s, its old doddered woods of birch
and hazel, its extensive lake, its headlong river, and its roaring
cataract. Nature had imparted to it much of a wild and savage beauty;
but art had done nothing for it. To reverse the well-known antithesis
in which Goldsmith sums up his description of Italy,--the only growth
that had _not_ dwindled in it was man. The cottage in which we resided
with an aged relative and his two stalwart sons, might be regarded as
an average specimen of the human dwellings of the district. It was a
low long building of turf, consisting of four apartments on the ground
floor,--the one stuck on to the end of the other, and threaded
together by a passage that connected the whole. From the nearest hill
the cottage reminded one of a huge black snail crawling up the slope.
The largest of the four apartments was occupied by the master's six
milk cows; the next in size was the ha', or sitting-room,--a rude but
not uncomfortable apartment, with the fire on a large flat stone in
the middle of the floor. The apartment adjoining was decently
partitioned into sleeping places; while the fourth and last in the
range--more neatly fitted up than any of the others, with furniture
the workmanship of a bred carpenter, a small bookcase containing from
forty to fifty volumes, and a box-bed of deal--was known as the
stranger's room. There was a straggling group of buildings outside, in
the same humble style,--a stable, a barn, a hay-barn, a sheep-pen with
a shed attached, and a milk-house; and stretching around the whole lay
the farm,--a straggling patch of corn land of from twelve to fifteen
acres in extent, that, from its extremely irregular outline, and the
eccentric forms of the parti-coloured divisions into which it was
parcelled, reminded one of a coloured map. Encircling all was a wide
sea of heath studded with huge stones--the pasturage land of the
farmer for his sheep and cattle--which swept away on every hand to
other islands of corn and other groups of cottages, identical in
appearance with the corn land and the cottages described.

We remember that, coming from a seaport town, where, to give to
property the average security, the usual means had to be resorted to,
we were first struck by finding that the door of our relative's
cottage, in this inland parish, was furnished with neither lock nor
bar. Like that of the hermit in the ballad, it opened with a latch;
but, unlike that of the hermit, it was not because the