we sat down accordingly, and Willie proceeds as follows:--"Weel, sir, I doubt if ever there was such a number of strangers--tourists, as they ca' them--day after day in Glencoe as there are this year. And a' the gentlemen that goes up the glen smoke, and I have seen some of the ladies--forrenders, I suspect--smoking too, the mair shame to them. They a' maistly smoke cigars, and they throw them from them when they're done with them; sometimes only a short stump, and sometimes almost a hail ane, as I have shown ye; and I pick them up and sell them in Greenock or Glasgow for three ha'pence or tuppence the ounce, and that's a' aboot it." "But what," we inquired, "do they make of them in Glasgow?" "Weel, sir," he replied, "I believe some of them, the cleanest, langest, and best bits, are unrolled, and made up anew into cigars, and the shorter and dirtier stumps are dried and broken down to mix with other tobacco, in making the mixtures called 'bird's eye,' 'shag,' exetry, exetry." We ordered Willie a glass of beer at Clachaig, and went on our way with a bit of curious information, till that particular date undreamt of in all our philosophy. CHAPTER XXXVI. Seaweed as a Fertiliser--Homer, Horace, Virgil--November Meteors--Gaelic Folk-Lore--A Curfew Prayer--A Bed Blessing--A Cattle Blessing--Rhyme to be said in driving Cattle to Pasture--"Luath," Cuchullin's Dog--Notes from the Outer Hebrides. From a utilitarian point of view, at least, the ancients seem to have looked upon the sea and all its products--exclusive, of course, of its myriad inhabitants of finny tribes--as absolutely worthless. Homer in the Iliad constantly speaks of the sea as "unfertile," alòs atrugétoio,--literally, the ocean where no harvest can be gathered; and Horace in one of his satires says that a man may be possessed of all the virtues, and all the accomplishments, &c. to boot, but if yet sine rê--without means, moneyless, or to use, perhaps, the best equivalent that our language can afford, without substance--he shall be accounted "vilior algâ," viler than seaweed, or, as we should say, viler than the dust on which he treads. Even Virgil in the Georgics has no good word for the sea as in any sense, directly or indirectly, subservient to husbandry, or an ally to the tiller of the ground. Had these master-poets of Greece and Rome, gentle reader, lived with us here in Nether Lochaber, in the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, they would have thought and said differently. Homer would have probably selected a more appropriate epithet than that constantly employed by him; Horace would have cast about for some other fitting dissyllable as a substitute for "algâ;" and Virgil would have written, as he alone could write, a score or two of unexceptionable hexameters in praise of seaweed as an excellent manure and fertiliser of the soil. "It is an ill wind," quoth the proverb, "that blows nobody good;" and disastrous in many