A PICNIC. 87 



to repeat myself, or to anticipate any of my better mate- 

 rials for a second volume of " Scenes and Legends/' and 

 the residue is mere gossip. Even were it otherwise, my 

 abundance, like the wealth of a miser, would have the 

 effect of rendering me poor. Had I but a single story 

 to tell I would tell it, but who would ever think of tell- 

 ing one of a hundred ! 



' I have no words to express to you, my own Lydia, 

 how much I long for your return, or how cold a look- 

 ing place Cromarty has become since you left it. 

 Ordinary pleasures and lukewarm friendships do well 

 enough for men who have not yet had experience of 

 the intense and the exquisite, but to those who 

 have, they do not seem pleasures or friendships at all. 

 I am amusing myself, however, just as I best can ; 

 sometimes picking up a geological specimen for my col- 

 lection, sometimes making an excursion to the hill or 

 the burn of Eathie. I accompanied to the latter place 

 on Saturday last Mr Ross and his children, with two of 

 their cousins, the Joyners. We were all thoroughly 

 wetted and thoroughly amused ; we told stories, gathered 

 immense bunches of flowers, incarcerated a light com- 

 pany of green grasshoppers, who were disorderly, and 

 ruined two unfortunate born beauties . of the butterfly 

 tribe. We, besides, ran down a green lizard. I have 

 picked up of late, in the little bay below the willows, a 

 fossil fish, in a high state of preservation ; the scales, 

 head, tail, fins are all beautifully distinct, and yet so 

 very ancient is the formation in which it was found, that 

 the era of the lias, with all its ammonites and belemnites, 

 is comparatively recent. 



' You are fretted, my own dear girl, by the bondage to 

 frivolity, which sex and fashion impose upon you. No 

 wonder you should, when one thinks of the sort of laws 



