"The wise
Shook their white aged heads o'er me, and said.
Of Such materials wretched men were made."--BYRON.
The report went abroad about this time, not without some foundation,
that Miss Bond purposed patronizing me. The copy of my verses which had
fallen into her hands--a genuine holograph--bore a-top a magnificent
view of the Doocot, in which horrid crags of burnt umber were perforated
by yawning caverns of Indian ink, and crested by a dense pine-forest of
sap-green; while vast waves blue on the one side and green on the other,
and bearing blotches of white lead a-top, rolled frightfully beneath.
And Miss Bond had concluded, it was said, that such a genius as that
evinced by the sketch and the "poem" for those sister arts of painting
and poesy in which she herself excelled, should not be left to waste
itself uncared for in the desert wilderness. She had published, shortly
before, a work, in two slim volumes, entitled, "Letters of a Village
Governess"--a curious kind of medley, little amenable to the ordinary
rules, but a genial book notwithstanding, with more heart than head
about it; and not a few of the incidents which it related had the merit
of being true. It was an unlucky merit for poor Miss Bond. She dated her
book from Fortrose, where she taught what was designated in the Almanac
as the boarding-school of the place, but which, according to Miss Bond's
own description, was the school of the "village governess." And as her
tales were found to be a kind of mosaics composed of droll bits of fact
picked up in the neighbourhood, Fortrose soon became considerably too
hot for her. She had drawn, under the over-transparent guise of the
niggardly Mrs. Flint, the skinflint wife of a "paper minister," who had
ruined at one fell blow her best silk dress, and a dozen of good eggs to
boot, by putting the eggs in her pocket when going out to a party, and
then stumbling over a stone. And, of course, Mrs. Skinflint and the Rev.
Mr. Skinflint, with all their blood-relations, could not be other than
greatly gratified to find the story furbished up in the printed form,
and set in fun. There were other stories as imprudent and as amusing--of
young ladies caught eavesdropping at their neighbours' windows; and of
gentlemen, ill at ease in their families, sitting soaking among vulgar
companions in the public-house; and so the authoress, shortly after the
appearance of her work, ceased to be the village governess of Fortrose,
and became the village governess of Cromarty.
It was on this occasion that I saw, for the first time, with mingled
admiration and awe, a human creature--not dead and gone, and merely a
printed name--that had actually published a book. Poor Miss Bond was a
kindly sort of person, fond of children, and mightily beloved by them in
turn; and, though keenly alive to the ludicrous, without a grain of
malice in her. I remember how, about this time, when, assisted by some
three or four boys more, I had succeeded in building a huge house, full
four feet long and three feet high, that contained us all, and a fire,
and a great deal of smoke to boot, Miss Bond the authoress came, and
looked in upon us, first through the little door, and then down through
the chimney, and gave us kind words, and seemed to enjoy our enjoyment
very much; and how we all deemed her visit one of the greatest events
that could possibly have taken place. She had been intimate with the
parents of Sir Walter Scott; and, on the appearance of Sir Walter's
first publication, the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," she had
taken a fit of enthusiasm, and written to him; and, when in the cold
paroxysm, and inclined to think she had done something foolish, had
received from Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, a characteristically
warm-hearted reply. She experienced much kindness at his hands ever
after; and when she herself became an author, she dedicated her book to
him. He now and then procured boarders for her; and when, after leaving
Cromarty for Edinburgh, she opened a school in the latter place, and got
on with but indifferent success, Sir Walter--though straggling with his
own difficulties at the time--sent her an enclosure of ten pounds, to
scare, as he said in his note, "the wolf from the door." But Miss Bond,
like the original of his own Jeanie Deans, was a "proud bodie;" and the
ten pounds were returned, with the intimation that the wolf had not yet
come to the door. Poor lady! I suspect he came to the door at last. Like
many other writers of books, her voyage through life skirted, for the
greater part of the way, the bleak lee-shore of necessity; and it cost
her not a little skilful steering at times to give the strand a
respectable offing. And in her solitary old age, she seemed to have got
fairly aground. There was an attempt made by some of her former pupils
to raise money enough to purchase for her a small annuity; but when the
design was in progress, I heard of her death. She illustrated in her
life the remark recorded by herself in her "Letters," as made by a
humble friend:--"It's no an easy thing, Mem, for a woman to go through
the world _without a head_," _i.e._, single and unprotected.
From some unexplained cause, Miss Bond's patronage never reached me. I
am sure the good lady intended giving me lessons in both drawing and
composition; for she had said it, and her heart was a kind one; but then
her time was too much occupied to admit of her devoting an occasional
hour to myself alone; and as for introducing me to her young-lady
classes, in my rough garments, ever greatly improved the wrong way by my
explorations in the ebb and the peat-moss, and frayed, at times, beyond
even my mother's ability of repair, by warping to the tops of great
trees, and by feats as a cragsman--that would have been a piece of
Jack-Cadeism, on which, then or now, no village governess could have
ventured. And so I was left to get on in verse and picture-making quite
in the wild way, without care or culture.
