but we have appealed to our geological friend, who states, in that emphatic way which scientific people adopt, that these irregular crags are made of millstone grit, and that the fantastic shapes are due to long exposure to weather and the unequal hardness of the rock.  Our guide accompanied us first to the top of a great rock, which he called Mount Pisgah, from which we could see on one side a wilderness of bare moors and mountains, and on the other a fertile valley, interspersed with towns and villages as far as the eye could reach.  Here the guide told my brother that he could imagine himself to be like Moses of old, who from Pisgah’s lofty height viewed the Promised Land of Canaan on one side, and the wilderness on the other!  But we were more interested in the astonishing number of rocks around us than in the distant view, and when our guide described them as the “finest freak of nature of the rock kind in England,” we thoroughly endorsed his remarks.  We had left our luggage at the caretaker’s house, which had been built near the centre of this great mass of stones in the year 1792, by Lord Grantley, to whom the property belonged, from the front door of which, we were told, could be seen, on a clear day, York Minster, a distance of twenty-eight miles as the crow flies.  As may be imagined, it was no small task for the guide to take us over fifty acres of ground and to recite verses about every object of interest he showed us, some of them from his book and some from memory.  But as we were without our burdens we could follow him quickly, while he was able to take us at once to the exact position where the different shapes could be seen to the best advantage.  How long it would have taken that gentleman we met near Loch Lomond in Scotland who tried to show us “the cobbler and his wife,” on the top of Ben Arthur, from a point from which it could not be seen, we could not guess, but it was astonishing how soon we got through the work, and were again on our way to find “fresh fields and pastures new.”

[Illustration:  THE HIGH ROCK.]

We saw the “Bulls of Nineveh,” the “Tortoise,” the “Gorilla,” and the “Druids’ Temple”—­also the “Druids’ Reading-desk,” the “Druids’ Oven,” and the “Druid’s Head.”  Then there was the “Idol,” where a great stone, said to weigh over two hundred tons, was firmly balanced on a base measuring only two feet by ten inches.  There was the usual Lovers’ Leap, and quite a number of rocking stones, some of which, although they were many tons in weight, could easily be rocked with one hand.  The largest stone of all was estimated to weigh over one hundred tons, though it was only discovered to be movable in the year 1786.  The “Cannon Rock” was thirty feet long, and, as it was perforated with holes, was supposed to have been used as an oracle by the Ancients, a question asked down a hole at one end being answered by the gods through the priest or priestess hidden from view at the other.  The different recesses, our guide