As I had not yet ascertained that the Old Red Sandstone of the north of Scotland is richly fossiliferous, Conon-side and its neighbourhood furnished me with no very favourable field for geologic exploration. It enabled me, however, to extend my acquaintance with the great conglomerate base of the system, which forms here, as I have already said, a sort of miniature Highlands, extending between the valleys of the Conon and the Peffer, and which—remarkable for its picturesque cliffs, abrupt eminences, and narrow steep-sided dells—bears in its centre a pretty wood-skirted loch, into which the old Celtic prophet Kenneth Ore, when, like Prospero, he relinquished his art, buried "deep beyond plummet sound" the magic stone in which he was wont to see both the distant and the future. Immediately over the pleasure-grounds of Brahan, the rock forms exactly such cliffs as the landscape gardener would make, if he could—cliffs with their rude prominent pebbles breaking the light over every square foot of surface, and furnishing footing, by their innumerable projections, to many a green tuft of moss, and many a sweet little flower; while far below, among the deep woods, there stand up enormous fragments of the same rock, that must have rolled down in some remote age from the precipices above, and which, mossy and hoar, and many of them ivy-bound, resemble artificial ruins—obnoxious, however, to none of the disparaging associations which the make-believe ruin is sure always to awaken. It was inexpressibly pleasant to spend a quiet evening hour among these wild cliffs, and imagine a time when the far distant sea beat against their bases; but though their enclosed pebbles evidently owed their rounded form to the attrition of water, the imagination seemed paralyzed when it attempted calling up a still earlier time, when these solid rocks existed as but loose sand and pebbles, tossed by waves or scattered by currents; and when, for hundreds and thousands of square miles, the wild tract around existed as an ancient ocean, skirted by unknown lands. I had not yet collected enough of geologic fact to enable me to grapple with the difficulties of a restoration of the more ancient time. There was a later period, also, represented in the immediate neighbourhood by a thick deposit of stratified sand, of which I knew as little as of the conglomerate. We dug into it, in founding a thrashing-mill, for about ten feet, but came to no bottom; and I could see that it formed the subsoil of the valley all around the policies of Conon-side, and underlay most of its fields and woods. It was white and pure, as if it had been washed by the sea only a few weeks previous; but in vain did I search its beds and layers for a fragment of shell by which to determine its age. I can now, however, entertain little doubt that it belonged to the boulder clay period of submergence, and that the fauna with which it was associated bore the ordinary sub-arctic character. When this stratified sand was deposited, the waves must have broken against the conglomerate precipices of Brahan, and the sea have occupied, as firths and sounds, the deep Highland valleys of the interior. And on such of the hills of the country as had their heads above water at the time, that interesting but somewhat meagre Alpine Flora must have flourished, which we now find restricted to our higher mountain summits.

Once every six weeks I was permitted to visit Cromarty, and pass a Sabbath there; but as my master usually accompanied me, and as the way proved sufficiently long and weary to press upon his failing strength and stiffening limbs, we had to restrict ourselves to the beaten road, and saw but little. On, however, one occasion this season, I journeyed alone, and spent so happy a day in finding my homeward road along blind paths—that ran now along the rocky shores of the Cromarty Firth in its upper reaches, now through brown, lonely moors, mottled with Danish encampments, and now beside quiet, tomb-besprinkled burying-grounds, and the broken walls of deserted churches—that its memory still lives freshly in my mind, as one of the happiest of my life. I passed whole hours among the ruins of Craighouse—a grey fantastic rag of a castle, consisting of four heavily-arched stories of time-eaten stone, piled over each other, and still bearing a-top its stone roof and its ornate turrets and bartizans—

"A ghastly prison, that eternally Hangs its blind visage out to the one sea."

It was said in these days to be haunted by its goblin—a miserable-looking, grey-headed, grey-bearded, little old man, that might be occasionally seen late in the evening, or early in the morning, peering out through some arrow-slit or shot-hole at the chance passenger. I remember getting the whole history of the goblin this day from a sun-burnt herd-boy, whom I found tending his cattle under the shadow of the old castle-wall. I began by asking him whose apparition he thought it was that could continue to haunt a building, the very name of whose last inhabitant had been long since forgotten. "Oh, they're saying," was the reply, "it's the spirit of the man that was killed on the foundation-stone, just after it was laid, and then built intil the wa' by the masons, that he might keep the castle by coming back again; and they're saying that a' the verra auld houses in the kintra had murderit men builded intil them in that way, and that they have a' o' them their bogle." I recognised in the boy's account of the matter an old and widely-spread tradition, which, whatever may have been its original basis of truth, seems to have so far influenced the buccaneers of the 17th century, as to have become a reality in their hands. "If time," says Sir Walter Scott, "did not permit the buccaneers to lavish away their plunder in their usual debaucheries, they were wont to hide it, with many superstitious solemnities, in the desert islands and keys which they frequented, and where much treasure, whose lawless owners perished without reclaiming it, is still supposed to be concealed. The most cruel of mankind are often the most superstitious; and those pirates are said to have had recourse to a horrid ritual, in order to secure an unearthly guardian to their treasures. They killed a negro or Spaniard, and buried him with the treasure, believing that his spirit would haunt the spot, and terrify away all intruders." There is a figurative peculiarity in the language in which Joshua denounced the man who should dare rebuild Jericho, that seems to point at some ancient pagan rite of this kind. Nor does it seem improbable that a practice which existed in times so little remote as those of the buccaneers, may have first begun in the dark and cruel ages of human sacrifices. "Cursed be the man before the Lord," said Joshua, "that riseth up and buildeth this city of Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it."

The large-farm system had been already introduced into the part of the country in which I at this time resided, on the richer and more level lands; but many a Gaelic-speaking cottar and small tenant still lived on the neighbouring moors and hill-sides. Though Highland in their surnames and language, they bore a character considerably different from that of the simpler Highlanders of the interior of Sutherland, or of a class I had shortly afterwards an opportunity of studying—the Highlanders of the western coast of Ross-shire. Doors were not left unbarred at night in the neighbourhood; and there were wretched hovels among the moors, very zealously watched and guarded indeed. There was much illicit distillation and smuggling at this time among the Gaelic-speaking people of the district; and it told upon their character with the usual deteriorating effect. Many of the Highlanders, too, had wrought as labourers at the Caledonian Canal, where they had come in contact with south-country workmen, and had brought back with them a confident, loquacious smartness, that, based on a ground-work of ignorance, which it rendered active and obtrusive, had a bizarre and disagreeable effect, and formed but an indifferent substitute for the diffident and taciturn simplicity which it had supplanted. But I have ever found the people of those border districts of the Highlands which join on to the low country, or that inhabit districts much traversed by tourists, of a comparatively inferior cast: the finer qualities of the Highland character seem easily injured: the hospitality, the simplicity, the unsuspecting honesty, disappear; and we find, instead, a people rapacious, suspicious, and unscrupulous, considerably beneath the Lowland average. In all the unopened districts of the remote Highlands into which I have penetrated, I have found the people strongly engage my sympathies and affections—much more strongly than in any part of the Lowlands; whereas, on the contrary, in the deteriorated districts I have been sensible of an involuntary revulsion of feeling, when in contact with the altered race, of which, among the low-country Scotch or the English, I have had no experience. I remember being impressed, in reading, many years ago, one of Miss Ferrier's novels, with the truth of a stroke that brought out very practically the ready susceptibility of injury manifested by the Celtic character. Some visitors of condition from the Highlands are represented as seeking out in one of our larger towns of the south, a simple Highland lad, who had quitted a remote northern district only a few months before; and when they find him, it is as a prisoner in Bridewell.

Towards the end of September, my master, who had wholly failed in overcoming his repugnance to labour as a mere journeyman, succeeded in procuring a piece of work by contract, in a locality about fourteen miles nearer our home than Conon-side, and I accompanied him to assist in its completion. Our employment in our new scene of labour was of the most disagreeable kind. Burns, who must have had a tolerably extensive experience of the evils of hard work, specifies in his "Twa Dogs" three kinds of labour in especial that give poor "cot-folk" "fash enough."

"Trowth, Caesar, whiles they're fash'd eneugh; A cottar howkin' in a sheugh, Wi' dirty stanes biggin' a dyke. Baring a quarry, and sic like."

All very disagreeable employments, as I also can testify; and our work here unfortunately combined the whole three. We were engaged in rebuilding one of those old-fashioned walls of gentlemen's pleasure-grounds known as "ha has," that line the sides of deep ditches, and raise their tops to but the level of the sward; and as the ditch in this special instance was a wet one, and as we had to clear it of the old fallen materials, and to dig it out for our new line of foundation, while at the same time we had to furnish ourselves with additional materials from a neighbouring quarry, we had at once the "baring of the quarry," the "howkin' in the sheugh," and the "biggin' of the dyke wi' dirty stanes," to "fash" us. The last-named employment is by far the most painful and trying. In most kinds of severe labour the skin thickens, and the hand hardens, through a natural provision, to suit the requirements of the task imposed, and yield the necessary protection to the integuments below; but the "dirty stanes" of the dyke-builder, when wet as well as dirty, try the reproductive powers of the cuticle too severely, and wear it off, so that under the rough friction the quick is laid bare. On this occasion, and on at least one other, when engaged in building in a wet season in the Western Highlands, I had all my fingers oozing blood at once; and those who think that in such circumstances labour protracted throughout a long day can be other than torture, would do well to try. How these poor hands of mine burnt and beat at night at this time, as if an unhappy heart had been stationed in every finger! and what cold chills used to run, sudden as electric shocks, through the feverish frame!

