FOOTNOTE:

"The verdant rising of theGallow-hill."

And so I thought a very great deal of his poem, and what I thought I said; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There was another mechanic in the neighbourhood,—a house-carpenter, who, though not a poet, was deeply read in books of all kinds, from the plays of Farquhar to the sermons of Flavel; and as both his father and grandfather—the latter, by the way, a Porteous-mob man, and the former a personal friend of poor Fergusson the poet—had also been readers and collectors of books, he possessed a whole pressful of tattered, hard-working volumes, some of them very curious ones; and to me he liberally extended, what literary men always value, "the full freedom of the press." But of all my occasional benefactors in this way, by far the greatest was poor old Francie, the retired clerk and supercargo.

Francie was naturally a man of fair talent and active curiosity. Nor was he by any means deficient in acquirement. He wrote and figured well, and knew a good deal about at least the theory of business; and when articled in early life to a Cromarty merchant and shopkeeper, it was with tolerably fair prospects of getting on in the world. He had, however, a certain infirmity of brain, which rendered both talent and acquirement of but little avail, and that began to manifest itself very early. While yet an apprentice, on ascertaining that the way was clear, he used, though grown a tall lad, to bolt out from behind the counter into the middle of a green directly opposite, and there, joining in the sports of some group of youngsters, which the place rarely wanted, he would play out half a game at marbles, or honey-pots, or hy-spy, and, when he saw his master or a customer approaching, bolt back againThe thing was not deemed seemly; but Francie, when spoken to on the subject, could speak as sensibly as any young person of his years. He needed relaxation, he used to say, though he never suffered it to interfere with his proper business; and where was there safer relaxation to be found than among innocent children? This, of course, was eminently rational, and even virtuous. And so, when his term of apprenticeship had expired, Francie was despatched, not without hope of success, to Newfoundland,—where he had relations extensively engaged in the fishing trade,—to serve as one of their clerks. He was found to be a competent clerk; but unluckily there was but little known of the interior of the island at the time; and some of the places most distant from St. John's, such as the Bay and River of Exploits, bore tempting names; and so, after Francie had made many inquiries at the older inhabitants regarding what was to be seen amid the scraggy brushwood and broken rocks of the inner country, a morning came in which he was reported missing at the office; and little else could be learned respecting him, than that at early dawn he had been seen setting out for the woods, provided with staff and knapsack. He returned in about a week, worn out and half-starved. He had not been so successful as he had anticipated, he said, in providing himself by the way with food, and so he had to turn back ere he could reach the point on which he had previously determined; but he was sure he would be happier in his next journey. It was palpably unsafe to suffer him to remain exposed to the temptation of an unexplored country; and as his friends and superiors at St. John's had just laden a vessel with fish for the Italian market during Lent, Francie was despatched with her as supercargo, to look after the sales, in a land of which every footbreadth had been familiar to men for thousands of years, and in which it was supposed he would have no inducement to wander. Francie, however, had read much about Italy; and finding, on landing at Leghorn, that he was withina short distance of Pisa, he left ship and cargo to take care of themselves, and set out on foot to see the famous hanging tower, and the great marble cathedral. And tower and cathedral he did see: but it was meanwhile found that he was not quite suited for a supercargo; and he had shortly after to return to Scotland, where his friends succeeded in establishing him in the capacity of clerk and overseer upon a small property in Forfarshire, which was farmed by the proprietor on what was then the newly introduced modern system. He was acquainted, however, with the classical description of Glammis Castle, in the letters of the poet Gray; and after visiting the castle, he set out to examine the ancient encampment at Ardoch—theLindumof the Romans. Finally, all hopes of getting him settled at a distance being given up by his friends, he had to fall back upon Cromarty, where he was yet once more appointed to a clerkship. The establishment with which he was now connected was a large hempen manufactory; and it was his chief employment to register the quantities of hemp given out to the spinners, and the number of hanks of yarn into which they had converted it, when given in. He soon, however, began to take long walks; and the old women, with their yarn, would be often found accumulated, ere his return, by tens and dozens at his office-door. At length, after taking a very long walk indeed, for it stretched from near the opening to the head of the Cromarty Firth, a distance of about twenty miles, and included in its survey the antique tower of Kinkell and the old Castle of Craighouse, he was relieved from the duties of his clerkship, and left to pursue his researches undisturbed, on a small annuity, the gift of his friends. He was considerably advanced in life ere I knew him, profoundly grave, and very taciturn, and, though he never discussed politics, a mighty reader of the newspapers. "Oh! this is terrible," I have heard him exclaim, when on one occasion a snow storm had blocked up both the coast and the Highland roads for a week together, and arrested the northwardcourse of the mails,—"It is terrible to be left in utter ignorance of the public business of the country!"

