"At Wallace' name what Scottish blood
But boils up in a spring-tide flood!
Oft have our fearless fathers strode
By Wallace' side,
Still pressing onward, red wat shod,
Or glorious died."--BURNS.
I first became thoroughly a Scot some time in my tenth year; and the
consciousness of country has remained tolerably strong within me ever
since. My uncle James had procured for me from a neighbour the loan of a
common stall-edition of Blind Harry's "Wallace," as modernized by
Hamilton; but after reading the first chapter,--a piece of dull
genealogy, broken into very rude rhyme,--I tossed the volume aside as
uninteresting; and only resumed it at the request of my uncle, who urged
that, simply for _his_ amusement and gratification, I should read some
three or four chapters more. Accordingly, the three or four chapters
more I did read;--I read "how Wallace killed young Selbie the
Constable's son;" "how Wallace fished in Irvine Water;" and "how Wallace
killed the Churl with his own staff in Ayr;" and then Uncle James told
me, in the quiet way in which he used to make a joke tell, that the book
seemed to be rather a rough sort of production, filled with accounts of
quarrels and bloodshed, and that I might read no more of it unless I
felt inclined. But I now did feel inclined very strongly, and read on
with increasing astonishment and delight. I was intoxicated with the
fiery narratives of the blind minstrel,--with his fierce breathings of
hot, intolerant patriotism, and his stories of astonishing prowess;
and, glorying in being a Scot, and the countryman of Wallace and the
Graham, I longed for a war with the Southron, that the wrongs and
sufferings of these noble heroes might yet be avenged. All I had
previously heard and read of the marvels of foreign parts, of the
glories of modern battles, seemed tame and commonplace, compared with
the incidents in the life of Wallace; and I never after vexed my mother
by wishing myself big enough to be a sailor. My Uncle Sandy, who had
some taste for the refinements of poetry, would fain have led me on from
the exploits of Wallace to the "Life of the Bruce," which, in the form
of a not very vigorous imitation of Dryden's "Virgil," by one Harvey,
was bound up in the same volume, and which my uncle deemed the
better-written life of the two. And so far as the mere amenities of
style were concerned, he was, I daresay, right. But I could not agree
with him. Harvey was by much too fine and too learned for me; and it was
not until some years after, when I was fortunate enough to pick up one
of the later editions of Barbour's "Bruce," that the Hero-King of
Scotland assumed his right place in my mind beside its Hero-Guardian.
There are stages of development in the immature youth of individuals,
that seem to correspond with stages of development in the immature youth
of nations; and the recollections of this early time enable me, in some
measure, to understand how it was that, for hundreds of years, Blind
Harry's "Wallace," with its rude and naked narrative, and its
exaggerated incident, should have been, according to Lord Hailes, the
Bible of the Scotch people.
I quitted the dame's school at the end of the first twelvemonth, after
mastering that grand acquirement of my life,--the art of holding
converse with books; and was transferred straightforth to the grammar
school of the parish, at which there attended at this time about a
hundred and twenty boys, with a class of about thirty individuals more,
much looked down upon by the others, and not deemed greatly worth the
counting, seeing that it consisted of only _lassies_. And here, too, the
early individual development seems nicely correspondent with an early
national one. In his depreciatory estimate of contemporary woman, the
boy is always a true savage. The old parish school of the place had been
nobly situated in a snug corner, between the parish churchyard and a
thick wood; and from the interesting centre which it formed, the boys,
when tired of making dragoon-horses of the erect head-stones, or of
leaping along the flat-laid memorials, from end to end of the
grave-yard, "without touching grass," could repair to the taller trees,
and rise in the world by climbing among them. As, however, they used to
encroach, on these latter occasions, upon the laird's pleasure-grounds,
the school had been removed ere my time to the sea-shore; where, though
there were neither tombstones nor trees, there were some balancing
advantages, of a kind which perhaps only boys of the old school could
have adequately appreciated. As the school-windows fronted the opening
of the Firth, not a vessel could enter the harbour that we did not see;
and, improving through our opportunities, there was perhaps no
educational institution in the kingdom in which all sorts of barques and
carvels, from the fishing yawl to the frigate, could be more correctly
drawn on the slate, or where any defect in hulk or rigging, in some
faulty delineation, was surer of being more justly and unsparingly
criticised. Further, the town, which drove a great trade in salted pork
at the time, had a killing-place not thirty yards from the school-door,
where from eighty to a hundred pigs used sometimes to die for the
general good in a single day; and it was a great matter to hear, at
occasional intervals, the roar of death outside rising high over the
general murmur within, or to be told by some comrade, returned from his
five minutes' leave of absence, that a hero of a pig had taken three
