lds outside.

How exquisitely the sun sets in a clear, calm, summer evening over the
blue Hebrides! Within less than a mile of our barrack, there rose a
tall hill, whose bold summit commanded all the Western Isles, from Sleat
in Skye, to the Butt of the Lewis. To the south lay the trap islands; to
the north and west, the gneiss ones. They formed, however, seen from
this hill, one great group, which, just as the sun had sunk, and sea and
sky were so equally bathed in gold as to exhibit on the horizon no
dividing line, seemed in their transparent purple--darker or lighter
according to the distance--a group of lovely clouds, that, though
moveless in the calm, the first light breeze might sweep away. Even the
flat promontories of sandstone, which, like outstretched arms, enclosed
the outer reaches of the foreground--promontories edged with low red
cliffs, and covered with brown heath--used to borrow at these times,
from the soft yellow beam, a beauty not their own. Amid the inequalities
of the gneiss region within--a region more broken and precipitous, but
of humbler altitude, than the great gneiss tract of the midland
Highlands--the chequered light and shade lay, as the sun declined, in
strongly contrasted patches, that betrayed the abrupt inequalities of
the ground, and bore, when all around was warm, tinted, and bright, a
hue of cold neutral grey; while immediately over and beyond this rough
sombre base there rose two noble pyramids of red sandstone, about two
thousand feet in height, that used to flare to the setting sun in bright
crimson, and whose nearly horizontal strata, deeply scored along the
lines, like courses of ashlar in an ancient wall, added to the mural
effect communicated by their bare fronts and steep rectilinear outlines.
These tall pyramids form the terminal members, towards the south, of an
extraordinary group of sandstone hills, of denudation unique in the
British islands, to which I have already referred, and which extends
from the northern boundary of Assynt to near Applecross. But though I
formed at this time my first acquaintance with the group, it was not
until many years after that I had an opportunity of determining the
relations of their component beds to each other, and to the fundamental
rocks of the country.

At times my walks were directed along the sea-shore. Naturalists well
know how much the western coasts of Scotland differ in their productions
from its eastern ones; but it was a diff