In some parts of Argyll the bat is said to live for three generations of an eagle, six generations of a stag, and nine generations of a man. With less poetic exactitude I have been told that it lives thirteen years in flight and thirty-three years in all! ... though equally authentic information avers that the average life of the bat is twenty-one years. A forester told me once that he did not think any bat lived longer than nine years, but he thought fifteen as likely as nine. On the other hand, he himself spoke, and as though for all he knew it might well be so, of an old tradition that a bat lives to a hundred years. This, I may add, I have heard again and again. The other day a fisherman from the island of Lismore gave the unexpected answer: ‘How old will the _ialtag_ be? Well, now, just exactly what the age of Judas was the hour he kissed Christ and betrayed Him, and not a day more and not a day less.’ Nothing explicit as to that, however, could be obtained. A gardener told me once a rhyme about how to get at the age of man, but I have forgotten it except that it was to the effect that a _losgunn_ (a toad) was twice the age of an _easgunn_ (an eel), and that a _dialtag_ (bat) was twice the age of a _losgunn_, and that _am fiadh_ (the stag) was twice the age of a _dialtag_, ‘and put ten to that and you’ll have the allotted age of man’ [_i.e._, an eel is supposed to live about seven years to seven and a half years: a frog or toad to about fifteen: a bat to about thirty: a deer to about sixty. I should add, however, that my informant was not sure if in the third instance it wasn’t a _iolair_ (eagle) instead of a deer]. One of the strangest English names for the bat (among over a score only less strange) is the Athern-bird--a Somerset term, I believe, whose meaning I do not know. But now to return to the rear-guard of Spring of whom we spoke first. Yet the folklore of the house-martin is so familiar that it need not be alluded to. We all know that it is time to think of summer when the martin clings once more to her last year’s clay-house under the eaves. It is when the wild-doves are heard in the woods that one realises the Spring-Summer borderland is being crossed. When the cushat calls, all the clans of the bushes are at home, runs a Highland saying: meaning that every mavis and merle and finch is busy with hatching the young brood, or busier still feeding the callow nestlings. But when the voice of the turtle is heard in the land, then Summer has come over the sea on the south wind, and is weaving roses for her coronal and will be with us while we are yet unaware.