and hung about its neck on the sunny brae. People said it was not
thriving: I would not believe it. It was my companion. I often fed it
with milk; put my finger into its little toothless mouth, and made it
lap the invigorating and nourishing liquid. It had no parent, no friend,
in a manner, but me, and I was only five years old, in petticoats; a
very semblance of humanity; a thing to be strode over in his path by
mankind of ordinary stature. But there came a blight, a curse, a
dreadful change, over my dear and endearing pet. It was torn--ay,
dreadfully torn, by some nightly dog. When I first found it, it was
scarcely alive, lying bleeding; its white, and soft, and smooth skin
dragged in the mud, torn and untouchable. There was a knife applied; but
not to cure; it was to kill, to put out of pain. I could not stand it; I
went into convulsions, screamed, and almost tore myself to pieces. "My
lamb! my wee lambie! my dear, dear sweety!"--but it had passed, and I
was alone in my existence. But, oh! it was a fearful lesson which I had
learned--a dreadful truth which I had ascertained. Youth, as well as
age, is subject to death: dreadful!
There she sits in loveliness--there, there, in the midst of that hazel
bush, snug in her retreat, her yellow bill projecting over the brow of
her nest: smooth, black, and glittering are her feathers, and her eye is
the very balmy south of expression. Yet there is a watchfulness and a
timidity in her attitude and movement--she is not at ease, for that eye
has caught mine, as they protrude upon her betwixt two separated
branches; and, after two or three hesitating stirs, she is
out--off--away; but perched on a neighbouring bough, to mark and watch
my proceedings. And _he_, too, is there; _he_, her companion and
helpmate; he who was singing, or rather whistling, so loud on that tall
and overtopping birch; he who was making the setting sunlight glad with
his music--who was, doubtless, chanting of courtship, and love, and
union, and progeny. Yes! _he_ has left his branch and his sun; he has
dropped down from his elevation, to inquire into the cause of that
sudden chuckle, by which his lady bird has alarmed him. There are four
eyes upon me now, and all my proceedings are registered in two beating
bosoms. But the nest is full--it is full of life--of young life--of the
gorling in its hair, and incipient tail--of yellow gaping bills, all
thrust upwards, and crying, as loud as attitude and cheep can do, "Give,
give, give!" Surely Solomon had never seen a blackbird's nest with
young, else he had given it a place amongst his "gives!" This was my
first nest. It was discovered when I was only five years old; it was
visited every day and every hour; the young ones grew apace; they
feathered into blackness; they hopped from their abode; they flew, or
were essaying to do so, when--O world! world! why, why, is it so with
thee!--destruction came in a night, and the feathers of my young ones
were strewed around their once happy and crowded abode. There had been
other eyes upon them than mine. Yes! eyes to which the night is as
noonday--vile, green, elongated eyes, and sharp, penetrating, and
unsparing teeth, and claws, stretched, crooked, and clutching; and, in
short, the cat had devoured the whole family!--not one was left to the
distracted parents. I shall never, never forget their fluttering
movements, their chirpings, their restlessness, their ruffled feathers,
and all but human speech. There was revenge in my young bosom--mad and
terrible revenge. I snatched up the murderer--all unconscious as she was
of her fault. I ran with her, like a fury, to a deep pool in the burn. I
dashed her headlong into the waters--from which, of course, she readily
escaped, and, eyeing me with a look of extreme surprise from the
further bank, immediately vanished into the house. Though we were great
friends before this event--and I would gladly have renewed our
intercourse afterwards, when my passion had subsided--yet Pussy never
forgave me, at least I know that she never trusted me, for I could never
catch her again.
