at rather more than ten years
ago, the idea struck the original improvers, that as green was an
improvement on brown, so far as the moors were concerned, white would
be an equally decided improvement on black, so far as the houses were
concerned. An order was accordingly issued, in the name of the Duke
and Duchess of Sutherland, that all the small tenants on both sides
the public road, where it stretches on the northern coast from the
confines of Reay to the Kyle of Tongue, a distance of about thirty
miles, should straightway build themselves new houses of stone and
mortar, according to a prescribed plan and specification. Pharaoh's
famous order could not have bred greater consternation. But the only
alternative given was summed up in the magic word _removal_; and the
poor Highlanders, dejected, tamed, broken in spirit as in means, well
knew from experience what the magic word meant. And so, as their
prototypes set themselves to gather stubble for their bricks, the poor
Highlanders began to build. We again quote from M'Leod:

'Previous to this, in the year 1829, I and my family had been forced
away, like others, being particularly obnoxious to those in authority
for sometimes showing an inclination to oppose their tyranny, and
therefore we had to be made examples of to frighten the rest; but in
1833 I made a tour of the district, when the building was going on,
and shall endeavour to describe a small part of what met my eye on
that occasion. In one locality (and this was a specimen of the rest) I
saw fourteen different squads of masons at work, with the natives
attending them. Old grey-headed men, worn down by previous hardship
and present want, were to be seen carrying stones, and wheeling them
and other materials on barrows, or conveying them on their backs to
the buildings, and with their tottering limbs and trembling hands
straining to raise them on the walls. The young men also, after
toiling all night at sea endeavouring for subsistence, were obliged to
yield their exhausted frames to the labours of the day. Even female
labour could not be dispensed with; the strong as well as the weak,
the delicate and sickly, and (shame to their oppressors) even the
pregnant, barefooted and scantily clothed, were obliged to join in
those rugged, unfeminine labours. In one instance I saw the husband
quarrying stones, and the wife and children dragging them along in an
old cart to the building. Such were the building scenes of tha