concealed recess of her former
apartment, and the mouldering ruins of the peddler under the ash tree,
gave evidence to the truth of her narrative. The story was hardly wild
enough for a night so drear and a road so lonely; its ghost-heroine was
but a homely ghost-heroine, too little aware that the same familiarity
which, according to the proverb, breeds contempt when exercised by the
denizens of this world, produces similar effects when too much indulged
in by the inhabitants of another. But the arrangement and restoration of
the details of the tradition,--for they had been scattered in my mind
like the fragments of a broken fossil,--furnished me with so much
amusement, when struggling with the storm, as to shorten by at least
one-half the seven miles which intervene between Gamrie and Macduff.
Instead, however, of pressing on to Banff, as I had at first intended,
I baited for the night at a snug little inn in the latter village, which
I reached just wet enough to enjoy the luxury of a strong clear fire of
Newcastle coal.

Mrs. Longmuir had furnished me with a note of introduction to Dr. Emslie
of Banff, an intelligent geologist, familiar with the deposits of the
district; and, walking on to his place of residence next morning, in a
rain as heavy as that of the previous night, I made it my first business
to wait on him, and deliver the note. Ere, however, crossing the
Deveron, which flows between Banff and Macduff, I paused for a few
minutes in the rain, to mark the peculiar appearance presented by the
beach where the river disembogues into the frith. Occurring as a
rectangular spit in the line of the shore, with the expanded stream
widening into an estuary on its upper side, and the open sea on the
lower, it marks the scene of an obstinate contest between antagonist
forces,--the powerful sweep of the torrent, and the not less powerful
waves of the stormy north-east; and exists, in consequence, as a long
gravelly prism, which presents as steep an angle of descent to the waves
on the one side as to the current on the other. It is a true river bar,
beaten in from its proper place in the sea by the violence of the surf,
and fairly stranded. Dr. Emslie obligingly submitted to my inspection
his set of Gamrie fossils, containing several good specimens of
Pterichthys and Coccosteus, undistinguishable, like those I had seen on
the previous day, in their state of keeping, and the character of the
nodular matrices in which they l