Page:A Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland.djvu/283

Rh hear, his beasts eat. Another pretty fashion among them (and it is universal), their dunghill is close to the door of the house, or hut: let the spot about it be ever so lovely, to them their sweet mixen is their choicest, their chief object. Next the dunghill stand their peat stacks; whilst, perhaps, on the back part of their house, where they seldom or ever go, all is neatness. What a perverse inclination for nastiness!

In most of the sequestered parts of the Highlands, the substitute for tallow candles, are the stumps of birch and fir trees, which the Highlandmen dig out of the peat mosses when they cut that fuel. These stumps appear to have lain buried in the bogs for a vast time; and when prepared for candles, they really give a charming light, but of short duration. After drying these stumps thoroughly, they cut them in slips like long matches, which are burned singly, or in a bundle, according to the light required. It falls to the lot of whatever useless being there is in a hut (old folks or children), to hold this torch, and renew it; for it burns out very fast. It is a pleasant sight to see an old woman of seventy or eighty, dressed in her snow-white cursche, sitting by a cozy (snug) fire, holding this clear taper