ADVENTURES IN THE HIGHLANDS.
1841.
A Fright--Fletcher's Eccentricities--The
Trossachs--The Travelers' Guide--A Comical
Picture--Highland Accommodation--Grand
Scenery--Changes in Route--A
Waterfall--Entrance to Glencoe--The Pass of
Glencoe--Loch Leven--A July Evening--Postal
Service at Loch Earn Head--The Maid of the
Inn--Impressions of Glencoe--An
Adventure--Torrents swollen with
Rain--Dangerous Traveling--Incidents and
Accidents--Broken-down Bridge--A Fortunate
Resolve--Post-boy in Danger--The Rescue--Narrow
Escape--A Highland Inn and Inmates--English
Comfort at Dalmally--Dinner at Glasgow
proposed--Eagerness for Home.
FROM Loch Earn Head Dickens wrote on Monday, the 5th of July, having
reached it, "wet through," at four that afternoon: "Having had a great
deal to do in a crowded house on Saturday night at the theatre, we left
Edinburgh yesterday morning at half-past seven, and traveled, with
Fletcher for our guide, to a place called Stewart's Hotel, nine miles
further than Callender. We had neglected to order rooms, and were
obliged to make a sitting-room of our own bed-chamber; in which my
genius for stowing furniture away was of the very greatest service.
Fletcher slept in a kennel with three panes of glass in it, which formed
part and parcel of a window; the other three panes whereof belonged to a
man who slept on the other side of the partition. He told me this
morning that he had had a nightmare all night, and had screamed
horribly, he knew. The stranger, as you may suppose, hired a gig and
went off at full gallop with the first glimpse of daylight.[40] Being
very tired (for we had not had more than three hours' sleep on the
previous night) we lay till ten this morning, and at half-past eleven
went through the Trossachs to Loch Katrine, where I walked from the
hotel after tea last night. It is impossible to say what a glorious
scene it was. It rained as it never does rain anywhere but here. We
conveyed Kate up a rocky pass to go and see the island of the Lady of
the Lake, but she gave in after the first five minutes, and we left
her, very picturesque and uncomfortable, with Tom" (the servant they had
brought with them from Devonshire Terrace) "holding an umbrella over her
head, while we climbed on. When we came back, she had gone into the
carriage. We were wet through to the skin, and came on in that state
four-and-twenty miles. Fletcher is very good-natured, and of
extraordinary use in these outlandish parts. His habit of going into
kitchens and bars, disconcerting at Broadstairs, is here of great
service. Not expecting us till six, they hadn't lighted our fires when
we arrived here; and if you had seen him (with whom the responsibility
of the omission rested) running in and out of the sitting-room and the
two bedrooms with a great pair of bellows, with which he distractedly
blew each of the fires out in turn, you would have died of laughing. He
had on his head a great Highland cap, on his back a white coat, and cut
such a figure as even the inimitable can't depicter. . . .
"The inns, inside and out, are the queerest places imaginable. From the
road, this one," at Loch Earn Head, "looks like a white wall, with
windows in it by mistake. We have a good sitting-room, though, on the
first floor: as large (but not as lofty) as my study. The bedrooms are
of that size which renders it impossible for you to move, after you have
taken your boots off, without chipping pieces out of your legs. There
isn't a basin in the Highlands which will hold my face; not a drawer
which will open, after you have put your clothes in it; not a
water-bottle capacious enough to wet your toothbrush. The huts are
wretched and miserable beyond all description. The food (for those who
can pay for it) 'not bad,' as M. would say: oat-cake, mutton,
hotch-potch, trout from the loch, small beer bottled, marmalade, and
whiskey. Of the last-named article I have taken about a pint to-day. The
weather is what they call 'soft'--which means that the sky is a vast
water-spout that never leaves off emptying itself; and the liquor has no
more effect than water. . . . I am going to work to-morrow, and hope before
leaving here to write you again. The elections have been sad work
indeed. That they should return Sibthorp and reject Bulwer, is, by
Heaven, a national disgrace. . . . I don't wonder the devil flew over
Lincoln. The people were far too addle-headed, even for him. . . . I don't
bore you with accounts of Ben this and that, and Lochs of all sorts of
names, but this is a wonderful region. The way the mists were stalking
about to-day, and the clouds lying down upon the hills; the deep glens,
the high rocks, the rushing waterfalls, and the roaring rivers down in
deep gulfs below; were all stupendous. This house is wedged round by
great heights that are lost in the clouds; and the loch, twelve miles
long, stretches out its dreary length before the windows. In my next I
shall soar to the sublime, perhaps; in this here present writing I
confine myself to the ridiculous. But I am always," etc. etc.
