thy epistles, our respective notions regarding the true
key for laying open their more occult meanings. And, after sharing with
him in his family dinner, I again took my seat on the mail, as a chill,
raw evening was falling, and rode on, some six or eight and twenty
miles, to Campbelton. The rain pattered drearily through the night on my
bed-room window; and as frequent exposure to the wet had begun to tell
on a constitution not altogether so strong as it had once been, I
awakened oftener than was quite comfortable, to hear it. The morning,
however, was dry, though gray and sunless; and, taking an early
breakfast at the inn, I traversed the flat gravelly points of Ardersier
and Fortrose, that, projecting like moles far into the Frith, narrow the
intervening ferry to considerably less than one-third the width which it
would present were they away. The origin of these long detrital
promontories, which form, when viewed from the heights on either side,
so peculiar a feature in the landscape, and which, were they directly
opposite, instead of being set down a mile awry, would shut up the
opening altogether, has not yet been satisfactorily accounted for. One
special theory assigns their formation to the agency of the descending
tide, striking in zig-gig style, in consequence of some peculiarity of
the coast-line or of the bottom, from side to side of the Frith, and
depositing a long trail of sand and gravel, at nearly right angles with
the beach, first on the one shore and then on the other. But why the
tide, which runs in various zig-zag crossings in the course of the
Frith, should have the effect here, and nowhere else, of raising two
vast mounds, each a full mile and a quarter in length, with an average
breadth of from two to five furlongs, is by no means very apparent.
Certainly the present tides of the Frith could not have formed them, nor
could they have been elevated to their present average height of ten or
twelve feet over the flood-line in a sea standing at the existing level.
If they in reality originated in this cause, it must have been ere the
latter upheavals of the land or recessions of the sea, when the great
Caledonian Valley existed as a narrow ocean sound, swept by powerful
currents. Upon another and entirely different hypothesis, these flat
promontories have been regarded as the remains, levelled by the waves,
and gapped direct in the middle by the tide, of a vast transverse morain
of the great valley, belo