While yet a mere child, five years or so of age, my parents took me to a new home in the ancient village of Torthorwald, about four and a quarter miles north from Dumfries, on the road to Lockerbie. At that time, about 1830, Torthorwald was a busy and thriving village, and comparatively populous, with its cottars and crofters, large farmers and small farmers, weavers and shoemakers, cloggers and coopers, blacksmiths and tailors. Fifty-five years later, when I last visited the scenes of my youth, the village proper was literally extinct, except for five thatched cottages where the lingering patriarchs were permitted to die slowly away,—when they too would be swept into the large farms, and their garden plots ploughed over, like sixty or seventy others that had been obliterated! Of course the Village Smithy still survives, but its sparks are few and fading,—the great cultivators patronizing rather the towns. The Meal Mill still grinds away,—but nothing like what it did when every villager bought or cultivated his few acres of corn, and every crofter and farmer in the parish sent all his grist to the mill. The Grocer’s Shop still recalls the well-known name of Robert Henderson; but so few are the mouths now to be fed, that his warm-hearted wife and universal favourite, the very heroine of our village life, “Jean Grier,” is retiring from it in disgust, and leaving it to her son-in-law, declaring that “these Tory landlords and their big farms hae driven our folks a’ awa’, and spoiled the Schule and the Shop, the Kirk and the Mill.” And verily the School is robbed of its children, and the Parish Church of its worshippers, when five families only are reared where twenty once flourished! Political economy may curse me, if it will; but I heard with grim satisfaction that this system of large farming, which extinguishes our village homes, and sends our peasantry to rear their children in lanes and alleys, in attics and cellars of populous towns, was proving ruinous at length to the landlords and factors, who had in many cases cruelly forced it on an unwilling people for mere selfish gain. The Villagers of my early days—the agricultural servants, or occasional labourers, the tradesmen, the small farmers—were, generally speaking, a very industrious and thoroughly independent race of people. Hard workers they had to be, else they would starve; yet they were keen debaters on all affairs both in Church and State, and sometimes in the “smiddy” or the “kiln,” sometimes in a happy knot on the “village green,” or on the road to the “kirk” or the “market,” the questions that were tearing the mighty world beyond were fought over again by secluded peasants with amazing passion and bright intelligence.