Eighteen months had passed over the Highland cottage, and in their brief course had swept away almost all that it had once contained of the appliances of domestic usefulness and comfort; for the scarcity which had been felt on the partial failure of the potato crop in 1845, had, in consequence of the _general_ failure of the following year, advanced through the successive stages of privation and destitution, till it might now truly be said in the simple, but emphatic language of Scripture, that “the famine was sore in the land,” for “_their food has been destroyed,_ and means of purchasing other food they have not.”[2] It is about the second week in January, 1847, that we would again introduce our friends to the home of the M’Kenzies. An air of desolation now reigned around it,—all was still. There was no hum of children’s voices making glad the lonely glen; the fowls that had gathered round the cottage-door were no longer to be seen, the pig-stye was empty,[3] the stream was frost-bound. The thatch which had been secured by birch twigs linked together in the Highland fashion, and kept down by a great stone suspended from the twisted ends, and dangling in front, was half off. The elder bush that had grown beside the shed was gone, and its hollow branches no longer creaked in the wintry blast, for when labour was scarce, and peat was three times its usual price, any thing that would serve for firing was little likely to be spared. The interior of the cottage offered a sad and striking contrast to the scene of joy and plenty it had presented before.