distinguished regiment on to the closing campaign of the Pyrenees; but received at the battle of Toulouse a wound so severe as to render him ever after incapable of active bodily exertion; and so he had to retire from the army on half-pay, and a pension honorably earned. The history of his career as a soldier he has told with singular interest, in one of the earlier volumes of "Constable's Miscellany;" and his poems abound in snatches of description painfully true, drawn from his experience of the military life, of scenes of stern misery and grim desolation, of injuries received, and of sufferings inflicted, that must have contrasted sadly in his mind, in their character as gross realities, with the dreamy visions of conquest and glory in which he had indulged at an earlier time. The ruin of St. Sebastian, complete enough, and attended with circumstances of the horrible extreme enough, to appal men long acquainted with the trade of war, must have powerfully impressed an imaginative susceptible lad, fresh from the domesticities of a rural manse, in whose quiet neighborhood the voice of battle had not been heard for centuries, and surrounded by a simple people, remarkable for the respect which they bear to human life. In all probability, the power evinced in his description of the siege, and of the utter desolation in which it terminated, is in part owing to the fresh impressibility of his mind at the time. Such, at least, was my feeling regarding it, as I caught myself muttering some of its more graphic passages, and saw, from the degree of alarm evinced by the boy who drove the mail-gig, that the sounds were not quite lost in the rattle of that somewhat rickety vehicle, and that he had come to entertain serious doubts respecting the sanity of his passenger:

"Sebastian, when I saw thee last,
It was in Desolation's day,

With fire and sword thy walks were swept:
Exploded mines thy streets had heaped
In hills of rubbish; they had been
Traversed by gabion and fascine,
With cannon lowering in the rear
In dark array, - a deadly tier, —
Whose thunder-clouds, with fiery breath,
Sent far around their iron death;
The bursting shell, in fragments flung
Athwart the skies, at midnight sung,
Or, on its airy pathway sent,
Its meteors sweep the firmament.
Thy castle, towering o'er the shore,
Reeled on its rock amidst the roar
Of thousand thunders, for it stood
In circle of a fiery flood;

And crumbling masses fiercely sent
From its high frowning battlement,

Smote by the shot and whistling shell,

With groan and crash in ruin fell.

Through desert streets the mourner passed,

Midst walls that spectral shadows cast,

Like some fair spirit wailing o'er
The faded scenes it loved of yore;
No human voice was heard to bless
That place of waste and loneliness.

I saw at eve the night-bird fly,
And vulture dimly flitting by,
To revel o'er each morsel stolen

From the cold corse, all black and swoln

That on the shattered ramparts lay,

Of him who perished yesterday,

Of him whose pestilential steam
Rose reeking on the morning beam,
Whose fearful fragments, nearly gone,

Were blackening from the bleaching bone.

The house-dog bounded o'er each scene
Where cisterns had so lately been:
Away in frantic haste he sprung,
And sought to cool his burning tongue.
He howled, and to his famished cry
The dreary echoes gave reply;

And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim,
Rolled back in sad response to him."

The father was succeeded in his parish by the brother of Malcolm, a gentleman to whom, during my stay in Orkney, I took the liberty of introducing myself in his snug little Free Church manse at the head of the bay, and in whose possession I found the only portrait of the poet which exists. It is that of a handsome and interesting looking young man, though taken not many years before his death; for, like the greater number of his class, he did not live to be an old one, dying under forty. His brother the clergyman kindly accompanied me to two quarries in the neighborhood of his new domicil, which I found, like almost all the dry-stone fences of the district, speckled with scales, occipital plates, and gill-covers, of Osteolepides and Dipteri, but containing no entire ichthyolites. He had taken his side in the Church controversy, he told me, firmly, but quietly; and when the Disruption came, and he found it necessary to quit the old manse, which had been a home to his family for well nigh two generations, and in which both he and his brother had been born, he scarce knew what his people were to do, nor in what proportion he was to have followers among them. Somewhat to his surprise, however, they came out with him almost to a man; so that his successor in the parish church had sometimes, he understood, to preach to congregations scarcely exceeding half a dozen. I had learned elsewhere how thoroughly Mr. Malcolm was loved and respected by his parishioners; and that unconsciousness on his own part of the strength of their affection

and esteem, which his statement evinced, formed, I thought, a very pleasing trait, and one that harmonized well with the finely-toned unobtrusiveness and unconscious elegance which characterized the genius of his deceased brother. A little beyond the Free Church manse the road ascends between stone walls, abounding in fragments of ichthyolites, weathered blue by exposure to the sun and wind; and the top of the eminence forms the water-shed in this part of the Mainland, and introduces the traveller to a scene entirely new. The prospect is of considerable extent; and, what seems strange in Orkney, nowhere presents the traveller, — though it contains its large inland lake,—with a glimpse of the sea.

Hills of Orkney

CHAPTER XII.

Their Geologic Composition - Scene of Scott's "Pirate ” — Stromness - Geology of the District "Seeking beasts" - Conglomerate in contact with Granite - A palæozoic Hudson's Bay - Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney - Oldest Vertebrate yet discovered in Orkney Its Size Figure of a characteristic plate of the Asterolepis - Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes Length of the Asterolepis A rich Ichthyolite Bed · Arrangement of the Layers - Queries as to the Cause of it - Minerals - An abandoned Mine - A lost Vessel - Kelp for Iodine — A dangerous Coast Incidents of Shipwreck - Hospitality Stromness Museum Diplopterus mistaken for Dipterus - Their Resemblances and Differences - Visit to a remarkable Stack - Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent Barrenness - Description of the Stack- Wave-formed Caves - Height to which the Surf rises.

THE Orkneys, like the mainland of Scotland, exhibit their higher hills and precipices on their western coasts: the Ward Hill of Hoy attains to an elevation of sixteen hundred feet; and there are some of the precipices which skirt the island of which it forms so conspicuous a feature, that rise sheer over the breakers from eight hundred to a thousand. Unlike, however, the arrangement on the mainland, it is the newer rocks that attain to the higher elevations; the heights of Hoy are composed of that arenaceous upper member of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, the last formed of the Paleozoic deposits of Orkney, which overlies the ichthyolitic flagstones and shales of Caithness at Dunnet Head, and the ichthyolitic nodular beds of Inverness, Ross, and Cromarty, at Culloden, Tarbet Ness, within the Northern Sutor, and along the bleak ridge of the Maolbuie. It is simply a tall upper story of the formation, erected along the western line of coast in the Orkneys, which the eastern line wholly wants. Its screen of hills forms a noble back