"The Thirteen Drifty Days," folk called this storm, and by that name it has gone down to history. "About the fifth and sixth days of the storm," says the Ettrick Shepherd, writing in _Blackwood's Magazine_ of July 1819, "the young sheep began to fall into a sleepy and torpid state, and all that were affected in the evening died over-night. The intensity of the frost wind often cut them off when in that state quite instantaneously. About the ninth and tenth days, the shepherds began to build up huge semicircular walls of their dead, in order to afford some shelter for the remainder of the living; but they availed but little, for about the same time they were frequently seen tearing at one another's wool with their teeth. When the storm abated on the fourteenth day from its commencement, there was, on many a high-lying farm, not a living sheep to be seen. Large misshapen walls of dead, surrounding a small prostrate flock, likewise all dead, and frozen stiff in their lairs, was all that remained to cheer the forlorn shepherd and his master." As a matter of fact, something like nine-tenths of all the sheep in the south of Scotland perished in this one storm, or if they did not then actually perish, their vitality was so lowered, their constitutions so wrecked, by the intense cold and the long deprivation of food, that they never again picked up condition, but died like flies when the spring was further advanced. Hogg says that in Eskdalemuir, out of 20,000 sheep "none were left alive but forty young wedders on one farm, and five old ewes on another. The farm of Phaup remained without a stock and without a tenant for twenty years subsequent to the storm." On another farm all the sheep perished save one black-faced ewe; and she was not long left to perpetuate her breed, for dogs hunted her into a loch, and she too went the way of her fellows.