ughened with moss and lichen, that have fallen
from above, and lie scattered at its base,--the extreme loneliness of
the place, for we have left behind us every trace of the human
family,--and the expanse of solitary sea which it commands,--all
conspire to render the scene a profoundly imposing one. It is one of
those scenes in which a man feels that he is little, and that nature is
great. There is no precipice in the island in which the puffin so
delights to build as among the dark pinnacles overhead, or around which
the silence is so frequently broken by the harsh scream of the eagle.
The sun had got far adown the sky ere we had reached the covered way at
the base of the rock. All lay dark below; and the red light atop, half
absorbed by the dingy hues of the stone, shone with a gleam so faint and
melancholy, that it served but to deepen the effect of the shadows.

The puffin, a comparatively rare bird in the inner Hebrides, builds, I
was told, in great numbers in the continuous line of precipice which,
after sweeping for a full mile round the Bay of Laig, forms the
pinnacled rampart here, and then, turning another angle of the island,
runs on parallel to the coast for about six miles more. In former times
the puffin furnished the islanders, as in St. Kilda, with a staple
article of food, in those hungry months of summer in which the stores of
the old crop had begun to fail, and the new crop had not yet ripened;
and the people of Eigg, taught by their necessities, were bold cragsmen.
But men do not peril life and limb for the mere sake of a meal, save
when they cannot help it; and the introduction of the potato has done
much to put out the practice of climbing for the bird, except among a
few young lads, who find excitement enough in the work to pursue it for
its own sake, as an amusement. I found among the islanders what was
said to be a piece of the natural history of the puffin, sufficiently
apocryphal to remind one of the famous passage in the history of the
barnacle, which traced the lineage of the bird to one of the
pedunculated cirripedes, and the lineage of the cirripede to a log of
wood. The puffin feeds its young, say the islanders, on an oily scum of
the sea, which renders it such an unwieldy mass of fat, that about the
time when it should be beginning to fly, it becomes unable to get out of
its hole. The parent bird, not in the least puzzled, however, treats the
case medicinally, and,--like mothers of anothe