In crossing the sea a second time, I was more curious to see Scotland
than England, partly because I had had a good glimpse of the latter
country eleven years before, but largely because I had always preferred
the Scotch people to the English (I had seen and known more of them in
my youth), and especially because just then I was much absorbed with
Carlyle, and wanted to see with my own eyes the land and the race from
which he sprang.
I suspect anyhow I am more strongly attracted by the Celt than by the
Anglo-Saxon; at least by the individual Celt. Collectively the
Anglo-Saxon is the more impressive; his triumphs are greater; the face
of his country and of his cities is the more pleasing; the gift of
empire is his. Yet there can be no doubt, I think, that the Celts, at
least the Scotch Celts, are a more hearty, cordial, and hospitable
people than the English; they have more curiosity, more raciness, and
quicker and surer sympathies. They fuse and blend readily with another
people, which the English seldom do. In this country John Bull is
usually like a pebble in the clay; grind him and press him and bake him
as you will, he is still a pebble--a hard spot in the brick, but not
essentially a part of it.
Every close view I got of the Scotch character confirmed my liking for
it. A most pleasant episode happened to me down in Ayr. A young man whom
I stumbled on by chance in a little wood by the Doon, during some
conversation about the birds that were singing around us, quoted my own
name to me. This led to an acquaintance with the family and with the
parish minister, and gave a genuine human coloring to our brief sojourn
in Burns's country. In Glasgow I had an inside view of a household a
little lower in the social scale, but high in the scale of virtues and
excellences. I climbed up many winding stone stairs and found the family
in three or four rooms on the top floor: a father, mother, three sons,
two of them grown, and a daughter, also grown. The father and the sons
worked in an iron foundry near by. I broke bread with them around the
table in the little cluttered kitchen, and was spared apologies as much
as if we had been seated at a banquet in a baronial hall. A Bible
chapter was read after we were seated at table, each member of the
family reading a verse alternately. When the meal was over, we went into
the next room, where all joined in singing some Scotch songs, mainly
from Burns. One of the sons possessed the finest bass voice I had ever
listened to. Its power was simply tremendous, well tempered with the
Scotch raciness and tenderness, too. He had taken the first prize at a
public singing bout, open to competition to all of Scotland. I told his
mother, who also had a voice of wonderful sweetness, that such a gift
would make her son's fortune anywhere, and found that the subject was
the cause of much anxiety to her. She feared lest it should be the
ruination of him--lest he should prostitute it to the service of the
devil, as she put it, rather than use it to the glory of God. She said
she had rather follow him to his grave than see him in the opera or
concert hall, singing for money. She wanted him to stick to his work,
and use his voice only as a pious and sacred gift. When I asked the
young man to come and sing for us at the hotel, the mother was greatly
troubled, as she afterward told me, till she learned we were stopping at
a temperance house. But the young man seemed not at all inclined to
break away from the advice of his mother. The other son had a sweetheart
who had gone to America, and he was looking longingly thitherward. He
showed me her picture, and did not at all attempt to conceal from me, or
from his family, his interest in the original. Indeed, one would have
said there were no secrets or concealments in such a family, and the
thorough unaffected piety of the whole household, mingled with so much
that was human and racy and canny, made an impression upon me I shall
not soon forget. This family was probably an exceptional one, but it
tinges all my recollections of smoky, tall-chimneyed Glasgow.
A Scotch trait of quite another sort, and more suggestive of Burns than
of Carlyle, was briefly summarized in an item of statistics which I used
to read in one of the Edinburgh papers every Monday morning, namely,
that of the births registered during the previous week, invariably from
ten to twelve per cent. were illegitimate. The Scotch--all classes of
them--love Burns deep down in their hearts, because he has expressed
them, from the roots up, as none other has.
