RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 247 



weapons given for the defence of a poor harmless creature 

 should be converted into the instruments of its destruction. 

 It was not without meaning that it was forbidden by the law 

 of Moses to seethe a kid in its mother's milk. 



A steep bulwark in front, against which the tide lashes 

 twice every twenty-four hours, an abrupt hill behind, a 

 few rows of squalid cottages built of red sandstone, much 

 wasted by the keen sea-winds, a wilderness of dunghills and 

 ruinous pig-sties, women seated at the doors, employed in 

 baiting lines or mending nets, groupes of men lounging 

 lazily at some gable-end fronting the sea, herds of ragged 

 children playing in the lanes, such are the components of 

 the fishing village of Gardenstone. From the identity of 

 name, I had associated the place with that Lord Gardenstone 

 of the Court of Session who published, late in the last cen- 

 tury, a volume of " Miscellanies in Prose and Verse," con- 

 taining, among other clever things, a series of tart criticisms 

 on English plays, transcribed, it was stated in the preface, 

 from the margins and fly-leaves of the books of a " small li- 

 brary kept open by his Lordship" for the amusement of tra- 

 vellers at the inn of some village in his immediate neigh- 

 bourhood ; and taking it for granted, somehow, that Garden- 

 stone was the village, I was looking around me for the inn, 

 in the hope that where his Lordship had opened a library I 

 might find a dinner. But failing to discern it, I addressed 

 myself on the subject to an elderly man in a pack-sheet apron, 

 who stood all alone, looking out upon the sea, like Napoleon, 

 in the print, from a projection of the bulwark. He turned 

 round, and showed, by an unmistakeable expression of eye 

 and feature, that he was what the servant girl in " Guy Man- 

 nering" characterizes as " very particularly drunk," not stu- 

 pidly, but happily, funnily, conceitedly drunk, and full of all 

 manner of high thoughts of himsel " It'll be an awfu' coorse 

 nicht," he said, "fra the sea." "Very likely," I replied, 



