the Fort
William steamer; and, taking out hammer and chisel from my bag, I
stepped ashore to question my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red
conglomerate, and was fortunate enough to meet on the pier-head, as I
landed, one of the best of companions for assisting in such work, Mr.
Colin Elder, of Isle Ornsay,--the gentleman who had so kindly furnished
my friend Mr. Swanson with an asylum for his family, when there was no
longer a home for them in Small Isles. "You are much in luck," he said,
after our first greeting: "one of the villagers, in improving his
garden, has just made a cut for some fifteen or twenty yards along the
face of the precipice behind the village, and laid open the line of
junction between the conglomerate and the clay-slate. Let us go and see
it."

I found several things worthy of notice in the chance section to which I
was thus introduced. The conglomerate lies uncomfortably along the edges
of the slate strata, which present under it an appearance exactly
similar to that which they exhibit under the rolled stones and shingle
of the neighboring shore, where we find them laid bare beside the
harbor, for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the pebbles of
various character and origin of which the conglomerate is mainly
composed, we see detached masses of the slate, that still exhibit on
their edges the identical lines of fracture characteristic of the rock,
which they received, when torn from the mass below, myriads of ages
before. In the incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base
of the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this district had
been exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. Some long anterior
convulsion had upturned its strata, and the sweep of water, mingled with
broken fragments of stone, had worn smooth the exposed edges, just as a
similar agency wears the edges exposed at the present time. Quarries
might have been opened in this rock, as now, for a roofing-slate, had
there been quarriers to open them, or houses to roof over; it was in
every respect as ancient a looking stone then as in the present late age
of the world. There are no sermons that seem stranger or more impressive
to one who has acquired just a little of the language in which they are
preached, than those which, according to the poet, are to be found in
stones; a bit of fractured slate, embedded among a mass of rounded
pebbles, proves voluble with ideas of a kind almost too large for the
mi