could load and fire; while the enemy’s skirmishers, as arranged in
the programme, fell back before us. My men were delighted with this
movement, which gave the effect of our winning the battle by our
special prowess; and not knowing better, we went on fighting for
our own hand, till we had nearly run out of ammunition. Meanwhile
from our side rang out imperious bugle-calls, which made me none
the wiser. At last, when the enemy’s thin red line could no longer
be seen for the cloud of smoke, I bethought myself to look round,
and observe how my devoted band was spread out half-way between the
two armies, exposed on either side to an exterminating fire of
cannon and rifles. There seemed something wrong here; but before I
could consider what to do about it, an aide-de-camp galloped up,
shepherding us with objurgations: “What on earth are you about,
sir! Get out of the way! Close and retire!” There was stronger
language that did not help to enlighten me. In my confusion, I
closed to the left, whereas our place was by this time on the right
of the line, the result being that we had to run the gauntlet of
our own army’s fire, then to turn and double up behind it to gain
our vacant post. That was not the worst of it. The drill of those
days made an important point of a company being pivoted on its
right or left flank; I forget the principle, but this I remember
too well that, whereas we ought to have come up “right in front” or
“left in front,” we had got the wrong way on, and reached our place
in the line with our rear turned to the enemy. My military science
was at a loss how to remedy this mistake; but I modestly ventured
on the order “right counter-march,” the effect of which was marred
by the right-hand man--who indeed as a haunter of the Barracks knew
more about soldiering than myself--_sotto voce_ giving the word and
example, “left counter-march.” How at last we got ourselves
straight and in face of the foe, I can hardly tell, but I, for one,
was ready to imitate poor Conachar by plunging into the Tay,
covered not with wounds but with blushes.
Another disgrace had nearly stained my company’s name, when we served as
guard of honour for Queen Victoria, on the inauguration of Prince
Albert’s statue at the foot of the North Inch. For once Her Majesty came
late--I forget through what delay--and we had to stand expectant for
hours under a hot sun, kept on the alert by a constant passing of
dignitaries, and pressed upon by a crowd that tried to break through our
ranks as often as a stately equipage drove up to excite the cry, “That’s
her, that’s her!” In vain I demanded the experienced help of police; on
us raw warriors fell the whole work of keeping the way clear, a very
fidgety task for a short-sighted young officer, who had not seen his
sovereign since he was young enough to be disappointed that she wore a
straw bonnet instead of a golden crown. When at last she came, it was
without observation, the crowd having given her up; then I shall always
be thankful that my lucky star showed me a carriage filled with ladies
in black, to which I was able to present arms just in the nick of
time--a moment more and the Queen would have been let go by in silence
without any salutation even from her heedless guard!
And already I had made a blunder of etiquette. A considerable force of
regulars were present, while we, as a local body, held the place of
honour. During the hours of uncertainty officers of rank kept galloping
to and fro, to whom I was uncertain whether or no I should pay military
compliments. I asked my colonel, who was as much at a loss as myself.
Then I consulted the staff-sergeant on whom I depended as my coach, and
his advice struck me as full of wisdom: “I don’t know what the practice
is, sir, but it would be safer to do it too much than too little.” So I
began presenting arms to every cocked hat that came by, and as I could
never be quite sure whether this or that one had been already saluted,
our rifles were going up and down all morning like the keys of a piano.
Afterwards I learned that the Sovereign’s guard should ignore any other
personage.
I could tell other tales of the Perthshire Volunteers in their early
days, but all I will say here is that if the Territorials who have taken
our place are more smart and efficient, they cannot surpass us in
good-will to serve our country. Some of us can remember an older and
perhaps less serviceable force, the tottering Pensioners who turned out
at least once a year upon the Inch to fire a _feu de joie_ for the
Queen’s birthday. I rather think I knew that Peninsular lieutenant of
whom Sir Evelyn Wood tells a touching tale--though here I am a little
confused between two bearded veterans that gave kindly words to a
boy--how he had lived obscurely at Perth, unnoted by two generations,
till Major Wood took a public occasion of pointing him out to his
fellow-citizens as one of the heroes of Albuera; then the old man in a
back seat bowed his head in tears of pride and joy--“_Let me
greet!_”--overcome to hear that fiery day not forgotten by soldiers of
another age. To a veteran of a former generation quartered at Perth was
born a son, afterwards well-known as Charles Mackay, editor and poet,
and as stepfather of one of the most popular novelists of our day, whose
modestly retiring disposition is so notorious that I do not mention her
name.