My schoolfellows liked my stories well enough--better at least, on most
occasions, than they did the lessons of the master; but, beyond the
common ground of enjoyment which these extempore compositions furnished
to both the "sennachie" and his auditors, our tracts of amusement lay
widely apart. I disliked, as I have said, the yearly cock-fight--found
no pleasure in cat-killing, or in teasing at nights, or on the street,
the cross-tempered, half-witted _eccentrics_ of the village--usually
kept aloof from the ordinary play-grounds, and very rarely mingled in
the old hereditary games. On the other hand, with the exception of my
little friend of the cave, who, even after that disastrous incident,
evinced a tendency to trust and follow me as implicitly as before, my
schoolmates cared as little for my amusements as I did for theirs; and,
having the majority on their side, they of course voted mine to be the
foolish ones. And certainly a run of ill-luck followed me in my sports
about this time, that did give some show of reason to their decision.
In the course of my book-hunting, I had fallen in with two old-fashioned
military treatises, part of the small library of a retired officer
lately deceased, of which the one entitled the "Military Medley,"
discussed the whole art of marshalling troops, and contained numerous
plans, neatly coloured, of battalions drawn up in all possible forms, to
meet all possible exigencies; while the other, which also abounded in
prints, treated of the noble science of fortification according to the
system of Vauban. I poured over both works with much perseverance; and,
regarding them as admirable toy-books, set myself to construct, on a
very small scale, some of the toys with which they specially dealt. The
sea-shore in the immediate neighbourhood of the town appeared to my
inexperienced eye an excellent field for the carrying on of a campaign.
The sea-sand I found quite coherent enough, when still moistened by the
waters of the receding tide, to stand up in the form of towers and
bastions, and long lines of rampart; and there was one of the commonest
of the Littorinidae--_Littorina litoralis_, that in one of its varieties
is of a rich yellow colour, and in another of a bluish-green tint--which
supplied me with soldiers enough to execute all the evolutions figured
and described in the "Medley." The warmly-hued yellow shells represented
Britons in their scarlet--the more dingy ones, the French in their
uniforms of dirty blue; well-selected specimens of _Purpura lapillus_,
just tipped on their backs with a speck of paint, blue or red, from my
box, made capital dragoons; while a few dozens of the slender pyramidal
shells of _Turritella communis_ formed complete parks of artillery. With
such unlimited stores of the _materiel_ of war at my command, I was
enabled, more fortunate than Uncle Toby of old, to fight battles and
conduct retreats, assault and defend, build up fortifications, and then
batter them down again, at no expense at all; and the only drawback on
such a vast amount of advantage that I could at first perceive consisted
in the circumstance, that the shore was exceedingly open to observation,
and that my new amusements, when surveyed at a little distance, did
greatly resemble those of the very young children of the place, who used
to repair to the same arenaceous banks and shingle-beds, to bake
dirt-pies in the sand, or range lines of shells on little shelves of
stone, imitative of the crockery cupboard at home. Not only my
school-fellows, but also some of their parents, evidently arrived at the
conclusion that the two sets of amusements--mine and those of the little
children--were identical; for the elder folk said, that "in their time,
poor Francie had been such another boy, and every one saw what he had
come to;" while the younger, more energetic in their manifestations,
and more intolerant of folly, have even paused in their games of
marbles, or ceased spinning their tops, to hoot at me from a safe
distance. But the campaign went on; and I solaced myself by reflecting,
that neither the big folk nor the little folk could bring a battalion of
troops across a bridge of boats in the face of an enemy, or knew that a
regular fortification could be constructed on only a regular polygon.
