This, however, has been the driest April known in the West Highlands for at least a score of years past. Hardly any rain has fallen during the month, and with a bright sun overhead, and drying north-easterly winds, rivers and streams have seldom been at a lower ebb even in midsummer, while in some places you hear complaints of an absolute scarcity of water even for ordinary household purposes—a very rare thing, indeed, in the West Highlands at this season of the year, or for that matter of it at any season. There was, however, such a superabundance of moisture in the ground, from the heavy rains of the past winter, that vegetation has as yet suffered little or nothing from the drought, and the country is beautiful exceedingly in all its greenery of leaf and gaiety of expanding blossom and bursting bud. Our wild-birds never had a finer nesting season, and they are now literally as merry as the day is long, for with the first flush of dawn in the east they begin their rich and varied song, which, with a short interval of quiescence and repose about mid-day, is continued without interruption until long after the sun has set and the earlier stars are already twinkling through the twilight gloom. April will be succeeded by the “merry month of May,” which, with the exception of two, or at most three, cold days, with frost at night, about the 10th, is pretty sure to be an unusually fine month even for May. It was an article of belief in the hygienic code of the old Highlanders, and which you come across occasionally even at the present day, that the invalid, suffering under no matter what form of internal ailment, upon whom the sun of May once fairly shed its light, was pretty sure of a renewed lease of life until at least the next autumnal equinox, and how fine, by the way, and lightsome and cheery withal, Bishop Gawin Douglas’ apostrophe (circa 1512):—
“Welcum the lord of licht, and lamp of day,
Welcum fosterare of tender herbis grene,
Welcum quickener of flurest flouris schene,
Welcum supporte of every rute and vane,
Welcum comfort of all kind frute and grane,
Welcum the birdis beild upon the brier,
Welcum maister and ruler of the yeare,
Welcum weilfare of husbands at the plewis,
Welcum repairer of woddis, treis, and bewis,