"When they sawe the darksome night,
They sat them downe and cryed."--BABES IN THE WOOD.
I spent the holidays of two other autumns in this delightful Highland
valley. On the second, as on the first occasion, I had accompanied my
mother, specially invited; but the third journey was an unsanctioned
undertaking of my own and a Cromarty cousin, my contemporary, to whom,
as he had never travelled the way, I had to act as protector and guide.
I reached my aunt's cottage without mishap or adventure of any kind; but
found, that during the twelvemonth which had just elapsed, great changes
had taken place in the circumstances of the household. My cousin George,
who had married in the interim, had gone to reside in a cottage of his
own; and I soon ascertained that my cousin William, who had been for
several months resident with his father, had not nearly so many visitors
as before; nor did presents of salmon and haunches of venison come at
all so often the way. Immediately after the final discomfiture of
Napoleon, an extensive course of speculation in which he had ventured to
engage had turned out so ill, that, instead of making him a fortune, as
at first seemed probable, it had landed him in the _Gazette_; and he was
now tiding over the difficulties of a time of settlement, six hundred
miles from the scene of disaster, in the hope of being soon enabled to
begin the world anew. He bore his losses with quiet magnanimity; and I
learned to know and like him better during his period of eclipse than in
the previous time, when summer friends had fluttered around him by
scores. He was a generous, warm-hearted man, who felt, with the force of
an implanted instinct not vouchsafed to all, that it is more blessed to
give than to receive; and it was doubtless a wise provision of nature,
and worthy, in this point of view, the special attention of moralists
and philosophers, that his old associates, the grand gentlemen, did not
now often come his way; seeing that his inability any longer to give
would cost him, in the circumstances, great pain.
I was much with my cousin George in his new dwelling. It was one of the
most delightful of Highland cottages, and George was happy in it, far
above the average lot of humanity, with his young wife. He had dared, in
opposition to the general voice of the district, to build it half-way up
the slope of a beautiful tomhan, that, waving with birch from base to
summit, rose regular as a pyramid from the bottom of the valley, and
commanded a wide view of Loch Shin on the one hand, with the moors and
mountains that lie beyond; and overlooked, on the other, with all the
richer portions of the Barony of Gruids, the church and picturesque
hamlet of Lairg. Half-hidden by the graceful birchen trees that sprang
up thick around, with their silvery boles and light foliage, it was
rather a nest than a house; and George, emancipated, by his reading, and
his residence for a time in the south, from at least the wilder beliefs
of the locality, failed to suffer, as had been predicted, for his
temerity; as the "good people," who, much to their credit, had made
choice of the place for themselves long before, never, to his knowledge,
paid him a visit. He had brought his share of the family library with
him; and it was a large share. He had mathematical instruments too, and
a colour-box, and the tools of his profession; in especial, large
hammers fitted to break great stones; and I was generously made free of
them all,--books, instruments, colour-box, and hammers. His cottage,
too, commanded, from its situation, a delightful variety of most
interesting objects. It had all the advantages of my uncle's domicile,
and a great many more.