blows of the hatchet ere it fell, and that even after its subjection to
the sticking process, it had got hold of Jock Keddie's hand in its
mouth, and almost smashed his thumb. We learned, too, to know, from our
signal opportunities of observation, not only a good deal about
pig-anatomy,--especially about the detached edible parts of the animal,
such as the spleen and the pancreas, and at least one other very
palatable viscus besides,--but became knowing also about the _take_ and
curing of herrings. All the herring boats during the fishing season
passed our windows on their homeward way to the harbour; and, from their
depth in the water, we became skilful enough to predicate the number of
crans aboard of each with wonderful judgment and correctness. In days of
good general fishings, too, when the curing-yards proved too small to
accommodate the quantities brought ashore, the fish used to be laid in
glittering heaps opposite the school-house door; and an exciting scene,
that combined the bustle of the workshop with the confusion of the
crowded fair, would straightway spring up within twenty yards of the
forms at which we sat, greatly to our enjoyment, and, of course, not a
little to our instruction. We could see, simply by peering over book or
slate, the curers going about rousing their fish with salt, to
counteract the effects of the dog-day sun; bevies of young women
employed as gutters, and horridly incarnadined with blood and viscera,
squatting around the heaps, knife in hand, and plying with busy fingers
their well-paid labours, at the rate of sixpence per hour; relays of
heavily-laden fish-wives bringing ever and anon fresh heaps of herrings
in their creels; and outside of all, the coopers hammering as if for
life and death,--now tightening hoops, and now slackening them, and anon
caulking with bulrush the leaky seams. It is not every grammar school in
which such lessons are taught as those in which all were initiated, and
in which all became in some degree accomplished, in the grammar school
of Cromarty!
The building in which we met was a low, long, straw-thatched cottage,
open from gable to gable, with a mud floor below, and an unlathed roof
above; and stretching along the naked rafters, which, when the master
chanced to be absent for a few minutes, gave noble exercise in climbing,
there used frequently to lie a helm, or oar, or boathook, or even a
foresail,--the spoil of some hapless peat-boat from the opposite side of
the Firth. The Highland boatmen of Ross had carried on a trade in peats
for ages with the Saxons of the town; and as every boat owed a
long-derived perquisite of twenty peats to the grammar school, and as
payment was at times foolishly refused, the party of boys commissioned
by the master to exact it almost always succeeded, either by force or
stratagem, in securing and bringing along with them, in behalf of the
institution, some spar, or sail, or piece of rigging, which, until
redeemed by special treaty, and the payment of the peats, was stowed up
over the rafters. These peat-expeditions, which were intensely popular
in the school, gave noble exercise to the faculties. It was always a
great matter to see, just as the school met, some observant boy appear,
cap in hand, before the master, and intimate the fact of an arrival at
the shore, by the simple words, "Peat-boat, Sir." The master would then
proceed to name a party, more or less numerous, according to the
exigency; but it seemed to be matter of pretty correct calculation that,
in the cases in which the peat claim was disputed, it required about
twenty boys to bring home the twenty peats, or, lacking these, the
compensatory sail or spar. There were certain ill-conditioned boatmen
who almost always resisted, and who delighted to tell us--invariably,
too, in very bad English--that our perquisite was properly the hangman's
perquisite,[2] made over to us because we were _like him_; not
seeing--blockheads as they were!--that the very admission established in
full the rectitude of our claim, and gave to us, amid our dire perils
and faithful contendings, the strengthening consciousness of a just
quarrel. In dealing with these recusants, we used ordinarily to divide
our forces into two bodies, the larger portion of the party filling
their pockets with stones, and ranging themselves on some point of
vantage, such as the pier-head; and the smaller stealing down as near
the boat as possible, and mixing themselves up with the purchasers of
the peats. We then, after due warning, opened fire upon the boatmen;
and, when the pebbles were hopping about them like hailstones, the boys
below commonly succeeded in securing, under cover of the fire, the
desired boathook or oar. And such were the ordinary circumstances and
details of this piece of Spartan education; of which a townsman has told
me he was strongly reminded when boarding, on one occasion, under cover
of a well-sustained discharge of musketry, the vessel of an enemy that
had been stranded on the shores of Berbice.
The parish schoolmaster was a scholar and an honest man, and if a boy
really wished to learn, _he_ certainly could teach him. He had attended
the classes at Aberdeen during the same sessions as the late Dr. Mearns,
and in mathematics and the languages had disputed the prize with the
Doctor; but he had failed to get on equally well in the world; and now,
in middle life, though a licentiate of the Church, he had settled down
to be what he subsequently remained--the teacher of a parish school.
