gunwale in the direction of the island of Eigg, still about five miles distant, though the boat from which they rose had not yet come in sight. "Some of my poor people," said the minister, "coming to tug us ashore!" We were boarded in rather more than half an hour after,--for the sounds in the dead calm had preceded the boat by miles,--by four active young men, who seemed wonderfully glad to see their pastor; and then, amid the thickening showers, which had recommenced heavy as during the night, they set themselves to tow us into the harbor. The poor fellows had a long and fatiguing pull, and were thoroughly drenched ere, about six o'clock in the evening, we had got up to our anchoring ground, and moored, as usual, in the open tideway between _Eilan Chasteil_ and the main island. There was still time enough for an evening discourse, and the minister, getting out of his damp clothes, went ashore and preached. The evening of Sunday closed in fog and rain, and in fog and rain the morning of Monday arose. The ceaseless patter made dull music on deck and skylight above, and the slower drip, drip, through the leaky beams, drearily beat time within. The roof of my bed was luckily water-tight; and I could look out from my snuggery of blankets on the desolations of the leakage, like Bacon's philosopher surveying a tempest from the shore. But the minister was somewhat less fortunate, and had no little trouble in diverting an ill-conditioned drop that had made a dead set at his pillow. I was now a full week from Edinburgh, and had seen and done nothing; and, were another week to pass after the same manner,--as, for aught that appeared, might well happen,--I might just go home again, as I had come, with my labor for my pains. In the course of the afternoon, however, the weather unexpectedly cleared up, and we set out somewhat impatiently through the wet grass, to visit a cave a few hundred yards to the west of _Naomh Fraingh_, in which it had been said the Protestants of the island might meet for the purposes of religious worship, were they to be ejected from the cottage erected by Mr. Swanson, in which they had worshipped hitherto. We reexamined, in the passing, the pitch stone dike mentioned in a former chapter, and the charnel cave of Frances; but I found nothing to add to my former descriptions, and little to modify, save that perhaps the cave appeared less dark, in at least the outer half of its area, than it had seemed to me in the former year, when examined by torch-light, and that the straggling twilight, as it fell on the ropy sides, green with moss and mould, and on the damp bone-strewn floor, overmantled with a still darker crust, like that of a stagnant pool, seemed also to wear its tint of melancholy greenness, as if transmitted through a depth of sea-water. The cavern we had come to examine we found to be a noble arched opening in a dingy-colored precipice of augitic trap,--a cave roomy and lofty as