In walking over the workyard at Arbroath this morning, the writer found

that the stones of the course immediately under the cornice were all in

hand, and that a week's work would now finish the whole, while the

intermediate courses lay ready numbered and marked for shipping to the

rock. Among other subjects which had occupied his attention to-day was a

visit from some of the relations of George Dall, a young man who had

been impressed near Dundee in the month of February last; a dispute had

arisen between the magistrates of that burgh and the Regulating Officer

as to his right of impressing Dall, who was _bona fide_ one of the

protected seamen in the Bell Rock service. In the meantime, the poor lad

was detained, and ultimately committed to the prison of Dundee, to

remain until the question should be tried before the Court of Session.

His friends were naturally very desirous to have him relieved upon bail.

But, as this was only to be done by the judgment of the Court, all that

could be said was that his pay and allowances should be continued in the

same manner as if he had been upon the sick-list. The circumstances of

Dall's case were briefly these:--He had gone to see some of his friends

in the neighbourhood of Dundee, in winter, while the works were

suspended, having got leave of absence from Mr. Taylor, who commanded

the Bell Rock tender, and had in his possession one of the Protection

Medals. Unfortunately, however, for Dall, the Regulating Officer thought

proper to disregard these documents, as, according to the strict and

literal interpretation of the Admiralty regulations, a seaman does not

stand protected unless he is actually on board of his ship, or in a boat

belonging to her, or has the Admiralty protection in his possession.

This order of the Board, however, cannot be rigidly followed in

practice; and therefore, when the matter is satisfactorily stated to the

Regulating Officer, the impressed man is generally liberated. But in

Dall's case this was peremptorily refused, and he was retained at the

instance of the magistrates. The writer having brought the matter under

the consideration of the Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses, they

authorised it to be tried on the part of the Lighthouse Board, as one of

extreme hardship. The Court, upon the first hearing, ordered Dall to be

liberated from prison; and the proceedings never went further.

Wednesday, 4th July.

Being now within twelve courses of being ready for building the cornice,

measures were taken for getting the stones of it and the parapet-wall of

the light-room brought from Edinburgh, where, as before noticed, they

had been prepared and were in readiness for shipping. The honour of

conveying the upper part of the lighthouse, and of landing the last

stone of the building on the rock, was considered to belong to Captain

Pool of the _Smeaton_, who had been longer in the service than the

master of the _Patriot_. The _Smeaton_ was, therefore, now partly loaded

with old iron, consisting of broken railways and other lumber which had

been lying about the rock. After landing these at Arbroath, she took on

board James Craw, with his horse and cart, which could now be spared at

the workyard, to be employed in carting the stones from Edinburgh to

Leith. Alexander Davidson and William Kennedy, two careful masons, were

also sent to take charge of the loading of the stones at Greenside, and

stowing them on board of the vessel at Leith. The writer also went on

board, with a view to call at the Bell Rock and to take his passage up

the Firth of Forth. The wind, however, coming to blow very fresh from

the eastward, with thick and foggy weather, it became necessary to reef

the mainsail and set the second jib. When in the act of making a tack

towards the tender, the sailors who worked the head-sheets were, all of

a sudden, alarmed with the sound of the smith's hammer and anvil on the

beacon, and had just time to put the ship about to save her from running

ashore on the north-western point of the rock, marked "James Craw's

Horse." On looking towards the direction from whence the sound came, the

building and beacon-house were seen, with consternation, while the ship

was hailed by those on the rock, who were no less confounded at seeing

the near approach of the _Smeaton_; and, just as the vessel cleared the

danger, the smith and those in the mortar gallery made signs in token of

their happiness at our fortunate escape. From this occurrence the writer

had an experimental proof of the utility of the large bells which were

in preparation to be rung by the machinery of the revolving light; for,

had it not been for the sound of the smith's anvil, the _Smeaton_, in

all probability, would have been wrecked upon the rock. In case the

vessel had struck, those on board might have been safe, having now the

beacon-house as a place of refuge; but the vessel, which was going at a

great velocity, must have suffered severely, and it was more than

probable that the horse would have been drowned, there being no means of

getting him out of the vessel. Of this valuable animal and his master we

shall take an opportunity of saying more in another place.

Thursday, 5th July.

The weather cleared up in the course of the night, but the wind shifted

to the N.E. and blew very fresh. From the force of the wind, being now

the period of spring-tides, a very heavy swell was experienced at the

rock. At two o'clock on the following morning the people on the beacon

were in a state of great alarm about their safety, as the sea had broke

up part of the floor of the mortar gallery, Which was thus cleared of

the lime-casks and other buoyant articles; and, the alarm-bell being

rung, all hands were called to render what assistance was in their

power for the safety of themselves and the materials. At this time some

would willingly have left the beacon and gone into the building; the

sea, however, ran so high that there was no passage along the bridge of

communication, and, when the interior of the lighthouse came to be

examined in the morning, it appeared that great quantities of water had

come over the walls--now eighty feet in height--and had run down through

the several apartments and out at the entrance door.

The upper course of the lighthouse at the workyard of Arbroath was

completed on the 6th, and the whole of the stones were, therefore, now

ready for being shipped to the rock. From the present state of the works

it was impossible that the two squads of artificers at Arbroath and the

Bell Rock could meet together at this period; and as in public works of

this kind, which had continued for a series of years, it is not

customary to allow the men to separate without what is termed a

"finishing-pint," five guineas were for this purpose placed at the

disposal of Mr. David Logan, clerk of works. With this sum the

stone-cutters at Arbroath had a merry meeting in their barrack,

collected their sweethearts and friends, and concluded their labours

with a dance. It was remarked, however, that their happiness on this

occasion was not without alloy. The consideration of parting and leaving

a steady and regular employment, to go in quest of work and mix with

other society, after having been harmoniously lodged for years together

in one large "guildhall or barrack," was rather painful.

Friday, 6th July.

While the writer was at Edinburgh he was fortunate enough to meet with

Mrs. Dickson, only daughter of the late celebrated Mr. Smeaton, whose

works at the Eddystone Lighthouse had been of such essential consequence

to the operations at the Bell Rock. Even her own elegant accomplishments

are identified with her father's work, she having herself made the

drawing of the vignette on the title-page of the "Narrative of the

Eddystone Lighthouse." Every admirer of the works of that singularly

eminent man must also feel an obligation to her for the very

comprehensive and distinct account given of his life, which is attached

to his reports, published, in three volumes quarto, by the Society of

Civil Engineers. Mrs. Dickson, being at this time returning from a tour

to the Hebrides and Western Highlands of Scotland, had heard of the Bell

Rock works, and from their similarity to those of the Eddystone, was

strongly impressed with a desire of visiting the spot. But on inquiring

for the writer at Edinburgh, and finding from him that the upper part of

the lighthouse, consisting of nine courses, might be seen in the

immediate vicinity, and also that one of the vessels, which, in

compliment to her father's memory, had been named the _Smeaton_, might

also now be seen in Leith, she considered herself extremely fortunate;

and having first visited the works at Greenside, she afterwards went to

Leith to see the _Smeaton_, then loading for the Bell Rock. On stepping

on board, Mrs. Dickson seemed to be quite overcome with so many

concurrent circumstances, tending in a peculiar manner to revive and

enliven the memory of her departed father, and, on leaving the vessel,

she would not be restrained from presenting the crew with a piece of

money. The _Smeaton_ had been named spontaneously, from a sense of the

obligation which a public work of the description of the Bell Rock owed

to the labours and abilities of Mr. Smeaton. The writer certainly never

could have anticipated the satisfaction which he this day felt in

witnessing the pleasure it afforded to the only representative of this

great man's family.

Friday, 20th July.

The gale from the N.E. still continued so strong, accompanied with a

heavy sea, that the _Patriot_ could not approach her moorings; although

the tender still kept her station, no landing was made to-day at the

rock. At high-water it was remarked that the spray rose to the height of

about sixty feet upon the building. The _Smeaton_ now lay in Leith

loaded, but, the wind and weather being so unfavourable for her getting

down the Firth, she did not sail till this afternoon. It may be here

proper to notice that the loading of the centre of the light-room floor,

or last principal stone of the building, did not fail, when put on

board, to excite an interest among those connected with the work. When

the stone was laid upon the cart to be conveyed to Leith, the seamen

fixed an ensign-staff and flag into the circular hole in the centre of

the stone, and decorated their own hats, and that of James Craw, the

Bell Rock carter, with ribbons; even his faithful and trusty horse

Brassey was ornamented with bows and streamers of various colours. The

masons also provided themselves with new aprons, and in this manner the

cart was attended in its progress to the ship. When the cart came

opposite the Trinity House of Leith, the officer of that corporation

made his appearance dressed in his uniform, with his staff of office;

and when it reached the harbour, the shipping in the different tiers

where the _Smeaton_ lay hoisted their colours, manifesting by these

trifling ceremonies the interest with which the progress of this work

was regarded by the public, as ultimately tending to afford safety and

protection to the mariner. The wind had fortunately shifted to the S.W.,

and about five o'clock this afternoon the Smeaton reached the Bell Rock.

Friday, 27th July.

The artificers had finished the laying of the balcony course, excepting

the centre-stone of the light-room floor, which, like the centres of the

other floors, could not be laid in its place till after the removal of

the foot and shaft of the balance-crane. During the dinner-hour, when

the men were off work, the writer generally took some exercise by

walking round the walls when the rock was under water; but to-day his

boundary was greatly enlarged, for, instead of the narrow wall as a

path, he felt no small degree of pleasure in walking round the balcony

and passing out and in at the space allotted for the light-room door. In

the labours of this day both the artificers and seamen felt their work

to be extremely easy compared with what it had been for some days past.

Sunday, 29th July.

Captain Wilson and his crew had made preparations for landing the last

stone, and, as may well be supposed, this was a day of great interest at

the Bell Rock. "That it might lose none of its honours," as he expressed

himself, the _Hedderwick_ praam-boat, with which the first stone of the

building had been landed, was appointed also to carry the last. At seven

o'clock this evening the seamen hoisted three flags upon the

_Hedderwick_, when the colours of the _Dickie_ praam-boat, tender,

_Smeaton_, floating light, beacon-house, and lighthouse were also

displayed; and, the weather being remarkably fine, the whole presented a

very gay appearance, and, in connection with the associations excited,

the effect was very pleasing. The praam which carried the stone was

towed by the seamen in gallant style to the rock, and, on its arrival,

cheers were given as a finale to the landing department.

Monday, 30th July.

The ninetieth or last course of the building having been laid to-day,

which brought the masonry to the height of one hundred and two feet six

inches, the lintel of the light-room door, being the finishing-stone of

the exterior walls, was laid with due formality by the writer, who, at

the same time, pronounced the following benediction: "May the Great

Architect of the Universe, under whose blessing this perilous work has

prospered, preserve it as a guide to the mariner."

