with his thumb and fore-finger,-"I know you," he said, "I know your kind well; ye're a Highland-Donald. Od, I've seen ye in the thick o't. Ye're reugh fellows when ye're bluid's up!" He had taken me for a grenadier of the 42d; and I lacked the moral courage to undeceive him. I met nothing further on my way worthy of record, save and except a sheep's trotter, dropped by the old pensioner in one of his zig-zaggings to the extreme left; but having no particular use for the trotter at the time and in the circumstances, I left it to benefit the next passer-by. I finished my journey of eighteen miles in capital style, and was within five minutes' walk of Fochabers when the horn of the mail-guard was sounding up the street. And, entering the village, I found the vehicle standing opposite the inn door, minus the horses.

The insides and outsides were sitting down to dinner together as I entered the inn; and I felt, after my long walk, that it would be rather an agreeable matter to join with them. But in the hope of meeting my old friend Mr. Joss, I requested to be shown, not into the passengers' room, but into that of the coachman and guard; and with them I dined. It so chanced, however, that Mr. Joss was not out that day; and the man in the red long coat was a stranger whom I had never seen before. I inquired of him regarding Mr. Joss,-one of perhaps the most remarkable mail-guards in Europe. I have at least never heard of another who, like him, amuses his leisure on the coachtop with the "Principia" of Newton, and understands it. And the man, drawing his inference from the interest in Mr. Joss which my queries evinced, asked me whether I myself was not a coach-guard. "No," I rather thoughtlessly replied, "I am not a coach-guard." Half a minute's consideration, however, led me to doubt whether I had given the right answer. "I am not sure," I said to myself,

on second thoughts, "but the man has cut pretty fairly on the point; - I daresay I am a sort of coach-guard. I have to mount my twice-a-week coach in all weathers, like any mail-guard among them all; I have to start at the appointed hour, whether the vehicle be empty or full; I have to keep a sharp eye on the opposition coaches; I am responsible, like any other mail-guard, for all the parcels carried, however little I may have had to do with the making of them up; I have always to keep my blunderbuss full charged to the muzzle, — not wishing harm to any one, but bound in duty to let drive at all and sundry who would make war upon the passengers, or attempt running the conveyance off the road; and, finally, as my friend Mr. Joss takes the Principia" to his coach-top, I take pockets full of fossils to the top of mine, and amuse myself in fine days by working out, as I best can, the problems which they furnish. Yes, I rather think I am a coach-guard." And so, taking my seat beside my red-coated brother, who had guessed the true nature of my occupation so much more shrewdly than myself, I rode on to Elgin, where I passed the night.

66

It is difficult to arrange in the mind the geologic formations of Banffshire in their character as a series of deposits. The pages of the stony record which the county composes, like those of an unskilfully-folded pamphlet, have been strangely mixed together, so that page last succeeds in some places to page first, and, of the intermediate pages, some appear at the beginning of the work, and some at the end. It is not until we reach the western confines of the county, some two or three miles short of the river Spey, its terminal boundary in this direction, that we find the beds comparatively little disturbed, and arranged chronologically in their original places. In the eastern and southern parts of the shire, rocks widely separated by the date of their formation have been set down side by side in

