, thickly dotted with minute circular spots of
soiled white--the aspect assumed, as seen through the water, by the
numerous specimens of univalve shells (_Purpura lapillus_ and _Patella
vulgata_) with which it was speckled; beneath, the irregular floor
seemed covered by a carpet that somewhat resembled in the pattern a
piece of marbled paper, save that the circular or oval patches of which
it was composed, and which had as their nuclei, stones, rocks,
shell-fish, bunches of fuci, and fronds of laminaria, were greatly
larger. There spread around a misty groundwork of green intensely deep
along its horizon, but comparatively light overhead, in its middle sky,
which had always its prodigy--wonderful circlets of light, that went
widening outwards, and with whose delicate green there mingled
occasional flashes of pale crimson. Such was the striking though
somewhat meagre scenery of a sea-bottom in Gairloch, as seen by a human
eye submerged in from two to three fathoms of water.

There still continued to linger in this primitive district, at the time,
several curious arts and implements, that had long become obsolete in
most other parts of the Highlands, and of which the remains, if found in
England or the Low country, would have been regarded by the antiquary as
belonging to very remote periods. During the previous winter I had read
a little work descriptive of an ancient ship, supposed to be Danish,
which had been dug out of the silt of an English river, and which, among
other marks of antiquity, exhibited seams caulked with moss--a
peculiarity which had set at fault, it was said, the modern
ship-carpenter, in the chronology of his art, as he was unaware that
there had ever been a time when moss was used for such a purpose. On
visiting, however, a boat-yard at Gairloch, I found the Highland builder
engaged in laying a layer of dried moss, steeped in tar, along one of
his seams, and learned that such had been the practice of
boat-carpenters in that locality from time immemorial. I have said that
the little old Highlander of the solitary shieling, whom we met on first
commencing our quarrying labours beside his hut, was engaged in
stripping with a pocket-knife long slender filaments from off a piece of
moss-fir. He was employed in preparing these ligneous fibres for the
manufacture of a primitive kind of cordage, in large use among the
fishermen, and which possessed a strength and flexibility that could
scarce have been expec