My general health, too, had become far from strong. As I had been almost entirely engaged in hewing for the two previous seasons, the dust of the stone, inhaled at every breath, had exerted the usual weakening effects on the lungs—those effects under which the life of the stone-cutter is restricted to about forty-five years; but it was only now, when working day after day with wet feet in a water-logged ditch, that I began to be sensibly informed, by a dull, depressing pain in the chest, and a blood-stained mucoidal substance, expectorated with difficulty, that I had already caught harm from my employment, and that my term of life might fall far short of the average one. I resolved, however, as the last year of my apprenticeship was fast drawing to its close, to complete, at all hazards, my engagement with my master. It had been merely a verbal engagement, and I might have broken it without blame, when, unable to furnish me with work in his character as a master-mason, he had to transfer my labour to another; but I had determined not to break it, all the more doggedly from the circumstance that my uncle James, in a moment of irritation, had said at its commencement that he feared I would no more persist in being a mason than I had done in being a scholar; and so I wrought perseveringly on; and slowly and painfully, rood after rood, the wall grew up under our hands. My poor master, who suffered even more from chopped hands and bleeding fingers than I did, was cross and fretful, and sometimes sought relief in finding fault with his apprentice; but, sobered by my forebodings of an early death, I used to make no reply; and the hasty, ill-tempered expressions in which he gave vent virtually to but his sense of pain and discomfort, were almost always followed by some conciliatory remark. Superstition takes a strong hold of the mind in circumstances such as those in which I was at this time placed. One day when on the top of a tall building, part of which we were throwing down to supply us with materials for our work, I raised up a broad slab of red micaceous sandstone, thin as a roofing slate, and exceedingly fragile, and, holding it out at arm's length, dropped it over the wall. I had been worse than usual all that morning, and much depressed; and, ere the slab parted from my hand, I said—looking forward to but a few months of life—I shall break up like that sandstone slab, and perish as little known. But the sandstone slab did not break up: a sudden breeze blew it aslant as it fell; it cleared the rough heap of stones below, where I had anticipated it would have been shivered to fragments; and, lighting on its edge, stuck upright like a miniature obelisk, in the soft green sward beyond. None of the Philosophies or the Logics would have sanctioned the inference which I immediately drew; but that curious chapter in the history of human belief which treats of signs and omens abounds in such postulates and such conclusions. I at once inferred that recovery awaited me: I was "to live and not die;" and felt lighter, during the few weeks I afterwards toiled at this place, under the cheering influence of the conviction.

The tenant of the farm on which our work was situated, and who had been both a great distiller and considerable fanner in his day, had become bankrupt shortly before, and was on the eve of quitting the place, a broken man. And his forlorn circumstances seemed stamped on almost every field and out-house of his farm. The stone fences were ruinous; the hedges gapped by the almost untended cattle; a considerable sprinkling of corn-ears lay rotting on the lea; and here and there an entire sheaf, that had fallen from the "leading-cart" at the close of harvest, might be seen still lying among the stubble, fastened to the earth by the germination of its grains. Some of the out-houses were miserable beyond description. There was a square of modern offices, in which the cattle and horses of the farm—appropriated by the landlord, at the time under the law of hypothec—were tolerably well lodged; but the hovel in which three of the farm-servants lived, and in which, for want of a better, my master and I had to cook and sleep, was one of the most miserable tumble-down erections I ever saw inhabited. It had formed part of an ancient set of offices that had been condemned about fourteen years before; but the proprietor of the place becoming insolvent, it had been spared, in lack of a better, to accommodate the servants who wrought on the farm; and it had now become not only a comfortless, but also a very unsafe dwelling. It would have formed no bad subject, with its bulging walls and gapped roof, that showed the bare ribs through the breaches, for the pencil of my friend William Koss; but the cow or horse that had no better shelter than that which it afforded could not be regarded as other than indifferently lodged. Every heavier shower found its way through the roof in torrents: I could even tell the hour of the night by the stars which passed over the long opening that ran along the ridge from gable to gable; and in stormy evenings I have paused at every ruder blast, in the expectation of hearing the rafters crack and give way over my head. The distiller had introduced upon his farm, on a small scale, what has since been extensively known as the bothy system; and this hovel was the bothy. There were, as I have said, but three farm-servants who lived in it at the time—young, unmarried lads, extremely ignorant, and of gay, reckless dispositions, whose care for their master's interests might be read in the germinating sheaves that lay upon his fields, and who usually spoke of him, when out of his hearing, as "the old sinner." He too evidently cared nothing for them; and they detested him, and regarded the ruin which had overtaken him, and which their own recklessness and indifference to his welfare must have at least assisted to secure, with open satisfaction. "It was ae comfort, anyhow," they said, "that the blastit old sinner, after a' his near-goingness wi' them, was now but a dyvour bankrupt." Bad enough certainly; and yet natural enough, and, in a sense, proper enough too. The Christian divine would have urged these men to return their master good for evil. Cobbett, on the contrary, would have advised them to go out at nights a rick-burning. The better advice will to a certainty not be taken by ninety-nine out of every hundred of our bothy-men; for it is one of the grand evils of the system, that it removes its victims beyond the ennobling influences of religion; and, on the other hand, at least this much may be said for the worse counsel, that the system costs the country every year the price of a great many corn-ricks.

The three lads lived chiefly on brose, as the viand at all edible into which their oatmeal could be most readily converted; and never baked or made for themselves a dish of porridge or gruel, apparently to avoid trouble, and that they might be as little as possible in the hated bothy. I always lost sight of them in the evening; but towards midnight their talk frequently awoke me as they were going to bed; and I heard them tell of incidents that had befallen them at the neighbouring farm-houses, or refer to blackguard bits of scandal which they had picked up. Sometimes a fourth voice mingled in the dialogue. It was that of a reckless poacher, who used to come in, always long after nightfall, and fling himself down on a lair of straw in a corner of the bothy; and usually ere day broke he was up and away. The grand enjoyment of the three farm-lads—the enjoyment which seemed to counterbalance, with its concentrated delights, the comfortless monotony of weeks—was a rustic ball which took place once every month, and sometimes oftener, at a public-house in the neighbouring village, and at which they used to meet some of the farm-lasses of the locality, and dance and drink whisky till morning. I know not how their money stood such frequent carousals; but they were, I saw, bare of every necessary article of clothing, especially of underclothing and linen; and I learned from their occasional talk about justice-of-peace summonses, that the previous term-day had left in the hands of their shoemakers and drapers unsettled bills. But such matters were taken very lightly: the three lads, if not happy, were at least merry; and the monthly ball, for which they sacrificed so much, furnished not only its hours of pleasure while it lasted, but also a week's talking in anticipation ere it came, and another week's talking over its various incidents after it had passed. And such was my experience of the bothy system in its first beginnings. It has since so greatly increased, that there are now single counties in Scotland in which there are from five to eight hundred farm-servants exposed to its deteriorating influences; and the rustic population bids fair in those districts fully to rival that of our large towns in profligacy, and greatly to outrival them in coarseness. Were I a statesman, I would, I think, be bold enough to try the efficacy of a tax on bothies. It is long since Goldsmith wrote regarding a state of society in which "wealth accumulates and men decay," and since Burns looked with his accustomed sagacity on that change for the worse in the character of our rural people which the large-farm system has introduced. "A fertile improved country is West Lothian," we find the latter poet remarking, in one of his journals, "but the more elegance and luxury among the farmers, I always observe in equal proportion the rudeness and stupidity of the peasantry. This remark I have made all over the Lothians, Merse, Roxburgh, &c.; and for this, among other reasons, I think that a man of romantic taste—'a man of feeling'—will be better pleased with the poverty but intelligent minds of the peasantry of Ayrshire (peasantry they all are, below the Justice of Peace), than the opulence of a club of Merse farmers, when he at the same time considers the Vandalism of their plough-folks." The deteriorating effect of the large-farm system, remarked by the poet, is inevitable. It is impossible that the modern farm-servant, in his comparatively irresponsible situation, and with his fixed wages of meagre amount, can be rendered as thoughtful and provident a person as the small farmer of the last age, who, thrown on his own resources, had to cultivate his fields and drive his bargains with his Martinmas and Whitsunday settlement with the landlord full before him; and who often succeeded in saving money, and in giving a classical education to some promising son or nephew, which enabled the young man to rise to a higher sphere of life. Farm-servants, as a class, must be lower in the scale than the old tenant-farmers, who wrought their little farms with their own hands; but it is possible to elevate them far above the degraded level of the bothy; and unless means be taken to check the spread of the ruinous process of brute-making which the system involves, the Scottish people will sink, to a certainty, in the agricultural districts, from being one of the most provident, intelligent, and moral in Europe, to be one of the most licentious, reckless, and ignorant.

