of a neighbouring morass; they resembled somewhat the beams of a large sloop reversed. The stones he carried from the outfield heath on a sledge; the interstices in the walls he caulked with moss; the roof he covered with sods. The entire erection was his workmanship, from foundation to ridge. And such, in brief, was the history of all those cottages in the interior of Sutherland, which the poor Highlanders so naturally deemed their own, but from which, when set on fire and burnt to the ground by the creatures of the proprietor, they were glad to escape with their lives. The plough, with the exception of the iron work, was altogether our relative's workmanship too. And such was the history of the rude implements of rural or domestic labour which were consumed in the burning dwellings. But we anticipate. There is little of gaiety or enjoyment among the Highlanders of Sutherland now. We spent a considerable time for two several years among their thickly-clustered cottages on the eastern coast, and saw how they live, and how it happens that when years of comparative scarcity come on they starve. Most of them saved, when in the interior, as we have said, a little money; but the process has been reversed here: in every instance in which they brought their savings to the coast-side has the fund been dissipated. Each cottage has from half an acre to an acre and half of corn land attached to it--just such patches as the Irish starve upon. In some places, by dint of sore labour, the soil has been considerably improved; and all that seems necessary to render it worth the care of a family, would be just to increase its area some ten or twelve times. In other cases, however, increase would be no advantage. We find it composed of a loose debris of granitic water-rolled pebbles and ferruginous sand, that seemed destined to perpetual barrenness. The rents, in every instance, seem moderate; the money of the tenant flows towards the landlord in a stream of not half the volume of that in which the money of the landlord must flow towards the tenant when the poor-laws shall be extended to Scotland. But no rent, in such circumstances, can be really moderate. A clergyman, when asked to say how many of his parishioners, in one of these coast districts, realized _less_ than sixpence a-day, replied, that it would be a much easier matter for him to point out how many of them realized _more_ than sixpence, as this more fortunate class were exceedingly few. And surely no rent can be moderate that is paid by a man who realizes less than sixpence a-day. It is the peculiar evil produced by the change in Sutherland, that it has consigned the population of the country to a condition in which no rent _can_ be moderate--to a condition in which they but barely avoid famine, when matters are at the best with them, and fall into it in every instance in which the herring fishing, their main and most precarious stay, partially fails, or their crops are just a little