in
by a small Celt going with his dad to seek for a lost sheep among the
snow-wreaths round his base. As for eagles, and ravens, and red-deer,
"those magnificent creatures so stately and bright," let them shift for
themselves--and perhaps in spite of all our rhapsodies--the fewer of
them the better; but among geese, and turkeys, and poultry, let
propagation flourish--the fleecy folk baa--and the hairy hordes bellow
on a thousand hills. All the beauty and sublimity on earth--over the
Four Quarters of the World--is not worth a straw if valued against a
good harvest. An average crop is satisfactory; but a crop that soars
high above an average--a golden year of golden ears--sends joy into the
heart of heaven. No prating now of the degeneracy of the potato. We can
sing now with our single voice, like a numerous chorus, of

"Potatoes drest both ways, both roasted and boiled;"

sixty bolls to the acre on a field of our own of twenty acres--mealier
than any meal--Perth reds--to the hue on whose cheeks dull was that on
the face of the Fair Maid of Perth, when she blushed to confess to
Burn-y-win' that hand-over-hip he had struck the iron when it was hot,
and that she was no more the Glover's. O bright are potato blooms!--O
green are potato-shaws!--O yellow are potato-plums! But how oft are
blighted summer hopes and broken summer promises! Spare not the
shaw--heap high the mounds--that damp nor frost may dim a single eye; so
that all winter through poor men may prosper, and spring see settings
of such prolific vigour, that they shall yield a thousandfold--and the
sound of rumbledethumps be heard all over the land.

Let the people eat--let them have food for their bodies, and then they
will have heart to care for their souls; and the good and the wise will
look after their souls with sure and certain hope of elevating them from
their hovels to heaven, while prigs, with their eyes in a fine frenzy
rolling, rail at railroads, and all the other vile inventions of an
utilitarian age to open up and expedite communication between the
Children of the Mist and the Sons and Daughters of the Sunshine, to the
utter annihilation of the sublime Spirit of Solitude. Be under no sort
of alarm for Nature. There is some talk, it is true, of a tunnel through
Cruachan to the Black Mount, but the general impression seems to be that
it will be a _great bore_. A joint-stock company that undertook to
remove Ben-Nevis, is beginning to find unexpect