hat we might go for
our milk to the next dairy, if we pleased, but that we would get none
from her. And so, for four months thereafter, we had to do penance for
the joke, on that not very luxurious viand "dry porridge." The pleasures
of the table had occupied but small space amid the very scanty
enjoyments of our barrack even before, and they were now so considerably
reduced, that I could have almost wished at meal-times that--like the
inhabitants of the moon, as described by Baron Munchausen--I could open
up a port-hole in my side, and lay in at once provisions enough for a
fortnight; but the infliction told considerably more on our
constitutions than on our appetites; and we all became subject to small
but very painful boils in the muscular parts of the body--a species of
disease which seems to be scarce less certainly attendant on the
exclusive use of oatmeal, than sea-scurvy on the exclusive use of salt
meat. Old John, however, though in a certain sense the author of our
calamity, escaped all censure, while a double portion fell to the share
of the gentleman's wife.

I never met a man possessed of a more thoroughly mathematical head than
this ancient mason. I know not that he ever saw a copy of Euclid; but
the principles of the work seemed to lie as self-evident truths in his
mind. In the ability, too, of drawing shrewd inferences from natural
phenomena, old John Fraser excelled all the other untaught men I ever
knew. Until my acquaintance with him commenced, I had been accustomed
to hear the removal of what was widely known in the north of Scotland as
"the travelled stone of Petty," attributed to supernatural agency. An
enormous boulder had been carried in the night-time by the fairies, it
was said, from its resting place on the sea-beach, into the middle of a
little bay--a journey of several hundred feet; but old John, though he
had not been on the spot at the time, at once inferred that it had been
carried, not by the fairies, but by a thick cake of ice, considerable
enough, when firmly clasped round it, to float it away. He had seen, he
told me, stones of considerable size floated off by ice on the shore
opposite his cottage, in the upper reaches of the Cromarty Firth: ice
was an agent that sometimes "walked off with great stones;" whereas he
had no evidence whatever that the fairies had any powers that way; and
so he accepted the agent which he knew, as the true one in the removal
of the travelled stone, and no