...

assistance of the naked toe and the toe-nail, it is just possible to creep We succeeded in scrambling up to it; and then, crawling outwards on all fours, the precipice beetling more and more formidable from above, and the water becoming greener and deeper below, we reached the outer point of the promontory; and then doubling the cape on a still narrowing margin, we found the ledge terminating just where, after clearing the sea, it overhung the gravelly beach at an elevation of nearly ten feet. Adown we both dropped, proud of our success; up splashed the rattling gravel as we fell; and for at least the whole coming week, though we were unaware of the extent of our good luck at the time, the marvels of the Doocot Cave might be regarded as solely and exclusively our own. For one short seven days-to borrow emphasis from the phraseology of Carlyle they were our own, and no other man's."

66

The first few hours were hours of sheer enjoyment. The larger cave proved a mine of marvels; and we found a great deal additional to wonder at on the slopes beneath the precipices, and along the piece of rocky sea-beach in front.

The long telescopic prospect of the sparkling sea, as viewed from the inner extremity of the cavern, while all around was dark as midnight; the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen for a moment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sunshine; the black heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of spray, and then, as turning downwards, it displayed its glossy back and vast angular fin; even the pigeons, as they shot whizzing by, one moment scarce visible in the gloom, the next radiant in the light—all acquired a new interest, from the peculiarity of the setting in which we saw them. They formed a series of sun-gilt vignettes, framed in jet; and it was long ere we tired of seeing and admiring in them much of the strange and the beautiful...It did seem rather ominous, however, and perhaps somewhat supernatural to boot, that about an hour after noon, the tide, while there was yet a full fathom of water beneath the brow of the promontory, ceased to fall, and then, after a quarter of an hour's space, began actually to creep upwards on the beach. But just hoping that there might be some mistake in the matter, which the evening tide would scarce fail to rectify, we continued to amuse ourselves, and to hope on. Hour after hour passed, lengthening as the shadows lengthened, and yet the tide still rose... The sun had sunk behind the precipices, and all was gloom along their bases, and double gloom in their caves; but their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose higher and higher, chased by the shadows; and then, after lingering for a moment on their crests

of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and the whole became sombre and grey... The sea-gull sprang upwards from where he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in his deep-sea stack; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf high on the precipice; the pigeons came whizzing downwards from the uplands and the opposite land, and disappeared amid the gloom of their caves; every creature that had wings made use of them in speeding homewards; but neither my companion nor myself had any, and there was no possibility of getting home without them... We made desperate efforts to scale the precipices, and on two several occasions succeeded in reaching mid-way shelves among the crags, where the sparrowhawk and the_raven build; but though we had climbed well enough to render our return a matter of bare possibility, there was no possibility whatever of getting farther up: the cliffs had never been scaled before, and they were not destined to be scaled now... And so, as the twilight deepened, and the precarious footing became every moment more doubtful and precarious still, we had just to give up in despair. 66 "Wouldn't care for myself," said the poor little fellow, my companion, bursting into tears, "if it were not for my mother; but what will my mother say?"... "Wouldn't care either," said I, with a heavy heart; "but it's just back water, and we'll get out at twelve.” We retreated together into one of the shallower and drier caves, and, clearing a little spot of its rough stones, and then groping along the rocks for the dry grass that in the spring season hangs from them in withered tufts, we formed for ourselves a most uncomfortable bed, and lay down in each other's arms For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising dark and stormy in the sea-mouth: they had flared portentously in the setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre thunderous brown, and from sombre brown to doleful black. And we could now at least hear what they portended, though we could no longer see... The rising wind began to howl mournfully amid the cliffs, and the sea, hitherto so silent, to beat heavily against the shore, and to boom, like distressguns, from the recesses of the two deep-sea caves. We could hear, too, the beating rain, now heavier, now lighter, as the gusts swelled or sank; and the intermittent patter of the streamlet over the deeper cave, now driving against the precipices, now descending heavily on the stones.

...

