Imaginary Autobiography of the _Clach Malloch_ Boulder--Its
Creation--Its long night of unsummed Centuries--Laid open to light
on a desert Island--Surrounded by an Arctic Vegetation--Undermined
by the rising Sea--Locked up and floated off on an Ice-field--At
rest on the Sea-bottom--Another Night of unsummed Years--The
Boulder raised again above the waves by the rising of the
Land--Beholds an altered Country--Pine Forests and Mammals--Another
Period of Ages passes--The Boulder again floated off by an
Iceberg--Finally at rest on the Shore of Cromarty Bay--Time and
Occasion of naming it--Strange Phenomena accounted for by
Earthquakes--How the Boulder of Petty Bay was moved--The Boulder of
Auldgrande--The old Highland Paupers--The little Parsi Girl--Her
Letter to her Papa--But one Human Nature on Earth--Journey
resumed--Conon Burying Ground--An aged Couple--Gossip.
The natural, and, if I may so speak, topographical, history of the
_Clach Malloch_,--including, of course, its zoology and botany, with
notes of those atmospheric effects on the tides, and of that stability
for ages of the existing sea-level, which it indicates,--would of itself
form one very interesting chapter: its geological history would furnish
another. It would probably tell, if it once fairly broke silence and
became autobiographical, first of a feverish dream of intense molten
heat and overpowering pressure; and then of a busy time, in which the
free molecules, as at once the materials and the artisans of the mass,
began to build, each according to its nature, under the superintendence
of a curious chemistry,--here forming sheets of black mica, there rhombs
of a dark-green hornblende and a flesh-colored feldspar, yonder
amorphous masses of a translucent quartz. It would add further, that at
length, when the slow process was over, and the entire space had been
occupied to the full by plate, molecule, and crystal, the red fiery
twilight of the dream deepened into more than midnight gloom, and a
chill unconscious night descended on the sleeper. The vast Palaeozoic
period passes by,--the scarce less protracted Secondary ages come to a
close,--the Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene epochs are ushered in and
terminate,--races begin and end,--families and orders are born and die;
but the dead, or those whose deep slumber admits not of dreams, take no
note of time; and so it would tell how its long night of unsummed
centuries seemed, like the long night of the grave, compressed into a
moment.
The marble silence is suddenly broken by the rush of an avalanche, that
tears away the superincumbent masses, rolling them into the sea; and the
ponderous block, laid open to the light, finds itself on the bleak shore
of a desert island of the northern Scottish archipelago, with a wintry
scene of snow-covered peaks behind, and an ice-mottled ocean before. The
winter passes, the cold severe spring comes on, and day after day the
field-ice goes floating by,--now gray in shadow, now bright in the sun.
At length vegetation, long repressed, bursts forth, but in no profuse
luxuriance. A few dwarf birches unfold their leaves amid the rocks; a
few sub-arctic willows hang out their catkins beside the swampy runnels;
the golden potentilla opens its bright flowers on slopes where the
evergreen _Empetrum nigrum_ slowly ripens its glossy crow-berries; and
from where the sea-spray dashes at full tide along the beach, to where
the snow gleams at midsummer on the mountain-summits, the thin short
sward is dotted by the minute cruciform stars of the scurvy-grass, and
the crimson blossoms of the sea-pink. Not a few of the plants of our
existing sea-shores and of our loftier hill-tops are still identical in
species; but wide zones of rich herbage, with many a fertile field and
many a stately tree, intervene between the bare marine belts and the
bleak insulated eminences; and thus the alpine, notwithstanding its
identity with the littoral flora, has been long divorced from it; but in
this early time the divorce had not yet taken place, nor for ages
thereafter; and the same plants that sprang around the sea-margin rose
also along the middle slopes to the mountain-summits. The landscape is
treeless and bare, and a hoary lichen whitens the moors, and waves, as
the years pass by, in pale tufts, from the disinterred stone, now
covered with weather-stains, green and gray, and standing out in bold
and yet bolder relief from the steep hill-side as the pulverizing frosts
and washing rains bear away the lesser masses from around it. The sea is
slowly rising, and the land, in proportion, narrowing its flatter
margins, and yielding up its wider valleys to the tide; the low green
island of one century forms the half-tide skerry, darkened with algae, of
another, and in yet a third exists but as a deep-sea rock. As its summit
disappears, groups of hills, detached from the land, become islands,
skerries, deep-sea rocks, in turn. At length the waves at full wash
within a few yards of the granitic block. And now, yielding to the
undermining influences, just as a blinding snow-shower is darkening the
heavens, it comes thundering down the steep into the sea, where it lies
immediately beneath the high-water line, surrounded by a wide float of
pulverized ice, broken by the waves. A keen frost sets in; the
half-fluid mass around is bound up for many acres into a solid raft,
that clasps fast in its rigid embrace the rocky fragment; a stream-tide,
heightened by a strong gale from the west, rises high on the beach; the
consolidated ice-field moves, floats, is detached from the shore, creeps
slowly outwards into the offing, bearing atop the boulder; and,
finally, caught by the easterly current, it drifts away into the open
ocean. And then, far from its original bed in the rock, amid the
jerkings of a cockling sea, the mass breaks through the supporting
float, and settles far beneath, amid the green and silent twilight of
the bottom, where its mosses and lichens yield their place to stony
encrustations of deep purple, and to miniature thickets of arboraceous
zoophites.
