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In the far Highlands and Islands can still be found countrymen of ours who speak no language but Gaelic, these hardly, indeed, unless among older people, the rising generation being schooled into the dominant tongue, in their case often a stiff book English, spangled with Lowland idioms and native constructions. Distrust the author who reports true Highlanders talking broad Scots after the school of Stratford-atte-Bow. This remark does not fully apply to the Central and Inner Highlands, where some generations have passed since people living a mile off spoke tongues foreign to each other, as may still happen on the borders of Wales. In the Highlands best known to tourists, the blending of blood, language, and customs has gone so far that a stranger may be excused for confounding a Perthshire strath with the true kailyard scenery. Beyond the Great Glen, still more markedly beyond the sounds, firths, and minches of the west coast, we find Highlanders less touched by the spirit of a practical age, whose first breath sets them shivering and drawing their tartans about them as they wake from fond dreams of a romantic past. All Scotland, alas! has been too much overrun by the alien clan of MacMillion, who, as one of its most eloquent sons complains, go on cutting it up into “moors” and “forests,” and its rivers into “beats.” Sheep farming on a large scale and other industries have here and there brought Saxon sojourners, like my Derbyshire acquaintance, to the western wilds. The aristocracy are much Anglified, even in these “Highlands of the Highlands.” But the mass of their human life is still Celtic, or at least Gaelic, if language can be trusted, with an old blend of Teuton infused both by sea and land, through Norse, Norman, and Saxon invaders, and with touches of Spanish Armada or other shipwrecked blood surmisable here and there among waifs and strays all going to make up a stock that may have absorbed who knows what prehistoric elements. The controversy between Thwackum and Square is not more famous than that hot debate between Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck and Sir Arthur Wardour, which stands as warning to a modest writer not to quarrel with any readers, at least at an early stage of his book, by taking sides on certain much-vexed ethnological and philological questions.