fleetness from among the prime Children of the Mist--and Tickler the
Tall, who keeps growing after threescore and ten like a stripling, and
leaves his mark within a few inches of the top of the pole, arrayed in
tights of Kendal green, bright from the skylight of the inimitable
Vallance or the matchless Williams--green too his vest, and green also
his tunic--while a green feather in a green bonnet dances in its airy
splendour, and gold button-holes give at once lustre and relief to the
glowing verdure (such was Little John, when arrayed in all his glory; to
walk behind Robin Hood and Maid Marian, as they glided from tree to
tree, in wait for the fallow-deer in merry Sherwood)--North in his
Quaker garb--Quaker-like all but in cuffs and flaps, which, when he goes
to the Forest, are not--North, with a figure combining in itself all the
strength of a William Penn, _sans_ its corpulency, all the agility of a
Jem Belcher with far more than a Jem Belcher's bottom--with a face
exhibiting in rarest union all the philosophy of a Bacon, the
benevolence of a Howard, the wisdom of a Wordsworth, the fire of a
Byron, the gnosticity of a John Bee, and the up-to-trappishness combined
not only with perfect honesty, but with honour bright, of the Sporting
Editor of _Bell's Life in London_--and then, why if Wilkie or Simpson
fail in making a GEM of all that, they are not the men of genius we took
them for, that is all, and the art must be at a low ebb indeed in these
kingdoms.
Well, our Tail has taken wings to itself and flown away with Dugald Dhu
and Donald Roy; and we, with Hamish Bhan, with Ponto, Piro, Basta, and
O'Bronte, are left by ourselves in the Tent. Before we proceed farther,
it may not be much amiss to turn up our little fingers--yestreen we were
all a leetle opstropelous--and spermaceti is not a more "sovereign
remedy for an inward bruise," than is a hair from the dog's tail that
bit you an antidote to any pus that produces rabies in the shape of
hydrophobia. Fill up the quaich, Hamish! a caulker of Milbank can harm
no man at any hour of the day--at least in the Highlands. Sma' Stell,
Hamish--assuredly Sma' Stell!
Ere we start, Hamish, play us a Gathering--and then a Pibroch. "The
Campbells are coming" is like a storm from the mountain sweeping
Glen-More, that roars beneath the hastening hurricane with all its
woods. No earthquake like that which accompanies the trampling of ten
thousand men. So, round that shoulder, Hamish--and away for a mile up
the Glen--then, turning on your heel, blow till proud might be the
mother that bore you; and from the Tent-mouth Christopher will keep
smart fire from his Pattereroes, answered by all the echoes.
Hamish--indeed
"The dun-deer's hide
On swifter foot was never tied--"
for even now as that cloud--rather thunderous in his aspect--settles
himself over the Tent--ere five minutes have elapsed--a mile off is the
sullen sound of the bagpipe!--music which, if it rouse you not when
heard among the mountains, may you henceforth confine yourself to the
Jew's harp. Ay, here's a claymore--let us fling away the scabbard--and
in upon the front rank of the bayoneted muskets, till the Saxon array
reels, or falls just where it has been standing, like a swathe of grass.
So swept of old the Highlanders--shepherds and herdsmen--down the wooded
cliffs of the pass of Killiecrankie, till Mackay's red-coats lay redder
in blood among the heather, or passed away like the lurid fragments of a
cloud. "The Campbells are coming"--and we will charge with the heroes in
the van. The whole clan is maddening along the Moor--and Maccallum More
himself is at their head. But we beseech you, O'Bronte! not to look so
like a lion--and to hush in your throat and breast that truly Leonine
growl--for after all, 'tis but a bagpipe with ribands
"Streaming like meteors to the troubled air,"
and all our martial enthusiasm has evaporated in--wind.
