The progress of this market, from what it was once to what it is at present, was strongly indicative of several other curious changes which were taking place in the country. The first achievement of commerce is the establishment of a market. In a semi-barbarous age the trader journeys from one district to another, and finds only, in a whole kingdom, that demand for his merchandise which, when in an after period civilisation has introduced her artificial wants among the people, may be found in a single province. So late as the year 1730, one solitary shopkeeper more than supplied the people of Cromarty with their few, everyday necessaries, of foreign manufacture or produce; I say more than supplied them, for in summer and autumn he travelled the country as a pedlar. For their occasional luxuries and finery they trusted to the traders of the fair. Times changed, however, and the shopkeeper wholly supplanted the travelling merchant; but the fair continued to be frequented till a later period by another class of traders, who dealt in various articles, the produce and manufacture of the country. Among these were a set of dealers who sold a kind of rude harness for horses and oxen, made of ropes of hair and twisted birch; a second set who dealt in a kind of conical-shaped carts made of basket-work; and a third who supplied the house-builders of the period with split lath, made of moss-fir, for thatched roofs and partitions. In time, however, the harness-maker, cart-wright, and house-carpenter of modern times, dealt by these artists as the shopkeeper had done by the market-trader. The broguer, or maker of Highland shoes, kept the field in spite of the regular shoemaker half a century later, and disappeared only about five years ago. The dealer in home-grown lint frequented it until last season; but the low wages, and sixteen-hour-per-day employment of the south country weaver, were gradually undermining his trade, and the steam-loom seems to have given it its deathblow. [Sidenote: THE HERRING DROVE.]