he was as good a naturalist and with as good a right to make names as any ornithologist who would know what the old man could not know, and would be familiar with common and other names that would be unfamiliar there among the far hills, or, at least, to the old mountaineer, for whom the hill-birds were the best of company. For the curlew, for instance, though he knew the common Scots name, Whaup, he had the good name _An t-Eun Chaismeachd_, ‘the bird of alarm’--how good a name (though perhaps equally applicable to the grey plover, the green whistler, or the lapwing) must be obvious to all who have walked the moorland or travelled the hillside. And where an islesman or a man of the mainland coasts would, for swiftness, use a comparison such as _cho luath ri sgadan_, ‘as swift as a herring,’ he would say, _cho luath ris nafeadag_, ‘as swift as the plover.’ White Weather, he said, was always first ‘called’ by the linnet, the ‘heather lintie’ so loved of Scots song-writers, to which he gave several names (‘out of a good ten that will be known to any one whatever’), one a curious blend of Scots-Gaelic, _Shilfe-monaidh_ (_i.e._, the moor--chaffinch), another a pretty name, _Breacan-Beithe_, ‘little speckled one of the birch.’ But even he, for all his hill-wisdom, could not tell me why it is that when the lapwing come again after the great winter-end storm about mid-March, welcome pioneers of the Spring that is stealing slowly up through the glens and straths of the south, they always, if they nest on the slope of a hillside, choose the east side for their unsheltered homes and where to lay their eggs. Do they so love the bleak wind of the east? Hardly any bird takes so little trouble with the nest: often it is but the frost-hardened delve of a cow’s hoof, a tangle of bent, or the hollow of a misplaced stone. I have heard that this is truer of the mainland than of the isles, but I have not found it so. Last March or April I remember that on the long, low-hilled and mainly ‘upland’ island where I then was, not a single lapwing’s nest but was on the east slope of grassy brae or sloping moor or pasture. But though he could not say a word on so strange, almost so inexplicable a habit, he could be positive as to the age of the eagle, and especially as to one aged _iolair_ that he often saw on Maol-Aitionnach, the great hill that was half the world and more to him: namely, that the king-bird lived to be three hundred years. And he computed it thus: that an eagle lives three times less than an oak, and three times more than a deer. There is a familiar proverb that ‘_Tri aois feidh aois firein; tri aois firein aois crsoibh dharaich_,’ ‘Thrice the age of a deer, the age of an eagle’ (‘ferain,’ ‘fireun,’ and ‘fiolair’ are variants of ‘iolair,’ whose more ancient name is ‘antar’ (_an t-ar_), one of the oldest names in the Gaelic language); ‘thrice the age of an eagle, the age of an oak.’ The stag lives a hundred years, or so it is universally