evicted thousands.  Steady, now! while the most tranquil light of the future is on the pathway of your eye.  This first reach of your vision is the life-track of the fathers and mothers unhoused among these mountains.  Look on beyond, over the longer life-line of their children; then farther still under the horizon of the remotest future to the track of their childrens’ children.  Can you make an angle of a single degree’s subtension in the hereditary conditions of these generations, or a dozen beyond?  Can you detect a point of departure by which the second generation would have diverged from the first, or the third from the second, and have attained to a higher life of comfort, intelligence, social and political position had they remained in these mountain cottages, grubbed on their cottage farms, and lived from hand to mouth on stinted rations of oatmeal and potatoes, as their ancestors had done from time immemorial?  Can you see among all the hopeful possibilities of Time’s tomorrows, any such change for the better?  You can sight no such prospect with your telescope in that direction.  Turn it around and sweep the horizon of that other condition into which they were thrust, weeping and wrathful against their will.  Follow them across the Atlantic to North America, to their homes in the States and in the Canadas.  Measure the angle they made in this transposition, and the latitude and longitude of social and moral life they have reached from this Sutherland point of departure.  The sons of the fathers and mothers who had their family nests stirred up so cruelly, and scattered, like those of rooks, from their holdings in the cliffs, gorges and glens of these cold mountains, are now among the most substantial and respected men of the Western World.  Some of them to-day are mayors of towns of larger population than the whole county of Sutherland.  Some, doubtless, are Members of Congress, representing each a constituency of one hundred thousand persons, and a vast amount of intelligence, wealth and industry.  They are merchants, manufacturers, farmers, teachers and preachers, filling all the professions and occupations of the continent.  Is not that an angle of promise to your telescope?  Is not that a line of divergence which has conducted these evicted populations, at a small distance from this point of departure, into the better latitudes of human experience?  The selling of this Scotch Joseph to America was more purely and simply a pecuniary transaction than that recorded in Scripture; for in that the unkind and jealous brothers sold the innocent boy for envy, not for the love of pelf, though the Ishmaelites bought him on speculation.  But not for envy was the Sutherland lad sold and shipped to a foreign land, but rather for a contemptuous estimate of his money value.  The proprietor-patriarch of the county took to a more quiet and profitable favorite—­the sheep, and sent it to feed on a pasture enriched with the ashes of Joseph’s cottage.  It is to be feared he meant only money; but Providence meant a blessing beyond the measurement of money to the evicted; and what Providence meant it made for him and his posterity, and they are now enjoying it.