The weather continues wonderfully fine for the season [October 1877], and with the exception of the potato-lifting, all our harvest labours are at length concluded. The ingathering has upon the whole been highly satisfactory, far more so than any one could have had the courage to predict up to the very advent of this our autumnal summer, which has already lasted just thirty days, uninterruptedly sunny and dry, without any more serious break than a mere passing shower, which invariably did more good than harm. More good? the reader exclaims interrogatively, how can a shower do good, how can it be otherwise than harmful in harvest time? Patience, courteous reader, and we shall explain. It is a case of something of this kind. You are driving along the road; the horse in the shafts before you is upon the whole a steady-going and willing animal enough, but you have let him have it just his own way for the last half hour, and dreaming, perhaps, of fresh fields and pastures green, he has for the moment forgotten your existence, and begins to lag. His usual pace of a good eight miles an hour is now hardly over five, and what in such a case shall you do? You drop the lash gently across his flank, as light and gently as falls the angler's cast on the waveless pool; you are too much of a Christian and a gentlemen--the terms are or ought to be synonymous--to do otherwise until it is absolutely necessary. Your horse forgets his dream; becomes instantly alive to the work before him; gathers himself together, and with a responsive toss of his head and a lively play of ears, goes along at rather more than his average speed until the next stage is reached; knowing full well that the hand that laid on that serpent-like lash so tenderly, can lay it on in very different fashion, hot and heavy enough when occasion calls. Or, dropping metaphor, let us state the matter plainly, thus:--Here in Lochaber, and we suppose it is just the same over all the Highlands, when really fine weather comes, we are for the first few days up and doing, busy enough. But as one fine day succeeds another, we are very ready to fall into the error that after all it is best to take things leisurely. Where's the need, we ask ourselves, for so much hurry and bustle? The fine weather has lasted a week; it may last a month, is indeed likely so to last; it is no more like rain to-day than it was yesterday; and thus we lapse, often unconsciously, perhaps, into a spirit of dilatoriness and procrastination, out of which only a lowering sky, and a shower that for all we know may become a flood, can fairly rouse us. You slept long, for instance, this morning; you dawdled over your porridge and milk at breakfast time, and it is now noonday. But see! the heavens yonder in the north-west are suddenly overcast; an ominous gloom creeps over the Outer Hebrides; a few drops of rain have already fallen, one on the back of your left hand, on which placing the index finger of your right, you can find