My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education
by Hugh Miller · English · Gutenberg #30737 · 1,180,156 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education
Author: Hugh Miller
Release date: December 22, 2009 [eBook #30737]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30737
Credits: Produced by Juliet Sutherland, David Garcia, Eric Hutton,
Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION ***
Produced by Juliet Sutherland, David Garcia, Eric Hutton,
Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)
MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.
_Morrison and Gibb, Edinburgh,_
_Printers to Her Majesty's Stationery Office._
[Illustration: Hugh Miller]
MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS
OR
THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION.
BY HUGH MILLER,
AUTHOR OF 'THE OLD RED SANDSTONE,' 'FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR,'
ETC. ETC.
[Illustration: Logo]
EDINBURGH:
W. P. NIMMO, HAY, & MITCHELL.
1889.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
A sailor's early career--First marriage--Escape from
shipwreck--Second Love--Traits of character, 1
CHAPTER II.
Childhood and childish visions--A Father's death--Favourite
books--Sketch of two maternal uncles, 20
CHAPTER III.
Dawn of patriotism--Cromarty Grammar School--Prevalent
amusements--Old Francie--Earliest geological researches, 40
CHAPTER IV.
Uncle Sandy as a Naturalist--Important discovery--Cromarty Sutors
and their caves--Expedition to the 'Doocot'--Difficulties and
dangers--Sensation produced, 62
CHAPTER V.
A would-be patroness--Boyish games--First friendship--Visit to the
Highlands--Geologizing in the Gruids--Ossian-worship, 85
CHAPTER VI.
Cousin George and Cousin William--Excursion with Cousin
Walter--Painful accident--Family bereavements--Links between
the present and the past, 107
CHAPTER VII.
Subscription school--Vacation delights--Forays and fears--Quarrel
with the schoolmaster--Poetical revenge--Johnstone the forester, 129
CHAPTER VIII.
Choice of a calling--Disappointment to relatives--Old Red Sandstone
quarry--Depression and walking-sleep--Temptations of
toil--Friendship with William Ross, 151
CHAPTER IX.
Life in the bothie--Mad Bell--Mournful history--Singular
intimacy--Manners and customs of north-country masons, 173
CHAPTER X.
Evening walks--Lines on a sun-dial--A haunted stream--Insect
transformations--Jock Moghoal--Musings, 195
CHAPTER XI.
An antiquary in humble life--Poor Danie--Proficiency in
porridge-making--Depressed health--A good omen--Close of
apprenticeship, 219
CHAPTER XII.
Swimming the Conon--Click-Clack the carter--Loch Maree--Fitting
up a barrack--Highland characteristics, 245
CHAPTER XIII.
The Brothers Fraser--Flora of the Northern Hebrides--Diving in
the Gareloch--Sabbaths in Flowerdale woods--Causes of
Highland distress, 268
CHAPTER XIV.
A cragsman's death--Providential escape--Property in Leith--First
sight of Edinburgh--Peter M'Craw--Niddry Woods--Researches
among the Coal Measures, 296
CHAPTER XV.
A worthy Seceder--The hero of the squad--Apology for
fanaticism--Strikes--Recollections of the theatre, 321
CHAPTER XVI.
Great fires in Edinburgh--Dr. Colquhoun--Dr. M'Crie--Return to
the North--Stanzas written at sea--Geological dreams, 348
CHAPTER XVII.
Religious phases--True centre of Christianity--Bearing of geology
upon theological belief--Delicate health--A gipsy wedding, 373
CHAPTER XVIII.
Convalescence--Pursuit of algeology--Jock Gordon--Theory of
idiocy--Mr. Stewart of Cromarty, 395
CHAPTER XIX.
Stone-cutting at Inverness--A jilted lover--The _Osars_--Death
of Uncle James--Farewell letter from William Ross, 416
CHAPTER XX.
Publication of poems--Newspaper criticisms--Walsh the
lecturer--Enlarged circle of friends--Miss Dunbar of Boath, 435
CHAPTER XXI.
Arenaceous formations--Antiquity of the earth--Tremendous
hurricane--_Loligo Vulgare_--Researches amid the
Lias--Interesting discoveries, 457
CHAPTER XXII.
Religious controversies--Ecclesiastical dispute--Cholera--Preventive
measures--Reform Bill, 474
CHAPTER XXIII.
Visitors in the churchyard--The Ladies' Walk--First
interview--Friendship--Love--Second visit to Edinburgh--Linlithgow
Bank--Favourable reception of "Scenes and Legends"--Marriage, 497
CHAPTER XXIV.
Married life at Cromarty--Ichthyolitic deposit of Old Red
Sandstone--Correspondence with Agassiz and Murchison--Happy
evenings--Death of eldest child, 522
CHAPTER XXV.
Voluntary principle--Position of the Establishment--Letter to
Lord Brougham--Invitation to Edinburgh--Editorship of the
_Witness_--Introduction to Dr. Chalmers--Visit from an old
friend--Removal to Edinburgh, 541
TO THE READER.
It is now nearly a hundred years since Goldsmith remarked, in his little
educational treatise, that "few subjects have been more frequently
written upon than the education of youth." And during the century which
has well-nigh elapsed since he said so, there have been so many more
additional works given to the world on this fertile topic, that their
number has been at least doubled. Almost all the men who ever taught a
few pupils, with a great many more who never taught any, deem themselves
qualified to say something original on education; and perhaps few books
of the kind have yet appeared, however mediocre their general tone, in
which something worthy of being attended to has not actually been said.
And yet, though I have read not a few volumes on the subject, and have
dipped into a great many more, I never yet found in them the sort of
direction or encouragement which, in working out my own education, I
most needed. They insisted much on the various modes of teaching others,
but said nothing--or, what amounted to the same thing, nothing to the
purpose--on the best mode of teaching one's-self. And as my
circumstances and position, at the time when I had most occasion to
consult them, were those of by much the largest class of the people of
this and every other civilized country--for I was one of the many
millions who need to learn, and yet have no one to teach them--I could
not help deeming the omission a serious one. I have since come to think,
however, that a formal treatise on self-culture might fail to supply
the want. Curiosity must be awakened ere it can be satisfied; nay, once
awakened, it never fails in the end fully to satisfy itself; and it has
occurred to me, that by simply laying before the working men of the
country the "Story of my Education," I may succeed in first exciting
their curiosity, and next, occasionally at least, in gratifying it also.
They will find that by far the best schools I ever attended are schools
open to them all--that the best teachers I ever had are (though severe
in their discipline) always easy of access--and that the special _form_
at which I was, if I may say so, most successful as a pupil, was a form
to which I was drawn by a strong inclination, but at which I had less
assistance from my brother men, or even from books, than at any of the
others. There are few of the natural sciences which do not lie quite as
open to the working men of Britain and America as Geology did to me.
My work, then, if I have not wholly failed in it, may be regarded as a
sort of educational treatise, thrown into the narrative form, and
addressed more especially to working men. They will find that a
considerable portion of the scenes and incidents which it records read
their lesson, whether of encouragement or warning, or throw their
occasional lights on peculiarities of character or curious natural
phenomena, to which their attention might be not unprofitably directed.
Should it be found to possess an interest to any other class, it will be
an interest chiefly derivable from the glimpses which it furnishes of
the inner life of the Scottish people, and its bearing on what has been
somewhat clumsily termed "the condition-of-the-country question." My
sketches will, I trust, be recognised as true to fact and nature. And as
I have never perused the autobiography of a working man of the more
observant type, without being indebted to it for new facts and ideas
respecting the circumstances and character of some portion of the people
with which I had been less perfectly acquainted before, I can hope that,
regarded simply as the memoir of a protracted journey through
_districts_ of society not yet very sedulously explored, and scenes
which few readers have had an opportunity of observing for themselves,
my story may be found to possess some of the interest which attaches to
the narratives of travellers who see what is not often seen, and know,
in consequence, what is not generally known. In a work cast into the
autobiographic form, the writer has always much to apologize for. With
himself for his subject, he usually tells not only more than he ought,
but also, in not a few instances, more than he intends. For, as has been
well remarked, whatever may be the character which a writer of his own
Memoirs is desirous of assuming, he rarely fails to betray the real one.
He has almost always his unintentional revelations, that exhibit
peculiarities of which he is not conscious, and weaknesses which he has
failed to recognise as such; and it will no doubt be seen that what is
so generally done in works similar to mine, I have not escaped doing.
But I cast myself full on the good-nature of the reader. My aims have, I
trust, been honest ones; and should I in any degree succeed in rousing
the humbler classes to the important work of self-culture and
self-government, and in convincing the higher that there are instances
in which working men have at least as legitimate a claim to their
respect as to their pity, I shall not deem the ordinary penalties of the
autobiographer a price too high for the accomplishment of ends so
important.
MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS
OR
THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION.
CHAPTER I.
"Ye gentlemen of England,
Who live at home at ease,
Oh, little do ye think upon
The dangers of the seas."--OLD SONG.
Rather more than eighty years ago, a stout little boy, in his sixth or
seventh year, was despatched from an old-fashioned farm-house in the
upper part of the parish of Cromarty, to drown a litter of puppies in an
adjacent pond. The commission seemed to be not in the least congenial.
He sat down beside the pool, and began to cry over his charge; and
finally, after wasting much time in a paroxysm of indecision and sorrow,
instead of committing the puppies to the water, he tucked them up in his
little kilt, and set out by a blind pathway which went winding through
the stunted heath of the dreary Maolbuoy Common, in a direction opposite
to that of the farm-house--his home for the two previous twelvemonths.
After some doubtful wandering on the waste, he succeeded in reaching,
before nightfall, the neighbouring seaport town, and presented himself,
laden with his charge, at his mother's door. The poor woman--a sailor's
widow, in very humble circumstances--raised her hands in astonishment:
"Oh, my unlucky boy," she exclaimed, "what's this?--what brings you
here?" "The little doggies, mither," said the boy; "I couldna drown the
little doggies; and I took them to you." What afterwards befell the
"little doggies," I know not; but trivial as the incident may seem, it
exercised a marked influence on the circumstances and destiny of at
least two generations of creatures higher in the scale than themselves.
The boy, as he stubbornly refused to return to the farm-house, had to be
sent on shipboard, agreeably to his wish, as a cabin-boy; and the writer
of these chapters was born, in consequence, a sailor's son, and was
rendered, as early as his fifth year, mainly dependent for his support
on the sedulously plied but indifferently remunerated labours of his
only surviving parent, at the time a sailor's widow.
The little boy of the farm-house we a descended from a long line of
seafaring men,--skilful and adventurous sailors,--some of whom had
coasted along the Scottish shores as early as the times of Sir Andrew
Wood and the "bold Bartons," and mayhap helped to man that "verrie
monstrous schippe the Great Michael," that "cumbered all Scotland to get
her to sea." They had taken as naturally to the water as the
Newfoundland dog or the duckling. That waste of life which is always so
great in the naval profession had been more than usually so in the
generation just passed away. Of the boy's two uncles, one had sailed
round the world with Anson, and assisted in burning Paita, and in
boarding the Manilla galleon; but on reaching the English coast he
mysteriously disappeared, and was never more heard of. The other uncle,
a remarkably handsome and powerful man,--or, to borrow the homely but
not inexpressive language in which I have heard him described, "as
_pretty_ a fellow as ever stepped in shoe-leather,"--perished at sea in
a storm; and several years after, the boy's father, when entering the
Firth of Cromarty, was struck overboard, during a sudden gust, by the
boom of his vessel, and, apparently stunned by the blow, never rose
again. Shortly after, in the hope of screening her son from what seemed
to be the hereditary fate, his mother had committed the boy to the
charge of a sister, married to a farmer of the parish, and now the
mistress of the farm-house of Ardavell; but the family death was not to
be so avoided; and the arrangement terminated, as has been seen, in the
transaction beside the pond.
In course of time the sailor boy, despite of hardship and rough usage,
grew up into a singularly robust and active man, not above the middle
size,--for his height never exceeded five feet eight inches,--but
broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-limbed, and so compact of bone
and muscle, that in a ship of the line, in which he afterwards sailed,
there was not, among five hundred able-bodied seamen, a man who could
lift so great a weight, or grapple with him on equal terms. His
education had been but indifferently cared for at home: he had, however,
been taught to read by a female cousin, a niece of his mother's, who,
like her too, was both the daughter and the widow of a sailor; and for
his cousin's only child, a girl somewhat younger than himself, he had
contracted a boyish affection, which in a stronger form continued to
retain possession of him after he grew up. In the leisure thrown on
his-hands in long Indian and Chinese voyages, he learned to write; and
profited so much by the instructions of a comrade, an intelligent and
warm-hearted though reckless Irishman, that he became skilful enough to
keep a log-book, and to take a reckoning with the necessary
correctness,--accomplishments far from common at the time among ordinary
sailors. He formed, too, a taste for reading. The recollection of his
cousin's daughter may have influenced him, but he commenced life with a
determination to rise in it,--made his first money by storing up instead
of drinking his grog,--and, as was common in those times, drove a little
trade with the natives of foreign parts in articles of curiosity and
vertu, for which, I suspect, the custom-house dues were not always paid.
With all his Scotch prudence, however, and with much kindliness of
heart and placidity of temper there was some wild blood in his veins,
derived, mayhap, from one or two buccaneering ancestors, that, when
excited beyond the endurance point, became sufficiently formidable; and
which, on at least one occasion, interfered very considerably with his
plans and prospects.
On a protracted and tedious voyage in a large East Indiaman, he had,
with the rest of the crew, been subjected to harsh usage by a stern,
capricious captain; but, secure of relief on reaching port, he had borne
uncomplainingly with it all. His comrade and quondam teacher, the
Irishman, was, however, less patient; and for remonstrating with the
tyrant, as one of a deputation of the seamen, in what was deemed a
mutinous spirit, he was laid hold of, and was in the course of being
ironed down to the deck under a tropical sun, when his quieter comrade,
with his blood now heated to the boiling point, stepped aft, and with
apparent calmness re-stated the grievance. The captain drew a loaded
pistol from his belt; the sailor struck up his hand; and, as the bullet
whistled through the rigging above, he grappled with him, and disarmed
him in a trice. The crew rose, and in a few minutes the ship was all
their own. But having failed to calculate on such a result, they knew
not what to do with their charge; and, acting under the advice of their
new leader, who felt to the full the embarrassing nature of the
position, they were content simply to demand the redress of their
grievances as their terms of surrender; when, untowardly for their
claims, a ship of war hove in sight, much in want of men, and, bearing
down on the Indiaman, the mutiny was at once suppressed, and the leading
mutineers sent aboard the armed vessel, accompanied by a grave charge,
and the worst possible of characters. Luckily for them, however, and
especially luckily for the Irishman and his friend, the war-ship was so
weakened by scurvy, at that time the untamed pest of the navy, that
scarce two dozen of her crew could do duty aloft A fierce tropical
tempest, too, which broke out not long after, pleaded powerfully in
their favour; and the affair terminated in the ultimate promotion of the
Irishman to the office of ship-schoolmaster, and of his Scotch comrade
to the captaincy of the foretop.
My narrative abides with the latter. He remained for several years
aboard a man-of-war, and, though not much in love with the service, did
his duty in both storm and battle. He served in the action off the
Dogger-Bank,--one of the last naval engagements fought ere the
manoeuvre of breaking the line gave to British valour its due
superiority, by rendering all our great sea-battles decisive; and a
comrade who sailed in the same vessel, and from whom, when a boy, I have
received kindness for my father's sake, has told me that, their ship
being but indifferently manned at the time, and the extraordinary
personal strength and activity of his friend well known, he had a
station assigned him at his gun against two of the crew, and that during
the action he actually outwrought them both. At length, however, the
enemy drifted to leeward to refit; and when set to repair the gashed and
severed rigging, such was his state of exhaustion, in consequence of the
previous overstrain on every nerve and muscle, that he had scarce vigour
enough left to raise the marlingspike employed in the work to the level
of his face. Suddenly, when in this condition, a signal passed along the
line, that the Dutch fleet, already refitted, was bearing down to renew
the engagement. A thrill like that of an electric shock passed through
the frame of the exhausted sailor; his fatigue at once left him; and,
vigorous and strong as when the action first began, he found himself
able, as before, to run out against his two comrades the one side of a
four-and-twenty pounder. The instance is a curious one of the influence
of that "spirit" which, according to the Wise King, enables a man to
"sustain his infirmity."
It may be well not to inquire too curiously regarding the mode in which
this effective sailor quitted the navy. The country had borrowed his
services without consulting his will; and he, I suspect, reclaimed them
on his own behalf without first asking leave. I have been told by my
mother that he found the navy very intolerable;--the mutiny at the Nore
had not yet meliorated the service to the common sailor. Among other
hardships, he had been oftener than once under not only very harsh, but
also very incompetent officers; and on one occasion, after toiling on
the foreyard in a violent night-squall, with some of the best seamen
aboard, in fruitless attempts to furl up the sail, he had to descend,
cap in hand, at the risk of a flogging, and humbly implore the
boy-lieutenant in charge that he should order the vessel's head to be
laid in a certain direction. Luckily for him, the advice was taken by
the young gentleman, and in a few minutes the sail was furled. He left
his ship one fine morning, attired in his best, and having on his head a
three-cornered hat, with tufts of lace at the corners, which I well
remember, from the circumstance that it had long after to perform an
important part in certain boyish masquerades at Christmas and the New
Year; and as he had taken effective precautions for being reported
missing in the evening, he got clear off.
Of some of the after-events of his life I retain such mere fragmentary
recollections, dissociated from date and locality, as might be most
readily seized on by the imagination of a child. At one time, when
engaged in one of his Indian voyages, he was stationed during the night,
accompanied by but a single comrade, in a small open boat, near one of
the minor mouths of the Ganges; and he had just fallen asleep on the
beams, when he was suddenly awakened by a violent motion, as if his
skiff were capsizing. Starting up, he saw in the imperfect light a huge
tiger, that had swam, apparently, from the neighbouring jungle, in the
act of boarding the boat. So much was he taken aback, that though a
loaded musket lay beside him, it was one of the loose beams, or
_foot-spars_, used as fulcrums for the feet in rowing, that he laid hold
of as a weapon; but such was the blow he dealt to the paws of the
creature, as they rested on the gunwale, that it dropped off with a
tremendous snarl, and he saw it no more. On another occasion, he was one
of three men sent with despatches to some Indian port in a boat, which,
oversetting in the open sea in a squall, left them for the greater part
of three days only its upturned bottom for their resting-place. And so
thickly during that time did the sharks congregate around them, that
though a keg of rum, part of the boat's stores, floated for the first
two days within a few yards of them, and they had neither meat nor
drink, none of them, though they all swam well, dared attempt regaining
it. They were at length relieved by a Spanish vessel, and treated with
such kindness, that the subject of my narrative used ever after to speak
well of the Spaniards, as a generous people, destined ultimately to
rise. He was at one time so reduced by scurvy, in a vessel half of whose
crew had been carried off by the disease, that, though still able to do
duty on the tops, the pressure of his finger left for several seconds a
dent in his thigh, as if the muscular flesh had become of the
consistency of dough. At another time, when overtaken in a small vessel
by a protracted tempest, in which "for many days neither sun nor moon
appeared," he continued to retain his hold of the helm for twelve hours
after every other man aboard was utterly prostrated and down, and
succeeded, in consequence, in weathering the storm for them all. And
after his death, a nephew of my mother's, a young man who had served his
apprenticeship under him, was treated with great kindness on the Spanish
Main, for his sake, by a West Indian captain, whose ship and crew he had
saved, as the captain told the lad, by boarding them in a storm, at
imminent risk to himself, and working their vessel into port, when, in
circumstances of similar exhaustion, they were drifting full upon an
iron-bound shore. Many of my other recollections of this manly sailor
are equally fragmentary in their character; but there is a distinct bit
of picture in them all, that strongly impressed the boyish fancy.
