old two-story house, with, what is rare in the island, a clump of trees beside it, which rises on the northern angle of the Oolitic meniscus; and after our day's hard work in the fresh sea-air, we did ample justice to the viands. Dark night had long set in ere we reached our vessel. Next day was Saturday; and it behooved my friend, the minister,--as scrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations for the islanders of Eigg as if his congregation were an Edinburgh one,--to remain on board, and study his discourse for the morrow. I found, however, no unmeet companion for my excursion in his trusty mate John Stewart. John had not very much English, and I had no Gaelic; but we contrived to understand one another wonderfully well; and ere evening I had taught him to be quite as expert in hunting dead crocodiles as myself. We reached the _Ru-Stoir_, and set hard to work with hammer and chisel. The fragments of red shale were strewed thickly along the shore for at least three quarters of a mile; wherever the red columnar rock appeared, there lay the shale, in water-worn blocks, more or less indurated; but the beach was covered over with shingle and detached masses of rock, and we could nowhere find it _in situ_. A winter storm powerful enough to wash the beach bare might do much to assist the explorer. There is a piece of shore on the eastern coast of Scotland, on which for years together I used to pick up nodular masses of lime containing fish of the Old Red Sandstone; but nowhere in the neighborhood could I find the ichthyolite bed in which they had originally formed. The storm of a single night swept the beach; and in the morning the ichthyolites lay revealed _in situ_ under a stratum of shingle which I had a hundred times examined, but which, though scarce a foot in thickness, had concealed from me the ichthyolite bed for five twelvemonths together!