A SUMMER RAMBLE AMONG THE HEBRIDES. 217 



the lesser moraines of Agassiz, save where the fabric here and 

 there bellied outwards or inwards, in perilous dilapidation, 

 that seemed but awaiting the first breeze. The low chinky 

 door opened direct into the one wretched apartment of the 

 hovel, which we found lighted chiefly by holes in the roo 

 The back of the sick woman's bed was so placed at the edge 

 of the opening, that it had formed at one time a sort of par- 

 tition to the portion of the apartment, some five or six feet 

 square, which contained the fire-place ; but the boarding that 

 had rendered it such had long since fallen away, and it now 

 presented merely a naked rickety frame to the current of cold 

 air from without. "Within a foot of the bed-ridden woman's 

 head there was a hole in the turf-wall, which was, we saw, 

 usually stuffed with a bundle of rags, but which lay open as 

 we entered, and which furnished a downward peep of sea and 

 shore, and the rocky Eilan Chctsteil, with the minister's yacht 

 riding in the channel hard by. The little hole in the wall 

 had formed the poor creature's only communication with the 

 face of the external world for ten weary years. She lay under 

 a dingy coverlet, which, whatever its original hue, had come 

 to differ nothing in colour from the graveyard earth, which 

 must so soon better supply its place. What perhaps first 

 struck the eye was the strange flatness of the bed-clothes, con- 

 sidering that a human body lay below : there seemed scarce 

 bulk enough under them for a human skeleton. The light 

 of the opening fell on the corpse-like features of the woman, 

 sallow, sharp, bearing at once the stamp of disease and of 

 famine ; and yet it was evident, notwithstanding, that they 

 had once been agreeable, not unlike those of her daughter, 

 a good-looking girl of eighteen, who, when we entered, was 

 sitting beside the fire. Neither mother nor daughter had any 

 English ; but it was not difficult to determine, from the wel- 

 come with which the minister was greeted from the sick-bed, 

 feeble as the tones were, that he was no unfrequent visitor. 