There were usually a few grown-up lads under his tuition--careful
sailors, that had stayed ashore during the winter quarter to study
navigation as a science,--or tall fellows, happy in the patronage of the
great, who, in the hope of being made excisemen, had come to school to
be initiated in the mysteries of gauging,--or grown young men, who, on
second thoughts, and somewhat late in the day, had recognised the Church
as their proper vocation; and these used to speak of the master's
acquirements and teaching ability in the very highest terms. He himself,
too, could appeal to the fact, that no teacher in the north had ever
sent more students to college, and that his better scholars almost
always got on well in life. But then, on the other hand, the pupils who
wished to do nothing--a description of individuals that comprised fully
two-thirds of all the younger ones--were not required to do much more
than they wished; and parents and guardians were loud in their
complaints that he was no suitable schoolmaster for them; though the
boys themselves usually thought him quite suitable enough.
He was in the habit of advising the parents or relations of those he
deemed his clever lads, to give them a classical education; and meeting
one day with Uncle James, he urged that I should be put on Latin. I was
a great reader, he said; and he found that when I missed a word in my
English tasks, I almost always substituted a synonym in the place of it.
And so, as Uncle James had arrived, on data of his own, at a similar
conclusion, I was transferred from the English to the Latin form, and,
with four other boys, fairly entered on the "Rudiments." I laboured with
tolerable diligence for a day or two; but there was no one to tell me
what the rules meant, or whether they really meant anything; and when I
got on as far as _penna_, a pen, and saw how the changes were rung on
one poor word, that did not seem to be of more importance in the old
language than in the modern one, I began miserably to flag, and to long
for my English reading, with its nice amusing stories, and its
picture-like descriptions. The Rudiments was by far the dullest book I
had ever seen. It embodied no thought that I could perceive,--it
certainly contained no narrative,--it was a perfect contrast to not only
the "Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace," but to even the
Voyages of Cook and Anson. None of my class-fellows were by any means
bright;--they had been all set on Latin without advice of the master;
and yet, when he learned, which he soon did, to distinguish and call us
up to our tasks by the name of the "heavy class," I was, in most
instances, to be found at its nether end. Shortly after, however, when
we got a little farther on, it was seen that I had a decided turn for
translation. The master, good simple man that he was, always read to us
in English, as the school met, the piece of Latin given us as our task
for the day; and as my memory was strong enough to carry away the whole
translation in its order, I used to give him back in the evening, word
for word, his own rendering, which satisfied him on most occasions
tolerably well. There were none of us much looked after; and I soon
learned to bring books of amusement to the school with me, which, amid
the Babel confusion of the place, I contrived to read undetected. Some
of them, save in the language in which they were written, were identical
with the books proper to the place. I remember perusing by stealth in
this way, Dryden's "Virgil," and the "Ovid" of Dryden and his friends;
while Ovid's own "Ovid," and Virgil's own "Virgil," lay beside me,
sealed up in the fine old tongue, which I was thus throwing away my only
chance of acquiring.
One morning, having the master's English rendering of the day's task
well fixed in my memory, and no book of amusement to read, I began
gossiping with my nearest class-fellow, a very tall boy, who ultimately
shot up into a lad of six feet four, and who on most occasions sat
beside me, as lowest in the form save one. I told him about the tall
Wallace and his exploits; and so effectually succeeded in awakening his
curiosity, that I had to communicate to him, from beginning to end,
every adventure recorded by the blind minstrel. My story-telling
vocation once fairly ascertained, there was, I found, no stopping in my
course. I had to tell all the stories I ever heard or read; all my
father's adventures, so far as I knew them, and all my Uncle
Sandy's,--with the story of Gulliver, and Philip Quarll, and Robinson
Crusoe,--of Sinbad, and Ulysses, and Mrs. Radcliffe's heroine Emily,
with, of course, the love-passages left out; and at length, after weeks
and months of narrative, I found my available stock of acquired fact
and fiction fairly exhausted. The demand on the part of my
class-fellows was, however, as great and urgent as ever; and, setting
myself, in the extremity of the case, to try my ability of original
production, I began to dole out to them by the hour and the diet, long
extempore biographies, which proved wonderfully popular and successful.
