occupied the central tract, rubble walls built in the ordinary style leak like the bad roofs of other parts of the country; and mansion-houses constructed within its precincts by qualified workmen from Edinburgh and Glasgow have been found to admit the water in such torrents as to be uninhabitable, until their more exposed walls had been slated over like their roofs. Old John, however, always succeeded in building water-tight walls. Departing from the ordinary rule of the builder elsewhere, and which on the east coast of Scotland he himself always respected, he slightly elevated the under beds of his stones, instead of laying them, as usual, on the dead level; while along the edges of their upper beds he struck off a small rude champer; and by these simple contrivances, the rain, though driven with violence against his work, coursed in streams along its face, without entering into the interior and soaking through. For about six weeks we had magnificent weather--clear, sunny skies, and calm seas; and I greatly enjoyed my evening rambles amid the hills, or along the sea-shore. I was struck, in these walks, by the amazing abundance of the wild flowers which covered the natural meadows and lower hill-slopes--an abundance, as I have since remarked, equally characteristic of both the northern and western islands of Scotland. The lower slopes of Gairloch, of western Sutherland, of Orkney, and of the northern Hebrides generally--though, for the purposes of the agriculturist, vegetation languishes, and wheat is never reared--are by many degrees richer in wild flowers than the fat loamy meadows of England. They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals as in leaves. Little of the rare is to be detected in these meadows, save, perhaps, that in those of western Sutherland a few Alpine plants may be found at a greatly lower level than elsewhere in Britain; but the vast profusion of blossoms borne by species common to almost every other part of the kingdom, imparts to them an apparently novel character. We may detect, I am inclined to think, in this singular floral profusion, the operation of a law not less influential in the animal than the vegetable world, which, when hardship presses upon the life of the individual shrub or quadruped, so as to threaten its vitality, renders it fruitful on behalf of its species. I have seen the principle strikingly exemplified in the common tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country, in the open air. Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller leaf and shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year of trial had been rigorous plants, of some three to four feet in height, had in the sixth or eighth become mere weeds, of scarce as many inches. But while the as yet undegenerate plant had merely borne atop a few florets, which produced a small quantity of exceedingly minute seeds, the stunted weed, its descendant,