To understand my story the better, gentlemen, you must yemaygine to yourselves a snug well-doing Nairnshire farmer's onstead, [1] situated in the parish of Auldearn, with a comfortable dwelling-house, of two low stories, accurately put down, so as mathematically to face the twelve o'clock line,--with its crow-steppit gables, small windows, little out-shot low addition behind, tall chimneys, and grey-slated roof--just such a house, to wit, as a man of his condition required in the middle of the last century--with two lines of strange-looking thatched or sod-covered stables, byres, barns, and other out-houses, projecting from its sides at right angles to its front, with divers out-riders, and isolated straggling edifices, of similar architecture and materials, dropped down here and there, as the hand of chance might have sown them--the smoke coming furth from some of their lumm-heads, and partly also from their low door-ways, proving to you, almost against your conviction, that they actually are the dwelling-places of human beings.--Fancy the whole grouped (as Mr. Grant, the long painter lad of Grantown, would have said) with sundry goodly rows of peat and turf stacks, a number of corn ricks wonderfully formed, and bulging and hanging out of the centre of gravity, each in a different direction, like a parcel of drunken Dutch dancers;--in the midst of all a large midden--(query whether the word midden may not be a mere corruption of the words middle-in,--the midden being always in the middle of all rural premises in Scotland? so that unlucky visitors not unfrequently walk up to the middle into the middle of it.)--Then picture to yourselves, behind the biggins, sundry kail-yards, with a few very ancient ash trees, sycamores, and rowan trees, rising from among their bourtree fences, or from the sides of their dilapidated dry-stone dikes. At a little distance below, a bog, with its attendant pools of dark moss-water, which shine amidst the black chaotic mass around them, and look blue by their reflection of the sky--with a half-ruined and roofless killogie, or kiln for drying corn and malt, standing on a sloping bank at no great distance from them. Then people all this with the farmer himself, a stout, hale, healthy-looking man, going bustling about from door to door among his folk, his muck-carts, and his horses, with a hodden-grey coat upon his back, a broad blue bonnet on his head, a hazle staff in his hand, and a colley and one or two rough terriers and greyhounds at his heels, shouting every now and then in Gaelic to his man, John Smith, a tall, handsome, strong-built Highlander, whilst the gudeman's wife, a very good-looking, round-formed, trigly-dressed Englishwoman, is seen appearing and disappearing from under the wooden porch, over which some attempts have been made to trail a plant or two of rose and honeysuckle, but which attempts have been rendered abortive by the epicurean taste of the browsing animals of the farm--her south