That's the pool--the very bumbling pool, where we bathed, and stood
beneath the cascade, for a whole summer's day. There were more than one
or two either--there were many of us; for we collected as the day
advanced, and still those who were retreating, upon encountering those
who were advancing, would turn with them again, and renew their
immersions. It was summer--and such summer as youth (for I was only six)
alone can experience--it was one long blaze of noontide radiance. The
sun stationary, as in the valley of Jehosophat; the trees, green, leafy,
shady, rejoicing; the very cattle dancing in upon the cooling element;
and the grasshopper still dumb. The heat was intense, yet not
overpowering; for we were naked--naked as were Adam and Eve prior to sin
and shame--naked as is Apollo Belvidere, or the Venus de Medicis. We
were Nature's children, and she was kind to us; she gave us air that was
balm; sunbeams that wooed us from the pool; and water again that enticed
us from the open air! What a day it was of fun and frolic, and splash,
and squatter, and confusion! Now jumping from the brow into the deep;
now standing beneath the Grey Mare's Tail, the flashing cascade; now
laving--like Diana on Actaeon--the water from the pool on each other's
limbs and faces; now circling along the green bank, in sportive chase
and mimic fray, and again couching neck deep in the pool. But the awful
dinnle is on the breeze; the black south hath advanced rapidly upon
meridian day; the white and swollen clouds have boiled up into spongy
foam; and there runs a light blue vapour over the inky cloud beneath.
Hist!--whisht!--it's _thunner_! and, ere many minutes have escaped, we
are each quaking every limb at our own firesides.
Many recent winters have made me cry, What has become of winter? I
wished Government would fit out an expedition to go in quest of him. He
must have been couching somewhere, the funny old rogue, behind the Pole;
he must have been coquetting with the beauties of Greenland or Nova
Zembla. He has, last season, condescended to give us a glimpse of his
icy beard and hoary temples. Oh, I like the old fellow dearly!--but it
is the old fellow only. As to him of modern times, I know not what to
make of him--a blustering, blubbering, braggadocio; making darkness his
pavilion, for no other purpose than to throw pailfuls of water on the
heads of women and children; letting out his colds and influenzas from
his Baltic bags, and terrifying our citizens with "auld wives," broken
slates, and shivered tiles. But my winter of 1794--what a delightful
companion he was! He did his work genteelly; his drift was a matter of a
few hours; but they were hours of vigorous and terrible exertion. Some
ten score of sheep, and some twenty shepherds, perished within a limited
range, in one wild and outrageous night. It was, indeed, sublime--even
to me, a youth of eight years of age, it was fearfully sublime. Can
anything be more beautiful than falling and newly-fallen snow. _There_
you see it above, and to a great height, shaping into varied and
convolving forms. It nears, it nears, it nears, and lights in your
little hand, a feathery diamond, a crystallized vapour, an evanescent
loveliness! But the tempest has sounded an assail, and the broadened
flakes are comminuted into blinding drift--the earth beneath blows up to
heaven, whilst the heaven thunders its vengeance upon the earth. The
restless snow whirls, eddies, rises, disperses, accumulates. Man cannot
breathe in the thick and toiling atmosphere. The wreaths swell into
rounded and polished forms, and, on a sudden, disappear. The air has
cleared, has stilled, and the sharp and consolidating frost has
commenced. What a sea of celestial brightness! The earth wrapped in an
alabaster mantle, the folds of which are the folds of beauty and
enchantment. Days of glory, and nights of splendour. The moon, in her
own blue heaven, contracted to a small circumference of clear, gaseous
light; the hills, the hollows, the valleys, the muirs, the mosses, the
woodlands, the rocky eminences, the houses, the churchyards, the
gardens, the whole of external nature beneath her, giving up again into
the biting and twinkling air an arrowy radiance of far-spread light.
Here and there the course of a mountain torrent, or of a winding river,
marked with a jagged and broken line of black. The bay of the house-dog
heard far off--the sound of the curlers' sport, composed of a mixture of
moanings--the "sweep," the "guard," the "stroke," the homebred and
hearty shout and guffaw--the Babel mixture of noises, coming softened
and attuned from the distant pond. It is the "how-dum-dead" of winter.
Christmas has passed, with its happiness wished and enjoyed--it is the
last night of the year; long and fondly-expected Hogmanay! We are
abroad, amongst the farm-houses and cottars' huts--we pass nothing that
emits smoke. Our disguises are fearful, even to ourselves, as we
encounter each other unexpectedly at corners. Cakes, cheese, and all
manner of eatables are ours, even to profusion. And who would not endure
much of life, to have such exquisite fan renewed!
But my first trout!--killed--fairly landed out of the water--dancing
about in all its speckled beauty on the green bank: this was indeed an
event--this was an achievement of no ordinary interest. Fishing! to thee
I owe more of exquisite enjoyment than to any other amusement whatever.