In my youth the neighbourhood of Perth was strongly garrisoned by
retired officers, some of whom belonged to the Sandemanian congregation
here, an exclusive body that, like the Plymouth Brethren in England, had
a curious attraction for old Indian soldiers. The sons usually went with
their fathers, while in some cases the mothers and daughters attended
the Episcopal “Chapel,” where my _Wenigkeit_, as son of an Englishwoman,
escaped the long sermons and Shorter Catechism of Presbyterian boyhood.
The Anglican form of worship has in the last generation made great way
among townsmen, but it then was apt to mark either English associations
or hereditary Toryism. Perth had a Cathedral, looked on askance in those
days as “Puseyite,” so that even the bishop for a time held aloof from
it; at all events he preached regularly in our smaller church, his lawn
sleeves attracting youthful reverence beside the black-gowned pastor of
those Protestant days. Now, so strongly has turned the tide of
ecclesiastical fashion, it is the Cathedral at whose door a string of
equipages may be seen standing of a Sunday morning, and three or four
English prelates officiating at the altar in the shooting season. But
half a century ago, and later, the “Chapel,” as we called it, as yet
ignorant that we were “the Church in Scotland,” made the more genteel
place of worship, with peers, baronets, and lairds as thick as
blackberries in the congregation, their carriages breaking the Sabbath
quiet of the street. The English soldiers were marched to it from the
other end of the town, though that empty Cathedral stood neighbour to
their barracks; and thereby hangs a tale to be caught at in my
reminiscent mood.
One warm summer forenoon, some of the congregation may have been finding
the sermon too long, when it was broken on by a stirring incident. A
whispered message came to the officer of the military party. The men
abruptly rose to clatter out, heedless of the pulpit. Presently the
captain sent back for his sword, and his wife turned pale before the
surmising eyes of the congregation. What could be the matter? Had the
French landed? Neither preacher nor people could give all their minds to
the conclusion of the service. As we streamed forth, all agog with
curiosity, the street showed the unusual Sabbath sight of cabs full of
policemen dashing up towards what was then the General Prison for
Scotland, beyond the South Inch. Report soon spread that the inmates of
this Penitentiary, hundreds strong, had broken out and might be expected
to scatter over the country like ravening wolves, after an alarming
[Illustration: AUTUMN IN THE HIGHLANDS]
example familiar to me from the pages of--was it not?--_Midshipman
Easy._
The excitement that followed seemed a godsend to youngsters, and perhaps
to older captives of the dull Sabbath. But, as usual, rumour
exaggerated. There had been a conspiracy to break prison, which, in the
case of the men, proved a fiasco; while the women, after throwing their
Bibles at the chaplain as signal of revolt, got loose into a yard, but
failed either to make their escape from the walls or to release the men,
as had been plotted. These incidents I state with reserve, after the
example of the Father of History in dealing with facts beyond his own
observation. The story that passed current was that our gallant
centurion reached the scene of action in hot haste, but on beholding the
enemy he marched off in high dudgeon, flatly refusing to lead his
company against a mob of women. In the end, we understood, those
Bacchanals were quelled by the artillery of the Fire Brigade.
If all tales be true, this is not the most ignominious retreat forced
upon our gallant soldiers at the hands of Scotswomen. In Penny’s
_Traditions of Perth_ it is told how, in the old martinet days, half a
dozen soldiers were flogged in public on the North Inch. Mobs of that
century seem rather to have enjoyed such spectacles, as a rule; but
pressed enlistments had made military discipline a sore point in
Scotland; and now the poor fellows’ cries excited angry pity among the
lookers-on. When it came to the turn of a married man, sentenced to five
hundred lashes for stealing a few potatoes to feed his family, their
feelings boiled over. His own wife was present, who, as he screamed
under the lash, rushed in to hold the drummer’s arm; then other women
began to pelt the executioners with stones. Led by these pitying
Amazons, the crowd broke through the ranks to rescue the sufferer, and
his fellow-soldiers apparently made no stout resistance. The officers
were set to flight, the unfortunate adjutant being captured, whom the
women are said to have stripped and whipped on the spot as a lesson in
humanity. That made the last flogging on the North Inch.
Perth has had the soldiers of many armies quartered upon it, including
Cromwell’s troopers, and the Hessians encamped for long on the Inch
after the Rebellion of ’45. At that time barracks were so deficient that
Cumberland’s men had to be lodged in the parish church and
meetinghouses, turned into dormitories by deal boards laid across the
pews. Later on, soldiers would be billeted upon the townsfolk, as the
militiamen were in my recollection; and their pay was so poor that, like
that culprit already mentioned, they did not always prove honest guests.
