We are bound for the regions of ghosts and fays, mermaids and kelpies, of great sea-snakes, and a hundred other marvels and miracles. To accomplish all this, we have nothing more to do than step on board the steam-packet that lies at the Broomielaw, or great quay at Glasgow. The volume of heavy black smoke, issuing from its nickled chimney, announces that it means to be moving on its way speedily.... Emerging from the Crinan canal, you issue forth into the Sound of Jura, and feel at once that you are in the stern and yet beautiful region of your youthful admiration. There is the heavy swell and the solemn roar of the great Atlantic. You feel the wild winds that sweep over it. You see around you only high and craggy coasts, that are bleak and naked with the lashings of a thousand tempests. All before you, are scattered rocks that emerge from the restless sea, and rocky isles, with patches of the most beautiful greensward, but with scarcely a single tree. The waves are leaping in whiteness against the cliffs, and thousands of sea-birds are floating in long lines on the billows, or skimming past you singly, and diving into the clear hissing waters as they near your vessel. One of the very first objects which arrests your senses is the Coryvreckan, or great whirlpool of the Hebrides, an awful feature in all the poetry and ballads belonging to these regions. I never visited any part of Great Britain which more completely met my anticipated ideas than this. The day was fine, but with a strong breeze. The sea was rough; the wild-fowl were flying, scudding, and diving on all hands; and, wherever the eye turned, were craggy islands-mountains of dark heath or bare splintered stone, and green, solitary slopes, where scarcely a tree or a hut was to be discovered; but now and then black cattle might be descried grazing, or flocks of sheep dotted the hill sides. Far as we could look, were naked rocks rising from the sea, that were worn almost into roundness, or scooped into hollows by the eternal action of the stormy waters. Some of them stood in huge arches, like temples of some shaggy seagod, or haunts of sea-fowl--daylight and the waves passing freely through them. Everywhere were waves, leaping in snowy foam against these rocks and against the craggy shores. It was a stern wilderness of chafing billows and of resisting stone. The rocks were principally of dark red granite, and were cracked across and across, as if by the action of fire or frost. Every thing spake to us of the wild tempests that so frequently rage through these seas....