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the giant cliffs of Handa, laps gently.

The grey rocks frame this picture of a Highland home and emphasise its comfort. Twenty years ago such а traveller would have found for his host a stately Highland gentleman, with snow - white hair and clear light-blue eyes, and for his hostess one of the kindest and most fascinating of Highland ladies, who, in spite of being the mother of eleven children, felt impelled to mother every young man who came within her ken. Hospitality is understood only in the Highlands, and its high priestess was the gracious lady who for fifty-six years was the wife of the subject of this memorial volume. The breakfast of porridge, fish fresh fresh from the bay, "lamb-cakes," turkey's eggs, home cured bacon, with an endless variety of scones and " preserves, a melon grown from seed sent home by a son in South Africa, or a bunch of grapes, or a dish of peaches from the house in the garden, with tea served from a teapot which had been Flora Macdonald's, made the idea of but two meals aday a pleasant prospect without austerity. Then came the substantial lunch of sandwiches on the hillside or by the stream, and whisky and a plum-cake at five o'clock deprived you of all feeling of even nominal asceticism.

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Such were the surroundings in which the last of the Highland factors lived. The Southron has but a vague idea of the factor's powers. Twenty

or thirty years ago in Sutherland, the Duke was Providence and the factor was his prophet. It has a benign tyranny, tempered by the law of the land. Whatever opinions may be held as to the wisdom of the "Sutherland Clearances which took place under the rule of an English nobleman who married the heiress of the ancient Earls of Sutherlandthere cannot be two opinions as to the wisdom of the despotism exercised in West Sutherland by Evander Maciver and the late Duke,-not his "employer," as a brutal Saxon would say if he knew no better, but his "constituent." Then, at any rate, whatever may be the case now, the factor was not a paid servant, nor was he a vizier. he a vizier. He was the representative of the landowner, he was also the representative of the tenants and feuars. He had to do the best for the Duke, but he had also to do the best for the Duke's people. His was no mere policy of getting the highest possible rental from the land, he had to see that no rent was higher than the tenant could afford to pay. He had to suggest and carry out improvements. Churches, schools, roads, the administration of Justices' justice, public health, were indeed among the minor of his cares. The improvement of flocks and herds, the provision of fresh seed-potatoes, oats, and barley, the introduction of new agricultural machinery, manures, and appliances, these were his care and duty all his life. But in a life which extended from the reign

of George III. to that of Edward VII., in the case of a man who was sworn a Justice of the Peace in the reign of William the Fourth, many administrative changes had to be superintended by the Viceroy of four large districts, with an acreage of tens of thousands, and a population of some 5000 souls. When Evander Maciver, after a training as bank-agent at Dingwall, assumed the reins of the government of something like a thousand square miles of the west of Scotland, the Poor Law had not been invented; there were no School Boards, no Parish nor County Councils. Poverty was not unknown, but its relief was left to the charity of the community. The later mania for uniformity did no particular good in multiplying organisations in sparsely-populated districts. Education, according to Mr Maciver, has become more widespread but less beneficial. The schoolmasters provided by School Boards are inferior to the men who gave Scotland its educational reputation, a complaint not confined to the West Highlands nor to local administrators who were born in the reign of George the Third. Parish and County Councils have had but little practical effect in Sutherland. Rates have increased there as else

where; but otherwise their advent has had no particular result.

Desultory but incisive as the reminiscences of this Highland satrap are, their purpose is to give his grandchildren and their

children a picture of the life of their ancestor during the nineteenth century. The value of these records of a personal experience, set down without any ulterior motive, will be best appreciated long after the writer's great-grandchildren are dust. The book, edited as it has been by a scholar and student of history, will be as valuable to the students of the social history of Scotland two hundred years hence as is Evelyn to us.

