The absence of vulgar crime is still more marked in the Highlands, where, but for whisky and religious zeal, there would be little need of magistrates. “Ye see, if they stole anything, they couldn’t get it off the island,” a Bute cynic once explained to me; but on the mainland opposite, I have known the ladies of a family leave their bathing dress hanging over the hedge by the roadside for weeks together. It was only on the grand and gallant scale that John Highlandman made a confusion between _meum_ and _tuum_. But a distinctly litigious disposition in trifles keeps northern lawyers from starving among clients who, like Bartoline Saddletree and Peter Peebles, often cherish a strong amateur interest in law. In Dandie Dinmont’s country, we know, a man was “aye the better thought o’ for having been afore the Feifteen.” Now that everybody subscribes to an Encyclopædia, it may not be necessary to remind readers how the Scots law is founded on the Roman, and how the practice of courts differs north and south of the Tweed. The administration of justice in Scotland seems now an example to England, whatever it may have been in the past. Feudalism died slow here. Baron courts continued to be held to our own day, though shorn of such unjust privilege as that by which the lord’s bailie decided questions between himself and his tenants. There was a time when only high treason was withheld from the jurisdiction of these private Solons. Then they lost power to adjudicate in the “four pleas of the crown,”--murder, rape, robbery, and arson, unless in the case of the slayer taken red-hand or the thief _infang_ with the stolen property in his possession within the barony bounds. So late as 1707 Lord Drummond was good enough to “lend” his executioner to the city of Perth. After Culloden, hereditary judges like the Baron of Bradwardine were wholly deprived of the right of _furca et fossa_, the drowning of female and hanging of male offenders. Yet a generation ago the dispensers of minor justice in certain towns were the “bailies” of the superior, whom in one case I have known to be an Australian squatter and his distant deputy a respectable carpenter, while in such a town as Dalkeith, the Duke of Buccleuch appointed an able lawyer as permanent magistrate. The adoption of the Police Act brought this state of things to an end; and the baron’s judicial rights, if not formally abolished, have practically dwindled out of existence. The part of police magistrate and county court judge is doubled by the sheriff, an official whose title may be a [Illustration: A PEEP OF THE GRAMPIANS, INVERNESS-SHIRE]