Even now a troop is busy; how their shrill voices go the while! [Sidenote: Old Effie.] Old Effie I see is out to-day, quite a picturesque object, with her white cap and red shawl. With a tin can in one hand, an old reaping-hook in the other, she goes poking among the tangle. Let us see what sport she has had. She turns round at our salutation--very old, old almost as the worn rocks around. She might have been the wife of Wordsworth's "Leech-gatherer." Her can is sprawling with brown crabs; and, opening her apron, she exhibits a large black and blue lobster--a fellow such as she alone can capture. A queer woman is Effie, and an awesome. She is familiar with ghosts and apparitions. She can relate legends that have power over the superstitious blood, and with little coaxing will sing those wild Gaelic songs of hers--of dead lights on the sea, of fishing-boats going down in squalls, of unburied bodies tossing day and night upon the gray peaks of the waves, and of girls that pray God to lay them by the sides of their drowned lovers, although for them should never rise mass nor chant, and although their flesh should be torn asunder by the wild fishes of the sea. Rain is my enemy here; and at this writing I am suffering siege. For three days this rickety dwelling has stood assault of wind and rain. Yesterday a blast breached the door, and the tenement fluttered for a moment like an umbrella caught in a gust. All seemed lost; but the door was got closed again, heavily barred across, and the enemy foiled. An entrance, however, had been effected, and that portion of the attacking column which I had imprisoned by my dexterous manœuvre, maddened itself into whirlwind, rushed up the chimney, scattering my turf-fire as it went, and so escaped. Since that time the windy columns have retired to the gorges of the hills, where I can hear them howl at intervals; and the only thing I am exposed to is the musketry of the rain. How viciously the small shot peppers the walls! Here must I wait till the cloudy armament breaks up. One's own mind is a dull companion in such circumstances. A Sheridan himself--wont with his wit to brighten the feast, whose mind is a phosphorescent sea, dark in its rest, but when touched giving out a flash of splendour for response--if cooped up here would be dull as a Lincolnshire fen at midnight, unenlivened by a single Jack-o'-Lantern. Books are the only refuge on a rainy day; but in Skye bothies books are rare. [Sidenote: The "Monthly Review."] To me, however, the gods have proved kind--for in my sore need I found on a shelf here two volumes of the old _Monthly Review_, and I have sauntered through those dingy literary catacombs with considerable satisfaction. What a strange set of old fogies the writers are! To read them is like conversing with the antediluvians. Their opinions have fallen into disuse long ago, and resemble to-day the rusty armour and gimcracks of an old curiosity shop. Mr Henry Rogers has