The many-colored Acalephae float by; the many-armed Sepiadae shoot over;
while shells that love the profounder depths,--the black Modiola and
delicate Anomia,--anchor along the sides of the mass; and where thickets
of the deep-sea tangle spread out their long, streamer-like fronds to
the tide, the strong Cyprina and many-ribbed Astarte shelter by scores
amid the reticulations of the short woody stems and thick-set roots. A
sudden darkness comes on, like that which fell upon Sinbad when the
gigantic roc descended upon him; the sea-surface is fully sixty fathoms
over head; but even at this great depth an enormous iceberg grates
heavily against the bottom, crushing into fragments in its course,
Cyprina, Modiola, Astarte, with many a hapless mollusc besides; and
furrows into deep grooves the very rocks on which they lie. It passes
away; and, after many an unsummed year has also passed, there comes
another change. The period of depression and of the boulder-clay is
over. The water has shallowed as the sea-line gradually sank, or the
land was propelled upwards by some elevatory process from below; and
each time the tide falls, the huge boulder now raises over the waters
its broad forehead, already hung round with flowing tresses of brown
sea-weed, and looks at the adjacent coast. The country has strangely
altered its features: it exists no longer as a broken archipelago,
scantily covered by a semi-arctic vegetation, but as a continuous land,
still whitened, where the great valleys open to the sea, by the pale
gleam of local glaciers, and snow-streaked on its loftier hill-tops. But
vast forests of dark pine sweep along its hill-sides or selvage its
shores; and the sheltered hollows are enlivened by the lighter green of
the oak, the ash, and the elm. Human foot has not yet imprinted its
sward; but its brute inhabitants have become numerous. The cream-colored
coat of the wild bull,--a speck of white relieved against a ground of
dingy green,--may be seen far amid the pines, and the long howl of the
wolf heard from the nearer thickets. The gigantic elk raises himself
from his lair, and tosses his ponderous horns at the sound; while the
beaver, in some sequestered dell traversed by a streamlet, plunges
alarmed into his deep coffer-dam, and, rising through the submerged
opening of his cell, shelters safely within, beyond reach of pursuit.
The great transverse valleys of the country, from its eastern to its
western coasts, are still occupied by the sea,--they exist as broad
ocean-sounds; and many of the detached hills rise around its shores as
islands. The northern Sutor forms a bluff high island, for the plains of
Easter Ross are still submerged; and the Black Isle is in reality what
in later times it is merely in name,--a sea-encircled district, holding
a midway place between where the Sound of the great Caledonian Valley
and the Sounds of the Valleys of the Conon and Carron open into the
German Ocean. Though the climate has greatly softened, it is still, as
the local glaciers testify, ungenial and severe. Winter protracts his
stay through the later months of spring; and still, as of old, vast
floats of ice, detached from the glaciers, or formed in the lakes and
shallower estuaries of the interior, come drifting down the Sounds every
season, and disappear in the open sea, or lie stranded along the shores.