My heroes were usually warriors like Wallace, and voyagers like
Gulliver, and dwellers in desolate islands like Robinson Crusoe; and
they had not unfrequently to seek shelter in huge deserted castles,
abounding in trap-doors and secret passages, like that of Udolpho. And
finally, after much destruction of giants and wild beasts, and frightful
encounters with magicians and savages, they almost invariably succeeded
in disentombing hidden treasures to an enormous amount, or in laying
open gold mines, and then passed a luxurious old age, like that of
Sinbad the Sailor, at peace with all mankind, in the midst of
confectionery and fruits. The master had a tolerably correct notion of
what was going on in the "heavy class;"--the stretched-out necks, and
the heads clustered together, always told their own special story when I
was engaged in telling mine; but, without hating the child, he spared
the rod, and simply did what he sometimes allowed himself to
do--bestowed a nickname upon me. I was the _Sennachie_, he said; and as
the Sennachie I might have been known so long as I remained under his
charge, had it not been that, priding himself upon his Gaelic, he used
to bestow upon the word the full Celtic pronunciation, which, agreeing
but ill with the Teutonic mouths of my school-fellows, militated against
its use; and so the name failed to take. With all my carelessness, I
continued to be a sort of favourite with the master; and, when at the
general English lesson, he used to address to me little quiet speeches,
vouchsafed to no other pupil, indicative of a certain literary ground
common to us, on which the others had not entered. "That, Sir," he has
said, after the class had just perused, in the school collection, a
_Tatler_ or _Spectator_,--"That, Sir, is a good paper;--it's an
_Addison_;" or, "That's one of Steele's, Sir;" and on finding in my
copy-book, on one occasion, a page filled with rhymes, which I had
headed "Poem on Care," he brought it to his desk, and, after reading it
carefully over, called me up, and with his closed penknife, which served
as a pointer, in the one hand, and the copy-book brought down to the
level of my eyes in the other, began his criticism. "That's bad grammar,
Sir," he said, resting the knife-handle on one of the lines; "and here's
an ill-spelt word; and there's another; and you have not at all attended
to the punctuation; but the general sense of the piece is good,--very
good indeed, Sir." And then he added, with a grim smile, "_Care_, Sir,
is, I daresay, as you remark, a very bad thing; but you may safely
bestow a little more of it on your spelling and your grammar."
The school, like almost all the other grammar-schools of the period in
Scotland, had its yearly cock-fight, preceded by two holidays and a
half, during which the boys occupied themselves in collecting and
bringing up their cocks. And such always was the array of fighting birds
mustered on the occasion, that the day of the festival, from morning
till night, used to be spent in fighting out the battle. For weeks after
it had passed, the school-floor would continue to retain its
deeply-stained blotches of blood, and the boys would be full of exciting
narratives regarding the glories of gallant birds, who had continued to
fight until both their eyes had been picked out, or who, in the moment
of victory, had dropped dead in the middle of the cock-pit. The yearly
fight was the relic of a barbarous age; and, in at least one of its
provisions, there seemed evidence that it was that of an intolerant age
also: every pupil at school, without exemption, had his name entered on
the subscription-list, as a cock-fighter, and was obliged to pay the
master at the rate of twopence per head, ostensibly for leave to bring
his birds to the pit; but, amid the growing humanities of a better
time, though the twopences continued to be exacted, it was no longer
imperative to bring the birds; and availing myself of the liberty I
never brought any. Nor, save for a few minutes, on two several
occasions, did I ever attend the fight. Had the combat been one among
the boys themselves, I would readily enough have done my part, by
meeting with any opponent of my years and standing; but I could not bear
to look at the bleeding birds. And so I continued to pay my yearly
sixpence, as a holder of three cocks,--the lowest sum deemed in any
degree genteel,--but remained simply a fictitious or paper cock-fighter,
and contributed in no degree to the success of the _head-stock_ or
leader, to whose party, in the general division of the school, it was my
lot to fall. Neither, I must add, did I learn to take an interest in the
sacrificial orgies of the adjoining slaughter-house. A few of the chosen
school-boys were permitted by the killers to exercise at times the
privilege of knocking down a pig, and even, on rare occasions, to essay
the sticking; but I turned with horror from both processes; and if I
drew near at all, it was only when some animal, scraped and cleaned, and
suspended from the beam, was in the course of being laid open by the
butcher's knife, that I might mark the forms of the viscera, and the
positions which they occupied. To my dislike of the annual cock-fight my
uncles must have contributed. They were loud in their denunciations of
the enormity; and on one occasion, when a neighbour was unlucky enough
to remark, in extenuation, that the practice had been handed down to us
by pious and excellent men, who seemed to see nothing wrong in it, I saw
the habitual respect for the old divines give way, for at least a
moment. Uncle Sandy hesitated under apparent excitement; but, quick and
fiery as lightning, Uncle James came to his rescue. "Yes, excellent
men!" said my uncle, "but the excellent men of a rude and barbarous age;
and, in some parts of their character, tinged by its barbarity. For the
cock-fight which these excellent men have bequeathed to us, they ought
to have been sent to Bridewell for a week, and fed upon bread and
water." Uncle James was, no doubt, over hasty, and felt so a minute
after; but the practice of fixing the foundations of ethics on a _They
themselves did it_, much after the manner in which the Schoolmen fixed
the foundations of their nonsensical philosophy on a "_He himself said
it_," is a practice which, though not yet exploded in even very pure
Churches, is always provoking, and not quite free from peril to the
worthies, whether dead or alive, in whose precedents the moral right is
made to rest. In the class of minds represented among the people by that
of Uncle James, for instance, it would be much easier to bring down even
the old divines, than to bring up cock-fighting.
