If one asked us where he could get coals, we should without hesitation be disposed, were it but to keep the well-known proverb in countenance, to direct him to Newcastle-on-Tyne. If he consulted us as to where he could best procure a serviceable and trustworthy sword-blade of finest workmanship and highest value, we should probably direct him to Damascus or Toledo. If slings and slingers, we should send him to the Balearic Isles; if bows and arrows, and how to use them with perfectest dexterity, to the Parthians; and in so advising the anxious inquirer for coals, or the warlike weapons in question, we should probably be disposed to feel that we had advised him wisely and well. And suppose one wanted a "Lochaber axe," where would he most naturally look for it but in Lochaber? And yet, in all Lochaber there is probably at this moment not a single specimen of a weapon at one time so common and so peculiar to the district as to have been called after it. The Secretary of the Royal Institution of a seaport city of England wrote us lately, begging us to procure for them a Lochaber axe, to be placed in a collection of shafted weapons in their museum. He wrote as if he thought there need be no difficulty about the matter; living as we do in Lochaber, he seemed to think that we could lay our hands upon such a weapon as easily as upon a tuft of heather or a twig of birch. We were, of course, obliged to write him in reply that neither in Lochaber proper, nor, so far as we knew, in any of the neighbouring districts, was there to be found a single specimen of the formidable weapon in question. There should be a good many Lochaber axes in the country however, though not in Lochaber. We wonder if such a thing as a "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