studs that thick emboss his iron door;
Then downward and then upwards, then aslant
And then alternate; with a sickly hope
By dint of change to give his tasteless task
Some relish; till, the sum exactly found
In all directions, he begins again."

It was idle work; for to reckon up the door-studs never so often
was not the way of opening up the door. But in carefully examining
and recording for our own use the appearances of the stony bars of
our prison, we were greatly more profitably employed. Nay, we had
stumbled on one of the best possible modes of escaping from our
prison. We were in reality getting hold of its bolts and its
stancheons, and converting them into tools in the work of breaking
out. We remember once passing a whole season in one of the dreariest
districts of the north-western Highlands,--a district included in
that unhappy tract of country, doomed, we fear, to poverty and
suffering, which we find marked in the rain-map of Europe with a
double shade of blackness. We had hard work, and often soaking rain,
during the day; and at night our damp fuel filled the turf hut in
which we sheltered with suffocating smoke, and afforded no light by
which to read. Nor--even ere the year got into its wane, and when
in the long evenings we _had_ light--had we any books to read by it,
or a single literary or scientific friend with whom to exchange an
idea. We remember at another time living in an agricultural district
in the low country, in a hovel that was open along the ridge of the
roof from gable to gable, so that as we lay a-bed we could tell
the hours of the night by the stars that were passing overhead across
the chasm. There were about half-a-dozen farm-servants, victims to the
bothie system, that ate and slept in the same place; and often, long
after midnight, a disreputable poacher used to come stealthily in, and
fling himself down on a lair of straw that he had prepared for
himself in a corner. Now, both the Highland hut and the Lowland
hovel, with their accompaniments of protracted and uncongenial
labour, might be regarded as dreary prisons; and yet we found them
to be in reality useful schools, very necessary to our education.
And now, when we hear about the state of the Highlands, and the
character of our poor Highlanders, and of the influence of the bothie
system and of the game-laws, we feel that we know considerably more
about such matters than if our experience had been of a mo