THE MOORS.

"Piety is sweet to infant minds;"

what they love they remember—for how easy—how happy—to get dear things by heart! Happiest of all—the things held holy on earth as in heaven—because appertaining here to Eternal Life.

TO THE SCOTTISH CHRISTIAN HERALD.by the rev. duncan grant, a.m., minister of forres."Beauteous on our heath-clad mountains,May ourHerald'sfeet appear;Sweet, by silver lakes and fountains,May his voice be to our ear.Let the tenants of our rocks,Shepherds watching o'er their flocks,Village swain and peasant boy,Thee salute with songs of joy!

TO THE SCOTTISH CHRISTIAN HERALD.

by the rev. duncan grant, a.m., minister of forres.

"Beauteous on our heath-clad mountains,May ourHerald'sfeet appear;Sweet, by silver lakes and fountains,May his voice be to our ear.Let the tenants of our rocks,Shepherds watching o'er their flocks,Village swain and peasant boy,Thee salute with songs of joy!

Christian Herald! spread the storyOf Redemption's wondrous plan;'Tis Jehovah's brightest glory,'Tis His highest gift to man;Angels on their harps of gold,Love its glories to unfold;Heralds who its influence wield,Make the waste a fruitful field.To the fount of mercy soaring,On the wings of faith and love;And the depths of grace exploring,By the light shed from above;Show us whence life's waters flow,And where trees of blessing grow,Bearing fruit of heavenly bloom,Breathing Eden's rich perfume.Love to God and man expressing,In thy course of mercy speed;Lead to springs of joy and blessing,And with heavenly manna feedScotland's children high and low,Till the Lord they truly know:As to us our fathers told,He was known by them of old.To the young, in season vernal,Jesus in His grace disclose;As the tree of life eternal,'Neath whose shade they may repose,Shielded from the noontide ray,And from ev'ning's tribes of prey;And refresh'd with fruits of love,And with music from above.Christian Herald! may the blessingOf the Highest thee attend,That, this chiefest boon possessing,Thou may'st prove thy country's friendTend to make our land assumeSomething of its former bloom,When the dews of heaven were seenSparkling on its pastures green,

To the fount of mercy soaring,On the wings of faith and love;And the depths of grace exploring,By the light shed from above;Show us whence life's waters flow,And where trees of blessing grow,Bearing fruit of heavenly bloom,Breathing Eden's rich perfume.

Love to God and man expressing,In thy course of mercy speed;Lead to springs of joy and blessing,And with heavenly manna feedScotland's children high and low,Till the Lord they truly know:As to us our fathers told,He was known by them of old.

To the young, in season vernal,Jesus in His grace disclose;As the tree of life eternal,'Neath whose shade they may repose,Shielded from the noontide ray,And from ev'ning's tribes of prey;And refresh'd with fruits of love,And with music from above.

Christian Herald! may the blessingOf the Highest thee attend,That, this chiefest boon possessing,Thou may'st prove thy country's friendTend to make our land assumeSomething of its former bloom,When the dews of heaven were seenSparkling on its pastures green,

When the voice of warm devotionTo the throne of God arose—Mighty as the sound of ocean,Calm as nature in repose;Sweeter, than when ArabyPerfume breathes from flow'r and tree,Rising 'bove the shining sphere,To Jehovah's list'ning ear."

It is time we were going—but we wish to hear how thy voice sounds, Christian, when it reads. So read these same verses, first "into yourself," and then to us. They speak of mercies above your comprehension, and ours, and all men's; for they speak of the infinite goodness and mercy of God—but though thou hast committed in thy short life no sins, or but small, towards thy fellow-creatures—how couldst thou? yet thou knowest we are all sinful in His eyes, and thou knowest on whose merits is the reliance of our hopes of Heaven. Thank you, Christian. Three minutes from two by your house-clock—she gives a clear warning—and three minutes from two by our watch—rather curious this coincidence to such a nicety—we must take up our Crutch and go. Thank thee, bonny wee Christian—in wi' the bannocks intil our pouch—but we fear you must take us for a sad glutton.

"Zickety, dickety, dock,The mouse ran up the nock;The nock struck one,Down the mouse ran,Zickety, dickety, dock."

Come closer, Christian—and let us put it to thine ear. What a pretty face of wonder at the chime! Good people, you have work to do in the hay-field—let us part—God bless you—Good-by—farewell!

Half an hour since we parted—we cannot help being a little sad—and fear we were not so kind to the old people—not so considerate as we ought to have been—and perhaps, though pleased with us just now, they may say to one another before evening that we were too merry for our years. Nonsense. We were all merry together—daft Uncle among the lave—for the creature came stealing in and sat down on his own stool in the corner; and what's the use of wearing along face at all times like a Methodist minister? A Methodist minister! Why, John Wesley was facete, and Whitfield humorous, and Rowland Hill witty—though he, we believe, was not a Methody; yet were their hearts fountains of tears—and ours is not a rock—if it be, 'tis the rock of Horeb.

