dles. Their appearance in most cases betrayed their life of
hardship. I scarce saw a Gairloch woman of the humbler class turned of
thirty, who was not thin, sallow, and prematurely old. The men, their
husbands and brothers, were by no means worn out with hard work. I have
seen them, time after time, sunning themselves on a mossy bank, when the
females were thus engaged; and used, with my brother-workmen--who were
themselves Celts, but of the industrious, hardworking type--to feel
sufficiently indignant at the lazy fellows. But the arrangement which
gave them rest, and their wives and sisters hard labour, seemed to be as
much the offspring of a remote age as the woollen sails and the moss-fir
cordage. Several other ancient practices and implements had at this time
just disappeared from the district. A good meal-mill of the modern
construction had superseded, not a generation before, several small
mills with horizontal water-wheels, of that rude antique type which
first supplanted the still more ancient handmill. These horizontal mills
still exist, however--at least they did so only two years ago--in the
gneiss region of Assynt. The antiquary sometimes forgets that, tested by
his special rules for determining periods, several ages may be found
contemporary in contiguous districts of the same country. I am old
enough to have seen the handmill at work in the north of Scotland; and
the traveller into the Highlands of western Sutherland might have
witnessed the horizontal mill in action only two years ago. But to the
remains of either, if dug out of the mosses or sand-hills of the
southern counties, we would assign an antiquity of centuries. In the
same way, the unglazed earthen pipkin, fashioned by the hand without the
assistance of the potter's wheel, is held to belong to the "bronze and
stone periods" of the antiquary; and yet my friend of the Doocot Cave,
when minister of Small Isles, found the remains of one of these pipkins
in the famous charnel cave of Eigg, which belonged to an age not earlier
than that of Mary, and more probably pertained to that of her son James;
and I have since learned, that in the southern portions of the Long
Island, this same hand-moulded pottery of the bronze period has been
fashioned for domestic use during the early part of the present century.
A chapter devoted to these lingering, or only recently departed, arts of
the primitive ages, would be a curious one; but I fear the time for
writing it