The Sons and hemlock, the tresses of the larch and birch, 

 of the ma y bend with the unmelting snowfall. But, 

 Wind a ^ ^ ie wors t> it is never long before a wind out 

 of the south, or from the wet mouth of the 

 west, breathes upon the fens, and the silence 

 is become a faint stir, a whisper, a rustle ; till 

 the moveless steel is become a film, to be 

 gathered some noon, like May-dew from the 

 thickets, the autumn-frost from the whin and 

 gorse. It is never long till the meh-ing of the 

 sheep is again a sweet lamentation upon the 

 hill-pastures, or till the fox dusts the last snow 

 from his root-roof in the wintry glen, or till the 

 jay screams in the woodlands as from fir-plume 

 and oak-bough slip or fall with heavy thump 

 their unloosened burthens. True, the Sons of 

 the North Wind, as in the Highland West and 

 North we know so well and often to such bitter 

 cost, may come to us with suddenness of 

 tempest, raging in their mysterious wrath, and 

 may long endure, trampling upon life, as, in 

 the old legend, the gigantic phantom-men of 

 the Northern Lights trample the souls of the 

 dead condemned to Ifurin, the Gaelic hell. 

 Every year there is sorrow upon some strath, 

 grief in the glens, lamentation by hillside and 

 moor. From the Ord of Sutherland to Land's 

 End there may be a tale of disaster. Snow- 

 drift, snow-storm, snow-fog may paralyse 



70 