His next letter bore the date of "Ballechelish, Friday evening, ninth
July, 1841, half-past nine, P.M.," and described what we had often
longed to see together, the Pass of Glencoe. . . . "I can't go to bed
without writing to you from here, though the post will not leave this
place until we have left it and arrived at another. On looking over the
route which Lord Murray made out for me, I found he had put down
Thursday next for Abbotsford and Dryburgh Abbey, and a journey of
seventy miles besides! Therefore, and as I was happily able to steal a
march upon myself at Loch Earn Head, and to finish in two days what I
thought would take me three, we shall leave here to-morrow morning; and,
by being a day earlier than we intended at all the places between this
and Melrose (which we propose to reach by Wednesday night), we shall
have a whole day for Scott's house and tomb, and still be at York on
Saturday evening, and home, God willing, on Sunday. . . . We left Loch Earn
Head last night, and went to a place called Killin, eight miles from it,
where we slept. I walked some six miles with Fletcher after we got
there, to see a waterfall; and truly it was a magnificent sight, foaming
and crashing down three great steeps of riven rock; leaping over the
first as far off as you could carry your eye, and rumbling and foaming
down into a dizzy pool below you, with a deafening roar. To-day we have
had a journey of between 50 and 60 miles, through the bleakest and most
desolate part of Scotland, where the hill-tops are still covered with
great patches of snow, and the road winds over steep mountain-passes,
and on the brink of deep brooks and precipices. The cold all day has
been _intense_, and the rain sometimes most violent. It has been
impossible to keep warm, by any means; even whiskey failed; the wind was
too piercing even for that. One stage of ten miles, over a place called
the Black Mount, took us two hours and a half to do; and when we came to
a lone public called the King's House, at the entrance to Glencoe,--this
was about three o'clock,--we were wellnigh frozen. We got a fire
directly, and in twenty minutes they served us up some famous kippered
salmon, broiled; a broiled fowl; hot mutton ham and poached eggs;
pancakes; oat-cake; wheaten bread; butter; bottled porter; hot water,
lump sugar, and whiskey; of which we made a very hearty meal. All the
way, the road had been among moors and mountains, with huge masses of
rock, which fell down God knows where, sprinkling the ground in every
direction, and giving it the aspect of the burial-place of a race of
giants. Now and then we passed a hut or two, with neither window nor
chimney, and the smoke of the peat fire rolling out at the door. But
there were not six of these dwellings in a dozen miles; and anything so
bleak and wild, and mighty in its loneliness, as the whole country, it
is impossible to conceive. Glencoe itself is perfectly _terrible_. The
pass is an awful place. It is shut in on each side by enormous rocks
from which great torrents come rushing down in all directions. In
amongst these rocks on one side of the pass (the left as we came) there
are scores of glens, high up, which form such haunts as you might
imagine yourself wandering in, in the very height and madness of a
fever. They will live in my dreams for years--I was going to say as long
as I live, and I seriously think so. The very recollection of them makes
me shudder. . . . Well, I will not bore you with my impressions of these
tremendous wilds, but they really are fearful in their grandeur and
amazing solitude. Wales is a mere toy compared with them."
