iniature desert, tradition says, was an Eden four hundred years
ago, but a wicked guardian robbed the helpless orphan heiresses of it
by fraud and violence, and the maidens threw a spell or _weird_ upon
it in these terms:

"Yf evyr maydens malysone
Did licht upon drye lande,
Let nocht bee funde in Furvye's glebys
Bot thystl, bente and sande."

I must not forget the "Bullers," a natural curiosity which is the
boast of the neighborhood of Slains, and is moreover connected with
a feat performed by a former guest and friend of one of the lords of
Erroll. We drove there in a large party, and passed through an untidy,
picturesque little fishing-hamlet on our way, where the women talked
to each other in Gaelic as they stood barefooted at the doors of
their cabins, and where the children looked so hardy, fearless and
determined that the wildest dreams of future possible achievement
seemed hardly unlikely of realization in connection with any one of
them.

"The Pot," as it is locally called, is a huge rocky cavern,
irregularly circular and open to the sky, into which the sea rushes
through a natural archway. A narrow pathway is left quite round
the basin, from which one looks down a sheer descent of more than a
hundred feet; but this is so dangerous, the earth and coarse grass
that carpet it so deceptive and loose, and the wind almost always
so high on this spot, that only the most foolhardy or youngest of
visitors would dare in broad daylight to attempt to _walk_ round it.
Yet it is on record that the duke of Richmond, some sixty or seventy
years ago, made a bet at Lord Erroll's dinner-table that he would
_ride round it after dark_. He accomplished the feat in safety. His
picture, life-size, hangs in the dining-room to this day, and as he
is represented standing in all the pride of a vigorous manhood by
the side of his beautiful charger, he does not seem to belie the
reputation which this incident created for him in the old district of
Buchan.

The peasants of this wild and primitive neighborhood, though to some
extent slightly infected by modernization, are yet very fair specimens
of the hardy, trusty clansmen of Scottish history, and the present
owners of Slains certainly give them every reason to keep up the old
bonds of affectionate interest with every one and everything belonging
to "the family." To my own observation of the ancient seat of the Hays
I owe one of the most delightful recollections of my li