he arrangement I was now on my way to Mull.

St. Swithin's day, so important in the calendar of our humbler
meteorologists, had in this part of the country its alternate fits of
sunshine and shower. We passed gaily along the green banks of the Clyde,
with their rich flat fields glittering in moisture, and their lines of
stately trees, that, as the light flashed out, threw their shadows over
the grass. The river expanded into the estuary, the estuary into the
open sea; we left behind us beacon, and obelisk, and rock-perched
castle;--

"Merrily down we drop
Below the church, below the tower,
Below the light house top,"

and, as the evening fell, we were ploughing the outer reaches of the
Frith, with the ridgy table-land of Ayrshire stretching away, green, on
the one side, and the serrated peaks of Arran rising dark and high on
the other. At sunrise next morning our boat lay, unloading a portion of
her cargo, in one of the ports of Islay, and we could see the Irish
coast resting on the horizon to the south and west, like a long
undulating bank of thin blue cloud; with the island of Rachrin--famous
for the asylum it had afforded the Bruce when there was no home for him
in Scotland,--presenting in front its mass of darker azure. On and away!
We swept past Islay, with its low fertile hills of mica-schist and
slate; and Jura, with its flat dreary moors, and its far-seen gigantic
paps, on one of which, in the last age, Professor Walker, of Edinburgh,
set water a-boil with six degrees of heat less than he found necessary
for the purpose on the plain below. The Professor describes the view
from the summit, which includes in its wide circle at once the Isle of
Skye and the Isle of Man, as singularly noble and imposing; two such
prospects more, he says, would bring under the eye the whole island of
Great Britain, from the Pentland Frith to the English Channel. We sped
past Jura. Then came the Gulf of Coryvrekin, with the bare mountain
island of Scarba overlooking the fierce, far-famed whirlpool, that we
could see from the deck, breaking in long lines of foam, and sending out
its waves in wide rings on every side, when not a speck of white was
visible elsewhere in the expanse of sea around us. And then came an
opener space, studded with smaller islands,--mere hill-tops rising out
of the sea, with here and there insulated groups of pointed rocks, the
skeletons of perished hills, amid which the tide chafed and frette