Gowrie House, presented by the loyal townsfolk to the victor of
Culloden, was made into an Artillery Barrack, but afterwards given back
to the town to serve as its jail and county buildings in exchange for
ground above the South Inch, where the General Prison came to be built.
This was originally a depôt for French prisoners of war, the first batch
of whom, confined in a church on their way from Dundee, stole all the
brass nails, green baize, and other fittings they could lay hands on.
The prisoners became increased to thousands, who on the whole must have
behaved better, for they are said to have been missed at the peace,
having, indeed, spent in the city a good deal of money which they earned
in part by ingenious industries. These foreigners appear as the
unexpected means of importing cricket into Scotland, first played on the
Inches of Perth by the English regiments sent to guard the depôt.
English soldiers, one supposes, are not now needed to guard Perth, its
ordinary garrison a small body of the Black Watch or other local
regiment. Gone, too, are the militia whom I once came upon drawn up at
the top of the “Whins” without a stitch of uniform on, stripped to bathe
by word of command. Military displays on the Inch will be less common
than games of golf, cricket, and football, the last in its more
unsophisticated forms, since this public space does not lend itself to
the collection of gate-money; but the barefoot laddies who here kick
about the “leather” for their own divert, are the buds of those
professionals that bloom out to such applause in English enclosures. And
the rules of football have changed even since my youth, when a band of
youngsters from various public schools, gathered on the Inch for a
Christmas game, found themselves all at loggerheads in an anarchy not
yet divided into the kingdoms of “Rugger” and “Soccer.” Still more has
the game been refined since a day when country folk coming down to
market, about two miles out of Perth, met a man charging along the
Crieff road, chased by a party of the Forty-Second with their kilts
streaming in the wind; at first sight the fugitive was taken for a
deserter, and the farmers drew aside to give him a fair chance, but it
was only a Methven lad carrying off the ball from a match on the North
Inch, nor could he be tackled till it was goaled in his house, half a
dozen miles from the field. Scone had once a name for rough matches, at
which limbs were often broken, but, as the proverb went, “A’s fair at
the ba’ of Scone.”
The example of that hero warns me not to linger on the Perth Inch, but
to be off up the Tay, keeping as near it as one can for parks, and for
the jealously guarded banks of valuable salmon fisheries. For the first
two miles there is a public walk up the right bank to the Almond mouth.
On the opposite side, hidden in lordly foliage, lies Scone Palace and
the site of the old Pictish capital. The Scot is so notoriously modest
that English example has often led him to mishandle his own names:
before Scone gets corrupted, then, let me insist that it is pronounced
_Scoon_, as the eatable _scone_, so mumbled in Cockney mouths, should
rhyme with _on_, and not be treated as their _own_.
To modern Scone we could come on that side by a tramway which is turning
this goodly village into a suburb of Perth. Even when we get into the
Highlands we shall find how the squalid “Tullyveolans” and “Glenburnies”
have been improved away generations ago. At the gates of great
proprietors, at all events, a Scottish village usually compares well
with an English one in point of comfort if not of picturesqueness. The
former commonly wears an air of stiff neatness and coldness toned by its
grey stone walls and slated roofs; the hand of the laird and factor is
seen over it all, and only here and there are left such wigwam
makeshifts as might still move Waverley’s disgust in the
poverty-stricken Hebrides. The Southern village, even if a model one,
is apt to be more taking to the eye, with its show of warm brick
scattered among the green, its unstudied variety of thatched and
lichened roofs, of gabled, plastered, and half-timbered walls, where
paddocks and gardens divide an age-mellowed block of farm buildings from
a row of picturesquely decayed hovels; and over all rises the tower or
spire of some much-patched church, neighboured by a smug chapel that
throws the ancient fane into striking relief. The churches of Scotland
make no such points of dignity, as a rule; but their old austerity now
often becomes relaxed by more ambitious architecture of Anglican-aping
days; and here and there has been spared some stout hull that weathered
the Reformation storms.
