remoteness from the tract of ordinary intention, give evidence of their truth; and I now called up a tradition, which I owed to my friend the maniac, respecting the manner in which the Mackenzies of Fairburn and the Chisholms of Strathglass had divided this barren tract between them. It had lain, from the first settlement of the country, an unappropriated waste, and neither proprietor could tell where his own lands terminated, or those of his neighbour began; but finding that the want of a proper line of demarcation led to quarrels between their herdsmen when baiting in their summer shielings with their cattle, they agreed to have the tract divided. The age of land-surveyors had not yet come; but, selecting two old women of seventy-five, they sent them out at the same hour, to meet among the hills, the one from Fairburn Tower, the other from Erchless Castle, after first binding themselves to accept their place of meeting as the point at which to set up the boundary-stone of the two properties. The women, attended by a bevy of competent witnesses, journeyed as if for life and death; but the Fairburn woman, who was the laird's foster-mother, either more zealous or more active than the Chisholm one, travelled nearly two miles for her one; and when they came in sight of each other in the waste, it was far from the fields of Fairburn, and comparatively at no great distance from those of the Chisholm. It is not easy knowing why they should have regarded one another in the light of enemies; but at a mile's distance their flagging pace quickened into a run, and, meeting at a narrow rivulet, they would fain have fought; but lacking, in their utter exhaustion, strength for fighting and breath for scolding, they could only seat themselves on the opposite banks, and _girn_ at one another across the stream. George Cruikshank has had at times worse subjects for his pencil. It is, I believe, Landor, in one of his "imaginary conversations," who makes a Highland laird inform Adam Smith that, desirous to ascertain, in some sort of conceivable degree, the size of his property, he had placed a line of pipers around it, each at such a distance from his nearest neighbour that he could barely catch the sound of his bagpipe; and that from the number of pipers required he was able to form an approximate estimate of the extent of his estate. And here, in a Highland tradition, genuine at least as such, are we introduced to an expedient of the kind scarce less ludicrous or inadequate than that which Landor must, in one of his humorous moods, have merely imagined.