e good of belonging to that curious
superstition of yours if one mayn't play cards on Sunday?" Through her
mediation the desired indulgence was granted. The game was played, but
Providence nevertheless chastened Lord Houghton, using me as its humble
instrument, for I won three or four pounds from him--the largest, if not
the only, sum that I ever won at cards in my life.

Such episodes, imported as they were from the social world of England,
were not altogether in keeping with the visionary world of Waverley, but
they could not dissipate its atmosphere, charged with bygone romance.
And yet it was among these "distant dreams of dreams" that my ears
became first awake to the nearer sounds of some vague social disturbance
of which Ruskin's gospel of Labor, as I heard it at Oxford without any
clear comprehension of it, had been a harbinger.

I had been asked, when I left Dorlin, to pay one or two other visits in
the Highlands farther north--to the Sutherlands at Dunrobin, the Munro
Fergusons at Novar, and the Lovats at Beaufort. My route to these places
was by the Caledonian Canal, and in listening to the conversation of
various groups on the steamer I several times heard the opinion
expressed that, sooner or later, the Highlands were bound to be the
scene of some great agrarian revolution. I was well aware that the
assailants of landed property, from Marx and George down to the
semiconservative Bright, to whose voices had now been joined that of Mr.
Joseph Chamberlain, had pointed to the magnitude of the greater Highland
estates as signal types of the abuses to which Highland landlordism is
liable; but not till I took that journey on the steamer from Fort
William to Inverness had I attached to these arguments more than an
academic importance.

In the course of my ensuing visits I talked over the threatened
revolution with persons of much local knowledge, especially with one of
the Duke of Sutherland's agents, and Father Grant, the chaplain of the
Catholic Lovats at Beaufort. They did not, it appeared to me, take the
threatened revolution very seriously, and they showed me how absurdly in
error the agitators were as to certain of the facts alleged by them. One
of their errors consisted in their gross overestimates of what the
practical magnitude of the great Highland properties was, the rent of
the Sutherland property being, for instance, no more per acre than the
twentieth part of an average acre in England. Father Grant