what a mere procession he must have
considered all the rest of human life; — a procession
of companies— now a set of proprietors of
the mines, and a chaplain, and an Earl or
Hopetoun, and a population of grandparents,
working men and women, and children; and
presently, another set of proprietors, another
chaplain, another Earl of Hopetoun, another
population of old, middle-aged, and young;
and he, at first walking with them in the
procession, but long ago standing by to see
them pass, as naturally as if it was his
business to observe them, and theirs to pass
on towards their graves.

Perhaps it was all less striking to him than
to us; the grass, and the rocks, and the sky,
being what he had already known them, and
the fish leaping to his bait as they had done
in his youth. One day, when he was one
hundred and twenty years old, the snows
came upon him when he was up in the hills,
and blocked up his way on every side. He
gave himself up for lost. Perhaps he felt it
hard to be thus cut off untimely, instead of
dying in his bed. He stuck his fishing-rod
upright in the snow, and made another
struggle for life. He struggled through to a
place where he was found. When he had
recovered, he went back, plucked his rod out
of the snow, and returned to begin his new
lease of seventeen years of life. To us, all
this seems very sad and fearful. We feel that
we had rather die to-night, than run the risk
of living so long; but, we may have found, in
the course of our lives, that some things
which we would rather have died than
encounter, have turned out very endurable,
after all; and so may this John Taylor, of
the Leadhills, have found it with his burden
of years. There must be some who remember
John Taylor; for he died about seventy
years ago. And he must have remembered
something of the trouble in Scotland, when
Charles the First afflicted the church, and
went to war with his Scottish subjects. He
must have heard of the fearful death of that
king; and of the pious soldier who ruled in
his place, without the name of king. Strange
rumours of the Fire of London and of the
great Plague must have floated up to the
head of his valley when he was a well-grown
young man. And what a succession of
sovereigns— Stuarts, William of Orange, Anne
of Denmark, and one, two, three Georges—
George the Third having become a familiar
king when the old man stuck his rod in the
snow, and thought he was going to be cut off
by an accident! It is almost bewildering,
so we will see what younger people are
about.

Old as he lived to be, John Taylor had
been a miner— had worked under ground.
In his day, as now, the gallows-like apparatus
erected over the shafts of the mines stood up
against the sky, on a ridge here, on the summit
of a knoll there. Down the ladders he went,
fathoms deep, to a resting place; and then,
turning aside a little, down many more— ten
times as many— to where he had to work six
hours a day, hewing away at the vein of ore,
sending up the rubbish, sending up the ore,
toiling in darkness, heat, damp, and often
up to the knees in the turbid water of the
mine.

The men work, as in Cornwall, on tribute
— sharing the success or failure of their
enterprises with the proprietors. They change
the name of a mine, quaintly enough, according
to their approbation or displeasure
towards it. We saw one which had, till
lately, been called the "Labour in Vain Vein."
After a lucky turn which disclosed new riches
(more lead with a little gold), it was called
California, which is its present title— a title,
by the way, which shows that some tidings
from the world without reach this secluded
spot. The residents say, that even fewer
strangers come now than before the opening
of the Caledonian Railway; but, on the other
hand, we find reason to believe that there has
been enough of intercourse with the navvies
of that railway, to work anything but good
to the habits of the miners, who must be very
like children in their impressibleness, and in
the precarious character of the innocence
which has been maintained in the absence of
temptation. One other kind of intercourse is
provided by the annual arrival of Lord Hopetoun,
or his sporting friends, in August and
onwards. We saw an elegant moor-hen
moving tamely on in the heather, not far
from the smelting-houses; and this game so
abounds on the hills, that the sportsmen
come home to dinner at "the Ha'" with
their thirty or forty brace each. Looking
round on the very small cabbage patches of
the miners, remembering their oatmeal diet,
without even a smell of bacon to their bread,
pondering also the average of nine shillings a
week, which leaves so many with only six,
we inquired whether poaching could, in such
a wild scene, be kept within bounds. The
answer was, that poaching is a thing never
heard of; and the reason given was, that the
poacher would forfeit everything, if detected.
It is wonderful, and must be the result of
strong compulsion of circumstance, that
hungering men can see wild creatures fluttering
in the herbage on far spreading moors,
away from every human eye but their own,
and can abstain from taking what can hardly
appear like property, and can never be missed.
If there is something fine— as there certainly
is— in the obedience to law, there is
something mournful, too, in the subservience, so
customary as to have become a second nature,
which secures the grouse and the sport to
the aristocracy, and keeps the labourer, who
has no sport, within the arbitrary limit of his
oat bread and milk.

Perhaps we should not say that the
labourer has no sport, for we heard of a novelty
in that way having been lately introduced—
an occasional game at quoits. There is a