202 THE OLD RED SANDSTONE. 
see, far in the distance, the blue vista of the Great Valley, 
with its double wall of jagged and serrated hills, and directly 
in the opening, the gray, diminished spires of Inverness. We 
reach a brown mossy stream, of just volume enough to sweep 
away the pebbles and shells that have been strewed in its 
course by the last tide; and see, on turning a sudden angle, 
the precipices cleft to their base by the ravine that has yielded 
its waters a passage from the interior. 
We enter along the bed of the stream. A line of mural 
precipices rises on either hand — here advancing in ponderous 
overhanging buttresses, there receding into deep, damp recess 
es, tapestried with ivy, and darkened with birch and hazel. 
A powerful spring, charged with lime, comes pouring by a 
hundred different threads over the rounded brow of a beetling 
crag, and the decaying vegetation around it is hardening into 
stone. The cliffs vary their outline at every step, as if assum- 
ing in succession all the various combinations of form that 
constitute the wild and the picturesque ; and the pale hues of 
the stone seem, when brightened by the sun, the very tints a 
painter would choose to heighten the effect of his shades, or to 
contrast most delicately with the luxuriant profusion of bushes 
and flowers that wave over the higher shelves and crannies. 
A colony of swallows have built from time immemorial under 
the overhanging strata of one of the lofiier precipices; the fox 
and badger harbor in the clefts of the steeper and more inac- 
cessible banks. As we proceed, the dell becomes wilder 
and more deeply wooded ; the stream frets and toils at our 
feet — here leaping over an opposing ridge — there struggling 
in a pool — yonder escaping to the light from under some 
broken fragment of cliff. There is a richer profusion of 
flowers, a thicker mantling of ivy and honeysuckle ; and after 
passing a semicircular inflection of the bank, that waves 
