ke him up the Forth as far as Stirling.

For the first time in his life, perhaps, in passing along the Canongate,
he did NOT TURN TO LOOK AT HOLYROOD, the palace of the former sovereigns
of Scotland. He did not notice the sentinels who stood before its
gateways, dressed in the uniform of their Highland regiment, tartan
kilt, plaid and sporran complete. His whole thought was to reach
Callander where Harry Ford was supposedly awaiting him.

The better to understand this narrative, it will be as well to hear a
few words on the origin of coal. During the geological epoch, when
the terrestrial spheroid was still in course of formation, a thick
atmosphere surrounded it, saturated with watery vapors, and copiously
impregnated with carbonic acid. The vapors gradually condensed in
diluvial rains, which fell as if they had leapt from the necks of
thousands of millions of seltzer water bottles. This liquid, loaded
with carbonic acid, rushed in torrents over a deep soft soil, subject to
sudden or slow alterations of form, and maintained in its semi-fluid
state as much by the heat of the sun as by the fires of the interior
mass. The internal heat had not as yet been collected in the center of
the globe. The terrestrial crust, thin and incompletely hardened,
allowed it to spread through its pores. This caused a peculiar form of
vegetation, such as is probably produced on the surface of the inferior
planets, Venus or Mercury, which revolve nearer than our earth around
the radiant sun of our system.

The soil of the continents was covered with immense forests. Carbonic
acid, so suitable for the development of the vegetable kingdom,
abounded. The feet of these trees were drowned in a sort of immense
lagoon, kept continually full by currents of fresh and salt waters.
They eagerly assimilated to themselves the carbon which they, little by
little, extracted from the atmosphere, as yet unfit for the function
of life, and it may be said that they were destined to store it, in the
form of coal, in the very bowels of the earth.

It was the earthquake period, caused by internal convulsions, which
suddenly modified the unsettled features of the terrestrial surface.
Here, an intumescence which was to become a mountain, there, an abyss
which was to be filled with an ocean or a sea. There, whole forests sunk
through the earth's crust, below the unfixed strata, either until they
found a resting-place, such as the primitive bed of granitic rock, o