circumstances of very general bearing, and on whose after development, when in their latent state, improving landlords had failed to calculate; the island itself was in the market, and a report went current at the time that it was on the eve of being purchased by some wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. The cycle--which bids fair to be that of the Highlands generally--had already revolved in the depopulated island of Rum. We have said that the sheep-farmer had gone down, in this instance, under adverse circumstances of very extensive bearing. In a beautiful transatlantic poem, a North American Indian is represented as visiting by night the tombs of his fathers, now surrounded, though reared in the depths of a forest, by the cultivated farms and luxurious dwellings of the stranger, and there predicting that the race by which _his_ had been supplaced should be in turn cast out of their possessions. His fancy on the subject is a wild one, though not unfitted for the poet. The streams, he said, were yielding a lower murmur than of old, and rolling downwards a decreasing volume; the springs were less copious in their supplies; the land, shorn of its forests, was drying up under the no longer softened influence of summer suns. Yet a few ages more, and it would spread out all around an arid and barren wilderness, unfitted, like the deserts of the East, to be a home of man. The fancy, we repeat, though a poetic, is a wild one; but the grounds from which we infer that the clearers of the Highlands--the supplanters of the Highlanders--are themselves to be cleared and supplanted in turn, is neither wild nor poetic. The voice which predicts in the case is a voice, not of shrinking rivulets nor failing springs, but of the 'Cloth Hall' in Leeds, and of the worsted factories of Bradford and Halifax. Most of our readers must be aware that the great woollen trade of Britain divides into two main branches--its woollen cloth manufacture, and its worsted and stuff manufactures: and in both these the estimation in which British wool is held has mightily sunk of late years, never apparently to rise again; for it has sunk, not through any caprice of fashion, but in the natural progress of improvement. Mr. Dodd, in his interesting little work on the _Textile Manufactures of Great Britain_, refers incidentally to the fact, in drawing a scene in the Cloth Hall of Leeds, introduced simply for the purpose of showing at how slight an expense of time and words business is transacted in this great mart of trade. 'All the sellers,' says Mr. Dodd, 'know all the buyers; and each buyer is invited, as he passes along, to look at some "olives," or "browns," or "pilots," or "six quarters," or "eight quarters;" and the buyer decides in a wonderfully short space of time whether it will answer his purpose to purchase or not. "Mr. A., just look at these olives." "How much?" "Six and eight." "Too high." Mr. A. walks on, and