r the
kindness of his friends, especially of Miss Lammie, he would have been
altogether 'a weary wight forlorn.'

Shargar was happier than ever he had been in his life. His white
face hung on Miss Lammie's looks, and haunted her steps from spence
(store-room, as in Devonshire) to milk-house, and from milk-house to
chessel, surmounted by the glory of his red hair, which a farm-servant
declared he had once mistaken for a fun-buss (whin-bush) on fire. This
day she had gone to the field to see the first handful of barley cut,
and Shargar was there, of course.

It was a glorious day of blue and gold, with just wind enough to set the
barley-heads a-talking. But, whether from the heat of the sun, or the
pain of his foot operating on the general discouragement under which he
laboured, Robert turned faint all at once, and dragged himself away to a
cottage on the edge of the field.

It was the dwelling of a cottar, whose family had been settled upon the
farm of Bodyfauld from time immemorial. They were, indeed, like other
cottars, a kind of feudal dependents, occupying an acre or two of the
land, in return for which they performed certain stipulated labour,
called cottar-wark. The greater part of the family was employed in the
work of the farm, at the regular wages.

Alas for Scotland that such families are now to seek! Would that the
parliaments of our country held such a proportion of noble-minded men as
was once to be found in the clay huts on a hill-side, or grouped about a
central farm, huts whose wretched look would move the pity of many a
man as inferior to their occupants as a King Charles's lap-dog is to a
shepherd's colley. The utensils of their life were mean enough: the life
itself was often elixir vitae--a true family life, looking up to the
high, divine life. But well for the world that such life has been
scattered over it, east and west, the seed of fresh growth in new lands.
Out of offence to the individual, God brings good to the whole; for
he pets no nation, but trains it for the perfect globular life of all
nations--of his world--of his universe. As he makes families mingle, to
redeem each from its family selfishness, so will he make nations
mingle, and love and correct and reform and develop each other, till the
planet-world shall go singing through space one harmony to the God of
the whole earth. The excellence must vanish from one portion, that
it may be diffused through the whole. The seed ripens on one