This habit of allowing the women to do menial drudgery, so characteristic of uncivilised races, seems hard to throw off, though probably it is now undergoing amelioration. Burt, writing in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, gives an amusing instance of how the treatment of women in the Highlands appeared to a foreigner. ‘A French officer coming hither to raise some recruits for the Dutch service, met a Highlandman with a good pair of brogues on his feet, and his wife marching bare-foot after him. This indignity to the sex raised the Frenchman’s anger to such a degree, that he leaped from his horse and obliged the fellow to take off the shoes, and the woman to put them on.’ In commenting on this incident, the editor of the fifth edition of Burt’s volumes records an instance in which ‘a stout fellow of the very lowest class in Ardgour, took his wife and daughter, with wicker baskets on their backs, to a dunghill, filled their baskets with manure, and sent them to spread it with their hands on the croft; then, with his greatcoat on, he laid himself down on the lee side of the heap, to bask and chew tobacco till they returned for another load. A stranger, who merely looked at the outside of things, would hardly believe that this man was a kind and tender husband and father, as he really was. The maxim that such work (which must be done by some one) _spoils the men_, has been so long received as unquestionable by the women, that it makes a part of their nature; and a wife would despise her husband, and expect the contempt of her neighbours on her husband’s account, if he were so forgetful of himself, as to attempt to do such a thing, unless her situation at the time did not admit of her doing it.’[22]