Evander Maciver was born at Gress, in the parish of Stornoway, in 1811. Gress was a farm, described as "vast, scant, drearie; it never produced what it did not swallow up." The following extract gives a picture of a North country farmer's troubles in the end of the eighteenth century:—

"My grandfather, after whom I was called" [Anglice named], writes Mr Maciver, "was ruined in a singular manner. There was a considerable extent of arable land, from the produce of which a large fold of Highland cattle were wintered in byres. A stackyard adjoined, and they con

sumed the straw. A swarm of rats landed at Gress from the sea, came grain, riddling the stacks to such to the stackyard and ate up the an extent that they fell to the ground, and what was left by the rats rotted away and was rendered useless for the cattle. A very severe spring followed, and a large number of the cattle died of starvation. Such was the loss that he was never able to recover.. My father was

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account of the incident is so naïve and frankly free from the embellishment that any one tainted by a desire to write for the public would inevitably have bestowed upon it, that it should be given in full:

"During my last year at the Academy two gentlemen came into the class-room, as visitors often did. One of them was a heavy, dull, redfaced, grey-haired gentleman, who kept his head and face down without the smallest appearance of animation. He was well known to many of my schoolfellows, and the whisper went round that he was Sir Walter Scott, the great poet and novelist of the day. We were reading a chapter of Xenophon's 'Anabasis' in Greek, translating and parsing as we went along, when they entered.

To my

amazement, Mr Mitchell [the master], on a short pause, called upon me to read a sentence or two of an older les son in the 'Anabasis.' By this time I had become a good Greek scholar. I knew the passage asked for, and read and translated it correctly with out a stop or hitch, and was complimented by the master, when I concluded, on the correctness with which I had read and answered; and ever afterwards I felt no small pride in having been asked to show my scholarship before so great and eminent an author as Sir Walter was."

The boy was more interested in his own rendering of aorists

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with Colin Mackenzie to the New "At eleven went by appointment Edinburgh Academy. In the fifth class, Mr Mitchell's, we heard Greek, of which I am no otherwise a judge than that it was fluently read and explained. . . . Of my young friends I saw a son of John Swinton, a son of Johnstone of Alva, and a son of Craufurd Tait."

It is to be hoped that Mr Maciver's attention was drawn to Sir Walter's appreciation of his fluent reading of his Xenophon.

After he left school, two years at the university were pleasantly, if not profitably, spent.

"I had an extensive acquaintance in Edinburgh. . . . Looking back on my college days, I am satisfied I was a better classical scholar after quitting the Academy than I was after being two sessions in the Greek and Latin classes at the University."

Then some French must be some business acquired and training in an office. After that he went to Lanarkshire as a "mud student," then to Dum

friesshire to get a practical knowledge of sheep-farming, then home for a bit, and then a brief period in the Duke of Buccleuch's estate office at Dalkeith. After a visit to Ireland came the event a first visit to London, and so were filled up the years of training. The London visit in 1834 was the

of

opportunity for a new experience in locomotion.

"At this time the only railway open in the kingdom for passengers was that from Liverpool to Manchester, and being most anxious for a drive on a railway, I went to Glasgow, and thence by steamer to Liverpool. I got my first railway drive to Manchester it was so rapid that I reached Manchester much sooner than

I expected, and was rather disappointed at the brevity of the journey Next day I left Manchester at 6 A.M. in a splendidly horsed stage-coach

with four horses, and had a most interesting drive all the way to London. The distance was 180 miles, and was accomplished in 18 hours to the Post Office at St Martin's-le-Grand. As we approached London we met a great number of mail-coaches with shining lights, carrying the mails

north from London."

The young Evander found more romance in the four horses than in the hurrying little railway, which gave him no time to see the country or the strange English people. "Romance is dead, the caveman said," and so forth, as the poetic apostle of hurry tells us. The romance of haste to get somewhere to do nothing, or nothing worth doing, may appeal to a generation yet unborn: to us, surely the picture of the young Islesman going to the capital, where his future career was to be decided, behind relays of four spanking horses, through 180 miles of the heart of England, must be more romantic than a night journey in a third-class carriage from Glasgow to Euston can possibly be.