Francie, whom every one called Mr. —— to his face, and always Francie when his back was turned, chiefly because it was known he was punctilious on the point, and did not like the more familiar term, used in the winter evenings to be a regular member of the circle that met beside my Uncle James's work-table. And, chiefly through the influence, in the first instance, of my uncles, I was permitted to visit him in his own room—a privilege enjoyed by scarce any one else—and even invited to borrow his books. His room—a dark and melancholy chamber, grey with dust—always contained a number of curious but not very rare things, which he had picked up in his walks—prettily coloured fungi—vegetable monstrosities of the commoner kind, such as "fause craws' nests," and flattened twigs of pine—and with these, as the representatives of another department of natural science, fragments of semi-transparent quartz or of glittering feldspar, and sheets of mica a little above the ordinary size. But the charm of the apartment lay in its books. Francie was a book-fancier, and lacked only the necessary wealth to be in the possession of a very pretty collection. As it was, he had some curious volumes; among others, a first-edition copy of the "Nineteen Years' Travels of William Lithgow," with an ancient woodcut, representing the said William in the background, with his head brushing the skies, and, far in front, two of the tombs which covered the heroes of Ilium, barely tall enough to reach half-way to his knee, and of the length, in proportion to the size of the traveller, of ordinary octavo volumes. He had black-letter books, too, on astrology, and on the planetary properties of vegetables; and an ancient book on medicine, that recommended as a cure for the toothache a bit of the jaw of a suicide, well triturated; and, as an infallible remedy for the falling-sickness, an ounce or two of the brains of a young man, carefully dried over the fire. Better,however, than these, for at least my purpose, he had a tolerably complete collection of the British essayists, from Addison to Mackenzie, with the "Essays" and "Citizen of the World" of Goldsmith; several interesting works of travels and voyages, translated from the French; and translations from the German, of Lavater, Zimmerman, and Klopstock. He had a good many of the minor poets too; and I was enabled to cultivate, mainly from his collection, a tolerably adequate acquaintance with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne. Poor Francie was at bottom a kindly and honest man; but the more intimately one knew him, the more did the weakness and brokenness of his intellect appear. His mind was a labyrinth without a clue, in whose recesses there lay stored up a vast amount of book-knowledge, that could never be found when wanted, and was of no sort of use to himself, or any one else. I got sufficiently into his confidence to be informed, under the seal of strict secrecy, that he contemplated producing a great literary work, whose special character he had not quite determined, but which was to be begun a few years hence. And when death found him, at an age which did not fall far short of the allotted threescore and ten, the great unknown work was still an undefined idea, and had still to be begun.

There were several other branches of my education going on at this time outside the pale of the school, in which, though I succeeded in amusing myself, I was no trifler. The shores of Cromarty are strewed over with water-rolled fragments of the primary rocks, derived chiefly from the west during the ages of the boulder clay; and I soon learned to take a deep interest in sauntering over the various pebble-beds when shaken up by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their numerous components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary; and as, according to Cowper, "the growth of what is excellent is slow," it was not until long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of representing the variousspecies of simple rocks, by certain numerals, and the compound ones by the numerals representative of each separate component, ranged, as in vulgar fractions, along a medial line, with the figures representative of the prevailing materials of the mass above, and those representative of the materials in less proportions below. Though, however, wholly deficient in the signs proper to represent what I knew, I soon acquired a considerable quickness of eye in distinguishing the various kinds of rock, and tolerably definite conceptions of the generic character of the porphyries, granites, gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, and mica-schists, which everywhere strewed the beach. In the rocks of mechanical origin I was at this time much less interested; but in individual, as in general history, mineralogy almost always precedes geology. I was fortunate enough to discover, one happy morning, among the lumber and debris of old John Feddes's dark room, an antique-fashioned hammer, which had belonged, my mother told me, to old John himself more than a hundred years before. It was an uncouth sort of implement, with a handle of strong black oak, and a short, compact head, square on the one face and oblong on the other. And though it dealt rather an obtuse blow, the temper was excellent, and the haft firmly set; and I went about with it, breaking into all manner of stones, with great perseverance and success. I found, in a large-grained granite, a few sheets of beautiful black mica, that, when split exceedingly thin, and pasted between slips of mica of the ordinary kind, made admirably-coloured eye-glasses, that converted the landscapes around into richly-toned drawings in sepia; and numerous crystals of garnet embedded in mica-schist, that were, I was sure, identical with the stones set in a little gold brooch, the property of my mother. To this last surmise, however, some of the neighbours to whom I showed my prize demurred. The stones in my mother's brooch were precious stones, they said; whereas whatIhad found was merely a "stone upon the shore." My friend the cabinet-makerwent so far as to say that the specimen was but a mass of plum-pudding stone, and its dark-coloured enclosures simply the currants; but then, on the other hand, Uncle Sandy took my view of the matter: the stone was not plum-pudding stone, he said: he had often seen plum-pudding stone in England, and knew it to be a sort of rough conglomerate of various components; whereas my stone was composed of a finely-grained silvery substance, and the crystals which it contained were, he was sure, gems like those in the brooch, and, so far as he could judge, real garnets. This was a great decision; and, much encouraged in consequence, I soon ascertained that garnets are by no means rare among the pebbles of the Cromarty shore. Nay, so mixed up are they with its sands even,—a consequence of the abundance of the mineral among the primary rocks of Ross,—that after a heavy surf has beaten the exposed beach of the neighbouring hill, there may be found on it patches of comminuted garnet, from one to three square yards in extent, that resemble, at a little distance, pieces of crimson carpeting, and nearer at hand, sheets of crimson bead-work, and of which almost every point and particle is a gem. From some unexplained circumstance, connected apparently with the specific gravity of the substance, it separates in this style from the general mass, on coasts much beaten by the waves; but the garnets of these curious pavements, though so exceedingly abundant, are in every instance exceedingly minute. I never detected in them a fragment greatly larger than a pin-head; but it was always with much delight that I used to fling myself down on the shore beside some newly-discovered patch, and bethink me, as I passed my fingers along the larger grains, of the heaps of gems in Aladdin's cavern, or of Sinbad's valley of diamonds.

