as cloud after cloud dashed over it,
like ocean waves breaking on some low volcanic island, than it did on
this clear, breathless afternoon, in the unclouded sunshine. But the
sublimity of the moor on which Macbeth met the witches depends in no
degree on that of the "heath near Forres," whether seen in foul weather
or fair; its topography bears relation to but the mind of Shakspeare;
and neither tile-draining nor the plough will ever lessen an inch of its
area.

The limestone quarry of Clune has been opened on the edge of an
extensive moor, about three miles from the public road, where the
province of Moray sweeps upwards from the broad fertile belt of
corn-land that borders on the sea, to the brown and shaggy interior.
There is an old-fashioned bare-looking farm-house on the one side,
surrounded by a few uninclosed patches of corn; and the moorland, here
dark with heath, there gray with lichens, stretches away on the other.
The quarry itself is merely a piece of moor that has been trenched to
the depth of some five or six feet from the surface, and that presents,
at the line where the broken ground leans against the ground still
unbroken, a low uneven frontage, somewhat resembling that of a ruinous
stone-fence. It has been opened in the outcrop of an ichthyolite bed of
the Lower Old Red Sandstone, on which in this locality the thin moory
soil immediately rests, without the intervention of the common boulder
clay of the country; and the fish-enveloping nodules, which are composed
in this bed of a rich limestone, have been burnt, for a considerable
number of years, for the purposes of the agriculturist and builder.
There was a kiln smoking this evening beside the quarry; and a
few laborers were engaged with shovel and pickaxe in cutting into
the stratified clay of the unbroken ground, and throwing up its
spindle-shaped nodules on the bank, as materials for their next
burning. Antiquaries have often regretted that the sculptured marble
of Greece and Egypt,--classic urns, to whose keeping the ashes of
the dead had been consigned, and antique sarcophagi, roughened with
hieroglyphics,--should have been so often condemned to the lime-kiln by
the illiterate Copt or tasteless Mohammedan; and I could not help
experiencing a somewhat similar feeling here. The urns and sarcophagi,
many times more ancient than those of Greece and Egypt, and that told
still more wondrous stories, lay thickly ranged in this strange
catacomb,--so thi