My native town had possessed, for at least an age or two previous to
that of my boyhood, its sprinkling of intelligent, book-consulting
mechanics and tradesfolk; and as my acquaintance gradually extended
among their representatives and descendants, I was permitted to rummage,
in the pursuit of knowledge, delightful old chests and cupboards, filled
with tattered and dusty volumes. The moiety of my father's library which
remained to me consisted of about sixty several works; my uncle
possessed about a hundred and fifty more; and there was a literary
cabinet-maker in the neighbourhood, who had once actually composed a
poem of thirty lines on the Hill of Cromarty, whose collection of books,
chiefly poetical, amounted to from about eighty to a hundred. I used to
be often at nights in the workshop of the cabinet-maker, and was
sometimes privileged to hear him repeat his poem. There was not much
admiration of poets or poetry in the place; and my praise, though that
of a very young critic, had always the double merit of being both ample
and sincere. I knew the very rocks and trees which his description
embraced,--had heard the birds to which he referred, and seen the
flowers; and as the Hill had been of old a frequent scene of executions,
and had borne the gallows of the sheriffdom on its crest, nothing could
be more definite than the grave reference, in his opening line, to
"The verdant rising of the _Gallow_-hill."
And so I thought a very great deal of his poem, and what I thought I
said; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of
extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There was another
mechanic in the neighbourhood,--a house-carpenter, who, though not a
poet, was deeply read in books of all kinds, from the plays of Farquhar
to the sermons of Flavel; and as both his father and grandfather--the
latter, by the way, a Porteous-mob man, and the former a personal friend
of poor Fergusson the poet--had also been readers and collectors of
books, he possessed a whole pressful of tattered, hard-working volumes,
some of them very curious ones; and to me he liberally extended, what
literary men always value, "the full freedom of the press." But of all
my occasional benefactors in this way, by far the greatest was poor old
Francie, the retired clerk and supercargo.
Francie was naturally a man of fair talent and active curiosity. Nor was
he by any means deficient in acquirement. He wrote and figured well, and
knew a good deal about at least the theory of business; and when
articled in early life to a Cromarty merchant and shopkeeper, it was
with tolerably fair prospects of getting on in the world. He had,
however, a certain infirmity of brain, which rendered both talent and
acquirement of but little avail, and that began to manifest itself very
early. While yet an apprentice, on ascertaining that the way was clear,
he used, though grown a tall lad, to bolt out from behind the counter
into the middle of a green directly opposite, and there, joining in the
sports of some group of youngsters, which the place rarely wanted, he
would play out half a game at marbles, or honey-pots, or hy-spy, and,
when he saw his master or a customer approaching, bolt back again The
thing was not deemed seemly; but Francie, when spoken to on the subject,
could speak as sensibly as any young person of his years. He needed
relaxation, he used to say, though he never suffered it to interfere
with his proper business; and where was there safer relaxation to be
found than among innocent children? This, of course, was eminently
rational, and even virtuous. And so, when his term of apprenticeship had
expired, Francie was despatched, not without hope of success, to
Newfoundland,--where he had relations extensively engaged in the fishing
trade,--to serve as one of their clerks. He was found to be a competent
clerk; but unluckily there was but little known of the interior of the
island at the time; and some of the places most distant from St. John's,
such as the Bay and River of Exploits, bore tempting names; and so,
after Francie had made many inquiries at the older inhabitants regarding
what was to be seen amid the scraggy brushwood and broken rocks of the
inner country, a morning came in which he was reported missing at the
office; and little else could be learned respecting him, than that at
early dawn he had been seen setting out for the woods, provided with
staff and knapsack. He returned in about a week, worn out and
half-starved. He had not been so successful as he had anticipated, he
said, in providing himself by the way with food, and so he had to turn
back ere he could reach the point on which he had previously determined;
but he was sure he would be happier in his next journey. It was palpably
unsafe to suffer him to remain exposed to the temptation of an
unexplored country; and as his friends and superiors at St. John's had
just laden a vessel with fish for the Italian market during Lent,
Francie was despatched with her as supercargo, to look after the sales,
in a land of which every footbreadth had been familiar to men for
thousands of years, and in which it was supposed he would have no
inducement to wander. Francie, however, had read much about Italy; and
finding, on landing at Leghorn, that he was within a short distance of
Pisa, he left ship and cargo to take care of themselves, and set out on
foot to see the famous hanging tower, and the great marble cathedral.