The further mention of his guide's whimsical ways may stand, for it
cannot now be the possible occasion of pain or annoyance, or of
anything but very innocent laughter:
"We are now in a bare white house on the banks of Loch Leven, but in a
comfortably-furnished room on the top of the house,--that is, on the
first floor,--with the rain pattering against the window as though it
were December, the wind howling dismally, a cold damp mist on everything
without, a blazing fire within half way up the chimney, and a most
infernal Piper practicing under the window for a competition of pipers
which is to come off shortly. . . . The store of anecdotes of Fletcher with
which we shall return will last a long time. It seems that the F.'s are
an extensive clan, and that his father was a Highlander. Accordingly,
wherever he goes, he finds out some cotter or small farmer who is his
cousin. I wish you could see him walking into his cousins' curds and
cream, and into their dairies generally! Yesterday morning, between
eight and nine, I was sitting writing at the open window, when the
postman came to the inn (which at Loch Earn Head is the post-office) for
the letters. He is going away, when Fletcher, who has been writing
somewhere below-stairs, rushes out, and cries, 'Halloa there! Is that
the Post?' 'Yes!' somebody answers. 'Call him back!' says Fletcher:
'Just sit down till I've done, _and don't go away till I tell
you_.'--Fancy! The General Post, with the letters of forty villages in a
leathern bag! . . . To-morrow at Oban. Sunday at Inverary. Monday at
Tarbet. Tuesday at Glasgow (and that night at Hamilton). Wednesday at
Melrose. Thursday at ditto. Friday I don't know where. Saturday at York.
Sunday--how glad I shall be to shake hands with you! My love to Mac. I
thought he'd have written once. Ditto to Macready. I had a very nice and
welcome letter from him, and a most hearty one from Elliotson. . . . P.S.
Half asleep. So excuse drowsiness of matter and composition. I shall be
full of joy to meet another letter from you! . . . P.P.S. They speak Gaelic
here, of course, and many of the common people understand very little
English. Since I wrote this letter, I rang the girl up-stairs, and gave
elaborate directions (you know my way) for a pint of sherry to be made
into boiling negus; mentioning all the ingredients one by one, and
particularly nutmeg. When I had quite finished, seeing her obviously
bewildered, I said, with great gravity, 'Now you know what you're going
to order?' 'Oh, yes. Sure.' 'What?'--a pause--'Just'--another
pause--'Just plenty of _nutbergs_!'"
The impression made upon him by the Pass of Glencoe was not overstated
in this letter. It continued with him as he there expressed it; and as
we shall see hereafter, even where he expected to find Nature in her
most desolate grandeur on the dreary waste of an American prairie, his
imagination went back with a higher satisfaction to Glencoe. But his
experience of it is not yet completely told. The sequel was in a letter
of two days' later date, from "Dalmally, Sunday, July the eleventh,
1841:"
"As there was no place of this name in our route, you will be surprised
to see it at the head of this present writing. But our being here is a
part of such moving accidents by flood and field as will astonish you.
If you should happen to have your hat on, take it off, that your hair
may stand on end without any interruption. To get from Ballyhoolish (as
I am obliged to spell it when Fletcher is not in the way; and he is out
at this moment) to Oban, it is necessary to cross two ferries, one of
which is an arm of the sea, eight or ten miles broad. Into this
ferry-boat, passengers, carriages, horses, and all, get bodily, and are
got across by hook or by crook if the weather be reasonably fine.
Yesterday morning, however, it blew such a strong gale that the landlord
of the inn, where we had paid for horses all the way to Oban (thirty
miles), honestly came up-stairs just as we were starting, with the money
in his hand, and told us it would be impossible to cross. There was
nothing to be done but to come back five-and-thirty miles, through
Glencoe and Inverouran, to a place called Tyndrum, whence a road twelve
miles long crosses to Dalmally, which is sixteen miles from Inverary.
