g me till he had brought me full within view of it, we
parted. The ichthyolites which I had just been laying open occur on the
verge of that Strathbogie district in which the Church controversy raged
so hot and high; and by a common enough trick of the associative
faculty, they now recalled to my mind a stanza which memory had somehow
caught when the battle was at the fiercest. It formed part of a satiric
address, published in an Aberdeen newspaper, to the not very respectable
non-intrusionists who had smoked tobacco and drank whisky in the parish
church at Culsalmond, on the day of a certain forced settlement there,
specially recorded by the clerks of the Justiciary Court.

"Tobacco and whisky cost siller,
And meal is but scanty at hame;
But gang to the stane-mason M----r,
Wi' Old Red Sandstone fish he'll fill your wame."

Rather a dislocated line that last, I thought, and too much in the style
in which Zachary Boyd sings "Pharaoh and the Pascal." And as it is wrong
to leave the beast of even an enemy in the ditch, however long its ears,
I must just try and set it on its legs. Would it not run better thus?

"Tobacco and whisky cost siller,
An' meal is but scanty at hame;
But gang to the stane-mason M----r,"
He'll pang wi' ichth'olites your wame,--
Wi' _fish_!! as Agassiz has ca'ed 'em,
In Greek, like themsel's, _hard_ an' _odd_,
That were baked in stane pies afore Adam
Gaed names to the haddocks and cod.

Bad enough as rhyme, I suspect; but conclusive as evidence to prove
that the animal spirits, under the influence of the bracing walk, the
fine day, and the agreeable recounter at the fish-beds,--not forgetting
the half-gill bumper,--had mounted very considerably above their
ordinary level at the editorial desk.

The raised beach may be found on the slopes of a grass-covered eminence,
once the site of an ancient hill-fort, and which still exhibits, along
the rim-like edge of the flat area atop, scattered fragments of the
vitrified walls. A general covering of turf restricted my examination of
the shells to one point, where a land-slip on a small scale had laid the
deposit bare; but I at least saw enough to convince me that the debris
of the shell-fish used of old as food by the garrison had not been
mistaken for the remains of a raised beach,--a mistake which in other
localities has occurred, I have reason to believe, oftener than once.
The shells, some of them exceedingly minute, and no