When not much turned of thirty, the sailor returned to his native town,
with money enough, hardly earned, and carefully kept, to buy a fine
large sloop, with which he engaged in the coasting trade; and shortly
after he married his cousin's daughter. He found his cousin, who had
supported herself in her widowhood by teaching a school, residing in a
dingy, old-fashioned house, three rooms in length, but with the windows
of its second story half-buried in the eaves, that had been left her by
their mutual grandfather, old John Feddes, one of the last of the
buccaneers. It had been built, I have every reason to believe, with
Spanish gold; not, however, with a great deal of it, for,
notwithstanding its six rooms, it was a rather humble erection, and had
now fallen greatly into disrepair. It was fitted up with some of the
sailor's money, and, after his marriage, became his home,--a home
rendered all the happier by the presence of his cousin, now rising in
years, and who, during her long widowhood, had sought and found
consolation, amid her troubles and privations, where it was surest to be
found. She was a meek-spirited, sincerely pious woman; and the sailor,
during his more distant voyages,--for he sometimes traded with ports of
the Baltic on the one hand, and with those of Ireland and the south of
England on the other,--had the comfort of knowing that his wife, who had
fallen into a state of health chronically delicate, was sedulously
tended and cared for by a devoted mother. The happiness which he would
have otherwise enjoyed was, however, marred in some degree by his wife's
great delicacy of constitution, and ultimately blighted by two unhappy
accidents.
He had not lost the nature which had been evinced at an early age beside
the pond: for a man who had often looked death in the face, he had
remained nicely tender of human life, and had often hazarded his own in
preserving that of others; and when accompanied, on one occasion, by his
wife and her mother to his vessel, just previous to sailing, he had
unfortunately to exert himself in her presence, in behalf of one of his
seamen, in a way that gave her constitution a shock from which it never
recovered. A clear frosty moonlight evening had set in; the pier-head
was glistening with new-formed ice; and one of the sailors, when engaged
in casting over a haulser which he had just loosed, missed footing on
the treacherous margin, and fell into the sea. The master knew his man
could not swim; a powerful seaward tide sweeps past the place with the
first hours of ebb; there was not a moment to be lost; and, hastily
throwing off his heavy greatcoat, he plunged after him, and in an
instant the strong current swept them both out of sight. He succeeded,
however, in laying hold of the half-drowned man, and, striking with him
from out the perilous tideway into an eddy, with a Herculean effort he
regained the quay. On reaching it, his wife lay insensible in the arms
of her mother; and as she was at the time in the delicate condition
incidental to married women, the natural consequence followed, and she
never recovered the shock, but lingered for more than a twelve-mouth,
the mere shadow of her former self; when a second event, as untoward as
the first, too violently shook the fast ebbing sands, and precipitated
her dissolution.
A prolonged tempest from the stormy north-east had swept the Moray Firth
of its shipping, and congregated the stormbound vessels by scores in the
noble harbour of Cromarty, when the wind chopped suddenly round, and
they all set out to sea,--the sloop of the master among the rest. The
other vessels kept the open Firth; but the master, thoroughly acquainted
with its navigation, and in the belief that the change of wind was but
temporary, went on hugging the land on the weather side, till, as he had
anticipated, the breeze set full into the old quarter, and increased
into a gale. And then, when all the rest of the fleet had no other
choice left them than just to scud back again, he struck out into the
Firth in a long tack, and, doubling Kinnaird's Head and the dreaded
Buchan Ness, succeeded in making good his voyage south. Next morning the
wind-bound vessels were crowding the harbour of refuge as before, and
only his sloop was amissing. The first war of the French Revolution had
broken out at the time; it was known there were several French
privateers hovering on the coast; and the report went abroad that the
missing sloop had been captured by the French. There was a
weather-brained tailor in the neighbourhood, who used to do very odd
things, especially, it was said, when the moon was at the full, and whom
the writer remembers from the circumstance that he fabricated for him
his first jacket, and that, though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve
to the hole at the shoulder, where it ought to be, he committed the
slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes.
Poor Andrew Fern had heard that his townsman's sloop had been captured
by a privateer, and, fidgety with impatience till he had communicated
the intelligence where he thought it would tell most effectively, he
called on the master's wife, to ask whether she had not heard that all
the wind-bound vessels had got back again save the master's, and to
wonder no one had yet told her that, if _his_ had not got back, it was
simply because it had been taken by the French. The tailor's
communication told more powerfully than he could have anticipated: in
less than a week after, the master's wife was dead; and long ere her
husband's return she was lying in the quiet family burying-place, in
which--so heavy were the drafts made by accident and violent death on
the family--the remains of none of the male members had been deposited
for more than a hundred years.
The mother, now left, by the death of her daughter, to a dreary
solitude, sought to relieve its tedium, during the absence of her
son-in-law when on his frequent voyages, by keeping, as she had done ere
his return from foreign parts, a humble school. It was attended by two
little girls, the children of a distant relation but very dear friend,
the wife of a tradesman of the place,--a woman, like herself, of sincere
though unpretending piety. Their similarity of character in this respect
could hardly be traced to their common ancestor. He was the last curate
of the neighbouring parish of Nigg; and, though not one of those
intolerant Episcopalian ministers that succeeded in rendering their
Church thoroughly hateful to the Scottish people,--for he was a simple,
easy man, of much good nature,--he was, if tradition speak true, as
little religious as any of them. In one of the earlier replies to that
curious work, "Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed," I find a
nonsensical passage from one of the curate's sermons, given as a set-off
against the Presbyterian nonsense adduced by the other side. "Mr. James
M'Kenzie, curate of Nigg in Ross," says the writer, "describing eternity
to his parishioners, told them that in that state they would be
immortalized, so that nothing could hurt them: a slash of a broadsword
could not hurt you, saith he; nay, a cannon-ball would play but _baff_
on you." Most of the curate's descendants were stanch Presbyterians, and
animated by a greatly stronger spirit than his; and there were none of
them stancher in their Presbyterianism than the two elderly women who
counted kin from him in the fourth degree, and who, on the basis of a
common faith, had become attached friends. The little girls were great
favourites with the schoolmistress; and when, as she rose in years, her
health began to fail, the elder of the two removed from her mother's
house, to live with, and take care of her; and the younger, who was now
shooting up into a pretty young woman, used, as before, to pass much of
her time with her sister and her old mistress.
Meanwhile the shipmaster was thriving. He purchased a site for a house
beside that of his buccaneering grandfather, and built for himself and
his aged relative a respectable dwelling, which cost him about four
hundred pounds, and entitled his son, the writer, to exercise the
franchise, on the passing, considerably more than thirty years after, of
the Reform Bill. The new house was, however, never to be inhabited by
its builder; for, ere it was fully finished, he was overtaken by a sad
calamity, that, to a man of less energy and determination, would have
been ruin, and in consequence of which he had to content himself with
the old house as before, and almost to begin the world anew. I have now
reached a point in my narrative at which, from my connexion with the two
little girls,--both of whom still live in the somewhat altered character
of women far advanced in life,--I can be as minute in its details as I
please; and the details of the misadventure which stripped the
shipmaster of the earnings of long years of carefulness and toil,
blended as they are with what an old critic might term a curious
_machinery_ of the supernatural, seem not unworthy of being given
unabridged.
Early in November 1797, two vessels--the one a smack in the London and
Inverness trade, the other the master's square-rigged sloop--lay
wind-bound for a few days on their passage north, in the port of
Peterhead. The weather, which had been stormy and unsettled, moderated
towards the evening of the fifth day of their detention; and the wind
chopping suddenly into the east, both vessels loosed from their
moorings, and, as a rather gloomy day was passing into still gloomier
night, they bore out to sea. The breeze soon freshened into a gale; the
gale swelled into a hurricane, accompanied by a thick snow-storm: and
when, early next morning, the smack opened the Firth, she was staggering
under her storm-jib, and a mainsail reefed to the cross. Whatever wind
may blow, there is always shelter within the Sutors; and she was soon
riding at anchor in the roadstead; but she had entered the bay alone;
and when day broke, and for a brief interval the driving snow-rack
cleared up towards the east, no second sail appeared in the offing.
"Poor Miller!" exclaimed the master of the smack; "if he does not enter
the Firth ere an hour, he will never enter it at all. Good sound vessel,
and better sailor never stepped between stem and stern; but last night
has, I fear, been too much for him. He should have been here long ere
now." The hour passed; the day itself wore heavily away in gloom and
tempest; and as not only the master, but also all the crew of the sloop,
were natives of the place, groups of the town's-folk might be seen, so
long as the daylight lasted, looking out into the storm from the salient
points of the old coast-line that, rising immediately behind the houses,
commands the Firth. But the sloop came not, and before they had retired
to their homes, a second night had fallen, dark and tempestuous as the
first.
Ere morning the weather moderated: a keen frost bound up the wind in its
icy fetters; and during the following day, though a heavy swell
continued to roll shorewards between the Sutors, and sent up its white
foam high against the cliffs, the surface of the sea had become glassy
and smooth. But the day wore on, and evening again fell; and even the
most sanguine relinquished all hope of ever again seeing the sloop or
her crew. There was grief in the master's dwelling,--grief in no degree
the less poignant from the circumstance that it was the tearless,
uncomplaining grief of rigid old age. Her two youthful friends and their
mother watched with the widow, now, as it seemed, left alone in the
world. The town-clock had struck the hour of midnight, and still she
remained as if fixed to her seat, absorbed in silent, stupifying sorrow,
when a heavy foot was heard pacing along the now silent street. It
passed, and anon returned; ceased for a moment nearly opposite the
window; then approached the door, where there was a second pause; and
then there succeeded a faltering knock, that struck on the very hearts
of the inmates within. One of the girls sprang up, and on undoing the
bolt, shrieked out, as the door fell open, "O mistress, here is Jack
Grant the mate!" Jack, a tall, powerful seaman, but apparently in a
state of utter exhaustion, staggered, rather than walked in, and flung
himself into a chair. "Jack," exclaimed the old woman, seizing him
convulsively by both his hands, "where's my cousin?--where's Hugh?" "The
master's safe and well," said Jack; "but the poor _Friendship_ lies in
_spales_ on the bar of Findhorn." "God be praised!" ejaculated the
widow. "Let the gear go!"
I have often heard Jack's story related in Jack's own words, at a period
of life when repetition never tires; but I am not sure that I can do it
the necessary justice now. "We left Peterhead," he said, "with about
half a cargo of coal,--for we had lightened ship a day or two
before,--and the gale freshened as the night came on. We made all tight,
however; and though the snow-drift was so blinding in the thick of the
shower that I could scarce see my hand before me, and though it soon
began to blow great guns, we had given the land a good offing, and the
hurricane blew the right way. Just as we were loosening from the quay, a
poor young woman, much knocked up, with a child in her arms, had come to
the vessel's side, and begged hard of master to take her aboard. She was
a soldier's wife, and was travelling to join her husband at Fort-George;
but she was already worn out and penniless, she said; and now, as a
snow-storm threatened to block up the roads, she could neither stay
where she was, nor pursue her journey. Her infant, too,--she was sure,
if she tried to force her way through the hills, it would perish in the
snow. The master, though unwilling to cumber us with a passenger in such
weather, was induced, out of pity for the poor destitute creature, to
take her aboard. And she was now with her child, all alone, below in the
cabin I was stationed a-head on the out-look beside the foresail
_horse_: the night had grown pitch dark; and the lamp in the binnacle
threw just light enough through the grey of the shower to show me the
master at the helm. He looked more anxious, I thought, than I had almost
ever seen him before, though I have been with him, mistress, in bad
weather; and all at once I saw he had got company, and strange company
too, for such a night: there was a woman moving round him, with a child
in her arms. I could see her as distinctly as ever I saw anything,--now
on the one side, now on the other,--at one time full in the light, at
another half lost in the darkness. That, I said to myself, must be the
soldier's wife and her child; but how in the name of wonder can the
master allow a woman to come on deck in such a night as this, when we
ourselves have just enough ado to keep footing? He takes no notice of
her neither, but keeps looking on, quite in his wont, at the binnacle.
'Master,' I said, stepping up to him, 'the woman had surely better go
below.' 'What woman, Jack?' said he; 'our passenger, you may be sure, is
nowhere else.' I looked round, mistress, and found he was quite alone,
and that the companion-head was hasped down. There came a cold sweat all
over me. 'Jack,' said the master, 'the night is getting worse, and the
roll of the waves heightening every moment. I'm convinced, too, our
cargo is shifting: as the last sea struck us, I could hear the coals
rattle below; and see how stiffly we heel to the larboard. Say nothing,
however, to the men, but have all your wits about you; and look,
meanwhile, to the boat-tackle and the oars. I have seen a boat live in
as bad a night as this.' As he spoke, a blue light from above glimmered
on the deck. We looked up, and saw a dead-fire sticking to the
cross-trees. 'It's all over with us now, master,' said I. 'Nay, man,'
replied the master, in his easy, humorous way, which I always like well
enough except in bad weather, and then I see his humour is served out
like his extra grog, to keep up hearts that have cause enough to get
low,--'Nay, man,' he said, 'we can't afford to let your grandmother
board us to-night. If you will insure _me_ against the shifting coal,
I'll be your guarantee against the dead-light. Why, it's as much a
natural appearance, man, as a flash of lightning. Away to your berth,
and keep up a good heart: we can't be far from Covesea now, where, when
once past the Skerries, the swell will take off; and then, in two short
hours, we may be snug within the Sutors.' I had scarcely reached my
berth a-head, mistress, when a heavy sea struck us on the starboard
quarter, almost throwing us on our beam-ends. I could hear the rushing
of the coals below, as they settled on the larboard side; and though the
master set us full before the wind, and gave instant orders to lighten
every stitch of sail,--and it was but little sail we had at the time to
lighten,--still the vessel did not rise, but lay unmanageable as a log,
with her gunwale in the water. On we drifted, however, along the south
coast, with little expectation save that every sea would send us to the
bottom; until, in the first grey of the morning, we found ourselves
among the breakers of the terrible bar of Findhorn. And shortly after,
the poor _Friendship_ took the ground right on the edge of the
quicksands, for she would neither stay nor wear; and as she beat hard
against the bottom, the surf came rolling over half-mast high.
"Just as we struck," continued Jack, "the master made a desperate effort
to get into the cabin. The vessel couldn't miss, we saw, to break up and
fill; and though there was little hope of any of us ever setting foot
ashore, he wished to give the poor woman below a chance with the rest.
All of us but himself, mistress, had got up into the shrouds, and so we
could see round us a bit; and he had just laid his hand on the
companion-hasp to undo the door, when I saw a tremendous sea coming
rolling towards us, like a moving wall, and shouted on him to hold fast.
He sprang to the weather back-stay, and laid hold. The sea came tumbling
on, and, breaking full twenty feet over his head, buried him for a
minute's space in the foam. We thought we should never see him more; but
when it cleared away, there was he still, with his iron grip on the
stay, though the fearful wave had water-logged the _Friendship_ from bow
to stem, and swept her companion-head as cleanly off by the deck as if
it had been cut with a saw. No human aid could avail the poor woman and
her baby. Master could hear the terrible choking noise of her dying
agony right under his feet, with but a two-inch plank between; and the
sounds have haunted him ever since. But even had he succeeded in getting
her on deck, she could not possibly have survived, mistress. For five
long hours we clung to the rigging, with the seas riding over us all the
time like wild horses; and though we could see, through the snow-drift
and the spray, crowds on the shore, and boats lying thick beside the
pier, none dared venture out to assist us, till near the close of the
day, when the wind fell with the falling tide, and we were brought
ashore, more dead than alive, by a volunteer crew from the harbour. The
unlucky _Friendship_ began to break up under us ere mid-day, and we saw
the corpse of the drowned woman, with the dead infant still in its arms,
come floating out through a hole in the side. But the surf soon tore
mother and child asunder, and we lost sight of them as they drifted away
to the west. Master would have crossed the Firth himself this morning to
relieve your mind, but being less worn out than any of us, he thought it
best to remain in charge of the wreck."
Such, in effect, was the narrative of Jack Grant, the mate. The master,
as I have said, had well-nigh to commence the world anew, and was on the
eve of selling his new house at a disadvantage, in order to make up the
sum necessary for providing himself with a new vessel, when a friend
interposed, and advanced him the balance required. He was assisted, too,
by a sister in Leith, who was in tolerably comfortable circumstances;
and so he got a new sloop, which, though not quite equal in size to the
one he had lost, was built wholly of oak, every plank and beam of which
he had superintended in the laying down, and a prime sailer to boot; and
so, though he had to satisfy himself with the accommodation of the old
domicile, with its little rooms and its small windows, and to let the
other house to a tenant, he began to thrive again as before. Meanwhile
his aged cousin was gradually sinking. The master was absent on one of
his longer voyages, and she too truly felt that she could not survive
till his return. She called to her bedside her two young friends, the
sisters, who had been unwearied in their attentions to her, and poured
out her blessing on them; first on the elder, and then on the younger.
"But as for you, Harriet," she added, addressing the latter, "there
waits for you one of the best blessings of this world also--the
blessings of a good husband: you will be a gainer in the end, even in
this life, through your kindness to the poor childless widow." The
prophecy was a true one: the old woman had shrewdly marked where the
eyes of her cousin had been falling of late; and in about a twelvemonth
after her death her young friend and pupil had become the master's wife.
There was a very considerable disparity between their ages,--the master
was forty-four, and his wife only eighteen,--but never was there a
happier marriage. The young wife was simple, confiding, and
affectionate; and the master of a soft and genial nature, with a large
amount of buoyant humour about him, and so equable of temper, that,
during six years of wedded life, his wife never saw him angry but once.
I have heard her speak of the exceptional instance, however, as too
terrible to be readily forgotten.
She had accompanied him on ship-board, during their first year of
married life, to the upper parts of the Cromarty Firth, where his sloop
was taking in a cargo of grain, and lay quietly embayed within two
hundred yards of the southern shore. His mate had gone away for the
night to the opposite side of the bay, to visit his parents, who resided
in that neighbourhood; and the remaining crew consisted of but two
seamen, both young and somewhat reckless men, and the ship-boy. Taking
the boy with them to keep the ship's boat afloat, and wait their return,
the two sailors went ashore, and, setting out for a distant
public-house, remained there drinking till a late hour. There was a
bright moon overhead, but the evening was chilly and frosty; and the
boy, cold, tired, and half-overcome by sleep, after waiting on till past
midnight, shoved off the boat, and, making his way to the vessel, got
straightway into his hammock and fell asleep. Shortly after, the two men
came to the shore much the worse of liquor; and, failing to make
themselves heard by the boy, they stripped off their clothes, and chilly
as the night was, swam aboard. The master and his wife had been for
hours snug in their bed, when they were awakened by the screams of the
boy: the drunken men were unmercifully bastinading him with a rope's end
apiece. The master, hastily rising, had to interfere in his behalf, and
with the air of a man who knew that remonstrance in the circumstances
would be of little avail, he sent them both off to their hammocks.
Scarcely, however, had he again got into bed, when he was a second time
aroused by the cries of the boy, uttered on this occasion in the shrill
tones of agony and terror; and, promptly springing up, now followed by
his wife, he found the two sailors again belabouring the boy, and that
one of them, in his blind fury, had laid hold of a rope-end, armed, as
is common on shipboard, with an iron thimble or ring, and that every
blow produced a wound. The poor boy was streaming over with blood. The
master, in the extremity of his indignation, lost command of himself.
