sessed capital,
from converting their farm-stock into cash, but this has been long
exhausted; and it is truly distressing to view their general poverty,
aggravated by their having once enjoyed abundance and independence.'

Some of the removals to which we have referred took place during that
group of scarce seasons in which the year 1816 was so prominent; but
the scarcity which these induced served merely to render the other
sufferings of the people more intense, and was lost sight of in the
general extent of the calamity. Another group of hard seasons came
on,--one of those groups which seem of such certain and yet of such
irregular occurrence in our climate, that though they have attracted
notice from the days of Bacon downwards, they have hitherto resisted
all attempts to include them in some definite cycle. The summer and
harvest of 1835 were the last of a series of fine summers and abundant
harvests; and for six years after there was less than the usual heat,
and more than the usual rain. Science, in connection with agriculture,
has done much for us in the low country, and so our humbler population
were saved from the horrors of a dearth of food; but on the green
patches which girdle the shores of Sutherland, and which have been
esteemed such wonderful improvements, science had done and could do
nothing. The people had been sinking lower and lower during the
previous twenty years, and what would have been great hardship before
had become famine now. One feels at times that it may be an advantage
to have lived among the humbler people. We have been enabled, in
consequence, to detect many such gross misstatements as those with
which the apologists of the disastrous revolution effected in
Sutherland have attempted to gloss over the ruin of that country. In
other parts of the Highlands, especially in the Hebrides, the failure
of the kelp trade did much to impoverish the inhabitants; but in the
Highlands of Sutherland the famine was the effect of _improvement_
alone.

The writer of these chapters saw how a late, untoward year operates on
the bleak shores of the north-western Highlands, when spending a
season there a good many years ago. He found what only a few
twelvemonths previous had been a piece of dark moor, laid out into
minute patches of corn, and bearing a dense population. The herring
fishing had failed for the two seasons before, and the poor cottars
were, in consequence, in arrears with their rent; but the