nd, "on hospitable thoughts intent," he climbed to
where we sat, accompanied by his wife, she bearing a vast bowl of milk,
and he a basket of bread and cheese. And we found the refreshment most
seasonable, after our long hours of toil, and with a rough journey still
before us. It is an excellent circumstance, that hospitality grows best
where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears,
like fruits in the thick of a wood; but where man is planted sparsely,
it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or espalier. It
flourishes where the inn and the lodging-house cannot exist, and dies
out where they thrive and multiply.

We reached the cross valley in the interior of the island about half an
hour before sunset. The evening was clear, calm, golden-tinted; even
wild heaths and rude rocks had assumed a flush of transient beauty; and
the emerald-green patches on the hill-sides, barred by the plough
lengthwise, diagonally, and transverse, had borrowed an aspect of soft
and velvety richness, from the mellowed light and the broadening
shadows. All was solitary. We could see among the deserted fields the
grass-grown foundations of cottages razed to the ground; but the valley,
more desolate than that which we had left, had not even its single
inhabited dwelling: it seemed as if man had done with it forever. The
island, eighteen years before, had been divested of its inhabitants,
amounting at the time to rather more than four hundred souls, to make
way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand sheep. All the aborigines of
Rum crossed the Atlantic; and at the close of 1828, the entire
population consisted of but the sheep-farmer, and a few shepherds, his
servants; the island of Rum reckoned up scarce a single family at this
period for every five square miles of area which it contained. But
depopulation on so extreme a scale was found inconvenient; the place had
been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the comfort of the occupant;
and on the occasion of a clearing which took place shortly after in
Skye, he accommodated some ten or twelve of the ejected families with
sites for cottages, and pasturage for a few cows, on the bit of morass
beside Loch Scresort, on which I had seen their humble dwellings. But
the whole of the once-peopled interior remains a wilderness, without
inhabitant,--all the more lonely in its aspect from the circumstance
that the solitary valleys, with their plough-furrowed patches, and