or want of right Gaelic!
Why, he has more right Gaelic in his own self than all the Society's
teachers in this corner of Scotland put together. They are the
_curiousest_ people, some of these good gentlemen of the Edinburgh
Committees, that I ever heard of: they're just like our country
lawyers." It would, however, be far from fair to regard this
transaction, which took place, I may mention, so late as the year 1829,
as a specimen of the actings of either civic societies or country
lawyers. George's chief examinator on the occasion was the minister of
the Gaelic Chapel of the place, at that time one of the Society's
Committee for the year; and, not being a remarkably scrupulous man, he
seems to have stretched a point or two, in compliance with the pious
wishes and occult judgment of the Society's Secretary. But the anecdote
is not without its lesson. When devout Walter Taits set themselves
ingeniously to manoeuvre with the purest of intentions, and for what
they deem the best of purposes--when, founding their real grounds of
objection on one set of appearances, they found their ostensible grounds
of objection on another and entirely different set--they are always
exposed to the signal danger of--getting indevout Duncan M'Caigs to
assist them. Only two years from the period of my cousin's examination
before the Society, his reverend examinator received at the bar of the
High Court of Justiciary, in the character of a thief convicted of
eleven several acts of stealing, sentence of transportation for fourteen
years.

I had several interesting excursions with my cousin William. We found
ourselves one evening--on our way home from a mineral spring which he
had discovered among the hills--in a little lonely valley, which opened
transversely into that of the Gruids, and which, though its sides were
mottled with green furrow-marked patches, had not at the time a single
human habitation. At the upper end, however, there stood the ruins of a
narrow two-storied house, with one of its gables still entire from
foundation-stone to the shattered chimney-top, but with the other gable,
and the larger part of the front wall, laid prostrate along the sward.
My cousin, after bidding me remark the completeness of the solitude, and
that the eye could not command from the site of the ruin a single spot
where man had ever dwelt, told me that it had been the scene of the
strict seclusion, amounting almost to imprisonment, about eighty years
be