In the course of my ensuing visits I talked over the threatened revolution with persons of much local knowledge, especially with one of the Duke of Sutherland's agents, and Father Grant, the chaplain of the Catholic Lovats at Beaufort. They did not, it appeared to me, take the threatened revolution very seriously, and they showed me how absurdly in error the agitators were as to certain of the facts alleged by them. One of their errors consisted in their gross overestimates of what the practical magnitude of the great Highland properties was, the rent of the Sutherland property being, for instance, no more per acre than the twentieth part of an average acre in England. Father Grant, who was a learned antiquarian, mentioned as a commonplace on revolutionary platforms the statement that in the Highlands no such beings as the private landlord existed prior to the rebellion of 1745, on the suppression of which the government stole their communal rights from the clansmen, turning them into tenants at will, whom the chieftains, now absolute owners, could evict and expatriate as they pleased. No fiction, said Father Grant, himself a crofter's son, could be more absurd than this. It was absolutely disproved, he said, by a mass of medieval charters, in which were assigned to the chieftains by the Scottish Crown the fullest territorial rights possible for lawyers to devise.[1] At the same time my informants admitted with regret that landlordism in the Highlands was liable to special abuses, an instance of which had come to the fore recently. This was the long lease acquired by a rich American of enormous areas which he converted into a single deer forest, evicting certain crofters in the process with what was said to have been signal harshness.