The meteorological vaticinations of our weather-wise octogenarian neighbours have met with abundant and speedy verification in the storms and heavy rains of the past ten days [October 1876]. For the month of October, however, the weather continues wonderfully mild; even with wind and rain the temperature is higher than it usually is at this date; an occasional fine day, besides, encouraging us in the hope that winter proper, winter with its thousand discomforts, its snow and sleet, its cold and cheerlessness and gloom, may be checked in his advance for some weeks to come, by the uncompromising attitude of an autumn so lusty of life and bright of eye, but, despite an occasional overclouding of countenance, it seems yet but only little past its prime. Agriculturally the season is being wound up satisfactorily enough; crops have, upon the whole, been secured in very fair condition, and although the herring fishing in our lochs as elsewhere has proved a failure, our people are prepared to meet the coming winter in comparative abundance, and with a cheerfulness calculated to disarm the gloomy season of more than half its terrors. The poet has philosophically observed that man "Wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long"-- where "wants," you will observe, has to be read in a restricted and peculiar sense: the plain prose of it being, that for all his essential needs man requires but little, that merely to live a little suffices, and that, on account of the shortness and certainty of human life, even that "little" is soon dispensed with--is no longer required. Granted, O Poet! but not the less true is it that during man's allotted time the "little," however small, is indispensable all the same, and any sensible diminution or curtailment of his "little" will make a man, however abstemious and sober of life, just as miserable as his fellow who has to bewail the diminution, not of his "little," but of his abundance. Nothing pleases us in our people here more than their constant cheerfulness in the enjoyment of their "little." They would doubtless take more if they could get it, and rejoice exceedingly if their "little" could be converted into an abundance; but meantime they have the good sense to be contented, and even happy with what they have, and that, too, to a degree that no one perhaps less intimate with them than we are could believe possible in the circumstances.