Candle-light is a luxury in which no one ever thinks of indulging in a barrack; and in a barrack such as ours at this time, riddled with gaps and breaches, and filled with all manner of cold draughts, it was not every night in which a candle would have burnt. And as our fuel, which consisted of sorely decayed wood—the roofing of a dilapidated out-house which we were pulling down—formed but a dull fire, it was with difficulty I could read by its light. By spreading out my book, however, within a foot or so of the embers, I was enabled, though sometimes at the expense of a headache, to prosecute a new tract of reading which had just opened to me, and in which, for a time, I found much amusement. There was a vagabond pedlar who travelled at this time the northern counties, widely known as Jack from Dover, but whose true name was Alexander Knox, and who used to affirm that he was of the same family as the great Reformer. The pedlar himself was, however, no reformer. Once every six weeks or two months he got madly drunk, and not only "perished the pack," as he used to say, but sometimes got into prison to boot. There were, however, some kind relations in the south, who always set him up again; and Jack from Dover, after a fortnight of misery, used to appear with the ordinary bulk of merchandise at his back, and continue thriving until he again got drunk. He had a turn for buying and reading curious books, which, after mastering their contents, he always sold again; and he learned to bring them, when of a kind which no one else would purchase, to my mother, and recommend them as suitable for me. Poor Jack was always conscientious in his recommendations. I know not how he contrived to take the exact measure of my tastes in the matter, but suitable for me they invariably were; and as his price rarely exceeded a shilling per volume, and sometimes fell below a sixpence, my mother always purchased, when she could, upon his judgment. I owed to his discrimination my first copy of Bacon's "Wisdom of the Ancients," "done into English by Sir Arthur Gorges," and a book to which I had long after occasion to refer in my geological writings—Maillet's "Telliamed"—one, of the earlier treatises on the development hypothesis; and he had now procured for me a selection, in one volume, of the Poems of Gawin Douglas and Will Dunbar, and another collection in a larger volume, of "Ancient Scottish Poems," from the MSS. of George Bannatyne. I had been previously almost wholly unacquainted with the elder Scotch poets. My uncle James had introduced me, at a very early age, to Burns and Ramsay, and I had found out Fergusson and Tannahill for myself; but that school of Scotch literature which nourished between the reigns of David the Second and James the Sixth had remained to me, until now, well-nigh a terra incognita, and I found no little pleasure in exploring the antique recesses which it opened up. Shortly after, I read Ramsay's "Evergreen," the "King's Quair," and the true "Actes and Deides of ye illuster and vailyeand campioun Shyr Wilham Wallace," not modernized, as in my first copy, but in the tongue in which they had been recited of old by Henry the Minstrel: I had previously gloated over Harbour's Bruce; and thus my acquaintance with the old Scots poets, if not very profound, became at least so respectable, that not until many years after did I meet with an individual who knew them equally well.

The strange picturesque allegories of Douglas, and the terse sense and racy humour of Dunbar, delighted me much. As I had to con my way slowly amid the difficulties of a language which was no longer that spoken by my country-folk, I felt as if I were creating the sense which I found; it came gradually out like some fossil of the rock, from which I had laboriously to chip away the enveloping matrix; and in hanging admiringly over it, I thought I perceived how it was that some of my old schoolfellows, who were prosecuting their education at college, were always insisting on the great superiority of the old Greek and Roman writers over the writers of our own country. I could not give them credit for much critical discernment: they were indifferent enough, some of them, to both verse and prose, and hardly knew in what poetry consisted; and yet I believed them to be true to their perceptions when they insisted on what they termed the high excellence of the ancients. With my old schoolfellows, I now said, the process of perusal, when reading an English work of classical standing, is so sudden, compared with the slowness with which they imagine or understand, that they slide over the surface of their author's numbers, or of his periods, without acquiring a due sense of what lies beneath; whereas, in perusing the works of a Greek or Latin author, they have just to do what I am doing in deciphering the "Palice of Honour" or the "Goldin Terge,"—they have to proceed slowly, and to render the language of their author into the language of their own thinking. And so, losing scarce any of his meaning in consequence, and not reflecting on the process through which they have entered into it, they contrast the little which they gain from a hurried perusal of a good English book, with the much which they gain from the very leisurely perusal of a good Latin or Greek one; and term the little the poverty of modern writers, and the much the fertility of the ancients. Such was my theory, and it was at least not an uncharitable one to my acquaintance. I was, however, arrested in the middle of my studies by a day of soaking rain, which so saturated with moisture the decayed spongy wood, our fuel, that, though I succeeded in making with some difficulty such fires of it as sufficed to cook our victuals, it defied my skill to make one by which I could read. At length, however, this dreary season of labour—by far the gloomiest I ever spent—came to a close, and I returned with my master to Cromarty about Martinmas, our heavy job of work completed, and my term of apprenticeship at a close.



CHAPTER XII.

"Far let me wander down thy craggy shore, With rocks and trees bestrewn, dark Loch Maree."—SMALL.

The restorative powers of a constitution which at this time it took much hard usage to injure, came vigorously into operation on my removal from the wet ditch and the ruinous hovel; and ere the close of winter I had got once more into my ordinary state of robust health. I read, wrote, drew, corresponded with my friend William Ross (who had removed to Edinburgh), re-examined the Eathie Lias, and re-explored the Eathie Burn—a noble Old Red Sandstone ravine, remarkable for the wild picturesqueness of its cliffs and the beauty of its cataracts. I spent, too, many an evening in Uncle James's workshop, on better terms with both my uncles than almost ever before—a consequence, in part, of the sober complexion which, as the seasons passed, my mind was gradually assuming, and in part, of the manner in which I had completed my engagement with my master. "Act always," said Uncle James, "as you have done in this matter. In all your dealings, give your neighbour the cast of the bauk—'good measure, heaped up and running over'—and you will not lose by it in the end." I certainly did not lose by faithfully serving out my term of apprenticeship. It is not uninstructive to observe how strangely the public are led at times to attach paramount importance to what is in reality only subordinately important, and to pass over the really paramount without thought or notice. The destiny in life of the skilled mechanic is much more influenced, for instance, by his second education—that of his apprenticeship—than by his first—that of the school; and yet it is to the education of the school that the importance is generally regarded as attaching, and we never hear of the other. The careless, incompetent scholar has many opportunities of recovering himself; the careless, incompetent apprentice, who either fails to serve out his regular time, or who, though he fulfils his term, is discharged an inferior workman, has very few; and further, nothing can be more certain than that inferiority as a workman bears much more disastrously on the condition of the mechanic than inferiority as a scholar. Unable to maintain his place among brother journeymen, or to render himself worthy of the average wages of his craft, the ill-taught mechanic falls out of regular employment, subsists precariously for a time on occasional jobs, and either, forming idle habits, becomes a vagabond tramper, or, getting into the toils of some rapacious task-master, becomes an enslaved sweater. For one workman injured by neglect of his school-education, there are scores ruined by neglect of their apprenticeship-education. Three-fourths of the distress of the country's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of the unhappy class who have to compete with machinery), and nine-tenths of their vagabondism, will be found restricted to inferior workmen, who, like Hogarth's "careless apprentice," neglected the opportunities of their second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer insight into this matter than most of our modern educationists.

My friend of the Doocot Cave had been serving a short apprenticeship to a grocer in London during the latter years in which I had been working out mine as a stone-mason in the north country; and I now learned that he had just returned to his native place, with the intention of setting up in business for himself. To those who move in the upper walks, the superiority in status of the village shop-keeper over the journeyman mason may not be very perceptible; but, surveyed from the lower levels of society, it is quite considerable enough to be seen; even Gulliver could determine that the Emperor of Lilliput was taller by almost the breadth of a nail than any of his Court; and, though extremely desirous of renewing my acquaintanceship with my old friend, I was sensible enough of his advantage over me in point of position, to feel that the necessary advances should be made on his part, not on mine. I, however, threw myself in his way, though after a manner so fastidiously proud and jealous, that even yet, every time the recollection crosses me, it provokes me to a smile. On learning that he was engaged at the quay in superintending the landing of some goods, for, I suppose, his future shop, I assumed the leathern apron, which I had thrown aside for the winter at Martinmas, and stalked past him in my working dress—a veritable operative mason—eyeing him steadfastly as I passed. He looked at me for a moment; and then, without sign of recognition, turned indifferently away. I failed taking into account that he had never seen me girt with a leathern apron before—that, since we had last parted, I had grown more than half a foot—and that a young man of nearly five feet eleven inches, with an incipient whisker palpably visible on his cheek, might be a different-looking sort of person from a smooth-chinned stripling of little more than five feet three. And certainly my friend, as I learned from him nearly three years after, failed on this occasion to recognise me. But believing that he did, and that he did not choose to reckon among his friends a humble working man, I returned to my home very sad, and, I am afraid, not a little angry; and, locking up the supposed slight in my breast, as of too delicate a nature to be communicated to any one, for more than two years from this time I did not again cross his path.

