100 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OK, 



two mural fronts of precipice, and sinks in steep grassy slopes 

 on two sides more, bears atop a fine old ruin. There is a 

 blind-fronted massy keep, wrapped up in a mantle of ivy, 

 perched at the one end, where the precipice sinks steepest ; 

 while a more ruinous though much more modern pile of 

 building, perforated by a double row of windows, occupies 

 the rest of the area. The square keep has lost its genealogy 

 in the mists of the past, but a vague tradition attributes its 

 erection to the Norwegians. The more modern pile is said to 

 have been built about three centuries ago by a younger son 

 of M 'Donald of the Isles ; but it is added that, owing to the 

 jealousy of his elder brother, he was not permitted to com- 

 plete or inhabit it. I find it characteristic of most Highland 

 traditions, that they contain speeches : they constitute true 

 oral specimens of that earliest and rudest style of historic 

 composition in which dialogue alternates with narrative. 

 " My wise brother is building a fine house," is the speech 

 preserved in this tradition as that of the elder son : "it is 

 rather a pity for himself that he should be building it on 

 another man's lands." The remark was repeated to the 

 builder, says the story, and at once arrested the progress of 

 the work. Mr Elder's boys showed me several minute pieces 

 of brass, somewhat resembling rust-eaten coin, that they had 

 dug out of the walls of the old keep ; but the pieces bore no 

 impress of the dye, and seemed mere fragments of metal 

 beaten thin by the hammer. 



The gneiss at Knock is exceedingly various in its compo- 

 sition, and many of its strata the geologist would fail to re- 

 cognise as gneiss at all. We find along the precipices its two 

 unequivocal varieties, the schistose and the granitic, passing 

 not unfrequently, the former into a true mica schist, the lat- 

 ter into a pale feldspathose rock, thickly pervaded by needle- 

 like crystals of tremolite, that, from the style of the group- 

 ing, and the contrast existing between the dark green of the 