The Hill of Cromarty formed at this time at once my true school and favourite play-ground; and if my master did wink at times harder than master ought, when I was playing truantamong its woods or on its shores, it was, I believe, whether he thought so or no, all for the best. My uncle Sandy had, as I have already said, been bred a cartwright; but finding, on his return, after his seven years' service on board a man-of-war, that the place had cartwrights enough for all the employment, he applied himself to the humble but not unremunerative profession of a sawyer, and used often to pitch his saw-pit, in the more genial seasons of the year, among the woods of the hill. I remember, he never failed setting it down in some pretty spot, sheltered from the prevailing winds under the lee of some fern-covered rising ground or some bosky thicket, and always in the near neighbourhood of a spring; and it used to be one of my most delightful exercises to find out for myself among the thick woods, in some holiday journey of exploration, the place of a newly-formed pit. With the saw-pit as my baseline of operations, and secure always of a share in Uncle Sandy's dinner, I used to make excursions of discovery on every side,—now among the thicker tracts of wood, which bore among the town-boys, from the twilight gloom that ever rested in their recesses, the name of "the dungeons;" and anon to the precipitous sea-shore, with its wild cliffs and caverns. The Hill of Cromarty is one of a chain belonging to the great Ben Nevis line of elevation; and, though it occurs in a sandstone district, is itself a huge primary mass, upheaved of old from the abyss, and composed chiefly of granitic gneiss and a red splintery horn-stone. It contains also numerous veins and beds of hornblend rock and chlorite-schist, and of a peculiar-looking granite, of which the quartz is white as milk, and the feldspar red as blood. When still wet by the receding tide, these veins and beds seem as if highly polished, and present a beautiful aspect; and it was always with great delight that I used to pick my way among them, hammer in hand, and fill my pockets with specimens.

There was one locality which I in especial loved. No pathruns the way. On the one side, an abrupt iron-tinged promontory, so remarkable for its human-like profile, that it seems part of a half-buried sphinx, protrudes into the deep green water. On the other—less prominent, for even at full tide the traveller can wind between its base and the sea—there rises a shattered and ruined precipice, seamed with blood-red ironstone, that retains on its surface the bright metallic gleam, and amid whose piles of loose and fractured rock one may still detect fragments of stalactite. The stalactite is all that remains of a spacious cavern, which once hollowed the precipice, but which, more than a hundred years before, had tumbled down during a thunder-storm, when filled with a flock of sheep, and penned up the poor creatures for ever. The space between these headlands forms an irregular crescent of great height, covered with wood a-top, and amid whose lichened crags, and on whose steep slopes, the hawthorn, and bramble, and wild rasp, and rock strawberry, take root, with many a scraggy shrub and sweet wild flower besides; while along its base lie huge blocks of green hornblend, on a rude pavement of granitic gneiss, traversed at one point, for many yards, by a broad vein of milk-white quartz. The quartz vein formed my central point of attraction in this wild paradise. The white stone, thickly traversed by threads of purple and red, is a beautiful though unworkable rock; and I soon ascertained that it is flanked by a vein of feldspar broader than itself, of a brick-red tint, and the red stone flanked, in turn, by a drab-coloured vein of the same mineral, in which there occur in great abundance masses of a homogeneous mica,—mica not existing in lamina, but, if I may use the term, as a sort of micaceous felt. It would almost seem as if some gigantic experimenter of the old world had set himself to separate into their simple mineral components the granitic rocks of the hill, and that the three parallel veins were the results of his labour. Such, however, was not the sort of idea which they at this time suggested to me. I had read in Sir Walter Raleigh's voyageto Guiana, the poetic description of that upper country in which the knight's exploration of the river Corale terminated, and where, amid lovely prospects of rich valleys, and wooded hills, and winding waters, almost every rock bore on its surface the yellow gleam of gold. True, according to the voyager, the precious metal was itself absent. But Sir Walter, on afterwards showing "some of the stones to a Spaniard of the Caraccas, was told by him they werela madre de oro, that is, the mother of gold, and that the mine itself was further in the ground." And though the quartz vein of the Cromarty Hill contained no metal more precious than iron, and but little even of that, it was, I felt sure, the "mother" of something very fine. As for silver, I was pretty certain I had found the "mother" ofit, if not, indeed, the precious metal itself, in a cherty boulder, enclosing numerous cubes of rich galena; and occasional masses of iron pyrites gave, as I thought, large promise of gold. But though sometimes asked in humble irony, by the farm-servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed along the Cromarty beach, whether I was "getting siller in the stanes," I was so unlucky as never to be able to answer their question in the affirmative.