When I think of Edinburgh the vision that comes before my mind's eye is
of a city presided over, and shone upon as it were, by two green
treeless heights. Arthur's Seat is like a great irregular orb or
half-orb, rising above the near horizon there in the southeast, and
dominating city and country with its unbroken verdancy. Its greenness
seems almost to pervade the air itself--a slight radiance of grass,
there in the eastern skies. No description of Edinburgh I had read had
prepared me for the striking hill features that look down upon it. There
is a series of three hills which culminate in Arthur's Seat, 800 feet
high. Upon the first and smaller hill stands the Castle. This is a
craggy, precipitous rock, on three sides, but sloping down into a broad
gentle expanse toward the east, where the old city of Edinburgh is
mainly built,--as if it had flowed out of the Castle as out of a
fountain, and spread over the adjacent ground. Just beyond the point
where it ceases rise Salisbury Crags to a height of 570 feet, turning to
the city a sheer wall of rocks like the Palisades of the Hudson. From
its brink eastward again, the ground slopes in a broad expanse of
greensward to a valley called Hunter's Bog, where I thought the hunters
were very quiet and very numerous until I saw they were city riflemen
engaged in target practice; thence it rises irregularly to the crest of
Arthur's Seat, forming the pastoral eminence and green-shining disk to
which I have referred. Along the crest of Salisbury Crags the thick turf
comes to the edge of the precipices, as one might stretch a carpet. It
is so firm and compact that the boys cut their initials in it, on a
large scale, with their jack-knives, as in the bark of a tree. Arthur's
Seat was a favorite walk of Carlyle's during those gloomy days in
Edinburgh in 1820-21. It was a mount of vision to him, and he apparently
went there every day when the weather permitted.[Note: See letter to his
brother John, March 9, 1821.]
There was no road in Scotland or England which I should have been so
glad to have walked over as that from Edinburgh to Ecclefechan,--a
distance covered many times by the feet of him whose birth and burial
place I was about to visit. Carlyle as a young man had walked it with
Edward Irving (the Scotch say "travel" when they mean going afoot), and
he had walked it alone, and as a lad with an elder boy, on his way to
Edinburgh college. He says in his "Reminiscences" he nowhere else had
such affectionate, sad, thoughtful, and, in fact, interesting and
salutary journeys. "No company to you but the rustle of the grass under
foot, the tinkling of the brook, or the voices of innocent, primeval
things." "I have had days as clear as Italy (as in this Irving case);
days moist and dripping, overhung with the infinite of silent gray,--and
perhaps the latter were the preferable, in certain moods. You had the
world and its waste imbroglios of joy and woe, of light and darkness, to
yourself alone. You could strip barefoot, if it suited better; carry
shoes and socks over shoulder, hung on your stick; clean shirt and comb
were in your pocket; _omnia mea mecum porto_. You lodged with shepherds,
who had clean, solid cottages; wholesome eggs, milk, oatmeal porridge,
clean blankets to their beds, and a great deal of human sense and
unadulterated natural politeness."
But how can one walk a hundred miles in cool blood without a companion,
especially when the trains run every hour, and he has a surplus
sovereign in his pocket? One saves time and consults his ease by riding,
but he thereby misses the real savor of the land. And the roads of this
compact little kingdom are so inviting, like a hard, smooth surface
covered with sand-paper! How easily the foot puts them behind it! And
the summer weather,--what a fresh under-stratum the air has even on the
warmest days! Every breath one draws has a cool, invigorating core to
it, as if there might be some unmelted, or just melted, frost not far
off.
But as we did not walk, there was satisfaction in knowing that the
engine which took our train down from Edinburgh was named Thomas
Carlyle. The cognomen looked well on the toiling, fiery-hearted,
iron-browed monster. I think its original owner would have contemplated
it with grim pleasure, especially since he confesses to having spent
some time, once, in trying to look up a shipmaster who had named his
vessel for him. Here was a hero after his own sort, a leader by the
divine right of the expansive power of steam.
