It is not half as far from Albany to Aberdeen as it is from New York to
London. In fact, I venture to say that an American on foot will find
himself less a foreigner in Scotland than in any other country in the
Old World. There is something warm and hospitable—if he knew the
language well enough he would call it _couthy_—in the greeting that he
gets from the shepherd on the moor, and the conversation that he holds
with the farmer’s wife in the stone cottage, where he stops to ask for a
drink of milk and a bit of oat-cake. He feels that there must be a drop
of Scotch somewhere in his mingled blood, or at least that the texture
of his thought and feelings has been partly woven on a Scottish
loom—perhaps the Shorter Catechism, or Robert Burns’s poems, or the
romances of Sir Walter Scott. At all events, he is among a kindred and
comprehending people. They do not speak English in the same way that he
does—through the nose—but they think very much more in his mental
dialect than the English do. They are independent and wide awake,
curious and full of personal interest. The wayside mind in Inverness or
Perth runs more to muscle and less to fat, has more active vanity and
less passive pride, is more inquisitive and excitable and sympathetic—in
short, to use a symbolist’s description, it is more apt to be
red-headed—than in Surrey or Somerset. Scotchmen ask more questions
about America, but fewer foolish ones. You will never hear them
inquiring whether there is any good bear-hunting in the neighbourhood of
Boston, or whether Shakespeare is much read in the States. They have a
healthy respect for our institutions, and have quite forgiven (if,
indeed, they ever resented) that little affair in 1776. They are all
born Liberals. When a Scotchman says he is a Conservative, it only means
that he is a Liberal with hesitations.
And yet in North Britain the American pedestrian will not find that
amused and somewhat condescending toleration for his peculiarities, that
placid willingness to make the best of all his vagaries of speech and
conduct, that he finds in South Britain. In an English town you may do
pretty much what you like on a Sunday, even to the extent of wearing a
billycock hat to church, and people will put up with it from a
country-man of Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Show. But in a Scotch
village, if you whistle in the street on a Lord’s Day, though it be a
Moody and Sankey tune, you will be likely to get, as I did, an
admonition from some long-legged, grizzled elder:
“Young man, do ye no ken it ’s the Sawbath Day?”
I recognised the reproof of the righteous, an excellent oil which doth
not break the head, and took it gratefully at the old man’s hands. For
did it not prove that he regarded me as a man and a brother, a creature
capable of being civilised and saved?
It was in the gray town of Dingwall that I had this bit of pleasant
correction, as I was on the way to a fishing tramp through
Sutherlandshire. This northwest corner of Great Britain is the best
place in the whole island for a modest and impecunious angler. There
are, or there were a few years ago, wild lochs and streams which are
still practically free, and a man who is content with small things can
pick up some very pretty sport from the highland inns, and make a good
basket of memorable experiences every week.
The inn at Lairg, overlooking the narrow waters of Loch Shin, was
embowered in honeysuckles, and full of creature comfort. But there were
too many other men with rods there to suit my taste. “The feesh in this
loch,” said the boatman, “iss not so numerous ass the feeshermen, but
more wise. There iss not one of them that hass not felt the hook, and
they know ferry well what side of the fly has the forkit tail.”
At Altnaharra, in the shadow of Ben Clebrig, there was a cozy little
house with good fare, and abundant trout-fishing in Loch Naver and Loch
Meadie. It was there that I fell in with a wandering pearl-peddler who
gathered his wares from the mussels in the moorland streams. They were
not of the finest quality, these Scotch pearls, but they had pretty,
changeable colours of pink and blue upon them, like the iridescent light
that plays over the heather in the long northern evenings. I thought it
must be a hard life for the man, wading day after day in the ice-cold
water, and groping among the coggly, sliddery stones for the shellfish,
and cracking open perhaps a thousand before he could find one pearl.
“Oh, yess,” said he, “and it iss not an easy life, and I am not saying
that it will be so warm and dry ass liffing in a rich house. But it iss
the life that I am fit for, and I hef my own time and my thoughts to
mysel’, and that is a ferry goot thing; and then, sir, I haf found the
Pearl of Great Price, and I think upon that day and night.”