FOOTNOTE:[2]There may have been truth in the allegation; at least the hangman of Inverness enjoyed, from time immemorial, a similar perquisite,—a peat out of every creel brought to the burgh market.

[2]There may have been truth in the allegation; at least the hangman of Inverness enjoyed, from time immemorial, a similar perquisite,—a peat out of every creel brought to the burgh market.

"Strange marble stones, here larger and there less,And of full various forms, which still increaseIn height and bulk by a continual drop.Which upon each distilling from the top,And falling still exactly on the crown.There break themselves to mists, which, trickling down.Crust into stone, and (but with leisure) swellThe sides, and still advance the miracle."—Charles Cotton.

"Strange marble stones, here larger and there less,

And of full various forms, which still increase

In height and bulk by a continual drop.

Which upon each distilling from the top,

And falling still exactly on the crown.

There break themselves to mists, which, trickling down.

Crust into stone, and (but with leisure) swell

The sides, and still advance the miracle."—Charles Cotton.

It is low water in the Firth of Cromarty during stream tides, between six and seven o'clock in the evening; and my uncle Sandy, in returning from his work at the close of the day, used not unfrequently, when, according to the phrase of the place, "there was a tide in the water," to strike down the hillside, and spend a quiet hour in the ebb. I delighted to accompany him on these occasions. There are professors of Natural History that know less of living nature than was known by Uncle Sandy; and I deemed it no small matter to have all the various productions of the sea with which he was acquainted pointed out to me in these walks, and to be in possession of his many curious anecdotes regarding them.

He was a skilful crab and lobster fisher, and knew every hole and cranny, along several miles of rocky shore, in which the creatures were accustomed to shelter, with not a few of their own peculiarities of character. Contrary to the view taken by some of our naturalists, such as Agassiz, who hold that the crab—a genus comparatively recent in its appearance in creation—is less embryotic in its character, and higher in its standing, than the more ancient lobster, my uncle regarded thelobster as a more highly developed and more intelligent animal than the crab. The hole in which the lobster lodges has almost always two openings, he has said, through one of which it sometimes contrives to escape when the other is stormed by the fisher; whereas the crab is usually content, like the "rat devoid of soul," with a hole of only one opening; and, besides, gets so angry in most cases with his assailant, as to become more bent on assault than escape, and so loses himself through sheer loss of temper. And yet the crab has, he used to add, some points of intelligence about him too. When, as sometimes happened, he got hold, in his dark narrow recess in the rock, of some luckless digit, my uncle showed me how that, after the first tremendous squeeze, he began always to experiment upon what he had got, by alternately slackening and straitening his grasp, as if to ascertain whether it had life in it, or was merely a piece of dead matter; and that the only way to escape him, on these trying occasions, was to let the finger lie passively between his nippers, as if it were a bit of stick or tangle; when, apparently deeming it such, he would be sure to let it go; whereas, on the least attempt to withdraw it, he would at once straiten his gripe, and not again relax it for mayhap half an hour. In dealing with the lobster, on the other hand, the fisher had to beware that he did not depend too much on the hold he had got of the creature, if it was merely a hold of one of the great claws. For a moment it would remain passive in his grasp; he would then be sensible of a slight tremor in the captured limb, and mayhap hear a slight crackle; and,presto, the captive would straightway be off like a dart through the deep-water hole, and only the limb remain in the fisher's hand. My uncle has, however, told me that lobsters do not always lose their limbs with the necessary judgment. They throw them off when suddenly frightened, without first waiting to consider whether the sacrifice of a pair of legs is the best mode of obviating the danger. On firing amusket immediately over a lobster just captured, he has seen it throw off both its great claws in the sudden extremity of its terror, just as a panic-struck soldier sometimes throws away his weapons. Such, in kind, were the anecdotes of Uncle Sandy. He instructed me, too, how to find, amid thickets of laminaria and fuci, the nest of the lump-fish, and taught me to look well in its immediate neighbourhood for the male and female fish, especially for the male; and showed me further, that the hard-shelled spawn of this creature may, when well washed, be eaten raw, and forms at least as palatable a viand in that state as the imported caviare of Russia and the Caspian. There were instances in which the common crow acted as a sort of jackal to us in our lump-fish explorations. We would see him busied at the side of some fuci-covered pool, screaming and cawing as if engaged in combating an enemy; and, on going up to the place, we used to find the lump-fish he had killed fresh and entire, but divested of the eyes, which we found, as a matter of course, that the assailant, in order to make sure of victory, had taken the precaution of picking out at an early stage of the contest.

