HUGH MILLER 15 



lated shore-line, where they eked out, as crofters or as 

 fishermen, a precarious existence without capital or the 

 acquired experience of either occupation, and laid the 

 seeds of the future crofter question. The mauufacture 

 of kelp, which for a time rendered profitable to many a 

 Highland proprietor his barren acres on a rocky shore, 

 was not destined to long survive the introduction 

 of the principles of Free Trade. The potato blight 

 succeeded finally in reducing the once fairly pro- 

 sperous native of the interior to chronic poverty and 

 distress. 



On the West Coast, the heavy rainfall is unfavourable 

 to agriculture on any extended scale. From Assynt to 

 Mull the average rain-gauge is thirty-five inches, and 

 the cottars of Ross were threatened with the fate of 

 the Irish in Connemara, through periodic failures in the 

 herring fishery and liabilities for their scanty holdings 

 to their landlords. Miller found the men of Gairloch, 

 in 1823, where the public road was a good day's journey 

 from the place, still turning up or scratching the soil 

 with the old Highland cass-chron^ and the women carry- 

 ing the manure on their backs to the fields in spring, 

 while all the time they kept twirling the distaff old 

 and faded before their time, like the women in some of 

 the poorer cantons the traveller meets with in Switzer- 

 land. Their constant employment was the making of 

 yarn ; and, as we have seen, the spinning-wheel was for 

 long as rare as the possession of a plough or horse. 

 The boats built for the fishing were still caulked with 