Ages have again passed: the huge boulder, from the further sinking of
the waters, lies dry throughout the neaps, and is covered only at the
height of each stream-tide; there is a float of ice stranded on the
beach, which consolidates around it during the neap, and is floated off
by the stream; and the boulder, borne in its midst, as of old, again
sets out a voyaging. It has reached the narrow opening of the Sutors,
swept downwards by the strong ebb current, when a violent storm from the
north-east sets in; and, constrained by antagonist forces,--the sweep of
the tide on the one hand, and the roll of the waves on the other,--the
ice-raft deflects into the little bay that lies to the east of the
promontory now occupied by the town of Cromarty. And there it tosses,
with a hundred more jostling in rude collision; and at length bursting
apart, the _Clach Malloch_, its journeyings forever over, settles on its
final resting-place. In a period long posterior it saw the ultimate
elevation of the land. Who shall dare say how much more it witnessed, or
decide that it did not form the centre of a rich forest vegetation, and
that the ivy did not cling round it, and the wild rose shed its petals
over it, when the Dingwall, Moray, and Dornoch Friths existed as
sub-aerial valleys, traversed by streams that now enter the sea far
apart, but then gathered themselves into one vast river, that, after it
had received the tributary waters of the Shin and the Conon, the Ness
and the Beauly, the Helmsdale, the Brora, the Findhorn, and the Spey,
rolled on through the flat secondary formations of the outer Moray
Frith,--Lias, and Oolite, and Greensand, and Chalk,--to fall into a gulf
of the Northern Ocean which intervened between the coasts of Scotland
and Norway, but closed nearly opposite the mouth of the Tyne, leaving a
broad level plain to connect the coasts of England with those of the
Continent! Be this as it may, the present sea-coast became at length the
common boundary of land and sea. And the boulder continued to exist for
centuries still later as a nameless stone, on which the tall gray heron
rested moveless and ghost-like in the evenings, and the seal at mid-day
basked lazily in the sun. And then there came a night of fierce tempest,
in which the agonizing cry of drowning men was heard along the shore.
When the morning broke, there lay strewed around a few bloated corpses,
and the fragments of a broken wreck; and amid wild execrations and loud
sorrow the boulder received its name. Such is the probable history,
briefly told, because touched at merely a few detached points, of the
huge _Clach Malloch_. The incident of the second voyage here is of
course altogether imaginary, in relation to at least this special
boulder; but it is to second voyages only that all our positive evidence
testifies in the history of its class. The boulders of the St. Lawrence,
so well described by Sir Charles Lyell, voyage by thousands every
year;[18] and there are few of my northern readers who have not heard of
the short trip taken nearly half a century ago by the boulder of Petty
Bay, in the neighborhood of Culloden.
A Highland minister of the last century, in describing, for Sir John
Sinclair's Statistical Account, a large sepulchral cairn in his parish,
attributed its formation to an _earthquake_! Earthquakes, in these
latter times, are introduced, like the heathen gods of old, to bring
authors out of difficulties. I do not think, however,--and I have the
authority of the old critic for at least half the opinion,--that either
gods or earthquakes should be resorted to by poets or geologists,
without special occasion: they ought never to be called in except as a
last resort, when there is no way of getting on without them. And I am
afraid there have been few more gratuitous invocations of the earthquake
than on a certain occasion, some five years ago, when it was employed by
the inmate of a north-country manse, at once to account for the removal
of the boulder-stone of Petty Bay, and to annihilate at a blow the
geology of the Free Church editor of the _Witness_. I had briefly stated
in one of my papers, in referring to this curious incident, that the
boulder of the bay had been "borne nearly three hundred yards outwards
into the sea by an enclasping mass of ice, in the course of a single
tide." "Not at all," said the northern clergyman; "the cause assigned is
wholly insufficient to produce such an effect. All the ice ever formed
in the bay would be insufficient to remove such a boulder a distance,
not of three hundred, but even of _three_ yards." The removal of the
stone "_is referrible to an_ EARTHQUAKE!" The country, it would seem,
took a sudden lurch, and the stone tumbled off. It fell athwart the flat
surface of the bay, as a soup tureen sometimes falls athwart the table
of a storm-beset steamer, vastly to the discomfort of the passengers,
and again caught the ground as the land righted. Ingenious, certainly!