Rushing in, the two men were in a moment dashed against the deck;--they
seemed powerless in his hands as children; and had not his wife,
although very unfit at the time for mingling in a fray, run in and laid
hold of him,--a movement which calmed him at once,--it was her serious
impression that, unarmed as he was, he would have killed them both upon
the spot. There are, I believe, few things more formidable than the
unwonted anger of a good-natured man.
CHAPTER II.
"Three stormy nights and stormy days
We tossed upon the raging main;
And long we strove our barque to save,
But all our striving was in vain."--LOWE.
I was born, the first child of this marriage, on the 10th day of October
1802, in the low, long house built by my great-grandfather the
buccaneer. My memory awoke early. I have recollections which date
several months ere the completion of my third year; but, like those of
the golden age of the world, they are chiefly of a mythologic character.
I remember, for instance, getting out unobserved one day to my father's
little garden, and seeing there a minute duckling covered with soft
yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant
that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red
colour. I know not what prodigy of the vegetable kingdom produced the
little duckling; but the plant with the shells must, I think, have been
a scarlet runner, and the shells themselves the papilionaceous blossoms.
I have a distinct recollection, too,--but it belongs to a later
period,--of seeing my ancestor, old John Feddes the buccaneer, though he
must have been dead at the time considerably more than half a century. I
had learned to take an interest in his story, as preserved and told in
the antique dwelling which he had built more than a hundred years
before. To forget a love disappointment, he had set out early in life
for the Spanish Main, where, after giving and receiving some hard blows,
he succeeded in filling a little bag with dollars and doubloons; and
then coming home, he found his old sweetheart a widow, and so much
inclined to listen to reason, that she ultimately became his wife. There
were some little circumstances in his history which must have laid hold
of my imagination; for I used over and over to demand its repetition;
and one of my first attempts at a work of art was to scrabble his
initials with my fingers, in red paint, on the house-door. One day, when
playing all alone at the stair-foot--for the inmates of the house had
gone out--something extraordinary had caught my eye on the landing-place
above; and looking up, there stood John Feddes--for I somehow
instinctively divined that it was none other than he--in the form of a
large, tall, very old man, attired in a light-blue greatcoat He seemed
to be steadfastly regarding me with apparent complacency; but I was
sadly frightened; and for years after, when passing through the dingy,
ill-lighted room out of which I inferred he had come, I used to feel not
at all sure that I might not tilt against old John in the dark.
I retain vivid recollections of the joy which used to light up the
household on my father's arrival; and I remember that I learned to
distinguish for myself his sloop when in the offing, by the two slim
stripes of white which ran along her sides, and her two square topsails.
I have my golden memories, too, of splendid toys that he used to bring
home with him,--among the rest, of a magnificent four-wheeled waggon of
painted tin, drawn by four wooden horses and a string; and of getting it
into a quiet corner, immediately on its being delivered over to me, and
there breaking up every wheel and horse, and the vehicle itself, into
their original bits, until not two of the pieces were left sticking
together. Further, I still remember my disappointment at not finding
something curious within at least the horses and the wheels; and as
unquestionably the main enjoyment derivable from such things is to be
had in the breaking of them, I sometimes wonder that our ingenious
toymen do not fall upon the way of at once extending their trade, and
adding to its philosophy, by putting some of their most brilliant things
where nature puts the nut-kernel,--inside. I shall advert to but one
other recollection of this period. I have a dreamlike memory of a busy
time, when men with gold lace on their breasts, and at least one
gentleman with golden epaulets on his shoulders, used to call at my
father's house, and fill my newly acquired pockets with coppers; and how
they wanted, it was said, to bring my father along with them, to help
them to sail their great vessel; but he preferred remaining, it was
added, with his own little one. A ship of war, under the guidance of an
unskilful pilot, had run aground on a shallow flat on the opposite side
of the Firth, known as the _Inches_; and as the flood of a stream tide
was at its height at the time, and straightway began to fall off, it was
found, after lightening her of her guns and the greater part of her
stores, that she still stuck fast. My father, whose sloop had been
pressed into the service, and was loaded to the gunwale with the
ordnance, had betrayed an unexpected knowledge of the points of a large
war-vessel; and the commander, entering into conversation with him, was
so impressed by his skill, that he placed his ship under his charge, and
had his confidence repaid by seeing her hauled off into deep water in a
single tide. Knowing the nature of the bottom,--a soft arenaceous mud,
which if beat for some time by the foot or hand, resolved itself into a
sort of quicksand, half-sludge, half-water, which, when covered by a
competent depth of sea, could offer no effectual resistance to a ship's
keel,--the master had set half the crew to run in a body from side to
side, till, by the motion generated in this way, the portion of the bank
immediately beneath was beaten soft; and then the other moiety of the
men, tugging hard on kedge and haulser, drew the vessel off a few feet
at a time, till at length, after not a few repetitions of the process,
she floated free. Of course, on a harder bottom the expedient would not
have availed; but so struck was the commander by its efficacy and
originality, and by the extent of the master's professional resources,
that he strongly recommended him to part with his sloop, and enter the
navy, where he thought he had influence enough, he said, to get him
placed in a proper position. But as the master's previous experience of
the service had been of a very disagreeable kind, and as his position,
as at once master and owner of the vessel he sailed, was at least an
independent one, he declined acting on the advice.
Such are some of my earlier recollections. But there was a time of
sterner memories at hand. The kelp trade had not yet attained to the
importance which it afterwards acquired, ere it fell before the first
approaches of Free Trade; and my father, in collecting a supply for the
Leith Glass Works, for which he occasionally acted both as agent and
shipmaster, used sometimes to spend whole months amid the Hebrides,
sailing from station to station, and purchasing here a few tons and
there a few hundredweights, until he had completed his cargo. In his
last kelp voyage he had been detained in this way from the close of
August till the end of October; and at length, deeply laden, he had
threaded his way round Cape Wrath, and through the Pentland and across
the Moray Firths, when a severe gale compelled him to seek shelter in
the harbour of Peterhead. From that port, on the 9th of November 1807,
he wrote my mother the last letter she ever received from him; for on
the day after he sailed from it there arose a terrible tempest, in which
many seamen perished, and he and his crew were never more heard of. His
sloop was last seen by a brother townsman and shipmaster, who, ere the
storm came on, had been fortunate enough to secure an asylum for his
barque in an English harbour on an exposed portion of the coast. Vessel
after vessel had been coming ashore during the day; and the beach was
strewed with wrecks and dead bodies; but he had marked his townsman's
sloop in the offing from mid-day till near evening, exhausting every
nautical shift and expedient to keep aloof from the shore; and at
length, as the night was falling, the skill and perseverance exerted
seemed successful; for, clearing a formidable headland that had lain on
the lee for hours, and was mottled with broken ships and drowned men,
the sloop was seen stretching out in a long tack into the open sea.
"Miller's seamanship has saved him once more!" said Matheson, the
Cromarty skipper, as, quitting his place of outlook, he returned to his
cabin; but the night fell tempestuous and wild, and no vestige of the
hapless sloop was ever after seen. It was supposed that, heavy laden,
and labouring in a mountainous sea, she must have started a plank and
foundered. And thus perished,--to borrow from the simple eulogium of his
seafaring friends, whom I heard long after condoling with my
mother,--"one of the best sailors that ever sailed the Moray Firth."
The fatal tempest, as it had prevailed chiefly on the eastern coasts of
England and the south of Scotland, was represented in the north by but a
few bleak, sullen days, in which, with little wind, a heavy ground-swell
came rolling in coastwards from the cast, and sent up its surf high
against the precipices of the Northern Sutor. There were no forebodings
in the master's dwelling; for his Peterhead letter--a brief but hopeful
missive--had been just received; and my mother was sitting, on the
evening after, beside the household fire, plying the cheerful needle,
when the house door, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and I
was despatched from her side to shut it. What follows must be regarded
as simply the recollection, though a very vivid one, of a boy who had
completed his fifth year only a mouth before. Day had not wholly
disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a grey haze spread
a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the
nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at the open door, within
less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a
dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were
apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance;
and directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was
only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms
of the objects beyond. I was fearfully startled, and ran shrieking to my
mother, telling what I had seen; and the house-girl whom she next sent
to shut the door, apparently affected by my terror, also returned
frightened, and said that she too had seen the woman's hand; which,
however, did not seem to be the case. And finally, my mother going to
the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the
extremeness of my terror and the minuteness of my description. I
communicate the story, as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting
to explain it. The supposed apparition may have been merely a momentary
affection of the eye, of the nature described by Sir Walter Scott in his
"Demonology," and Sir David Brewster in his "Natural Magic." But if so,
the affection was one of which I experienced no after-return; and its
coincidence, in the case, with the probable time of my father's death,
seems at least curious.
There followed a dreary season, on which I still look back in memory, as
on a prospect which, sunshiny and sparkling for a time, has become
suddenly enveloped in cloud and storm. I remember my mother's long fits
of weeping, and the general gloom of the widowed household; and how,
after she had sent my two little sisters to bed,--for such had been the
increase of the family,--and her hands were set free for the evening,
she used to sit up late at night engaged as a seamstress, in making
pieces of dress for such of the neighbours as chose to employ her. My
father's new house lay untenanted at the time; and though his sloop had
been partially insured, the broker with whom he dealt was, it would
seem, on the verge of insolvency, and having raised objections to paying
the money, it was long ere any part of it could be realized. And so,
with all my mother's industry, the household would have fared out ill,
had it not been for the assistance lent her by her two brothers,
industrious, hard-working men, who lived with their aged parents, and an
unmarried sister, about a bow-shot away, and now not only advanced her
money as she needed it, but also took her second child, the elder of my
two sisters, a docile little girl of three years, to live with them. I
remember I used to go wandering disconsolately about the harbour at this
season, to examine the vessels which had come in during the night; and
that I oftener than once set my mother a-crying, by asking her why the
shipmasters who, when my father was alive, used to stroke my head and
slip halfpence into my pockets, never now took any notice of me, or gave
me anything? She well knew that the shipmasters--not an ungenerous class
of men--had simply failed to recognise their old comrade's child; but
the question was only too suggestive, notwithstanding, of both her own
loss and mine. I used, too, to climb, day after day, a grassy
protuberance of the old coast-line immediately behind my mother's house,
that commands a wide reach of the Moray Firth, and to look wistfully
out, long after every one else had ceased to hope, for the sloop with
the two stripes of white and the two square topsails. But months and
years passed by, and the white stripes and the square topsails I never
saw.
The antecedents of my father's life impressed me more powerfully during
my boyhood than at least aught I acquired at school; and I have
submitted them to the reader at considerable length, as not only curious
in themselves, but as forming a first chapter in the story of my
education. And the following stanzas, written at a time when, in opening
manhood, I was sowing my wild oats in verse, may serve to show that they
continued to stand out in bold relief on my memory, even after I had
grown up:--
"Round Albyn's western shores, a lonely skiff
Is coasting slow:--the adverse winds detain:
And now she rounds secure the dreaded cliff,[1]
Whose horrid ridge beats back the northern main;
And now the whirling Pentland roars in rain
Her stern beneath, for favouring breezes rise;
The green isles fade, whitens the watery plain.
O'er the vexed waves with meteor speed she flies.
Till Moray's distant hills o'er the blue waves arise.
Who guides that vessel's wanderings o'er the wave;
A patient, hardy man, of thoughtful brow;
Serene and warm of heart, and wisely brave,
And sagely skill'd, when gurly breezes blow,
To press through angry waves the adventurous prow.
Age hath not quell'd his strength, nor quench'd desire
Of generous deed, nor chill'd his bosom's glow;
Yet to a better world his hopes aspire.
Ah! this must sure be thee! All hail, my honoured Sire!
Alas! thy latest voyage draws near a close,
For Death broods voiceless in the darkening sky;
Subsides the breeze; the untroubled waves repose;
The scene is peaceful all. Can Death be nigh,
When thus, mute and unarm'd, his vassals lie?
Mark ye that cloud! There toils the imprisoned gale;
E'en now it comes, with voice uplifted high;
Resound the shores, harsh screams the rending sail,
And roars th' amazed wave, and bursts the thunder peal!
Three days the tempest raged; on Scotia's shore
Wreck piled on wreck, and corse o'er corse was thrown;
Her rugged cliffs were red with clotted gore;
Her dark caves echoed back th' expiring moan;
And luckless maidens mourned their lovers gone,
And friendless orphans cried in vain for bread;
And widow'd mothers wandered forth alone;--
Restore, O wave, they cried,--restore our dead!
And then the breast they bared, and beat th' unsheltered head.
Of thee, my Sire, what mortal tongue can tell!
No friendly bay thy shattered barque received;
Ev'n when thy dust reposed in ocean cell,
Strange baseless tales of hope thy friends deceived
Which oft they doubted sad, or gay believed.
At length, when deeper, darker, wax'd the gloom,
Hopeless they grieved; but 'twas in vain they grieved:
If God be truth, 'tis sure no voice of doom,
That bids the accepted soul its robes of joy assume."
I had been sent, previous to my father's death, to a dame's school,
where I was taught to pronounce my letters to such effect in the old
Scottish mode, that still, when I attempt spelling a word aloud, which
is not often,--for I find the process a perilous one,--the _aa's_ and
_ee's_, and _uh's_ and _vaus_, return upon me and I have to translate
them with no little hesitation as I go along, into the more modish
sounds. A knowledge of the letters themselves I had already acquired by
studying the signposts of the place,--rare works of art, that excited my
utmost admiration, with jugs, and glasses, and bottles, and ships, and
loaves of bread upon them; all of which could, as the artists had
intended, be actually recognised. During my sixth year I spelt my way,
under the dame, through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New
Testament, and then entered upon her highest form, as a member of the
Bible class; but all the while the process of acquiring learning had
been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the
awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended, when
at once my mind awoke to the meaning of that most delightful of all
narratives,--the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made
before! I actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the
art of finding stories in books, and from that moment reading became one
of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a
corner at the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself
the new-found story of Joseph; nor did one perusal serve; the other
Scripture stories followed,--in especial, the story of Samson and the
Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha;
and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by
my uncles, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about
nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great
many immortal works,--Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the
Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor,
and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with
several others of resembling character. Those intolerable nuisances the
useful-knowledge books had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars, on the
educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting
influence on the opening intellect of the "youth-hood;" and so, from my
rudimental books--books that made themselves truly such by their
thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind--I passed on, without
being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the
learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I
found to be quite as nice children's books as any of the others. Old
Homer wrote admirably for little folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy
of which,--in the only true translation extant,--for, judging from its
surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope
to be,--I found in the house of a neighbour. Next came the Iliad; not,
however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes
of Bernard Lintot. With what power, and at how early an age, true genius
impresses! I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer
could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went
whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the
steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next
succeeded in discovering for myself a child's book, of not less interest
than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a
magnificent old edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," printed on coarse
whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous woodcuts, each of which
occupied an entire page, that, on principles of economy, bore
letter-press on the other side. And such delightful prints as these
were! It must have been some such volume that sat for its portrait to
Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as
"Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts,
Strange and uncouth; dire faces, figures dire,
Sharp-knee'd, sharp elbow'd, and lean-ankled too,
With long and ghastly shanks,--forms which, once seen,
Could never be forgotten."
In process of time I had devoured, besides these genial works Robinson
Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the "judgment chapter" in
Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the Adventures of Philip
Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and
fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my
father. It was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir.
Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel
when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's Voyages, all the volumes
were now absent save the first; and a very tantalizing romance, in four
volumes,--Mrs. Ratcliff's "Mysteries of Udolpho," was represented by
only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained some
rare books,--among the rest, a curious little volume, entitled "The
Miracles of Nature and Art," to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in
one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day,
and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth
century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge,
between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of
the "Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his
Religion,"--a work interesting from the circumstance that--though it
bore another name on its title-page--it had been translated from the
French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith, in his days of obscure
literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellencies of his style.
The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by
very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an
English sailor who had spent his best years of life as a slave in
Morocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff
controversy,--Flavel's Works, and Henry's Commentary, and Hutchinson on
the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelation, with the
title-page away, and blind Jameson's volume on the Hierarchy, with first
editions of Naphthali, the Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind let Loose.
But with these solid authors I did not venture to grapple until long
after this time. Of the works of fact and incident which it contained,
those of the voyagers were my especial favourites. I perused with
avidity the voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods
Rogers; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be
seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a
sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and
hunt wild beasts and fight battles. I have already made mention of my
two maternal uncles; and referred, at least incidentally, to their
mother, as the friend and relative of my fathers aged cousin, and, like
her, a great-grand-child of the last curate of Nigg. The curate's
youngest daughter had been courted and married by a somewhat wild young
farmer, of the clan Ross, but who was known, like the celebrated
Highland outlaw, from the colour of his hair, as Roy, or the Red. Donald
Roy was the best club-player in the district; and as King James's "Book
of Sports" was not deemed a very bad one in the semi-Celtic parish of
Nigg, the games in which Donald took part were usually played on the
Sabbath. About the time of the Revolution, however, he was laid hold of
by strong religious convictions, heralded, say the traditions of the
district, by events that approximated in character to the supernatural;
and Donald became the subject of a mighty change. There is a phase of
the religious character, which in the south of Scotland belongs to the
first two ages of Presbytery, but which disappeared ere its third
establishment under William of Nassau, that we find strikingly
exemplified in the Welches, Pedens, and Cargills of the times of the
persecution, and in which a sort of wild machinery of the supernatural
was added to the commoner aspects of a living Christianity. The men in
whom it was exhibited were seers of visions and dreamers of dreams; and,
standing on the very verge of the natural world, they looked far into
the world of spirits, and had at times their strange glimpses of the
distant and the future. To the north of the Grampians, as if born out of
due season, these seers pertain to a later age. They flourished chiefly
in the early part of the last century; for it is a not uninstructive
fact, that in the religious history of Scotland, the eighteenth century
of the Highland and semi-Highland districts of the north corresponded in
many of its traits to the seventeenth century of the Saxon-peopled
districts of the south; and Donald Roy was one of the most notable of
the class. The anecdotes regarding him which still float among the old
recollections of Ross-shire, if transferred to Peden or Welch, would be
found entirely in character with the strange stories that inlay the
biographies of these devoted men, and live so enduringly in the memory
of the Scottish people. Living, too, in an age in which, like the
Covenanters of a former century, the Highlander still retained his
weapons, and knew how to use them, Donald had, like the Patons,
Hackstons, and Balfours of the south, his dash of the warlike spirit;
and after assisting his minister, previous to the rebellion of 1745, in
what was known as the great religious revival of Nigg, he had to assist
him, shortly after, in pursuing a band of armed Caterans, that,
descending from the hills, swept the parish of its cattle. And coming up
with the outlaws in the gorge of a wild Highland glen, no man of his
party was more active in the fray that followed than old Donald, or
exerted himself to better effect in re-capturing the cattle. I need
scarce add, that he was an attached member of the Church of Scotland:
but he was not destined to die in her communion.
