dancing and drinking. Erskine finds employment as Sheriff, for the neighborhood of the fort enables him to make _main forte_, and secure a number of the rioters. We visit F. Charlotte, which is a neat little fort mounting ten heavy guns to the sea, but only one to the land. Major F., the Governor, showed us the fort; it commands both entrances of the harbor: the north entrance is not very good, but the south capital. The water in the harbor is very deep, as frigates of the smaller class lie almost close to the shore. Take a walk with Captain M'Diarmid, a gentlemanlike and intelligent officer of the garrison; we visit a small fresh-water loch called _Cleik-him-in_; it borders on the sea, from which it is only divided by a sort of beach, apparently artificial: though the sea lashes the outside of this beach, the water of the lake is not brackish. In this lake are the remains of a Picts' castle, but ruinous. The people think the castle has not been built on a natural island, but on an artificial one formed by a heap of stones. These Duns or Picts' castles are so small, it is impossible to conceive what effectual purpose they could serve excepting a temporary refuge for the chief.--Leave _Cleik-him-in_, and proceed along the coast. The ground is dreadfully encumbered with stones; the patches which have been sown with oats and barley bear very good crops, but they are mere _patches_, the cattle and ponies feeding amongst them, and secured by tethers. The houses most wretched, worse than the worst herd's house I ever saw. It would be easy to form a good farm by enclosing the ground with Galloway dykes, which would answer the purpose of clearing it at the same time of stones; and as there is plenty of limeshell, marle, and alga-marina, manure could not be wanting. But there are several obstacles to improvement, chiefly the undivided state of the properties, which lie _run-rig_; then the claims of Lord Dundas, the lord of the country, and above all, perhaps, the state of the common people, who, dividing their attention between the fishery and the cultivation, are not much interested in the latter, and are often absent at the proper times of labor. Their ground is chiefly dug with the spade, and their ploughs are beyond description awkward. An odd custom prevails: any person, without exception (if I understand rightly), who wishes to raise a few kail, fixes upon any spot he pleases, encloses it with a dry stone wall, uses it as a kailyard till he works out the soil, then deserts it and makes another. Some dozen of these little enclosures, about twenty or thirty feet square, are in sight at once. They are called _planty-cruives_; and the Zetlanders are so far from reckoning this an invasion, or a favor on the part of the proprietor, that their most exaggerated description of an avaricious person is one who would refuse liberty for a _planty-cruive_; or to infer the greatest contempt of another, they will say, they would not hold a _planty-cruive_ of him.