24 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



and the only objects we saw distinctly visible were each other's 

 heads and faces, and the lighter parts of our dress. 



The floor, for about a hundred feet inwards from the nar- 

 row vestibule, resembles that of a charnel-house. At almost 

 every step we come upon heaps of human bones grouped to- 

 gether, as the Psalmist so graphically describes, " as when one 

 cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth." They are of a 

 brownish, earthy hue, here and there tinged with green ; the 

 skulls, with the exception of a few broken fragments, have 

 disappeared ; for travellers in the Hebrides have of late years 

 been numerous and curious ; and many a museum, that at 

 Abbotsford among the rest, exhibits, in a grinning skull, its 

 memorial of the Massacre at Eigg. "We find, too, further 

 marks of visitors in the single bones separated from the heaps 

 and scattered over the area ; but enough still remains to show, 

 in the general disposition of the remains, that the hapless 

 islanders died under the walls in families, each little group 

 separated by a few feet from the others. Here and there the 

 remains of a detached skeleton may be seen, as if some robust 

 islander, restless in his agony, had stalked out into the middle 

 space ere he fell ; but the social arrangement is the general 

 one. And beneath every heap we find, at the depth, as has 

 been said, of a few inches, the remains of the straw-bed upon 

 which the family had lain, largely mixed with the smaller 

 bones of the human frame, ribs and vertebrae, and hand and 

 feet bones ; occasionally, too, with fragments of unglazed pot- 

 tery, and various other implements of a rude housewifery. 

 The minister found for me, under one family heap, the pieces 

 of a half-burned, unglazed earthen jar, with a narrow mouth, 

 that, like the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, had been 

 moulded by the hand without the assistance of the potter's 

 wheel ; and to one of the fragments there stuck a minute pel- 

 let of gray hair. From under another heap he disinterred 

 the handle-stave of a child's wooden porringer (bicker), per- 



