We drove heavily, and had to dismount and walk afoot over every steeper acclivity; but I carried my hammer, and only grieved that in some one or two localities the road should have been so level. I regretted it in especial on the southern and eastern side of Loch Sligachan, where I could see from my seat, as we drove past, the dark blue rocks in the water-courses on each side the road, studded over with that characteristic shell of the Lias, the _Gryphaea incurva_, and that the dry-stone fences in the moor above exhibit fossils that might figure in a museum. But we rattled by. At Broadford, twenty-five miles from Portree, and nine miles from Isle Ornsay, I partook of a hospitable meal in the house of an acquaintance; and in little more than two hours after was with my friend the minister at Isle Ornsay. The night wore pleasantly by. Mrs. Swanson, a niece of the late Dr. Smith of Campbelton, so well known for his Celtic researches and his exquisite translations of ancient Celtic poetry, I found deeply versed in the legendary lore of the Highlands. The minister showed me a fine specimen of Pterichthys which I had disinterred for him, out of my first discovered fossiliferous deposit of the Old Red Sandstone, exactly thirteen years before, and full seven years ere I had introduced the creature to the notice of Agassiz. And the minister's daughter, a little chubby girl of three summers, taking part in the general entertainment, strove to make her Gaelic sound as like English as she could, in my especial behalf. I remembered, as I listened to the unintelligible prattle of the little thing, unprovided with a word of English, that just eighteen years before, her father had had no Gaelic; and wondered what he would have thought, could he have been told, when he first sat down to study it, the story of his island charge in Eigg, and his Free Church yacht the Betsey. Nineteen years before, we had been engaged in beating over the Eathie Lias together, collecting Belemnites, Ammonites, and fossil wood, and striving in friendly emulation the one to surpass the other in the variety and excellence of our specimens. Our leisure hours were snatched, at the time, from college studies by the one, from the mallet by the other: there were few of them that we did not spend together, and that we were not mutually the better for so spending. I at least, owe much to these hours,--among other things, views of theologic truth, that determined the side I have taken in our ecclesiastical controversy. Our courses at an after period lay diverse; the young minister had greatly more important business to pursue than any which the geologic field furnishes; and so our amicable rivalry ceased early. In the words in which an English poet addresses his brother,--the clergyman who sat for the picture in the "Deserted Village,"--my friend "entered on a sacred office, where the harvest is great and the laborers are few, and left to me a field in which the