To leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with
novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing light
upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr. Galton’s, the
image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central
features of the race; when once youth has flown, each new impression only
deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native places. So may
some cadet of Royal Écossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard
about French citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the
Scots-Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides
upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of
peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all men.
This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and Pharpar; it is
confined to no race nor country, for I know one of Scottish blood but a
child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers about the lilied lowland
waters of that shire. But the streams of Scotland are incomparable in
themselves—or I am only the more Scottish to suppose so—and their sound
and colour dwell for ever in the memory. How often and willingly do I
not look again in fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or
Dee swirling in its Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden
burn that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie! I think shame to
leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too long if
I remembered all; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor birch-wetting
Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions, that Water of Leith
of the many and well-named mills—Bell’s Mills, and Canon Mills, and
Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn of pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its
smallness, that nameless trickle that springs in the green bosom of
Allermuir, and is fed from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and
threads the moss under the Shearer’s Knowe, and makes one pool there,
overhung by a rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then
kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of the
sea-beholding city in the plain. From many points in the moss you may
see at one glance its whole course and that of all its tributaries; the
geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its corners without sitting
down, and not yet begin to be breathed; Shearer’s Knowe and Halkerside
are but names of adjacent cantons on a single shoulder of a hill, as
names are squandered (it would seem to the in-expert, in superfluity)
upon these upland sheepwalks; a bucket would receive the whole discharge
of the toy river; it would take it an appreciable time to fill your
morning bath; for the most part, besides, it soaks unseen through the
moss; and yet for the sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain
_genius loci_, I am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores;
and if the nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire
my pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me.
John Todd, when I knew him, was already “the oldest herd on the
Pentlands,” and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-scattering,
sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days, when the drove
roads, that now lie green and solitary through the heather, were thronged
thoroughfares. He had himself often marched flocks into England,
sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; and by his account it was a
rough business not without danger. The drove roads lay apart from
habitation; the drovers met in the wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea
fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the
one as in the other case rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes
were committed, sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of
which offences had a moorland burial and were never heard of in the
courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once attacked,—by
two men after his watch,—and at least once, betrayed by his habitual
anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic
prison-house, the doors of which he burst in the night and was no more
heard of in that quarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in
quieter places, and he had no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and
the inroads of pedestrians from town. But for a man of his propensity to
wrath these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by
snatches; in the gray of the summer morning, and already from far up the
hill, he would wake the “toun” with the sound of his shoutings; and in
the lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced late at night. This
wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the
Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no doubt it added to the fear in which
men stood of John a touch of something legendary. For my own part, he
was at first my enemy, and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his
natural abhorrence. It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing
him only by some sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me
“c’way oot amang the sheep.” The quietest recesses of the hill harboured
this ogre; I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the
Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing
dragoons. Little by little we dropped into civilities; his hail at sight
of me began to have less of the ring of a war-slogan; soon, we never met
but he produced his snuff-box, which was with him, like the calumet with
the Red Indian, a part of the heraldry of peace; and at length, in the
ripeness of time, we grew to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone
in these parts in the winter, it was a settled thing for John to “give me
a cry” over the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and
for me to overtake and bear him company.
That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in
ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied,
friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He
laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw,
hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was
permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like
a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain and a threat of latent
anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine and harassed
with perpetual vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I
ever heard; the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise
to me, so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new
acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, stalking
a little before me, “beard on shoulder,” the plaid hanging loosely about
him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill by
that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade.
I might count him with the best talkers; only that talking Scotch and
talking English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothing at least,
but he adorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he
spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a
colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising. The clans of sheep
with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in the yearly
killings and purchases, each must be proportionally thinned and
strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the signs of the weather,
the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite stupidity of sheep, the
exquisite cunning of dogs: all these he could present so humanly, and
with so much old experience and living gusto, that weariness was
excluded. And in the midst he would suddenly straighten his bowed back,
the stick would fly abroad in demonstration, and the sharp thunder of his
voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw at last the
use of that great wealth of names for every knowe and howe upon the
hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with lowered tails and raised
faces, would run up their flags again to the masthead and spread
themselves upon the indicated circuit. It used to fill me with wonder
how they could follow and retain so long a story. But John denied these
creatures all intelligence; they were the constant butt of his passion
and contempt; it was just possible to work with the like of them, he
said,—not more than possible. And then he would expand upon the subject
of the really good dogs that he had known, and the one really good dog
that he had himself possessed. He had been offered forty pounds for it;
but a good collie was worth more than that, more than anything, to a
“herd;” he did the herd’s work for him. “As for the like of them!” he
would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of his assistants.
