“There, indeed, you are right; he was the man that had a kind heart. But this new man that has come in his place has a heart of remarkable hardness, and cares not a straw for the pipes or anything that belongs to the Highlands. He is a perfect fanatic in his passion for big sheep. It brings more enjoyment to him to look at a wether parading on green braes than to listen to all the pibrochs that ever were played. If I were to compose a pibroch for him, I would call it ‘Lament for the Big Wether,’ the wether that fell over the rock the other day, the loss of which almost drove him mad. It’s not I that would be caring to say this to everybody; but as you happen to be with me on the spot there can be no harm in telling you how he treated the poor people here. There is not now smoke coming out of single chimney or sheiling in the whole glen, where you used to see scores of decent people working at honest work. This man would as soon give lodgment to a fox as to a poor crofter or a widow woman. You never heard in your life what a mangling and maiming he has made of the population of this glen. Not even a shepherd would he have from the people of the country; he brought them all in from the south. Even his shepherd’s dog does not understand a word of Gaelic. Mactalla of the Crag has not sent back a single echo since good Donald went away. Everything must make way for the sheep. There is not a single brake now in which a bramble would grow; no tuft of brushwood on the slope where one could gather a nut; he has shaved the country as bare as the gable wall of a house, and as for sloes, where sloes used to be you may as well go and look for grapes. The birds, too, have left us; they have gone to the wood on the other side of the Sound; even the gay cuckoo cannot find a single stunted bush where it might hide. He has burnt all the wild wood that ran so prettily up the slope from end to end of this property. You won’t gather as many sticks from the brushwood as would serve to boil a pot of potatoes, or as many twigs as would make a fishing basket. But no more of this; it makes my heart sick to think of it. Better to be talking of something else.”