here could be little doubt that the old shepherd had merely seen
one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts so frequently
startle the night traveller; but the apparition now filled his whole
mind, as one vouchsafed from the spiritual world, and of strange and
frightful portent:--

"A meteor of the night of distant years,
That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld,
Musing at midnight upon prophecies."

I spent the greater part of the following day with my cousin in the
forest of Corrybhalgan, and saw two large herds of red deer on the
hills. The forest was but a shred of its former self; but the venerable
trees still rose thick and tall in some of the more inaccessible
hollows; and it was interesting to mark, where they encroached furthest
on the open waste, how thoroughly they lost the ordinary character of
the Scotch fir, and how, sending out from their short gnarled boles
immense branches, some two or three feet over the soil, they somewhat
resembled in their squat, dense proportions, and rounded contours,
gigantic bee-hives. It was of itself worth while undertaking a journey
to the Highlands, to witness these last remains of that arboreous
condition of our country to which the youngest of our geological
formations, the Peat Mosses, bear such significant witness; and which
still, largely existing as the condition of the northern countries of
continental Europe, "remains to attest," as Humboldt well remarks, "more
than even the records of history, the youthfulness of our civilisation."
I revisited at this time, before returning home, the Barony of Gruids;
but winter had not improved it: its humble features, divested of their
summer complexion, had assumed an expression of blank wretchedness; and
hundreds of its people, appalled at the time by a summons of ejection,
looked quite as depressed and miserable as its scenery.

Finlay and my friend of the Doocot Cave were no longer within reach;
but during this winter I was much in the company of a young man about
five years my senior, who was of the true stuff of which friends are
made, and to whom I became much attached. I had formed some acquaintance
with him about five years before, on his coming to the place from the
neighbouring parish of Nigg, to be apprenticed to a house-painter, who
lived a few doors from my mother's. But there was at first too great a
disparity between us for friendship; he was a tall lad, and I a wild
boy; and, tho