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RECREATIONS
OF
CHRISTOPHER NORTH
A New Edition in Two Volumes
VOL. I.
William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
MDCCCLXVIII
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
PAGE
CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET:--
FYTTE FIRST, 1
FYTTE SECOND, 29
FYTTE THIRD, 52
TALE OF EXPIATION, 75
MORNING MONOLOGUE, 104
THE FIELD OF FLOWERS, 121
COTTAGES, 135
AN HOUR'S TALK ABOUT POETRY, 179
INCH-CRUIN, 231
A DAY AT WINDERMERE, 242
THE MOORS!--
PROLOGUE, 262
FLIGHT FIRST--GLEN-ETIVE, 290
FLIGHT SECOND--THE COVES OF CRUACHAN, 316
FLIGHT THIRD--STILL LIFE, 336
FLIGHT FOURTH--DOWN RIVER AND UP LOCH, 365
HIGHLAND SNOW-STORM, 390
THE HOLY CHILD, 410
OUR PARISH, 422
PREFATORY NOTE.
Like most of Professor Wilson's miscellaneous writings, the articles
contained in the two following volumes appeared originally in
"Blackwood's Magazine." Having been revised and considerably remodelled
by their Author, they were published in three volumes, 8vo, in 1842,
under the general title, "The Recreations of Christopher North." In the
reprint, the special titles of some of the articles are different from
those which the same papers bear in the Magazine.
RECREATIONS
OF
CHRISTOPHER NORTH.
CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET.
FYTTE FIRST.
There is a fine and beautiful alliance between all pastimes pursued on
flood, field, and fell. The principles in human nature on which they
depend, are in all the same; but those principles are subject to
infinite modifications and varieties, according to the difference of
individual and national character. All such pastimes, whether followed
merely as pastimes, or as professions, or as the immediate means of
sustaining life, require sense, sagacity, and knowledge of nature and
nature's laws; nor less, patience, perseverance, courage even, and
bodily strength or activity, while the spirit which animates and
supports them is a spirit of anxiety, doubt, fear, hope, joy,
exultation, and triumph--in the heart of the young a fierce passion--in
the heart of the old a passion still, but subdued and tamed down,
without, however, being much dulled or deadened, by various experience
of all the mysteries of the calling, and by the gradual subsiding of all
impetuous impulses in the frames of all mortal men beyond perhaps
three-score, when the blackest head will be becoming grey, the most
nervous knee less firmly knit, the most steely-springed instep less
elastic, the keenest eye less of a far-keeker, and, above all, the most
boiling heart less like a caldron or a crater--yea, the whole man
subject to some dimness or decay, and, consequently, the whole duty of
man like the new edition of a book, from which many passages that formed
the chief glory of the _editio princeps_ have been expunged--the whole
character of the style corrected without being thereby improved--just
like the later editions of the Pleasures of Imagination, which were
written by Akenside when he was about twenty-one, and altered by him at
forty--to the exclusion or destruction of many most _splendida vitia_,
by which process the poem, in our humble opinion, was shorn of its
brightest beams, and suffered disastrous twilight and eclipse--perplexing
critics.
Now, seeing that such pastimes are in number almost infinite, and
infinite the varieties of human character, pray what is there at all
surprising in your being madly fond of shooting--and your brother Tom
just as foolish about fishing--and cousin Jack perfectly insane on
fox-hunting--while the old gentleman your father, in spite of wind and
weather, perennial gout, and annual apoplexy, goes a-coursing of the
white-hipped hare on the bleak Yorkshire wolds--and uncle Ben, as if
just escaped from Bedlam or St Luke's with Dr Haslam at his heels, or
with a few hundred yards' start of Dr Warburton, is seen galloping, in a
Welsh wig and strange apparel, in the rear of a pack of Lilliputian
beagles, all barking as if they were as mad as their master, supposed to
be in chase of an invisible animal that keeps eternally doubling in
field and forest--"still hoped for, never seen," and well christened by
the name of Escape?
Phrenology sets the question for ever at rest. All people have
thirty-three faculties. Now there are but twenty-four letters in the
alphabet; yet how many languages--some six thousand we believe, each of
which is susceptible of many dialects! No wonder, then, that you might
as well try to count all the sands on the sea-shore as all the species
of sportsmen.
There is, therefore, nothing to prevent any man with a large and sound
development from excelling, at once, in rat-catching and
deer-stalking--from being, in short, a universal genius in sports and
pastimes. Heaven has made us such a man.
Yet there seems to be a natural course or progress in pastimes. We do
not now speak of marbles--or knuckling down at taw--or trundling a
hoop--or pall-lall--or pitch and toss--or any other of the games of the
school playground. We restrict ourselves to what, somewhat inaccurately
perhaps, are called field-sports. Thus Angling seems the earliest of
them all in the order of nature. There the new-breeched urchin stands on
the low bridge of the little bit burnie! and with crooked pin, baited
with one unwrithing ring of a dead worm, and attached to a
yarn-thread--for he has not yet got into hair, and is years off gut--his
rod of the mere willow or hazel wand, there will he stand during all his
play-hours, as forgetful of his primer as if the weary art of printing
had never been invented, day after day, week after week, month after
month, in mute, deep, earnest, passionate, heart-mind-and-soul-engrossing
hope of some time or other catching a minnow or a beardie! A tug--a tug!
