232 JOHN DUNCAN, WEAVER AND BOTANIST. 



While he enjoyed his nutritious and delicious repast, she 

 crowned her kindly services by baking a great oaten cake, 

 which she put before him, with a new supply of Highland 

 creamy milk, elsewhere unknown. 



John viewed the scene in wondering silence and with 

 swelling gratitude. It was all so new, beautiful, unex- 

 pected and kindly, so eastern and biblical, so royal and 

 abundant, in its simple hospitality and self-helpful inde- 

 pendence. It became a favourite tale of his, and he 

 concluded it, when he told it to James Black, by saying, 

 that should James live to be an old man, it would be 

 something to tell his friends that he had seen and known 

 a man to whom all this was done, in bonnie Scotland, in 

 the nineteenth century. 



But it was not so uncommon as John thought, and is 

 carried on even now, fifty years since that time, in some 

 parts of the Highlands and Western Isles, where the 

 " quern " may still be seen in use, and where a dish can be 

 as rapidly and hospitably produced from the field, in some 

 of the remoter corners there ; as the author and some of 

 his friends have more than once witnessed in these primitive 

 regions. 



John and James were once talking together about the 

 modern adulterations in linen fabrics, when James remarked 

 that in his youth, he had seen flax spun on a wheel by the 

 fireside, a much more common sight in John's young days. 

 John replied that that was nothing strange, for he had seen 

 it spun with the distaff,* by the young maidens in the 



* The author has never seen flax spun by the distaff. He has, 

 however, seen wool so spun in the Highlands more than once. He 



