“The houses of the tenants form a cluster. In parts of Lewis the houses are in a straight line called _Straid_, street, occasionally from one to three miles in length. They are placed in a suitable part of the townland, and those of the tenants on the run-rig system are warm, good and comfortable. These tenants carry on their farming operations simultaneously, and not without friendly and wholesome rivalry, the enterprise of one stimulating the zeal of another.... “Not the least pleasing feature in this semi-family system is the assistance rendered by their neighbours to a tenant whose work has fallen behind through accident, sickness, death, or other unavoidable cause.... “Their mode of dividing the land and of equalising the stock may seem primitive and complex to modern views, but they are not so to the people themselves, who apply them amicably, accurately and skilfully. The division of the land is made with care and justice. This is the interest of all, no one knowing which place may fall to himself, for his neighbour’s share may become his own three years hence. “Whatever may be the imperfections, according to modern notions, of this very old semi-family system of run-rig husbandry, those tenants who have least departed from it are the most comfortable in North Uist, and, accordingly, in the Outer Hebrides.” Mr. Carmichael informs me that the whole of this description held good at least up to May, 1904. The brief descriptions and other references to the run-rig system of the agricultural writers whom Sir John Sinclair and Arthur Young enlisted in the service of the Board of Agriculture at the end of the eighteenth, and the beginning of the nineteenth century, are sufficient to show that in all essential features it was fundamentally identical in different parts of Scotland. Sir John Sinclair’s own description is meagre and unsympathetic: “Were there twenty tenants and as many fields, each tenant would think himself unjustly treated unless he had a proportionate share in each. This causes treble labour, and as they are perpetually crossing each other, they must be in a state of constant quarrelling and bad neighbourhood. In order to prevent any of the soil being carried to the adjoining ridge, each individual makes his own ridge as high as possible, which renders the furrow quite bare, so that it produces no crop, while the accumulated soil in the middle of the ridge is never stirred deeper than the plough. The proprietors begin to see the inconveniences of this system, and in general intend to remedy it, by dividing the land into regular farms.”[86] [86] “General View of the Agriculture of the Northern Counties and Highlands of Scotland,” p. 205.