In preparing my volume a second time for the press, I have felt rather gratified than otherwise, that, at least, much of what it contains should have been preserved. The reader will here and there find snatches of dissertation, which would perhaps not be missed if away--which, at all events, had they not been written before, would have remained unwritten now; but which I have spared, partly for the sake of the associations connected with them, and partly under the impression that the other portions of the work would have less of character if they were wanting. Some of these dissertative fragments I have, however, considerably abridged, and there were others of a similar kind in the first edition which have been wholly suppressed. In my longer stories I have, I find, exercised the same sort of liberty in filling up the outlines as that taken by the ancient historians in their earlier chapters. Livy in the the times of the Empire could write speeches for Romulus and Junius Brutus, and introduce them into his narrative as authentic; and Tacitus details as minutely, in his Life of Agricola, the deliberations of the warlike Caledonians as if he had formed one of their councils. Even the sober Hume puts arguments for and against toleration into the mouths of Cardinal Pole and his opponents which belonged to neither the men nor the age. But though I have, in some cases, given shade and colour to the original lines, in no case have I altered the character of the drawing. I have only to state further, that the reader, when he finds reference made, in the indefinite style of the traditionary historian, to the years which have elapsed since the events related took place, must add in every instance twenty additional twelvemonths to the number; the some thirty bygone years of my narratives have stretched out into half a century, and the half century into the threescore years and ten. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAGE My Old Library and its Contents--The Three Classes of Traditions--Legend of Sludach--Singular Test of Character--The Writer’s Pledge, 1 CHAPTER II. Alypos--Etymological Legends--Epic Poetry of the Middle Ages--Astorimon--The Spectre Ships--Olaus Rudbeck, 10 CHAPTER III. The Bay of Cromarty--The Old Coast Line--The Old Town--The Storms of the Five Winters--Donald Miller’s Wars with the Sea, 25 CHAPTER IV. Macbeth--Our earlier Data--The Fions of Knock-Ferril--The King’s Sons--The Obelisks of Easter Ross--Dunskaith--The Urquharts of Cromarty--Wallace--The Foray of the Clans--Paterhemon, 36 CHAPTER V.