The declining sun warned me that I had lingered rather longer than was prudent among the ichthyolites of Clune; and so, striking in an eastern direction across a flat moor, through which I found the schistose gneiss of the district protruding in masses resembling half-buried boulders, I entered the forest of Darnaway. There was no path, and much underwood, and I enjoyed the luxury of steering my course, out of sight of road and landmark, by the sun, and of being not sure at times whether I had skill enough to play the part of the bush-ranger under his guidance. A sultry day had clarified and cooled down into a clear, balmy evening; the slant beam was falling red on a thousand tall trunks,--here gleaming along some bosky vista, to which the white silky wood-moths, fluttering by scores, and the midge and the mosquito dancing by myriads, imparted a motty gold-dust atmosphere; there penetrating in straggling rays far into some gloomy recess, and resting in patches of flame, amid the darkness, on gnarled stem, or moss-cushioned stump, or gray beard-like lichen. I dislodged, in passing through the underwood, many a tiny tenant of the forest, that had a better right to harbor among its wild raspberries and junipers than I had to disturb them,--velvety night-moths, that had sat with folded wings under the leaves, awaiting the twilight, and that now took short blind flights of some two or three yards, to get out of my way,--and robust, well-conditioned spiders, whose elastic, well-tightened lines snapped sharp before me as I pressed through, and then curled up on the scarce perceptible breeze, like broken strands of wool. But every man, however Whiggish in his inclinations, entertains a secret respect for the powerful; and though I passed within a few feet of a large wasps' nest, suspended to a jutting bough of furze, the wasps I took especial care _not_ to disturb. I pressed on, first through a broad belt of the forest, occupied mainly by melancholy Scotch firs; next through an opening, in which I found an American-looking village of mingled cottages, gardens, fields and wood; and then through another broad forest-belt, in which the ground is more varied with height and hollow than in the first, and in which I found only forest trees, mostly oaks and beeches. I heard the roar of the Findhorn before me, and premised I was soon to reach the river; but whether I should pursue it upwards or downwards, in order to find the ferry at Sluie, was more than I knew. There lay in my track a beautiful hillock, that reclines on the one side to the setting sun, and sinks sheer on the other, in a mural sandstone precipice, into the Findhorn. The trees open over it, giving full access to the free air and the sunshine; and I found it as thickly studded over with berries as if it had been the special care of half a dozen gardeners. The red light fell yet redder on the thickly inlaid cranberries and stone-brambles of the slope, and here and there, though so late in the season, on a patch of wild strawberries; while over all, dark, delicate blueberries, with their flour-bedusted coats, were studded as profusely as if they had been peppered over it by a hailstone cloud. I have seldom seen such a school-boy's paradise, and I was just thinking what a rare discovery I would have deemed it had I made it thirty years sooner, when I heard a whooping in the wood, and four little girls, the eldest scarcely eleven, came bounding up to the hillock, their lips and fingers already dyed purple, and dropped themselves down among the berries with a shout. They were sadly startled to find they had got a companion in so solitary a recess; but I succeeded in convincing them that they were in no manner of danger from him; and on asking whether there was any of them skilful enough to show me the way to Sluie, they told me they all lived there, and were on their way home from school, which they attended at the village in the forest. Hours had elapsed since the master had _let them go_, but in so fine an evening the berries wouldn't, and so they were still in the wood. I accompanied them to Sluie, and was ferried over the river in a salmon coble. There is no point where the Findhorn, celebrated among our Scotch streams for the beauty of its scenery, is so generally interesting as in the neighborhood of this village; forest and river,--each a paragon in its kind,--uniting for several miles together what is most choice and characteristic in the peculiar features of both.