ugly name enough--but itself is beautiful; for it diffuses its own light
round about it, like a star vivifying its halo. The sward encircling it
is firm--and Kit lays him down, heedless of the bird, with eyes fixed on
the oozing spring. How fresh the wild cresses! His very eyes are
drinking! His thirst is at once excited and satisfied by looking at the
lustrous leaves--composed of cooling light without spot or stain. What
ails the boy? He covers his face with his hands, and in the silence
sighs. A small white hand, with its fingers spread, rises out of the
spring, as if it were beckoning to heaven in prayer--and then is sucked
slowly in again out of sight with a gurgling groan. The spring so fresh
and fair--so beautiful with its cresses and many another water-loving
plant beside--is changed into the same horrid quagmire it was that
day--a holiday--three years ago--when racing in her joy Amy Lewars
blindly ran into it, among her blithe companions, and suddenly perished.
Childhood, they say, soon dries its tears, and soon forgets. God be
praised for all his goodness! true it is that on the cheek of childhood
tears are dried up as if by the sunshine of joy stealing from on
high--but, God be praised for all his goodness! false it is that the
heart of childhood has not a long memory, for in a moment the mournful
past revives within it--as often as the joyful--sadness becomes sorrow,
sorrow grief, and grief anguish, as now it is with the solitary boy
seated by that ghastly spot in the middle of the wide moor.
Away he flies, and he is humming a tune. But what's this? A merry-making
in the moor? Ay, merry-making; but were you to take part in it, you
would find it about the hardest work that ever tried the strength of
your spine. 'Tis a party of divot-flaughters. The people in the parish
are now digging their peats, and here is a whole household, provident of
winter, borrowing fuel from the moss. They are far from coals, and wood
is intended by nature for other uses; but fire in peat she dedicated to
the hearth, and there it burns all over Scotland, Highland and Lowland,
far and near, at many a holy altar. 'Tis the mid-day hour of rest. Some
are half asleep, some yet eating, some making a sort of under-voiced,
under-hand love. "Mr North! Mr North! Mr North!" is the joyful
cry--horny-fists first--downy-fists next--and after heartiest greeting,
Master Kitty is installed, enthroned on a knowe, Master of the
Ceremonies--and in good time gives them a song. Then "galliards cry a
hall, a hall," and hark and lo! preluded by six smacks--three foursome
reels! "Sic hirdum-dirdum and sic din," on the sward, to a strathspey
frae the fiddle o' auld blin' Hugh Lyndsay, the itinerant musicianer,
who was noways particular about the number of his strings, and when one,
or even two snapped, used to play away at pretty much of the same tune
with redoubled energy and variations. He had the true old Niel-Gow yell,
and had he played on for ever, folk would have danced on for ever till
they had all, one after the other, dropped down dead. What steps!
"Who will try me," cries Kit, "at loup-the-barrows?" "I will," quoth
Souple Tam. The barrows are laid--how many side by side we fear to
say--for we have become sensitive on our veracity--on a beautiful piece
of springy turf, an inclined plane with length sufficient for a run; and
while old and young line both sides of the lane near the loup, stript to
the sark and the breeks, Souple Tam, as he fondly thinks, shows the way
to win, and clears them all like a frog or a roebuck. "Clear the way,
clear the way for the callant, Kit's comin!" cries Ebenezer Brackenrigg,
the Elder, a douce man now, but a deevil in his youth, and like "a waff
o' lichtnin'" past their een, Kit clears the barrows a foot beyond
Souple Tam, and at the first fly is declared victor by acclamation. Oh,
our unprophetic soul, did the day indeed dawn--many long years after
this our earliest great conquest yet traditional in the parish--that ere
nightfall witnessed our defeat by--a tailor! The Flying Tailor of
Ettrick--the Lying Shepherd thereof--would they had never been born--the
one to triumph and the other to record that triumph;--yet let us be just
to the powers of our rival--for though all the world knows we were lame
when we leapt him, long past our prime, had been wading all day in the
Yarrow with some stones-weight in our creel, and allowed him a yard,
"Great must I call him, for he vanquish'd ME."
