David survived his mistress for more than forty years. For thirty of these he was an elder of the Church--a man conversant with deathbeds, and a visitor of the fatherless and the widow. Few persons die so regretted as David died, or leave behind them so fair a name; nor will the reader fail to recognise something uncommon in his character when I tell him, that he was steady and prudent though a poet, and of a grave deportment, good-natured, and a Christian, though of a ready wit. He left behind him, treasured up in the memories of his many friends, shrewd, pithy remarks on men and things--specimens of mind, if I may so express myself, which exhibit the quality of the mass from off which they were struck. His wit, too, was equally popular. I have heard some of his _bon-mots_ repeated and laughed at more than twenty years after his death; but his writings were so much less fortunate, that there were few of the people with whom I have conversed concerning him, who even knew that he made verses, though none of them were ignorant of his having been a good man. [Sidenote: MACCULLOCH OF DUN-LOTH.] The last of the Cromarty poets who lived and wrote before the beginning of the present century, was Macculloch of Dun-Loth. He was, for nearly sixty years, a Society schoolmaster in that parish of Sutherlandshire whose name, for some cause or other, is always attached to his own. But I shall attempt introducing him to the reader in the manner in which he has been introduced to myself. “About twenty-eight years ago,” said my informant, “I resided for a few weeks with the late Dr. R---- at the manse of Kiltearn. I was lounging one evening beside the front door, when a singular-looking old man came up to me, and asked for the Doctor. He was such an equivocal-looking sort of person, that it was quite a puzzle to me whether I should show him into the parlour;--he might be little better than a beggar; he might be worth half a million; but whether a rich man or a poor one, no one could look at him and doubt of his being a _particular_ man. He was very little, and very much bent, with just such a grotesque cast of countenance as I have seen carved on the head of a walking-stick. His outer man was cased in an old-fashioned suit of raven grey, and he had immense plated buckles in his shoes and in his breeches. I thought of the legend of the Seven Sleepers, and wondered where this fragment of the old world could have lain for the last hundred years. The Doctor relieved me from my perplexity. He had seen him from a window, and, coming out, he welcomed the little old man with his wonted cordiality, and ushered him into the parlour as the poet of Dun-Loth.