1 66 LOCH C RERAN. 



excuse for the formation of deer-forests, it is surely to be 

 found in such districts, where many acres of scarce 

 traversable land are required to feed a single blackface. 

 The great distance between the dwellings and the wild 

 nature of the intervening ground, must make these quar- 

 ters very isolated ; and the inhabitants must gradually 

 acquire some of the self-dependence and shrewd hardi- 

 hood of the blackfaces and the collies with whom they 

 mainly associate. Many of these farmers, in the wildest 

 districts, have wrestled in the thickest of the fight in the 

 struggling mercantile world ; and consequently appre- 

 ciate the advantages, while they are greatly saved from 

 the manifest disadvantages, of the situation ; and when 

 this is considered, and it is known how many purely 

 Teutonic names yearly seek a calm haven " out of the 

 hurly-burly," it appears more and more absurd to talk of 

 the Highlands as peopled by Celts, and subjected to the 

 domination of the " brutal Saxon," as we have been so 

 often told of late. This constant intermixture has gone 

 on at all times, and many of the most thoroughly 

 Highland families are Scandinavian, Saxon, and Norman 

 by descent as thoroughly as they are in appearance. 

 Many of these outsiders have been partially baffled in 

 their contests with their compeers ere they retire to these 

 solitudes, where they recuperate their exhausted nervous 

 systems, and, if not in their own persons, at least in their 

 descendants, are better fitted, physically and mentally, 

 through their struggle with wild nature, to return and 

 once more enter the too-often fatal lists with human 

 nature and civilisation. Such stern solitudes are there- 

 fore training schools for the nation ; and it is almost a 

 pity to see them steadily narrowing. Yet as we look at 

 the stalwart shepherds ascending the rugged hill-faces on 



