THE SUTHERLAND CLEARINGS. 359 



are all adherents of the Free Church. They surrounded 

 the tent by hundreds, wonderfully clean and decent 

 considering their extreme poverty, but with a look of 

 suffering and subdued sadness about them that har- 

 monized but too well with the melancholy tones of their 

 psalms. There is, it is said, a very intense feeling 

 among them. " We were ruined and made beggars 

 before," they say, " and now they have taken the gospel 

 from us." I hear that when the Duke last passed 

 through the place the men stood sulkily looking at him, 

 or slunk away into their houses, but that some of the 

 women began to baa like sheep. I can get no informa- 

 tion at the inns; the Duke is, of course, omnipotent in 

 the county, and there is a general fear of trusting a 

 stranger with what might be unfitted to reach his ers, 

 and might reach them notwithstanding/ 



' Monday evening. 



' What a very peculiar taste in the ornamental High- 

 land landladies display ! My landlady at Brora last 

 year was a stately, lady-looking personage, who, as 

 Dandy Dinmont would say, behaved herself very dis- 

 tinctly. And yet, barbarous to relate, she had, by way 

 of ornament on the chimney-piece of her best room, a 

 child's toy-house, rough with glue, and daubed over 

 with paint. In my present inn, a neat little place, with 

 a good side-board and mahogany chairs in the sitting- 

 parlour, and with a very genteel bed-room, there are 

 square bits of common 2JJ. per yard room-paper, framed 

 round with a listing of black velvet, that hang on the 

 walls, and supply the place of pictures. My bed-room 

 has got two of these superb ornaments. One of them 

 presents five nondescript brown flowers, with brown 

 leaves on a field of buff. The other boasts of but one 



