268 NETHER LOCHABER. 



moving away with them, when a smothered sepulchral voice from 

 under the sea-ware struck his ear an ear painfully acute under 

 the circumstances, " Gabh mo chomhairl' 's fag na brbgan sin ! " 

 " Take my advice, and leave these shoes alone ! " At the same time 

 he saw the mass of drift-weed heaving and moving. Dropping 

 the shoes as if they had suddenly become each a mass of red-hot 

 iron in his hand, he started off with a yell that frightened the sea- 

 birds all the way to Camus-na-Gall, and ran a terrible race without 

 once halting or looking over his shoulder, till, penitent and 

 breathless, he reached his own fireside. He was completely cured 

 of shore-wandering, for, as our informant told us, he soon after 

 sickened and took to his bed, from which he never rose again. 

 Told in excellent Gaelic, and with a large admixture of the serio- 

 comic quiet humour so characteristic of an old Highlander, the 

 story made us laugh heartily ; and not the less so that it was told 

 in sly reference to our own frequent sea-shore perambulations. 



It is many years since our wild birds have had to encounter a 

 winter of such unmitigated severity as the present. Dead rooks, 

 blackbirds, chaffinches, and hedge sparrows are only too common 

 in copse, hedgerow, and open field, stiffened and starved all of 

 them, nothing but the bones, skin, and feathers remaining as you 

 take them up and handle them, so that one only wonders how it is 

 they did not drop and die long before reaching such a sad state of 

 utter fleshlessness and emaciation. A whole month, however, of 

 intense frost, making every one exposed to its direct influence, 

 even for a moment, put their fingers to their mouths with a " poor 

 Tom's a-cold " attitude and grin of intense frost, in which the 

 earth became hard and resonant as iron, clearly accounts for it all. 

 Some idea of the keenness of the frost at times may be gathered from 

 the following facts : On Friday afternoon we had occasion to go 

 to look if our boat on the beach was all right, for the darkening 

 heavens threatened an immediate storm, a not uncommon end to 



