2 Notes and Sketches. 



years' purchase of the then low rents." It was not 

 always that the lairds could find tenants willing to 

 " keep in the rigs " at a merely nominal rent, until 

 resort was had to the practice of stocking farms as 

 occasion required on " steelbow," a technical term, the 

 signification of which was that the landlord provided 

 a " stocking " of cattle, corn, and implements, and the 

 tenant became hound to return to him articles equal in 

 quantity and quality at the end of his lease, if he could 

 not free himself sooner. A man, if he were so minded, 

 might readily obtain a "tack " on very easy terms, so 

 far as a money or other payment was concerned \ and 

 that tack to last not for his own lifetime only, but for 

 the period of one or two lives thereafter of such persons 

 as he chose to name. 



And small in amount as the money payments to 

 rental were, they were not always, nor indeed generally, 

 made off the produce of the land. It was chiefly 

 through the manufacture of home-spun cloths, and the 

 knitting of stockings for exportation that money came 

 into the hands of the smaller tenants, sub-tenants, and 

 cottar folks ; and it was chiefly through them that it 

 reached both the principal tenant and the proprietor, 

 other sources of revenue hardly existing for either, in so 

 far as local industry was concerned. 



The roads they had were roads only by courtesy. 

 Wheeled vehicles were scarcely known, and would have 

 been but little serviceable if they had been more 

 plentiful. The best frequented lines of road were not 

 much else than mere tracks, that had taken their form 

 from the hoof-marks of the cattle that traversed them ; 

 a few stones being sometimes roughly thrown into the 

 bottom of a soft bit, forming a kind of rude causeway, 

 sometimes not. And thus came the story of a certain 

 man and his mare. As he plodded along, driving 

 the animal before him, with the pack saddle on her 

 back, the wary beast boggled at a particular part in the 

 road, where she had " laired " on a previous occasion, 



