said that I had walked all
the way from London to see the country and people. They admitted me
into the kitchen and gave me a seat by the great peat fire, where I
had a long talk with them, beginning with the mother. Having
intimated that I was an American, the whole family, old and young,
including the landlord, gathered around me and had a hundred
questions to ask. They related many incidents about the great
eviction in Sutherland, which was an event that seems to make a
large stock of legendary and unwritten stories, like the old Sagas
of the Northmen. When I had dried my clothes and eaten a
comfortable dinner before their kitchen fire and resumed my staff,
they all followed me out to the road, and then with their wishes for
a good journey as long as I was in hearing distance. Continued my
walk around headlands, now looking seaward, now mountainward, now
ascending on heather-bound esplanades, now descending in zig-zag
directions into deep glens, over massive and elegant bridges that
spanned the mountain streams and their steep and jagged banks.
After a walk of eighteen miles, put up at an inn a little north of
the village of Dunbeath, kept by an intelligent and industrious
farmer. The rain had continued most of the day, and I was obliged
to seek shelter sometimes under a stunted tree which helped out the
protecting power of a weather-beaten umbrella; now in the doorway of
an open stable or cow-shed, and once with my back against the door
of a wayside church, which kept off the rain in one direction. This
being a kind of border-season between summer and autumn, there were
no fires in the inns generally except in the kitchen, and I soon
learned to make for that, and always found a kindly welcome to its
comforts; though sometimes the good woman and her lassie would look
a little flushed at having their busiest culinary operations
revealed so suddenly to a stranger. Some of these kitchens are
fitted for sleeping apartments; occasionally having two tiers of
berths like a ship's cabin, slightly and rudely curtained.

The family of this wayside inn, seemingly like every other family in
the country, had connections in America, embracing brothers, uncles
and cousins. I was shown a little paper casket of hair flower-work,
sent by _post_! It was wrought of locks of every shade and tint,
from the snow of a grandmother over one hundred years of age to the
little, sunny curls of the youngest child in the circle of kindr