But let us inspect Brown Bess. Till sixty, we used a single barrel. At
seventy we took to a double;--but dang detonators--we stick to the
flint. "Flint," says Colonel Hawker, "shoots strongest into the bird." A
percussion-gun is quicker, but flint is fast enough; and it does,
indeed, argue rather a confusion than a rapidity of ideas, to find fault
with lightning for being too slow. With respect to the flash in the pan,
it is but a fair warning to ducks, for example, to dive if they can, and
get out of the way of mischief. It is giving birds a chance for their
lives, and is it not ungenerous to grudge it? When our gun goes to our
shoulder, that chance is but small; for with double-barrel Brown Bess,
it is but a word and a blow,--the blow first, and long before you could
say Jack Robinson, the gorcock plays thud on the heather. But we beg
leave to set the question at rest for ever by one single clencher. We
have killed fifty birds--grouse--at fifty successive shots--one bird
only to the shot. And mind, not mere pouts--cheepers--for we are no
chicken-butchers--but all thumpers--cocks and hens as big as their
parents, and the parents themselves likewise; not one of which fell _out
of bounds_ (to borrow a phrase from the somewhat silly though skilful
pastime of pigeon-shooting), except one that suddenly soared half-way up
to the moon, and then
"Into such strange vagaries fell
As he would dance,"
and tumbled down stone-dead into a loch. Now, what more could have done
a detonator in the hands of the devil himself? Satan might have shot as
well, perhaps, as Christopher North--better we defy him; and we cannot
doubt that his detonator--given to him in a present, we believe, by Joe
Manton--is a prime article--one of the best ever manufactured on the
percussion system. But what more could he have done? When we had killed
our fiftieth bird in style, we put it to the Christian reader, would not
the odds have been six to four on the flint? And would not Satan, at the
close of the match, ten birds behind perhaps, and with a bag shamefully
rich in poor pouts, that would have fallen to the ground had he but
thrown salt on their tails, have looked excessively sheepish? True, that
in rain or snow the percussion-lock will act, from its detonating power,
more correctly than the common flint-lock, which, begging its pardon,
will then often not act at all; but that is its only advantage, and we
confess a great one, especially in Scotland, where it is a libel on the
country to say that it always rains, for it almost as often snows.
However, spite of wind and weather, we are faithful to flint; nor shall
any newfangled invention, howsoever ingenious, wean us from our First
Love.
Let not youthful or middle-aged sportsmen--in whose veins the blood yet
gallops, canters, or trots--despise us, Monsieur Vieillard, in whose
veins the blood creeps like a wearied pedestrian at twilight hardly able
to hobble into the wayside inn--for thus so long preferring the steel
pen to the steel barrel (the style of both is equally polished)--our
Bramah to our Manton. Those two wild young fellows, Tickler and the
Admiral, whose united ages amount to little more than a century and a
half, are already slaughtering their way along the mountain-side, the
one on Buachaille Etive, and the other on the Black Mount. But we love
not to commit murder long before meridian--"gentle lover of Nature" as
we are; so, in spite of the scorn of the more passionate sportsman, we
shall continue for an hour or two longer inditing, ever and anon lifting
our eyes from whitey-brown paper to whitey-blue sky, from
memorandum-book to mountain, from ink-bottle to loch, and delight
ourselves, and perchance a few thousand others, by a waking-dream
description of Glen-Etive.
'Tis a vast Glen. Not one single human dwelling anywhere speck-like on
the river-winding plain--or nest-like among the brushwood knolls--or
rock-like among the fractured cliffs far up on the mountain region do
our eyes behold, eager as they are to discover some symptom of life. Two
houses we know to be in the solitude--ay, two--one of them near the
head of the Loch, and the other near the head of the Glen--but both
distant from this our Tent, which is pitched between, in the very heart
of the Moor. We were mistaken in saying that Dalness is invisible--for
yonder it looms in a sullen light, and before we have finished the
sentence, may have again sunk into the moor. Ay, it is gone--for lights
and shadows coming and going, we know not whence nor whither, here
travel all day long--the sole tenants--very ghostlike--and seemingly in
their shiftings imbued with a sort of dim uncertain life. How far off
from our Tent may be the Loch? Miles--and silently as snow are seen to
break the waves along the shore, while beyond them hangs an aerial haze,
the great blue water. How far off from our Tent may be the mountains at
the head of the Glen? Miles--for though that speck in the sky into which
they upheave their mighty altitudes, be doubtless an eagle, we cannot
hear its cry. What giants are these right opposite our Pyramid?--Co--grim
chieftain--and his Tail. What an assemblage of thunder-riven cliffs!
This is what may be well called--Nature on a grand scale. And then, how
simple! We begin to feel ourselves--in spite of all we can do to support
our dignity by our pride--a mighty small and insignificant personage. We
are about six feet high--and everybody around us about four thousand.
Yes, that is the Four Thousand Feet Club! We had no idea that in any
situation we could be such dwindled dwarfs, such perfect pigmies. Our
Tent is about as big as a fir-cone--and Christopher North an insect!
