The weather was still unsettled, with much wind and rain.  Resumed my walk, and at about four miles from Tain, crossed the Dornoch Firth in a sail ferry boat, and at noon reached Dornoch, the capital of Sutherlandshire.  This was one of the fourteen cities of Scotland; and its little, chubby cathedral, and the tower of the old bishop’s palace still give it a kind of Canterbury air.  The Earls of Sutherland for many generations lie interred within the walls of this ancient church.  After stopping here for an hour or two for dinner, I continued on to Golspie, the residence of the mighty lord of the manor, or the owner, master and human disposer of this great mountain county of Scotland.  It is stated that full four-fifths of it belong to him who now holds the title, and that his other great estates, added to this territory, make him the largest landowner in Great Britain and probably in Europe.  Just before reaching Golspie, a lofty, sombre mountain, with its bald head enveloped in the mist, and which I had been two hours apparently in passing, cleared away and revealed its full stature—­and more.  Towering up from its topmost summit, a tall column lifted a human figure in bronze skyward cloud-high and frequently higher still.  I believe the brazen face that thus looks into the pure and holy skies without blushing, is a duplicate of the one worn in human flesh by His Grace, Evictor I., who unpeopled his great county of many thousands of human inhabitants, and made nearly its whole area of 18,000 square miles a sheep-walk.  But I will not break the seal of that history.  It was full of bitter experience to multitudes.  Not for the time being was it joyous, but grievous exceedingly—­surpassing endurance to many.  But it is all over now.  The ship-loads of evicted men and women who looked their last upon Scotland while its mountains and glens were reddened with the flames of their burning cottages, carried away with them a bitter feeling in their hearts which years of better experience did not soften.  Not for their good did it seem in the motive of the transaction; but for their good it worked most blessedly.  It was a rough transplanting, and the tenderest fibres of human affection broke and bled under the uptearing; but they took root in the Western World, and grew luxuriantly under the light and dew of a happier destiny.  It was hard for fathers and mothers who were taking on the frostwork of age upon their brows; but for their children it was the birth of a new life; for them it was the introduction to a future which had a sun in it, rayful and radiant with the beams of hope and promise.  Let those who denounce and deplore this harsh unpeopling come and stand upon the cold, bleak summit of one of these Sutherland mountains.  Let them bring their compasses, or some other instrument for measuring the angles, sines and cosines of human conditions.  Plant your theodolite here; wipe the telescope’s eye with your handkerchief; look your keenest in the line of the lineage of these