Author.—The pine is certainly the prevailing tree, but it is by no means the only one. Birches, alders, and hazels are common, and oaks of immense size, some of them three or four feet in diameter for a great way up the stem, are dug up in various parts of these moors, and many of them in situations where it is now matter of astonishment that such monarchs of the wood could have been produced; for they are found high on the hills yonder above Dulsie, as well as in the mosses far up the courses of the rivers Dorback and Divie.
Clifford, with enthusiasm,—With what a different scene should we now be surrounded, if we could conjure up all these ancient tenants of the soil, like the reanimated bodies of dead warriors from their graves, as told in some fairy tale of my childhood, to live again, and to wave their leafy banners triumphantly over these hills and hollows!
Grant.—It would be a very different scene indeed.
Author.—Aye, truly it would. Conceive the bleak face of these moors so covered, and then carry your imagination back into remote ages, and let us endeavour to people it in fancy with the animals which must have roamed through its endless wildernesses, and couched within the protection of its almost impervious thickets.
Clifford.—What a country for sport!
Author.—Let us picture to ourselves the myriads of birds of all kinds which winged their flight over the boundless ocean of its foliage, as it was blown into billowy motion by the breezes, or which nestled among its branches as it quietly settled itself to repose, and we shall not only have produced out of these wastes a gorgeous landscape, most romantic in its character, but we shall have opened a wide field for the speculations of the naturalist.
Clifford.—Yes; but, talking of the romantic character of your landscape, what would all that be to the ancient figures to be found in it? Fancy, only fancy the figures! Think of the dress, the arms, the hunting-implements, and the houses of its human inhabitants! Would we could have but one glimpse of them truly as they were!
Author.—If you were to go far enough back for them, you would fill our forests with a race of men, rude as the scenes in which they lived and roamed, and the whole sketch would be one for which we could hardly now find any really existing resemblance, save in the wilds of North America.
Grant.—Your view of the matter is probably correct enough.
Author.—I believe it to be very correct; and, now I think of it, a discovery was made some eight or ten years ago, which would seem to bear evidence to the former existence of this ideal picture in which we have been indulging. Some labourers, who were employed in digging in a moss on Lord Moray’s estate of Brae-Moray, to our left there, found a curious bundle, they took from under ten feet of a solid peat stratum. The bundle was about two feet long by one foot thick, and in form it very much resembled such a cloak-bag as you may have at times seen strapped behind a horseman’s saddle. A careless inspection of it would have led one to believe that it was covered with leather tanned with the hair on it, and it looked, for all the world, like that of one of those strange old trunks which were frequently to be seen bristling like bears among the uncouth baggage on the top of our ancient Flies and Diligences. When I first saw it, a piece of it had been torn up by the curious peasants who had found it, and the aperture they had thus made enabled us to become instantly acquainted with the nature of the mass within, which proved to be tallow.