On the third day Boswell went out, with old Malcolm, to see a ruined castle, which he found less entire than was promised, but he saw the country. I did not go, for the castle was, perhaps, ten miles off, and there is no riding at Raarsa, the whole island being rock or mountain, from which the cattle often fall, and are destroyed. It is very barren, and maintains, as near as I could collect, about seven hundred inhabitants, perhaps ten to a square mile. In these countries you are not to suppose that you shall find villages or inclosures. The traveller wanders through a naked desert, gratified sometimes, but rarely, with the sight of cows, and now and then finds a heap of loose stones and turf, in a cavity between rocks, where a being, born with all those powers which education expands, and all those sensations which culture refines, is condemned to shelter itself from the wind and rain. Philosophers there are, who try to make themselves believe, that this life is happy; but they believe it only while they are saying it, and never yet produced conviction in a single mind; he whom want of words or images sunk into silence still thought, as he thought before, that privation of pleasure can never please, and that content is not to be much envied, when it has no other principle than ignorance of good. This gloomy tranquillity, which some may call fortitude, and others, wisdom, was, I believe, for a long time, to be very frequently found in these dens of poverty; every man was content to live like his neighbours, and, never wandering from home, saw no mode of life preferable to his own, except at the house of the laird, or the laird's nearest relations, whom he considered as a superiour order of beings, to whose luxuries or honours he had no pretensions. But the end of this reverence and submission seems now approaching; the highlanders have learned, that there are countries less bleak and barren than their own, where, instead of working for the laird, every man will till his own ground, and eat the produce of his own labour. Great numbers have been induced, by this discovery, to go, every year, for some time past, to America. Macdonald and Macleod, of Skie, have lost many tenants and many labourers; but Raarsa has not yet been forsaken by a single inhabitant. Rona is yet more rocky and barren than Raarsa, and, though it contains, perhaps, four thousand acres, is possessed only by a herd of cattle and the keepers. I find myself not very able to walk upon the mountains, but one day I went out to see the walls, yet standing, of an ancient chapel. In almost every island the superstitious votaries of the Romish church erected places of worship, in which the drones of convents, or cathedrals, performed the holy offices; but, by the active zeal of protestant devotion, almost all of them have sunk into ruin. The chapel at Raarsa is now only considered as the burying-place of the family, and, I suppose, of the whole island.