asking
their leave. With neither character nor a settled way of living, his
wits, I am afraid, must have been often whetted by his necessities: he
stole lest he should starve. For some time he had resided in the
adjacent island of Muck; but, proving a bad tenant, he had been ejected
by the agent of the landlord, I believe a very worthy man, who gave him
half a boll of meal to get quietly rid of him, and pulled down his
house, when he had left the island, to prevent his return. Betaking
himself, with his boys, to a boat, he set out in quest of some new
lodgment. He made his first attempt or two on the mainland, where he
strove to drive a trade in begging, but he was always recognized as the
convicted sheep-stealer, and driven back to the shore. At length, after
a miserable term of wandering, he landed in the winter season on Eigg,
where he had a grown-up son, a miller; and, erecting a wretched shed
with some spars and the old sail of a boat placed slantways against the
side of a rock, he squatted on the beach, determined, whether he lived
or died, to find a home on the island. The islanders were no strangers
to the character of the poor forlorn creature, and kept aloof from
him,--none of them, however, so much as his own son; and, for a time, my
friend the minister, aware that he had been the pest of every community
among which he had lived, stood aloof from him too, in the hope that at
length, wearied out, he might seek for himself a lodgment elsewhere.
There came on, however, a dreary night of sleet and rain, accompanied by
a fierce storm from the sea; and intelligence reached the manse late in
the evening, that the wretched sheep-stealer had been seized by sudden
illness, and was dying on the beach. There could be no room for further
hesitation in this case; and my friend the minister gave instant orders
that the poor creature should be carried to the manse. The party,
however, which he had sent to remove him found the task impracticable.
The night was pitch dark; and the road, dangerous with precipices, and
blocked up with rough masses of rock and stone, they found wholly
impassable with so helpless a burden. And so, administering some
cordials to the poor, hapless wretch, they had to leave him in the midst
of the storm, with the old wet sail flapping about his ears, and the
half-frozen rain pouring in upon him in torrents. He must have passed a
miserable night, but it could not have been a whit more miserable than
th