breeze, and free and sparkling as the mountain stream, and more especially our Celtic friends who have been taught to honour and reverence the "kilted" muse-will be glad to know that Professor Blackie has in preparation the materials of what cannot fail to prove a very interesting volume, consisting of translations of some of the most admired compositions of our modern Gaelic bards. Macintyre's Ben. Dorain, Alasdair Macdonald's Berliun, with many of such lesser popular lyrics, as Am Breacan Wallach, Failte na Mor-Thir, A Bhanarach Dhoun a Cruidh, &c., will thus appear for the first time in a becoming Saxon garb; not-to use the milliner's phrase-too tight a fit, observe, but natural and easy, though "made to measure," and we venture to predict that our English readers, who as yet know them not at all, and our Gaelic friends, who know them well and have long known them, will alike be pleased with the results of the learned Professor's gallant raid into bard-land. The Professor has been visiting us here lately, and we can honestly say that such specimens of his work as he was good enough to read to us-and there are few better readers than Professor Blackie-seemed to us admirably done. His version of Ben. Dorain particularly, which we had an opportunity of hearing twice, and of which we can thus speak most positively, is thoroughly well done; so well, so faithfully, and with such spirit and verve as must delight not only the ordinary reader, but the very "ghost" of the original author-Macintyre himself if, like the Ossianic departed heroes, he is permitted to know and appreciate sublunary affairs from out the bosom of "his cloud." The Professor translates these Gaelic poems into English verse just as, in our opinion, they should be translated; not too literally, but with all necessary freedom and elbow room, and yet so literally that any one knowing the English version may rest assured that he knows also the original quite as intimately and correctly as it is possible in the circumstances for any mere outsider

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to know it. Johnson, in his Life of Dryden, referring to the latter's version of the Eneid, &c., has a paragraph which is worth quoting in this connection:-" When languages are formed upon different principles, it is impossible that the same modes of expression should always be elegant in both. While they run on together, the closest translation may be considered the best; but when they divaricate, each must take its natural course. Where correspondence cannot be obtained, it is necessary to be content with something equivalent. Translation, therefore,' says Dryden, 'is not so loose as paraphrase, nor so close as metaphrase.' With all this we entirely concur, more especially when such widely different languages as the English and Gaelic have to be dealt with. We do not know that Professor Blackie ever read the paragraph quoted, or, even if he did read it, that he now remembers it; but to his translations from the Gaelic, to so much of them, at all events, as were submitted to our notice, Dryden's dictum is entirely applicable-they are not so loose as paraphrase, nor so close as metaphrase. They strike a golden mean very difficult of attainment in such efforts; and on the appearance of the volume itself, we shall be disappointed if nine-tenths at least of the many readers it is sure to command do not entirely agree with us. But nous verrons, if we live we shall see.

The Transactions of the Gaelic Society of Inverness for 1873-4 and 1874-5, have reached us. The Secretary's paper on "Coinneach Odhar," the Brahan seer, is most interesting, containing as it does the best account that we have met with of that uncanny Ross-shire worthy. That he was an impostor, and a vulgar impostor too, there can be no doubt; but the story of a man-clever, shrewd rascal as he was in whom the people so thoroughly believed, is worth the telling, and Mr. Mackenzie tells it very well. He should, we think, give us, if possible, a second paper, containing the many other wonderful vaticinations attributed to his hero, who seems to have

latterly been too clever by half; for he who could foresee the misfortunes of others-the death even of a cow-couldn't evidently foresee the well-merited fate that awaited himself; for he was hanged, and we have no doubt at all that he richly deserved that species of exaltation. What Thomas the Rhymer-him of Ercildoune was in the south of Scotland at a much earlier period, this Coinneach Odhar, comparing small things with great, seems to have been in the North-West Highlands during the latter half of the seventeenth century. "True Thomas," however, was a gentleman and a scholar; whereas Coinneach was, of course, utterly illiterate, conducting his scheme of imposture solely by the aid of natural talents, which must have been considerable, and a large and ever-ready stock of impudence and cunning, nicely calculated to impose upon the vulgar. He made his grand mistake when he flew at such high game as Lady Seaforth and her domestic affairs. She was too clever, too intelligent and well-educated to be imposed upon. She ordered him to be hanged, a doom to which many were led at that period who probably less richly deserved it than such a prying, meddling, mischief-maker as was Kenneth the Seer.

CHAPTER XLVIII.

Crops-Potato Slug-Fern Slug-Brackens: How thoroughly to extirpate them-The Merlin-Falcon and Tringa.

WE have had a full fortnight of magnificent summer weather [August 1875], a bright sun over head from morning till night, with brisk breezes, a leanachd na gréine, following the sun; that is, beginning in the morning at east, and gradually wearing round pari passú with the solar march, till at sunset it is north-west, and so on round and round the compass day after day, a phenomenon usually attendant upon the very finest weather in our northern latitudes. Under these circumstances it will not surprise those who care for such matters to hear that our hay crop, about which we were in such anxiety, has been secured in splendid condition, in such condition, indeed, as we can rarely boast of in the West Highlands. Our meadow hay crop, too, is this year unusually heavy, and already, in obedience to the adage which teaches that it is well and wise to make one's hay while the sun shines, we are all busy getting it cut down and secured, although the old, orthodox season is not yet for a fortnight to come-about old Lammastide. Oats with us here are generally a light crop, but it will as such be easier to secure in good condition than a heavier crop would be, and, upon the whole, may thus turn out quite as profitable. Potatoes are not so heavy haulmed as usual, but in other respects they promise well, and there is no appearance of our old enemy the "blight." We hear, however, a good deal of complaint in some districts on account of the prevalence this year of yellow shaw, or

bar-buidhe as our Highlanders term it, the work of a small grey slug that attacks the main-stem shaw just at its point of junction with the soil, and eating and tunnelling it through and through until the leaves first assume a yellow and withered appearance, and the whole shaw finally falls down paralysed, and practically useless and inoperative as to its proper functions, though not actually rotten or dead, as in the case of the "blight." Many such shaws in a field give it an unsightly appearance, but beyond this there is no great harm done after all, for as the slug seldom begins its work until the plant is large and well forward, the tubers underground, though they may be of smaller size than their neighbours that have escaped the slug's attentions, are yet sound and wholesome food enough either for man or beast. We have observed that this particular slug, or a closely allied species, is also much given to feeding on the stem of the common fern or bracken, dealing with it just as it does with the potato shaw, though, to be sure, it finds the fern a rather harder nut to crack; for the brave bracken, with its firmer contexture of stem, refuses to bend its head to the ground, no matter the number or direction of the slug's insidious tunnellings and perforations. If you glance at a fern clump as you ride along the road or climb the mountain steep, the yellow, withered fronds of an occasional plant, here and there painfully conspicuous amid the rich, dark, emerald green of its healthy companions, tell you where the grey slug-and a nasty, slimy little wretch it is-is busy at its evil work, drinking up, like consumption among the human race, the very heart's blood, so to speak, of the fairest and finest plants it can find. We have found in our own experience that the best protection of the potato from its ravages is to give the ground a sprinkling of lime just as the plants are appearing above ground, about the end of April or beginning of May. For the early varieties usually planted in our gardens, a sprinkling of soot is less unsightly and equally efficacious with lime.