With face ten times flushed and pale by turns ere you could count ten,
he at last has strength, in the agitation of his fear and joy, to pull
away at the monster--and there he lies in his beauty among the gowans
and the greensward, for he has whapped him right over his head and far
away, a fish a quarter of an ounce in weight, and, at the very least,
two inches long! Off he flies, on wings of wind, to his father, mother,
and sisters, and brothers, and cousins, and all the neighbourhood,
holding the fish aloft in both hands, still fearful of its escape, and,
like a genuine child of corruption, his eyes brighten at the first blush
of cold blood on his small fumy fingers. He carries about with him,
up-stairs and down-stairs, his prey upon a plate; he will not wash his
hands before dinner, for he exults in the silver scales adhering to the
thumb-nail that scooped the pin out of the baggy's maw--and at night,
"cabined, cribbed, confined," he is overheard murmuring in his sleep--a
thief, a robber, and a murderer, in his yet infant dreams!
From that hour Angling is no more a mere delightful daydream, haunted by
the dim hopes of imaginary minnows, but a reality--an art--a science--of
which the flaxen-headed schoolboy feels himself to be master--a mystery
in which he has been initiated; and off he goes now, all alone, in the
power of successful passion, to the distant brook--brook a mile
off--with fields, and hedges, and single trees, and little groves, and a
huge forest of six acres, between and the house in which he is boarded
or was born! There flows on the slender music of the shadowy
shallows--there pours the deeper din of the birch-tree'd waterfall. The
scared water-pyet flits away from stone to stone, and dipping,
disappears among the airy bubbles, to him a new sight of joy and wonder.
And oh! how sweet the scent of the broom or furze, yellowing along the
braes, where leap the lambs, less happy than he, on the knolls of
sunshine! His grandfather has given him a half-crown rod in two
pieces--yes, his line is of hair twisted--plaited by his own
soon-instructed little fingers. By Heavens, he is fishing with the fly!
And the Fates, grim and grisly as they are painted to be by full-grown,
ungrateful, lying poets, smile like angels upon the paidler in the
brook, winnowing the air with their wings into western breezes, while at
the very first throw the yellow trout forsakes his fastness beneath the
bog-wood, and with a lazy wallop, and then a sudden plunge, and then a
race like lightning, changes at once the child into the boy, and shoots
through his thrilling and aching heart the ecstasy of a new life
expanding in that glorious pastime, even as a rainbow on a sudden
brightens up the sky. _Fortuna favet fortibus_--and with one long pull,
and strong pull, and pull altogether, Johnny lands a twelve-incher on
the soft, smooth, silvery sand of the only bay in all the burn where
such an exploit was possible, and dashing upon him like an osprey, soars
up with him in his talons to the bank, breaking his line as he hurries
off to a spot of safety twenty yards from the pool, and then flinging
him down on a heath-surrounded plat of sheep-nibbled verdure, lets him
bounce about till he is tired, and lies gasping with unfrequent and
feeble motions, bright and beautiful, and glorious with all his yellow
light and crimson lustre, spotted, speckled, and starred in his scaly
splendour, beneath a sun that never shone before so dazzlingly; but now
the radiance of the captive creature is dimmer and obscured, for the eye
of day winks and seems almost shut behind that slow-sailing mass of
clouds, composed in equal parts of air, rain, and sunshine.
Springs, summers, autumns, winters--each within itself longer, by many
times longer than the whole year of grown-up life, that slips at last
through one's fingers like a knotless thread--pass over the curled
darling's brow; and look at him now, a straight and strengthy stripling,
in the savage spirit of sport, springing over rock-ledge after
rock-ledge, nor needing aught as he plashes knee-deep, or
waistband-high, through river-feeding torrents, to the glorious music of
his running and ringing reel, after a tongue-hooked salmon, insanely
seeking with the ebb of tide, but all in vain, the white breakers of the
sea. No hazel or willow wand, no half-crown, rod of ash framed by
village wright, is now in his practised hands, of which the very left is
dexterous; but a twenty-feet rod of Phin's, all ring-rustling, and
a-glitter with the preserving varnish, limber as the attenuating line
itself, and lithe to its topmost tenuity as the elephant's
proboscis--the hiccory and the horn without twist, knot, or flaw--from
butt to fly a faultless taper, "fine by degrees and beautifully less,"
the beau-ideal of a rod by the skill of cunning craftsman to the senses
materialised! A fish--fat, fair, and forty! "She is a salmon, therefore
to be woo'd--she is a salmon, therefore to be won"--but shy, timid,
capricious, headstrong, now wrathful and now full of fear, like any
other female whom the cruel artist has hooked by lip or heart, and, in
spite of all her struggling, will bring to the gasp at last; and then
with calm eyes behold her lying in the shade dead, or worse than dead,
fast-fading, and to be re-illumined no more the lustre of her beauty,
insensible to sun or shower, even the most perishable of all perishable
things in a world of perishing!--But the salmon has grown sulky, and
must be made to spring to the plunging stone. There, suddenly, instinct
with new passion, she shoots out of the foam like a bar of silver
bullion; and, relapsing into the flood, is in another moment at the very
head of the waterfall! Give her the butt--give her the butt--or she is
gone for ever with the thunder into ten fathom deep!--Now comes the
trial of your tackle--and when was Phin ever known to fail at the edge
of cliff or cataract? Her snout is southwards--right up the middle of
the main current of the hill-born river, as if she would seek its very
course where she was spawned! She still swims swift, and strong, and
deep--and the line goes steady, boys, steady--stiff and steady as a Tory
in the roar of Opposition. There is yet an hour's play in her dorsal
fin--danger in the flap of her tail--and yet may her silver shoulder
shatter the gut against a rock. Why, the river was yesterday in spate,
and she is fresh run from the sea. All the lesser waterfalls are now
level with the flood, and she meets with no impediment or
obstruction--the coast is clear--no tree-roots here--no floating
branches--for during the night they have all been swept down to the
salt loch. _In medio tutissimas ibis_--ay, now you feel she begins to
fail--the butt tells now every time you deliver your right. What!
