out, hammer in hand, to explore. Stromness is a long,
narrow, irregular strip of a town, fairly thrust by a steep hill into
the sea, on which it encroaches in a broken line of wharf-like bulwarks,
along which, at high water, vessels of a hundred tons burden float so
immediately beside the houses, that their pennants on gala days wave
over the chimney tops. The steep hill forms part of a granitic axis,
about six miles in length by a mile in breadth, which forms the backbone
of the district, and against which the Great Conglomerate and lower
schists of the Old Red are upturned at a rather high angle. It is
wrapped round in some places by a thin caul of the stratified primary
rocks. Immediately over the town, on the brow of the eminence, where the
granitic axis had been laid bare in digging a foundation for the Free
Church manse, I saw numerous masses of schistose-gneiss, passing in some
of the beds into a coarse-grained mica-schist, and a lustrous
hornblendic slate, that had been quarried from over it, and which may be
still seen built up into the garden-wall of the erection. I walked out
towards the west, to examine the junction of the granite and the Great
Conglomerate, where it is laid bare by the sea, little more than a
quarter of a mile outside the town. There was a horde of noisy urchins a
little beyond the inn, who, having seen me alight from the mail-gig, had
determined in their own minds that I was engaged in the political
canvass going forward at the time, but had not quite ascertained my
side. They now divided into two parties; and when the one, as I passed,
set up a "Hurra for Dundas," the other met them from the opposite side
of the street, with a counter cry of "Anderson forever." Immediately
after clearing the houses, I was accosted by a man from the country.
"Ye'll be seeking beasts," he said: "what price are cattle gi'en the
noo?" "Yes, seeking _beasts_," I replied, "but very old ones: I have
come to hammer your rocks for petrified fish." "I see, I see," said the
man; "I took ye by ye'er gray plaid for a drover; but I ken something
about the stane fish too; there's lots o' them in the quarries at
Skaill."

I found the great Conglomerate in immediate contact with the granite,
which is a ternary of the usual components, somewhat intermediate in
color between that of Peterhead and Aberdeen, and which at this point
bears none of the caul of stratified primary rock by which it is
overlaid on the brow of the h