It does appear a little wonderful, however, that in a shock so
tremendous nothing should have fallen off except the stone. In an
earthquake on an equally great scale, in the present unsettled state of
society, endowed clergymen would, I am afraid, be in some danger of
falling out of their charges.
The boulder beside the Auldgrande has not only, like the _Clach
Malloch_, a geologic history of its own, but, what some may deem of
perhaps equal authority, a _mythologic_ history also. The inaccessible
chasm, impervious to the sun, and ever resounding the wild howl of the
tortured water, was too remarkable an object to have escaped the notice
of the old imaginative Celts; and they have married it, as was their
wont, to a set of stories quite as wild as itself. And the boulder,
occupying a nearly central position in its course, just where the dell
is deepest, and narrowest, and blackest, and where the stream bellows
far underground in its wildest combination of tones, marks out the spot
where the more extraordinary incidents have happened, and the stranger
sights have been seen. Immediately beside the stone there is what seems
to be the beginning of a path leading down to the water; but it stops
abruptly at a tree,--the last in the descent,--and the green and dewy
rock sinks beyond for more than a hundred feet, perpendicular as a wall.
It was at the abrupt termination of this path that a Highlander once saw
a beautiful child smiling and stretching out its little hand to him, as
it hung half in air by a slender twig. But he well knew that it was no
child, but an evil spirit, and that if he gave it the assistance which
it seemed to crave, he would be pulled headlong into the chasm, and
never heard of more. And the boulder still bears, it is said, on its
side,--though I failed this evening to detect the mark,--the stamp,
strangely impressed, of the household keys of Balconie.[19]
The sun had now got as low upon the hill, and the ravine had grown as
dark, as when, so long before, the lady of Balconie took her last walk
along the sides of the Auldgrande; and I struck up for the little alpine
bridge of a few undressed logs, which has been here thrown across the
chasm, at the height of a hundred and thirty feet over the water. As I
pressed through the thick underwood, I startled a strange-looking
apparition in one of the open spaces beside the gulf, where, as shown by
the profusion of plants of _vaccinium_, the blaeberries had greatly
abounded in their season. It was that of an extremely old woman,
cadaverously pale and miserable looking, with dotage glistening in her
inexpressive, rheum-distilling eyes, and attired in a blue cloak, that
had been homely when at its best, and was now exceedingly tattered. She
had been poking with her crutch among the bushes, as if looking for
berries; but my approach had alarmed her; and she stood muttering in
Gaelic what seemed, from the tones and repetition, to be a few
deprecatory sentences. I addressed her in English, and inquired what
could have brought to a place so wild and lonely, one so feeble and
helpless. "Poor object!" she muttered in reply,--"poor object!--very
hungry;" but her scanty English could carry her no further. I slipped
into her hand a small piece of silver, for which she overwhelmed me with
thanks and blessings; and, bringing her to one of the broader avenues,
traversed by a road which leads out of the wood, I saw her fairly
entered upon the path in the right direction, and then, retracing my
steps crossed the log-bridge. The old woman,--little, I should suppose
from her appearance, under ninety,--was I doubt not, one of our
ill-provided Highland paupers, that starve under a law which, while it
has dried up the genial streams of voluntary charity in the country and
presses hard upon the means of the humbler classes, alleviates little,
if at all, the sufferings of the extreme poor. Amid present suffering
and privation there had apparently mingled in her dotage some dream of
early enjoyment,--a dream of the days when she had plucked berries, a
little herd-girl, on the banks of the Auldgrande; and the vision seemed
to have sent her out, far advanced in her second childhood, to poke
among the bushes with her crutch.
My old friend the minister of Alness,--uninstalled at the time in his
new dwelling,--was residing in a house scarce half a mile from the
chasm, to which he had removed from the parish manse at the Disruption;
and, availing myself of an invitation of long standing, I climbed the
acclivity on which it stands, to pass the night with him. I found,
however, that with part of his family, he had gone to spend a few weeks
beside the mineral springs of Strathpeffer, in the hope of recruiting a
constitution greatly weakened by excessive labor, and that the entire
household at home consisted of but two of the young ladies his
daughters, and their ward, the little Buchubai Hormazdji.