Donald's minister, John Balfour of Nigg--a man whose memory is still
honoured in the north--died in middle life, and an unpopular presentee
was obtruded on the people. The policy of Robertson prevailed at the
time; Gillespie had been deposed only four years previous, for refusing
to assist in the disputed settlement of Inverkeithing; and four of the
Nigg Presbytery, overawed by the stringency of the precedent, repaired
to the parish church to conduct the settlement of the obnoxious
licentiate, and introduce him to the parishioners. They found, however,
only an empty building; and, notwithstanding the ominous absence of the
people, they were proceeding in shame and sorrow with their work, when a
venerable man, far advanced in life, suddenly appeared before them, and,
solemnly protesting against the utter mockery of such a proceeding,
impressively declared, "that if they settled a man to the _walls_ of
that kirk, the blood of the parish of Nigg would be required at their
hands." Both Dr. Hetherington and Dr. Merle d'Aubigné record the event;
but neither of these accomplished historians seems to have been aware of
the peculiar emphasis which a scene that would have been striking in any
circumstances derived from the character of the protester--old Donald
Roy. The Presbytery, appalled, stopt short in the middle of its work;
nor was it resumed till an after day, when, at the command of the
Moderate majority of the Church--a command not unaccompanied by
significant reference to-the fate of Gillespie--the forced settlement
was consummated. Donald, who carried the entire parish with him,
continued to cling to the National Church for nearly ten years after,
much befriended by one of the most eminent and influential divines of
the north--Fraser of Alness--the author of a volume on Sanctification,
still regarded as a standard work by Scottish theologians. But as
neither the people nor their leader ever entered on any occasion the
parish church, or heard the obnoxious presentee, the Presbytery at
length refused to tolerate the irregularity by extending to them as
before the ordinary Church privileges; and so they were lost to the
Establishment, and became Seceders. And in the communion of that portion
of the Secession known as the Burghers, Donald died several years after,
at a patriarchal old age.
Among his other descendants, he had three grand-daughters, who were left
orphans at an early age by the death of both their parents, and whom
the old man, on their bereavement, had brought to his dwelling to live
with him. They had small portions apiece, derived from his son-in-law,
their father, which did not grow smaller under the care of Donald; and
as each of the three was married in succession out of his family, he
added to all his other kindnesses the gift of a gold ring. They had been
brought up under his eye sound in the faith; and Donald's ring had, in
each case, a mystic meaning;--they were to regard it, he told them, as
the wedding ring of their _other Husband_, the Head of the Church, and
to be faithful spouses to Him in their several households. Nor did the
injunction, nor the significant symbol with which it was accompanied,
prove idle in the end. They all brought the savour of sincere piety into
their families. The grand-daughter with whom the writer was more
directly connected, had been courted and married by an honest and
industrious but somewhat gay young tradesman, but she proved, under God,
the means of his conversion; and their children, of whom eight grew up
to be men and women, were reared in decent frugality, and the exercise
of honest principles carefully instilled. Her husband's family had, like
that of my paternal ancestors, been a seafaring one. His father, after
serving for many years on shipboard, passed the latter part of his life
as one of the armed boatmen that, during the last century, guarded the
coasts in behalf of the revenue; and his only brother, the boatman's
son, an adventurous young sailor had engaged in Admiral Vernon's
unfortunate expedition, and left his bones under the walls of
Carthagena; but he himself pursued the peaceful occupation of a
shoemaker, and, in carrying on his trade, usually employed a few
journeymen, and kept a few apprentices. In course of time the elder
daughters of the family married, and got households of their own; but
the two sons, my uncles, remained under the roof of their parents, and
at the time when my father perished, they were both in middle life. And,
deeming themselves called on to take his place in the work of
instruction and discipline, I owed to them much more of my real
education than to any of the teachers whose schools I afterwards
attended. They both bore a marked individuality of character, and were
much the reverse of commonplace or vulgar men.
My elder uncle, James, added to a clear head and much native sagacity, a
singularly retentive memory, and great thirst of information. He was a
harness-maker, and wrought for the farmers of an extensive district of
country; and as he never engaged either journeyman or apprentice, but
executed all his work with his own hands, his hours of labour, save that
he indulged in a brief pause as the twilight came on, and took a mile's
walk or so, were usually protracted from six o'clock in the morning till
ten at night. Such incessant occupation left him little time for
reading; but he often found some one to read beside him during the day;
and in the winter evenings his portable bench used to be brought from
his shop at the other end of the dwelling, into the family sitting-room,
and placed beside the circle round the hearth, where his brother
Alexander, my younger uncle, whose occupation left his evenings free,
would read aloud from some interesting volume for the general
benefit,--placing himself always at the opposite side of the bench, so
as to share in the light of the worker. Occasionally the family circle
would be widened by the accession of from two to three intelligent
neighbours, who would drop in to listen; and then the book, after a
space, would be laid aside, in order that its contents might be
discussed in conversation. In the summer months Uncle James always spent
some time in the country, in looking after and keeping in repair the
harness of the farmers for whom he wrought; and during his journeys and
twilight walks on these occasions there was not an old castle, or
hill-fort, or ancient encampment, or antique ecclesiastical edifice,
within twenty miles of the town, which he had not visited and examined
over and over again. He was a keen local antiquary; knew a good deal
about the architectural styles of the various ages, at a time when these
subjects were little studied or known; and possessed more traditionary
lore, picked up chiefly in his country journeys, than any man I ever
knew. What he once heard he never forgot; and the knowledge which he had
acquired he could communicate pleasingly and succinctly, in a style
which, had he been a writer of books, instead of merely a reader of
them, would have had the merit of being clear and terse, and more laden
with meaning than words. From his reputation for sagacity, his advice
used to be much sought after by the neighbours in every little
difficulty that came their way; and the counsel given was always shrewd
and honest. I never knew a man more entirely just in his dealings than
Uncle James, or who regarded every species of meanness with a more
thorough contempt. I soon learned to bring my story-books to his
workshop, and became, in a small way, one of his _readers_,--greatly
more, however, as may be supposed, on my own account than his. My books
were not yet of the kind which he would have chosen for himself; but he
took an interest in _my_ interest; and his explanations of all the hard
words saved me the trouble of turning over a dictionary. And when tired
of reading, I never failed to find rare delight in his anecdotes and
old-world stories, many of which were not to be found in books, and all
of which, without apparent effort on his own part, he could render
singularly amusing. Of these narratives, the larger part died with him;
but a portion of them I succeeded in preserving in a little traditionary
work published a few years after his death. I was much a favourite with
Uncle James,--even more, I am disposed to think, on my father's account
than on that of his sister, my mother. My father and he had been close
friends for years; and in the vigorous and energetic sailor he had found
his _beau-idéal_ of a man.
My Uncle Alexander was of a different cast from his brother both in
intellect and temperament; but he was characterized by the same strict
integrity; and his religious feelings, though quiet and unobtrusive,
were perhaps more deep. James was somewhat of a humorist, and fond of a
good joke. Alexander was grave and serious; and never, save on one
solitary occasion, did I know him even attempt a jest. On hearing an
intelligent but somewhat eccentric neighbour observe, that "all flesh is
grass," in a strictly physical sense, seeing that all the flesh of the
herbivorous animals is elaborated from vegetation, and all the flesh of
the carnivorous animals from that of the herbivorous ones, Uncle Sandy
remarked that, knowing, as he did, the piscivorous habits of the
Cromarty folk, he should surely make an exception in his generalization,
by admitting that in at least one village "all flesh is fish." My uncle
had acquired the trade of the cartwright, and was employed in a workshop
at Glasgow at the time the first war of the French Revolution broke out;
when, moved by some such spirit as possessed his uncle,--the victim of
Admiral Vernon's unlucky expedition,--or Old Donald Roy, when he buckled
himself to his Highland broadsword, and set out in pursuit of the
Caterans,--he entered the navy. And during the eventful period which
intervened between the commencement of the war and the peace of 1802,
there was little either suffered or achieved by his countrymen in which
he had not a share. He sailed with Nelson; witnessed the mutiny at the
Nore; fought under Admiral Duncan at Camperdown, and under Sir John
Borlase Warren at Loch Swilly; assisted in capturing the Généroux and
Guillaume Tell, two French ships of the line; was one of the seamen who,
in the Egyptian expedition, were drafted out of Lord Keith's fleet to
supply the lack of artillerymen in the army of Sir Ralph Abercromby; had
a share in the danger and glory of the landing in Egypt; and fought in
the battle of 13th March, and in that which deprived our country of one
of her most popular generals. He served, too, at the siege of
Alexandria. And then, as he succeeded in procuring his discharge during
the short peace of 1802, he returned home with a small sum of
hardly-earned prize-money, heartily sick of war and bloodshed. I was
asked not long ago by one of his few surviving comrades, whether my
uncle had ever told me that _their_ gun was the first landed in Egypt,
and the first dragged up the sand-bank immediately over the beach, and
how hot it grew under their hands, as, with a rapidity unsurpassed along
the line, they poured out in thick succession its iron discharges upon
the enemy. I had to reply in the negative. All my uncle's narratives
were narratives of what he had seen--not of what he had done; and when,
perusing, late in life, one of his favourite works--Dr. Keith's "Signs
of the Times"--he came to the chapter in which that excellent writer
describes the time of hot naval warfare which immediately followed the
breaking out of war, as the period in which the second vial was poured
out on the sea, and in which the waters "became as the blood of a dead
man, so that every living soul died in the sea," I saw him bend his head
in reverence as he remarked, "Prophecy, I find, gives to all our glories
but a single verse, and it is a verse of judgment." Uncle Sandy,
however, did not urge the peace principles which he had acquired amid
scenes of death and carnage, into any extravagant consequences; and on
the breaking out, in 1803, of the second war of the Revolution, when
Napoleon threatened invasion from Brest and Boulogne, he at once
shouldered his musket as a volunteer. He had not his brother's fluency
of speech; but his narratives of what he had seen were singularly
truthful and graphic; and his descriptions of foreign plants and
animals, and of the aspect of the distant regions which he had visited,
had all the careful minuteness of those of a Dampier. He had a decided
turn for natural history. My collection contains a murex, not unfrequent
in the Mediterranean, which he found time enough to transfer, during the
heat of the landing in Egypt, from the beach to his pocket; and the
first ammonite I ever saw was a specimen, which I still retain, that he
brought home with him from one of the Liassic deposits of England.
Early on the Sabbath evenings I used regularly to attend at my uncle's
with two of my maternal cousins, boys of about my own age, and latterly
with my two sisters, to be catechized, first on the Shorter Catechism,
and then on the Mother's Catechism of Willison. On Willison my uncles
always cross-examined us, to make sure that we understood the short and
simple questions; but, apparently regarding the questions of the Shorter
Catechism as seed sown for a future day, they were content with having
them well fixed in our memories. There was a Sabbath class taught in the
parish church at the time by one of the elders; but Sabbath-schools my
uncles regarded as merely compensatory institutions, highly creditable
to the teachers, but very discreditable indeed to the parents and
relatives of the taught; and so they of course never thought of sending
us there. Later in the evening, after a short twilight walk, for which
the sedentary occupation of my Uncle James formed an apology, but in
which my Uncle Alexander always shared, and which usually led them into
solitary woods, or along an unfrequented sea-shore, some of the old
divines were read; and I used to take my place in the circle, though, I
am afraid, not to much advantage. I occasionally caught a fact, or had
my attention arrested for a moment by a simile or metaphor; but the
trains of close argument, and the passages of dreary "application," were
always lost.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Cape Wrath.
CHAPTER III.
"At Wallace' name what Scottish blood
But boils up in a spring-tide flood!
Oft have our fearless fathers strode
By Wallace' side,
Still pressing onward, red wat shod,
Or glorious died."--BURNS.
I first became thoroughly a Scot some time in my tenth year; and the
consciousness of country has remained tolerably strong within me ever
since. My uncle James had procured for me from a neighbour the loan of a
common stall-edition of Blind Harry's "Wallace," as modernized by
Hamilton; but after reading the first chapter,--a piece of dull
genealogy, broken into very rude rhyme,--I tossed the volume aside as
uninteresting; and only resumed it at the request of my uncle, who urged
that, simply for _his_ amusement and gratification, I should read some
three or four chapters more. Accordingly, the three or four chapters
more I did read;--I read "how Wallace killed young Selbie the
Constable's son;" "how Wallace fished in Irvine Water;" and "how Wallace
killed the Churl with his own staff in Ayr;" and then Uncle James told
me, in the quiet way in which he used to make a joke tell, that the book
seemed to be rather a rough sort of production, filled with accounts of
quarrels and bloodshed, and that I might read no more of it unless I
felt inclined. But I now did feel inclined very strongly, and read on
with increasing astonishment and delight. I was intoxicated with the
fiery narratives of the blind minstrel,--with his fierce breathings of
hot, intolerant patriotism, and his stories of astonishing prowess;
and, glorying in being a Scot, and the countryman of Wallace and the
Graham, I longed for a war with the Southron, that the wrongs and
sufferings of these noble heroes might yet be avenged. All I had
previously heard and read of the marvels of foreign parts, of the
glories of modern battles, seemed tame and commonplace, compared with
the incidents in the life of Wallace; and I never after vexed my mother
by wishing myself big enough to be a sailor. My Uncle Sandy, who had
some taste for the refinements of poetry, would fain have led me on from
the exploits of Wallace to the "Life of the Bruce," which, in the form
of a not very vigorous imitation of Dryden's "Virgil," by one Harvey,
was bound up in the same volume, and which my uncle deemed the
better-written life of the two. And so far as the mere amenities of
style were concerned, he was, I daresay, right. But I could not agree
with him. Harvey was by much too fine and too learned for me; and it was
not until some years after, when I was fortunate enough to pick up one
of the later editions of Barbour's "Bruce," that the Hero-King of
Scotland assumed his right place in my mind beside its Hero-Guardian.
There are stages of development in the immature youth of individuals,
that seem to correspond with stages of development in the immature youth
of nations; and the recollections of this early time enable me, in some
measure, to understand how it was that, for hundreds of years, Blind
Harry's "Wallace," with its rude and naked narrative, and its
exaggerated incident, should have been, according to Lord Hailes, the
Bible of the Scotch people.
I quitted the dame's school at the end of the first twelvemonth, after
mastering that grand acquirement of my life,--the art of holding
converse with books; and was transferred straightforth to the grammar
school of the parish, at which there attended at this time about a
hundred and twenty boys, with a class of about thirty individuals more,
much looked down upon by the others, and not deemed greatly worth the
counting, seeing that it consisted of only _lassies_. And here, too, the
early individual development seems nicely correspondent with an early
national one. In his depreciatory estimate of contemporary woman, the
boy is always a true savage. The old parish school of the place had been
nobly situated in a snug corner, between the parish churchyard and a
thick wood; and from the interesting centre which it formed, the boys,
when tired of making dragoon-horses of the erect head-stones, or of
leaping along the flat-laid memorials, from end to end of the
grave-yard, "without touching grass," could repair to the taller trees,
and rise in the world by climbing among them. As, however, they used to
encroach, on these latter occasions, upon the laird's pleasure-grounds,
the school had been removed ere my time to the sea-shore; where, though
there were neither tombstones nor trees, there were some balancing
advantages, of a kind which perhaps only boys of the old school could
have adequately appreciated. As the school-windows fronted the opening
of the Firth, not a vessel could enter the harbour that we did not see;
and, improving through our opportunities, there was perhaps no
educational institution in the kingdom in which all sorts of barques and
carvels, from the fishing yawl to the frigate, could be more correctly
drawn on the slate, or where any defect in hulk or rigging, in some
faulty delineation, was surer of being more justly and unsparingly
criticised. Further, the town, which drove a great trade in salted pork
at the time, had a killing-place not thirty yards from the school-door,
where from eighty to a hundred pigs used sometimes to die for the
general good in a single day; and it was a great matter to hear, at
occasional intervals, the roar of death outside rising high over the
general murmur within, or to be told by some comrade, returned from his
five minutes' leave of absence, that a hero of a pig had taken three
blows of the hatchet ere it fell, and that even after its subjection to
the sticking process, it had got hold of Jock Keddie's hand in its
mouth, and almost smashed his thumb. We learned, too, to know, from our
signal opportunities of observation, not only a good deal about
pig-anatomy,--especially about the detached edible parts of the animal,
such as the spleen and the pancreas, and at least one other very
palatable viscus besides,--but became knowing also about the _take_ and
curing of herrings. All the herring boats during the fishing season
passed our windows on their homeward way to the harbour; and, from their
depth in the water, we became skilful enough to predicate the number of
crans aboard of each with wonderful judgment and correctness. In days of
good general fishings, too, when the curing-yards proved too small to
accommodate the quantities brought ashore, the fish used to be laid in
glittering heaps opposite the school-house door; and an exciting scene,
that combined the bustle of the workshop with the confusion of the
crowded fair, would straightway spring up within twenty yards of the
forms at which we sat, greatly to our enjoyment, and, of course, not a
little to our instruction. We could see, simply by peering over book or
slate, the curers going about rousing their fish with salt, to
counteract the effects of the dog-day sun; bevies of young women
employed as gutters, and horridly incarnadined with blood and viscera,
squatting around the heaps, knife in hand, and plying with busy fingers
their well-paid labours, at the rate of sixpence per hour; relays of
heavily-laden fish-wives bringing ever and anon fresh heaps of herrings
in their creels; and outside of all, the coopers hammering as if for
life and death,--now tightening hoops, and now slackening them, and anon
caulking with bulrush the leaky seams. It is not every grammar school in
which such lessons are taught as those in which all were initiated, and
in which all became in some degree accomplished, in the grammar school
of Cromarty!
The building in which we met was a low, long, straw-thatched cottage,
open from gable to gable, with a mud floor below, and an unlathed roof
above; and stretching along the naked rafters, which, when the master
chanced to be absent for a few minutes, gave noble exercise in climbing,
there used frequently to lie a helm, or oar, or boathook, or even a
foresail,--the spoil of some hapless peat-boat from the opposite side of
the Firth. The Highland boatmen of Ross had carried on a trade in peats
for ages with the Saxons of the town; and as every boat owed a
long-derived perquisite of twenty peats to the grammar school, and as
payment was at times foolishly refused, the party of boys commissioned
by the master to exact it almost always succeeded, either by force or
stratagem, in securing and bringing along with them, in behalf of the
institution, some spar, or sail, or piece of rigging, which, until
redeemed by special treaty, and the payment of the peats, was stowed up
over the rafters. These peat-expeditions, which were intensely popular
in the school, gave noble exercise to the faculties. It was always a
great matter to see, just as the school met, some observant boy appear,
cap in hand, before the master, and intimate the fact of an arrival at
the shore, by the simple words, "Peat-boat, Sir." The master would then
proceed to name a party, more or less numerous, according to the
exigency; but it seemed to be matter of pretty correct calculation that,
in the cases in which the peat claim was disputed, it required about
twenty boys to bring home the twenty peats, or, lacking these, the
compensatory sail or spar. There were certain ill-conditioned boatmen
who almost always resisted, and who delighted to tell us--invariably,
too, in very bad English--that our perquisite was properly the hangman's
perquisite,[2] made over to us because we were _like him_; not
seeing--blockheads as they were!--that the very admission established in
full the rectitude of our claim, and gave to us, amid our dire perils
and faithful contendings, the strengthening consciousness of a just
quarrel. In dealing with these recusants, we used ordinarily to divide
our forces into two bodies, the larger portion of the party filling
their pockets with stones, and ranging themselves on some point of
vantage, such as the pier-head; and the smaller stealing down as near
the boat as possible, and mixing themselves up with the purchasers of
the peats. We then, after due warning, opened fire upon the boatmen;
and, when the pebbles were hopping about them like hailstones, the boys
below commonly succeeded in securing, under cover of the fire, the
desired boathook or oar. And such were the ordinary circumstances and
details of this piece of Spartan education; of which a townsman has told
me he was strongly reminded when boarding, on one occasion, under cover
of a well-sustained discharge of musketry, the vessel of an enemy that
had been stranded on the shores of Berbice.
The parish schoolmaster was a scholar and an honest man, and if a boy
really wished to learn, _he_ certainly could teach him. He had attended
the classes at Aberdeen during the same sessions as the late Dr. Mearns,
and in mathematics and the languages had disputed the prize with the
Doctor; but he had failed to get on equally well in the world; and now,
in middle life, though a licentiate of the Church, he had settled down
to be what he subsequently remained--the teacher of a parish school.