What a place at night was that Moor! At night! That is a most
indeterminate mode of expression, for there are nights of all sorts and
sizes, and what kind of a night do we mean? Not a mirk night, for no man
ever walked that moor on a mirk night, except one, and he, though
blind-fou, was drowned. But a night may be dark without being mirk, with
or without stars; and on many such a night have we, but not always
alone--who was with us you shall never know--threaded our way with no
other clue than that of evolving recollections, originally notices,
across that wilderness of labyrinths, fearlessly, yet at times with a
beating heart. Our companion had her clue too, one in her pocket, of
blue worsted, with which she kept in repair all the stockings belonging
to the family, and one in her memory, of green ethereal silk, which,
finer far than any spider's web, she let out as she tript along the
moor, and on her homeward way she felt, by some spiritual touch, the
invisible lines, along which she retript as safely as if they had been
moonbeams. During such journeyings we never saw the moor, how then can
you expect us to describe it?
But oftener we were alone. Earthquakes abroad are dreadful occurrences,
and blot out the obituary. But here they are so gentle that the heedless
multitude never feel them, and on hearing you tell of them, they
incredulously stare. That moor made no show of religion, but was a
Quaker. We had but to stand still for five minutes or so, no easy matter
then, for we were more restless than a wave, or to lie down with our ear
to the ground, and the spirit was sure to move the old Quaker, who
forthwith began to preach and pray and sing Psalms. How he moaned at
times as if his heart were breaking! At times, as if some old forgotten
sorrow were recalled, how he sighed! Then recovering his
self-possession, as if to clear his voice, he gave a hem, and then a
short nasty cough like a patient in a consumption. Now all was hush, and
you might have supposed he had fallen asleep, for in that hush you heard
what seemed an intermitting snore. When all at once, whew, whew, whew,
as if he were whistling, accompanied with a strange rushing sound as of
diving wings. That was in the air--but instantly after you heard
something odder still in the bog. And while wondering, and of your
wonder finding no end, the ground, which a moment before had felt firm
as a road, began to shrink, and sink, and hesitate, and hurry, and
crumble, and mumble all around you, and close up to your very feet--the
quagmires gurgling as if choked--and a subterranean voice distinctly
articulating Oh! Oh! Oh!
We have heard of people who pretend not to believe in ghosts--geologists
who know how the world was created; but will they explain that moor? And
how happened it that only by nights and dark nights it was so haunted?
Beneath a wakeful moon and unwinking stars it was silent as a frozen
sea. You listened then, and heard but the grass growing, and beautiful
grass it was, though it was called coarse, and made the sweetest-scented
hay. What crowds of bum-bees' bikes--foggies--did the scythe not reveal
as it heaped up the heavy swathes--three hundred stone to the acre--by
guess,--for there was neither weighing nor measuring there then-a-days,
but all was in the lump--and there the rush-roped stacks stood all the
winter through, that they might be near the "eerie outlan' cattle," on
places where cart-wheel never circled, nor axle-tree creaked--nor ever
car of antique make trailed its low load along--for the horse would have
been laired. We knew not then at all--and now we but imperfectly
know--the cause of the Beautiful. Then we believed the Beautiful to be
wholly extern; something we had nothing to do with but to look at, and
lo! it shone divinely there! Happy creed if false--for in it, with
holiest reverence, we blamelessly adored the stars. There they were in
millions as we thought--every one brighter than another, when by chance
we happened to fix on any individual among them, that we might look
through its face into its heart. All above gloriously glittering, all
below a blank. Our body here, our spirit there--how mean our birthplace,
our death-home how magnificent! "Fear God and keep his commandments,"
said a small still voice--and we felt that if He gave us strength to
obey that law, we should live for ever beyond all those stars.
