tter-churn, and a tub half-filled with curd; while a few
cheeses, soft from the press, lay on a shelf above. The little girls
were but occasional visitors, who had come, out of a juvenile frolic, to
pass the night in the place; but I was informed by John that the
shieling had two other inmates, young women, like the one so hospitably
engaged in our behalf, who were out at the milking, and that they lived
here all alone for several months every year, when the pasturage was at
its best, employed in making butter and cheese for their master, worthy
Mr. M'Donald of Keill. They must often feel lonely when night has closed
darkly over mountain and sea, or in those dreary days of mist and rain
so common in the Hebrides, when nought may be seen save the few
shapeless crags that stud the nearer hillocks around them, and nought
heard save the moaning of the wind in the precipices above, or the
measured dash of the wave on the wild beach below. And yet they would do
ill to exchange their solitary life and rude shieling for the village
dwellings and gregarious habits of the females who ply their rural
labors in bands among the rich fields of the Lowlands, or for the
unwholesome backroom and weary task-work of the city seamstress. The
sunlight was fading from the higher hill-tops of Skye and Glenelg as we
bade farewell to the lonely shieling and the hospitable island girl.

The evening deepened as we hurried southwards along the scarce visible
pathway, or paused for a few seconds to examine some shattered block,
bulky as a Highland cottage, that had fallen from the precipice above.
Now that the whole landscape lay equally in shadow, one of the more
picturesque peculiarities of the continuous rampart came out more
strongly as a feature of the scene than when a strip of shade rested
along the face of the rock, imparting to it a retiring character, and
all was sunshine beyond. A thick bed of white sandstone, as continuous
as the rampart itself, runs nearly horizontally about midway in the
precipice for mile after mile, and, standing out in strong contrast with
the dark-colored trap above and below, reminds one of a belt of white
hewn work in a basalt house front, or rather,--for there occurs above a
second continuous strip, of an olive hue, the color assumed, on
weathering by a bed of amygdaloid,--of a piece of dingy old-fashioned
furniture, inlaid with one stringed belt of bleached holly, and another
of faded green-wood. At some of the