160 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR, 



tricts through which we passed. On one high-lying farm, the 

 grass, he said, was short and thin, but sweet and wholesome, 

 and the flocks throve steadily, and were never thinned by 

 disease ; whereas on another farm that lay along the dank 

 bottom of a valley, the herbage was rank and rich, and the 

 sheep fed and got heavy, but braxy at the close of autumn 

 fell upon them like a pestilence, and more than neutralized 

 to the farmer every advantage of the superior fertility of the 

 soil. It was not uninteresting, even for one not a sheep- 

 farmer, to learn that the life of the sheep is worth fewer years' 

 purchase in one little track of country than in another adja- 

 cent one ; and that those differences in the salubrity of par- 

 ticular spots which obtain in other parts of the world with 

 regard to our own species, and which make it death to linger 

 on the luxuriant river-skle, while on the arid plain or ele- 

 vated hill-top there in health and safety, should exist in con- 

 tiguous walks in the Highlands of Scotland in reference to 

 some of the inferior animals. The minister and I became 

 wonderfully good friends for the time. All the seats in the 

 gig, both back and front, had been occupied ere he had taken 

 his passage, and the postman had assigned him a miserable 

 place on the narrow elevated platform in the middle, where 

 he had to coil himself up like a hedgehog in its hole, sadly to 

 the discomfort of limbs still stout and strong, but stiffened 

 by the long service of full seventy years. And, as in the 

 case, made famous by Cowper, of the "softer sex" and the 

 old-fashioned iron-cushioned arm-chairs, the old man had, as 

 became his years, "'gan murmur." I contrived, by sitting 

 on the edge of the gig on the one side, and by getting the 

 postman to take a similar seat on the other, to find room for 

 him in front ; and there, feeling he had not to do with sa- 

 vages, he became kindly and conversible. We beat together 

 over a wide range of topics ; the Scotch banks, and Sir Ro- 

 bert Peel's intentions regarding them, the periodical press 



