objections to straw-roofs have no application. A few sparrows chirping
and fluttering in the eaves can do no great harm, and they serve to
amuse the children. The very baby in the cradle, when all the family are
in the fields, mother and all, hears the cheerful twitter, and is
reconciled to solitude. The quantity of corn that a few sparrows can
eat--greedy creatures as they are--cannot be very deadly; and it is
chiefly in the winter-time that they attack the stacks, when there is
much excuse to be made on the plea of hunger. As to the destruction of a
little thatch, why, there is not a boy about the house, above ten years,
who is not a thatcher, and there is no expense in such repairs. Let the
honeysuckle, too, steal up the wall, and even blind unchecked a corner
of the kitchen-window. Its fragrance will often cheer unconsciously the
labourer's heart, as, in the mid-day hour of rest, he sits dandling his
child on his knee, or converses with the passing pedlar. Let the
moss-rose tree flourish, that its bright blush-balls may dazzle in the
kirk the eyes of the lover of fair Helen Irwin, as they rise and fall
with every movement of a bosom yet happy in its virgin innocence. Nature
does not spread in vain her flowers in flush and fragrance over every
obscure nook of earth. Simple and pure is the delight they inspire. Not
to the poet's eye alone is their language addressed. The beautiful
symbols are understood by lowliest minds; and while the philosophical
Wordsworth speaks of the meanest flower that blows giving a joy too deep
for tears, so do all mankind feel the exquisite truth of Burns's more
simple address to the mountain-daisy which his ploughshare had upturned.
The one touches sympathies too profound to be general--the other speaks
as a son of the soil affected by the fate of the most familiar flower
that springs from the bosom of our common dust.
Generally speaking, there has been a spirit of improvement at work,
during these last twenty years, upon all the Cottages in Scotland. The
villages are certainly much neater and cleaner than formerly, and in
very few respects, if any, positively offensive. Perhaps none of them
have--nor ever will have--the exquisite trimness, the habitual and
hereditary rustic elegance, of the best villages of England. There, even
the idle and worthless have an instinctive love of what is decent, and
orderly, and pretty in their habitations. The very drunkard must have a
well-sanded floor, a clean-swept hearth, clear-polished furniture, and
uncobwebbed walls to the room in which he quaffs, guzzles, and smokes
himself into stupidity. His wife may be a scold, but seldom a
slattern--his children ill taught, but well apparelled. Much of this is
observable even among the worst of the class; and, no doubt, such things
must also have their effect in tempering and restraining excesses.
Whereas, on the other hand, the house of a well-behaved, well-doing
English villager is a perfect model of comfort and propriety. In
Scotland, the houses of the dissolute are always dens of dirt, and
disorder, and distraction. All ordinary goings-on are inextricably
confused--meals eaten in different nooks, and at no regular
hour--nothing in its right place or time--the whole abode as if on the
eve of a flitting; while, with few exceptions, even in the dwellings of
the best families in the village, one may detect occasional
forgetfulness of trifling matters, that, if remembered, would be found
greatly conducive to comfort--occasional insensibilities to what would
be graceful in their condition, and might be secured at little expense
and less trouble--occasional blindness to minute deformities that mar
the aspect of the household, and which an awakened eye would sweep away
as absolute nuisances. Perhaps the very depth of their affections--the
solemnity of their religious thoughts--and the reflective spirit in
which they carry on the warfare of life--hide from them the perception
of what, after all, is of such very inferior moment, and even create a
sort of austerity of character which makes them disregard, too much,
trifles that appear to have no influence or connection with the essence
of weal or woe. Yet if there be any truth in this, it affords, we
confess, an explanation rather than a justification.
Our business at present, however, is rather with single Cottages than
with villages. We Scottish people have, for some years past, been doing
all we could to make ourselves ridiculous, by claiming for our capital
the name of Modern Athens, and talking all manner of nonsense about a
city which stands nobly on its own proper foundation; while we have kept
our mouths comparatively shut about the beauty of our hills and vales,
and the rational happiness that everywhere overflows our native land.