What a wild world of clouds all over that vast central wilderness of
Northern Argyllshire lying between Cruachan and Melnatorran--Corryfinuarach
and Ben Slarive, a prodigious land! defying description, and in memory
resembling not realities, but like fragments of tremendous dreams. Is it
a sterile region? Very. In places nothing but stones. Not a blade of
grass--not a bent of heather--not even moss. And so they go shouldering
up into the sky--enormous masses--huger than churches or ships. And
sometimes not unlike such and other structures--all huddled together--yet
never jostling, so far as we have seen; and though often overhanging, as
if the wind might blow them over with a puff, steadfast in the storm
that seems rather to be an earthquake, and moving not an hair's-breadth,
while all the shingly sides of the mountains--you know shingle--with an
inconstant clatter--hurry-skurry--seem to be breaking up into debris.
Is that the character of the whole region? No, you darling; it has vales
on vales of emerald, and mountains on mountains of amethyst, and streams
on streams of silver; and, so help us Heaven!--for with these eyes we
have seen them, a thousand and a thousand times--at sunrise and sunset,
rivers on rivers of gold. What kind of climate? All kinds, and all kinds
at once--not merely during the same season, but the same hour. Suppose
it three o'clock of a summer afternoon--you have but to choose your
weather. Do you desire a close sultry breathless gloom? You have it in
the stifling dens of Ben-An[=e]a, where lions might breed. A breezy
coolness, with a sprinkling of rain? Then open your vest to the green
light in the dewy vales of Benl[=u]ra. Lochs look lovely in mist, and so
thinks the rainbow--then away with you ere the rainbow fade--away, we
beseech you, to the wild shores of Lochan-a-L[=u]rich. But you would
rather see a storm, and hear some Highland thunder? There is one at this
moment on Unimore, and Cruachl[=i]a growls to Meallanuir, till the
cataracts of Glashgour are dumb as the dry rocks of Craig-te[=o]nan.
In those regions we were, when a boy, initiated into the highest
mysteries of the Highlands. No guide dogged our steps--as well might a
red-deer have asked a cur to show him the Forest of Braemar, or
Beniglo--an eagle where best to build his eyrie have advised with the
Glasgow Gander. O heavens! how we were bewildered among the vast objects
that fed that delirium of our boyhood! We dimly recognised faces of
cliffs wearing dreadful frowns; blind though they looked, they seemed
sensible of our approach; and we heard one horrid monster mutter, "What
brings thee here, infatuated Pech?--begone!" At his impotent malice we
could not choose but smile, and shook our staff at the blockhead, as
since at many a greater blockhead even than he have we shook--and more
than shook our Crutch. But as through "pastures green and quiet waters
by," we pursued, from sunrise to sunset, our uncompanioned way, some
sweet spot, surrounded by heather, and shaded by fern, would woo us to
lie down on its bosom, and enjoy a visionary sleep! Then it was that the
mountains confidentially told us their names--and we got them all by
heart; for each name characterised its owner by some of his peculiar and
prominent qualities--as if they had been one and all christened by poets
baptising them from a font
"Translucent, pure,
With touch ethereal of heaven's fiery rod."
O! happy pastor of a peaceful flock! Thou hast long gone to thy reward!
One--two--three--four successors hast thou had in that manse--(now it
too has been taken down and the plough gone over it)--and they all did
their duty; yet still is thy memory fragrant in the glen; for deeds like
thine "smell sweet, and blossom in the dust!" Under heaven, we owed our
life to thy care of us in a brain fever. Sometimes thy face would grow
grave, never angry, at our sallies--follies--call them what you will,
but not sins. And methinks we hear the mild old man somewhat mournfully
saying, "Mad boy! out of gladness often cometh grief--out of mirth
misery; but our prayers, when thou leavest us, shall be, that never,
never may such be thy fate!" Were those prayers heard in heaven and
granted on earth? We ask our heart in awe, but its depths are silent,
and make no response.
But is it our intention to sit scribbling here all day? Our fancy lets
our feet enjoy their sinecure, and they stretch themselves out in
indolent longitude beneath the Tent-table, while we are settled in
spirit, a silent thought, on the battlements of our cloud-castle on the
summit of Cruachan. What a prospect! Our cloud-castle rests upon a
foundation of granite precipices; and down along their hundred chasms,
from which the eye recoils, we look on Loch-Etive bearing on its bosom
stationary--so it seems in the sunshine--one snow-white sail! What
brings the creature there--and on what errand may she be voyaging up the
uninhabited sea-arm that stretches away into the uninhabited mountains?
