RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 265 



dewy evening, as gloamin was darkening into uncertainty the 

 outlines of the ancient ruin, and the newly-kindled stars looked 

 down upon the stream. 



It so happened, however, that my only story connected 

 with either ruin or valley was as little a ghost story as might 

 be. I remember that, when lying ill of fever on one occa- 

 s i ori) indisposed enough to see apparition after apparition 

 flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of a magic 

 lanthorn posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-pos- 

 sessed enough to know that they were but mere pictures 

 in the eye, and to watch them as they rose, I set myself 

 to determine whether they were in any degree amenable to 

 the will, or connected by the ordinary associative links of 

 the metaphysician. Fixing my mind on a certain object, I 

 strove to call it up in the character, not of an image of the 

 conceptive faculty, but of a fever-vision on the retina. The 

 image which I pictured to myself was that of a death's head, 

 yellow and grim, and lighted up, as if from within, amid the 

 darkness of a burial vault. But the death's head obstinately 

 refused to rise. I had no control, I found, over the fever 

 imagery. And the picture that rose instead, uncalled and 

 unexpected, was that of a coal-fire burning brightly in a grate, 

 with a huge tea-kettle steaming 1 cheerily over it 



In traversing the bare height which, rising on the west- 

 ern side of the valley of the Boyne, owes its comparatively 

 bold relief in the landscape to the firmness of the primary 

 rock which composes it, I picked up a piece of graphic gra- 

 nite, bearing its inlaid characters of dark quartz on a ground 

 of cream-coloured feldspar. This variety, however, though 

 occasionally found in rolled boulders in the neighbourhood 

 of Portsoy, is not the graphic granite for which the locality 

 is famous, and which occurs in a vein in the mica schist of 

 the eminence I was now traversing, about a mile to the east 

 of the town. The prevailing ground of the granite of the 