My companion had only the real evils of the case to deal with, and so, the hardness of our bed and the coldness of the

me...

night considered, he slept tolerably well; but I was unlucky enough to have evils greatly worse than the real ones to annoy The corpse of a drowned seaman had been found on the beach about a month previous, some forty yards from where we lay. The hands and feet, miserably contracted, and corrugated into deep folds at every joint, yet swollen to twice their proper size, had been bleached as white as pieces of alumed sheep-skin ; and where the head should have been, there existed only a sad mass of rubbish ... I had examined the body, as young people are apt to do, a great deal too curiously for my peace; and, though I had never done the poor nameless seaman any harm, I could not have suffered more from him during that melancholy night, had I been his murderer... Sleeping or waking, he was continually before me. Every time I dropped into a doze, he would come stalking up the beach from the spot where he had lain, with his stiff white fingers, that stuck out like eagle's toes, and his pale, broken pulp of a head, and attempt striking me; and then I would awaken with a start, cling to my companion, and remember that the drowned sailor had lain festering among the identical bunches of sea-weed that still rotted on the beach not a stone-cast away. The near neighbourhood of a score of living bandits would have inspired less horror than the recollection of that one dead seaman,

As the moon rose, and brightened, the dead seaman became less troublesome; and I had succeeded in dropping as soundly asleep as my companion, when we were both aroused by a loud shout. We started up and again crept downwards among the crags to the shore; and as we reached the sea the shout was repeated. It was that of at least a dozen harsh voices united... There was a brief pause, followed by another shout; and then two boats, strongly manned, shot round the western promontory, and the men, resting on their oars, turned towards the rock, and shouted yet again... The whole town had been alarmed by the intelligence that two little boys had straggled away in the morning to the rocks of the southern Sutor, and had not found their way back. The precipices had been the scene of frightful accidents from time immemorial, and it was at once inferred that one other sad accident had been added to the number. And in this belief, when the moon rose and the surf fell, the two boats had been fitted out... It was late ere we reached Cromarty, yet a crowd on the beach awaited our arrival; and there were anxious-looking lights glancing in the windows, thick and manifold.

Early one February morning I set out a little before sunrise to make my first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint, and I have rarely had a heavier heart than on that morning. I was but a thin loose-jointed boy at the time; fond of the petty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his "Twa Dogs," as one of the most disagreeable of all employments to work in a quarry...Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods; a reader of curious books when I could get them; a gleaner of old traditionary stories; and now, I was going to exchange all my day-dreams and all my amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil!

The quarry in which I worked lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or frith rather, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been

opened in the old red sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, which rose over it in some places to the height of nearly thirty feet, and which at this time was rent and shivered, wherever it presented an open front to the weather, by a recent frost. A heap of loose fragments, which had fallen from above, blocked up the face of the quarry, and my first employment was to clear them away..... The friction of the shovel soon blistered my hands, but the pain was by no means very severe, and I worked hard, and willingly, that I might see how the huge strata below, which presented so firm and unbroken a frontage, were to be torn up and removed. Picks, and wedges, and levers, were applied by my brother workmen; and simple and rude as I had been accustomed to regard these implements, I found I had much to learn in the way of using them... They all proved inefficient, however, and the workmen had to bore into one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowder. The process was new to me, and I deemed it a highly amusing one; it had the merit, too, of being attended with some degree of danger, as a boating or rock excursion, and had thus an interest independent of its novelty. We had a few capital shots: the fragments flew in every direction, and an immense mass of the diluvium came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds, that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures, to die in the shelter... I felt a new interest in examining them. The one was a pretty cock goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid with

the gold to which it owes its name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it had been preserved for a museum. The other, a somewhat rarer bird, of the wood-pecker tribe, was variegated with light blue and a greyish-yellow... I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed to be sentimental, perhaps, than if I had been ten years older, and thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green summer haunts, and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard our employer bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up, and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir wood beside us, and the long dark shadows of the trees stretching downwards towards the shore.

This was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. To be sure my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had worked and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening converted by a rare transmutation into the delicious "blink of rest" which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own.

I was as light of heart next morning as any of my brother workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onward through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed as it advanced into one of those delightful days of early spring, which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year... All the workmen rested at mid-day, and I went to enjoy my half hour, alone, on a mossy knoll in the neighbouring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as motionless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas... From a wooded promontory that stretched halfway across the frith there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then on reaching a thinner stratum of air spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere, as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white; all below was purple... They reminded me of the pretty French story, in which an old artist is described as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law, by giving him as a subject for his pencil, a flower-piece composed only of white flowers, of