But were there no Lochs in our parish? Yea. Four. The Little Loch--the
White Loch--the Black Loch--and the Brother Loch. Not a tree on the
banks of any one of them--yet he had been a blockhead who called them
bare. Had there been any need for trees, Nature would have sown them on
hills she so dearly loved. Nor sheep nor cattle were ever heard to
complain of those pastures. They bleated and they lowed as cheerily as
the moorland birdies sang--and how cheerily that was nobody knew who had
not often met the morning on the brae, and shaken hands with her the
rosy-fingered like two familiar friends. No want of lown places there,
in which the creatures could lie with wool or hair unruffled among
surrounding storms. For the hills had been dropt from the hollow of His
hand who "tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"--and even high up, where
you might see tempest-stricken stones--some of them like pillars--but
placed not there by human art--there were cosy bields in wildest
weather, and some into which the snow was never known to drift, green
all the winter through--perennial nests. Such was the nature of the
region where lay our Four Lochs. They were some quarter of a mile--some
half mile--and some whole mile--not more--asunder; but there was no
great height--and we have a hundred times climbed the highest--from
which they could be all seen at once--so cannily were they embosomed, so
needed not to be embowered.
The LITTLE LOCH was the rushiest and reediest little rascal that ever
rustled, and he was on the very edge of the Moor. That he had fish we
all persisted in believing, in spite of all the successless angling of
all kinds that from time immemorial had assailed his sullen depths;--but
what a place for pow-heads! One continued bank of them--while yet they
were but eyes in the spawn--encircled it instead of water-lilies; and at
"the season of the year," by throwing in a few stones, you awoke a
croaking that would have silenced a rookery. In the early part of the
century a pike had been seen basking in the shallows, by eye-measurement
about ten feet long--but fortunately he had never been hooked, or the
consequences would have been fatal. We have seen the Little Loch alive
with wild-ducks; but it was almost impossible by position to get a shot
at them--and quite impossible, if you did, to get hold of the slain. Fro
himself--the best dog that ever dived--was baffled by the multiplicity
of impediments and obstructions--and at last refused to take the
water--sat down and howled in spiteful rage. Yet Imagination loved the
Little Loch, and so did Hope. We have conquered it in sleep both with
rod and gun--the weight of bag and basket has wakened us out of dreams
of murder that never were realised--yet once, and once only, in it we
caught an eel, which we skinned, and wore the shrivel for many a day
round our ankle--nor is it a vain superstition--to preserve it from
sprains. We are willing the Little Loch should be drained; but you would
have to dig a fearsome trench, for it used to have no bottom. A party of
us--six--ascertained that fact, by heaving into it a stone which
six-and-thirty schoolboys of this degenerate age could not have lifted
from its moss-bed--and though we watched for an hour, not a bubble rose
to the surface. It used sometimes to boil like a pot on breathless days,
for events happening in foreign countries disturbed the spring, and the
torments it suffered thousands of fathoms below, were manifested above
in turbulence that would have drowned a school-boy's skiff.
The WHITE LOCH--so called from the silver sand of its shores--had
likewise its rushy and reedy bogs; but access to every part of the main
body was unimpeded, and you waded into it, gradually deeper and deeper,
with such a delightful descent, that up to the arm-pits and then to the
chin, you could keep touching the sand with your big-toe, till you
floated away off at the nail, out of your depth, without for a little
while discovering that it was incumbent on you, for sake of your
personal safety, to take to regular swimming--and then how buoyant was
the milk-warm water, without a wave but of your own creating, as the
ripples went circling away before your breast or your breath! It was
absolutely too clear--for without knitting your brows you could not see
it on bright airless days--and wondered what had become of it--when all
at once, as if it had been that very moment created out of nothing,
there it was! endued with some novel beauty--for of all the lochs we
ever knew--and to be so simple too--the White Loch had surely the
greatest variety of expression,--but all within the cheerful--for
sadness was alien altogether from its spirit, and the gentle Mere for
ever wore a smile. Swans--but that was but once--our own eyes had seen
on it--and were they wild or were they tame swans, certain it is they
were great and glorious and lovely creatures, and whiter than any snow.
No house was within sight, and they had nothing to fear--nor did they
look afraid--sailing in the centre of the loch--nor did we see them fly
away--for we lay still on the hill-side till in the twilight we should
not have known what they were, and we left them there among the shadows
seemingly asleep. In the morning they were gone, and perhaps making love
in some foreign land.
