we dare to decide, whether or not Nature--O most matchless creature of
thy kind!--gave thee, or gave thee not, the gift of an immortal
soul!--Better such creed--fond and foolish though it may be--yet
scarcely unscriptural, for in each word of Scripture there are many
meanings, even when each sacred syllable is darkest to be read,--better
such creed than that of the atheist or sceptic, distracted ever in his
seemingly sullen apathy, by the dim, dark doom of dust. Better that Fro
should live, than that Newton should die--for ever. What though the
benevolent Howard devoted his days to visit the dungeon's gloom, and by
intercession with princes, to set the prisoners free from the low
damp-dripping stone roof of the deep-dug cell beneath the foundation
rocks of the citadel, to the high dewdropping vault of heaven, too, too
dazzlingly illumined by the lamp of the insufferable sun! There reason
triumphed--those were the works of glorified humanity. But thou--a
creature of mere instinct--according to Descartes, a machine, an
automaton--hadst yet a constant light of thought and of affection in
thine eyes; nor wert thou without some glimmering and mysterious
notions--and what more have we ourselves?--of life and of death! Why
fear to say that thou wert divinely commissioned and inspired--on that
most dismal and shrieking hour, when little Harry Seymour, that bright
English boy, "whom all that looked on loved," entangled among the cruel
chains of those fair water-lilies, all so innocently yet so murderously
floating round him, was, by all standing or running about there with
clenched hands, or kneeling on the sod--given up to inextricable death?
We were not present to save the dear boy, who had been delivered to our
care as to that of an elder brother, by the noble lady who, in her deep
widow's weeds, kissed her sole darling's sunny head, and disappeared. We
were not present--or by all that is holiest in heaven or on earth--our
arms had been soon around thy neck, when thou wert seemingly about to
perish!
But a poor dumb despised dog--nothing, as some say, but animated
dust--was there,--and without shout or signal--for all the Christian
creatures were alike helpless in their despair--shot swift as a sunbeam
over the deep, and by those golden tresses, sinking and brightening
through the wave, brought the noble child ashore, and stood over him, as
if in joy and sorrow, lying too like death on the sand! And when little
Harry opened his glazed eyes, and looked bewildered on all the faces
around--and then fainted--and revived and fainted again--till at last he
came to dim recollection of this world on the bosom of the physician
brought thither with incomprehensible speed from his dwelling afar
off--thou didst lick his cold white hands and blue face, with a whine
that struck awful pity into all hearts, and thou didst follow him--one
of the group--as he was borne along--and frisking and gambolling no more
all that day, gently didst thou lay thyself down at the feet of his
little bed, and watch there unsleeping all night long! For the boy knew
that God had employed one of his lowly creatures to save him--and
beseeched that he might lie there to be looked at by the light of the
taper, till he himself, as the pains went away, might fall asleep! And
we, the watchers by his bedside, heard him in his dreams mentioning the
creature's name in his prayers.
Yet at times--O Fro--thou wert a sad dog indeed--neither to bind nor to
hold--for thy blood was soon set aboil, and thou--like Julius Caesar--and
Demetrius Poliorcetes--and Alexander the Great--and many other ancient
and modern kings and heroes--thou wert the slave of thy passions. No
Scipio wert thou with a Spanish captive. Often--in spite of threatening
eye and uplifted thong--uplifted only, for thou went'st unflogged to thy
grave--didst thou disappear for days at a time--as if lost or dead.
Rumours of thee were brought to the kirk by shepherds from the remotest
hills in the parish--most confused and contradictory--but, when
collected and compared, all agreeing in this--that thou wert living, and
lifelike, and life-imparting, and after a season from thy travels to
return; and return thou still didst--wearied often and woe-begone--purpled
thy snow-white curling--and thy broad breast torn, not disfigured, by
honourable wounds. For never yet saw we a fighter like thee. Up on thy
hind-legs in a moment, like a growling Polar monster, with thy fore-paws
round thy foeman's neck, bull-dog, collie, mastiff, or greyhound, and
down with him in a moment, with as much ease as Cass, in the wrestling
ring at Carlisle, would throw a Bagman, and then woe to the throat of
the downfallen, for thy jaws were shark-like as they opened and shut
with their terrific tusks, grinding through skin and sinew to the spine.
