76 THE CRUISE OP THE BETSEY ; OR, 



the -viands. Dark night had long set in ere we reached our 

 vessel. 



Next day was Saturday ; and it behoved my friend the 

 minister, as scrupulously careful in his pulpit preparations 

 for the islanders of Eigg as if his congregation were an Edin- 

 burgh one, to remain on board, and study his discourse for 

 the morrow. I found, however, no unmeet companion for 

 my excursion in his trusty mate John Stewart John had 

 not very much English, and I had no Gaelic ; but we con- 

 trived to understand one another wonderfully well ; and ere 

 evening I had taught him to be quite as expert in hunting 

 dead crocodiles as myself. "We reached the Ru-Stoir, and 

 set hard to work with hammer and chisel. The fragments 

 of red shale were strewed thickly along the shore for at least 

 three quarters of a mile ; wherever the red columnar rock 

 appeared, there lay the shale, in water-worn blocks, more or 

 less indurated ; but the beach was covered over with shingle 

 and detached masses of rock, and we could nowhere find it 

 in situ. A winter storm powerful enough to wash the beach 

 bare might do much to assist the explorer. There is a piece 

 of shore on the eastern coast of Scotland, on which for years 

 together I used to pick up nodular masses of lime containing 

 fish of the Old Red Sandstone ; but nowhere in the neigh- 

 bourhood could I find the ichthyolite bed in which they had 

 originally formed. The storm of a single night swept the 

 beach ; and in the morning the ichthyolites lay revealed in 

 situ under a stratum of shingle which I had a hundred times 

 examined, but which, though scarce a foot in thickness, had 

 concealed from me the ichthyolite bed for five twelvemonths 

 together ! 



Wherever the altered shale of Ru-Stoir has been thrown 

 high on the beach, and exposed to the influences of the wea- 

 ther, we find it fretted over with minute organisms, mostly 

 the scales, plates, bones, and teeth of fishes. The organisms, 