There were usually a few grown-up lads under his tuition--careful
sailors, that had stayed ashore during the winter quarter to study
navigation as a science,--or tall fellows, happy in the patronage of the
great, who, in the hope of being made excisemen, had come to school to
be initiated in the mysteries of gauging,--or grown young men, who, on
second thoughts, and somewhat late in the day, had recognised the Church
as their proper vocation; and these used to speak of the master's
acquirements and teaching ability in the very highest terms. He himself,
too, could appeal to the fact, that no teacher in the north had ever
sent more students to college, and that his better scholars almost
always got on well in life. But then, on the other hand, the pupils who
wished to do nothing--a description of individuals that comprised fully
two-thirds of all the younger ones--were not required to do much more
than they wished; and parents and guardians were loud in their
complaints that he was no suitable schoolmaster for them; though the
boys themselves usually thought him quite suitable enough.
He was in the habit of advising the parents or relations of those he
deemed his clever lads, to give them a classical education; and meeting
one day with Uncle James, he urged that I should be put on Latin. I was
a great reader, he said; and he found that when I missed a word in my
English tasks, I almost always substituted a synonym in the place of it.
And so, as Uncle James had arrived, on data of his own, at a similar
conclusion, I was transferred from the English to the Latin form, and,
with four other boys, fairly entered on the "Rudiments." I laboured with
tolerable diligence for a day or two; but there was no one to tell me
what the rules meant, or whether they really meant anything; and when I
got on as far as _penna_, a pen, and saw how the changes were rung on
one poor word, that did not seem to be of more importance in the old
language than in the modern one, I began miserably to flag, and to long
for my English reading, with its nice amusing stories, and its
picture-like descriptions. The Rudiments was by far the dullest book I
had ever seen. It embodied no thought that I could perceive,--it
certainly contained no narrative,--it was a perfect contrast to not only
the "Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace," but to even the
Voyages of Cook and Anson. None of my class-fellows were by any means
bright;--they had been all set on Latin without advice of the master;
and yet, when he learned, which he soon did, to distinguish and call us
up to our tasks by the name of the "heavy class," I was, in most
instances, to be found at its nether end. Shortly after, however, when
we got a little farther on, it was seen that I had a decided turn for
translation. The master, good simple man that he was, always read to us
in English, as the school met, the piece of Latin given us as our task
for the day; and as my memory was strong enough to carry away the whole
translation in its order, I used to give him back in the evening, word
for word, his own rendering, which satisfied him on most occasions
tolerably well. There were none of us much looked after; and I soon
learned to bring books of amusement to the school with me, which, amid
the Babel confusion of the place, I contrived to read undetected. Some
of them, save in the language in which they were written, were identical
with the books proper to the place. I remember perusing by stealth in
this way, Dryden's "Virgil," and the "Ovid" of Dryden and his friends;
while Ovid's own "Ovid," and Virgil's own "Virgil," lay beside me,
sealed up in the fine old tongue, which I was thus throwing away my only
chance of acquiring.
One morning, having the master's English rendering of the day's task
well fixed in my memory, and no book of amusement to read, I began
gossiping with my nearest class-fellow, a very tall boy, who ultimately
shot up into a lad of six feet four, and who on most occasions sat
beside me, as lowest in the form save one. I told him about the tall
Wallace and his exploits; and so effectually succeeded in awakening his
curiosity, that I had to communicate to him, from beginning to end,
every adventure recorded by the blind minstrel. My story-telling
vocation once fairly ascertained, there was, I found, no stopping in my
course. I had to tell all the stories I ever heard or read; all my
father's adventures, so far as I knew them, and all my Uncle
Sandy's,--with the story of Gulliver, and Philip Quarll, and Robinson
Crusoe,--of Sinbad, and Ulysses, and Mrs. Radcliffe's heroine Emily,
with, of course, the love-passages left out; and at length, after weeks
and months of narrative, I found my available stock of acquired fact
and fiction fairly exhausted. The demand on the part of my
class-fellows was, however, as great and urgent as ever; and, setting
myself, in the extremity of the case, to try my ability of original
production, I began to dole out to them by the hour and the diet, long
extempore biographies, which proved wonderfully popular and successful.
My heroes were usually warriors like Wallace, and voyagers like
Gulliver, and dwellers in desolate islands like Robinson Crusoe; and
they had not unfrequently to seek shelter in huge deserted castles,
abounding in trap-doors and secret passages, like that of Udolpho. And
finally, after much destruction of giants and wild beasts, and frightful
encounters with magicians and savages, they almost invariably succeeded
in disentombing hidden treasures to an enormous amount, or in laying
open gold mines, and then passed a luxurious old age, like that of
Sinbad the Sailor, at peace with all mankind, in the midst of
confectionery and fruits. The master had a tolerably correct notion of
what was going on in the "heavy class;"--the stretched-out necks, and
the heads clustered together, always told their own special story when I
was engaged in telling mine; but, without hating the child, he spared
the rod, and simply did what he sometimes allowed himself to
do--bestowed a nickname upon me. I was the _Sennachie_, he said; and as
the Sennachie I might have been known so long as I remained under his
charge, had it not been that, priding himself upon his Gaelic, he used
to bestow upon the word the full Celtic pronunciation, which, agreeing
but ill with the Teutonic mouths of my school-fellows, militated against
its use; and so the name failed to take. With all my carelessness, I
continued to be a sort of favourite with the master; and, when at the
general English lesson, he used to address to me little quiet speeches,
vouchsafed to no other pupil, indicative of a certain literary ground
common to us, on which the others had not entered. "That, Sir," he has
said, after the class had just perused, in the school collection, a
_Tatler_ or _Spectator_,--"That, Sir, is a good paper;--it's an
_Addison_;" or, "That's one of Steele's, Sir;" and on finding in my
copy-book, on one occasion, a page filled with rhymes, which I had
headed "Poem on Care," he brought it to his desk, and, after reading it
carefully over, called me up, and with his closed penknife, which served
as a pointer, in the one hand, and the copy-book brought down to the
level of my eyes in the other, began his criticism. "That's bad grammar,
Sir," he said, resting the knife-handle on one of the lines; "and here's
an ill-spelt word; and there's another; and you have not at all attended
to the punctuation; but the general sense of the piece is good,--very
good indeed, Sir." And then he added, with a grim smile, "_Care_, Sir,
is, I daresay, as you remark, a very bad thing; but you may safely
bestow a little more of it on your spelling and your grammar."
The school, like almost all the other grammar-schools of the period in
Scotland, had its yearly cock-fight, preceded by two holidays and a
half, during which the boys occupied themselves in collecting and
bringing up their cocks. And such always was the array of fighting birds
mustered on the occasion, that the day of the festival, from morning
till night, used to be spent in fighting out the battle. For weeks after
it had passed, the school-floor would continue to retain its
deeply-stained blotches of blood, and the boys would be full of exciting
narratives regarding the glories of gallant birds, who had continued to
fight until both their eyes had been picked out, or who, in the moment
of victory, had dropped dead in the middle of the cock-pit. The yearly
fight was the relic of a barbarous age; and, in at least one of its
provisions, there seemed evidence that it was that of an intolerant age
also: every pupil at school, without exemption, had his name entered on
the subscription-list, as a cock-fighter, and was obliged to pay the
master at the rate of twopence per head, ostensibly for leave to bring
his birds to the pit; but, amid the growing humanities of a better
time, though the twopences continued to be exacted, it was no longer
imperative to bring the birds; and availing myself of the liberty I
never brought any. Nor, save for a few minutes, on two several
occasions, did I ever attend the fight. Had the combat been one among
the boys themselves, I would readily enough have done my part, by
meeting with any opponent of my years and standing; but I could not bear
to look at the bleeding birds. And so I continued to pay my yearly
sixpence, as a holder of three cocks,--the lowest sum deemed in any
degree genteel,--but remained simply a fictitious or paper cock-fighter,
and contributed in no degree to the success of the _head-stock_ or
leader, to whose party, in the general division of the school, it was my
lot to fall. Neither, I must add, did I learn to take an interest in the
sacrificial orgies of the adjoining slaughter-house. A few of the chosen
school-boys were permitted by the killers to exercise at times the
privilege of knocking down a pig, and even, on rare occasions, to essay
the sticking; but I turned with horror from both processes; and if I
drew near at all, it was only when some animal, scraped and cleaned, and
suspended from the beam, was in the course of being laid open by the
butcher's knife, that I might mark the forms of the viscera, and the
positions which they occupied. To my dislike of the annual cock-fight my
uncles must have contributed. They were loud in their denunciations of
the enormity; and on one occasion, when a neighbour was unlucky enough
to remark, in extenuation, that the practice had been handed down to us
by pious and excellent men, who seemed to see nothing wrong in it, I saw
the habitual respect for the old divines give way, for at least a
moment. Uncle Sandy hesitated under apparent excitement; but, quick and
fiery as lightning, Uncle James came to his rescue. "Yes, excellent
men!" said my uncle, "but the excellent men of a rude and barbarous age;
and, in some parts of their character, tinged by its barbarity. For the
cock-fight which these excellent men have bequeathed to us, they ought
to have been sent to Bridewell for a week, and fed upon bread and
water." Uncle James was, no doubt, over hasty, and felt so a minute
after; but the practice of fixing the foundations of ethics on a _They
themselves did it_, much after the manner in which the Schoolmen fixed
the foundations of their nonsensical philosophy on a "_He himself said
it_," is a practice which, though not yet exploded in even very pure
Churches, is always provoking, and not quite free from peril to the
worthies, whether dead or alive, in whose precedents the moral right is
made to rest. In the class of minds represented among the people by that
of Uncle James, for instance, it would be much easier to bring down even
the old divines, than to bring up cock-fighting.
My native town had possessed, for at least an age or two previous to
that of my boyhood, its sprinkling of intelligent, book-consulting
mechanics and tradesfolk; and as my acquaintance gradually extended
among their representatives and descendants, I was permitted to rummage,
in the pursuit of knowledge, delightful old chests and cupboards, filled
with tattered and dusty volumes. The moiety of my father's library which
remained to me consisted of about sixty several works; my uncle
possessed about a hundred and fifty more; and there was a literary
cabinet-maker in the neighbourhood, who had once actually composed a
poem of thirty lines on the Hill of Cromarty, whose collection of books,
chiefly poetical, amounted to from about eighty to a hundred. I used to
be often at nights in the workshop of the cabinet-maker, and was
sometimes privileged to hear him repeat his poem. There was not much
admiration of poets or poetry in the place; and my praise, though that
of a very young critic, had always the double merit of being both ample
and sincere. I knew the very rocks and trees which his description
embraced,--had heard the birds to which he referred, and seen the
flowers; and as the Hill had been of old a frequent scene of executions,
and had borne the gallows of the sheriffdom on its crest, nothing could
be more definite than the grave reference, in his opening line, to
"The verdant rising of the _Gallow_-hill."
And so I thought a very great deal of his poem, and what I thought I
said; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of
extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There was another
mechanic in the neighbourhood,--a house-carpenter, who, though not a
poet, was deeply read in books of all kinds, from the plays of Farquhar
to the sermons of Flavel; and as both his father and grandfather--the
latter, by the way, a Porteous-mob man, and the former a personal friend
of poor Fergusson the poet--had also been readers and collectors of
books, he possessed a whole pressful of tattered, hard-working volumes,
some of them very curious ones; and to me he liberally extended, what
literary men always value, "the full freedom of the press." But of all
my occasional benefactors in this way, by far the greatest was poor old
Francie, the retired clerk and supercargo.
Francie was naturally a man of fair talent and active curiosity. Nor was
he by any means deficient in acquirement. He wrote and figured well, and
knew a good deal about at least the theory of business; and when
articled in early life to a Cromarty merchant and shopkeeper, it was
with tolerably fair prospects of getting on in the world. He had,
however, a certain infirmity of brain, which rendered both talent and
acquirement of but little avail, and that began to manifest itself very
early. While yet an apprentice, on ascertaining that the way was clear,
he used, though grown a tall lad, to bolt out from behind the counter
into the middle of a green directly opposite, and there, joining in the
sports of some group of youngsters, which the place rarely wanted, he
would play out half a game at marbles, or honey-pots, or hy-spy, and,
when he saw his master or a customer approaching, bolt back again The
thing was not deemed seemly; but Francie, when spoken to on the subject,
could speak as sensibly as any young person of his years. He needed
relaxation, he used to say, though he never suffered it to interfere
with his proper business; and where was there safer relaxation to be
found than among innocent children? This, of course, was eminently
rational, and even virtuous. And so, when his term of apprenticeship had
expired, Francie was despatched, not without hope of success, to
Newfoundland,--where he had relations extensively engaged in the fishing
trade,--to serve as one of their clerks. He was found to be a competent
clerk; but unluckily there was but little known of the interior of the
island at the time; and some of the places most distant from St. John's,
such as the Bay and River of Exploits, bore tempting names; and so,
after Francie had made many inquiries at the older inhabitants regarding
what was to be seen amid the scraggy brushwood and broken rocks of the
inner country, a morning came in which he was reported missing at the
office; and little else could be learned respecting him, than that at
early dawn he had been seen setting out for the woods, provided with
staff and knapsack. He returned in about a week, worn out and
half-starved. He had not been so successful as he had anticipated, he
said, in providing himself by the way with food, and so he had to turn
back ere he could reach the point on which he had previously determined;
but he was sure he would be happier in his next journey. It was palpably
unsafe to suffer him to remain exposed to the temptation of an
unexplored country; and as his friends and superiors at St. John's had
just laden a vessel with fish for the Italian market during Lent,
Francie was despatched with her as supercargo, to look after the sales,
in a land of which every footbreadth had been familiar to men for
thousands of years, and in which it was supposed he would have no
inducement to wander. Francie, however, had read much about Italy; and
finding, on landing at Leghorn, that he was within a short distance of
Pisa, he left ship and cargo to take care of themselves, and set out on
foot to see the famous hanging tower, and the great marble cathedral.
And tower and cathedral he did see: but it was meanwhile found that he
was not quite suited for a supercargo; and he had shortly after to
return to Scotland, where his friends succeeded in establishing him in
the capacity of clerk and overseer upon a small property in Forfarshire,
which was farmed by the proprietor on what was then the newly introduced
modern system. He was acquainted, however, with the classical
description of Glammis Castle, in the letters of the poet Gray; and
after visiting the castle, he set out to examine the ancient encampment
at Ardoch--the _Lindum_ of the Romans. Finally, all hopes of getting him
settled at a distance being given up by his friends, he had to fall back
upon Cromarty, where he was yet once more appointed to a clerkship. The
establishment with which he was now connected was a large hempen
manufactory; and it was his chief employment to register the quantities
of hemp given out to the spinners, and the number of hanks of yarn into
which they had converted it, when given in. He soon, however, began to
take long walks; and the old women, with their yarn, would be often
found accumulated, ere his return, by tens and dozens at his
office-door. At length, after taking a very long walk indeed, for it
stretched from near the opening to the head of the Cromarty Firth, a
distance of about twenty miles, and included in its survey the antique
tower of Kinkell and the old Castle of Craighouse, he was relieved from
the duties of his clerkship, and left to pursue his researches
undisturbed, on a small annuity, the gift of his friends. He was
considerably advanced in life ere I knew him, profoundly grave, and very
taciturn, and, though he never discussed politics, a mighty reader of
the newspapers. "Oh! this is terrible," I have heard him exclaim, when
on one occasion a snow storm had blocked up both the coast and the
Highland roads for a week together, and arrested the northward course
of the mails,--"It is terrible to be left in utter ignorance of the
public business of the country!"
Francie, whom every one called Mr. ---- to his face, and always Francie
when his back was turned, chiefly because it was known he was
punctilious on the point, and did not like the more familiar term, used
in the winter evenings to be a regular member of the circle that met
beside my Uncle James's work-table. And, chiefly through the influence,
in the first instance, of my uncles, I was permitted to visit him in his
own room--a privilege enjoyed by scarce any one else--and even invited
to borrow his books. His room--a dark and melancholy chamber, grey with
dust--always contained a number of curious but not very rare things,
which he had picked up in his walks--prettily coloured fungi--vegetable
monstrosities of the commoner kind, such as "fause craws' nests," and
flattened twigs of pine--and with these, as the representatives of
another department of natural science, fragments of semi-transparent
quartz or of glittering feldspar, and sheets of mica a little above the
ordinary size. But the charm of the apartment lay in its books. Francie
was a book-fancier, and lacked only the necessary wealth to be in the
possession of a very pretty collection. As it was, he had some curious
volumes; among others, a first-edition copy of the "Nineteen Years'
Travels of William Lithgow," with an ancient woodcut, representing the
said William in the background, with his head brushing the skies, and,
far in front, two of the tombs which covered the heroes of Ilium, barely
tall enough to reach half-way to his knee, and of the length, in
proportion to the size of the traveller, of ordinary octavo volumes. He
had black-letter books, too, on astrology, and on the planetary
properties of vegetables; and an ancient book on medicine, that
recommended as a cure for the toothache a bit of the jaw of a suicide,
well triturated; and, as an infallible remedy for the falling-sickness,
an ounce or two of the brains of a young man, carefully dried over the
fire. Better, however, than these, for at least my purpose, he had a
tolerably complete collection of the British essayists, from Addison to
Mackenzie, with the "Essays" and "Citizen of the World" of Goldsmith;
several interesting works of travels and voyages, translated from the
French; and translations from the German, of Lavater, Zimmerman, and
Klopstock. He had a good many of the minor poets too; and I was enabled
to cultivate, mainly from his collection, a tolerably adequate
acquaintance with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne. Poor Francie was
at bottom a kindly and honest man; but the more intimately one knew him,
the more did the weakness and brokenness of his intellect appear. His
mind was a labyrinth without a clue, in whose recesses there lay stored
up a vast amount of book-knowledge, that could never be found when
wanted, and was of no sort of use to himself, or any one else. I got
sufficiently into his confidence to be informed, under the seal of
strict secrecy, that he contemplated producing a great literary work,
whose special character he had not quite determined, but which was to be
begun a few years hence. And when death found him, at an age which did
not fall far short of the allotted threescore and ten, the great unknown
work was still an undefined idea, and had still to be begun.
There were several other branches of my education going on at this time
outside the pale of the school, in which, though I succeeded in amusing
myself, I was no trifler. The shores of Cromarty are strewed over with
water-rolled fragments of the primary rocks, derived chiefly from the
west during the ages of the boulder clay; and I soon learned to take a
deep interest in sauntering over the various pebble-beds when shaken up
by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their numerous
components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary; and as, according
to Cowper, "the growth of what is excellent is slow," it was not until
long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of
representing the various species of simple rocks, by certain numerals,
and the compound ones by the numerals representative of each separate
component, ranged, as in vulgar fractions, along a medial line, with the
figures representative of the prevailing materials of the mass above,
and those representative of the materials in less proportions below.
Though, however, wholly deficient in the signs proper to represent what
I knew, I soon acquired a considerable quickness of eye in
distinguishing the various kinds of rock, and tolerably definite
conceptions of the generic character of the porphyries, granites,
gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, and mica-schists, which everywhere
strewed the beach. In the rocks of mechanical origin I was at this time
much less interested; but in individual, as in general history,
mineralogy almost always precedes geology. I was fortunate enough to
discover, one happy morning, among the lumber and debris of old John
Feddes's dark room, an antique-fashioned hammer, which had belonged, my
mother told me, to old John himself more than a hundred years before. It
was an uncouth sort of implement, with a handle of strong black oak, and
a short, compact head, square on the one face and oblong on the other.