I was now my own master, and commenced work as a journeyman in behalf of one of my maternal aunts—the aunt who had gone so many years before to live with her aged relative, the cousin of my father, and the mother of his first wife. Aunt Jenny had resided for many years after this time with an aged widow lady, who had lived apart in quiet gentility on very small means; and now that she was dead, my aunt saw her vocation gone, and wished that she too could live apart, a life of humble independency, supporting herself by her spinning-wheel, and by now and then knitting a stocking. She feared, however, to encounter the formidable drain on her means of a half-yearly room-rent; and, as there was a little bit of ground at the head of the strip of garden left me by my father, which bordered on a road that, communicating between town and country, bore, as is common in the north of Scotland, the French name of the Pays, it occurred to me that I might try my hand, as a skilled mechanic, in erecting upon it a cottage for Aunt Jenny. Masons have, of course, more in their power in the way of house-building than any other class of mechanics. It was necessary, however, that there should be money provided for the purchase of wood for the roof, and for the carting of the necessary stones and mortar; and I had none. But Aunt Jenny had saved a few pounds, and a very few proved sufficient; and so I built a cottage in the Pays, of a single room and a closet, as my first job, which, if not very elegant, or of large accommodation, came fully up to Aunt Jenny's ideas of comfort, and which, for at least a quarter of a century, has served her as a home. It was completed before Whitsunday, and I then deliberated on setting myself to seek after employment of a more remunerative kind, with just a little of the feeling to which we owe one of the best-known elegiac poems in the language—the "Man was made to Mourn" of Burns. "There is nothing that gives me a more mortifying picture of human life," said the poet, "than a man seeking work." The required work, however, came direct in my way without solicitation, and exactly at the proper time. I was engaged to assist in hewing a Gothic gateway among the woods of my old haunt, Conon-side; and was then despatched, when the work was on the eve of being finished, to provide materials for building a house on the western coast of Ross-shire. My new master had found me engaged in the previous season, amid the wild turmoil of the barrack, in studying practical geometry, and had glanced approvingly over a series of architectural drawings which I had just completed; and he now sought me out in consequence, and placed me in charge of a small party which he despatched in advance of his other workmen, and which I was instructed to increase, by employing a labourer or two on arriving at the scene of our future employment.

We were to be accompanied by a carter from a neighbouring town; and on the morning fixed for the commencement of our journey, his cart and horse were early at Conon-side, to carry across the country the tools required at our new job; but of himself we saw no trace; and about ten o'clock we set off without him. Ascertaining, however, when about two miles on our way, that we had left behind us a lever useful in the setting of large stones, I bade my companion wait for me at the village of Contin, where we expected meeting the carter; and, returning for the tool, I quitted the high road on finding it, and, to save time, and avoid a detour of about three miles, struck across the country direct on the village. My way was, however, a very rough one; and in coming upon the Conon, which it was necessary I should ford—for by avoiding the detour I had missed the bridge—I found it tolerably heavy in flood. Save for the iron lever which I carried, I would have selected, as my point of crossing, one of the still deep pools, as much safer to a vigorous swimmer than any of the apparent fords, with their powerful currents, whirling eddies, and rough bottoms. But though the heroes of antiquity—men such as Julius Caeesar and Horatius Cocles—could swim across rivers and seas in heavy armour, the specific gravity of the human subject in these latter ages of the world forbids such feats; and, concluding that I had not levity enough in my framework to float across the lever, I selected, with some hesitation, one of the better-looking fords, and, with my trousers dangling from the iron beam on my shoulder, entered the river. Such was the arrowy swiftness of the current, however, that the water had scarce reached my middle when it began to hollow out the stones and gravel from under my feet, and to bear me down per force in a slanting direction. There was a foaming rapid just at hand; and immediately beyond, a deep, dark pool, in which the chafed current whirled around, as if exhausting the wrath aroused by its recent treatment among rocks and stones, ere recovering its ordinary temper; and had I lost footing, or been carried a little further down, I know not how it might have fared with me in the wild foaming descent that lay between the ford and the pool. Curiously enough, however, the one idea which, in the excitement of the moment, filled my mind, was an intensely ludicrous one. I would, of course, lose not only the lever in the torrent, but my trousers also; and how was I ever to get home without them? Where, in the name of wonder, should I get a kilt to borrow? I have oftener than once experienced this strange sensation of the ludicrous in circumstances with which a different feeling would have harmonized better. Byron represents it as rising in extreme grief: it is, however, I suspect, greatly more common in extreme danger; and all the instances which the poet himself gives in his note—Sir Thomas More on the scaffold, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, and those victims of the French Revolution "with whom it became a fashion to leave some mot as a legacy"—were all jokers rather in circumstances of desperate and hopeless peril than of sorrow. It is, however, in danger, us certainly as in grief, a joyless sort of mirth.

"That playfulness of sorrow ne'er beguiles; It smiles in bitterness: but still it smiles, And sometimes with the wisest and the best. Till even the scaffold echoes with their jest."

The feeling, however, though an inharmoniously toned, is not a weakening one. I laughed in the stream, but I did not yield to it; and, making a violent effort, when just on the edge of the rapid, I got into stiller water, and succeeded in making my way to the opposite bank, drenched to the arm-pits. It was in nearly the same reach of the Conon that my poor friend the maniac of Ord lost her life a few days after.

I found my companion in charge of the cart with our tools, baiting at an inn a little beyond Contin; but there was no sign of the carter; and we were informed by the innkeeper, to whom he was well known, that we might have to wait for him all day, and perhaps not see him at night. Click-Clack—a name expressive of the carter's fluency as a talker, by which he was oftener designated than by the one in the parish register—might no doubt have purposed in the morning joining us at an early hour, but that was when he was sober; and what his intention might be now, said the innkeeper, when in all probability he was drunk, no living man could say. This was rather startling intelligence to men who had a long journey through a rough country before them; and my comrade—a lad a year or two older than myself, but still an apprentice—added to my dismay by telling me he had been sure from the first there was something wrong with Click-Clack, and that his master had secured his services, not from choice, but simply because, having thoughtlessly become surety for him at a sale for the price of a horse, and being left to pay for the animal, he had now employed him, in the hope of getting himself reimbursed. I resolved, however, on waiting for the carter until the last moment after which it would be possible for us to reach our ultimate stage without perilously encroaching on the night; and, taking it for granted that he would not very soon join us, I set out for a neighbouring hill, which commands an extensive view, to take note of the main features of a district with which I had formed, during the two previous years, not a few interesting associations, and to dry my wetted clothes in the breeze and the sun. The old tower of Fairburn formed one of the most striking objects in the prospect; and the eye expatiated beyond from where the gneiss region begins, on a tract of broken hill and brown moor, uncheered by a single green field or human dwelling. There are traditions that, in their very peculiarity, and remoteness from the tract of ordinary intention, give evidence of their truth; and I now called up a tradition, which I owed to my friend the maniac, respecting the manner in which the Mackenzies of Fairburn and the Chisholms of Strathglass had divided this barren tract between them. It had lain, from the first settlement of the country, an unappropriated waste, and neither proprietor could tell where his own lands terminated, or those of his neighbour began; but finding that the want of a proper line of demarcation led to quarrels between their herdsmen when baiting in their summer shielings with their cattle, they agreed to have the tract divided. The age of land-surveyors had not yet come; but, selecting two old women of seventy-five, they sent them out at the same hour, to meet among the hills, the one from Fairburn Tower, the other from Erchless Castle, after first binding themselves to accept their place of meeting as the point at which to set up the boundary-stone of the two properties. The women, attended by a bevy of competent witnesses, journeyed as if for life and death; but the Fairburn woman, who was the laird's foster-mother, either more zealous or more active than the Chisholm one, travelled nearly two miles for her one; and when they came in sight of each other in the waste, it was far from the fields of Fairburn, and comparatively at no great distance from those of the Chisholm. It is not easy knowing why they should have regarded one another in the light of enemies; but at a mile's distance their flagging pace quickened into a run, and, meeting at a narrow rivulet, they would fain have fought; but lacking, in their utter exhaustion, strength for fighting and breath for scolding, they could only seat themselves on the opposite banks, and girn at one another across the stream. George Cruikshank has had at times worse subjects for his pencil. It is, I believe, Landor, in one of his "imaginary conversations," who makes a Highland laird inform Adam Smith that, desirous to ascertain, in some sort of conceivable degree, the size of his property, he had placed a line of pipers around it, each at such a distance from his nearest neighbour that he could barely catch the sound of his bagpipe; and that from the number of pipers required he was able to form an approximate estimate of the extent of his estate. And here, in a Highland tradition, genuine at least as such, are we introduced to an expedient of the kind scarce less ludicrous or inadequate than that which Landor must, in one of his humorous moods, have merely imagined.

