clutches in my collection. As I was coming down, a great piece of turf came away, and I fell with a jerk which would have pulled down the men above if they had not been firmly anchored in their seat.
My last eagle’s nest was got on May nth at a place called Geo More na Tarkal in South Harris. The old bird was sitting so hard that wc could see her from the top of the cliff only about ten yards down, and when Sandy was lowered he nearly touched her before she went off. There were three large white eggs, which, notwithstanding the lateness of the season, had not been incubated for more than ten or twelve days. After this we crossed over the Sound of Harris to North Uist, where I was enter- tained hospitably by Mr. Macdonald of Newton on the west coast, from whose house one could see by the light of the setting sun the high cliff of the island of St. Kilda, fifty miles away.
Haskeir is a small rock about twelve miles west of North Uist; and on it I found a large colony of Sterna arctica breeding, though at a considerable distance from their feeding-grounds. One of the smaller rocks near it is the resort of all the cormorants for many miles, which are probably attracted by the solitude of the place. I found that many of their nests contained fresh eggs in July, though no one had landed there for some months; and as there were many young ones nearly fledged, I presume they occasion- ally rear two broods. Haskeir is the principal resort of the great seals (Halichœrus griseus), which breed there in October and November, and were formerly killed with clubs every year, as they lay on the rock with their young ones. This wholesale slaughter, to which the men of Uist looked forward with great eagerness, had now (1868) been stopped by the proprietor of that island, Sir John Orde, as the seals were in danger of being totally exterminated. I noticed here that none of the nests of the Sterna arctica contained more than, two eggs, which was also the case in other places I visited, while Sterna fluviatilis, which is also common in the Hebrides, usually lays three eggs.
In Berneray (or Barra Head, as it is generally called, to distinguish it from the numerous other islands of the same name) I had the good fortune to stay for four days in the height of the breeding season. I had a narrow escape from drowning in reaching this remote spot, which, so far as I know, no other ornithologist had then visited, At Castlebay, in Barra, I found a man who carried the mails and supplies for the lighthouse, when the weather allowed, and agreed with him for a passage in a boat which, I learnt too late, had only just been purchased by him from one of the East Coast fishermen who came every summer for the herring fishing. She was of the old type of open boat, with a big lug-sail, which had prob- ably been sold as no longer seaworthy, and the purchaser with true Hebri- dean carelessness took her out on his trial trip without examining her tackle. When we got out of Castlebay into one of the sounds where the heavy. Atlantic swell meets wind and tide, there was a very short chopping sea, high enough to take the wind out of the sail when the boat was down in the trough of the waves. We tried to take the sail down to reef it, but the sheave in the mast, on which the halyard worked, jammed, and we had to cut the halyard. During the confusion the master lost his head, and let the boat get half-full of water by bad steering. Luckily we had on board
