pebbles, by adjourning to the workshop of the Portsoy lapidary, Mr. Clark, and examining under cover his polished specimens, of which I purchased for a few shillings a characteristic and elegant little set. Portsoy is peculiarly rich in minerals; and hence it reckons among its mechanics of the ordinary class, what perhaps no other village in Scotland of the same size and population possesses,--a skilful lapidary. Mr. Clark's collection of the graphic granites, serpentines, and talcose and mica schists, of the district, with their associated minerals, such as schorl, talc, asbestos, amianthus, mountain cork, steatite, and schiller spar, will be found eminently worthy a visit by the passing traveller. I made several inquiries in the village, though not, as it proved, in the right direction, regarding a poor old lady, several years dead, of whom I had known a very little considerably more than a quarter of a century before, and whose grave I would have visited, bad as the night was, had I met any one who could have pointed it out to me. But ungrateful Portsoy seemed to have forgotten poor Miss Bond, who, in all her printed letters and little stories, so rarely forgot _it_. Have any of my readers ever seen the work (in two slim volumes), "Letters of a Village Governess," published in 1814 by Elizabeth Bond, and dedicated to Sir Walter Scott? If not, and should they chance to see, as I lately did, a copy on a stall (with uncut leaves, alas! and selling dog cheap), they might possibly do worse things than buy it.[12]