I returned to the inn at the hour from which, as I have said, it would be possible for us, and not more than possible, to complete our day's journey; and finding, as I had anticipated, no trace of Click-Clack, we set off without him. Our way led us through long moory straths, with here and there a blue lake and birch wood, and here and there a group of dingy cottages and of irregular fields; but the general scenery was that of the prevailing schistose gneiss of the Scotch Highlands, in which rounded confluent hills stand up over long-withdrawing valleys, and imposing rather from its bare and lonely expansiveness, than from aught bold or striking in its features. The district had been opened up only a few seasons previous by the Parliamentary road over which we travelled, and was at that time little known to the tourist; and the thirty years which have since passed have in some respects considerably changed it, as they have done the Highlands generally. Most of the cottages, when I last journeyed the way, were represented by but broken ruins, and the fields by mossy patches that remained green amid the waste. I marked at one spot an extraordinary group of oak-trees, in the last stage of decay, which would have attracted notice from their great bulk and size in even the forests of England. The largest of the group lay rotting upon the ground—a black, doddered shell, fully six feet in diameter, but hollow as a tar-barrel; while the others, some four or five in number, stood up around it, totally divested of all their larger boughs, but green with leaves, that, from the minuteness of the twigs on which they grew, wrapped them around like close-fitting mantles. Their period of "tree-ship"—to borrow a phrase from Cowper—must have extended far into the obscure past of Highland history—to a time, I doubt not, when not a few of the adjacent peat mosses still lived as forests, and when some of the neighbouring clans—Frasers, Bissets, and Chisholms—had, at least under the existing names (French and Saxon in their derivation), not yet begun to be. Ere we reached the solitary inn of Auchen-nasheen—a true Highland clachan of the ancient type, the night had fallen dark and stormy for a night in June; and a grey mist which had been descending for hours along the hills—blotting off their brown summits bit by bit, as an artist might his pencilled hills with a piece of India rubber, but which, methodical in its encroachments, had preserved in its advances a perfect horizontality of line—had broken into a heavy, continuous rain. As, however, the fair weather had lasted us till we were within a mile of our journey's end, we were only partially wet on our arrival, and soon succeeded in drying ourselves in front of a noble turf fire. My comrade would fain have solaced himself, after our weary journey, with something nice. He held that a Highland inn should be able to furnish at least a bit of mutton-ham or a cut of dried salmon, and ordered a few slices, first of ham, and then of salmon; but his orders served merely to perplex the landlord and his wife, whose stores seemed to consist of only oatmeal and whisky; and, coming down in his expectations and demands, and intimating that he was very hungry, and that anything edible would do, we heard the landlady inform, with evident satisfaction, a red-armed wench, dressed in blue plaiding, that "the lads would take porridge." The porridge was accordingly prepared; and, when engaged in discussing this familiar viand, a little before midnight—for we had arrived late—a tall Highlander entered the inn, dropping like a mill-wheel. He was charged, he said, with messages to the landlord, and to two mason lads in the inn, from a forlorn carter with whom he had travelled about twenty miles, but who, knocked up by the "drap drink" and a pair of bad shoes, had been compelled to shelter for the night in a cottage about seven miles short of Auchen-nasheen. The carter's message to the landlord was simply to the effect that the two mason lads having stolen his horse and cart, he instructed him to detain his property for him until he himself should come up in the morning. As for his message to the lads, said the Highlander, "it was no meikle worth gaun o'er again; but if we liked to buckle on a' the Gaelic curses to a' the English ones, it would be something like that."

We were awakened next morning by a tremendous hubbub in the adjoining apartment. "It is Click-Clack the carter," said my comrade: "oh, what shall we do?" We leaped up; and getting into our clothes in doubly-quick time, set ourselves to reconnoitre through the crannies of a deal partition, and saw the carter standing in the middle of the next room, storming furiously, and the landlord, a smooth-spoken, little old man, striving hard to conciliate him. Click-Clack was a rough-looking fellow, turned of forty, of about five feet ten, with a black unshaven beard, like a shoe-brush stuck under his nose, which was red as a coal, and attired in a sadly-breached suit of Aberdeen grey, topped by a brimless hat, that had been borrowed, apparently, from some obliging scare-crow. I measured him in person and expression; and, deeming myself his match, even unassisted by my comrade, on whose discretion I could calculate with more certainty than on his valour, I entered the apartment, and taxed him with gross dereliction of duty. He had left us to drive his horse and cart for a whole day, and had broken, for the sake of his wretched indulgence in the public-house, his engagement with our master; and I would report him to a certainty. The carter turned upon me with the fierceness of a wild beast; but, first catching his eye, as I would that of a maniac, I set my face very near his, and he calmed down in a moment. He could not help being late, he said: he had reached the inn at Contin not an hour after we had left it; and it was really very hard to have to travel a long day's journey in such bad shoes. We accepted his apology; and, ordering the landlord to bring in half a mutchkin of whisky, the storm blew by. The morning, like the previous night, had been thick and rainy; but it gradually cleared up as the day rose; and after breakfast we set out together along a broken footpath, never before traversed by horse and cart. We passed a solitary lake, on whose shores the only human dwelling was a dark turf shieling, at which, however, Click-Clack ascertained there was whisky to be sold; and then entered upon a tract of scenery wholly different in its composition and character from that through which our journey had previously lain.

There runs along the west coast of Scotland, from the island of Rum to the immediate neighbourhood of Cape Wrath, a formation, laid down by Macculloch, in his Geological Map of the Kingdom, as Old Red Sandstone, but which underlies formations deemed primary—two of these of quartz rock, and a third of that unfossiliferous limestone in which the huge Cave of Smoo is hollowed, and to which the Assynt marbles belong. The system, which, taken as a whole—quartz-rock, lime, and sandstone—corresponds bed for bed with the Lower Old Red of the east coast, and is probably a highly metamorphic example of that great deposit, exhibits its fullest development in Assynt, where all its four component beds are present. In the tract on which we now entered, it presents only two of these—the lower quartz-rock, and the underlying red sandstone; but wherever any of its members appear, they present unique features—marks of enormous denudation, and a bold style of landscape altogether its own; and, in now entering upon it for the first time, I was much impressed by its extraordinary character. Loch Maree, one of the wildest of our Highland lakes, and at this time scarce at all known to the tourist, owes to it all that is peculiar in its appearance—its tall pyramidal quartz mountains, that rise at one stride, steep, and well-nigh as naked as the old Pyramids, from nearly the level of the sea, to heights on which at midsummer the snows of winter gleam white in streaks and patches; and a picturesque sandstone tract of precipitous hills, which flanks its western shore, and bore at this period the remains of one of the old pine forests. A continuous wall of gneiss mountains, that runs along the eastern side of the lake, sinks sheer into its brown depths, save at one point, where a level tract, half-encircled by precipices, is occupied by fields and copsewood, and bears in the midst a white mansion-house; the blue expanse of the lake greatly broadens in its lower reaches; and a group of partially submerged hillocks, that resemble the forest-covered ones on its western shores, but are of lower altitude, rise over its waters, and form a miniature archipelago, grey with lichened stone, and bosky with birch and hazel. Finding at the head of the loch that no horse and cart had ever forced their way along its sides, we had to hire a boat for the transport of at least cart and baggage; and when the boatmen were getting ready for the voyage, which was, with the characteristic dilatoriness of the district, a work of hours, we baited at the clachan of Kinlochewe—a humble Highland inn, like that in which we had passed the night. The name—that of an old farm which stretches out along the head or upper end of Loch Maree—has a remarkable etymology: it means simply the head of Loch Ewe—the salt-water loch into which the waters of Loch Maree empty themselves by a river little more than a mile in length, and whose present head is some sixteen or twenty miles distant from the farm which bears its name. Ere that last elevation of the land, however, to which our country owes the level marginal strip that stretches between the present coast-line and the ancient one, the sea must have found its way to the old farm. Loch Maree (Mary's Loch), a name evidently of mediaeval origin, would then have existed as a prolongation of the marine Loch Ewe, and Kinlochewe would have actually been what the compound words signify—the head of Loch Ewe. There seems to be reason for holding that, ere the latest elevation of the land took place in our island, it had received its first human inhabitants—rude savages, who employed tools and weapons of stone, and fashioned canoes out of single logs of wood. Are we to accept etymologies such as the instanced one—and there are several such in the Highlands—as good, in evidence that these aboriginal savages were of the Celtic race, and that Gaelic was spoken in Scotland at a time when its strips of grassy links, and the sites of many of its seaport towns, such as Leith, Greenock, Musselburgh, and Cromarty, existed as oozy sea-beaches, covered twice every day by the waters of the ocean?

