Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But how much better it
was to hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob
Bain among the roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat
coiling a wet rope and shouting orders - not always very wise -
than to be warm and dry, and dull, and dead-alive, in the most
comfortable office. And Wick itself had in those days a note of
originality. It may have still, but I misdoubt it much. The old
minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate times, for
an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies must be gone from
their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women
tending their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off
their coarse potations; and where, in winter gales, the surf would
beleaguer them closely, bursting in their very door. A traveller
to-day upon the Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloud of
smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite openly, it marked a
private still. He would not indeed make that journey, for there is
now no Thurso coach. And even if he could, one little thing that
happened to me could never happen to him, or not with the same
trenchancy of contrast.
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