the birch woods, and on the sides of the hills, driven on the wind, the white smoke of the rain. Though fierce as a charge of Highland bayonets, these squalls are seldom of long duration, and you bless them when you creep from your shelter, for out comes the sun, and the birch woods are twinkling, and more intensely flash the levels of the sea, and at a stroke the clouds are scattered from the wet brow of Blavin, and to the whole a new element is added, the voice of the swollen stream as it rushes over a hundred tiny cataracts, and roars river-broad into the sea, making turbid the azure. Then I have my amusements in this solitary place. The mountains are of course open, and this morning at dawn a roe swept past me like the wind, nose to the dewy ground, “tracking," they call it here. Above all, I can wander on the ebbed beach. Hogg speaks of that "Undefined and mingled hum, Voice of the desert, never dumb." But far more than the murmuring and insecty air of the moorland, does the wet chirk-chirking of the living shore give one the idea of crowded and multitudinous life. Did the reader ever hunt razor-fish? not sport like tigerhunting, I admit; yet it has its pleasures and excitements, and can kill a forenoon for an idle man agreeably. On the wet sands yonder the razor-fish are spouting like the fountains at Versailles on a fête day. The sly fellow sinks on discharging his watery feu de joie. If you are quickly after him through the sand, you catch him, and then comes the tug of war. Address and dexterity are required. If you pull vigorously, he slips out of his sheath a "mothernaked" mollusk, and escapes. If you do your spiriting gently, you drag him up to light, a long, thin case, with a white fishy bulb protruding at one end like a root. Rinse him in sea-water, toss him into your basket, and plunge after another watery flash. These razor-fish are excellent eating, the people say; and when used as bait, no fish that swims the ocean stream, cod, whiting, haddock, flat skate broad-shouldered, crimson bream, not the detested dogfish himself, this summer swarming in every loch and becursed by every fisherman, can keep himself off the hook, and in an hour your boat is laden with glittering spoil. Then if you take your gun to the low islands, and you can go dry-shod at ebb of tide, - you have your chance of sea-fowl. Gulls of all kinds are there, dookers and divers of every description; flocks of shy curlews, and specimens of a hundred tribes, to which my limited. ornithological knowledge cannot furnish a name. The Solan goose yonder falls from heaven into the water like a meteor-stone. See the solitary scart, with long, narrow wing and outstretched neck, shooting toward some distant promontory! Anon, high overhead, come wheeling a covey of lovely sea-swallows. You fire; one flutters down never more to skim the horizon or to dip in the sea sparkle. Lift it up; is it not beautiful? The wild keen eye is closed, but you see the delicate slate-color of the wings, and the long tail-feathers white as the creaming foam. There is a stain of blood on the breast, hardly brighter than the scarlet of its beak and feet. Lay it down, for its companions are dashing round and round, uttering harsh cries of rage and sorrow; and had you the heart, you could shoot them one by one. At ebb of tide wild-looking children, from turf-cabins on the hillside, come down to hunt shell-fish. Even now a troop is busy; how their shrill voices go the while! Old Effie, I see, is out to-day, quite a picturesque object with her white cap and red shawl. With a tin can in one hand, an old reapinghook in the other, she goes poking among the tangle. Let us see what sport she has had. She turns round at our salutation, very old, old almost as the worn rocks around. She might have been the wife of Wordsworth's "Leechgatherer." Her can is sprawling with brown crabs; and opening her apron, she exhibits a large black and blue lobster, a fellow such as she alone can capture. A queer woman is Effie, and an awsome. She is familiar with ghosts and apparitions. She can relate legends that have power over the superstitious blood, and with little coaxing will sing those wild Gaelic songs of hers, - of dead lights on the sea, of fishing-boats going down in squalls, of unburied bodies tossing day and night upon the gray peaks of the waves, and of girls that pray God to lay them by the sides of their drowned lovers; although for them should never rise mass nor chant, and although their flesh should be torn asunder by the wild fishes of the sea. Rain is my enemy here, and at this writing I am suffering siege. For three days this rickety dwelling has stood assault of wind and rain. Yesterday a blast breached the door, and the tenement fluttered for a moment like an `umbrella caught in a gust. All seemed lost, but the door was got to again, heavily