THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY. 



CHAPTER I 



THE pleasant month of July had again come round, and for 

 full five weeks I was free. Chisels and hammers, and the 

 bag for specimens, were taken from their corner in the dark 

 closet, and packed up with half a stone weight of a fine soft 

 Conservative Edinburgh newspaper, valuable for a quality of 

 preserving old things entire. And at noon on St Swithin's 

 day (Monday the loth), I was speeding down the Clyde in 

 the Toward Castle steamer, for Tobermory in Mull. In the 

 previous season I had intended passing direct from the Oolitic 

 deposits of the eastern coast of S< ^tland, to the Oolitic de- 

 posits of the Hebrides. But the weeks glided all too quickly 

 away among the ichthyolites of Caithness and Cromarty, and 

 the shells and lignites of Sutherland and Ross. My friend, too, 

 the Rev. Mr Swanson of Small Isles, on whose assistance I had 

 reckoned, was in the middle of his troubles at the time, with 

 no longer a home in his parish, and not yet provided with one 

 elsewhere ; and I concluded he would have but little heart, 

 at such a season, for breaking into rocks, or for passing from 

 the too pressing monstrosities of an existing state of things, 

 to the old lapidified monstrosities of the past. And so my 

 design on the Hebrides had to be postponed for a twelve- 