Ha, Hamish! Here we are beneath the Merlin Crag. What sport? Why, five brace is not so much amiss—and they are thumpers. Fifteen brace in all. Ducks and flappers. Seven leash. We are getting on.

"But what are these,So wither'd and so wild in their attire;That look not like th' inhabitants o' the earth,And yet are on't? Live you? or are you aughtThat man may question? You seem to understand me,By each at once her choppy finger layingUpon her skinny lips:—you should be women,And yet your beards forbid me to interpretThat you are so!"

Shakespeare is not familiar, we find, among the natives of Loch-Etive side—else these figures would reply,

"All hail, Macbeth! hail to thee, Thane of Glammis!"

But not satisfied with laying their choppy fingers on their skinny lips, they now put them to their plooky noses, having first each dipped fore and thumb in his mull, and gibber Gaelic, to us unintelligible as the quacking of ducks, when a Christian auditor has been prevented from catching its meaning by the gobbling of turkeys.

Witches at the least, and about to prophesy to us some pleasant events, that are to terminate disastrously in after years. Is there no nook of earth perfectly solitary—but must natural or supernatural footsteps haunt the remotest and most central places? But now we shall have our fortunes told in choice Erse, for sure these are the Children of the Mist, and perhaps they will favour us with a running commentary on Ossian. Stout, grim, heather-legged bodies they are, one and all, and luckily we are provided with snuff and tobacco sufficient for the whole crew. Were they even ghosts they will not refuse a sneeshin, and a Highland spirit will look picturesque puffing a cigar!—Hark! we know them andtheir vocation. These are the Genii of the Mountain-dew; and their hidden enginery, depend on't, is not far off, but buried in the bowels of some brae. See!—a faint mist dissipating itself over the heather! There—at work, shaming the idle waste, and in use and wont to break even the Sabbath-day, is aStill!

Do we look like Excisemen? The Crutch has indeed a suspicious family resemblance to a gauging-rod; and literary characters, like us, may well be mistaken for the Supervisor himself. But the smuggler's eye knows his enemy at a glance, as the fox knows a hound; and the whispering group discern at once that we are of a nobler breed. That one fear dispelled, Highland hospitality bids us welcome, even into the mouth of the malt-kiln, and, with a smack on our loof, the Chief volunteers to initiate us into the grand mysteries of the Worm.

The turf-door is flung outward on its lithe hinges, and already what a gracious smell! In we go, ushered by unbonneted Celts, gentlemen in manners wherever the kilt is worn; for the tartan is the symbol of courtesy, and Mac a good password all the world over between man and man. Lowland eyes are apt to water in the peat-reek, but ere long we shall have another "drappie in our ee," and drink to the Clans in the "uuchristened cretur." What a sad neglect in our education, among all the acquired lingoes extant, to have overlooked the Gaelic! Yet nobody who has ever heard P. R. preach an Erse Sermon, need despair of discoursing in that tongue after an hour's practice; so let us forget, if possible, every word of English, and the language now needed will rise up in its place.

And these figures in men's coats and women's petticoats are females? We are willing to believe it in spite of their beards. One of them absolutely suckling a child! Thank you, my dear sir, but we cannot swallow the contents of that quaich. Yet, let us try.—A little too warm, and rather harsh; but meat and drink to a man of age. That seems to be goat-milk cheese, and the scones are barley; and they and the speerit will wash one another down in an amicable plea, nor quarrel at close quarters. Honey too—heather-honey of this blessed year's produce. Hecate's forefinger mixes it in a quaich with mountain-dew—and that is Atholl-brose?

There cannot be the least doubt in the world that theHamiltonian system of teaching languages is one of the best ever invented. It will enable any pupil of common-run powers of attention to read any part of the New Testament in Greek in some twenty lessons of an hour each. But what is that to the principle of the Worm? Half a blessed hour has not elapsed since we entered into the door of this hill-house, and we offer twenty to one that we read Ossianad aperturam libri, in the original Gaelic. We feel as if we could translate the works of Jeremy Bentham into that tongue—ay, even Francis Maximus Macnab's Theory of the Universe. We guarantee ourselves to do both, this identical night before we go to sleep, and if the printers are busy during the intermediate hours, to correct the press in the morning. Why, there are not above five thousand roots—but we are getting a little gizzy—into a state of civilation in the wilderness—and, gentlemen, let us drink—in solemn silence—the "Memory of Fingal."