Under the black, shattered peaks of Ben Laoghal, where I saw an eagle
poising day after day as if some invisible centripetal force bound him
forever to that small circle of air, there was a loch with plenty of
brown trout and a few _salmo ferox_; and down at Tongue there was a
little river where the sea-trout sometimes come up with the tide.
Here I found myself upon the north coast, and took the road eastward
between the mountains and the sea. It was a beautiful region of
desolation. There were rocky glens cutting across the road, and
occasionally a brawling stream ran down to the salt water, breaking the
line of cliffs with a little bay and a half-moon of yellow sand. The
heather covered all the hills. There were no trees, and but few houses.
The chief signs of human labour were the rounded piles of peat, and the
square cuttings in the moor marking the places where the subterranean
wood-choppers had gathered their harvests. The long straths were once
cultivated, and every patch of arable land had its group of cottages
full of children. The human harvest has always been the richest and most
abundant that is raised in the Highlands; but unfortunately the supply
exceeded the demand; and so the crofters were evicted, and great flocks
of sheep were put in possession of the land; and now the sheep-pastures
have been changed into deer-forests; and far and wide along the valleys
and across the hills there is not a trace of habitation, except the
heaps of stones and the clumps of straggling bushes which mark the sites
of lost homes. But what is one country’s loss is another country’s gain.
Canada and the United States are infinitely the richer for the tough,
strong, fearless, honest men that were dispersed from these lonely
straths to make new homes across the sea.
It was after sundown when I reached the straggling village of Melvich,
and the long day’s journey had left me weary. But the inn, with its
red-curtained windows, looked bright and reassuring. Thoughts of dinner
and a good bed comforted my spirit—prematurely. For the inn was full.
There were but five bedrooms and two parlours. The gentlemen who had the
neighbouring shootings occupied three bedrooms and a parlour; the other
two bedrooms had just been taken by the English fishermen who had passed
me in the road an hour ago in the mail-coach (oh! why had I not
suspected that treacherous vehicle?); and the landlord and his wife
assured me, with equal firmness and sympathy, that there was not another
cot or pair of blankets in the house. I believed them, and was sinking
into despair when Sandy M’Kaye appeared on the scene as my angel of
deliverance. Sandy was a small, withered, wiry man, dressed in rusty
gray, with an immense white collar thrusting out its points on either
side of his chin, and a black stock climbing over the top of it. I
guessed from his speech that he had once lived in the lowlands. He had
hoped to be engaged as a gillie by the shooting party, but had been
disappointed. He had wanted to be taken by the English fishermen, but
another and younger man had stepped in before him. Now Sandy saw in me
his Predestinated Opportunity, and had no idea of letting it post up the
road that night to the next village. He cleared his throat respectfully
and cut into the conversation.
“Ah’m thinkin’ the gentleman micht find a coomfortaible lodgin’ wi’ the
weedow Macphairson a wee bittie doon the road. Her dochter is awa’ in
Ameriky, an’ the room is a verra fine room, an’ it is a peety to hae it
stannin’ idle, an’ ye wudna mind the few steps to and fro tae yir meals
here, sir, wud ye? An’ if ye ’ill gang wi’ me efter dinner, ’a ’ll be
prood to shoo ye the hoose.”
So, after a good dinner with the English fishermen, Sandy piloted me
down the road through the thickening dusk. I remember a hoodie crow flew
close behind us with a choking, ghostly cough that startled me. The
Macpherson cottage was a snug little house of stone, with fuchsias and
roses growing in the front yard: and the widow was a douce old lady,
with a face like a winter apple in the month of April, wrinkled, but
still rosy. She was a little doubtful about entertaining strangers, but
when she heard I was from America she opened the doors of her house and
her heart. And when, by a subtle cross examination that would have been
a credit to the wife of a Connecticut deacon, she discovered the fact
that her lodger was a minister, she did two things, with equal and
immediate fervour; she brought out the big Bible and asked him to
conduct evening worship, and she produced a bottle of old Glenlivet and
begged him to “guard against takkin’ cauld by takkin’ a glass of
speerits.”
