The changes that many of us have lived to witness in this kind of intercourse between families and old servants is a part of a still greater change—­the change in that modification of the feudal system, the attachment of clans.  This, also, from transfers of property and extinction of old families in the Highlands, as well as from more general causes, is passing away; and it includes also changes in the intercourse between landed proprietors and cottagers, and abolition of harvest-homes, and such meetings.  People are now more independent of each other, and service has become a pecuniary and not a sentimental question.  The extreme contrast of that old-fashioned Scottish intercourse of families with their servants and dependants, of which I have given some amusing examples, is found in the modern manufactory system.  There the service is a mere question of personal interest.  One of our first practical engineers, and one of the first engine-makers in England, stated that he employed and paid handsomely on an average 1200 workmen; but that they held so little feeling for him as their master, that not above half-a-dozen of the number would notice him when passing him, either in the works or out of work hours.  Contrast this advanced state of dependants’ indifference with the familiarity of domestic intercourse we have been describing!

It has been suggested by my esteemed friend, Dr. W. Lindsay Alexander, that Scottish anecdotes deal too exclusively with the shrewd, quaint, and pawky humour of our countrymen, and have not sufficiently illustrated the deep pathos and strong loving-kindness of the “kindly Scot,”—­qualities which, however little appreciated across the Border, abound in Scottish poetry and Scottish life.  For example, to take the case before us of these old retainers, although snappy and disagreeable to the last degree in their replies, and often most provoking in their ways, they were yet deeply and sincerely attached to the family where they had so long been domesticated; and the servant who would reply to her mistress’s order to mend the fire by the short answer, “The fire’s weel eneuch,” would at the same time evince much interest in all that might assist her in sustaining the credit of her domestic economy; as, for example, whispering in her ear at dinner, “Press the jeelies; they winna keep;” and had the hour of real trial and of difficulty come to the family, would have gone to the death for them, and shared their greatest privations.  Dr. Alexander gives a very interesting example of kindness and affectionate attachment in an old Scottish domestic of his own family, whose quaint and odd familiarity was charming.  I give it in his own words:—­“When I was a child there was an old servant at Pinkieburn, where my early days were spent, who had been all her life, I may say, in the house—­for she came to it a child, and lived, without ever leaving it, till she died in it, seventy-five years of age.  Her feeling to her old master, who was just two years