from the work, and they will
soon tire out, and leave you to pursue your own course. I know exactly
the nature of your offence: you do not drink with them or treat them;
but they will soon cease to expect that you should; and when once they
find that you are not to be coerced or driven off, they will let you
alone." As, however, from the abundance of employment--a consequence of
the Building mania--the men were masters and more at the time, the
foreman could not take my part openly in opposition to them; but I was
grateful for his kindness, and felt too thoroughly indignant at the mean
fellows who could take such odds against an inoffensive stranger, to be
much in danger of yielding to the combination. It is only a weak man
whom the wind deprives of his cloak: a man of the average strength is
more in danger of losing it when assailed by the genial beams of a too
kindly sun.

I threw myself, as usual, for the compensatory pleasures, on my evening
walks, but found the enclosed state of the district, and the fence of a
rigorously-administered trespass-law, serious drawbacks; and ceased to
wonder that a thoroughly cultivated country is, in most instances, so
much less beloved by its people than a wild and open one. Rights of
proprietorship may exist equally in both; but there is an important
sense in which the open country belongs to the proprietors and to the
people too. All that the heart and the intellect can derive from it may
be alike free to peasant and aristocrat; whereas the cultivated and
strictly fenced country belongs usually, in every sense, to only the
proprietor; and as it is a much simpler and more obvious matter to love
one's country as a scene of hills, and streams, and green fields, amid
which Nature has often been enjoyed, than as a definite locality, in
which certain laws and constitutional privileges exist, it is rather to
be regretted than wondered at that there should be often less true
patriotism in a country of just institutions and equal laws, whose soil
has been so exclusively appropriated as to leave only the dusty
high-roads to its people, than in wild open countries, in which the
popular mind and affections are left free to embrace the soil, but whose
institutions are partial and defective. Were our beloved Monarch to
regard such of the gentlemen of her court as taboo their Glen Tilts, and
shut up the passes of the Grampians, as a sort of disloyal Destructives
of a peculiar type, who make it t