It was a delightful evening—still, breathless, clear—as we swept slowly across the broad breast of Loch Maree; and the red light of the sinking sun fell on many a sweet wild recess, amid the labyrinth of islands purple with heath, and overhung by the birch and mountain-ash; or slanted along the broken glades of the ancient forest; or lighted up into a blush the pale stony faces of the tall pyramidal hills. A boat bearing a wedding party was crossing the lake to the white house on the opposite side, and a piper stationed in the bows, was discoursing sweet music, that, softened by distance, and caught up by the echoes of the rocks, resembled no strain I had ever heard from the bagpipe before. Even the boatmen rested on their oars, and I had just enough of Gaelic to know that they were remarking how very beautiful it was. "I wish," said my comrade, "you understood these men: they have a great many curious stories about the loch, that I am sure you would like. See you that large island? It is Island-Maree. There is, they tell me, an old burying-ground on it, in which the Danes used to bury long ages ago, and whose ancient tomb-stones no man can read. And yon other island beside it is famous as the place in which the good people meet every year to make submission to their queen. There is, they say, a little loch in the island, and another little island in the loch; and it is under a tree on that inner island that the queen sits and gathers kain for the Evil One. They tell me that, for certain, the fairies have not left this part of the country yet." We landed, a little after sunset, at the point from which our road led across the hills to the sea-side, but found that the carter had not yet come up; and at length, despairing of his appearance, and unable to carry off his cart and the luggage with us, as we had succeeded in bringing off cart, horse, and luggage on the previous day, we were preparing to take up our night's lodging under the shelter of an overhanging crag, when we heard him coming soliloquizing through the wood, in a manner worthy of his name, as if he were not one, but twenty carters. "What a perfect shame of a country!" he exclaimed—"perfect shame! Road for a horse, forsooth!—more like a turnpike stair. And not a feed of corn for the poor beast; and not a public-house atween this and Kinlochewe; and not a drop of whisky: perfect, perfect shame of a country!" On his coming up in apparently very bad humour, we found him disposed to transfer the shame of the country to our shoulders. What sort of people were we, he asked, to travel in such a land without whisky! Whisky, however, there was none to produce: there was no whisky nearer, we told him, than the public-house at the sea-side, where we proposed spending the night; and, of course, the sooner we got there the better. And after assisting him to harness his horse, we set off in the darkening twilight, amid the hills. Rough grey rocks, and little blue lochans, edged with flags, and mottled in their season with water-lilies, glimmered dim and uncertain in the imperfect light as we passed; but ere we reached the inn of Flowerdale in Gairloch, every object stood out clear, though cold, in the increscent light of morning; and a few light streaks of cloud, poised in the east over the unrisen sun, were gradually exchanging their gleam of pale bronze for a deep flush of mingled blood and fire.

After the refreshment of a few hours' sleep and a tolerable breakfast, we set out for the scene of our labours, which lay on the sea-shore, about two miles further to the north and west; and were shown an out-house—one of a square of dilapidated offices—which we might fit up, we were told, for our barrack. The building had been originally what is known on the north-western coast of Scotland, with its ever-weeping climate, as a hay-barn; but it was now merely a roof-covered tank of green stagnant water, about three-quarters of a foot in depth, which had oozed through the walls from an over-gorged pond in the adjacent court, that in a tract of recent rains had overflowed its banks, and not yet subsided. Our new house did look exceedingly like a beaver-dam, with this disadvantageous difference, that no expedient of diving could bring us to better chambers on the other side of the wall. My comrade, setting himself to sound the abyss with his stick, sung out in sailor style, "three feet water in the hold." Click-Clack broke into a rage: "That a dwelling for human creatures!" he said. "If I was to put my horse intil't, poor beast! the very hoofs would rot off him in less than a week. Are we eels or puddocks, that we are sent to live in a loch?" Marking, however, a narrow portion of the ridge which dammed up the waters of the neighbouring pool whence our domicile derived its supply, I set myself to cut it across, and had soon the satisfaction of seeing the general surface lowered fully a foot, and the floor of our future dwelling laid bare. Click-Clack, gathering courage as he saw the waters ebbing away, seized a shovel, and soon showed us the value of his many years' practice in the labours of the stable; and then, despatching him for a few cart-loads of a dry shell-sand from the shore, which I had marked by the way as suitable for mixing with our lime, we had soon for our tank of green water a fine white floor. "Man wants but little here below," especially in a mason's barrack. There were two square openings in the apartment, neither of them furnished with frame or glass; but the one we filled up with stone, and an old unglazed frame, which, with the assistance of a base and border of turf, I succeeded in fitting into the other, gave at least an air of respectability to the place. Boulder stones, capped with pieces of mossy turf, served us for seats; and we had soon a comfortable peat fire blazing against the gable; but we were still sadly in want of a bed: the fundamental damp of the floor was, we saw, fast gaining on the sand; and it would be neither comfortable nor safe to spread our dried grass and blankets over it. My comrade went out to see whether the place did not furnish materials enough of any kind to make a bedstead, and soon returned in triumph, dragging after him a pair of harrows which he placed side by side in a snug corner beside the fire, with of course the teeth downwards. A good Catholic, prepared to win heaven for himself by a judicious use of sharp points, might have preferred having them turned the other way; but my comrade was an enlightened Protestant; and besides, like Goldsmith's sailor, he loved to lie soft. The second piece of luck was mine. I found lying unclaimed in the yard an old barn-door, which a recent gale had blown from off its hinges; and by placing it above the harrows, and driving a row of stakes around it into the floor, to keep the outer sleeper from rolling off—for the wall served to secure the position of the inner one—we succeeded in constructing, by our joint efforts, a luxurious bed. There was but one serious drawback on its comforts: the roof overhead was bad, and there was an obstinate drop, that used, during every shower which fell in the season of sleep, to make a dead set at my face, and try me at times with the water torture of the old story, mayhap half a dozen times in the course of a single night.

Our barrack fairly fitted up, I set out with my comrade, whose knowledge of Gaelic enabled him to act as my interpreter, to a neighbouring group of cottages, to secure a labourer for the work of the morrow. The evening was now beginning to darken; but there was still light enough to show me that the little fields I passed through on my way resembled very much those of Liliput, as described by Gulliver. They were, however, though equally small, greatly more irregular, and had peculiarities, too, altogether their own. The land had originally been stony; and as it showed, according to the Highland phrase, its "bare bones through its skin"—large bosses of the rock beneath coming here and there to the surface—the Highlanders had gathered the stones in great pyramidal heaps on the bare bosses; and so very numerous were these in some of the fields, that they looked as if some malignant sorcerer had, in the time of harvest, converted all their shocks into stone. On approaching the cottage of our future labourer, I was attracted by a door of very peculiar construction that lay against the wall. It had been brought from the ancient pine forest on the western bank of Loch Maree, and was formed of the roots of trees so curiously interlaced by nature, that when cut out of the soil, which it had covered over like a piece of network, it remained firmly together, and now formed a door which the mere imitator of the rustic might in vain attempt to rival. We entered the cottage, and plunging downwards two feet or so, found ourselves upon the dunghill of the establishment, which in this part of the country usually occupied at the time an ante-chamber which corresponded to that occupied by the cattle a few years earlier, in the midland districts of Sutherland. Groping in this foul outer chamber through a stifling atmosphere of smoke, we came to an inner door raised to the level of the soil outside, through which a red umbry gleam escaped into the darkness; and, climbing into the inner apartment, we found ourselves in the presence of the inmates of the mansion. The fire, as in the cottage of my Sutherlandshire relative, was placed in the middle of the floor: the master of the mansion, a red-haired, strongly-built Highlander, of the middle size and age, with his son, a boy of twelve, sat on the one side; his wife, who, though not much turned of thirty, had the haggard, drooping cheeks, hollow eyes, and pale, sallow complexion of old age, sat on the other. We broke our business to the Highlander through my companion—for, save a few words caught up at school by the boy, there was no English in the household—and found him disposed to entertain it favourably. A large pot of potatoes hung suspended over the fire, under a dense ceiling of smoke; and he hospitably invited us to wait supper, which, as our dinner had consisted of but a piece of dry oaten cake, we willingly did. As the conversation went on, I became conscious that it turned upon myself, and that I was an object of profound commiseration to the inmates of the cottage. "What," I inquired of my companion, "are these kind people pitying me so very much for?" "For your want of Gaelic, to be sure. How can a man get on in the world that wants Gaelic?" "But do not they themselves," I asked, "want English?" "O yes," he said, "but what does that signify? What is the use of English in Gairloch?" The potatoes, with a little ground salt, and much unbroken hunger as sauce, ate remarkably well. Our host regretted that he had no fish to offer us; but a tract of rough weather had kept him from sea, and he had just exhausted his previous supply; and as for bread, he had used up the last of his grain crop a little after Christmas, and had been living, with his family, on potatoes, with fish when he could get them, ever since.

