devastated the province of Moray, and covered over whole miles of marine beach with the spoils of land and river, than that a sea-bottom should have been elevated for their production, into a fresh-water lake, and then let down into a sea-bottom again. We find it recorded in the "Shepherd's Calendar," that after the thaw which followed the great snow-storm of 1794, there were found on a part of the sands of the Solway Frith known as the Beds of Esk, where the tide disgorges much of what is thrown into it by the rivers, "one thousand eight hundred and forty sheep, nine black cattle, three horses, two men, one woman, forty-five dogs, and one hundred and eighty hares, beside a number of meaner animals." A similar storm in an earlier time, with a soft sea-bottom prepared to receive and retain its spoils, would have formed a fresh-water stratum intercalated in a marine deposit. Rounding the promontory, we lose sight of the Bay of Laig, and find the narrow front of the island that now presents itself exhibiting the appearance of a huge bastion. The green talus slopes upwards, as its basement, for full three hundred feet; and a noble wall of perpendicular rock, that towers over and beyond for at least four hundred feet more, forms the rampart. Save towards the sea, the view is of but limited extent; we see it restricted, on the landward side, to the bold face of the bastion; and in a narrow and broken dell that runs nearly parallel to the shore for a few hundred yards between the top of the talus and the base of the rampart,--a true covered way,--we see but the rampart alone. But the dizzy front of black basalt, dark as night, save where a broad belt of light-colored sandstone traverses it in an angular direction, like a white sash thrown across a funeral robe,--the fantastic peaks and turrets in which the rock terminates atop,--the masses of broken ruins, roughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen from above, and lie scattered at its base,--the extreme loneliness of the place, for we have left behind us every trace of the human family,--and the expanse of solitary sea which it commands,--all conspire to render the scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one of those scenes in which a man feels that he is little, and that nature is great. There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin so delights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or around which the silence is so frequently broken by the harsh scream of the eagle. The sun had got far adown the sky ere we had reached the covered way at the base of the rock. All lay dark below; and the red light atop, half absorbed by the dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint and melancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the shadows.