he cave by the poor child amid whose
mouldering remains Mr. Swanson found it. The little pellet of gray hair
spoke of feeble old age involved in this wholesale massacre with the
vigorous manhood of the island; and here was a story of unsuspecting
infancy amusing itself on the eve of destruction with its toys. Alas,
for man! "Should not I spare Nineveh, that great city," said God to the
angry prophet, "wherein are more than six score thousand persons that
cannot discern between their right hand and their left?" God's image
must have been sadly defaced in the murderers of the poor inoffensive
children of Eigg, ere they could have heard their feeble wailings,
raised, no doubt, when the stifling atmosphere within began first to
thicken, and yet ruthlessly persist in their work of indiscriminate
destruction.

Various curious things have from time to time been picked up from under
the bones. An islander found among them, shortly before our visit, a
sewing needle of copper, little more than an inch in length; fragments
of Eigg shoes, of the kind still made in the island, are of
comparatively common occurrence; and Mr. James Wilson relates, in the
singularly graphic and powerful description of _Uamh Fraingh_, which
occurs in his "Voyage round the Coasts of Scotland" (1841), that a
sailor, when he was there, disinterred, by turning up a flat stone, a
"buck-tooth" and a piece of money,--the latter a rusty copper coin,
apparently of the times of Mary of Scotland. I also found a few teeth;
they were sticking fast in a fragment of jaw; and, taking it for
granted, as I suppose I may, that the dentology of the murderous M'Leods
outside the cave must have very much resembled that of the murdered
M'Donalds within, very harmless looking teeth they were for being those
of an animal so maliciously mischievous as man. I have found in the Old
Red Sandstone the strong-based tusks of the semi-reptile Holoptychius; I
have chiselled out of the limestone of the Coal Measures the sharp,
dagger-like incisors of the Megalichthys; I have picked up in the Lias
and Oolite the cruel spikes of the Crocodile and the Ichthyosaurus; I
have seen the trenchant, saw-edged teeth of gigantic Cestracions and
Squalidae that had been disinterred from the Chalk and the London Clay;
and I have felt, as I examined them, that there could be no possibility
of mistake regarding the nature of the creatures to which they had
belonged;--they were teeth made for hacking, tea