lassic
portico; and as we had no one to state our case, our house was rated,
not according to its reduced, but according to its original value. And
so the entire rental of the second year, with several pounds additional
which I had to subtract from my hard-earned savings as a mason, were
appropriated in behalf of the ecclesiastical Establishment of the
country, by the builders of the church and spire. I had attained my
majority when lodging in the fragment of a salt storehouse in Gairloch;
and, competent in the eye of the law to dispose of the house on the
Coal-hill, I now hoped to find, if not a purchaser, at least some one
foolish enough to take it off my hands for nothing. I have since heard
and read a good deal about the atrocious landlords of the poorer and
less reputable sort of houses in our large towns, and have seen it
asserted that, being a bad and selfish kind of people, they ought to be
rigorously dealt with. And so, I daresay, they ought; but at the same
time I cannot forget, that I myself was one of these atrocious landlords
from my fifth till nearly my twenty-second year, and that I could not
possibly help it, and was very sorry for it.

On the fourth day after losing sight of the Hill of Cromarty, the Leith
smack in which I sailed was slowly threading her way, in a morning of
light airs and huge broken fog-wreaths, through the lower tracts of the
Firth of Forth. The islands and distant land looked dim and grey through
the haze, like objects in an unfinished drawing; and at times some vast
low-browed cloud from the sea applied the sponge as it rolled past, and
blotted out half a county at a time; but the sun occasionally broke
forth in partial glimpses of great beauty, and brought out into bold
relief little bits of the landscape--now a town, and now an islet, and
anon the blue summit of a hill. A sunlit wreath rose from around the
abrupt and rugged Bass as we passed; and my heart leaped within me as I
saw, for the first time, that stern Patmos of the devout and brave of
another age looming dark and high through the diluted mist, and
enveloped for a moment, as the cloud parted, in an amber-tinted glory.
There had been a little Presbyterian oasis of old in the neighbourhood
of Cromarty, which, in the midst of the Highland and _Moderate_
indifferency that characterized the greater part of the north of
Scotland during the seventeenth century, had furnished the Bass with not
a few of its most devoted victims.