re. The state of his flocks was not
particularly cheering; and he had, besides, seen a vision of late, he
said, that filled his mind with strange forebodings. He had gone out
after nightfall on the previous evening to a dank hollow on the
hill-side, in which many of his flock had died; the rain had ceased a
few hours before, and a smart frost had set in, that, as on this
second evening, filled the whole valley with a wreath of silvery
vapour, dimly lighted by the thin fragment of a moon that appeared as
if resting at the time on the hill-top. The wreath stretched out its
grey folds beneath him, for he had climbed half-way up the acclivity,
when suddenly what seemed the figure of a man in heated metal--the
figure of a brazen man brought to a red heat in a furnace--sprang up
out of the darkness; and after stalking over the surface of the fog
for a few seconds--in which, however, it traversed the greater part of
the valley--as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanescent trail of
flame behind it. There could be little doubt that the old shepherd had
merely seen one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts,
during unsettled weather, so frequently startle the night traveller,
and that some peculiarity of form in the meteor had been exaggerated
by the obscuring influence of the frost-rime and the briefness of the
survey; but the apparition had filled his whole mind, as one of
strange and frightful portent from the spiritual world. And often
since that night has it returned to us in recollection, as a vision in
singular keeping with the wild valley which it traversed, and the
credulous melancholy of the solitary shepherd, its only witness,--

'A meteor of the night of distant years,
That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld
Musing at midnight upon prophecies.'

By much the greater part of Strathcarron, in those days, was in the
possession of its ancient inhabitants; and we learn from the
description of Mr. Robertson, that it has since undergone scarce any
change. 'Strathcarron,' he says, 'is still in the old state.'
Throughout its whole extent the turf cottages of the aborigines rise
dark and thick as heretofore, from amid their irregular patches of
potatoes and corn. But in an adjacent glen, through which the Calvie
works its headlong way to the Carron, that terror of the Highlanders,
a summons of removal, has been served within the last few months on a
whole community; and the graphic sketch of M