6 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



chisel from my bag, I stepped ashore to question my ancient 

 acquaintance the Old Bed conglomerate, and was fortunate 

 enough to meet on the pier-head, as I landed, one of the best 

 of companions for assisting in such work, Mr Colin Elder of 

 Isle Ornsay, the gentleman who had so kindly furnished 

 my friend Mr Swanson with an asylum for his family, when 

 there was no longer a home for them in Small Isles. " You 

 are much in luck," he said, after our first greeting : " one of 

 the villagers, in improving his garden, has just made a cut for 

 some fifteen or twenty yards along the face of the precipice 

 behind the village, and laid open the line of junction between 

 the conglomerate and the clay-slate. Let us go and see it." 

 I found several things worthy of notice in the chance sec- 

 tion to which I was thus introduced. The conglomerate lies 

 unconformably along the edges of the slate strata, which 

 present under it an appearance exactly similar to that which 

 they exhibit under the rolled stones and shingle of the 

 neighbouring shore, where we find. them laid bare beside the 

 harbour for several hundred yards. And, mixed with the j 

 pebbles of various character and origin of which the conglo- 

 merate is mainly composed, we see detached masses of the 

 slate, that still exhibit on their edges the identical lines of 

 fracture characteristic of the rock, which they received, when 

 torn from the mass below, myriads of ages before. In the 

 incalculably remote period in which the conglomerate base of 

 the Old Red Sandstone was formed, the clay-slate of this dis- 

 trict had been exactly the same sort of rock that it is now. 

 Some long anterior convulsion had upturned its strata ; and 

 the sweep of water, mingled with broken fragments of stone, 

 had worn smooth the exposed edges, just as a similar agency 

 wears the edges exposed at the present time. Quarries might 

 have been opened in this rock, as now, for a roofing slate, had 

 there been quarriers to open them, or houses to roof over : 

 it was in every respect as ancient a looking stone then as in 