Once—I translate John’s Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being born
_Britannis in montibus_, indeed, but alas! _inerudito sæculo_—once, in
the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in Edinburgh, and on
the way out, the road being crowded, two were lost. This was a reproach
to John, and a slur upon the dog; and both were alive to their
misfortune. Word came, after some days, that a farmer about Braid had
found a pair of sheep; and thither went John and the dog to ask for
restitution. But the farmer was a hard man and stood upon his rights.
“How were they marked?” he asked; and since John had bought right and
left from many sellers and had no notion of the marks—“Very well,” said
the farmer, “then it’s only right that I should keep them.”—“Well,” said
John, “it’s a fact that I cannae tell the sheep; but if my dog can, will
ye let me have them?” The farmer was honest as well as hard, and besides
I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so he had all the sheep upon
his farm into one large park, and turned John’s dog into their midst.
That hairy man of business knew his errand well; he knew that John and he
had bought two sheep and (to their shame) lost them about
Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the lord knows how, unless by
listening) that they were come to Braid for their recovery; and without
pause or blunder singled out, first one and then another, the two waifs.
It was that afternoon the forty pounds were offered and refused. And the
shepherd and his dog—what do I say? the true shepherd and his man—set off
together by Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and “smiled to ither” all the
way home, with the two recovered ones before them. So far, so good; but
intelligence may be abused. The dog, as he is by little man’s inferior
in mind, is only by little his superior in virtue; and John had another
collie tale of quite a different complexion. At the foot of the moss
behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton, wise men say) there is a scrog of low
wood and a pool with a dam for washing sheep. John was one day lying
under a bush in the scrog, when he was aware of a collie on the far
hillside skulking down through the deepest of the heather with obtrusive
stealth. He knew the dog; knew him for a clever, rising practitioner
from quite a distant farm; one whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw him
masterfully steering flocks to market. But what did the practitioner so
far from home? and why this guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the
pool?—for it was towards the pool that he was heading. John lay the
closer under his bush, and presently saw the dog come forth upon the
margin, look all about him to see if he were anywhere observed, plunge in
and repeatedly wash himself over head and ears, and then (but now openly
and with tail in air) strike homeward over the hills. That same night
word was sent his master, and the rising practitioner, shaken up from
where he lay, all innocence, before the fire, was had out to a dykeside
and promptly shot; for alas! he was that foulest of criminals under
trust, a sheep-eater; and it was from the maculation of sheep’s blood
that he had come so far to cleanse himself in the pool behind Kirk
Yetton.
A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of life, in
which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a hint of it
ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal or
written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that
writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited experience of him who
reads; and when I hear with a particular thrill of things that I have
never done or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors
rejoicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine
_dilettanti_ but the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak
of parlours and shades of manner and still-born niceties of motive, and
begin to deal with fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth;
and thus ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields
the shepherd’s crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance
into a near neighbourhood with epic. These aged things have on them the
dew of man’s morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the
semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and aboriginal taproot of the
race. A thousand interests spring up in the process of the ages, and a
thousand perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost art which was once
the fashion of an empire; and those only are perennial matters that rouse
us to-day, and that roused men in all epochs of the past. There is a
certain critic, not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be
known to set before the best: a certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at
first a percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in
caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a pleasant
afternoon, to munch his berries—his wife, that accomplished lady,
squatting by his side: his name I never heard, but he is often described
as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for recognition. Each has his own
tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all
our veins there run some minims of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our
civilised nerves still tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to
that which would have moved our common ancestor, all must obediently
thrill.
We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I had one
for an ascendant who has largely moulded me. But yet I think I owe my
taste for that hillside business rather to the art and interest of John
Todd. He it was that made it live for me, as the artist can make all
things live. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheep
upon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shaggy
aides-de-camp, was an affair that I never wearied of seeing, and that I
never weary of recalling to mind: the shadow of the night darkening on
the hills, inscrutable black blots of snow shower moving here and there
like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black
dogs upon the snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly
harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centre piece to all these
features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his captain’s
eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of
bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I
still see him in my mind’s eye, perched on a hump of the declivity not
far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, his great voice taking
hold upon the hills and echoing terror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile,
standing somewhat back, until the fit should be over, and, with a pinch
of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation.