Kinaldy is now the property of Mr Purves—an excellent country gentleman who has made an ample fortune in America; but the period to which my narrative refers, was long prior to this. The property is poor and moorish though now covered with wood, sheltered, and highly cultivated. In the days of Andrew Watson, it bore a very different appearance: in fact, Andrew was not the proprietor, but only the farmer; whilst a nephew of Archbishop Sharp, long resident in an asylum, was the nominal proprietor, under various trustees, of whom the famous Archbishop was one. Farm houses in those days were very different from those of the present. A thatched and patched roof, with walls of alternate layers of turf and stone, and mid-walls or hallens of clay and straw, quite Egyptian manufacture, were all the go; and if any one, more advanced and uppish than his neighbours, got the length of a stone and clay wall, with a wooden partition within, he was deemed uncommonly appointed, as times went. Through these stone and turf walls there was free ingress and egress to the wind, as well as a plentiful allotment of rats, and the light infantry, the mice; and holes capable of admitting even the cat in full chase of her prey, perforated the clayey hallen in particular. Thus, by little and little, the frail separation betwixt but and ben—the house and the cha’mer—was in a manner undermined; and even the pressure of a little urchin’s elbow, of eight or ten years of age, was sufficient to shake it to its foundation. It is of one such as I am describing, that the author of Maggy Lauder speaks, when he makes his jolly heroine contemptuously exclaim— “Begone ye hallenshauker,” in other words, ye puir contemptible body, whom no respectable person will permit to advance further into their house than the hallen, against which ye loiter and lean till it shakes.