CHAPTER XXXVI.
Seaweed as a Fertiliser—Homer, Horace, Virgil—November Meteors—Gaelic Folk-Lore—A Curfew Prayer—A Bed Blessing—A Cattle Blessing—Rhyme to be said in driving Cattle to Pasture—“Luath,” Cuchullin’s Dog—Notes from the Outer Hebrides.
From a utilitarian point of view, at least, the ancients seem to have looked upon the sea and all its products—exclusive, of course, of its myriad inhabitants of finny tribes—as absolutely worthless. Homer in the Iliad constantly speaks of the sea as “unfertile,” ălòs atrugétoio,—literally, the ocean where no harvest can be gathered; and Horace in one of his satires says that a man may be possessed of all the virtues, and all the accomplishments, &c. to boot, but if yet sine rê—without means, moneyless, or to use, perhaps, the best equivalent that our language can afford, without substance—he shall be accounted “vilior algâ,” viler than seaweed, or, as we should say, viler than the dust on which he treads. Even Virgil in the Georgics has no good word for the sea as in any sense, directly or indirectly, subservient to husbandry, or an ally to the tiller of the ground. Had these master-poets of Greece and Rome, gentle reader, lived with us here in Nether Lochaber, in the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, they would have thought and said differently. Homer would have probably selected a more appropriate epithet than that constantly employed by him; Horace would have cast about for some other fitting dissyllable as a substitute for “algâ;” and Virgil would have written, as he alone could write, a score or two of unexceptionable hexameters in praise of seaweed as an excellent manure and fertiliser of the soil. “It is an ill wind,” quoth the proverb, “that blows nobody good;” and disastrous in many a place as was the dreadful storm of the first week of this month [November 1872], here along the western seaboard it only blew us good, in the very tangible and tangly shape of thousands of tons of drift-ware, that, laid on the soil in fair abundance just now, prepares it without any more trouble for the reception of seed, when, ushered in by the vernal equinox, the jocund, jolly spring comes round. For the last fortnight, wherever you wandered about the coast, you found the people in every direction—men, women, and children—busy as busy could be gathering and carting afield this really valuable product of the sea—Homer and Horace to the contrary notwithstanding. We draw attention to the subject at present by reason of its timeousness, and because within recent years we have had it made clear to us beyond all cavil, and in the most practical manner possible, that for potatoes at least there is no manure for a moment to be compared with a heavy blanketing of drift-ware laid on the ground in early winter. On our own land this year a field of potatoes thus treated was a third at least better than another of equal size manured from the farmyard “heap” in the usual orthodox manner. The soil, observe, was the same, the seed the same, the date of planting the same—the only difference being in the manure. In the experience of such of our neighbours, too, as have tried it, the result has been precisely the same. The salts and other essential ingredients of seaware seem to be really antagonistic to the spread of “blight” among the tubers; and we would strongly advise as many of our readers as have the opportunity to experiment for themselves in the direction indicated during the present winter and spring, and we are ready to wager our good porcupine-shafted “Pickwick” steel pen against the vilest crow-quill, that, on the ingathering of the crop this time twelve months, our advice, in nineteen cases out of twenty, will have been found to be a sound and good one.
Since the cessation of the terrible gales of the early part of the month, the weather has been bright, bracing, and breezy, with occasional snow showers along the uplands, that have already converted the many mountain ridges around each into a veritable Sierra Nevada. On the nights of the 13–14th and 14–15th we sat up till a late, or rather an early hour, keenly on the watch for a meteoric display, in railway nomenclature, then due, but which, up to the date of the present writing, has not yet put in an appearance. Meteors there were, but they were the mere phosphorescent streaks rarely looked for in vain by the student of the heavens on a fairly cloudless night at this season. The lunar eclipse of the early morning of the 15th was well seen, the beautiful orb, like a shield of burnished silver, riding serene in the unclouded blue; but the obscuration was too partial to be in any way interesting or striking to any one who had gazed on the phenomenon in its grander phases as often as we have done.
To our good friend Mr. Carmichael of South Uist we are indebted for the following contributions to our stock of ancient Celtic folk-lore, a subject much neglected, but of very great interest notwithstanding:—
Urnuigh Smalaidh Teine.
A prayer to be said at covering up the fire at bedtime.
(Taken down from the recitation of a man living at Iocar of Uist.)
Smàlaidh mise an teine;