in the Moss of the Willows
"for perhaps half a century." There was positive anger in the tone of my
uncle's reply. "Half a century, Sir!!" he exclaimed; "was the elk a
native of Scotland half a century ago? There is no notice of the elk,
Sir, in British history. That horn must have lain in the Moss of the
Willows for thousands of years!" "Ah, ha, James, ah, ha," ejaculated the
neighbour, with a sceptical shake of the head; but as neither he nor any
one else dared meet my uncle on historical ground, the controversy took
end with the ejaculation. I soon added to the horn of the elk that of a
roe, and part of that of a red deer, found in the same ravine; and the
neighbours, impressed by Uncle James's view, used to bring strangers to
look at them. At length, unhappily, a relation settled in the south, who
had shown me kindness, took a fancy to them; and, smit by the charms of
a gorgeous paint-box which he had just sent me, I made them over to him
entire. They found their way to London, and were ultimately lodged in
the collection of some obscure virtuoso, whose locality or name I have
been unable to trace.

The Cromarty Sutors have their two lines of caves--an ancient line
hollowed by the waves many centuries ago, when the sea stood, in
relation to the land, from fifteen to thirty feet higher along our
shores than it does now; and a modern line, which the surf is still
engaged in scooping out. Many of the older caves are lined with
stalactites, deposited by springs that, filtering through the cracks and
fissures of the gneiss, find lime enough in their passage to acquire
what is known as a _petrifying_, though, in reality, only an incrusting
quality. And these stalactites, under the name of "white stones made by
the water," formed of old--as in that Cave of Slains specially mentioned
by Buchanan and the Chroniclers, and in those caverns of the Peak so
quaintly described by Cotton--one of the grand marvels of the place.
Almost all the old gazetteers sufficiently copious in their details to
mention Cromarty at all, refer to its "Dropping Cave" as a marvellous
marble-producing cavern; and this "Dropping Cave" is but one of many
that look out upon the sea from the precipices of the southern Sutor, in
whose dark recesses the drops ever tinkle, and the stony ceilings ever
grow. The wonder could not have been deemed a great or very rare one by
a man like the late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, well known from his
travels in Iceland