Our character is to be found in the country; and therefore, gentle
reader, behold along with us a specimen of Scottish scenery. It is not
above some four miles long--its breadth somewhere about a third of its
length; a fair oblong, sheltered and secluded by a line of varied
eminences, on some of which lies the power of cultivation, and over
others the vivid verdure peculiar to a pastoral region; while, telling
of disturbed times past for ever, stand yonder the ruins of an old
fortalice or keep, picturesque in its deserted decay. The plough has
stopped at the edge of the profitable and beautiful coppice-woods, and
encircled the tall elm-grove. The rocky pasturage, with its clovery and
daisied turf, is alive with sheep and cattle--its briery knolls with
birds--its broom and whins with bees--and its wimpling burn with trouts
and minnows glancing through the shallows, or leaping among the cloud of
injects that glitter over its pools. Here and there a cottage--not above
twenty in all--one low down in the holm, another on a cliff beside the
waterfall: that is the mill--another breaking the horizon in its more
ambitious station--and another far up at the hill-foot, where there is
not a single tree, only shrubs and brackens. On a bleak day, there is
but little beauty in such a glen; but when the sun is cloudless, and all
the light serene, it is a place where poet or painter may see visions
and dream dreams, of the very age of gold. At such seasons, there is a
home-felt feeling of humble reality, blending with the emotions of
imagination. In such places, the low-born high-souled poets of old
breathed forth their songs, and hymns, and elegies--the undying lyrical
poetry of the heart of Scotland.
Take the remotest Cottage first in order, HILLFOOT, and hear who are its
inmates--the Schoolmaster and his spouse. The schoolhouse stands on a
little unappropriated piece of ground--at least it seems to be so--quite
at the head of the glen; for there the hills sink down on each side, and
afford an easy access to the seat of learning from two neighbouring
vales, both in the same parish. Perhaps fifty scholars are there
taught--and with their small fees, and his small salary, Allan Easton is
contented. Allan was originally intended for the Church; but some
peccadilloes obstructed his progress with the Presbytery, and he never
was a preacher. That disappointment of all his hopes was for many years
grievously felt, and somewhat soured his mind with the world. It is
often impossible to recover one single false step in the slippery road
of life--and Allan Easton, year after year, saw himself falling farther
and farther into the rear of almost all his contemporaries. One became a
minister, and got a manse, with a stipend of twenty chalders; another
grew into an East India Nabob; one married the laird's widow, and kept a
pack of hounds--another expanded into a colonel--one cleared a plum by a
cotton-mill--another became the Croesus of a bank--while Allan, who
had beat them all hollow at all the classes, wore second-hand clothes,
and lived on the same fare with the poorest hind in the parish. He had
married, rather too late, the partner of his frailties--and after many
trials, and, as he thought, not a few persecutions, he got settled at
last, when his head, not very old, was getting grey, and his face
somewhat wrinkled. His wife, during his worst poverty, had gone again
into service, the lot, indeed, to which she had been born; and Allan had
struggled and starved upon private teaching. His appointment to the
parish school had, therefore, been to them both a blessed elevation. The
office was respectable--and loftier ambition had long been dead. Now
they are old people--considerably upwards of sixty--and twenty years'
professional life have converted Allan Easton, once the wild and
eccentric genius, into a staid, solemn, formal, and pedantic pedagogue.
All his scholars love him, for even in the discharge of such very humble
duties, talents make themselves felt and respected; and the kindness of
an affectionate and once sorely wounded, but now healed heart, is never
lost upon the susceptible imaginations of the young. Allan has sometimes
sent out no contemptible scholars, as scholars go in Scotland, to the
universities; and his heart has warmed within him when he has read
their names, in the newspaper from the manse, in the list of successful
competitors for prizes. During vacation-time, Allan and his spouse leave
their cottage locked up, and disappear, none know exactly whither, on
visits to an old friend or two, who have not altogether forgotten them
in their obscurity. During the rest of the year, his only out-of-doors
amusement is an afternoon's angling, an art in which it is universally
allowed he excels all mortal men, both in river and loch; and often,
during the long winter nights, when the shepherd is walking by his
dwelling, to visit his "ain lassie," down the burn, he hears Allan's
fiddle playing, in the solitary silence, some one of those Scottish
melodies, that we know not whether it be cheerful or plaintive, but
soothing to every heart that has been at all acquainted with grief.
Rumour says too, but rumour has not a scrupulous conscience, that the
Schoolmaster, when he meets with pleasant company, either at home or a
friend's house, is not averse to a hospitable cup, and that then the
memories of other days crowd upon his brain, and loosen his tongue into
eloquence. Old Susan keeps a sharp warning eye upon her husband on all
such occasions; but Allan braves its glances, and is forgiven.
