The Dwarfie Stone has been a good deal undervalued by some writers, such as the historian of Orkney, Mr. Barry; and, considered simply as a work of art or labour, it certainly does not stand high. When tracing, as I lay abed, the marks of the tool, which in the harder portions of the stone are still distinctly visible, I just thought how that, armed with pick and chisel, and working as I was once accustomed to work, I could complete such another excavation to order in some three weeks or a month. But then I could not make my excavation a thousand years old, nor envelop its origin in the sun-gilt vapours of a poetic obscurity, nor connect it with the supernatural through the influence of wild, ancient traditions, nor yet encircle it with a classic halo borrowed from the undying inventions of an exquisite literary genius. The pillow I found littered over with the names of visitors; but the stone—an exceedingly compact red sandstone—had resisted the imperfect tools at the command of the traveller, usually a nail or a knife, and so there were but two of the names decipherable—that of an “H. Ross, 1735,” and that of a “P. Folster, 1830.” The rain still pattered heavily overhead, and with my geological chisel and hammer I did, to beguile the time, what I very rarely do—added my name to the others, in characters which, if both they and the Dwarfie Stone get but fair play, will be distinctly legible two centuries hence. In what state will the world then exist, or what sort of ideas will fill the head of the man who, when the rock has well-nigh yielded up its charge, will decipher the name for the last time, and inquire, mayhap, regarding the individual whom it now designates, as I did this morning when I asked, “Who was this H. Ross, and who this P. Folster?”? I remember when it would have saddened me to think that there would in all probability be as little response in the one case as in the other; but as men rise in years they become more indifferent than in early youth to “that life which wits inherit after death,” and are content to labour on and be obscure. The sun broke out in great beauty after the shower, glistening on a thousand minute runnels that came streaming down the precipices, and revealing through the thin, vapoury haze the horizontal lines of strata that bar the hillsides, like courses of ashlar in a building. I failed, however, to detect, amid the general many-pointed glitter by which the blue, gauze-like mist was bespangled, the light of the great carbuncle for which the Ward Hill has long been famous—that wondrous gem, according to Sir Walter, “that, though it gleams ruddy as a furnace to them that view it from beneath, ever becomes invisible to him whose daring foot scales the precipices whence it darts its splendour.” The Standing Stones. [Illustration: _The Standing Stones—The Ring of Brogar._]