it exists no longer as a broken archipelago,
scantily covered by a semi-arctic vegetation, but as a continuous land,
still whitened, where the great valleys open to the sea, by the pale
gleam of local glaciers, and snow-streaked on its loftier hill-tops. But
vast forests of dark pine sweep along its hill-sides or selvage its
shores; and the sheltered hollows are enlivened by the lighter green of
the oak, the ash, and the elm. Human foot has not yet imprinted its
sward; but its brute inhabitants have become numerous. The cream-colored
coat of the wild bull,--a speck of white relieved against a ground of
dingy green,--may be seen far amid the pines, and the long howl of the
wolf heard from the nearer thickets. The gigantic elk raises himself
from his lair, and tosses his ponderous horns at the sound; while the
beaver, in some sequestered dell traversed by a streamlet, plunges
alarmed into his deep coffer-dam, and, rising through the submerged
opening of his cell, shelters safely within, beyond reach of pursuit.
The great transverse valleys of the country, from its eastern to its
western coasts, are still occupied by the sea,--they exist as broad
ocean-sounds; and many of the detached hills rise around its shores as
islands. The northern Sutor forms a bluff high island, for the plains of
Easter Ross are still submerged; and the Black Isle is in reality what
in later times it is merely in name,--a sea-encircled district, holding
a midway place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian Valley
and the Sounds of the Valleys of the Conon and Carron open into the
German Ocean. Though the climate has greatly softened, it is still, as
the local glaciers testify, ungenial and severe. Winter protracts his
stay through the later months of spring; and still, as of old, vast
floats of ice, detached from the glaciers, or formed in the lakes and
shallower estuaries of the interior, come drifting down the Sounds every
season, and disappear in the open sea, or lie stranded along the shores.

Ages have again passed: the huge boulder, from the further sinking of
the waters, lies dry throughout the neaps, and is covered only at the
height of each stream-tide; there is a float of ice stranded on the
beach, which consolidates around it during the neap, and is floated off
by the stream; and the boulder, borne in its midst, as of old, again
sets out a voyaging. It has reached the narrow opening of the Sutors,
swept downwards by the strong eb