capital. The Highlander was never wealthy: the inhabitants of a wild mountainous district, formed of the primary rocks, never are. But he possessed on the average his six, or eight, or ten head of cattle, and his small flock of sheep; and when, as sometimes happened in the high-lying districts, the corn-crop turned out a failure, the sale of a few cattle or sheep more than served to clear scores with the landlord, and enabled him to purchase his winter and spring supply of meal in the Lowlands. He was thus a capitalist, and possessed the capitalist's peculiar advantage of not "living from hand to mouth," but on an accumulated fund, which always stood between him and absolute want, though not between him and positive hardship, and which enabled him to rest, during a year of scarcity, on his own resources, instead of throwing himself on the charity of his Lowland neighbors. Nay, in what were emphatically termed "the dear years" of the beginning of the present and latter half of the past century, the humble people of the Lowlands, especially our Lowland mechanics and laborers, suffered more than the crofters and small farmers of the Highlands, and this mainly from the circumstance, that as the failure of the crops which induced the scarcity was a corn failure, not a failure of grass and pasture, the humbler Highlanders had sheep and cattle, which continued to supply them with food and raiment; while the humbler Lowlanders, depending on corn almost exclusively, and accustomed to deal with the draper for their articles of clothing, were reduced by the high price of provisions to great straits. There took place, however, about the beginning of the century, a mighty change, coincident with, and, to a certain extent, an effect of, the wars of the first French Revolution. The price of provisions rose in England and the Lowlands, and, with the price of provisions, the rent of land. The Highland proprietor naturally enough set himself to determine how his rental also was to be increased; and, as a consequence of the conclusion at which he arrived, the sheep-farm and clearance-system began. Many thousand Highlanders, ejected from their snug holdings, employed their little capital in emigrating to Canada and the

States; and there, in most cases, the little capital increased, and a rude plenty continues to be enjoyed by their descendants, Many thousands more, however, fell down upon the coasts of the country, and, on moss-covered moors or bare promontories, ill-suited to repay the labors of the agriculturist, commenced a sort of amphibious life as crofters and fishermen. And, located on an ungenial soil, and prosecuting with but indifferent skill a precarious trade, their little capital dribbled out of their hands, and they became the poorest of men. Meanwhile, in some parts of the Highlands and Islands, a busy commerce sprang up, which employed-much to the profit of the landlords—many thousands of the inhabitants. The kelp manufacture rendered inhospitable islets and tracts of bleak rocky shore, rich in sea-weed, of as much value to the proprietors as the best land in Scotland; and under the impetus given by full employment, and, if not ample, at least remunerative pay, population increased. Suddenly, however, Free Trade, in its first approaches, destroyed the trade in kelp; and then the discovery of a cheap mode of manufacturing soda out of common salt secured its ruin beyond the power of legislation to retrieve. Both the people and landlords experienced in the kelp districts the evils which a ruined commerce alway leaves behind it. Old Highland families disappeared from amid the aristocracy and landowners of Scotland; and the population of extensive islands and sea-boards of the country, from being no more than adequate, suddenly became oppressively redundant. It required, however, another drop to make the full cup run

over.

The potatoes had become, as I have shown, the staple food of the Highlander; and when, in 1846, the potato blight came on, the people, most of them previously stripped of their little capitals, and divested of their employment, were deprived of their food, and ruined at a blow. The same stroke which did little more than slightly impinge on the comforts of the people of the Lowlands, utterly prostrated the Highlanders; and ever since, the sufferings of famine have become chronic along the bleak shores and rugged islands of at least the northwestern portion of our country. Nor is it perhaps the worst

part of the evil that takes the form of clamorous want: so heavily have the famines born on a class which were not absolutely the poor when they came on, that they are absolutely the poor now;—they have dissipated the last remains of capital possessed by the people of the Highlands.

CHAPTER XIV.

"Edina! Scotia's darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and towers!"

BURNS.

THERE had occurred a sad accident among the Cromarty rocks this season, when I was laboring in Gairloch, which, from the circumstance that it had nearly taken place in my own person about five years before, a good deal impressed me on my return. A few hundred yards from the very bad road which I had assisted old Johnstone of the Forty-Second in constructing, there is a tall inaccessible precipice of ferruginous gneiss, that from time immemorial down to this period had furnished a secure nestling-place to a pair of ravens, the only birds of their species that frequented the rocks of the Hill. Year after year, regularly as the breeding season came round, the ravens used to make their appearance, and enter on possession of their hereditary home: they had done so for a hundred years to a certainty,-some said, for a much longer time; and as there existed a tradition in the place that the nest had once been robbed of its young birds by a bold climber, I paid it a visit one morning, in order to determine whether I could not rob it too. There was no getting up to it from below: the precipice, more inaccessible for about a hundred feet from its base than a castle-wall, overhung the shore; but it seemed not impracticable from above; and, coming gradually down

upon it, availing myself, as I crept along, of every little protuberance and hollow, I at length stood within six or eight feet of the young birds. From that point, however, a smooth shelf, without projection or cavity, descended at an angle of about forty, to the nest, and terminated abruptly, without ledge or margin, in the overhanging precipice. Have I not, I asked, crept along a roof of even a steeper slope than that of the shelf? Why not, in like manner, creep along it to the nest, where there is firm footing? I had actually stretched out my naked foot to take the first step, when I observed, as the sun suddenly broke out from behind a cloud, that the light glistened on the smooth surface. It was encrusted over by a thin layer of chlorite, slippery as the mixture of soap and grease that the ship-carpenter spreads over his slips on the morning of a launch. I at once saw there was an element of danger in the way on which I had at first failed to calculate; and so, relinquishing the attempt as hopeless, I returned by the path I had come, and thought no more of robbing the raven's nest. It was, however, again attempted this season, but with tragic result, by a young lad from Sutherland named Mackay, who had previously approved his skill as a cragsman in his native county, and several times secured the reward given by an Agricultural Society for the destruction of young birds of prey. As the incident was related to me, he had approached the nest by the path which I had selected: he had paused where I had paused, and even for a longer time; and then, venturing forward, he no sooner committed himself to the treacherous chlorite, than, losing footing as if on a steep sheet of ice, he shot right over the precipice. Falling sheer for the first fifty feet or so without touching the rock, he was then turned full round by a protuberance against which he had glanced, and descending for the lower half of the way head foremost and dashing with tremendous force among the srnooth sea-stones below, his brains were scattered over an area of from ten to twelve square yards in extent. His only companion-an ignorant Irish lad-had to gather up the fragments of his head in a napkin.