rance of houses.

[8] The act for manumitting our Scotch colliers was passed in the year
1775, forty-nine years prior to the date of my acquaintance with the
class at Niddry. But though it was only such colliers of the village as
were in their fiftieth year when I knew them (with, of course, all the
older ones), who had been born slaves, even its men of thirty had
actually, though not nominally, come into the world in a state of
bondage, in consequence of certain penalties attached to the
emancipating act, of which the poor ignorant workers under ground were
both too improvident and too little ingenious to keep clear. They were
set free, however, by a second act passed in 1799. The language of both
these acts, regarded as British ones of the latter half of the last
century, and as bearing reference to British subjects living within the
limits of the island, strikes with startling effect. "Whereas," says the
preamble of the older act--that of 1775--"by the statute law of
Scotland, as explained by the judges of the courts of law there, many
colliers, and coal-bearers, and salters, are in a state of _slavery or
bondage_, bound to the collieries or salt-works where they work _for
life, transferable with the collieries and salt-works_; and whereas the
emancipating," &c. &c. A passage in the preamble of the act of 1799 is
scarce less striking: it declares that, notwithstanding the former act,
"many colliers and coal-bearers _still continue in a state of bondage_"
in Scotland. The history of our Scotch colliers will be found a curious
and instructive one. Their slavery seems not to have been derived from
the ancient tunes of general serfship, but to have originated in
comparatively modern acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in decisions
of the Court of Session--in acts of a Parliament in which the poor
ignorant subterranean men of the country were, of course, wholly
unrepresented, and in decisions of a Court in which no agent of theirs
ever made appearance in their behalf.

CHAPTER XV.

"See Inebriety, her wand she waves,
And lo! her pale and lo! her purple slaves."--CRABBE.

I was joined in the course of a few weeks, in Peggy Russel's one-roomed
cottage, by another lodger--lodgers of the humbler class usually
consociating together in pairs. My new companion had lived for some
time, ere my arrival at Niddry, in a neighbouring domicile, which, as he
was what was termed a "quiet-living man," and as the inma