NORMA A DRUIDICAL AUTHORITY. 235 



beside a Tolmen, and with the mind's eye behold my 

 casta diva about to perish, the victim of a superstition 

 which had small sympathy with lovers. 



Following Borlase's directions, I soon came upon a 

 towering altitude of stones, in solitary isolation on the 

 shore. A less erudite eye would have seen here no- 

 thing but a pile of stones ; but the forewarned mind 

 descried in their symmetrical arrangement, ledge upon 

 ledge, crag upon crag, the rude architecture of early 

 days ; especially when it glanced at the stone-hedges 

 and stone- cottages near at hand, which assuredly were 

 built by human architects, and showed a less symme- 

 trical arrangement than the towering pile. Then, again, 

 the rock-basins, in which the pure water of heaven was 

 received, who could doubt that their oval form and 

 smoothly chiselled sides and bottoms were the work 

 of man ? If the cairn of stones left vague doubts, these 

 rock-basins veritably wei^e Druidical remains ; and thus 

 fortified against scepticism, I indulged in the emotions 

 which naturally accompanied the belief of being in the 

 presence of the remnants of a great human epoch long 

 since passed away. 



Having indulged in these emotions, and extracted 

 from them all the pleasure they could yield, it was 

 with acquiescent equanimity that I afterwards learned 

 how little probability historical scepticism allowed to 

 these Druidical remains. It appears that the cairns 

 are simply cairns, and not temples. The architecture is 

 Nature's ; and, indeed, the forms are repeated in almost 

 every cairn along the shores. Moreover, those rock- 



