against the sea-pebbles, that they stuck out from under more than
a hundred tons of fallen rock, divested of the bark on their under
sides, as if peeled by the hand. And what I felt on all these occasions
was, I believe, not more in accordance with the nature of man as an
instinct of the moral faculty, than in agreement with that provision of
the Divine Government under which a sparrow falleth not without
permission. There perhaps never was a time in which the doctrine of a
particular Providence was more questioned and doubted than in the
present; and yet the scepticism which obtains regarding it seems to be
very much a scepticism of effort, conjured up by toiling intellects, in
a quiet age, and among the easy classes; while the belief which,
partially and for the time, it overshadows, lies safely entrenched all
the while amid the fastnesses of the unalterable nature of man. When
danger comes to touch it, it will spring up in its old proportions; nay,
so indigenous is it to the human heart, that if it will not take its
_cultivated_ form as a belief in Providence, it will to a certainty take
to it its _wild_ form as a belief in Fate or Destiny. Of a doctrine so
fundamentally important that there can be no religion without it, God
himself seems to have taken care when he moulded the human heart.

The raven no longer builds among the rocks of the Hill of Cromarty; and
I saw many years ago its last pair of eagles. This last noble bird was a
not unfrequent visitor of the Sutors early in the present century. I
still remember scaring it from its perch on the southern side of the
hill, as day was drawing to a close, when the tall precipices amid which
it had lodged lay deep in the shade; and vividly recollect how
picturesquely it used to catch the red gleam of evening on its plumage
of warm brown, as, sailing outwards over the calm sea many hundred feet
below, it emerged from under the shadow of the cliffs into the sunshine.
Uncle James once shot a very large eagle beneath one of the loftiest
precipices of the southern Sutor; and, swimming out through the surf to
recover its body--for it had dropped dead into the sea--he kept its skin
for many years as a trophy.[6] But eagles are now no longer to lie seen
or shot on the Sutors or their neighbourhood. The badger, too--one of
perhaps the oldest inhabitants of the country, for it seems to have been
contemporary with the extinct elephants and hyaenas of the Pleistocene
periods--has