I at length discovered however, that as a sea-shore is always a sloping
plane, and the Cromarty beach, in particular, a plane of a rather steep
slope, it afforded no proper site for a fortress fitted to stand a
protracted siege, seeing that, fortify the place as I might, it could be
easily commanded by batteries raised on the higher side. And so fixing
upon a grassy knoll among the woods, in the immediate neighbourhood of a
scaur of boulder clay, capped by a thick stratum of sand, as a much
better scene of operations, I took possession of the knoll somewhat
irregularly; and carrying to it large quantities of sand from the scaur,
converted it into the site of a magnificent stronghold. First I erected
an ancient castle, consisting of four towers built on a rectangular
base, and connected by straight curtains embrasured a-top. I then
surrounded the castle by outworks in the modern style, consisting of
greatly lower curtains than the ancient ones, flanked by numerous
bastions, and bristling with cannon of huge calibre, made of the jointed
stalks of the hemlock; while, in advance of these, I laid down ravelins,
horn-works, and tenailles. I was vastly delighted with my work: it
would, I was sure, be no easy matter to reduce such a fortress; but
observing an eminence in the immediate neighbourhood which could, I
thought, be occupied by a rather annoying battery, I was deliberating
how I might best take possession of it by a redoubt, when out started,
from behind a tree, the factor of the property on which I was
trespassing, and rated me soundly for spoiling the grass in a manner so
wantonly mischievous. Horn-work and half-moon, tower and bastion,
proved of no manner of effect in repelling an attack of a kind so little
anticipated. I did think that the factor, who was not only an
intelligent man, but had also seen much service in his day on the town
links, as the holder of a commission in the Cromarty volunteers, might
have perceived that I was labouring on scientific principles, and so
deem me worthy of some tolerance on that account; but I suppose he did
not; though, to be sure, his scold died out good-naturedly enough in the
end, and I saw him laugh as he turned away. But so it was, that in the
extremity of my mortification I gave up generalship and bastion-building
for the time; though, alas! my next amusement must have worn in the eyes
of my youthful compeers as suspicious an aspect as either.
My friend of the cave had lent me what I had never seen before--a fine
quarto edition of Anson's Voyages, containing the original prints (my
father's copy had only the maps); among the others, Mr. Brett's
elaborate delineation of that strangest of vessels, a proa of the
Ladrone Islands. I was much struck by the singularity of the
construction of a barque that, while its head and stern were exactly
alike, had sides that totally differed from each other, and that, with
the wind upon the beam, outsailed, it was said, all other vessels in the
world; and having the command of the little shop in which my Uncle Sandy
made occasional carts and wheelbarrows when unemployed abroad, I set
myself to construct a miniature proa, on the model given in the print,
and succeeded in fabricating a very extraordinary proa indeed. While its
lee side was perpendicular as a wall, its windward one, to which there
was an outrigger attached, resembled that of a flat-bottomed boat; head
and stern were exactly alike, so as to fit each for performing in turn
the part of either; a moveable yard, which supported the sail, had to be
shifted towards the end converted into the stern for the time, at each
tack; while the sail itself--a most uncouth-looking thing--formed a
scalene triangle. Such was the vessel--some eighteen inches long or
so--with which I startled from their propriety the mimic navigators of a
horse-pond in the neighbourhood--all very masterly critics in all sorts
of barques and barges known on the Scottish coast. According to
Campbell,
"'Twas a thing beyond
Description wretched: such a wherry,
Perhaps, ne'er ventured on a pond,
Or crossed a ferry."
And well did my fellows appreciate its extreme ludicrousness. It was
certainly rash to "venture" it on this especial "pond;" for, greatly to
the damage of the rigging, it was fairly pelted off, and I was sent to
test elsewhere its sailing qualities, which were, as I ascertained, not
very remarkable after all. And thus, after a manner so unworthy, were my
essays in strategy and barque-building received by a censorious age,
that judged ere it knew. Were I sentimental, which lucidly I am not, I
might well exclaim, in the very vein of Rousseau, Alas! it has been ever
the misfortune of my life that, save by a few friends, I have never been
understood!
I was evidently out-Francieing Francie; and the parents of my young
friend, who saw that I had acquired considerable influence over him, and
were afraid lest I should make another Francie of _him_, had become
naturally enough desirous to break off our intimacy, when there occurred
an unlucky accident, which served materially to assist them in the
design. My friend's father was the master of a large trading smack,
which, in war times, carried a few twelve-pounders, and was furnished
with a small magazine of powder and shot; and my friend having secured
for himself from the general stock, through the connivance of the
ship-boy, an entire cannon cartridge, containing some two or three
pounds of gunpowder, I was, of course, let into the secret, and invited
to share in the sport and the spoil We had a glorious day together in
his mother's garden: never before did such magnificent volcanoes break
forth out of mole-hills, or were plots of daisies and violets so
ruthlessly scorched and torn by the explosion of deep laid mines; and
though a few mishaps did happen to over-forward fingers, and to
eye-brows that were in the way, our amusements passed off innocuously on
the whole, and evening saw nearly the half of our precious store
unexhausted. It was garnered up by my friend in an unsuspected corner of
the garret in which he slept, and would have been safe, had he not been
seized, when going to bed, with a yearning desire to survey his treasure
by candle-light; when an unlucky spark from the flame exploded the
whole. He was so sadly burnt about the face and eyes as to be blind for