It was a very pleasant fortnight at Melvich. Mistress Macpherson was so
motherly that “takkin’ cauld” was reduced to a permanent impossibility.
The other men at the inn proved to be very companionable fellows, quite
different from the monsters of insolence that my anger had imagined in
the moment of disappointment. The shooting party kept the table
abundantly supplied with grouse and hares and highland venison; and
there was a piper to march up and down before the window and play while
we ate dinner—a very complimentary and disquieting performance. But
there are many occasions in life when pride can be entertained only at
the expense of comfort.
Of course Sandy was my gillie. It was a fine sight to see him exhibiting
the tiny American trout-rod, tied with silk ribbons in its delicate
case, to the other gillies and exulting over them. Every morning he
would lead me away through the heather to some lonely loch on the
shoulders of the hills, from which we could look down upon the Northern
Sea and the blue Orkney Isles far away across the Pentland Firth.
Sometimes we would find a loch with a boat on it, and drift up and down,
casting along the shores. Sometimes, in spite of Sandy’s confident
predictions, no boat could be found, and then I must put on the
Mackintosh trousers and wade out over my hips into the water, and
circumambulate the pond, throwing the flies as far as possible toward
the middle, and feeling my way carefully along the bottom with the long
net-handle, while Sandy danced on the bank in an agony of apprehension
lest his Predestinated Opportunity should step into a deep hole and be
drowned. It was a curious fact in natural history that on the lochs with
boats the trout were in the shallow water, but in the boatless lochs
they were away out in the depths. “Juist the total depraivity o’
troots,” said Sandy, “an’ terrible fateegin’.”
Sandy had an aversion to commit himself to definite statements on any
subject not theological. If you asked him how long the morning’s tramp
would be, it was “no verra long, juist a bit ayant the hull yonner.” And
if, at the end of the seventh mile, you complained that it was much too
far, he would never do more than admit that “it micht be shorter.” If
you called him to rejoice over a trout that weighed close upon two
pounds, he allowed that it was “no bad—but there’s bigger anes i’ the
loch gin we cud but wile them oot.” And at lunch-time, when we turned
out a full basket of shining fish on the heather, the most that he would
say, while his eyes snapped with joy and pride, was, “Aweel, we canna
complain, the day.”
Then he would gather an armful of dried heather-stems for kindling, and
dig out a few roots and crooked limbs of the long-vanished forest from
the dry, brown, peaty soil, and make our camp-fire of prehistoric
wood—just for the pleasant, homelike look of the blaze—and sit down
beside it to eat our lunch. Heat is the least of the benefits that man
gets from fire. It is the sign of cheerfulness and good comradeship. I
would not willingly satisfy my hunger, even in a summer nooning, without
a little flame burning on a rustic altar to consecrate and enliven the
feast. When the bread and cheese were finished and the pipes were filled
with Virginia tobacco, Sandy would begin to tell me, very solemnly and
respectfully, about the mistakes I had made in the fishing that day, and
mourn over the fact that the largest fish had not been hooked. There was
a strong strain of pessimism in Sandy, and he enjoyed this part of the
sport immensely.
But he was at his best in the walk home through the lingering twilight,
when the murmur of the sea trembled through the air, and the incense of
burning peat floated up from the cottages, and the stars blossomed one
by one in the pale-green sky. Then Sandy dandered on at his ease down
the hills, and discoursed of things in heaven and earth. He was an
unconscious follower of the theology of the Reverend John Jasper, of
Richmond, Virginia, and rejected the Copernican theory of the universe
as inconsistent with the history of Joshua. “Gin the sun doesna muve,”
said he, “what for wad Joshua be tellin’ him to stond steel? ‘A wad
suner beleeve there was a mistak’ in the veesible heevens than ae fault
in the Guid Buik.” Whereupon we held long discourse of astronomy and
inspiration; but Sandy concluded it with a philosophic word which left
little to be said: “Aweel, yon teelescope is a wonnerful deescovery; but
’a dinna think the less o’ the Baible.”