rge of emotion, and more successfully than any
formal harangue, work out their intended function. Such works as _Unto
this Last_ and _Munera Pulveris_, however keen the mental antagonism
they may initially provoke, mark a period in the spiritual life of the
reader: no matter what the prepossessions of a man may be, these books
will modify them. He is reverent, but, like Plato, he is dynamic. You
can't sit at ease as you read his pages, for they are charged as much
with defiance as with guidance.

CHAPTER IV.

EDUCATIONAL.

Some Insular Dominies--Education Act of 1872--Education in the
Highlands--Feeding the hungry--Parish Council
boarders--Dwindling attendances--Arnisdale--Golspie Technical
School--On the Sidlaws--Some surprises--Arran schools--Science
and literature--Study of Scott--The old classical dominie--Vogue
of Latin in former times--Teachers and
examinations--Howlers--Competing subjects.

SOME INSULAR DOMINIES.

It is by no means an easy matter for a teacher to get south again once
he is installed in a remote Highland school. He accepts a distant rural
or insular post, marries the girl of his heart, gets settled in the
schoolhouse of the glen or township, and rarely moves thence all the
succeeding years of his life. He becomes identified with local affairs;
plays whist maybe with the doctor, the factor, and the banker; and is
apt to magnify the cackle of his bourg into the great Voice that echoes
round the world. The monotony of his life is varied by such happenings
as a birth or a death in his own household, a visit from the emissary of
My Lords, an epidemic of measles, a general election, and the like. I
don't say these men are unhappy, but unless they develop a hobby,
torpidity is bound to settle like a mist upon their brains. Such studies
as geology, botany, and gardening, are sovereign for driving off the
vapours of ennui. Nor are golf, angling, and the composition of verse,
specifics that the rural dominie can afford to despise.

I have in my mind at this moment the portraits of many notable gentlemen
(for true gentlemen they are, though their purses are thin) who have
given up their lives to educating the progeny of the inclement North.
Lamont, for example, whom I remember as a first-class mathematician, is
living in the marshy navel of an Outer Isle, amid wild-fowl and spirals
of peat-reek. If you want to visit him you have (1) to cross the billowy
western dee