"Tobacco and whisky cost siller,
And meal is but scanty at hame;
But gang to the stane-mason M——r,
Wi' Old Red Sandstone fish he'll fill your wame."
Rather a dislocated line that last, I thought, and too much in the style in which Zachary Boyd sings "Pharaoh and the Pascal." And as it is wrong to leave the beast of even an enemy in the ditch, however long its ears, I must just try and set it on its legs. Would it not run better thus?
"Tobacco and whisky cost siller,
An' meal is but scanty at hame;
But gang to the stane-mason M——r,"
He'll pang wi' ichth'ólites your wame,—
Wi' fish!! as Agassiz has ca'ed 'em,
In Greek, like themsel's, hard an' odd,
That were baked in stane pies afore Adam
Gaed names to the haddocks and cod.
Bad enough as rhyme, I suspect; but conclusive as evidence to prove that the animal spirits, under the influence of the bracing walk, the fine day, and the agreeable recounter at the fish-beds,—not forgetting the half-gill bumper,—had mounted very considerably above their ordinary level at the editorial desk.
The raised beach may be found on the slopes of a grass-covered eminence, once the site of an ancient hill-fort, and which still exhibits, along the rim-like edge of the flat area atop, scattered fragments of the vitrified walls. A general covering of turf restricted my examination of the shells to one point, where a land-slip on a small scale had laid the deposit bare; but I at least saw enough to convince me that the debris of the shell-fish used of old as food by the garrison had not been mistaken for the remains of a raised beach,—a mistake which in other localities has occurred, I have reason to believe, oftener than once. The shells, some of them exceedingly minute, and not of edible species, occur in layers in a siliceous stratified sand, overlaid by a bed of bluish-colored silt. I picked out of the sand two entire specimens of a full-grown Fusus, little more than half an inch in length,—the Fusus turricola; and the greater number of the fragments that lay bleaching at the foot of the broken slope, in a state of chalky friability, seemed to be fragments of those smaller bivalves, belonging to the genera Donax, Venus, and Mactra, that are so common on flat sandy shores. But when the sea washed over these shells, they could have been the denizens of at least no flat shore. The descent on which they occur sinks downwards to the existing beach, over which it is elevated at this point two hundred and thirty feet, at an angle with the horizon of from thirty-five to forty degrees. Were the land to be now submerged to where they appear on the hill-side, the bay of Gamrie, as abrupt in its slopes as the upper part of Loch Lomond or the sides of Loch Ness, would possess a depth of forty fathoms water at little more than a hundred yards from the shore. I may add, that I could trace at this height no marks of such a continuous terrace around the sides of the bay as the waves would have infallibly excavated in the diluvium, had the sea stood at a level so high, or, according to the more prevalent view, had the land stood at a level so low, for any considerable time; though the green banks which sweep around the upper part of the inflection, unscarred by the defacing plough, would scarce have failed to retain some mark of where the surges had broken, had the surges been long there. Whatever may in this special case be the fact, however, I cannot doubt that in the comparatively modern period of the boulder clays, Scotland lay buried under water to a depth at least five times as great as the space between this ancient sea-beach and the existing tide-line.
CHAPTER II.
Character of the Rocks near Gardenstone—A Defunct Father-lasher—A Geological Inference—Village of Gardenstone—The drunken Scot—Gardenstone Inn—Lord Gardenstone—A Tempest threatened—The Author's Ghost Story—The Lady in Green—Her Appearance and Tricks—The Rescued Children—The murdered Peddler and his Pack—Where the Green Dress came from—Village of Macduff—Peculiar Appearance of the Beach at the Mouth of the Deveron—Dr. Emslie's Fossils—Pterichthys quadratus—Argillaceous Deposit of Blackpots—Pipe-laying in Scotland—Fossils of Blackpots Clay—Mr. Longmuir's Description of them—Blackpots Deposit a Re-formation of a Liasic Patch—Period of its Formation.