t, on doggedly beating our way adown the Sound of Sleat to Small
Isles. If the wind does not fail us, said my friend, we have little
more than a day's work before us, and shall get into Eigg about
midnight. We had but one of our seamen aboard, for John Stewart was
engaged with his potato crop at home; but the minister was content, in
the emergency, to rank his passenger as an able-bodied seaman; and so,
hoisting sail and anchor, we got under way, and, clearing the loch,
struck out into the Sound.

We tacked in long reaches for several hours, now opening up in
succession the deep withdrawing lochs of the mainland, now clearing
promontory after promontory in the island district of Sleat. In a few
hours we had left a bulky schooner, that had quitted Isle Ornsay at the
same time, full five miles behind us; but as the sun began to decline,
the wind began to sink; and about seven o'clock, when we were nearly
abreast of the rocky point of Sleat, and about half-way advanced in our
voyage, it had died into a calm; and for full twenty hours thereafter
there was no more sailing for the Betsey. We saw the sun set, and the
clouds gather, and the pelting rain come down, and nightfall, and
morning break, and the noon-tide hour pass by, and still were we
floating idly in the calm. I employed the few hours of the Saturday
evening that intervened between the time of our arrest and nightfall, in
fishing from our little boat for medusae with a bucket. They had risen by
myriads from the bottom as the wind fell, and were mottling the green
depths of the water below and around far as the eye could reach. Among
the commoner kinds,--the kind with the four purple rings on the area of
its flat bell, which ever vibrates without sound, and the kind with the
fringe of dingy brown, and the long stinging tails, of which I have
sometimes borne from my swimming excursions the nettle-like smart for
hours,--there were at least two species of more unusual occurrence, both
of them very minute. The one, scarcely larger than a shilling, bore the
common umbiliferous form, but had its area inscribed by a pretty
orange-colored wheel; the other, still more minute, and which presented
in the water the appearance of a small hazel-nut of a brownish-yellow
hue, I was disposed to set down as a species of beroe. On getting one
caught, however, and transferred to a bowl, I found that the
brownish-colored, melon-shaped mass, though ribbed like the beroe, did
not represen