a
week's pleasant and gentle thaw [February 1870], we
had hoped that the worst of winter was come and gone; but to our no
small disappointment the genial interregnum has been followed by another
heavy fall of snow, and a wonderfully keen and biting frost, which,
borne on the wings of a surly nor'easter, has again bound up the earth
as if with fetters of iron. Under such circumstances the sea-coast, we
take it, presents the most dreary and desolate-looking winter picture
imaginable; far more so, to our thinking, than either moss, or moorland,
or mountain range. There is a something inexpressibly dismal and doicie in
the black crape-like belt of sea beach which divides a landscape deeply
clad with snow and frost-bound, from the dull and leaden coloured deep
beyond; the dashing of the waves of said deep upon the shore, uttering
the while a sadly funereal and dirge-like moan. If our inland friends,
in view of the wintry waste around them, take
up the cry of "O the dreary, dreary moorland"—we, dwellers by the sea
coast, have the best possible right to finish the Tennysonian line by
exclaiming "O the barren, barren shore." It must, by the way, have been
on some fair summer eve
that the Crown officials first thought of depriving landowners of the
sea-shore privileges hitherto enjoyed by them; had it been in winter, the
idea, it strikes us, would have withered in 'the bud; they would have
fled the very sight of the dark and dreary " foreshore," and wisely
confined themselves to the shelter of their Woods and Forests!
It is worthy of record that the present severe snow-storm
was ushered in by a very splendid and in many respects peculiar auroral
display. Shortly after dark on Friday evening, a faint auroral film,
over which an occasional streamer flashed impetuously, overspread the
northern heavens. All this, however, soon died away, and the north
assumed a cold, clear, frosty aspect. Between seven and eight o'clock
many meteors, some of them of great brilliancy and beauty, were observed
to cross and recross the zenith and its neighbourhood in all directions.
Towards the latter hour, however, ' these ceased, and all of a sudden,
in a very few seconds at most, the whole celestial hemisphere from E.N.E.
to W.S.W.—from horizon to horizon—appeared completely spanned by a
magnificent auroral arch, eight degrees in breadth; like a glorious
bridge of a single semicircular span, with its edges or parapets of a
deep blood-red colour, and its centre part or roadway of frosted silver;
the rest of the heavens, in all directions, being the while of an inky
blue, and cold and cloudless, without the slightest appearance of
anything like streamers to be seen anywhere. Some idea of the brilliancy
of this auroral arch may be formed from the fact that such bright stars
as Arcturus, Castor and Pollux, Aldebaran, Mars, and others, which lay
along its path, became quite dim, and when located near the centre and
brightest part of the stream, almost invisible. Even Yenus, which once
or twice was overlapped for a few minutes by the arch's margin only,
lost all its lustre and sheen, and had a burdened anxious aspect, as if
the forehead and "face divine" of a mighty intelligence laboured under
the shade of deep and profound thought. For upwards of an hour did this
splendid auroral arch continue to span the heavens from horizon to
horizon, and undergoing little or no change, until its final
disappearance, by what seemed a process of gradual contraction into
itself and towards its terminus in the east-north-east, whence it
started. Such was the very singular meteoric phenomena by which a severe
snow-storm and an amount of cold almost unparalleled in its intensity
was ushered in on the western sea-hoard of Scotland in February of the
year of grace 1870.
And how fares it with our feathered favourites, the wild
birds, in these hard times 1 Fertile as they are in resources, and
indefatigable in providing for the wants of the passing hour, all their
little shifts must frequently prove inadequate to the supply of their
daily wants in such trying times as these. St. "Valentine's day has come
and gone, but neither in copse, nor hedgerow, nor ivy-mantled wall, find
wre as yet any traces of nidification, nor has the
love-prompted warble, in past years so loud and incessant at this
season, been yet heard around us. The robin only cheeps; the sparrow
simply chirps; the linnet merely twitters; and even the " gay chaffinch"
can only give us a disconsolate " fink, fink," in place of his
well-known glad burst of choicest and cheeriest song. The mellow chaunt
of the merle and song-thrush delights not yet the ear from copse or
brake at early morn or evening-tide. The intense and piercing cold,
which, on the wings of the northern blast, sweeps over the land as we
write, and as it moans, and sighs, and wildly shrieks by starts in its
progress over the deep, causes the lone sea-bird to utter its eeriest
and wildest cry, has succeeded in freezing, not only the rivulet and the
pool, but has actually bound up the voice of gladness and -every source
of joyful utterance in all our feathered friends as well. But "nil
desperandum," better
times are coming. Fields will yet be green, trees will yet be leafy,
rivers unbound from icy fetters will yet dance merrily in the sun, and
laugh with all their ripples, as they hasten seawards; and then "again
shall flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds
shall have come, and the voice of the turtle be heard in our land."
Are glanders incurable? is a very ugly, but doubtless a
very important question, which is being at present keenly discussed in
the columns of several metropolitan journals. By glanders is
meant, not the equine disease in the equine subject properly so called,
and which comes so frequently under the treatment of the veterinary
surgeon, but the same frightful disease when introduced either by
accident or design into the human
system. Is it curable 1 This
is the question, and the general impression seems to be, that when it
once fairly lays hold of the human system, it is, like hydrophobia,
quite and utterly incurable. "We do not pretend to know anything of the
subject, and we allude to it merely to say that we well recollect of
hearing, on undoubted authority, of a patient who was actually cured of
glanders, caught, if we remember rightly, from eating some beans found
in a manger in which a horse having the disease had recently been
feeding. All the circumstances connected with the case and cure were
related in our hearing by the late Dr. John Eeid, Professor of Anatomy
in the University of St. Andrews, one evening that we dined at his house
during our attendance at the University. It is now some eighteen or
twenty years ago, and we were then too young and thoughtless to give
that attention to the subject which it deserved. TYe recollect, however,
that the case was said to have occurred in Edinburgh, and to have been
treated in the infirmary of that city, and that the patient, on his
recovery, having been found shrewd, intelligent, and steady, was
afterwards appointed one of the janitors of that institution. There must
be some medical gentleman still in Edinburgh able to speak to a case of
such importance; and amongst others present on the occasion that we
heard Professor Eeid refer to it, were, if we rightly remember,
Principal Sir David Brewster and Professor Martin, now of Aberdeen, and
at that time Mathematical Master in the Madras College of St. Andrews.
The other evening a one pound note, which a lady friend
of ours had just received by post, was handed to us, with a request that
we should try and decipher some writing which was observed on the back
of it. After some little trouble, we were a good deal amused to find
that the writing in question really consisted of the following lines:—
''I am a note of the British Linen;
I've long been kept by L. Mackinnon;
Where'er you go you'll find them willing
To give for me just twenty shilling.—L. M'K."
"We have no idea who this poetical L. Mackinnon is or
was, but it is pretty evident, we think, that both he and the British
Linen Company's Bank note had very excellent opinions of themselves. It
was Lady Louisa Stewart, if we rightly recollect, who sent Sir "Walter
Scott a copy of the following lines, which she discovered on the back of
a battered bank note wThich had come into her possession. It
will be observed that they are in all respects immeasurably superior to
Mr. L. Mackinnon's :—
"Farewell, my note, and wheresoe'er ye wend,
Shun gaudy scenes, and be the poor man's friend;
You've left a poor one ; go to one as poor,
And drive despair and hunger from his door."
Let cynics growl and snarl as they list, some people have hearts,
and the author of the above lines, be sure, had a right warm and kindly
one.
