LOCH BRORA. 365 



spots that, ere the poor Highlander had been driven 

 from home, kept him in oats and bere. I saw in one 

 little bay some of the prettiest water-lilies I have ever 

 seen. They looked like so many bathing Venuses sub- 

 mersed to the neck. Some of the green deserted spots 

 on the shore, with the purple hills rising behind, the 

 blue loch in front, and the dwarf birch all around, were 

 really very sweet. I doubt not that the thoughts of 

 them live, set in sorrow, in hearts beyond the Atlantic. 

 As you look down the loch, the whole opening of the 

 glen seems a tempestuous sea of miniature hills, from 

 thirty to forty feet in height ; the Highlanders call 

 detached hillocks of this kind Tomhans, and believe 

 them to be the haunts of fairies. Geologists have learned 

 from Agassiz to term them moraines. They form the 

 accumulations of stones and gravel which were ploughed 

 up before the glacier. Amid a good deal of irregularity 

 they have an evident bearing in their arrangement to 

 the mountains around, from which the ice descended. 

 In some places I could trace them in chains of half a 

 mile in length quite parallel to the mountains ; and 

 about half a mile above Brora three of these chains lie 

 parallel to one another, like the strings in a triple neck- 

 lace of beads. There lie between them miniature val- 

 leys cultivated by the ejected Highlanders ; and there 

 are many miserable-looking hovels on their sides. 

 Imagine a table covered with crumbs, and that you set 

 yourself to rake them into lines with the edge of your 

 hand, keeping a sort of rude parallelism to that end of the 

 table at which you sat, and from which you raked them. 

 Your little lines of accumulation would be moraines of 

 crumbs. But there are more than moraines here to 

 testify of the glacier. Suppose your hand to be moist, 

 and that it left on the cleared table in the direction in 



