March--The Story of a Spanish Dollar--The Spanish Armada--The "Florida"--Faire-Chlaidh, or Watching of the Graveyard--Molehill Earth for Flowers.
A fall of snow on Monday, followed by keen frost during three consecutive nights, rendered the past week [March 1871], as to mere cold at least, the most wintry of the season; but with a bright sun circling at mid-March altitude, the frost had no time to penetrate the soil to any depth, and spring work has been steadily pushed on, with hardly any retardation. In the upland glens, however, the frost was for some days intense, and had it continued much longer, weakly sheep must have suffered severely. But solvitur hiems, the frost is gone; the weather is now again open, and mild and spring-like, and our wild birds--scores of them within a stone's cast of our window as we write--only seem all the more jubilant because of the past week's temporary dip of temperature to the freezing-point. "Speed the plough"--one of our very best Scotch reels, by the way--should now be the cry, at once earnest and cheery, of every one connected with arable land, for what says the old Gaelic proverb--
"Am fear nach cuir 'sa Mhàrt, 'Sanmoch a bhuaineas e."
He that sows not in March shall have a late ingathering.