and roars river-broad into the sea, making turbid the azure. Then I have my amusements in this solitary place. The mountains are of course open, and this morning, at dawn, a roe swept past me like the wind, with its nose to the dewy ground--"tracking," they call it here. Above all, I can wander on the ebbed beach. Hogg speaks of that "Undefined and mingled hum, Voice of the desert, never dumb." But far more than the murmuring and insecty air of the moorland does the wet _chirk-chirking_ of the living shore give one the idea of crowded and multitudinous life. [Sidenote: Hunting razor-fish.] Did the reader ever hunt razor-fish?--not sport like tiger-hunting, I admit; yet it has its pleasures and excitements, and can kill a forenoon for an idle man agreeably. On the wet sands yonder the razor-fish are spouting like the fountains at Versailles on _fête_ day. The shy fellow sinks on discharging his watery _feu de joie_. If you are quickly after him through the sand, you catch him, and then comes the tug of war. Address and dexterity are required. If you pull vigorously, he slips out of his sheath a "mother-naked" mollusc, and escapes. If you do your spiriting gently, you drag him up to light, a long thin case, with a white fishy bulb protruding at one end like a root. Rinse him in sea water, toss him into your basket, and plunge after another watery flash. These razor-fish are excellent eating, the people say, and when used as bait no fish that swims the ocean stream--cod, whiting, haddock, flat skate, broad-shouldered crimson bream--no, not the detested dog-fish himself, this summer swarming in every Loch and becursed by every fisherman--can keep himself off the hook, and in an hour your boat is laden with glittering spoil. Then, if you take your gun to the low islands--and you can go dry-shod at ebb of tide--you have your chance of sea-fowl. Gulls of all kinds are there, dookers and divers of every description, flocks of shy curlews, and specimens of a hundred tribes to which my limited ornithological knowledge cannot furnish a name. The solan goose yonder falls from heaven into the water like a meteor-stone. See the solitary scart, with long narrow wing and outstretched neck, shooting towards some distant promontory. Anon, high above head, come wheeling a covey of lovely sea-swallows. You fire, one flutters down, never more to skim the horizon or to dip in the sea-sparkle. Lift it up; is it not beautiful? The wild, keen eye is closed, but you see the delicate slate-colour of the wings, and the long tail-feathers white as the creaming foam. There is a stain of blood on the breast, hardly brighter than the scarlet of its beak and feet. Lay it down, for its companions are dashing round and round, uttering harsh cries of rage and sorrow; and had you the heart, you could shoot them one by one. At ebb of tide wild-looking children, from turf cabins on the hill-side, come down to hunt shell-fish.