his love of kindred, and the Broadford Mail and the Portree Advertiser lying yet in the womb of time by his love of gossip also. The market is the Skyeman's exchange, his family gathering, and his newspaper. From the deep sea of his solitude he comes up to breathe there, and, refreshed, sinks again. This fair at Broadford I re solved to see. Starting early in the morning, my way for the most part lay through a desolation where Nature seemed deteriorated, and at her worst. Winter could not possibly sadden the region; no spring could quicken it into Howe: s. The hills wear but for ornament the white streak of the torrent; the rocky soil clothes itself in heather to which the purple never comes. Even man, the miracle-worker, who transforms everything he touches, who has rescued a fertile Holland from the waves, who has reared a marble Venice from out salt lagunes and marshes, is defeated here. A turf hut, with smoke issuing from the roof, and a patch of sickly green around, which will ripen by November, is all that he has won from Nature. Gradually, as I proceeded, the aspect of the country changed, began to exhibit traces of cultivation; and erelong the red hill with the Norwegian woman's cairn a-top rose before me, suggesting Broadford and the close of the journey. The roads were filled with cattle, driven forward with oath and shout. Every now and then, a dog-cart came skirring along, and infinite the confusion, and loud the clamor of tongues, when one or other plunged into a herd of sheep, or skittish "three-year-olds." At the entrance to the fair, the horses were taken out of the vehicles, and left, with a leathern thong tied round their forelegs, to limp about in search of breakfast. As you advance, on either side of the road stand hordes of cattle, the wildest looking creatures, black, white, dun, and cream-colored, with fells of hair hanging over their savage eyes, and graced with horns of preposterous dimensions. Horses neighed from their stakes, the

owners looking out for customers. Sheep were there, too, in restless masses, scattering hither and thither like quicksilver, with dogs and men flying along their edges, excited to the verge of insanity. What a hubbub of sound! What lowing and neighing! what bleating and barking! It was a novel sight, that rude, primeval traffic. Down in the hollow ground tents had been knocked up since dawn; there potatoes were being cooked for drovers who had been travelling all night; there, also, liquor could be had. To these places, I observed, contracting parties invariably repaired to solemnize a bargain. Booths ranged along the side of the road were plentifully furnished with confections, ribbons, and cheap jewellery; and as the morning wore on, around these the girls swarmed thickly, as bees round summer flowers. The fair was running its full career of bargain-making and consequent dram-drinking, rude flirtation, and meeting of friend with friend, when up the middle of the road, hustling the passengers, terrifying the cattle, came three misguided young gentlemen-medical students, I opined engaged in botanical researches in these regions. Evidently they had been "dwellers in tents." One of them, gifted with a comic genius, — his companions were desperately solemn, at one point of the road, threw back his coat, in emulation of Sambo when he brings down the applauses of the threepenny gallery, and executed a shuffle in front of a bewildered cow. Crummie backed and shied, bent on retreat. He, agile as a cork, bobbed up and down in her front, turn whither she would, with shouts and hideous grimaces, his companions standing by the while like mutes. at a funeral. That feat accomplished, the trio staggered on, amid the derision and scornful laughter of the Gael. Lifting our eyes up out of the noise and confusion, there were the solitary mountain-tops and the clear mirror of Broadford Bay, the opposite coast sleeping green in it with all its woods; and lo! the steamer from the South sliding

in, with her red funnel, breaking the reflection with a tract of foam, and disturbing the far-off morning silence with the thunder of her paddles. By noon, a considerable stroke of business had been done, Hordes of bellowing cattle were being driven off toward Broadford, and drovers were rushing about in a wonderful manner, armed with tar-pot and stick, smearing their peculiar mark upon the shaggy hides of their purchases. Rough-looking customers enough, these fellows, yet they want not means. Some of them, I am told, came here this morning with five hundred pounds in their pocket-books, and have spent every paper of it, and this day three months they will return with as large a sum. By three o'clock in the afternoon the place was deserted by cattle, and fun and business gathered round the booths and refreshment tents, the noise increasing every hour, and towards evening deepening into brawl and general combat,

