is known to have been the ancient boundary of the possessions of the Hays, is the identical stone from which the lucky falcon started.  It was left standing as a special memorial of the defeat of the Danes at Loncarty.  Another stone famous in the Hay annals, and conspicuously placed in front of the entrance to Slains Castle, is said to be the same on which the peasant general rested after his toilsome leadership in the battle.

Our walks over the bleak moors on one side, with the heather in bloom and the blackberries in low—­lying purple clusters fringing the granite rocks, were sometimes rendered more interesting, though more dangerous, by the sudden falling of a thick white mist.  Slowly it would come at first, gathering little filmy clouds together as it were, and hovering over the gray sea in curling tufts, and then, growing strong and dense, would swoop down irresistibly, till what was clear five minutes before was impenetrably walled off, and one seemed to stand alone in a silent world of ghosts.  Or again, our walks would take us on the other side, over the Sands of Forvie, a desolate tract where nothing grows save the coarse grass called bent by the Scotch, and where the wearied eye rests on nothing but mounds of shifting sand, drearily shaped into the semblance of graves by the keen winds that blow from over the German Ocean.

This miniature desert, tradition says, was an Eden four hundred years ago, but a wicked guardian robbed the helpless orphan heiresses of it by fraud and violence, and the maidens threw a spell or weird upon it in these terms: 

  “Yf evyr maydens malysone
    Did licht upon drye lande,
  Let nocht bee funde in Furvye’s glebys
    Bot thystl, bente and sande.”

I must not forget the “Bullers,” a natural curiosity which is the boast of the neighborhood of Slains, and is moreover connected with a feat performed by a former guest and friend of one of the lords of Erroll.  We drove there in a large party, and passed through an untidy, picturesque little fishing-hamlet on our way, where the women talked to each other in Gaelic as they stood barefooted at the doors of their cabins, and where the children looked so hardy, fearless and determined that the wildest dreams of future possible achievement seemed hardly unlikely of realization in connection with any one of them.

“The Pot,” as it is locally called, is a huge rocky cavern, irregularly circular and open to the sky, into which the sea rushes through a natural archway.  A narrow pathway is left quite round the basin, from which one looks down a sheer descent of more than a hundred feet; but this is so dangerous, the earth and coarse grass that carpet it so deceptive and loose, and the wind almost always so high on this spot, that only the most foolhardy or youngest of visitors would dare in broad daylight to attempt to walk round it.  Yet it is on record that the duke of Richmond, some sixty or seventy years ago, made a bet at Lord Erroll’s dinner-table that he would ride round it after dark.  He accomplished the feat in safety.  His picture, life-size, hangs in the dining-room to this day, and as he is represented standing in all the pride of a vigorous manhood by the side of his beautiful charger, he does not seem to belie the reputation which this incident created for him in the old district of Buchan.