Once, and once only--bullied out of all endurance by a half-drunken
carrier--did we consent to let thee engage in a pitched battle with a
mastiff victorious in fifty fights--a famous shanker--and a throttler
beyond all compare. It was indeed a bloody business--now growling along
the glaur of the road--a hairy hurricane--now snorting in the
suffocating ditch--now fair play on the clean and clear crown of the
causey--now rolling over and over through a chance-open white little
gate, into a cottage-garden--now separated by choking them both with a
cord--now brought out again with savage and fiery eyes to the scratch on
a green plat round the signboard-swinging tree in the middle of the
village--auld women in their mutches crying out, "Shame! whare's the
minister?"--young women, with combs in their pretty heads, blinking with
pale and almost weeping faces from low-lintelled doors--children
crowding for sight and safety on the louping-on-stane--and loud cries
ever and anon at each turn and eddy of the fight, of "Well done, Fro!
well done, Fro!--see how he worries his windpipe--well done, Fro!" for
Fro was the delight and glory of the whole parish, and the honour of all
its inhabitants, male and female, was felt to be staked on the
issue--while at intervals was heard the harsh hoarse voice of the
carrier and his compeers, cursing and swearing in triumph in a
many-oathed language peculiar to the race that drive the broad-wheeled
waggons with the high canvass roofs, as the might of Teeger prevailed,
and the indomitable Fro seemed to be on his last legs beneath a grip of
the jugular, and then stretched motionless and passive--in defeat or
death. A mere _ruse_ to recover wind. Like unshorn Sampson starting from
his sleep, and snapping like fired flax the vain bands of the
Philistines, Fro whammled Teeger off, and twisting round his head in
spite of the grip on the jugular, the skin stretching and giving way in
a ghastly but unfelt wound, he suddenly seized with all his tusks his
antagonist's eye, and bit it clean out of the socket. A yowl of
unendurable pain--spouting of blood--sickness--swooning--tumbling
over--and death. His last fight is over! His remaining eye glazed--his
protruded tongue bitten in anguish by his own grinding teeth--his massy
hind-legs stretched out with a kick like a horse--his short tail
stiffens--he is laid out a grim corpse--flung into a cart tied behind
the waggon--and off to the tanyard.
No shouts of victory--but stern, sullen, half-ashamed silence--as of
guilty things after the perpetration of a misdeed. Still glaring
savagely, ere yet the wrath of fight has subsided in his heart, and
going and returning to the bloody place, uncertain whether or not his
enemy were about to return, Fro finally lies down at some distance, and
with bloody flews keeps licking his bloody legs, and with long darting
tongue cleansing the mire from his neck, breast, side, and back--a
sanguinary spectacle! He seems almost insensible to our caresses, and
there is something almost like upbraiding in his victorious eyes. Now
that his veins are cooling, he begins to feel the pain of his
wounds--many on, and close to vital parts. Most agonising of all--all
his four shanks are tusk-pierced, and, in less than ten minutes, he
limps away to his kennel, lame as if riddled by shot--
"Heu quantum mutatus ab illo
Hectore!"
gore-besmeared and dirt-draggled--an hour ago serenely bright as the
lily in June, or the April snow. The huge waggon moves away out of the
clachan without its master, who, ferocious from the death of the other
brute he loved, dares the whole school to combat. Off fly a dozen
jackets--and a devil's dozen of striplings from twelve past to going
sixteen--firmly wedged together like the Macedonian Phalanx--are yelling
for the fray. There is such another shrieking of women as at the taking
of Troy. But
"The Prince of Mearns stept forth before the crowd,
And, Carter, challenged you to single fight!"
