ormed
"Scottish Association for the Protection of the Poor" than that of this
miserable family; and it is but one of many which the island of Eigg
will be found to furnish.

After a week's weary waiting, settled weather came at last; and the
morning of Tuesday rose bright and fair. My friend, whose absence at the
General Assembly had accumulated a considerable amount of ministerial
labor on his hands, had to employ the day professionally; and as John
Stewart was still engaged with his potato crop, I was necessitated to
sally out on my first geological excursion alone. In passing
vessel-wards, on the previous year, from the _Ru Stoir_ to the
farm-house of Keill, along the escarpment under the cliffs, I had
examined the shores somewhat too cursorily during the one-half of my
journey, and the closing evening had prevented me from exploring them
during the other half at all; and I now set myself leisurely to retrace
the way backwards from the farm-house to the _Stoir_. I descended to the
bottom of the cliffs, along the pathway which runs between Keill and the
solitary midway shieling formerly described, and found that the basaltic
columns over head, which had seemed so picturesque in the twilight, lost
none of their beauty when viewed by day. They occur in forms the most
beautiful and fantastic; here grouped beside some blind opening in the
precipice, like pillars cut round the opening of a tomb, on some
rock-front in Petraea; there running in long colonnades, or rising into
tall porticoes; yonder radiating in straight lines from some common
centre, resembling huge pieces of fan-work, or bending out in bold
curves over some shaded chasm, like rows of crooked oaks projecting from
the steep sides of some dark ravine. The various beds of which the
cliffs are composed, as courses of ashlar compose a wall, are of very
different degrees of solidity: some are of hard porphyritic or basaltic
trap; some of soft Oolitic sandstone or shale. Where the columns rest on
a soft stratum, their foundations have in many places given way, and
whole porticoes and colonnades hang perilously forward in tottering
ruin, separated from the living rock behind by deep chasms. I saw one of
these chasms, some five or six feet in width, and many yards in length,
that descended to a depth which the eye could not penetrate; and another
partially filled up with earth and stones, through which, along a dark
opening not much larger than a chimney-vent, the bo