d and his partner, the workmen had a royal "founding-pint," and two
whole glasses of the whisky came to my share. A full-grown man would
not have deemed a gill of usquebaugh an overdose, but it was
considerably too much for me; and when the party broke up, and I got
home to my books, I found, as I opened the pages of a favourite author,
the letters dancing before my eyes, and that I could no longer master
the sense. I have the volume at present before me--a small edition of
the Essays of Bacon, a good deal worn at the corners by the friction of
the pocket; for of Bacon I never tired. The condition into which I had
brought myself was, I felt, one of degradation. I had sunk, by my own
act, for the time, to a lower level of intelligence than that on which
it was my privilege to be placed; and though the state could have been
no very favourable one for forming a resolution, I in that hour
determined that I should never again sacrifice my capacity of
intellectual enjoyment to a drinking usage; and, with God's help, I was
enabled to hold by the determination. Though never a strict abstainer, I
have wrought as an operative mason for whole twelvemonths together, in
which I did not consume half-a-dozen glasses of ardent spirits, or
partake of half-a-dozen draughts of fermented liquor. But I do see, in
looking back on this my first year of labour, a dangerous point, at
which, in the attempt to escape from the sense of depression and
fatigue, the craving appetite of the confirmed tippler might have been
formed.

The ordinary, long-wrought quarries of my native town have been opened
in the old coast-line along the southern shores of the Cromarty Firth,
and they contain no organisms. The beds occasionally display their
water-rippled surfaces, and occasionally their areas of ancient
desiccation, in which the polygonal partings still remain as when they
had cracked in the drying, untold ages before. But the rock contains
neither fish nor shell; and the mere mechanical processes of which it
gave evidence, though they served to raise strange questions in my mind,
failed to interest me so deeply as the wonderful organisms of other
creations would have done. We soon quitted these quarries, however, as
they proved more than usually difficult in the working at this time, for
a quarry situated on the northern shore of the Moray Firth, which had
been recently opened in an inferior member of the Lower Old Red
Sandstone, and which, as I subsequ