Various

“ We reached the island about five in the evening, and separating from the smack, cast our anchor near the shore. Soon a crowd began to gather on the rocks, but they did not seem in a hurry to launch their boat. I observed one of the women who had come with the smack standing on deck and holding up her infant (born during her absence from St Kilda) in a triumphant manner, although she was too distant to be seen from the shore. At length a boat is pushed off and pulls towards us; the crew stare doubtfully at me, and then, as they come alongside, repeat my name and grasp my hand. ”

“ The principal parts of a submarine cable are: the conductor; the insulator; and the protector or sheathing. The conductor, as its name implies, is the wire which conducts or conveys the electric current from one place to another. It corresponds to the iron wire of our ordinary open air or land lines of telegraph. Along this wire, as is well known, the current from the battery at the station from which the message is being sent travels to the station receiving the message, where it passes to the earth, and appears to return through the earth to the battery again ”

“ Women squat upon the ground and chant their lamentations; and men stand with open mouths and eyes and mutter observations in Gaelic on the wonderful news.
The boat goes off to the smack and brings the two women on shore, where they are received with conjugal kisses. Ten months had elapsed from the receipt in Harris of the letter from Africa until its arrival in St Kilda—although the one place is visible from the other in a clear day. ”

“ First, then, it is a well-established truth that the barbarous races which have proved totally unsusceptible of civilisation are those which are utterly or almost utterly devoid of the sense of humour: exemplified in the aborigines of Australia and the Indians of the West; while on the other hand the Negro, endowed with the most whimsical of fancies, has, though steeped in barbarism, the latent germ of intellectual and moral progress. ”

“ An insulator is a non-conducting substance, impervious, so to speak, to electricity. It is the theoretical antipodes of a conductor. While the conductor is a substance through or over which electricity flows freely, the insulator will neither{282} permit electricity to pass through its mass nor over its surface. It can therefore be used as a means of confining electricity to a conductor, and preventing it from escaping to other conductors in the neighbourhood. In short it can be made to insulate or isolate the particular conductor from all other conductors. ”

“ The iron wires of the sheathing, which completely inclose and cover the served core, are wound on by the powerful 'cable machines,' whose operation is so interesting a feature in a visit to a cable factory. The great revolving disc, seven or eight feet in diameter, is set round with iron bobbins filled with the iron sheathing wires. These bobbins are suspended on the face of the disc, so that as the disc revolves they always preserve their fixed position with respect to the earth. In this way the wires themselves are not twisted round their own axes as they are laid on the core. ”

“ Before I left St Kilda I had an opportunity of seeing how the trade was conducted—the low prices which the poor people received for their produce, and the high prices they were obliged to pay for their supplies, and I felt no little sympathy for them. Animated with a desire to better their condition and assimilate themselves with their more fortunate brethren of the mainland, they requested me several times to try to get them a boat large enough to carry a crew and cargo to Harris, where they might carry on their trade on more profitable terms than with the proprietor. ”

“ On the other hand, their hopes, their loves, their sorrows, their great life-purposes, their very identities, are held together in the minds of the masses by the force of association with trivial and adventitious circumstances. It is an odd but not necessarily a humiliating reflection; for the mind that can find 'good in all things' will see in it a most wise and important provision in our mental economy. ”

“ Again, if we permit the mind to revert unrestrainedly to the events of childhood, the earliest to suggest themselves are, almost invariably, those which have exercised our risible faculties or sense of the absurd—the laughable scrapes, odd predicaments, amusing exploits of ourselves or others, are the things remembered of our youth. ”

“ Therefore the advantages in point of price of iron wire over copper in the first place, would be greatly overbalanced by the increased cost of insulating and sheathing it. It is of the greatest importance that the copper wire of the cable should be as pure as possible, for the slightest trace of arsenic or other foreign element is sufficient to hamper, in some mysterious way, the swift course of the subtle current, and very materially to weaken the conducting power of the wire. ”

“ When Maida chose to leave the party, he signified his inclinations by beating the door with his huge paw; Scott rose and opened it for him with courteous alacrity—and then Hinse came down purring from his perch, and mounted guard by the foot-stool, vice Maida absent on furlough. Whatever discourse might be passing was broken, every now and then, by some affectionate apostrophe to these four-footed friends. Dogs and cats, like children, have some infallible tact for discovering who is, and who is not, really fond of their company ”

“ The land in Scalpa is poor and boggy; but some of the people are fine specimens of humanity—good-looking and polite. Some of them expressed an opinion that the island was over-populated, which I am afraid is the case, although I should be sorry to see such men leave the country. On the 17th, the Vigilant, which had returned to Stornoway, again called at Scalpa, and took me and my boat on to Obe in the Sound of Harris. ”

“ Secondly, among the so-called civilised branches of the human family, the Caucasian, with its rich vein of humour, its hearty power of laughter, and its deftness in extracting from every condition of things the elixir of fun, stands in unapproachable superiority. ”

“ In 1697 Martin visited the island, and wrote a quaint but faithful account of it. At present there is no regular communication between St Kilda and any other place except by a boat called 'the smack,' which is sent out by the proprietor (MacLeod of MacLeod) twice a year—namely in summer and autumn, to collect the rents, to carry away the produce, and to furnish supplies. Some bold yachtsman generally pays the island a hurried visit about the end of summer; but as the anchorage is dangerous, he seldom or never remains more than two or three hours. ”

