tagem which our informant could not describe, young Kennedy succeeded in getting the stern Sir Ulrick into his custody, who, seeing, as was said, no chance of escaping, put an end to his existence. But it was more generally believed that his sudden death was only the consequence of private instructions which Kennedy had received from the King to that effect. This supposi tion was greatly strengthened by his immediately afterwards receiving a royal grant of the Barony of Blairquhan, in possession of which his descendant continued till the reign of King Charles II, New Cumnock is a little village totally destitute of interest. Old Cumnock is a large village, settled snugly down in a deep sheltered hollow. The principal part of the town is a triangular space, which was formerly the church-yard, and is now a sort of market-place.* Cumnock is remarkable on account of an ingenious manufacture, which seems to be known nowhere else except at Laurencekirk and Montrose. It is now about twenty years since some ingenious individuals commenced the * This singular revolution took place about twenty years ago, not without great opposition on the part of the inhabitants. A piece of waste ground, a little to the northward of the town, where the gallows had formerly stood, being appropriated as the new burial-place, the people were only reconciled to the change by a strange circumstance connected with the ignominious character of the place. It so happened that the body of one Peden, a great seer among the Ayrshire enthusiasts of the seventeenth century, but who happened to die in his bed, was, after having lain some weeks in a more honourable place, lifted by the persecuting dragoons, and buried under the public gallows of Cumnock, implying that he had only escaped, by a natural death, the violent one which a life of rebellion had rendered his due. sides the body of Peden, that of one Dun, who had been hanged, contributed to sanctify the root of the fatal tree; and, accordingly, when the spot was enclosed, it occurred to the devout imaginations of the villagers, that the whole affair proceeded from a wish on the part of Providence to do justice to the memory of those holy men: the little area was immediately considered as consecrated ground, and the good folk no longer expressed any reluctance to be buried so far from home. Be making of those curious little cabinets now generally known by the appellation of Cumnock Snuff-Boxes. There are now a hundred persons, (men, women, and children,) employed in the trade, all of whom get more considerable wages by their labour than most other artisans; and a good deal of money is thus caused to flow through and enrich the town. Plane-tree is the wood used in the manufacture, and great ingenuity is evinced in adorning the lids with devices. But the great knack of the trade lies in making the hinges, which are of a singularly curious and complicated nature, and justly termed "invisible." It is the secret of this part of the work which makes it as good as if held by patent to the people of Cumnock. Such is the value conferred on woods by these ingenious artists, or so high a price do the articles bear in consequence of this mystery, that a log of plane-tree purchased lately for five-and-twenty shillings was calculated by the man that bought it, as sufficient to make three thousand pounds worth of snuffboxes. Nearly the half of the value of the goods, however, lies in the little drawings with which they are adorned. These are executed individually by the hand -not, as many suppose, by engraving, like the ornaments of pottery. The persons employed in this department are chiefly artists by education and taste, who have chosen to turn their talents in this humble but useful direction, and who have apprentices, that at first perform the inferior parts of the ornaments, and afterwards attain to work at the designs. Many of these designs are chaste and beautiful, and the execution is in general perfectly unexceptionable. Aird's Moss, a large morass extending several miles in every direction betwixt Cumnock, Mauchline, and Muirkirk, will be viewed by the traveller with some interest, as the scene of a skirmish in 1686 between the Covenanters and dragoons. The precise spot where the skirmish happened, is commemorated by a large flat monument, which some pious individuals erected fifty years after the event to the memory of Richard Cameron and the rest of the slain, and which lies about a quar ter of a mile from the public road between Cumnock and Muirkirk, near the western extremity of the morass. This is commonly called Cameron's Stone.