men such as the Messrs. Penn, Stuart, and Lord may rest
assured, that what I believe in this matter now, all theologians, even
the weakest, will be content to believe fifty years hence.

Sometimes a chance incident taught me an interesting geological lesson.
At the close of the year 1830, a tremendous hurricane from the south and
west, unequalled in the north of Scotland, from at least the time of the
great hurricane of Christmas 1806, blew down in a single hour four
thousand full-grown trees on the Hill of Cromarty. The vast gaps and
avenues which it opened in the wood above could be seen from the town;
and no sooner had it begun to take off than I set out for the scene of
its ravages. I had previously witnessed, from a sheltered hollow of the
old coast-line, the extraordinary appearance of the sea. It would seem
as if the very violence of the wind had kept down the waves. It brushed
off their tops as they were rising, and swept along the spray in one
dense cloud, white as driving snow, that rose high into the air as it
receded from the shore, and blotted out along the horizon the line
between sky and water. As I approached the wood, I met two poor little
girls of from eight to ten years, coming running and crying along the
road in a paroxysm of consternation; but, gathering heart on seeing me,
they stood to tell that when the storm was at its worst they were in the
midst of the falling trees. Setting out for the Hill on the first rising
of the wind, in the expectation of a rich harvest of withered boughs,
they had reached one of its most exposed ridges just as the gale had
attained to its extreme height, and the trees began to crash down around
them. Their little tear-bestained countenances still continued to show
how extreme the agony of their terror had been. They would run, they
said, for a few paces in one direction, until some huge pine would come
roaring down, and block up their path; when, turning with a shriek, they
would run for a few paces in another; and then, terrified by a similar
interruption, again strike off in a third. At length, after passing
nearly an hour in the extremest peril, and in at least all the fear
which the circumstances justified, they succeeded in making their way
unhurt to the outer skirts of the wood. Bewick would have found in the
incident the subject of a vignette that would have told its own story.
In getting into the thick of the trees, I was struck by the
extraordinary character o