I come now to a subject on which a great change has taken place in this country during my own experience—­viz. those peculiarities of intercourse which some years back marked the connection between masters and servants.  In many Scottish houses a great familiarity prevailed between members of the family and the domestics.  For this many reasons might have been assigned.  Indeed, when we consider the simple modes of life, which discarded the ideas of ceremony or etiquette; the retired and uniform style of living, which afforded few opportunities for any change in the domestic arrangements; and when we add to these a free, unrestrained, unformal, and natural style of intercommunion, which seems rather a national characteristic, we need not be surprised to find in quiet Scottish families a sort of intercourse with old domestics which can hardly be looked for at a time when habits are so changed, and where much of the quiet eccentricity belonging to us as a national characteristic is almost necessarily softened down or driven out.  Many circumstances conspired to promote familiarity with old domestics, which are now entirely changed.  We take the case of a domestic coming early into service, and passing year after year in the same family.  The servant grows up into old age and confirmed habits when the laird is becoming a man, a husband, father of a family.  The domestic cannot forget the days when his master was a child, riding on his back, applying to him for help in difficulties about his fishing, his rabbits, his pony, his going to school.  All the family know how attached he is; nobody likes to speak harshly to him.  He is a privileged man.  The faithful old servant of thirty, forty, or fifty years, if with a tendency to be jealous, cross, and interfering, becomes a great trouble.  Still the relative position was the result of good feelings.  If the familiarity sometimes became a nuisance, it was a wholesome nuisance, and relic of a simpler time gone by.  But the case of the old servant, whether agreeable or troublesome, was often so fixed and established in the households of past days, that there was scarce a possibility of getting away from it.  The well-known story of the answer of one of these domestic tyrants to the irritated master, who was making an effort to free himself from the thraldom, shows the idea entertained, by one of the parties at least, of the permanency of the tenure.  I am assured by a friend that the true edition of the story was this:—­An old Mr. Erskine of Dun had one of these retainers, under whose language and unreasonable assumption he had long groaned.  He had almost determined to bear it no longer, when, walking out with his man, on crossing a field, the master exclaimed, “There’s a hare.”  Andrew looked at the place, and coolly replied, “What a big lee, it’s a cauff.”  The master, quite angry now, plainly told the old domestic that they must part.  But the tried servant of forty years, not dreaming of the possibility of his dismissal,