O St Cecilia! we did not lay our account with a bagpipe! What is the competition of pipers in the Edinburgh Theatre, small as it is, to this damnable drone in an earth-cell, eight feet by six! Yet while the drums of our ears are continuing to split like old parchment title-deeds to lands nowhere existing, and all our animal economy, from finger to toe, is one agonising dirl, Æolus himself sits as proud as Lucifer in Pandemonium; and as the old soldiers keep tending the Worm in the reek as if all were silence, the male-looking females, and especially the he-she with the imp at her breast, nod, and smirk, and smile, and snap their fingers, in a challenge to a straspey—and, by all that is horrible, a red hairy arm is round our neck, and we are half choked with the fumes of whisky-kisses. An hour ago we were dreaming of Malvina! and here she is with a vengeance, while we in the character of Oscar are embraced till almost all the Lowland breath in our body expires.

And this isstill-life.

Extraordinary it is, that, go where we will, we are in a wonderfully short time discovered to be Christopher North. A few years ago, the instant we found our feet in a mine in Cornwall, after a descent of about one-third the bored earth's diameter, we were saluted by name by a grim Monops who had not seen the upper regions for years, preferring the interior of the planet; and forthwith "Christopher North," "Christopher North," reverberated along the galleries, while the gnomes came flocking in all directions, with safety-lamps, to catch a glimpse of the famous Editor. On another occasion, we remember, when coasting the south of Ireland in our schooner, falling in with a boat like a cockle-shell, well out of the Bay of Bantry, and of the three half-naked Paddies that were ensnaring the finny race, two smoked us at the helm, and bawled up, "Kitty go bragh!" Were we to go up in a balloon, and by any accident descend in the interior of Africa, we have not the slightest doubt that Sultan Belloo would know us in a jiffy, having heard our person so frequently described by Major Denham and Captain Clapperton. So we are known, it seems, in the Still—by the men of the Worm? Yes—the principal proprietor in the concern is a schoolmaster over about Loch-Earn-Head—a man of no mean literary abilities, and an occasional contributor to the Magazine. He visits The Shop in breeches—but now mounts the kilt—and astonishes us by the versatility of his talents. In one of the most active working bees we recognise a cadie, formerly in Auld Reekie ycleped "The Despatch," now retired to the Braes of Balquhidder, and breathing strongly the spirit of his youth. With that heather-houghed gentleman, fiery-tressed as the God of Day, we were, for the quarter of a century that we held a large grazing farm, in the annual practice of drinking a gill at the Falkirk Tryst; and—wonderful, indeed, to think how old friends meet—we were present at the amputation of the right leg of that timber-toed hero with the bushy whiskers—in the Hospital of Rosetta—having accompanied Sir David Baird's splendid Indian army into Egypt.

Shying, for the present, the question in Political Economy, and viewing the subject in a moral, social, and poetical light, what, pray, is the true influence ofThe Still? It makes people idle. Idle? What species of idleness is that which consists in being up night and day—traversing moors and mountains in all weathers—constantly contriving the most skilful expedients for misleading the Excise, and which, on some disastrous day, when dragoons suddenly shake the desert—when all is lost except honour—hundreds of gallons of wash (alas! alas! a-day!) wickedly wasted among the heather-roots, and the whole beautiful Apparatus lying battered and spiritless in the sun beneath the accursed blows of the Pagans—returns, after a few weeks set apart to natural grief and indignation, with unabated energy, to the self-same work, even within view of the former ruins, and pouring out a libation of the first amalgamated hotness that deserves the name of speerit, devotes the whole Board of Excise to the Infernal Gods?

The argument of idleness has not a leg to stand on, and falls at once to the ground.—But the Still makes men dishonest. We grant that there is a certain degree of dishonesty in cheating the Excise; and we shall allow yourself to fix it, who give as fine a caulker from the sma' still as any moral writer on Honesty with whom we have the pleasure occasionally to take a family dinner. But the poor fellows either grow or purchase their own malt. They do not steal it; and many is the silent benediction that we have breathed over a bit patch of barley, far up on its stony soil among the hills, bethinking us that it would yield up its precious spirit unexcised! Neither do they charge for it any very extravagant price—for what is twelve, fourteen, twenty shillings a-gallon for such drink divine as is now steaming before us in that celestial caldron?

Having thus got rid of the charge of idleness and dishonesty, nothing more needs to be said on the Moral Influence of the Still; and we come now, in the second place, to consider it in a Social Light. The biggest bigot will not dare to deny, that without whisky the Highlands of Scotland would be uninhabitable. And if all the population were gone, or extinct, where then would be your social life? Smugglers are seldom drunkards; neither are they men of boisterous manners or savage dispositions. In general, they are grave, sedate, peaceable characters, not unlike elders of the Kirk. Even Excisemen admit them, except on rare occasions when human patience is exhausted, to be merciful. Four pleasanter men do not now exist in the bosom of the earth, than the friends with whom we are now on the hobnob. Stolen waters are sweet—a profound and beautiful reflection—and no doubt originally made by some peripatetic philosopher at a Still. The very soul of the strong drink evaporates with the touch of the gauger's wand. An evil day would it indeed be for Scotland, that should witness the extinguishment of all herfree and unlicensed mountain stills! The charm of Highland hospitality would be wan and withered, and thedoch-an-dorras, instead of a blessing, would sound like a ban.