I am a mountain child--born, and nursed, and trotted about from my
cradle on the winding banks of a bonny burn, through whose waters there
looked up eyes, and there waved fins and tails. I have taken, again and
again, in after life, the wings of the morning, and have made my
dwelling with the stunted thorn, the corbie nest, the croaking raven,
the willie-wagtail, and the plover, and the snipe, and the lapwing. I
have seen mist--glorious mist!--in all its fantastic shapes, and
openings and closings, from the dense crawling blanket of wet to the
bright, sun-penetrated, rent, and dispersing tatterment of haze. I have
studied all manner of cloud, from the swollen, puffed up, and rolling
castellation, to the smooth, level, and widespread overshadowing. The
breezes have been my companions all along. I could scan their merits and
demerits with a fisher's eye, from the rough and sudden puff, urging the
pool into ridges of ripple, to the steady, soft, and balmy breath that
merely brought the surface into a slight commotion. Burns, too, I have
studied, and streams, and gullets, and weils, and clay-brows, and
bumbling pools. I have fished in the Caple with Willie Herdman. (See
Blackwood, volume sixth.) I have fished in the Turrit with Stoddart.
(See his admirable book on Angling.) But the true happiness of a fisher
is solitude. Oh, for a fine morning in April, fresh, breezy, and
dark!--a mountain glen, through which the Dar or the Brawn threads its
mazy descent; the bottom clear, and purified by a recent flood; the
waters not yet completely subsided--something betwixt clear and muddy--a
light blue, and a still lighter brown.
Not a shepherd, nor a sheep, nor a living creature within sight--nothing
but the sound of the passing stream, and the plash of the hooked and
landing trout. A whole immensity of unexhausted stream unfurled before
me; the day yet in its nonage; my pockets stuffed with stomach store;
my mind at ease; my tongue ever and anon repeating, audibly--"Now for
it, this will do, there he has it, this way, sir, this way; nay, no
tricks upon travellers--out, out you _must_ come--so, so, my pretty
fellow, take it gently, take it gently!" But I am forgetting my first
trout in the thousand and tens of thousands which have succeeded it. I
had a knife--I know not how I got it; perhaps I bought it at a Thornhill
fair, with a sixpence which the guidman of Auchincairn gave me as my
fairing, or perhaps--but no matter; as Wordsworth would say, "I had a
knife!" and this knife was my humble servant in all manner of duties; it
was, in fact, my slave; it would cut bourtree, and fashion scout guns;
it would make saugh whistles; it would fashion bows and arrows; it would
pare cheese, and open hazel nuts; it was more generally useful than
Hudibras' sword--and I felt its value. In fact, what was I without my
knife? A soldier without his gun, a fiddler without his fiddle, a tailor
without his shears. And yet this very knife, dear and useful as it was
to me, I parted with--I gave it away, I fairly bartered it for a
bait-hook with a horse-hair line attached to it. But then I had seen,
and seen it for the first time, a trout caught with this very hook and
line. Having a hook and line, I cut myself, from an adjoining wood, a
rowan-tree fishing-rod, which might serve a double purpose, protecting
me from the witches, and aiding me in catching trout. Away I went, "owre
muirs and mosses mony o'," to the glorious Caple, of which I had heard
much. I baited my hook with some difficulty; for worms, whatever boys
may be, are not fond of _the sport_. I stood alongside of the deep black
pool. I saw the deception alight in the water, and heard the plump; it
sank, and sank, by a certain law, which philosophers have named
gravitation; it became first pale-white, then yellow, then almost red,
as it sank away into the dark profundity of mossy water. It lay still
and motionless for a few instants. At last it moved; ye powers! it cuts
the water like an edged instrument--it pulls--pulls strongly. The top of
the rod touches the surface of the pool--something must be done--I am
all trepidation. But, by mere strength of pulling and of tackle, a large
yellow-wamed, black-backed fellow lies panting on the sand bank at the
foot of the pool.
"And its hame, hame, hame,
Fain wad I be;
And it's hame, hame, hame,
To my ain mammie!"
I ran home with all possible rapidity; and displayed, on a very large
pewter plate, my first trout, to my kind and affectionate parent. My
happiness was completed.