Accordingly we turned back, and in a great storm of wind and rain began
to retrace the dreary road we had come the day before. . . . I was not at
all ill pleased to have to come again through that awful Glencoe. If it
had been tremendous on the previous day, yesterday it was perfectly
horrific. It had rained all night, and was raining then, as it only does
in these parts. Through the whole glen, which is ten miles long,
torrents were boiling and foaming, and sending up in every direction
spray like the smoke of great fires. They were rushing down every hill
and mountain side, and tearing like devils across the path, and down
into the depths of the rocks. Some of the hills looked as if they were
full of silver, and had cracked in a hundred places. Others as if they
were frightened, and had broken out into a deadly sweat. In others there
was no compromise or division of streams, but one great torrent came
roaring down with a deafening noise, and a rushing of water that was
quite appalling. Such a _spaet_, in short (that's the country word), has
not been known for many years, and the sights and sounds were beyond
description. The post-boy was not at all at his ease, and the horses
were very much frightened (as well they might be) by the perpetual
raging and roaring; one of them started as we came down a steep place,
and we were within that much (----) of tumbling over a precipice; just
then, too, the drag broke, and we were obliged to go on as we best
could, without it: getting out every now and then, and hanging on at the
back of the carriage to prevent its rolling down too fast, and going
Heaven knows where. Well, in this pleasant state of things we came to
King's House again, having been four hours doing the sixteen miles. The
rumble where Tom sat was by this time so full of water that he was
obliged to borrow a gimlet and bore holes in the bottom to let it run
out. The horses that were to take us on were out upon the hills,
somewhere within ten miles round; and three or four bare-legged fellows
went out to look for 'em, while we sat by the fire and tried to dry
ourselves. At last we got off again (without the drag and with a broken
spring, no smith living within ten miles), and went limping on to
Inverouran. In the first three miles we were in a ditch and out again,
and lost a horse's shoe. All this time it never once left off raining;
and was very windy, very cold, very misty, and most intensely dismal. So
we crossed the Black Mount, and came to a place we had passed the day
before, where a rapid river runs over a bed of broken rock. Now, this
river, sir, had a bridge last winter, but the bridge broke down when the
thaw came, and has never since been mended; so travelers cross upon a
little platform, made of rough deal planks stretching from rock to rock;
and carriages and horses ford the water, at a certain point. As the
platform is the reverse of steady (we had proved this the day before),
is very slippery, and affords anything but a pleasant footing, having
only a trembling little rail on one side, and on the other nothing
between it and the foaming stream, Kate decided to remain in the
carriage, and trust herself to the wheels rather than to her feet.
Fletcher and I had got out, and it was going away, when I advised her,
as I had done several times before, to come with us; for I saw that the
water was very high, the current being greatly swollen by the rain, and
that the post-boy had been eyeing it in a very disconcerted manner for
the last half-hour. This decided her to come out; and Fletcher, she,
Tom, and I, began to cross, while the carriage went about a quarter of a
mile down the bank, in search of a shallow place. The platform shook so
much that we could only come across two at a time, and then it felt as
if it were hung on springs. As to the wind and rain! . . . well, put into
one gust all the wind and rain you ever saw and heard, and you'll have
some faint notion of it! When we got safely to the opposite bank, there
came riding up a wild Highlander, in a great plaid, whom we recognized
as the landlord of the inn, and who, without taking the least notice of
us, went dashing on,--with the plaid he was wrapped in, streaming in the
wind,--screeching in Gaelic to the post-boy on the opposite bank, and
making the most frantic gestures you ever saw, in which he was joined by
some other wild man on foot, who had come across by a short cut,
knee-deep in mire and water. As we began to see what this meant, we
(that is, Fletcher and I) scrambled on after them, while the boy,
horses, and carriage were plunging in the water, which left only the
horses' heads and the boy's body visible. By the time we got up to them,
the man on horseback and the men on foot were perfectly mad with
pantomime; for as to any of their shouts being heard by the boy, the
water made such a great noise that they might as well have been dumb. It
made me quite sick to think how I should have felt if Kate had been
inside. The carriage went round and round like a great stone, the boy
was as pale as death, the horses were struggling and plashing and
snorting like sea-animals, and we were all roaring to the driver to
throw himself off and let them and the coach go to the devil, when
suddenly it came all right (having got into shallow water), and, all
tumbling and dripping and jogging from side to side, climbed up to the
dry land. I assure you we looked rather queer, as we wiped our faces and
stared at each other in a little cluster round about it. It seemed that
the man on horseback had been looking at us through a telescope as we
came to the track, and knowing that the place was very dangerous, and
seeing that we meant to bring the carriage, had come on at a great
gallop to show the driver the only place where he could cross. By the
time he came up, the man had taken the water at a wrong place, and in a
word was as nearly drowned (with carriage, horses, luggage, and all) as
ever man was. Was _this_ a good adventure?