We have said that smugglers are never drunkards, not forgetting that general rules are proved by exceptions; nay, we go farther, and declare that the Highlanders are the soberest people in Europe. Whisky is to them a cordial, a medicine, a life-preserver. Chief of the umbrella and wraprascal! were you ever in the Highlands? We shall produce a single day from any of the fifty-two weeks of the year that will out-argue you on the present subject, in half an hour. What sound is that? The rushing of rain from heaven, and the sudden outcry of a thousand waterfalls. Look through a chink in the bothy, and far as you can see for the mists, the heath-covered desert is steaming like the smoke of a smouldering fire. Winds biting as winter come sweeping on their invisible chariots armed with scythes, down every glen, and scatter far and wide over the mountains the spray of the raging lochs. Now you have a taste of the summer cold, more dangerous far than that of Yule, for it often strikes "aitches" into the unprepared bones, and congeals the blood of the shelterless shepherd on the hill. But one glorious gurgle of the speerit down the throat of a storm-stayed man! and bold as a rainbow he faces the reappearing sun, and feels assured (though there he may be mistaken) of dying at a good old age.

Then think, oh think, how miserably poor are most of those men who have fought our battles, and so often reddened their bayonets in defence of our liberties and our laws! Would you grudge them a little whisky? And depend upon it, a little is the most, taking one day of the year with another, that they imbibe. You figure to yourself two hundred thousand Highlanders, taking snuff, and chewing tobacco, and drinking whisky, all year long. Why, one pound of snuff, two of tobacco, and two gallons of whisky, would be beyond the mark of the yearly allowance of every grown-up man! Thousands never taste such luxuries at all—meal and water, potatoes and salt, their only food. The animal food, sir, and the fermented liquors of various kinds, Foreign and British, which to our certain knowledge you have swallowed within the last twelve months, would have sufficed for fifty families in our abstemious region of mist and snow. We haveknown you drink a bottle of champagne, a bottle of port, and two bottles of claret, frequently at a sitting, equal, in prime cost, to three gallons of the best Glenlivet! AndYou(who, by the way, are an English clergyman, a circumstance we had entirely forgotten, and have published a Discourse against Drunkenness, dedicated to a Bishop) pour forth the Lamentations of Jeremiah over the sinful multitude of Small Stills! Hypocrisy! hypocrisy! where shalt thou hide thy many-coloured sides?

Whisky is found by experience to be, on the whole, a blessing in so misty and mountainous a country. It destroys disease and banishes death; without some such stimulant the people would die of cold. You will see a fine old Gael, of ninety or a hundred, turn up his little finger to a caulker with an air of patriarchal solemnity altogether scriptural; his great-grandchildren eyeing him with the most respectful affection, and the youngest of them toddling across the floor, to take the quaich from his huge, withered, and hairy hand, which he lays on the amiable Joseph's sleek craniology, with a blessing heartier through the Glenlivet, and with all the earnestness of religion. There is no disgrace in getting drunk—in the Highlands—not even if you are of the above standing—for where the people are so poor, such a state is but of rare occurrence; while it is felt all over the land of sleet and snow, that a 'drap o' the cretur' is a very necessary of life, and that but for its 'dew' the mountains would be uninhabitable. At fairs, and funerals, and marriages, and suchlike merry meetings, sobriety is sent to look after the sheep; but, except on charitable occasions of that kind, sobriety stays at home among the peat-reek, and is contented with crowdy. Who that ever stooped his head beneath a Highland hut would grudge a few gallons of Glenlivet to its poor but unrepining inmates? The seldomer they get drunk the better—and it is but seldom they do so; but let the rich man—the monied moralist, who bewails and begrudges the Gael a modicum of the liquor of life, remember the doom of a certain Dives, who, in a certain place that shall now be nameless, cried, but cried in vain, for a drop of water. Lord bless the Highlanders, say we, for the most harmless, hospitable, peaceable, brave people that ever despised breeches, blew pibrochs, took invincible standards, and believed in the authenticity ofOssian's poems. In that pure and lofty region ignorance is not, as elsewhere, the mother of vice—penury cannot repress the noble rage of the mountaineer as "he sings aloud old songs that are the music of the heart;" while superstition herself has an elevating influence, and will be suffered, even by religion, to show her shadowy shape and mutter her wild voice through the gloom that lies on the heads of the remote glens, and among the thousand caves of echo in her iron-bound coasts, dashed on for ever—night and day—summer and winter—by those sleepless seas, who have no sooner laid their heads on the pillow than up they start with a howl that cleaves the Orcades, and away off in search of shipwrecks round the corner of Cape Wrath.