And though it dealt rather an obtuse blow, the temper was excellent, and
the haft firmly set; and I went about with it, breaking into all manner
of stones, with great perseverance and success. I found, in a
large-grained granite, a few sheets of beautiful black mica, that, when
split exceedingly thin, and pasted between slips of mica of the ordinary
kind, made admirably-coloured eye-glasses, that converted the landscapes
around into richly-toned drawings in sepia; and numerous crystals of
garnet embedded in mica-schist, that were, I was sure, identical with
the stones set in a little gold brooch, the property of my mother. To
this last surmise, however, some of the neighbours to whom I showed my
prize demurred. The stones in my mother's brooch were precious stones,
they said; whereas what _I_ had found was merely a "stone upon the
shore." My friend the cabinet-maker went so far as to say that the
specimen was but a mass of plum-pudding stone, and its dark-coloured
enclosures simply the currants; but then, on the other hand, Uncle Sandy
took my view of the matter: the stone was not plum-pudding stone, he
said: he had often seen plum-pudding stone in England, and knew it to be
a sort of rough conglomerate of various components; whereas my stone was
composed of a finely-grained silvery substance, and the crystals which
it contained were, he was sure, gems like those in the brooch, and, so
far as he could judge, real garnets. This was a great decision; and,
much encouraged in consequence, I soon ascertained that garnets are by
no means rare among the pebbles of the Cromarty shore. Nay, so mixed up
are they with its sands even,--a consequence of the abundance of the
mineral among the primary rocks of Ross,--that after a heavy surf has
beaten the exposed beach of the neighbouring hill, there may be found on
it patches of comminuted garnet, from one to three square yards in
extent, that resemble, at a little distance, pieces of crimson
carpeting, and nearer at hand, sheets of crimson bead-work, and of which
almost every point and particle is a gem. From some unexplained
circumstance, connected apparently with the specific gravity of the
substance, it separates in this style from the general mass, on coasts
much beaten by the waves; but the garnets of these curious pavements,
though so exceedingly abundant, are in every instance exceedingly
minute. I never detected in them a fragment greatly larger than a
pin-head; but it was always with much delight that I used to fling
myself down on the shore beside some newly-discovered patch, and bethink
me, as I passed my fingers along the larger grains, of the heaps of gems
in Aladdin's cavern, or of Sinbad's valley of diamonds.
The Hill of Cromarty formed at this time at once my true school and
favourite play-ground; and if my master did wink at times harder than
master ought, when I was playing truant among its woods or on its
shores, it was, I believe, whether he thought so or no, all for the
best. My uncle Sandy had, as I have already said, been bred a
cartwright; but finding, on his return, after his seven years' service
on board a man-of-war, that the place had cartwrights enough for all the
employment, he applied himself to the humble but not unremunerative
profession of a sawyer, and used often to pitch his saw-pit, in the more
genial seasons of the year, among the woods of the hill. I remember, he
never failed setting it down in some pretty spot, sheltered from the
prevailing winds under the lee of some fern-covered rising ground or
some bosky thicket, and always in the near neighbourhood of a spring;
and it used to be one of my most delightful exercises to find out for
myself among the thick woods, in some holiday journey of exploration,
the place of a newly-formed pit. With the saw-pit as my baseline of
operations, and secure always of a share in Uncle Sandy's dinner, I used
to make excursions of discovery on every side,--now among the thicker
tracts of wood, which bore among the town-boys, from the twilight gloom
that ever rested in their recesses, the name of "the dungeons;" and anon
to the precipitous sea-shore, with its wild cliffs and caverns. The Hill
of Cromarty is one of a chain belonging to the great Ben Nevis line of
elevation; and, though it occurs in a sandstone district, is itself a
huge primary mass, upheaved of old from the abyss, and composed chiefly
of granitic gneiss and a red splintery horn-stone. It contains also
numerous veins and beds of hornblend rock and chlorite-schist, and of a
peculiar-looking granite, of which the quartz is white as milk, and the
feldspar red as blood. When still wet by the receding tide, these veins
and beds seem as if highly polished, and present a beautiful aspect; and
it was always with great delight that I used to pick my way among them,
hammer in hand, and fill my pockets with specimens.
There was one locality which I in especial loved. No path runs the way.
On the one side, an abrupt iron-tinged promontory, so remarkable for its
human-like profile, that it seems part of a half-buried sphinx,
protrudes into the deep green water. On the other--less prominent, for
even at full tide the traveller can wind between its base and the
sea--there rises a shattered and ruined precipice, seamed with blood-red
ironstone, that retains on its surface the bright metallic gleam, and
amid whose piles of loose and fractured rock one may still detect
fragments of stalactite. The stalactite is all that remains of a
spacious cavern, which once hollowed the precipice, but which, more than
a hundred years before, had tumbled down during a thunder-storm, when
filled with a flock of sheep, and penned up the poor creatures for ever.
The space between these headlands forms an irregular crescent of great
height, covered with wood a-top, and amid whose lichened crags, and on
whose steep slopes, the hawthorn, and bramble, and wild rasp, and rock
strawberry, take root, with many a scraggy shrub and sweet wild flower
besides; while along its base lie huge blocks of green hornblend, on a
rude pavement of granitic gneiss, traversed at one point, for many
yards, by a broad vein of milk-white quartz. The quartz vein formed my
central point of attraction in this wild paradise. The white stone,
thickly traversed by threads of purple and red, is a beautiful though
unworkable rock; and I soon ascertained that it is flanked by a vein of
feldspar broader than itself, of a brick-red tint, and the red stone
flanked, in turn, by a drab-coloured vein of the same mineral, in which
there occur in great abundance masses of a homogeneous mica,--mica not
existing in lamina, but, if I may use the term, as a sort of micaceous
felt. It would almost seem as if some gigantic experimenter of the old
world had set himself to separate into their simple mineral components
the granitic rocks of the hill, and that the three parallel veins were
the results of his labour. Such, however, was not the sort of idea which
they at this time suggested to me. I had read in Sir Walter Raleigh's
voyage to Guiana, the poetic description of that upper country in which
the knight's exploration of the river Corale terminated, and where, amid
lovely prospects of rich valleys, and wooded hills, and winding waters,
almost every rock bore on its surface the yellow gleam of gold. True,
according to the voyager, the precious metal was itself absent. But Sir
Walter, on afterwards showing "some of the stones to a Spaniard of the
Caraccas, was told by him they were _la madre de oro_, that is, the
mother of gold, and that the mine itself was further in the ground." And
though the quartz vein of the Cromarty Hill contained no metal more
precious than iron, and but little even of that, it was, I felt sure,
the "mother" of something very fine. As for silver, I was pretty certain
I had found the "mother" of _it_, if not, indeed, the precious metal
itself, in a cherty boulder, enclosing numerous cubes of rich galena;
and occasional masses of iron pyrites gave, as I thought, large promise
of gold. But though sometimes asked in humble irony, by the
farm-servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed along the
Cromarty beach, whether I was "getting siller in the stanes," I was so
unlucky as never to be able to answer their question in the affirmative.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] There may have been truth in the allegation; at least the hangman of
Inverness enjoyed, from time immemorial, a similar perquisite,--a peat
out of every creel brought to the burgh market.
CHAPTER IV.
"Strange marble stones, here larger and there less,
And of full various forms, which still increase
In height and bulk by a continual drop.
Which upon each distilling from the top,
And falling still exactly on the crown.
There break themselves to mists, which, trickling down.
Crust into stone, and (but with leisure) swell
The sides, and still advance the miracle."--CHARLES COTTON.
It is low water in the Firth of Cromarty during stream tides, between
six and seven o'clock in the evening; and my uncle Sandy, in returning
from his work at the close of the day, used not unfrequently, when,
according to the phrase of the place, "there was a tide in the water,"
to strike down the hillside, and spend a quiet hour in the ebb. I
delighted to accompany him on these occasions. There are professors of
Natural History that know less of living nature than was known by Uncle
Sandy; and I deemed it no small matter to have all the various
productions of the sea with which he was acquainted pointed out to me in
these walks, and to be in possession of his many curious anecdotes
regarding them.
He was a skilful crab and lobster fisher, and knew every hole and
cranny, along several miles of rocky shore, in which the creatures were
accustomed to shelter, with not a few of their own peculiarities of
character. Contrary to the view taken by some of our naturalists, such
as Agassiz, who hold that the crab--a genus comparatively recent in its
appearance in creation--is less embryotic in its character, and higher
in its standing, than the more ancient lobster, my uncle regarded the
lobster as a more highly developed and more intelligent animal than the
crab. The hole in which the lobster lodges has almost always two
openings, he has said, through one of which it sometimes contrives to
escape when the other is stormed by the fisher; whereas the crab is
usually content, like the "rat devoid of soul," with a hole of only one
opening; and, besides, gets so angry in most cases with his assailant,
as to become more bent on assault than escape, and so loses himself
through sheer loss of temper. And yet the crab has, he used to add, some
points of intelligence about him too. When, as sometimes happened, he
got hold, in his dark narrow recess in the rock, of some luckless digit,
my uncle showed me how that, after the first tremendous squeeze, he
began always to experiment upon what he had got, by alternately
slackening and straitening his grasp, as if to ascertain whether it had
life in it, or was merely a piece of dead matter; and that the only way
to escape him, on these trying occasions, was to let the finger lie
passively between his nippers, as if it were a bit of stick or tangle;
when, apparently deeming it such, he would be sure to let it go;
whereas, on the least attempt to withdraw it, he would at once straiten
his gripe, and not again relax it for mayhap half an hour. In dealing
with the lobster, on the other hand, the fisher had to beware that he
did not depend too much on the hold he had got of the creature, if it
was merely a hold of one of the great claws. For a moment it would
remain passive in his grasp; he would then be sensible of a slight
tremor in the captured limb, and mayhap hear a slight crackle; and,
_presto_, the captive would straightway be off like a dart through the
deep-water hole, and only the limb remain in the fisher's hand. My uncle
has, however, told me that lobsters do not always lose their limbs with
the necessary judgment. They throw them off when suddenly frightened,
without first waiting to consider whether the sacrifice of a pair of
legs is the best mode of obviating the danger. On firing a musket
immediately over a lobster just captured, he has seen it throw off both
its great claws in the sudden extremity of its terror, just as a
panic-struck soldier sometimes throws away his weapons. Such, in kind,
were the anecdotes of Uncle Sandy. He instructed me, too, how to find,
amid thickets of laminaria and fuci, the nest of the lump-fish, and
taught me to look well in its immediate neighbourhood for the male and
female fish, especially for the male; and showed me further, that the
hard-shelled spawn of this creature may, when well washed, be eaten raw,
and forms at least as palatable a viand in that state as the imported
caviare of Russia and the Caspian. There were instances in which the
common crow acted as a sort of jackal to us in our lump-fish
explorations. We would see him busied at the side of some fuci-covered
pool, screaming and cawing as if engaged in combating an enemy; and, on
going up to the place, we used to find the lump-fish he had killed fresh
and entire, but divested of the eyes, which we found, as a matter of
course, that the assailant, in order to make sure of victory, had taken
the precaution of picking out at an early stage of the contest.
Nor was it with merely the edible that we busied ourselves on these
journeys. The brilliant metallic _plumage_ of the sea mouse
(_Aphrodita_), steeped as in the dyes of the rainbow, excited our
admiration time after time; and still higher wonder used to be awakened
by a much rarer annelid, brown, and slender as a piece of rope-yarn, and
from thirty to forty feet in length, which no one save my uncle had ever
found along the Cromarty shores, and which, when broken in two, as
sometimes happened in the measuring, divided its vitality so equally
between the pieces, that each was fitted, we could not doubt, though
unable to repeat in the case the experiment of Spallanzani, to set up as
an independent existence, and carry on business for itself. The
annelids, too, that form for themselves tubular dwellings built up of
large grains of sand (_amphitrites_), always excited our interest. Two
hand-shaped tufts of golden-hued setæ--furnished, however, with greatly
more than the typical number of fingers--rise from the shoulders of
these creatures, and must, I suspect, be used as hands in the process of
building; at least the hands of the most practised builder could not set
stones with nicer skill than is exhibited by these worms in the setting
of the grains which compose their cylindrical dwellings--dwellings that,
from their form and structure, seem suited to remind the antiquary of
the round towers of Ireland, and, from the style of their masonry, of
old Cyclopean walls. Even the mason-wasps and bees are greatly inferior
workmen to these mason _amphitrites_. I was introduced also, in our ebb
excursions, to the cuttle-fish and the sea-hare, and shown how the one,
when pursued by an enemy, discharges a cloud of ink to conceal its
retreat, and that the other darkens the water around it with a lovely
purple pigment, which my uncle was pretty sure would make a rich dye,
like that extracted of old by the Tyrians from a whelk which he had
often seen on the beach near Alexandria. I learned, too, to cultivate an
acquaintance with some two or three species of doris, that carry their
arboraceous, tree-like lungs on their backs, as Macduff's soldiers
carried the boughs of Birnam wood to the Hill of Dunsinane; and I soon
acquired a sort of affection for certain shells, which bore, as I
supposed, a more exotic aspect than their neighbours. Among these were,
_Trochus Zizyphinus_, with its flame-like markings of crimson, on a
ground of paley-brown; _Patella pellucida_, with its lustrous rays of
vivid blue on its dark epidermis, that resemble the sparks of a firework
breaking against a cloud; and, above all, _Cypræa Europea_, a not rare
shell further to the north, but so little abundant in the Firth of
Cromarty, as to render the live animal, when once or twice in a season I
used to find it creeping on the laminaria at the extreme outer edge of
the tide-line, with its wide orange mantle flowing liberally around it,
somewhat of a prize. In short, the tract of sea-bottom laid dry by the
ebb formed an admirable school, and Uncle Sandy an excellent teacher,
under whom I was not in the least disposed to trifle; and when, long
after, I learned to detect old-marine bottoms far out of sight of the
sea--now amid the ancient forest-covered Silurians of central England,
and anon opening to the light on some hillside among the Mountain
Limestones of our own country--I have felt how very much I owed to his
instructions.
His facts wanted a vocabulary adequately fitted to represent them; but
though they "lacked a commodity of good names," they were all founded on
careful observation, and possessed that first element of
respectability--perfect originality: they were all acquired by himself.
I owed more, however, to the habit of observation which he assisted me
in forming, than even to his facts; and yet some of these were of high
value. He has shown me, for instance, that an immense granitic boulder
in the neighbourhood of the town, known for ages as the Clach Malloch,
or Cursed Stone, stands so exactly in the line of low water, that the
larger stream-tides of March and September lay dry its inner side, but
never its outer one;--round the outer side there are always from two to
four inches of water; and such had been the case for at least a hundred
years before, in his father's and grandfather's days--evidence enough of
itself, I have heard him say, that the relative levels of sea and land
were not altering; though during the lapsed century the waves had so
largely encroached on the low flat shores, that elderly men of his
acquaintance, long since passed away, had actually held the plough when
young where they had held the rudder when old. He used, too, to point
out to me the effect of certain winds upon the tides. A strong hasty
gale from the east, if coincident with a spring-tide, sent up the waves
high upon the beach, and cut away whole roods of the soil; but the gales
that usually kept larger tides from falling during ebb were prolonged
gales from the west. A series of these, even when not very high, left
not unfrequently from one to two feet water round the Clach Malloch,
during stream-tides, that would otherwise have laid its bottom bare--a
proof, he used to say, that the German Ocean, from its want of breadth,
could not be heaped up against our coasts to the same extent, by the
violence of a very powerful east wind, as the Atlantic by the force of a
comparatively moderate westerly one. It is not improbable that the
philosophy of the Drift Current, and of the apparently reactionary Gulf
Stream, may be embodied in this simple remark.
The woods on the lower slopes of the hill, when there was no access to
the zones covered save at low ebb by the sea, furnished me with
employment of another kind. I learned to look with interest on the
workings of certain insects, and to understand some of at least their
simpler instincts. The large Diadem Spider, which spins so strong a web,
that, in pressing my way through the furze thickets, I could hear its
white silken cords crack as they yielded before me, and which I found
skilled, like an ancient magician, in the strange art of rendering
itself invisible in the clearest light, was an especial favourite;
though its great size, and the wild stories I had read about the bite of
its cogener the tarantula, made me cultivate its acquaintance somewhat
at a distance. Often, however, have I stood beside its large web, when
the creature occupied its place in the centre, and, touching it with a
withered grass stalk, I have seen it sullenly swing on the lines "with
its hands," and then shake them with a motion so rapid, that--like
Carathis, the mother of the Caliph Vathek, who, when her hour of doom
had come, "glanced off in a rapid whirl, which rendered her
invisible"--the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes
together. Nothing appeals more powerfully to the youthful fancy than
those coats, rings, and amulets of eastern lore, that conferred on their
possessors the gift of invisibility. I learned, too, to take an especial
interest in what, though they belong to a different family, are known as
the Water _Spiders_; and have watched them speeding by fits and starts,
like skaters on the ice, across the surface of some woodland spring or
streamlet--fearless walkers on the waters, that, with true faith in the
integrity of the implanted instinct, never made shipwreck in the eddy or
sank in the pool. It is to these little creatures that Wordsworth refers
in one of his sonnets on sleep:--
"O sleep, thou art to me
A fly that up and down himself doth shove
Upon a fretful rivulet; now _above_,
Now _on_ the water, vexed with mockery."
As shown, however, to the poet himself on one occasion, somewhat to his
discomfort, by assuredly no mean authority--Mr. James Wilson--the
"vexed" "fly," though one of the hemipterous insects, never uses its
wings, and so never gets "_above_" the water. Among my other favourites
were the splendid dragon-flies, the crimson-speckled Burnet moths, and
the small azure butterflies, that, when fluttering among delicate
harebells and crimson-tipped daisies, used to suggest to me, long ere I
became acquainted with the pretty figure of Moore,[3] or even ere the
figure had been produced, the idea of flowers that had taken to flying.
The wild honey bees, too, in their several species, had peculiar charms
for me. There were the buff-coloured carders, that erected over their
honey-jars domes of moss; the lapidary red-tipped bees, that built amid
the recesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone walls, and were so
invincibly brave in defending their homesteads, that they never gave up
the quarrel till they died; and, above all, the yellow-zoned
humble-bees, that lodged deep in the ground along the dry sides of
grassy banks, and were usually wealthier in honey than any of their
cogeners, and existed in larger communities. But the herd-boys of the
parish, and the foxes of its woods and brakes, shared in my interest in
the wild honey bees, and, in the pursuit of something else than
knowledge, were ruthless robbers of their nests. I often observed, that
the fox, with all his reputed shrewdness, is not particularly knowing on
the subject of bees. He makes as dead a set on a wasp's nest as on that
of the carder or humble-bee, and gets, I doubt not, heartily stung for
his pains; for though, as shown by the marks of his teeth, left on
fragments of the paper combs scattered about, he attempts eating the
young wasps in the chrysalis state, the undevoured remains seem to argue
that he is but little pleased with them as food. There were occasions,
however, in which even the herd-boys met with only disappointment in
their bee-hunting excursions; and in one notable instance, the result of
the adventure used to be spoken of in school and elsewhere, under our
breath and in secret, as something very horrible. A party of boys had
stormed a humble-bees' nest on the side of the old chapel-brae, and,
digging inwards along the narrow winding earth passage, they at length
came to a grinning human skull, and saw the bees issuing thick from out
a round hole at its base--the _foramen magnum_. The wise little workers
had actually formed their nest within the hollow of the head, once
occupied by the busy brain; and their spoilers, more scrupulous than
Samson of old, who seems to have enjoyed the meat brought forth out of
the eater, and the sweetness extracted from the strong, left in very
great consternation their honey all to themselves.
One of my discoveries of this early period would have been deemed a not
unimportant one by the geologist. Among the woods of the hill, a short
half-mile from the town, there is a morass of comparatively small
extent, but considerable depth, which had been laid open by the bursting
of a waterspout on the uplands, and in which the dark peaty chasm
remained unclosed, though the event had happened ere my birth, until I
had become old and curious enough thoroughly to explore it. It was a
black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in depth. The bogs around
waved thick with silvery willows of small size; but sticking out from
the black sides of the ravine itself, and in some instances stretched
across it from side to side, lay the decayed remains of huge giants of
the vegetable world, that had flourished and died long ages ere, in at
least our northern part of the island, the course of history had begun.
