The November meteors of the present year seem to have made little or no display anywhere. Here it was wet and cloudy, so that we could not have seen them even if the sky was ablaze with them.
November Rains: 1500 tons per Imperial Acre!--Rainfall in Skye--An old Gaelic Apologue--The Drover and his Minister--Grand Stag's Head--Scott as a Poet--Mr. Gladstone and Scott--An old Lullaby from the Gaelic.
With the exception of two, or at most three, tolerably fine days at the beginning of the month, December [1870] has been hardly less rainy and generally disagreeable than November itself, and this, although in November a fall of 18 inches--1500 tons of rain water to the imperial acre--was duly registered. A recent communication from Skye went to show that in the matter of rainfall that island is far ahead, not only of Lochaber, but of every other station in the kingdom--a pluvial pre-eminence which we had really thought belonged to ourselves, but which, claimed for Skye on the impartial authority of the rain-gauge, we give up ungrudgingly, simply exclaiming with Meliboeus in the Virgilian eclogue--
"Non equidem invideo, miror magis." (In sooth I feel not envy, but surprise.)