Hugh Miller, the geologist, journalist, and man of genius, was sitting
in his newspaper office late one dreary winter night. The clerks had all
left and he was preparing to go, when a quick rap came to the door. He
said "Come in," and, looking towards the entrance, saw a little ragged
child all wet with sleet. "Are ye Hugh Miller?" "Yes." "Mary Duff wants
ye." "What does she want?" "She's deein." Some misty recollection of the
name made him at once set out, and with his well-known plaid and stick,
he was soon striding after the child, who trotted through the now
deserted High Street, into the Canongate. By the time he got to the Old
Playhouse Close, Hugh had revived his memory of Mary Duff: a lively girl
who had been bred up beside him in Cromarty. The last time he had seen
her was at a brother mason's marriage, where Mary was "best maid," and
he "best man." He seemed still to see her bright young careless face,
her tidy short gown, and her dark eyes, and to hear her bantering, merry
tongue.
Down the close went the ragged little woman, and up an outside stair,
Hugh keeping near her with difficulty; in the passage she held out her
hand and touched him; taking it in his great palm, he felt that she
wanted a thumb. Finding her way like a cat through the darkness, she
opened a door, and saying "That's her!" vanished. By the light of a
dying fire he saw lying in the corner of the large empty room something
like a woman's clothes, and on drawing nearer became aware of a thin
pale face and two dark eyes looking keenly but helplessly up at him. The
eyes were plainly Mary Duff's, though he could recognize no other
feature. She wept silently, gazing steadily at him. "Are you Mary Duff?"
"It's a' that's o' me, Hugh." She then tried to speak to him, something
plainly of great urgency, but she couldn't, and seeing that she was very
ill, and was making herself worse, he put half-a-crown into her feverish
hand, and said he would call again in the morning. He could get no
information about her from the neighbors; they were surly or asleep.
When he returned next morning, the little girl met him at the
stair-head, and said, "She's deid." He went in, and found that it was
true; there she lay, the fire out, her face placid, and the likeness to
her maiden self restored. Hugh thought he would have known her now, even
with those bright black eyes closed as they were, _in aeternum_.
Seeking out a neighbor, he said he would like to bury Mary Duff, and
arranged for the funeral with an undertaker in the close. Little seemed
to be known of the poor outcast, except that she was a "licht," or, as
Solomon would have said, a "strange woman." "Did she drink?" "Whiles."
On the day of the funeral one or two residents in the close accompanied
him to the Canongate Churchyard. He observed a decent looking little old
woman watching them, and following at a distance, though the day was wet
and bitter. After the grave was filled, and he had taken off his hat, as
the men finished their business by putting on and slapping the sod, he
saw this old woman remaining. She came up and, courtesying, said, "Ye
wad ken that lass, sir?" "Yes; I knew her when she was young." The woman
then burst into tears, and told Hugh that she "keepit a bit shop at the
Closemooth, and Mary dealt wi' me, and aye paid reglar, and I was feared
she was dead, for she had been a month awin' me half-a-crown:" and then
with a look and voice of awe, she told him how on the night he was sent
for, and immediately after he had left, she had been awakened by some
one in her room; and by her bright fire--for she was a _bein_,
well-to-do body--she had seen the wasted dying creature, who came
forward and said, "Wasn't it half-a-crown?" "Yes." "There it is," and
putting it under the bolster, vanished!
Alas for Mary Duff! her career had been a sad one since the day when she
had stood side by side with Hugh at the wedding of their friends. Her
father died not long after, and her mother supplanted her in the
affections of the man to whom she had given her heart. The shock was
overwhelming, and made home intolerable. Mary fled from it blighted and
embittered, and after a life of shame and sorrow, crept into the corner
of her wretched garret, to die deserted and alone; giving evidence in
her latest act that honesty had survived amid the wreck of nearly every
other virtue.
"My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith
the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."
_OUR DOGS._
"_The misery of keeping a dog, is his dying so soon; but to be
sure, if he lived for fifty years, and then died, what would
become of me?_"--SIR WALTER SCOTT.
"_There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of
humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life
looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and
claims the fellowship of the creature if not of the
soul._"--RUSKIN.
_To Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan's
glum and faithful_
"PETER,"
_with much regard_.
I was bitten severely by a little dog when with my mother at Moffat
Wells, being then three years of age, and I have remained "bitten" ever
since in the matter of dogs. I remember that little dog, and can at this
moment not only recall my pain and terror--I have no doubt I was to
blame--but also her face; and were I allowed to search among the shades
in the cynic Elysian fields, I could pick her out still. All my life I
have been familiar with these faithful creatures, making friends of
them, and speaking to them; and the only time I ever addressed the
public, about a year after being bitten, was at the farm of Kirklaw
Hill, near Biggar, when the text, given out from an empty cart in which
the ploughmen had placed me, was "Jacob's dog," and my entire sermon was
as follows:--"Some say that Jacob had a black dog (the _o_ very long),
and some say that Jacob had a white dog, but _I_ (imagine the
presumption of four years!) say Jacob had a brown dog, and a brown dog
it shall be."
I had many intimacies from this time onwards--Bawtie, of the inn;
Keeper, the carrier's bull-terrier; Tiger, a huge tawny mastiff from
Edinburgh, which I think must have been an uncle of Rab's; all the sheep
dogs at Callands--Spring, Mavis, Yarrow, Swallow, Cheviot, etc.; but it
was not till I was at college, and my brother at the High School, that
we possessed a dog.