If of late we had to admit--somewhat reluctantly be it confessed--that it was "wet, very wet," even for Lochaber, we have it in our power now at length [1st August 1870] to strike a different key-note, and to say that it is dry, very dry; bright, very bright; hot, very hot,--so dry, bright, and hot, in fact, that one might as well be on the banks of the Nile or Niger as on the shores of Loch Leven, were it not for a delightful sea breeze that never fails to come to cheer and gladden us evening and morning; and then you may fancy--that is, if you can swim, dear reader--the unspeakable delight of a headlong plunge into the cool and sparkling waters of the advancing tide! The heat is in truth something extraordinary, and if it weren't that you felt yourself fast retrograding into the same condition, it would be an amusing study to watch a certain class of people, generally the most staid and stiff and correct possible, who, as a rule, would rather die than violate the least of the proprieties, now going about in a semi-nude state, as if they had just escaped from a lunatic asylum, panting the while as if they were in the last stage of asthma, and streaming with perspiration as if they had resolutely made up their minds to melt away and dissolve like untimely snowballs. Crops everywhere are splendid, and, after all the rain of the earlier part of the season, which gave them growth, this is just the weather that suits them in their present stage, strengthening and consolidating their tissues, and bringing them to a rapid and healthy maturity. The meadow hay crop is unusually heavy everywhere. We saw a field belonging to Mr. Maclean of Ardgour in the act of being cut the other day, and we never saw anything finer or heavier fall before a scythe. This is precisely the weather for securing such a heavy swathe in good order, although one cannot but feel for the poor scythesman, who, brown as an Indian and bathed in sweat, wields his glittering weapon under a burning, blazing sun, such as at a pinch might serve the turn of our cousins of Jamaica or Demerara. Some idea of the extraordinary heat and drought of the past week may be gathered from the fact that it was frequently found possible to stack or carry into the barn in one day the hay that had only been cut on the day previous--something hitherto unheard-of, we should say, in Lochaber, or, indeed, in any part of the Highlands.