Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 13, 1902.djvu/54

42 It is not right to kill a sheep on a Friday.

The saying "Bright Sunday, rough Monday," is more or less equivalent to our "Sunday rules Tuesday." We have also an equivalent to the theory "Mackerel speckles on the sky, and a good day to-morrow."

It is well known that the rain of the Flood came slanting down from the S.W., as is easily seen by the fact that all the mountains and hills in the Western Isles are bare on their south-west faces.

A saying in Uist with regard to the harvest is, "The year of the coilchean (short-grown straw) never brought famine to Uist." Coilchean is straw stunted by drought, and would imply a dry season.

Owing to the indifference of certain proprietors, there is an immense waste of human life and energy spent in herding sheep and cattle, for want of fences. In former times the cattle grazed on the hills and the low-lying ground was all arable, but now the hill-grazing has been taken away from the poor, and in the islands of South Uist, Benbecula, and Barra, all on the Gordon estate, there is no provision for keeping the cattle from encroaching upon the poor little crofts or cultivated ground, the more tempting to the wretched half-starved creatures, that owing to lack of drainage such grass as they can reach is sour and without nourishing qualities. The following rhymes are common among the herd-boys, who pass so many hours in charge of sheep, cows, and horses on the treeless, wind-swept marshes, and to whom rain is a melancholy aggravation of their tedium and discomfort.