country--with well-enclosed fields and whitewashed cottages; but the association is altogether a false one. As shown by the testimony of General Stewart of Garth, the Sutherland regiment was not only the most eminently moral, but, as their tastes and habits demonstrated, one of the most decidedly intellectual under the British Crown. Our relative's cottage had, as we have said, its bookcase, and both his sons were very intelligent men; but intelligence derived directly from books was not general in the county; a very considerable portion of the people understood no other language than Gaelic, and many of them could not even read; for at this period about one-tenth of the families of Sutherland were distant five or more miles from the nearest school. Their characteristic intelligence was of a kind otherwise derived: it was an intelligence drawn from these domestic readings of the Scriptures and from the pulpit; and is referred mainly to that profound science which even a Newton could recognise as more important and wonderful than any of the others, but which many of the shallower intellects of our own times deem no science at all. It was an intelligence out of which their morality sprung; it was an intelligence founded in earnest belief. But what, asks the reader, was the economic condition--the condition with regard to circumstances and means of living--of these Sutherland Highlanders? How did they fare? The question has been variously answered: much must depend on the class selected from among them as specimens of the whole,--much, too, taking for granted the honesty of the party who replies, on his own condition in life, and his acquaintance with the circumstances of the poorer people of Scotland generally. The county had its less genial localities, in which, for a month or two in the summer season, when the stock of grain from the previous year was fast running out, and the crops on the ground not yet ripened for use, the people experienced a considerable degree of scarcity,--such scarcity as a mechanic in the south feels when he has been a fortnight out of employment. But the Highlander had resources in these seasons which the mechanic has not. He had his cattle and his wild pot-herbs, such as the mugwort and the nettle. It has been adduced by the advocates of the change which has ruined Sutherland, as a proof of the extreme hardship of the Highlander's condition, that at such times he could have eaten as food a broth made of nettles, mixed up with a little oatmeal, or have had recourse to the expedient of bleeding his cattle, and making the blood into a sort of pudding. And it is quite true that the Sutherlandshire Highlander was in the habit, at such times, of having recourse to such food. It is not less true, however, that the statement is just as little conclusive regarding his condition, as if it were alleged there must always be famine in France when the people eat the hind legs of frogs, or in Italy when they make dishes of snails.