There were oaks of enormous girth, into whose coal-black substance one
could dig as easily with a pickaxe as one digs into a bank of clay; and
at least one noble elm, which ran across the little stream that
trickled, rather than flowed, along the bottom of the hollow, and which
was in such a state of keeping, that I have scooped out of its trunk,
with the unassisted hand, a way for the water. I have found in the
ravine--which I learned very much to like as a scene of exploration,
though I never failed to quit it sadly bemired--handfuls of hazel-nuts,
of the ordinary size, but black as jet, with the cups of acorns, and
with twigs of birch that still retained almost unchanged their silvery
outer crust of bark, but whose ligneous interior existed as a mere pulp.
I have even laid open, in layers of a sort of unctuous clay, resembling
fuller's earth, leaves of oak, birch, and hazel, that had fluttered in
the wind thousands of years before; and there was one happy day in which
I succeeded in digging from out the very bottom of the excavation a huge
fragment of an extraordinary-looking deer's horn. It was a broad,
massive, strange-looking piece of bone, evidently old-fashioned in its
type; and so I brought it home in triumph to Uncle James, as the
antiquary of the family, assured that he could tell me all about it.
Uncle James paused in the middle of his work; and, taking the horn in
his hand, surveyed it leisurely on every side. "That is the horn, boy,"
he at length said, "of no deer that now lives in this country. We have
the red deer, and the fallow deer, and the roe; and none of them have
horns at all like that. I never saw an elk; but I am pretty sure this
broad, plank-like horn can be none other than the horn of an elk." My
uncle set aside his work; and, taking the horn in his hand, went out to
the shop of a cabinet-maker in the neighbourhood, where there used to
work from five to six journeymen. They all gathered round him to examine
it, and agreed in the decision that it was an entirely different sort of
horn from any borne by the existing deer of Scotland, and that this
surmise regarding it was probably just. And, apparently to enhance the
marvel, a neighbour, who was lounging in the shop at the time, remarked,
in a tone of sober gravity, that it had lain in the Moss of the Willows
"for perhaps half a century." There was positive anger in the tone of my
uncle's reply. "Half a century, Sir!!" he exclaimed; "was the elk a
native of Scotland half a century ago? There is no notice of the elk,
Sir, in British history. That horn must have lain in the Moss of the
Willows for thousands of years!" "Ah, ha, James, ah, ha," ejaculated the
neighbour, with a sceptical shake of the head; but as neither he nor any
one else dared meet my uncle on historical ground, the controversy took
end with the ejaculation. I soon added to the horn of the elk that of a
roe, and part of that of a red deer, found in the same ravine; and the
neighbours, impressed by Uncle James's view, used to bring strangers to
look at them. At length, unhappily, a relation settled in the south, who
had shown me kindness, took a fancy to them; and, smit by the charms of
a gorgeous paint-box which he had just sent me, I made them over to him
entire. They found their way to London, and were ultimately lodged in
the collection of some obscure virtuoso, whose locality or name I have
been unable to trace.
The Cromarty Sutors have their two lines of caves--an ancient line
hollowed by the waves many centuries ago, when the sea stood, in
relation to the land, from fifteen to thirty feet higher along our
shores than it does now; and a modern line, which the surf is still
engaged in scooping out. Many of the older caves are lined with
stalactites, deposited by springs that, filtering through the cracks and
fissures of the gneiss, find lime enough in their passage to acquire
what is known as a _petrifying_, though, in reality, only an incrusting
quality. And these stalactites, under the name of "white stones made by
the water," formed of old--as in that Cave of Slains specially mentioned
by Buchanan and the Chroniclers, and in those caverns of the Peak so
quaintly described by Cotton--one of the grand marvels of the place.
Almost all the old gazetteers sufficiently copious in their details to
mention Cromarty at all, refer to its "Dropping Cave" as a marvellous
marble-producing cavern; and this "Dropping Cave" is but one of many
that look out upon the sea from the precipices of the southern Sutor, in
whose dark recesses the drops ever tinkle, and the stony ceilings ever
grow. The wonder could not have been deemed a great or very rare one by
a man like the late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, well known from his
travels in Iceland, and his experiments on the inflammability of the
diamond; but it so happened, that Sir George, curious to see the sort of
stones to which the old gazetteers referred, made application to the
minister of the parish for a set of specimens; and the minister
straightway deputed the commission, which he believed to be not a
difficult one, to one of his poorer parishioners, an old nailer, as a
means of putting a few shillings in his way.
It so happened, however, that the nailer had lost his wife by a sad
accident, only a few weeks before; and the story went abroad that the
poor woman was, as the townspeople expressed it, "coming back." She had
been very suddenly hurried out of the world. When going down the quay
after nightfall one evening, with a parcel of clean linen for a sailor,
her relative, she had missed footing on the pier edge, and,
half-brained, half-drowned, had been found in the morning, stone dead,
at the bottom of the harbour. And now, as if pressed by some unsettled
business, she used to be seen, it was said, hovering after nightfall
about her old dwelling, or sauntering along the neighbouring street;
nay, there were occasions, according to the general report, in which she
had even exchanged words with some of the neighbours, little to their
satisfaction. The words, however, seemed in every instance to have
wonderfully little to do with the affairs of another world. I remember
seeing the wife of a neighbour rush into my mother's one evening about
this time, speechless with terror, and declare, after an awful pause,
during which she had lain half-fainting in a chair, that she had just
seen Christy. She had been engaged, as the night was falling, but ere
darkness had quite set in, in piling up a load of brushwood for fuel
outside the door, when up started the spectre on the other side of the
heap, attired in the ordinary work-day garb of the deceased, and, in a
light and hurried tone, asked, as Christy might have done ere the fatal
accident, for a share of the brushwood. "Give me some of that _hag_,"
said the ghost; "you have plenty--I have none." It was not known whether
or no the nailer had seen the apparition; but it was pretty certain he
believed in it; and as the "Dropping Cave" is both dark and solitary,
and had forty years ago a bad name to boot--for the mermaid had been
observed disporting in front of it even at mid-day, and lights and
screams heard from it at nights--it must have been a rather formidable
place to a man living in the momentary expectation of a visit from a
dead wife. So far as could be ascertained--for the nailer himself was
rather close in the matter--he had not entered the cave at all. He
seemed, judging from the marks of scraping left along the sides for
about two or three feet from the narrow opening, to have taken his stand
outside, where the light was good, and the way of retreat clear, and to
have raked outwards to him, as far as he could reach, all that stuck to
the walls, including ropy slime and mouldy damp, but not one particle of
stalactite. It was, of course, seen that his specimens would not suit
Sir George; and the minister, in the extremity of the case, applied to
my uncles, though with some little unwillingness, as it was known that
no remuneration for their trouble could be offered to them. My uncles
were, however, delighted with the commission--it was all for the benefit
of science; and, providing themselves with torches and a hammer, they
set out for the caves. And I, of course, accompanied them--a very happy
boy--armed, like themselves, with hammer and torch, and prepared
devotedly to labour in behalf of science and Sir George.
I had never before seen the caves by torch-light; and though what I now
witnessed did not quite come up to what I had read regarding the Grotto
of Antiparos, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably
both strange and fine. The celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior--as
is not unfrequently the case with the celebrated--to a cave almost
entirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little further to the
east; and yet even _it_ had its interest. It widened, as one entered,
into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp
and the shade; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by
the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of
the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended
many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave,
however, we found to be of much greater extent, and of more varied
character. It is one of three caves of the old coast line, known as the
Doocot or Pigeon Caves, which open upon a piece of rocky beach, overhung
by a rudely semicircular range of gloomy precipices. The points of the
semicircle project on either side into deep water--into at least water
so much deeper than the fall of ordinary neaps, that it is only during
the ebb of stream tides that the place is accessible by land; and in
each of these bold promontories--the terminal horns of the
crescent--there is a cave of the present coast-line, deeply hollowed, in
which the sea stands from ten to twelve feet in depth when the tide is
at full, and in which the surf thunders, when gales blow hard from the
stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave
in the western promontory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of
the "Puir Wife's Meal Kist," has its roof drilled by two small
perforations--the largest of them not a great deal wider than the
blow-hole of a porpoise--that open externally among the cliffs above;
and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore
like green moving walls, there are certain times of the tide in which
they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within, that
it rushes upwards through the openings, roaring in its escape as if ten
whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in
two white jets of vapour, distinctly visible, to the height of from
sixty to eighty feet. If there be critics who have deemed it one of the
extravagances of Goethe that he should have given life and motion, as in
his famous witch-scene in "Faust," to the Hartz crags, they would do
well to visit this bold headland during some winter tempest from the
east, and find his description perfectly sober and true:
"See the giant crags, oh ho!
How they snort and how they blow!"
Within, at the bottom of the crescent, and where the tide never reaches
when at the fullest, we found the large pigeon cave which we had come to
explore, hollowed for about a hundred and fifty feet in the line of a
fault. There runs across the opening the broken remains of a wall
erected by some monopolizing proprietor of the neighbouring lands, with
the intention of appropriating to himself the pigeons of the cavern; but
his day, even at this time, had been long gone by, and the wall had sunk
into a ruin. As we advanced, the cave caught the echoes of our
footsteps, and a flock of pigeons, startled from their nests, came
whizzing out, almost brushing us with their wings. The damp floor
sounded hollow to the tread; we saw the green mossy sides, which close
in the uncertain light, more than twenty feet overhead, furrowed by
ridges of stalactites, that became whiter and purer as they retired from
the vegetative influences; and marked that the last plant which appeared
as we wended our way inwards was a minute green moss, about half an inch
in length, which slanted outwards on the prominence of the sides, and
overlay myriads of similar sprigs of moss, long before converted into
stone, but which, faithful in death to the ruling law of their lives,
still pointed, like the others, to the free air and the light. And then,
in the deeper recesses of the cave, where the floor becomes covered with
uneven sheets of stalagmite, and where long spear-like icicles and
drapery-like foldings, pure as the marble of the sculptor, descend from
above, or hang pendent over the sides, we found in abundance magnificent
specimens for Sir George. The entire expedition was one of wondrous
interest; and I returned next day to school, big with description and
narrative, to excite, by truths more marvellous than fiction, the
curiosity of my class-fellows.
I had previously introduced them to the marvels of the hill; and during
our Saturday half-holidays, some of them had accompanied me in my
excursions to it. But it had failed, somehow, to catch their fancy. It
was too solitary, and too far from home, and, as a scene of amusement,
not at all equal to the town-links, where they could play at "shinty"
and "French and English," almost within _hail_ of their parents'
homesteads. The very tract along its flat, moory summit, over which,
according to tradition, Wallace had once driven before him in headlong
rout a strong body of English, and which was actually mottled with
sepulchral tumuli, still visible amid the heath, failed in any marked
degree to engage them; and though they liked well enough to hear about
the caves, they seemed to have no very great desire to see them. There
was, however, one little fellow, who sat in the Latin form--the member
of a class lower and brighter than the heavy one, though it was not
particularly bright either--who differed in this respect from all the
others. Though he was my junior by about a twelvemonth, and shorter by
about half a head, he was a diligent boy in even the Grammar School, in
which boys were so rarely diligent, and, for his years, a thoroughly
sensible one, without a grain of the dreamer in his composition. I
succeeded, however, notwithstanding his sobriety, in infecting him
thoroughly with my peculiar tastes, and learned to love him very much,
partly because he doubled my amusements by sharing in them, and partly,
I daresay--on the principle on which Mahomet preferred his old wife to
his young one--because "he believed in me." Devoted to him as Caliban in
the _Tempest_ to his friend Trinculo--
"I showed him the best springs, I plucked him berries.
And I with my long nails did dig him pig-nuts."
His curiosity on this occasion was largely excited by my description of
the Doocot Cave; and, setting out one morning to explore its wonders,
armed with John Feddes's hammer, in the benefits of which my friend was
permitted liberally to share, we failed, for that day at least, in
finding our way back.
It was on a pleasant spring morning that, with my little curious friend
beside me, I stood on the beach opposite the eastern promontory, that,
with its stern granitic wall, bars access for ten days out of every
fourteen to the wonders of the Doocot; and saw it stretching provokingly
out into the green water. It was hard to be disappointed, and the caves
so near. The tide was a low neap, and if we wanted a passage dry-shod,
it behoved us to wait for at least a week; but neither of us understood
the philosophy of neap-tides at the period. I was quite sure I had got
round at low water with my uncles not a great many days before, and we
both inferred, that if we but succeeded in getting round now, it would
be quite a pleasure to wait among the caves inside until such time as
the fall of the tide should lay bare a passage for our return. A narrow
and broken shelf runs along the promontory, on which, by the assistance
of the naked toe and the toe-nail, it is just possible to creep. We
succeeded in scrambling up to it; and then, crawling outwards on all
fours--the precipice, as we proceeded, beetling more and more formidable
from above, and the water becoming greener and deeper below--we reached
the outer point of the promontory; and then doubling the cape on a still
narrowing margin--the water, by a reverse process, becoming shallower
and less green as we advanced inwards--we found the ledge terminating
just where, after clearing the sea, it overhung the gravelly beach at an
elevation of nearly ten feet. Adown we both dropped, proud of our
success; up splashed the rattling gravel as we fell; and for at least
the whole coming week--though we were unaware of the extent of our good
luck at the time--the marvels of the Doocot Cave might be regarded as
solely and exclusively our own. For one short seven days--to borrow
emphasis from the phraseology of Carlyle--"they were our own, and no
other man's."
The first few hours were hours of sheer enjoyment The larger cave proved
a mine of marvels; and we found a great deal additional to wonder at on
the slopes beneath the precipices, and along the piece of rocky
sea-beach in front. We succeeded in discovering for ourselves, in
creeping, dwarf bushes, that told of the blighting influences of the
sea-spray; the pale yellow honeysuckle, that we had never seen before,
save in gardens and shrubberies; and on a deeply-shaded slope that
leaned against one of the steeper precipices, we detected the
sweet-scented woodroof of the flower-plot and parterre, with its pretty
verticillate leaves, that become the more odoriferous the more they are
crushed, and its white delicate flowers. There, too, immediately in the
opening of the deeper cave, where a small stream came pattering in
detached drops from the over-beetling precipice above, like the first
drops of a heavy thunder-shower, we found the hot, bitter scurvy grass,
with its minute cruciform flowers, which the great Captain Cook had
used in his voyages; above all, _there_ were the caves with their
pigeons--white, variegated, and blue--and their mysterious and gloomy
depths, in which plants hardened into stone, and water became marble. In
a short time we had broken off with our hammers whole pocketfuls of
stalactites and petrified moss. There were little pools at the side of
the cave, where we could see the work of congelation going on, as at the
commencement of an October frost, when the cold north wind ruffles, and
but barely ruffles, the surface of some mountain lochan or sluggish
moorland stream, and shows the newly-formed needles of ice projecting
mole-like from the shores into the water. So rapid was the course of
deposition, that there were cases in which the sides of the hollows
seemed growing almost in proportion as the water rose in them; the
springs, lipping over, deposited their minute crystals on the edges; and
the reservoirs deepened and became more capacious as their mounds were
built up by this curious masonry. The long telescopic prospect of the
sparkling sea, as viewed from the inner extremity of the cavern, while
all around was dark as midnight--the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen
for a moment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sunshine--the
black heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of
spray, and then, turning downwards, displayed its glossy back and vast
angular fin--even the pigeons, as they shot whizzing by, one moment
scarce visible in the gloom, the next radiant in the light--all acquired
a new interest, from the peculiarity of the _setting_ in which we saw
them. They formed a series of sun-gilt vignettes, framed in jet; and it
was long ere we tired of seeing and admiring in them much of the strange
and the beautiful. It did seem rather ominous, however, and perhaps
somewhat supernatural to boot, that about an hour after noon, the tide,
while there was yet a full fathom of water beneath the brow of the
promontory, ceased to fall, and then, after A quarter of an hour's
space, began actually to creep upwards on the beach. But just hoping
that there might be some mistake in the matter, which the evening tide
would scarce fail to rectify, we continued to amuse ourselves, and to
hope on. Hour after hour passed, lengthening as the shadows lengthened,
and yet the tide still rose. The sun had sunk behind the precipices, and
all was gloom along their bases, and double gloom in their caves; but
their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose
higher and higher, chased by the shadows; and then, after lingering for
a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and
the whole became sombre and grey. The sea-gull sprang upwards from where
he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in
his deep-sea stack; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and
more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf high on the precipice; the
pigeons came whizzing downwards from the uplands and the opposite land,
and disappeared amid the gloom of their caves; every creature that had
wings made use of them in speeding homewards; but neither my companion
nor myself had any; and there was no possibility of getting home without
them. We made desperate efforts to scale the precipices, and on two
several occasions succeeded in reaching mid-way shelves among the crags,
where the sparrowhawk and the raven build; but though we had climbed
well enough to render our return a matter of bare possibility, there was
no possibility whatever of getting farther up: the cliffs had never been
scaled before, and they were not destined to be scaled now. And so, as
the twilight deepened, and the precarious footing became every moment
more doubtful and precarious still, we had just to give up in despair.
"Wouldn't care for myself," said the poor little fellow, my companion,
bursting into tears, "if it were not for my mother; but what will my
mother say?" "Wouldn't care neither," said I, with a heavy heart; "but
it's just back water, and we'll get out at twall." We retreated together
into one of the shallower and drier caves, and, clearing a little spot
of its rough stones, and then groping along the rocks for the dry grass
that in the spring season hangs from them in withered tufts, we formed
for ourselves a most uncomfortable bed, and lay down in one another's
arms. For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising
dark and stormy in the sea-mouth: they had flared portentously in the
setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every
meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre thundrous brown, and
from sombre brown to doleful black. And we could now at least hear what
they portended, though we could no longer see. The rising wind began to
howl mournfully amid the cliffs, and the sea, hitherto so silent, to
beat heavily against the shore, and to boom, like distress-guns, from
the recesses of the two deep-sea caves. We could hear, too, the beating
rain, now heavier, now lighter, as the gusts swelled or sank; and the
intermittent patter of the streamlet over the deeper cave, now driving
against the precipices, now descending heavily on the stones.
My companion had only the real evils of the case to deal with, and so,
the hardness of our bed and the coldness of the night considered, he
slept tolerably well; but I was unlucky enough to have evils greatly
worse than the real ones to annoy me. The corpse of a drowned seaman had
been found on the beach about a month previous, some forty yards firm
where we lay. The hands and feet, miserably contracted, and corrugated
into deep folds at every joint, yet swollen to twice their proper size,
had been bleached as white as pieces of alumed sheep-skin; and where the
head should have been, there existed only a sad mass of rubbish. I had
examined the body, as young people are apt to do, a great deal too
curiously for my peace; and, though I had never done the poor nameless
seaman any harm, I could not have suffered more from him during that
melancholy night, had I been his murderer. Sleeping or waking, he was
continually before me. Every time I dropped into a doze, he would come
stalking up the beach from the spot where he had lain, with his stiff
white fingers, that stuck out like eagle's toes, and his pale, broken
pulp of a head, and attempt striking me; and then I would awaken with a
start, cling to my companion, and remember that the drowned sailor had
lain festering among the identical bunches of sea-weed that still rotted
on the beach not a stone-cast away. The near neighbourhood of a score of
living bandits would have inspired less horror than the recollection of
that one dead seaman.
