Chapter xvii. Shetland Hospitality.
“Guide! Where are we?”
“I can’t say for certain.”
“Have you lost your way?”
The guide looks slowly all round him, and then looks at me. That is his answer to my question. And that is enough.
The lost persons are three in number. My traveling companion, myself, and the guide. We are seated on three Shetland ponies — so small in stature, that we two strangers were at first literally ashamed to get on their backs. We are surrounded by dripping white mist so dense that we become invisible to one another at a distance of half a dozen yards. We know that we are somewhere on the mainland of the Shetland Isles. We see under the feet of our ponies a mixture of moorland and bog — here, the strip of firm ground that we are standing on, and there, a few feet of
