habits of silence long indulged,--it begins to
tell its story. And a most curious story it is.

The morning was clear, but just a little chill; and a soft covering of
snow, that had fallen during the storm on the flat summit of Ben-Wevis,
and showed its extreme tenuity by the paleness of its tint of watery
blue, was still distinctly visible at the distance of full twenty miles.
The sun, low in the sky,--for the hour was early,--cast its slant rays
athwart the prospect, giving to each nearer bank and hillock, and to the
more distant protuberances on the mountain-sides, those well-defined
accompaniments of shadow that serve by throwing the minor features of a
landscape upon the eye in bold relief, to impart to it an air of higher
finish and more careful filling up than it ever bears under a more
vertical light. I took the road which, leading westward from the town
towards Invergordon Ferry, skirts the Frith on the one hand, and runs
immediately under the noble escarpment of green bank formed by the old
coast line on the other. Fully two-thirds of the entire height of the
rampart here, which rises in all about a hundred feet over the
sea-level, is formed of the boulder-clay; and I am acquainted with no
locality in which the deposit presents more strongly, for at least the
first half mile, one of its marked scenic peculiarities. It is furrowed
vertically on the slope, as if by enormous flutings in the more antique
Doric style; and the ridges by which these are separated,--each from a
hundred to a hundred and fifty feet in length, and from five-and-twenty
to thirty feet in average height,--resemble those burial mounds with
which the sexton frets the churchyard turf; with this difference,
however, that they seem the burial mounds of giants, tall and bulky as
those that of old warred against the gods. They are striking enough to
have caught the eye of the children of the place, and are known among
them as the Giants' Graves. I could fain have taken their portrait in a
calotype this morning, as they lay against the green bank,--their feet
to the shore, and their heads on the top of the escarpment,--like
patients on a reclining bed, and strongly marked, each by its broad bar
of yellow light and of dark shadow, like the ebon and ivory buttresses
of the poet. This little vignette, I would have said to the landscape
painter, represents the boulder-clay, after its precipitous banks--worn
down, by the frosts and rains of centuries, i