place where that Highland freebooter lived, when he placed himself for a time under the shelter of the Argyll of his day. [Sidenote: KENNEDY OF DUNURE] Perhaps no county in Scotland could furnish an ampler list of landed proprietors than Ayrshire, both of the old stock and of the new comers. The former included both titled possessors of large estates and smaller lairds who could trace their genealogy back to a remote ancestry. One of the best examples of these landed gentry whom I have known was the Right Honourable Thomas Francis Kennedy of Dunure. Educated in Edinburgh under Pillans and Dugald Stewart, he was associated from his youth with the brilliant literary coterie which then flourished in that city, and delighted to recount his reminiscences of the men and the clubs of the time. As he was born near Ayr, and had passed much of his life in Ayrshire, where he possessed considerable estates, he retained a lively recollection of the state of the south-west of Scotland in the closing years of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth century. I have heard him tell of the hardships of the peasantry and small farmers in his boyhood, how in severe winters they were compelled to bleed their cattle and mix the blood with oatmeal to keep themselves in life. He used to describe the cuisine of his early days, and the contrast between it and modern cookery. One of the dishes, rather a favourite in Carrick, was roast Solan goose from Ailsa Craig. But his account of it was not itself appetising, for he told how they had to bury the bird for some time in the garden, and when it came to be cooked, all the windows in the house had to be kept open, to let out the ‘ancient and fish-like smell.’ White and black puddings, now almost entirely banished, still maintained their place, together with ‘crappit heads,’ ‘singed sheep’s head,’ and sundry other national dishes which have long been banished from the tables of polite society. He used sometimes to revive a few of these dishes, and I thought them excellent, but he never, so far as I experienced, tried the Solan goose again. He was a gentleman of the antique cast, courteous and stately in his manners, proud of his descent and of his ancestral possessions, and tenacious of his rights, which he was sometimes thought to insist upon rather more than he need have done. When I came to know him about the year 1863 he had retired from public life, and devoted himself to the care of his property. He looked carefully after his breeds of cattle, and was keenly alive to new inventions for the improvement of agriculture, which he was always ready to test on his own land. Part of one of the smallest coal-fields in Scotland underlay his estate of Dalquharran, and he worked the mineral according to the best known methods.