hing Golspie,
a lofty, sombre mountain, with its bald head enveloped in the mist,
and which I had been two hours apparently in passing, cleared away
and revealed its full stature--and more. Towering up from its
topmost summit, a tall column lifted a human figure in bronze
skyward cloud-high and frequently higher still. I believe the
brazen face that thus looks into the pure and holy skies without
blushing, is a duplicate of the one worn in human flesh by His
Grace, Evictor I., who unpeopled his great county of many thousands
of human inhabitants, and made nearly its whole area of 18,000
square miles a sheep-walk. But I will not break the seal of that
history. It was full of bitter experience to multitudes. Not for
the time being was it joyous, but grievous exceedingly--surpassing
endurance to many. But it is all over now. The ship-loads of
evicted men and women who looked their last upon Scotland while its
mountains and glens were reddened with the flames of their burning
cottages, carried away with them a bitter feeling in their hearts
which years of better experience did not soften. Not for their good
did it seem in the motive of the transaction; but for their good it
worked most blessedly. It was a rough transplanting, and the
tenderest fibres of human affection broke and bled under the
uptearing; but they took root in the Western World, and grew
luxuriantly under the light and dew of a happier destiny. It was
hard for fathers and mothers who were taking on the frostwork of age
upon their brows; but for their children it was the birth of a new
life; for them it was the introduction to a future which had a sun
in it, rayful and radiant with the beams of hope and promise. Let
those who denounce and deplore this harsh unpeopling come and stand
upon the cold, bleak summit of one of these Sutherland mountains.
Let them bring their compasses, or some other instrument for
measuring the angles, sines and cosines of human conditions. Plant
your theodolite here; wipe the telescope's eye with your
handkerchief; look your keenest in the line of the lineage of these
evicted thousands. Steady, now! while the most tranquil light of
the future is on the pathway of your eye. This first reach of your
vision is the life-track of the fathers and mothers unhoused among
these mountains. Look on beyond, over the longer life-line of their
children; then farther still under the horizon of the remotest
future to the track of t