A considerable portion of the people were terribly destitute. We have heard what the biographer of Young Barisdale says, about a diet of shell-fish from March to August, about the faces that never wear a smile. Franck, writing in 1654-1660, tells us how, when Monk held Scotland, the Strathnaver crofters bled their cows in winter, and fed on blood mixed with oatmeal.[167] Burt and Knox testify to the same practice, a century later and more. ‘This immoderate bleeding reduces the cattle to so low a plight that in the morning they cannot rise from the ground, and several of the inhabitants join together to help up each other’s cows.’[168] ‘The gentry may be said to be a handsome people, but the commonalty much otherwise; one would hardly think, by their faces, they were of the same species, or, at least, of the same country, which plainly proceeds from their bad food....’[169] The old times were not so good; the peasants, who protected and concealed him, could not give Lord Pitsligo salt to his porridge: ‘Salt is dear.’ But people who have seen nothing better are not discontented. The gentry—not chiefs, but tacksmen—as we have said, did not live luxuriously. Examples may be given. ‘Although they have been attended at dinner by five or six servants, they have often dined upon oat-meal varied several ways, pickled herrings, or other such cheap and indifferent diet.... Their houses are _sometimes_ built with stone and lime’ (like Barisdale’s palace), but other houses of the gentry ‘are built in the manner of the huts.’ Burt mentions one such house, with beasts dwelling under the roof of the owner, or tacksman. For many years Old Glengarry dwelt in a hut, his castle being occupied by an English commercial gentleman. The laird’s children were ‘dirty and half naked’—this is on hearsay—and it was a common proverb that ‘a gentleman’s bairns are known by their speaking English.’ Glengarry’s niece, daughter of Æneas, shot at Falkirk, ‘had no English,’ when she could not have been under thirteen years of age.[170] Thus there was no very great gulf, in some cases, between gentry and peasantry, where comfort was concerned. The difference of appearance between them, as between beings ‘of a different species,’ is the less intelligible. But herrings and game are more nutritious than nettles, cows’ blood, and shell-fish, especially where all are scarce.