n-Wevis on the
other. I had purposed ascending this latter mountain,--the giant of the
north-eastern coast, and one of the loftiest of our second-class
Scottish hills anywhere,--to ascertain the extreme upper line at which
travelled boulders occur in this part of the country. But it was no
morning for wading knee-deep through the trackless heather; and after
waiting on, in the hope the weather might clear up, watching at a window
the poorer invalids at the Spa, as they dragged themselves through the
rain to the water, I lost patience, and sallied out, beplaided and
umbrellaed, to see from the top of Knock Farril how the country looked
in a fog. At first, however, I saw much fog, but little country; but as
the day wore on, the flat mist-ceiling rose together, till it rested on
but the distant hills, and the more prominent features of the landscape
began to stand out amid the more general gray, like the stronger lines
and masses in a half-finished drawing, boldly dashed off in the neutral
tint of the artist. The portions of the prospect generically distinct
are, notwithstanding its great extent and variety, but few; and the
partial veil of haze, by glazing down its distracting multiplicity of
minor points, served to bring them out all the more distinctly. There
is, first stretching far in a southern and eastern direction along the
landscape, the rectilinear ridge of the Black Isle,--not quite the sort
of line a painter would introduce into a composition, but true to
geologic character. More in the foreground, in the same direction, there
spreads a troubled cockling sea of the Great Conglomerate. Turning to
the north and west, the deep valley of Strathpeffer, with its expanse of
rich level fields, and in the midst its old baronial castle, surrounded
by coeval trees of vast bulk, lies so immediately at the foot of the
eminence, that I could hear in the calm the rush of the little stream,
swollen to thrice its usual bulk by the rains of the night. Beyond rose
the thick-set Ben-Wevis,--a true gneiss mountain, with breadth enough of
shoulders, and amplitude enough of base, to serve a mountain thrice as
tall, but which, like all its cogeners of this ancient formation, was
arrested in its second stage of growth, so that many of the slimmer
granitic and porphyritic hills of the country look down upon it, as
Agamemnon, according to Homer, looked down upon Ulysses.

"Broad is his breast, his shoulders larger spread,
Though great