In the third place, what shall we say of the poetical influence ofStills? What more poetical life can there be than that of the men with whom we are now quaffing the barley-bree? They live with the moon and stars. All the night winds are their familiars. If there be such things as ghosts, and fairies, and apparitions—and that there are, no man who has travelled much by himself after sunset will deny, except from the mere love of contradiction—they see them; or when invisible, which they generally are, hear them—here—there—everywhere—in sky, forest, cave, or hollow-sounding world immediately beneath their feet. Many poets walk these wilds; nor do their songs perish. They publish not with Blackwood or with Murray—but for centuries on centuries, such songs are the preservers, often the sources, of the oral traditions that go glimmering and gathering down the stream of years. Native are they to the mountains as the blooming heather, nor shall they ever cease to invest them with the light of poetry—in defiance of large farms, Methodist preachers, and the Caledonian Canal.

People are proud of talking of solitude. It redounds, they opine, to the honour of their great-mindedness to be thought capable of living, for an hour or two, by themselves, at a considerable distance from knots or skeins of their fellow-creatures. Byron, again, thought he showed his superiority by swearing as solemnly as a man can do in the Spenserian stanza that

"To sit alone, and muse o'er flood and fell,"

has nothing whatever to do with solitude—and that, if youwish to know and feel what solitude really is, you must go to Almack's.

"This is to be alone,—this, this is solitude."

His Lordship's opinions were often peculiar—but the passage has been much admired; therefore we are willing to believe that the Great Desert is, in point of loneliness, unable to stand a philosophical, much less a poetical comparison, with a well-frequented Fancy-ball. But is the statement not borne out by facts? Zoology is on its side—more especially two of its most interesting branches, Entomology and Ornithology.

Go to a desert and clap your back against a cliff. Do you think yourself alone? What a ninny! Your great clumsy splay feet are bruising to death a batch of beetles. See that spider whom you have widowed, running up and down your elegant leg, in distraction and despair, bewailing the loss of a husband who, however savage to the ephemerals, had always smiled sweetly upon her. Meanwhile your shoulders have crushed a colony of small red ants settled in a moss city beautifully roofed with lichens—and that accounts for the sharp tickling behind your ear, which you keep scratching, no Solomon, in ignorance of the cause of that effect. Should you sit down—we must beg to draw a veil over your hurdies, which at the moment extinguish a fearful amount of animal life—creation may be said to groan under them; and, insect as you are yourself, you are defrauding millions of insects of their little day. All the while you are supposing yourself alone! Now, are you not, as we hinted, a prodigious ninny? But the whole wilderness—as you choose to call it—is crawling with various life. London with its million and a half of inhabitants—including of course the suburbs—is, compared with it, an empty joke. Die—and you will soon be picked to the bones. The air swarms with sharpers—and an insurrection of radicals will attack your corpse from the worm-holes of the earth. Corbies, ravens, hawks, eagles, all the feathered furies of beak and bill, will come flying ere sunset to anticipate the maggots, and carry your remains—if you will allow us to call them so—over the whole of Argyllshire in many living sepulchres. We confess ourselves unable to see the solitude of this—and begin to agree with Byron, that a man is less crowded at a masquerade.

But the same subject may be illustrated less tragically, and even with some slight comic effect. A man among mountains is often surrounded on all sides with mice and moles. What cosy nests do the former construct at the roots of heather, among tufts of grass in the rushes, and the moss on the greensward! As for the latter, though you think you know a mountain from a molehill, you are much mistaken; for what is a mountain, in many cases, but a collection of molehills—and of fairy knolls?—which again introduce a new element into the composition, and show, in still more glaring colours, your absurdity in supposing yourself to be in solitude. The "Silent People" are around you at every step. You may not see them—for they are dressed in invisible green; but they see you, and that unaccountable whispering and buzzing sound one often hears in what we call the wilderness, what is it, or what can it be, but the fairies making merry at your expense, pointing out to each other the extreme silliness of your meditative countenance, and laughing like to split at your fond conceit of being alone among a multitude of creatures far wiser than yourself.

But should all this fail to convince you that you are never less alone than when you think yourself alone, and that a man never knows what it is to be in the very heart of life till he leaves London, and takes a walk in Glen-Etive—suppose yourself to have been leaning with your back against that knoll, dreaming of the far-off race of men, when all at once the support gives way inwards, and you tumble head over heels in among a snug coterie of kilted Celts, in the very act of creating Glenlivet in a great warlock's caldron, seething to the top with the Spirit of Life!

