Fort Worth daily gazette. (Fort Worth, Tex.) 1882-1891, 1890-12-28
battle. Occasionally a few break

battle. Occasionally few break
through the line and escape. As rule
the school is doomed. Once driven into
shosl water where they can only founder
in mighty struggles, or high and dry on
land, where they often toss themselves
in their mad efforts to escape, their
butchery, which is always a savage and
sickening sight, proceeds with wonderful
dispatch. In this bloody work the hardy
and powerful Shetland women take a
gleetul and almost frenzisd part.
The chief industry of the Shetlanders
must always be that OF fishing. Cod
ling and herring are taken. The boats
formerly used were 'sixerns, or an
cient six-oared boats, of about twenty
feet keel, and "fiddle- shaped'' at bow
and stern; but the great loss of life in
1881, which occurred in the "Haaf' or
dsep-ses fishing with long lines, in which
ten boats went down and ffty-eight fish
errnen persisted, paved the wav for
the adoption of the large decked
boats, described In recent arti-
Gle Of this series on the herring fisheries
of Scotland. Cod and ling fishing is ex-
tensively prosecuted, many of the Shet-
land smacks going as far as the Farce
Islands and to Iceland. The lumber of
land vessels in 1883 was l $50 .446, rep
resenting a weight of 8. sc 600 pounds
when cured and dried; more than one
third of this class of fishing for ell Scot
land for the same year. In general,
however, Shetland annually produces
fully ous-half of the total catch for
Scotland.
The Shetland crofter- differs little in
character aud environment from the
Scottish Highland crofter Of the north
and west shores of the Scottish main
land. He is q fearing, rugged,
hardy, honest, simple fellow, with
scarcely other than the two impulses of
being, in living and right living. If he
possesses faults they are inherited rather
than acquired. His sodden fatal
ism, despite his almost fierce
religious faith, is the outcome of
those curious superstitious of all lowly
races living alongside the material relics
and remains of Pagan progenitors; and
his apparently easy-going nature, which
cheerily contsmplates most of the bur-
dsns of home-life aud croft-toil falling
upon his faithful spouse, is the tradi-
tional one existing among all seafaring
people. The Islands being deeply in
denied with voes, OF arms of the sea, the
crofts are generally situated along the
shores of these. Croft Holdings COM
prise from three to ten acres of arabic
land, with hillside pasture in common.
The latter Is known here as scsttald,
pronounced by the natives "scatnold; -
but the land is reckoned by so many
msrks value, the merk being an old
Morse coin worth about So. 22--thus q
"5- mrrk CROFT "20-merk croft, -
etc., the value, rather titan the size of
the croft being thus ind icated.
The "truok'' system, that barbarous
iuiquity still prevalent in some portions
70 our own country, which formerly
kept Shetlanders in precisely the same
abhorsnt condition of slavery as that
suffered by the miners of Pennsylvania,
Indiana and Illinois, having a few years
since been extirpated from Shetland By
the same British public sentiment which
fixed "fsir rents'' for Scottish crofters
generally, the Shetland fisher crofters
are prosperous and content upon their
bits of land, as the result of the labor
upon the crofts and in fishing; for every
Shetland peasant is both fisher aud
croftsr. At each creft-homs will be
found few sheep, great ftocks OF geese,
often a cow and always the stumpy little
Shetland pony and cart. The ponies
ere very hardy. wondrousiy sure.