standard of the Cross, about the middle of the sixth century; that when he left Ireland he vowed never to return, and never again to look upon the place of his birth. Standing on the beetling cliff which rises immediately behind his new Oronsay home, the shores of the Emerald Isle came into view; and, true to his vow, he again set sail, with a portion of his followers, and found another home at Icolmkill, or Iona, where he long labored, and where he planted those institutions so famous in the religious history of Scotland, and, indeed, of Western Europe, during the Middle Ages. All authentic history would seem to show that Iona was the first and only place where Columba himself lived and labored. However this may be, it may still be claimed that Oronsay was an early Christian home, and the residence of devoted Christian men belonging to that religions body which, for more than seven centuries, preached a pure Gospel, and which, though mainly displaced and driven out by the Roman Catholics, still preserved a nominal existence down almost to the time of the Reformation. Dr. Leyden, in a contribution to the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, gives us a beautiful legend of Colonsay, telling how an ancient laird of the island was seduced away by a mermaid, and long made his home with her in her gemmed cave in the ocean. In steaming down the Clyde, a canny Scotchman said to me, "Do you know the origin of these rocks of Dumbarton and Ailsa?" Not professing acquaintance with the geology of Scotland, I answered no. He said that when St. Patrick was chasing the devil out of Ireland, he shied two stones after him as he fled toward Scotland, one of which fell and became the rock of Ailsa, and the other the rock of Dumbarton. I answered that it was indeed curious. But as St. Patrick himself — according to his own "confessions" — was born at or near the little village of Kilpatrick, on the banks of the Clyde, between Greenock and Dumbarton, it was cruel in him to drive his Satanic. Majesty out of Ireland into his own native land. I added there was a compensation, and that Columba, who was a follower and teacher of the doctrines of St. Patrick, and a native of Ireland, had afterward settled in Scotland for the express purpose of expelling that same devil from St. Patrick's native land, and that it was to be hoped that the enterprise had proved successful. Legends and traditions were the order of the day, as we strolled, in company with the good clergyman of Colonsay, amidst the ruins of Oronsay. I am indebted to him for the views of the cross and the ruins given with this article.

Oronsay, lying away from traveled routes, is seldom visited by strangers. After exploring the old ruins, and removing the tangled grass from stones covering the remains of men who had been Christian laborers in bygone ages — climbing up to the top of overhanging cliffs, and looking out, as 4he followers of Columba may have done, upon distant Ireland-we drove back to the shore. The tide was still out, and a bed of hard sand a mile in width lay between us and Colonsay. On the opposite shore the road comes down to the sea through a narrow ravine, and near at hand are the ruins of a small stone chapel. At this chapel, in cases of funeral processions — especially when the tide was in — the body rested on its way to burial in sacred earth at Oronsay. It would require the magical pen of Scott to bring vividly and trufy before the mind's eye the burial of the chief. The procession is winding down, and halts at the little chapel. The wail of the mourning clansmen rises above the sound of the waves. As the waters recede and the tide goes out, the procession again takes up its march amass the sands, meeting on the Oronsay side the white-robed priests, chanting their sacred hymns, and who have come to escort the remains of their feudal chief to their last resting-place on the other side of the island.