370 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



yards of the building a small cottage, and beside it the 

 debris of a quarry, out of which the stones for the 

 erection had been taken. The hill itself is one of those 

 Old Red Sandstone eminences which in this part of the 

 country attain to so great a height. I at once inferred 

 that the cottage was the deserted barracks in which the 

 workmen engaged in erecting the monument had lived. 

 What was my surprise, however, to find it inhabited ; 

 one might as well expect to find a human family located 

 in a crow's nest on a tree-top. It is elevated I know 

 not how many feet over the level of the sea, far above 

 the line of cultivation, and with only heath and moss 

 around it. I tapped at the door, and sought a glass of 

 water, the matron, a sunburned, staid-looking woman 

 of about thirty-five, brought me a drink very civilly. 

 Her husband, she said, had charge of the planting 

 below, and of the monument, but though they had 

 been in the place for only a year, they were both think- 

 ing long to get away. Last winter the snow lay so 

 thick around them, that for five weeks they could not 

 descend the hill, and weeks sometimes passed even in 

 summer without their seeing any one. It was so very 

 cold a place, too, at all seasons when there blew any 

 wind ! I saw in front of the cottage a minute patch of 

 garden ground, in which, as if by way of experiment, a 

 few potatoes had been planted, and that the more 

 vigorous among them had contrived to throw up three 

 whole leaves above the soil. According to Cowper, 



" So farewell envy of the peasant's nest." 



' The monument of the Duke, as becomes a man who 

 had four hundred thousand pounds a year, is of colossal 

 proportions. There is a huge statue of White, and a 

 huge pedestal of Red, Sandstone. The large dead eyes 

 look over Sutherland and the sea, and if they do not see 



