mains 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 this
broad, 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