CHEVIOT SHEEP. Ill 



keeps them warmer in cold weather, and prevents either 

 snow or rain from incommoding them. They have never 

 any other food, except when they are fattened, than the grass 

 and natural hay produced on their own hills." 



The Cheviot has pushed itself over nearly all Scotland, 

 and is everywhere contesting the ground inch by inch with 

 the black-faced sheep. With every improvement in agricul- 

 ture it advances. The fleece being more compact, it is found 

 to be a better endurer of cold, though not so patient of hunger. 

 On scanty pasture it does quite as well, and where there is 

 great abundance, it leaves its black-faced competitor far be- 

 hind ; and it is supposed that it will soon be the only breed 

 worthy of the Highlands of Scotland. 



This may be considered a proper place to describe those 

 terrible storms in the Scottish Highlands, to which these 

 and the black-faced sheep are so often exposed. The sub- 

 joined accounts are from the " Shepherd's Calendar," by 

 the Ettrick shepherd, James Hogg. The first account is 

 termed the " thirteen drifty days." 



" For thirteen days and nights the snowdrift never once 

 abated ; the ground was covered with frozen snow when it 

 commenced, and during all the time of its continuance, the 

 sheep never broke fast. The cold was intense to a degree 

 never before remembered, and about the fifth and sixth days 

 of the storm, the young sheep began to fall into a sleepy 

 and torpid state, and all that were so affected in the evening, 

 died in the night. About the ninth and tenth days the shep- 

 herds began to build up huge semicircular walls of their 

 dead, in order to afford some shelter to the remainder ; but 

 shelter availed little, for the want of food began to be felt so 

 severely, that they were frequently seen tearing one another's 

 wool. 



" When the storm abated on the fourteenth day, there was 

 on many a high-lying farm not a living sheep to be seen. 

 Large misshapen walls of dead, surrounding a small pros- 

 trate flock, likewise all dead and frozen stiff in their layers, 

 were all that remained to the forlorn shepherd and his master. 

 In the extensive pastoral district of Eskdale-muir, which 

 previously contained more than 20,000 sheep, only forty 

 young wethers were left on one farm, and five old ewes on 

 another." 



The sheep seem possessed of an instinctive foresight of 

 the approach of these storms, and will hurry to a place for 