"We all went on to the inn,--the wild man galloping on first, to get a
fire lighted,--and there we dined on eggs and bacon, oat-cake, and
whiskey; and changed and dried ourselves. The place was a mere knot of
little outhouses, and in one of these there were fifty Highlanders _all
drunk_. . . . Some were drovers, some pipers, and some workmen engaged to
build a hunting-lodge for Lord Breadalbane hard by, who had been driven
in by stress of weather. One was a paper-hanger. He had come out three
days before to paper the inn's best room, a chamber almost large enough
to keep a Newfoundland dog in, and, from the first half-hour after his
arrival to that moment, had been hopelessly and irreclaimably drunk.
They were lying about in all directions: on forms, on the ground, about
a loft overhead, round the turf-fire wrapped in plaids, on the tables,
and under them. We paid our bill, thanked our host very heartily, gave
some money to his children, and after an hour's rest came on again. At
ten o'clock at night we reached this place, and were overjoyed to find
quite an English inn, with good beds (those we have slept on, yet, have
always been of straw), and every possible comfort. We breakfasted this
morning at half-past ten, and at three go on to Inverary to dinner. I
believe the very rough part of the journey is over, and I am really glad
of it. Kate sends all kind of regards. I shall hope to find a letter
from you at Inverary when the post reaches there, to-morrow. I wrote to
Oban yesterday, desiring the post-office keeper to send any he might
have for us, over to that place. Love to Mac."
One more letter, brief, but overflowing at every word with his generous
nature, must close the delightful series written from Scotland. It was
dated from Inverary the day following his exciting adventure; promised
me another from Melrose (which has unfortunately not been kept with the
rest); and inclosed the invitation to a public dinner at Glasgow. "I
have returned for answer that I am on my way home, on pressing business
connected with my weekly publication, and can't stop. But I have offered
to come down any day in September or October, and accept the honor then.
Now, I shall come and return per mail; and, if this suits them, enter
into a solemn league and covenant to come with me. _Do._ You must. I am
sure you will. . . . Till my next, and always afterwards, God bless you. I
got your welcome letter this morning, and have read it a hundred times.
What a pleasure it is! Kate's best regards. I am dying for Sunday, and
wouldn't stop now for twenty dinners of twenty thousand each.
[Illustration: 'Always your affectionate friend
'Doz.]
"Will Lord John meet the Parliament, or resign first?" I agreed to
accompany him to Glasgow; but illness intercepted that celebration.
FOOTNOTES:
[40] Poor good Mr. Fletcher had, among his other peculiarities, a habit
of venting any particular emotion in a wildness of cry that went beyond
even the descriptive power of his friend, who referred to it frequently
in his Broadstairs letters. Here is an instance (20th Sept, 1840): "Mrs.
M. being in the next machine the other day heard him howl like a wolf
(as he does) when he first touched the cold water. I am glad to have my
former story in that respect confirmed. There is no sound on earth like
it. In the infernal regions there may be, but elsewhere there is no
compound addition of wild beasts that could produce its like for their
total. The description of the wolves in _Robinson Crusoe_ is the nearest
thing; but it's feeble--very feeble--in comparison." Of the generally
amiable side to all his eccentricities I am tempted to give an
illustration from the same letter: "An alarming report being brought to
me the other day that he was preaching, I betook myself to the spot, and
found he was reading Wordsworth to a family on the terrace, outside the
house, in the open air and public way. The whole town were out. When he
had given them a taste of Wordsworth, he sent home for Mrs. Norton's
book, and entertained them with selections from that. He concluded with
an imitation of Mrs. Hemans reading her own poetry, which he performed
with a pocket-handkerchief over his head to imitate her veil--all this
in public, before everybody."