I am, I trust, no _hypocrite_ in literature, but a right-hearted devotee to whom composition is quite its own reward. If my little volume succeed, I shall be gratified by reflecting that the pleasure derived from it has not been confined to myself; if it fail, there will be some comfort in the thought that it has proved, to at least one mind, a copious source of entertainment. Besides, I am pretty sure, I shall be sanguine enough to transfer to some production of the future, the few hopes which, in the past, I had founded on it. And when thinking of it as the “poor deceased,” I reflect that, at worst, it was rather dull than wicked, and that it rather failed in performance than erred in intention; I shall not judge the less tenderly regarding it, when I further remember that it procured for me the honour of your notice, and furnished me with this opportunity of subscribing myself, Honoured Sir, With sincere respect, Your humble friend, and obedient Servant, THE AUTHOR. CROMARTY, 1834. NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION. The present edition contains about one-third more matter than the first. The added chapters, however, like those which previously composed the work, were almost all written about twenty years ago,[1] in leisure hours snatched from a laborious employment, or during the storms of winter, when the worker in the open air has to seek shelter at home. But it is always less disadvantageous to a traditionary work, that it should have been written early than late. Of the materials wrought up into the present volume, the greater part was gathered about from fifteen to twenty years earlier still; and though some thirty-five or forty years may not seem a very lengthened period, such has been the change that has taken place during the lapse of the generation which has in that time disappeared from the earth, that perhaps scarce a tithe of the same matter could be collected now. We live in an age unfavourable to tradition, in which the written has superseded the oral. As the sun rose in his strength, the manna wasted away like hoar-frost from off the ground.