From the wooded knoll to the left, as we entered the village of Portnacroish, we heard some notes that, harsh as they were, delighted us, for we had not heard them for many years; and the reader will perhaps smile when we confess delight in association with what was neither more nor less than the chattering of a pair of magpies! Knowing that it must be magpie chattering and nothing else, though the lively confabulators were for the moment invisible, we got out of our conveyance, and on reaching an open glade we got sight of a pair of these beautiful birds perched on the topmost bough of an old ash tree; and so busy were they in the discussion of what must have been a matter of grave and immediate importance, that the usually shy and wary birds did not notice our approach till we were quite close upon them, when, with a scream of alarm and an indignant flirt of their tails, they glided in graceful curve, rather than flew, over the tree tops and disappeared. So rare has the magpie become in Lochaber and the immediately surrounding districts, that a sight of a pair of these handsome and sagacious birds delighted us exceedingly. We had little difficulty in concluding that their lively chattering on that bright and beautiful morning was about no less important a matter than the propriety of at once putting their house in order and setting about the labours of incubation. If there were any truth in popular superstition, that particular day ought to have afterwards turned out a disagreeable one to us; for had we not seen two magpies together, and what is more, did we not go out of our way to see them, when we might have easily passed on unseen of them, as they were invisible to us? In the south of Scotland the old pyet rhyme is something like this—
“One’s joy,
Two’s grief,
Three a wedding,
Four death.”
In the old sgeulachd the Gaelic rhyme is of similar import—
“Chunnaic mi pioghaid a’s dh-éirich leam;
Chunnaic mi dhà ’sgum b’iargain iad;
Chunnaic mi tri a’s b’aighearach mi;
Ach ceithir ri’m linn chan iarrainn iad.”