several days after; but, amid smoke and confusion, he gallantly bolted
his garret-door, and, while the inmates of the household, startled by
the shock and the noise, came rushing up stairs, sturdily refused to let
any of them in. Volumes of gunpowder reek issued from every crack and
cranny, and his mother and sisters were prodigiously alarmed. At length,
however, he capitulated--terms unknown; and I, next morning, heard with
horror and dismay of the accident. It had been matter of agreement
between us on the previous day, mainly in order to screen the fine
fellow of a ship-boy, that I should be regarded as the owner of the
powder; but here was a consequence on which I had not calculated; and
the strong desire to see my poor friend was dashed by the dread of being
held responsible by his parents and sisters for the accident. And so,
more than a week elapsed ere I could muster up courage enough to visit
him. I was coldly received by his mother, and, what vexed me to the
heart, coldly received by himself; and suspecting that he had been
making an ungenerous use of our late treaty, I took leave in high
dudgeon, and came away. My suspicions, however, wronged him: he had
stoutly denied, as I afterwards learned, that I had any share in the
powder; but his friends deeming the opportunity a good one for breaking
with me, had compelled him, very unwillingly, and after much
resistance, to give me up. And from this period more than two years
elapsed, though our hearts beat quick and high every time we
accidentally met, ere we exchanged a single word. On one occasion,
however, shortly after the accident, we did exchange letters. I wrote to
him from the school-form, when, of course, I ought to have been engaged
with my tasks, a stately epistle, in the style of the billets in the
"Female Quixote," which began, I remember, as follows:--"I once thought
I had a friend whom I could rely upon; but experience tells me he was
only nominal. For, had he been a real friend, no accident could have
interfered with, or arbitrary command annihilated, his affection," &c.,
&c. As I was rather an indifferent scribe at the time, one of the lads,
known as the "copperplate writers" of the class, made for me a fair copy
of my lucubration, full of all manner of elegant dashes, and in which
the spelling of every word was scrupulously tested by the dictionary.
And, in due course, I received a carefully engrossed note in reply, of
which the manual portion was performed by my old companion, but the
composition, as he afterwards told me, elaborated by some one else. It
assured me he was still my friend, but that there were "certain
circumstances" which would prevent us from meeting for the future on our
old terms. We were, however, destined to meet pretty often in the
future, notwithstanding; and narrowly missed going to the bottom
together many years after, in the Floating Manse, grown infirm in her
nether parts at the time, when he was the outed minister of Small Isles,
and I editor of the _Witness_ newspaper.
I had a maternal aunt long settled in the Highlands of Sutherland, who
was so much older than her sister, my mother, that, when nursing her
eldest boy, she had, when on a visit to the low country, assisted also
in nursing her. The boy had shot up into a very clever lad, who, having
gone to seek his fortune in the south, rose, through the several degrees
of clerkship in a mercantile firm, to be the head of a commercial house
of his own, which, though ultimately unsuccessful, seemed for some four
or five years to be in a fair way of thriving. For about three of these
the portion of the profits which fell to my cousin's share did not fall
short of fifteen hundred pounds per annum; and on visiting his parents
in their Highland home in the heyday of his prosperity, after an absence
of years, it was found that he had a great many friends in his native
district on whom he had not calculated, and of a class that had not been
greatly in the habit of visiting his mother's cottage, but who now came
to lunch, and dine, and take their wine with him, and who seemed to
value and admire him very much. My aunt, who was little accustomed to
receive high company, and found herself, like Martha of old, "cumbered
about much serving," urgently besought my mother, who was young and
active at the time, to visit and assist her; and, infinitely to my
delight, I was included in the invitation. The place was not much above
thirty miles from Cromarty; but then it was in the _true_ Highlands,
which I had never before seen, save on the distant horizon; and, to a
boy who had to walk all the way, even thirty miles, in an age when
railways were not, and ere even mail gigs had penetrated so far,
represented a journey of no inconsiderable distance. My mother, though
rather a delicate-looking woman, walked remarkably well; and early on
the evening of the second day, we reached together my aunt's cottage, in
the ancient Barony of Gruids. It was a low, long, dingy edifice of turf,
four or five rooms in length, but only one in height, that, lying along
a gentle acclivity, somewhat resembled at a distance a huge black snail
creeping up the hill. As the lower apartment was occupied by my uncle's
half-dozen milk-cows, the declination of the floor, consequent on the
nature of the site, proved of signal importance, from the free drainage
which it secured; the second apartment, reckoning upwards, which was of
considerable size, formed the sitting-room of the family, and had, in
the old Highland style, its fire full in the middle of the floor,
without back or sides; so that, like a bonfire kindled in the open air,
all the inmates could sit around it in a wide circle--the women
invariably ranged on the one side, and the men on the other; the
apartment beyond was partitioned into small and very dark bed-rooms;
while, further on still, there was a closet with a little window in it,
which was assigned to my mother and me; and beyond all lay what was
emphatically "the room," as it was built of stone, and had both window
and chimney, with chairs, and table, and chest of drawers, a large
box-bed, and a small but well-filled bookcase. And "the room" was, of
course, for the time, my cousin the merchant's apartment,--his dormitory
at night, and the hospitable refectory in which he entertained his
friends by day.