Thirty years have now passed since I shared in the Highlander's evening meal, and during the first twenty of these, the use of the potatoe—unknown in the Highlands a century before—greatly increased. I have been told by my maternal grandfather, that about the year 1740, when he was a boy of about eight or nine years of age, the head-gardener at Balnagown Castle used, in his occasional visits to Cromarty, to bring him in his pocket, as great rarities, some three or four potatoes; and that it was not until some fifteen or twenty years after this time that he saw potatoes reared in fields in any part of the Northern Highlands. But, once fairly employed as food, every season saw a greater breadth of them laid down. In the North-western Highlands, in especial, the use of these roots increased from the year 1801 to the year 1846 nearly a hundredfold, and came at length to form, as in Ireland, not merely the staple, but in some localities almost the only food of the people; and when destroyed by disease in the latter year, famine immediately ensued in both Ireland and the Highlands. A writer in the Witness, whose letter had the effect of bringing that respectable paper under the eye of Mr. Punch, represented the Irish famine as a direct judgment on the Maynooth Endowment; while another writer, a member of the Peace Association—whose letter did not find its way into the Witness, though it reached the editor—challenged the decision on the ground that the Scotch Highlanders, who were greatly opposed to Maynooth, suffered from the infliction nearly as much as the Irish themselves, and that the offence punished must have been surely some one of which both Highlanders and Irish had been guilty in common. He, however, had found out, he said, what the crime visited actually was. Both the Irish and Highland famines were judgments upon the people for their great homicidal efficiency as soldiers in the wars of the empire—an efficiency which, as he truly remarked, was almost equally characteristic of both nations. For my own part, I have been unable hitherto to see the steps which conduct to such profound conclusions; and am content simply to hold, that the superintending Providence who communicated to man a calculating, foreseeing nature, does occasionally get angry with him, and inflict judgments upon him, when, instead of exercising his faculties, he sinks to a level lower than his own, and becomes content, like some of the inferior animals, to live on a single root.

There are two periods favourable to observation—an early and a late one. A fresh eye detects external traits and peculiarities among a people, seen for the first time, which disappear as they become familiar; but it is not until after repeated opportunities of study, and a prolonged acquaintanceship, that internal characteristics and conditions begin to be rightly known. During the first fortnight of my residence in this remote district, I was more impressed than at a later stage by certain peculiarities of manner and appearance in the inhabitants. Dr. Johnson remarked that he found fewer very tall or very short men among the people of the Hebrides than in England: I was now struck by a similar mediocrity of size among the Highlanders of Western Ross; five-sixths of the grown men seemed to average between five feet seven and five feet nine inches in height, and either tall or short men I found comparatively rare. The Highlanders of the eastern coast were, on the contrary, at that period, mayhap still, very various of stature—some of them exceedingly diminutive, others of great bulk and height; and, as might be seen in the congregations of the parish churches removed by but a few miles, there were marked differences in this respect between the people of contiguous districts—certain tracts of plain or valley producing larger races than others. I was inclined to believe at the time that the middle-sized Highlanders of the west coast were a less mixed race than the unequally-sized Highlanders of the east: I at least found corresponding inequalities among the higher-born Highland families, that, as shown by their genealogies, blended the Norman and Saxon with the Celtic blood; and as the unequally-sized Highland race bordered on that Scandinavian one which fringes the greater part of the eastern coast of Scotland, I inferred that there had been a similar blending of blood among them. I have since seen, in Gustav Kombst's Ethnographic Map of the British Islands, the difference which I at this time but inferred, indicated by a different shade of colour, and a different name. The Highlanders of the east coast Kombst terms "Scandinavian-Gaelic;" those of the west, "Gaelic-Scandinavian-Gaelic,"—names indicative, of course, of the proportions in which he holds that they possess the Celtic blood. Disparity of bulk and size appears to be one of the consequences of a mixture of races; nor does the induced inequality seem restricted to the physical framework. Minds of large calibre, and possessed of the kingly faculty, come first into view, in our history, among the fused tribes, just as of old it was the mixed marriages that first produced the giants. The difference in size which I remarked in particular districts of the Scandinavian-Gaelic region, separated, in some instances, by but a ridge of hills or an expanse of moor, must have been a result of the old clan divisions, and is said to have marked the clans themselves very strongly. Some of them were of a greatly more robust, and some of a slimmer type, than others.

I was struck by another peculiarity in the west coast Highlanders. I found the men in general greatly better-looking than the women, and that in middle life they bore their years much more lightly. The females seemed old and haggard at a period when the males were still comparatively fresh and robust. I am not sure whether the remark may not in some degree apply to Highlanders generally. The "rugged form" and "harsher features," which, according to Sir Walter, "mark the mountain band," accord worse with the female than with the male countenance and figure. But I at least found this discrepancy in the appearance of the sexes greatly more marked on the west than on the eastern coast; and saw only too much reason to conclude that it was owing in great part to the disproportionately large share of crushing labour laid, in the district, in accordance with the practice of a barbarous time, on the weaker frame of the female. There is, however, a style of female loveliness occasionally though rarely exemplified in the Highlands, which far transcends the Saxon or Scandinavian type. It is manifested usually in extreme youth—at least between the fourteenth and eighteenth year; and its effect we find happily indicated by Wordsworth—who seems to have met with a characteristic specimen—in his lines to a Highland girl. He describes her as possessing as her "dower," "a very shower of beauty." Further, however, he describes her as very young.

"Twice seven consenting years had shed Their utmost bounty on her head."

I was, besides, struck at this time by finding, that while almost all the young lads under twenty with whom I came in contact had at least a smattering of English, I found only a single Highlander turned of forty with whom I could exchange a word. The exceptional Highlander was, however, a curiosity in his way. He seemed to have a natural turn for acquiring languages, and had derived his English, not from conversation, but, in the midst of a Gaelic-speaking people, from the study of the Scriptures in our common English version. His application of Bible language to ordinary subjects told at times with rather ludicrous effect. Upon inquiring of him, on one occasion, regarding a young man whom he wished to employ as an extra labourer, he described him in exactly the words in which David is described in the chapter that records the combat with Goliath, as "but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance;" and on asking where he thought we could get a few loads of water-rolled pebbles for causewaying a floor, he directed us to the bed of a neighbouring rivulet, where we might "choose us," he said, "smooth stones out of the brook." He spoke with great deliberation, translating evidently his Gaelic thinking, as he went on, into scriptural English.



CHAPTER XIII.

"A man of glee With hair of glittering grey, As blythe a man as you could see On a spring holiday."—WORDSWORTH.

There existed at this time no geological map of Scotland. Macculloch's did not appear until about six or seven years after (in 1829 or 1830), and Sedgwick and Murchison's interesting sketch of the northern formations[4] not until at least five years after (1828). And so, on setting out on the morning after that of my arrival, to provide stones for our future erection, I found myself in a terra incognita, new to the quarrier, and unknown to the geologist. Most of the stratified primary rocks make but indifferent building materials; and in the immediate neighbourhood of our work I could find only one of the worst of the class—the schistose gneiss. On consulting, however, the scenery of the district, I marked that at a certain point both shores of the open sea-loch on whose margin we were situated suddenly changed their character. The abrupt rugged hills of gneiss that, viewed from an eminence, resembled a tumbling sea, suddenly sank into low brown promontories, unbroken by ravines, and whose eminences were mere flat swellings; and in the hope of finding some change of formation coincident with the change of scenery, I set out with my comrade for the nearest point at which the broken outline passed into the rectilinear or merely undulatory one. But though I did expect a change, it was not without some degree of surprise that, immediately after passing the point of junction, I found myself in a district of red sandstone. It was a hard, compact, dark-coloured stone, but dressed readily to pick and hammer, and made excellent corner-stones and ashlar; and it would have furnished us with even hewn work for our building, had not our employer, unacquainted, like every one else at the time, with the mineral capabilities of the locality, brought his hewing stone in a sloop, at no small expense, through the Caledonian Canal, from one of the quarries of Moray—a circuitous voyage of more than two hundred miles.

