e--An old Rhyme mended--A raised
Beach--Fossil Shells--Scotland under water at the time of the
Boulder Clays.

From circumstances that in no way call for explanation, my usual
exploratory ramble was thrown this year (1847) from the middle of July
into the middle of September; and I embarked at Granton for the north
just as the night began to count hour against hour with the day. The
weather was fine, and the voyage pleasant. I saw by the way, however, at
least one melancholy memorial of a hurricane which had swept the eastern
coasts of the island about a fortnight before, and filled the provincial
newspapers with paragraphs of disaster. Nearly opposite where the Red
Head lifts its mural front of Old Red Sandstone a hundred yards over the
beach, the steamer passed a foundered vessel, lying about a mile and a
half off the land, with but her topmast and the point of her peak over
the surface. Her vane, still at the mast-head, was drooping in the calm;
and its shadow, with that of the fresh-colored _spar_ to which it was
attached, white atop and yellow beneath, formed a well-defined
undulatory strip on the water, that seemed as if ever in the process of
being rolled up, and yet still retained its length unshortened. Every
recession of the swell showed a patch of mainsail attached to the peak:
the sail had been hoisted to its full stretch when the vessel went down.
And thus, though no one survived to tell the story of her disaster,
enough remained to show that she had sprung a leak when straining in the
gale, and that, when staggering under a press of canvas towards the
still distant shore, where, by stranding her, the crew had hoped to save
at least their lives, she had disappeared with a sudden lurch, and all
aboard had perished. I remembered having read, among other memorabilia
of the hurricane, without greatly thinking of the matter, that "a large
sloop had foundered off the Red Head,--name unknown." But the minute
portion of the wreck which I saw rising over the surface, to certify,
like some frail memorial in a churchyard, that the dead lay beneath, had
an eloquence in it which the words wanted, and at once sent the
imagination back to deal with the stern realities of the disaster, and
the feelings abroad to expatiate over saddened hearths and melancholy
homesteads, where for many a long day the hapless perished would be
missed and mourned, but where the true story of their fate, though too
surely guessed a