uttering in
Gaelic what seemed, from the tones and repetition, to be a few
deprecatory sentences. I addressed her in English, and inquired what
could have brought to a place so wild and lonely, one so feeble and
helpless. "Poor object!" she muttered in reply,--"poor object!--very
hungry;" but her scanty English could carry her no further. I slipped
into her hand a small piece of silver, for which she overwhelmed me with
thanks and blessings; and, bringing her to one of the broader avenues,
traversed by a road which leads out of the wood, I saw her fairly
entered upon the path in the right direction, and then, retracing my
steps crossed the log-bridge. The old woman,--little, I should suppose
from her appearance, under ninety,--was I doubt not, one of our
ill-provided Highland paupers, that starve under a law which, while it
has dried up the genial streams of voluntary charity in the country and
presses hard upon the means of the humbler classes, alleviates little,
if at all, the sufferings of the extreme poor. Amid present suffering
and privation there had apparently mingled in her dotage some dream of
early enjoyment,--a dream of the days when she had plucked berries, a
little herd-girl, on the banks of the Auldgrande; and the vision seemed
to have sent her out, far advanced in her second childhood, to poke
among the bushes with her crutch.

My old friend the minister of Alness,--uninstalled at the time in his
new dwelling,--was residing in a house scarce half a mile from the
chasm, to which he had removed from the parish manse at the Disruption;
and, availing myself of an invitation of long standing, I climbed the
acclivity on which it stands, to pass the night with him. I found,
however, that with part of his family, he had gone to spend a few weeks
beside the mineral springs of Strathpeffer, in the hope of recruiting a
constitution greatly weakened by excessive labor, and that the entire
household at home consisted of but two of the young ladies his
daughters, and their ward, the little Buchubai Hormazdji.

And who, asks the reader, is this Buchubai Hormazdji? A little Parsi
girl, in her eighth year, the daughter of a Christian convert from the
ancient faith of Zoroaster, who now labors in the Free Church Mission at
Bombay. Buchubai, his only child, was on his conversion, forcibly taken
from him by his relatives, but restored again by a British court of law;
and he had secured her safety by sending her to Europe, a