Immediately beside where we opened our quarry, there was a little solitary shieling: it was well-nigh such an edifice as I used to erect when a boy—some eight or ten feet in length, and of so humble an altitude, that, when standing erect in the midst, I could lay my hand on the roof-tree. A heath-bed occupied one of the corners; a few grey embers were smouldering in the middle of the floor; a pot lay beside them, ready for use, half-filled with cockles and razor-fish, the spoils of the morning ebb; and a cog of milk occupied a small shelf that projected from the gable above. Such were the contents of the shieling. Its only inmate, a lively little old man, sat outside, at once tending a few cows grouped on the moor, and employed in stripping with a pocket-knife, long slender filaments from off a piece of moss fir; and as he wrought and watched, he crooned a Gaelic song, not very musically mayhap, but, like the happy song of the humble-bee, there was perfect content in every tone. He had a great many curious questions to ask in his native Gaelic, of my comrade, regarding our employment and our employer; and when satisfied, he began, I perceived, like the Highlander of the previous evening, to express very profound commiseration for me. "Is that man also pitying me?" I asked. "O yes, very much," was the reply: "he does not at all see how you are to live in Gairloch without Gaelic." I was reminded by the shieling and its happy inmate, of one of my father's experiences, as communicated to me by Uncle James. In the course of a protracted kelp voyage among the Hebrides, he had landed in his boat, before entering one of the sounds of the Long Island, to procure a pilot, but found in the fisherman's cottage on which he had directed his course, only the fisherman's wife—a young creature of not more than eighteen—engaged in nursing her child, and singing a Gaelic song, in tones expressive of a light heart, till the rocks rang again. A heath bed, a pot of baked clay, of native manufacture, fashioned by the hand, and a heap of fish newly caught, seemed to constitute the only wealth of the cottage; but its mistress was, notwithstanding, one of the happiest of women; and deeply did she commiserate the poor sailors, and earnestly wish for the return of her husband, that he might assist them in their perplexity. The husband at length appeared. "Oh," he asked, after the first greeting, "have you any salt?" "Plenty," said the master; "and you, I see, from your supply of fresh fish, want it very much; but come, pilot us through the sound, and you shall have as much salt as you require." And so the vessel got a pilot, and the fisherman got salt; but never did my father forget the light-hearted song of the happy mistress of that poor Highland cottage. It was one of the palpable characteristics of our Scottish Highlanders, for at least the first thirty years of the century, that they were contented enough, as a people, to find more to pity than to envy in the condition of their neighbours; and I remember that at this time, and for years after, I used to deem the trait a good one. I have now, however, my doubts on the subject, and am not quite sure whether a content so general as to be national may not, in certain circumstances, be rather a vice than a virtue. It is certainly no virtue when it has the effect of arresting either individuals or peoples in their course of development; and is perilously allied to great suffering, when the men who exemplify it are so thoroughly happy amid the mediocrities of the present, that they fail to make provision for the contingencies of the future.

We were joined in about a fortnight by the other workmen from the Low country, and I resigned my temporary charge (save that I still retained the time-book in my master's behalf) into the hands of an ancient mason, remarkable over the north of Scotland for his skill as an operative, and who, though he was now turned of sixty, was still able to build and hew considerably more than the youngest and most active man in the squad. He was at this time the only survivor of three brothers, all masons, and all not merely first-class workmen, but of a class to which, at least to the north of the Grampians, only they themselves belonged, and very considerably in advance of the first. And on the removal of the second of the three brothers to the south of Scotland, it was found that, amid the stone-cutters of Glasgow, David Fraser held relatively the same place that he had done among those of the north. I have been told by Mr. Kenneth Matheson—a gentleman well known as a master-builder in the west of Scotland—that in erecting some hanging stairs of polished stone, ornamented in front and at the outer edge by the common fillet and torus, his ordinary workmen used to complete for him their one step a-piece per day, and David Fraser his three steps, finished equally well. It is easily conceivable how, in the higher walks of art, one man should excel a thousand—nay, how he should have neither competitor when living, nor successor when dead. The English gentleman who, after the death of Canova, asked a surviving brother of the sculptor whether he purposed carrying on Canova's business, found that he had achieved in the query an unintentional joke. But in the commoner avocations there appear no such differences between man and man; and it may seem strange how, in ordinary stone-cutting, one man could thus perform the work of three. My acquaintance with old John Fraser showed me how very much the ability depended on a natural faculty. John's strength had never been above the average of that of Scotchmen, and it was now considerably reduced; nor did his mallet deal more or heavier blows than that of the common workman. He had, however, an extraordinary power of conceiving of the finished piece of work, as lying within the rude stone from which it was his business to disinter it; and while ordinary stone-cutters had to repeat and re-repeat their lines and draughts, and had in this way virtually to give to their work several surfaces in detail ere they reached the true one, old John cut upon the true figure at once, and made one surface serve for all. In building, too, he exercised a similar power: he hammer-dressed his stones with fewer strokes than other workmen, and in fitting the interspaces between stones already laid, always picked from out of the heap at his feet the stone that exactly fitted the place; while other operatives busied themselves in picking up stones that were too small or too large; or, if they set themselves to reduce the too large ones, reduced them too little or too much, and had to fit and fit again. Whether building or hewing, John never seemed in a hurry. He has been seen, when far advanced in life, working very leisurely, as became his years, on the one side of a wall, and two stout young fellows building against him on the other side—toiling, apparently, twice harder than he, but the old man always contriving to keep a little a-head of them both.

David Fraser I never saw; but as a hewer he was said considerably to excel even his brother John. On hearing that it had been remarked among a party of Edinburgh masons, that, though regarded as the first of Glasgow stone-cutters, he would find in the eastern capital at least his equals, he attired himself most uncouthly in a long-tailed coat of tartan, and, looking to the life the untamed, untaught, conceited little Celt, he presented himself on Monday morning, armed with a letter of introduction from a Glasgow builder, before the foreman of an Edinburgh squad of masons engaged upon one of the finer buildings at that time in the course of erection. The letter specified neither his qualifications nor his name: it had been written merely to secure for him the necessary employment, and the necessary employment it did secure. The better workmen of the party were engaged, on his arrival, in hewing columns, each of which was deemed sufficient work for a week; and David was asked, somewhat incredulously, by the foreman, "if he could hew?" "O yes, he thought he could hew." "Could he hew columns such as these!" "O yes, he thought he could hew columns such as these." A mass of stone in which a possible column lay hid, was accordingly placed before David, not under cover of the shed, which was already occupied by workmen, but, agreeably to David's own request, directly in front of it, where he might be seen by all, and where he straightway commenced a most extraordinary course of antics. Buttoning his long tartan coat fast around him, he would first look along the stone from the one end, anon from the other, and then examine it in front and rear; or, quitting it altogether for the time, he would take up his stand beside the other workmen, and, after looking at them with great attention, return and give it a few taps with the mallet, in a style evidently imitative of theirs, but monstrously a caricature. The shed all that day resounded with roars of laughter; and the only thoroughly grave man on the ground was he who occasioned the mirth of all the others. Next morning David again buttoned his coat; but he got on much better this day than the former: he was less awkward and less idle, though not less observant than before: and he succeeded ere evening in tracing, in workman-like fashion, a few draughts along the future column. He was evidently greatly improving. On the morning of Wednesday he threw off his coat; and it was seen that, though by no means in a hurry, he was seriously at work. There were no more jokes or laughter; and it was whispered in the evening that the strange Highlander had made astonishing progress during the day. By the middle of Thursday he had made up for his two days' trifling, and was abreast of the other workmen; before night he was far ahead of them; and ere the evening of Friday, when they had still a full day's work on each of their columns, David's was completed in a style that defied criticism; and, his tartan coat again buttoned around him, he sat resting himself beside it. The foreman went out and greeted him. "Well," he said, "you have beaten us all: you certainly can hew!" "Yes," said David; "I thought I could hew columns. Did the other men take much more than a week to learn?" "Come, come, David Fraser," replied the foreman; "we all guess who you are: you have had your joke out; and now, I suppose, we must give you your week's wages, and let you away." "Yes," said David; "work waits for me in Glasgow; but I just thought it might be well to know how you hewed on this east side of the country."

John Fraser was a shrewd, sarcastic old man, much liked, however, by his brother workmen; though his severe sayings—which, never accompanied by any ill-nature, were always tolerated in the barrack—did both himself and them occasional harm when repeated outside. To men who have to live for months together on oatmeal and salt, the difference between porridge with and porridge without milk is a very great difference indeed, both in point of salutariness and comfort; and I had succeeded in securing, on the ordinary terms, ere the arrival of John, what was termed a set of skimmed milk from the wife of the gentleman at whose dwelling-house we were engaged in working. The skimmed milk was, however, by no means good: it was thin, blue, and sour; and we received it without complaint only because we knew that, according to the poet, it was "better just than want aye," and that there was no other dairy in that part of the country. But old John was less prudent; and, taking the dairy-maid to task in his quiet ironical style, he began by expressing wonder and regret that a grand lady like her mistress should be unable to distinguish the difference between milk and wine. The maid indignantly denied the fact in toto: her mistress, she said, did know the difference. "O no," replied John; "wine always gets better the longer it is kept, and milk always the worse; but your mistress, not knowing the difference, keeps her milk very long, in order to make it better, and makes it so very bad in consequence, that there are some days we can scarce eat it at all." The dairy-maid bridled up, and, communicating the remark to her mistress, we were told next morning that we might go for our milk to the next dairy, if we pleased, but that we would get none from her. And so, for four months thereafter, we had to do penance for the joke, on that not very luxurious viand "dry porridge." The pleasures of the table had occupied but small space amid the very scanty enjoyments of our barrack even before, and they were now so considerably reduced, that I could have almost wished at meal-times that—like the inhabitants of the moon, as described by Baron Munchausen—I could open up a port-hole in my side, and lay in at once provisions enough for a fortnight; but the infliction told considerably more on our constitutions than on our appetites; and we all became subject to small but very painful boils in the muscular parts of the body—a species of disease which seems to be scarce less certainly attendant on the exclusive use of oatmeal, than sea-scurvy on the exclusive use of salt meat. Old John, however, though in a certain sense the author of our calamity, escaped all censure, while a double portion fell to the share of the gentleman's wife.