THE LOCHABER AXE. 241 "Jeddart staff" could be had to-day in its proper locality? We recollect that during Her Majesty's first visit to Scotland in 1842, when she was received by such a splendid gathering of the Clans at Dunkeld, there was a company of a hundred men, commanded by the Honourable Captain James Murray, brother of Lord Glenlyon, the biggest men that could be got in Athole and the surrounding districts, all armed with Lochaber axes, and a very fine sight they were as they poised and swung about their ponderous and terrible weapons. We were then but a boy at school, just entering upon our teens, but the appearance of these kilted giants, with their dreadful battle-axes, is as fresh and vivid as if, since that bright and beautiful September noon, hardly thirty days had elapsed, instead of upwards of thirty years. We doubt, however, if the Lochaber axe, so called, as seen at Dunkeld on the occasion referred to, and as usually shown in our collections of weapons, is at all a true representative of the ancient arm so formidable in many a dour conflict in the hands of the Camerons, Macmartins, Macmillans, and Macphees of Lochielside, Glenarkaig, and Glenlochy, and of the Macdonalds of the Braes, and Mackenzies of Lochlevenside. The weapon as now shown is decidedly too big, too ponderous and unwieldy ever to have been used in actual fight. Only a Clan Samson or Clan Goliath, and all of them of ancestral stature and strength, could hope to wield such an arm in the heat and hurry of conflict with anything like dexterity and ease. Like the immense two-handed "Wallace" style of sword that is sometimes shown to you as having been the favourite weapon of some celebrated warrior of the middle ages and subsequent centuries, but which it is simply impossible that any mere man could ever have wielded with effect in actual fight, the modern Lochaber axe is too gigantic for use, and must have been manufactured, a big pattern of a lesser weapon, merely for parade and show. That a weapon of the kind, however, once existed, and was a favourite arm with the The men of Lochaber, is unquestionable, and a truly formidable weapon it must have been. With a crescent axe face to cut with, it had a hook at the back by which horsemen could be caught hold of and dragged from their saddles, to be despatched at leisure as they lay helpless upon the ground. The shaft was necessarily of considerable length, about six feet, of ash or other tough wood, and of no greater girth than a common hay-fork handle. The shaft of the modern weapon, however, is between seven and eight feet long, and of a girth that an ordinary hand does not suffice to grasp. axe proper, too, or head of the arm usually shown as a Lochaber axe, is nearly twice the weight of that of the older and more business-like weapon. An Indian tomahawk with a six-foot shaft, or a mediæval knight's battle-axe with a six-foot handle, such as that with which the Bruce cleft the skull of Henry de Boune at Bannockburn, would probably be nearer to the pattern of the original Lochaber axe than the ridiculously big and cumbrous modern article. You remember the scene in Scott's Lord of the Isles "Of Hereford's high blood he came, A race renown'd for knightly fame. To do some deed of chivalry. He spurr'd his steel, he couched his lance, And darted on the Bruce at once. "As motionless as rocks, that bide The wrath of the advancing tide, The Bruce stood fast. Each breast beat high, And dazzled was each gazing eye. The heart had hardly time to think, The eyelid scarce had time to wink, museums. THE LOCHABER AXE. Onward the baffled warrior bore His course-but soon his course was o'er! How sudden fell the fierce De Boune!" 243 A real Lochaber axe-head we have seen, never the complete weapon properly shafted, though surely real and genuine specimens. of the old and famous war-arm must be found in some of our At what period the Lochaber axe ceased to be carried as a battle-arm by the Highlanders it is impossible to say; probably soon after the general introduction of fire-arms into the northern half of the kingdom, for it was certainly not used in the '45, nor, so far as we know, in the '15, nor even in the wars of Montrose; so that for upwards of two hundred years at least it has not been used in actual combat. CHAPTER XL. Sea-Fowl--Weather Prognostics- Goosander (Mergus Merganser, Linn.)—Gales of WindJanuary Primroses-Lachlan Gorach, the Mull “Natural”—A Dancing Rhyme. WHEN a prophet's vaticinations are verified by the event, the world rarely fails to he reminded of it; when it is otherwise, however; when the vaticinations turn out to be the very reverse of true, people are rarely ever troubled with a note on the matter, least of all on the part of the disappointed vaticinator himself. The fact is that everything like vaticination had better, as a rule, be let alone; sooner or later, and in nine cases out of ten, or oftener, the prophet never fails to come to grief. So convinced, for our own part, are we of this, that while reserving our right to vaticinate and predict as much and as recklessly as anybody else, when it so pleased us, yet, as a matter of fact, we never do venture further into the treacherous territories of vaticination than the mere outskirts, so to speak, of what may well be called the debateable land of weather prognostics; and even there we tread as gingerly and cautiously as if at this moment we were on the banks of the Prah, in constant dread of a lurking ambuscade of fierce and fetish-valorous Ashantees. Our weather prophecies from time to time have often, as the courteous reader may remember, been fully justified by the event; but if the whole truth is to be told, we fear we must confess that they have almost as frequently turned out to be wrong, and it is not every weather prophet who will confess so much. It requires a larger share of magnanimity than the reader is perhaps aware of, to be able to confess one's errors with anything ARCTIC SEA-FOWL. 245 like complaisance, even in such a matter as weather prognostics, and we therefore trust that the following confession will be valued as it ought. Some time ago the number of Arctic sea-fowl in our creeks and bays, and the near approach of a rather early fall of snow to the sea line, justified us, as we thought, in predicting an early and severe winter, meaning by "severe"-for we scorn to be disingenuous in the matter-that it was likely to be excessively cold as well as unusually stormy. The experience of upwards of twenty years, during which we have been a keen and close student of meteorological phenomena and wild-bird life, seemed to us to warrant the conclusion at which we had arrived. But how at mid-winter stands the fact? Why, thus: that up to this date [January 1874], it has been, upon the whole, the "openest" and mildest season for at least a quarter of a century! How, then, about your Arctic seabirds? the reader may exclaim, and we can only answer that their presence so early and in such numbers is to be accounted for by the almost incessant gales that have been sweeping over the Atlantic and northern seas, with such disastrous effects, for nearly two months past. Feeling the first blast of the approaching tempest, and assured of its prolonged continuance by a marvellous instinct, further and more correctly prescient of such matters than man, with all his boasted science, they fled to the shelter of our, to them in such cases, Friendly Islands; for an Arctic web-foot dreads an unusual severity of hyperborean storms, long continued, quite as much as it dreads an excessive intensity of hyperborean cold, and for the same reason-both equally interfere with the allotted comforts of its economy and due supply of food. The winter, besides, is not yet past; whistling before one is fairly out of the wood is proverbially foolish, and there is, after all, time enough yet betwixt this and the vernal equinox for the advent of any amount of cold, so that there is still a chance for our wild-bird friends and ourselves standing higher in the reader's estimation as weather prophets, ere |