[Sidenote: THE LEGEND OF WILLIE MILLAR.] There was a Cromarty mechanic of the last age, named Willie Millar, who used to relate a wonderful adventure which befell him in the cave. Willie was a man of fertile invention, fond of a good story, and zealous in the improvement of bad ones; but his zeal was evil spoken of--the reformations he effected in this way being regarded as little better than sinful, and his finest inventions as downright lying. There was a smithy in the place, which, when he had become old and useless, was his favourite resort. He would take up his seat on the forge each evening, regularly as the evening came, and relate to a group of delighted but too incredulous youngsters, some new passage in his wonderful autobiography; which, though it seemed long enough to stretch beyond the flood, received new accessions every night. So little, indeed, had he in common with the small-minded class who, possessed of only a limited number of narratives and ideas, go over and over these as the hands of a clock pass continually over the same figures, that, with but one exception in favour of the adventure of the cave, he hardly ever told the same story twice. There was a tradition current in Cromarty, that a town’s-man had once passed through the Dropping-Cave, until he heard a pair of tongs rattle over his head on the hearth of a farmhouse of Navity, a district of the parish which lies fully three miles from the opening; and Willie, who was, it seems, as hard of belief in such matters as if he himself had never drawn on the credulity of others, resolved on testing the story by exploring the cave. He sewed sprigs of rowan and wych-elm in the hem of his waistcoat, thrust a Bible into one pocket and a bottle of gin into the other, and providing himself with a torch, and a staff of buckthorn which had been cut at the full of the moon, and dressed without the assistance of iron or steel, he set out for the cave on a morning of midsummer. It was evening ere he returned--his torch burnt out, and his clothes stained with mould and slime, and soaked with water.