lating medium in Rum; and the cottars in Eigg contrive barely
enough to earn at the harvest in the Lowlands money sufficient to clear
with their landlord at rent-day. Their contributions for ecclesiastical
purposes make no great figure, therefore, in the lists of the
Sustentation Fund. But of what they have they give willingly and in a
kindly spirit; and if baskets of small trout, or pailfuls of spout-fish,
went current in the Free Church, there would, I am certain, be a per
centage of both the fish and the mollusc, derived from the Small Isles,
in the half-yearly sustentation dividends. We found the supply of
both,--especially as provisions were beginning to run short in the
lockers of the Betsey,--quite deserving of our gratitude. The razor-fish
had been brought us by the worthy catechist of the island. He had gone
to the ebb in our special behalf, and had spent a tide in laboriously
filling the pail with these "treasures hid in the sand;" thoroughly
aware, like the old exiled puritan, who eked out his meals in a time of
scarcity with the oysters of New England, that even the razor-fish,
under this head, is included in the promises. There is a peculiarity in
the razor-fish of Rum that I have not marked in the razor-fish of our
eastern coasts. The gills of the animal, instead of bearing the general
color of its other parts, like those of the oyster, are of a deep green
color, resembling, when examined by the microscope, the fringe of a
green curtain.

We were told by John Stewart, that the expatriated inhabitants of Rum
used to catch trout by a simple device of ancient standing, which
preceded the introduction of nets into the island, and which, it is
possible, may in other localities have not only preceded the use of the
net, but may have also suggested it: it had at least the appearance of
being a first beginning of invention in this direction. The islanders
gathered large quantities of heath, and then tying it loosely into
bundles, and stripping it of its softer leafage, they laid the bundles
across the stream on a little mound held down by stones, with the tops
of the heath turned upwards to the current. The water rose against the
mound for a foot or eighteen inches, and then murmured over and through,
occasioning an expansion among the hard elastic sprays. Next a party of
the islanders came down the stream, beating the banks and pools, and
sending a still thickening shoal of trout before them, that, on
reaching th