Such fancies as these, among many others, were with us in the Still. But a glimmering and a humming and a dizzy bewilderment hangs over that time and place, finally dying away into oblivion. Here are we sitting in a glade of a birch-wood in what must be Gleno—some miles from the Still. Hamish asleep, as usual, whenever he lies down, and all the dogs yowffing in dreams, and Surefoot standing with his long beard above ours, almost the same in longitude. We have been more, we suspect, than half-seas over, and are now lying on the shore of sobriety, almost a wreck. The truth is, that the new spirit is even more dangerous than the new light.Both at first dazzle, then obfuscate, and lastly darken into temporary death. There is, we fear, but one word of one syllable in the English language that could fully express our late condition. Let our readers solve the enigma. Oh! those quaichs! By

"What drugs, what spells,What conjurations, and what mighty magic"

was Christopher overthrown! A strange confusion of sexes, as of men in petticoats and women in breeches—gowns transmogrified into jackets—caps into bonnets—and thick naked hairy legs into slim ankles decent in hose—all somewhere whirling and dancing by, dim and obscure, to the sound of something groaning and yelling, sometimes inarticulately, as if it came from something instrumental, and then mixed up with a wild gibberish, as if shrieking, somehow or other, from living lips, human and brute—for a dream of yowling dogs is over all—utterly confounds us as we strive to muster in recollection the few last hours that have passed tumultuously through our brain—and then a wide black moor, sometimes covered with day, sometimes with night, stretches around us, hemmed in on all sides by the tops of mountains seeming to reel in the sky. Frequent flashes of fire, and a whirring as of the wings of birds—but sound and sight alike uncertain—break again upon our dream. Let us not mince the matter—we can afford the confession—we have been overtaken by liquor—sadly intoxicated—out with it at once! Frown not, fairest of all sweet—for we lay our calamity, not to the charge of the Glenlivet circling in countless quaichs, but at the door of that inveterate enemy to sobriety—the Fresh Air.

But now we are as sober as a judge. Pity our misfortune—rather than forgive our sin. We entered that Still in a State of innocence before the Fall. Where we fell, we know not—in divers ways and sundry places—between that magic cell on the breast of Benachochie, and this glade in Gleno. But

"There are worse things in life than a fall among heather."

Surefoot, we suppose, kept himself tolerably sober—and O'Bronte, at each successive cloit, must have assisted us to remount—for Hamish, from his style of sleeping, must have been as bad as his master; and, after all, it is wonderful tothink how we got here—over hags and mosses, and marshes, and quagmires, like those in which "armies whole have sunk." But the truth is, that never in the whole course of our lives—and that course has been a strange one—did we ever so often as once lose our way. Set us down blindfolded on Zahara, and we will beat the caravan to Timbuctoo. Something or other mysteriously indicative of the right direction touches the soles of our feet in the shape of the ground they tread; and even when our souls have gone soaring far away, or have sunk within us, still have our feet pursued the shortest and the safest path that leads to the bourne of our pilgrimage. Is not that strange? But not stranger surely than the flight of the bee, on his first voyage over the coves of the wilderness to the far-off heather-bells—or of the dove that is sent by some Jew stock-jobber, to communicate to Dutchmen the rise or fall of the funds, from London to Hamburg, from the clear shores of silver Thames to the muddy shallows of the Zuyder Zee.

Let us inspect the state of Brown Bess. Right barrel empty—left barrel—what is the meaning of this?—crammed to the muzzle! Ay, that comes of visiting Stills. We have been snapping away at the coveys and single birds all over the moor, without so much as a pluff, with the right-hand cock—and then, imagining that we had fired, have kept loading away at the bore to the left, till, see! the ramrod absolutely stands upright in the air, with only about three inches hidden in the hollow! What a narrow—a miraculous escape has the world had of losing Christopher North! Had he drawn that trigger instead of this, Brown Bess would have burst to a moral certainty, and blown the old gentleman piecemeal over the heather. "In the midst of life we are in death!" Could we but know one in a hundred of the close approachings of the skeleton, we should lead a life of perpetual shudder. Often and often do his bony fingers almost clutch our throat, or his foot is put out to give us a cross-buttock. But a saving arm pulls him back, ere we have seen so much as his shadow. We believe all this—but the belief that comes not from something steadfastly present before our eyes, is barren; and thus it is, since believing is not seeing, that we walk hoodwinked nearly all our days, and worst of all blindness is that of ingratitude and forgetfulness of Him whose shield is for ever over us, and whose mercy shall be with us in the world beyond the grave.

