Transactions. D1 
nearly in the same localities ; the smithies are in the identical 
localities, these being the localities best adapted for the farmers 
in the different straths. For joiners and blacksmiths in rural 
and agricultural parishes there will always be found occupation, 
and there will at all times be need. 
Fifty years ago and later there were many small shops scattered 
up and down the parish. Every little group of cottages had its 
shop. Villages of twenty or thirty families hud two, rival shops, 
where, besides the ordinary articles of grocery, tea and sugar, 
butter and eggs, soap and candles, bread, meal, and flour, were 
to be had, cotton and woollen goods, ropes and twine, brushes, 
hammers, nails, and almost every article of household economy. 
They were, in the strictest sense of the term, stores, and stores 
very cosmopolitan in their contents. They contained every 
article which, on an emergency, a person might require, not even 
omitting medicines in common use. To a rural population, dis- 
tant from a town, and with no direct means of communication, 
these shops were a great convenience, and, to the shopkeepers 
themselves, no small source of gain. But their day is done; 
their number ison the decline, and the few that remain have 
little or no variety to attract customers. What is the reason ? 
Travelling grocers, travelling drapers, travelling butchers and 
bakers, travelling vans, containing every conceivable article of 
household or outdoor requirements traverse the parish from week’s 
end to week’s end. 
Fifty years ago two carriers plied semi-weekly between Dal- 
beattie and Dumfries, and semi-weekly on intermediate days 
between Dalbeattie and Colvend. They brought the supplies of 
bread and groceries to the different shops scattered up and down 
_the parish, and parcels to the different houses situated along their 
route. There were no bread carts, no butchers’ carts, no grocers’ 
carts in these days; and, without the carriers, 1 know not how 
the people could have procured for themselves the necessaries of 
life. They were an excellent and most useful class of men, but 
their day is past, at least so far as Colvend is concerned. 
Carriers still travel between Dalbeattie and Dumfries, but no 
one comes to Colvend. 
Though not properly speaking a trade, peat-casting was an 
industry of no little importance in former times, and even in times 
so recent as fifty or forty years ago. Peats at that time were a 
chief article of fuel in Colvend. Almost every family in the 
