h they occur into large irregular fields, laid out
considerably more in accordance with the principles of the landscape
gardener than the stiffly squared rectilinear fields of the
agriculturist. They are _ha-has_ of Nature's digging; and their bottom
and sides in this part of the country we still find occupied in a few
cases--though in many more they have been ravaged by the wasteful
axe--by noble forest-_hedges_, tall enough to overtop, in at least their
middle reaches, the tracts of table-land which they divide.

I passed, a little farther on, the quarry of Old Red Sandstone, with a
huge bank of boulder-clay resting over it, in which I first experienced
the evils of hard labor, and first set myself to lessen their weight by
becoming an observer of geological phenomena. It had been deserted
apparently for many years; and the debris of the clay partially covered
up, in a sloping talus, the frontage of rock beneath. Old Red Sandstone
and boulder-clay, a broad bar of each!--such was the compound problem
which the excavation propounded to me when I first plied the tool in
it,--a problem equally dark at the time in both its parts. I have since
got on a very little way with the Old Red portion of the task; but alas
for the boulder-clay portion of it! A bar of impenetrable shadow has
rested long and obstinately over the newer deposit; and I scarce know
whether the light which is at length beginning to play on its pebbly
front be that of the sun or of a delusive meteor. But courage, patient
hearts! the boulder-clay will one day yield up _its_ secret too. Still
further on by a few hundred yards, I could have again found use for the
calotype, in transferring to paper the likeness of a protuberant
picturesque cliff, which, like the Giants' Graves, could have belonged,
of all our Scotch deposits, to only the boulder-clay. It stands out, on
the steep acclivity of a furze-covered bank, abrupt as a precipice of
solid rock, and yet seamed by the rain into numerous divergent channels,
with pyramidal peaks between; and, combining the perpendicularity of a
true cliff with the water-scooped furrows of a yielding clay, it
presents a peculiarity of aspect which strikes, by its grotesqueness,
eyes little accustomed to detect the picturesque in landscape. I
remember standing to gaze upon it when a mere child; and the fisher
children of the neighboring town still tell that "_it has been
prophesied_" it will one day fall, "and kill a man and a h