Friday, 3rd Aug.

At three p.m., the necessary preparations having been made, the

artificers commenced the completing of the floors of the several

apartments, and at seven o'clock the centre-stone of the light-room

floor was laid, which may be held as finishing the masonry of this

important national edifice. After going through the usual ceremonies

observed by the brotherhood on occasions of this kind, the writer,

addressing himself to the artificers and seamen who were present,

briefly alluded to the utility of the undertaking as a monument of the

wealth of British commerce, erected through the spirited measures of the

Commissioners of the Northern Lighthouses by means of the able

assistance of those who now surrounded him. He then took an opportunity

of stating that toward those connected with this arduous work he would

ever retain the most heartfelt regard in all their interests.

Saturday, 4th Aug.

When the bell was rung as usual on the beacon this morning, every one

seemed as if he were at a loss what to make of himself. At this period

the artificers at the rock consisted of eighteen masons, two joiners,

one millwright, one smith, and one mortar-maker, besides Messrs. Peter

Logan and Francis Watt, foremen, counting in all twenty-five; and

matters were arranged for proceeding to Arbroath this afternoon with all

hands. The _Sir Joseph Banks_ tender had by this time been afloat, with

little intermission, for six months, during greater part of which the

artificers had been almost constantly off at the rock, and were now much

in want of necessaries of almost every description. Not a few had lost

different articles of clothing, which had dropped into the sea from the

beacon and building. Some wanted jackets; others, from want of hats,

wore nightcaps; each was, in fact, more or less curtailed in his

wardrobe, and it must be confessed that at best the party were but in a

very tattered condition. This morning was occupied in removing the

artificers and their bedding on board of the tender; and, although their

personal luggage was easily shifted, the boats had, nevertheless, many

articles to remove from the beacon-house, and were consequently employed

in this service till eleven a.m. All hands being collected, and just

ready to embark, as the water had nearly overflowed the rock, the

writer, in taking leave, after alluding to the harmony which had ever

marked the conduct of those employed on the Bell Rock, took occasion to

compliment the great zeal, attention, and abilities of Mr. Peter Logan

and Mr. Francis Watt, foremen; Captain James Wilson, landing-master; and

Captain David Taylor, commander of the tender, who, in their several

departments, had so faithfully discharged the duties assigned to them,

often under circumstances the most difficult and trying. The health of

these gentlemen was drunk with much warmth of feeling by the artificers

and seamen, who severally expressed the satisfaction they had

experienced in acting under them; after which the whole party left the

rock.

In sailing past the floating light, mutual compliments were made by a

display of flags between that vessel and the tender; and at five p.m.

the latter vessel entered the harbour of Arbroath, where the party were

heartily welcomed by a numerous company of spectators, who had collected

to see the artificers arrive after so long an absence from the port. In

the evening the writer invited the foremen and captains of the service,

together with Mr. David Logan, clerk of works at Arbroath, and Mr.

Lachlan Kennedy, engineer's clerk and bookkeeper, and some of their

friends, to the principal inn, where the evening was spent very happily;

and after "His Majesty's Health" and "The Commissioners of the Northern

Lighthouses" had been given, "Stability to the Bell Rock Lighthouse" was

hailed as a standing toast in the Lighthouse service.

Sunday, 5th Aug.

The author has formerly noticed the uniformly decent and orderly

deportment of the artificers who were employed at the Bell Rock

Lighthouse, and to-day, it is believed, they very generally attended

church, no doubt with grateful hearts for the narrow escapes from

personal danger which all of them had more or less experienced during

their residence at the rock.

Tuesday, 14th Aug.

The _Smeaton_ sailed to-day at one p.m., having on board sixteen

artificers, with Mr. Peter Logan, together with a supply of provisions

and necessaries, who left the harbour pleased and happy to find

themselves once more afloat in the Bell Rock service. At seven o'clock

the tender was made fast to her moorings, when the artificers landed on

the rock and took possession of their old quarters in the beacon-house,

with feelings very different from those of 1807, when the works

commenced.

The barometer for some days past had been falling from 29.90, and to-day

it was 29.50, with the wind at N.E., which, in the course of this day,

increased to a strong gale accompanied with a sea which broke with great

violence upon the rock. At twelve noon the tender rode very heavily at

her moorings, when her chain broke at about ten fathoms from the ship's

bows. The kedge-anchor was immediately let go, to hold her till the

floating buoy and broken chain should be got on board. But while this

was in operation the hawser of the kedge was chafed through on the rocky

bottom and parted, when the vessel was again adrift. Most fortunately,

however, she cast off with her head from the rock, and narrowly cleared

it, when she sailed up the Firth of Forth to wait the return of better

weather. The artificers were thus left upon the rock with so heavy a sea

running that it was ascertained to have risen to the height of eighty

feet on the building. Under such perilous circumstances it would be

difficult to describe the feelings of those who, at this time, were

cooped up in the beacon in so forlorn a situation, with the sea not only

raging under them, but occasionally falling from a great height upon the

roof of their temporary lodging, without even the attending vessel in

view to afford the least gleam of hope in the event of any accident. It

is true that they had now the masonry of the lighthouse to resort to,

which, no doubt, lessened the actual danger of their situation; but the

building was still without a roof, and the deadlights, or

storm-shutters, not being yet fitted, the windows of the lower story

were stove in and broken, and at high-water the sea ran in considerable

quantities out at the entrance door.

Thursday, 16th Aug.

The gale continues with unabated violence to-day, and the sprays rise to

a still greater height, having been carried over the masonry the

building, or about ninety feet above the level of the sea. At four

o'clock this morning it was breaking into the cook's berth, when he rang

the alarm-bell, and all hands turned out to attend to their personal

safety. The floor of the smith's, or mortar gallery, was now completely

burst up by the force of the sea, when the whole of the deals and the

remaining articles upon the floor were swept away, such as the cast-iron

mortar-tubs, the iron hearth of the forge, the smith's bellows, and even

his anvil were thrown down upon the rock. Before the tide rose to its

full height to-day some of the artificers passed along the bridge into

the lighthouse, to observe the effects of the sea upon it, and they

reported that they had felt a slight tremulous motion in the building

when great seas struck it in a certain direction, about high-water mark.

On this occasion the sprays were again observed to wet the balcony, and

even to come over the parapet wall into the interior of the light-room.

Thursday, 23rd Aug.

The wind being at W.S.W., and the weather more moderate, both the tender

and the _Smeaton_ got to their moorings on the 23rd, when hands were

employed in transporting the sash-frames from on board of the _Smeaton_

to the rock. In the act of setting up one of these frames upon the

bridge, it was unguardedly suffered to lose its balance, and in saving

it from damage, Captain Wilson met with a severe bruise in the groin, on

the seat of a gun-shot wound received in the early part of his life.

This accident laid him aside for several days.

Monday, 27th Aug.

The sash-frames of the light-room, eight in number, and weighing each

254 pounds, having been got safely up to the top of the building were

ranged on the balcony in the order in which they were numbered for their

places on the top of the parapet-wall; and the balance-crane, that

useful machine having now lifted all the heavier articles, was unscrewed

and lowered, to use the landing-master's phrase, "in mournful silence."

Sunday, 2nd Sept.

The steps of the stair being landed, and all the weightier articles of

the light-room got up to the balcony, the wooden bridge was now to be

removed, as it had a very powerful effect upon the beacon when a heavy

sea struck it, and could not possibly have withstood the storms of a

winter. Everything having been cleared from the bridge, and nothing left

but the two principal beams with their horizontal braces, James Glen, at

high-water, proceeded with a saw to cut through the beams at the end

next the beacon, which likewise disengaged their opposite extremity,

inserted a few inches into the building. The frame was then gently

lowered into the water, and floated off to the _Smeaton_ to be towed to

Arbroath, to be applied as part of the materials in the erection of the

lightkeepers' houses. After the removal of the bridge, the aspect of

things at the rock was much altered. The beacon-house and building had

both a naked look to those accustomed to their former appearance; a

curious optical deception was also remarked, by which the lighthouse

seemed to incline from the perpendicular towards the beacon. The

horizontal rope-ladder before noticed was again stretched to preserve

the communication, and the artificers were once more obliged to practise

the awkward and straddling manner of their passage between them during

1809.

At twelve noon the bell rung for prayers, after which the artificers

went to dinner, when the writer passed along the rope-ladder to the

lighthouse, and went through the several apartments, which were now

cleared of lumber. In the afternoon all hands were summoned to the

interior of the house, when he had the satisfaction of laying the upper

step of the stair, or last stone of the building. This ceremony

concluded with three cheers, the sound of which had a very loud and

strange effect within the walls of the lighthouse. At six o'clock Mr.

Peter Logan and eleven of the artificers embarked with the writer for

Arbroath, leaving Mr. James Glen with the special charge of the beacon

and railways, Mr. Robert Selkirk with the building, with a few

artificers to fit the temporary windows to render the house habitable.

Sunday, 14th Oct.

On returning from his voyage to the Northern Lighthouses, the writer

landed at the Bell Rock on Sunday, the 14th of October, and had the

pleasure to find, from the very favourable state of the weather, that

the artificers had been enabled to make great progress with the

fitting-up of the light-room.

Friday, 19th Oct.

The light-room work had proceeded, as usual, to-day under the direction

of Mr. Dove, assisted in the plumber-work by Mr. John Gibson, and in the

brazier-work by Mr. Joseph Fraser; while Mr. James Slight, with the

joiners, were fitting up the storm-shutters of the windows. In these

several departments the artificers were at work till seven o'clock p.m.,

and it being then dark, Mr. Dove gave orders to drop work in the

light-room; and all hands proceeded from thence to the beacon-house,

when Charles Henderson, smith, and Henry Dickson, brazier, left the work

together. Being both young men, who had been for several weeks upon the

rock, they had become familiar, and even playful, on the most difficult

parts about the beacon and building. This evening they were trying to

outrun each other in descending from the light-room, when Henderson led

the way; but they were in conversation with each other till they came to

the rope-ladder distended between the entrance-door of the lighthouse

and the beacon. Dickson, on reaching the cook-room, was surprised at not

seeing his companion, and inquired hastily for Henderson. Upon which the

cook replied, "Was he before you upon the rope-ladder?" Dickson

answered, "Yes; and I thought I heard something fall." Upon this the

alarm was given, and links were immediately lighted, with which the

artificers descended on the legs of the beacon, as near the surface of

the water as possible, it being then about full tide, and the sea

breaking to a considerable height upon the building, with the wind at

S.S.E. But, after watching till low-water, and searching in every

direction upon the rock, it appeared that poor Henderson must have

unfortunately fallen through the rope-ladder and been washed into the

deep water.

