O the Barren, Barren Shore--Brilliant Auroral Display--Intense
Cold--Birds--Glanders--Scribblings on the Back of One Pound Notes.
During a week's pleasant and gentle thaw [February 1870], we had
hoped that the worst of winter was come and gone; but to our no small
disappointment the genial interregnum has been followed by another
heavy fall of snow, and a wonderfully keen and biting frost, which,
borne on the wings of a surly nor'easter, has again bound up the earth
as if with fetters of iron. Under such circumstances the sea-coast,
we take it, presents the most dreary and desolate-looking winter
picture imaginable; far more so, to our thinking, than either moss,
or moorland, or mountain range. There is a something inexpressibly
dismal and dowie in the black crape-like belt of sea beach which
divides a landscape deeply clad with snow and frost-bound, from the
dull and leaden coloured deep beyond; the dashing of the waves of
said deep upon the shore, uttering the while a sadly funereal and
dirge-like moan. If our inland friends, in view of the wintry waste
around them, take up the cry of "O the dreary, dreary moorland"--we,
dwellers by the sea coast, have the best possible right to finish
the Tennysonian line by exclaiming "O the barren, barren shore." It
must, by the way, have been on some fair summer eve that the Crown
officials first thought of depriving landowners of the sea-shore
privileges hitherto enjoyed by them; had it been in winter, the idea,
it strikes us, would have withered in the bud; they would have fled
the very sight of the dark and dreary "foreshore," and wisely confined
themselves to the shelter of their Woods and Forests!
It is worthy of record that the present severe snow-storm was
ushered in by a very splendid and in many respects peculiar auroral
display. Shortly after dark on Friday evening, a faint auroral film,
over which an occasional streamer flashed impetuously, over-spread
the northern heavens. All this, however, soon died away, and the
north assumed a cold, clear, frosty aspect. Between seven and eight
o'clock many meteors, some of them of great brilliancy and beauty,
were observed to cross and recross the zenith and its neighbourhood in
all directions. Towards the latter hour, however, these ceased, and
all of a sudden, in a very few seconds at most, the whole celestial
hemisphere from E.N.E. to W.S.W.--from horizon to horizon--appeared
completely spanned by a magnificent auroral arch, eight degrees
in breadth; like a glorious bridge of a single semi-circular span,
with its edges or parapets of a deep blood-red colour, and its centre
part or roadway of frosted silver; the rest of the heavens, in all
directions, being the while of an inky blue, and cold and cloudless,
without the slightest appearance of anything like streamers to be
seen anywhere. Some idea of the brilliancy of this auroral arch may
be formed from the fact that such bright stars as Arcturus, Castor
and Pollux, Aldebaran, Mars, and others, which lay along its path,
became quite dim, and when located near the centre and brightest part
of the stream, almost invisible. Even Venus, which once or twice was
overlapped for a few minutes by the arch's margin only, lost all its
lustre and sheen, and had a burdened anxious aspect, as if the forehead
and "face divine" of a mighty intelligence laboured under the shade
of deep and profound thought. For upwards of an hour did this splendid
auroral arch continue to span the heavens from horizon to horizon, and
undergoing little or no change, until its final disappearance, by what
seemed a process of gradual contraction into itself and towards its
terminus in the east-north-east, whence it started. Such was the very
singular meteoric phenomena by which a severe snow-storm and an amount
of cold almost unparalleled in its intensity was ushered in on the
western sea-board of Scotland in February of the year of grace 1870.
And how fares it with our feathered favourites, the wild birds, in
these hard times? Fertile as they are in resources, and indefatigable
in providing for the wants of the passing hour, all their little
shifts must frequently prove inadequate to the supply of their daily
wants in such trying times as these. St. Valentine's day has come
and gone, but neither in copse, nor hedgerow, nor ivy-mantled wall,
find we as yet any traces of nidification, nor has the love-prompted
warble, in past years so loud and incessant at this season, been yet
heard around us. The robin only cheeps; the sparrow simply chirps;
the linnet merely twitters; and even the "gay chaffinch" can only give
us a disconsolate "fink, fink," in place of his well-known glad burst
of choicest and cheeriest song. The mellow chaunt of the merle and
song-thrush delights not yet the ear from copse or brake at early morn
or evening-tide. The intense and piercing cold, which, on the wings
of the northern blast, sweeps over the land as we write, and as it
moans, and sighs, and wildly shrieks by starts in its progress over
the deep, causes the lone sea-bird to utter its eeriest and wildest
cry, has succeeded in freezing, not only the rivulet and the pool,
but has actually bound up the voice of gladness and every source
of joyful utterance in all our feathered friends as well. But "nil
desperandum," better times are coming. Fields will yet be green,
trees will yet be leafy, rivers unbound from icy fetters will yet
dance merrily in the sun, and laugh with all their ripples, as they
hasten seawards; and then "again shall flowers appear on the earth;
the time of the singing of birds shall have come, and the voice of
the turtle be heard in our land."
Are glanders incurable? is a very ugly, but doubtless a very
important question, which is being at present keenly discussed in
the columns of several metropolitan journals. By glanders is meant,
not the equine disease in the equine subject properly so called,
and which comes so frequently under the treatment of the veterinary
surgeon, but the same frightful disease when introduced either by
accident or design into the human system. Is it curable? This is
the question, and the general impression seems to be, that when it
once fairly lays hold of the human system, it is, like hydrophobia,
quite and utterly incurable. We do not pretend to know anything of the
subject, and we allude to it merely to say that we well recollect of
hearing, on undoubted authority, of a patient who was actually cured
of glanders, caught, if we remember rightly, from eating some beans
found in a manger in which a horse having the disease had recently been
feeding. All the circumstances connected with the case and cure were
related in our hearing by the late Dr. John Reid, Professor of Anatomy
in the University of St. Andrews, one evening that we dined at his
house during our attendance at the University. It is now some eighteen
or twenty years ago, and we were then too young and thoughtless to
give that attention to the subject which it deserved. We recollect,
however, that the case was said to have occurred in Edinburgh, and to
have been treated in the infirmary of that city, and that the patient,
on his recovery, having been found shrewd, intelligent, and steady,
was afterwards appointed one of the janitors of that institution. There
must be some medical gentleman still in Edinburgh able to speak to a
case of such importance; and amongst others present on the occasion
that we heard Professor Reid refer to it, were, if we rightly remember,
Principal Sir David Brewster and Professor Martin, now of Aberdeen, and
at that time Mathematical Master in the Madras College of St. Andrews.
The other evening a one pound note, which a lady friend of ours
had just received by post, was handed to us, with a request that we
should try and decipher some writing which was observed on the back
of it. After some little trouble, we were a good deal amused to find
that the writing in question really consisted of the following lines:--
"I am a note of the British Linen;
I've long been kept by L. Mackinnon;
Where'er you go you'll find them willing
To give for me just twenty shilling.--L. M'K."
We have no idea who this poetical L. Mackinnon is or was, but it is
pretty evident, we think, that both he and the British Linen Company's
Bank note had very excellent opinions of themselves. It was Lady Louisa
Stewart, if we rightly recollect, who sent Sir Walter Scott a copy of
the following lines, which she discovered on the back of a battered
bank note which had come into her possession. It will be observed that
they are in all respects immeasurably superior to Mr. L. Mackinnon's:--
"Farewell, my note, and wheresoe'er ye wend,
Shun gaudy scenes, and be the poor man's friend;
You've left a poor one; go to one as poor,
And drive despair and hunger from his door."
Let cynics growl and snarl as they list, some people HAVE hearts,
and the author of the above lines, be sure, had a right warm and
kindly one.