And tower and cathedral he did see: but it was meanwhile found that he
was not quite suited for a supercargo; and he had shortly after to
return to Scotland, where his friends succeeded in establishing him in
the capacity of clerk and overseer upon a small property in Forfarshire,
which was farmed by the proprietor on what was then the newly introduced
modern system. He was acquainted, however, with the classical
description of Glammis Castle, in the letters of the poet Gray; and
after visiting the castle, he set out to examine the ancient encampment
at Ardoch--the _Lindum_ of the Romans. Finally, all hopes of getting him
settled at a distance being given up by his friends, he had to fall back
upon Cromarty, where he was yet once more appointed to a clerkship. The
establishment with which he was now connected was a large hempen
manufactory; and it was his chief employment to register the quantities
of hemp given out to the spinners, and the number of hanks of yarn into
which they had converted it, when given in. He soon, however, began to
take long walks; and the old women, with their yarn, would be often
found accumulated, ere his return, by tens and dozens at his
office-door. At length, after taking a very long walk indeed, for it
stretched from near the opening to the head of the Cromarty Firth, a
distance of about twenty miles, and included in its survey the antique
tower of Kinkell and the old Castle of Craighouse, he was relieved from
the duties of his clerkship, and left to pursue his researches
undisturbed, on a small annuity, the gift of his friends. He was
considerably advanced in life ere I knew him, profoundly grave, and very
taciturn, and, though he never discussed politics, a mighty reader of
the newspapers. "Oh! this is terrible," I have heard him exclaim, when
on one occasion a snow storm had blocked up both the coast and the
Highland roads for a week together, and arrested the northward course
of the mails,--"It is terrible to be left in utter ignorance of the
public business of the country!"
Francie, whom every one called Mr. ---- to his face, and always Francie
when his back was turned, chiefly because it was known he was
punctilious on the point, and did not like the more familiar term, used
in the winter evenings to be a regular member of the circle that met
beside my Uncle James's work-table. And, chiefly through the influence,
in the first instance, of my uncles, I was permitted to visit him in his
own room--a privilege enjoyed by scarce any one else--and even invited
to borrow his books. His room--a dark and melancholy chamber, grey with
dust--always contained a number of curious but not very rare things,
which he had picked up in his walks--prettily coloured fungi--vegetable
monstrosities of the commoner kind, such as "fause craws' nests," and
flattened twigs of pine--and with these, as the representatives of
another department of natural science, fragments of semi-transparent
quartz or of glittering feldspar, and sheets of mica a little above the
ordinary size. But the charm of the apartment lay in its books. Francie
was a book-fancier, and lacked only the necessary wealth to be in the
possession of a very pretty collection. As it was, he had some curious
volumes; among others, a first-edition copy of the "Nineteen Years'
Travels of William Lithgow," with an ancient woodcut, representing the
said William in the background, with his head brushing the skies, and,
far in front, two of the tombs which covered the heroes of Ilium, barely
tall enough to reach half-way to his knee, and of the length, in
proportion to the size of the traveller, of ordinary octavo volumes. He
had black-letter books, too, on astrology, and on the planetary
properties of vegetables; and an ancient book on medicine, that
recommended as a cure for the toothache a bit of the jaw of a suicide,
well triturated; and, as an infallible remedy for the falling-sickness,
an ounce or two of the brains of a young man, carefully dried over the
fire. Better, however, than these, for at least my purpose, he had a
tolerably complete collection of the British essayists, from Addison to
Mackenzie, with the "Essays" and "Citizen of the World" of Goldsmith;
several interesting works of travels and voyages, translated from the
French; and translations from the German, of Lavater, Zimmerman, and
Klopstock. He had a good many of the minor poets too; and I was enabled
to cultivate, mainly from his collection, a tolerably adequate
acquaintance with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne. Poor Francie was
at bottom a kindly and honest man; but the more intimately one knew him,
the more did the weakness and brokenness of his intellect appear. His
mind was a labyrinth without a clue, in whose recesses there lay stored
up a vast amount of book-knowledge, that could never be found when
wanted, and was of no sort of use to himself, or any one else. I got
sufficiently into his confidence to be informed, under the seal of
strict secrecy, that he contemplated producing a great literary work,
whose special character he had not quite determined, but which was to be
begun a few years hence. And when death found him, at an age which did
not fall far short of the allotted threescore and ten, the great unknown
work was still an undefined idea, and had still to be begun.
