The Highlands may be all the more prosperous for the new husbandry that drove so many of their sons to seek fortune in distant lands, often to find fame. It might be well for the people to have such enterprise roughly forced on a conservative spirit which scowled at the introduction of potatoes, turnips, and other improvements to their backward culture. What their good old days were in truth may be guessed in the smoky huts where they still love to pig together, stubbornly refusing to adapt themselves to an order in which sheep are found more profitable than men, and deer than sheep. The big sheep-farmer from the south makes more of the land than the easy-going crofter; yet the smallest drop of Celtic blood cannot but stir to see a clansman touching his hat for tips from [Illustration: A SHEPHERD’S COT IN GLEN NEVIS, INVERNESS-SHIRE] southron stockbrokers, and serving as obsequious attendant to the American millionaires who enclose his native heath. Naturally the Highlander is a gentleman, for all his faults, with instinctive courtesy to soften his somewhat sullen pride. More than once I have had a tip refused by a Highland servant, as nowhere else in the world unless in the United States before their social independence, too, began to be demoralised by the largesses of successful speculators, who, after piling up dollars by “rings” and “corners,” find they can buy less observance for their money at home than by corrupting a race declared by Mrs. Grant of Laggan, herself reared in America, “to resemble the French in being poor with a better grace than other people.” The Highlander was a born sportsman as well as a gentleman, who by his paternal chiefs would not be called closely to account for every deer and salmon that went to eke out his frugal fare. Now he can shoot or fish only in the way of business, the very laird making two ends meet by letting out his moors and streams to a stranger, in whose service the sons of warriors play the gamekeeper and gillie, with more or less good will, loading the gun and carrying the well-stocked luncheon basket, perhaps not always very hearty in hunting down those Ishmaelite brethren who do a little grouse-netting on their own account for the supply of London tables by the 12th of August. Sometimes the Gael takes revenge by being able to hint his scorn for the sportsmanship of these new masters; but as often, to do them justice, they will not give him this poor satisfaction. A well-known southron humorist tells a story which needs his voice to bring out the point, how he missed a deer, to the disgust of the keeper, and how, trying to conciliate this worthy by admiration of a fine head, he got the dry answer--“It’s no near so fine as the one ye shot this morning--a-a-at!”