120 AN OLD BURYING-GROUND. CHAP, x, 



fragments of a dark blue flag, charged, more or less. 

 with organisms. Some very fine fossil fish have been 

 found there. I next come in sight of the human bury- 

 ing-ground on the top of the bank, as distinguished from 

 the fish burying-ground on the rocks underneath. 



" The family to which the burying-ground belonged, 

 though once numbering among the Caithness aristocracy, 

 have experienced a sad reverse. The last of the race is 

 now toiling for his bread in a foreign land. Yet, one 

 cannot help heaving a sigh in passing, to think that 

 through his follies and imprudence, the dust of his 

 fathers should be exposed to the contempt of passers-by. 

 The door of their sepulchre is battered to pieces, and the 

 ground is overspread with dank nettles and hemlocks, 

 and other abominations. 



" It must surely have been a refined, a poetic feeling, 

 which prompted the founder of the burying-ground to 

 pitch it in such* *a spot, close by the murmuring sea 

 the image of eternity. He thought to have slept in 

 undisturbed security. Yet the sea is already under- 

 mining the graveyard, and it is not improbable that the 

 rock on which the family vault stands may itself be 

 washed away, and the dust of the dead be driven hither 

 and thither by the wasting and unfeeling waves. 



" A little past the burying-ground, and on the beach. 

 I find a change in the dip of the strata. The beds dip 

 east, though almost immediately thereafter they return 

 to their former dip namely northerly, with a little of 

 west ; and continue so until we arrive at the Bishop's 

 Palace, where yellowish, whitish, and striped beds of 