Bob Howie, who never yet feared the face of clay, and had too great a
heart to suffer mere children to combat the strongest and most unhappy
man in the whole country--stripped to the buff; and there he stands,
with
"An eye like Mars, to threaten and command;"
shoulders like Atlas--breast like Hercules--and arms like Vulcan. The
heart of Benjamin the waggoner dies within him--he accepts the challenge
for a future day--and retreating backwards to his clothes, receives a
right-hander as from a sledge-hammer on the temple, that fells him like
an ox. The other carters all close in, but are sent spinning in all
directions as from the sails of a windmill. Ever as each successive lout
seeks the earth, we savage schoolboys rush in upon him in twos, and
threes, and fours, basting and battering him as he bawls; at this very
crisis--so fate ordained--are seen hurrying down the hill from the
south, leaving their wives, sweethearts, and asses in the rear, with
coal-black hair and sparkling eyes, brown brany legs, and clenched iron
fists at the end of long arms, swinging flail-like at all times, and
never more than now, ready for the fray, a gang of Gypsies!
while--beautiful coincidence!--up the hill from the north came on, at
double-quick time, an awkward squad of as grim Milesians as ever buried
a pike in a Protestant. Nor question nor reply; but in a moment a
general melee. Men at work in the hay-fields, who would not leave their
work for a dog-fight, fling down scythe and rake, and over the hedges
into the high-road, a stalwart reinforcement. Weavers leap from their
treddles--doff their blue aprons, and out into the air. The red-cowled
tailor pops his head through a skylight, and next moment is in the
street. The butcher strips his long light-blue linen coat, to engage a
Paddy; and the smith, ready for action--for the huge arms of Burniwind
are always bare--with a hand-ower-hip delivery, makes the head of the
king of the gypsies ring like an anvil. There has been no marshalling of
forces--yet lo! as if formed in two regular lines by the Adjutant
himself after the first tuilzie, stand the carters, the gypsies, and the
Irishmen, opposed to Bob Howie, the butcher, the smith, the tailor, the
weaver, the haymakers, and the boys from the manse--the latter drawn up
cautiously, but not cowardly, in the rear. What a twinkling of fists and
shillelas! what bashed and bloody noses! cut blubber lips--cheekbones
out of all proportion to the rest of the face, and, through sudden black
and blue tumefactions, men's changed into pigs' eyes! And now there is
also rugging of caps and mutches and hair, "femineo ululatu," for the
Egyptian Amazons bear down like furies on the glee'd widow that keeps
the change-house, half-witted Shoosy that sells yellow sand, and Davie
Donald's dun daughter, commonly called Spunkie. What shrieking and
tossing of arms, round the whole length and breadth of the village!
Where is Simon Andrew the constable? Where is auld Robert Maxwell the
ruling elder? What can have become of Laird Warnock, whose word is law?
And what can the Minister be about, can anybody tell, that he does not
come flying from the manse to save the lives of his parishioners from
cannibals, and gypsies, and Eerish, murdering their way to the gallows?
How--why--or when--that bloody battle ceased to be, was never distinctly
known either then or since; but, like everything else, it had an
end--and even now we have a confused dream of the spot at its
termination--naked men lying on their backs in the mire, all drenched in
blood--with women, some old and ugly, with shrivelled witch-like hag
breasts, others young, and darkly, swarthily, blackly beautiful, with
budding or new-blown bosoms unkerchiefed in the collyshangie--perilous
to see--leaning over them: and these were the Egyptians! Men in brown
shirts, gore-spotted, with green bandages round their broken heads,
laughing, and joking, and jeering, and singing, and shouting, though
desperately mauled and mangled--while Scottish wives, and widows, and
maids, could not help crying out in sympathy, "Oh! but they're bonny
men--what a pity they should aye be sae fond o' fechting, and a' manner
o' mischief!"--and these were the Irishmen! Retired and apart, hangs the
weaver, with his head over a wall, dog-sick, and bocking in strong
convulsions; some haymakers are washing their cut faces in the well; the
butcher, bloody as a bit of his own beef, walks silent into the
shambles; the smith, whose grimy face hides its pummelling, goes off
grinning a ghastly smile in the hands of his scolding, yet not unloving
wife; the tailor, gay as a flea, and hot as his own goose, to show how
much more he has given than received, offers to leap any man on the
ground, hop-step-and-jump, for a mutchkin--while Bob Howie walks about,
without a visible wound, except the mark of bloody knuckles on his
brawny breast, with arms a-kimbo, seaman-fashion--for Bob had been at
sea--and as soon as the whisky comes, hands it about at his own expense,
caulker after caulker, to the vanquished--for Bob was as generous as
brave; had no spite at the gypsies; and as for Irishmen, why they were
ranting, roving, red-hot, dare-devil boys, just like himself; and after
the fight, he would have gone with them to Purgatory, or a few steps
further down the hill. All the battle through, we manse-boys had fought,
it may be said, behind the shadow of him our hero; and in warding off
mischief from us, he received not a few heavy body-blows from King
Carew, a descendant of Bamfylde Moore, and some crown-cracks from the
shillelas of the Connaught Rangers.
