t
period. The poor people had often to give the last morsel of food they
possessed to feed the masons, and subsist on shell-fish themselves.
This went on for several years, in the course of which many hundreds
of these houses were erected on unhospitable spots unfit for a human
residence.'

We add another extract from the same writer:

'It might be thought,' adds M'Leod, 'that the design of forcing the
people to build such houses was to provide for their comfort and
accommodation, but there seems to have been quite a different
object,--which, I believe, was the true motive,--and that was to hide
the misery that prevailed. There had been a great sensation created in
the public mind by the cruelties exercised in these districts; and it
was thought that a number of neat white houses, ranged on each side of
the road, would take the eye of strangers and visitors, and give a
practical contradiction to the rumours afloat. Hence the poor
creatures were forced to resort to such means, and to endure such
hardships and privations as I have described, to carry the scheme into
effect. And after they had spent their remaining all, and more than
their all, on the erection of these houses, and involved themselves in
debt, for which they have been harassed and pursued ever since, what
are these erections but whitened tombs! many of them now ten years in
existence, and still without proper doors or windows, destitute of
furniture and of comfort,--the unhappy lairs of a heart-broken,
squalid, fast-degenerating race.'

CHAPTER VI.

We have exhibited to our readers, in the _clearing_ of Sutherland, a
process of ruin so thoroughly disastrous, that it might be deemed
scarce possible to render it more complete. And yet, with all its
apparent completeness, it admitted of a supplementary process. To
employ one of the striking figures of Scripture, it was possible to
grind into powder what had been previously broken into fragments,--to
degrade the poor inhabitants to a still lower level than that on which
they had been so cruelly precipitated,--though persons of a not very
original cast of mind might have found it difficult to say how; and
the Duke of Sutherland has been ingenious enough to fall on exactly
the one proper expedient for supplementing their ruin. All in mere
circumstance and situation that could lower and deteriorate, had been
present as ingredients in the first process; but there still remained
for the people, however