With fire and sword thy walks were swept:
Exploded mines thy streets had heaped
In hills of rubbish; they had been
Traversed by gabion and fascine,
With cannon lowering in the rear
In dark array, - a deadly tier,—
Whose thunder-clouds, with fiery breath,
Sent far around their iron death;
The bursting shell, in fragments flung
Athwart the skies, at midnight sung,
Or, on its airy pathway sent,
Its meteors sweep the firmament.
Thy castle, towering o'er the shore,
Reeled on its rock amidst the roar
Of thousand thunders, for it stood
In circle of a fiery flood;

And crumbling masses fiercely sent
From its high frowning battlement,
Smote by the shot and whistling shell,

With groan and crash in ruin fell.

Through desert streets the mourner passed,
Midst walls that spectral shadows cast,
Like some fair spirit wailing o'er
The faded scenes it loved of yore;
No human voice was heard to bless
That place of waste and loneliness.

I saw at eve the night-bird fly,
And vulture dimly flitting by,
To revel o'er each morsel stolen

From the cold corse, all black and swoln

That on the shattered ramparts lay,

Of him who perished yesterday,

Of him whose pestilential steam

Rose reeking on the morning beam, -
Whose fearful fragments, nearly gone,

Were blackening from the bleaching bone.

The house-dog bounded o'er cach scene
Where cisterns had so lately been:
Away in frantic haste he sprung,
And sought to cool his burning tongue.
He howled, and to his famished cry
The dreary echoes gave reply;

And owlet's dirge, through shadows dim,

Rolled back in sad response to him."

The father was succeeded in his parish by the brother of Malcolm, a gentleman to whom, during my stay in Orkney, I took the liberty of introducing myself in his snug little Free Church manse at the head of the bay, and in whose possession I found the only portrait of the poet which exists. It is that of a handsome and interesting looking young man, though taken not many years before his death; for, like the greater number of his class, he did not live to be an old one, dying under forty. His brother the clergyman kindly accompanied me to two quarries in the neighborhood of his new domicil, which I found, like almost all the dry-stone fences of the district, speckled with scales, occipital plates, and gill-covers, of Osteolepides and Dipteri, but containing no entire ichthyolites. He had taken his side in the Church controversy, he told me, firmly, but quietly; and when the Disruption came, and he found it necessary to quit the old manse, which had been a home to his family for well nigh two generations, and in which both he and his brother had been born, he scarce knew what his people were to do, nor in what proportion he was to have followers among them. Somewhat to his surprise, however, they came out with him almost to a man; so that his successor in the parish church had sometimes, he understood, to preach to congregations scarcely exceeding half a dozen. I had learned elsewhere how thoroughly Mr. Malcolm was loved and respected by his parishioners; and that unconsciousness on his own part of the strength of their affection

and esteem, which his statement evinced, formed, I thought, a very pleasing trait, and one that harmonized well with the finely-toned unobtrusiveness and unconscious elegance which characterized the genius of his deceased brother. A little beyond the Free Church manse the road ascends between stone walls, abounding in fragments of ichthyolites, weathered blue by exposure to the sun and wind; and the top of the eminence forms the water-shed in this part of the Mainland, and introduces the traveller to a scene entirely new. The prospect is of considerable extent; and, what seems strange in Orkney, nowhere presents the traveller, - though it contains its large inland lake, with a glimpse of the sea.

CHAPTER XII.

Hills of Orkney · -Their Geologic Composition

Stromness - Geology of the District -"Seeking beasts"-Conglomerate in contact with Granite — A palæozoic Hudson's Bay - Thickness of Conglomerate of Orkney - Oldest Vertebrate yet discovered in Orkney Its Size Figure of a characteristic plate of the Asterolepis - Peculiarity of Old Red Fishes Length of the Asterolepis - A rich Ichthyolite Bed - Arrangement of the Layers - Queries as to the Cause of it - Minerals - An abandoned Mine - A lost Vessel - Kelp for Iodine A dangerous Coast Shipwreck Hospitality - Stromness Museum Dipterus - Their Resemblances and Differences - Visit to a remarkable Stack - Paring the Soil for Fuel, and consequent Barrenness

Incidents of

- Diplopterus mistaken for

-

Description of the

Height to which the Surf rises.

THE Orkneys, like the mainland of Scotland, exhibit their higher hills and precipices on their western coasts: the Ward Hill of Hoy attains to an elevation of sixteen hundred feet; and there are some of the precipices which skirt the island of which it forms so conspicuous a feature, that rise sheer over the breakers from eight hundred to a thousand. Unlike, however, the arrangement on the mainland, it is the newer rocks that attain to the higher elevations; the heights of Hoy are composed of that arenaceous upper member of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, the last formed of the Paleozoic deposits of Orkney, — which overlies the ichthyolitic flagstones and shales of Caithness at Dunnet Head, and the ichthyolitic nodular beds of Inverness, Ross, and Cromarty, at Culloden, Tarbet Ness, within the Northern Sutor, and along the bleak ridge of the Maolbuie. It is simply a tall upper story of the formation, erected along the western line of coast in the Orkneys, which the eastern line wholly wants. Its screen of hills forms a noble back

ground to the prospect which opens on the traveller as he ascends the eminence beyond the Free Church manse of Frith and Stennis. A large lake, bare and treeless, like all the other lakes and lochs of Orkney, but picturesque of outline, and divided into an upper and lower sheet of water by two low, long promontories, that jut out from opposite sides, and so nearly meet as to be connected by a threadlike line of road, half mound, half bridge, occupies the middle distance. There are moory hills and a few cottages in front; and on the promontories, conspicuous in the landscape, from the relief furnished by the blue ground of the surrounding waters, stand the tall stones of Stennis, - one group on the northern promontory, the other on the south. A gray old-fashioned house, of no very imposing appearance, rises between the road and the lake. It is the house of Stennis, or Turmister, in which Scott places some of the concluding scenes of the "Pirate," and from which he makes Cleveland and his fantastic admirer Jack Bunce witness the final engagement, in the bay of Stromness, between the Halcyon sloop of war and the savage Goffe. Nor does it matter anything that neither sea nor vessels can be seen from the house of Turmister: the fact which would be so fatal to a dishonest historian tells with no effect against the honest "maker," responsible for but the management of his tale.

1

I got on to Stromness; and finding, after making myself comfortable in my inn, that I had a fine bright evening still before me, longer by some three or four degrees of north latitude than the July evenings of Edinburgh, I set out, hammer in hand, to explore. Stromness is a long, narrow, irregular strip of a town, fairly thrust by a steep hill into the sea, on which it encroaches in a broken line of wharf-like bulwarks, along which, at high water, vessels of a hundred tons burden float so immediately beside the houses, that