A visit to Loch Coruisk had for some little time been meditated; and in the evening of the day on which the otter was slain the boat was dragged from its shed down towards the sea, launched, and brought round to the rude pier, where it was moored for the night. We went to bed early, for we were to rise with the sun. We got up, breakfasted, and went down to the pier where two or three sturdy fellows were putting oars and rowlocks to rights, tumbling in huge stones for ballast, and carefully stowing away a couple of guns and a basket of provisions. In about an hour we were fairly afloat; the broad-backed fellows bent to their oars, and soon the house began to dwindle in the distance, the irregular winding shores to gather into compact masses, and the white cliffs, which we knew to be a couple of miles inland, to come strangely forward, and to overhang the house and the surrounding stripes of pasturage and clumps of birchwood. [Sidenote: Loch Eishart.] On a fine morning there is not in the whole world a prettier sheet of water than Loch Eishart. Everything about it is wild, beautiful, and lonely. You drink a strange and unfamiliar air. You seem to be sailing out of the nineteenth century away back into the ninth. You are delighted, and there is no remembered delight with which you can compare the feeling. Over the Loch the Cuchullins rise crested with tumult of golden mists; the shores are green behind; and away out, towards the horizon, the Island of Rum--ten miles long at the least--shoots up from the flat sea like a pointed flame. It is a granite mass, you know, firm as the foundations of the world; but as you gaze the magic of morning light makes it a glorious apparition--a mere crimson film or shadow, so intangible in appearance you might almost suppose it to exist on sufferance, and that a breath could blow it away. Between Rum, fifteen miles out yonder, and the shores drawing together and darkening behind, with the white cliffs coming forward to stare after us, the sea is smooth, and flushed with more varied hues than ever lived on the changing opal--dim azures, tender pinks, sleek emeralds. It is one sheet of mother-of-pearl. The hills are silent. The voice of man has not yet awoke on their heathery slopes. But the sea, literally clad with birds, is vociferous. They make plenty of noise at their work, these fellows. Darkly the cormorant shoots across our track. The air is filled with a confused medley of sweet, melancholy, and querulous notes. As we proceed, a quick head ducks; a troop of birds sinks suddenly to reappear far behind, or perhaps strips off the surface of the water, taking wing with a shrill cry of complaint. Occasionally, too, a porpoise, or "fish that hugest swims the ocean stream," heaves itself slowly out of the element, its wet sides flashing for a moment in the sunlight, and then heeling lazily over, sinks with never a ripple. As we approached the Strathaird