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(Lond. Lit. Gaz.)

THE HIGHLANDS AND WESTERN ISLES OF SCOTLAND.
BY JOHN MACCULLOCH, ESQ.

UR friend Dr. Macculloch is a never-failing source of amusement By the by, we do not believe, though the ominous Mac is prefixed to his name, that he is a Scotsman; for, if he had possessed either nationality or clanship, he never could have drawn such pictures of bad inns and clumsy Highland gardening as our last Gazette exhibited. Nevertheless, the Scots may think of the old saying, "Fas est ab hoste docere ;" and in this hope we add some of the author's accounts of Thurso, and the mode of stabling and grooming horses in that part of our Island called Caithness.

"Thurso harbour is a very indifferent one. The town itself is sufficiently respectable, and the situation is not unpleasing but why should I trouble myself to describe Thurso, when you will find it all in the Book. Where you may also find, for aught I know to the contrary, how, when the people, in the time of Alexander II. complained of the oppressions of their bishop to the Earl of Caithness, his Lordship replied in a pet, go and seethe him, and sup him too if you like;' on which they put the unlucky prelate into a kettle, and made him into soup.

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"I was bound for Houna Inn. Houna Inn was the hotel and ferryhouse for Orkney: there was a beautiful little circle in the map, marked Houna Inn, it was next door to John o' Groat's house, and every one spoke of Houna Inn, and Houna Inn was to be the end of my labours, and my horse had eaten nothing since he had left Tongue, and myself little more, and I expected a hotel like Quillac's. But the road was expended and gone. "Where was Houna Inn ?' 'There.' I saw six or eight black cottages scattered about the intermingled waste of corn and sand. I arrived at the worst of the whole. It was impossible it could be Houna Inn; the hotel and ferry-house to Orkney; the hospitium of those who may be detained a week for a fair wind; the beautiful little circle in Mr. Arrowsmith's map. I rode up to the door, and the dreadful

truth, as the novelists say, burst on my sight. To the door-neither man nor beast ever rode or walked to within five yards of the door of Houna Inn. He who would learn to value the blackest house that ever Ross and Sutherland saw, must come and sojourn among the Catti; let him come to Houna Inn. The ditch that surrounded it was broad, and liquid, and black; how deep it was I know not, for it had never been fathomed. My pony backed from it instinctively, worse than he would have done from a Sutherland bog. Three huge lumps of stone formed the access to the door: it was even difficult to step on them without falling in ; but he who had fallen in would never have come out again to reveal the secrets of the deep. If I was the Earl of Houna Inn, I would blow it up, for my own credit.

"I fear we must give our Ostermannish ancestry the credit of this method of fortification, for I have seen the same in Shetland. If so, the muchabused Celts must have been a polished people in comparison; for, with the one exception of old Stornaway, no species or variety of Highland midden that I ever saw can be compared to Houna Inn.

"The affection of a farmer for his dunghill is pardonable; but, in a state of civilization, it is treated, like his cattle, not as his bosom friend: squared and dressed, and trimmed, as is just; and then consigned to its proper station, not admitted into the secretiora consilia; far less into the bosom of the family. In genuine Caledonian land, the sappy midden' is an object of far warmer affections; exhaling its 'steam of rich distilled perfumes' to the morning and evening nose, and occupying the place commonly reserved for the less profitable odours of the rose and honeysuckle. A few proprietors have lately attempted to get rid of this ornament, by compelling the small tenants to remove it from their doors; and where this had been attempted, I remember one town' where an old lady boasted that she had cheated the laird,

as she had ta'en the midden into the house.' In the old village of Stornaway, the inside of the house is the natural and hereditary place of the midden; but were I to tell you how it is accumulated and managed, I should tell a tale little fitting for delicate ears and noses. Pauca verba, as Pistol says. In St. Kilda, the same manufacture is also carried on in-doors, but with some comparative regard to decency; as the floor is only strewed with the daily ashes of the fire, among which the relics of fish and birds, and other ' varia materia,' are suffered to accumulate, till, the depth becoming inconvenient, the Augean heap is carried off to the field, to make room for a new stratum. If we except the pig, man appears to be the only animal who is naturally fond of dirt, and in whom cleanliness, whether of person or dwelling, is matter of compulsion or effort. But I should beg the pig's pardon for the debasing comparison; since he is solicitous about the cleanliness of his nest, at least.