The deceased had passed along this rope-ladder many hundred times, both

by day and night, and the operations in which he was employed being

nearly finished, he was about to leave the rock when this melancholy

catastrophe took place. The unfortunate loss of Henderson cast a deep

gloom upon the minds of all who were at the rock, and it required some

management on the part of those who had charge to induce the people to

remain patiently at their work; as the weather now became more

boisterous, and the nights long, they found their habitation extremely

cheerless, while the winds were howling about their ears, and the waves

lashing with fury against the beams of their insulated habitation.

Tuesday, 23rd Oct.

The wind had shifted in the night to N.W., and blew a fresh gale, while

the sea broke with violence upon the rock. It was found impossible to

land, but the writer, from the boat, hailed Mr. Dove, and directed the

ball to be immediately fixed. The necessary preparations were

accordingly made, while the vessel made short tacks on the southern side

of the rock, in comparatively smooth water. At noon Mr. Dove, assisted

by Mr. James Slight, Mr. Robert Selkirk, Mr. James Glen, and Mr. John

Gibson, plumber, with considerable difficulty, from the boisterous state

of the weather, got the gilded ball screwed on, measuring two feet in

diameter, and forming the principal ventilator at the upper extremity of

the cupola of the lightroom. At Mr. Hamilton's desire, a salute of seven

guns was fired on this occasion, and, all hands being called to the

quarter-deck, "Stability to the Bell Rock Lighthouse" was not forgotten.

Tuesday, 30th Oct.

On reaching the rock it was found that a very heavy sea still ran upon

it; but the writer having been disappointed on two former occasions,

and, as the erection of the house might now be considered complete,

there being nothing wanted externally, excepting some of the

storm-shutters for the defence of the windows, he was the more anxious

at this time to inspect it. Two well-manned boats were therefore ordered

to be in attendance; and, after some difficulty, the wind being at

N.N.E., they got safely into the western creek, though not without

encountering plentiful sprays. It would have been impossible to have

attempted a landing to-day, under any other circumstances than with

boats perfectly adapted to the purpose, and with seamen who knew every

ledge of the rock, and even the length of the sea-weeds at each

particular spot, so as to dip their oars into the water accordingly, and

thereby prevent them from getting entangled. But what was of no less

consequence to the safety of the party, Captain Wilson, who always

steered the boat, had a perfect knowledge of the set of the different

waves, while the crew never shifted their eyes from observing his

motions, and the strictest silence was preserved by every individual

except himself.

On entering the house, the writer had the pleasure to find it in a

somewhat habitable condition, the lower apartments being closed in with

temporary windows, and fitted with proper storm-shutters. The lowest

apartment at the head of the staircase was occupied with water, fuel,

and provisions, put up in a temporary way until the house could be

furnished with proper utensils. The second, or light-room store, was at

present much encumbered with various tools and apparatus for the use of

the workmen. The kitchen immediately over this had, as yet, been

supplied only with a common ship's caboose and plate-iron funnel, while

the necessary cooking utensils had been taken from the beacon. The

bedroom was for the present used as the joiners' workshop, and the

strangers' room, immediately under the light-room, was occupied by the

artificers, the beds being ranged in tiers, as was done in the barrack

of the beacon. The lightroom, though unprovided with its machinery,

being now covered over with the cupola, glazed and painted, had a very

complete and cleanly appearance. The balcony was only as yet fitted with

a temporary rail, consisting of a few iron stanchions, connected with

ropes; and in this state it was necessary to leave it during the winter.

Having gone over the whole of the low-water works on the rock, the

beacon, and lighthouse, and being satisfied that only the most untoward

accident in the landing of the machinery could prevent the exhibition of

the light in the course of the winter, Mr. John Reid, formerly of the

floating light, was now put in charge of the lighthouse as principal

keeper; Mr. James Slight had charge of the operations of the

artificers, while Mr. James Dove and the smiths, having finished the

frame of the light-room, left the rock for the present. With these

arrangements the writer bade adieu to the works for the season. At

eleven a.m. the tide was far advanced; and there being now little or no

shelter for the boats at the rock, they had to be pulled through the

breach of sea, which came on board in great quantities, and it was with

extreme difficulty that they could be kept in the proper direction of

the landing-creek. On this occasion he may be permitted to look back

with gratitude on the many escapes made in the course of this arduous

undertaking, now brought so near to a successful conclusion.

Monday, 5th Nov.

On Monday, the 5th, the yacht again visited the rock, when Mr. Slight

and the artificers returned with her to the workyard, where a number of

things were still to prepare connected with the temporary fitting up of

the accommodation for the lightkeepers. Mr. John Reid and Peter Fortune

were now the only inmates of the house. This was the smallest number of

persons hitherto left in the lighthouse. As four lightkeepers were to be

the complement, it was intended that three should always be at the rock.

Its present inmates, however, could hardly have been better selected for

such a situation; Mr. Reid being a person possessed of the strictest

notions of duty and habits of regularity from long service on board of a

man-of-war, while Mr. Fortune had one of the most happy and contented

dispositions imaginable.

Tuesday, 13th Nov.

From Saturday the 10th till Tuesday the 13th, the wind had been from

N.E. blowing a heavy gale; but to-day, the weather having greatly

moderated, Captain Taylor, who now commanded the _Smeaton_, sailed at

two o'clock a.m. for the Bell Rock. At five the floating light was

hailed and found to be all well. Being a fine moonlight morning, the

seamen were changed from the one ship to the other. At eight, the

_Smeaton_ being off the rock, the boats were manned, and taking a supply

of water, fuel, and other necessaries, landed at the western side, when

Mr. Reid and Mr. Fortune were found in good health and spirits.

Mr. Reid stated that during the late gales, particularly on Friday, the

30th, the wind veering from S.E. to N.E., both he and Mr. Fortune

sensibly felt the house tremble when particular seas struck, about the

time of high-water; the former observing that it was a tremor of that

sort which rather tended to convince him that everything about the

building was sound, and reminded him of the effect produced when a good

log of timber is struck sharply with a mallet; but, with every

confidence in the stability of the building, he nevertheless confessed

that, in so forlorn a situation, they were not insensible to those

emotions which, he emphatically observed, "made a man look back upon his

former life."

Friday, 1st Feb.

The day, long wished for, on which the mariner was to see a light

exhibited on the Bell Rock at length arrived. Captain Wilson, as usual,

hoisted the float's lanterns to the topmast on the evening of the 1st of

February; but the moment that the light appeared on the rock, the crew,

giving three cheers, lowered them, and finally extinguished the lights.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] This is, of course, the tradition commemorated by Southey in

his ballad of "The Inchcape Bell." Whether true or not, it points to

the fact that from the infancy of Scottish navigation, the seafaring

mind had been fully alive to the perils of this reef. Repeated

attempts had been made to mark the place with beacons, but all

efforts were unavailing (one such beacon having been carried away

within eight days of its erection) until Robert Stevenson conceived

and carried out the idea of the stone tower.

[12] The particular event which concentrated Mr. Stevenson's

attention on the problem of the Bell Rock was the memorable gale of

December 1799, when, among many other vessels, H.M.S. _York,_ a

seventy-four-gun ship, went down with all hands on board. Shortly

after this disaster Mr. Stevenson made a careful survey, and

prepared his models for a stone tower, the idea of which was at

first received with pretty general scepticism. Smeaton's Eddystone

tower could not be cited as affording a parallel, for there the rock

is not submerged even at high-water, while the problem of the Bell

Rock was to build a tower of masonry on a sunken reef far distant

from land, covered at every tide to a depth of twelve feet or more,

and having thirty-two fathoms' depth of water within a mile of its

eastern edge.

[13] The grounds for the rejection of the Bill by the House of Lords

in 1802-3 had been that the extent of coast over which dues were

proposed to be levied would be too great. Before going to Parliament

again, the Board of Northern Lights, desiring to obtain support and

corroboration for Mr. Stevenson's views, consulted first Telford,

who was unable to give the matter his attention, and then (on

Stevenson's suggestion) Rennie, who concurred in affirming the

practicability of a stone tower, and supported the Bill when it came

again before Parliament in 1806. Rennie was afterwards appointed by

the Commissioners as advising engineer, whom Stevenson might consult

in cases of emergency. It seems certain that the title of chief

engineer had in this instance no more meaning than the above.

Rennie, in point of fact, proposed certain modifications in

Stevenson's plans, which the latter did not accept; nevertheless

Rennie continued to take a kindly interest in the work, and the two

engineers remained in friendly correspondence during its progress.

The official view taken by the Board as to the quarter in which lay

both the merit and the responsibility of the work may be gathered

from a minute of the Commissioners at their first meeting held after

Stevenson died; in which they record their regret "at the death of

this zealous, faithful, and able officer, _to whom is due the honour

of conceiving and executing the Bell Rock Lighthouse_." The matter

is briefly summed up in the "Life" of Robert Stevenson by his son

David Stevenson (A. & C. Black, 1878), and fully discussed, on the

basis of official facts and figures, by the same writer in a letter

to the _Civil Engineers' and Architects' Journal_, 1862.

[14] "Nothing was said, but I was _looked out of countenance_," he

says in a letter.

[15] Ill-formed--ugly.--[R. L. S.]

[16] This is an incurable illusion of my grandfather's; he always

writes "distended" for "extended." [R. L. S.]

ADDITIONAL MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

ADDITIONAL MEMORIES AND PORTRAITS

I

RANDOM MEMORIES

I. THE COAST OF FIFE

Many writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day or the

first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I believe, they are

more often agreeably exciting. Misery--or at least misery unrelieved--is

confined to another period, to the days of suspense and the "dreadful

looking-for" of departure; when the old life is running to an end, and

the new life, with its new interests, not yet begun; and to the pain of

an imminent parting, there is added the unrest of a state of conscious

pre-existence. The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of

semi-suburban tanpits, the song of the church-bells upon a Sunday, the

thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field--what a

sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each familiar

circumstance! The assaults of sorrow come not from within, as it seems

to him, but from without. I was proud and glad to go to school; had I

been let alone, I could have borne up like any hero; but there was

around me, in all my native town, a conspiracy of lamentation: "Poor

little boy, he is going away--unkind little boy, he is going to leave

us"; so the unspoken burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and

reproach. And at length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn,

and at a place where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always

autumn and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I

saw--the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church upon

the hill, the woody hillside garden--a look of such a piercing sadness

that my heart died; and seating myself on a door-step, I shed tears of

miserable sympathy. A benevolent cat cumbered me the while with

consolations--we two were alone in all that was visible of the London

Road: two poor waifs who had each tasted sorrow--and she fawned upon the

weeper, and gambolled for his entertainment, watching the effect, it

seemed, with motherly eyes.

