We never saw scarcity in the house of our relative, but we have seen the nettle broth in it very frequently, and the blood-pudding oftener than once; for both dishes were especial favourites with the Highlanders. With regard to the general comfort of the people in their old condition, there are better tests than can be drawn from the kind of food they occasionally ate. The country hears often of dearth in Sutherland now: every year in which the crop falls a little below average in other districts, is a year of famine there; but the country never heard of dearth in Sutherland then. There were very few among the holders of its small inland farms who had not saved a little money. Their circumstances were such, that their moral nature found full room to develope itself, and in a way the world has rarely witnessed. Never were there a happier or more contented people, or a people more strongly attached to the soil; and not one of them now lives in the altered circumstances on which they were so rudely precipitated by the landlord, who does not look back on this period of comfort and enjoyment with sad and hopeless regret. We have never heard the system which has depopulated this portion of the country defended, without recurring to our two several visits to the turf cottage in Lairg, or without feeling that the defence embodied an essential falsehood, which time will not fail to render evident to the apprehensions of all. We would but fatigue our readers were we to run over half our recollections of the interior of Sutherland. They are not all of a serious cast. We have sat in the long autumn evenings in the cheerful circle round the turf-fire of the ha', and have heard many a tradition of old clan feuds pleasingly told, and many a song of the poet of the county, Old Rob Donn, gaily sung. In our immediate neighbourhood, by the side of a small stream--small, but not without its supply of brown trout, speckled with crimson--there was a spot of green meadow land, on which the young men of the neighbourhood used not unfrequently to meet and try their vigour in throwing the stone. The stone itself had its history. It was a ball of gneiss, round as a bullet, that had once surmounted the gable of a small Popish chapel, of which there now remained only a shapeless heap of stones, that scarce overtopped the long grass amid which it lay. A few undressed flags indicated an ancient burying-ground; and over the ruined heap, and the rude tombstones that told no story, an ancient time-hallowed tree, coeval with the perished building, stretched out its giant arms. Even the sterner occupations of the farm had in their very variety a strong smack of enjoyment. We found one of the old man's sons engaged, during our one visit, in building an outhouse, after the primitive fashion of the Highlands, and during our other visit, in constructing a plough. The two main _cupples_ of the building he made of huge trees, dug out