Skie is the greatest island, or the greatest but one, among the Hebrides.  Of the soil, I have already given some account:  it is generally barren, but some spots are not wholly unfruitful.  The gardens have apples and pears, cherries, strawberries, raspberries, currants, and gooseberries, but all the fruit, that I have seen, is small.  They attempt to sow nothing but oats and barley.  Oats constitute the bread-corn of the place.  Their harvest is about the beginning of October; and, being so late, is very much subject to disappointments from the rains that follow the equinox.  This year has been particularly disastrous.  Their rainy season lasts from autumn to spring.  They have seldom very hard frosts; nor was it ever known that a lake was covered with ice strong enough to bear a skater.  The sea round them is always open.  The snow falls, but soon melts; only in 1771, they had a cold spring, in which the island was so long covered with it, that many beasts, both wild and domestick, perished, and the whole country was reduced to distress, from which I know not if it is even yet recovered.

The animals here are not remarkably small; perhaps they recruit their breed from the mainland.  The cows are sometimes without horns.  The horned and unhorned cattle are not accidental variations, but different species:  they will, however, breed together.

October 3rd.  The wind is now changed, and if we snatch the moment of opportunity, an escape from this island is become practicable; I have no reason to complain of my reception, yet I long to be again at home.

You and my master may, perhaps, expect, after this description of Skie, some account of myself.  My eye is, I am afraid, not fully recovered; my ears are not mended; my nerves seem to grow weaker, and I have been otherwise not as well as I sometimes am, but think myself, lately, better.  This climate, perhaps, is not within my degree of healthy latitude.

Thus I have given my most honoured mistress the story of me and my little ramble.  We are now going to some other isle, to what we know not; the wind will tell us.  I am, &c.

XXV.—­To MRS. THRALE.

Mull, Oct. 15, 1773.

DEAR MADAM,—­Though I have written to Mr. Thrale, yet having a little more time than was promised me, I would not suffer the messenger to go without some token of my duty to my mistress, who, I suppose, expects the usual tribute of intelligence, a tribute which I am not very able to pay.

October 3rd.  After having been detained, by storms, many days in Skie, we left it, as we thought, with a fair wind; but a violent gust, which Bos. had a great mind to call a tempest, forced us into Col, an obscure island; on which

—­“nulla campis Arbor aestiva recreatur aura.”