CHAPTEE XII. 



Extraordinary aspect of the Sun— Sunset from Ra/ieby—Ur. Glaisher^" Demoiselle " or 

 Numidian Crane at Deerness— The Snowy Owl in Sutherlandshire— Does the Fieldfare 

 breed in Scotland ?— The Woodcock. 



We have just had a -week of the finest weather imaginahle, dry, 

 bright and hreezy, and with uninterrupted sunshine. The greater 

 part of our hay crop has, in consequence, heen secured in splendid 

 condition, without a drop of rain, in fact — a piece of rare good 

 fortune in Lochaber. We do not know if the extraordinary aspect 

 of the sun at its rising and setting on Monday, the 13th instant 

 [June 1870], was noticed elsewhere by any of our readers. On the 

 morning of the day in question it presented a strangely mottled, 

 yellowish copper-coloured disc, so singularly unusual as to induce 

 an old seaman, nearly eighty years of age, in our neighbourhood, to 

 call our attention to the circumstance. In the evening a little 

 before its setting, it assumed a lurid blood-red colour, which was 

 very remarkable, and forcibly reminded us at the moment of Scott's 

 lines in Rolcehy — 



" No pale gradations quencli his ray, 

 No twilight dews his wrath allay ; 

 With disc like battle-target red, 

 He rushes to his burning bed, 

 Dyes the wide wave with bloody light, 

 Then sinks at once — and all is night." 



We were unanimous in predicting an immediate and violent storm 

 of wind and rain, but the next morning came in bright, breezy, 

 and cloudless, and such it has continued ever since. Such 

 X)henomena, and the nature of the weather following them, are 



