"Three stormy nights and stormy days
We tossed upon the raging main;
And long we strove our barque to save,
But all our striving was in vain."--LOWE.
I was born, the first child of this marriage, on the 10th day of October
1802, in the low, long house built by my great-grandfather the
buccaneer. My memory awoke early. I have recollections which date
several months ere the completion of my third year; but, like those of
the golden age of the world, they are chiefly of a mythologic character.
I remember, for instance, getting out unobserved one day to my father's
little garden, and seeing there a minute duckling covered with soft
yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant
that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red
colour. I know not what prodigy of the vegetable kingdom produced the
little duckling; but the plant with the shells must, I think, have been
a scarlet runner, and the shells themselves the papilionaceous blossoms.
I have a distinct recollection, too,--but it belongs to a later
period,--of seeing my ancestor, old John Feddes the buccaneer, though he
must have been dead at the time considerably more than half a century. I
had learned to take an interest in his story, as preserved and told in
the antique dwelling which he had built more than a hundred years
before. To forget a love disappointment, he had set out early in life
for the Spanish Main, where, after giving and receiving some hard blows,
he succeeded in filling a little bag with dollars and doubloons; and
then coming home, he found his old sweetheart a widow, and so much
inclined to listen to reason, that she ultimately became his wife. There
were some little circumstances in his history which must have laid hold
of my imagination; for I used over and over to demand its repetition;
and one of my first attempts at a work of art was to scrabble his
initials with my fingers, in red paint, on the house-door. One day, when
playing all alone at the stair-foot--for the inmates of the house had
gone out--something extraordinary had caught my eye on the landing-place
above; and looking up, there stood John Feddes--for I somehow
instinctively divined that it was none other than he--in the form of a
large, tall, very old man, attired in a light-blue greatcoat He seemed
to be steadfastly regarding me with apparent complacency; but I was
sadly frightened; and for years after, when passing through the dingy,
ill-lighted room out of which I inferred he had come, I used to feel not
at all sure that I might not tilt against old John in the dark.
I retain vivid recollections of the joy which used to light up the
household on my father's arrival; and I remember that I learned to
distinguish for myself his sloop when in the offing, by the two slim
stripes of white which ran along her sides, and her two square topsails.
I have my golden memories, too, of splendid toys that he used to bring
home with him,--among the rest, of a magnificent four-wheeled waggon of
painted tin, drawn by four wooden horses and a string; and of getting it
into a quiet corner, immediately on its being delivered over to me, and
there breaking up every wheel and horse, and the vehicle itself, into
their original bits, until not two of the pieces were left sticking
together. Further, I still remember my disappointment at not finding
something curious within at least the horses and the wheels; and as
unquestionably the main enjoyment derivable from such things is to be
had in the breaking of them, I sometimes wonder that our ingenious
toymen do not fall upon the way of at once extending their trade, and
adding to its philosophy, by putting some of their most brilliant things
where nature puts the nut-kernel,--inside. I shall advert to but one
other recollection of this period. I have a dreamlike memory of a busy
time, when men with gold lace on their breasts, and at least one
gentleman with golden epaulets on his shoulders, used to call at my
father's house, and fill my newly acquired pockets with coppers; and how
they wanted, it was said, to bring my father along with them, to help
them to sail their great vessel; but he preferred remaining, it was
added, with his own little one. A ship of war, under the guidance of an
unskilful pilot, had run aground on a shallow flat on the opposite side
of the Firth, known as the _Inches_; and as the flood of a stream tide
was at its height at the time, and straightway began to fall off, it was
found, after lightening her of her guns and the greater part of her
stores, that she still stuck fast. My father, whose sloop had been
pressed into the service, and was loaded to the gunwale with the
ordnance, had betrayed an unexpected knowledge of the points of a large
war-vessel; and the commander, entering into conversation with him, was
so impressed by his skill, that he placed his ship under his charge, and
had his confidence repaid by seeing her hauled off into deep water in a
single tide. Knowing the nature of the bottom,--a soft arenaceous mud,
which if beat for some time by the foot or hand, resolved itself into a
sort of quicksand, half-sludge, half-water, which, when covered by a
competent depth of sea, could offer no effectual resistance to a ship's
keel,--the master had set half the crew to run in a body from side to
side, till, by the motion generated in this way, the portion of the bank
immediately beneath was beaten soft; and then the other moiety of the
men, tugging hard on kedge and haulser, drew the vessel off a few feet
at a time, till at length, after not a few repetitions of the process,
she floated free. Of course, on a harder bottom the expedient would not
have availed; but so struck was the commander by its efficacy and
originality, and by the extent of the master's professional resources,
that he strongly recommended him to part with his sloop, and enter the
navy, where he thought he had influence enough, he said, to get him
placed in a proper position. But as the master's previous experience of
the service had been of a very disagreeable kind, and as his position,
as at once master and owner of the vessel he sailed, was at least an
independent one, he declined acting on the advice.