The woods!--I was born in the woods; man lives originally in the
primeval forests, with the exception, perhaps, of the Arab, the
Babylonian, and Egyptian; wherever there was sufficient soil and
suitable climate, there was wood, from Lapland to Capetown, from the Bay
of Biscay to the Yellow Sea. The American forests still exist, where
even the axe of European civilization has not reached them. There woods
are natural to man; he turns to them as to something, he cannot well
tell how or why, congenial to his nature. At least so I have felt it,
and feel it still in my recollections of early life. Plantations are
stiff and artificial, generally consisting of a dense field of regular
similarity; but natural wood, the offspring of our own soil, the
indigenous plants of Scotland--the birch, for example, with its bending
and elegant twigs, its white stem, and grateful fragrance; the eternal
oak, with its leafy shade; the tough ash, with its pointed leaf; the
lowly hazel, with its straight stems and fragrant nuts; the saugh, the
willow, the thorn-sloe, the haw, the elder, the bourtree, the crabtree,
the briar, and the bramble--all these consociate lovingly, and actually
did consociate around, and almost over, the humble but snug cot where I
first drew breath. There, my first herald of day was the song of the
linnet, thrush, or blackbird; there, my first efforts were made in
gaining the top of some little ash or birch; there, my first riches
consisted in a few pints of ripened and browned nuts, kept in the leg of
a footless stocking, against the ensuing Halloween. But Halloween has
now become a mere name--_et preterea nihil_, still _stat nominis umbra_,
sufficient to make me recollect with delight the exquisite pleasure
which I enjoyed in anticipating as well as in observing this festival.
The crabtree yielded its reddest and ripest fruit for the occasion; a
casual apple was hooked over the hedge of the castle orchard for the
same purpose; but, above and beyond all, nuts were gathered, dried and
stored away into sly corners and out-of-the-way places. What amusement
so delightful as nut-gathering! There they hang to the afternoon sun,
brown and ready to escape from their husks or shells. There are twosome
clusters, and threesome clusters; and if you could reach without shaking
that topmost branch (but there is the difficulty and the danger), you
may even secure a twelvesome cluster--a glorious knot of lovely
associates, that would crumble from their abodes into your hands like
dried leaves! You pass on from bush to bush; but you have been
anticipated. Will or Tam, or Jock or Jamie, or all four, have been there
before you, and have left you nothing but a scanty gleaning. Here and
there, you are enabled to extract from the centre of a leafy shade, an
ill-ripened, because an unsound, single nut, which serves no better
purpose than to break your jaws with its emptiness, in cracking it. But
you push away into the interior--the _terra incognita_ of the woodland;
and, standing out by itself, aired and sunned all over, you find a
little branch of scroggs, stinted and ill-leaved, but really covered all
over with the most exquisite fruitage. Long, large, are the nuts you
have thus acquired; and you chuckle inwardly, as you contemplate a
prize which has been reserved for your exclusive use. With what despatch
are cluster after cluster accumulated into handfuls, and then again into
pocketfuls, and then, at last, into cap, hat, or bonnetfuls, till you
become a kind of shellicoat, a walking _nuttery_, a thing of husks and
kernels! The voice of your companions is loud and frequent, in the
language of inquiry into the state of your success; but you preserve a
deep silence, or answer prevaricatingly, by, "you have got a few--not
many--very bad place this," &c. &c. At last you come upon them with the
astonishment of display, and expose your treasure with ineffable
feelings of triumph. You have distanced them all. Your Halloween fortune
is made--you are a happy being.
But Halloween comes at last--Scotland's Halloween--Burns' Halloween--the
Halloween of centuries upon centuries--of the Celt amidst his mountains,
the Saxon in his valley, the Druid in his woods, King James the First in
his palace--and old Janet Smith in her humble cottage. It was at Janet
Smith's that I held the first Halloween of which I have any distinct
recollection. There was a kind of couthiness about old Janet, which made
her hearth the resort of all the young lads and lasses, boys and girls,
around. On Halloween, Janet had on her best head-gear, her check apron,
and clean neck napkin.
We had such burning of nuts, such pu'ing of stocks, such singing of
songs, such gibing, laughing, cracking, tale-telling, and, to crown all,
such a gallant bowl of punch, made from a sonsy greybeard, which the
young men had taken care to store previously with the needful, that I
went home half crazy, and, my mother affirmed, continued so for several
days to come.
