we passed outside Skye, and saw Dunvegan Bay, of which Alexander Smith writes so much; passing rocky islands, all more or less known to song, and caves with dark legends of blood, and cruelty, and crime. One night was spent in Bunessan Bay, where some noble sportsmen were very needlessly, but, _con amore_, butchering the few peaceful seals to be found in those parts; and a short while we lay off Staffa, which rises straight out of the water like an old cathedral, where the winds and waves ever play a solemn dirge. In its way, I know nothing more sublime than Staffa, with its grey arch and black columns and rushing waves. No picture or photograph I have seen ever can give any adequate idea of it. “Altogether,” writes Miss Gordon Cumming, “it is a scene of which no words can convey the smallest idea;” and for once I agree with the lady. It is seldom the reality surpasses your expectations. As regards myself, in the case of Staffa I must admit it did.