Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine

ing made in the meal, and sprinkled with salt, the boiling-water is poured over the meal, and the mixture receiving a little stirring with a horn-spoon, and the allowance of milk poured over it, the brose is ready to be eaten; and, as every man makes his own brose, and knows his own appetite, he makes just as much as he can consume." [2]

[Footnote 2: "The fare is simple, and is as simply made, but it must be wholesome, and capable of supplying the loss of substance occasioned by hard labour; for I believe that no class of men can endure more bodily fatigue for ten hours every day, than those ploughmen of Scotland who subsist on this brose three times a-day."--Vol. ii. p. 384.]

But if the life of the ploughman is familiar to our author, the work he has to do, and the mode of doing it well, and the reason why it should be done one way here, and another way there, are no less so. The uninitiated have no idea of the complicated patterns which the ploughman works, according to the nature of