anitic boulder
in the neighbourhood of the town, known for ages as the Clach Malloch,
or Cursed Stone, stands so exactly in the line of low water, that the
larger stream-tides of March and September lay dry its inner side, but
never its outer one;--round the outer side there are always from two to
four inches of water; and such had been the case for at least a hundred
years before, in his father's and grandfather's days--evidence enough of
itself, I have heard him say, that the relative levels of sea and land
were not altering; though during the lapsed century the waves had so
largely encroached on the low flat shores, that elderly men of his
acquaintance, long since passed away, had actually held the plough when
young where they had held the rudder when old. He used, too, to point
out to me the effect of certain winds upon the tides. A strong hasty
gale from the east, if coincident with a spring-tide, sent up the waves
high upon the beach, and cut away whole roods of the soil; but the gales
that usually kept larger tides from falling during ebb were prolonged
gales from the west. A series of these, even when not very high, left
not unfrequently from one to two feet water round the Clach Malloch,
during stream-tides, that would otherwise have laid its bottom bare--a
proof, he used to say, that the German Ocean, from its want of breadth,
could not be heaped up against our coasts to the same extent, by the
violence of a very powerful east wind, as the Atlantic by the force of a
comparatively moderate westerly one. It is not improbable that the
philosophy of the Drift Current, and of the apparently reactionary Gulf
Stream, may be embodied in this simple remark.

The woods on the lower slopes of the hill, when there was no access to
the zones covered save at low ebb by the sea, furnished me with
employment of another kind. I learned to look with interest on the
workings of certain insects, and to understand some of at least their
simpler instincts. The large Diadem Spider, which spins so strong a web,
that, in pressing my way through the furze thickets, I could hear its
white silken cords crack as they yielded before me, and which I found
skilled, like an ancient magician, in the strange art of rendering
itself invisible in the clearest light, was an especial favourite;
though its great size, and the wild stories I had read about the bite of
its cogener the tarantula, made me cultivate its acquaintance somewhat
at a distanc