We see only the uncertain glimmer of their dwelling through the
low-lying mist; and therefore we cannot describe it, as if it were
clearly before our eyes. But should you ever chance to angle your way up
to HILLFOOT, admire Allan Easton's flower-garden, and the jargonelle
pear-tree on the southern gable. The climate is somewhat high, but it is
not cold; and, except when the spring-frosts come late and sharp, there
do all blossoms and fruits abound, on every shrub and tree native to
Scotland. You will hardly know how to distinguish--or rather, to speak
in clerkly phrase, to analyse the sound prevalent over the fields and
air; for it is made up of that of the burn, of bees, of old Susan's
wheel, and the hum of the busy school. But now it is the play-hour, and
Allan Easton comes into his kitchen for his frugal dinner. Brush up your
Latin, and out with a few of the largest trouts in your pannier. Susan
fries them in fresh butter and oatmeal--the greyhaired pedagogue asks a
blessing--and a merrier man, within the limits of becoming mirth, you
never passed an hour's talk withal. So much for Allan Easton and Susan
his spouse.
You look as if you wished to ask who inhabits the Cottage--on the left
hand yonder--that stares upon us with four front windows, and pricks up
its ears like a new-started hare? Why, sir, that was once a
Shooting-box. It was built about twenty years ago, by a sporting
gentleman of two excellent double-barrelled guns, and three stanch
pointers. He attempted to live there, several times, from the 12th of
August till the end of September, and went pluffing disconsolately among
the hills from sunrise to sunset. He has been long dead and buried; and
the Box, they say, is now haunted. It has been attempted to be let
furnished, and there is now a board to that effect hung out like an
escutcheon. Picturesque people say it ruins the whole beauty of the
glen; but we must not think so, for it is not in the power of the
ugliest house that ever was built to do that, although, to effect such a
purpose, it is unquestionably a skilful contrivance. The window-shutters
have been closed for several years, and the chimneys look as if they had
breathed their last. It stands in a perpetual eddy, and the ground
shelves so all around it, that there is barely room for a barrel to
catch the rain-drippings from the slate-eaves. If it be indeed haunted,
pity the poor ghost! You may have it on a lease, short or long, for
merely paying the taxes. Every year it costs some pounds in
advertisements. What a jointure-house it would be for a relict! By name,
WINDY-KNOWE.
Nay, let us not fear to sketch the character of its last inhabitant, for
we desire but to speak the truth. Drunkard, stand forward, that we may
have a look at you, and draw your picture. There he stands! The mouth of
the drunkard, you may observe, contracts a singularly sensitive
appearance--seemingly red and rawish; and he is perpetually licking or
smacking his lips, as if his palate were dry and adust. His is a thirst
that water will not quench. He might as well drink air. His whole being
burns for a dram. The whole world is contracted into a caulker. He would
sell his soul in such extremity, were the black bottle denied him, for a
gulp. Not to save his soul from eternal fire, would he, or rather could
he, if left alone with it, refrain from pulling out the plug, and
sucking away at destruction. What a snout he turns up to the morning
air, inflamed, pimpled, snubby, and snorty, and with a nob at the end
on't like one carved out of a stick by the knife of a schoolboy--rough
and hot to the very eye--a nose which, rather than pull, you would
submit even to be in some degree insulted. A perpetual cough harasses
and exhausts him, and a perpetual expectoration. How his hand trembles!
It is an effort even to sign his name: one of his sides is certainly not
by any means as sound as the other; there has been a touch of palsy
there; and the next hint will draw down his chin to his collar-bone, and
convert him, a month before dissolution, into a slavering idiot. There
is no occupation, small or great, insignificant or important, to which
he can turn, for any length of time, his hand, his heart, or his head.
