On the fourth day after losing sight of the Hill of Cromarty, the Leith smack in which I sailed was slowly threading her way, in a morning of light airs and huge broken fog-wreaths, through the lower tracts of the Firth of Forth. The islands and distant land looked dim and grey through the haze, like objects in an unfinished drawing; and at times some vast low-browed cloud from the sea applied the sponge as it rolled past, and blotted out half a county at a time; but the sun occasionally broke forth in partial glimpses of great beauty, and brought out into bold relief little bits of the landscape--now a town, and now an islet, and anon the blue summit of a hill. A sunlit wreath rose from around the abrupt and rugged Bass as we passed; and my heart leaped within me as I saw, for the first time, that stern Patmos of the devout and brave of another age looming dark and high through the diluted mist, and enveloped for a moment, as the cloud parted, in an amber-tinted glory. There had been a little Presbyterian oasis of old in the neighbourhood of Cromarty, which, in the midst of the Highland and _Moderate_ indifferency that characterized the greater part of the north of Scotland during the seventeenth century, had furnished the Bass with not a few of its most devoted victims. Mackilligen of Alness, Hogg of Kiltearn, and the Rosses of Tain and Kincardine, had been incarcerated in its dungeons; and, when labouring in the Cromarty quarries in early spring, I used to know that it was time to gather up my tools for the evening, when I saw the sun resting over the high-lying farm which formed the patrimony of another of its better-known victims--young Fraser of Brea. And so I looked with a double interest on the bold sea-girt rock, and the sun-gilt cloud that rose over its scared forehead, like that still brighter halo which glorifies it in the memories of the Scottish people. Many a long-cherished association drew my thoughts to Edinburgh. I was acquainted with Ramsay, and Fergusson, and the "Humphrey Clinker" of Smollett, and had read a description of the place in the "Marmion" and the earlier novels of Scott; and I was not yet too old to feel as if I were approaching a great magical city--like some of those in the "Arabian Nights"--that was even more intensely poetical than Nature itself. I did somewhat chide the tantalizing mist, that, like a capricious showman, now raised one corner of its curtain, and anon another, and showed me the place at once very indistinctly, and only by bits at a time; and yet I know not that I could in reality have seen it to greater advantage, or after a mode more in harmony with my previous conceptions. The water in the harbour was too low, during the first hour or two after our arrival, to float our vessel, and we remained tacking in the roadstead, watching for the signal from the pier-head which was to intimate to us when the tide had risen high enough for our admission; and so I had sufficient time given