what a wide gloom is cast over them by this severe necessity, which is
nevertheless the great and constant cause of the improvement of their
condition. It is not suffering alone--for _that_ they may be inured to
bear,--but the darkness of the understanding, and the darkness of the
heart, which comes on under the oppression of toil, that is miserable to
see. Our fellow-men, born with the same spirit as ourselves, seem yet
denied the common privileges of that spirit. They seem to bring
faculties into the world that cannot be unfolded, and powers of
affection and desire which not their fault but the lot of their birth
will pervert and degrade. There is a humiliation laid upon our nature in
the doom which seems thus to rest upon a great portion of our species,
which, while it requires our most considerate compassion for those who
are thus depressed, compels us to humble ourselves under the sense of
our own participation in the nature from which it flows. Therefore, in
estimating the worth, the virtue of our fellow-men, whom Providence has
placed in a lot that yields to them the means, and little more than the
means, of supporting life in themselves and those born of them, let us
never forget how intimate is the necessary union between the wants of
the body and the thoughts of the soul. Let us remember, that over a
great portion of humanity the soul is in a struggle for its independence
and power with the necessities of that nature in which it is enveloped.
It has to support itself against sickening, or irritating, or maddening
thoughts, inspired by weariness, lassitude, want, or the fear of want.
It is chained down to the earth by the influence of one great and
constant occupation--that of providing the means of its mortal
existence. When it shows itself shook and agitated, or overcome in the
struggle, what ought to be the thoughts and feelings of the wise for
poor humanity! When, on the other hand, we see nature preserving itself
pure, bold, and happy amidst the perpetual threatenings or assaults of
those evils from which it cannot fly, and though oppressed by its own
weary wants, forgetting them all in that love which ministers to the
wants of others,--when we see the brow wrinkled and drenched by
incessant toil, the body in the power of its prime bowed down to the
dust, and the whole frame in which the immortal spirit abides marked,
but not dishonoured, by its slavery to fate,--and when, in the midst of
all this ceaseless depression and oppression, from which man must never
hope to escape on earth, we see him still seeking and still finding joy,
delight, and happiness in the finer affections of his spiritual being,
giving to the lips of those he loves the scanty morsel earned by his own
hungry and thirsty toil, purchasing by sweat, sickness, and fever,
Education and Instruction and Religion to the young creatures who
delight him who is starving for their sakes, resting with gratitude on
that day, whose return is ever like a fresh fountain to his exhausted
and weary heart, and preserving a profound and high sense of his own
immortality among all the earth-born toils and troubles that would in
vain chain him down to the dust;--when we see all this, and think of all
this, we feel indeed how rich may be the poorest of the poor, and learn
to respect the moral being of man in its triumphs over the power of his
physical nature. But we do not learn to doubt or deny the wisdom of the
Creator. We do not learn from all these struggles, and all these
defeats, and all these victories, and all these triumphs, that God sent
us His creatures into this life to starve, because the air, the earth,
and the waters have not wherewithal to feed the mouths that gape for
food through all the elements! Nor do we learn that want is a crime, and
poverty a sin--and that they who _would_ toil, but cannot, and they who
_can_ toil, but have no work set before them, are intruders at Nature's
table, and must be driven, by those who are able to pay for their seats,
to famine, starvation, and death--almost denied a burial!--Finis. Amen.
Often has it been our lot, by our conversational powers to set the table
on a snore. The more stirring the theme, the more soporific the sound of
our silver voice. Look there, we beseech you! In a small spot of
"stationary sunshine"--lie Hamish, and Surefoot, and O'Bronte, and
Ponto, and Piro, and Basta, all sound asleep! Dogs are troubled
sleepers--but these four are now like the dreamless dead. Horses, too,
seem often to be witch-ridden in their sleep. But at this moment
Surefoot is stretched more like a stone than a shelty in the land of
Nod. As for Hamish, were he to lie so braxy-like by himself on the hill,
he would be awakened by the bill of the raven digging into his sockets.
We are Morpheus and Orpheus in one incarnation--the very Pink of
Poppy--the true spirit of Opium--of Laudanum the concentrated
Essence--of the black Drop the Gnome.
