Volume 3 - Electric Scotland

STRATH. 413
could hot see trees where there were none to he seen.
As to the Highlanders, I must say, that the few who have
thought fit to be aii^gry, are very ungrateful to him ;
though the same blindness which prevented him from
seeing the trees that really existed, was, possibly, what
prevented him from seeing a great deal more that might
have been recorded. But, in reality, there is a kind-
ness little to be expected, which runs throughout all his
remarks on this country; and there is not one of all his
travelling successors, under circumstances very conspi-
cuously improved, who has been inclined to look with
such lenity on things that no man can approve. It is
but just, however, to both parties, to remark, that, in Sky,
so far from being disliked, he is spoken of with regard
by the few persons who yet remember him, and that his
memory is in respect among those to whom his visit is
only matter of tradition. But am not I, even I, writing
in the position of Damocles, myself; and who can say
that the Cerberean mouth of some rabid Mac Nicol will
not also be opened against the mechanician who has been
so " ignorant" and " insolent" as to maintain that a strap
of leather under a horse's tail was softer than the trunk
of a tree.
On parting company with the deal boards, I found
myself in a valley which nature certainly meant to be
useful and beautiful both ; but such cattle as happened
to stray that way on a false hypothesis, were destined to
find that fields were not invariably meant to contain
corn, potatoes, nor grass. They were not, however, de-
prived of all the benefits of the Church, since they slept
in it. I presume they give way to their betters on Sun-
days. I had heard of such neglect in Scotland, but did
not believe. This, howeve.r, is not the first or second time
that I have found a parish church in the Highlands, open
to all the elements as well as to the cattle ; nor, as in