216 THE CRUISE OF THE BETSEY; OR, 



Protestants of the island might meet for the purposes of re- 

 ligious worship, were they to be ejected from the cottage 

 erected by Mr Swanson, in which they had worshipped hither- 

 to. We re-examined, in the passing, the pitch-stone dike 

 mentioned in a former chapter, and the charnel cave of Fran- 

 cis ; but I found nothing to add to my former descriptions, 

 and little to modify, save that perhaps the cave appeared 

 less dark, in at least the outer half of its area, than it had 

 seemed to me in the former year, when examined by torch- 

 light, and that the straggling twilight, as it fell on the ropy 

 sides, green with moss and mould, and on the damp bone- 

 strewn floor, overmantled with a still darker crust, like that 

 of a stagnant pool, seemed also to wear its tint of melan- 

 choly greenness, as if transmitted through a depth of sea- 

 water. The cavern we had come to examine we found to be 

 a noble arched opening in a dingy-coloured precipice of augi- 

 tic trap, a cave roomy and lofty as the nave of a cathedral, 

 and ever resounding to the dash of the sea j but though it 

 could have amply accommodated a congregation of at least five 

 hundred, we found the way far too long and difficult for at 

 least the weak and the elderly, and in some places inaccessible 

 at full flood ; and so we at once decided against the accom- 

 modation which it offered. But its shelter will, I trust, scarce 

 be needed. 



On our return to the Betsey, we passed through a straggling 

 group of cottages on the hill-side, one of which, the most di- 

 lapidated and smallest of the number, the minister entered, 

 to visit a poor old woman, who had been bed-ridden for ten 

 years. Scarce ever before had I seen so miserable a hovel. 

 It was hardly larger than the cabin of the Betsey, and a thou- 

 sand times less comfortable. The walls and roof, formed of 

 damp grass-grown turf, with a few layers of unconnected stone 

 in the basement tiers, seemed to constitute one continuous 

 hillock, sloping upwards from foundation to ridge, like one of 