Towards midnight the sky cleared and the wind fell, and the moon, in her
last quarter, rose red as a mass of heated iron out of the sea. We crept
down, in the uncertain light, over the rough slippery crags, to
ascertain whether the tide had not fallen sufficiently far to yield us a
passage; but we found the waves chafing among the rocks just where the
tide-line had rested twelve hours before, and a full fathom of sea
enclasping the base of the promontory. A glimmering idea of the real
nature of our situation at length crossed my mind. It was not
imprisonment for a tide to which we had consigned ourselves, it was
imprisonment for a week. There was little comfort in the thought,
arising, as it did, amid the chills and terrors of a dreary midnight;
and I looked wistfully on the sea as our only path of escape. There was
a vessel crossing the wake of the moon at the time, scarce half a mile
from the shore; and, assisted by my companion, I began to shout at the
top of my lungs, in the hope of being heard by the sailors. We saw her
dim bulk falling slowly athwart the red glittering belt of light that
had rendered her visible, and then disappearing in the murky blackness,
and just as we lost sight of her for ever, we could hear an indistinct
sound mingling with the dash of the waves--the shout, in reply, of the
startled helmsman. The vessel, as we afterwards learned, was a large
stone-lighter, deeply laden, and unfurnished with a boat; nor were her
crew at all sure that it would have been safe to attend to the midnight
voice from amid the rocks, even had they had the means of communication
with the shore. We waited on and on, however, now shouting by turns, and
now shouting together; but there was no second reply; and at length,
losing hope, we groped our way back to our comfortless bed, just as the
tide had again turned on the beach, and the waves began to roll upwards
higher and higher at every dash.
As the moon rose and brightened, the dead seaman became less
troublesome; and I had succeeded in dropping as soundly asleep as my
companion, when we were both aroused by a loud shout. We started up and
again crept downwards among the crags to the shore; and as we reached
the sea the shout was repeated. It was that of at least a dozen harsh
voices united. There was a brief pause, followed by another shout; and
then two boats, strongly manned, shot round the western promontory, and
the men, resting on their oars, turned towards the rock, and shouted yet
again. The whole town had been alarmed by the intelligence that two
little boys had straggled away in the morning to the rocks of the
southern Sutor, and had not found their way back. The precipices had
been a scene of frightful accidents from time immemorial, and it was at
once inferred that one other sad accident had been added to the number.
True, there were cases remembered of people having been tide-bound in
the Doocot Caves, and not much the worse in consequence; but as the
caves were inaccessible during neaps, we could not, it was said,
possibly be in them; and the sole remaining ground of hope was, that, as
had happened once before, only one of the two had been killed, and that
the survivor was lingering among the rocks, afraid to come home. And in
this belief, when the moon rose and the surf fell, the two boats had
been fitted out. It was late in the morning ere we reached Cromarty, but
a crowd on the beach awaited our arrival; and there were anxious-looking
lights glancing in the windows, thick and manifold; nay, such was the
interest elicited, that some enormously bad verses, in which the writer
described the incident a few days after, became popular enough to be
handed about in manuscript, and read at tea-parties by the _élite_ of
the town. Poor old Miss Bond, who kept the town boarding-school, got the
piece nicely dressed up, somewhat on the principle upon which Macpherson
translated Ossian; and at our first school-examination--proud and happy
day for the author!--it was recited with vast applause, by one of her
prettiest young ladies, before the assembled taste and fashion of
Cromarty.
FOOTNOTE:
[3]
"The beautiful blue damsel flies,
That fluttered round the jasmine steins,
Like wingéd flowers or flying gems."
PARADISE AND THE PEEL.
CHAPTER V.
"The wise
Shook their white aged heads o'er me, and said.
Of Such materials wretched men were made."--BYRON.
The report went abroad about this time, not without some foundation,
that Miss Bond purposed patronizing me. The copy of my verses which had
fallen into her hands--a genuine holograph--bore a-top a magnificent
view of the Doocot, in which horrid crags of burnt umber were perforated
by yawning caverns of Indian ink, and crested by a dense pine-forest of
sap-green; while vast waves blue on the one side and green on the other,
and bearing blotches of white lead a-top, rolled frightfully beneath.
And Miss Bond had concluded, it was said, that such a genius as that
evinced by the sketch and the "poem" for those sister arts of painting
and poesy in which she herself excelled, should not be left to waste
itself uncared for in the desert wilderness. She had published, shortly
before, a work, in two slim volumes, entitled, "Letters of a Village
Governess"--a curious kind of medley, little amenable to the ordinary
rules, but a genial book notwithstanding, with more heart than head
about it; and not a few of the incidents which it related had the merit
of being true. It was an unlucky merit for poor Miss Bond. She dated her
book from Fortrose, where she taught what was designated in the Almanac
as the boarding-school of the place, but which, according to Miss Bond's
own description, was the school of the "village governess." And as her
tales were found to be a kind of mosaics composed of droll bits of fact
picked up in the neighbourhood, Fortrose soon became considerably too
hot for her. She had drawn, under the over-transparent guise of the
niggardly Mrs. Flint, the skinflint wife of a "paper minister," who had
ruined at one fell blow her best silk dress, and a dozen of good eggs to
boot, by putting the eggs in her pocket when going out to a party, and
then stumbling over a stone. And, of course, Mrs. Skinflint and the Rev.
Mr. Skinflint, with all their blood-relations, could not be other than
greatly gratified to find the story furbished up in the printed form,
and set in fun. There were other stories as imprudent and as amusing--of
young ladies caught eavesdropping at their neighbours' windows; and of
gentlemen, ill at ease in their families, sitting soaking among vulgar
companions in the public-house; and so the authoress, shortly after the
appearance of her work, ceased to be the village governess of Fortrose,
and became the village governess of Cromarty.
It was on this occasion that I saw, for the first time, with mingled
admiration and awe, a human creature--not dead and gone, and merely a
printed name--that had actually published a book. Poor Miss Bond was a
kindly sort of person, fond of children, and mightily beloved by them in
turn; and, though keenly alive to the ludicrous, without a grain of
malice in her. I remember how, about this time, when, assisted by some
three or four boys more, I had succeeded in building a huge house, full
four feet long and three feet high, that contained us all, and a fire,
and a great deal of smoke to boot, Miss Bond the authoress came, and
looked in upon us, first through the little door, and then down through
the chimney, and gave us kind words, and seemed to enjoy our enjoyment
very much; and how we all deemed her visit one of the greatest events
that could possibly have taken place. She had been intimate with the
parents of Sir Walter Scott; and, on the appearance of Sir Walter's
first publication, the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," she had
taken a fit of enthusiasm, and written to him; and, when in the cold
paroxysm, and inclined to think she had done something foolish, had
received from Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, a characteristically
warm-hearted reply. She experienced much kindness at his hands ever
after; and when she herself became an author, she dedicated her book to
him. He now and then procured boarders for her; and when, after leaving
Cromarty for Edinburgh, she opened a school in the latter place, and got
on with but indifferent success, Sir Walter--though straggling with his
own difficulties at the time--sent her an enclosure of ten pounds, to
scare, as he said in his note, "the wolf from the door." But Miss Bond,
like the original of his own Jeanie Deans, was a "proud bodie;" and the
ten pounds were returned, with the intimation that the wolf had not yet
come to the door. Poor lady! I suspect he came to the door at last. Like
many other writers of books, her voyage through life skirted, for the
greater part of the way, the bleak lee-shore of necessity; and it cost
her not a little skilful steering at times to give the strand a
respectable offing. And in her solitary old age, she seemed to have got
fairly aground. There was an attempt made by some of her former pupils
to raise money enough to purchase for her a small annuity; but when the
design was in progress, I heard of her death. She illustrated in her
life the remark recorded by herself in her "Letters," as made by a
humble friend:--"It's no an easy thing, Mem, for a woman to go through
the world _without a head_," _i.e._, single and unprotected.
From some unexplained cause, Miss Bond's patronage never reached me. I
am sure the good lady intended giving me lessons in both drawing and
composition; for she had said it, and her heart was a kind one; but then
her time was too much occupied to admit of her devoting an occasional
hour to myself alone; and as for introducing me to her young-lady
classes, in my rough garments, ever greatly improved the wrong way by my
explorations in the ebb and the peat-moss, and frayed, at times, beyond
even my mother's ability of repair, by warping to the tops of great
trees, and by feats as a cragsman--that would have been a piece of
Jack-Cadeism, on which, then or now, no village governess could have
ventured. And so I was left to get on in verse and picture-making quite
in the wild way, without care or culture.
My schoolfellows liked my stories well enough--better at least, on most
occasions, than they did the lessons of the master; but, beyond the
common ground of enjoyment which these extempore compositions furnished
to both the "sennachie" and his auditors, our tracts of amusement lay
widely apart. I disliked, as I have said, the yearly cock-fight--found
no pleasure in cat-killing, or in teasing at nights, or on the street,
the cross-tempered, half-witted _eccentrics_ of the village--usually
kept aloof from the ordinary play-grounds, and very rarely mingled in
the old hereditary games. On the other hand, with the exception of my
little friend of the cave, who, even after that disastrous incident,
evinced a tendency to trust and follow me as implicitly as before, my
schoolmates cared as little for my amusements as I did for theirs; and,
having the majority on their side, they of course voted mine to be the
foolish ones. And certainly a run of ill-luck followed me in my sports
about this time, that did give some show of reason to their decision.
In the course of my book-hunting, I had fallen in with two old-fashioned
military treatises, part of the small library of a retired officer
lately deceased, of which the one entitled the "Military Medley,"
discussed the whole art of marshalling troops, and contained numerous
plans, neatly coloured, of battalions drawn up in all possible forms, to
meet all possible exigencies; while the other, which also abounded in
prints, treated of the noble science of fortification according to the
system of Vauban. I poured over both works with much perseverance; and,
regarding them as admirable toy-books, set myself to construct, on a
very small scale, some of the toys with which they specially dealt. The
sea-shore in the immediate neighbourhood of the town appeared to my
inexperienced eye an excellent field for the carrying on of a campaign.
The sea-sand I found quite coherent enough, when still moistened by the
waters of the receding tide, to stand up in the form of towers and
bastions, and long lines of rampart; and there was one of the commonest
of the Littorinidæ--_Littorina litoralis_, that in one of its varieties
is of a rich yellow colour, and in another of a bluish-green tint--which
supplied me with soldiers enough to execute all the evolutions figured
and described in the "Medley." The warmly-hued yellow shells represented
Britons in their scarlet--the more dingy ones, the French in their
uniforms of dirty blue; well-selected specimens of _Purpura lapillus_,
just tipped on their backs with a speck of paint, blue or red, from my
box, made capital dragoons; while a few dozens of the slender pyramidal
shells of _Turritella communis_ formed complete parks of artillery. With
such unlimited stores of the _matériel_ of war at my command, I was
enabled, more fortunate than Uncle Toby of old, to fight battles and
conduct retreats, assault and defend, build up fortifications, and then
batter them down again, at no expense at all; and the only drawback on
such a vast amount of advantage that I could at first perceive consisted
in the circumstance, that the shore was exceedingly open to observation,
and that my new amusements, when surveyed at a little distance, did
greatly resemble those of the very young children of the place, who used
to repair to the same arenaceous banks and shingle-beds, to bake
dirt-pies in the sand, or range lines of shells on little shelves of
stone, imitative of the crockery cupboard at home. Not only my
school-fellows, but also some of their parents, evidently arrived at the
conclusion that the two sets of amusements--mine and those of the little
children--were identical; for the elder folk said, that "in their time,
poor Francie had been such another boy, and every one saw what he had
come to;" while the younger, more energetic in their manifestations,
and more intolerant of folly, have even paused in their games of
marbles, or ceased spinning their tops, to hoot at me from a safe
distance. But the campaign went on; and I solaced myself by reflecting,
that neither the big folk nor the little folk could bring a battalion of
troops across a bridge of boats in the face of an enemy, or knew that a
regular fortification could be constructed on only a regular polygon.
I at length discovered however, that as a sea-shore is always a sloping
plane, and the Cromarty beach, in particular, a plane of a rather steep
slope, it afforded no proper site for a fortress fitted to stand a
protracted siege, seeing that, fortify the place as I might, it could be
easily commanded by batteries raised on the higher side. And so fixing
upon a grassy knoll among the woods, in the immediate neighbourhood of a
scaur of boulder clay, capped by a thick stratum of sand, as a much
better scene of operations, I took possession of the knoll somewhat
irregularly; and carrying to it large quantities of sand from the scaur,
converted it into the site of a magnificent stronghold. First I erected
an ancient castle, consisting of four towers built on a rectangular
base, and connected by straight curtains embrasured a-top. I then
surrounded the castle by outworks in the modern style, consisting of
greatly lower curtains than the ancient ones, flanked by numerous
bastions, and bristling with cannon of huge calibre, made of the jointed
stalks of the hemlock; while, in advance of these, I laid down ravelins,
horn-works, and tenailles. I was vastly delighted with my work: it
would, I was sure, be no easy matter to reduce such a fortress; but
observing an eminence in the immediate neighbourhood which could, I
thought, be occupied by a rather annoying battery, I was deliberating
how I might best take possession of it by a redoubt, when out started,
from behind a tree, the factor of the property on which I was
trespassing, and rated me soundly for spoiling the grass in a manner so
wantonly mischievous. Horn-work and half-moon, tower and bastion,
proved of no manner of effect in repelling an attack of a kind so little
anticipated. I did think that the factor, who was not only an
intelligent man, but had also seen much service in his day on the town
links, as the holder of a commission in the Cromarty volunteers, might
have perceived that I was labouring on scientific principles, and so
deem me worthy of some tolerance on that account; but I suppose he did
not; though, to be sure, his scold died out good-naturedly enough in the
end, and I saw him laugh as he turned away. But so it was, that in the
extremity of my mortification I gave up generalship and bastion-building
for the time; though, alas! my next amusement must have worn in the eyes
of my youthful compeers as suspicious an aspect as either.
My friend of the cave had lent me what I had never seen before--a fine
quarto edition of Anson's Voyages, containing the original prints (my
father's copy had only the maps); among the others, Mr. Brett's
elaborate delineation of that strangest of vessels, a proa of the
Ladrone Islands. I was much struck by the singularity of the
construction of a barque that, while its head and stern were exactly
alike, had sides that totally differed from each other, and that, with
the wind upon the beam, outsailed, it was said, all other vessels in the
world; and having the command of the little shop in which my Uncle Sandy
made occasional carts and wheelbarrows when unemployed abroad, I set
myself to construct a miniature proa, on the model given in the print,
and succeeded in fabricating a very extraordinary proa indeed. While its
lee side was perpendicular as a wall, its windward one, to which there
was an outrigger attached, resembled that of a flat-bottomed boat; head
and stern were exactly alike, so as to fit each for performing in turn
the part of either; a moveable yard, which supported the sail, had to be
shifted towards the end converted into the stern for the time, at each
tack; while the sail itself--a most uncouth-looking thing--formed a
scalene triangle. Such was the vessel--some eighteen inches long or
so--with which I startled from their propriety the mimic navigators of a
horse-pond in the neighbourhood--all very masterly critics in all sorts
of barques and barges known on the Scottish coast. According to
Campbell,
"'Twas a thing beyond
Description wretched: such a wherry,
Perhaps, ne'er ventured on a pond,
Or crossed a ferry."
And well did my fellows appreciate its extreme ludicrousness. It was
certainly rash to "venture" it on this especial "pond;" for, greatly to
the damage of the rigging, it was fairly pelted off, and I was sent to
test elsewhere its sailing qualities, which were, as I ascertained, not
very remarkable after all. And thus, after a manner so unworthy, were my
essays in strategy and barque-building received by a censorious age,
that judged ere it knew. Were I sentimental, which lucidly I am not, I
might well exclaim, in the very vein of Rousseau, Alas! it has been ever
the misfortune of my life that, save by a few friends, I have never been
understood!
I was evidently out-Francieing Francie; and the parents of my young
friend, who saw that I had acquired considerable influence over him, and
were afraid lest I should make another Francie of _him_, had become
naturally enough desirous to break off our intimacy, when there occurred
an unlucky accident, which served materially to assist them in the
design. My friend's father was the master of a large trading smack,
which, in war times, carried a few twelve-pounders, and was furnished
with a small magazine of powder and shot; and my friend having secured
for himself from the general stock, through the connivance of the
ship-boy, an entire cannon cartridge, containing some two or three
pounds of gunpowder, I was, of course, let into the secret, and invited
to share in the sport and the spoil We had a glorious day together in
his mother's garden: never before did such magnificent volcanoes break
forth out of mole-hills, or were plots of daisies and violets so
ruthlessly scorched and torn by the explosion of deep laid mines; and
though a few mishaps did happen to over-forward fingers, and to
eye-brows that were in the way, our amusements passed off innocuously on
the whole, and evening saw nearly the half of our precious store
unexhausted. It was garnered up by my friend in an unsuspected corner of
the garret in which he slept, and would have been safe, had he not been
seized, when going to bed, with a yearning desire to survey his treasure
by candle-light; when an unlucky spark from the flame exploded the
whole. He was so sadly burnt about the face and eyes as to be blind for
several days after; but, amid smoke and confusion, he gallantly bolted
his garret-door, and, while the inmates of the household, startled by
the shock and the noise, came rushing up stairs, sturdily refused to let
any of them in. Volumes of gunpowder reek issued from every crack and
cranny, and his mother and sisters were prodigiously alarmed. At length,
however, he capitulated--terms unknown; and I, next morning, heard with
horror and dismay of the accident. It had been matter of agreement
between us on the previous day, mainly in order to screen the fine
fellow of a ship-boy, that I should be regarded as the owner of the
powder; but here was a consequence on which I had not calculated; and
the strong desire to see my poor friend was dashed by the dread of being
held responsible by his parents and sisters for the accident. And so,
more than a week elapsed ere I could muster up courage enough to visit
him. I was coldly received by his mother, and, what vexed me to the
heart, coldly received by himself; and suspecting that he had been
making an ungenerous use of our late treaty, I took leave in high
dudgeon, and came away. My suspicions, however, wronged him: he had
stoutly denied, as I afterwards learned, that I had any share in the
powder; but his friends deeming the opportunity a good one for breaking
with me, had compelled him, very unwillingly, and after much
resistance, to give me up. And from this period more than two years
elapsed, though our hearts beat quick and high every time we
accidentally met, ere we exchanged a single word. On one occasion,
however, shortly after the accident, we did exchange letters. I wrote to
him from the school-form, when, of course, I ought to have been engaged
with my tasks, a stately epistle, in the style of the billets in the
"Female Quixote," which began, I remember, as follows:--"I once thought
I had a friend whom I could rely upon; but experience tells me he was
only nominal. For, had he been a real friend, no accident could have
interfered with, or arbitrary command annihilated, his affection," &c.,
&c. As I was rather an indifferent scribe at the time, one of the lads,
known as the "copperplate writers" of the class, made for me a fair copy
of my lucubration, full of all manner of elegant dashes, and in which
the spelling of every word was scrupulously tested by the dictionary.
And, in due course, I received a carefully engrossed note in reply, of
which the manual portion was performed by my old companion, but the
composition, as he afterwards told me, elaborated by some one else. It
assured me he was still my friend, but that there were "certain
circumstances" which would prevent us from meeting for the future on our
old terms. We were, however, destined to meet pretty often in the
future, notwithstanding; and narrowly missed going to the bottom
together many years after, in the Floating Manse, grown infirm in her
nether parts at the time, when he was the outed minister of Small Isles,
and I editor of the _Witness_ newspaper.
I had a maternal aunt long settled in the Highlands of Sutherland, who
was so much older than her sister, my mother, that, when nursing her
eldest boy, she had, when on a visit to the low country, assisted also
in nursing her. The boy had shot up into a very clever lad, who, having
gone to seek
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