These boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly
fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of
existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the
diversion of young gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red
and many of them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the
manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady
alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with flowers; nets
a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward parts; a smell of
fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of blowing sand at the
street-corners; shops with golf-balls and bottled lollipops; another
shop with penny pickwicks (that remarkable cigar) and the London
_Journal_, dear to me for its startling pictures, and a few novels,
dear for their suggestive names: such, as well as memory serves me,
were the ingredients of the town. These, you are to conceive, posted
on a split between two sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with
villas--enough for the boys to lodge in with their subsidiary parents,
not enough (not yet enough) to cocknify the scene: a haven in the
rocks in front: in front of that, a file of gray islets: to the left,
endless links and sand wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive
with popping rabbits and soaring gulls: to the right, a range of
seaward crags, one rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty
and ancient fortress on the brink of one; coves between--now charmed
into sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with
bursting surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and
southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and pungent
of the sea--in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward.
[Footnote 65: From "Across the Plains With Other Memories and Essays."
Copyright, 1892, by Charles Scribner's Sons.]
There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in
that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure. You might golf if you
wanted; but I seem to have been better employed. You might secrete
yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of elders, all
mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted here and there
by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold homes of anchorites.
To fit themselves for life, and with a special eye to acquire the art
of smoking, it was even common for the boys to harbor there; and you
might have seen a single penny pickwick, honestly shared in lengths
with a blunt knife, bestrew the glen with these apprentices. Again,
you might join our fishing parties, where we sat perched as thick as
solan geese, a covey of little anglers, boy and girl, angling over
each other's head, to the much entanglement of lines and loss of
podleys and consequent shrill recrimination--shrill as the geese
themselves. Indeed, had that been all, you might have done this often;
but tho fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be regarded
as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honor that a boy
should eat all that he had taken. Or again, you might climb the Law,
where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the buzzing wind, and
behold the face of many counties, and the smoke and spires of many
towns, and the sails of distant ships. You might bathe, now in the
flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically call our summer, now in a
gale of wind, with the sand scourging your bare hide, your clothes
thrashing abroad from underneath their guardian stone, the froth of
the great breakers casting you headlong ere it had drowned your knees.
Or you might explore the tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs,
when the very roots of the hills were for the nonce discovered;
following my leader from one group to another, groping in slippery
tangle for the wreck of ships, wading in pools after the abominable
creatures of the sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march
of the tide and the menaced line of your retreat. And then you might
go Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air;
digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a
fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there--if they were truly
apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us off
with some inferior and quite local fruit, capable of resolving, in the
neighborhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodin; or perhaps
pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sandwiches and visions in the
grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling turrets; or
clambering along the coasts, ear geans[66] (the worst, I must suppose,
in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that had taken root
under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of east wind, and
silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign among its bleak
surroundings that to eat of its produce was an adventure in itself.
[Footnote 66: Wild cherries.]
These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory
dwells upon the most, I have been all this while withholding. It was a
sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of our two
months' holiday there. Maybe it still flourishes in its native spot;
for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic forces inscrutable
to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in their due season, regular
like the sun and moon; and the harmless art of knucklebones has seen
the fall of the Roman empire and the rise of the United States. It may
still flourish in its native spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded;
for I tried myself to introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated
lamentably; its charm being quite local, like a country wine that
cannot be exported.
The idle manner of it was this:
Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and the
nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective
villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so
well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of Great Britain;
and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows
with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the
waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the
game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin;
they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers;
their use was naught; the pleasure of them merely fanciful; and yet a
boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The
fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I
suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes,
nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at
their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not
pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some
haunting thoughts of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when
lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had
found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the
pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a
bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.
When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you got
your lantern?" and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth, and
very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory
contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer, unless (like the
pole-cat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the
belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above
them--for the cabin was usually locked, or choose out some hollow of
the links where the wind might whistle overhead. There the coats would
be unbuttoned and the bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering
glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich
steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would
crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on the scaly bilges
of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with inappropriate talk.
Wo is me that I may not give some specimens--some of their foresights
of life, or deep inquiries into the rudiments of man and nature, these
were so fiery and so innocent, they were so richly silly, so
romantically young. But the talk, at any rate, was but a condiment;
and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the
lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in
the black night; the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned; not a ray
escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory
public: a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while deep
down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye
at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.