mile or two behind us, and was growing more dreary as we advanced. Huge
continuous heaths spread before, behind, and around us, in hopeless
barrenness--now level and interspersed with swamps, green with
treacherous verdure, or sable with turf, or, as they call them in
Scotland, peat-bogs,--and now swelling into huge heavy ascents, which
wanted the dignity and form of hills, while they were still more toilsome
to the passenger. There were neither trees nor bushes to relieve the eye
from the russet livery of absolute sterility. The very heath was of that
stinted imperfect kind which has little or no flower, and affords the
coarsest and meanest covering, which, as far as my experience enables me
to judge, mother Earth is ever arrayed in. Living thing we saw none,
except occasionally a few straggling sheep of a strange diversity of
colours, as black, bluish, and orange. The sable hue predominated,
however, in their faces and legs. The very birds seemed to shun these
wastes, and no wonder, since they had an easy method of escaping from
them;--at least I only heard the monotonous and plaintive cries of the
lapwing and curlew, which my companions denominated the peasweep and
whaup.

At dinner, however, which we took about noon, at a most miserable
alehouse, we had the good fortune to find that these tiresome screamers
of the morass were not the only inhabitants of the moors. The goodwife
told us, that "the gudeman had been at the hill;" and well for us that he
had been so, for we enjoyed the produce of his _chasse_ in the shape of
some broiled moor-game,--a dish which gallantly eked out the ewe-milk
cheese, dried salmon, and oaten bread, being all besides that the house
afforded. Some very indifferent two-penny ale, and a glass of excellent
brandy, crowned our repast; and as our horses had, in the meantime,
discussed their corn, we resumed our journey with renovated vigour.

I had need of all the spirits a good dinner could give, to resist the
dejection which crept insensibly on my mind, when I combined the strange
uncertainty of my errand with the disconsolate aspect of the country
through which it was leading me. Our road continued to be, if possible,
more waste and wild than that we had travelled in the forenoon. The few
miserable hovels that showed some marks of human habitation, were now of
still rarer occurrence; and at length, as we began to ascend an
uninterrupted swell of moorland, they totally disappeared. The only