Onward the baffled warrior bore His course--but soon his course was o'er! High in his stirrups stood the King, And gave his battle-axe the swing. Right on De Boune, the whiles he pass'd, Fell that stern dint--the first--the last! Such strength upon the blow was put, The helmet crush'd like hazel nut; The axe shaft, with its brazen clasp, Was shiver'd to the gauntlet grasp. Springs from the blow the startled horse, Drops to the plain the lifeless corse. First of that fatal field, how soon, How sudden fell the fierce De Boune!" A real Lochaber axe-head we have seen, never the complete weapon properly shafted, though surely real and genuine specimens of the old and famous war-arm must be found in some of our museums. At what period the Lochaber axe ceased to be carried as a battle-arm by the Highlanders it is impossible to say; probably soon after the general introduction of fire-arms into the northern half of the kingdom, for it was certainly not used in the '45, nor, so far as we know, in the '15, nor even in the wars of Montrose; so that for upwards of two hundred years at least it has not been used in actual combat. CHAPTER XL. Sea-Fowl--Weather Prognostics--Goosander (Mergus Merganser, Linn.)--Gales of Wind--January Primroses--Lachlan Gorach, the Mull "Natural"--A Dancing Rhyme. When a prophet's vaticinations are verified by the event, the world rarely fails to be reminded of it; when it is otherwise, however; when the vaticinations turn out to be the very reverse of true, people are rarely ever troubled with a note on the matter, least of all on the part of the disappointed vaticinator himself. The fact is that everything like vaticination had better, as a rule, be let alone; sooner or later, and in nine cases out of ten, or oftener, the prophet never fails to come to grief. So convinced, for our own part, are we of this, that while reserving our right to vaticinate and predict as much and as recklessly as anybody else, when it so pleased us, yet, as a matter of fact, we never do venture further into the treacherous territories of vaticination than the mere outskirts, so to speak, of what may well be called the debateable land of weather prognostics; and even there we tread as gingerly and cautiously as if at this moment we were on the banks of the Prah, in constant dread of a lurking ambuscade of fierce and fetish-valorous Ashantees. Our weather prophecies from time to time have often, as the courteous reader may remember, been fully justified by the event; but if the whole truth is to be told, we fear we must confess that they have almost as frequently turned out to be wrong, and it is not every weather prophet who will confess so much. It requires a larger share of magnanimity than the reader is perhaps aware of, to be able to confess one's errors with anything like complaisance, even in such a matter as weather prognostics, and we therefore trust