d towards the sea. I could but
glance at the appearances as the gig drove past, and point them out to a
fellow passenger, the Establishment minister of----, remarking, at the
same time, how much more dreary the prospect must have seemed than even
it did to-day, though the fog was thick and the drizzle disagreeable,
when the lateral hollows on each side were blocked up with ice, and
overhanging glaciers, that ploughed the rock bare in their descent,
glistened on the bleak hill-sides. I wore a gray maud over a coat of
rough russet, with waist-coat and trowsers of plaid; and the minister,
who must have taken me, I suppose, for a southland shepherd looking out
for a farm, gave me much information of a kind I might have found
valuable had such been my condition and business, regarding the various
districts through which we passed. On one high-lying farm, the grass, he
said, was short and thin, but sweet and wholesome, and the flocks throve
steadily, and were never thinned by disease; whereas on another farm,
that lay along the dank bottom of a valley, the herbage was rank and
rich, and the sheep fed and got heavy, but braxy at the close of autumn
fell upon them like a pestilence, and more than neutralized to the
farmer every advantage of the superior fertility of the soil. It was not
uninteresting, even for one not a sheep-farmer, to learn that the life
of the sheep is worth fewer years' purchase in one little track of
country than in another adjacent one; and that those differences in the
salubrity of particular spots which obtain in other parts of the world
in regard to our own species, and which make it death to linger on the
luxuriant river-side, while on the arid plain or elevated hill-top there
is health and safety, should exist in contiguous walks in the Highlands
of Scotland in reference to some of the inferior animals. The minister
and I became wonderfully good friends for the time. All the seats in the
gig, both back and front, had been occupied ere he had taken his
passage, and the postman had assigned him a miserable place on the
narrow elevated platform in the middle, where he had to coil himself up
like a hedgehog in its hole, sadly to the discomfort of limbs still
stout and strong, but stiffened by the long service of full seventy
years. And, as in the case made famous by Cowper, of the "softer sex"
and the old-fashioned iron-cushioned arm-chairs, the old man had, as
became his years, "'gan murmur." I contrived,