In London Maciver saw the sights, met a cousin and his friend just home from service under Don Pedro,-discharged

at the close of the revolution, nineteenth century Scots soldiers of fortune, "with some pay in their pockets, a foolish, reckless lot," says the future elder of the Church of Scotland, -and settled his appointment as factor to Davidson of Tulloch.

Then we have pictures of the social and economic life of Scotland from 1834 to the beginning of the twentieth century, of great interest to all Scotsmen, of value to all who wish to know something of the land which they visit for sport or pleasure, and of supreme importance to the future historian. Mr Maciver conjoined banking at Dingwall with his duties as estate manager, and was prosperous and happy as one of the chief men in a county town. Promotion came, and in the freer life of the Duke of Sutherland's representative at Scourie his administrative faculties had greater scope. There was another advantage, from the point of view at any rate of the reader of his reminiscences, he had opportunities of meeting people whose names are writ large in history, and of most of them he records very frank opinions.

His dealings with John Bright show the Man of Peace in the human light of a disappointed sportsman.

"John Bright came to Scourie in my absence, with a letter of introduction from the Duke of Sutherland asking me to give him fishing on the river Laxford. He was sent there by my son. It turned out that he went there with a small trout rod, and he broke it soon after beginning to fish and came back without any sport. I returned home that evening

and went to the hotel to call for him. I found him reading and smoking, and the room so full of smoke that I could scarcely breathe. I found him in shocking bad humour. He said he had remained a whole day, spent ten shillings in driving to the Laxford, broke his rod, and had no sport. did all I could to restore him to good humour in vain, offered him the use of a salmon-rod, which he declinedsaid he would leave next morning. I parted with him concluding that he was the most uncouth, ill-tempered man I had ever met in his rank."

Poor Mr Bright! He lost two chances-the one of a day's sport under proper conditions a fascinating river, the other of rising to the level of Highland courtesy. But Sir William Harcourt comes off

on

even worse.

"In 1868 I visited Sir John Fowler at Braemore, and met there, among other notabilities, Vernon Harcourt, now Sir William, and my first impression of him formed in London at a dinner was confirmed. I heard him speak that evening in London in a most supercilious, uppish manner during dinner. He spoke in a style indicating he was superior to all present, and that no one should contradict him. When I arrived at Braemore from Ullapool I found the gentlemen all smoking after breakfast in front of the house, which is about eight or nine miles from Ullapool. Vernon Harcourt at once made up to me, and asked me to send my horse back to Ullapool with a telegram. I calmly said that I had driven my horse the previous day from Scourie to Ullapool, a distance of over forty miles, that he was very tired, and that I could not comply with his request. About a month after I met him at Dunrobin Castle. He was not quite so overbearing there, but still he was far from agreeable, and my former impressions of him were confirmed."

Of Millais none but kindly recollections remained. Seymour Haden and Peter Graham

were among his artist friends. The former gave him a copy of his rare etching, the "Agamemnon"; the latter painted the rocks and waves of Handa.

Nobody ever visited Sutherland without seeing Maciver of Scourie, and in his long life he had talks with nearly every contemporary worth knowing, from King Edward and his brothers and sisters downwards. He records several interviews with Mr Gladstone, whose later politics did not appeal to him. After their first meeting in the 'Fifties he

says

"Mr Gladstone was a most pleasing, agreeable man in society; did not in the very slightest appear a big man or elated by his high reputation, most affable, full of humour, simple in his manners. . . . The im pression I formed of Mr Gladstone was that he was too impetuous in coming to conclusions, too easily impressed by what he heard, and he did not appear to me to be a man of that strong judgment and common-sense necessary for those who are to be guides of men or parties, but that a more delightful man in society and in conversation could not be met with."

Is not this the judgment of the professional on the gifted amateur? Maciver was a ruler

of men by birth as well as by natural selection, and in his own domain he had greater power and met with less opposition than fell to the Liberal Prime Minister in his larger sphere.

Of Mr Gladstone's family he speaks with the frankness of a relative-for Mrs Maciver's mother and Mr Gladstone's were cousins. "His mother was a woman of very high character, talents, and

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