There were several other branches of my education going on at this time
outside the pale of the school, in which, though I succeeded in amusing
myself, I was no trifler. The shores of Cromarty are strewed over with
water-rolled fragments of the primary rocks, derived chiefly from the
west during the ages of the boulder clay; and I soon learned to take a
deep interest in sauntering over the various pebble-beds when shaken up
by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their numerous
components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary; and as, according
to Cowper, "the growth of what is excellent is slow," it was not until
long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of
representing the various species of simple rocks, by certain numerals,
and the compound ones by the numerals representative of each separate
component, ranged, as in vulgar fractions, along a medial line, with the
figures representative of the prevailing materials of the mass above,
and those representative of the materials in less proportions below.
Though, however, wholly deficient in the signs proper to represent what
I knew, I soon acquired a considerable quickness of eye in
distinguishing the various kinds of rock, and tolerably definite
conceptions of the generic character of the porphyries, granites,
gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, and mica-schists, which everywhere
strewed the beach. In the rocks of mechanical origin I was at this time
much less interested; but in individual, as in general history,
mineralogy almost always precedes geology. I was fortunate enough to
discover, one happy morning, among the lumber and debris of old John
Feddes's dark room, an antique-fashioned hammer, which had belonged, my
mother told me, to old John himself more than a hundred years before. It
was an uncouth sort of implement, with a handle of strong black oak, and
a short, compact head, square on the one face and oblong on the other.
And though it dealt rather an obtuse blow, the temper was excellent, and
the haft firmly set; and I went about with it, breaking into all manner
of stones, with great perseverance and success. I found, in a
large-grained granite, a few sheets of beautiful black mica, that, when
split exceedingly thin, and pasted between slips of mica of the ordinary
kind, made admirably-coloured eye-glasses, that converted the landscapes
around into richly-toned drawings in sepia; and numerous crystals of
garnet embedded in mica-schist, that were, I was sure, identical with
the stones set in a little gold brooch, the property of my mother. To
this last surmise, however, some of the neighbours to whom I showed my
prize demurred. The stones in my mother's brooch were precious stones,
they said; whereas what _I_ had found was merely a "stone upon the
shore." My friend the cabinet-maker went so far as to say that the
specimen was but a mass of plum-pudding stone, and its dark-coloured
enclosures simply the currants; but then, on the other hand, Uncle Sandy
took my view of the matter: the stone was not plum-pudding stone, he
said: he had often seen plum-pudding stone in England, and knew it to be
a sort of rough conglomerate of various components; whereas my stone was
composed of a finely-grained silvery substance, and the crystals which
it contained were, he was sure, gems like those in the brooch, and, so
far as he could judge, real garnets. This was a great decision; and,
much encouraged in consequence, I soon ascertained that garnets are by
no means rare among the pebbles of the Cromarty shore. Nay, so mixed up
are they with its sands even,--a consequence of the abundance of the
mineral among the primary rocks of Ross,--that after a heavy surf has
beaten the exposed beach of the neighbouring hill, there may be found on
it patches of comminuted garnet, from one to three square yards in
extent, that resemble, at a little distance, pieces of crimson
carpeting, and nearer at hand, sheets of crimson bead-work, and of which
almost every point and particle is a gem. From some unexplained
circumstance, connected apparently with the specific gravity of the
substance, it separates in this style from the general mass, on coasts
much beaten by the waves; but the garnets of these curious pavements,
though so exceedingly abundant, are in every instance exceedingly
minute. I never detected in them a fragment greatly larger than a
pin-head; but it was always with much delight that I used to fling
myself down on the shore beside some newly-discovered patch, and bethink
me, as I passed my fingers along the larger grains, of the heaps of gems
in Aladdin's cavern, or of Sinbad's valley of diamonds.
