his county some thirty years ago to make room for sheep.  I made only eleven miles this day on account of the rain, and was glad to find cheery and comfortable quarters in an excellent inn kept by a widow and her three daughters in Tain.  Nothing could exceed their kindness and attention, which evidently flowed more from a disposition than from a professional habit of making their guests at home for a pecuniary or business consideration.  I reached their house about the middle of the afternoon, cold and wet, after several hours’ walk in the rain, and was received as one of the family; the eldest daughter, who had all the grace and intelligence of a cultivated lady, helping me off with my wet overcoat, and even offering to pull off my water-soaked boots—­an office no American could accept, and which I gently declined, taking the will for the deed.  A large number of Scotch navvies were at the inns of the town, making an obstreperous auroval in celebration of the monthly pay-day.  They had received the day preceding a month’s wages, and they were now drinking up their money with the most reckless hilarity; swallowing the pay of five long hours at the pick in a couple of gills of whiskey.  How strange that men can work in rain, cold and heat at the shovel for a whole day, then drink up the whole in two hours at the gin-shop!  These pickmen pioneers of the Iron Horse, with their worst habits, are yet a kind of John-the-Baptists to the march and mission of civilization, preparing its way in the wilderness, and bringing secluded and isolated populations to its light and intercourse.  It is wonderful how they are working their way northward among these bald and thick-set mountains.  When I first visited Scotland, in 1846, the only piece of railroad north of the Forth was that between Dundee and Arbroath, hardly an hour long.  Now the iron pathways are running in every direction, making grand junctions at points which had never felt the navvy’s pick a dozen years ago.  Here is one heading towards John O’Groat’s, grubbing its way like a mole around the firths, cutting spiral gains into the rock-ribbed hills, bridging the deep and dark gorges, and holding on steadily north-poleward with a brave faith and faculty of patience that moves mountains, or as much of them as blocks its course.  The progress is slow, silent, but sure.  The world, busy in other doings, does not hear the pick, nor the speech of the powder when it speaks to a huge rock a-straddle the path.  The world, even including the shareholders, hears but little, if anything, of the progress of the work for months, perhaps for a year.  Then the consummation is announced in the form of an invitation to the public to “assist” at the opening of a railroad through towns and villages that never saw the daylight the locomotive brings in its wake.  So it will be here.  Some day, in the present decade, there will be an excursion train advertised to run from London to John O’Groat’s; and perhaps the lineal descendant of Sigurd, or some other old Norse jarl, will wear the conductor’s belt and cap or drive the engine.