thirteen hundred feet high. It was in flood at this time from the melting of the snow, and the late rains; and what was most remarkable, an arch of snow covered the narrow glen from which it tumbled over the rocks. We approached so near to the cataract as to know that there was no other lake or stream; and then we had to climb among huge rocks, varying from one to ten tons, and to catch hold of the stones or fragments that projected, while we ascended in an angle of seventy or eighty degrees. A little before four o'clock we go to the top of the mountain, which I knew to be Brae Riach, or the speckled mountain. Here we found the highest well, which we afterwards learned was called Well Dee, and other five copious fountains, which make a considerable stream before they fall over the precipice. We sat down completely exhausted, at four o'clock P.M., and drank of the highest well, which we found to be four thousand and sixty feet above the level of the sea; and whose fountain was only thirty-five degrees of heat on the 17th of July, or three degrees above the freezing-point. We mixed some good whisky with this water, and recruited our strength [a very judicious proceeding]. Then we poured as a libation into the fountain a little of the excel

lent whisky which our landlord had brought along with him [a very foolish proceeding]. After resting half an hour, we ascended to the top of Brae Riach at five P.M., and found it to be four thousand two hundred and eighty feet above the level of the sea.

I must not leave this mountain desert without asking attention to a peculiar feature in the hills connected with a disastrous history. In many places the declivities are seamed with trenches some forty or fifty feet deep, appearing as if they were made by a gigantic ploughshare which, instead of sand, casts up huge masses of rock on either side, in parallel mounds, like the moraines of a glacier. There are many of these furrows on the side of Ben Muich Dhui nearest to the Dee. Though I had long noticed them, it was not until I happened to be in that district, immediately after the great floods of 1829, that I was forcibly told of the peculiar cause of this appearance. The old furrows were as they had been before -the stones, grey, weather-beaten, and covered with lichen, while heather and wild-flowers grew in the interstices. But among them were new scaurs, still like fresh wounds, with the stones

* Dr Skene Keith's 'Survey of Aberdeenshire,' p. 644.

showing the sharpness of late fracture, and no herbage covering the blood-red sand. It was clear, from the venerable appearance of the older scaurs, that only at long intervals do the elements produce this formidable effect-at least many years had passed since the last instance before 1829 had occurred. The theory of the phenomenon appeared to be pretty simple. Each spring is a sort of stone cistern, which, through its peculiar duct, sends forth to one part of the surface of the earth the water it receives from another. If, through inordinately heavy falls of rain, there be a great volume of water pressing on the entrance tubes, the expansive force of the water in the cistern increases in that accumulating ratio which is practically exemplified in the hydraulic press, and the whole mass of water bursts forth from the side of the mountain, as if it were a staved barrel, rending rocks, and scattering their shattered fragments around like dust. Hence, we may presume, arose these fierce pulsations which made the rivers descend wave on wave. Hence, too, the assertions of some of the people of the district, that they heard and saw a piece of the mountain of Ben Avon fall down. If this be a just explanation of the cause why the rises in the rivers were instantaneous,

while the downfall of rain which caused them was continuous, then it is a fact that in the rocky recesses of those mountains there are great tanks which may at any time burst forth on a rainfall, exceeding perhaps but by a few inches some specific height-just as a mine explodes when the ignition of the train reaches it.

That deluge was a memorable epoch in the strath of the Dee, and in all others watered by streams descending from the northern Grampians. People speaking of family events there used to particularise them as having occurred before or after "the flood." It is good that such an event should be remembered and its special phenomena studied, for what has occurred once may occur again. I remember well to what a terrible ordeal it subjected the kindly stately lady of the old house on the brink of the river, renowned for its abounding birches. She who, when vagrant kinsmen arrived soiled and tired and hungry at her hospitable door at utterly untimely hours, had not the heart to administer any more severe rebuke than a recommendation not to arrive after midnight, had on that dreadful night of the 3d of August to summon the iron nerve of her warlike race. It was she who had to give courage and hope to domestic and guest while the tor

rent which cut them off from human intercourse roared around them madder and madder every hour, as if furiously chafing for its prey. The place of refuge was naturally the tower with the vaulted dining-room; but even this mass of stone, which seemed built to endure with the crust of the earth, shivered from its foundation before the rush of the waters and the trees and great stones which, like a besieging enemy, they cast against it, and nothing seemed more likely than that at any time the whole might come down with a crash. When the subsidence of the waters permitted the mistress of the mansion to walk through her drenched and desolated grounds, her little dog fell a-yelping at the foot of a tree, and, looking up, she saw sticking in its fork a dead fawn. It was a neat enough antithesis to this that a neighbouring peasant-woman caught a trout in her platerack. It all reminded one of our school friend the fables of the Metamorphoses, and

"Ille supra segetes, aut mersæ columina villæ

Navigat; hic summa piscem deprendit in ulmo." Johnson said he would like to see a shipwreck from Slains Castle-not, as he explains himself, that he would desire such a thing to be performed for his gratification, but if a shipwreck did occur