My aunt's family was one of solid worth. Her husband--a compactly-built,
stout-limbed, elderly Highlander, rather below the middle size, of grave
and somewhat melancholy aspect, but in reality of a temperament rather
cheerful than otherwise--had been somewhat wild in his young days. He
had been a good shot and a skilful angler, and had danced at bridals,
and, as was common in the Highlands at the time, at lykewakes; nay, on
one occasion he had succeeded in inducing a new-made widow to take the
floor in a strathspey, beside her husband's corpse when every one else
had failed to bring her up, by roguishly remarking, in her hearing, that
whoever else might have refused to dance at poor Donald's death wake, he
little thought it would have been she. But a great change had passed
over him; and he was now a staid, thoughtful, God-fearing man, much
respected in the Barony for honest worth and quiet unobtrusive
consistency of character. His wife had been brought, at an early age,
under the influence of Donald Roy's ring, and had, like her mother, been
the means of introducing the vitalities of religion into her household.
They had two other sons besides the merchant--both well-built, robust
men, somewhat taller than their father, and of such character, that one
of my Cromarty cousins, in making out his way, by dint of frequent and
sedulous inquiry, to their dwelling, found the general verdict of the
district embodied in the very bad English of a poor old woman, who,
after doing her best to direct him, certified her knowledge of the
household by remarking, "It's a goot mistress;--it's a goot
maister;--it's a goot, goot two lads." The elder of the two brothers
superintended, and partly wrought, his father's little farm; for the
father himself found employment enough in acting as a sort of humble
factor for the proprietor of the Barony, who lived at a distance, and
had no dwelling upon the land. The younger was a mason and slater, and
was usually employed, in the working seasons, at a distance; but in
winter, and, on this occasion, for a few weeks during the visit of his
brother the merchant, he resided with his father. Both were men of
marked individuality of character. The elder, Hugh, was an ingenious,
self-taught mechanic, who used in the long winter evenings to fashion a
number of curious little articles by the fireside--among the rest,
Highland snuff-mulls, with which he supplied all his friends; and he was
at this time engaged in building for his father a Highland barn, and, to
vary the work, fabricating for him a Highland plough. The younger,
George, who had wrought for a few years at his trade in the south of
Scotland, was a great reader, wrote very tolerable prose, and verse
which, if not poetry, to which he made no pretensions, was at least
quaintly-turned rhyme. He had, besides, a competent knowledge of
geometry, and was skilled in architectural drawing; and--strange
accomplishment for a Celt--he was an adept in the noble science of
self-defence. But George never sought out quarrels; and such was his
amount of bone and muscle, and such the expression of manly resolution
stamped on his countenance, that they never came in his way unsought.
At the close of the day, when the members of the household had assembled
in a wide circle round the fire, my uncle "took the Book," and I
witnessed, for the first time, family-worship conducted in Gaelic.
There was, I found, an interesting peculiarity in one portion of the
services which he conducted. He was, as I have said, an elderly man, and
had worshipped in his family ere Dr. Stewart's Gaelic translation of the
Scriptures had been introduced into the county; and as he possessed in
those days only the English Bible, while his domestics understood only
Gaelic, he had to acquire the art, not uncommon in Sutherland at the
time, of translating the English chapter for them, as he read, into
their native tongue; and this he had learned to do with such ready
fluency, that no one could have guessed it to be other than a Gaelic
work from which he was reading. Nor had the introduction of Dr.
Stewart's translation rendered the practice obsolete in his household.
His Gaelic was _Sutherlandshire_ Gaelic, whereas that of Dr. Stewart was
Argyleshire Gaelic. His family understood his rendering better, in
consequence, than that of the Doctor; and so he continued to translate
from his English Bible _ad aperturam libri_, many years after the Gaelic
edition had been spread over the country. The concluding evening prayer
was one of great solemnity and unction. I was unacquainted with the
language in which it was couched; but it was impossible to avoid being
struck, notwithstanding, with its wrestling earnestness and fervour. The
man who poured it forth evidently believed there was an unseen ear open
to it, and an all-seeing presence in the place, before whom every secret
thought lay exposed. The entire scene was a deeply impressive one; and
when I saw, in witnessing the celebration of high mass in a Popish
cathedral many years after, the altar suddenly enveloped in a dim and
picturesque obscurity, amid which the curling smoke of the incense
ascended, and heard the musically-modulated prayer sounding in the
distance from within the screen, my thoughts reverted to the rude
Highland cottage, where, amid solemnities not theatric, the red umbry
light of the fire fell with uncertain glimmer upon dark walls, and bare
black rafters, and kneeling forms, and a pale expanse of dense smoke,
that, filling the upper portion of the roof, overhung the floor like a
ceiling, and there arose amid the gloom the sounds of prayer truly
God-directed, and poured out from the depths of the heart; and I felt
that the stoled priest of the cathedral was merely an artist, though a
skilful one, but that in the "priest and father" of the cottage there
were the truth and reality from which the artist drew. No bolt was drawn
across the outer door as we retired for the night. The philosophic Biot,
when employed with his experiments on the second pendulum, resided for
several months in one of the smaller Shetland islands; and, fresh from
the troubles of France--his imagination bearing about with it, if I may
so speak, the stains of the guillotine--the state of trustful security
in which he found the simple inhabitants filled him with astonishment.
