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when he first sat down to study it, the story of his island charge in Eigg, and his Free Church yacht the Betsey. Nineteen years before, we had been engaged in beating over the Eathie Lias together, collecting Belemnites, Ammonites, and fossil wood, and striving in friendly emulation the one to surpass the other in the variety and excellence of our specimens. Our leisure hours were snatched, at the time, from college studies by the one, from the mallet by the other: there were few of them that we did not spend together, and that we were not mutually the better for so spending. I at least, owe much to these hours,--among other things, views of theologic truth, that determined the side I have taken in our ecclesiastical controversy. Our courses at an after period lay diverse; the young minister had greatly more important business to pursue than any which the geologic field furnishes; and so our amicable rivalry ceased early. In the words in which an English poet addresses his brother,--the clergyman who sat for the picture in the "Deserted Village,"--my friend "entered on a sacred office, where the harvest is great and the laborers are few, and left to me a field in which the laborers are many, and the harvest scarce worth carrying away." Next day at noon we weighed anchor, and stood out for Rum, a run of about twenty-five miles. A kind friend had, we found, sent aboard in our behalf two pieces of rare antiquity,--rare anywhere, but especially rare in the lockers of the Betsey,--in the agreeable form of two bottles of semi-fossil Madeira,--Madeira that had actually existed in the grape exactly half a century before, at the time when Robespierre was startling Paris from its propriety, by mutilating at the neck the busts of other people, and multiplying casts and medals of his own; and we found it, explored in moderation, no bad study for geologists, especially in coarse weather, when they had got wet and somewhat fatigued. It was like Landlord Boniface's ale, mild as milk, had exchanged its distinctive flavor as Madeira for a better one, and filled the cabin with fragrance every time the cork was drawn. Old observant Homer must have smelt some such liquor somewhere, or he could never have described so well the still more ancient and venerable wine with which wily Ulysses beguiled one-eyed Polypheme:-- "Unmingled wine, Mellifluous, undecaying, and divine, Which now, some ages from his race conce
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