iderably different from that of
the simpler Highlanders of the interior of Sutherland, or of a class I
had shortly afterwards an opportunity of studying--the Highlanders of
the western coast of Ross-shire. Doors were not left unbarred at night
in the neighbourhood; and there were wretched hovels among the moors,
very zealously watched and guarded indeed. There was much illicit
distillation and smuggling at this time among the Gaelic-speaking people
of the district; and it told upon their character with the usual
deteriorating effect. Many of the Highlanders, too, had wrought as
labourers at the Caledonian Canal, where they had come in contact with
south-country workmen, and had brought back with them a confident,
loquacious smartness, that, based on a ground-work of ignorance, which
it rendered active and obtrusive, had a bizarre and disagreeable effect,
and formed but an indifferent substitute for the diffident and taciturn
simplicity which it had supplanted. But I have ever found the people of
those border districts of the Highlands which join on to the low
country, or that inhabit districts much traversed by tourists, of a
comparatively inferior cast: the finer qualities of the Highland
character seem easily injured: the hospitality, the simplicity, the
unsuspecting honesty, disappear; and we find, instead, a people
rapacious, suspicious, and unscrupulous, considerably beneath the
Lowland average. In all the unopened districts of the remote Highlands
into which I have penetrated, I have found the people strongly engage my
sympathies and affections--much more strongly than in any part of the
Lowlands; whereas, on the contrary, in the deteriorated districts I have
been sensible of an involuntary revulsion of feeling, when in contact
with the altered race, of which, among the low-country Scotch or the
English, I have had no experience. I remember being impressed, in
reading, many years ago, one of Miss Ferrier's novels, with the truth of
a stroke that brought out very practically the ready susceptibility of
injury manifested by the Celtic character. Some visitors of condition
from the Highlands are represented as seeking out in one of our larger
towns of the south, a simple Highland lad, who had quitted a remote
northern district only a few months before; and when they find him, it
is as a prisoner in Bridewell.

Towards the end of September, my master, who had wholly failed in
overcoming his repugnance to labour as a m