en he at the
same time considers the Vandalism of their plough-folks." The
deteriorating effect of the large-farm system, remarked by the poet, is
inevitable. It is impossible that the modern farm-servant, in his
comparatively irresponsible situation, and with his fixed wages of
meagre amount, can be rendered as thoughtful and provident a person as
the small farmer of the last age, who, thrown on his own resources, had
to cultivate his fields and drive his bargains with his Martinmas and
Whitsunday settlement with the landlord full before him; and who often
succeeded in saving money, and in giving a classical education to some
promising son or nephew, which enabled the young man to rise to a higher
sphere of life. Farm-servants, as a class, _must_ be lower in the scale
than the old tenant-farmers, who wrought their little farms with their
own hands; but it is possible to elevate them far above the degraded
level of the bothy; and unless means be taken to check the spread of the
ruinous process of brute-making which the system involves, the Scottish
people will sink, to a certainty, in the agricultural districts, from
being one of the most provident, intelligent, and moral in Europe, to be
one of the most licentious, reckless, and ignorant.

Candle-light is a luxury in which no one ever thinks of indulging in a
barrack; and in a barrack such as ours at this time, riddled with gaps
and breaches, and filled with all manner of cold draughts, it was not
every night in which a candle would have burnt. And as our fuel, which
consisted of sorely decayed wood--the roofing of a dilapidated
out-house which we were pulling down--formed but a dull fire, it was
with difficulty I could read by its light. By spreading out my book,
however, within a foot or so of the embers, I was enabled, though
sometimes at the expense of a headache, to prosecute a new tract of
reading which had just opened to me, and in which, for a time, I found
much amusement. There was a vagabond pedlar who travelled at this time
the northern counties, widely known as Jack from Dover, but whose true
name was Alexander Knox, and who used to affirm that he was of the same
family as the great Reformer. The pedlar himself was, however, no
reformer. Once every six weeks or two months he got madly drunk, and not
only "perished the pack," as he used to say, but sometimes got into
prison to boot. There were, however, some kind relations in the south,
who always set him up