rrears.'

Mr. Robertson gives us the tragedy of a clearing in its first act. We
had lately the opportunity of witnessing the closing scene in the
after-piece, by which a clearing more than equally extensive has been
followed up, and which bids fair to find at no distant day many
counterparts in the Highlands of Scotland. Rather more than twenty
years ago, the wild, mountainous island of Rum, the home of
considerably more than five hundred souls, was divested of all its
inhabitants, to make way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand
sheep. It was soon found, however, that there are limits beyond which
it is inconvenient to depopulate a country on even the sheep-farm
system: the island had been rendered too thoroughly a desert for the
comfort of the tenant; and on the occasion of a clearing which took
place in a district of Skye, and deprived of their homes many of the
old inhabitants, some ten or twelve families of the number were
invited to Rum, and may now be found squatting on the shores of the
only bay of the island, on a strip of unprofitable morass. But the
whole of the once peopled interior remains a desert, all the more
lonely in its aspect from the circumstance that the solitary glens,
with their green, plough-furrowed patches, and their ruined heaps of
stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as themselves, and that
the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily around. We spent a long
summer's day amidst its desert recesses, and saw the sun set behind
its wilderness of pyramidal hills. The evening was calm and clear; the
armies of the insect world were sporting by millions in the light; a
brown stream that ran through the valley at our feet yielded an
incessant poppling sound from the myriads of fish that were
incessantly leaping in the pools, beguiled by the quick glancing wings
of green and gold that incessantly fluttered over them; the
half-effaced furrows borrowed a richer hue from the yellow light of
sunset; the broken cottage-walls stood up more boldly prominent on the
hill-side, relieved by the lengthening shadows; along a distant
hill-side there ran what seemed the ruins of a grey stone fence,
erected, says tradition, in a very remote age to facilitate the
hunting of deer: all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting habitation
for man, and in which not only the necessaries, but not a few also of
the luxuries of life, might be procured; but in the entire prospect
not a man nor a man's dwelling could th