72 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY ; OR, 



in which man feels that he is little, and that nature is great 

 There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin so 

 delights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or 

 around which the silence is so frequently broken by the harsh 

 scream of the eagle. The sun had got far adown the sky ere 

 we had reached the covered way at the base of the rock. All 

 lay dark below ; and the red light atop, half-absorbed by the 

 dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint and 

 melancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the 

 shadows. 



The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner Hebrides, 

 builds, I was told, in great numbers in the continuous line 

 of precipice which, after sweeping for a full mile round the 

 Bay of Laig, forms the pinnacled rampart here, and then, turn- 

 ing another angle of the island, runs on parallel to the coast 

 for about six miles more. In former times the puffin fur- 

 nished the islanders, as in St Kilda, with a staple article of 

 food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores 

 of the old crop had begun to fail, and the new crop had not 

 yet ripened ; and the people of Eigg, taught by their neces- 

 sities, were bold cragsmen. But men do not peril life and 

 limb for the mere sake of a meal, save when they cannot help 

 it ; and the introduction of the potatoe has done much to put 

 out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among a few 

 young lads, who find excitement enough in the work to pur- 

 sue it for its own sake, as an amusement. I found among 

 the islanders what was said to be a piece of the natural his- 

 tory of the puffin, sufficiently apocryphal to remind one of 

 the famous passage in the history of the barnacle, which traced 

 the lineage of the bird to one of the pedunculated cirripedes, 

 and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of wood. The puffin 

 feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of the sea, 

 which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about the 

 time when it should be beginning to Hy, it becomes unable to 



