The last cotter had been seen, the last _levée_ had been held, and we then climbed up to the crown of the hill to visit the traces of an old fortification, or _dün_, as the Skye people call it. These ruins, and they are thickly scattered over the island, are supposed to be of immense antiquity--so old, that Ossian may have sung in each to a circle of Fingalian chiefs. When we reached the _dün_--a loose congregation of mighty stones, scattered in a circular form, with some rude remnants of an entrance and a covered way--we sat down, and the Landlord lighted a cheroot. Beneath lay the little village covered with smoke. Far away to the right, Skye stretched into ocean, pale headland after headland. In front, over a black wilderness of moor, rose the conical forms of Macleod's Tables, and one thought of the "restless bright Atlantic plain" beyond, the endless swell and shimmer of watery ridges, the clouds of sea birds, the sudden glistening upheaval of a whale and its disappearance, the smoky trail of a steamer on the horizon, the tacking of white-sailed craft. On the left, there was nothing but moory wilderness and hill, with something on a slope flashing in the sunshine like a diamond. A falcon palpitating in the intense blue above, the hare-hound cocked her ears and looked out alertly, the Landlord with his field-glass counted the sheep feeding on the hill-side a couple of miles off. Suddenly he closed the glass, and lay back on the heather, puffing a column of white smoke into the air. "I suppose," said I, "your going in and out amongst your tenants to-day is very much the kind of thing you used to do in India?" "Exactly. I know these fellows, every man of them--and they know me. We get on very well together. I know everything they do. I know all their secrets, all their family histories, everything they wish, and everything they fear. I think I have done them some good since I came amongst them." "But," said I, "I wish you to explain to me your system of penal servitude, as you call it. In what respect do the people on the cultivated hillside differ from the people in the black ground behind the village?"