their
ruined heaps of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as
themselves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around.
The armies of the insect world were sporting in the light this evening
by millions; a brown stream that runs through the valley yielded an
incessant popling sound, from the myriads of fish that were ceaselessly
leaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and
gold that fluttered over them; along a distant hill-side there ran what
seemed the ruins of a gray-stone fence, erected, says tradition, in a
remote age, to facilitate the hunting of the deer; there were fields on
which the heath and moss of the surrounding moorlands were fast
encroaching, that had borne many a successive harvest; and prostrate
cottages, that had been the scenes of christenings, and bridals, and
blythe new-year's days;--all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting
habitation for man, in which not only the necessaries, but also a few of
the luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect not
a man nor a man's dwelling could the eye command. The landscape was one
without figures. I do not much like extermination carried out so
thoroughly and on system;--it seems bad policy; and I have not succeeded
in thinking any the better of it though assured by economists that there
are more than people enough in Scotland still. There are, I believe,
more than enough in our workhouses,--more than enough on our
pauper-rolls,--more than enough huddled up, disreputable, useless, and
unhappy, in the miasmatic alleys and typhoid courts of our large towns;
but I have yet to learn how arguments for local depopulation are to be
drawn from facts such as these. A brave and hardy people, favorably
placed for the development of all that is excellent in human nature,
form the glory and strength of a country;--a people sunk into an abyss
of degradation and misery, and in which it is the whole tendency of
external circumstances to sink them yet deeper, constitute its weakness
and its shame; and I cannot quite see on what principle the ominous
increase which is taking place among us in the worse class, is to form
our solace or apology for the wholesale expatriation of the better. It
did not seem as if the depopulation of Rum had tended much to any one's
advantage. The single sheep-farmer who had occupied the holdings of so
many had been unfortunate in his speculations, and had left the island:
the propri