A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 73 



get out of its hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, 

 however, treats the case medicinally, and, like mothers of 

 another two-legged genus, who, when their daughters get 

 over-stout, put them through a course of reducing acids to 

 bring them down, feeds it on sorrel-leaves for several days 

 together, till, like a boxer under training, it gets thinned to 

 the proper weight, and becomes able not only to get out of 

 its cell, but also to employ its wings. 



We pass through the hollow, and, reaching the farther edge 

 of the bastion, towards the east, see a new range of prospect 

 opening before us. There is first a long unbroken wall of 

 precipice, a continuation of the tall rampart overhead, re- 

 lieved along its irregular upper line by the blue sky. "We 

 mark the talus widening at its base, and expanding, as on 

 the shores of the Bay of Laig, into an irregular grassy plat- 

 form, that, sinking midway into a ditch-like hollow, rises again 

 towards the sea, and presents to the waves a perpendicular 

 precipice of red stone. The sinking sun shone brightly this 

 evening ; and the warm hues of the precipice, which bears 

 the name offtu-Stoir, the Red Head, strikingly contrasted 

 with the pale and dark tints of the alternating basalts and 

 sandstones in the taller cliff behind. The ditch-like hollow, 

 which seems to indicate the line of a fault, cuts off this red 

 headland from all the other rocks of the island, from which 

 it appears to differ as considerably in texture as in hue. It 

 consists mainly of thick beds of a pale red stone, which 

 M'Culloch regarded as a trap, and which, intercalated with 

 here and there a thin band of shale, and presenting not a few 

 of the mineralogical appearances of what geologists of the 

 school of the late Mr Cunningham term Primary Old Red 

 Sandstone, in some cases has been laid down as a deposit of 

 Old Red proper, abutting in the line of a fault on the neigh- 

 bouring Oolites and basalts. In the geological map which 

 I carried with me, not one of high authority, however, I 