Indeed, gentlemen, you have reason to be ashamed of yourselves--but
where is the awkward squad? Clean gone. They have stolen a march on us,
and while we have been preaching they have been poaching--_sans_ mandate
of the Marquess and Monzie. We may catch them ere close of day; and, if
they have a smell of slaughter, we shall crack their sconces with our
Crutch. No apologies, Hamish--'tis only making the matter worse; but we
expected better things of the Dogs. O'Bronte! fie! fie! sirrah. Your
sire would not have fallen asleep during a speech of ours--and such a
speech!--he would have sat it out without winking--at each more splendid
passage testifying his delight by a yowl. Leap over the Crutch, you
reprobate, and let us see thee scour. Look at him, Hamish, already
beckoning to us on his hurdies from the hill-top. Let us scale those
barriers--and away over the table-land between that summit and the head
of Gleno. No sooner said than done--and here we are on the level--such a
level as the ship finds on the main sea, when in the storm-lull she
rides up and down the green swell, before the trade-winds that cool the
tropics. The surface of this main land-sea is black in the gloom, and
green in the glimmer, and purple in the light, and crimson in the
sunshine. O, never looks Nature so magnificent
"As in this varying and uncertain weather,
When gloom and glory force themselves together,
When calm seems stormy, and tempestuous light
At day's meridian lowers like noon of night!"
Whose are these fine lines? Hooky Walker, OUR OWN. Dogs!
Down--down--down--be stonelike, O Shelty!--and Hamish, sink thou into
the heather like a lizard; for if these old dim eyes of ours may be in
aught believed, yonder by the birches stands a Red-Deer snuffing the
east wind! Hush! hush! hush! He suspects an enemy in that airt--but
death comes upon him with stealthy foot, from the west; and if Apollo
and Diana--the divinities we so long have worshipped--be now propitious,
his antlers shall be entangled in the heather, and his hoofs beat the
heavens. Hamish, the rifle! A tinkle as of iron, and a hiss accompanying
the explosion--and the King of the Wilderness, bounding up into the air
with his antlers higher than ever waved chieftain's plume, falls down
stone-dead where he stood; for the blue-pill has gone through his
vitals, and lightning itself could hardly have withered him into more
instantaneous cessation of life!
He is an enormous animal. What antlers! Roll him over, Hamish, on his
side! See, up to our breast, nearly, reaches the topmost branch. He is
what the hunter of old called a "Stag of Ten." His eye has lost the
flash of freedom--the tongue that browsed the brushwood is bitten
through by the clenched teeth--the fleetness of his feet has felt that
fatal frost--the wild heart is hushed, Hamish--tame, tame, tame; and
there the Monarch of the Mountains--the King of the Cliffs--the Grand
Llama of the Glens--the Sultan of the Solitudes--the Dey of the
Deserts--the Royal Ranger of the Woods and Forests--yea, the very Prince
of the Air and Thane of Thunder--"shorn of all his beams," lies
motionless as a dead Jackass by the wayside, whose hide was not thought
worth the trouble of flaying by his owners the gypsies! "To this
complexion has he come at last"--he who at dawn had borrowed the wings
of the wind to carry him across the cataracts!
A sudden pang shoots across our heart. What right had we to commit this
murder? How, henceforth, shall we dare to hold up our head among the
lovers of liberty, after having thus stolen basely from behind on him,
the boldest, brightest, and most beautiful of all her sons! We, who for
so many years have been just able to hobble, and no more, by aid of the
Crutch--who feared to let the heather-bent touch our toe, so sensitive
in its gout--We, the old and impotent, all last winter bed-ridden, and
even now seated like a lameter on a shelty, strapped by a patent buckle
to a saddle provided with a pummel behind as well as before--such an
unwieldy and weary wretch as We--"fat, and scant of breath"--and with
our hand almost perpetually pressed against our left side, when a
coughing-fit of asthma brings back the stitch, seldom an absentee--to
assassinate THAT RED-DEER, whose flight on earth could accompany the
eagles in heaven; and not only to assassinate him, but, in a moral vein,
to liken his carcass to that of a Jackass! It will not bear further
reflection; so, Hamish, out with your whinger, and carve him a dish fit
for the gods--in a style worthy of Sir Tristrem, Gill Morice, Robin
Hood, or Lord Ranald. No; let him lie till nightfall, when we shall be
returning from Inveraw with strength sufficient to bear him to the Tent.
