198 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



to Sluie, they told me they all lived there, and were on their 

 way home from school, which they attended at the village 

 in the forest. Hours had elapsed since the master had let 

 them go, but in so fine an evening the berries would' nt, and so 

 they were still in the wood. I accompanied them to Sluie, 

 and was ferried over the river in a salmon coble. There is 

 no point where the Findhorn, celebrated among our Scotch 

 streams for the beauty of its scenery, is so generally interest- 

 ing as in the neighbourhood of this village ; forest and river, 

 each a paragon in its kind, uniting for several miles to- 

 gether what is most choice and characteristic in the peculiar 

 features of both. In no locality is the surface of t'he great 

 forest of Darnaway more undulated, or its trees nobler ; and 

 nowhere does the river present a livelier succession of eddy- 

 ing pools and rippling shallows, or fret itself in sweeping on 

 its zig-zag course, now to the one bank, now to the other, 

 against a more picturesque and imposing series of cliffs. But 

 to the geologist the locality possesses an interest peculiar to 

 itself. The precipices on both sides are charged with fossils 

 of the Upper Old Red Sandstone : they form part of a vast 

 indurated grave-yard, excavated to the depth of an hundred 

 feet by the ceaseless wear of the stream ; and when the waters 

 are low, the teeth-plates and scales of ichthyolites, all of them 

 specifically different from those of Clune and Lethenbar, and 

 most of them generically so, may be disinterred from the 

 strata in handfuls. But the closing evening left me neither 

 light nor time for the work of exploration. I heard the cur- 

 few in the woods from the yet distant town, and dark night 

 had set in long ere I reached Forres. On the following 

 morning I took a seat in one of the south coaches, and got 

 on to Elgin an hour before noon. 



Elgin, one of the finest of our northern towns, occupies 

 the centre of a richly fossiliferous district, which wants only 

 better sections to rank it among the most interesting in the 



