We have no idea who this poetical L. Mackinnon is or was, but it is pretty evident, we think, that both he and the British Linen Company's Bank note had very excellent opinions of themselves. It was Lady Louisa Stewart, if we rightly recollect, who sent Sir Walter Scott a copy of the following lines, which she discovered on the back of a battered bank note which had come into her possession. It will be observed that they are in all respects immeasurably superior to Mr. L. Mackinnon's:-- "Farewell, my note, and wheresoe'er ye wend, Shun gaudy scenes, and be the poor man's friend; You've left a poor one; go to one as poor, And drive despair and hunger from his door." Let cynics growl and snarl as they list, some people HAVE hearts, and the author of the above lines, be sure, had a right warm and kindly one. CHAPTER VIII. A Wet February--A Good Time Coming--Sir Walter Scott--Mr. Gladstone--Death of Sir David Brewster. One swallow doesn't make a summer, says the proverb, and unless one fine day (the 19th) makes a spring, we haven't for the last six weeks [February 1870] and more had a single hour of a character to be disassociated from one of the wettest and wildest winters on record. No sooner has one storm died away, less from any voluntary cessation on its part than from sheer exhaustion of its forces, than, after a slushy, sludgy interregnum of brief duration, it has been succeeded in every instance by another and another still of equal or greater violence and fury, so that of quiet or calm we have known little, and of sun or moon or stars we have seen hardly the briefest glimpse since Old New Year's Day. When Foote, the incomparable comedian (Johnson said of him that "the dog was irresistible"), after acquiring and dissipating several fortunes, was at last lucky enough to be able to set up his carriage in a more dashing style than ever, he selected as his motto, and emblematical of his career, the words Iterum, Iterum, Iterumque! (Again, and Again, and Again!) It has struck us that if the Meteorological Society were to apply to the Herald's College for a crest and armorial bearings to be displayed on the title-page of their volume of "Transactions" for the first quarter of the current year, we, should they do us the honour to consult us, would suggest a cloud-cumulus, rain-surcharged, proper on the shield, with Aquarius and the "watery" Hyades as supporters; Eolus ordering "a fresh hand to the bellows" as a crest, and the Iterum, Iterum, Iterumque of Foote's chariot as a motto of singular appropriateness and meaning. How delighted, by the way, must our amphibious friend Mr. Symons be in the midst of all this rainfall! His crest again should be a man's head on a fish's body in an overflowed meadow, natant, and his supporters an anemometer and rain-gauge proper! It is needless to say that anything like spring work is with us not only in a very backward state, but has hardly been commenced. Before the end