"Here, during the twenty-five years in which Europe has been devouring
herself," he exclaimed, "the door of the house I inhabit has remained
open day and night." The interior of Sutherland was at the time of my
visit in a similar condition. The door of my uncle's cottage,
unfurnished with lock or bar, opened, like that of the hermit in the
ballad, with a latch; but, unlike that of the hermit, it was not because
there were no stores within to demand the care of the master, but
because at that comparatively recent period the crime of theft was
unknown in the district.
I rose early next morning, when the dew was yet heavy on grass and
lichen, curious to explore a locality so new to me. The tract, though a
primary one, forms one of the tamer gneiss districts of Scotland; and I
found the nearer hills comparatively low and confluent, and the broad
valley in which lay my uncle's cottage, flat, open, and unpromising.
Still there were a few points to engage me; and the more I attached
myself to them, the more did their interest grow. The western slopes of
the valley are mottled by grassy tomhans--the moraines of some ancient
glacier, around and over which there rose, at this period, a low
widely-spreading wood of birch, hazel, and mountain ash--of hazel, with
its nuts fast filling at the time, and of mountain ash, with its berries
glowing bright in orange and scarlet. In looking adown the hollow, a
group of the green tomhans might be seen relieved against the blue hills
of Ross; in looking upwards, a solitary birch-covered hillock of similar
origin, but larger proportions, stood strongly out against the calm
waters of Loch Shin and the purple peaks of the distant Ben-Hope. In the
bottom of the valley, close beside my uncle's cottage, I marked several
low swellings of the rock beneath, rising above the general level; and,
ranged along these, there were groups of what seemed to be huge boulder
stones, save that they were less rounded and water-worn than ordinary
boulders, and were, what groups of boulders rarely are, all of one
quality. And on examination, I ascertained that some of their number,
which stood up like broken obelisks, tall, and comparatively narrow of
base, and all hoary with moss and lichen, were actually still connected
with the mass of rock below. They were the wasted upper portions of vast
dikes and veins of a grey, large-grained syenite, that traverse the
fundamental gneiss of the valley, and which I found veined, in turn, by
threads and seams of a white quartz, abounding in drusy cavities,
thickly lined along their sides with sprig crystals. Never had I seen
such lovely crystals on the shores of Cromarty, or anywhere else. They
were clear and transparent as the purest spring water, furnished each
with six sides, and sharpened a-top into six facets. Borrowing one of
Cousin George's hammers, I soon filled a little box with these gems,
which even my mother and aunt were content to admire, as what of old
used, they said, to be called Bristol diamonds, and set in silver
brooches and sleeve buttons. Further, within less than a hundred yards
of the cottage, I found a lively little stream, brown, but clear as a
cairngorm of the purest water, and abounding, as I soon ascertained, in
trout, lively and little like itself, and gaily speckled with scarlet.
It wound through a flat, dank meadow, never disturbed by the plough; for
it had been a burying-ground of old, and flat undressed stones lay thick
amid the rank grass. And in the lower corner, where the old turf-wall
had sunk into an inconspicuous mound, there stood a mighty tree, all
solitary, for its fellows had long before disappeared, and so
hollow-hearted in its corrupt old age, that though it still threw out
every season a mighty expanse of foliage, I was able to creep into a
little chamber in its trunk, from which I could look out through
circular openings where boughs once had been, and listen, when a sudden
shower came sweeping down the glen, to the pattering of the rain-drops
amid the leaves. The valley of the Gruids was perhaps not one of the
finest or most beautiful of Highland valleys, but it was a very
admirable place after all; and amid its woods, and its rocks, and its
tomhans, and at the side of its little trouting stream, the weeks passed
delightfully away.
