“There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and the day mellowed as it advanced into one of those delightful days of early spring which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water, nor a cloud in the sky; and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight on the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards; and then, as reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side, like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wevis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snows of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiselled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple.”—_Old Red Sandstone_, pp. 6, 7. In raising from its bed the large mass of strata which the gunpowder had loosened, on the surface of the solid stone, our young quarrier descried the ridged and furrowed ripple marks which the tide leaves upon every sandy shore, and he wondered what had become of the waves that had thus fretted the solid rock, and of what element they had been composed. His admiration was equally excited by a circular depression in the sandstone, “broken and flawed in every direction, as if it had been the bottom of a pool recently dried up, which had shrunk and split in the hardening.” And before the day closed, a series of large stones had rolled down from the clay, “all rounded and water-worn, as if they had been tossed in the sea or the bed of a river for hundreds of years.” Was the clay which enclosed them created on the rock upon which it lay? No workman ever manufactures a half-worn article!—were the ejaculations of the geologist at his alphabet. Our author and his companions were soon removed to an easier wrought quarry, and one more pregnant with interest, which had been opened “in a lofty wall of cliffs that overhangs the northern shore of the Moray Frith.” Here the geology of the district exhibited itself in section.