The human faculties of observation have not yet adjusted themselves to
the flying train. Steam has clapped wings to our shoulders without the
power to soar; we get bird's-eye views without the bird's eyes or the
bird's elevation, distance without breadth, detail without mass. If such
speed only gave us a proportionate extent of view, if this leisure of
the eye were only mated to an equal leisure in the glance! Indeed, when
one thinks of it, how near railway traveling, as a means of seeing a
country, comes, except in the discomforts of it, to being no traveling
at all! It is like being tied to your chair, and being jolted and shoved
about at home. The landscape is turned topsy-turvy. The eye sustains
unnatural relations to all but the most distant objects. We move in an
arbitrary plane, and seldom is anything seen from the proper point, or
with the proper sympathy of coordinate position. We shall have to wait
for the air ship to give us the triumph over space in which the eye can
share. Of this flight south from Edinburgh on that bright summer day, I
keep only the most general impression. I recall how clean and naked the
country looked, lifted up in broad hill-slopes, naked of forests and
trees and weedy, bushy growths, and of everything that would hide or
obscure its unbroken verdancy,--the one impression that of a universe of
grass, as in the arctic regions it might be one of snow; the mountains,
pastoral solitudes; the vales, emerald vistas.
Not to be entirely cheated out of my walk, I left the train at
Lockerbie, a small Scotch market town, and accomplished the remainder of
the journey to Ecclefechan on foot, a brief six-mile pull. It was the
first day of June; the afternoon sun was shining brightly. It was still
the honeymoon of travel with me, not yet two weeks in the bonnie land;
the road was smooth and clean as the floor of a sea beach, and firmer,
and my feet devoured the distance with right good will. The first red
clover had just bloomed, as I probably would have found it that day had
I taken a walk at home; but, like the people I met, it had a ruddier
cheek than at home. I observed it on other occasions, and later in the
season, and noted that it had more color than in this country, and held
its bloom longer. All grains and grasses ripen slower there than here,
the season is so much longer and cooler. The pink and ruddy tints are
more common in the flowers also. The bloom of the blackberry is often of
a decided pink, and certain white, umbelliferous plants, like yarrow,
have now and then a rosy tinge. The little white daisy ("gowan," the
Scotch call it) is tipped with crimson, foretelling the scarlet
poppies, with which the grain fields will by and by be splashed.
Prunella (self-heal), also, is of a deeper purple than with us, and a
species of cranesbill, like our wild geranium, is of a much deeper and
stronger color. On the other hand, their ripened fruits and foliage of
autumn pale their ineffectual colors beside our own.
Among the farm occupations, that which most took my eye, on this and on
other occasions, was the furrowing of the land for turnips and potatoes;
it is done with such absolute precision. It recalled Emerson's statement
that the fields in this island look as if finished with a pencil instead
of a plow,--a pencil and a ruler in this case, the lines were so
straight and so uniform. I asked a farmer at work by the roadside how he
managed it. "Ah," said he, "a Scotchman's head is level." Both here and
in England, plowing is studied like a fine art; they have plowing
matches, and offer prizes for the best furrow. In planting both potatoes
and turnips the ground is treated alike, grubbed, plowed, cross-plowed,
crushed, harrowed, chain-harrowed, and rolled. Every sod and tuft of
uprooted grass is carefully picked up by women and boys, and burned or
carted away; leaving the surface of the ground like a clean sheet of
paper, upon which the plowman is now to inscribe his perfect lines. The
plow is drawn by two horses; it is a long, heavy tool, with double
mould-boards, and throws the earth each way. In opening the first furrow
the plowman is guided by stakes; having got this one perfect, it is
used as the model for every subsequent one, and the land is thrown into
ridges as uniform and faultless as if it had been stamped at one stroke
with a die, or cast in a mould. It is so from one end of the island to
the other; the same expert seems to have done the work in every plowed
and planted field.
