hich it was the special ambition
of this law-lord of the last century to create; and which, did it
produce only its famed snuff-boxes, with the invisible hinges, would be
rather a more valuable boon to the country than that secured to it by
those law-lords of our own days, who at one fell blow disestablished the
national religion of Scotland, and broke off the only handle by which
their friends the politicians could hope to _manage_ the country's old
vigorous Presbyterianism. Meanwhile it was becoming apparent that the
man with the apron had as shrewdly anticipated the character of the
coming night as if he had been soberer. The sun, ere its setting,
disappeared in a thick leaden haze, which enveloped the whole heavens;
and twilight seemed posting on to night a full hour before its time. I
settled a very moderate bill, and set off under the cliffs at a round
pace, in the hope of scaling the hill, and gaining the high road atop
which leads to Macduff, ere the darkness closed. I had, however,
miscalculated my distance; I, besides, lost some little time in the
opening of the deep ravine to which I have already referred as that in
which possibly the fish-beds may be found cropping out; and I had got
but a little beyond the gray ecclesiastical ruin, with its lonely
burying-ground, when the tempest broke and the night fell.

One of the last objects which I saw, as I turned to take a farewell look
of the bay of Gamrie, was the magnificent promontory of Troup Head,
outlined in black on a ground of deep gray, with its two terminal stacks
standing apart in the sea. And straightway, through one of those tricks
of association so powerful in raising, as if from the dead, buried
memories of things of which the mind has been oblivious for years, there
started up in recollection the details of an ancient ghost-story, of
which I had not thought before for perhaps a quarter of a century. It
had been touched, I suppose, in its obscure, unnoted corner, as Ithuriel
touched the toad, by the apparition of the insulated stacks of Troup,
seen dimly in the thickening twilight over the solitary burying-ground.
For it so chances that one of the main incidents of the story bears
reference to an insulated sea-stack; and it is connected altogether,
though I cannot fix its special locality, with this part of the coast.
The story had been long in my mother's family, into which it had been
originally brought by a great-grandfather of the writer, who quit