another mad leap! yet another sullen plunge! She seems absolutely to
have discovered, or rather to be an impersonation of, the Perpetual
Motion. Stand back out of the way, you son of a sea-cook!--you in the
tattered blue breeches, with the tail of your shirt hanging out. Who the
devil sent you all here, ye vagabonds?--Ha! Watty Ritchie, my man, is
that you? God bless your honest laughing phiz! What, Watty, would you
think of a Fish like that about Peebles? Tarn Grieve never gruppit sae
heavy a ane since first he belanged to the Council.--Curse that collie!
Ay! well done, Watty! Stone him to Stobbo. Confound these stirks--if
that white one, with caving horns, kicking heels, and straight-up tail,
come bellowing by between us and the river, then, "Madam! all is lost,
except honour!" If we lose this Fish at six o'clock, then suicide at
seven. Our will is made--ten thousand to the Foundling--ditto to the
Thames Tunnel--ha--ha--my Beauty! Methinks we could fain and fond kiss
thy silver side, languidly lying afloat on the foam as if all further
resistance now were vain, and gracefully thou wert surrendering thyself
to death! No faith in female--she trusts to the last trial of her
tail--sweetly workest thou, O Reel of Reels! and on thy smooth axle
spinning sleep'st, even, as Milton describes her, like our own worthy
planet. Scrope--Bainbridge--Maule--princes among Anglers--oh! that you
were here! Where the devil is Sir Humphrey? At his retort? By mysterious
sympathy--far off at his own Trows, the Kerss feels that we are killing
the noblest Fish whose back ever rippled the surface of deep or shallow
in the Tweed. Tom Purdy stands like a seer, entranced in glorious
vision, beside turreted Abbotsford. Shade of Sandy Govan! Alas! alas!
Poor Sandy--why on thy pale face that melancholy smile!--Peter! The
Gaff! The Gaff! Into the eddy she sails, sick and slow, and almost with
a swirl--whitening as she nears the sand--there she has it--struck right
into the shoulder, fairer than that of Juno, Diana, Minerva, or
Venus--and lies at last in all her glorious length and breadth of
beaming beauty, fit prey for giant or demigod angling before the Flood!
"The child is father of the man,
And I would wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety!"
So much for the Angler. The Shooter, again, he begins with his pipe-gun,
formed of the last year's growth of a branch of the plane-tree--the
beautiful dark-green-leaved and fragrant-flowered plane-tree--that
stands straight in stem and round in head, visible and audible too from
afar the bee-resounding umbrage, alike on stormy sea-coast and in
sheltered inland vale, still loving the roof of the fisherman's or
peasant's cottage.
Then comes, perhaps, the city pop-gun, in shape like a very musket, such
as soldiers bear--a Christmas present from parent, once a colonel of
volunteers--nor feeble to discharge the pea-bullet or barley-shot,
formidable to face and eyes; nor yet unfelt, at six paces, by hinder-end
of playmate, scornfully yet fearfully exposed. But the shooter soon
tires of such ineffectual trigger--and his soul, as well as his hair, is
set on fire by that extraordinary compound--Gunpowder. He begins with
burning off his eyebrows on the King's birthday; squibs and crackers
follow, and all the pleasures of the pluff. But he soon longs to let off
a gun--"and follows to the field some warlike lord"--in hopes of being
allowed to discharge one of the double-barrels, after Ponto has made his
last point, and the half-hidden chimneys of home are again seen smoking
among the trees. This is his first practice in firearms, and from that
hour he is--a Shooter.
