A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 57 



a hard siliceous stone, that has resisted those disintegrating 

 influences of the weather and the surf under which the yield- 

 ing matrix in which they were embedded has worn from 

 around them. Here and there we find them lying detached 

 on the beach, like huge shot, compared with which the green- 

 stone balls of Mons Meg are but marbles for children to play 

 with; in other cases they project from the mural front of 

 rampart-like precipices, as if they had been showered into 

 them by the ordnance of some besieging battery, and had 

 stuck fast in the mason-work. Abbotsford has been described 

 as a romance in stone and lime : we have here, on the shores 

 of Laig, what seems a wild but agreeable tale, of the extra- 

 vagant cast of " Christabel," or the " Rhyme of the Ancient 

 Mariner," fretted into sandstone. But by far the most curi- 

 ous part of the story remains to be told. 



The hollows and fissures of the lower sandstone bed we 

 find filled with a fine quartzose sand, which, from its pure 

 white colour, and the clearness with which the minute par- 

 ticles reflect the light, reminds one of accumulations of po- 

 tato-flour drying in the sun. It is formed almost entirely of 

 disintegrated particles of the soft sandstone ; and as we at 

 first find it occurring in mere handfuls, that seem as if they 

 had been detached from the mass during the last few tides, 

 we begin to marvel to what quarter the missing materials of 

 the many hundred cubic yards of rock, ground down along 

 the shore in this bed during the last century or two, have 

 been conveyed away. As we pass on northwards, however, 

 we see the white sand occurring in much larger quantities, 

 here heaped up in little bent-covered hillocks above the 

 reach of the tide, there stretching out in level, ripple-marked 

 wastes into the waves, yonder rising in flat narrow spits 

 among the shallows. At length we reach a small, irregularly- 

 formed bay, a few hundred feet across, floored with it from 

 side to side ; and see it, on the one hand, descending deep 