"The stable at Houna, considering that it contained nothing at all, had no positive demerits: a rare case, I must admit. But if, after describing Mrs. Maclarty's kitchen, and after breakfasting, dining, and sleeping at her hotel, I were not to lead you into the stable of a Highland inn of this class, I should be unjust to the fair sex; as it must be supposed that this department, however indirectly, is under the control and management of Mr. Maclarty, not of the lady. If you should succeed in reaching it, it must be through a pool of mud and water, and other indescribables, and it will be fortunate if there are some stepping-stones for yourself: more fortunate, if your horse does not trip on them, and souse you with the perfumes of this moat. If he is a tall horse, not understanding architecture, he will knock his head against the door-way; and if you have the misfortune to carry a portmanteau, as may happen to single gentlemen, he will stick in the passage, and pull off the straps, which there is no saddler to mend. When you get in, you find two or three holes in the wall, for the sake ATHENEUM VOL. 2. 2d series.

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of ventilation; so that, on Mr. Colman's system, he cannot catch cold. If you do not keep an eye on him, you will shortly find him swilling water out of a bucket, or in the nearest river; and the next morning he is foundered; and so are you. When he does want water, as there is seldom a pail, he is dragged out by the mane to this river; and if he breaks his knees among the rocks and stones, he is used to it; or else his fraternity is; which is the same thing. It is reckoned politic here to suffer the mud to dry on his legs and to pick or examine his feet would be troublesome. If the thatch is water tight, so much the better. A hayloft is a luxury and as there is no stable lantern, the hay hangs down among the loose boards upon the candle; but, being damp, there is no danger. The boy goes up to stir it about, and you are covered with dust and chaff. So is the horse: and as he is not wiped down, and there is no horse-cloth, that helps to keep him warm. Since the Scottish reformers pulled down the stalls in their churches, they have probably thought them unnecessary in their stables; but a few saddles and pikes and poles and wheelbarrows and horse-collars, with a stray pig, a hen and chickens, and a calf, serve, at the same time, to wedge him up, and to prevent him from being dull. It is likely that you will object to the society of half a dozen sharp-horned stirks and stots; but what then? If you think it prudent to tie him up, under these circumstances, or because the house is filled with Highland ponies justling and squabbling and kicking in every direction, there is no halter. You may use your bridle, which he will break; or if you insist on a halter, a rope will be found before to-morrow, and made fast round his throat with a slip-knot; so that it is not unlikely you will find him hanged the next morning. If there is a manger, probably the corn is put into it but it is either full of holes, so that the oats run through, or so high that he cannot reach them. If there is a rack, the hay is thrown on the ground: which is a great saving; because he will spoil half of it, and

that will serve for his bed. That, with his own produce, is probably the only bed he will get; but, being added to the former beds of former horses, it serves to keep him moist and cool. You begin by giving him hay; but as it is made of musty rushes and other matters, he refuses to eat it, expecting corn. But if you begin with corn, as that is musty too, he waits for the hay. It is probable that he will determine which is worst when he is hungry enough. A Highland ostler of this family is a great enemy to false delicacy therefore begin your journey by bronzing your stirrups and bridle; it will save remonstrance. When you are about to depart in the morning, you must not be in haste; because your horse is neither fed nor watered, nor is likely to be, until you do it yourself. If he is a grey horse, you will find that he is turned green; and as he will become greener every day, since a curry-comb was never heard of in Mr. Maclarty's stable, the prudent thing is to paint him green before you begin. A whisp of straw might have been substituted, you will think, for the curry-comb: but the knave trusts that the next shower will do as well. The mane, of course, is matted by the fairies; for how else should it have become so inextricable that the fingers of this bare-headed kilted callan will not make it lie in any direction-even in a wrong one? If he possessed the luxury of either kind, it is probable he would use the one to straighten his own locks, and the other to claw his own hide. When your saddle and bridle are to be put on, you will find that they have been lying in the dirt all night, as there is no peg to hang them on: and, in a well-regulated stable, it is held matter of policy to keep some wild colt or filly loose, who walks about in the night, trying to purloin the hay and corn of his neighbours, having none of his own; so that, if you sleep near it, you are regaled with quarrelling and kicking and stamping all night. But it is time to lock the stable door: yet not till you have paid the breechless lout as much for doing nothing, as, in London, would have polished horse, bit, and stirrups, to the lustre of the

planet Venus; and twice as much for musty husks and mouldy rushes as would have procured all the luxuries of Mark-lane and the Haymarket.”

