om all you know of us,
whether or no we have a heart to understand and enjoy such rare
felicity.

But let us be off to the mountains, and endeavour to interest our
beloved reader in a Highland Cottage--in any one, taken at hap-hazard,
from a hundred. You have been roaming all day among the mountains, and
perhaps seen no house except at a dwindling distance. Probably you have
wished not to see any house, but a ruined shieling--a deserted hut--or
an unroofed and dilapidated shed for the outlying cattle of some remote
farm. But now the sun has inflamed all the western heaven, and darkness
will soon descend. There is now a muteness more stern and solemn than
during unfaded daylight. List--the faint, far-off, subterranean sound of
the bagpipe! Some old soldier, probably, playing a gathering or a
coronach. The narrow dell widens and widens into a great glen, in which
you just discern the blue gleam of a loch. The martial music is more
distinctly heard--loud, fitful, fierce, like the trampling of men in
battle. Where is the piper? In a cave, or within the Fairies' Knowe? At
the door of a hut. His eyes were extinguished by ophthalmia, and there
he sits, fronting the sunlight, stone-blind. Long silver hair flows down
his broad shoulders, and you perceive that, when he rises, he will rear
up a stately bulk. The music stops, and you hear the bleating of goats.
There they come, prancing down the rocks, and stare upon the stranger.
The old soldier turns himself towards the voice of the Sassenach, and,
with the bold courtesy of the camp, bids him enter the hut. One
minute's view has sufficed to imprint the scene for ever on the
memory--a hut whose turf walls and roof are incorporated with the living
mountain, and seem not the work of man's hand, but the casual
architecture of some convulsion--the tumbling down of fragments from the
mountain-side by raging torrents, or a partial earthquake; for all the
scenery about is torn to pieces--like the scattering of some wide ruin.
The imagination dreams of the earliest days of our race, when men
harboured, like the other creatures, in places provided by nature. But
even here, there are visible traces of cultivation working in the spirit
of a mountainous region--a few glades of the purest verdure opened out
among the tall brackens, with a birch-tree or two dropped just where the
eye of taste could have wished, had the painter planted the sapling,
instead of the winds of heaven having wafted th