every runnel
was tumbling down big and turbid with the rains,--intimated, when, after
leaving Cullen some six or seven miles behind me, I passed from a bare
moory region of quartz rock into a region of woods and fields, that I
was again upon my ancient acquaintance, the Old Red Sandstone. And the
section furnished by the Burn of Tynet showed me shortly after that the
intimation was a correct one, and how generally it may be laid down as a
rule, that at least the more impalpable portions of the boulder-clay are
derived from the rocks on which it rests. The ichthyolite beds appear in
the course of the burn. They have furnished several good
specimens,--among the others, the specimen of Coccosteus figured by Mr.
Patrick Duff in his "Sketches of the Geology of Moray;" and they are,
besides, curious, as being the first to exhibit to the traveller who
explores from Gamrie westwards, that peculiar style of coloring which
characterizes the Old Red ichthyolites of the shires of Moray and Nairn,
and which differs so strikingly from the more sombre style exhibited by
the other ichthyolites of Banffshire, with those of Cromarty, Ross,
Caithness, and Orkney. Instead of bearing, like these, one uniform hue,
as if deeply shaded with Indian ink, they are gorgeously attired,
especially when newly laid open, in white, red, purple, and blue. The
day, however, was ill-suited for fishing Pterichthyes and Osteolepi out
of the Tynet: the red water was roaring from bank to brae; here eddying
along the half-submerged furze,--there tearing down the boulder-days in
raw, red land-slips; and so, casting but one eager glance at the bed
where the fish lay, I travelled on, and entered the tall woods to the
east of Fochabers. The rain ceased for a time; and I met in the woods an
old pensioner, who had been evidently weather-bound in some
public-house, and had now taken the opportunity of the fair interval to
stagger to his dwelling. He was eminently, exuberantly happy,--there
could not be two opinions on that head,--full of all manner of bright
sunshiny thoughts and imaginations, rendered just a little tremulous and
uncertain by the _summer-heat_ exhalations of the imbibed moisture, like
distant objects in a hot noonday landscape in July seen through volumes
of rising vapor; and a sheep's head and trotters, which he carried under
his arm, was, I saw, to serve as a peace-offering to his wife at home.
True, he had been taking a dram, but he was mindful of