ite of your slips and blunders, the Ross-shire crofters will not
turn round and rend you. They do not wish to embarrass the Government;
but have a care: their eyes are on you, and forbearance has its limits.
Think not because they live remote from train and telegraph, that you
are immune from their censure. Far from it! Round the hill-side at a
stated hour every day, in shine or shower, gust or calm, comes the
mail-coach of King Edward VII., bringing its pile of letters and
newspapers. I see the little throng of village politicians, eager-eyed,
peruse the latest parliamentary news. There they get all the needed
pabulum for the next political debate. If the answers to Mr. Galloway
Weir have been shifty and evasive, it will go hard with the Government
to-night in the little schoolroom, and the plaster will fall in showers
of dust from the ceiling as the iniquities of our rulers are ruthlessly
shown up. I should not like to feel the rough side of that chairman's
tongue.

A library of representative English works, presented to a remote
provincial society like the one I speak of, is a centre of unspeakable
entertainment and instruction. The _entertainment_, during the long
nights of winter, when the natives gather round the ingle and someone
reads aloud, is a very palpable addition to the joys of life. The
_instruction_ is perhaps slower in coming, but is none the less sure.
Only by comparison of books can their relative value as literature be
determined. Bigotry and narrow-mindedness in literature and religion are
almost always the result of ignorance. In the Highlands it is oftenest
the local teacher who is the librarian, and the books are accommodated
in the school. The teacher is thus able to make his instruction in
literature vivid and interesting to his senior pupils; he can authorise
a pupil to take a particular volume home and require an essay to be
written on it within a given time; and he can, in school, read aloud
typical passages of good prose to supplement the limited extracts of the
class text-books. The books have been selected (i.) to form useful
reading for adults; (ii.) to supply suitable pabulum for literary
societies; (iii.) to aid the schemes of the Education Department in
connection with what is called the "Supplementary Course of Instruction
in English Literature." The selection of the books for the use of senior
scholars has been, as a rule, easy enough. Dictionaries of the French
and German languages