Down comes a sudden thunder-plump, making the road a river--and to the
whiff o' lightning, all in the shape of man, woman, and child, are under
roof-cover. The afternoon soon clears up, and the haymakers leave the
clanking empty gill or half-mutchkin stoup for the field, to see what
the rain has done--the forge begins again to roar--the sound of the
flying shuttle tells that the weaver is again on his treddles; the
tailor hoists up his little window in the thatch, in that close
confinement, to enjoy the cauler air--the tinklers go to encamp on the
common--"the air is balm"--insects, drooping from eave and tree, "show
to the sun their waved coats dropt with gold"--though the season of
bird-singing be over and gone, there is a pleasant chirping hereabouts,
thereabouts, everywhere; the old blind beggar, dog-led, goes from door
to door, unconscious that such a stramash has ever been--and dancing
round our champion, away we schoolboys all fly with him to swim in the
Brother Loch, taking our fishing-rods with us, for one clap of thunder
will not frighten the trouts; and about the middle or end of July, we
have known great labbers, twenty inches long, play wallop between our
very feet, in the warm shallow water, within a yard of the edge, to the
yellow-bodied, tinsey-tailed, black half-heckle, with brown mallard
wing, a mere midge, but once fixed in lip or tongue, "inextricable as
the gored lion's bite."
But ever after that Passage in the life of Fro, his were, on the whole,
years of peace. Every season seemed to strengthen his sagacity, and to
unfold his wonderful instincts. Most assuredly he knew all the simpler
parts of speech--all the household words in the Scottish language. He
was, in all our pastimes, as much one of ourselves, as if, instead of
being a Pagan with four feet, he had been a Christian with two. As for
temper, we trace the sweetness of our own to his; an angry word from one
he loved, he forgot in half a minute, offering his lion-like paw; yet
there were particular people he could not abide, nor from their hands
would he have accepted a roast potato out of the dripping-pan, and in
this he resembled his master. He knew the Sabbath-day as well as the
sexton--and never was known to bark till the Monday morning when the
cock crew; and then he would give a long musical yowl, as if his breast
were relieved from silence. If ever, in this cold, changeful, inconstant
world, there was a friendship that might be called sincere, it was that
which, half a century ago and upwards, subsisted between Christopher
North and John Fro. We never had a quarrel in all our lives--and within
these two months we made a pilgrimage to his grave. He was buried--not
by our hands, but by the hands of one whose tender and manly heart loved
the old, blind, deaf, staggering creature to the very last--for such in
his fourteenth year he truly was--a sad and sorry sight to see, to them
who remembered 'the glory of his stately and majestic years. One day he
crawled with a moan-like whine to our brother's feet, and expired.
Reader, young, bright, and beautiful though thou be--remember all flesh
is dust!
This is an episode--a tale, in itself complete, yet growing out of, and
appertaining to, the main plot of Epic or Article. You will recollect we
were speaking of ducks, teals, and widgeons; and we come now to the next
clause of the verse--wild geese and swans.
Some people's geese are all swans; but so far from that being the case
with ours--sad and sorry are we to say it--now all our swans are geese.
But in our buoyant boyhood, all God's creatures were to our eyes just as
God made them; and there was ever--especially birds--a tinge of beauty
over them all. What an inconceivable difference--distance--to the
imagination, between the nature of a tame and a wild goose! Aloft in
heaven, themselves in night invisible, the gabble of a cloud of wild
geese is sublime. Whence comes it--whither goes it--for what end, and by
what power impelled? Reason sees not into the darkness of instinct--and
therefore the awestruck heart of the night-wandering boy beats to hear
the league-long gabble that probably has winged its wedge-like way from
the lakes, and marshes, and dreary morasses of Siberia, from Lapland, or
Iceland, or the unfrequented and unknown northern regions of
America--regions set apart, quoth Bewick we believe, for summer
residences and breeding-places, and where they are amply provided with a
variety of food, a large portion of which must consist of the larvae of
gnats, and myriads of insects, there fostered by the unsetting sun! Now
they are gabbling good Gaelic over a Highland night-moor. Perhaps in
another hour the descending cloud will be covering the wide waters at
the head of the wild Loch Maree--or, silent and asleep, the whole host
be riding at anchor around Lomond's Isles!