By all that is most beautifully wild in animated nature, a Roe! a Roe! Shall we slay him where he stands, or let him vanish in silent glidings in among his native woods? What a fool for asking ourselves such a question! Slay him where he stands to be sure—for many pleasant seasons hath he led in his leafy lairs, a life of leisure, delight, and love, and thehour is come when he must sink down on his knees in a sudden and unpainful death—fair sylvan dreamer! We have drawn that multitudinous shot—and both barrels of Brown Bess now are loaded with ball—for Hamish is yet lying with his head on the rifle. Whiz! whiz! one is through lungs, and another through neck—and seemingly rather to sleep than die (so various are the many modes of expiration!)

"In quietness he lays him downGently, as a weary waveSinks, when the summer breeze has died,Against an anchor'd vessel's side."

Ay—Hamish—you may start to your feet—and see realised the vision of your sleep. What a set of distracted dogs! But O'Bronte first catches sight of the quarry—and clearing, with grasshopper spangs, the patches of stunted coppice, stops stock-still beside the roe in the glade, as if admiring and wondering at the beauty of the fair spotted creature! Yes, dogs have a sense of the beautiful. Else how can you account for their loving so to lie down at the feet and lick the hands of the virgin whose eyes are mild, and forehead meek, and hair of placid sunshine, rather than act the same part towards ugly women, who, coarser and coarser in each successive widow-hood, when at their fourth husband are beyond expression hideous, and felt to be so by the whole canine tribe? Spenser must have seen some dog like O'Bronte lying at the feet and licking the hand of some virgin—sweet reader, like thyself—else never had he painted the posture of that Lion who guarded through Fairyland

"Heavenly Una and her milk-white lamb."

A divine line of Wordsworth's, which we shall never cease quoting on to the last of our inditings, even to our dying day!

But where, Hamish, are all the flappers, the mawsies, and the mallards? What! You have left them—hare, grouse, bag, and all, at the Still! We remember it now—and all the distillers are to-night to be at our Tent, bringing with them feathers, fur, and hide—ducks, pussy, and deer. But take the roe on your stalwart shoulders, Hamish, and bear it down to the sylvan dwelling at the mouth of Gleno. Surefoot has asufficient burden in us—for we are waxing more corpulent every day—and ere long shall be a Silenus.

Ay, travel all the world over, and a human dwelling lovelier in its wildness shall you nowhere find, than the one that hides itself in the depth of its own beauty, beneath the last of the green knolls besprinkling Gleno, dropt down there in presence of the peacefulest bay of all Loch-Etive, in whose cloud-softened bosom it sees itself reflected among the congenial imagery of the skies. And, hark! a murmur as of swarming bees! 'Tis a Gaelic school—set down in this loneliest of all places, by that religious wisdom that rests not till the seeds of saving knowledge shall be sown over all the wilds. That greyhaired minister of God, whom all Scotland venerates, hath been here from the great city on one of his holy pilgrimages. And, lo! at his bidding, and that of his coadjutors in the heavenly work, a Schoolhouse has risen with its blue roof—the pure diamond-sparkling slates of Ballahulish—beneath a tuft of breeze-breaking trees. But whence come they—the little scholars—who are all murmuring there? We said that the shores of Loch-Etive were desolate. So seem they to the eye of Imagination, that loves to gather up a hundred scenes into one, and to breathe over the whole the lonesome spirit of one vast wilderness. But Imagination was a liar ever—a romancer and a dealer in dreams. Hers are the realms of fiction,

"A boundless contiguity of shade!"

But the land of truth is ever the haunt of the heart—there her eye reposes or expatiates, and what sweet, humble, and lowly visions arise before it, in a light that fadeth not away, but abideth for ever! Cottages, huts, shielings, she sees hidden—few and far between indeed—but all filled with Christian life—among the hollows of the hills—and up, all the way up the great glens—and by the shores of the loneliest lochs—and sprinkled, not so rarely, among the woods that enclose little fields and meadows of their own—all the way down—more and more animated—till children are seen gathering before their doors the shells of the contiguous sea.

Look and listen far and wide through a sunshiny day, over a rich wooded region, with hedgerows, single trees, groves, and forests, and yet haply not one bird is to be seen or heard—neither plumage nor song. Yet many a bright lyrist isthere, all mute till the harbinger-hour of sunset, when all earth, air, and heaven, shall be ringing with one song. Almost even so is it with this mountain-wilderness. Small bright-haired, bright-eyed, bright-faced children, come stealing out in the morning from many hidden huts, each solitary in its own site, the sole dwelling on its own brae or its own dell. Singing go they one and all, alone or in small bands, trippingly along the wide moors; meeting into pleasant parties at cross-paths or at fords, till one stated hour sees them all gathered together, as now in the small Schoolhouse of Gleno, and the echo of the happy hum of the simple scholars is heard soft among the cliffs. But all at once the hum now ceases, and there is a hurry out of doors, and an exulting cry; for the shadow of Hamish, with the roe on his shoulders, has passed the small lead-latticed window, and the Schoolroom has emptied itself on the green, which is now brightening with the young blossoms of life. "A roe—a roe—a roe!"—is still the chorus of their song; and the Schoolmaster himself, though educated at college for the kirk, has not lost the least particle of his passion for the chase, and with kindling eyes assists Hamish in laying down his burden, and gazes on the spots with a hunter's joy. We leave you to imagine his delight and his surprise when, at first hardly trusting his optics, he beholdsChristopher on Surefoot, and then, patting the shelty on the shoulder, bows affectionately and respectfully to the Old Man, and while our hands grasp, takes a pleasure in repeating over and over again that celebrated surname—North—North—North.

