ble, but to animal substance; the tar which used to boil in it
to the heat, like resin in a fagot of moss-fir, was as strange a mixture
as ever yet bubbled in witches' caldron--blood of pterodactyle and
grease of ichthyosaur--eye of belemnite and hood of nautilus; and we
learned to delight in its very smell, all oppressive as that was, as
something wild, strange, and inexplicable. Once or twice I seemed on the
eve of a discovery: in splitting the masses, I occasionally saw what
appeared to be fragments of shells embedded in its substance; and at
least once I laid open a mysterious-looking scroll or volute, existing
on the dark surface as a cream-coloured film; but though these organisms
raised a temporary wonder, it was not until a later period that I
learned to comprehend their true import, as the half-effaced but still
decipherable characters of a marvellous record of the grey,
dream-encircled past.

With the docile Finlay as my companion, and left to work out my own will
unchallenged, I was rarely or never mischievous. On the occasions,
however, in which my band swelled out to ten or a dozen, I often
experienced the ordinary evils of leadership, as known in all gangs and
parties, civil and ecclesiastical; and was sometimes led, in
consequence, to engage in enterprises which my better judgment
condemned. I fain wish that among the other "Confessions" with which our
literature is charged, we had the _bona fide_ "Confessions of a Leader,"
with examples of the cases in which, though he seems to overbear, he is
in reality overborne, and actually follows, though he appears to lead.
Honest Sir William Wallace, though seven feet high, and a hero, was at
once candid and humble enough to confess to the canons of Hexham, that,
his "soldiers being evil-disposed men," whom he could neither "justify
nor punish," he was able to protect women and Churchmen only so long as
they "abided in his sight." And, of course, other leaders, less tall and
less heroic, must not unfrequently find themselves, had they but
Wallace's magnanimity to confess the fact, in circumstances much akin to
those of Wallace. When bee-masters get hold of queen bees, they are
able, by controlling the movements of these natural leaders of hives, to
control the movements of the hives themselves; and not unfrequently in
Churches and States do there exist inconspicuous bee-masters, who, by
influencing or controlling the leader-bees, in reality influence and
control t