A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 153 



biscuit cost us sixpence per pound. And now our stores 

 were exhausted, and we had to dine as we best could, on our 

 last half-ounce of tea, sweetened by our last quarter of a pound 

 of sugar. I had marked, however, a dried thornback hang- 

 ing among the rigging. It had been there nearly three weeks 

 before, when I came first aboard, and no one seemed to know 

 for how many weeks previous ; for, as it had come to be a 

 sort of fixture in the vessel, it could be looked at without 

 being seen. But necessity sharpens the discerning faculty, and 

 on this pressing occasion I was fortunate enough to see it. 

 It was straightway taken down, skinned, roasted, and eaten ; 

 and, though rather rich in ammonia, a substance better suit- 

 ed to form the food of the organisms that do not unite sensa- 

 tion to vitality, than organisms so high in the scale as the 

 minister and his friend, we came deliberately to the opinion, 

 that, on the whole, we could scarce have dined so well on one 

 of Major Bellenden's jack-boots, " so thick in the soles," 

 according to Jenny Dennison, " forby being tough in the up- 

 per leather." The tide failed us opposite the opening of Loch 

 Alsh ; the wind, long dying, at length died out into a dead 

 calm ; and we cast anchor in ten fathoms water, to wait the 

 ebbing current that was to cany us through Kyle Rhea, 



The ebb-tide set in about half an hour after sunset ; and 

 in weighing anchor to float down the Kyle, for we still 

 lacked wind to sail down it, we brought up from below, on 

 one of the anchor-flukes, an immense bunch of deep-sea tangle, 

 with huge soft fronds and long slender stems, that had lain 

 flat on the rocky bottom, and had here and there thrown out 

 roots along its length of stalk, to attach itself to the rock, in 

 the way the ivy attaches itself to the wall. Among the in- 

 tricacies of the true roots of the bunch, if one may speak of 

 the true roots of an alga, I reckoned up from eighteen to 

 twenty different forms of animal life, Flustrae, Sertulariae, 

 Serpulse, Anomise, Modiolse, Astarte, Annelida, Crustacea, 



