. The gardens
have apples and pears, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, currants,
and gooseberries, but all the fruit, that I have seen, is small. They
attempt to sow nothing but oats and barley. Oats constitute the bread-corn
of the place. Their harvest is about the beginning of October; and,
being so late, is very much subject to disappointments from the rains
that follow the equinox. This year has been particularly disastrous.
Their rainy season lasts from autumn to spring. They have seldom very
hard frosts; nor was it ever known that a lake was covered with ice
strong enough to bear a skater. The sea round them is always open. The
snow falls, but soon melts; only in 1771, they had a cold spring, in
which the island was so long covered with it, that many beasts, both
wild and domestick, perished, and the whole country was reduced to
distress, from which I know not if it is even yet recovered.

The animals here are not remarkably small; perhaps they recruit their
breed from the mainland. The cows are sometimes without horns. The
horned and unhorned cattle are not accidental variations, but different
species: they will, however, breed together.

October 3rd. The wind is now changed, and if we snatch the moment of
opportunity, an escape from this island is become practicable; I have no
reason to complain of my reception, yet I long to be again at home.

You and my master may, perhaps, expect, after this description of Skie,
some account of myself. My eye is, I am afraid, not fully recovered; my
ears are not mended; my nerves seem to grow weaker, and I have been
otherwise not as well as I sometimes am, but think myself, lately,
better. This climate, perhaps, is not within my degree of healthy
latitude.

Thus I have given my most honoured mistress the story of me and my
little ramble. We are now going to some other isle, to what we know not;
the wind will tell us. I am, &c.

XXV.--To MRS. THRALE.

Mull, Oct. 15, 1773.

DEAR MADAM,--Though I have written to Mr. Thrale, yet having a little
more time than was promised me, I would not suffer the messenger to go
without some token of my duty to my mistress, who, I suppose, expects
the usual tribute of intelligence, a tribute which I am not very able to
pay.

October 3rd. After having been detained, by storms, many days in Skie,
we left it, as we thought, with a fair wind; but a violent gust, which
Bos. had a great mind to call a tempest, forced us into Col, an ob