We have exhibited the Sutherland Highlanders to the reader as they exhibited themselves to their country, when, as Christian soldiers,--men, like the old chivalrous knight, 'without fear or reproach,'--they fought its battles and reflected honour on its name. Interest must attach to the manner in which men of so high a moral tone were reared; and a sketch drawn from personal observation of the interior of Sutherland eight-and-twenty years ago, may be found to throw very direct light on the subject. To know what the district once was, and what it is now, is to know with peculiar emphasis the meaning of the sacred text, 'One sinner destroyeth much good.' The eye of a Triptolemus Yellowlee would have found exceedingly little to gratify it in the parish of Lairg thirty years ago. The parish had its bare hills, its wide, dark moors, its old doddered woods of birch and hazel, its extensive lake, its headlong river, and its roaring cataract. Nature had imparted to it much of a wild and savage beauty; but art had done nothing for it. To reverse the well-known antithesis in which Goldsmith sums up his description of Italy,--the only growth that had _not_ dwindled in it was man. The cottage in which we resided with an aged relative and his two stalwart sons, might be regarded as an average specimen of the human dwellings of the district. It was a low long building of turf, consisting of four apartments on the ground floor,--the one stuck on to the end of the other, and threaded together by a passage that connected the whole. From the nearest hill the cottage reminded one of a huge black snail crawling up the slope. The largest of the four apartments was occupied by the master's six milk cows; the next in size was the ha', or sitting-room,--a rude but not uncomfortable apartment, with the fire on a large flat stone in the middle of the floor. The apartment adjoining was decently partitioned into sleeping places; while the fourth and last in the range--more neatly fitted up than any of the others, with furniture the workmanship of a bred carpenter, a small bookcase containing from forty to fifty volumes, and a box-bed of deal--was known as the stranger's room. There was a straggling group of buildings outside, in the same humble style,--a stable, a barn, a hay-barn, a sheep-pen with a shed attached, and a milk-house; and stretching around the whole lay the farm,--a straggling patch of corn land of from twelve to fifteen acres in extent, that, from its extremely irregular outline, and the eccentric forms of the parti-coloured divisions into which it was parcelled, reminded one of a coloured map. Encircling all was a wide sea of heath studded with huge stones--the pasturage land of the farmer for his sheep and cattle--which swept away on every hand to other islands of corn and other groups of cottages, identical in appearance with the corn land and the cottages described.