For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I confessed at home the story of

my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, and

the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road. It was

judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the public highway, some change of

scene was (in the medical sense) indicated; my father at the time was

visiting the harbour lights of Scotland; and it was decided that he

should take me along with him around a portion of the shores of Fife; my

first professional tour, my first journey in the complete character of

man, without the help of petticoats.

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the curious

on the map, occupying a tongue of land between the firths of Forth and

Tay. It may be continually seen from many parts of Edinburgh (among the

rest, from the windows of my father's house) dying away into the

distance and the easterly _haar_ with one smoky seaside town beyond

another, or in winter printing on the grey heaven some glittering

hill-tops. It has no beauty to recommend it, being a low, sea-salted,

wind-vexed promontory; trees very rare, except (as common on the east

coast) along the dens of rivers; the fields well cultivated, I

understand, but not lovely to the eye. It is of the coast I speak: the

interior may be the garden of Eden. History broods over that part of the

world like the easterly haar. Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic

place-names bear testimony to an old and settled race. Of these little

towns, posted along the shore as close as sedges, each with its bit of

harbour, its old weather-beaten church or public building, its flavour

of decayed prosperity and decaying fish, not one but has its legend,

quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be

still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine; somnolent

Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aberdour, hard by the

monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face

was spoiled": Burntisland, where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the

Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between tide-marks, and publicly

prayed against the rover at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland

dialect; Kinghorn, where Alexander "brak's neck-bane" and left Scotland

to the English wars; Kirkcaldy, where the witches once prevailed

extremely and sank tall ships and honest mariners in the North Sea;

Dysart, famous--well, famous at least to me for the Dutch ships that lay

in its harbour, painted like toys and with pots of flowers and cages of

song-birds in the cabin-windows, and for one particular Dutch skipper

who would sit all day in slippers on the break of the poop, smoking a

long German pipe; Wemyss (pronounced Weems) with its bat-haunted caves,

where the Chevalier Johnstone, on his flight from Culloden, passed a

night of superstitious terrors; Leven, a bald, quite modern place,

sacred to summer visitors, whence there has gone but yesterday the tall

figure and the white locks of the last Englishman in Delhi, my uncle Dr.

Balfour, who was still walking his hospital rounds, while the troopers

from Meerut clattered and cried "Deen Deen" along the streets of the

imperial city, and Willoughby mustered his handful of heroes at the

magazine, and the nameless brave one in the telegraph office was perhaps

already fingering his last despatch; and just a little beyond Leven,

Largo Law and the smoke of Largo town mounting about its feet, the town

of Alexander Selkirk, better known under the name of Robinson Crusoe.

So on the list might be pursued (only for private reasons, which the

reader will shortly have an opportunity to guess) by St. Monans, and

Pittenweem, and the two Anstruthers, and Cellardyke, and Crail, where

Primate Sharpe was once a humble and innocent country minister: on to

the heel of the land, to Fife Ness, overlooked by a sea-wood of matted

elders and the quaint old mansion of Balcomie, itself overlooking but

the breach or the quiescence of the deep--the Carr Rock beacon rising

close in front, and as night draws in, the star of the Inchcape reef

springing up on the one hand, and the star of the May Island on the

other, and farther off yet a third and a greater on the craggy foreland

of St. Abb's. And but a little way round the corner of the land,

imminent itself above the sea, stands the gem of the province and the

light of mediaeval Scotland, St. Andrews, where the great Cardinal Beaton

held garrison against the world, and the second of the name and title

perished (as you may read in Knox's jeering narrative) under the knives

of true-blue Protestants, and to this day (after so many centuries) the

current voice of the professor is not hushed.

Here it was that my first tour of inspection began, early on a bleak

easterly morning. There was a crashing run of sea upon the shore, I

recollect, and my father and the man of the harbour light must sometimes

raise their voices to be audible. Perhaps it is from this circumstance,

that I always imagine St. Andrews to be an ineffectual seat of learning,

and the sound of the east wind and the bursting surf to linger in its

drowsy class-rooms and confound the utterance of the professor, until

teacher and taught are alike drowned in oblivion, and only the sea-gull

beats on the windows and the draught of the sea-air rustles in the pages

of the open lecture. But upon all this, and the romance of St. Andrews

in general, the reader must consult the works of Mr. Andrew Lang; who

has written of it but the other day in his dainty prose and with his

incommunicable humour, and long ago, in one of his best poems, with

grace and local truth and a note of unaffected pathos. Mr. Lang knows

all about the romance, I say, and the educational advantages, but I

doubt if he had turned his attention to the harbour lights; and it may

be news even to him, that in the year 1863 their case was pitiable.

Hanging about with the east wind humming in my teeth, and my hands (I

make no doubt) in my pockets, I looked for the first time upon that

tragi-comedy of the visiting engineer which I have seen so often

re-enacted on a more important stage. Eighty years ago, I find my

grandfather writing: "It is the most painful thing that can occur to me

to have a correspondence of this kind with any of the keepers, and when

I come to the Light House, instead of having the satisfaction to meet

them with approbation and welcome their Family, it is distressing when

one is obliged to put on a most angry countenance and demeanour." This

painful obligation has been hereditary in my race. I have myself, on a

perfectly amateur and unauthorised inspection of Turnberry Point, bent

my brows upon the keeper on the question of storm-panes; and felt a keen

pang of self-reproach, when we went downstairs again and I found he was

making a coffin for his infant child; and then regained my equanimity

with the thought that I had done the man a service, and when the proper

inspector came, he would be readier with his panes. The human race is

perhaps credited with more duplicity than it deserves. The visitation of

a lighthouse at least is a business of the most transparent nature. As

soon as the boat grates on the shore, and the keepers step forward in

their uniformed coats, the very slouch of the fellows' shoulders tells

their story, and the engineer may begin at once to assume his "angry

countenance." Certainly the brass of the handrail will be clouded; and

if the brass be not immaculate, certainly all will be to match--the

reflectors scratched, the spare lamp unready, the storm-panes in the

storehouse. If a light is not rather more than middling good, it will be

radically bad. Mediocrity (except in literature) appears to be

unattainable by man. But of course the unfortunate of St. Andrews was

only an amateur, he was not in the Service, he had no uniform coat, he

was, I believe, a plumber by his trade, and stood (in the mediaeval

phrase) quite out of the danger of my father; but he had a painful

interview for all that, and perspired extremely.

From St. Andrews we drove over Magus Muir. My father had announced we

were "to post," and the phrase called up in my hopeful mind visions of

top-boots and the pictures in Rowlandson's "Dance of Death"; but it was

only a jingling cab that came to the inn door, such as I had driven in a

thousand times at the low price of one shilling on the streets of

Edinburgh. Beyond this disappointment, I remember nothing of that drive.

It is a road I have often travelled, and of not one of these journeys do

I remember any single trait. The fact has not been suffered to encroach

on the truth of the imagination. I still see Magus Muir two hundred

years ago: a desert place, quite unenclosed; in the midst, the primate's

carriage fleeing at the gallop; the assassins loose-reined in pursuit,

Burley Balfour, pistol in hand, among the first. No scene of history has

ever written itself so deeply on my mind; not because Balfour, that

questionable zealot, was an ancestral cousin of my own; not because of

the pleadings of the victim and his daughter; not even because of the

live bum-bee that flew out of Sharpe's 'bacco-box, thus clearly

indicating his complicity with Satan; nor merely because, as it was

after all a crime of a fine religious flavour, it figured in Sunday

books and afforded a grateful relief from "Ministering Children" or the

"Memoirs of Mrs. Katherine Winslowe." The figure that always fixed my

attention is that of Hackston of Rathillet, sitting in the saddle with

his cloak about his mouth, and through all that long, bungling,

vociferous hurly-burly, revolving privately a case of conscience. He

would take no hand in the deed, because he had a private spite against

the victim, and "that action" must be sullied with no suggestion of a

worldly motive; on the other hand, "that action" in itself was highly

justified, he had cast in his lot with "the actors," and he must stay

there, inactive, but publicly sharing the responsibility. "You are a

gentleman--you will protect me!" cried the wounded old man, crawling

towards him. "I will never lay a hand on you," said Hackston, and put

his cloak about his mouth. It is an old temptation with me to pluck away

that cloak and see the face--to open that bosom and to read the heart.

With incomplete romances about Hackston, the drawers of my youth were

lumbered. I read him up in every printed book that I could lay my hands

on. I even dug among the Wodrow manuscripts, sitting shame-faced in the

very room where my hero had been tortured two centuries before, and

keenly conscious of my youth in the midst of other and (as I fondly

thought) more gifted students. All was vain: that he had passed a

riotous nonage, that he was a zealot, that he twice displayed (compared

with his grotesque companions) some tincture of soldierly resolution and

even of military common sense, and that he figured memorably in the

scene on Magus Muir, so much and no more could I make out. But whenever

I cast my eyes backward, it is to see him like a landmark on the plains

of history, sitting with his cloak about his mouth, inscrutable. How

small a thing creates an immortality! I do not think he can have been a

man entirely commonplace; but had he not thrown his cloak about his

mouth, or had the witnesses forgot to chronicle the action, he would not

thus have haunted the imagination of my boyhood, and to-day he would

scarce delay me for a paragraph. An incident, at once romantic and

dramatic, which at once awakes the judgment and makes a picture for the

eye, how little do we realise its perdurable power! Perhaps no one does

so but the author, just as none but he appreciates the influence of

jingling words; so that he looks on upon life, with something of a

covert smile, seeing people led by what they fancy to be thoughts and

what are really the accustomed artifices of his own trade, or roused by

what they take to be principles and are really picturesque effects. In a

pleasant book about a school-class club, Colonel Fergusson has recently

told a little anecdote. A "Philosophical Society" was formed by some

Academy boys--among them, Colonel Fergusson himself, Fleeming Jenkin,

and Andrew Wilson, the Christian Buddhist and author of "The Abode of

Snow." Before these learned pundits, one member laid the following

ingenious problem: "What would be the result of putting a pound of

potassium in a pot of porter?" "I should think there would be a number

of interesting bi-products," said a smatterer at my elbow; but for me

the tale itself has a bi-product, and stands as a type of much that is

most human. For this inquirer, who conceived himself to burn with a zeal

entirely chemical, was really immersed in a design of a quite different

nature: unconsciously to his own recently breeched intelligence, he was

engaged in literature. Putting, pound, potassium, pot, porter; initial

p, mediant t--that was his idea, poor little boy! So with politics and

that which excites men in the present, so with history and that which

rouses them in the past: there lie, at the root of what appears, most

serious unsuspected elements.