The BLACK LOCH was a strange misnomer for one so fair--for black we
never saw him, except it might be for an hour or so before thunder. If
he really was a loch of colour the original taint had been washed out of
him, and he might have shown his face among the purest waters of Europe.
But then he was deep; and knowing that, the natives had named him, in no
unnatural confusion of ideas, the Black Loch. We have seen wild-duck
eggs five fathoms down so distinctly that we could count them--and
though that is not a bad dive, we have brought them up, one in our mouth
and one in each hand, the tenants of course dead--nor can we now
conjecture what sank them there; but ornithologists see unaccountable
sights, and they only who are not ornithologists disbelieve Audubon and
Wilson. Two features had the Black Loch which gave it to our eyes a
pre-eminence in beauty over the other three--a tongue of land that
half-divided it, and never on hot days was without some cattle grouped
on its very point, and in among the water--and a cliff on which, though
it was not very lofty, a pair of falcons had their nest. Yet in misty
weather, when its head was hidden, the shrill cry seemed to come from a
great height. There were some ruins too--tradition said of some church
or chapel--that had been ruins long before the establishment of the
Protestant faith. But they were somewhat remote, and likewise somewhat
imaginary, for stones are found lying strangely distributed, and those
looked to our eyes not like such as builders use, but to have been
dropped there most probably from the moon.
But the best beloved, if not the most beautiful, of them all was the
BROTHER LOCH. It mattered not what was his disposition or genius, every
one of us boys, however different might be our other tastes, preferred
it far beyond the rest, and for once that we visited any of them we
visited it twenty times, nor ever once left it with disappointed hopes
of enjoyment. It was the nearest, and therefore most within our power,
so that we could gallop to it on shank's naigie, well on in the
afternoon, and enjoy what seemed a long day of delight, swift as flew
the hours, before evening prayers. Yet was it remote enough to make us
always feel that our race thither was not for every day--and we seldom
returned home without an adventure. It was the largest too by far of the
Four--and indeed its area would have held the waters of all the rest.
Then there was a charm to our heart as well as our imagination in its
name--for tradition assigned it on account of three brothers that
perished in its waters--and the same name for the same reason belongs to
many another loch--and to one pool on almost every river. But above all
it was the Loch for angling, and we long kept to perch. What schools!
Not that they were of a very large size--though pretty well--but
hundreds all nearly the same size gladdened our hearts as they lay, at
the close of our sport, in separate heaps on the greensward shore, more
beautiful out of all sight than your silver or golden fishes in a
glass-vase, where one appears to be twenty, and the delusive voracity
is all for a single crumb. No bait so killing as cowshairn-mauks, fresh
from their native bed, scooped out with the thumb. He must have been a
dear friend to whom in a scarcity, by the water-side, when the corks
were dipping, we would have given a mauk. No pike. Therefore the trout
were allowed to gain their natural size--and that seemed to be about
five pounds--adolescents not unfrequent swam two or three--and you
seldom or never saw the smaller fry. But few were the days "good for the
Brother Loch." Perch rarely failed you, for by perseverance you were
sure to fall in with one circumnatatory school or other, and to do
murderous work among them with the mauk, from the schoolmaster himself
inclusive down to the little booby of the lowest form. Not so with
Trout. We have angled ten hours a-day for half a-week (during the
vacance), without ever getting a single rise, nor could even that be
called bad sport, for we lived in momentary expectation, mingled with
fear, of a monster. Better far from sunrise to sunset never to move a
fin, than oh! me miserable! to hook a huge hero with shoulders like a
hog--play him till he comes floating side up close to the shore, and
then to feel the feckless fly leave his lip and begin gamboling in the
air, while he wallops away back into his native element, and sinks
utterly and for evermore into the dark profound. Life loses at such a
moment all that makes life desirable--yet strange! the wretch lives
on--and has not the heart to drown himself, as he wrings his hands and
curses his lot and the day he was born. But, thank Heaven, that ghastly
fit of fancy is gone by, and we imagine one of those dark, scowling,
