Page:Transactions of the Natural History Society of Northumberland, Durham, and Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1838 Vol.2.djvu/236

218 coats are made, drawn in at the waist, but as they are not generally, I think, so good-looking as the men, this negligence is not becoming.

Their habitations lie in a cluster, within a hundred yards of the bay on the south-east side of St. Kilda, and are about thirty in number ; as the manners of the people are very uncleanly, and all the refuse of the fowl and other filth, is carefully accumulated, within them, to be removed annually, mixed with the straw thatchings thoroughly saturated with smoke, to manure their barley, it may be imagined how unsavoury they become. The inhabitants sleep in apartments like rabbit-holes in construction, excavated from the earth surrounding their houses, and fasten their doors — a rather unnecessary precaution — with simple but ingenious wooden locks of their own manufacture.

On our departure for St. Kilda, we were assured that we should imbibe a smell, from living among them, that would adhere to us for five or six weeks: fortunately the newly built parsonage house, of which our informants had been unaware, presented a comfortable and in-odorous habitation while we staid.

No specific trade or profession is followed by any of the Kildeans; each man farms, weaves, makes shoes, and does joiner work for himself and children alone, nor though naturally kind and obliging in an admirable degree, will they, without a recompence, lend assistance to a neighbour. All their thoughts are bent on the one subject of fowling, and all energies of mind and body centered in it. To say it is of as exclusive importance to them, as the capture of whales is to a Greenland crew, would convey but a slight idea of the value of fowl to the Kildean; for to the one his profession is matter of choice, and his mode of life may be changed at will for any other which appears more agreeable; to the other, it constitutes his only means of livelihood and sustenance, and that not for a season, to be alternated with other fairer scenes and less hazardous occupation, but for the whole period of existence, as they never leave the island, only one or two instances occurring of their being found over the whole of Scotland. From their childhood the rock is the only field of their industry or hardihood, and the produce of it almost the only desirable object to them: consti-