During the last few weeks I have had opportunity of wit nessing something of life as it passes in the Skye wildernesses, and have been struck with its self-containedness, not less than with its remoteness. A Skye family has everything within itself. The bare mountains yield them mutton, of a flavor and delicacy unknown in the south. The copses swarm with rabbits; and if a net is set over night at the Black Island, there is abundance of fish to breakfast. The farmer grows his own corn, barley, and potatoes, digs his own peats, makes his own candles; he tans leather, spins cloth shaggy as a terrier's pile, and a hunchback artist or the place transforms the raw materials into boots or shepherd garments. Twice every year a huge hamper arrives from Glasgow, stuffed with all the little luxuries of housekeeping, -tea, sugar, coffee, and the like. At more fre quent intervals comes a ten-gallon cask from Greenock, whose contents can cunningly draw the icy fangs of a northeaster, or take the chill out of the clammy mists.

"What want they that a king should have?"

on

And once a week the Inverness Courier, like a window suddenly opened on the roaring sea, brings a murmur of the outer world, its politics, its business, its crimes, its literature, its whole multitudinous and unsleeping life, making the stillness yet more still. To the Isle'sman the dial face of the year is not artificially divided, as in cities, by parlia mentary session and recess, college terms or vacations, short and long, by the rising and sitting of courts of justice nor yet, as in more fortunate soils, by imperceptible gradations of colored light, the green flowery year deepening into the sunset of the October hollyhock, the slow reddening of burdened orchards, the slow yellowing of wheaten plains. Not by any of these, but by the higher and more affecting element of animal life, with its passions and instincts, its gladness and suffering; existence like our own, although in a lower key, and untouched by its solemn issues; the same music and wail, although struck on ruder and uncertain chords. To the Isle'sman, the year rises into interest when the hills, yet wet with melted snows, are pathetic with newly-yeaned lambs, and completes itself through the successive steps of weaning, fleecing, sorting, fattening, sale, final departure, and cash in pocket. The shepherd life is more interesting than the agricultural, inasmuch as it deals. with a higher order of being; for I suppose - apart from considerations of profit - a couchant ewe, with her young one at her side, or a ram, "with wreathed horns superb," cropping the herbage, is a more pleasing object to the asthetic sense than a field of mangold-wurzel, flourishing ever so gloriously. The shepherd inhabits a mountain country, lives more completely in the open air, and is acquainted with all phenomena of storm and calm, the thunder-smoke coiling in the wind, the hawk hanging stationary in the breathless blue. He knows the faces of the hills, recognizes the voices of the torrents as if they were children of his own, can unknit their intricate melody, as he lies with

his dog beside him on the warm slope at noon, separating one from tone, and giving this to iron crag, that to pebbly cottom. From long intercourse, every member of his flock wears to his eye its special individuality, and he recognizes the countenance of a "wether" as he would the countenance of a human acquaintance. Sheep-farming is a pic turesque occupation; and I think a cataract of sheep descending a hillside, now gathering into a mighty pool, now emptying itself in a rapid stream, the dogs, urged more by sagacity than by the shepherd's voice, flying along the edges, turning, guiding, changing the shape of the mass,one of the prettiest sights in the world. But the most affecting incident of shepherd life is the weaning of the lambs;-affecting, because it reveals passions in the "fleecy fools," the manifestation of which we are accustomed to consider ornamental in ourselves. From all the hills men and dogs drive the flocks down into a fold, or fank, as it is called nere, consisting of several chambers or compartments. Into these compartments the sheep are huddled, and then the separation takes place. The ewes are returned to the mountains, the lambs are driven away to some spot where the pasture is rich, and where they are watched day and night. Midnight comes with dews and stars; the troop is couched peacefully as the cloudlets of a summer sky. Suddenly they are restless, ill at ease, goaded by some sore unknown want, and evince a disposition to scatter in every direction; out the shepherds are wary, the dogs swift and sure, and after & tittle while the perturbation is allayed, and they rest agun. Walk up now to the fank. The full moon is riding between the hills, filling the glen with lustre and floating mysterious glooms. Listen! You hear it on every side of you, till it dies away in the silence of distance, the hecy Rachel weeping for her children. The turf walls of the fark are in shadow, but something seems to be moving there. As