A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 29 



cable chieftain, giving orders, on the discovery, to unroof the 

 houses in the neighbourhood, raised high a pile of rafters 

 against the opening, and set it on fire. And there he stood 

 in front of the blaze, hump-backed and grim, till the wild 

 hollow cry from the rock within had sunk into silence, and 

 there lived not a single islander of Eigg, man, woman, or 

 child The fact that their remains should have been left to 

 moulder in the cave is proof enough of itself that none sur- 

 vived to bury the dead. I am inclined to believe, from the 

 appearance of the place, that smoke could scarcely have been 

 the real agent of destruction : then, as now, it would have 

 taken a great deal of pure smoke to smother a Highlander. 

 It may be perhaps deemed more probable, that the huge fire 

 of rafter and roof-tree piled close against the opening, and 

 rising high over it, would draw out the oxygen within as its 

 proper food, till at length all would be exhausted ; and life 

 would go out for want of it, like the flame of a candle under 

 an upturned jar. Sir Walter refers the date of the event to 

 some time " about the close of the sixteenth century ;" and 

 the coin of Queen Mary, mentioned by Mr Wilson, points at 

 a period at least not much earlier : but the exact time of its 

 occurrence is so uncertain, that a Roman Catholic priest of 

 the Hebrides, in lately showing his people what a very bad 

 thing Protestantism is, instanced, as a specimen of its average 

 morality, the affair of the cave. The Protestant M'Leods of 

 Skye, he said, full of hatred in their hearts, had murdered 

 wholesale their wretched brethren the Protestant McDonalds 

 of Eigg, and sent them off to perdition before their time. 



Quitting the beach, we ascended the breezy hill-side on 

 our way to the Scuir, an object so often and so well de- 

 scribed, that it might be perhaps prudent, instead of attempt- 

 ing one description more, to present the reader with some of 

 the already existing ones. " The Scuir pf Eigg," says Pro- 

 fessor Jamieson, in his " Mineralogy of the Western Islands," 