The triple town of Anstruther Wester, Anstruther Easter, and Cellardyke,

all three Royal Burghs--or two Royal Burghs and a less distinguished

suburb, I forget which--lies continuously along the seaside, and boasts

of either two or three separate parish churches, and either two or three

separate harbours. These ambiguities are painful; but the fact is

(although it argues me uncultured), I am but poorly posted up on

Cellardyke. My business lay in the two Anstruthers. A tricklet of a

stream divides them, spanned by a bridge; and over the bridge at the

time of my knowledge, the celebrated Shell House stood outpost on the

west. This had been the residence of an agreeable eccentric; during his

fond tenancy he had illustrated the outer walls, as high (if I remember

rightly) as the roof, with elaborate patterns and pictures, and

snatches of verse in the vein of _exegi monumentum_; shells and pebbles,

artfully contrasted and conjoined, had been his medium; and I like to

think of him standing back upon the bridge, when all was finished,

drinking in the general effect, and (like Gibbon) already lamenting his

employment.

The same bridge saw another sight in the seventeenth century. Mr.

Thomson, the "curat" of Anstruther Easter, was a man highly obnoxious to

the devout: in the first place, because he was a "curat"; in the second

place, because he was a person of irregular and scandalous life; and in

the third place, because he was generally suspected of dealings with the

Enemy of Man. These three disqualifications, in the popular literature

of the time, go hand in hand; but the end of Mr. Thomson was a thing

quite by itself, and, in the proper phrase, a manifest judgment. He had

been at a friend's house in Anstruther Wester, where (and elsewhere, I

suspect) he had partaken of the bottle; indeed, to put the thing in our

cold modern way, the reverend gentleman was on the brink of _delirium

tremens_. It was a dark night, it seems; a little lassie came carrying a

lantern to fetch the curate home; and away they went down the street of

Anstruther Wester, the lantern swinging a bit in the child's hand, the

barred lustre tossing up and down along the front of slumbering houses,

and Mr. Thomson not altogether steady on his legs nor (to all

appearance) easy in his mind. The pair had reached the middle of the

bridge when (as I conceive the scene) the poor tippler started in some

baseless fear and looked behind him; the child, already shaken by the

minister's strange behaviour, started also; in so doing she would jerk

the lantern; and for the space of a moment the lights and the shadows

would be all confounded. Then it was that to the unhinged toper and the

twittering child, a huge bulk of blackness seemed to sweep down, to pass

them close by as they stood upon the bridge, and to vanish on the

farther side in the general darkness of the night. "Plainly the devil

come for Mr. Thomson!" thought the child. What Mr. Thomson thought

himself, we have no ground of knowledge; but he fell upon his knees in

the midst of the bridge like a man praying. On the rest of the journey

to the manse, history is silent; but when they came to the door, the

poor caitiff, taking the lantern from the child, looked upon her with so

lost a countenance that her little courage died within her, and she fled

home screaming to her parents. Not a soul would venture out; all that

night the minister dwelt alone with his terrors in the manse; and when

the day dawned, and men made bold to go about the streets, they found

the devil had come indeed for Mr. Thomson.

This manse of Anstruther Easter has another and a more cheerful

association. It was early in the morning, about a century before the

days of Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out of bed to

welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, just landed in

the harbour underneath. But sure there was never seen a more decayed

grandee; sure there was never a duke welcomed from a stranger place of

exile. Half-way between Orkney and Shetland there lies a certain isle;

on the one hand the Atlantic, on the other the North Sea, bombard its

pillared cliffs; sore-eyed, short-living, inbred fishers and their

families herd in its few huts; in the graveyard pieces of wreck-wood

stand for monuments; there is nowhere a more inhospitable spot.

_Belle-Isle-en-Mer_--Fair-Isle-at-Sea--that is a name that has always

rung in my mind's ear like music; but the only "Fair Isle" on which I

ever set my foot was this unhomely, rugged turret-top of submarine

sierras. Here, when his ship was broken, my lord Duke joyfully got

ashore; here for long months he and certain of his men were harboured;

and it was from this durance that he landed at last to be welcomed (as

well as such a papist deserved, no doubt) by the godly incumbent of

Anstruther Easter; and after the Fair Isle, what a fine city must that

have appeared! and after the island diet, what a hospitable spot the

minister's table! And yet he must have lived on friendly terms with his

outlandish hosts. For to this day there still survives a relic of the

long winter evenings when the sailors of the great Armada crouched about

the hearths of the Fair-Islanders, the planks of their own lost galleon

perhaps lighting up the scene, and the gale and the surf that beat about

the coast contributing their melancholy voices. All the folk of the

north isles are great artificers of knitting: the Fair-Islanders alone

dye their fabrics in the Spanish manner. To this day, gloves and

nightcaps, innocently decorated, may be seen for sale in the Shetland

warehouse at Edinburgh, or on the Fair Isle itself in the catechist's

house; and to this day, they tell the story of the Duke of Medina

Sidonia's adventure.

It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some attraction for "persons of

quality." When I landed there myself, an elderly gentleman, unshaved,

poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid, was seen walking to

and fro, with a book in his hand, upon the beach. He paid no heed to our

arrival, which we thought a strange thing in itself; but when one of the

officers of the _Pharos_, passing narrowly by him, observed his book to

be a Greek Testament, our wonder and interest took a higher flight. The

catechist was cross-examined; he said the gentleman had been put across

some time before in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh's schooner, the only link

between the Fair Isle and the rest of the world; and that he held

services and was doing "good." So much came glibly enough; but when

pressed a little further, the catechist displayed embarrassment. A

singular diffidence appeared upon his face: "They tell me," said he, in

low tones, "that he's a lord." And a lord he was; a peer of the realm

pacing that inhospitable beach with his Greek Testament, and his plaid

about his shoulders, set upon doing good, as he understood it, worthy

man! And his grandson, a good-looking little boy, much better dressed

than the lordly evangelist, and speaking with a silken English accent

very foreign to the scene, accompanied me for a while in my exploration

of the island. I suppose this little fellow is now my lord, and wonder

how much he remembers of the Fair Isle. Perhaps not much; for he seemed

to accept very quietly his savage situation; and under such guidance, it

is like that this was not his first nor yet his last adventure.

II

RANDOM MEMORIES

II. THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER

Anstruther is a place sacred to the Muse; she inspired (really to a

considerable extent) Tennant's vernacular poem "Anster Fair"; and I have

there waited upon her myself with much devotion. This was when I came as

a young man to glean engineering experience from the building of the

breakwater. What I gleaned, I am sure I do not know; but indeed I had

already my own private determination to be an author; I loved the art of

words and the appearances of life; and _travellers_, and _headers_, and

_rubble_, and _polished ashlar_, and _pierres perdues_, and even the

thrilling question of the _string-course_, interested me only (if they

interested me at all) as properties for some possible romance or as

words to add to my vocabulary. To grow a little catholic is the

compensation of years; youth is one-eyed; and in those days, though I

haunted the breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the sake of

the sunshine, the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the

sea-face, the green glimmer of the divers' helmets far below, and the

musical chinking of the masons, my one genuine pre-occupation lay

elsewhere, and my only industry was in the hours when I was not on duty.

I lodged with a certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade; and there,

as soon as dinner was despatched, in a chamber scented with dry

rose-leaves, drew in my chair to the table and proceeded to pour forth

literature, at such a speed, and with such intimations of early death

and immortality, as I now look back upon with wonder. Then it was that

I wrote "Voces Fidelium," a series of dramatic monologues in verse; then

that I indited the bulk of a covenanting novel--like so many others,

never finished. Late I sat into the night, toiling (as I thought) under

the very dart of death, toiling to leave a memory behind me. I feel

moved to thrust aside the curtain of the years, to hail that poor

feverish idiot, to bid him go to bed and clap "Voces Fidelium" on the

fire before he goes; so clear does he appear before me, sitting there

between his candles in the rose-scented room and the late night; so

ridiculous a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does the fool present! But

he was driven to his bed at last without miraculous intervention; and

the manner of his driving sets the last touch upon this eminently

youthful business. The weather was then so warm that I must keep the

windows open; the night without was populous with moths. As the late

darkness deepened, my literary tapers beaconed forth more brightly;

thicker and thicker came the dusty night-fliers, to gyrate for one

brilliant instant round the flame and fall in agonies upon my paper.

Flesh and blood could not endure the spectacle; to capture immortality

was doubtless a noble enterprise, but not to capture it at such a cost

of suffering; and out would go the candles, and off would I go to bed in

the darkness, raging to think that the blow might fall on the morrow,

and there was "Voces Fidelium" still incomplete. Well, the moths are all

gone, and "Voces Fidelium" along with them; only the fool is still on

hand and practises new follies.

Only one thing in connection with the harbour tempted me, and that was

the diving, an experience I burned to taste of. But this was not to be,

at least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a change of scene to

the sub-arctic town of Wick. You can never have dwelt in a country more

unsightly than that part of Caithness, the land faintly swelling,

faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow, the fields divided by

single slate stones set upon their edge, the wind always singing in your

ears and (down the long road that led nowhere) thrumming in the

telegraph wires. Only as you approached the coast was there anything to

stir the heart. The plateau broke down to the North Sea in formidable

cliffs, the tall out-stacks rose like pillars ringed about with surf,

the coves were over-brimmed with clamorous froth, the sea-birds

screamed, the wind sang in the thyme on the cliff's edge; here and

there, small ancient castles toppled on the brim; here and there, it was

possible to dip into a dell of shelter, where you might lie and tell

yourself you were a little warm, and hear (near at hand) the whin-pods

bursting in the afternoon sun, and (farther off) the rumour of the

turbulent sea. As for Wick itself, it is one of the meanest of man's

towns, and situate certainly on the baldest of God's bays. It lives for

herring, and a strange sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the heights

of Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers, as when a city crowds

to a review--or, as when bees have swarmed, the ground is horrible with

lumps and clusters; and a strange sight, and a beautiful, to see the

fleet put silently out against a rising moon, the sea-line rough as a

wood with sails, and ever and again and one after another, a boat

flitting swiftly by the silver disk. This mass of fishers, this great

fleet of boats, is out of all proportion to the town itself; and the

oars are manned and the nets hauled by immigrants from the Long Island

(as we call the outer Hebrides), who come for that season only, and

depart again, if "the take" be poor, leaving debts behind them. In a bad

year, the end of the herring-fishery is therefore an exciting time;

fights are common, riots often possible; an apple knocked from a child's

hand was once the signal for something like a war; and even when I was

there, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities. To contrary

interests, it should be observed, the curse of Babel is here added; the

Lews men are Gaelic speakers, those of Caithness have adopted English;

an odd circumstance, if you reflect that both must be largely Norsemen

by descent. I remember seeing one of the strongest instances of this

division: a thing like a Punch-and-Judy box erected on the flat

gravestones of the churchyard; from the hutch or proscenium--I know not

what to call it--an eldritch-looking preacher laying down the law in

Gaelic about some one of the name of _Powl_, whom I at last divined to

be the apostle to the Gentiles; a large congregation of the Lews men

very devoutly listening; and on the outskirts of the crowd, some of the

town's children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew)

profanely playing tigg. The same descent, the same country, the same

narrow sect of the same religion, and all these bonds made very largely

nugatory by an accidental difference of dialect!

Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the unfinished

breakwater, in its cage of open staging; the travellers (like frames of

churches) over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end, the divers

toiling unseen on the foundation. On a platform of loose planks, the

assistants turned their air-mills; a stone might be swinging between

wind and water; underneath the swell ran gaily; and from time to time, a

mailed dragon with a window-glass snout came dripping up the ladder.

Youth is a blessed season after all; my stay at Wick was in the year of

"Voces Fidelium" and the rose-leaf room at Bailie Brown's; and already I

did not care two straws for literary glory. Posthumous ambition perhaps

requires an atmosphere of roses; and the more rugged excitant of Wick

east winds had made another boy of me. To go down in the diving-dress,

that was my absorbing fancy; and with the countenance of a certain

handsome scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I gratified the whim.

It was grey, harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high, and out

in the open there were "skipper's daughters," when I found myself at

last on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of lead upon each foot and

my whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen underclothing. One

moment, the salt wind was whistling round my night-capped head; the

next, I was crushed almost double under the weight of the helmet. As

that intolerable burthen was laid upon me, I could have found it in my

heart (only for shame's sake) to cry off from the whole enterprise. But

it was too late. The attendants began to turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the

air to whistle through the tube; some one screwed in the barred window

of the vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my fellow-men; standing

there in their midst, but quite divorced from intercourse: a creature

deaf and dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a climate of

his own. Except that I could move and feel, I was like a man fallen in a

catalepsy. But time was scarce given me to realise my isolation; the

weights were hung upon my back and breast, the signal-rope was thrust

into my unresisting hand; and setting a twenty-pound foot upon the

ladder, I began ponderously to descend.

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell. Looking up, I saw

a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; looking

around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the ladder, nothing

but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very restful and delicious.

Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the _pierres perdues_ of the

foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me by the hand, and made a

gesture (as I read it) of encouragement; and looking in at the

creature's window, I beheld the face of Bain. There we were, hand to

hand and (when it pleased us) eye to eye; and either might have burst

himself with shouting, and not a whisper come to his companion's

hearing. Each, in his own little world of air, stood incommunicably

separate.

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes' drama at the

bottom of the sea, which at that moment possibly shot across my mind. He

was down with another, settling a stone of the sea-wall. They had it

well adjusted, Bob gave the signal, the scissors were slipped, the stone

set home; and it was time to turn to something else. But still his

companion remained bowed over the block like a mourner on a tomb, or

only raised himself to make absurd contortions and mysterious signs

unknown to the vocabulary of the diver. There, then, these two stood for

a while, like the dead and the living; till there flashed a fortunate

thought into Bob's mind, and he stooped, peered through the window of

that other world, and beheld the face of its inhabitant wet with

streaming tears. Ah! the man was in pain! And Bob, glancing downward,

saw what was the trouble: the block had been lowered on the foot of that

unfortunate--he was caught alive at the bottom of the sea under fifteen

tons of rock.

That two men should handle a stone so heavy, even swinging in the

scissors, may appear strange to the inexpert. These must bear in mind

the great density of the water of the sea, and the surprising results of

transplantation to that medium. To understand a little what these are,

and how a man's weight, so far from being an encumbrance, is the very

ground of his agility, was the chief lesson of my submarine experience.

The knowledge came upon me by degrees. As I began to go forward with the

hand of my estranged companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible,

pillared with the weedy uprights of the staging: overhead, a flat roof

of green: a little in front, the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart.

And presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned me to leap upon a

stone; I looked to see if he were possibly in earnest, and he only

signed to me the more imperiously. Now the block stood six feet high; it

would have been quite a leap to me unencumbered; with the breast and

back weights, and the twenty pounds upon each foot, and the staggering

load of the helmet, the thing was out of reason. I laughed aloud in my

tomb; and to prove to Bob how far he was astray, I gave a little impulse

from my toes. Up I soared like a bird, my companion soaring at my side.

As high as to the stone, and then higher, I pursued my impotent and

empty flight. Even when the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders,

my heels continued their ascent; so that I blew out side-ways like an

autumn leaf, and must be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in

the slack of a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated

sparrow. Yet a little higher on the foundation, and we began to be

affected by the bottom of the swell, running there like a strong breeze

of wind. Or so I must suppose; for, safe in my cushion of air, I was

conscious of no impact; only swayed idly like a weed, and was now borne

helplessly abroad, and now swiftly--and yet with dream-like

gentleness--impelled against my guide. So does a child's balloon

divagate upon the currents of the air, and touch and slide off again

from every obstacle. So must have ineffectually swung, so resented their

inefficiency, those light crowds that followed the Star of Hades, and

uttered exiguous voices in the land beyond Cocytus.

There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely

wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions. It is bitter to return to

infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon your

feet, by the hand of some one else. The air besides, as it is supplied to

you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the eustachian tubes and

keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, till his throat is grown so

dry that he can swallow no longer. And for all these reasons--although I

had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed joy in my surroundings, and longed, and

tried, and always failed, to lay hands on the fish that darted here and

there about me, swift as humming-birds--yet I fancy I was rather relieved

than otherwise when Bain brought me back to the ladder and signed to me

to mount. And there was one more experience before me even then. Of a

sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell. Out of the

green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of sanguine light--the

multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven above a vault of crimson. And

then the glory faded into the hard, ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn,

with a low sky, a grey sea, and a whistling wind.

Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble, and I had done what I

desired. It was one of the best things I got from my education as an

engineer: of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with

sympathy. It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about

harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to

wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it

supplies him with dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his

ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one)

for the miserable life of cities. And when it has done so, it carries

him back and shuts him in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet

thwart of the tossing boat, he passes to the stool and desk, and with a

memory full of ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining

pharos, he must apply his long-sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of

drawing, or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of

consecutive figures. He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one

part of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls,

and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.

Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay. But how much better it was to

hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob Bain among the

roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat coiling a wet rope and

shouting orders--not always very wise--than to be warm and dry, and

dull, and dead-alive, in the most comfortable office. And Wick itself

had in those days a note of originality. It may have still, but I

misdoubt it much. The old minister of Keiss would not preach, in these

degenerate times, for an hour and a half upon the clock. The gipsies

must be gone from their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the

women tending their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off

their coarse potations; and where in winter gales, the surf would

beleaguer them closely, bursting in their very door. A traveller to-day

upon the Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloud of smoke among

the moorlands, and be told, quite openly, it marked a private still. He

would not indeed make that journey, for there is now no Thurso coach.

And even if he could, one little thing that happened to me could never

happen to him, or not with the same trenchancy of contrast.

We had been upon the road all evening; the coach-top was crowded with

Lews fishers going home, scarce anything but Gaelic had sounded in my

ears; and our way had lain throughout over a moorish country very

northern to behold. Latish at night, though it was still broad day in

our sub-arctic latitude, we came down upon the shores of the roaring

Pentland Firth, that grave of mariners; on one hand, the cliffs of

Dunnet Head ran seaward; in front was the little bare white town of

Castleton, its streets full of blowing sand; nothing beyond, but the

North Islands, the great deep, and the perennial ice-fields of the Pole.

And here, in the last imaginable place, there sprang up young outlandish

voices and a chatter of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the

coach with its load of Hebridean fishers--as they had pursued

_vetturini_ up the passes of the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto

under Virgil's tomb--two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian

vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one with a hurdy-gurdy,

the other with a cage of white mice. The coach passed on, and their

small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was left to marvel how

they had wandered into that country, and how they fared in it, and what

they thought of it, and when (if ever) they should see again the silver

wind-breaks run among the olives, and the stone-pine stand guard upon

Etruscan sepulchres.

Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident is somewhat lost.

For as far back as he goes in his own land, he will find some alien

camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or Mexican half-blood, the

negro in the South, these are deep in the woods and far among the

mountains. But in an old, cold, and rugged country such as mine, the

days of immigration are long at an end; and away up there, which was at

that time far beyond the northernmost extreme of railways, hard upon the

shore of that ill-omened strait of whirlpools, in a land of moors where

no stranger came, unless it should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an

antiquary to decipher runes, the presence of these small pedestrians

struck the mind as though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather

or an albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick. They were as strange to

their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish grandee on

the Fair Isle.

III

A CHAPTER ON DREAMS

The past is all of one texture--whether feigned or suffered--whether

acted out in three dimensions, or only witnessed in that small theatre

of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night long, after the

jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign undisturbed in the remainder

of the body. There is no distinction on the face of our experiences; one

is vivid indeed, and one dull, and one pleasant, and another agonising

to remember; but which of them is what we call true, and which a dream,

there is not one hair to prove. The past stands on a precarious footing;

another straw split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of

it. There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a

claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate: a claim not

prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a

great alleviation of idle hours. A man's claim to his own past is yet

less valid. A paper might turn up (in proper story-book fashion) in the

secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and restore your family to its

ancient honours and reinstate mine in a certain West Indian islet (not

far from St. Kitt's, as beloved tradition hummed in my young ears) which

was once ours, and is now unjustly some one else's, and for that matter

(in the state of the sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody. I do

not say that these revolutions are likely; only no man can deny that

they are possible; and the past, on the other hand, is lost for ever:

our old days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in which

these scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint residuum as

a last night's dream, to some incontinuous images, and an echo in the

chambers of the brain. Not an hour, not a mood, not a glance of the eye,

can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring. And yet conceive us

robbed of it, conceive that little thread of memory that we trail behind

us broken at the pocket's edge; and in what naked nullity should we be

left! for we only guide ourselves, and only know ourselves, by these

air-painted pictures of the past.

Upon these grounds, there are some among us who claim to have lived

longer and more richly than their neighbours; when they lay asleep they

claim they were still active; and among the treasures of memory that all

men review for their amusement, these count in no second place the

harvests of their dreams. There is one of this kind whom I have in my

eye, and whose case is perhaps unusual enough to be described. He was

from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of

fever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes,

hanging on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church, and

now drew away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite

littleness, the poor soul was very well aware of what must follow, and

struggled hard against the approaches of that slumber which was the

beginning of sorrows. But his struggles were in vain; sooner or later

the night-hag would have him by the throat, and pluck him, strangling

and screaming, from his sleep. His dreams were at times commonplace

enough, at times very strange: at times they were almost formless, he

would be haunted, for instance, by nothing more definite than a certain

hue of brown, which he did not mind in the least while he was awake, but

feared and loathed while he was dreaming; at times, again, they took on

every detail of circumstance, as when once he supposed he must swallow

the populous world, and awoke screaming with the horror of the thought.