Four miles from Lockerbie I came to Mainhill, the name of a farm where
the Carlyle family lived many years, and where Carlyle first read
Goethe, "in a dry ditch," Froude says, and translated "Wilhelm Meister."
The land drops gently away to the south and east, opening up broad views
in these directions, but it does not seem to be the bleak and windy
place Froude describes it. The crops looked good, and the fields smooth
and fertile. The soil is rather a stubborn clay, nearly the same as one
sees everywhere. A sloping field adjoining the highway was being got
ready for turnips. The ridges had been cast; the farmer, a courteous but
serious and reserved man, was sprinkling some commercial fertilizer in
the furrows from a bag slung across his shoulders, while a boy, with a
horse and cart, was depositing stable manure in the same furrows, which
a lassie, in clogs and short skirts, was evenly distributing with a
fork. Certain work in Scotch fields always seems to be done by women and
girls,--spreading manure, pulling weeds, and picking up sods,--while
they take an equal hand with the men in the hay and harvest fields.
The Carlyles were living on this farm while their son was teaching
school at Annan, and later at Kirkcaldy with Irving, and they supplied
him with cheese, butter, ham, oatmeal, etc., from their scanty stores. A
new farmhouse has been built since then, though the old one is still
standing; doubtless the same Carlyle's father refers to in a letter to
his son, in 1817, as being under way. The parish minister was expected
at Mainhill. "Your mother was very anxious to have the house done before
he came, or else she said she would run over the hill and hide herself."
From Mainhill the highway descends slowly to the village of Ecclefechan,
the site of which is marked to the eye, a mile or more away, by the
spire of the church rising up against a background of Scotch firs, which
clothe a hill beyond. I soon entered the main street of the village,
which in Carlyle's youth had an open burn or creek flowing through the
centre of it. This has been covered over by some enterprising citizen,
and instead of a loitering little burn, crossed by numerous bridges, the
eye is now greeted by a broad expanse of small cobble-stone. The
cottages are for the most part very humble, and rise from the outer
edges of the pavement, as if the latter had been turned up and shaped to
make their walls. The church is a handsome brown stone structure, of
recent date, and is more in keeping with the fine fertile country about
than with the little village in its front. In the cemetery back of it,
Carlyle lies buried. As I approached, a girl sat by the roadside, near
the gate, combing her black locks and arranging her toilet; waiting, as
it proved, for her mother and brother, who lingered in the village. A
couple of boys were cutting nettles against the hedge; for the pigs,
they said, after the sting had been taken out of them by boiling. Across
the street from the cemetery the cows of the villagers were grazing.
I must have thought it would be as easy to distinguish Carlyle's grave
from the others as it was to distinguish the man while living, or his
fame when dead; for it never occurred to me to ask in what part of the
inclosure it was placed. Hence, when I found myself inside the gate,
which opens from the Annan road through a high stone wall, I followed
the most worn path toward a new and imposing-looking monument on the far
side of the cemetery; and the edge of my fine emotion was a good deal
dulled against the marble when I found it bore a strange name. I tried
others, and still others, but was disappointed. I found a long row of
Carlyles, but he whom I sought was not among them. My pilgrim enthusiasm
felt itself needlessly hindered and chilled. How many rebuffs could one
stand? Carlyle dead, then, was the same as Carlyle living; sure to take
you down a peg or two when you came to lay your homage at his feet.
