CHAPTER XXIII. 



March— The Story of a Spanish Dollar— The Spanish Armada— The " FloMa."—Fa!re- 

 Chlaidli, or Watching of the Graveyard— Molehill Earth for Flowers. 



A FALL of snow on Monday, followed by keen frost during three 

 consecutive nights, rendered the past week [March 1871], as to 

 mere cold at least, the most wintry of the season ; hut with a 

 hright sun circling at mid-March altitude, the frost had no time to 

 penetrate the soil to any depth, and spring work has been steadily 

 pushed on, with hardly any retardation. In the upland glens, 

 however, the frost was for some days intense, and had it continued 

 much longer, weakly sheep must have suffered severely. But 

 solvUur hiems, the frost is gone ; the weather is now again open, 

 and mUd and spring-like, and our wild birds — scores of them 

 within a stone's cast of our window as we 'rn'ite — only seem all the 

 more jubilant because of the past week's temporary dip of tempera- 

 ture to the freezing-point. " Speed the plough " — one of our very 

 best Scotch reels, by the way — should now be the cry, at once 

 earnest and cheery, of every one connected with arable land, for 

 what says the old Gaelic proverb — 



" Am fear nach cuir 'sa Mhkrt, 

 'Sanmoch a bhuaineas e." 



He that sows not in March shall have a late ingathering. 



A coin was sent us for identification a few days ago, the history 

 of which strikes us as interesting. We had no difficulty in de- 

 termining it to be a silver Spanish dollar of the time of Philip II. 

 It is much corroded and worn, but the following letters of the 



