Lairg, or without feeling that the defence embodied an
essential falsehood, which time will not fail to render evident to the
apprehensions of all.

We would but fatigue our readers were we to run over half our
recollections of the interior of Sutherland. They are not all of a
serious cast. We have sat in the long autumn evenings in the cheerful
circle round the turf-fire of the ha', and have heard many a tradition
of old clan feuds pleasingly told, and many a song of the poet of the
county, Old Rob Donn, gaily sung. In our immediate neighbourhood, by
the side of a small stream--small, but not without its supply of brown
trout, speckled with crimson--there was a spot of green meadow land,
on which the young men of the neighbourhood used not unfrequently to
meet and try their vigour in throwing the stone. The stone itself had
its history. It was a ball of gneiss, round as a bullet, that had once
surmounted the gable of a small Popish chapel, of which there now
remained only a shapeless heap of stones, that scarce overtopped the
long grass amid which it lay. A few undressed flags indicated an
ancient burying-ground; and over the ruined heap, and the rude
tombstones that told no story, an ancient time-hallowed tree, coeval
with the perished building, stretched out its giant arms. Even the
sterner occupations of the farm had in their very variety a strong
smack of enjoyment. We found one of the old man's sons engaged, during
our one visit, in building an outhouse, after the primitive fashion of
the Highlands, and during our other visit, in constructing a plough.
The two main _cupples_ of the building he made of huge trees, dug out
of a neighbouring morass; they resembled somewhat the beams of a large
sloop reversed. The stones he carried from the outfield heath on a
sledge; the interstices in the walls he caulked with moss; the roof he
covered with sods. The entire erection was his workmanship, from
foundation to ridge. And such, in brief, was the history of all those
cottages in the interior of Sutherland, which the poor Highlanders so
naturally deemed their own, but from which, when set on fire and burnt
to the ground by the creatures of the proprietor, they were glad to
escape with their lives. The plough, with the exception of the iron
work, was altogether our relative's workmanship too. And such was the
history of the rude implements of rural or domestic labour which were
consumed in the burning dwellings. But we antic