The two chief troubles of his very narrow existence--the practical and

everyday trouble of school tasks and the ultimate and airy one of hell

and judgment--were often confounded together into one appalling

nightmare. He seemed to himself to stand before the Great White Throne;

he was called on, poor little devil, to recite some form of words, on

which his destiny depended; his tongue stuck, his memory was blank, hell

gaped for him; and he would awake, clinging to the curtain-rod with his

knees to his chin.

These were extremely poor experiences, on the whole; and at that time of

life my dreamer would have very willingly parted with his power of

dreams. But presently, in the course of his growth, the cries and

physical contortions passed away, seemingly for ever; his visions were

still for the most part miserable, but they were more constantly

supported; and he would awake with no more extreme symptom than a flying

heart, a freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless midnight fear.

His dreams, too, as befitted a mind better stocked with particulars,

became more circumstantial, and had more the air and continuity of life.

The look of the world beginning to take hold on his attention, scenery

came to play a part in his sleeping as well as in his waking thoughts,

so that he would take long, uneventful journeys and see strange towns

and beautiful places as he lay in bed. And, what is more significant, an

odd taste that he had for the Georgian costume and for stories laid in

that period of English history, began to rule the features of his

dreams; so that he masqueraded there in a three-cornered hat, and was

much engaged with Jacobite conspiracy between the hour for bed and that

for breakfast. About the same time, he began to read in his

dreams--tales, for the most part, and for the most part after the manner

of G. P. R. James, but so incredibly more vivid and moving than any

printed book, that he has ever since been malcontent with literature.

And then, while he was yet a student, there came to him a

dream-adventure which he has no anxiety to repeat; he began, that is to

say, to dream in sequence and thus to lead a double life--one of the

day, one of the night--one that he had every reason to believe was the

true one, another that he had no means of proving to be false. I should

have said he studied, or was by way of studying, at Edinburgh College,

which (it may be supposed) was how I came to know him. Well, in his

dream-life he passed a long day in the surgical theatre, his heart in

his mouth, his teeth on edge, seeing monstrous malformations and the

abhorred dexterity of surgeons. In a heavy, rainy, foggy evening he came

forth into the South Bridge, turned up the High Street, and entered the

door of a tall _land_, at the top of which he supposed himself to lodge.

All night long, in his wet clothes, he climbed the stairs, stair after

stair in endless series, and at every second flight a flaring lamp with

a reflector. All night long he brushed by single persons passing

downward--beggarly women of the street, great, weary, muddy labourers,

poor scarecrows of men, pale parodies of women--but all drowsy and weary

like himself, and all single, and all brushing against him as they

passed. In the end, out of a northern window, he would see day beginning

to whiten over the Firth, give up the ascent, turn to descend, and in a

breath be back again upon the streets, in his wet clothes, in the wet,

haggard dawn, trudging to another day of monstrosities and operations.

Time went, quicker in the life of dreams, some seven hours (as near as

he can guess) to one; and it went, besides, more intensely, so that the

gloom of these fancied experiences clouded the day, and he had not

shaken off their shadow ere it was time to lie down and to renew them. I

cannot tell how long it was that he endured this discipline; but it was

long enough to leave a great black blot upon his memory, long enough to

send him, trembling for his reason, to the doors of a certain doctor;

whereupon with a simple draught he was restored to the common lot of

man.

The poor gentleman has since been troubled by nothing of the sort;

indeed, his nights were for some while like other men's, now blank, now

chequered with dreams, and these sometimes charming, sometimes

appalling, but except for an occasional vividness, of no extraordinary

kind. I will just note one of these occasions, ere I pass on to what

makes my dreamer truly interesting. It seemed to him that he was in the

first floor of a rough hill-farm. The room showed some poor efforts at

gentility, a carpet on the floor, a piano, I think, against the wall;

but, for all these refinements, there was no mistaking he was in a

moorland place, among hillside people, and set in miles of heather. He

looked down from the window upon a bare farmyard, that seemed to have

been long disused. A great, uneasy stillness lay upon the world. There

was no sign of the farm-folk or of any live stock, save for an old,

brown, curly dog of the retriever breed, who sat close in against the

wall of the house and seemed to be dozing. Something about this dog

disquieted the dreamer; it was quite a nameless feeling, for the beast

looked right enough--indeed, he was so old and dull and dusty and

broken-down, that he should rather have awakened pity; and yet the

conviction came and grew upon the dreamer that this was no proper dog at

all, but something hellish. A great many dozing summer flies hummed

about the yard; and presently the dog thrust forth his paw, caught a fly

in his open palm, carried it to his mouth like an ape, and looking

suddenly up at the dreamer in the window, winked to him with one eye.

The dream went on, it matters not how it went; it was a good dream as

dreams go; but there was nothing in the sequel worthy of that devilish

brown dog. And the point of interest for me lies partly in that very

fact: that having found so singular an incident, my imperfect dreamer

should prove unable to carry the tale to a fit end and fall back on

indescribable noises and indiscriminate horrors. It would be different

now; he knows his business better!

For, to approach at last the point: This honest fellow had long been in

the custom of setting himself to sleep with tales, and so had his father

before him; but these were irresponsible inventions, told for the

teller's pleasure, with no eye to the crass public or the thwart

reviewer: tales where a thread might be dropped, or one adventure

quitted for another, on fancy's least suggestion. So that the little

people who manage man's internal theatre had not as yet received a very

rigorous training; and played upon their stage like children who should

have slipped into the house and found it empty, rather than like drilled

actors performing a set piece to a huge hall of faces. But presently my

dreamer began to turn his former amusement of story-telling to (what is

called) account; by which I mean that he began to write and sell his

tales. Here was he, and here were the little people who did that part of

his business, in quite new conditions. The stories must now be trimmed

and pared and set upon all-fours, they must run from a beginning to an

end and fit (after a manner) with the laws of life; the pleasure, in one

word, had become a business; and that not only for the dreamer, but for

the little people of his theatre. These understood the change as well as

he. When he lay down to prepare himself for sleep, he no longer sought

amusement, but printable and profitable tales; and after he had dozed

off in his box-seat, his little people continued their evolutions with

the same mercantile designs. All other forms of dream deserted him but

two: he still occasionally reads the most delightful books, he still

visits at times the most delightful places; and it is perhaps worthy of

note that to these same places, and to one in particular, he returns at

intervals of months and years, finding new field-paths, visiting new

neighbours, beholding that happy valley under new effects of noon and

dawn and sunset. But all the rest of the family of visions is quite lost

to him: the common, mangled version of yesterday's affairs, the

raw-head-and-bloody-bones nightmare, rumoured to be the child of toasted

cheese--these and their like are gone; and, for the most part, whether

awake or asleep, he is simply occupied--he or his little people--in

consciously making stories for the market. This dreamer (like many

other persons) has encountered some trifling vicissitudes of fortune.

When the bank begins to send letters and the butcher to linger at the

back gate, he sets to belabouring his brains after a story, for that is

his readiest money-winner; and, behold! at once the little people begin

to bestir themselves in the same quest, and labour all night long, and

all night long set before him truncheons of tales upon their lighted

theatre. No fear of his being frightened now; the flying heart and the

frozen scalp are things bygone; applause, growing applause, growing

interest, growing exultation in his own cleverness (for he takes all the

credit), and at last a jubilant leap to wakefulness, with the cry, "I

have it, that'll do!" upon his lips: with such and similar emotions he

sits at these nocturnal dramas, with such outbreaks, like Claudius in

the play, he scatters the performance in the midst. Often enough the

waking is a disappointment: he has been too deep asleep, as I explain

the thing; drowsiness has gained his little people, they have gone

stumbling and maundering through their parts; and the play, to the

awakened mind, is seen to be a tissue of absurdities. And yet how often

have these sleepless Brownies done him honest service, and given him, as

he sat idly taking his pleasure in the boxes, better tales than he could

fashion for himself.

Here is one, exactly as it came to him. It seemed he was the son of a

very rich and wicked man, the owner of broad acres and a most damnable

temper. The dreamer (and that was the son) had lived much abroad, on

purpose to avoid his parent; and when at length he returned to England,

it was to find him married again to a young wife, who was supposed to

suffer cruelly and to loathe her yoke. Because of this marriage (as the

dreamer indistinctly understood) it was desirable for father and son to

have a meeting; and yet both being proud and both angry, neither would

condescend upon a visit. Meet they did accordingly, in a desolate, sandy

country by the sea; and there they quarrelled, and the son, stung by

some intolerable insult, struck down the father dead. No suspicion was

aroused; the dead man was found and buried, and the dreamer succeeded to

the broad estates, and found himself installed under the same roof with

his father's widow, for whom no provision had been made. These two lived

very much alone, as people may after a bereavement, sat down to table

together, shared the long evenings, and grew daily better friends; until

it seemed to him of a sudden that she was prying about dangerous

matters, that she had conceived a notion of his guilt, that she watched

him and tried him with questions. He drew back from her company as men

draw back from a precipice suddenly discovered; and yet so strong was

the attraction that he would drift again and again into the old

intimacy, and again and again be startled back by some suggestive

question or some inexplicable meaning in her eye. So they lived at cross

purposes, a life full of broken dialogue, challenging glances, and

suppressed passion; until, one day, he saw the woman slipping from the

house in a veil, followed her to the station, followed her in the train

to the seaside country, and out over the sandhills to the very place

where the murder was done. There she began to grope among the bents, he

watching her, flat upon his face; and presently she had something in her

hand--I cannot remember what it was, but it was deadly evidence against

the dreamer--and as she held it up to look at it, perhaps from the shock

of the discovery, her foot slipped, and she hung at some peril on the

brink of the tall sand-wreaths. He had no thought but to spring up and

rescue her; and there they stood face to face, she with that deadly

matter openly in her hand--his very presence on the spot another link of

proof. It was plain she was about to speak, but this was more than he

could bear--he could bear to be lost, but not to talk of it with his

destroyer; and he cut her short with trivial conversation. Arm in arm,

they returned together to the train, talking he knew not what, made the

journey back in the same carriage, sat down to dinner, and passed the

evening in the drawing-room as in the past. But suspense and fear

drummed in the dreamer's bosom. "She has not denounced me yet"--so his

thoughts ran: "when will she denounce me? Will it be to-morrow?" And it

was not to-morrow, nor the next day, nor the next; and their life

settled back on the old terms, only that she seemed kinder than before,

and that, as for him, the burthen of his suspense and wonder grew daily

more unbearable, so that he wasted away like a man with a disease. Once,

indeed, he broke all bounds of decency, seized an occasion when she was

abroad, ransacked her room, and at last, hidden away among her jewels,

found the damning evidence. There he stood, holding this thing, which

was his life, in the hollow of his hand, and marvelling at her

inconsequent behaviour, that she should seek, and keep, and yet not use

it; and then the door opened, and behold herself. So, once more, they

stood, eye to eye, with the evidence between them; and once more she

raised to him a face brimming with some communication; and once more he

shied away from speech and cut her off. But before he left the room,

which he had turned upside down, he laid back his death-warrant where he

had found it; and at that, her face lighted up. The next thing he heard,

she was explaining to her maid, with some ingenious falsehood, the

disorder of her things. Flesh and blood could bear the strain no longer;

and I think it was the next morning (though chronology is always hazy in

the theatre of the mind) that he burst from his reserve. They had been

breakfasting together in one corner of a great, parqueted,

sparely-furnished room of many windows; all the time of the meal she had

tortured him with sly allusions; and no sooner were the servants gone,

and these two protagonists alone together, than he leaped to his feet.