Such are some of my earlier recollections. But there was a time of
sterner memories at hand. The kelp trade had not yet attained to the
importance which it afterwards acquired, ere it fell before the first
approaches of Free Trade; and my father, in collecting a supply for the
Leith Glass Works, for which he occasionally acted both as agent and
shipmaster, used sometimes to spend whole months amid the Hebrides,
sailing from station to station, and purchasing here a few tons and
there a few hundredweights, until he had completed his cargo. In his
last kelp voyage he had been detained in this way from the close of
August till the end of October; and at length, deeply laden, he had
threaded his way round Cape Wrath, and through the Pentland and across
the Moray Firths, when a severe gale compelled him to seek shelter in
the harbour of Peterhead. From that port, on the 9th of November 1807,
he wrote my mother the last letter she ever received from him; for on
the day after he sailed from it there arose a terrible tempest, in which
many seamen perished, and he and his crew were never more heard of. His
sloop was last seen by a brother townsman and shipmaster, who, ere the
storm came on, had been fortunate enough to secure an asylum for his
barque in an English harbour on an exposed portion of the coast. Vessel
after vessel had been coming ashore during the day; and the beach was
strewed with wrecks and dead bodies; but he had marked his townsman's
sloop in the offing from mid-day till near evening, exhausting every
nautical shift and expedient to keep aloof from the shore; and at
length, as the night was falling, the skill and perseverance exerted
seemed successful; for, clearing a formidable headland that had lain on
the lee for hours, and was mottled with broken ships and drowned men,
the sloop was seen stretching out in a long tack into the open sea.
"Miller's seamanship has saved him once more!" said Matheson, the
Cromarty skipper, as, quitting his place of outlook, he returned to his
cabin; but the night fell tempestuous and wild, and no vestige of the
hapless sloop was ever after seen. It was supposed that, heavy laden,
and labouring in a mountainous sea, she must have started a plank and
foundered. And thus perished,--to borrow from the simple eulogium of his
seafaring friends, whom I heard long after condoling with my
mother,--"one of the best sailors that ever sailed the Moray Firth."
The fatal tempest, as it had prevailed chiefly on the eastern coasts of
England and the south of Scotland, was represented in the north by but a
few bleak, sullen days, in which, with little wind, a heavy ground-swell
came rolling in coastwards from the cast, and sent up its surf high
against the precipices of the Northern Sutor. There were no forebodings
in the master's dwelling; for his Peterhead letter--a brief but hopeful
missive--had been just received; and my mother was sitting, on the
evening after, beside the household fire, plying the cheerful needle,
when the house door, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and I
was despatched from her side to shut it. What follows must be regarded
as simply the recollection, though a very vivid one, of a boy who had
completed his fifth year only a mouth before. Day had not wholly
disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a grey haze spread
a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the
nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at the open door, within
less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a
dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were
apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance;
and directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was
only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms
of the objects beyond. I was fearfully startled, and ran shrieking to my
mother, telling what I had seen; and the house-girl whom she next sent
to shut the door, apparently affected by my terror, also returned
frightened, and said that she too had seen the woman's hand; which,
however, did not seem to be the case. And finally, my mother going to
the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the
extremeness of my terror and the minuteness of my description. I
communicate the story, as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting
to explain it. The supposed apparition may have been merely a momentary
affection of the eye, of the nature described by Sir Walter Scott in his
"Demonology," and Sir David Brewster in his "Natural Magic." But if so,
the affection was one of which I experienced no after-return; and its
coincidence, in the case, with the probable time of my father's death,
seems at least curious.
