life, as the wife of one of the Conon-side
hinds, and who not unfrequently, when I was toiling at the mallet in the
burning sun, hot and thirsty, and rather loosely knit for my work, had
brought me--all she had to offer at the time--a draught of fresh whey.
At first she seemed to have wholly forgotten both her kindness and the
object of it. She well remembered my master, and another Cromarty man
who had been grievously injured, when undermining an old building, by
the sudden fall of the erection; but she could bethink her of no third
Cromarty man whatever. "Eh, sirs!" she at length exclaimed, "I daresay
ye'll be just the sma' prentice laddie. Weel, what will young folk no
come out o'? They were amaist a' stout big men at the wark except
yoursel'; an' you're now stouter and bigger than maist o' them. Eh,
sirs!--an' are ye still a mason?" "No; I have not wrought as a mason for
the last fourteen years; but I have to work hard enough for all that."
"Weel, weel, it's our appointed lot; an' if we have but health an'
strength, an' the wark to do, why should we repine?" Once fairly entered
on our talk together, we gossipped on till the night fell, giving and
receiving information regarding our old acquaintances of a quarter of a
century before; of whom we found that no inconsiderable proportion had
already sunk in the stream in which eventually we must all disappear.
And then, taking leave of the kindly old woman, I walked on in the dark
to Dingwall, where I spent the night. I could fain have called by the
way on my old friend and brother-workman, Mr. Urquhart,--of a very
numerous party of mechanics employed at Conon-side in the year 1821 the
only individual now resident in this part of the country; but the
lateness of the hour forbade. Next morning I returned by the Conon road,
as far as the noble old bridge which strides across the stream at the
village, and which has done so much to banish the water-wraith from the
fords; and then striking off to the right, I crossed, by a path
comparatively little frequented, the insulated group of hills which
separates the valley of the Conon from that of the Peffer. The day was
mild and pleasant, and the atmosphere clear; but the higher hills again
exhibited their ominous belts of vapor, and there had been a slight
frost during the night,--at this autumnal season the almost certain
precursor of rain.

CHAPTER IX.

The Great Conglomerate--Its Undulatory and Rectilinear
M