My cousin William, the merchant, had, as I have said, many guests; but
they were all too grand to take any notice of me. There was, however,
one delightful man, who was said to know a great deal about rocks and
stones, that, having heard of my fine large crystals, desired to see
both them and the boy who had found them; and I was admitted to hear him
talk about granites, and marbles, and metallic veins, and the gems that
lie hid among the mountains in nooks and crannies. I am afraid I would
not now deem him a very accomplished mineralogist: I remember enough of
his conversation to conclude that he knew but little, and that little
not very correctly: but not before Werner or Hutton could I have bowed
down with a profounder reverence. He spoke of the marbles of Assynt--of
the petrifactions of Helmsdale and Brora--of shells and plants embedded
in solid rocks, and of forest trees converted into stone; and my ears
drank in knowledge eagerly, as those of the Queen of Sheba of old when
she listened to Solomon. But all too soon did the conversation change.
My cousin was mighty in Gaelic etymology, and so was the mineralogist;
and while my cousin held that the name of the Barony of Gruids was
derived from the great hollow tree, the mineralogist was quite as
certain that it was derived from its syenite, or, as he termed it, its
_granite_, which resembled, he remarked, from the whiteness of its
feldspar, a piece of curd. _Gruids_, said the one, means the place of
the great tree; _Gruids_, said the other, means the place of the curdled
stone. I do not remember how they settled the controversy; but it
terminated, by an easy transition, in a discussion respecting the
authenticity of Ossian--a subject on which they were both perfectly
agreed. There could exist no manner of doubt regarding the fact that the
poems given to the world by Macpherson had been sung in the Highlands by
Ossian, the son of Fingal, more than fourteen hundred years before. My
cousin was a devoted member of the Highland Society; and the Highland
Society, in these days, was very much engaged in ascertaining the right
cut of the philabeg, and in determining the chronology and true sequence
of events in the Ossianic age.
Happiness perfect and entire is, it is said, not to be enjoyed in this
sublunary state; and even in the Gruids, where there was so much to be
seen, heard, and found out, and where I was separated by more than
thirty miles from my Latin--for I had brought none of it from home with
me--this same Ossianic controversy rose like a Highland fog on my
horizon, to chill and darken my hours of enjoyment. My cousin possessed
everything that had been written on the subject, including a
considerable amount of manuscript of his own composition; and as Uncle
James had inspired him with the belief that I could master anything to
which in good earnest I set my mind, he had determined that it should be
no fault of his if I did not become mighty in the controversy regarding
the authenticity of Ossian. This was awful. I liked Blair's Dissertation
well enough, nor did I greatly quarrel with that of Kames; and as for
Sir Walter's critique in the _Edinburgh_, on the opposite side, I
thought it not only thoroughly sensible, but, as it furnished me with
arguments against the others, deeply interesting to boot. But then there
succeeded a vast ocean of dissertation, emitted by Highland gentlemen
and their friends, as the dragon in the Apocalypse emitted the great
flood which the earth swallowed up; and, when once fairly embarked upon
it, I could see no shore and find no bottom. And so at length, though
very unwillingly--for my cousin was very kind--I fairly mutinied and
struck work, just as he had begun to propose that, after mastering the
authenticity controversy, I should set myself to acquire Gaelic, in
order that I might be able to read Ossian in the original. My cousin was
not well pleased; but I did not choose to aggravate the case by giving
expression to the suspicion which, instead of lessening, has rather
grown upon me since, that as I possessed an English copy of the poems, I
had read the true Ossian in the original already. With Cousin George,
however, who, though strong on the authenticity side, liked a joke
rather better than he did Ossian, I was more free; and to him I ventured
to designate his brother's fine Gaelic copy of the poems, with a superb
head of the ancient bard affixed, as "The Poems of Ossian in Gaelic,
translated from the original English by their author." George looked
grim, and called me infidel, and then laughed, and said he would tell
his brother. But he didn't; and as I really liked the poems, especially
"_Temora_" and some of the smaller pieces, and could read them with more
real pleasure than the greater part of the Highlanders who believed in
them, I did not wholly lose credit with my cousin the merchant. He even
promised to present me with a finely bound edition of the "Elegant
Extracts," in three bulky octavo volumes, whenever I should have gained
my first prize at College; but I unluckily failed to qualify myself for
the gift; and my copy of the "Extracts" I had to purchase for myself ten
years after, at a book-stall, when working in the neighbourhood of
Edinburgh as a journeyman mason.
