The smoke you now live in not only dirties and destroys your clothes and furniture, but soon reduces the prettiest rosy faces in the world to premature wrinkles and deformities.... Let there be no apology for want of time for carrying away ashes, sweepings, or dirty water, and adding them to your dunghill, instead of sweeping all into a corner till you have more time, and emptying the dirty water at your door because you are too lazy to go a few yards farther." The houses of the crofters are certainly undergoing gradual improvement, but the majority cling tenaciously to the type of dwelling their fathers occupied before them. Perhaps the villages of Strath, Poolewe, and Port-Henderson contain the most improved houses in the parish. Very few of the crofters have gardens worthy of the name, so that, of course, they lose the advantage of green vegetables and fresh fruits. Still more rare is it to see trees planted about their dwellings, though pleasant shade and shelter might thus be had, and though, it is understood, saplings might be obtained for the asking from the proprietors. As a natural consequence of the proximity of middens to dwelling-houses, and other unhealthy arrangements, cases of fever occasionally occur. In the Old Statistical Account, 1792 (Appendix C), the writer, speaking of Gairloch, says that fevers were frequent, and an infectious putrid fever early in the preceding winter had proved fatal to many. Pennant had previously noticed how spring fever used to decimate the west coast. Such outbreaks have happily become rare since the potato famine of 1847 led the people to depend more on imported meal for their sustenance in spring. Few of the crofters' houses are floored, so that the inmates stand on the natural ground, or put their feet on a loose plank. In wet weather the ground often becomes damp. From this and other local causes pulmonary consumption is common among the crofter class. It is only right to add that this fatal disease often appears among some of the young people who go to work in southern towns, and come home to die. Smallpox is said to have been fatal in Gairloch in the eighteenth century, at the time when it ravaged the adjoining parish of Applecross. The _soubriquet_ "breac" (_i.e._ pock-pitted), so often met with in the history of Gairloch, is an evidence of the former frequency of this epidemic. Thanks to vaccination, it is now almost unknown. [Illustration: TOR-SGIAN, OR PEAT KNIFE. SCALE--ONE INCH TO A FOOT.]