There followed a dreary season, on which I still look back in memory, as
on a prospect which, sunshiny and sparkling for a time, has become
suddenly enveloped in cloud and storm. I remember my mother's long fits
of weeping, and the general gloom of the widowed household; and how,
after she had sent my two little sisters to bed,--for such had been the
increase of the family,--and her hands were set free for the evening,
she used to sit up late at night engaged as a seamstress, in making
pieces of dress for such of the neighbours as chose to employ her. My
father's new house lay untenanted at the time; and though his sloop had
been partially insured, the broker with whom he dealt was, it would
seem, on the verge of insolvency, and having raised objections to paying
the money, it was long ere any part of it could be realized. And so,
with all my mother's industry, the household would have fared out ill,
had it not been for the assistance lent her by her two brothers,
industrious, hard-working men, who lived with their aged parents, and an
unmarried sister, about a bow-shot away, and now not only advanced her
money as she needed it, but also took her second child, the elder of my
two sisters, a docile little girl of three years, to live with them. I
remember I used to go wandering disconsolately about the harbour at this
season, to examine the vessels which had come in during the night; and
that I oftener than once set my mother a-crying, by asking her why the
shipmasters who, when my father was alive, used to stroke my head and
slip halfpence into my pockets, never now took any notice of me, or gave
me anything? She well knew that the shipmasters--not an ungenerous class
of men--had simply failed to recognise their old comrade's child; but
the question was only too suggestive, notwithstanding, of both her own
loss and mine. I used, too, to climb, day after day, a grassy
protuberance of the old coast-line immediately behind my mother's house,
that commands a wide reach of the Moray Firth, and to look wistfully
out, long after every one else had ceased to hope, for the sloop with
the two stripes of white and the two square topsails. But months and
years passed by, and the white stripes and the square topsails I never
saw.
The antecedents of my father's life impressed me more powerfully during
my boyhood than at least aught I acquired at school; and I have
submitted them to the reader at considerable length, as not only curious
in themselves, but as forming a first chapter in the story of my
education. And the following stanzas, written at a time when, in opening
manhood, I was sowing my wild oats in verse, may serve to show that they
continued to stand out in bold relief on my memory, even after I had
grown up:--
"Round Albyn's western shores, a lonely skiff
Is coasting slow:--the adverse winds detain:
And now she rounds secure the dreaded cliff,[1]
Whose horrid ridge beats back the northern main;
And now the whirling Pentland roars in rain
Her stern beneath, for favouring breezes rise;
The green isles fade, whitens the watery plain.
O'er the vexed waves with meteor speed she flies.
Till Moray's distant hills o'er the blue waves arise.
Who guides that vessel's wanderings o'er the wave;
A patient, hardy man, of thoughtful brow;
Serene and warm of heart, and wisely brave,
And sagely skill'd, when gurly breezes blow,
To press through angry waves the adventurous prow.
Age hath not quell'd his strength, nor quench'd desire
Of generous deed, nor chill'd his bosom's glow;
Yet to a better world his hopes aspire.
Ah! this must sure be thee! All hail, my honoured Sire!
Alas! thy latest voyage draws near a close,
For Death broods voiceless in the darkening sky;
Subsides the breeze; the untroubled waves repose;
The scene is peaceful all. Can Death be nigh,
When thus, mute and unarm'd, his vassals lie?
Mark ye that cloud! There toils the imprisoned gale;
E'en now it comes, with voice uplifted high;
Resound the shores, harsh screams the rending sail,
And roars th' amazed wave, and bursts the thunder peal!
Three days the tempest raged; on Scotia's shore
Wreck piled on wreck, and corse o'er corse was thrown;
Her rugged cliffs were red with clotted gore;
Her dark caves echoed back th' expiring moan;
And luckless maidens mourned their lovers gone,
And friendless orphans cried in vain for bread;
And widow'd mothers wandered forth alone;--
Restore, O wave, they cried,--restore our dead!
And then the breast they bared, and beat th' unsheltered head.
Of thee, my Sire, what mortal tongue can tell!
No friendly bay thy shattered barque received;
Ev'n when thy dust reposed in ocean cell,
Strange baseless tales of hope thy friends deceived
Which oft they doubted sad, or gay believed.
At length, when deeper, darker, wax'd the gloom,
Hopeless they grieved; but 'twas in vain they grieved:
If God be truth, 'tis sure no voice of doom,
That bids the accepted soul its robes of joy assume."
