me to see from my
bed-room windows the first rays of the rising sun gleaming on the
hill-tops.

CHAPTER VII.

Exploration resumed--Geology of Rasay--An Illustration--Storr of
Skye--From Portree to Holm--Discovery of Fossils--An Island
Rain--Sir R. Murchison--Labor of drawing a Geological Line--Three
Edinburgh Gentlemen--_Prosopolepsia_--Wrong surmises corrected--The
Mail Gig--The Portree Postmaster--Isle Ornsay--An Old
Acquaintance--Reminiscences--A Run for Rum--"Semi-fossil
Madeira"--Idling on Deck--Prognostics of a Storm--Description of
the Gale--Loch Scresort--The Minister's lost _Sou-wester_--The Free
Church Gathering--The weary Minister.

I breakfasted in the travellers' room with three gentlemen from
Edinburgh; and then, accompanied by a boy, whom I had engaged to carry
my bag, set out to explore. The morning was ominously hot and
breathless; and while the sea lay moveless in the calm, as a floor of
polished marble, mountain and rock, and distant island, seemed tremulous
all over, through a wavy medium of thick rising vapor. I judged from the
first that my course of exploration for the day was destined to
terminate abruptly; and as my arrangements with Mr. Swanson left me, for
this part of the country, no second day to calculate upon, I hurried
over deposits which in other circumstances I would have examined more
carefully,--content with a glance. Accustomed in most instances to take
long aims, as Cuddy Headrig did, when he steadied his musket on a rest
behind the hedge, and sent his ball through Laird Oliphant's forehead, I
had on this occasion to shoot flying; and so, selecting a large object
for a mark, that I might run the less risk of missing, I strove to
acquaint myself rather with the general structure of the district than
with the organisms of its various fossiliferous beds.

The long narrow island of Rasay lies parallel to the coast of Skye,
like a vessel laid along a wharf, but drawn out from it as if to suffer
another vessel of the same size to take her berth between; and on the
eastern shores of both Skye and Rasay we find the same Oolitic deposits
tilted up at nearly the same angle. The section presented on the eastern
coast of the one is nearly a duplicate of the section presented on the
eastern coast of the other. During one of the severer frosts of last
winter I passed along a shallow pond, studded along the sides with
boulder stones. It had