ou, I see, from your supply of fresh fish, want it very
much; but come, pilot us through the sound, and you shall have as much
salt as you require." And so the vessel got a pilot, and the fisherman
got salt; but never did my father forget the light-hearted song of the
happy mistress of that poor Highland cottage. It was one of the palpable
characteristics of our Scottish Highlanders, for at least the first
thirty years of the century, that they were contented enough, as a
people, to find more to pity than to envy in the condition of their
neighbours; and I remember that at this time, and for years after, I
used to deem the trait a good one. I have now, however, my doubts on the
subject, and am not quite sure whether a content so general as to be
national may not, in certain circumstances, be rather a vice than a
virtue. It is certainly no virtue when it has the effect of arresting
either individuals or peoples in their course of development; and is
perilously allied to great suffering, when the men who exemplify it are
so thoroughly happy amid the mediocrities of the present, that they fail
to make provision for the contingencies of the future.

We were joined in about a fortnight by the other workmen from the Low
country, and I resigned my temporary charge (save that I still retained
the time-book in my master's behalf) into the hands of an ancient mason,
remarkable over the north of Scotland for his skill as an operative, and
who, though he was now turned of sixty, was still able to build and hew
considerably more than the youngest and most active man in the squad. He
was at this time the only survivor of three brothers, all masons, and
all not merely first-class workmen, but of a class to which, at least to
the north of the Grampians, only they themselves belonged, and very
considerably in advance of the first. And on the removal of the second
of the three brothers to the south of Scotland, it was found that, amid
the stone-cutters of Glasgow, David Fraser held relatively the same
place that he had done among those of the north. I have been told by Mr.
Kenneth Matheson--a gentleman well known as a master-builder in the west
of Scotland--that in erecting some hanging stairs of polished stone,
ornamented in front and at the outer edge by the common fillet and
torus, his ordinary workmen used to complete for him their one step
a-piece per day, and David Fraser his _three_ steps, finished equally
well. It is easily concei