CHAPTEE LVI. 



Rain in Lochaber — An Apple Tree in bloom by Candle-light — Mackenzie the Bird-Catcher — 

 A Badenoch " Wise Woman " spitting in a Child's Face to preserve it from the Fairies ! 



" It never rains tut it pours," and nowhere is the familiar adage in 

 its utmost literalness truer than in Lochaber. During a long pro- 

 tracted drought of nearly a couple of months' duration [June 1877], 

 we were constantly calling for rain ; and no wonder, for the earth 

 was hard and hide-bound as an Egyptian mummy ; sheep and 

 cattle finding little more to gather on the parched uplands than if 

 they were nibbling at the bulge of an ironclad laid up in ordinary. 

 For full five and twenty years — so far back, elieu and alas ! do our 

 own individual meteorological records , extend — we have had no 

 May month so persistently ungenial and cold ; nor, when one 

 comes to think of it, is it much matter of surprise, for we have 

 just been reading that in the North Atlantic, within a few hundred 

 leagues of the British shores, and up to the very margin of the 

 Gulf Stream, a ship recently arrived in port had to fight her way 

 through quite a continent of drift ice, with occasional icebergs 

 " from two to three hundred feet in height." With such grim, 

 hyperborean neighbours on the one hand, and a keen-edged east 

 wiad on the other, it was impossible that it should be otherwise 

 than cold and uncomfortable all round. On the 26th, however, 

 came the long-looked-for change, the wind came slowly round to 

 S.S.W., rain began to fall, and the effect was magical. There was 

 instantly a blanket-hke kindliness and a balminess in the air that 

 was delicious. The birds, that a little before coidd only chirp 

 dolorously, burst out into loud and jubilant song, the cattle lowed 