barred across, and the enemy foiled. An entrance, however, had been effected; and that portion of the attacking column which I had imprisoned by my dexterous manoeuvre, maddening itself into whirlwind, rushed up the chimney, scattering my turf fire as it went, and so escaped. Since that time the windy columns have retired to the gorges of the hills, where I hear them howl at intervals; and the only thing I am exposed to is the musketry of the rain. How viciously the small shot peppers the walls! Here must I wait till the cloudy armament breaks up. One's own mind is a dull companion in these circumstances. Sheridan, - wont with his talk to brighten the table more than the champagne; whose mind was a phosphorescent sea, dark in its rest, every movement a flash of splendor, if cooped up here, begirt with this murky atmosphere, would be dull as a Lincoln fen unen -- livened by a single will-o'-the-wisp. Books are the only refuge on a rainy day; but in Skye Bothies books are rare To me, however, the gods have proved kind, for in my sore need I found on a shelf here two volumes of the old Monthly Review, and have sauntered through these dingy literary catacombs with considerable satisfaction. What a strange set of old fogies the writers! To read them is like conversing with the antediluvians. Their opinions have fallen into disuse long ago, and resemble to-day the rusty armor and gimcracks of a curiosity-shop. These essays and criticisms were thought brilliant, I suppose, when they appeared last century, and authors praised therein considered themselves rather handsome flies, preserved in pure critical amber for the inspection of posterity. The volumes were published, I notice, from 1790 to 1792, and exhibit a period of wonderful literary activity. Not to speak of novels, histories, travels, farces, tragedies, upwards of two hundred poems are brought to judgment. Plainly, these Monthly Reviewers worked hard, and on the whole with spirit and deftness. A proper sense of the importance of their craft had these gentlemen; they laid down the law with great gravity, and from critical benches shook their awful wigs on offenders. How it all looks now! "Let us indulge ourselves with another extract," quoth one," and contemplate once more the tear of grief before we are called upon to witness the tear of rapture." Both tears dried up long ago, as those that sparkled on a Pharaoh's cheek. Hear this other, stern as Rhadamanthus; behold Duty steeling itself against human weakness! "It grieves us to wound a young man's feelings; but our judgment must not be biassed by any plea whatsoever. Why will men apply for our opinion, when they know that we cannot be silent, and that we will not lie?" Listen to this prophet knee to Baal, and say in Israel, one who has not bent the if there is not a touch of hopeless pathos in him: "Fine words do not make fine poems. Scarcely a month passes in which we are not obliged to issue this decree. But in these days of universal heresy, our decrees are no more respected than the Bulls of the Bishop of Rome." O that men would hear, that they would incline their hearts to wisdom! The ghosts of the dim literary Hades are getting tiresome, and as I look up, lo! the rain has ceased, from sheer fatigue: great white vapors are rising from the damp valleys; and, better than all, pleasant as Blucher's cannon on the evening of Waterloo, the sound of wheels on the boggy ground; and just when the stanched rainclouds are burning into a sullen red at sunset, I have a visitor in my Bothy, and pleasant human intercourse. Broadford Fair is a great event in the island. The little town lies on the margin of a curving bay, and under the shadow of a somewhat celebrated hill. On the crest of it is a cairn of stones, the burying-place of an ancient Scandinavian woman, tradition informs me, whose wish it was to be laid high up there, that she might sleep right in the pathway of the Norway wind. In a green glen, at its base, stand the ruins of the House of Corrichatachin, where Boswell had his share of four bowls of punch, and went to bed at five in the morning, and, awakening at noon with a severe headache, saw Dr. Johnson burst in upon him with the exclamation, "What, drunk yet!" "His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraiding," writes the penitent Bozzy, "so I was relieved a little." Broadford is a post-town of about a dozen houses, and is a place of great importance. If Portree is the London of Skye, Broadford is its Manchester. The markets, held every three months or so, take place on a patch of moorland about a mile from the village. Not only are cattle sold and cash exchanged for the same, but there a Skye farmer meets his relations, from the brother of his blood to his cousin forty times removed. To these meetings he is drawn, not only by his love of coin, but by |