of this cottage, what I had frequent occasion to remark afterwards, that much of the wood used in building in the smaller and outer islands of the Hebrides must have drifted across the Atlantic, borne eastwards and northwards by the great Gulf-stream. Many of the beams and boards, sorely drilled by the Teredo navalis, are of American timber, that, from time to time, has been cast upon the shore,— a portion of it, apparently, from timber-laden vessels unfortunate in their voyage, but a portion of it, also, with root and branch still attached, bearing mark of having been swept to the sea by transatlantic rivers. Nuts and seeds of tropical plants are occasionally picked up on the beach. My friend gave me a bean or nut of the Dolichos urens, or cowitch shrub, of the West Indies, which an islander had found on the shore sometime in the previous year, and given to one of the manse children as a toy; and I attach some little interest to it, as a curiosity of the same class with the large canes and the fragment of carved wood found floating near the shores of Madeira by the brother-in-law of Columbus, and which, among other pieces of circumstantial evidence, led the great navigator to infer the existence of a western continent. Curiosities of this kind seem still more common in the northern than in the western islands of Scotland. "Large exotic nuts or seeds," says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his interesting "Tour," quoted in a former chapter, “which in Orkney are known by the name of Molucca beans, are occasionally found among the rejectamenta of the sea, especially after westerly winds. There are two kinds commonly found: the larger (of which the fishermen very generally make snuff-boxes) seem to be seeds from the great pod of the Mimosa scandens of the West Indies; the smaller seeds, from the pod of the Dolichos urens, also a native of the same region. It is probable that the currents of the ocean, and particularly that great current which issues from the

Gulf of Florida, and is hence denominated the Gulf Stream, aid very much in transporting across the mighty Atlantic these American products. They are generally quite fresh and entire, and afford an additional proof how impervious to moisture, and how imperishable, nuts and seeds generally

are."

The evening was fast falling ere the minister closed his discourse; and we had but just light enough left, on reaching the Betsey, to show us that there lay a dead sheep on the deck. It had been sent aboard to be killed by the minister's factotum, John Stewart; but John was at the evening preaching at the time, and the poor sheep, in its attempts to set itself free, had got itself entangled among the cords, and strangled itself. "Alas, alas !" exclaimed the minister, "thus ends our hope of fresh mutton for the present, and my hapless speculation as a sheep farmer for evermore." I learned from him, afterwards, over our tea, that shortly previous to the Convocation he had got his glebe,- one of the largest in Scotland,-well stocked with sheep and cattle, which he had to sell, immediately on the Disruption, in miserably bad condition, at a loss of nearly fifty per cent. He had a few sheep, however, that would not sell at all, and that remained on the glebe, in consequence, until his successor entered into possession. And he, honest man, straightway impounded them, and got them incarcerated in a dark, dirty hole, somewhat in the way Giant Despair incarcerated the pilgrims,—a thing he had quite alegal right to do, seeing that the mile-long glebe, with its many acres of luxuriant pasture, was now as much his property as it had been Mr. Swanson's a few months before, and seeing Mr. Swanson's few sheep had no right to crop his grass. But a worthy neighbor interfered,— Mr. M'Donald, of Keil, the principal tenant in the island. Mr. M'Donald,—a practical commentator on the law of kind

ness, was sorely scandalized at what he deemed the new minister's gratuitous unkindness to a brother in calamity; and, relieving the sheep, he brought them to his own farm, where he found them board and lodging on my friend's behalf, till they could be used up at leisure. And it was one of the last of this unfortunate lot that now contrived to escape from us by anticipating John Stewart. "A black beginning makes a black ending," said Gouffing Jock, an ancient border shepherd, when his only sheep, a black ewe, the sole survivor of a flock smothered in a snow-storm, was worried to death by his dogs. Then, taking down his broadsword, he added, "Come awa, my auld friend; thou and I maun e'en stock Bowerhope-Law ance mair!" Less warlike than Gouffing Jock, we were content to repeat over the dead, on this occasion, simply the first portion of his speech; and then, betaking ourselves to our cabin, we forgot all our sorrows over our tea.

6*

CHAPTER IV.

An Excursion - The Chain of Crosses-Bay of Laig-Island of Rum-Description of the Island - Superstitions banished by pure Religion- Fossil Shells Remarkable Oyster Bed-New species of Belemnite-Oölitic Shells White Sandstone Precipices - Gigantic Petrified Mushrooms-"Christabel " in Stone - Musical Sand-Jabel Nakous, or Mountain of the Bell - Experiments of Travellers at Jabel Nakous- Welsted's Account-Reg-Rawan, or the Moving Sand - The Musical Sounds inexplicable-Article on the subject in the North British Review.

THERE had been rain during the night; and when I first got on deck, a little after seven, a low stratum of mist, that completely enveloped the Scuir, and truncated both the eminence on which it stands and the opposite height, stretched like a ruler across the flat valley which indents so deeply the middle of the island. But the fogs melted away as the morning rose, and ere our breakfast was satisfactorily discussed, the last thin wreath had disappeared from around the columned front of the rock-tower of Eigg, and a powerful sun looked down on moist slopes and dank hollows, from which there arose in the calm a hazy vapor, that, while it softened the lower features of the landscape, left the bold outline relieved against a clear sky. Accompanied by our attendant of the previous day, bearing bag and hammer, we set out a little before eleven for the north-western side of the island, by a road which winds along the central hollow. My friend showed me as we went, that on the edge of an eminence, on which the traveller journeying westwards catches the last glimpse of the chapel of St. Donan, there had once been a rude cross erected, and another rude cross on an eminence on which he catches the last glimpse of the

first; and that there had thus been a chain of stations formed from sea to sea, like the sights of a land-surveyor, from one of which a second could be seen, and a third from the second, till, last of all, the emphatically holy point of the island,—the burial-place of the old Culdee,- came full in view. The unsteady devotion, that journeyed, fancy-bound, along the heights, to gloat over a dead man's bones, had its clue to carry it on in a straight line. Its trail was on the ground; it glided snake-like from cross to cross, in quest of dust; and, without its finger-posts to guide it, would have wandered devious. It is surely a better devotion that, instead of thus creeping over the earth to a mouldy sepulchre, can at once launch into the sky, secure of finding Him who once arose from one. In less than an hour we were descending on the Bay of Laig, a semicircular indentation of the coast, about a mile in length, and, where it opens to the main sea, nearly two miles in breadth; with the noble island of Rum rising high in front, like some vast breakwater; and a meniscus of comparatively level land, walled in behind by a semicircular rampart of continuous precipice, sweeping round its shores. There are few finer scenes in the Hebrides than that furnished by this island bay and its picturesque accompaniments,-none that break more unexpectedly on the traveller who descends upon it from the east; and rarely has it been seen to greater advantage than on the delicate day, so soft, and yet so sunshiny and clear, on which I paid it my first visit.

The island of Rum, with its abrupt sea-wall of rock, and its steep-pointed hills, that attain, immediately over the sea, an elevation of more than two thousand feet, loomed bold and high in the offing, some five miles away, but apparently much nearer. The four tall summits of the island rose clear against the sky like a group of pyramids; its lower slopes and precipices, variegated and relieved by graceful