ork, and his donkey up to
the knees in one of his clover fields, feeding luxuriously. 'Hollo,
Andrew,' said he; 'I thought you told me your cuddy would eat nothing
but nettles and thistles.' 'Ay,' said he, 'but he misbehaved the day; he
nearly kicket me ower his head, sae I pat him in there just to
_punish_ him.'"

There is a good deal of the same sort of simple character brought out in
the two following. They were sent to me from Golspie, and are original,
as they occurred in my correspondent's own experience. The one is a
capital illustration of thrift, the other of kind feeling for the
friendless, in the Highland character. I give the anecdotes in my
correspondent's own words:--A little boy, some twelve years of age, came
to me one day with the following message: "My mother wants a vomit from
you, sir, and she bade me say if it will not be strong enough, she will
send it back." "Oh, Mr. Begg," said a woman to me, for whom I was
weighing two grains of calomel for a child, "dinna be so mean wi' it; it
is for a poor faitherless bairn."

The following, from a provincial paper, contains a very amusing
recognition of a return which one of the itinerant race considered
himself conscientiously bound to make to his clerical patron for an
alms: "A beggar, while on his rounds one day this week, called on a
clergyman (within two and a half miles of the Cross of Kilmarnock), who,
obeying the biblical injunction of clothing the naked, offered the
beggar an old top-coat. It was immediately rolled up, and the beggar, in
going away with it under his arm, thoughtfully (!) remarked, 'I'll hae
tae gie ye a day's _hearin_' for this na.'"

The natural and self-complacent manner in which the following anecdote
brings out in the Highlander an innate sense of the superiority of
Celtic blood is highly characteristic:--A few years ago, when an English
family were visiting in the Highlands, their attention was directed to a
child crying; on their observing to the mother it was _cross_, she
exclaimed--"Na, na, it's nae cross, for we're baith true Hieland."

The late Mr. Grahame of Garsock, in Strathearn, whose grandson now "is
laird himsel," used to tell, with great _unction_, some thirty years
ago, a story of a neighbour of his own of a still earlier generation,
Drummond of Keltie, who, as it seems, had employed an itinerant tailor
instead of a metropolitan artist. On one occasion a new pair of
inexpressibles had been made for the laird; th