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THE OLD RED SANDSTONE.

of low-lying houses exposed in wet weather to the sudden riseof water. The numerous boulders of this tract have theirstory to tell, and it is a curious one. The Southern Sutor,with its multitudinous fragments of gneiss tom from its sidesby the sea, or loosened by the action of frosts and storms, androlled down its precipices, is only a few hundred yards away.Its base, where these lie thickest, has been swept by tempests,chiefly from the east, for thousands and thousands of years ;and the direct effect of these tempests, regarded as transport-ing agents, would have been to strew this stony tract withthose detached fragments. The same billow that sends itslong roll from the German Ocean to sweep the base of theSutor, and to leap up against its precipices to the height ofeighty and a hundred feet, breaks in foam, only a minuteafter, over this stony tract ; which has, in consequence, itssprinkling of fragments of gneiss transported by an agency soobvious. But for every one such fragment which it bears,we find at least ten boulders that have been borne for fortyand fifty miles in the opposite direction from the interior ofthe country,—a direction in which no transporting agencynow exists. The tempests of thousands of years have convey-ed for but a few hundred yards not more than a tithe of thematerials of this tract : nine-tenths of the whole have beenconveyed by an older agency over spaces of forty and fiftymiles. How immensely more powerful, then, or how im-mensely protracted in its operation, must that older agencyhave been !

I passed onwards, and reached a little bay, or rather an-gular indentation of the coast, in the neighbourhood of thetown. It was laid bare by the tide this morning far beyondits outer opening ; and the huge table-like boulder which oc-cupies nearly its centre, and to which, in a former chapter, Ihave had occasion to refer, held but a middle place betweenthe still darkened flood-line that ran high along the beach, and