342 NETHER LOCHABER. 



needs man requires but little, that merely to live a little suffices, 

 and that, on account of the shortness and certainty of human life, 

 even that " little " is soon dispensed with is no longer required. 

 Granted, Poet ! but not the less true is it that during man's 

 allotted time the " little," however small, is indispensable all the 

 same, and any sensible diminution or curtailment of his " little " 

 will make a man, however abstemious and sober of life, just as 

 miserable as his fellow who has to bewail the diminution, not of his 

 " little," but of his abundance. Nothing pleases us in our people 

 here more than their constant cheerfulness in the enjoyment of 

 their " little." They would doubtless take more if they could get 

 it, and rejoice exceedingly if their "little" could be converted into 

 an abundance ; but meantime they have the good sense to be con- 

 tented, and even happy with what they have, and that, too, to a 

 degree that no one perhaps less intimate with them than we are 

 could believe possible in the circumstances. 



Our " Indian summer," that seems still to linger, as if loth to 

 leave us to the tender mercies of a winter that is likely to prove 

 unusually inclement, has been a season of unwonted jubilation to 

 our wild- birds ; for, guided by an instinct that is a monitor suffi- 

 ciently to be depended upon in ordinary circumstances, they had 

 already, each after his kind, prepared themselves, not for equinoctial 

 warmth and sunshine, but for equinoctial storms. All the more, 

 then, from its very unexpectedness, did they feel bound to rejoice 

 in the incalculable blessing of twenty free days of midsummer 

 warmth and calm at a time when, in the usual course of events, 

 the tempest should have been howling through the woods and 

 careering over moss and moorland, they the while glad to cower 

 for shelter and safety in such crevices and corners as might be best 

 suited to their purpose. At and after the autumnal equinox, in 

 ordinary seasons, the only one of our native wild-birds that sings, or 

 attempts to sing, a fairly finished song, is the redbreast ; though, 