But 'tis now mid-day--and lo! in that mediterranean--a flock of wild
Swans! Have they dropt down from the ether into the water almost as pure
as ether, without having once folded their wings, since they rose aloft
to shun the insupportable northern snows hundreds of leagues beyond the
storm-swept Orcades? To look at the quiet creatures, you might think
that they had never left the circle of that little loch. There they hang
on their shadows, even as if asleep in the sunshine; and now stretching
out their long wings--how apt for flight from clime to clime!--joyously
they beat the liquid radiance, till to the loud flapping high rises the
mist, and wide spreads the foam, almost sufficient for a rainbow. Safe
are they from all birds of prey. The Osprey dashes down on the teal, or
sea-trout, swimming within or below their shadow. The great Erne, or
Sea-eagle, pounces on the mallard, as he mounts from the bulrushes
before the wild swans sailing, with all wings hoisted, like a fleet--but
osprey nor eagle dares to try his talons on that stately bird--for he is
bold in his beauty, and formidable as he is fair; the pinions that swim
and soar can also smite; and though the one be a lover of war, the other
of peace, yet of them it may be said,
"The eagle he is lord above,
The swan is lord below!"
To have shot such a creature--so large--so white--so high-soaring--and
on the winds of midnight wafted from so far--a creature that seemed not
merely a stranger in that loch, but belonging to some mysterious land in
another hemisphere, whose coast ships with frozen rigging have been
known to visit, driving under bare poles through a month's
snow-storms--to have shot such a creature was an era in our imagination,
from which, had nature been more prodigal, we might have sprung up a
poet. Once, and but once, we were involved in the glory of that event.
The creature had been in a dream of some river or lake in
Kamtschatka--or ideally listening,
"Across the waves' tumultuous roar,
The wolf's long howl from Oonalashka's shore,"
when, guided by our good genius and our brightest star, we suddenly saw
him sitting asleep in all his state, within gunshot, in a bay of the
moonlight Loch! We had nearly fainted--died on the very spot--and why
were we not entitled to have died as well as any other passionate
spirit, whom joy ever divorced from life? We blew his black bill into
pieces--not a feather on his head but was touched; and like a little
white-sailed pleasure-boat caught in a whirlwind, the wild swan spun
round, and then lay motionless on the water, as if all her masts had
gone by the board. We were all alone that night--not even Fro was with
us; we had reasons for being alone, for we wished not that there should
be any footfall but our own round that mountain-hut. Could we swim? Ay,
like the wild swan himself, through surge or breaker. But now the loch
was still as the sky, and twenty strokes carried us close to the
glorious creature, which, grasped by both hands, and supporting us as it
was trailed beneath our breast, while we floated rather than swam
ashore, we felt to be in verity our--Prey! We trembled with a sort of
fear, to behold him lying indeed dead on the sward. The moon--the many
stars, here and there one wondrously large and lustrous--the hushed
glittering loch--the hills, though somewhat dimmed, green all winter
through, with here and there a patch of snow on their summits in the
blue sky, on which lay a few fleecy clouds--the mighty foreign bird,
whose plumage we had never hoped to touch but in a dream, lying like the
ghost of something that ought not to have been destroyed--the scene was
altogether such as made our wild young heart quake, and almost repent of
having killed a creature so surpassingly beautiful. But that was a
fleeting fancy--and over the wide moors we went, like an American Indian
laden with game, journeying to his wigwam over the wilderness. As we
whitened towards the village in the light of morning, the earlier
labourers held up their hands in wonder what and who we might be; and
Fro, who had missed his master, and was lying awake for him on the
mount, came bounding along, nor could refrain the bark of delighted
passion as his nose nuzzled in the soft down of the bosom of the
creature whom he remembered to have sometimes seen floating too far off
in the lake, or far above our reach cleaving the firmament.
CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET.
FYTTE THIRD.
O Muckle-mou'd Meg! and can it be that thou art numbered among forgotten
things--unexistences!
"Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees!"