rt of Coach-guard--On the Coach to Elgin--Geology of
Banffshire--Irregular paging of the Geologic Leaves--Geologic Map
of the County like Joseph's Coat--Striking Illustration.

I parted from Dr. Emslie, and walked on along the shore to Portsoy,--for
three-fourths of the way over the prevailing grauwacke of the county,
and for the remaining fourth over mica schist, primary limestone,
hornblende slate, granitic and quartz veins, and the various other
kindred rocks of a primary district. The day was still gloomy and gray,
and ill suited to improve homely scenery; nor is this portion of the
Banff coast nearly so striking as that which I had travelled over the
day before. It has, however, its spots of a redeeming character,--rocky
recesses on the shore, half-beach, half-sward, rich in wild-flowers and
shells,--where one could saunter in a calm sunny morning, with one's
_bairns_ about one, very delightfully; and the interior is here and
there agreeably undulated by diluvial hillocks, that, when the sun falls
low in the evening, must chequer the landscape with many a pleasing
alternation of light and shadow. The Burn of Boyne,--which separates,
about two miles from Portsoy, a grauwacke from a mica-schist
district,--with its bare, open valley, its steep limestone banks, and
its gray, melancholy castle, long since roofless and windowless, and
surrounded by a few stunted trees, bears a deserted and solitary
shagginess about it, that struck me as wildly agreeable. It is such a
valley as one might expect to meet a ghost in, in some still, dewy
evening, as gloamin was darkening into uncertainty the outlines of the
ancient ruin, and the newly-kindled stars looked down upon the stream.

It so happened, however, that my only story connected with either ruin
or valley was as little a ghost story as might be. I remember that, when
lying ill of fever on one occasion,--indisposed enough to see apparition
after apparition flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of a
magic lantern posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-possessed
enough to know that they were but mere pictures in the eye, and to watch
them as they rose,--I set myself to determine whether they were in any
degree amenable to the will, or connected by the ordinary associative
links of the metaphysician. Fixing my mind on a certain object, I strove
to call it up in the character, not of an image of the conceptive
faculty, but of a fever-vision on the