The following passage must strike all acquainted with the Highlanders of Sutherland as a true representation of the circumstances to which they have been reduced: 'Ancient respectable tenants who have passed the greater part of life in the enjoyment of abundance, and in the exercise of hospitality and charity, possessing stock of ten, twenty, and thirty breeding cows, with the usual proportion of other stock, are now pining on one or two acres of bad land, with one or two starved cows; and for this accommodation a calculation is made, that they must support their families, and pay the rent of their lots, not from the produce, but from the sea, thus drawing a rent which the land cannot afford. When the herring fishing succeeds, they generally satisfy the landlord, whatever privations they may suffer; but when the fishing fails, they fall into arrears. The herring fishing, always precarious, has for a succession of years been very defective, and this class of people are reduced to extreme misery. At first, some of them possessed capital, from converting their farm-stock into cash, but this has been long exhausted; and it is truly distressing to view their general poverty, aggravated by their having once enjoyed abundance and independence.' Some of the removals to which we have referred took place during that group of scarce seasons in which the year 1816 was so prominent; but the scarcity which these induced served merely to render the other sufferings of the people more intense, and was lost sight of in the general extent of the calamity. Another group of hard seasons came on,--one of those groups which seem of such certain and yet of such irregular occurrence in our climate, that though they have attracted notice from the days of Bacon downwards, they have hitherto resisted all attempts to include them in some definite cycle. The summer and harvest of 1835 were the last of a series of fine summers and abundant harvests; and for six years after there was less than the usual heat, and more than the usual rain. Science, in connection with agriculture, has done much for us in the low country, and so our humbler population were saved from the horrors of a dearth of food; but on the green patches which girdle the shores of Sutherland, and which have been esteemed such wonderful improvements, science had done and could do nothing. The people had been sinking lower and lower during the previous twenty years, and what would have been great hardship before had become famine now. One feels at times that it may be an advantage to have lived among the humbler people. We have been enabled, in consequence, to detect many such gross misstatements as those with which the apologists of the disastrous revolution effected in Sutherland have attempted to gloss over the ruin of that country. In other parts of the Highlands, especially in the Hebrides, the failure of the kelp trade did much to impoverish the inhabitants; but in the