inquired where he came from. 'Oh!' exclaimed
the man with surprise, 'd'ye no' ken me? _Do ye no' ken that your
faither sell't me for a powny?_'"

HAND-LOOM WEAVING.

The miner is still with us, but the weaver is almost obsolete in the
Lowlands. You must search diligently for him. In Laurencekirk (a quaint
village of one long street, in the shire of Forfar), and in similar
out-of-the-way nooks, can still be faintly heard the music of the
hand-loom. I went recently into a weaver's shop in Laurencekirk, and
found three old men and one aged woman plying their shuttles. The oldest
of the men was born four years after the battle of Waterloo, and there
he sat, like a vision of the vanished years, striving to weave a few
more yards of drugget before going to rejoin his contemporaries of the
reign of George III. He told me there were once seven hundred hand-loom
weavers in the place, and "_that young fellow_" said he, pointing to a
wrinkled carle of eighty on the loom behind, "remembers it as well as I
do."

The industry of hand-loom weaving, which, a century ago, made every town
in Scotland resonant with the din of shuttles, is thus almost a thing of
the past, and the men who engaged in it have gone the way of their
shoe-buckles, knee-breeches, and seventeen-hundred linen. Yet weavers
were typical of all that was intellectual in Scottish life: every shop
was in its way a miniature university, and every weaver a man who
believed himself capable of giving Pitt a lesson or two on the
management of the war, and Dundas a few hints on political economy. They
had, indeed, far clearer views on politics than most of their
legislators; from their ranks at a subsequent period the Chartist
agitators--regrettably extreme as they were--were largely recruited; and
it is not too much to say that the minds of many of our leading
accredited reformers took the ply from these politicians of the loom.
These men who, in a way so characteristic of Scotland, managed to make
high-thinking subsist on homely fare, can never quite fade from memory
while their tuneful poetical exponent, Tannahill, is read and enjoyed.
In his works we have a page out of the past; and as we read his life and
poems, we behold the Scotch village as it was a century ago; we see the
old houses with their outside stairs, the antique boulder-paved cross,
and the assemblies of aproned craftsmen discussing news much older than
their ale.

In Broadford, Skye, there is