RAMBLES OF A GEOLOGIST. 379 



the Old Red, not a single fish, not a "nibble" even, repaid 

 the patient search of half a day. I, however, passed some 

 time agreeably enough among the ruins of Craighouse. When 

 I had last seen, many years before, this old castle,* the upper 

 storeys were accessible ; but they were now no longer so. 

 Time, and the little herdboys who occasionally shelter in its 

 vaults, had been busy in the interval ; and, by breaking off a 

 few projecting corners by which the climber had held, and by 

 effacing a few notches into which he had thrust his toe-points, 

 they had rendered what had been merely difficult impracticable. 

 I remarked that the huge kitchen chimney of the building, 

 a deep hollow recess, which stretches across the entire gable, 

 and in which, it is said, two thrashers once plied the flail for 

 a whole winter, bore less of the stain of recent smoke than 

 it used to exhibit twenty years before ; and inferred that there 

 would be fewer wraith-lights seen from the castle at nights 

 than in those days of evil spirits and illicit stills, when the 

 cottars in the neighbourhood sent more smuggled whisky to 

 market than any equal number of the inhabitants of almost 

 any other district in the north. It has been long alleged that 

 there existed a close connection between the more ghostly 

 spirits of the country and its distilled ones. " How do you 

 account," said a north country minister of the last age (the 

 late Rev. Mr M'Bean of Alves) to a sagacious old elder of 

 his Session, " for the almost total disappearance of the ghosts 

 and fairies that used to be so common in your young days ?" 

 " Tak my word fort, minister," replied the shrewd old man, 

 " it's a' owing to the tea ; whan the tea cam in, the ghaists 

 an' fairies gaed out. Weel do I mind whan at a' our neebourly 

 meetings, bridals, christenings, lyke-wakes, an' the like, 

 we entertained ane anither wi' rich nappy ale ; an' whan the 

 verra dowiest o' us used to get warm f the face, an' a little 

 confused in the head, an' weel fit to see amaist ony thing whan 

 * See " My Schools and Schoolmasters." chap. xi. 