One feature of a northern parish seems past praying for. The churchyard,
if not miserably neglected, is apt to look grim, dismal, forbidding, in
contrast with those flowery God’s acres of a less stern faith, that
sometimes tempt poor human nature to be half in love with death. As a
child I remember my nurse, and she was an Englishwoman, pointing out to
me for reprobation what seemed the Popish sacrilege of a wreath laid
upon a grave. Such Protestant superstition has been broken down in the
last half-century. Large towns, even so long ago, had more or less
ornamentally laid-out cemeteries, which were allowed to be the goal of a
Sabbath walk. But still, in out-of-the-way parts, the disposition is not
to mantle the king of terrors in any sentimental disguise; and weeds may
be more common than flowers about tombstones that give lessons of
warning rather than of consolation. The memorials of the dead are
oftenest plain and practical, like the homes of the living, whose very
gardens run rather to kail and berries than to flowers. Yet where a
Scotsman’s time is less taken up by wringing a bare subsistence from his
poor soil, he can treat himself to the luxury of bloom; his grey walls
are more and more lit by hardy creepers; and on heathery slopes you may
see cottages covered with gay tropæolum, which I cannot coax to flourish
on a London balcony.
But Scone, in its semi-urbanity, is no fair specimen of a Scottish
village, nor are we yet in the Highlands, though hints of them peep to
view as we pass up towards the blue Grampian barrier. We soon come,
indeed, to a manufacturing nook, a “white country” of Perthshire, where
the river, swollen by several streams uniting as the Luncarty Burn,
washes the bleach-fields of that ilk and the cotton mills of Stanley.
But these meads of Luncarty were once dyed red rather than white, when
the Danes had almost overcome a Scottish king, till a peasant named Hay,
with his two sons, held a narrow pass so well with his ploughshare that
the Vikings in turn were put to flight by those rustic champions,
claimed as ancestors for the House of Errol. Be this a fable or no, when
the bleach-field came to be laid out, several tumuli were opened
containing skeletons and weapons.
The whole country on both sides of the river is studded with Druidical
stones, with camps and gravemounds, and with sites of old tradition,
such as that ascribed to Macbeth’s castle, where the Sidlaw Hills swell
up behind the left bank of the Tay, winding round them under the wooded
cliffs of Kinnoull, making such a bend that a house I have reason to
know stands equidistant between two reaches, which are nearly a score of
miles apart by the bank. Should I be spared another score of years or
so, I could tell some queer tales about more than one late laird in this
nook, whose memory at present must rest in the truce _de mortuis_. As
for Macbeth’s memory, I have already shown some hint of materials for
whitewashing it. Why was not Shakespeare told of this Thane being an
elder in the Wee Free Church, when King Duncan must needs send his loons
south, one to Oxford and one to Cambridge, who came back dropping their
_h_’s, whustling on the Sabbath, and such-like; then what for no should
an outraged patriot but yoke with the sword of Gideon on the whole
Erastian hypothec? As for Lady Macbeth, does not Shakespeare himself
admit evidence to justify a soft-hearted verdict of temporary insanity?
Above the mills of Stanley we come to Campsie Linn, the first romantic
scene of the Tay, on which is set the last tableau in _The Fair Maid of
Perth_. Such a picturesque nook tempted the monks of Cupar to build a
retreat on the precipitous rock above its cataract; and here was the
country seat of the Mercers, that mediæval trading family of Perth,
already mentioned as growing into nobility. But the great name
hereabouts in the old days was the Drummonds, lords of Stobhall on the
Tay, their principal residence till they built a more lordly one in
Strathearn.
This family, long so powerful in Perthshire, claim to be descended from
an Hungarian chief, settled in Scotland under the civilising patronage
of Malcolm Canmore. So well did his line thrive here that a daughter of
the house of Drummond sat to watch that North Inch combat as Robert
III.’s queen, Anabella, mother of the unfortunate Duke of Rothesay, who
comes to such a tragic end in Scott’s romance. A century later, when the
family had moved their main seat to Drummond Castle, another connection
with royalty again brought about a mysterious crime. James IV., all his
life much misled by Cupid, took for his mistress or left-handed wife
Bonnie Margaret Drummond; it is said that he proposed to marry her
openly as soon as a dispensation from the Pope unloosed their bonds of
kindred. Be that as it may, other Scottish nobles looked askance on the
growth of the Drummonds, while politic statesmen may well have sought to
clear the way to peace with England by the King’s marriage to Margaret
Tudor; there is also a suspicion of jealousy on the part of another
royal lady love. By unknown hands, Margaret Drummond and her two sisters
were poisoned at Drummond Castle, and they lie beneath three slabs of
blue marble in Dunblane Cathedral. A daughter of this doubtful union was
married successively to the Earl of Huntly, the Duke of Albany, and to a
kinsman of her own; then her infusion of Stuart blood has passed into at
least a score of Scottish noble families.
