Sir John Sinclair marks the autumn of the year 1770 as a season in which the herring fishery of Caithness suddenly doubled its amount. “From that time,” he adds, “the fishery gradually increased for a few years, but afterwards fell off again, and did not revive with spirit until the year 1788.” During the short period in which it was plied with success, it was prosecuted by several crews of Cromarty fishermen; and their first visit to the coast of this northern county, I find connected with a curious anecdote of the class whose extreme singularity gives in some measure evidence of their truth. Invention generally loves a beaten track--it has its rules and its formulas, beyond which it rarely ventures to expatiate; but the course of real events is narrowed by no such contracting barrier; the range of possibility is by far too extensive to be fully occupied by the anticipative powers of imagination; and hence it is that true stories are often stranger than fictions, and that their very strangeness, and their dissimilarity from all the models of literary plot and fable, guarantee in some measure their character as authentic. The hill of Cromarty is skirted, as I have said, by dizzy precipices, some of them more than a hundred yards in height; and one of these, for the last hundred and fifty years, has borne the name of the Caithness-man’s Leap. The sheer descent is broken by projecting shelves, covered with a rank vegetation, and furrowed by deep sloping hollows, filled at the bottom with long strips of loose _débris_, which, when set in motion by the light foot of the goat, falls rattling in continuous streams on the beach. The upper part of the precipice is scooped out by a narrow and perilous pathway, which, rising slantways from the shore, along the face of the neighbouring precipices, makes an abrupt turn on the upper edge of the “leap,” and then gains the top. Immediately above, on a sloping acclivity, covered for the last century by a thick wood, there was a little field, the furrows of which can still be distinctly traced among the trees, and which, about the time of the Revolution, was tenanted by a wild young fellow, quite as conversant with his fowling-piece as with his plough. He was no favourite with such of the neighbouring proprietors as most resembled himself; the game-laws in Scotland were not quite so stringent at that period as they are now, but game had its value; and sheriffs and barons, addicted to hunting and the chase, who had dungeons in their castles, and gibbets on their Gallow Hills, neither lacked the will nor the power to protect it. And so the tacksman of the the little field found poaching no safe employment; but the dangers he incurred had only the effect common in such cases, of imparting to his character a sort of Irish-like recklessness--a carelessness both of his own life and the lives of others. He had laid down his little field with peas, and was seriously annoyed, when they began to ripen, by the