b current, when a violent storm from the
north-east sets in; and, constrained by antagonist forces,--the sweep of
the tide on the one hand, and the roll of the waves on the other,--the
ice-raft deflects into the little bay that lies to the east of the
promontory now occupied by the town of Cromarty. And there it tosses,
with a hundred more jostling in rude collision; and at length bursting
apart, the _Clach Malloch_, its journeyings forever over, settles on its
final resting-place. In a period long posterior it saw the ultimate
elevation of the land. Who shall dare say how much more it witnessed, or
decide that it did not form the centre of a rich forest vegetation, and
that the ivy did not cling round it, and the wild rose shed its petals
over it, when the Dingwall, Moray, and Dornoch Friths existed as
sub-aerial valleys, traversed by streams that now enter the sea far
apart, but then gathered themselves into one vast river, that, after it
had received the tributary waters of the Shin and the Conon, the Ness
and the Beauly, the Helmsdale, the Brora, the Findhorn, and the Spey,
rolled on through the flat secondary formations of the outer Moray
Frith,--Lias, and Oolite, and Greensand, and Chalk,--to fall into a gulf
of the Northern Ocean which intervened between the coasts of Scotland
and Norway, but closed nearly opposite the mouth of the Tyne, leaving a
broad level plain to connect the coasts of England with those of the
Continent! Be this as it may, the present sea-coast became at length the
common boundary of land and sea. And the boulder continued to exist for
centuries still later as a nameless stone, on which the tall gray heron
rested moveless and ghost-like in the evenings, and the seal at mid-day
basked lazily in the sun. And then there came a night of fierce tempest,
in which the agonizing cry of drowning men was heard along the shore.
When the morning broke, there lay strewed around a few bloated corpses,
and the fragments of a broken wreck; and amid wild execrations and loud
sorrow the boulder received its name. Such is the probable history,
briefly told, because touched at merely a few detached points, of the
huge _Clach Malloch_. The incident of the second voyage here is of
course altogether imaginary, in relation to at least this special
boulder; but it is to second voyages only that all our positive evidence
testifies in the history of its class. The boulders of the St. Lawrence,
so well described by Sir C