The histories of single districts of country rarely ascend into so remote an antiquity as to be lost like those of nations in the ages of fable. It so happens, however, whether fortunately or otherwise, for the writer, that in this respect the old shire of Cromarty differs from every other in the kingdom. Sir Thomas Urquhart, an ingenious native of the district, who flourished about the middle of the seventeenth century, has done for it all that the chroniclers and senachies of England and Ireland have done for their respective countries; and as he united to a vigorous imagination a knowledge of what is excellent in character, instead of peopling it with the caco-demons of the one kingdom, or the resuscitated antediluvians of the other, he has bestowed upon it a longer line of heroes and demigods than can be exhibited by the annals of either. I avail myself of his writings on the strength of that argument which O’Flaherty uses in his Ogygia as an apology for the story of the three fishermen who were driven by tempest into a haven of Ireland fifteen days before the universal deluge. “Where there is no room,” says this historian, “for just disquisition, and no proper field of inquiry, we must rely on the common suffrages of the writers of our country; to whose opinions I voluntarily subscribe.” Alypos, the forty-third in a direct line from Japhet, was the first, says Sir Thomas, who discovered that part of Scotland which has since been known by the name of Cromarty. He was contemporary with Rehoboam, the fourth king of Israel, and a very extraordinary personage, independent of his merits as a navigator. For we must regard him as constituting a link which divides into ancestors and descendants--a chain that depends unbroken from the creation of Adam to the present times; and which either includes in itself, or serves to connect by its windings and involutions, some of the most famous people of every age of the world. His grandmother was a daughter of Calcido the Tyrian, who founded Carthage, and who must have lived several ages before the Dido of Virgil; his mother travelled from a remote eastern country to profit by the wisdom of Solomon, and is supposed by many, says Sir Thomas, to have been the queen of Sheba. Nor were his ancestors a whit less happy in their friends than in their consorts. There was one of them intimately acquainted with Nimrod, the founder of the Assyrian Empire, and the builder of Babel; another sat with Abraham in the door of his tent, sharing with him his feelings of sorrow and horror when the fire of destruction was falling on the cities of the plain; a third, after accompanying Bacchus in his expedition to the Indies, and receiving from him in marriage the hand of Thymelica his daughter, was presented with a rich jewel when passing through Syria, by Deborah, the judge and prophetess of Israel. The gem might have been still in the family had not one of his descendants given it to Penthesilea, that queen of