n the
morning of Monday arose. The ceaseless patter made dull music on deck
and skylight above, and the slower drip, drip, through the leaky beams,
drearily beat time within. The roof of my bed was luckily water-tight;
and I could look out from my snuggery of blankets on the desolations of
the leakage, like Bacon's philosopher surveying a tempest from the
shore. But the minister was somewhat less fortunate, and had no little
trouble in diverting an ill-conditioned drop that had made a dead set at
his pillow. I was now a full week from Edinburgh, and had seen and done
nothing; and, were another week to pass after the same manner,--as, for
aught that appeared, might well happen,--I might just go home again, as
I had come, with my labor for my pains. In the course of the afternoon,
however, the weather unexpectedly cleared up, and we set out somewhat
impatiently through the wet grass, to visit a cave a few hundred yards
to the west of _Naomh Fraingh_, in which it had been said the
Protestants of the island might meet for the purposes of religious
worship, were they to be ejected from the cottage erected by Mr.
Swanson, in which they had worshipped hitherto. We reexamined, in the
passing, the pitch stone dike mentioned in a former chapter, and the
charnel cave of Frances; but I found nothing to add to my former
descriptions, and little to modify, save that perhaps the cave appeared
less dark, in at least the outer half of its area, than it had seemed to
me in the former year, when examined by torch-light, and that the
straggling twilight, as it fell on the ropy sides, green with moss and
mould, and on the damp bone-strewn floor, overmantled with a still
darker crust, like that of a stagnant pool, seemed also to wear its tint
of melancholy greenness, as if transmitted through a depth of sea-water.
The cavern we had come to examine we found to be a noble arched opening
in a dingy-colored precipice of augitic trap,--a cave roomy and lofty as
the nave of a cathedral, and ever resounding to the dash of the sea; but
though it could have amply accommodated a congregation of at least five
hundred, we found the way far too long and difficult for at least the
weak and the elderly, and in some places inaccessible at full flood; and
so we at once decided against the accommodation which it offered. But
its shelter will, I trust, scarce be needed.

On our return to the Betsey, we passed through a straggling group of
cottages on the hill-