But hark, Hamish, to that sullen croak from the cliff! The old raven of
the cove already scents death--
"Sagacious of his quarry from afar!"
But where art thou, Hamish? Ay, yonder is Hamish, wriggling on his very
belly, like an adder, through the heather to windward of the croaker,
whose nostrils, and eyes, and bill, are now all hungrily fascinated, and
as it were already fastened into the very bowels of the beast. His days
are numbered. That sly serpent, by circuitous windings insinuating his
limber length through among all obstructions, has ascended unseen the
drooping shoulder of the cliff, and now cautiously erects his crest
within a hundred yards or more of the unsuspecting savage, still
uttering at intervals his sullen croak, croak, croak! Something
crumbles, and old Sooty, unfolding his huge wings, lifts himself up like
Satan, about to sail away for a while into another glen; but the rifle
rings among the rocks--the lead has broken his spine--and look! how the
demon, head-over-heels, goes tumbling down, down, down, many hundred
fathoms, dashed to pieces and impaled on the sharp-pointed granite! Ere
nightfall the bloody fragments will be devoured by his mate. Nothing now
will disturb the carcass of the deer. No corbies dare enter the cove
where the raven reigned; the hawk prefers grouse to venison, and so does
the eagle, who, however, like a good Catholic as he is--this is
Friday--has gone out to sea for a fish dinner, which he devours to the
music of the waves on some isle-rock. Therefore lie there, dethroned
king! till thou art decapitated; and ere the moon wanes, that haunch
will tower gloriously on our Tent-table at the Feast of Shells.
What is your private opinion, O'Bronte, of the taste of Red-deer blood?
Has it not a wild twang on the tongue and palate, far preferable to
sheep's-head? You are absolutely undergoing transfiguration into a
deer-hound! With your fore-paws on the flank, your tail brandished like
a standard, and your crimson flews (thank you, Shepherd, for that word)
licked by a long lambent tongue red as crimson, while your eyes express
a fierce delight never felt before, and a stifled growl disturbs the
star on your breast--just as you stand now, O'Bronte, might Edwin
Landseer rejoice to paint thy picture, for which, immortal image of the
wilderness, the Duke of Bedford would not scruple to give a draft on his
banker for one thousand pounds!
Shooting grouse after red-deer is, for a while at first, felt to be like
writing an anagram in a lady's album, after having given the
finishing-touch to a tragedy or an epic poem. 'Tis like taking to
catching shrimps in the sand with one's toes, on one's return from
Davis' Straits in a whaler that arrived at Peterhead with sixteen fish,
each calculated at ten tun of oil. Yet, 'tis strange how the human soul
can descend, pleasantly at every note, from the top to the bottom of
passion's and imagination's gamut.
A Tarn--a Tarn! with but a small circle of unbroken water in the centre,
and all the rest of its shallowness bristling, in every bay, with reeds
and rushes, and surrounded, all about the mossy flat, with marshes and
quagmires! What a breeding-place--"procreant cradle" for water-fowl! Now
comes thy turn, O'Bronte--for famous is thy name, almost as thy sire's,
among the flappers. Crawl down to leeward, Hamish, that you may pepper
them--should they take to flight overhead to the loch. Surefoot, taste
that greensward, and you will find it sweet and succulent. Dogs,
heel--heel!--and now let us steal, on our Crutch, behind that knoll, and
open a sudden fire on the swimmers, who seem to think themselves out of
shot at the edge of that line of water-lilies; but some of them will
soon find themselves mistaken, whirling round on their backs, and vainly
endeavouring to dive after their friends that disappear beneath the
agitated surface shot-swept into spray. Long Gun! who oft to the
forefinger of Colonel Hawker has swept the night-harbour of Poole all
alive with widgeons, be true to the trust now reposed in thee by Kit
North! And though these be neither geese, nor swans, nor hoopers, yet
send thy leaden shower among them feeding in their play, till all the
air be afloat with specks, as if at the shaking of a feather-bed that
had burst the ticking, and the tarn covered with sprawling mawsies and
mallards, in death-throes among the ducklings! There it lies on its
rest--like a telescope. No eye has discovered the invention--keen as
those wild eyes are of the plouterers on the shallows. Lightning and
thunder! to which all the echoes roar. But we meanwhile are on our back;
for of all the recoils that ever shook a shoulder, that one was the
severest--but 'twill probably cure our rheumatism and----Well
done--nobly, gloriously done, O'Bronte! Heaven and earth, how otter-like
he swims! Ha, Hamish! you have cut off the retreat of that airy
voyager--you have given it him in his stern, Hamish--and are reloading
for the flappers. One at a time in your mouth, O'Bronte! Put about with
that tail for a rudder--and make for the shore. What a stately creature!
