The natural and self-complacent manner in which the following anecdote brings out in the Highlander an innate sense of the superiority of Celtic blood is highly characteristic:—­A few years ago, when an English family were visiting in the Highlands, their attention was directed to a child crying; on their observing to the mother it was cross, she exclaimed—­“Na, na, it’s nae cross, for we’re baith true Hieland.”

The late Mr. Grahame of Garsock, in Strathearn, whose grandson now “is laird himsel,” used to tell, with great unction, some thirty years ago, a story of a neighbour of his own of a still earlier generation, Drummond of Keltie, who, as it seems, had employed an itinerant tailor instead of a metropolitan artist.  On one occasion a new pair of inexpressibles had been made for the laird; they were so tight that, after waxing hot and red in the attempt to try them on, he let out rather savagely at the tailor, who calmly assured him, “It’s the fash’n; it’s jist the fash’n.”  “Eh, ye haveril, is it the fashion for them no to go on?”

An English gentleman writes to me—­“We have all heard much of Scotch caution, and I met once with an instance of it which I think is worth recording, and which I tell as strictly original.  About 1827, I fell into conversation, on board of a Stirling steamer, with a well-dressed middle-aged man, who told me he was a soldier of the 42d, going on leave.  He began to relate the campaigns he had gone through, and mentioned having been at the siege of St. Sebastian.—­’Ah! under Sir Thomas Graham?’ ‘Yes, sir; he commanded there.’  ‘Well,’ I said, merely by way of carrying on the crack, ‘and what do you think of him?’ Instead of answering, he scanned me several times from head to foot, and from foot to head, and then said, in a tone of the most diplomatic caution, ‘Ye’ll perhaps be of the name of Grah’m yersel, sir?’ There could hardly be a better example, either of the circumspection of a real canny Scot, or of the lingering influence of the old patriarchal feeling, by which ’A name, a word, makes clansmen vassals to their lord.’”

Now when we linger over these old stories, we seem to live at another period, and in such reminiscences we converse with a generation different from our own.  Changes are still going on around us.  They have been going on for some time past.  The changes are less striking as society advances, and we find fewer alterations for us to notice.  Probably each generation will have less change to record than the generation that preceded; still every one who is tolerably advanced in life must feel that, comparing its beginning and its close, he has witnessed two epochs, and that in advanced life he looks on a different world from one which he can remember.  To elucidate this fact has been my present object, and in attempting this task I cannot but feel how trifling and unsatisfactory my remarks must seem to many who have a more enlarged