118 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, 



plate rustled sharp through the foam ; but, like a staunch 

 Free Churchwoman, the lowlier she bent, the more steadfastly 

 did she hold her head to the storm. The strength of the op- 

 position served but to speed her on all the more surely to the 

 desired haven. At five o'clock in the morning we cast an- 

 chor in Loch Scresort, the only harbour of Rum in which 

 a vessel can moor, within two hundred yards of the shore, 

 having, with the exception of the minister, gained no loss in 

 the gale. He, luckless man, had parted from his excellent 

 sou-wester ; a sudden gust had seized it by the flap, and hur- 

 ried it away far to the lee. He had yielded it to the winds, 

 as he had done the temporalities, but much more unwilling- 

 ly, and less as a free agent. Should any conscientious ma- 

 riner pick up anywhere in the Atlantic a serviceable ochre- 

 coloured souwester, not at all the worse for the wear, I give 

 him to wit that he holds Free Church property, and that he 

 is heartily welcome to hold it, leaving it to himself to con- 

 sider whether a benefaction to its full value, deducting sal- 

 vage, is not owing, in honour, to the Sustentation Fund. 



It was ten o'clock ere the more fatigued aboard could mus- 

 ter resolution enough to quit their beds a second time ; and 

 then it behoved the minister to prepare for his Sabbath la- 

 bours ashore. The gale still blew in fierce gusts from the 

 hills, and the rain pattered like small shot on the deck. Loch 

 Scresort, by no means one of our finer island lochs, viewed 

 under any circumstances, looked particularly dismal this mom- 

 ing. It forms the opening of a dreary moorland valley, 

 bounded on one of its sides, to the mouth of the loch, by a 

 homely ridge of Old Hed Sandstone, and on the other by a 

 line of dark augitic hills, that attain, at the distance of about 

 a mile from the sea, an elevation of two thousand feet. Along 

 the slopes of the sandstone ridge I could discern, through the 

 haze, numerous green patches, that had once supported a dense 

 population, long since " cleared off" to the backwoods of Ame- 



