ey had rendered what
had been merely difficult impracticable. I remarked that the huge
kitchen chimney of the building,--a deep hollow recess which stretches
across the entire gable, and in which, it is said, two thrashers once
plied the flail for a whole winter,--bore less of the stain of recent
smoke than it used to exhibit twenty years before; and inferred that
there would be fewer wraith-lights seen from the castle at nights than
in those days of _evil spirits_ and illicit stills, when the cottars in
the neighborhood sent more smuggled whiskey to market than any equal
number of the inhabitants of almost any other district in the north. It
has been long alleged that there existed a close connection between the
more ghostly spirits of the country and its distilled ones. "How do you
account," said a north country minister of the last age (the late Rev.
Mr. M'Bean of Alves) to a sagacious old elder of his Session, "for the
almost total disappearance of the ghosts and fairies that used to be so
common in your young days?" "Tak my word for 't, minister," replied the
shrewd old man, "it's a' owing to the _tea_; when the _tea_ cam in, the
ghaists an' fairies gaed out. Weel do I mind when at a' our neeborly
meetings,--bridals, christenings, lyke-wakes, an' the like,--we
entertained ane anither wi' rich nappy ale; an' whan the verra dowiest
o' us used to get warm i' the face, an' a little confused in the head,
an' weel fit to see amaist onything whan on the muirs on our way hame.
But the tea has put out the nappy; an' I have remarked, that by losing
the nappy we lost baith ghaists an' fairies."

Quitting the ruin, I walked on along the shore, tracing the sandstone as
I went, as it rises from lower to higher beds; and where it ceases to
crop out at the surface, and gravel and the red boulder-clays take the
place of rock, I struck up the hill, and, traversing the parishes of
Resolis and Cromarty, got home early in the evening. I had seen and done
scarcely half what I had intended seeing or doing: alas, that in
reference to every walk which I have yet attempted to tread, this
special statement should be so invariably true to fact!--alas, that all
my full purposes, should be coupled with but half realizations! But I
had at least the satisfaction, that though I had accomplished little, I
had enjoyed much; and it is something, though not all, nor nearly all,
that, since time is passing, it should pass happily. In my next chapter
I