84 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



a second continuous strip, of an olive hue, the colour assumed, 

 on weathering, by a bed of amygdaloid of a piece of dingy 

 old-fashioned furniture, inlaid with one stringed belt of bleach ', 

 ed holly, and another of faded green-wood. At some of the 

 more accessible points I climbed to the line of white belting, 

 and found it to consist of the same soft quartzy sandstone that 

 in the Bay of Laig furnishes the musical sand. Lower down 

 there occur, alternating with the trap, beds of shale and of 

 blue clay, but they are lost mostly in the talus. Ill adapted to 

 resist the frosts and rains of winter, their exposed edges have 

 mouldered into a loose soil, now thickly covered over with 

 herbage ; and, but for the circumstance that we occasionally 

 find them laid bare by a water -course, we would scarce be 

 aware of their existence at all. The shale exhibits every- 

 where, as on the opposite side of the Ru-Stoir, faint impres- 

 sions of a minute shell resembling a Cyclas, and ill-preserved 

 fragments of fish-scales. The blue clay I found at one spot 

 where the pathway had cut deep into the hill-side, richly 

 charged with bivalves of the species I had seen so abundant 

 in the resembling clay of the Bay of Laig ; but the closing 

 twilight prevented me from ascertaining whether it also con- 

 tained the characteristic univalves of the deposit, and whether 

 its shells, for they seem identical with those of the altered 

 shales of the Ru-Stoir, might not be associated, like these, 

 with reptilian remains. Night fell fast, and the streaks of 

 mist that had mottled the hills at sunset began to spread 

 gray over the heavens in a continuous curtain ; but there was 

 light enough left to show me that the trap became more co- 

 lumnar as we neared our journey's end. One especial jutting 

 in the rock presented in the gloom the appearance of an an- 

 cient portico, with pediment and cornice, such as the travel- 

 ler sees on the hill-sides of Petrsea in front of some old tomb ; 

 but it may possibly appear less architectural by day. At 

 length, passing from under the long line of rampart, just as 



