Page:Dapples of the Circus (1943).pdf/13



HE home of the Shetland pony is the Shetland Islands, a group of about a hundred sea-girt, wind swept islands, situated in the North Sea about fifty miles northeast of the north of Scotland. These lonely islands together with the Orkneys, which are much nearer the mainland, form one of the shires, or counties, of Scotland.

These islands were inhabited many centuries ago by those little dark people called the Picts. Much has been written about them, but they have so many legends and myths surrounding them, that they belong partly to fairy-land, although they were a real people who flourished many centuries ago on these strange islands. But finally the Norsemen, who were much larger and stronger, came to the islands