wisdom. I forget whether it was Catherine Sinclair’s father or brother who was said to have three dozen feet of daughters; and when he put down a new pavement--probably from his own quarries--opposite his house in Edinburgh, it was readily nicknamed the “Giant’s Causeway.” The main branch of the Sinclairs, whose titles at one time, says Sir Walter, might have wearied a herald when they were not so rich as many an English yeoman, is represented near Edinburgh by the ruins of Rosslyn Castle and the monuments of that beautiful chapel-- Where Rosslyn’s chiefs uncoffined lie Each baron for a sable shroud Sheathed in his iron panoply. The railway, forking for the only Caithness towns, Wick and Thurso, with their ports Pulteneytown and Scrabster, does not give a fair view of the county. Its most impressive features, as at our other Land’s End, are to be looked for in its rim of brown cliffs, tight-packed layers of flagstones, their faces “etched out in alternate lines of cornice and frieze,” here dappled by hardy vegetation, there alive with clamorous sea-fowl. Like the granite, slate, and serpentine edges of Cornwall, these sandstone rocks have been carved by wind and water into boldest shapes of capes and bays, dark caverns, funnels, overhanging shelves and gables, swirling “pots” and foaming reefs, isolated stacks lashed by every tide, broken teeth bored and filled by every storm, and the deep chasms here called _geos_, that sometimes lead down to beaches rich in fine and rare shells, for one, “John o’ Groat’s Buckie,” akin to the cowries of the tropics. In the damp crevices, also, grow rare herbs such as that “Holy Grass” found by Robert Dick of Thurso, one of Mr. Smiles’s “discoveries” in the species of self-helped naturalists. More truly than of Cornwall, it may be said that Caithness seldom grows wood enough to make a coffin. Where Cornwall comes short of Caithness is in the numerous castles, not all of them left to decay, that on the verge of those northern precipices might often be confounded with Nature’s own ruins. It was only about the beginning of the eighteenth century that such strongholds could be deserted for snugger mansions. Here, in 1680, was the scene of our last private war, when the head of the Breadalbane Campbells invaded Caithness with a small army, that overcame the Sinclairs, it is said, by the wily stratagem of causing to be stranded on their coast a ship freighted with whisky to drown the enemy’s prudence and resolution.