salt herring served for dinner, and all the expenses of the academical year were covered by some twelve to sixteen pounds! We are by no means sure that knowledge was not more valued when it was attainable only at such a cost of self-denial and rigid effort; and we certainly believe that it was more thorough, more entirely a man’s own, because it was wrung, so to speak, from the reluctant goddess by strenuous, steadfast work and sheer mental travail. To the Age of Gold and the Age of Iron has succeeded the Age of Veneer; and we trouble ourselves too little now-a-days, in spite of the teaching of Ruskin and Carlyle, about the solidness and durability of the material, so long as it will take a ready polish. But what a strange world was that of the Scotch peasant in those far off days--far off at least they _seem_, on account of the immense social revolution that has taken place, and set between the _now_ and the _then_ a profound chasm. Men often speak of the hard-headedness and matter-of-fact stolidity of the Scotch nature; but is it not true that below the surface lies an abundant fountain of wild, quaint, original fancy? And how, in the olden time, it surrounded itself with signs and omens and wonders! How it loved to put itself in communion, as it were, with that _other_ world which lies beyond and yet around us, which perplexes us with its subtle intelligence, which we cannot discern, though of its presence we are always sensible! From the cradle to the grave the Scotch peasant went his way attended by the phantoms of this mysterious world; always recognising its warnings, always seeing the shadows which it cast of coming events, and so burdening himself with a weight of grim and eëry superstition, that we marvel he did not stumble and grow faint, seeing that his dreary Calvinistic creed could have brought him little hope or comfort. Nay, it is a question whether his superstition did not partly grow out of, or was fostered by, his hard, cold religion. Superstition is the shadow of Religion, and from the shadow we may infer the nature of the substance or object that casts it. But of these darker things we shall not speak. Let us trace a few of the common traditions and customs of the people, though in doing so we digress, perhaps, from the main lines of the present volume. While less impressive than the mere mystical practices, they proceeded from the same source,--an imagination haunted by the formidable presence of Nature, by the forms of lofty mountains, by the mysteries of pine-clad ravines, and the murmurs of storm-swept lochs and falling waters. For it has been truly said that the Scotch people have been made what they are by Scotland; that the Land has moulded and fashioned the People; and that in their literature, their religion, their manners, their history, the influence is seen of the physical characteristics of the country.