eep by the snow, and of whole families in the moor and high
lands; much loss of cows everywhere, also of wild beasts, as of doe and
roe."

"The Thirteen Drifty Days," folk called this storm, and by that name it
has gone down to history. "About the fifth and sixth days of the storm,"
says the Ettrick Shepherd, writing in _Blackwood's Magazine_ of July
1819, "the young sheep began to fall into a sleepy and torpid state, and
all that were affected in the evening died over-night. The intensity of
the frost wind often cut them off when in that state quite
instantaneously. About the ninth and tenth days, the shepherds began to
build up huge semicircular walls of their dead, in order to afford some
shelter for the remainder of the living; but they availed but little,
for about the same time they were frequently seen tearing at one
another's wool with their teeth. When the storm abated on the fourteenth
day from its commencement, there was, on many a high-lying farm, not a
living sheep to be seen. Large misshapen walls of dead, surrounding a
small prostrate flock, likewise all dead, and frozen stiff in their
lairs, was all that remained to cheer the forlorn shepherd and his
master."

As a matter of fact, something like nine-tenths of all the sheep in the
south of Scotland perished in this one storm, or if they did not then
actually perish, their vitality was so lowered, their constitutions so
wrecked, by the intense cold and the long deprivation of food, that they
never again picked up condition, but died like flies when the spring was
further advanced. Hogg says that in Eskdalemuir, out of 20,000 sheep
"none were left alive but forty young wedders on one farm, and five old
ewes on another. The farm of Phaup remained without a stock and without
a tenant for twenty years subsequent to the storm." On another farm all
the sheep perished save one black-faced ewe; and she was not long left
to perpetuate her breed, for dogs hunted her into a loch, and she too
went the way of her fellows.

Amongst other great storms, Hogg also mentions one in this same century,
long remembered as the "Blast o' March." It occurred on a Monday, the
twenty-fourth day of March, and was of singularly short duration,
considering the havoc it wrought. The previous Sunday was so warm that
lassies returning from Yarrow Kirk in the evening took off shoes and
stockings and walked barefoot; the young men cast plaids and coats. To
their unconcealed astonishment