he
stones marked by the anchor,--a corner stone in a gate-pillar,--when one
of my brother apprentices entered the work-shed, laden with a bundle of
newly sharpened irons from the smithy, and said he had just been told by
the smith that the great Napoleon Bonaparte was dead. I returned to the
village of Conon Bridge, through the woods of Conon House. The day was
still very bad: the rain pattered thick on the leaves, and fell
incessantly in large drops on the pathways. There is a solitary,
picturesque burying-ground on a wooded hillock beside the river, with
thick dark woods all around it,--one of the two burying-grounds of the
parish of Urquhart,--which I would fain have visited, but the swollen
stream had risen high around, converting the hillock into an island, and
forbade access. I had spent many an hour among the tombs. They are few
and scattered, and of the true antique cast,--roughened with death's
heads, and cross-bones, and rudely sculptured armorial bearings; and on
a broken wall, that marked where the ancient chapel once had stood,
there might be seen, in the year 1821, a small, badly-cut sun-dial, with
its iron gnomon wasted to a saw-edged film, that contained more oxide
than metal. The only fossils described in my present chapter are fossils
of mind; and the reader will, I trust, bear with me should I produce
one fossil more of this somewhat equivocal class. It has no merit to
recommend it,--it is simply an organism of an immature intellectual
formation, in which, however, as in the Carboniferous period, there was
provision made for the necessities of an after time.[8] If a young man
born on the wrong side of the Tweed for _speaking_ English, is desirous
to acquire the ability of _writing_ it, he should by all means begin by
trying to write it in verse.

I passed, on my return to Dingwall, through the village of Conon Bridge;
and remembering that one of the masons who had hewn beside me in the
work-shed so many years before lived in the village at the time, I went
direct to the house he had inhabited, to see whether he might not be
there still. It was a low-roofed domicile beside the river, but in the
days of my old acquaintance it had presented an appearance of great
comfort and neatness; and as there now hung an air of neglect about it,
I inferred that it had found some other tenant. I inquired, however, at
the door, and was informed that Mr. ---- now lived higher up the street.
I would find him, it was add