he district,--a primary region with regard to organic existence,
"without _form_ and void." From Isle Ornsay to the Point of Sleat, a
distance of thirteen miles, gneiss is the prevailing deposit; and in no
place in the district are the strata more varied and interesting than in
the neighborhood of Knockhouse, the residence of Mr. Elder, which I
found pleasingly situated at the bottom of a little open bay, skirted
with picturesque knolls partially wooded, that present to the surf
precipitous fronts of rock. One insulated eminence, a gun-shot from the
dwelling-house, that presents to the sea two mural fronts of precipice,
and sinks in steep grassy slopes on two sides more, bears atop a fine
old ruin. There is a blind-fronted massy keep, wrapped up in a mantle of
ivy, perched at the one end, where the precipice sinks steepest; while a
more ruinous though much more modern pile of building, perforated by a
double row of windows, occupies the rest of the area. The square keep
has lost its genealogy in the mists of the past, but a vague tradition
attributes its erection to the Norwegians. The more modern pile is said
to have been built about three centuries ago by a younger son of
M'Donald of the Isles; but it is added that, owing to the jealousy of
his elder brother, he was not permitted to complete or inhabit it. I
find it characteristic of most Highland traditions, that they contain
speeches: they constitute true oral specimens of that earliest and
rudest style of historic composition in which dialogue alternates with
narrative. "My wise brother is building a fine house," is the speech
preserved in this tradition as that of the elder son: "it is rather a
pity for himself that he should be building it on another man's lands."
The remark was repeated to the builder, says the story, and at once
arrested the progress of the work. Mr. Elder's boys showed me several
minute pieces of brass, somewhat resembling rust-eaten coin, that they
had dug out of the walls of the old keep; but the pieces bore no impress
of the dye, and seemed mere fragments of metal beaten thin by the
hammer.

The gneiss at Knock is exceedingly various in its composition, and many
of its strata the geologist would fail to recognize as gneiss at all. We
find along the precipices its two unequivocal varieties, the schistose
and the granitic, passing not unfrequently, the former into a true mica
schist, the latter into a pale feldspathose rock, thickly pervaded b