Presently I saw "Thomas Carlyle" on a big marble slab that stood in a
family inclosure. But this turned out to be the name of a nephew of the
great Thomas. However, I had struck the right plat at last; here were
the Carlyles I was looking for, within a space probably of eight by
sixteen feet, surrounded by a high iron fence. The latest made grave was
higher and fuller than the rest, but it had no stone or mark of any kind
to distinguish it. Since my visit, I believe, a stone or monument of
some kind has been put up. A few daisies and the pretty blue-eyed
speedwell were growing amid the grass upon it. The great man lies with
his head toward the south or southwest, with his mother, sister, and
father to the right of him, and his brother John to the left. I was glad
to learn that the high iron fence was not his own suggestion. His father
had put it around the family plat in his lifetime. Carlyle would have
liked to have it cut down about half way. The whole look of this
cemetery, except in the extraordinary size of the headstones, was quite
American, it being back of the church, and separated from it, a kind of
mortuary garden, instead of surrounding it and running under it, as is
the case with the older churches. I noted here, as I did elsewhere, that
the custom prevails of putting the trade or occupation of the deceased
upon his stone: So-and-So, mason, or tailor, or carpenter, or farmer,
etc.
A young man and his wife were working in a nursery of young trees, a few
paces from the graves, and I conversed with them through a thin place in
the hedge. They said they had seen Carlyle many times, and seemed to
hold him in proper esteem and reverence. The young man had seen him
come in summer and stand, with uncovered head, beside the graves of his
father and mother. "And long and reverently did he remain there, too,"
said the young gardener. I learned this was Carlyle's invariable custom:
every summer did he make a pilgrimage to this spot, and with bared head
linger beside these graves. The last time he came, which was a couple of
years before he died, he was so feeble that two persons sustained him
while he walked into the cemetery. This observance recalls a passage
from his "Past and Present." Speaking of the religious custom of the
Emperor of China, he says, "He and his three hundred millions (it is
their chief punctuality) visit yearly the Tombs of their Fathers; each
man the Tomb of his Father and his Mother; alone there in silence with
what of 'worship' or of other thought there may be, pauses solemnly each
man; the divine Skies all silent over him; the divine Graves, and this
divinest Grave, all silent under him; the pulsings of his own soul, if
he have any soul, alone audible. Truly it may be a kind of worship!
Truly, if a man cannot get some glimpse into the Eternities, looking
through this portal,--through what other need he try it?"
Carlyle's reverence and affection for his kindred were among his most
beautiful traits, and make up in some measure for the contempt he felt
toward the rest of mankind. The family stamp was never more strongly set
upon a man, and no family ever had a more original, deeply cut pattern
than that of the Carlyles. Generally, in great men who emerge from
obscure peasant homes, the genius of the family takes an enormous leap,
or is completely metamorphosed; but Carlyle keeps all the paternal
lineaments unfaded; he is his father and his mother, touched to finer
issues. That wonderful speech of his sire, which all who knew him
feared, has lost nothing in the son, but is tremendously augmented, and
cuts like a Damascus sword, or crushes like a sledge-hammer. The
strongest and finest paternal traits have survived in him. Indeed, a
little congenital rill seems to have come all the way down from the old
vikings. Carlyle is not merely Scotch; he is Norselandic. There is a
marked Scandinavian flavor in him; a touch, or more than a touch, of the
rude, brawling, bullying, hard-hitting, wrestling viking times. The
hammer of Thor antedates the hammer of his stone-mason sire in him. He
is Scotland, past and present, moral and physical. John Knox and the
Covenanters survive in him: witness his religious zeal, his depth and
solemnity of conviction, his strugglings and agonizings, his
"conversion." Ossian survives in him: behold that melancholy retrospect,
that gloom, that melodious wail. And especially, as I have said, do his
immediate ancestors survive in him,--his sturdy, toiling, fiery-tongued,
clannish yeoman progenitors: all are summed up here; this is the net
result available for literature in the nineteenth century.
Carlyle's heart was always here in Scotland. A vague, yearning
homesickness seemed ever to possess him. "The Hill I first saw the Sun
rise over," he says in "Past and Present," "when the Sun and I and all
things were yet in their auroral hour, who can divorce me from it?
Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the roots I have struck into my
Native Soil; no _tree_ that grows is rooted so." How that mournful
retrospective glance haunts his pages! His race, generation upon
generation, had toiled and wrought here amid the lonely moors, had
wrestled with poverty and privation, had wrung the earth for a scanty
subsistence, till they had become identified with the soil, kindred with
it. How strong the family ties had grown in the struggle; how the
sentiment of home was fostered! Then the Carlyles were men who lavished
their heart and conscience upon their work; they builded themselves,
their days, their thoughts and sorrows, into their houses; they leavened
the soil with the sweat of their rugged brows. When James Carlyle, his
father, after a lapse of fifty years, saw Auldgarth bridge, upon which
he had worked as a lad, he was deeply moved. When Carlyle in his turn
saw it, and remembered his father and all he had told him, he also was
deeply moved. "It was as if half a century of past time had fatefully
for moments turned back." Whatever these men touched with their hands in
honest toil became sacred to them, a page out of their own lives. A
silent, inarticulate kind of religion they put into their work. All this
bore fruit in their distinguished descendant. It gave him that
reverted, half mournful gaze; the ground was hallowed behind him; his
dead called to him from their graves. Nothing deepens and intensifies
family traits like poverty and toil and suffering. It is the furnace
heat that brings out the characters, the pressure that makes the strata
perfect. One recalls Carlyle's grandmother getting her children up late
at night, his father one of them, to break their long fast with oaten
cakes from the meal that had but just arrived; making the fire from
straw taken from their beds. Surely, such things reach the springs of
being.
It seemed eminently fit that Carlyle's dust should rest here in his
native soil, with that of his kindred, he was so thoroughly one of them,
and that his place should be next his mother's, between whom and himself
there existed such strong affection. I recall a little glimpse he gives
of his mother in a letter to his brother John, while the latter was
studying in Germany. His mother had visited him in Edinburgh. "I had
her," he writes, "at the pier of Leith, and showed her where your ship
vanished; and she looked over the blue waters eastward with wettish
eyes, and asked the dumb waves 'when he would be back again.' Good
mother."
To see more of Ecclefechan and its people, and to browse more at my
leisure about the country, I brought my wife and youngster down from
Lockerbie; and we spent several days there, putting up at the quiet and
cleanly little Bush Inn. I tramped much about the neighborhood, noting
the birds, the wild flowers, the people, the farm occupations, etc.;
going one afternoon to Scotsbrig, where the Carlyles lived after they
left Mainhill, and where both father and mother died; one day to Annan,
another to Repentance Hill, another over the hill toward Kirtlebridge,
tasting the land, and finding it good. It is an evidence of how
permanent and unchanging things are here that the house where Carlyle
was born, eighty-seven years ago, and which his father built, stands
just as it did then, and looks good for several hundred years more. In
going up to the little room where he first saw the light, one ascends
the much-worn but original stone stairs, and treads upon the original
stone floors. I suspect that even the window panes in the little window
remain the same. The village is a very quiet and humble one, paved with
small cobble-stone, over which one hears the clatter of the wooden
clogs, the same as in Carlyle's early days. The pavement comes quite up
to the low, modest, stone-floored houses, and one steps from the street
directly into most of them. When an Englishman or a Scotchman of the
humbler ranks builds a house in the country, he either turns its back
upon the highway, or places it several rods distant from it, with sheds
or stables between; or else he surrounds it with a high, massive fence,
shutting out your view entirely. In the village he crowds it to the
front; continues the street pavement into his hall, if he can; allows no
fence or screen between it and the street, but makes the communication
between the two as easy and open as possible. At least this is the case
with most of the older houses. Hence village houses and cottages in
Britain are far less private and secluded than ours, and country houses
far less public. The only feature of Ecclefechan, besides the church,
that distinguishes it from the humblest peasant village of a hundred
years ago, is the large, fine stone structure used for the public
school. It confers a sort of distinction upon the place, as if it were
in some way connected with the memory of its famous son. I think I was
informed that he had some hand in founding it. The building in which he
first attended school is a low, humble dwelling, that now stands behind
the church, and forms part of the boundary between the cemetery and the
Annan road.