It is not every day one meets with so genuine a Highlander as my cousin
the merchant; and though he failed to inspire me with all his own
Ossianic faith and zeal, there were some of the little old Celtic
practices which he resuscitated _pro tempore_ in his father's household,
that I learned to like very much. He restored the genuine Highland
breakfasts; and, after hours spent in busy exploration outside, I found
I could as thoroughly admire the groaning table, with its cheese, and
its trout, and its cold meat, as even the immortal Lexicographer
himself. Some of the dishes, too, which he revived, were at least
curious. There was a supply of _gradden_-meal prepared--_i.e._, grain
dried in a pot over the fire, and then coarsely ground in a
handmill--which made cakes that, when they had hunger for their sauce,
could be eaten; and on more than one occasion I shared in a not
unpalatable sort of blood-pudding, enriched with butter, and well
seasoned with pepper and salt, the main ingredient of which was derived,
through a judicious use of the lancet, from the _yeld_ cattle of the
farm. The practice was an ancient, and by no means unphilosophic one. In
summer and early autumn there is plenty of grass in the Highlands; but,
of old at least, there used to be very little grain in it before the
beginning of October; and as the cattle could, in consequence, provide
themselves with a competent supply of blood from the grass, when their
masters, who could not eat grass, and had little else that they could
eat, were able to acquire very little, it was opportunely discovered
that, by making a division in this way of the all-essential fluid,
accumulated as a common stock, the circumstances of the cattle and their
owners could be in some degree equalized. With these peculiarly Highland
dishes there mingled others not less genuine--now and then a salmon from
the river, and a haunch of venison from the hill-side--which I relished
better still; and if all Highlanders live but as well in the present day
as I did during my stay with my aunt and cousins, they would be rather
unreasonable were they greatly to complain.
There were some of the other Highland restorations effected by my
cousin that pleased me much. He occasionally gathered at night around
the central Ha' fire a circle of the elderly men of the neighbourhood,
to repeat long-derived narratives of the old clan feuds of the district,
and wild Fingalian legends; and though, of course, ignorant of the
language in which the stories were conveyed, by taking my seat beside
Cousin George, and getting him to translate for me in an under tone, as
the narratives went on, I contrived to carry away with me at least as
much of the clan stories and legends as I ever after found use for. The
clan stories were waxing at the time rather dim and uncertain in
Sutherland. The county, through the influence of its good Earls and its
godly Lords Reay, had been early converted to Protestantism; and its
people had in consequence ceased to take liberties with the throats and
cattle of their neighbours, about a hundred years earlier than in any
other part of the Scotch Highlands. And as for the Fingalian legends,
they were, I found, very wild legends indeed. Some of them immortalized
wonderful hunters, who had excited the love of Fingal's lady, and whom
her angry and jealous husband had sent out to hunt monstrous wild boars
with poisonous bristles on their backs,--secure in this way of getting
rid of them. And some of them embalmed the misdeeds of spiritless
diminutive Fions, not very much above fifteen feet in height, who,
unlike their more active companions, could not leap across the Cromarty
or Dornoch Firths on their spears, and who, as was natural, were very
much despised by the women of the tribe. The pieces of fine sentiment
and brilliant description discovered by Macpherson seemed never to have
found their way into this northern district. But, told in fluent Gaelic,
in the great "Ha'," the wild legends served every necessary purpose
equally well. The "Ha'" in the autumn nights, as the days shortened and
the frosts set in, was a genial place; and so attached was my cousin to
its distinctive principle--the fire in the midst--as handed down from
the "days of other years," that in the plan of a new two-storied house
for his father, which he had procured from a London architect, one of
the nether rooms was actually designed in the circular form; and a
hearth like a millstone, placed in the centre, represented the place of
the fire. But there was, as I remarked to Cousin George, no
corresponding central hole in the room above, through which to let up
the smoke; and I questioned whether a nicely plastered apartment, round
as a band-box, with the fire in the middle, like the sun in the centre
of an Orrery, would have been quite like anything ever seen in the
Highlands before. The plan, however, was not destined to encounter
criticism, or give trouble in the execution of it.
On Sabbaths my cousin and his two brothers attended the parish church,
attired in the full Highland dress; and three handsome, well-formed men
they were; but my aunt, though mayhap not quite without the mother's
pride, did not greatly relish the exhibition; and oftener than once I
heard her say so to her sister my mother; though she, smitten by the
gallant appearance of her nephews, seemed inclined rather to take the
opposite side. My uncle, on the other hand, said nothing either for or
against the display. He had been a keen Highlander in his younger days;
and when the inhibition against wearing tartan and the philabeg had been
virtually removed, in consideration of the achievements of the "hardy
and dauntless men" who, according to Chatham, conquered for England "in
every quarter of the globe," he had celebrated the event in a
merrymaking, at which the dance was kept up from night till morning; but
though he retained, I suspect, his old partialities, he was now a
sobered man; and when I ventured to ask him, on one occasion, why he too
did not get a Sunday kilt, which, by the way, he would "_have set_,"
notwithstanding his years, as well as any of his sons, he merely replied
with a quiet "No, no; there's no fool like an old fool."