A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 1 7 



kedge and halser, stretched thwartwise to a neighbouring crag, 

 and jambed fast in a crevice, served in moderate weather to 

 keep us tolerably right In the severer seasons, however, 

 the kedge is found inadequate, and the minister has to hoist 

 sail and make out for the open sea, as if served with a sudden 

 summons of ejectment. 



Among the various things brought aboard this morning, 

 there was a pair of island shoes for the minister's cabin use, 

 that struck my fancy not a little. They were all around of 

 a deep madder-red colour, soles, welts, and uppers ; and, 

 though somewhat resembling in form the little yawl of the 

 Betsey, were sewed not unskilfully with thongs ; and their 

 peculiar style of tie seemed of a kind suited to furnish with 

 new idea a fashionable shoemaker of the metropolis. They 

 were altogether the production of Eigg, from the skin out of 

 which they had been cut, with the lime that had prepared it 

 for the tan, and the root by which the tan had been furnish- 

 ed, down to the last on which they had been moulded, and 

 the artizan that had cast them ofij a pair of finished shoes. 

 There are few trees, and, of course, no bark to spare, in the 

 island ; but the islanders find a substitute in the astringent 

 lobiferous root of the Tormentilla erecta, which they dig out 

 for the purpose among the heath, at no inconsiderable expense 

 of time and trouble. I was informed by John Stewart, an 

 adept in all the multifarious arts of the island, from the tan- 

 ning of leather and the tilling of land, to the building of a 

 house or the working of a ship, that the infusion of root had 

 to be thrice changed for every skin, and that it took a man 

 nearly a day to gather roots enough for a single infusion. I 

 was further informed that it was not unusual for the owner 

 of a skin to give it to some neighbour to tan, and that> the 

 process finished, it was divided equally between them, the 

 time and trouble bestowed on it by the one being deemed 

 equivalent to the property held in it by the other. I wished 