Some poet, perhaps, steers her--sitting at the helm in a dream, and
allowing her to dance her own way, at her own will, up and down the
green glens and hills of the foam-crested waves--a swell rolling in the
beauty of light and music for ever attendant on her, as the Sea-mew--for
so we choose to name her--pursues her voyage--now on water, and now, as
the breezes drop, in the air--elements at times undistinguishable, as
the shadows of the clouds and of the mountains mingle their imagery in
the sea. Oh! that our head, like that of a spider, were all studded with
eyes--that our imagination, sitting in the "palace of the soul" (a noble
expression, borrowed or stolen by Byron from Waller), might see all at
once all the sights from centre to circumference, as if all rallying
around her for her own delight, and oppressing her with the poetry of
nature--a lyrical, an elegiac, an epic, or a tragic strain. Now the
bright blue water-gleams enchain her vision, and are felt to constitute
the vital, the essential spirit of the whole--Loch Awe land-serpent,
large as serpent of the sea, lying asleep in the sun, with his burnished
skin all bedropt with scales of silver and of gold--the lands of Lorn,
mottled and speckled with innumerous lakelets, where fancy sees millions
of water-lilies riding at anchor in bays where the breezes have fallen
asleep--Oban, splendid among the splendours of that now almost
motionless mediterranean, the mountain-loving Linnhe Loch--Jura, Islay,
Colonsay, and nameless other islands, floating far and wide away on--on
to Coll and Tiree, drowned beneath the faint horizon. But now all the
eyes in our spider-head are lost in one blaze of undistinguishable
glory; for the whole Highlands of Scotland are up in their power against
us--rivers, lochs, seas, islands, cliffs, clouds, and mountains. The pen
drops from our hand, and here we are--not on the battlements of the
air-palace on the summit of Cruachan, but sitting on a tripod or
three-legged stool at the mouth of our Tent, with our MS. before us, and
at our right hand a quaich of Glenlivet, fresh drawn from yonder
ten-gallon cask--and here's to the health of "Honest men and bonny
lasses" all over the globe.
So much for description--an art in which the Public (God bless her,
where is she now--and shall we ever see her more?) has been often
pleased to say that we excel. But let us off to the Moor. Piro! Ponto!
Basta! to your paws, and O'Bronte, unfurl your tail to heaven. Pointers!
ye are a noble trio. White, O Ponto! art thou as the foam of the sea.
Piro! thou tan of all tans! red art thou as the dun-deer's hide, and
fleet as he while thou rangest the mountain-brow, now hid in heather,
and now reappearing over the rocks. Waur hawk, Basta!--for
finest-scented though be thy scarlet nostrils, one bad trick alone hast
thou; and whenever that grey wing glances from some pillar-stone in the
wilderness, headlong goest thou, O lawless negro! But behave thyself
to-day, Basta! and let the kestrel unheeded sail or sun herself on the
cliff. As for thee, O'Bronte! the sable dog with the star-bright breast,
keep thou like a serf at our heels, and when our course lies over the
fens and marshes, thou mayest sweep like a hairy hurricane among the
flappers, and haply to-day grip the old drake himself, and, with thy
fan-like tail proudly spread in the wind, deposit at thy master's feet,
with a smile, the monstrous mallard.
But in what direction shall we go, callants--towards what airt shall we
turn our faces? Over yonder cliffs shall we ascend, and descend into
Glen-Creran, where the stony regions that the ptarmigan loves melt away
into miles of the grousey heather, which, ere we near the salmon-haunted
Loch so beautiful, loses itself in woods that mellow all the heights of
Glen Ure and Fasnacloigh with sylvan shades, wherein the cushat coos,
and the roe glides through the secret covert? Or shall we away up by
Kinloch-Etive, and Melnatorran, and Mealgayre, into the Solitude of
Streams, that from all their lofty sources down to the far-distant Loch
have never yet brooked, nor will they ever brook, the bondage of
bridges, save of some huge stone flung across some chasm, or trunk of a
tree--none but trunks of trees there, and all dead for centuries--that
had sunk down where it grew, and spanned the flood that eddies round it
with a louder music? Wild region! yet not barren; for there are cattle
on a thousand hills, that, wild as the very red-deer, toss their heads
as they snuff the feet of rarest stranger, and form round him in a
half-alarmed and half-threatening crescent. There flocks of
goats--outliers from Dalness--may be seen as if following one another on
the very air, along the lichen-stained cliffs that frown down unfathomed
abysses--and there is frequent heard the whirring of the gorcock's wing,
and his gobble gathering together his brood, scattered by the lightning
that in its season volleys through the silence, else far deeper than
that of death;--for the silence of death--that is, of a churchyard
filled with tombs--is nothing to the austerity of the noiselessness that
prevails under the shadow of Unimore and Attchorachan, with their cliffs
on which the storms have engraven strange hieroglyphical inscriptions,
which, could but we read them wisely, would record the successive ages
of the Earth, from the hour when fire or flood first moulded the
mountains, down to the very moment that we are speaking, and with small
steel-hammer roughening the edges of our flints that they may fail not
to murder. Or shall we away down by Armaddy, where the Fox-Hunter
dwells--and through the woods of Inverkinglass and Achran, "double,
double, toil and trouble" overcome the braes of Benanea and
Mealcopucaich, and drop down like two unwearied eagles into Glen-Scrae,
with a peep in the distance of the young tower of Dalmally, and the old
turrets of Kilchurn? Rich and rare is the shooting-ground, Hamish, which
by that route lies between this our Tent and the many tarns that freshen
the wildernesses of Lochanancrioch. Say the word--tip the wink--tongue
on your cheek--up with your forefinger--and we shall go; for hark,
Hamish, our chronometer chimes eight--a long day is yet before us--and
what if we be benighted? We have a full moon and plenty of stars.
