“The laird can have no rent unless it answers to you to pay it. You bargain for a mutual advantage. He receives money for the use of the land and sea belonging to him, and you have the benefit of a good station.” “They say that the sea ought to be as free as the air, instead of rent being asked for it.” “The air would be let, if there were degrees of goodness in it, and if it could be marked out by boundaries and made a profit of like the sea and land; and again, if all land were equally good, and all parts of all seas and rivers equally productive, there would be no rent paid for either the one or the other. The laird who owns all the islands within sight, owns the sounds which divide them, as if they were so many fishponds; and if one part yields more herrings than another, or, which is nearly the same thing, if the herrings can be got out at less expense of capital and toil at one point than another, it is very fair that a bargain should be struck for the benefit of both parties, whether the property in question be land or water.” “Or rock either, I suppose,” said Fergus. “If we sold the feathers of Archie’s birds, might not the laird ask rent for the Storr?” “He would ask a yearly sum of money, which we might fairly call rent. The birds are not produced by the rock as corn is produced by the power of the soil; but as long as the situation is so favourable to sea fowl as to cause a constant supply on the same spot, it may be said that it yields rent as justly as when we say the same thing of the sea; and much more justly than of mines.” “I used to hear my father speak,” said Ella, “of the lead-mines in Isla, and of the high rent they once paid.” “Yet the mines did not produce more lead in the place of that which was taken away, and therefore the lessees paid the proprietor merely a certain sum for the capital they removed from his property. They bought the lead of him, in fact, to sell again. They bought it buried in the ground, and sold it prepared for the market. Now, Fergus, tell me what rent is, before we begin to guess what I shall have to pay the laird, if I settle near you.” “What farm will you have? Where is it? How large?” “Answer me first,” said Angus, laughing. “What is rent?” “The money that a man pays——” “Nay; rent may be paid in corn, or kelp, or fish, or many things besides money. Better say _produce_.” “Rent is the produce that remains to a man——” “Ella is to pay rent,” interrupted Ronald, laughing. “Well, well. Rent is the part of the produce paid to the landlord when his tenant has made as much as his neighbours on worse land will let him gain.” “True, as far as your account goes; but not clear or full enough. You do not know yet, boys, how important it is for you to understand all this rightly before you pay rent yourselves, and even if you were never to pay.—Come, Ronald.”