I parted from Dr. Emslie, and walked on along the shore to Portsoy,--for three-fourths of the way over the prevailing grauwacke of the county, and for the remaining fourth over mica schist, primary limestone, hornblende slate, granitic and quartz veins, and the various other kindred rocks of a primary district. The day was still gloomy and gray, and ill suited to improve homely scenery; nor is this portion of the Banff coast nearly so striking as that which I had travelled over the day before. It has, however, its spots of a redeeming character,--rocky recesses on the shore, half-beach, half-sward, rich in wild-flowers and shells,--where one could saunter in a calm sunny morning, with one's _bairns_ about one, very delightfully; and the interior is here and there agreeably undulated by diluvial hillocks, that, when the sun falls low in the evening, must chequer the landscape with many a pleasing alternation of light and shadow. The Burn of Boyne,--which separates, about two miles from Portsoy, a grauwacke from a mica-schist district,--with its bare, open valley, its steep limestone banks, and its gray, melancholy castle, long since roofless and windowless, and surrounded by a few stunted trees, bears a deserted and solitary shagginess about it, that struck me as wildly agreeable. It is such a valley as one might expect to meet a ghost in, in some still, dewy evening, as gloamin was darkening into uncertainty the outlines of the ancient ruin, and the newly-kindled stars looked down upon the stream. It so happened, however, that my only story connected with either ruin or valley was as little a ghost story as might be. I remember that, when lying ill of fever on one occasion,--indisposed enough to see apparition after apparition flitting across the bed-curtains, like the figures of a magic lantern posting along the darkened wall, and yet self-possessed enough to know that they were but mere pictures in the eye, and to watch them as they rose,--I set myself to determine whether they were in any degree amenable to the will, or connected by the ordinary associative links of the metaphysician. Fixing my mind on a certain object, I strove to call it up in the character, not of an image of the conceptive faculty, but of a fever-vision on the retina. The image which I pictured to myself was that of a death's head, yellow and grim, and lighted up, as if from within, amid the darkness of a burial vault. But the death's head obstinately refused to rise. I had no control, I found, over the fever imagery. And the picture that rose instead, uncalled and unexpected, was that of a coal-fire burning brightly in a grate, with a huge tea-kettle steaming cheerily over it.