, went down to the wharf or quay
and had some conversation with one of the masters of the business.
He cured and put up about 30,000 barrels of herrings himself in a
season, employing, while it lasted, 500 persons. Their chief market
is the North of Europe, especially Poland, and the business was
consequently much depressed on account of the troubles in that
country. The occupation of this little sea-side village illustrated
the ramifications of commerce. They imported their salt from
Liverpool, their staves from Norway and their hoops from London.

Set out again immediately after breakfast, feeling that I was
drawing near to the end of my journey. I was soon in the treeless
county of Caithness, so fraught with the wild romance of the
Norsemen. Passed over the bleakest district I had yet seen, called
Old Ord, a cold, rough, cloud-breeding region that the very heavens
above seem to frown upon with a scowl of dissatisfaction. Still,
the road over this dark, mountain desert, though staked on each side
to keep the traveller from wandering in the blinding snows of
winter, was as beautifully kept as the carriage-way in the park of
Dunrobin Castle. The sending of an English queen to conciliate the
Welsh, by giving birth to a son in one of their castles, was not a
much better stroke of policy than that of England in perforating
Scotland to the Northern Sea with this unparalleled and splendid
road, constructed at first for a military purpose. I heard a man
repeat a couplet, probably of unwritten poetry, in popular vogue
among the Highlands, and which has quite an Irish collocation of
ideas. It is spoken thus, as far as I can recollect--

Who knew these roads ere they were made
Should bless the Lord for General Wade.

I doubt if there are ten consecutive miles of carriage-road in
America that could compare for excellence with that over the desert
of Old Ord. I was overtaken by a heavy shower before I had made the
trajet, and was glad to reach one of the most comfortable inns of
the Highlands, in the beautiful, romantic and picturesque glen of
Berriedale. Here, nestling between lofty mountain ridges, which
warded off the blasting sea-winds sweeping across from Norway, were
plantations and groves of trees, almost the only ones I saw in the
county. Nothing could exceed the hospitality of the family that
kept the large, white-faced hotel at the bottom of this pleasant
valley; especially after I incidentally