And who, asks the reader, is this Buchubai Hormazdji? A little Parsi
girl, in her eighth year, the daughter of a Christian convert from the
ancient faith of Zoroaster, who now labors in the Free Church Mission at
Bombay. Buchubai, his only child, was on his conversion, forcibly taken
from him by his relatives, but restored again by a British court of law;
and he had secured her safety by sending her to Europe, a voyage of many
thousand miles, with a lady, the wife of one of our Indian missionaries,
to whom she had become attached, as her second but true mamma, and with
whose sisters I now found her. The little girl, sadly in want of a
companion this evening, was content, for lack of a better, to accept of
me as a playfellow; and she showed me all her rich eastern dresses, and
all her toys, and a very fine emerald, set in the oriental fashion,
which, when she was in full costume, sparkled from her embroidered
tiara. I found her exceedingly like little girls at home, save that she
seemed more than ordinarily observant and intelligent,--a consequence
mayhap, of that early development, physical and mental, which
characterizes her race. She submitted to me, too, when I had got very
much into her confidence, a letter she had written to her papa from
Strathpeffer, which was to be sent him by the next Indian mail. And as
it may serve to show that the style of little girls whose fathers were
fire-worshippers for three thousand years and more differs in no
perceptible quality from the style of little girls whose fathers in
considerably less than three thousand were Pagans, Papists, and
Protestants by turns, besides passing through the various intermediate
forms of belief, I must, after pledging the reader to strict secrecy,
submit it to his perusal:--
"My dearest Papa,--I hope you are quite well. I am visiting mamma at
present at Strathpeffer. She is much better now than when she was
travelling. Mamma's sisters give their love to you, and mamma, and Mr.
and Mrs. F. also. They all ask you to pray for them, and they will pray
also. There are a great many at water here for sick people to drink out
of. The smell of the water is not at all nice. I sometimes drink it.
Give my dearest love to Narsion Skishadre, and tell her that I will
write to her.--Dearest papa," etc.
It was a simple thought, which required no reach of mind whatever to
grasp,--and yet an hour spent with little Buchubai made it tell upon me
more powerfully than ever before,--that there is in reality but one
human nature on the face of the earth. Had I simply read of Buchubai
Hormazdji corresponding with her father Hormazdji Pestonji, and sending
her dear love to her old companion Narsion Skishadre, the names so
specifically different from those which we ourselves employ in
designating our country folk, would probably have led me, through a
false association, to regard the parties to which they attach as
scarcely less specifically different from our country folk themselves. I
suspect we are misled by associations of this kind when we descant on
the peculiarities of race as interposing insurmountable barriers to the
progress of improvement, physical or mental. We overlook, amid the
diversities of form, color, and language, the specific identity of the
human family. The Celt, for instance, wants, it is said, those powers of
sustained application which so remarkably distinguish the Saxon; and so
we agree on the expediency of getting rid of our poor Highlanders by
expatriation as soon as possible, and of converting their country into
sheep-walks and hunting-parks. It would be surely well to have
philosophy enough to remember what, simply through the exercise of a
wise faith, the Christian missionary never forgets, that the
peculiarities of race are not specific and ineradicable, but mere
induced habits and idiosyncracies engrafted on the stock of a common
nature by accident of circumstance or development; and that, as they
have been wrought into the original tissue through the protracted
operation of one set of causes, the operation of another and different
set, wisely and perseveringly directed, could scarce fail to unravel and
work them out again. They form no part of the inherent design of man's
nature, but have merely stuck to it in its transmissive passage
downwards and require to be brushed off. There was a time, some four
thousand years ago, when Celt and Saxon were represented by but one man
and his wife, with their children and their children's wives; and some
sixteen or seventeen centuries earlier all the varieties of the
species,--Caucasian and Negro, Mongolian and Malay,--lay close packed up
in the world's single family. In short, Buchubai's amusing prattle
proved to me this evening no bad commentary on St. Paul's sublime
enunciation to the Athenians, that God has "made of one blood all
nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth." I was amused to
find that the little girl, who listened intently as I described to the
young ladies all I had seen and knew of the Auldgrande, had never before
heard of a ghost, and could form no conception of one now. The ladies
explained, described, defined; carefully guarding all they said,
however, by stern disclaimers against the ghost theory altogether, but
apparently to little purpose. At length Buchubai exclaimed, that she now
knew what they meant, and that she herself had seen a great many ghosts
in India. On explanation, however, her ghosts, though quite frightful
enough, turned out to be not at all spiritual: they were things of
common occurrence in the land she had come from,--exposed bodies of the
dead.
