there was the usual misproportion to the extent and produce of the farm, of lean inefficient cattle--four half-starved animals performing, with incredible labour, the work of one. And yet, now that a singularly inventive mind had come into existence on this very farm, and though its attentions had been directed, as far as external influences could direct them, on the various employments of the farmer, the interests of husbandry were to be in no degree improved by the circumstance. Nature, in the midst of her wisdom, seems to cherish a dash of the eccentric. The ingenuity of the farmer’s son was to be employed, not in facilitating the labours of the farmer, but in inventing binnacle lamps, which would yield an undiminished light amid the agitations of a tempest, and in constructing mariners’ compasses on a new principle. There are instances of similar character furnished by the experience of almost every one. In passing, some years since, over a dreary moor in the interior of the country, my curiosity was excited by a miniature mast, furnished, like that of a ship, with shrouds and yards, and bearing a-top a gaudy pinnet, which rose beside a little Highland cottage. And on inquiring regarding it at the door, I was informed that it was the work of the cottager’s son, a lad who, though he had scarcely ever seen the sea, had taken a strange fancy to the life of a sailor, and had left his father only a few weeks before, to serve aboard a man-of-war. Kenneth’s first employment was the tending of a flock of sheep, the property of his father; and wretchedly did he acquit himself of the charge. The farm was bounded on the eastern side by a deep bosky ravine, through the bottom of which a scanty runnel rather trickled than flowed; and when it was discovered on any occasion that Kenneth’s flock had been left to take care of themselves, and of his father’s corn to boot--and such occasions were wofully frequent--Kenneth himself was almost invariably to be found in the ravine. There would he sit for hours among the bushes, engaged with his knife in carving uncouth faces on the heads of walking-sticks, or in constructing little water-mills, or in making Liliputian pumps of the dried stalks of the larger hemlock, and in raising the waters of the runnel to basins dug in the sides of the hollow. Sometimes he quitted his charge altogether, and set out for a meal-mill about a quarter of a mile from the farm, where he would linger for half a day at a time watching the motion of the wheels. His father complained that he could make nothing of him--“The boy,” he said, “seemed to have nearly as much sense as other boys of his years, and yet for any one useful purpose he was nothing better than an idiot.” His mother, as is common with mothers, and who was naturally an easy kind-hearted sort of woman, had better hopes of him. Kenneth, she affirmed, was only a little peculiar, and would turn out well after all. He was growing up, however, without improving in