Well sung the Ayrshire ploughman, when musing on the great truth that the present scene of being "is surely not the last,"--a truth corroborated since his day by the analogies of a new science,-- "The poor, oppressed, honest man, Had never sure been born, Had not there been some recompense To comfort those that mourn." It was Sabbath, but the morning rose like a hypochondriac wrapped up in his night-clothes,--gray in fog, and sad with rain. The higher grounds of the island lay hid in clouds, far below the level of the central hollow; and our whole prospect from the deck was limited to the nearer slopes, dank, brown, and uninhabited, and to the rough black crags that frown like sentinels over the beach. Now the rime thickened as the rain pattered more loudly on the deck; and even the nearer stacks and precipices showed as unsolid and spectral in the cloud as moonlight shadows thrown on a ground of vapor; anon it cleared up for a few hundred yards, as the shower lightened; and then there came in view, partially at least, two objects that spoke of man,--a deserted boat harbor, formed of loosely piled stone, at the upper extremity of a sandy bay; and a roofless dwelling beside it, with two ruinous gables rising over the broken walls. The entire scene suggested the idea of a land with which man had done for ever;--the vapor-enveloped rocks,--the waste of ebb-uncovered sand,--the deserted harbor,--the ruinous house,--the melancholy rain-fretted tides eddying along the strip of brown tangle in the foreground,--and, dim over all, the thick, slant lines of the beating shower!--I know not that of themselves they would have furnished materials enough for a finished picture in the style of Hogarth's "End of all Things;" but right sure am I that in the hands of Bewick they would have been grouped into a tasteful and poetic vignette. We set out for church a little after eleven,--the minister encased in his ample-skirted storm-jacket of oiled canvas, and protected atop by a genuine _sou-wester_, of which the broad posterior rim eloped half a yard down his back; and I closely wrapped up in my gray maud, which proved, however, a rather indifferent protection against the penetrating powers of a true Hebridean drizzle. The building in which the congregation meets is a low dingy cottage of turf and stone, situated nearly opposite to the manse windows. It had been built by my friend, previous to the Disruption, at his own expense, for a Gaelic school, and it now serves as a place of worship for the people.