ment, I
never yet knew one of the half-witted caste who was not selfish and a
rogue.

We were unlucky in our barracks this season. Ere completing our first
piece of work, we had to quit the hay-barn, our earliest dwelling, to
make way for the proprietor's hay, and to shelter in a cow-house, where,
as the place had no chimney, we were nearly suffocated by smoke; and we
now found the innkeeper, our new employer, speculating, like the
magistrates in Joe Miller, on the practicability of lodging us in a
building, the materials of which were to be used in erecting the one
which we were engaged to build. We did our best to solve the problem,
by hanging up at the end of the doomed hovel--which had been a
salt-store in its day, and was in damp weather ever sweating
salt-water--a hanging partition of mats, that somewhat resembled the
curtain of a barn-theatre; and, making our beds within, we began pulling
down piecemeal, as the materials were required, that part of the
erection which lay outside. We had very nearly unhoused ourselves ere
our work was finished; and the chill blasts of October, especially when
they blew in at the open end of our dwelling, rendered it as
uncomfortable as a shallow cave in an exposed rock-front. My boyish
experiences, however, among the rocks of Cromarty, constituted no bad
preparation for such a life, and I roughed it out at least as well as
any of my comrades. The day had so contracted, that night always fell
upon our unfinished labours, and I had no evening walks; but there was a
delightful gneiss island, of about thirty acres in extent, and nearly
two miles away, to which I used to be occasionally despatched to quarry
lintels and corner stones, and where work had all the charms of play;
and the quiet Sabbaths were all my own. So long as the laird and his
family were at the mansion-house of Flowerdale--at least four months of
every year--there was an English service in the parish church; but I had
come to the place this season before the laird, and now remained in it
after he had gone away, and there was no English service for me. And so
I usually spent my Sabbaths all alone in the noble Flowerdale woods, now
bright under their dark hillsides, in the autumnal tints, and remarkable
for the great height and bulk of their ash trees, and of a few detached
firs, that spoke, in their venerable massiveness, of former centuries.
The clear, calm mornings, when the gossamer went sailing in long grey
films