e eye command. The landscape
was one without figures. And where, it may be asked, was the one
tenant of the island for whose sake so many others had been removed?
We found his house occupied by a humble shepherd, who had in charge
the wreck of his property,--property no longer his, but held for the
benefit of his creditors. The great sheep-farmer had gone down under
circumstances of very general bearing, and on whose after development,
when in their latent state, improving landlords had failed to
calculate; the island itself was in the market, and a report went
current at the time that it was on the eve of being purchased by some
wealthy Englishman, who purposed converting it into a deer-forest. The
cycle--which bids fair to be that of the Highlands generally--had
already revolved in the depopulated island of Rum.

We have said that the sheep-farmer had gone down, in this instance,
under adverse circumstances of very extensive bearing. In a beautiful
transatlantic poem, a North American Indian is represented as visiting
by night the tombs of his fathers, now surrounded, though reared in
the depths of a forest, by the cultivated farms and luxurious
dwellings of the stranger, and there predicting that the race by
which _his_ had been supplaced should be in turn cast out of their
possessions. His fancy on the subject is a wild one, though not
unfitted for the poet. The streams, he said, were yielding a lower
murmur than of old, and rolling downwards a decreasing volume; the
springs were less copious in their supplies; the land, shorn of its
forests, was drying up under the no longer softened influence of
summer suns. Yet a few ages more, and it would spread out all around
an arid and barren wilderness, unfitted, like the deserts of the East,
to be a home of man. The fancy, we repeat, though a poetic, is a wild
one; but the grounds from which we infer that the clearers of the
Highlands--the supplanters of the Highlanders--are themselves to be
cleared and supplanted in turn, is neither wild nor poetic. The voice
which predicts in the case is a voice, not of shrinking rivulets nor
failing springs, but of the 'Cloth Hall' in Leeds, and of the worsted
factories of Bradford and Halifax. Most of our readers must be aware
that the great woollen trade of Britain divides into two main
branches--its woollen cloth manufacture, and its worsted and stuff
manufactures: and in both these the estimation in which British wool
is held has m