as he comes issuing from the shallows, and bearing the old mallard
breast-high, walks all dripping along the greensward, and then shakes
from his curled ebony the flashing spray-mist. He gives us one look as
we crown the knoll, and then in again with a spang and a plunge far into
the tarn, caring no more for the reeds than for so many windle-straes,
and, fast as a sea-serpent, is among the heart of the killed and
wounded. In unerring instinct he always seizes the dead--and now a
devil's dozen lie along the shore. Come hither, O'Bronte, and caress thy
old master. Ay--that showed a fine feeling--did that long shake that
bedrizzled the sunshine. Put thy paws over our shoulders, and round our
neck, true son of thy sire--oh! that he were but alive, to see and share
thy achievements: but indeed, two such dogs, living together in their
prime at one era, would have been too great glory for this sublunary
canine world. Therefore Sirius looked on thy sire with an evil eye, and
in jealousy--
"Tantaene animis caelestibus irae!"
growled upon some sinner to poison the Dog of all Dogs, who leapt up
almost to the ceiling of the room where he slept--our own bedroom--under
the agony of that accursed arsenic, gave one horrid howl, and expired.
Methinka we know his murderer--his eye falls when it meets ours on the
Street of Princes; and let him scowl there but seldom--for though 'tis
but suspicion, this fist, O'Bronte, doubles at the sight of the
miscreant--and some day, impelled by wrath and disgust, it will smash
his nose flat with the other features, till his face is a pancake. Yea!
as sure as Themis holds her balance in the skies, shall the poisoner be
punished out of all recognition by his parents, and be disowned by the
Irish Cockney father that begot him, and the Scotch Cockney mother that
bore him, as he carries home a tripe-like countenance enough to make his
paramour the scullion miscarry, as she opens the door to him on the
fifth flat of a common stair. But we are getting personal, O'Bronte, a
vice abhorrent from our nature.
There goes our Crutch, Hamish, whirling aloft in the sky like a rainbow
flight, even like the ten-pound hammer from the fling of George Scougal
at the St Ronans games. Our gout is gone--so is our asthma--eke our
rheumatism--and, like an eagle, we have renewed our youth. There is hop,
step, and jump, for you, Hamish--we should not fear, young and agile as
you are, buck, to give you a yard. But now for the flappers. Pointers
all, stir your stumps and into the water. This is rich. Why, the reeds
are as full of flappers as of frogs. If they can fly, the fools don't
know it. Why, there is a whole musquito-fleet of yellow boys, not a
month old. What a prolific old lady must she have been, to have kept on
breeding till July. There she sits, cowering, just on the edge of the
reeds, uncertain whether to dive or fly. By the creak and cry of the
cradle of thy first-born, Hamish, spare the plumage on her yearning and
quaking breast. The little yellow images have all melted away, and are
now, in holy cunning of instinct, deep down beneath the waters, shifting
for themselves among the very mud at the bottom of the reeds. By-and-by
they will be floating with but the points of their bills above the
surface, invisible among the air-bells. The parent duck has also
disappeared; the drake you disposed of, Hamish, as the coward was
lifting up his lumbering body, with fat doup and long neck in the air,
to seek safer skies. We male creatures--drakes, ganders, and men
alike--what are we, when affection pleads, in comparison with females!
