Connecticut western news., 1876-05-12
SHEPHERD LIFE IN SCOTLAND.
A Peculiar and Trying Existence Mll the
 Year Round,


 Shepherd life in the Scotch highlands and on the border hills is very peculiar and trying one all the year round. You are shooting over some wild grouse moor, and have started from shooting box, which, though it certainly stands on a carriage road. seems to all intents and purposes at the very back of the world. The church, the post office and the public house are dozen miles away; there is not even merchants shop" within radius of three times the dis tance. You have got to the end of your most remote beat after several hours of severe exertion, and, having climbed to the summit of some heathery Pisgah, you rest upon your gun to contemplate the landscape. A thread of white smoke, one of the rare signs of the presence of man in those solitudes, catches your eye in one of the valleys at your feet. It goes up from the chimney of thatched shieling which is scarcely distinguishable from the long peat stack beside it, being built of precisely the same material. There is strip of kale- yard, carefully fenced in against the red deer, and patch of natural meadow running down to the burn before the door.
 You may distinguish dwarf COW picking up a subsistence on the grass land, and, were you to make a nearer approach to the place you would be vel comed by chorus of collies yelping at you from the roof as the most conven. ient vantage ground. It is one of those shepherds cots so much in favor with our poets, and with the exception of his wife, his children and his sheep, the COW and the collies are pretty nearly all the society the occupant has from one years end to the other. From time to time he may take child to the kirk to be christened, or he may indulge him. self in a pilgrimage of many a weary mile to the public house on his own ac- count, or he may exchange an unusual greeting with the keeper, although more probably he is at feud with the keeper and gillies on some difficulty about the marauding of his collies. He has toler- ably good wages, no doubt; he may be warmly clothed and bountifully fed, and, having no means of getting rid of his money, may have put by snug sum in the savings bank. But he is condemned to lead the life of hermit, with next to no intellectual resources, although, as like as not, he is an intelligent man who has come northward with one of those great Southland sheep owners who are now monopolizing the highland grazing. Very possibly he%has been fairly edu- cated, which is what his children can scarcely aspiA to be, all educational acts to the contrary for you cannot legislate them into walking twenty-four miles day to and from the parish school. During the fine weather he is by no means badly off, physically, al though he has so much time for medita. tion that it must often hang heavy on his hands. He lies basking on the heather in the sun, when there is any, and leaves his dogs to do his work.
 But as the days shorten and the snow storms set in, things become very diff. ferent. Searching and scraping for the food which is somehow to keep the breath in their bodies, the hocks scatter and stray into the most out-of- -the-way hooks and corners; their instinct some times serves them only too we'll in seeking out refuge in the most shel tered places. Their guardian has been lying all through the night listening to the bowling of the storm; when he has got up to peer anxiously from the little easement, he has distinguished nothing but gray quivering darkness that might be felt.
 He has risen with the earliest glimmel of the dawn to find his doorway heape6 with snow wreaths that must be due through. Stumbling out into the open he sees just a glimmer of light as yet and that is all, for the air is thick witt the broad floating snowfakes and blind ing drift. The biting wind, twisted in the glens and valleys into eddies, has beer capriciously heaping up the fresh faller snow. The storm swept hillsides would be safe enough lying for the sheep i they could only keep in the anima warmth by huddling themselves together But unluckily they have wandered into those more protected corners where tn, snow has been settling down in thicken ing layers, and when they have at las been discovered in their 1airs by the in stinct of the sheep dogs they have to b. extricated with infinite pains and labor -Saturtlay RevieaV.