Then there is in most rural parishes--and of rural parishes alone do we
condescend to speak--a pistol, a horse one, with a bit of silver on the
butt--perhaps one that originally served in the Scots Greys. It is
bought, or borrowed, by the young shooter, who begins firing first at
barn-doors, then at trees, and then at living things--a strange cur,
who, from his lolling tongue, may be supposed to have the hydrophobia--a
cat that has purred herself asleep on the sunny churchyard wall, or is
watching mice at their hole-mouths among the graves--a water-rat in the
mill-lead--or weasel that, running to his retreat in the wall, always
turns round to look at you--a goose wandered from his common in
disappointed love--or brown duck, easily mistaken by the unscrupulous
for a wild one, in pond remote from human dwelling, or on meadow by the
river-side, away from the clack of the muter-mill. The corby-crow, too,
shouted out of his nest on some tree lower than usual, is a good flying
mark to the more advanced class; or morning magpie, a-chatter at skreigh
of day close to the cottage door among the chickens; or a flock of
pigeons wheeling overhead on the stubble-field, or sitting so thick
together that every stock is blue with tempting plumage.
But the pistol is discharged for a fowling-piece--brown and rusty, with
a slight crack probably in the muzzle, and a lock out of all proportion
to the barrel. Then the young shooter aspires at halfpennies thrown up
into the air--and generally hit, for there is never wanting an apparent
dent in copper metal; and thence he mounts to the glancing and skimming
swallow, a household bird, and therefore to be held sacred, but shot at
on the excuse of its being next to impossible to hit him--an opinion
strengthened into belief by several summers' practice. But the small
brown and white marten wheeling through below the bridge, or along the
many-holed red sand-bank, is admitted by all boys to be fair game--and
still more, the long-winged legless black devilet, that, if it falls to
the ground, cannot rise again, and therefore screams wheeling round the
corners and battlements of towers and castles, or far out even of
cannon-shot, gambols in companies of hundreds, and regiments of a
thousand, aloft in the evening ether, within the orbit of the eagle's
flight. It seems to boyish eyes that the creatures near the earth, when
but little blue sky is seen between the specks and the wallflowers
growing on the coign of vantage: the signal is given to fire; but the
devilets are too high in heaven to smell the sulphur. The starling whips
with a shrill cry into his nest, and nothing falls to the ground but a
tiny bit of mossy mortar, inhabited by a spider!
But the Day of Days arrives at last, when the schoolboy, or rather the
college boy, returning to his rural vacation (for in Scotland college
winters tread close, too close, on the heels of academies), has a gun--a
gun in a case--a double-barrel too--of his own--and is provided with a
licence, probably without any other qualification than that of hit or
miss. On some portentous morning he effulges with the sun in velveteen
jacket and breeches of the same--many-buttoned gaiters, and an
unkerchiefed throat. 'Tis the fourteenth of September, and lo! a
pointer at his heels--Ponto, of course--a game-bag like a beggar's
wallet at his side--destined to be at eve as full of charity--and all
the paraphernalia of an accomplished sportsman. Proud, were she to see
the sight, would be the "mother that bore him;" the heart of that old
sportsman, his daddy, would sing for joy! The chained mastiff in the
yard yowls his admiration; the servant lasses uplift the pane of their
garret, and, with suddenly withdrawn blushes, titter their delight in
their rich paper curls and pure night-clothes. Rab Roger, who has been
cleaning out the barn, comes forth to partake of the caulker; and away
go the footsteps of the old poacher and his pupil through the autumnal
rime, off to the uplands, where--for it is one of the earliest of
harvests--there is scarcely a single acre of standing corn. The
turnip-fields are bright green with hope and expectation--and coveys are
couching on lazy beds beneath the potato-shaw. Every high hedge,
ditch-guarded on either side, shelters its own brood--imagination hears
the whirr shaking the dewdrops from the broom on the brae--and first one
bird and then another, and then the remaining number, in itself no
contemptible covey, seems to fancy's ear to spring single, or in clouds,
from the coppice brushwood with here and there an intercepting standard
tree.
Poor Ponto is much to be pitied. Either having a cold in his nose, or
having ante-breakfasted by stealth on a red herring, he can scent
nothing short of a badger, and, every other field, he starts in horror,
shame, and amazement, to hear himself, without having attended to his
points, enclosed in a whirring covey. He is still duly taken between
those inexorable knees; out comes the speck-and-span new dog-whip, heavy
enough for a horse; and the yowl of the patient is heard over the whole
parish. Mothers press their yet unchastised infants to their breasts;
and the schoolmaster, fastening a knowing eye on dunce and neerdoweel,
holds up, in silent warning, the terror of the tawes. Frequent flogging
will cow the spirit of the best man and dog in Britain. Ponto travels
now in fear and trembling but a few yards from his tyrant's feet, till,
rousing himself to the sudden scent of something smelling strongly, he
draws slowly and beautifully, and
"There fix'd, a perfect semicircle stands."
Up runs the Tyro ready-cocked, and, in his eagerness, stumbling among
the stubble, when, hark and lo! the gabble of grey goslings, and the
bill-protruded hiss of goose and gander! Bang goes the right-hand barrel
at Ponto, who now thinks it high time to be off to the tune of "ower the
hills and far awa'," while the young gentleman, half-ashamed and
half-incensed, half-glad and half-sorry, discharges the left-hand
barrel, with a highly improper curse, at the father of the feathered
family before him, who receives the shot like a ball in his breast,
throws a somerset quite surprising for a bird of his usual habits, and,
after biting the dust with his bill, and thumping it with his bottom,
breathes an eternal farewell to this sublunary scene--and leaves himself
to be paid for at the rate of eighteenpence a pound to his justly
irritated owner, on whose farm he had led a long, and not only harmless,
but honourable and useful life.