I had been sent, previous to my father's death, to a dame's school,
where I was taught to pronounce my letters to such effect in the old
Scottish mode, that still, when I attempt spelling a word aloud, which
is not often,--for I find the process a perilous one,--the _aa's_ and
_ee's_, and _uh's_ and _vaus_, return upon me and I have to translate
them with no little hesitation as I go along, into the more modish
sounds. A knowledge of the letters themselves I had already acquired by
studying the signposts of the place,--rare works of art, that excited my
utmost admiration, with jugs, and glasses, and bottles, and ships, and
loaves of bread upon them; all of which could, as the artists had
intended, be actually recognised. During my sixth year I spelt my way,
under the dame, through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New
Testament, and then entered upon her highest form, as a member of the
Bible class; but all the while the process of acquiring learning had
been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the
awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended, when
at once my mind awoke to the meaning of that most delightful of all
narratives,--the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made
before! I actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the
art of finding stories in books, and from that moment reading became one
of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a
corner at the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself
the new-found story of Joseph; nor did one perusal serve; the other
Scripture stories followed,--in especial, the story of Samson and the
Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha;
and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by
my uncles, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about
nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great
many immortal works,--Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the
Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor,
and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with
several others of resembling character. Those intolerable nuisances the
useful-knowledge books had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars, on the
educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting
influence on the opening intellect of the "youth-hood;" and so, from my
rudimental books--books that made themselves truly such by their
thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind--I passed on, without
being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the
learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I
found to be quite as nice children's books as any of the others. Old
Homer wrote admirably for little folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy
of which,--in the only true translation extant,--for, judging from its
surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope
to be,--I found in the house of a neighbour. Next came the Iliad; not,
however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes
of Bernard Lintot. With what power, and at how early an age, true genius
impresses! I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer
could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went
whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the
steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next
succeeded in discovering for myself a child's book, of not less interest
than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a
magnificent old edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," printed on coarse
whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous woodcuts, each of which
occupied an entire page, that, on principles of economy, bore
letter-press on the other side. And such delightful prints as these
were! It must have been some such volume that sat for its portrait to
Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as
"Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts,
Strange and uncouth; dire faces, figures dire,
Sharp-knee'd, sharp elbow'd, and lean-ankled too,
With long and ghastly shanks,--forms which, once seen,
Could never be forgotten."
In process of time I had devoured, besides these genial works Robinson
Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the "judgment chapter" in
Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the Adventures of Philip
Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and
fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my
father. It was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir.
Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel
when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's Voyages, all the volumes
were now absent save the first; and a very tantalizing romance, in four
volumes,--Mrs. Ratcliff's "Mysteries of Udolpho," was represented by
only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained some
rare books,--among the rest, a curious little volume, entitled "The
Miracles of Nature and Art," to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in
one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day,
and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth
century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge,
between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of
the "Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his
Religion,"--a work interesting from the circumstance that--though it
bore another name on its title-page--it had been translated from the
French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith, in his days of obscure
literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellencies of his style.
The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by
very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an
English sailor who had spent his best years of life as a slave in
Morocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff
controversy,--Flavel's Works, and Henry's Commentary, and Hutchinson on
the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelation, with the
title-page away, and blind Jameson's volume on the Hierarchy, with first
editions of Naphthali, the Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind let Loose.
But with these solid authors I did not venture to grapple until long
after this time. Of the works of fact and incident which it contained,
those of the voyagers were my especial favourites. I perused with
avidity the voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods
Rogers; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be
seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a
sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and
hunt wild beasts and fight battles. I have already made mention of my
two maternal uncles; and referred, at least incidentally, to their
mother, as the friend and relative of my fathers aged cousin, and, like
her, a great-grand-child of the last curate of Nigg. The curate's
youngest daughter had been courted and married by a somewhat wild young
farmer, of the clan Ross, but who was known, like the celebrated
Highland outlaw, from the colour of his hair, as Roy, or the Red. Donald
Roy was the best club-player in the district; and as King James's "Book
of Sports" was not deemed a very bad one in the semi-Celtic parish of
