And as for three years together the herring fishing had failed in the Loch, they had been unable, term after term, to meet with the laird, and were now three years in arrears. Fortunately for them, he was a humane, sensible man, comfortable enough in his circumstances to have, what Highland proprietors often have not, the complete command of his own affairs; but they all felt that their cattle were their own only by sufferance, and so long as he forbore urging his claims against them; and they entertained but little hope of ultimate extrication. I saw among these poor men much of that indolence of which the country has heard not a little; and could not doubt, from the peculiar aspects in which it presented itself, that it was, as I have said, a long-derived hereditary indolence, in which their fathers and grandfathers had indulged for centuries. But there was certainly little in their circumstances to lead to the formation of new habits of industry. Even a previously industrious people, were they to be located within the great north-western curve of thirty-five inch rain, to raise corn and potatoes for the autumnal storms to blast, and to fish in the laird's behalf herrings that year after year refused to come to be caught, would, I suspect, in a short time get nearly as indolent as themselves. And certainly, judging from the contrast which my brother-workmen presented to these Highlanders of the west coast, the indolence which we saw, and for which my comrades had no tolerance whatever, could scarce be described as inherently Celtic. I myself was the only genuine Lowlander of our party. John Fraser, who, though turned of sixty, would have laid or hewn stone for stone with the most diligent Saxon mason in Britain or elsewhere, was a true Celt of the Scandinavian-Gaelic variety; and all our other masons--Macdonalds, M'Leods, and Mackays, hard-working men, who were content to toil from season to season, and all day long--were true Celts also. But they had been bred on the eastern border of the Highlands, in a sandstone district, where they had the opportunity of acquiring a trade, and of securing in the working season regular well-remunerated employment; and so they had developed into industrious, skilled mechanics, of at least the ordinary efficiency. There are other things much more deeply in fault as producing causes of the indolence of the west-coast Highlander than his Celtic blood.