Nor was it with merely the edible that we busied ourselves on these journeys. The brilliant metallicplumageof the sea mouse (Aphrodita), steeped as in the dyes of the rainbow, excited our admiration time after time; and still higher wonder used to be awakened by a much rarer annelid, brown, and slender as a piece of rope-yarn, and from thirty to forty feet in length, which no one save my uncle had ever found along the Cromarty shores, and which, when broken in two, as sometimes happened in the measuring, divided its vitality so equally between the pieces, that each was fitted, we could not doubt, though unable to repeat in the case the experiment of Spallanzani, to set up as an independent existence, and carry on business for itself. The annelids, too, that form for themselves tubular dwellings built up of large grains of sand (amphitrites), always excited our interest. Two hand-shaped tufts ofgolden-hued setæ—furnished, however, with greatly more than the typical number of fingers—rise from the shoulders of these creatures, and must, I suspect, be used as hands in the process of building; at least the hands of the most practised builder could not set stones with nicer skill than is exhibited by these worms in the setting of the grains which compose their cylindrical dwellings—dwellings that, from their form and structure, seem suited to remind the antiquary of the round towers of Ireland, and, from the style of their masonry, of old Cyclopean walls. Even the mason-wasps and bees are greatly inferior workmen to these masonamphitrites. I was introduced also, in our ebb excursions, to the cuttle-fish and the sea-hare, and shown how the one, when pursued by an enemy, discharges a cloud of ink to conceal its retreat, and that the other darkens the water around it with a lovely purple pigment, which my uncle was pretty sure would make a rich dye, like that extracted of old by the Tyrians from a whelk which he had often seen on the beach near Alexandria. I learned, too, to cultivate an acquaintance with some two or three species of doris, that carry their arboraceous, tree-like lungs on their backs, as Macduff's soldiers carried the boughs of Birnam wood to the Hill of Dunsinane; and I soon acquired a sort of affection for certain shells, which bore, as I supposed, a more exotic aspect than their neighbours. Among these were,Trochus Zizyphinus, with its flame-like markings of crimson, on a ground of paley-brown;Patella pellucida, with its lustrous rays of vivid blue on its dark epidermis, that resemble the sparks of a firework breaking against a cloud; and, above all,Cypræa Europea, a not rare shell further to the north, but so little abundant in the Firth of Cromarty, as to render the live animal, when once or twice in a season I used to find it creeping on the laminaria at the extreme outer edge of the tide-line, with its wide orange mantle flowing liberally around it, somewhat of a prize. In short, the tract of sea-bottom laid dry by the ebb formed anadmirable school, and Uncle Sandy an excellent teacher, under whom I was not in the least disposed to trifle; and when, long after, I learned to detect old-marine bottoms far out of sight of the sea—now amid the ancient forest-covered Silurians of central England, and anon opening to the light on some hillside among the Mountain Limestones of our own country—I have felt how very much I owed to his instructions.

