126                                    KIDNAPPED.
All day it streamed rain; the island ran like a sop;
there was no dry spot to be found; and when I lay
down that night, between two boulders that made a
kind of roof, my feet were in a bog.
The   second day I crossed  the   island to  all sides.
There was no one part of it better than another; it was
all desolate and rocky; nothing living on it but game
birds which I lacked the means to kill, and the gulls
which haunted the outlying rocks in a prodigious num-
ber. But the creek, or straits, that cut off the isle from
the main land of the Ross, opened out on the north into
a bay, and the bay again opened into the sound of Iona;
and it was the neighbourhood of this place that I chose
to be my home; though if I had thought upon the very
name of home in such a spot, I must have burst out
weeping.
I had good reasons for my choice. There was in
this part of the isle a little hut of a house like a pig's
hut, where fishers used to sleep when they came there
upon their business; but the turf roof of it had fallen
entirely in; so that the hut was of no use to me, and
gave me less shelter than my rocks. What was more
important, the shell-fish on which I lived grew there in
great plenty; when the tide was out I could gather a
peck at a time : and this was doubtless a convenience.
But the other reason went deeper. I had become in no
way used to the horrid solitude of the isle, but still
looked round me on all sides (like a man that was hunted)
between fear and hope that I might see some human