edge--the huge gray cairn, raised, says tradition, over the body of an
ancient Pictish king. But the contest of which it was the scene belongs
to a profoundly dark period, ere the gray dawn of Scottish history
began. As shown by the remains of ancient art occasionally dug up on the
moor, it was a conflict of the times of the stone battle-axe, the flint
arrow-head, and the unglazed sepulchral urn, unindebted for aught of its
symmetry to the turning-lathe,--times when there were heroes in
abundance, but no scribes. And the cairn, about a hundred feet in length
and breadth, by about twenty in height, with its long hoary hair of
overgrown lichen waving in the breeze, and the trailing club-moss
shooting upwards from its base along its sides, bears in its every
lineament full mark of its great age. It is a mound striding across the
stream of centuries, to connect the past with the present. And yet,
after all, what a mere matter of yesterday its extreme antiquity is! My
explorations this morning bore reference to but the later eras of the
geologist; the portion of the geologic volume which I was attempting to
decipher and translate formed the few terminal paragraphs of its
concluding chapter. And yet the _finis_ had been added to them for
thousands of years ere this latter antiquity began. The boulder-clay had
been formed and deposited; the land, in rising over the waves, had had
many a huge pebble washed out of its last formed red stratum, or dropped
upon it by ice-floes from above; and these pebbles lay mottling the
surface of this barren moor for mile after mile, bleaching pale to the
rains and the sun, as the meagre and mossy soil received, in the lapse
of centuries, its slow accessions of organic matter, and darkened around
them. And then, for a few brief hours, the heath, no longer solitary,
became a wild scene of savage warfare,--of waving arms and threatening
faces,--and of human lives violently spilled, gushing forth in blood;
and, when all was over, the old weathered boulders were heaped up above
the slain, and there began a new antiquity in relation to the pile in
its gathered state, that bore reference to man's short lifetime, and to
the recent introduction of the species. The child of a few summers
speaks of the events of last year as long gone by; while his father
advanced into middle life, regards them as still fresh and recent.

I reached the Burn of Killein,--the scene of my purposed
explorations,--where it bis