land,--had then been swept to the sea,--had been entombed deep at the bottom in a grit of Oolite,--had been heaved up to the surface, and high over it, by volcanic agencies working from beneath,--and had finally been built upon, as moles are built upon piles, by the architect that had laid down the masonry of the gigantic Scuir, in one fiery layer after another. The mountain wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of four hundred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid crossways; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig into the floor of this deep-hewn piazza, to be convinced that at least it _is_ a fact. Just at this interesting stage, however, our explorations bade fair to be interrupted. Our man who carried the pickaxe had lingered behind us for a few hundred yards, in earnest conversation with an islander; and he now came up, breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, a Roman Catholic tacksman in the neighborhood, had peremptorily warned him that the Scuir of Eigg was the property of Dr. M'Pherson of Aberdeen, not ours, and that the Doctor would be very angry at any man who meddled with it. "That message," said my friend, laughing, but looking just a little sad through the laugh, "would scarce have been sent us when I was minister of the Establishment here; but it seems allowable in the case of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little ways in which the Roman Catholic population of the island try to annoy me, now that they see my back to the wall." I was tickled with the idea of a fossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of the associative faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for the British empire, framed on the principles of the game-laws; and, just wondering what sort of disreputable vagabonds geological poachers would become under its deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the pickaxe and broke into the stonefast floor; and thence I succeeded in abstracting,--feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet got into the statute-book--some six or eight pieces of the _Pinites Eiggensis_, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot of that very ancient wood--value unknown. I trust, should the case come to a serious bearing, the members of the London Geological Society will generously subscribe half-a-crown a-piece to assist me in feeing counsel. There are more interests than mine at stake in the affair. If I be cast and committed,--I, who have poached over only a few miserable districts in Scotland,--pray, what will become of some of them,--the Lyells, Bucklands, Murchisons and Sedgwicks,--who have poached over whole continents?