The Hill of Cromarty formed at this time at once my true school and
favourite play-ground; and if my master did wink at times harder than
master ought, when I was playing truant among its woods or on its
shores, it was, I believe, whether he thought so or no, all for the
best. My uncle Sandy had, as I have already said, been bred a
cartwright; but finding, on his return, after his seven years' service
on board a man-of-war, that the place had cartwrights enough for all the
employment, he applied himself to the humble but not unremunerative
profession of a sawyer, and used often to pitch his saw-pit, in the more
genial seasons of the year, among the woods of the hill. I remember, he
never failed setting it down in some pretty spot, sheltered from the
prevailing winds under the lee of some fern-covered rising ground or
some bosky thicket, and always in the near neighbourhood of a spring;
and it used to be one of my most delightful exercises to find out for
myself among the thick woods, in some holiday journey of exploration,
the place of a newly-formed pit. With the saw-pit as my baseline of
operations, and secure always of a share in Uncle Sandy's dinner, I used
to make excursions of discovery on every side,--now among the thicker
tracts of wood, which bore among the town-boys, from the twilight gloom
that ever rested in their recesses, the name of "the dungeons;" and anon
to the precipitous sea-shore, with its wild cliffs and caverns. The Hill
of Cromarty is one of a chain belonging to the great Ben Nevis line of
elevation; and, though it occurs in a sandstone district, is itself a
huge primary mass, upheaved of old from the abyss, and composed chiefly
of granitic gneiss and a red splintery horn-stone. It contains also
numerous veins and beds of hornblend rock and chlorite-schist, and of a
peculiar-looking granite, of which the quartz is white as milk, and the
feldspar red as blood. When still wet by the receding tide, these veins
and beds seem as if highly polished, and present a beautiful aspect; and
it was always with great delight that I used to pick my way among them,
hammer in hand, and fill my pockets with specimens.
There was one locality which I in especial loved. No path runs the way.
On the one side, an abrupt iron-tinged promontory, so remarkable for its
human-like profile, that it seems part of a half-buried sphinx,
protrudes into the deep green water. On the other--less prominent, for
even at full tide the traveller can wind between its base and the
sea--there rises a shattered and ruined precipice, seamed with blood-red
ironstone, that retains on its surface the bright metallic gleam, and
amid whose piles of loose and fractured rock one may still detect
fragments of stalactite. The stalactite is all that remains of a
spacious cavern, which once hollowed the precipice, but which, more than
a hundred years before, had tumbled down during a thunder-storm, when
filled with a flock of sheep, and penned up the poor creatures for ever.
The space between these headlands forms an irregular crescent of great
height, covered with wood a-top, and amid whose lichened crags, and on
whose steep slopes, the hawthorn, and bramble, and wild rasp, and rock
strawberry, take root, with many a scraggy shrub and sweet wild flower
besides; while along its base lie huge blocks of green hornblend, on a
rude pavement of granitic gneiss, traversed at one point, for many
yards, by a broad vein of milk-white quartz. The quartz vein formed my
central point of attraction in this wild paradise. The white stone,
thickly traversed by threads of purple and red, is a beautiful though
unworkable rock; and I soon ascertained that it is flanked by a vein of
feldspar broader than itself, of a brick-red tint, and the red stone
flanked, in turn, by a drab-coloured vein of the same mineral, in which
there occur in great abundance masses of a homogeneous mica,--mica not
existing in lamina, but, if I may use the term, as a sort of micaceous
felt. It would almost seem as if some gigantic experimenter of the old
world had set himself to separate into their simple mineral components
the granitic rocks of the hill, and that the three parallel veins were
the results of his labour. Such, however, was not the sort of idea which
they at this time suggested to me. I had read in Sir Walter Raleigh's
voyage to Guiana, the poetic description of that upper country in which
the knight's exploration of the river Corale terminated, and where, amid
lovely prospects of rich valleys, and wooded hills, and winding waters,
almost every rock bore on its surface the yellow gleam of gold. True,
according to the voyager, the precious metal was itself absent. But Sir
Walter, on afterwards showing "some of the stones to a Spaniard of the
Caraccas, was told by him they were _la madre de oro_, that is, the
mother of gold, and that the mine itself was further in the ground." And
though the quartz vein of the Cromarty Hill contained no metal more
precious than iron, and but little even of that, it was, I felt sure,
the "mother" of something very fine. As for silver, I was pretty certain
I had found the "mother" of _it_, if not, indeed, the precious metal
itself, in a cherty boulder, enclosing numerous cubes of rich galena;
and occasional masses of iron pyrites gave, as I thought, large promise
of gold. But though sometimes asked in humble irony, by the
farm-servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed along the
Cromarty beach, whether I was "getting siller in the stanes," I was so
unlucky as never to be able to answer their question in the affirmative.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] There may have been truth in the allegation; at least the hangman of
Inverness enjoyed, from time immemorial, a similar perquisite,--a peat
out of every creel brought to the burgh market.