KIL HUGH MILLER. 



men were ordered to lay aside their tools ; and thus ended the 

 first day's labour of our young geologist. The sun was then 

 sinking behind the thick fir wood behind him, and the long 

 dark shadows of the trees stretching to the shore. Notwith- 

 standing his blistered hands, and the fatigue which blistered 

 them, he found himself next morning as light of heart as his 

 fellow-labourers, and able to enjoy the magnificent scenery 

 around him, which he thus so beautifully describes : — 



"There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay 

 white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields ; but the sun 

 rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed as it advanced into one 

 of those delightful days of early spring which give so pleasing an earnest 

 of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the 

 workmen rested at mid-day, and I went to enjoy my half hour alone on 

 a mossy knoll in the neighbouring wood, which commands through the 

 trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not 

 a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky ; and the branches were 

 as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a 

 wooded promontory that stretched half-way across the frith there as- 

 cended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight on the line of a plum- 

 met for more than a thousand yard^ ; and then, as reaching a thinner 

 stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the fcliage of a 

 stately tree. Ben We vis rose to the west, white with the yet un wasted 

 snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all 

 its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. 

 A line of snow ran along the opposite hills ; all above was white, and all 

 below was purple." — Old Red Sandstone, pp. 6, 7. 



In raising from its bed the large mass of strata which the 

 gunpowder had loosened, on the surface of the solid stone, 

 our young quarrier descried the ridged and furrowed ripple - 

 marks which the tide leaves upon every sandy shore, and he 

 wondered what had become of the waves that had thus fret- 

 ted the solid rock, and of what element they had been com- 

 posed. His admiration was equally excited by a circular de- 

 pression in the sandstone, " broken and flawed in every di- 

 rection, as if it had been the bottom of a pool recently dried 

 up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening." And be- 