From our window I used to watch the laborers on their way to their work,
the children going to school, or to the pump for water, and night and
morning the women bringing in their cows from the pasture to be milked.
In the long June gloaming the evening milking was not done till about
nine o'clock. On two occasions, the first in a brisk rain, a bedraggled,
forlorn, deeply-hooded, youngish woman, came slowly through the street,
pausing here and there, and singing in wild, melancholy, and not
unpleasing strains. Her voice had a strange piercing plaintiveness and
wildness. Now and then some passer-by would toss a penny at her feet.
The pretty Edinburgh lass, her hair redder than Scotch gold, that waited
upon us at the inn, went out in the rain and put a penny in her hand.
After a few pennies had been collected the music would stop, and the
singer disappear,--to drink up her gains, I half suspect, but do not
know. I noticed that she was never treated with rudeness or disrespect.
The boys would pause and regard her occasionally, but made no remark, or
gesture, or grimace. One afternoon a traveling show pitched its tent in
the broader part of the street, and by diligent grinding of a hand-organ
summoned all the children of the place to see the wonders. The admission
was one penny, and I went in with the rest, and saw the little man, the
big dog, the happy family, and the gaping, dirty-faced, but orderly
crowd of boys and girls. The Ecclefechan boys, with some of whom I
tried, not very successfully, to scrape an acquaintance, I found a
sober, quiet, modest set, shy of strangers, and, like all country boys,
incipient naturalists. If you want to know where the birds'-nests are,
ask the boys. Hence, one Sunday afternoon, meeting a couple of them on
the Annan road, I put the inquiry. They looked rather blank and
unresponsive at first; but I made them understand I was in earnest, and
wished to be shown some nests. To stimulate their ornithology I offered
a penny for the first nest, twopence for the second, threepence for the
third, etc.,--a reward that, as it turned out, lightened my burden of
British copper considerably; for these boys appeared to know every nest
in the neighborhood, and I suspect had just then been making Sunday
calls upon their feathered friends. They turned about, with a bashful
smile, but without a word, and marched me a few paces along the road,
when they stepped to the hedge, and showed me a hedge-sparrow's nest
with young. The mother bird was near, with food in her beak. This nest
is a great favorite of the cuckoo, and is the one to which Shakespeare
refers:--
"The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long
That it's had it head bit off by it young."
The bird is not a sparrow at all, but is a warbler, closely related to
the nightingale. Then they conducted me along a pretty by-road, and
parted away the branches, and showed me a sparrow's nest with eggs in
it. A group of wild pansies, the first I had seen, made bright the bank
near it. Next, after conferring a moment soberly together, they took me
to a robin's nest,--a warm, mossy structure in the side of the bank.
Then we wheeled up another road, and they disclosed the nest of the
yellow yite, or yellow-hammer, a bird of the sparrow kind, also upon the
ground. It seemed to have a little platform of coarse, dry stalks, like
a door-stone, in front of it. In the mean time they had showed me
several nests of the hedge-sparrow, and one of the shilfa, or chaffinch,
that had been "harried," as the boys said, or robbed. These were
gratuitous and merely by the way. Then they pointed out to me the nest
of a tomtit in a disused pump that stood near the cemetery; after which
they proposed to conduct me to a chaffinch's nest and a blackbird's
nest; but I said I had already seen several of these and my curiosity
was satisfied. Did they know any others? Yes, several of them; beyond
the village, on the Middlebie road, they knew a wren's nest with
eighteen eggs in it. Well, I would see that, and that would be enough;
the coppers were changing pockets too fast. So through the village we
went, and along the Middlebie road for nearly a mile. The boys were as
grave and silent as if they were attending a funeral; not a remark, not
a smile. We walked rapidly. The afternoon was warm, for Scotland, and
the tips of their ears glowed through their locks, as they wiped their
brows. I began to feel as if I had had about enough walking myself.
