Excerpt from Book:

In the middle of the last century - with two lines of strange-looking thatched or sod-covered stables, byres, barns, and other out-houses, pro jecting from its sides at right angles to its front, with divers out-riders, and isolated strag gling edifices, of similar architecture and materials, dropped down here and there, as the hand of chance might have sown them - the smoke coming furth from some of their lumm heads, and partly also from their low door-ways, proving to you, almost against your conviction, that they actually are the dwelling-places of human beings - Fancy the whole grouped (as Mr. Grant, the long painter lad of Grantown, would have said) with sundry goodly rows of peat and turf stacks, a number of corn ricks wonderfully formed, and bulging and hanging out of the centre of gravity, each in a different direction, like a parcel of drunken Dutch dancers - in the midst of all a large midden - (query whether the word madden may not be a mere corruption of the words middle-izz, - tbe im'dden being always in tlw middle of all rural premises in Scotland?