ce."
But of pumice in connection with the pitchstones of Eigg, more anon.

Leaving our boat to return to the Betsey at John Stewart's leisure, and
taking with us his companion, to assist us in carrying such specimens as
we might procure, we passed westwards for a few hundred yards under the
crags, and came abreast of a dark angular opening at the base of the
precipice, scarce two feet in height, and in front of which there lies a
little sluggish, ankle-deep pool, half mud, half water, and matted over
with grass and rushes. Along the mural face of the rock of earthy
amygdaloid there runs a nearly vertical line, which in one of the
stratified rocks one might perhaps term the line of a fault, but which
in a trap rock may merely indicate where two semi-molten masses had
pressed against each other without uniting--just as currents of cooling
lead, poured by the plumber from the opposite end of a groove, sometimes
meet and press together, so as to make a close, polished joint, without
running into one piece. The little angular opening forms the lower
termination of the line, which, hollowing inwards, recedes near the
bottom into a shallow cave, roughened with tufts of fern and bunches of
long silky grass, here and there enlivened by the delicate flowers of
the lesser rock-geranium. A shower of drops patters from above among the
weeds and rushes of the little pool. My friend the minister stopped
short. "There," he said, pointing to the hollow, "you will find such a
bone cave as you never saw before. Within that opening there lie the
remains of an entire race, palpably destroyed, as geologists in so many
other cases are content merely to imagine, by one great catastrophe.
That is the famous cave of Frances (_Uamh Fraingh_), in which the whole
people of Eigg were smoked to death by the M'Leods."

We struck a light, and, worming ourselves through the narrow entrance,
gained the interior,--a true rock gallery, vastly more roomy and lofty
than one could have anticipated from the mean vestibule placed in front
of it. Its extreme length we found to be two hundred and sixty feet; its
extreme breadth twenty-seven feet; its height, where the roof rises
highest, from eighteen to twenty feet. The cave seems to have owed its
origin to two distinct causes. The trap-rocks on each side of the
vertical fault-like crevice which separates them are greatly decomposed,
as if by the moisture percolating from above; and directly in the line
of the