little we know regarding its _state_ and its _place_--or that we should send our thoughts roaming in long excursions, to glean from the experience of the past all that it tells us of the occasional visits of the dead, and all that in their less taciturn and more social moments they have communicated to the living. And hence, from feelings so natural, and a train of associations so obvious, the character of a country lykewake and the cast of its stories--I say a _country_ lykewake, for in at least all our larger towns, where a cold and barren scepticism has chilled the feelings and imaginations of the people, without, I fear, much improving their judgments, the conversation on such occasions takes a lower and less interesting range. I once spent a night with a friend from the south, a man of an inquiring and highly philosophic cast of mind, at a lykewake in the upper part of the parish of Cromarty. I had excited his curiosity by an incidental remark or two of the kind I have just been dropping; and, on his expressing a wish that I should introduce him, by way of illustration, to some such scenes as I have been describing, we had set out together to the wake of an elderly female who had died that morning. Her cottage--a humble creation of stone and lime--was situated beside a thick fir wood, on the edge of the solitary Mulebuy, one of the dreariest and most extensive commons in Scotland. We had to pass, in our journey, over several miles of desolate muir, sprinkled with cairns and tumuli--the memorials of some forgotten conflict of the past; we had to pass, too, through a thick, dark wood, with here and there an intervening marsh, whitened over with moss and lichens, and which, from this circumstance, are known to the people of the country as the _white bogs_. Nor was the more distant landscape of a less gloomy character. On the one hand, there opened an interminable expanse of muir, that went stretching onwards, mile beyond mile, bleak, dreary, uninhabited, and uninhabitable, till it merged into the far horizon. On the other, there rose a range of blue, solitary hills, towering, as they receded, into loftier peaks and bolder acclivities, till they terminated on the snow-streaked Ben Weavis. The season, too, was in keeping with the scene. It was drawing towards the close of autumn; and, as we passed through the wood, the falling leaves were eddying round us with every wind, or lay in rustling heaps at our feet. "I do not wonder," said my companion, "that the superstitions of so wild a district as this should bear in their character some marks of a corresponding wildness. Night itself, in a populous and cultivated country, is attended with less of the stern and the solemn than mid-day amid solitudes like these. Is the custom of watching beside the dead of remote antiquity in this part of the country?"