* A more appropriate strong-hold than this for a party of gloomy enthusiasts could not have been chosen; and the utter desolation of the spot gives it a melancholy interest, stronger and finer than any which mere admiration of the principles of the sect could inspire. The world, viewed from Cameron's Stone, seems a howling wilderness; and nothing fair is to be seen but that heaven above, on which the hopes of the enthusiasts, withdrawn from all earthly objects, were so firmly fixed. The heath and long deer-grass bear no traces of the blood which must once have stained them; and the event is so remote, that all the more ostentatious ensigns and indications of death and woe, as well as all claims upon a sympathy with mere bodily suffering, are gone and obliterated. Nothing but the sentiment remains, that here lie six men who were at least as much sinned against as sinning, and who, unto pain and death, proved themselves superior to the ordinary worldly considerations which are perpetually dragging their fellowcreatures down from romance into common-place, from generosity into selfishness, from the aspirations of their better nature into the struggles necessary for physical existence, from the sublime emotions of pure piety into the abject hopelessness of scepticism or not less miserable misgivings of indifference. Muirkirk surrounded by coal-pits and iron-works— the land either black heath or blacker clay-destitute of trees-and the air perpetually clouded with smoke -is not a village of the most attractive possible characThe large works in the neighbourhood give employment to about five hundred men, who live in the ter. *Cameron's hands were cut off after he was slain, and, being attached to long poles, were carried though the streets of Edinburgh, in such a manner as to express the attitude of prayer— the miscreant who bore them making them occasionally clap together, &c. village, and whose character is quite appropriate to the unpleasing nature of the locale. Galston is about four miles west from Kilmarnock, lying on the banks of the Irvine Water, in a hollow situation sheltered on all sides by rising grounds. This is a town of considerable size and of very pleasant appearance; deriving great ornament from the "woods and braes" of Loudoun, which overhang it on the north side. Loudoun Castle is a huge and magnificent structure, in the modern castellated style, about half a mile from the village. Newmills is a town of equal size, but less pleasing appearance, three miles farther up the Irvine Water. The scene of Ramsay's popular song, "the Lass of Patie's Mill," is in the immediate neighbourhood of Newmills. Patie's Mill, or, as it is called by the people at the place, Pate's Mill, consists in a range of three cottages on one side of the road and a mill on the other, about a hundred yards westward from the village, and as much south from the Irvine Water. None of the present buildings, except the west end of the row of cottages, are so old as Ramsay's time; the meadow, however, where the poet saw the beauteous lass, flourishes of course in immortal youth. The story of this song is well-known. Ramsay and the Earl of Loudoun were riding along the high road on the other side of the water, when they saw in a park (the second west from Pate's Mill,) a pretty girl tedding hay. The Earl suggested the sight as a fine subject for Allan's muse, and the poet lagged behind his lordship a little, composed the song, and produced it that afternoon at dinner. Newmills contains no fewer than seven hundred weavers. 326 Lanarkshire. Now sunk in shades, now bright in open day, LANARKSHIRE, the principal inland county in the southern section of Scotland, and the most populous of all, the great theatre of manufacture and trade in modern times, and not less remarkable at a former period as the scene of the chief warlike transactions by which Wallace preserved the independency of his country,Lanarkshire, the country of horses, the country of fruit, the country of milk-formerly an independent kingdom, and still so noble a district as almost to entitle it to that political distinction,-is otherwise denominated Clydesdale from its being simply the vale formed by the course of the river Clyde. This stream, the third in rank among Scottish rivers, rises in a mountainous district about the centre of the country south of the Forth, and, holding a N. N. E. course of nearly fifty miles, becomes an estuary at the place where Lanarkshire adjoins to Renfrew and Dunbarton. The country whose shape it determines, resembling in figure the map of South America, is bounded on the west by Ayr and Renfrew, on the north by Dunbarton and Stirling, on the east by Edinburgh and Peebles, and on the south by Dumfries. From the banks of the Clyde, where the land is uniformly fertile, the country swells gently upwards on both sides in long flat moorish uplands, till the highest part forms a natural boundary between this and the neighbouring counties. From each side of these ridges de |