RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 249 



would be rather a more valuable boon to the country than 

 that secured to it by those law-lords of our own days, who at 

 one fell blow disestablished the national religion of Scotland, 

 and broke off the only handle by which their friends the po- 

 liticians could hope to manage the country's old vigorous 

 Presbyterianism. Meanwhile it was becoming apparent that 

 the man with the apron had as shrewdly anticipated the cha- 

 racter of the coming night as if he had been soberer. The 

 sun, ere its setting, disappeared in a thick leaden haze, which 

 enveloped the whole heavens ; and twilight seemed posting 

 on to night a full hour before its time. I settled a very 

 moderate bill, and set off under the cliffs at a round pace, in 

 the hope of scaling the hill, and gaining the high road atop 

 which leads to Macduff, ere the darkness closed. I had, how- 

 ever, miscalculated my distance ; I, besides, lost some little 

 time in the opening of the deep ravine to which I have al- 

 ready referred as that in which possibly the fish-beds may be 

 found cropping out ; and I had got but a little beyond the 

 gray ecclesiastical ruin, with its lonely burying-ground, when 

 the tempest broke and the night fell. 



One of the last objects which I saw, as I turned to take a 

 farewell look of the bay of Gamrie, was the magnificent pro- 

 montory of Troup Head, outlined in black on a ground of 

 deep gray, with its two terminal stacks standing apart in the 

 sea. And straightway, through one of those tricks of asso- 

 ciation so powerful in raising, as if from the dead, buried 

 memories of things of which the mind has been oblivious for 

 years, there started up in recollection the details of an ancient 

 ghost-story, of which I had not thought before for perhaps a 

 quarter of a century. It had been touched, I suppose, in its 

 obscure, unnoted corner, as Ithuriel touched the toad, by the 

 apparition of the insulated stacks of Troup, seen dimly in the 

 thickening twilight over the solitary burying-ground. For 

 it so chances that one of the main incidents of the story bears 