Ye gods! what superstitious notions peopled my brain ever since! I
recollect such fears about the invisible world becoming visible--I
walked amidst a multitude of unseen terrors, ever ready to burst the
casement of immateriality, and to stand, naked, confessed, in material
semblance, before me. There was the fairy, the inhabitant of the green
unploughed knowe, the green-coated imp, intent on child-stealing, or
rather barter, and jingling her bridle through the high air on
Halloween; there was the ghost, awful, solemn, and admonishing, pointing
with the finger to buried treasure or murder glen; there was the wraith,
little less terrible, and clothed in a well-known presence,
prognosticating death or sore affliction; there was the death-watch,
distinctly heard tick, ticking, all night long, in the bed-post; there
were the blue lights seen in round spots on the bed-head, on the very
night when three lads and three lasses perished in the boat; there was
the muckle deil himself, driving in a post-chaise, over the
"chaise-craig," or panting, like a bull-dog, at the nightly traveller's
feet; and, over and above all these, was "Will o' the Wisp," skipping
about from one side of the moss to the other, and always placing itself
betwixt you and your home.
"D'ye see that?" said my cousin, Nelly Laurie, a girl of eighteen, to
me, when my years could be reckoned by the number of the muses.
"What! what is it!" I exclaimed; and my attention was directed towards a
moss, or morass, through which our footpath lay, on our way home, about
ten o'clock of a dark, damp, and cloudy night.
"There! there it's again!"
There is something in the word "it" most indefinitely terrific. Had she
said _he_ or _she_, or even that ghost, or that wraith, or that bogle,
it would not have been half so startling; but "it"--do you see it?--see
a thing without a name, a definition--a mere object, shorn of its
accidents or qualities! This is indeed most awful. With fear and
trembling, I lifted up mine eyes, and beheld--O mercy, mercy!--a light
in the middle of the moss, where no light should have been; and it was
floating and playing about, blue as indigo, and making the darkness
around it visible. My joints relaxed, and I fell to the earth, incapable
of motion. I was a mere bundle of loose and unconnected bones, sinews,
and muscles. My cousin stood over me, incapable of deciding what would
be done; at last, it was discovered that to advance homewards was better
than to retrograde, as we were already more than half-way on our course.
I was instructed to repeat, and to continue repeating, aloud, the Lord's
prayer; whilst she, on whose shoulders I lay like a dead sheep,
continued to give audible note to the tune of the twenty-third psalm. It
was, indeed, an odd concert for the devil, or his emissary, Mr. William
yclept "of the Wisp," to listen to; for, whilst I was roaring out, in
perfect desperation, "Our Father which art in Heaven," she was
articulating, in a clear and overpowering tone, "The Lord's my
shepherd;" whilst I slipt into "Hallowed be thy name," she advanced
with, "I'll not want--he makes me down to lie!"--and, sure enough, down
_both of us lay_, with a vengeance, in the midst of a moss-hole, into
which, from terror and the darkness of the night, we had inadvertently
plunged. "What's the meaning of all this, sirs!" exclaimed a well-known
voice. It was my mother's, God bless her! I clung to her like grim
death, and never quitted my hold till I was snugly lodged above the
fire, near to the lamp, and with dog, cat, my cousin, and my mother,
betwixt me and the dark doorway passage! I did not get a sound sleep for
months and years afterwards! Such are thy miseries, unhallowed, unmanly
superstition! Disease may relax the body and enervate the whole frame;
but thou art the disease of the soul, the fever of the brain.
Misfortunes may be borne--pain must be endured till it is cured--but
superstition such as _this_, is neither endurable nor curable. I am not
yet completely cured of it, now that I have entered my sixtieth year.
Were you to send me into an empty, dark church, at midnight, and through
a surrounding churchyard, peopled with the bodies of the dead, I durst
not go, though you gave me large sums of money. And is my judgment or
reason in fault? Not at all; it is my feelings, my moral nature; my very
blood has got such a blue tinge that I verily believe it would look like
the blue ink I am writing with, were it caught in a tea-cup! Sir Walter
Scott was bit, too, and so are nine-tenths of the _living_, though they
won't allow it. It has now become, like latent heat, an unseen agency;
but it still acts, and powerfully, on civilized, and even learned man!