His facts wanted a vocabulary adequately fitted to represent them; but though they "lacked a commodity of good names," they were all founded on careful observation, and possessed that first element of respectability—perfect originality: they were all acquired by himself. I owed more, however, to the habit of observation which he assisted me in forming, than even to his facts; and yet some of these were of high value. He has shown me, for instance, that an immense granitic boulder in the neighbourhood of the town, known for ages as the Clach Malloch, or Cursed Stone, stands so exactly in the line of low water, that the larger stream-tides of March and September lay dry its inner side, but never its outer one;—round the outer side there are always from two to four inches of water; and such had been the case for at least a hundred years before, in his father's and grandfather's days—evidence enough of itself, I have heard him say, that the relative levels of sea and land were not altering; though during the lapsed century the waves had so largely encroached on the low flat shores, that elderly men of his acquaintance, long since passed away, had actually held the plough when young where they had held the rudder when old. He used, too, to point out to me the effect of certain winds upon the tides. A strong hasty gale from the east, if coincident with a spring-tide, sent up the waves high upon the beach, and cut away whole roods of the soil; but the gales that usually kept larger tides from falling during ebb were prolonged gales from the west. A series of these, even when not very high, left not unfrequently from one to two feet waterround the Clach Malloch, during stream-tides, that would otherwise have laid its bottom bare—a proof, he used to say, that the German Ocean, from its want of breadth, could not be heaped up against our coasts to the same extent, by the violence of a very powerful east wind, as the Atlantic by the force of a comparatively moderate westerly one. It is not improbable that the philosophy of the Drift Current, and of the apparently reactionary Gulf Stream, may be embodied in this simple remark.

The woods on the lower slopes of the hill, when there was no access to the zones covered save at low ebb by the sea, furnished me with employment of another kind. I learned to look with interest on the workings of certain insects, and to understand some of at least their simpler instincts. The large Diadem Spider, which spins so strong a web, that, in pressing my way through the furze thickets, I could hear its white silken cords crack as they yielded before me, and which I found skilled, like an ancient magician, in the strange art of rendering itself invisible in the clearest light, was an especial favourite; though its great size, and the wild stories I had read about the bite of its cogener the tarantula, made me cultivate its acquaintance somewhat at a distance. Often, however, have I stood beside its large web, when the creature occupied its place in the centre, and, touching it with a withered grass stalk, I have seen it sullenly swing on the lines "with its hands," and then shake them with a motion so rapid, that—like Carathis, the mother of the Caliph Vathek, who, when her hour of doom had come, "glanced off in a rapid whirl, which rendered her invisible"—the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes together. Nothing appeals more powerfully to the youthful fancy than those coats, rings, and amulets of eastern lore, that conferred on their possessors the gift of invisibility. I learned, too, to take an especial interest in what, though they belong to a different family, are known as the WaterSpiders; and havewatched them speeding by fits and starts, like skaters on the ice, across the surface of some woodland spring or streamlet—fearless walkers on the waters, that, with true faith in the integrity of the implanted instinct, never made shipwreck in the eddy or sank in the pool. It is to these little creatures that Wordsworth refers in one of his sonnets on sleep:—

"O sleep, thou art to meA fly that up and down himself doth shoveUpon a fretful rivulet; nowabove,Nowonthe water, vexed with mockery."

"O sleep, thou art to me

A fly that up and down himself doth shove

Upon a fretful rivulet; nowabove,

Nowonthe water, vexed with mockery."

As shown, however, to the poet himself on one occasion, somewhat to his discomfort, by assuredly no mean authority—Mr. James Wilson—the "vexed" "fly," though one of the hemipterous insects, never uses its wings, and so never gets "above" the water. Among my other favourites were the splendid dragon-flies, the crimson-speckled Burnet moths, and the small azure butterflies, that, when fluttering among delicate harebells and crimson-tipped daisies, used to suggest to me, long ere I became acquainted with the pretty figure of Moore,[3]or even ere the figure had been produced, the idea of flowers that had taken to flying. The wild honey bees, too, in their several species, had peculiar charms for me. There were the buff-coloured carders, that erected over their honey-jars domes of moss; the lapidary red-tipped bees, that built amid the recesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone walls, and were so invincibly brave in defending their homesteads, that they never gave up the quarrel till they died; and, above all, the yellow-zoned humble-bees, that lodged deep in the ground along the dry sides of grassy banks, and were usually wealthier in honey than any of their cogeners, and existed in larger communities. But the herd-boys of the parish, and the foxes of its woods andbrakes, shared in my interest in the wild honey bees, and, in the pursuit of something else than knowledge, were ruthless robbers of their nests. I often observed, that the fox, with all his reputed shrewdness, is not particularly knowing on the subject of bees. He makes as dead a set on a wasp's nest as on that of the carder or humble-bee, and gets, I doubt not, heartily stung for his pains; for though, as shown by the marks of his teeth, left on fragments of the paper combs scattered about, he attempts eating the young wasps in the chrysalis state, the undevoured remains seem to argue that he is but little pleased with them as food. There were occasions, however, in which even the herd-boys met with only disappointment in their bee-hunting excursions; and in one notable instance, the result of the adventure used to be spoken of in school and elsewhere, under our breath and in secret, as something very horrible. A party of boys had stormed a humble-bees' nest on the side of the old chapel-brae, and, digging inwards along the narrow winding earth passage, they at length came to a grinning human skull, and saw the bees issuing thick from out a round hole at its base—theforamen magnum. The wise little workers had actually formed their nest within the hollow of the head, once occupied by the busy brain; and their spoilers, more scrupulous than Samson of old, who seems to have enjoyed the meat brought forth out of the eater, and the sweetness extracted from the strong, left in very great consternation their honey all to themselves.

