coppers, itself invisible; we
could see the chain-cable dangling from the hatchway to the floor, and
John Stewart's companion, a powerful-looking, handsome young man, with
broad bare breast, and in his shirt-sleeves, squatted full in front of
the blaze, like the household goblin described by Milton, or the
"Christmas Present" of Dickens. Mr. Elder left us for the steamer, in
which he prosecuted his voyage next morning to Skye; and we tumbled in,
each to his narrow bed,--comfortable enough sort of resting places,
though not over soft; and slept so soundly, that we failed to mark Mr.
Elder's return for a few seconds, a little after daybreak. I found at my
bedside, when I awoke, a fragment of rock which he had brought from the
shore, charged with Liasic fossils; and a note he had written, to say
that the deposit to which it belonged occurred in the trap immediately
above the village-mill; and further, to call my attention to a house
near the middle of the village, built of a mouldering red sandstone,
which had been found _in situ_ in digging the foundations. I had but
little time for the work of exploration in Mull, and the information
thus kindly rendered enabled me to economize it.

The village of Tobermory resembles that of Oban. A quiet bay has its
secure island-breakwater in front; a line of tall, well-built houses,
not in the least rural in their aspect, but that seem rather as if they
had been transported from the centre of some stately city entire and at
once, sweeps round its inner inflection, like a bent bow; and an
amphitheatre of mingled rock and wood rises behind. With all its beauty,
however, there hangs about the village an air of melancholy. Like some
of the other western coast villages, it seems not to have grown,
piece-meal, as a village ought, but to have been made wholesale, as
Frankenstein made his man; and to be ever asking, and never more
incessantly than when it is at its quietest, why it should have been
made at all? The remains of the Florida, a gallant Spanish ship, lie off
its shores, a wreck of the Invincible Armada, "deep whelmed," according
to Thompson,

"What time,
Snatched sudden by the vengeful blast,
The scattered vessels drove, and on blind shelve,
And pointed rock that marks th' indented shore,
Relentless dashed, where loud the northern main
Howls through the fractured Caledonian isles."

Macculloch relates, that there was an attempt made, rather more