166 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



the woods of Conon House. The day was still very bad : the 

 rain pattered thick on the leaves, and fell incessantly in large 

 drops on the pathways. There is a solitary, picturesque bury- 

 ing-ground on a wooded hillock beside the river, with thick 

 dark woods all around it, one of the two burying-grounds 

 of the parish of Urquhart, which I would fain have visited, 

 but the swollen stream had risen high around, converting the 

 hillock into an island, and forbade access. I had spent many 

 an hour among the tombs. They are few and scattered, and 

 of the true antique cast, roughened with death's heads, and 

 cross bones, and rudely sculptured armorial bearings ; and on 

 a broken wall, that marked where the ancient chapel once had 

 stood, there might be seen, in the year 1821, a small, badly 

 cut sun-dial, with its iron gnomon wasted to a saw-edged film, 

 that contained more oxide than metal. The only fossils de- 

 scribed in- my present chapter are fossils of mind ; and the 

 reader will, I trust, bear with me should I produce one fossil 

 more of this somewhat equivocal class. It has no merit to 

 recommend it, it is simply an organism of an immature in- 

 tellectual formation, in which, however, as in the Carbonife- 

 rous period, there was provision made for the necessities of 

 an after time.* If a young man born on the wrong side of 

 the Tweed for speaking English, is desirous to acquire the 

 ability of writing it, he should by all means begin by trying 

 to write it in verse. 



I passed, on my return to Dingwall, through the village of 

 Conon Bridge ; and, remembering that one of the masons who 

 had hewn beside me in the work-shed so many years before 

 lived in the village at the time, I went direct to the house he 

 had inhabited, to see whether he might not be there still. It 



* These remarks refer to the poem " On Seeing a Sun-Dial in a Church- 

 Yard," which was introduced here when these chapters were first published 

 in the " Witness," but, having been afterwards inserted in the tenth chap- 

 ter of "My Schools and Schoolmasters," is not here re-produced. 



