with the late Mr. William Laidlaw, the trusted
friend of Sir Walter Scott, he intimated to me his intention,--pointing
to a boulder of this species of gneiss,--of having it cut into two
oblong pedestals, with which he purposed flanking the entrance to the
mansion-house of the chief of the Rosses,--the gentleman whose property
he at that time superintended. It was, he said, both in appearance and
history, the most remarkable stone on the lands of Balnagown; and so he
was desirous that it should be exhibited at Balnagown Castle to the best
advantage. But as he fell shortly after into infirm health, and resigned
his situation, I know not that he ever carried his purpose into effect.
The boulder here, beside the chasm, measures about twelve feet in length
and breadth, by from five to six in height, and contains from eight to
nine hundred cubic feet of stone. On its upper table-like surface I
found a few patches of moss and lichen, and a slim reddening tuft of the
_Vaccinium myrtillus_, still bearing, late as was the season, its
half-dozen blaeberries. This pretty little plant occurs in great
profusion along the steep edges of the Auldgrande, where its delicate
bushes, springing up amid long heath and ling, and crimsoned by the
autumnal tinge, gave a peculiar warmth and richness this evening to
those bosky spots under the brown trees, or in immediate contact with
the dark chasm on which the sunlight fell most strongly; and on all the
more perilous projections, I found the dark berries still shrivelling on
their stems. Thirty years earlier I would scarce have left them there;
and the more perilous the crag on which they had grown, the more
deliciously would they have eaten. But every period of life has its own
playthings; and I was now chiefly engaged with the deep chasm and the
huge boulder. Chasm and boulder had come to have greatly more of
interest to me than the delicate berries, or than even that sovereign
dispeller of ennui and low spirits, an adventurous scramble among the
cliffs.

In what state did the chasm exist when the huge boulder,--detached,
mayhap, at the close of a severe frost, from some island of the
archipelago that is now the northern Highlands of Scotland,--was
suffered to drop beside it, from some vast ice-floe drifting eastwards
on the tide? In all probability merely as a fault in the Conglomerate,
similar to many of those faults which in the Coal Measures of the
southern districts we find occupied by