In a central part of the churchyard of Nigg there is a rude undressed stone, near which the sexton never ventures to open a grave. A wild apocryphal tradition connects the erection of this stone with the times of the quarantine fleet. The plague, as the story goes, was brought to the place by one of the vessels, and was slowly flying along the ground, disengaged from every vehicle of infection, in the shape of a little yellow cloud. The whole country was alarmed, and groups of people were to be seen on every eminence, watching with anxious horror the progress of the little cloud. They were relieved, however, from their fears and the plague by an ingenious man of Nigg, who, having provided himself with an immense bag of linen, fashioned somewhat in the manner of a fowler’s net, cautiously approached the yellow cloud, and, with a skill which could have owed nothing to previous practice, succeeded in enclosing the whole of it in the bag. He then secured it by wrapping it up carefully, fold after fold, and fastening it down with pin after pin; and as the linen was gradually changing, as if under the hands of the dyer, from white to yellow, he consigned it to the churchyard, where it has slept ever since. But to our narrative. The cholera was at length introduced into Britain, and shortly after into Ireland; not, however, at any of the quarantine ports, but at places where scarcely any precautions had been taken to exclude it, or any danger apprehended; much in the manner that a beleaguered garrison is sometimes surprised at some unnoticed bastion, or untented angle, after the main points of attack have withstood the utmost efforts of the besiegers. It had previously been remarked that the disease traversed the various countries which it visited, at nearly the same pace with the inhabitants. In Persia, where there is little trade, and neither roads nor canals to facilitate intercourse, it was a whole year in passing over a distance of somewhat less than three hundred leagues; while among the more active people of Russia, it performed a journey of seven hundred in less than six months. In Britain it travelled through the interior with the celerity of the mail, and voyaged along the coasts with the speed of the trading vessels; and in a few weeks after its first appearance, it was ravaging the metropolis of England, and the southern shores of the Firth of Forth. It was introduced by some south country fishermen into the town of Wick, and a village of Sutherlandshire, in the month of July 1832; and from the latter place in the following August, into the fishing villages of the peninsula of Easter Ross. It visited Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall, Urquhart, and Rosemarkie, a few weeks after.