COUNTRY LIFE
I HAVE an old friend who is one of the most sagacious, conversant and far-seeing of English farmers. He lives in a long-fronted William-and- Mary house under the North Downe, and his bailiff, who has been with him for donkey's years, is as tall, massive and lanterned-faced -as the house is long. This man is a Highlander, and so extravagantly so in speech, frame, gait and appearance that to see him stride into the room is to look upon an embodied legend :—
" From the lone shieling of the misty island Mountains divide us, and the waste of seas— Yet still the blood is strong, the heart is Highland, And we in dreams behold the Hebrides."
Yet this overpowering clanstnan reminds me in his land-sense, his felicities with animals, his intuitive bond with nature, his play-in-his-work and his thought-in-his-hand more of the all but obsolete English codntryman than of any wild Highlander, divided in mind between caschrom and claymore.
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