Highland Crofters.

Te Aroha News, Volume III, Issue 131, 5 December 1885, Page 3

Highland Crofters.

There has been a good deal in the colonial papers recently about the Highland Crofters in connection with Mr Mac Andrew's scheme of special settlements for these people in New Zealand. It may therefore interest our readers to peruse the following account of them given by an English lady writer in Good Words:— "I ought to say that we know the crofters only as neighbours. As an English tamily renting a small shooting, now here, now there, and having none but voluntary relations with them, we may havo seen them at their best. Their lives and ours run on smoothly side by side, and at the end of eleven summers spent among them we find ourselves full of admiration of the dignity, the child-like simplicity, the kindliness, the courtesy, and the romance of character of our fellow-tenants. But if we think better of the people themselves than some do, we also think better of their condition than do others. When I compare their daily life with that of English agricultural labourers, I rind the crofters infinitely better off, and if I try to compare it with the existence of the poor in large towns, I find comparison impossible -the one life I could live— of the other I d arc hardly think. They have many advantages. They have space. The houses may be small, but behind it lies the hillside. In a sheltered hollow by the burn a copper is built upon two or three stones, some peats are lighted underneath it, and there the washing is clone ; thither on fine days the bedding is brought and laid out to air ; there the children play, and there on Sunday afternoons in summer the whole family sit out on the heather, joined perhaps by two or three friends who have come 'a bit 1 to visit them, talking in their slow restful Gaelic. (I speak, of course, here, as elsewhere, only of districts I have known.) They have the quiet and freedom that belongs to lives lived in lonely places, and the leisure that comes of indifference to petty comforts and discomforts. If they are without thrift they are also without worry. They take life easily and amuse themselves readily. Their food lends itself to easy hospitality, a piece of oat-cake and a glass of milk is a meal for any guest, and nearly every family has a cow, often two or three cows, so that the children are well nourished and well grown. Seen from the outside the cottages, as in the photographs, so in reality, look bare, neglected, and miserable, but this is due to the invincible Celtic slovenliness of the inhabitants rather than to their poverty. To them a pool of dirty water at their v.cry threshold is a matter of indifference ; wrhat they do care for— warmth, wholesonne food, and leisure— they have, even, so fa,r as we have seen, the poorest of them."