along the retired glades of the wood, and the straggling sunlight
fell on the crimson and orange mushroom, as it sprang up amid the dank
grass, and under thickly-leaved boughs of scarlet and gold, I deemed
peculiarly delightful. For one who had neither home nor church, the
autumnal woods formed by much a preferable Sabbath haunt to a shallow
cave, dropping brine, unprovided with chair or table, and whose only
furniture consisted of two rude bedsteads of undressed slabs, that bore
atop two blankets a-piece, and a heap of straw. Sabbath-walking in
parties, and especially in the neighbourhood of our large towns, is
always a frivolous, and often a very bad thing; but lonely Sabbath-walks
in a rural district--walks such as the poet Graham describes--are not
necessarily bad; and the Sabbatarians who urge that in all cases, men,
when not in church on the Sabbath, ought to be in their dwellings, must
know very little indeed of the "huts where poor men lie." In the mason's
barrack, or the farm-servant's bothy, it is often impossible to enjoy
the quiet of the Sabbath: the circumstances necessary to its enjoyment
must be sought in the open air, amid the recesses of some thick wood, or
along the banks of some unfrequented river, or on the brown wastes of
some solitary moor.

We had completed all our work ere Hallowday, and, after a journey of
nearly three days, I found myself once more at home, with the leisure of
the long happy winter before me. I still look lack on the experiences of
this year with a feeling of interest. I had seen in my boyhood, in the
interior of Sutherland, the Highlanders living in that condition of
comparative comfort which they enjoyed from shortly after the
suppression of the rebellion of 1745, and the abolition of the
hereditary jurisdictions, till the beginning of the present century, and
in some localities for ten or twelve years later. And here again I saw
them in a condition--the effect mainly of the introduction of the
extensive sheep-farm system into the interior of the country--which has
since become general over almost the entire Highlands, and of which the
result may be seen in the annual famines. The population, formerly
spread pretty equally over the country, now exists as a miserable
selvedge, stretched along its shores, dependent in most cases on
precarious fisheries, that prove remunerative for a year or two, and
disastrous for mayhap half-a-dozen; and able barely to subsist when
most succes