The domestic economy of the people, who still continue to inhabit the town, differed considerably from what it had been when their circumstances were more prosperous. There was now no just division of labour among them--working people of all the different denominations encroaching each on the bounds of the others’ profession. Fishermen wrought as labourers, tradesfolk as fishermen, and both as farmers. In the latter part of spring every year, and the two first months of summer, the town’s-people spent their evenings in angling with rods and hand-lines in their boats, or from the rocks at the entrance of the bay; towards the end of July they formed themselves into parties of eight or ten, and sailed to Tarbat Ness, a fishing station of the Moray Firth, where they remained for several weeks catching and storing up fish for winter. At night they converted their sails into tents, ranged in the manner of an encampment, at the edge of the little bay where they moored their boats. The long low promontory of Tarbat Ness forms the north-eastern extremity of Ross-shire. Etymologists derive its name from the practice which prevailed among mariners in this country during the infancy of navigation, of drawing their light shallops across the necks of such promontories instead of sailing round them. On a moor of this headland there may be traced the vestiges of an encampment, which some have deemed Roman, and others Danish; and there is a cave among the low rocks by which it is skirted, which, according to tradition, communicates with another cave on the coast of Caithness. The scenery of Tarbat Ness is of that character which Addison regarded as the most sublime; but it has something more to recommend it than a mere expansiveness, like that predicated by the poet, in which no object, tree, house, or mountain, contracts the view of the vast arch of heaven or the huge circle of earth. Instead of a low plain bounded by the sky, there is here a wide expanse of ocean encircling a narrow headland--brown, sterile, solitary, edged with rock, and studded with fragments of stone. On the one hand, the mountains of Sutherland are seen rising out of the sea like a volume of blue clouds; on the other, at a still greater distance, the hills of Moray stretch along the horizon in a long undulating strip, so faintly defined in the outline that they seem almost to mingle with the firmament. Instead, however, of contracting the prospect, they serve but to enhance, by their diminished bulk, the immense space in which they are included. Space--wide, interminable space--in which he who contemplates it finds himself lost, and is oppressed by a sense of his own littleness, is at all times the circumstance to which the prospect owes most of its power; but it is only during the storms of winter, when the firmament in all its vastness seems converted into a hall of the tempest, and the earth in all its extent into a gymnasium for contending elements,