One of my discoveries of this early period would have been deemed a not unimportant one by the geologist. Among the woods of the hill, a short half-mile from the town, there is a morass of comparatively small extent, but considerable depth, which had been laid open by the bursting of a waterspout on the uplands, and in which the dark peaty chasm remained unclosed, though the event had happened ere my birth, until I had become old and curious enough thoroughly to explore it.It was a black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in depth. The bogs around waved thick with silvery willows of small size; but sticking out from the black sides of the ravine itself, and in some instances stretched across it from side to side, lay the decayed remains of huge giants of the vegetable world, that had flourished and died long ages ere, in at least our northern part of the island, the course of history had begun. There were oaks of enormous girth, into whose coal-black substance one could dig as easily with a pickaxe as one digs into a bank of clay; and at least one noble elm, which ran across the little stream that trickled, rather than flowed, along the bottom of the hollow, and which was in such a state of keeping, that I have scooped out of its trunk, with the unassisted hand, a way for the water. I have found in the ravine—which I learned very much to like as a scene of exploration, though I never failed to quit it sadly bemired—handfuls of hazel-nuts, of the ordinary size, but black as jet, with the cups of acorns, and with twigs of birch that still retained almost unchanged their silvery outer crust of bark, but whose ligneous interior existed as a mere pulp. I have even laid open, in layers of a sort of unctuous clay, resembling fuller's earth, leaves of oak, birch, and hazel, that had fluttered in the wind thousands of years before; and there was one happy day in which I succeeded in digging from out the very bottom of the excavation a huge fragment of an extraordinary-looking deer's horn. It was a broad, massive, strange-looking piece of bone, evidently old-fashioned in its type; and so I brought it home in triumph to Uncle James, as the antiquary of the family, assured that he could tell me all about it. Uncle James paused in the middle of his work; and, taking the horn in his hand, surveyed it leisurely on every side. "That is the horn, boy," he at length said, "of no deer that now lives in this country. We have the red deer, and the fallow deer, and the roe; and none of them have horns at all like that. I never saw an elk; but I am pretty sure thisbroad, plank-like horn can be none other than the horn of an elk." My uncle set aside his work; and, taking the horn in his hand, went out to the shop of a cabinet-maker in the neighbourhood, where there used to work from five to six journeymen. They all gathered round him to examine it, and agreed in the decision that it was an entirely different sort of horn from any borne by the existing deer of Scotland, and that this surmise regarding it was probably just. And, apparently to enhance the marvel, a neighbour, who was lounging in the shop at the time, remarked, in a tone of sober gravity, that it had lain in the Moss of the Willows "for perhaps half a century." There was positive anger in the tone of my uncle's reply. "Half a century, Sir!!" he exclaimed; "was the elk a native of Scotland half a century ago? There is no notice of the elk, Sir, in British history. That horn must have lain in the Moss of the Willows for thousands of years!" "Ah, ha, James, ah, ha," ejaculated the neighbour, with a sceptical shake of the head; but as neither he nor any one else dared meet my uncle on historical ground, the controversy took end with the ejaculation. I soon added to the horn of the elk that of a roe, and part of that of a red deer, found in the same ravine; and the neighbours, impressed by Uncle James's view, used to bring strangers to look at them. At length, unhappily, a relation settled in the south, who had shown me kindness, took a fancy to them; and, smit by the charms of a gorgeous paint-box which he had just sent me, I made them over to him entire. They found their way to London, and were ultimately lodged in the collection of some obscure virtuoso, whose locality or name I have been unable to trace.

The Cromarty Sutors have their two lines of caves—an ancient line hollowed by the waves many centuries ago, when the sea stood, in relation to the land, from fifteen to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does now; and a modern line, which the surf is still engaged in scooping out. Many of theolder caves are lined with stalactites, deposited by springs that, filtering through the cracks and fissures of the gneiss, find lime enough in their passage to acquire what is known as apetrifying, though, in reality, only an incrusting quality. And these stalactites, under the name of "white stones made by the water," formed of old—as in that Cave of Slains specially mentioned by Buchanan and the Chroniclers, and in those caverns of the Peak so quaintly described by Cotton—one of the grand marvels of the place. Almost all the old gazetteers sufficiently copious in their details to mention Cromarty at all, refer to its "Dropping Cave" as a marvellous marble-producing cavern; and this "Dropping Cave" is but one of many that look out upon the sea from the precipices of the southern Sutor, in whose dark recesses the drops ever tinkle, and the stony ceilings ever grow. The wonder could not have been deemed a great or very rare one by a man like the late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, well known from his travels in Iceland, and his experiments on the inflammability of the diamond; but it so happened, that Sir George, curious to see the sort of stones to which the old gazetteers referred, made application to the minister of the parish for a set of specimens; and the minister straightway deputed the commission, which he believed to be not a difficult one, to one of his poorer parishioners, an old nailer, as a means of putting a few shillings in his way.