He cannot angle--for his fingers refuse to tie a knot, much more to busk
a fly. The glimmer and the glow of the stream would make his brain
dizzy--to wet his feet now would, he fears, be death. Yet he thinks that
he will go out--during that sunny blink of a showery day--and try the
well-known pool in which he used to bathe in boyhood, with the long,
matted, green-trailing water-plants depending on the slippery rocks, and
the water-ousel gliding from beneath the arch that hides her "procreant
cradle," and then sinking like a stone suddenly in the limpid stream. He
sits down on the bank, and fumbling in his pouch for his pocket-book,
brings out, instead, a pocket-pistol. Turning his fiery face towards the
mild, blue, vernal sky, he pours the gurgling brandy down his
throat--first one dose, and then another--till, in an hour, stupefied
and dazed, he sees not the silvery crimson-spotted trouts, shooting, and
leaping, and tumbling, and plunging in deep and shallow; a day on which,
with one of Captain Colley's March-Browns, in an hour we could fill our
pannier. Or, if it be autumn or winter, he calls, perhaps, with a voice
at once gruff and feeble, an old Ponto, and will take a pluff at the
partridges. In former days, down they used to go, right and left, in
potato or turnip-field, broomy brae or stubble--but now his sight is dim
and wavering, and his touch trembles on the trigger. The covey whirrs
off, unharmed in a single feather--and poor Ponto, remembering better
days, cannot conceal his melancholy, falls in at his master's heel, and
will range no more. Out, as usual, comes the brandy-bottle--he is still
a good shot when his mouth is the mark; and having emptied the fatal
flask, he staggers homewards, with the muzzles of his double-barrel
frequently pointed to his ear, both being on full cock, and his brains
not blown out only by a miracle. He tries to read the newspaper--just
arrived--but cannot find his spectacles. Then, by way of variety, he
attempts a tune on the fiddle; but the bridge is broken, and her side
cracked, and the bass-string snapped--and she is restored to her peg
among the cobwebs. In comes a red-headed, stockingless lass, with her
carrots in papers, and lays the cloth for dinner--salt beef and greens.
But the Major's stomach scunners at the Skye-stot--his eyes roll eagerly
for the hot-water--and in a couple of hours he is dead-drunk in his
chair, or stoitering and staggering, in aimless dalliance with the
scullion, among the pots and pans of an ever-disorderly and dirty
kitchen. Mean people, in shabby sporting velveteen dresses, rise up, as
he enters, from the dresser, covered with cans, jugs, and quaichs, and
take off their rusty and greasy napless hats to the Major; and, to
conclude the day worthily and consistently, he squelches himself down
among the reprobate crew, takes his turn at smutty jest and smuttier
song, which drive even the jades out of the kitchen--falls back
insensible, exposed to gross and indecent practical jokes from the
vilest of the unhanged--and finally is carried to bed on a hand-barrow,
with hanging head and heels, like a calf across a butcher's cart, and,
with glazed eyes and lolling tongue, is tumbled upon the quilt--if ever
to awake it is extremely doubtful; but if awake he do, it is to the same
wretched round of brutal degradation--a career, of which the inevitable
close is an unfriended deathbed and a pauper's grave. O hero! six feet
high, and once with a brawn like Hercules--in the prime of life
too--well born and well bred--once bearing the king's commission--and on
that glorious morn, now forgotten or bitterly remembered, thanked on the
field of battle by Picton, though he of the fighting division was a hero
of few words--is that a death worthy of a man--a soldier--and a
Christian? A dram-drinker! Faugh! faugh! Look over--lean over that
stile, where a pig lies wallowing in mire--and a voice, faint and
feeble, and far off, as if it came from some dim and remote world within
your lost soul, will cry, that of the two beasts, that bristly one,
agrunt in sensual sleep, with its snout snoring across the husk-trough,
is, as a physical, moral, and intellectual being, superior to you, late
Major in his Majesty's ---- regiment of foot, now dram-drinker,
drunkard, and dotard, and self-doomed to a disgraceful and disgusting
death ere you shall have completed your thirtieth year. What a changed
being from that day when you carried the colours, and were found, the
bravest of the brave, and the most beautiful of the beautiful, with the
glorious tatters wrapped round your body all drenched in blood, your
hand grasping the broken sabre, and two grim Frenchmen lying hacked and
hewed at your feet! Your father and your mother saw your name in the
"Great Lord's" Despatch; and it was as much as he could do to keep her
from falling on the floor, for "her joy was like a deep affright!" Both
are dead now; and better so, for the sight of that blotched face and
those glazed eyes, now and then glittering in fitful frenzy, would have
killed them both, nor, after such a spectacle, could their old bones
have rested in the grave.