This is, no doubt, extremely facetious; but one does not well know how much to take for fact and how much for fancy, amid the exaggeration. At this place, the Doctor goes on

"I had almost forgotten that I was near John o' Groat's house, when I was reminded of it by a fisherman who wanted a shilling. When we came to John o' Groat's house, behold, like the lover's tomb at Lyons, no house was there. Who was John o' Groat, where did he live, what did he do, where was he born, married, or buried, when did he build the house, when was it pulled down, who had ever seen it, whose grandfathers and grandmothers, whose great-grandfathers great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers had ever seen it. Nobody knew any thing, nobody had heard of any thing, except that a piece of green turf, as flat and as bare as the back of my hand, was John o' Groat's house. Why did they believe in John o' Groat; what did they believe of John o' Groat who had told them of John o' Groat, and of John o' Groat's house; their godfathers and their godmothers. I congratulated myself that I had not come from London to see John o' Groat's house. If the tomb of Ajax and the tomb of Achilles, the antion and the Achilleion, had been no more than John o' Groat's house, Jacob Bryant would have had a better reason than he has ever yet shown for doubting of the war of Troy.

"Fame is a strange, capricious, unjust, unaccountable dame; not a whit more honest and reasonable than her sister Fortune. But of all her vagaries, the immortalization of a hero and a house that never existed is the foremost. After all, it is of no great consequence; for I dare say that Ajax and Achilles have fully as little enjoyment of their tombs in the Troad and their deeds in the Iliad, as John o' Groat has of his house and his fame on the coast of Caithness. It is all, equally, nothing But you and I must be great noodles to be labouring fo fame, each in his several vocation, for post

humous fame too, when here is a name more immortal—at least than mine will be, without any trouble; and only a name; an immortal name without an owner; a vox et præterea nihil, which will nevertheless be heard of as long as that of Erostratus or of Empedocles. ·

"As Wollaston said long ago, it is now only the five letters of Cæsar's name of which we know, and which we admire; and those of John o' Groat's are as substantial."

Pass we to another of the Doctor's adventures while navigating Loch Broom. "In the night (he tells his friend Sir W. Scott) I was roused by a great weight, tumbling, with vast commotion and outrage, into my birth. Concluding, very logically, that the ship had gone to pieces, I put out my hand in some alarm, and laid hold of a pair of horns. Half asleep, I thought I was already in the hands of Davy Jones; and both Davy and I were soon upon the cabin floor. It proved to be a goat, which the men had brought on board that we might be sure of milk for our breakfasts. Unluckily, when it came to be milked, it was discovered to be a he goat; such was the pastoral knowledge of our boatswain. The animal had found the deck cold, and had scrambled down the companion ladder, whence he thus proposed himself for my bedfellow. A bedfellow in a birth ought, however, to be somewhat more choice; as there are no means of lying "extrema sponda," if you chance to disagree. Milk, of course, we obtained none from our horned friend; but he paid his passage, and his diet too by his harlequin tricks. His diet, it is true, was rather heterodox; as it consisted, except on holidays, of kippered salmon, brown paper, old hoops, carpenter's chips, and pig-tail tobacco. The paper was plundered from my specimens; but the depredations on the fish became so serious, that we were obliged to hoist them into the shrouds out of his reach. His system of diet was somewhat extraordinary, it must be owned; but as the universal scavenger, at least of the vegetable creation, the goat seems to outdo even the hog. Indeed I never could discover any thing which our bearded companion would not eat, ex

