-floe, detained in the shelter by
the revolving eddy, dashed together in rude collision, and shook their
stony burdens to the bottom. Immediately to the east of the low
promontory on which the town of Cromarty is built there is another
extensive accumulation of boulders, some of them of great size. They
occupy exactly the place to which I have oftener than once seen the
drift-ice of the upper part of the Cromarty Frith, set loose by a thaw,
and then carried seawards by the retreating tide, forced back by a
violent storm from, the east, and the fragments ground against each
other into powder. And here, I doubt not, of old, when the sea stood
greatly higher than now, and the ice-floes were immensely larger and
more numerous than those formed, in the existing circumstances, in the
upper shallows of the Frith, would the fierce north-east have charged
home with similar effect, and the broken masses have divested themselves
of their boulders.

The Highland chieftain of one of our old Gaelic traditions conversed
with a boulder-stone, and told to it the story which he had sworn never
to tell to man. I too, after a sort, have conversed with boulder-stones,
not, however, to tell them any story of mine, but to urge them to tell
theirs to me. But, lacking the fine ear of Hans Anderson, the Danish
poet, who can hear flowers and butterflies talk, and understand the
language of birds, I have as yet succeeded in extracting from them no
such articulate reply

"As Memnon's image, long renowned of old
By fabling Nilus, to the quivering touch
Of Titan's ray, with each repulsive string
Consenting, sounded through the warbling air."

And yet, who can doubt that, were they a little more communicative,
their stories of movement in the past, with the additional circumstances
connected with the places which they have occupied ever since they gave
over travelling, would be exceedingly curious ones? Among the boulder
group to the east of Cromarty, the most ponderous individual stands so
exactly on the low-water line of our great Lammas tides, that though its
shoreward edge may be reached dry-shod from four to six times every
twelvemonth, no one has ever succeeded in walking dry shod round it. I
have seen a strong breeze from the west, prolonged for a few days,
prevent its drying, when the Lammas stream was at its point of lowest
ebb, by from a foot to eighteen inches,--an indication, apparently, that
to that height the waters of the Atlant