gusty, almost tempestuous days, "prime for the Brother Loch." No glare
or glitter on the water, no reflection of fleecy clouds, but a
black-blue undulating swell, at times turbulent--with now and then a
breaking wave,--that was the weather in which the giants fed, showing
their backs like dolphins within a fathom of the shore, and sucking in
the red heckle among your very feet. Not an insect in the air, yet then
the fly was all the rage. This is a mystery, for you could do nothing
with the worm. Oh! that we had then known the science of the spinning
minnow! But we were then but an apprentice--who are now Emeritus Grand
Master. Yet at this distance of time--half a century and more--it is
impious to repine. Gut was not always to be got; and on such days a
three-haired snood did the business--for they were bold as lions, and
rashly rushed on death. The gleam of the yellow-worsted body with
star-y-pointed tail maddened them with desire--no dallying with the gay
deceiver--they licked him in--they gorged him--and while satiating their
passion got involved in inextricable fate. You have seen a single strong
horse ploughing up-hill. How he sets his brisket to it--and snooves
along--as the furrows fall in beautiful regularity from the gliding
share. So snooved along the Monarch of the Mere--or the
heir-apparent--or heir-presumptive--or some other branch of the royal
family--while our line kept steadily cutting the waves, and our rod
enclosing some new segment of the sky.
But many another pastime we pursued upon those pastoral hills, for even
angling has its due measure, and unless that be preserved, the passion
wastes itself into lassitude, or waxes into disease. "I would not angle
alway," thinks the wise boy--"off to some other game we altogether
flew." Never were there such hills for hare and hounds. There couched
many a pussy--and there Bob Howie's famous Tickler--the Grew of all
Grews--first stained his flews in the blood of the Fur. But there is no
coursing between April and October--and during the intervening months we
used to have many a hunt on foot, without dogs, after the leverets. We
all belonged to the High School indeed, and here was its playground.
Cricket we had then never heard of; but there was ample room and verge
enough for football. Our prime delight, however, was the chase. We were
all in perpetual training, and in such wind that there were no bellows
to mend after a flight of miles. We circled the Lochs. Plashing through
the marishes we strained winding up the hill-sides, till on the cairn
called a beacon that crowned the loftiest summit of the range, we stood
and waved defiance to our pursuers scattered wide and far below, for
'twas a Deer Hunt. Then we became cavaliers. We caught the long-maned
and long-tailed colts, and mounting bare-backed, with rush helmets and
segg sabres charged the nowte till the stirks were scattered, and the
lowing lord of herds himself taken captive, as he stood pawing in a nook
with his nose to the ground and eyes of fire. That was the riding-school
in which we learned to witch the world with noble horsemanship. We thus
got confirmed in that fine, easy, unconstrained, natural seat, which we
carried with us into the saddle when we were required to handle the
bridle instead of the mane. 'Tis right to hold on by the knees, but
equally so to hold on by the calves of the legs and the heels. The
modern system of turning out the toes, and sticking out the legs as if
they were cork or timber, is at once dangerous and ridiculous; hence in
our cavalry the men got unhorsed in every charge. On pony-back we used
to make the soles of our feet smack together below the belly, for
quadruped and biped were both unshod, and hoof needed no iron on that
stoneless sward. But the biggest fun of all was to "grup the auld mare,"
and ride her sextuple, the tallest boy sitting on the neck, and the
shortest on the rump with his face to the tail, and holding on by that
fundamental feature by which the urchin tooled her along as by a tiller.
How the silly foal whinnied, as with light-gathered steps he accompanied
in circles his populous parent, and seemed almost to doubt her identity,
till one by one we slipped off over her hurdies, and let him take a
suck! But what comet is yon in the sky--"with fear of change perplexing
mallards?" A Flying Dragon. Of many degrees is his tail, with a tuft
like that of Taurus terrified by the sudden entrance of the Sun into his
sign. Up goes Sandy Donald's rusty and rimless beaver as a messenger to
the Celestial. He obeys, and stooping his head, descends with many
diverse divings, and buries his beak in the earth. The feather kite
quails and is cowed by him of paper, and there is a scampering of cattle
on a hundred hills.