134 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY j OR, 



amounting at the time to rather more than four hundred 

 souls, to make way for one sheep-farmer and eight thousand 

 sheep. All the aborigines of Rum crossed the Atlantic ; and 

 at the close of 1828, the entire population consisted of but 

 the Bheep-farmer, and a few shepherds, his servants : the 

 island of Rum reckoned up scarce a single family at this pe- 

 riod for every five square miles of area which it contained. 

 But depopulation on so extreme a scale was found inconve- 

 nient ; the place had been rendered too thoroughly a desert 

 for the comfort of the occupant ; and on the occasion of a 

 clearing which took place shortly after in Skye, he accommo- 

 dated some ten or twelve of the ejected families with sites 

 for cottages, and pasturage for a few cows, 011 the bit of mo- 

 rass beside Loch Scresort, on which I had seen their humble 

 dwellings. But the whole of the once peopled interior re- 

 mains a wilderness, without inhabitant, all the more lonely 

 in its aspect from the circumstance that the solitary valleys, 

 with their plough-furrowed patches, and their ruined heaps 

 of stone, open upon shores every whit as solitary as them- 

 selves, and that the wide untrodden sea stretches drearily 

 around. The armies of the insect world were sporting in the 

 light this evening by millions ; a brown stream that runs 

 through the valley yielded an incessant poppling sound, from 

 the myriads of fish that were ceaselessly leaping in the pools, 

 beguiled by the quick glancing wings of green and gold that 

 fluttered over them ; along a distant hill-side there ran what 

 seemed the ruins of a gray-stone fence, erected, says tradition, 

 in a remote age, to facilitate the hunting of the deer ; there 

 were fields on which the heath and moss of the surrounding 

 moorlands were fast encroaching, that had borne many a suc- 

 cessive harvest; and prostrate cottages, that had been the 

 scenes of christenings, and bridals, and blythe new-year's days; 

 all seemed to bespeak the place a fitting habitation for man, 

 in which not only the necessaries, but also a few of the luxu- 



