o the rough tear and wear to which
the ordinary stone-cutter must subject himself, I could live. I deemed
it an advantage, too, rather than the reverse, that my new branch of
employment brought me not unfrequently for a few days into country
districts sufficiently distant from home to present me with new fields
of observation, and to open up new tracts of inquiry. Sometimes I spent
half a week in a farm-house in the neighbourhood of some country
churchyard--sometimes I lodged in a village--oftener than once I
sheltered beside some gentleman's seat, where the august shadow of
lairdship lay heavy on society; and in this way I came to see and know
a good deal of the Scottish people, in their many-coloured aspects, of
which otherwise I might have remained ignorant. At times, too, on some
dusty cottage shelf I succeeded in picking up a rare book, or, what was
not less welcome, got a curious tradition from the cottager; or there
lay within the reach of an evening walk some interesting piece of
antiquity, or some rock-section, which I found it profitable to visit. A
solitary burying-ground, too, situated, as country burying-grounds
usually are, in some pleasant spot, and surrounded by its groups of
ancient trees, formed a much more delightful scene of labour than a
dusty work-shed, or some open area in a busy town; and altogether I
found my new mode of life a quiet and happy one. Nor, with all its
tranquillity, was it a sort of life in which the intellect was in any
great danger of falling asleep. There was scarce a locality in which new
game might not be started, that, in running down, kept the faculties in
full play. Let me exemplify by describing the courses of inquiry,
physical and metaphysical, which opened up to me when spending a few
days, first in the burying-ground of Kirkmichael, and next in the
churchyard of Nigg.

I have elsewhere somewhat fancifully described the ruinous chapel and
solitary grave-yard of Kirkmichael as lying on the sweep of a gentle
declivity, within a few yards of a flat sea-beach, so little exposed to
the winds, that it would seem as if "ocean muffled its waves in
approaching this field of the dead." And so the two vegetations--that of
the land and of the sea--undisturbed by the surf, which on opener coasts
prevents the growth of either along the upper littoral line, where the
waves beat heaviest, here meet and mingle, each encroaching for a little
way on the province of the other. And at meal-t