when
he first sat down to study it, the story of his island charge in Eigg,
and his Free Church yacht the Betsey. Nineteen years before, we had been
engaged in beating over the Eathie Lias together, collecting Belemnites,
Ammonites, and fossil wood, and striving in friendly emulation the one
to surpass the other in the variety and excellence of our specimens. Our
leisure hours were snatched, at the time, from college studies by the
one, from the mallet by the other: there were few of them that we did
not spend together, and that we were not mutually the better for so
spending. I at least, owe much to these hours,--among other things,
views of theologic truth, that determined the side I have taken in our
ecclesiastical controversy. Our courses at an after period lay diverse;
the young minister had greatly more important business to pursue than
any which the geologic field furnishes; and so our amicable rivalry
ceased early. In the words in which an English poet addresses his
brother,--the clergyman who sat for the picture in the "Deserted
Village,"--my friend "entered on a sacred office, where the harvest is
great and the laborers are few, and left to me a field in which the
laborers are many, and the harvest scarce worth carrying away."

Next day at noon we weighed anchor, and stood out for Rum, a run of
about twenty-five miles. A kind friend had, we found, sent aboard in our
behalf two pieces of rare antiquity,--rare anywhere, but especially
rare in the lockers of the Betsey,--in the agreeable form of two bottles
of semi-fossil Madeira,--Madeira that had actually existed in the grape
exactly half a century before, at the time when Robespierre was
startling Paris from its propriety, by mutilating at the neck the busts
of other people, and multiplying casts and medals of his own; and we
found it, explored in moderation, no bad study for geologists,
especially in coarse weather, when they had got wet and somewhat
fatigued. It was like Landlord Boniface's ale, mild as milk, had
exchanged its distinctive flavor as Madeira for a better one, and filled
the cabin with fragrance every time the cork was drawn. Old observant
Homer must have smelt some such liquor somewhere, or he could never have
described so well the still more ancient and venerable wine with which
wily Ulysses beguiled one-eyed Polypheme:--

"Unmingled wine,
Mellifluous, undecaying, and divine,
Which now, some ages from his race conce