is now well-nigh past. My few facts on the subject may serve
to show that, even as late as the year 1823, some three days' journey
into the Highlands might be regarded as analogous in some respects to a
journey into the past of some three or four centuries. But even since
that comparatively recent period the Highlands have greatly changed.

After some six or eight weeks of warm sunny days and lovely evenings,
there came on a dreary tract of rainy weather, with strong westerly
gales; and for three months together, while there was scarce a day that
had not its shower, some days had half-a-dozen. Gairloch occupies, as I
have said, exactly the focus of that great curve of annual rain which,
impinging on our western shores from the Atlantic, extends from the
north of Assynt to the south of Mull, and exhibits on the rain-gauge an
average of thirty-five yearly inches--an average very considerably above
the medium quantity that falls in any other part of Great Britain, save
a small tract at the Land's End, included in a southern curve of equal
fall. The rain-fall of this year, however, must have stood very
considerably above even this high average; and the corn crops of the
poor Highlanders soon began to testify to the fact. There had been a
larger than ordinary promise during the fine weather; but in the danker
hollows the lodged oats and barley now lay rotting on the ground, or, on
the more exposed heights, stood up, shorn of the ears, as mere naked
spikes of straw. The potatoes, too, had become soft and watery, and must
have formed but indifferent food to the poor Highlanders, condemned,
even in better seasons, to feed upon them during the greater part of the
year, and now thrown upon them almost exclusively by the failure of the
corn crop. The cottars of the neighbouring village were on other
accounts in more than usually depressed circumstances at the time. Each
family paid to the laird for its patch of corn-land, and the pasturage
of a wide upland moor, on which each kept three cows a-piece, a small
yearly rent of three pounds. The males were all fishermen as well as
crofters; and, small as the rent was, they derived their only means of
paying it from the sea--chiefly, indeed, from the herring
fishery--which, everywhere an uncertain and precarious source of supply,
is more so here than in most other places on the north-western coasts of
Scotland. And as for three years together the herring fishing had failed
in the Loch,