nourable interment to their
dead, given to their predecessors in the little island of St. Colme (or
Colmoch!) something more than a century before--said island having
derived its name from the Lindisfarne Saint, who may have occasionally
occupied it as his desert or hermitage? I do not expect that you will
not laugh at all this! but a hearty laugh is not a bad thing in this
gloomy weather.--P.]

[Footnote 105: See extract in Goodall's edition of the _Scotichronicon_,
vol. i. p. 6. (footnote), and in Colgan's _Trias Thaumaturga_, vol. ii.
p. 466.]

[Footnote 106: Dr. O'Donovan's _Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland_, vol.
i. p. 557.]

[Footnote 107: In Scotland we have various alleged instances of caves
being thus employed as anchorite or devotional cells, and some of them
still show rudely cut altars, crosses, etc.--as the so-called cave of
St. Columba on the shores of Loch Killesport in North Knapdale, with an
altar, a font or piscina, and a cross cut in the rock (_Origines
Parochiales_, vol. ii. p. 40); the cave of St. Kieran on Loch Kilkerran
in Cantyre (_Ibid._ vol. ii. p. 12); the cave of St. Ninian on the coast
of Wigtonshire (_Old Statistical Account of Scotland_, vol. xvii. p.
594); the cave of St. Molio or Molaise, in Holy Island, in the Clyde,
with Runic inscriptions on its walls (see an account of them in Dr.
Daniel Wilson's admirable _Prehistoric Annals of Scotland_, pp. 531 to
533, etc). The island of Inchcolm pertains to Fifeshire, and in this
single county there are at least four caves that are averred to have
been the retreats which early Christian devotees and ascetics occupied
as temporary abodes and oratories, or in which they occasionally kept
their holy vigils; namely, the cave at Dunfermline, which bears the name
of Malcolm Canmore's devout Saxon queen St. Margaret, and which is said
to have contained formerly a stone table or altar, with "something like
a crucifix" upon it (Dr. Chalmers' _Historical Account of Dunfermline_,
vol. i. pp. 88, 89); the cave of St. Serf at Dysart (the name
itself--Dysart--an instance, in all probability, of the "_desertum_" of
the text, p. 124), in which that saint contested successfully in debate,
according to the _Aberdeen Breviary_, with the devil, and expelled him
from the spot (see _Breviarium Aberdonense_, Mens. Julii, fol. xv, and
Mr. Muir's _Notices of Dysart_ printed for the Maitland Club, p. 3); the
caves of Caplawchy, on the east Fifeshire coast, marked inte