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Martorv has a specific gravity thrice as great as that of ordinary peat in consequence of the pressure of the sand. Interior Structure of Dunes. The interior structure of the dunes, the arrangement of their particles, is not, as might be expected, that of an unorganized, confused heap, but they show a strong tendency to stratification.
I had been plunging and slipping in the dark mosses for maybe two hours when, looking down from a little rise, I caught a gleam of light. Instantly my mood changed to content. It could only be a herd's cottage, where I might hope for a peat fire, a bicker of brose, and, at the worst, a couch of dry bracken.
It cannot be crossed at night, for the warders withdraw and lock on the prison side the swinging bridges of the numerous canals. These canals are seven feet deep and fourteen wide, and the banks are soft peat. It would be dangerous to try to swim them. You must procure a long plank or beam, and carry it from trench to trench.
"That place where I came down is of course the chimney. Peat does not give much smoke, and making its way out through that screen of bushes it would be so light that it would not be noticed by any one on the cliffs. Well, it's been a good morning's work a band of notorious scoundrels captured and an illicit still discovered in full work. It was a cleverly contrived place.
The lady perceived no dwellings; but Macdonald, who observed her searching gaze, pointed his glass and invited her to look through it. At first she saw nothing but a dim confusion of grey rocks and dull grass; but at length she made out a grey cottage, with a roof of turf, and a peat stack beside it. "I see one dwelling," said the lady.
"See, Hamish, my little brown horse is wearying for the air o' the hills and the spring water," and she would smile with her brows raised a little and her lips pouting. When we were on the brow of the black hill "I am thinking we will ride to the peat hags," said Margaret, "and we'll maybe be seeing Bryde," and she laughed in my face, and, indeed, after that she was always at the laughing.
I cannot help suspecting that many tusks and teeth of the mammoth, said to have been found in peat, may be as spurious as are the horns of the rhinoceros cited more than once in the "Memoirs of the Wernerian Society" as having been obtained from shell-marl in Forfarshire and other Scotch counties; yet, between the period when the mammoth was most abundant and that when it died out, there must have elapsed a long interval of ages when it was growing more and more scarce; and we may expect to find occasional stragglers buried in deposits long subsequent in date to others, until at last we may succeed in tracing a passage from the Pleistocene to the Recent fauna, by geological monuments, which will fill up the gap before alluded to as separating the era of the flint tools of Amiens and Abbeville from that of the peat of the valley of the Somme.
It may have been a few years; it may have been a period as great or even greater than the ten thousand years we are able to measure. The peat gradually displaced an early forest of giant oaks. Their stems are still there, standing rooted in the older clay. Where they once stood no trees now grow. The whole face of the land has changed.
They had slipped homewards, by little-known tracks across the peat hags; and, shamefaced and fearful of the consequences, the spirit all gone out of them, had turned their minds to oaths and alibis. They had been in trouble before, and were taken to know; and their departure sapped the O'Beirnes' resolution, whose uneasy faces as they talked together spread the contagion.
He never lifted his eyes to the sky. When he reached his home he threw himself on the skemmel drawn up to the hearth. He was sober now. His mother had been taking her Sunday afternoon's sleep on the settle, which stood at one side of the kitchen. His noisy entrance awoke her. He broke the peat with the peat-stick and kicked it into the fire. "What's come ower thee?" said Mrs.
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