away his weapons. Such, in kind,
were the anecdotes of Uncle Sandy. He instructed me, too, how to find,
amid thickets of laminaria and fuci, the nest of the lump-fish, and
taught me to look well in its immediate neighbourhood for the male and
female fish, especially for the male; and showed me further, that the
hard-shelled spawn of this creature may, when well washed, be eaten raw,
and forms at least as palatable a viand in that state as the imported
caviare of Russia and the Caspian. There were instances in which the
common crow acted as a sort of jackal to us in our lump-fish
explorations. We would see him busied at the side of some fuci-covered
pool, screaming and cawing as if engaged in combating an enemy; and, on
going up to the place, we used to find the lump-fish he had killed fresh
and entire, but divested of the eyes, which we found, as a matter of
course, that the assailant, in order to make sure of victory, had taken
the precaution of picking out at an early stage of the contest.

Nor was it with merely the edible that we busied ourselves on these
journeys. The brilliant metallic _plumage_ of the sea mouse
(_Aphrodita_), steeped as in the dyes of the rainbow, excited our
admiration time after time; and still higher wonder used to be awakened
by a much rarer annelid, brown, and slender as a piece of rope-yarn, and
from thirty to forty feet in length, which no one save my uncle had ever
found along the Cromarty shores, and which, when broken in two, as
sometimes happened in the measuring, divided its vitality so equally
between the pieces, that each was fitted, we could not doubt, though
unable to repeat in the case the experiment of Spallanzani, to set up as
an independent existence, and carry on business for itself. The
annelids, too, that form for themselves tubular dwellings built up of
large grains of sand (_amphitrites_), always excited our interest. Two
hand-shaped tufts of golden-hued setae--furnished, however, with greatly
more than the typical number of fingers--rise from the shoulders of
these creatures, and must, I suspect, be used as hands in the process of
building; at least the hands of the most practised builder could not set
stones with nicer skill than is exhibited by these worms in the setting
of the grains which compose their cylindrical dwellings--dwellings that,
from their form and structure, seem suited to remind the antiquary of
the round towers of Ireland, and, from the style of their