The next day made a walk to Helmsdale, a distance of about eighteen miles. The weather was favorable, the scenery grand and varied with almost every feature that could give it interest. The finest of roads wound in and out around the mountain headlands, so that alternately I was walking upon a lofty esplanade overlooking the still expanse of the steel-blue sea, then facing inward to the gorges of the grand and solemn hills. Found comfortable quarters in one of the inns of Helmsdale, a vigorous, busy, fishing village nestling under the shadow of the mountains at the mouth of a little river of the same name. After tea, went down to the wharf or quay and had some conversation with one of the masters of the business. He cured and put up about 30,000 barrels of herrings himself in a season, employing, while it lasted, 500 persons. Their chief market is the North of Europe, especially Poland, and the business was consequently much depressed on account of the troubles in that country. The occupation of this little sea-side village illustrated the ramifications of commerce. They imported their salt from Liverpool, their staves from Norway and their hoops from London. Set out again immediately after breakfast, feeling that I was drawing near to the end of my journey. I was soon in the treeless county of Caithness, so fraught with the wild romance of the Norsemen. Passed over the bleakest district I had yet seen, called Old Ord, a cold, rough, cloud-breeding region that the very heavens above seem to frown upon with a scowl of dissatisfaction. Still, the road over this dark, mountain desert, though staked on each side to keep the traveller from wandering in the blinding snows of winter, was as beautifully kept as the carriage-way in the park of Dunrobin Castle. The sending of an English queen to conciliate the Welsh, by giving birth to a son in one of their castles, was not a much better stroke of policy than that of England in perforating Scotland to the Northern Sea with this unparalleled and splendid road, constructed at first for a military purpose. I heard a man repeat a couplet, probably of unwritten poetry, in popular vogue among the Highlands, and which has quite an Irish collocation of ideas. It is spoken thus, as far as I can recollect-- Who knew these roads ere they were made Should bless the Lord for General Wade.