“ If we deliberately cast back in our minds for the images of our early playmates and school-fellows, we observe that the first to present themselves, as a rule, are those possessing some marked peculiarities, and that those peculiarities are the centre-points of the pictures. ”

“ The single-wire sheathing is applied to cables to be laid in shallower depths, such as coast-waters; and the heavy-strand sheathing is for protecting the cable in anchorages and on sea-beaches. The light-sheathed cable is called 'main' or 'deep-sea cable;' the medium is called 'intermediate;' and the heavy-sheathed cable is called 'shore-end.' There is seldom more of the last than ten or twelve miles, to carry the cable well out of reach of the abrasion of storm-shifted boulders and coast anchorage. ”

“ The recollections of any two men of middle age with regard to their common school-days teem with whimsical anecdotes, to the almost total extinguishing of other things. This experience may be termed universal, and suggests the curious question: To what extent should we be at all able, if devoid of the sense of humour, to recall the companions and incidents of our childhood and youth? ”

“ Even nicknames have almost disappeared from polite literature and society with the increasing sensitiveness of the age. The art of 'smashing' in the matter of names, however, still lingers in the nursery and the playground, as well as in the inner circles of family life generally; and if we cast an observing glance down the social scale, we shall find the practice more and more widely obtaining, until, amongst the rural population and the operatives of Lancashire and the Black Country, we find it absolutely universal. ”

“ It is of consequence, therefore, to ascertain the inductive capacity of a cable; as the less it is, the greater will the speed of signalling be.
The resistances and capacity of a cable are usually tested, according to the standards of resistance and capacity—that is, with the ohm, meg-ohm, and micro-farad—by measuring the strength of an electric current passing through the cable, by means of an instrument called the galvanometer, or current measurer. ”

“ The small amount of money which we allowed ourselves to spend was spent in a way which might not a little surprise some people. We tried to make the little room attractive, with an ornament or two, which though inexpensive, were in good taste and pretty in shape and colouring—a primitive hanging shelf with two or three neatly bound books, a clean blind, a nicely framed print for the wall, and so forth, all new and fresh and bright ”

“ But the majority have never been farther than Boreray. No people can be more isolated or less indebted to their neighbours for example or instruction in the ways of civilised life. Notwithstanding this, it will be difficult to find a better-behaved community—one more pious, sober, industrious, polite, and hospitable.
I had always a great desire to see this Ultima Thule, and in 1875 the proprietor's factor agreed to give me a passage in his smack to the island. ”

“ These cliffs are frequented by vast numbers of sea-fowl; by puffins, cormorants, guillemots, auks, and other birds. A species of gull called the fulmar also abounds, and is of great value to the inhabitants, who salt the flesh for food in winter and sell the oil and feathers. St Kilda is the only island in Great Britain where that bird breeds. About three miles to the north-east of St Kilda is an island called Boreray, which is the great resort of solan-geese, which also frequent the stacks or isolated rocks adjacent. ”

“ Being acquainted with their habits, the women take dogs with them, which are taught to alarm the puffins and to catch them as they flutter out of their holes. The girls also place hair-ropes on the ground, held down at the ends by stones. Nooses of horse-hair are affixed to the rope, into which the birds (which frequent this island in incredible numbers) push their feet. In this way some of the girls catch as many as four or five hundred puffins in a day. The young women remain about three weeks on the island, all alone by themselves. They work until they drop asleep. ”

“ The composite sheathing of hemp and iron is usually applied to the deep-sea portion of a cable where, in laying, a union of lightness and strength is demanded, and where, when once laid, the cable is not likely to be molested. ”

“ We ourselves have a lively recollection of a woman in the neighbourhood of Bilston to whom her own husband's real name was so unfamiliar that she entirely failed to recognise it when we questioned her regarding him. ”

“ I do not believe that any utterly bad man would be as heartily ashamed of himself as Arthur Trafford appeared to be when he saw Lilian for the first time after his approaching marriage with 'Miss Farrar' was announced. ”

“ The love which the poor display for some little possession in the way of ornament, is not always, I think, sufficiently considered. I can only say that I have known one little thing of beauty, or even a faint and blurred image of beauty, to have a more refining influence in a cottage home than many would suspect. Wherever a cherished bit of china or what not is found, there will be also found some tendency towards making the surroundings more worthy of it.
I found that our proceedings not a little puzzled Mr Wyatt ”

“ It would seem a fair inference from these facts alone, had we not already indicated it, that it is man's moral nature which benefits most largely by the presence in the mental economy of a sense of the ludicrous. The saying, 'Beware of him who cannot laugh,' is a pithy but conclusive commentary. All that is fairest in human life; all that is best and brightest in our earthly lot ”

“ Whether the insulating substance is gutta-percha or india-rubber, there is generally wound round it a serving of untarred hemp or jute yarn, which has either been tanned or soaked in brine as a preservative. This is to act as a padding or cushion for the iron sheathing or protector next to be applied. This serving is applied in the following way. A circular disc or frame, carrying on one face a series of bobbins which hold the threads of the yarn, is kept revolving. ”