About fifteen years ago, a Cromarty fisherman was returning from Inverness by a road which for several miles skirts the upper edge of the moor, and passes within a few yards of the cairn. Night overtook him ere he had half completed his journey; but, after an interval of darkness, the moon, nearly at full, rose over the eminence on his right, and restored to him the face of the country--the hills which he had passed before evening, but which, faint and distant, were sinking as he advanced, the wood which, bordering his road on the one hand, almost reached him with its shadow, and the bleak, unvaried, interminable waste, which, stretching away on the other, seemed lost in the horizon. After he had entered on the moor, the stillness which, at an earlier stage of his journey, had occasionally been broken by the distant lowing of cattle, or the bark of a shepherd’s dog, was interrupted by only his own footsteps, which, from the nature of the soil, sounded hollow as if he trod over a range of vaults, and by the low monotonous murmur of the neighbouring wood. As he approached the cairn, however, a noise of a different kind began to mingle with the other two; it was one with which his profession had made him well acquainted--that of waves breaking against a rock. The nearest shore was fully three miles distant, the nearest cliff more than five, and yet he could hear wave after wave striking as if against a precipice, then dashing upwards, and anon descending, as distinctly as he had ever done when passing in his boat beneath the promontories of Cromarty. On coming up to the cairn, his astonishment was converted into terror.--Instead of the brown heath, with here and there a fir seedling springing out of it he saw a wide tempestuous sea stretching before him, with the large pile of stones frowning over it, like one of the Hebrides during the gales of the Equinox. The pile appeared as if half enveloped in cloud and spray, and two large vessels, with all their sheets spread to the wind, were sailing round it.