All these are splendid schemes--but what say you, Hamish, to one less
ambitious, and better adapted to Old Kit? Let us beat all the best bits
down by Armaddy--the Forge--Gleno, and Inveraw. We may do that well in
some six or seven hours--and then let us try that famous salmon-cast
nearest the mansion--(you have the rods?)--and if time permit, an hour's
trolling in Loch Awe, below the Pass of the Brander, for one of those
giants that have immortalised the names of a Maule, a Goldie, and a
Wilson. Mercy on us, Shelty, what a beard! You cannot have been shaved
since Whitsunday--and never saw we such lengthy love-locks as those
dangling at your heels. But let us mount, old Surefoot--mulish in nought
but an inveterate aversion to all stumbling. And now for the heather!
But are you sure, gents, _that we are on_?
And has it come to this! Where is the grandson of the desert-born?
Thirty years ago, and thou Filho da Puta wert a flyer! A fencer beyond
compare! Dost thou remember how, for a cool five hundred, thou clearedst
yon canal in a style that rivalled that of the red-deer across the
chasms of Cairngorm? All we had to do was to hold hard and not ride over
the hounds, when running breast-high on the rear of Reynard the savage
pack wakened the welkin with the tumultuous hubbub of their death-cry,
and whipper-in and huntsman were flogging on their faltering flight in
vain through fields and forests flying behind thy heels that glanced
and glittered in the frosty sunshine. What steed like thee in all
Britain at a steeple-chase? Thy hoofs scorned the strong stubble, and
skimmed the deep fallows, in which all other horses--heavy there as
dragoons--seemed fetlock-bound, or laboured on in staggerings, soil-sunk
to the knees. Ditches dwindled beneath thy bounds, and rivulets were as
rills; or if in flood they rudely overran their banks, into the spate
plunged thy sixteen hands and a-half height, like a Polar monster
leaping from an iceberg into the sea, and then lifting up thy small head
and fine neck and high shoulder, like a Draco from the weltering waters,
with a few proud pawings to which the recovered greensward rang, thy
whole bold, bright-brown bulk reappeared on the bank, crested by old
Christopher, and after one short snorting pause, over the miry
meadows--tantivy!--tantivy!--away! away! away!
Oh! son of a Rep! were not those glorious days? But Time has laid his
finger on us both, Filho; and never more must we two be seen by the edge
of the cover,
"When first the hunter's startling horn is heard
Upon the golden hills."
'Tis the last learned and highest lesson of Wisdom, Filho, in man's
studious obedience to Nature's laws--_to know when to stop in his
career_. Pride, Passion, Pleasure, all urge him on; while Prudence,
Propriety, Peace, cry halt! halt! halt! That mandate we have timeously
obeyed; and having, unblamed we hope, and blameless, carried on the
pastimes of youth into manhood, and even through the prime of manhood to
the verge of age--on that verge, after some few farewell vagaries up and
down the debatable land, we had the resolution to drop our bridle-hand,
to unloosen the spurs from our heels, and to dismount from the
stateliest and swiftest steed, Filho, that ever wafted mortal man over
moor and mountain like a storm-driven cloud.
You are sure _we are on_, Hamish? And that he will not run away? Come,
come, Surefoot, none of your funking! A better mane for holding on by we
could not imagine. Pure Shelty you say, Hamish? From his ears we should
have suspected his grandfather of having been at least a Zebra.
THE MOORS.
FLIGHT SECOND--THE COVES OF CRUACHAN.