hanges--New Faces--The Stonemason's Mark--The Burying Ground of
Urquhart--An old acquaintance--Property Qualification for Voting in
Scotland--Montgerald Sandstone Quarries--Geological Science in
Cromarty--The Danes at Cromarty--The Danish Professor and the "Old
Red Sandstone"--Harmonizing tendencies of Science.

The anchoring ground at Isle Ornsay was crowded with coasting vessels
and fishing boats; and when the Sabbath came round, no inconsiderable
portion of my friend's congregation was composed of sailors and
fishermen. His text was appropriate,--"He bringeth them into their
desired haven;" and as his sea-craft and his theology were alike
excellent, there were no incongruities in his allegory, and no defects
in his mode of applying it, and the seamen were hugely delighted. John
Stewart, though less a master of English than of many other things, told
me he was able to follow the minister from beginning to end,--a thing he
had never done before at an English preaching. The sea portion of the
sermon, he said, was very plain: it was about the helm, and the sails,
and the anchor, and the chart, and the pilot,--about rocks, winds,
currents, and safe harborage; and by attending to this simpler part of
it, he was led into the parts that were less simple, and so succeeded in
comprehending the whole. I would fain see this unique discourse,
preached by a sailor minister to a sailor congregation, preserved in
some permanent form, with at least one other discourse,--of which I
found trace in the island of Eigg, after the lapse of more than a
twelvemonth,--that had been preached about the time of the Disruption,
full in sight of the Scuir, with its impregnable hill-fort, and in the
immediate neighborhood of the cave of Frances, with its heaps of dead
men's bones. One note stuck fast to the islanders. In times of peril and
alarm, said the minister, the ancient inhabitants of the island had two
essentially different kinds of places in which they sought security;
they had the deep, unwholesome cave, shut up from the light and the
breath of heaven, and the tall rock summit, with its impregnable fort,
on which the sun shone and the wind blew. Much hardship might no doubt
be encountered on the one, when the sky was black with tempest, and
rains beat, or snows descended; but it was found associated with no
story of real loss or disaster,--it had kept safe all who had committed
themselves to it; whereas, in the close