164 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



a gloomy patch of water in the middle of a tangled thicket, 

 that rose some ten or twelve feet over my head. What had 

 been bare heath a quarter of a century before had become a 

 thick wood ; and I remembered, that when I had been last 

 there, the open space had just been planted with forest-trees, 

 and that some of the taller plants rose half-way to my knee. 

 Human lifetimes, as now measured, are not intended to wit- 

 ness both the seed-times and the harvests of forests, both 

 the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the huge tree 

 into which it has grown ; and so the incident impressed me 

 strongly. It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's 

 antediluvian tale, who became wealthy by the sale of his great 

 trees, two centuries after he had planted them. I pursued 

 my walk, to revisit another little patch of water which I had 

 found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twenty years 

 previous, that I could still recall many of its lessons ; but the 

 hand of improvement had been busy among the fields of 

 Conon-side ; and when I came up to the spot which it had 

 occupied, I found but a piece of level arable land, bearing a 

 rank swathe of grass and clover.* 



Not a single individual did I find on the farm who had 

 been there twenty years before. I entered into conversation 

 with one of the ploughmen, apparently a man of some intel- 

 ligence ; but he had come to the place only a summer or two 

 previous, and the names of most of his predecessors sounded 

 unfamiliar in his ears : he knew scarce anything of the old 

 laird or his times, and but little of the general history of the 

 district. The frequent change of servants incident to the 

 large-farm system has done scarce less to wear out the oral 

 antiquities of the country than has been done by its busy 

 ploughs in obliterating antiquities of a more material cast. 

 The mythologic legend and traditionary story have shared 



* For a description of this pond see " My Schools and Schoolmasters," 

 chapter tenth. 



