THE OLD BED SANDSTONE.

39

half resemblance,—it was the thing itself ; and I bad observ-ed it a hundred and a hundred times, when sailing my littleschooner in the shallows left by the ebb. But what had be-come of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, or ofwhat element had they been composed ? I felt as complete-ly at fault as Bobinson Crusoe did on his discovering theprint of the man’s foot on the sand. The evening furnishedme with still further cause of wonder. We raised anotherblock in a different part of the quarry, and found that thearea of a circular depression in the stratum below was brokenand flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottomof a pool recently dried up, which had shrunk and split inthe hardening. Several large stones came rolling down fromthe diluvium in the course of the afternoon. They were ofdifferent qualities from the sandstone below, and from oneanother ; and, what was more wonderful still, they were allrounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed about inthe sea or the bed of a river for hundreds of years. Therecould not, surely, be a more conclusive proof that the bankwhich had enclosed them so long could not have been createdon the rock on which it rested. No workman ever manu-factures a half-worn article, and the stones were all half-worn !And if not the bank, why then the sandstone underneath ?I was lost in conjecture, and found I had food enough forthought that evening, without once thinking of the unhap-piness of a life of labour.

The immense masses of diluvium which we had to clearaway rendered the working of the quarry laborious and ex-pensive, and all the party quitted it in a few days, to maketrial of another that seemed to promise better. The one wileft is situated, as I have said, on the southern shore of aninland bay,—the Bay of Cromarty; the one to which we re-moved has been opened in a lofty wall of cliffs that over-hangs the northern shore of the Moray Frith. I soon found