She too sprang up, with a pale face; with a pale face, she heard him as

he raved out his complaint: Why did she torture him so? she knew all,

she knew he was no enemy to her; why did she not denounce him at once?

what signified her whole behaviour? why did she torture him? and yet

again, why did she torture him? And when he had done, she fell upon her

knees, and with outstretched hands: "Do you not understand?" she cried.

"I love you!"

Hereupon, with a pang of wonder and mercantile delight the dreamer

awoke. His mercantile delight was not of long endurance; for it soon

became plain that in this spirited tale there were unmarketable

elements; which is just the reason why you have it here so briefly told.

But his wonder has still kept growing; and I think the reader's will

also, if he consider it ripely. For now he sees why I speak of the

little people as of substantive inventors and performers. To the end

they had kept their secret. I will go bail for the dreamer (having

excellent grounds for valuing his candour) that he had no guess whatever

at the motive of the woman--the hinge of the whole well-invented

plot--until the instant of that highly dramatic declaration. It was not

his tale; it was the little people's! And observe: not only was the

secret kept, the story was told with really guileful craftsmanship. The

conduct of both actors is (in the cant phrase) psychologically correct,

and the emotion aptly graduated up to the surprising climax. I am awake

now, and I know this trade; and yet I cannot better it. I am awake, and

I live by this business; and yet I could not outdo--could not perhaps

equal--that crafty artifice (as of some old, experienced carpenter of

plays, some Dennery or Sardou) by which the same situation is twice

presented and the two actors twice brought face to face over the

evidence, only once it is in her hand, once in his--and these in their

due order, the least dramatic first. The more I think of it, the more I

am moved to press upon the world my question: Who are the Little People?

They are near connections of the dreamer's, beyond doubt; they share in

his financial worries and have an eye to the bank-book; they share

plainly in his training; they have plainly learned like him to build the

scheme of a considerate story and to arrange emotion in progressive

order; only I think they have more talent; and one thing is beyond

doubt, they can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, and keep

him all the while in ignorance of where they aim. Who are they, then?

and who is the dreamer?

Well, as regards the dreamer, I can answer that, for he is no less a

person than myself;--as I might have told you from the beginning, only

that the critics murmur over my consistent egotism;--and as I am

positively forced to tell you now, or I could advance but little further

with my story. And for the Little People, what shall I say they are but

just my Brownies, God bless them! who do one-half my work for me while I

am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood, do the rest for me as well,

when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do it for myself. That part

which is done while I am sleeping is the Brownies' part beyond

contention; but that which is done when I am up and about is by no means

necessarily mine, since all goes to show the Brownies have a hand in it

even then. Here is a doubt that much concerns my conscience. For

myself--what I call I, my conscious ego, the denizen of the pineal gland

unless he has changed his residence since Descartes, the man with the

conscience and the variable bank-account, the man with the hat and the

boots, and the privilege of voting and not carrying his candidate at the

general elections--I am sometimes tempted to suppose is no story-teller

at all, but a creature as matter of fact as any cheesemonger or any

cheese, and a realist bemired up to the ears in actuality; so that, by

that account, the whole of my published fiction should be the

single-handed product of some Brownie, some Familiar, some unseen

collaborator, whom I keep locked in a back garret, while I get all the

praise and he but a share (which I cannot prevent him getting) of the

pudding. I am an excellent adviser, something like Moliere's servant. I

pull back and I cut down; and I dress the whole in the best words and

sentences that I can find and make; I hold the pen, too; and I do the

sitting at the table, which is about the worst of it; and when all is

done, I make up the manuscript and pay for the registration; so that, on

the whole, I have some claim to share, though not so largely as I do, in

the profits of our common enterprise.

I can but give an instance or so of what part is done sleeping and what

part awake, and leave the reader to share what laurels there are, at his

own nod, between myself and my collaborators; and to do this I will

first take a book that a number of persons have been polite enough to

read, "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." I had long been

trying to write a story on this subject, to find a body, a vehicle, for

that strong sense of man's double being which must at times come in upon

and overwhelm the mind of every thinking creature. I had even written

one, "The Travelling Companion," which was returned by an editor on the

plea that it was a work of genius and indecent, and which I burned the

other day on the ground that it was not a work of genius, and that

"Jekyll" had supplanted it. Then came one of those financial

fluctuations to which (with an elegant modesty) I have hitherto referred

in the third person. For two days I went about racking my brains for a

plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the

window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for

some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of

his pursuers. All the rest was made awake, and consciously, although I

think I can trace in much of it the manner of my Brownies. The meaning

of the tale is therefore mine, and had long pre-existed in my garden of

Adonis, and tried one body after another in vain; indeed, I do most of

the morality, worse luck! and my Brownies have not a rudiment of what we

call a conscience. Mine, too, is the setting, mine the characters. All

that was given me was the matter of three scenes, and the central idea

of a voluntary change becoming involuntary. Will it be thought

ungenerous, after I have been so liberally ladling out praise to my

unseen collaborators, if I here toss them over, bound hand and foot,

into the arena of the critics? For the business of the powders, which so

many have censured, is, I am relieved to say, not mine at all, but the

Brownies'. Of another tale, in case the reader should have glanced at

it, I may say a word: the not very defensible story of "Olalla." Here

the court, the mother, the mother's niche, Olalla, Olalla's chamber, the

meetings on the stair, the broken window, the ugly scene of the bite,

were all given me in bulk and detail as I have tried to write them; to

this I added only the external scenery (for in my dream I never was

beyond the court), the portrait, the characters of Felipe and the

priest, the moral, such as it is, and the last pages, such as, alas!

they are. And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was

given me; for it arose immediately on a comparison of the mother and the

daughter, and from the hideous trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes

a parabolic sense is still more undeniably present in a dream; sometimes

I cannot but suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no

case with what would possibly be called a moral in a tract; never with

the ethical narrowness; conveying hints instead of life's larger

limitations and that sort of sense which we seem to perceive in the

arabesque of time and space.

For the most part, it will be seen, my Brownies are somewhat fantastic,

like their stories hot and hot, full of passion and the picturesque,

alive with animating incident; and they have no prejudice against the

supernatural. But the other day they gave me a surprise, entertaining me

with a love-story, a little April comedy, which I ought certainly to

hand over to the author of "A Chance Acquaintance," for he could write

it as it should be written, and I am sure (although I mean to try) that

I cannot.--But who would have supposed that a Brownie of mine should

invent a tale for Mr. Howells?

IV

BEGGARS

I

In a pleasant, airy, up-hill country, it was my fortune when I was young

to make the acquaintance of a certain beggar. I call him beggar, though

he usually allowed his coat and his shoes (which were open-mouthed,

indeed) to beg for him. He was the wreck of an athletic man, tall,

gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption, with that disquieting smile

of the mortally stricken on his face; but still active afoot, still with

the brisk military carriage, the ready military salute. Three ways led

through this piece of country; and as I was inconstant in my choice, I

believe he must often have awaited me in vain. But often enough, he

caught me; often enough, from some place of ambush by the roadside, he

would spring suddenly forth in the regulation attitude, and launching at

once into his inconsequential talk, fall into step with me upon my

farther course. "A fine morning, sir, though perhaps a trifle inclining

to rain. I hope I see you well, sir. Why, no, sir, I don't feel as

hearty myself as I could wish, but I am keeping about my ordinary. I am

pleased to meet you on the road, sir. I assure you I quite look forward

to one of our little conversations." He loved the sound of his own voice

inordinately, and though (with something too off-hand to call servility)

he would always hasten to agree with anything you said, yet he could

never suffer you to say it to an end. By what transition he slid to his

favourite subject I have no memory; but we had never been long together

on the way before he was dealing, in a very military manner, with the

English poets. "Shelley was a fine poet, sir, though a trifle

atheistical in his opinions. His 'Queen Mab,' sir, is quite an

atheistical work. Scott, sir, is not so poetical a writer. With the

works of Shakespeare I am not so well acquainted, but he was a fine

poet. Keats--John Keats, sir--he was a very fine poet." With such

references, such trivial criticism, such loving parade of his own

knowledge, he would beguile the road, striding forward up-hill, his

staff now clapped to the ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now swinging

in the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and

all the while his toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking

out of his elbows, and death looking out of his smile, and his big,

crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.

He would often go the whole way home with me: often to borrow a book,

and that book always a poet. Off he would march, to continue his

mendicant rounds, with the volume slipped into the pocket of his ragged

coat; and although he would sometimes keep it quite a while, yet it came

always back again at last, not much the worse for its travels into

beggardom. And in this way, doubtless, his knowledge grew and his glib,

random criticism took a wider range. But my library was not the first he

had drawn upon: at our first encounter, he was already brimful of

Shelley and the atheistical "Queen Mab," and "Keats--John Keats, sir."

And I have often wondered how he came by these acquirements, just as I

often wondered how he fell to be a beggar. He had served through the

Mutiny--of which (like so many people) he could tell practically nothing

beyond the names of places, and that it was "difficult work, sir," and

very hot, or that so-and-so was "a very fine commander, sir." He was far

too smart a man to have remained a private; in the nature of things, he

must have won his stripes. And yet here he was, without a pension. When

I touched on this problem, he would content himself with diffidently

offering me advice. "A man should be very careful when he is young,

sir. If you'll excuse me saying so, a spirited young gentleman like

yourself, sir, should be very careful. I was perhaps a trifle inclined

to atheistical opinions myself." For (perhaps with a deeper wisdom than

we are inclined in these days to admit) he plainly bracketed agnosticism

with beer and skittles.