Nigg, the games in which Donald took part were usually played on the
Sabbath. About the time of the Revolution, however, he was laid hold of
by strong religious convictions, heralded, say the traditions of the
district, by events that approximated in character to the supernatural;
and Donald became the subject of a mighty change. There is a phase of
the religious character, which in the south of Scotland belongs to the
first two ages of Presbytery, but which disappeared ere its third
establishment under William of Nassau, that we find strikingly
exemplified in the Welches, Pedens, and Cargills of the times of the
persecution, and in which a sort of wild machinery of the supernatural
was added to the commoner aspects of a living Christianity. The men in
whom it was exhibited were seers of visions and dreamers of dreams; and,
standing on the very verge of the natural world, they looked far into
the world of spirits, and had at times their strange glimpses of the
distant and the future. To the north of the Grampians, as if born out of
due season, these seers pertain to a later age. They flourished chiefly
in the early part of the last century; for it is a not uninstructive
fact, that in the religious history of Scotland, the eighteenth century
of the Highland and semi-Highland districts of the north corresponded in
many of its traits to the seventeenth century of the Saxon-peopled
districts of the south; and Donald Roy was one of the most notable of
the class. The anecdotes regarding him which still float among the old
recollections of Ross-shire, if transferred to Peden or Welch, would be
found entirely in character with the strange stories that inlay the
biographies of these devoted men, and live so enduringly in the memory
of the Scottish people. Living, too, in an age in which, like the
Covenanters of a former century, the Highlander still retained his
weapons, and knew how to use them, Donald had, like the Patons,
Hackstons, and Balfours of the south, his dash of the warlike spirit;
and after assisting his minister, previous to the rebellion of 1745, in
what was known as the great religious revival of Nigg, he had to assist
him, shortly after, in pursuing a band of armed Caterans, that,
descending from the hills, swept the parish of its cattle. And coming up
with the outlaws in the gorge of a wild Highland glen, no man of his
party was more active in the fray that followed than old Donald, or
exerted himself to better effect in re-capturing the cattle. I need
scarce add, that he was an attached member of the Church of Scotland:
but he was not destined to die in her communion.
Donald's minister, John Balfour of Nigg--a man whose memory is still
honoured in the north--died in middle life, and an unpopular presentee
was obtruded on the people. The policy of Robertson prevailed at the
time; Gillespie had been deposed only four years previous, for refusing
to assist in the disputed settlement of Inverkeithing; and four of the
Nigg Presbytery, overawed by the stringency of the precedent, repaired
to the parish church to conduct the settlement of the obnoxious
licentiate, and introduce him to the parishioners. They found, however,
only an empty building; and, notwithstanding the ominous absence of the
people, they were proceeding in shame and sorrow with their work, when a
venerable man, far advanced in life, suddenly appeared before them, and,
solemnly protesting against the utter mockery of such a proceeding,
impressively declared, "that if they settled a man to the _walls_ of
that kirk, the blood of the parish of Nigg would be required at their
hands." Both Dr. Hetherington and Dr. Merle d'Aubigne record the event;
but neither of these accomplished historians seems to have been aware of
the peculiar emphasis which a scene that would have been striking in any
circumstances derived from the character of the protester--old Donald
Roy. The Presbytery, appalled, stopt short in the middle of its work;
nor was it resumed till an after day, when, at the command of the
Moderate majority of the Church--a command not unaccompanied by
significant reference to-the fate of Gillespie--the forced settlement
was consummated. Donald, who carried the entire parish with him,
continued to cling to the National Church for nearly ten years after,
much befriended by one of the most eminent and influential divines of
the north--Fraser of Alness--the author of a volume on Sanctification,
still regarded as a standard work by Scottish theologians. But as
neither the people nor their leader ever entered on any occasion the
parish church, or heard the obnoxious presentee, the Presbytery at
length refused to tolerate the irregularity by extending to them as
before the ordinary Church privileges; and so they were lost to the
Establishment, and became Seceders. And in the communion of that portion
of the Secession known as the Burghers, Donald died several years after,
at a patriarchal old age.
Among his other descendants, he had three grand-daughters, who were left
orphans at an early age by the death of both their parents, and whom
the old man, on their bereavement, had brought to his dwelling to live
with him. They had small portions apiece, derived from his son-in-law,
their father, which did not grow smaller under the care of Donald; and
as each of the three was married in succession out of his family, he
added to all his other kindnesses the gift of a gold ring. They had been
brought up under his eye sound in the faith; and Donald's ring had, in
each case, a mystic meaning;--they were to regard it, he told them, as
the wedding ring of their _other Husband_, the Head of the Church, and
to be faithful spouses to Him in their several households. Nor did the
injunction, nor the significant symbol with which it was accompanied,
prove idle in the end. They all brought the savour of sincere piety into
their families. The grand-daughter with whom the writer was more
directly connected, had been courted and married by an honest and
industrious but somewhat gay young tradesman, but she proved, under God,
the means of his conversion; and their children, of whom eight grew up
to be men and women, were reared in decent frugality, and the exercise
of honest principles carefully instilled. Her husband's family had, like
that of my paternal ancestors, been a seafaring one. His father, after
serving for many years on shipboard, passed the latter part of his life
as one of the armed boatmen that, during the last century, guarded the
coasts in behalf of the revenue; and his only brother, the boatman's
son, an adventurous young sailor had engaged in Admiral Vernon's
unfortunate expedition, and left his bones under the walls of
Carthagena; but he himself pursued the peaceful occupation of a
shoemaker, and, in carrying on his trade, usually employed a few
journeymen, and kept a few apprentices. In course of time the elder
daughters of the family married, and got households of their own; but
the two sons, my uncles, remained under the roof of their parents, and
at the time when my father perished, they were both in middle life. And,
deeming themselves called on to take his place in the work of
instruction and discipline, I owed to them much more of my real
education than to any of the teachers whose schools I afterwards
attended. They both bore a marked individuality of character, and were
much the reverse of commonplace or vulgar men.