It is nearly as impossible a thing as we know, to borrow a dog about the
time the sun has reached his meridian, on the First Day of the
Partridges. Ponto by this time has sneaked, unseen by human eye, into
his kennel, and coiled himself up into the arms of "tired Nature's sweet
restorer, balmy sleep." A farmer makes offer of a collie, who, from
numbering among his paternal ancestors a Spanish pointer, is quite a Don
in his way among the cheepers, and has been known in a turnip-field to
stand in an attitude very similar to that of setting. Luath has no
objection to a frolic over the fields, and plays the part of Ponto to
perfection. At last he catches sight of a covey basking, and, leaping in
upon them open-mouthed, despatches them right and left, even like the
famous dog Billy killing rats in the pit at Westminster. The birds are
bagged with a gentle remonstrance, and Luath's exploit rewarded with a
whang of cheese. Elated by the pressure on his shoulder, the young
gentleman laughs at the idea of pointing; and fires away, like winking,
at every uprise of birds, near or remote; works a miracle by bringing
down three at a time, that chanced, unknown to him, to be crossing, and,
wearied with such slaughter, lends his gun to the attendant farmer, who
can mark down to an inch, and walks up to the dropped pout as if he
could kick her up with his foot; and thus the bag in a few hours is half
full of feathers; while, to close with eclat the sport of the day, the
cunning elder takes him to a bramble bush, in a wall nook, at the edge
of a wood, and returning the gun into his hands, shows him poor pussy
sitting with open eyes, fast asleep! The pellets are in her brain, and
turning herself over, she crunkles out to her full length, like a piece
of untwisting Indian rubber, and is dead. The posterior pouch of the
jacket, yet unstained by blood, yawns to receive her--and in she goes
plump; paws, ears, body, feet, fud, and all--while Luath, all the way
home to the Mains, keeps snoking at the red drops oozing through; for
well he knows, in summer's heat and winter's cold, the smell of pussy,
whether sitting beneath a tuft of withered grass on the brae, or
burrowed beneath a snow-wreath. A hare, we certainly must say, in spite
of haughtier sportsman's scorn, is, when sitting, a most satisfactory
shot.
But let us trace no further thus, step by step, the Pilgrim's Progress.
Look at him now--a finished sportsman--on the moors--the bright black
boundless Dalwhinnie moors, stretching away, by long Loch Ericht side,
into the dim and distant day that hangs, with all its clouds, over the
bosom of far Loch Rannoch. Is that the pluffer at partridge-pouts who
had nearly been the death of poor Ponto? Lord Kennedy himself might take
a lesson now from the straight and steady style in which, on the
mountain brow, and up to the middle in heather, he brings his Manton to
the deadly level! More unerring eye never glanced along brown barrel!
Finer forefinger never touched a trigger! Follow him a whole day, and
not one wounded bird. All most beautifully arrested on their flight by
instantaneous death! Down dropped right and left, like lead on the
heather--old cock and hen, singled out among the orphaned brood, as
calmly as a cook would do it in the larder from among a pile of plumage.
No random shot within--no needless shot out of distance--covered every
feather before stir of finger--and body, back, and brain, pierced,
broken, shattered! And what perfect pointers! There they stand, still as
death--yet instinct with life--the whole half-dozen! Mungo, the
black-tanned--Don, the red-spotted--Clara, the snow-white--Primrose, the
pale yellow--Basto, the bright brown, and Nimrod, in his coat of many
colours, often seen afar through the mists like a meteor.
So much for the Angler's and the Shooter's Progress--now briefly for the
Hunter's. Hunting, in this country, unquestionably commences with cats.
Few cottages without a cat. If you do not find her on the mouse watch
at the gable end of the house just at the corner, take a solar
observation, and by it look for her on bank or brae--somewhere about the
premises--if unsuccessful, peep into the byre, and up through a hole
among the dusty divots of the roof, and chance is you see her eyes
glittering far-ben in the gloom; but if she be not there either, into
the barn and up on the mow, and surely she is on the straw or on the
baulks below the kipples. No. Well, then, let your eye travel along the
edge of that little wood behind the cottage--ay, yonder she is!--but she
sees both you and your two terriers--one rough and the other
smooth--and, slinking away through a gap in the old hawthorn hedge in
among the hazels, she either lies _perdu_, or is up a fir-tree almost as
high as the magpie's or corby's nest.
Now, observe, shooting cats is one thing, and hunting them is
another--and shooting and hunting, though they may be united, are here
treated separately; so, in the present case, the cat makes her escape.
