150 Report on some features of Scottish Agriculture. 
one room, or at most two. In cottage accommodation for agri- 
cultural labourers, Scotland is, on the whole, far behind the 
generality of English counties. The dislike to live on more than 
one floor is so strong that it may be regarded as characteristic of 
the Scotch labourer, but it by no means follows that the cottages 
built on that plan should be deficient in the accommodation 
necessary to preserve health and encourage morality. As an 
example of the force of this dislike, however, I may mention one 
instance which came under my notice, where a benevolent land- 
owner, who had built an experimental pair of semi-detached 
two-floor cottages, was at last obliged to make a door in the 
party-wall, both upstairs and down, and let the cottages as two 
"flats"! 
In the following pages, illustrations are given of admirable one- 
floor cottages on the two sides of Scotland ; but the labourer's 
cottage is very frequently a structure which is worthy of no 
better name than a hovel. In East Lothian, the garden of Scot- 
land, where the land is let at a high rent, the labourers often 
live in cottages built in long rows close to the road, not remark- 
able for either external or internal cleanliness, and as they have 
no garden-ground in front, the place of flowers and vegetables 
is usurped by ash-heaps and their repulsive accompaniments. 
Unhandsome as these appear to an English eye, they are, how- 
ever, far better than the tumble-down, antiquated huts which 
are too often met w ith on the west coast ; for whatever aesthetical 
delects the Lothian cottages may have, they generally possess the 
merit of keeping out the wind and the rain ; and the want of 
cleanliness is more the fault of the labourer's wife than of his 
cottage. But in Ayrshire, and other counties of the west of 
Scotland, the cottages are too often dilapidated to the last degree, 
and " scarcely to be rivalled by the mud cabins of Connemara," 
The Commissioner for the ' Glasgow Herald ' (Mr. Allan), who 
wrote for that paper a scries of clever essays, embodying the 
results of his ' Inquiry into the State of Agriculture in Scotland, 
including the past and present condition of Farmers and Farm- 
servants,' thus describes some cottages in the south-west : — 
" On both sides of the roadway, for miles, there is the same 
striking contrast already referred to, viz. : fine farms, good farm 
houses, and miserable hovels for the married ploughmen and 
cottars. They are all much alike in outward appearance, and in 
all the stages of decay and dilapidation — eyesores, in short, 
to the passing traveller, sources of much expense to the farmer, 
and dismal abodes for the poor inhabitants. The walls and 
gables in some cases are threatening to fall out or in, and are 
supported by stone buttresses or cuttings of trees. The roofs 
are mostly rotten thatch, if it be not renewed at the farmer's 
