A Highland Cottage

HIGHLAND COTTAGE.

Let us be off to the mountains and endeavor to interest our — beloved reader in a Highland cottage in anyone, taken at hap- hazard, from a hundred. You have been roaming all day among the mountains, and perhaps seen no house except at a dwindling distance. Probably you have wished not to see any house, but a ruined shieling —a deserted hut—or an unroofed and dilapidated shed for the out-lying cattle of some remote farm. But now the sun has inflamed all the western heaven, and darkness will soon descend. There is a muteness in the desert more stern and solemn than during unfaded daylight. List —the faint, far-off,

subterranean sound of the bagpipe! Some old soldier, probably, play- ing a gathering or a coronach. The narrow dell widens and widens into a great glen, in which you just discern the blue gleam of a loch. The martial music is more distinctly heard —loud, fitful, fierce,

like the trampling of men in battle. Where is the piper? In a cave, or within the Fairies' knoll?. At the door of a hut. His eyes are extinguished by ophthalmia, and there he sits, fronting the sunlight, stone blind. Long silver hair flows down his broad shoulders, and you perceive that when he rises he will rear up a stately bulk. The music stops, and you hear the bleating of goats. There they come, dancing down the rocks, and stare upon the stranger. The old soldier turns himself towards the voice of the Sassenach, and with the bold courtesy of the camp, bids him enter the hut. One minute's view has sufficed to imprint the vision for ever on the memory— a hut, whose turf walls and roof are incorporated with the living mountain, and seem not the work of man's hand, but the casual architecture of some convulsion, the

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tumbling down of fragments from the mountain side by raging torrents, or a partial earthquake; for all the scenery about is torn to pieces, like the scattering of some wide ruin. The imagination dreams of the earliest days of our race, when men harbored, like the other creatures, in places provided by nature. But even here, there are visible traces of cultivation Working in the spirit of a mountainous region, a few glades of the purest verdure opened out among the tall brackens, with a birch tree or two dropped just where the eye of taste could have wished, had the painter planted the sapling instead of the winds of heaven having wafted thither the seed; a small croft of barley, surrounded by a cairn-like wall, made up of stones cleared from the soil; and a patch of potato ground, neat almost as the garden that shows in a nook its fruit- bushes, and a few flowers. All the blasts that ever blew must be unavailing against the briery rock that shelters the hut from the storms; and the smoke may rise under its lee, unwavering on the windiest day. There is sweetness in all the air, and the glen is noiseless, except with the uncertain murmur of the now unswollen waterfalls. That is the croak of the raven sitting on his cliff half way up Benevis; and hark, the last belling of the red- deer, as the herd lies down in the midst among the last ridge of heather, blending with the shrubless stones, rocks, cliffs that girdle the upper regions of the vast mountain. Within the dimness of the hut you hear greetings in the Gaelic tongue, in a female voice, and when the eye has by and by become able to endure the smoke, it discerns the household, the veteran's ancient dame, a young man that may be his son, or rather his grandson, but whom you soon know to be neither, with black, matted locks, the keen eye, and the light limbs of the hunter; a young, married woman, his wife, suckling a child, and yet with a girlish look, as if but one year before her silken snood had been untied; a lassie of ten years, who had brought home the goats, and now sits timidly in a nook eyeing the stranger. The low growl of the huge, brindled stag-hound had been hushed by a word on your first entrance, and the noble animal watches his master's eye, which he obeys in his freedom throughout all the wild bounds of the forest chase. A napkin is taken out of an old, worm-eaten chest, and spread over a strangely-carved table, that seems to

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have belonged once to' a place of pride, and the hungry and thirsty- — stranger scarcely knows which most to admire the broad ban- nocks of barley-meal and the huge roll of butter, or the giant bottle, whose mouth exhales the strong savor of conquering Glenlivet. The board is spread, why not fall to and eat? First, be thanks given to the great God of the wilderness. The blind man holds up his hand and prays in a low, chanting voice, and then breaks bread for the lips of the stranger. On such an occasion is felt the sanctity of the meal shared by human beings brought accidentally together —the salt is sacred and the hearth an altar.