A finer winter [January 1871] never was known all over the West Highlands and Hebrides. Some tempestuousness is to be looked for at this season, and some tempestuousness we have had, but of actual winter rigour and cold we have hardly had a trace. Only twice during the winter have we had any frost, and even then it was but slight and of short duration. On several occasions, however, we have had such terrible rainfalls as are only known perhaps within sight of the mountain peaks of Jura and Mull and Morven. On the 19th of January, and again on the 23d, the rainfall within a given time was heavier than anything known even with us for many years past. In about sixteen hours on the 19th, 4·19 inches fell, and quite as much, if not more, on the 23d. Now, does the reader know what an inch of rain means? It means a gallon of water spread evenly over a surface of something like two square feet, or, to put it in a more striking and intelligible form, it means a fall of a hundred tons upon an acre of land; so that in sixteen hours on the 19th upwards of four hundred tons of rain fell on every acre of land for miles and miles around us. It will be confessed that thus the country was for once at least well soaked and saturated. All our rivers and mountain torrents were, of course, in full flood, and throughout the night, when it had calmed down a little, the "noise of many waters," as you lay awake on your pillow and listened, made wild and eerie music enough, to which the fitting bass was the boom of the storm-driven rollers as they broke in sullen thunder along the shore. We had occasion to be across Corran Ferry on the wettest of these days, bad as it was, and, in spite of waterproofs and haps of most approved texture and form, we returned in the evening so soaked and drenched and droukit, to use an expressive Scotticism, that we might as well have been for half an hour up to our chin, over head and ears for that matter of it, in the deepest pool of the Rhi. When changing our clothes in our own room after getting home, we managed to raise a quiet laugh with ourselves over it all, by the recollection of the music and words of a favourite Scotch reel not altogether inapplicable to our then condition. The reel in question is a well-known one, though we forget at present its proper distinctive name. It is, we think, one of Neil Gow's. A gudewife, presumably of Amazonian heart, and also of Amazonian proportions, makes her husband wince and quail, and conduct himself with becoming amiability and decorum, as she sings-- "Mur 'bi'dh agam ach trudair bodaich, Bhogain anns an allt e; Mur 'bi'dh agam ach trudair bodaich, Bhogain anns an allt e; Bhogain agus bhogain agus bhogain th'ar a cheann e, 'S mur 'bi'dh a glan 'nuair bhidh e tioram, Bhogain 'rithisd ann e!" Not very easily turned into English, but this is something like it--