But get her watching birds--young larks, perhaps, walking on the lea--or
young linnets hanging on the broom--down-by yonder in the holm lands,
where there are no trees, except indeed that one glorious single tree,
the Golden Oak, and he is guarded by Glowrer, and then what a most
capital chase! Stretching herself up with crooked back, as if taking a
yawn--off she jumps, with tremendous spangs, and tail, thickened with
fear and anger, perpendicular. Youf--youf--youf--go the
terriers--head-over-heels perhaps in their fury--and are not long in
turning her--and bringing her to bay at the hedge-root, all ablaze and
abristle. A she-devil incarnate! Hark--all at once now strikes up a
trio--Catalani caterwauling the treble--Glowrer taking the bass, and
Tearer the tenor--a cruel concert cut short by a squalling throttler.
Away--away along the holm--and over the knowe--and into the wood--for
lo! the gudewife, brandishing a besom, comes flying demented without her
mutch, down to the murder of her Tabby--her son, a stout stripling, is
seen skirting the potato-field to intercept our flight--and, most
formidable of all foes, the Man of the House himself, in his shirt
sleeves and flail in his hand, bolts from the barn, down the croft,
across the burn, and up the brae, to cut us off from the Manse. The
hunt's up--and 'tis a capital steeple-chase. Disperse--disperse! Down
the hill, Jack--up the hill, Gill--dive the dell, Kit--thread the wood,
Pat--a hundred yards' start is a great matter--a stern chase is always a
long chase--schoolboys are generally in prime wind--the old man begins
to puff, and blow, and snort, and put his paws to his paunch--the son is
thrown out by a double of dainty Davy's--and the "sair begrutten mither"
is gathering up the torn and tattered remains of Tortoise-shell Tabby,
and invoking the vengeance of heaven and earth on her pitiless
murderers. Some slight relief to her bursting and breaking heart to vow
that she will make the minister hear of it on the deafest side of his
head--ay, even if she have to break in upon him sitting on Saturday
night, getting aff by rote his fushionless sermon, in his ain study.
Now, gentle reader, again observe, that though we have now described,
_con amore_, a most cruel case of cat-killing, in which we certainly did
play a most aggravated part some Sixty Years since, far indeed are we
from recommending such wanton barbarity to the rising generation. We are
not inditing a homily on humanity to animals, nor have we been appointed
to succeed the Rev. Dr Somerville of Currie, the great Patentee of the
Safety Double Bloody Barrel, to preach the annual Gibsonian sermon on
that subject--we are simply stating certain matters of fact,
illustrative of the rise and progress of the love of pastime in the
soul, and leave our readers to draw the moral. But may we be permitted
to say, that the naughtiest schoolboys often make the most pious men;
that it does not follow, according to the wise saws and modern instances
of prophetic old women of both sexes, that he who in boyhood has worried
a cat with terriers, will, in manhood, commit murder on one of his own
species; or that peccadilloes are the progenitors of capital crimes.
Nature allows to growing lads a certain range of wickedness, _sans peur
et sans reproche_. She seems, indeed, to whistle into their ear, to mock
ancient females--to laugh at Quakers--to make mouths at a decent man and
his wife riding double to church--the matron's thick legs ludicrously
bobbing from the pillion, kept firm on Dobbin's rump by her bottom,
"_ponderibus librata suis_,"--to tip the wink to young women during
sermon on Sunday--and on Saturday, most impertinently to kiss them,
whether they will or no, on high-road or by-path--and to perpetrate many
other little nameless enormities.
No doubt, at the time, such things will wear rather a suspicious
character; and the boy who is detected in the fact, must be punished by
pawmy, or privation, or imprisonment from play. But when punished, he is
of course left free to resume his atrocious career; nor is it found that
he sleeps a whit the less soundly, or shrieks for Heaven's mercy in his
dreams. Conscience is not a craven. Groans belong to guilt. But fun and
frolic, even when trespasses, are not guilt; and though a cat have nine
lives, she has but one ghost--and that will haunt no house where there
are terriers. What! surely if you have the happiness of being a parent,
you would not wish your only boy--your son and heir--the blended image
of his mother's loveliness and his father's manly beauty--to be a smug,
smooth, prim, and proper prig, with his hair always combed down on his
forehead, hands always unglaured, and without spot or blemish on his
white-thread stockings? You would not wish him, surely, to be always
moping and musing in a corner with a good book held close to his
nose--botanising with his maiden aunts--doing the pretty at tea-tables
with tabbies, in handing round the short-bread, taking cups, and
attending to the kettle--telling tales on all naughty boys and
girls--laying up his penny a-week pocket-money in a penny-pig--keeping
all his clothes neatly folded up in an untumbled drawer--having his own
peg for his uncrushed hat--saying his prayers precisely as the clock
strikes nine, while his companions are yet at blind-man's-buff--and
puffed up every Sabbath eve by the parson's praises of his uncommon
memory for a sermon--while all the other boys are scolded for having
fallen asleep before Tenthly? You would not wish him, surely, to write
sermons himself at his tender years, nay--even to be able to give you
chapter and verse for every quotation from the Bible? No. Better far
that he should begin early to break your heart, by taking no care even
of his Sunday clothes--blotting his copy--impiously pinning pieces of
paper to the Dominie's tail, who to him was a second father--going to
the fishing not only without leave, but against orders--bathing in the
forbidden pool, where the tailor was drowned--drying powder before the
schoolroom fire, and blowing himself and two crack-skulled cronies to
the ceiling--tying kettles to the tails of dogs--shooting an old woman's
laying hen--galloping bare-backed shelties down stony steeps--climbing
trees to the slenderest twig on which bird could build, and up the
tooth-of-time-indented sides of old castles after wallflowers and
starlings--being run away with in carts by colts against turnpike
gates--buying bad ballads from young gypsy-girls, who, on receiving a
sixpence, give ever so many kisses in return, saying, "Take your change
out of that;"--on a borrowed broken-knee'd pony, with a switch-tail--a
devil for galloping--not only attending country races for a saddle and
collar, but entering for and winning the prize--dancing like a devil in
barns at kirns--seeing his blooming partner home over the blooming
heather, most perilous adventure of all in which virgin-puberty can be
involved--fighting with a rival in corduroy breeches, and poll shorn
beneath a caup, till his eyes just twinkle through the swollen
blue--and, to conclude "this strange eventful history," once brought
home at one o'clock in the morning, God knows whence or by whom, and
found by the shrieking servant, sent out to listen for him in the
moonlight, dead-drunk on the gravel at the gate!
