rther marks of visitors in the single bones
separated from the heaps and scattered over the area; but enough still
remains to show, in the general disposition of the remains, that the
hapless islanders died under the walls in families, each little group
separated by a few feet from the others. Here and there the remains of a
detached skeleton may be seen, as if some robust islander, restless in
his agony, had stalked out into the middle space ere he fell; but the
social arrangement is the general one. And beneath every heap we find,
at the depth, as has been said, of a few inches, the remains of the
straw-bed upon which the family had lain, largely mixed with the smaller
bones of the human frame, ribs and vertebrae, and hand and feet bones;
occasionally, too, with fragments of unglazed pottery, and various other
implements of a rude housewifery. The minister found for me, under one
family heap, the pieces of a half-burned, unglazed earthen jar, with a
narrow mouth, that, like the sepulchral urns of our ancient tumuli, had
been moulded by the hand, without the assistance of the potter's wheel;
and to one of the fragments there stuck a minute pellet of gray hair.
From under another heap he disinterred the handle-stave of a child's
wooden porringer (_bicker_), perforated by a hole still bearing the mark
of the cord that had hung it to the wall; and beside the stave lay a few
of the larger, less destructible bones of the child, with what for a
time puzzled us both not a little,--one of the grinders of a horse.
Certain it was, no horse could have got there to have dropped a
tooth,--a foal of a week old could not have pressed itself through the
opening; and how the single grinder, evidently no recent introduction
into the cave, could have got mixed up in the straw with the human
bones, seemed an enigma somewhat of the class to which the reel in the
bottle belongs. I found in Edinburgh an unexpected commentator on the
mystery, in the person of my little boy,--an experimental philosopher in
his second year. I had spread out on the floor the curiosities of
Eigg,--among the rest, the relics of the cave, including the pieces of
earthern jar, and the fragment of the porringer; but the horse's tooth
seemed to be the only real curiosity among them in the eyes of little
Bill. He laid instant hold of it; and, appropriating it as a toy,
continued playing with it till he fell asleep. I have now little doubt
that it was first brought into t