somewhat meagre scenery of a sea-bottom in Gairloch, as seen by a human eye submerged in from two to three fathoms of water. There still continued to linger in this primitive district, at the time, several curious arts and implements, that had long become obsolete in most other parts of the Highlands, and of which the remains, if found in England or the Low country, would have been regarded by the antiquary as belonging to very remote periods. During the previous winter I had read a little work descriptive of an ancient ship, supposed to be Danish, which had been dug out of the silt of an English river, and which, among other marks of antiquity, exhibited seams caulked with moss--a peculiarity which had set at fault, it was said, the modern ship-carpenter, in the chronology of his art, as he was unaware that there had ever been a time when moss was used for such a purpose. On visiting, however, a boat-yard at Gairloch, I found the Highland builder engaged in laying a layer of dried moss, steeped in tar, along one of his seams, and learned that such had been the practice of boat-carpenters in that locality from time immemorial. I have said that the little old Highlander of the solitary shieling, whom we met on first commencing our quarrying labours beside his hut, was engaged in stripping with a pocket-knife long slender filaments from off a piece of moss-fir. He was employed in preparing these ligneous fibres for the manufacture of a primitive kind of cordage, in large use among the fishermen, and which possessed a strength and flexibility that could scarce have been expected from materials of such venerable age and rigidity as the roots and trunks of ancient trees, that had been locked up in the peat-mosses of the district for mayhap a thousand years. Like the ordinary cordage of the rope-maker, it consisted of three strands, and was employed for haulsers, the cork-bauks of herring-nets, and the lacing of sails. Most of the sails themselves were made, not of canvas, but of a woollen stuff, the thread of which, greatly harder and stouter than that of common plaid, had been spun on the distaff and spindle. As hemp and flax must have been as rare commodities of old in the western Highlands, and the Hebrides generally, as they both were thirty years ago in Gairloch, whereas moss-fir must have been abundant, and sheep, however coarse their fleeces, common enough, it seems not improbable that the old Highland fleets that fought in the "Battle of the Bloody Bay," or that, in troublous times, when Donald quarrelled with the king, ravaged the coasts of Arran and Ayrshire, may been equipped with similar sails and cordage. Scott describes the fleet of the "Lord of the Isles," in the days of the Bruce, as consisting of "proud galleys," "streamered with silk and tricked with gold." I suspect he would have approved himself a truer antiquary, though mayhap worse poet, had he described it as composed of very rude carvels, caulked with moss, furnished with