I passed, a little farther on, the quarry of Old Red Sandstone, with a huge bank of boulder-clay resting over it, in which I first experienced the evils of hard labor, and first set myself to lessen their weight by becoming an observer of geological phenomena. It had been deserted apparently for many years; and the debris of the clay partially covered up, in a sloping talus, the frontage of rock beneath. Old Red Sandstone and boulder-clay, a broad bar of each!--such was the compound problem which the excavation propounded to me when I first plied the tool in it,--a problem equally dark at the time in both its parts. I have since got on a very little way with the Old Red portion of the task; but alas for the boulder-clay portion of it! A bar of impenetrable shadow has rested long and obstinately over the newer deposit; and I scarce know whether the light which is at length beginning to play on its pebbly front be that of the sun or of a delusive meteor. But courage, patient hearts! the boulder-clay will one day yield up _its_ secret too. Still further on by a few hundred yards, I could have again found use for the calotype, in transferring to paper the likeness of a protuberant picturesque cliff, which, like the Giants' Graves, could have belonged, of all our Scotch deposits, to only the boulder-clay. It stands out, on the steep acclivity of a furze-covered bank, abrupt as a precipice of solid rock, and yet seamed by the rain into numerous divergent channels, with pyramidal peaks between; and, combining the perpendicularity of a true cliff with the water-scooped furrows of a yielding clay, it presents a peculiarity of aspect which strikes, by its grotesqueness, eyes little accustomed to detect the picturesque in landscape. I remember standing to gaze upon it when a mere child; and the fisher children of the neighboring town still tell that "_it has been prophesied_" it will one day fall, "and kill a man and a horse on the road below,"--a legend which shows it must have attracted _their_ notice too.