Deceived by this transparency, I have plunged oftener than once over head and ears, when bathing among the rocks, in pools where I had confidently expected to find footing. From a rock that rose abrupt as a wall from the low-water level of stream tides to a little above the line of flood, I occasionally amused myself, when the evenings were calm, in practising the Indian method of diving--that in which the diver carries a weight with him, to facilitate his sinking, and keep him steadily at the bottom. I used to select an oblong-shaped stone, of sixteen or eighteen pounds' weight, but thin enough to be easily held in one hand; and after grasping it fast, and quitting the rock edge, I would in a second or two find myself on the grey pebble-strewed ooze beneath, some twelve or fifteen feet from the surface, where I found I could steadily remain, picking up any small objects I chanced to select, until, breath failing, I quitted my hold of the stone. And then two or three seconds more were always sufficient to bring me to the surface again. There are many descriptions, in the works of the poets, of submarine scenery, but it is always scenery such as may be seen by an eye looking down into the water--not by an eye enveloped in it--and very different from that with which I now became acquainted. I found that in these hasty trips to the bottom I could distinguish masses and colours, but that I always failed to determine outlines. The minuter objects--pebbles, shells, and the smaller bunches of sea-weed--always assumed the circular form; the larger, such as detached rocks, and patches of sand, appeared as if described by irregular curves. The dingy gneiss rock rose behind and over me like a dark cloud, thickly dotted with minute circular spots of soiled white--the aspect assumed, as seen through the water, by the numerous specimens of univalve shells (_Purpura lapillus_ and _Patella vulgata_) with which it was speckled; beneath, the irregular floor seemed covered by a carpet that somewhat resembled in the pattern a piece of marbled paper, save that the circular or oval patches of which it was composed, and which had as their nuclei, stones, rocks, shell-fish, bunches of fuci, and fronds of laminaria, were greatly larger. There spread around a misty groundwork of green intensely deep along its horizon, but comparatively light overhead, in its middle sky, which had always its prodigy--wonderful circlets of light, that went widening outwards, and with whose delicate green there mingled occasional flashes of pale crimson. Such was the striking though somewhat meagre scenery of a sea-bottom in Gairloch, as seen by a human eye submerged in from two to three fathoms of water.