retina. The image which I pictured
to myself was that of a death's head, yellow and grim, and lighted up,
as if from within, amid the darkness of a burial vault. But the death's
head obstinately refused to rise. I had no control, I found, over the
fever imagery. And the picture that rose instead, uncalled and
unexpected, was that of a coal-fire burning brightly in a grate, with a
huge tea-kettle steaming cheerily over it.

In traversing the bare height which, rising on the western side of the
valley of the Boyne, owes its comparatively bold relief in the landscape
to the firmness of the primary rock which composes it, I picked up a
piece of graphic granite, bearing its inlaid characters of dark quartz
on a ground of cream-colored feldspar. This variety, however, though
occasionally found in rolled boulders in the neighborhood of Portsoy, is
not the graphic granite for which the locality is famous, and which
occurs in a vein in the mica schist of the eminence I was now
traversing, about a mile to the east of the town. The prevailing ground
of the granite of the vein is a flesh-colored feldspar; and the
thickly-marked quartzose characters with which it is set, greatly
smaller and paler than in the cream-colored stone, bear less the antique
Hebraic look, and would scarce deceive even the most credulous
antiquary. Antiquarians, however, _have_ been sometimes deceived by
weathered specimens of this graphic rock, in which the characters were
of considerable size, and restricted to thin veins, covering the surface
of a schistose groundwork. Maupertuis, during his famous journey to
Lapland, undertaken in 1737, to establish, from actual measurement, that
the degrees of latitude are longer towards the pole than at the equator,
and which demonstrated, of consequence, the true figure of the earth,
travelled thirty leagues out of his way, through a wild country covered
with snow, to examine an ancient monument, of which, he says, "the Fins
and Laplanders frequently spoke, as containing in its inscription the
knowledge of everything of which they were ignorant." He found it on the
side of a mountain, buried in snow; and ascertained, after kindling a
great fire around it, in order to lay it bare, that it was a stone of
irregular form, composed of various layers of unequal hardness, and that
the characters, which were rather more than an inch in length, were
written on "a layer of a species of flint," chiefly in two lines, with a
few