nging to the same glacial age as the lateral
morains some ten or fifteen miles higher up, that extend from the
immediate neighborhood of Inverness to the mansion-house of Dochfour.
But this hypothesis, like the other, is not without its difficulties.
Why, for instance, should the promontories be a mile awry? There is,
however, yet another mode of accounting for their formation, which I am
not in the least disposed to criticise.

They were constructed, says tradition, through the agency of the
arch-wizard Michael Scott. Michael had called up the hosts of Faery to
erect the cathedral of Elgin and the chanonry kirk of Fortrose, which
they completed from foundation to ridge, each in a single
night,--committing, in their hurry, merely the slight mistake of
locating the building intended for Elgin in Fortrose, and that intended
for Fortrose in Elgin; but, their work over and done, and when the
magician had no further use for them, they absolutely refused to be
_laid_; and, like a _posse_ of Irish laborers thrown out of a job, came
thronging round him, clamoring for more employment. Fearing lest he
should be torn in pieces,--a catastrophe which has not unfrequently
happened in such circumstances in the olden time, and of which those
recent philanthropists who engage themselves in finding work for the
unemployed may have perhaps entertained some little dread in our own
days,--he got rid of them for the time by setting them off in a body to
run a mound across the Moray Frith from Fortrose to Ardersier. Toiling
hard in the evening of a moonlight night, they had proceeded greatly
more than two-thirds towards the completion of the undertaking, when a
luckless Highlander passing by bade God-speed the work, and, by thus
breaking the charm, arrested at once and forever the construction of the
mound, and saved the navigation of Inverness.

I stood for a few seconds at the Burn of Rosemarkie undecided whether I
should take the Scarfs-Craig road,--a break-neck path which runs
eastwards along the cliffs, and which, though the rougher, is the more
direct Cromarty line of the two,--or the considerably better though
longer line of the White Bog, which strikes upwards along the burn in a
westerly direction, and joins the Cromarty and Inverness highway on the
moor of the Maolbuie. I had got into a part of the country where every
little locality, and every more striking feature in the landscape, has
its associated tradition; and the pause of a