Alas, Scotland--ay, well-educated, moral, religious Scotland can show,
in the bosom of her bonny banks and braes, cases worse than this; at
which, if there be tears in heaven, the angels weep. Look at that
greyheaded man, of threescore and upwards, sitting by the wayside! He
was once an Elder of the Kirk, and a pious man he was, if ever piety
adorned the temples--"the lyart haffets, wearing thin and bare," of a
Scottish peasant. What eye beheld the many hundred steps, that one by
one, with imperceptible gradation, led him down--down--down to the
lowest depths of shame, suffering, and ruin! For years before it was
bruited abroad through the parish that Gabriel Mason was addicted to
drink, his wife used to sit weeping alone in the spence when her sons
and daughters were out at their work in the fields, and the infatuated
man, fierce in the excitement of raw ardent spirits, kept causelessly
raging and storming through every nook of that once so peaceful
tenement, which for many happy years had never been disturbed by the
loud voice of anger or reproach. His eyes were seldom turned on his
unhappy wife except with a sullen scowl, or fiery wrath; but when they
did look on her with kindness, there was also a rueful self-upbraiding
in their expression, on account of his cruelty; and at sight of such
transitory tenderness, her heart would overflow with forgiving
affection, and her sunk eyes with unendurable tears. But neither
domestic sin nor domestic sorrow will conceal from the eyes and the ears
of men; and at last Gabriel Mason's name was a byword in the mouth of
the scoffer. One Sabbath he entered the kirk in a state of miserable
abandonment, and from that day he was no longer an elder. To regain his
character seemed to him, in his desperation, beyond the power of man,
and against the decree of God. So he delivered himself up, like a slave,
to that one appetite, and in a few years his whole household had gone to
destruction. His wife was a matron, almost in the prime of life, when
she died; but as she kept wearing away to the other world, her face told
that she felt her years had been too many in this. Her eldest son,
unable, in pride and shame, to lift up his eyes at kirk or market, went
away to the city, and enlisted into a regiment about to embark on
foreign service. His two sisters went to take farewell of him, but never
returned; one, it is said, having died of a fever in the Infirmary--just
as if she had been a pauper; and the other--for the sight of sin, and
sorrow, and shame, and suffering, is ruinous to the soul--gave herself
up, in her beauty, an easy prey to a destroyer, and doubtless has run
her course of agonies, and is now at peace. The rest of the family dropt
down, one by one, out of sight, into inferior situations in far-off
places; but there was a curse, it was thought, hanging over the family,
and of none of them did ever a favourable report come to their native
parish; while he, the infatuated sinner, whose vice seemed to have
worked all the woe, remained in the chains of his tyrannical passion,
nor seemed ever, for more than the short term of a day, to cease hugging
them to his heart. Semblance of all that is most venerable in the
character of Scotland's peasantry! Image of a perfect patriarch, walking
out to meditate at eventide! What a noble forehead! Features how high,
dignified, and composed! There, sitting in the shade of that old wayside
tree, he seems some religious Missionary, travelling to and fro over the
face of the earth, seeking out sin and sorrow, that he may tame them
under the word of God, and change their very being into piety and peace.
Call him not a hoary hypocrite, for he cannot help that noble--that
venerable--that apostolic aspect--that dignified figure, as if bent
gently by Time, loth to touch it with too heavy a hand--that holy
sprinkling over his furrowed temples of the silver-soft, and the
snow-white hair--these are the gifts of gracious Nature all--and Nature
will not reclaim them, but in the tomb. That is Gabriel Mason--the
Drunkard! And in an hour you may, if your eyes can bear the sight, see
and hear him staggering up and down the village, cursing, swearing,
preaching, praying--stoned by blackguard boys and girls, who hound all
the dogs and curs at his heels, till, taking refuge in the smithy or the
pot-house, he becomes the sport of grown clowns, and, after much idiot
laughter, ruefully mingled with sighs, and groans, and tears, he is
suffered to mount upon a table, and urged, perhaps, by reckless folly to
give out a text from the Bible, which is nearly all engraven on his
memory--so much and so many other things effaced for ever--and there,
like a wild Itinerant, he stammers forth unintentional blasphemy, till
the liquor he has been allowed or instigated to swallow smites him
suddenly senseless, and, falling down, he is huddled off into a corner
of some lumber-room; and left to sleep--better far for such a wretch
were it to death.