36 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



mouritain-wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of four hun- 

 dred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid 

 erossways ; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but 

 to dig into the floor of this deep-hewn piazza, to be convinced 

 that at least it is a fact. 



Just at this interesting stage, however, our explorations 

 bade fair to be interrupted. Our man who carried the pick- 

 axe had lingered behind us for a few hundred yards, in ear- 

 nest conversation with an islander; and he now came up, 

 breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, a Roman 

 Catholic tacksman in the neighbourhood, had peremptorily 

 warned him that the Scuir of Eigg was the property of Dr 

 MTherson of Aberdeen, not ours, and that the Doctor would 

 be very angry at any man who meddled with it. " That 

 message," said my friend, laughing, but looking just a little 

 sad through the laugh, " would scarce have been sent us when 

 I was minister of the Establishment here ; but it seems al- 

 lowable in the case of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad speci- 

 men of the thousand little ways in which the Roman Ca- 

 tholic population of the island try to annoy me, now that 

 they see my back to the wall." I was tickled with the idea 

 of a fossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through 

 a trick of the associative faculty, with the idea of a great 

 fossil act for the British empire, framed on the principles of 

 the game-laws ; and, just wondering what sort of disreput- 

 able vagabonds geological poachers would become under its 

 deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the pickaxe, and broke 

 into the stonefast floor. And thence I succeeded in abstract- 

 ing, feloniously, I dare say, though the crime has not yet 

 got into the statute-book, some six or eight pieces of the 

 Pinites Eiggensis, amounting in all to about half a cubic foot 

 of that very ancient wood value unknown. I trust, should 

 the case come to a serious bearing, the members of the Lon- 

 don Geological Society will generously subscribe half-a-crown 