My elder uncle, James, added to a clear head and much native sagacity, a
singularly retentive memory, and great thirst of information. He was a
harness-maker, and wrought for the farmers of an extensive district of
country; and as he never engaged either journeyman or apprentice, but
executed all his work with his own hands, his hours of labour, save that
he indulged in a brief pause as the twilight came on, and took a mile's
walk or so, were usually protracted from six o'clock in the morning till
ten at night. Such incessant occupation left him little time for
reading; but he often found some one to read beside him during the day;
and in the winter evenings his portable bench used to be brought from
his shop at the other end of the dwelling, into the family sitting-room,
and placed beside the circle round the hearth, where his brother
Alexander, my younger uncle, whose occupation left his evenings free,
would read aloud from some interesting volume for the general
benefit,--placing himself always at the opposite side of the bench, so
as to share in the light of the worker. Occasionally the family circle
would be widened by the accession of from two to three intelligent
neighbours, who would drop in to listen; and then the book, after a
space, would be laid aside, in order that its contents might be
discussed in conversation. In the summer months Uncle James always spent
some time in the country, in looking after and keeping in repair the
harness of the farmers for whom he wrought; and during his journeys and
twilight walks on these occasions there was not an old castle, or
hill-fort, or ancient encampment, or antique ecclesiastical edifice,
within twenty miles of the town, which he had not visited and examined
over and over again. He was a keen local antiquary; knew a good deal
about the architectural styles of the various ages, at a time when these
subjects were little studied or known; and possessed more traditionary
lore, picked up chiefly in his country journeys, than any man I ever
knew. What he once heard he never forgot; and the knowledge which he had
acquired he could communicate pleasingly and succinctly, in a style
which, had he been a writer of books, instead of merely a reader of
them, would have had the merit of being clear and terse, and more laden
with meaning than words. From his reputation for sagacity, his advice
used to be much sought after by the neighbours in every little
difficulty that came their way; and the counsel given was always shrewd
and honest. I never knew a man more entirely just in his dealings than
Uncle James, or who regarded every species of meanness with a more
thorough contempt. I soon learned to bring my story-books to his
workshop, and became, in a small way, one of his _readers_,--greatly
more, however, as may be supposed, on my own account than his. My books
were not yet of the kind which he would have chosen for himself; but he
took an interest in _my_ interest; and his explanations of all the hard
words saved me the trouble of turning over a dictionary. And when tired
of reading, I never failed to find rare delight in his anecdotes and
old-world stories, many of which were not to be found in books, and all
of which, without apparent effort on his own part, he could render
singularly amusing. Of these narratives, the larger part died with him;
but a portion of them I succeeded in preserving in a little traditionary
work published a few years after his death. I was much a favourite with
Uncle James,--even more, I am disposed to think, on my father's account
than on that of his sister, my mother. My father and he had been close
friends for years; and in the vigorous and energetic sailor he had found
his _beau-ideal_ of a man.
