This went on for several years, in the course of which many hundreds of these houses were erected on unhospitable spots unfit for a human residence.' We add another extract from the same writer: 'It might be thought,' adds M'Leod, 'that the design of forcing the people to build such houses was to provide for their comfort and accommodation, but there seems to have been quite a different object,--which, I believe, was the true motive,--and that was to hide the misery that prevailed. There had been a great sensation created in the public mind by the cruelties exercised in these districts; and it was thought that a number of neat white houses, ranged on each side of the road, would take the eye of strangers and visitors, and give a practical contradiction to the rumours afloat. Hence the poor creatures were forced to resort to such means, and to endure such hardships and privations as I have described, to carry the scheme into effect. And after they had spent their remaining all, and more than their all, on the erection of these houses, and involved themselves in debt, for which they have been harassed and pursued ever since, what are these erections but whitened tombs! many of them now ten years in existence, and still without proper doors or windows, destitute of furniture and of comfort,--the unhappy lairs of a heart-broken, squalid, fast-degenerating race.' CHAPTER VI. We have exhibited to our readers, in the _clearing_ of Sutherland, a process of ruin so thoroughly disastrous, that it might be deemed scarce possible to render it more complete. And yet, with all its apparent completeness, it admitted of a supplementary process. To employ one of the striking figures of Scripture, it was possible to grind into powder what had been previously broken into fragments,--to degrade the poor inhabitants to a still lower level than that on which they had been so cruelly precipitated,--though persons of a not very original cast of mind might have found it difficult to say how; and the Duke of Sutherland has been ingenious enough to fall on exactly the one proper expedient for supplementing their ruin. All in mere circumstance and situation that could lower and deteriorate, had been present as ingredients in the first process; but there still remained for the people, however reduced to poverty or broken in spirit, all in religion that consoles and ennobles. Sabbath-days came round with their humanizing influences; and, under the teachings of the gospel, the poor and oppressed looked longingly forward to a future scene of being, in which there is no poverty and no oppression. They still possessed, amid their misery, something positively good, of which it was possible to deprive them; and hence the ability derived to the present lord of Sutherland, of deepening and rendering more signal the ruin accomplished by his predecessor.