pavement; and the whole gave
curious evidence of a kind fitted to picture to the imagination a
background vista of antiquity, all the more remotely ancient in aspect
from the venerable age of the object in front. Dry ground covered by
wood, a lake, a morass, and then dry ground again, had all taken
precedence, on the site of the tesselated pavement, in this instance, of
an old Roman villa. But what was antiquity in connection with a Roman
villa, to antiquity in connection with the Scuir of Eigg? Under the old
foundations of this huge wall we find the remains of a pine forest,
that, long ere a single bed of the porphyry had burst from beneath, had
sprung up and decayed on hill and beside stream in some nameless
land,--had then been swept to the sea,--had been entombed deep at the
bottom in a grit of Oolite,--had been heaved up to the surface, and
high over it, by volcanic agencies working from beneath,--and had
finally been built upon, as moles are built upon piles, by the architect
that had laid down the masonry of the gigantic Scuir, in one fiery layer
after another. The mountain wall of Eigg, with its dizzy elevation of
four hundred and seventy feet, is a wall founded on piles of pine laid
crossways; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig into
the floor of this deep-hewn piazza, to be convinced that at least it
_is_ a fact.

Just at this interesting stage, however, our explorations bade fair to
be interrupted. Our man who carried the pickaxe had lingered behind us
for a few hundred yards, in earnest conversation with an islander; and
he now came up, breathless and in hot haste, to say that the islander, a
Roman Catholic tacksman in the neighborhood, had peremptorily warned him
that the Scuir of Eigg was the property of Dr. M'Pherson of Aberdeen,
not ours, and that the Doctor would be very angry at any man who meddled
with it. "That message," said my friend, laughing, but looking just a
little sad through the laugh, "would scarce have been sent us when I was
minister of the Establishment here; but it seems allowable in the case
of a poor Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little ways
in which the Roman Catholic population of the island try to annoy me,
now that they see my back to the wall." I was tickled with the idea of a
fossil preserve, which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of the
associative faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for the
British empire, framed on the