The strain of royal descent was reinforced when the head of the Drummond
house married a daughter of this lady by the Stuart Duke of Albany. By
James VI. Lord Drummond was made Earl of Perth, a title augmented by the
French dukedom of Melfort. The Perth earldom was blown out into an empty
dukedom by the Pretender,
[Illustration: DUNKELD AND BIRNAM]
whose fortunes its holder followed into France, leaving his possessions
to be confiscated, and his honours attainted. The peerage was restored
to a Drummond under George III., but died out for want of heirs male;
then through marriage of a daughter the property passed to Lord Gwydir
of Wales, and through the Willoughby d’Eresbys to the English Earl of
Ancaster. I fear to make the reader’s head ache in the labyrinth of
Drummond genealogy. Enough to say that the earldom of Perth and Melfort
was restored in Victoria’s reign to a Drummond who held a French title.
Supported by a pension from a more fortunate kinsman, he lived latterly
in seclusion at Kew, and was buried there a few years ago, his life
shadowed by a painful tragedy that left his house without a direct heir
to its pride and its poverty. His home was literally a cottage, a
striking contrast to the glories of Drummond Castle; but to friendly
neighbours, who respected his misfortunes, he could humorously boast of
being by rights a duke in two countries.
A tragedy in humbler life has been commemorated in a Tayside ballad,
_The Weary Coble of Cargill_. The hero, Davie Drummond, is described as
a “brave page,” also as the “butler of Stobhall,” who, with the keys of
the mansion hanging at his belt, undertook to cross the swollen Tay one
night in a coble or ferry-boat: this local Leander seems to have had a
Hero on each bank, and to have played the perilous part of not being off
with one love before being on with another. The heroine, “the lass of
Ballathie,” took strong measures in a fit of jealousy, when Davie would
not stay the night on her side the river--
His bed was made in Ballathie town,
Of the clean sheets and of the strae;
But I wat it was far better made
Into the bottom o’ bonnie Tay.
She bored the coble in seven pairts,
I wat her heart might hae been sair,
For there she got the bonnie lad lost,
Wi’ the curly locks and the yellow hair.
He put his foot into the boat,
He little thocht o’ ony ill,
But before that he was mid-waters,
The weary coble began to fill....
I wat they had mair love than this
When they were young and at the schule;
But for his sake she wauked late
And bored the coble o’ bonny Cargill.
The poor youth was taken out a corpse; then too late came lifelong
repentance to his resentful sweetheart--
There’s ne’er a clean sark gae on my back,
Nor yet a kame gae in my hair,
There’s neither coal nor candle light
Shall shine in my bower for ever mair.
At kirk or market I’se ne’er be at,
Nor yet a blythe blink in my e’e,
There’s ne’er a ane shall say to anither,
That’s the lassie garr’d the young man dee.
Above Cargill, the river is spanned by the Caledonian railway; then on
the left bank comes in the Isla leading up to Blairgowrie, behind which
opens one of the great passes into the Highlands. Between Meikleour and
Kinclaven Castle, taken and burned by Wallace, the Tay makes an
extravagant circumvention of inches and haughs, flowing north for one
reach, then turning south, as it comes round from its eastward course
by Murthly. The Highland line cuts across this elbow bend to pass
opposite Caputh, reached by a floating bridge that looks safer than that
coble of Cargill. In _Bonnie Scotland_ I could not but speak of the
grounds of Murthly, with their show of ambitious structures; but I am
not sure if I did justice to the gardens and miles of magnificent
avenues, that, like those of Meikleour and Ballathie lower down, and of
Dunkeld above, might call a blush to the cheek of Dr. Johnson’s ghost,
if it could visit this edge of the Highlands. From near Murthly station
one may walk for two and a half straight miles on a grass ride bordered
by coniferous trees, bringing us down to the Dunkeld road, beyond
Bankfoot, a highway which has taken care not to follow the vagaries of
the river.
It is only fourteen miles to Dunkeld from Perth, whence houses on the
Grampian slope may be made out on a clear day. Strangers here who would
take the very shortest way for a peep at the Highlands may now from
Strathord station reach Bankfoot on a light railway up the Ordie Burn,
and over the native heath of Robert Nicoll, who, but for an early death
and his consuming zeal for reforming politics, might have been better
known as a Perthshire Burns.
Sae weel I lo’ed a’ things of earth--
The trees, the buds, the flowers,
The sun, the moon, the lochs and glens,
The Spring’s and Summer’s hours,--
A wither’d woodland twig would bring
The tears into my eye,
Laugh on! but there are souls of love
In laddies herding kye.