r I saw no more of
the bride's brother; the wrong-headed cabinetmaker, contrary to the
advice of his mother and her lodger, entered into a law-suit, in which
he got small damages and much vexation; and the slater and his mistress
broke out into such a course of dissipation after becoming man and wife,
that they and the five hundred pounds came to an end almost together.
Shortly after, my landlady and her son quitted the country for the
United States. So favourably had the poor woman impressed me as one of
the truly excellent, that I took a journey from Cromarty to Inverness--a
distance of nineteen miles--to bid her farewell; but I found, on my
arrival, her house shut up, and learned that she had left the place for
some sailing port on the west coast two days before. She was a humble
washerwoman; but I am convinced that in the other world, which she must
have entered long ere now, she ranks considerably higher!

I waited on in Inverness, in the hope that, according to Burns, "my
brothers of the earth would give me leave to toil;" but the hope was a
vain one, as I succeeded in procuring no second job. There was no lack,
however, of the sort of employment which I could cut out for myself; but
the remuneration--only now in the process of being realized, and that
very slowly--had to be deferred to a distant day. I had to give more
than twelve years' _credit_ to the pursuits that engaged me: and as my
capital was small, it was rather a trying matter to be "kept so long out
of my wages." There is a wonderful group of what are now termed _osars_,
in the immediate neighbourhood of Inverness--a group to which that Queen
of Scottish tomhans, the picturesque Tomnahuirich, belongs, and to the
examination of which I devoted several days. But I learned only to state
the difficulty which they form--not to solve it; and now that Agassiz
has promulgated his glacial theory, and that traces of the great ice
agencies have been detected all over Scotland, the mystery of the
_osars_ remains a mystery still. I succeeded, however, in determining at
this time, that they belong to a later period than the boulder clay,
which I found underlying the great gravel formation of which they form a
part, in a section near Loch Ness that had been laid open shortly
before, in excavating for the great Caledonian Canal. And as all, or
almost all, the shells of the boulder clay are of species that still
live, we may infer that the mysterious osars were formed n