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eira proved no specific in the case. He was suffering under excruciating headache, and had to stretch himself in his bed, with eyes shut but sleepless, waiting till the fit should pass,--every pulse that beat in his temples a throb of pain. CHAPTER VIII. Geology of Rum--Its curious Character illustrated--Rum famous for Bloodstones--Red Sandstones--"Scratchings" in the Rocks--A Geological Inscription without a Key--The Lizard--Vitality broken into two--Illustrations--Speculation--Scuir More--Ascent of the Scuir--The Bloodstones--An Illustrative Set of the Gem--M'Culloch's Pebble--A Chemical Problem--The solitary Shepherd's House--Sheep _versus_ Men--The Depopulation of Rum--A Haul of Trout--Rum Mode of catching Trout--At Anchor in the Bay of Glenelg. The geology of the island of Rum is simple, but curious. Let the reader take, if he can, from twelve to fifteen trap-hills, varying from one thousand to two thousand three hundred feet in height; let him pack them closely and squarely together, like rum-bottles in a case-basket; let him surround them with a frame of Old Red Sandstone, measuring rather more than seven miles on the side, in the way the basket surrounds the bottles; then let him set them down in the sea a dozen miles off the land,--and he shall have produced a second island of Rum, similar in structure to the existing one. In the actual island, however, there is a defect in the inclosing basket of sandstone: the basket, complete on three of its sides, wants the fourth: and the side opposite to the gap which the fourth should have occupied is thicker than the two other sides put together. Where I now write there is an old dark-colored picture on the wall before me. I take off one of the four bars of which the frame is composed,--the end-bar,--and stick it on to the end-bar opposite, and then the picture is fully framed on two of its sides, and doubly framed on a third, but the fourth side lacks framing altogether. And such is the geology of the island of Rum. We find the one loch of the island,--that in which the Betsey lies at anchor,--and the long withdrawing valley, of which the loch is merely a prolongation, occurring in the double sandstone bar: it seems to mark--to return to my illustration--the line in which the superadded piece of frame has been stuck on to the frame proper. The origin of the island is illustrated by its structure: it has left its stor
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