Nay, start not, parental reader--nor, in the terror of anticipation,
send, without loss of a single day, for your son at a distant academy,
mayhap pursuing even such another career. Trust thou to the genial,
gracious, and benign _vis medicatrix naturae_. What though a few clouds
bedim and deform "the innocent brightness of the new-born day?" Lo! how
splendid the meridian ether! What though the frost seem to blight the
beauty of the budding and blowing rose? Look how she revives beneath
dew, rain, and sunshine, till your eyes can even scarce endure the
lustre! What though the waters of the sullen fen seem to pollute the
snow of the swan? They fall off from her expanded wings, and, pure as a
spirit, she soars away, and descends into her own silver lake, stainless
as the water-lilies floating round her breast. And shall the immortal
soul suffer lasting contamination from the transient chances of its
nascent state--in this, less favoured than material and immaterial
things that perish? No--it is undergoing endless transmigrations,--every
hour a being different, yet the same--dark stains blotted out--rueful
inscriptions effaced--many an erasure of impressions once thought
permanent, but soon altogether forgotten--and vindicating, in the midst
of the earthly corruption in which it is immersed, its own celestial
origin, character, and end, often flickering, or seemingly blown out,
like a taper in the wind, but all at once self-reillumined, and shining
in inextinguishable and self-fed radiance--like a star in heaven.
Therefore, bad as boys too often are--and a disgrace to the mother who
bore them--the cradle in which they were rocked--the nurse by whom they
were suckled--the schoolmaster by whom they were flogged--and the
hangman by whom it was prophesied they were to be executed--wait
patiently for a few years, and you will see them all transfigured--one
into a preacher of such winning eloquence, that he almost persuades all
men to be Christians--another into a parliamentary orator, who commands
the applause of listening senates, and
"Reads his history in a nation's eyes"
--one into a painter, before whose thunderous heavens the storms of
Poussin "pale their ineffectual fires"--another into a poet composing
and playing, side by side, on his own peculiar harp, in a concert of
vocal and instrumental music, with Byron, Scott, and Wordsworth--one
into a great soldier, who, when Wellington is no more, shall, for the
freedom of the world, conquer a future Waterloo--another who, hoisting
his flag on the "mast of some tall ammiral," shall, like Eliab Harvey in
the Temeraire, lay two three-deckers on board at once, and clothe some
now nameless peak or promontory in immortal glory, like that shining on
Trafalgar.
Well, then, after cat-killing comes Coursing. Cats have a look of
hares--kittens of leverets--and they are all called Pussy. The terriers
are useful still, preceding the line like skirmishers, and with finest
noses startling the maukin from bracken-bush or rush bower, her skylight
garret in the old quarry, or her brown study in the brake. Away with
your coursing on Marlborough downs, where huge hares are seen squatted
from a distance, and the sleek dogs, disrobed of their gaudy trappings,
are let slip by a Tryer, running for cups and collars before lords and
ladies, and squires of high and low degree--a pretty pastime enough, no
doubt, in its way, and a splendid cavalcade. But will it for a moment
compare with the sudden and all-unlooked-for start of the "auld witch"
from the bunweed-covered lea, when the throat of every pedestrian is
privileged to cry "halloo--halloo--halloo"--and whipcord-tailed
greyhound and hairy lurcher, without any invidious distinction of birth
or bearing, lay their deep breasts to the sward at the same moment, to
the same instinct, and brattle over the brae after the disappearing
Ears, laid flat at the first sight of her pursuers, as with retroverted
eyes she turns her face to the mountain, and seeks the cairn only a
little lower than the falcon's nest.