It so happened, however, that the nailer had lost his wife by a sad accident, only a few weeks before; and the story went abroad that the poor woman was, as the townspeople expressed it, "coming back." She had been very suddenly hurried out of the world. When going down the quay after nightfall one evening, with a parcel of clean linen for a sailor, her relative, she had missed footing on the pier edge, and, half-brained, half-drowned, had been found in the morning, stone dead, at the bottom of the harbour. And now, as if pressed by some unsettled business, she used to be seen, it was said, hovering afternightfall about her old dwelling, or sauntering along the neighbouring street; nay, there were occasions, according to the general report, in which she had even exchanged words with some of the neighbours, little to their satisfaction. The words, however, seemed in every instance to have wonderfully little to do with the affairs of another world. I remember seeing the wife of a neighbour rush into my mother's one evening about this time, speechless with terror, and declare, after an awful pause, during which she had lain half-fainting in a chair, that she had just seen Christy. She had been engaged, as the night was falling, but ere darkness had quite set in, in piling up a load of brushwood for fuel outside the door, when up started the spectre on the other side of the heap, attired in the ordinary work-day garb of the deceased, and, in a light and hurried tone, asked, as Christy might have done ere the fatal accident, for a share of the brushwood. "Give me some of thathag," said the ghost; "you have plenty—I have none." It was not known whether or no the nailer had seen the apparition; but it was pretty certain he believed in it; and as the "Dropping Cave" is both dark and solitary, and had forty years ago a bad name to boot—for the mermaid had been observed disporting in front of it even at mid-day, and lights and screams heard from it at nights—it must have been a rather formidable place to a man living in the momentary expectation of a visit from a dead wife. So far as could be ascertained—for the nailer himself was rather close in the matter—he had not entered the cave at all. He seemed, judging from the marks of scraping left along the sides for about two or three feet from the narrow opening, to have taken his stand outside, where the light was good, and the way of retreat clear, and to have raked outwards to him, as far as he could reach, all that stuck to the walls, including ropy slime and mouldy damp, but not one particle of stalactite. It was, of course, seen that his specimens would not suit Sir George; and the minister, in the extremity of the case,applied to my uncles, though with some little unwillingness, as it was known that no remuneration for their trouble could be offered to them. My uncles were, however, delighted with the commission—it was all for the benefit of science; and, providing themselves with torches and a hammer, they set out for the caves. And I, of course, accompanied them—a very happy boy—armed, like themselves, with hammer and torch, and prepared devotedly to labour in behalf of science and Sir George.

I had never before seen the caves by torch-light; and though what I now witnessed did not quite come up to what I had read regarding the Grotto of Antiparos, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably both strange and fine. The celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior—as is not unfrequently the case with the celebrated—to a cave almost entirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little further to the east; and yet evenithad its interest. It widened, as one entered, into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp and the shade; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave, however, we found to be of much greater extent, and of more varied character. It is one of three caves of the old coast line, known as the Doocot or Pigeon Caves, which open upon a piece of rocky beach, overhung by a rudely semicircular range of gloomy precipices. The points of the semicircle project on either side into deep water—into at least water so much deeper than the fall of ordinary neaps, that it is only during the ebb of stream tides that the place is accessible by land; and in each of these bold promontories—the terminal horns of the crescent—there is a cave of the present coast-line, deeply hollowed, in which the sea stands from ten to twelve feet in depth when the tide is at full, and in which the surf thunders, when gales blow hardfrom the stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave in the western promontory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of the "Puir Wife's Meal Kist," has its roof drilled by two small perforations—the largest of them not a great deal wider than the blow-hole of a porpoise—that open externally among the cliffs above; and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore like green moving walls, there are certain times of the tide in which they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within, that it rushes upwards through the openings, roaring in its escape as if ten whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in two white jets of vapour, distinctly visible, to the height of from sixty to eighty feet. If there be critics who have deemed it one of the extravagances of Goethe that he should have given life and motion, as in his famous witch-scene in "Faust," to the Hartz crags, they would do well to visit this bold headland during some winter tempest from the east, and find his description perfectly sober and true:

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