patches, occasionally of but inconsiderable extent. Now the traveller passes over a district of grauwacke, now over a re-formation of the Lias; anon he finds himself on a primary limestone,- gneiss, syenite, clay-slate, or quartzrock; and yet anon amid the fossils of some outlier of the Old Red. The geological map of the county is, like Joseph's coat, of many colors. I remember seeing, when a boy, more years ago than I am inclined to specify, some workmen engaged in pulling down what had been a housepainter's shop, a full century before. The painter had been in the somewhat slovenly habit of cleaning his brushes by rubbing them against a hard-cast wall, which was covered, in consequence, by a many-colored layer of paint, a full halfinch in thickness, and as hard as a stone. Taking a little bit home with me, I polished it by rubbing the upper surface smooth; and, lo! a geological map. The strata of variously hued pigment, spread originally over the surface of the hard-cast wall, were cut open, by the denudation of the grindstone, into all manner of fantastic forms, and seemed thrown into all sorts of strange neighborhoods. The map lacked merely the additional perplexity of a few bold faults, with here and there a decided dike, in order to render it on a small scale a sort of miniature transcript of the geology of Banff; and I have very frequently found my thoughts reverting to it, in connection with deposits of this broken character. On a rough hard-cast basis of granite I have laid down in imagination, as if by way of priming, coat after coat of the primary rocks,- gneiss, and stratified hornblend, and mica-schist, and quartz-rock, and clay-slate; and then, after breaking the coatings well up, and rubbing them well down, and so spoiling and crumpling up the work as to make their original order considerably a puzzle, I have begun anew to paint over the rough surface with thick coatings of grauwacke and grauwacke

slate. When this part of the operation was completed, I have again begun to break up and grind down, - here letting a tract of grauwacke sink into the broken primary,

there wearing it off the surface altogether, — yonder elevating the original granitic hard-cast till it rose over all the coatings, Primary and Palæozoic. And then I have begun to paint yet a third time with thick Old Red Sandstone pigment; and yet again to break up and wear down, -here to insert a tenon of the Old Red deep into a mortise of the grauwacke, as at Gamrie, - there to dovetail it into the clay-slate, as at Tomantoul, — yonder, after laying it across the upturned quartz-rock, as at Cullen, to rub by much the greater part of it away again, leaving but mere remainder-patches and fragments, to mark where it had been. Lastly, if I had none of the superior Palæozoic or Secondary formations to deal with, I have brushed over the whole, by way of finish, with the variously-derived coatings of the superficial deposits; and thus, as I have said, I have often completed, in idea, after the chance suggestion of the old painter's shop, my portable models of the geology of disturbed districts like the Banffshire one. The deposits of Moray are greatly less broken. Denudation has partially worn them down; but they seem to have almost wholly escaped the previous crumpling process.

CHAPTER IV.

Extraor

Holopty

Yellow-hued Houses of Elgin - Geology of the Country indicated by the coloring of the Stone Houses Fossils of Old Red north of the Grampians different from those of Old Red south― Geologic Formations at Linksfield difficult to be understood Ganoid Scales of the Wealden Sudden Reaction, from complex to simple, in the Scales of Fishes - Pore-covered Scales dinary amount of Design exhibited in Ancient Ganoid Scales chius Scale illustrated by Cromwell's "fluted pot "- Patrick Duff's Geological Collection - Elgin Museum -Fishes of the Ganges-Armature of Ancient Fishes - Compensatory Defences - The Hermit-crab — Spines of the Pimelodi - Ride to Campbelton-Theories of the formation of Ardersier and Fortrose Promontories- Tradition of their construction by the Wizard, Michael Scott - A Region of Legendary Lore.

THE prevailing yellow hue of the Elgin houses strikes the eye of the geologist who has travelled northwards from the Frith of Forth. He takes leave of a similar stone at CuparFife, a warmly-tinted yellow sandstone, peculiarly wellsuited for giving effect to architectural ornament; and after passing along the deep-red sandstone houses of the shires of Angus and Kincardine, and the gneiss, granite, hyperstene, and mica-schist houses of Aberdeen and Banff shires, he again finds houses of a deep red on crossing the Spey, and houses of a warm yellow tint on reaching Elgin,-geologically the Cupar-Fife of the north. And the story that he has been passing,

the colored buildings tell him is, that though by a somewhat circuitous route of a hundred and fifty miles, over an anticlinal geological section,down in the scale till he reached Aberdeen and had gone a little beyond it, and then up again, until at Elgin he arrives at the same superior yellow bed of Old Red Sandstone which he had quitted at Cupar-Fife. Both beds contain the same