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cept oakum, which always puzzled him. Nature has been very ingenious in inventing some animal or other to devour every thing, as if eating was the sole purpose of creation; to eat and to be eaten all the business of the universe and if, as Mr. Humboldt says, (credat,) the Gourmets of the Oroonoko live on clay, as we of the Thames and the Tweed do on beef steaks and "singit sheep heads," I do not despair of yet hearing of some creature who may feed, like the ostrich, on a compote of horse shoes and tenpenny nails, or perhaps on pureés of graywacké and granite. This most amusing and docile and intelligent of all the four-legged tribes has now, however, become rare in the Highlands, being rather suffered than encouraged. The Caprine population here, as in Wales, has undergone the same revolution which it experienced in former days at Capri. The gentlemen of Leeds have been the Tiberiuses of the bearded race, finding that it was all cry and little wool. In those happy days when the beaux and the dandies emulated lions in the length of their manes, when the gallant Lovelace could pathetically complain to his mistress that he had been obliged to wring the dews of the night from his wig, the goat received that respect which the persistence of his buckle merited, and bounded from rock to rock, nourishing his length of hair and careless of future shaving. But now, alas! their friends are all concentrated behind the bar and on the episcopal bench; and the wisdom of a few hundred Welsh beards is sufficient to clothe with sapience all the skulls which flourish in the several departments of Westminster. Such are the catenations of political economy. Often, in contemplating my friend Pogonatus, did I figure to myself the quirks and crotchets, the doubtings, the decisions, the special pleadings and replies and rejoinders and rebutters, that lay perdue under his shaggy coat, while he was unconsciously chewing his quid; only waiting for the fingers of the barber and a few yards of silk, to blaze forth in forensic fire or suffocate us in the murky obscurities of causistical smoke; to empty our purses

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INDIA-RUBBER BLOW-PIPE.

THE blow-pipe having become so interesting and important an instrument for experimental purposes, it may not be unacceptable to receive an account of a means of constructing self-acting blow-pipes of India-rubber, capable of affording a strong and uniform stream of air, during twenty-five to sixty minutes, according to the size of the jet. Select at a stationer's bottles of India-Rubber, varying in weight from half to three-quarters of a pound, preferring those of a dark hue; a strip of which, when pulled out, so as to become very thin, is almost transparent; and avoid those bottles of a browner colour, a strip of which cannot be pulled out so thin as is mentioned above without breaking. The bottles selected are to be boiled in water until quite softened, which usually occurs after a quarter of an hour's boiling. A short brass tube, having a stop-cock on its middle, and a screw-tap adapted to screw into a condensing syringe at one end; and having, near to the other end, a milled projecting rib outside, provided for each bottle; and, when these are cooled after the boiling, the ribbed end of a tube is inserted into the neck of each India-rubber bottle, and is firmly secured there, by lapping strong waxed thread above and below the rib. The tube of one of the bottles is now screwed to the syringe, and air is forced in; after a few strokes of the syringe, a blister-like projection will be observed to form on that part of

the bottle which is the thinnest : and, as the forcing-in of air is slowly continued, the blister will be seen to enlarge, until it extends over the whole surface, and the bottle will usually then have acquired a diameter of fourteen to seventeen inches: in this state, the blow-pipe bottle being completed, it is unscrewed from the condenser, and the jet-pipe is screwed on in its place; and now the blow-pipe is ready for use; and immediately, on turning the stop-cock, the elastic contraction of the bottle will force out the air in a strong and steady jet, as has been mentioned above, which will continue until the bottle is reduced to about double its original size; when the condenser may be again applied, and the bottle be again distended as before, unless that several bottles have been prepared and charged at first, as is mentioned above. When no longer wanted, the bottles should be emptied of their air, and so may be kept for any length of time ready for charging; only observing, that if at any time a bottle has lost its pliability, and become hard by keeping, it must be immersed for a short time in boiling water before applying the syringe. The great portability, and the length and steadiness of action, of this blow-pipe, are its great recommendation it may be used with any of the gases, even explosive mixtures of oxygen and hydrogen, the accidental explosion of which would merely burst and destroy the bottle, without occasioning further mischief. Z. A.

PAVING OF STREETS--MACADAMS'S ROADS, &c. Granite stone, which is used for paving cart-ways of streets, is the hardest and most durable material which can be generally used; but the unevenness of the pavement, and the expense of keeping it in something

like order, are the great objections to the present pavement. Could it be kept as even as when first laid, no better road could then be made in narrow streets, whence there is much traffick.

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