, for about
ten feet, but came to no bottom; and I could see that it formed the
subsoil of the valley all around the policies of Conon-side, and
underlay most of its fields and woods. It was white and pure, as if it
had been washed by the sea only a few weeks previous; but in vain did I
search its beds and layers for a fragment of shell by which to determine
its age. I can now, however, entertain little doubt that it belonged to
the boulder clay period of submergence, and that the fauna with which it
was associated bore the ordinary sub-arctic character. When this
stratified sand was deposited, the waves must have broken against the
conglomerate precipices of Brahan, and the sea have occupied, as firths
and sounds, the deep Highland valleys of the interior. And on such of
the hills of the country as had their heads above water at the time,
that interesting but somewhat meagre Alpine Flora must have flourished,
which we now find restricted to our higher mountain summits.

Once every six weeks I was permitted to visit Cromarty, and pass a
Sabbath there; but as my master usually accompanied me, and as the way
proved sufficiently long and weary to press upon his failing strength
and stiffening limbs, we had to restrict ourselves to the beaten road,
and saw but little. On, however, one occasion this season, I journeyed
alone, and spent so happy a day in finding my homeward road along blind
paths--that ran now along the rocky shores of the Cromarty Firth in its
upper reaches, now through brown, lonely moors, mottled with Danish
encampments, and now beside quiet, tomb-besprinkled burying-grounds, and
the broken walls of deserted churches--that its memory still lives
freshly in my mind, as one of the happiest of my life. I passed whole
hours among the ruins of Craighouse--a grey fantastic rag of a castle,
consisting of four heavily-arched stories of time-eaten stone, piled
over each other, and still bearing a-top its stone roof and its ornate
turrets and bartizans--

"A ghastly prison, that eternally
Hangs its blind visage out to the one sea."

It was said in these days to be haunted by its goblin--a
miserable-looking, grey-headed, grey-bearded, little old man, that might
be occasionally seen late in the evening, or early in the morning,
peering out through some arrow-slit or shot-hole at the chance
passenger. I remember getting the whole history of the goblin this day
from a sun-burnt herd-boy, whom I found tend