no less than to ‘soothe’ it. Now and then the dancers would cease a
while, and seated in benches round the room, would listen in silence to
a song. A broad-faced, dull-eyed, young shepherd, with more energy than
finish, sang _My Hielan’ Hills_, and a dark pawky little man recited
out of a corner very slyly, _Rabbin Tamson’s Smiddy_. _The Laird o’
Cockpen_, _Why Left I my Hame?_ and _Willie brewed a Peck o’ Maut_,
were also given; the last named being received with great enthusiasm.
There was little culpable indulgence in whisky that I observed. This
may have been owing to the judicious arrangements of the host for
refreshing his guests during the evening with the national ‘toddy’
instead of the more potent undiluted spirit. Several times a tray was
handed round, bearing piles of bread-and-cheese, and a large jug full
of the resuscitating beverage; and though the latter in some cases was
a little freely partaken of, there was no unseemly manifestation of its
effects.
And thus, through the warm hours of that summer’s night, with lonely
hills listening in their dreams, the wedding festival of the shepherd’s
daughter glided merrily along. The sun had been already near two hours
climbing up the east, and the pale morning light had once more shot
its rays into many a glen and hollow, when these mountain merry-makers
ceased their saturnalia. The evening before, they had assembled for
the feast trim, fresh, rosy, and buoyant; and when the ‘garish day’
sent his mocking light through the narrow window-panes and shone upon
the forms of the dancers, they looked rosy and buoyant still. The
smoothness had departed from their hair and the aspect of freshness
from their garments; frills and ribbons had been dragged awry; but
the colour was as fresh in their cheeks, and their eyes were quite as
lustrous as when eight hours before they had stamped and bobbed and
‘_hooch’d_’ through their first Scotch reel. The most of them would
tramp their half-dozen miles and more back over the hills, and go
through the usual labours of the day with hardly a symptom of fatigue.
When all had come out of the cottage, and immediately before the
separation, about three-fourths of the party congregating on the
little knoll before the door where the bride’s-maid had stood with
the handkerchief on the previous evening, sent forth a long-drawn,
far-reverberating cheer. Then followed a tumultuous shaking of hands,
with many a kindly spoken farewell; and then finally they departed,
each group on its own path, for their wide-scattered farms and
cottages. Some days would pass during which the memory of the wedding
would be continually in their thoughts, forming a mental picture that
gave them solace in the midst of outward dreariness. But gradually the
lines of the picture would lose their vividness, and it would be less
frequently recurred to by the fancy, less fervently yearned after by
the heart. Emotions that had been stirred by that night’s entertainment
would after a while subside again; the old duties would present
themselves anew, calling for the old labour and attention; and harmony
would be again established between the inward life and the outward
circumstances.
The newly married couple had arranged to stay at the cottage till the
afternoon, and then to set out for their future home, which lay in the
adjoining parish, and about ten miles away. That parish in its whole
extent was high-lying and pastoral; and therefore the dwelling to which
they were going would be in every way as lonely as the one from which
they were departing. From what I had noticed of the bride’s mother, she
would undoubtedly feel melancholy over the losing of her daughter,
the last that had remained with her out of five; and I can think of
her that afternoon, when the two young people had left her, slipping
out to the door, and having shaded her eyes with her hand, taking a
far look at them as they passed out of her sight among the hills.
Then she would walk pensively back into her now dull-looking kitchen,
and perhaps ponder with some sadness about becoming old. The bride
and bridegroom would arrive at their abode in the gray hours of the
evening, where some relative would be waiting to receive them. It would
be such another cottage as the one we have been visiting; and there, in
the wide wilderness, untamed nature on every side of them, they would
settle down to await the domesticities that fate might send.
Is there not something almost awe-striking in the thought of civilised
human beings settling down to face perhaps half a century of life in
solitudes like these, all unconscious of the mighty pulse-beats of the
world they dwell in? It is to be presumed that this red-haired Briton
who has just led home his bride across ten miles of moorland, possesses
a fair share of practical energy and some fragments of intellect; he
has the faculty of loving his fellow-men and of gaining happiness,
perhaps also wisdom, from hours of bright social intercourse. If he
were now planted amid stimulating circumstances, a fine moral nature
might possibly be developed by the time his years were through. But
immured in this mountain fastness, away from human din, his mind will
probably never be unfolded to the least self-conscious effort; and he
will leave life at seventy little advanced in intellectual attainment
on what he was at twenty-five. For although Nature is an open book,
teeming over with wise and great lessons, it is only after toiling
through initiatory stages of culture that we can intelligently read
her book, or even believe that it exists. The unlettered shepherd
nestling in her shaggy bosom, unless she has gifted him with genius,
rarely dreams of the truths that she is symbolically publishing around
him. And I think of the future life of him whose marriage we have
been celebrating as something far different from that of a home-bred
philosopher or poet. Performing his simple pastoral duties with honesty
of purpose, I can still imagine his life to be monotonous, irksome,
and stagnant; having in it many hours of idleness unillumined by
neighbourly greetings or the mystic gleams of intelligent research.
As he goes his rounds in summer-time, he will see the wide stillness
of morning upon the hills; in winter he will have to battle with the
fury of the storm. The gloaming will find him cultivating an unfruitful
garden, or gathering hay out of morasses for his cow, or sitting over
his peat-fire knitting homespun stockings or reading legends of the
Covenanters. Now and then a distant neighbour, leading a life as lonely
as himself, or some wandering angler, will drop in upon him, and be
treated to a hospitable meal. But he will hardly see another face the
whole year through, except perchance on Sunday—until the ‘clipping’
season comes round, when he will be called away, now in one direction
now in another, to days of social labour.
Some day, let us hope, a wee body will appear upon his hearth—his own
offspring, to be loved, nourished, and instructed; and then probably
there will come another and another till a considerable family is
grouped around him. The care and training of these children will be
a kind of education to himself. The nursing of them will not fail to
develop the womanliness of the wife. Let us hope that she may have
much of a mother’s happiness and little of a mother’s sorrow, and
that rosy health will be ever upon her hearth! May her boys grow up
broad-shouldered and manly; may her girls be handsome, modest, and
fair; and some day or other, a quarter of a century hence, may there
be another moorland wedding, when those of us who have assisted at the
present one, fiddler and dancers, writer and readers, shall be wearing
away or perhaps gathered to ‘the land o’ the leal.’