"Boys, how much farther is it?" I said. "A wee bit farther, sir;" and
presently, by their increasing pace, I knew we were nearing it. It
proved to be the nest of the willow wren, or willow warbler, an
exquisite structure, with a dome or canopy above it, the cavity lined
with feathers and crowded with eggs. But it did not contain eighteen.
The boys said they had been told that the bird would lay as many as
eighteen eggs; but it is the common wren that lays this number,--even
more. What struck me most was the gravity and silent earnestness of the
boys. As we walked back they showed me more nests that had been harried.
The elder boy's name was Thomas. He had heard of Thomas Carlyle; but
when I asked him what he thought of him, he only looked awkwardly upon
the ground.
I had less trouble to get the opinion of an old road-mender whom I fell
in with one day. I was walking toward Repentance Hill, when he overtook
me with his "machine" (all road vehicles in Scotland are called
machines), and insisted upon my getting up beside him. He had a little
white pony, "twenty-one years old, sir," and a heavy, rattling
two-wheeler, quite as old I should say. We discoursed about roads. Had
we good roads in America? No? Had we no "metal" there, no stone? Plenty
of it, I told him,--too much; but we had not learned the art of
road-making yet. Then he would have to come "out" and show us; indeed,
he had been seriously thinking about it; he had an uncle in America, but
had lost all track of him. He had seen Carlyle many a time, "but the
people here took no interest in that man," he said; "he never done
nothing for this place." Referring to Carlyle's ancestors, he said, "The
Cairls were what we Scotch call bullies,--a set of bullies, sir. If you
crossed their path, they would murder you;" and then came out some
highly-colored tradition of the "Ecclefechan dog fight," which Carlyle
refers to in his Reminiscences. On this occasion, the old road-mender
said, the "Cairls" had clubbed together, and bullied and murdered half
the people of the place! "No, sir, we take no interest in that man
here," and he gave the pony a sharp punch with his stub of a whip. But
he himself took a friendly interest in the schoolgirls whom we overtook
along the road, and kept picking them up till the cart was full, and
giving the "lassies" a lift on their way home. Beyond Annan bridge we
parted company, and a short walk brought me to Repentance Hill, a grassy
eminence that commands a wide prospect toward the Solway. The tower
which stands on the top is one of those interesting relics of which this
land is full, and all memory and tradition of the use and occasion of
which are lost. It is a rude stone structure, about thirty feet square
and forty high, pierced by a single door, with the word "Repentance" cut
in Old English letters in the lintel over it. The walls are loopholed
here and there for musketry or archery. An old disused graveyard
surrounds it, and the walls of a little chapel stand in the rear of it.
The conies have their holes under it; some lord, whose castle lies in
the valley below, has his flagstaff upon it; and Time's initials are
scrawled on every stone. A piece of mortar probably three or four
hundred years old, that had fallen from its place, I picked up, and
found nearly as hard as the stone, and quite as gray and lichen-covered.
Returning, I stood some time on Annan bridge, looking over the parapet
into the clear, swirling water, now and then seeing a trout leap.
Whenever the pedestrian comes to one of these arched bridges, he must
pause and admire, it is so unlike what he is acquainted with at home. It
is a real _viaduct_; it conducts not merely the traveler over, it
conducts the road over as well. Then an arched bridge is ideally
perfect; there is no room for criticism,--not one superfluous touch or
stroke; every stone tells, and tells entirely. Of a piece of
architecture, we can say this or that, but of one of these old bridges
this only: it satisfies every sense of the mind. It has the beauty of
poetry, and the precision of mathematics. The older bridges, like this
over the Annan, are slightly hipped, so that the road rises gradually
from either side to the key of the arch; this adds to their beauty, and
makes them look more like things of life. The modern bridges are all
level on the top, which increases their utility. Two laborers, gossiping
on the bridge, said I could fish by simply going and asking leave of
some functionary about the castle.