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; but with a bright 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 solvitur hiems, the frost is gone; the weather is now again open, and mild and spring-like, and our wild birds--scores of them within a stone's cast of our window as we write--only seem all the more jubilant because of the past week's temporary dip of temperature 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 Mhàrt, '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 determining 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 original inscription are distinctly legible:--Ph. II., D.G. Hisp: et Ind: Rex. 1585. On the reverse disc is what seems to have been intended for the prow of a ship between two palm trees. The owner of this coin tells us that it came into his possession in the following manner:--A brother of his, who owned and commanded a coasting schooner about fifty years ago, chancing to be becalmed while passing through the Sound of Mull, thought it best to come to anchor for the night. Next morning, when getting under weigh, the anchor, as it came to the bows, was found to have brought up a large mass of tangle. While clearing this away, the edge of the coin was observed sticking out from among a lot of sand and shingle attached to the tangle roots, and having been secured and handed to the Captain, he ever after kept it in his purse as a "luckpenny," on which he set a high value, and all the more so, perhaps, that it happened to be found on the morning of Easter Sunday, a fact that to him, as a good Catholic, had a significance and meaning that the rest of the crew took no account of. Be this as it may, he was from that day an exceedingly prosperous and lucky man in all his undertakings, and till the day of his death he carried the coin about him wherever he went, as a "luckpenny" and talisman of extraordinary virtue. The present owner, too, sets a very high value on this numismatic talisman, which, he declares, hardly anything would induce him to part with. During the ten years that it has been in his possession, he assures us that he has been