What signifies any sport in the open air, except in congenial scenery of
earth and heaven? Go, thou gentle Cockney! and angle in the New
River;--but, bold Englishman, come with us and try a salmon-cast in the
old Tay. Go, thou gentle Cockney! and course a suburban hare in the
purlieus of Blackheath;--but, bold Englishman, come with us and course
an animal that never heard a city-bell, by day a hare, by night an old
woman, that loves the dogs she dreads, and, hunt her as you will with a
leash and a half of lightfoots, still returns at dark to the same form
in the turf-dyke of the garden of the mountain cottage. The children,
who love her as their own eyes--for she has been as a pet about the
family, summer and winter, since that chubby-cheeked urchin, of some
five years old, first began to swing in his self-rocking cradle--will
scarcely care to see her started--nay, one or two of the wickedest among
them will join in the halloo; for often, ere this, "has she cheated the
very jowlers, and lauched ower her shouther at the lang dowgs walloping
ahint her, sair forfeuchen, up the benty brae--and it's no the day that
she's gaun to be killed by Rough Robin, or smooth Spring, or the red
Bick, or the hairy Lurcher--though a' fowre be let lowse on her at ance,
and ye surround her or she rise." What are your great big fat lazy
English hares, ten or twelve pounds and upwards, who have the food
brought to their very mouth in preserves, and are out of breath with
five minutes' scamper among themselves--to the middle-sized,
hard-hipped, wiry-backed, steel-legged, long-winded maukins of Scotland,
that scorn to taste a leaf of a single cabbage in the wee moorland
yardie that shelters them, but prey in distant fields, take a breathing
every gloaming along the mountain-breast, untired as young eagles
ringing the sky for pastime, and before the dogs seem not so much
scouring for life as for pleasure--with such an air of freedom, liberty,
and independence, do they fling up the moss and cock their fuds in the
faces of their pursuers. Yet stanch are they to the spine--strong in
bone, and sound in bottom;--see, see how Tickler clears that
twenty-feet moss-hag at a single spang like a bird--tops that hedge
that would turn any hunter that ever stabled in Melton Mowbray--and
then, at full speed northward, moves as upon a pivot within his own
length, and close upon his haunches, without losing a foot, off within a
point of due south. A kennel! He never was and never will be in a kennel
all his free joyful days. He has walked and run--and leaped and swam
about--at his own will, ever since he was nine days old--and he would
have done so sooner had he had any eyes. None of your stinking cracklets
for him--he takes his meals with the family, sitting at the right hand
of the master's eldest son. He sleeps in any bed of the house he
chooses; and, though no Methodist, he goes every third Sunday to church.
That is the education of a Scottish greyhound--and the consequence is,
that you may pardonably mistake him for a deer dog from Badenoch or
Lochaber, and no doubt in the world that he would rejoice in a glimpse
of the antlers on the weather-gleam,
"Where the hunter of deer and the warrior trod
To his hills that encircle the sea."
This may be called roughing
it--slovenly--coarse--rude--artless--unscientific. But we say no--it is
your only coursing. Gods! with what a bounding bosom the schoolboy
salutes the dawning of the cool--clear--crisp, yes, crisp October morn
(for there has been a slight frost, and the almost leafless hedgerows
are all glittering with rime); and, little time lost at dress or
breakfast, crams the luncheon into his pouch, and away to the
Trysting-hill Farmhouse, which he fears the gamekeeper and his grews
will have left ere he can run across the two long Scotch miles of moor
between him and his joy! With step elastic, he feels flying along the
sward as from a spring-board; like a roe, he clears the burns and bursts
his way through the brakes; panting, not from breathlessness but
anxiety, he lightly leaps the garden fence without a pole, and lo, the
green jacket of one huntsman, the red jacket of another, on the plat
before the door, and two or three tall raw-boned poachers--and there is
mirth and music, fun and frolic, and the very soul of enterprise,
adventure, and desperation, in that word; while tall and graceful stand
the black, the brindled, and the yellow breed, with keen yet quiet
eyes, prophetic of their destined prey, and though motionless now as
stone statues of hounds at the feet of Meleager, soon to launch like
lightning at the loved halloo!
Out comes the gudewife with her own bottle from the press in the spence,
with as big a belly and broad a bottom as her own, and they are no
trifle--for the worthy woman has been making much beef for many years,
is moreover in the family way, and surely this time there will be twins
at least--and pours out a canty caulker for each crowing crony,
beginning with the gentle, and ending with the semple, that is our and
her self; and better speerit never steamed in sma' still. She offers
another with "hinny," by way of Athole brose; but it is put off till
evening, for coursing requires a clear head, and the same sobriety then
adorned our youth that now dignifies our old age. The gudeman, although
an elder of the kirk, and with as grave an aspect as suits that solemn
office, needs not much persuasion to let the flail rest for one day,
anxious though he be to show the first aits in the market; and donning
his broad blue bonnet, and the shortest-tailed auld coat he can find,
and taking his kent in his hand, he gruffly gives Wully his orders for
a' things about the place, and sets off with the younkers for a holiday.
Not a man on earth who has not his own pastime, depend on't, austere as
he may look; and 'twould be well for this wicked world if no elder in it
had a "sin that maist easily beset him," worse than what Gibby Watson's
wife used to call his "awfu' fondness for the Grews!"