We found ourselves in the park at Breadalbane, where there was no living
being in sight. The handsome castle stood silent and solitary, as if it
had been erected for its own accommodation. It was a large, elegant,
white structure, but had an architectural expression not sufficiently
imposing to contend with the bold scenery around. There was the river,
making a rush for Loch Long; there were the mountains;—these were masters
of the situation and of the castle, which seemed more like a looker-on.
This was my impression then; it might not be so now.
We had passed the night in the cottage of a shepherd which we entered,
and we asked the gudewife to give us food and lodging; this she did,
adding to them a hearty welcome, uncertificated as we were. She gave
us of what she had—a good mess of porridge and milk, with oat cakes as
a second course, for porridge makes one hungry, as we found the next
morning and the next day. We slept in beds built into recesses. On
the morrow, after our breakfast, we asked the hostess what we were in
her debt; but she scouted the idea of any payment, so we adopted the
alternative of guessing our hotel-bill, and paying it by placing a few
shillings on the table.
We proceeded for some hours along Loch Long, and by noon found hunger
growing upon us to a ravenous degree. There were no habitations, much
less shops, on the way, till at length we saw a villa. A maid-servant
stood at the door with her broom. I approached her, saying we were very
hungry, and asked her to sell us a loaf. She received my petition with
contempt, entered the villa and unsympathetically added the slam of the
door to her refusal. To be treated as the tramps which we were, was a new
sensation.
That evening we ceased to be footpads, and reached home.
At the end of summer, which was near, my brother returned southwards,
while I remained through the winter session to obtain more chemistry and
to complete my study of natural philosophy and physics. In the spring,
having completed my twenty-second year and passed the last six ones in
the study of the sciences, I thought it a good opportunity to graduate
on the spot, which I did accordingly, and was highly complimented on my
anatomical examination by that delightful gentleman, Dr. Badham. I had
answers to all his questions on the tip of my tongue. I may mention that
I had acquired anatomy at the then University of London, under Granville
Sharpe Pattison, at the first opening of that great institution.
The Scotch character is of a very mixed kind, perhaps too well known to
need comment. It is thrifty and extravagant, dissipated and religious,
sober and drunken, generous and mean in more striking contrast than
that of the English people, because it runs into greater extremes, the
opposite qualities being often united in the same individual. I met with
an instance in which even a decent respect for death was wanting. A
physician told me he had just left a dying patient who said to him, while
breathing gutturally, “I say, doctor, isn’t this the death-rattle?” The
doctor answered, “No, my dear sir, it is not that quite yet.” To which
the rejoinder was, “Well, if it isn’t, it is damned like it!”
A Scotchman whom I met before long at Florence—he had been one of George
the Fourth’s physicians—told me, not with a view to his credit, that he
was whistling as he entered a notorious den in Edinburgh on one Sunday
morning, when the landlady, to use a mild term, accosted him with the
words: “Dr. B⸺, I won’t have any whustling in my house on the sabbath
day!”
I have twice been in Scotland since; a country one never tires of unless
one is a native.