mineral springs of the Strath have their rise, and to which they owe their peculiar qualities. After walking on for about eight miles, through noble woods and a lovely country, I struck from off the high road at the pretty little village of Evanton, and pursued the course of the river Auldgrande, first through intermingled fields and patches of copsewood, and then through a thick fir wood, to where the bed of the stream contracts from a boulder-strewed bottom of ample breadth, to a gloomy fissure, so deep and dark, that in many places the water cannot be seen, and so narrow, that the trees which shoot out from the opposite sides interlace their branches atop. Large banks of the gray boulder-clay, laid open by the river, and charged with fragments of dingy sandstone and dark-colored breccia, testify, along the lower reaches of the stream, to the near neighborhood of the ichthyolitic member of the Old Red; but where the banks contract, we find only its lowest member, the Great Conglomerate. This last is by far the most picturesque member of the system,--abrupt and bold of outline in its hills, and mural in its precipices. And nowhere does it exhibit a wilder or more characteristic beauty than at the tall narrow portal of the Auldgrande, where the river,--after wailing for miles in a pent-up channel, narrow as one of the lanes of old Edinburgh, and hemmed in by walls quite as perpendicular, and nearly twice as lofty,--suddenly expands, first into a deep brown pool, and then into a broad tumbling stream, that, as if permanently affected in temper by the strict severity of the discipline to which its early life had been subjected, frets and chafes in all its after course, till it loses itself in the sea. The banks, ere we reach the opening of the chasm, have become steep, and wild, and densely wooded; and there stand out on either hand, giant crags, that plant their iron feet in the stream; here girdled with belts of rank succulent shrubs, that love the damp shade and the frequent drizzle of the spray; and there hollow and bare, with their round pebbles sticking out from the partially decomposed surface, like the piled-up skulls in the great underground cemetery of the Parisians. Massy trees, with their green fantastic roots rising high over the scanty soil, and forming many a labyrinthine recess for the frog, the toad, and the newt, stretch forth their gnarled arms athwart the stream. In front of the opening, with but a black deep pool between, there lies a midway bank of huge stones. Of these, not a few of the more angular masses still bear, though sorely worn by the torrent, the mark of the blasting iron, and were evidently tumbled into the chasm from the fields above. But in the chasm there was no rest for them, and so the arrowy rush of the water in the confined channel swept them down till they dropped where they now lie, just where the widening bottom first served to dissipate the force of the current. And over the sullen