In our passions, we are brave, but these satiated, we turn upon our heel
and disappear from danger, like dastards. But doves, and ducks, and
women, are fearless in affection to the very death. Therefore have we
all our days, sleeping or waking, loved the sex, virgin and matron; nor
would we hurt a hair of their heads, grey or golden, for all else that
shines beneath the sun.
Not the best practice this in the world, certainly, for pointers--and it
may teach them bad habits on the hill; but, in some situations, all dogs
and all men are alike, and cross them as you will, not a breed but shows
a taint of original sin, when under a temptation sufficiently strong to
bring it out. Ponto, Piro, and Basta, are now, according to their
abilities, all as bad as O'Bronte--and never, to be sure, was there such
a worrying in this wicked world. But now we shall cease our fire, and
leave the few flappers that are left alive to their own meditations. Our
conduct for the last hour must have seemed to them no less unaccountable
than alarming, and something to quack over during the rest of the
season. Well, we do not remember ever to have seen a prettier pile of
ducks and ducklings. Hamish, take census. What do you say--two score?
That beats cockfighting. Here's a hank of twine, Hamish, tie them
altogether by the legs, and hang them, in two divisions of equal
weights, over the crupper of Surefoot.
THE MOORS.
FLIGHT THIRD--STILL LIFE.
We have been sufficiently slaughterous for a man of our fine
sensibilities and moderate desires, Hamish; and as, somehow or other,
the scent seems to be beginning not to lie well--yet the air cannot be
said to be close and sultry either--we shall let Brown Bess cool herself
in both barrels--relinquish, for an hour or so, our seat on Shelty, and,
by way of a change, pad the hoof up that smooth ascent, strangely left
stoneless--an avenue positively looking as if it were artificial, as it
stretches away, with its beautiful green undulations, among the blocks;
for though no view-hunter, we are, Hamish, what in fine language is
called a devout worshipper of Nature, an enthusiast in the sublime; and
if Nature do not show us something worth gazing at when we reach yonder
altitudes, she must be a grey deceiver, and we shall never again kneel
at her footstool, or sing a hymn in her praise.
The truth is, we have a rending headache, for Bess has been for some
hours on the kick, and Surefoot on the jog, and our exertions in the
pulpit were severe--action, Hamish, action, action, being, as
Demosthenes said some two or three thousand years ago, essential to
oratory; and you observed how nimbly we kept changing legs, Hamish, how
strenuously brandishing arms, throughout our discourse--saving the
cunning pauses, thou simpleton, when, by way of relief to our auditors,
we were as gentle as sucking-doves, and folded up our wings as if about
to go to roost, whereas we were but meditating a bolder flight--about to
soar, Hamish, into the empyrean. Over and above all that, we could not
brook Tickler's insolence, who, about the sma' hours, challenged us, you
know, quaich for quaich; and though we gave him a fair back-fall, yet we
suffered in the tulzie, and there is at this moment a throbbing in our
temples that threatens a regular brain-fever. We burn for an air-bath on
the mountain-top. Moreover, we are seized with a sudden desire for
solitude--to be plain, we are getting sulky; so ascend, Surefoot,
Hamish, and be off with the pointers--O'Bronte goes with us--north-west,
making a circumbendibus round the _Tomhans_, where Mhairhe M'Intyre
lived seven years with the fairies; and in a couple of hours or so you
will find us under the Merlin Crag.
We offer to walk any man of our age in Great Britain. But what _is_ our
age? Confound us if we know within a score or two. Yet we cannot get rid
of the impression that we are under ninety. However, as we seek no
advantage, and give no odds, we challenge the octogenarians of the
United Kingdom--fair toe and heel--a twelve-hour match--for love, fame,
and a legitimate exchequer bill for a thousand. Why, these calves of
ours would look queer, we confess, on the legs of a Leith porter; but
even in our prime they were none of your big vulgar calves, but they
handled like iron--now more like butter. There is still a spring in our
instep; and our knees, sometimes shaky, are to-day knit as Pan's and
neat as Apollo's. Poet we may not be, but Pedestrian we are; with
Wordsworth we could not walk along imaginative heights, but, if not
grievously out of our reckoning; on the turnpike road we could keep pace
with Captain Barclay for a short distance--say from Dundee to Aberdeen.