NATURE IN MINIATURE. 175 



paved with pebbles, and the silvery trout may be seen 

 as they glance through its transparent depths ; depths, 

 pure enough to please the most fastidious nymph that 

 ever bathed her feet by classic fountain, or surveyed 

 her lovely form, mirrored in its translucent waters. 

 In another spot, issuing from a dark-looking hole in 

 the midst of a bed of luxuriant grass, studded over 

 with yellow-flowered water-plants, and hemmed in by 

 a forest of green horsetails and snake-grass, the stream 

 is welling upwards from one of Nature's own aque- 

 ducts, hidden within the bowels of the earth. Thence 

 wending its way silently over the dank herbage, it soon 

 reaches a harder channel, and leaping over rocky 

 barriers in a series of cascades, dances along its down- 

 ward course in a thousand jets and leaps, no two of 

 which are alike. 



Such are one or two of the choicest scenes which 

 Nature unfolds to the votary who seeks her in these 

 her innermost shrines. And in one of these is to be 

 found another specimen of the Pictish masonry. A 

 cleft in the rock forms the entrance into a dark, 

 subterranean passage, which opens into a large vaulted 

 chamber, circular in form, and sufficiently high for a 

 man of moderate dimensions to stand in, without en- 

 dangering his head. The walls are roughly cut, nor are 

 there visible traces of anything which could afford a clue 

 to the purpose for which the cave was intended. A few 

 bones are strewn over the damp floor of rock, but they, 

 doubtless, are the only surviving remains of animals, 

 who in their last solemn hour, have dragged their aged 

 limbs thither, actuated by an instinctive dread, common 

 to most wild animals, of having their death-struggle 

 exposed to the unholy gaze of the world. In all pro- 

 bability it was employed as a place of concealment in 

 the time of danger ; though for security, or as a strong- 