After a brief and bright hour of glee and merriment, mingled with grave talk, nor marred by the sweet undisturbance of all those elves maddening on the Green around the Roe, we express a wish that the scholars may all again be gathered together in the Schoolroom, to undergo an examination by the Christian Philosopher of Buchanan Lodge. 'Tis in all things gentle, in nothing severe. All slates are instantly covered with numerals, and 'tis pleasant to see their skill in finest fractions, and in the wonder-working golden rule of three. And now the rustling of their manuals is like that of rainy breezes among the summer leaves. No fears are here that the Book of God will lose its sanctity by becoming too familiar to eye, lip, and hand. Like the sunlight in the sky, the lightthat shines there is for ever dear—and unlike any sunlight in any skies, never is it clouded, permanently bright, and undimmed before pious eyes by one single shadow. We ought, perhaps, to be ashamed, but we are not so—we are happy that not an urchin is there who is not fully better acquainted with the events and incidents recorded in the Old and New Testaments than ourselves; and think not that all these could have been so faithfully committed to memory without the perpetual operation of the heart. Words are forgotten unless they are embalmed in spirit; and the air of the world, blow afterwards rudely as it may, shall never shrivel up one syllable that has been steeped into their souls by the spirit of the Gospel—felt by these almost infant disciples of Christ to be the very breath of God.

It has turned out one of the sweetest and serenest afternoons that ever breathed a hush over the face and bosom of August woods. Can we find it in our mind to think, in our heart to feel, in our hand to write, that Scotland is now even more beautiful than in our youth! No—not in our heart to feel—but in our eyes to see—for they tell us it is the truth. The people have cared for the land which the Lord their God hath given them, and have made the wilderness to blossom like the rose. The same Arts that have raised their condition have brightened their habitation; Agriculture, by fertilising the loveliness of the low-lying vales, has sublimed the sterility of the stupendous mountain heights—and the thundrous tides, flowing up the lochs, bring power to the cornfields and pastures created on hill-sides once horrid with rocks. The whole country laughs with a more vivid verdure—more pure the flow of her streams and rivers—for many a fen and marsh has been made dry, and the rainbow pictures itself on clearer cataracts.

The Highlands were, in our memory, overspread with a too dreary gloom. Vast tracts there were in which Nature herself seemed miserable; and if the heart find no human happiness to repose on, Imagination will fold her wings, or flee away to other regions, where in her own visionary world she may soar at will, and at will stoop down to the homes of this real earth. Assuredly the inhabitants are happier than they then were—better off—and therefore the change, whatever loss it may comprehend, has been a gain in good. Alas! poverty—penury—want—even of the necessaries of life—are too often there still rife; but patience and endurance dwell there, heroic and better far, Christian—nor has Charity been slow to succour regions remote but not inaccessible, Charity acting in power delegated by Heaven to our National Councils. And thus we can think not only without sadness, but with an elevation of soul inspired by such example of highest virtue in humblest estate, and in our own sphere exposed to other trials be induced to follow it, set to us in many "a virtuous household, though exceeding poor." What are the poetical fancies about "mountain scenery," that ever fluttered on the leaves of albums, in comparison with any scheme, however prosaic, that tends in any way to increase human comforts? The best sonnet that ever was written by a versifier from the South to the Crown of Benlomond, is not worth the worst pair of worsted stockings trotted in by a small Celt going with his dad to seek for a lost sheep among the snow-wreaths round his base. As for eagles, and ravens, and red-deer, "those magnificent creatures so stately and bright," let them shift for themselves—and perhaps in spite of all our rhapsodies—the fewer of them the better; but among geese, and turkeys, and poultry, let propagation flourish—the fleecy folk baa—and the hairy hordes bellow on a thousand hills. All the beauty and sublimity on earth—over the Four Quarters of the World—is not worth a straw if valued against a good harvest. An average crop is satisfactory; but a crop that soars high above an average—a golden year of golden ears—sends joy into the heart of heaven. No prating now of the degeneracy of the potato. We can sing now with our single voice, like a numerous chorus, of

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