My Uncle Alexander was of a different cast from his brother both in
intellect and temperament; but he was characterized by the same strict
integrity; and his religious feelings, though quiet and unobtrusive,
were perhaps more deep. James was somewhat of a humorist, and fond of a
good joke. Alexander was grave and serious; and never, save on one
solitary occasion, did I know him even attempt a jest. On hearing an
intelligent but somewhat eccentric neighbour observe, that "all flesh is
grass," in a strictly physical sense, seeing that all the flesh of the
herbivorous animals is elaborated from vegetation, and all the flesh of
the carnivorous animals from that of the herbivorous ones, Uncle Sandy
remarked that, knowing, as he did, the piscivorous habits of the
Cromarty folk, he should surely make an exception in his generalization,
by admitting that in at least one village "all flesh is fish." My uncle
had acquired the trade of the cartwright, and was employed in a workshop
at Glasgow at the time the first war of the French Revolution broke out;
when, moved by some such spirit as possessed his uncle,--the victim of
Admiral Vernon's unlucky expedition,--or Old Donald Roy, when he buckled
himself to his Highland broadsword, and set out in pursuit of the
Caterans,--he entered the navy. And during the eventful period which
intervened between the commencement of the war and the peace of 1802,
there was little either suffered or achieved by his countrymen in which
he had not a share. He sailed with Nelson; witnessed the mutiny at the
Nore; fought under Admiral Duncan at Camperdown, and under Sir John
Borlase Warren at Loch Swilly; assisted in capturing the Generoux and
Guillaume Tell, two French ships of the line; was one of the seamen who,
in the Egyptian expedition, were drafted out of Lord Keith's fleet to
supply the lack of artillerymen in the army of Sir Ralph Abercromby; had
a share in the danger and glory of the landing in Egypt; and fought in
the battle of 13th March, and in that which deprived our country of one
of her most popular generals. He served, too, at the siege of
Alexandria. And then, as he succeeded in procuring his discharge during
the short peace of 1802, he returned home with a small sum of
hardly-earned prize-money, heartily sick of war and bloodshed. I was
asked not long ago by one of his few surviving comrades, whether my
uncle had ever told me that _their_ gun was the first landed in Egypt,
and the first dragged up the sand-bank immediately over the beach, and
how hot it grew under their hands, as, with a rapidity unsurpassed along
the line, they poured out in thick succession its iron discharges upon
the enemy. I had to reply in the negative. All my uncle's narratives
were narratives of what he had seen--not of what he had done; and when,
perusing, late in life, one of his favourite works--Dr. Keith's "Signs
of the Times"--he came to the chapter in which that excellent writer
describes the time of hot naval warfare which immediately followed the
breaking out of war, as the period in which the second vial was poured
out on the sea, and in which the waters "became as the blood of a dead
man, so that every living soul died in the sea," I saw him bend his head
in reverence as he remarked, "Prophecy, I find, gives to all our glories
but a single verse, and it is a verse of judgment." Uncle Sandy,
however, did not urge the peace principles which he had acquired amid
scenes of death and carnage, into any extravagant consequences; and on
the breaking out, in 1803, of the second war of the Revolution, when
Napoleon threatened invasion from Brest and Boulogne, he at once
shouldered his musket as a volunteer. He had not his brother's fluency
of speech; but his narratives of what he had seen were singularly
truthful and graphic; and his descriptions of foreign plants and
animals, and of the aspect of the distant regions which he had visited,
had all the careful minuteness of those of a Dampier. He had a decided
turn for natural history. My collection contains a murex, not unfrequent
in the Mediterranean, which he found time enough to transfer, during the
heat of the landing in Egypt, from the beach to his pocket; and the
first ammonite I ever saw was a specimen, which I still retain, that he
brought home with him from one of the Liassic deposits of England.
Early on the Sabbath evenings I used regularly to attend at my uncle's
with two of my maternal cousins, boys of about my own age, and latterly
with my two sisters, to be catechized, first on the Shorter Catechism,
and then on the Mother's Catechism of Willison. On Willison my uncles
always cross-examined us, to make sure that we understood the short and
simple questions; but, apparently regarding the questions of the Shorter
Catechism as seed sown for a future day, they were content with having
them well fixed in our memories. There was a Sabbath class taught in the
parish church at the time by one of the elders; but Sabbath-schools my
uncles regarded as merely compensatory institutions, highly creditable
to the teachers, but very discreditable indeed to the parents and
relatives of the taught; and so they of course never thought of sending
us there. Later in the evening, after a short twilight walk, for which
the sedentary occupation of my Uncle James formed an apology, but in
which my Uncle Alexander always shared, and which usually led them into
solitary woods, or along an unfrequented sea-shore, some of the old
divines were read; and I used to take my place in the circle, though, I
am afraid, not to much advantage. I occasionally caught a fact, or had
my attention arrested for a moment by a simile or metaphor; but the
trains of close argument, and the passages of dreary "application," were
always lost.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] Cape Wrath.