NIM ROD'S NORTHERN TOUR. 279 



the laird, he is a man after my own heart ; overflowing with 

 high spirits ; without a particle of affectation ; a jolly com- 

 panion over the bowl; and, as a Welsh apothecary said of a 

 brother-in-law of mine, who began the world with ten thousand 

 a year, and ended it with two "just the right sort of man for the 

 country." What Rosaline says of Biron, in Love's Labour's Lost, 

 I may say of the owner of Abercairney Abbey: 



' A merrier man, 



Within the limits of becoming mirth, 

 I never spent an hour's talk with," 



and it will be neither his fault nor mine, if we do not meet again 

 within the walls of his splendid abbey. 



My place having been secured at Perth, in as I thought a 

 coach for Glasgow, on my road to visit Viscount Kelburne, I 

 quitted the abbey in the same gig that brought me thither, to 

 meet the said coach at the lodge gates, which open into the high 

 road; and being ten minutes, or so, "before time," had that 

 much talk with Jemmy Reid. He very much surprised me, I 

 confess, by a contrast he exhibited in the habits, manners, and 

 conduct of the middling and lower classes of the population of 

 the vale of Strathearn, as well as of the neighbouring Highlands 

 at that present period, and within his recollection, much in favour 

 of the latter the improvement being effected, as he emphati- 

 cally observed, " by the example set them by their betters ; by 

 the exertions of local associations, by the aid of turnpike roads, 

 and by the spread of the gospel in places where it was before 

 scarcely known, at any rate very little understood." In fact, he 

 gave me to understand and I am using his own words that 

 the people had been changed from ignorance, strife, and poverty, 

 to intelligence, peace, and comforts, within the last fifty years, to 

 an extent scarcely to be credited by those who have not been 

 amongst them to witness the pleasing change. 



Having been an inside passenger by the Perth and Glasgow 

 drag, I had not a good opportunity of seeing a strange country, 

 which I admit I chiefly look at with a sportsman's eye ; and I 

 considered a great part of that which we this day passed through, 

 to have had a good fox-hunting-like appearance. At the end of 

 about the fourth stage, guess my surprise when the order of the 

 day was " Now, gentlemen and ladies, if you please, you will 

 leave the coach here, and take the boat to Glasgow." The 

 change, however, was for the better, from a rumbling old drag, 

 badly horsed, and worse driven, to a snug and warm cabin in 

 the Edinburgh and Glasgow barge, which goes at the rate of 