Next morning--as the white clouds and thin mist-streaks of the preceding
day had fairly foretold--was close and wet; and the long trail of vapor
which rises from the chasm of the Auldgrande in such weather, and is
known to the people of the neighborhood as the "smoke of the lady's
baking," hung, snake-like, over the river. About two o'clock the rain
ceased, hesitatingly and doubtfully, however, as if it did not quite
know its own mind; and there arose no breeze to shake the dank grass, or
to dissipate the thin mist-wreath that continued to float over the river
under a sky of deep gray. But the ladies, with Buchubai, impatient to
join their friends at Strathpeffer, determined on journeying
notwithstanding; and, availing myself of their company and their
vehicle, I travelled on with them to Dingwall, where we parted. I had
purposed exploring the gray dingy sandstones and fetid breccias
developed along the shores on the northern side of the bay, about two
miles from the town, and on the sloping acclivities between the
mansion-houses of Tulloch and Fowlis; but the day was still unfavorable,
and the sections seemed untemptingly indifferent; besides, I could
entertain no doubt that the dingy beds here are identical in place with
those of Cadboll on the coast of Easter Ross, which they closely
resemble, and which alternate with the lower ichthyolitic beds of the
Old Red Sandstone; and so, for the present at least, I gave up my
intention of exploring them.
In the evening, the sun, far gone down towards its place of setting,
burst forth in great beauty; and, under the influence of a kindly breeze
from the west, just strong enough to shake the wet leaves, the sky flung
off its thick mantle of gray. I sauntered out along the high-road, in
the direction of my old haunts at Conon-side, with, however, no
intention of walking so far. But the reaches of the river, a little in
flood, shone temptingly through the dank foliage, and the cottages under
the Conon woods glittered clear on their sweeping hill-side, "looking
cheerily out" into the landscape; and so I wandered on and on, over the
bridge, and along the river, and through the pleasure grounds of
Conon-house, till I found myself in the old solitary burying-ground
beside the Conon, which, when last in this part of the country, I was
prevented from visiting by the swollen waters. The rich yellow light
streamed through the interstices of the tall hedge of forest-trees that
encircles the eminence, once an island, and fell in fantastic patches on
the gray tombstone and the graves. The ruinous little chapel in the
corner, whose walls a quarter of a century before I had distinctly
traced, had sunk into a green mound; and there remained over the sward
but the arch-stone of a Gothic window, with a portion of the moulded
transom attached, to indicate the character and style of the vanished
building. The old dial-stone, with the wasted gnomon, has also
disappeared; and the few bright-colored _throch-stanes_, raw from the
chisel, that had been added of late years to the group of older
standing, did not quite make up for what time in the same period had
withdrawn. One of the newer inscriptions, however, recorded a curious
fact. When I had resided in this part of the country so long before,
there was an aged couple in the neighborhood, who had lived together, it
was said, as man and wife, for more than sixty years: and now, here was
their tombstone and epitaph. They had lived on long after my departure;
and when, as the seasons passed, men and women whose births and baptisms
had taken place since their wedding-day were falling around them well
stricken in years, death seemed to have forgotten _them_; and when he
came at last, their united ages made up well nigh two centuries. The
wife had seen her ninety-sixth and the husband his hundred and second
birthday. It does not transcend the skill of the actuary to say how many
thousand women must die under ninety-six for every one that reaches it,
and how many tens of thousands of men must die under a hundred and two
for every man who attains to an age so extraordinary; but he would
require to get beyond his tables in order to reckon up the chances
against the woman destined to attain to ninety-six being courted and
married in early life by the man born to attain to a hundred and two.
After enjoying a magnificent sunset on the banks of the Conon, just
where the scenery, exquisite throughout, is most delightful, I returned
through the woods, and spent half an hour by the way in the cottage of a
kindly-hearted woman, now considerably advanced in years, whom I had
known, when she was in middle 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.