The nearer shores of Loch Shin were scarce half a mile away; and there
was a low long promontory which shot out into the lake, that was covered
at that time by an ancient wood of doddered time-worn trees, and bore
amid its outer solitudes, where the waters circled round its terminal
apex, one of those towers of hoary eld--memorials, mayhap, of the
primeval stone-period in our island, to which the circular erections of
Glenelg and Dornadilla belong. It was formed of undressed stones of vast
size, uncemented by mortar; and through the thick walls ran winding
passages--the only covered portions of the building, for the inner area
had never been furnished with a roof--in which, when a sudden shower
descended, the loiterer amid the ruins could find shelter. It was a
fascinating place to a curious boy. Some of the old trees had become
mere whitened skeletons, that stretched forth their blasted arms to the
sky, and had so slight a hold of the soil, that I have overthrown them
with a delightful crash, by merely running against them; the heath rose
thick beneath, and it was a source of fearful joy to know that it
harboured snakes full three feet long; and though the loch itself is by
no means one of our finer Highland lochs, it furnished, to at least my
eye at this time, a delightful prospect in still October mornings, when
the light gossamer went sailing about in white filmy threads, and birch
and hazel, glorified by decay, served to embroider with gold the brown
hillsides which, standing up on either hand in their long vista of more
than twenty miles, form the barriers of the lake; and when the sun,
still struggling with a blue diluted haze, fell delicately on the smooth
surface, or twinkled for a moment on the silvery coats of the little
trout, as they sprang a few inches into the air, and then broke the
water into a series of concentric rings in their descent. When I last
passed the way, both the old wood and the old tower were gone; and for
the latter, which, though much a ruin, might have survived for ages, I
found only a long extent of dry-stone dike, and the wide ring formed by
the old foundation-stones, which had proved too massive to be removed. A
greatly more entire erection of the same age and style, known of old as
Dunaliscag--which stood on the Ross-shire side of the Dornoch Firth, and
within whose walls, forming, as it did, a sort of half-way stage, I
used, on these Sutherlandshire journeys, to eat my piece of cake with a
double relish--I found, on last passing the way, similarly represented.
Its grey venerable walls, and dark winding passages of many steps--even
the huge pear-shaped lintel, which had stretched over its little door,
and which, according to tradition, a great Fingalian lady had once
thrown across the Dornoch Firth from off the point of her spindle--had
all disappeared, and I saw instead, only a dry-stone wall. The men of
the present generation do certainly live in a most enlightened age--an
age in which every trace of the barbarism of our early ancestors is fast
disappearing; and were we but more zealous in immortalizing the public
benefactors who efface such dark memorials of the past as the tower of
Dunaliscag and the promontory of Loch Shin, it would be, doubtless, an
encouragement to others to speed us yet further on in the march of
improvement. It seems scarce fair that the enlightened destroyers of
Arthur's Oven or of the bas-relief known as Robin of Redesdale, or of
the Town-cross of Edinburgh, should enjoy all the celebrity attendant on
such acts, while the equally deserving iconoclasts of Dunaliscag and the
tower of Loch Shin should be suffered to die without their fame.
I remember spending one singularly delightful morning with Cousin George
beside the ancient tower. He pointed out to me, amid the heath, several
plants to which the old Highlanders used to attach occult
virtues,--plants that disenchanted bewitched cattle, not by their
administration as medicines to the sick animals, but by bringing them in
contact, as charms, with the injured milk; and plants which were used as
philters, either for procuring love, or exciting hatred. It was, he
showed me, the root of a species of orchis that was employed in making
the philters. While most of the radical fibres of the plant retain the
ordinary cylindrical form, two of their number are usually found
developed into starchy tubercles; but, belonging apparently to different
seasons, one of the two is of a dark colour, and of such gravity that it
sinks in water; while the other is light-coloured, and floats. And a
powder made of the light-coloured tubercle formed the main ingredient,
said my cousin, in the love philter; while a powder made of the
dark-coloured one excited, it was held, only antipathy and dislike. And
then George would speculate on the origin of a belief which could, as he
said, neither be suggested by reason, nor tested by experience. Living,
however, among a people with whom beliefs of the kind were still vital
and influential, he did not wholly escape their influence; and I saw
him, in one instance, administer to an ailing cow a little live trout,
simply because the traditions of the district assured him, that a trout
swallowed alive by the creature was the only specific in the case. Some
of his Highland stories were very curious. He communicated to me, for
example, beside the broken tower, a tradition illustrative of the Celtic
theory of dreaming, of which I have since often thought. Two young men
had been spending the early portion of a warm summer day in exactly such
a scene as that in which he communicated the anecdote. There was an
ancient ruin beside them, separated, however, from the mossy bank on
which they sat, by a slender runnel, across which there lay, immediately
over a miniature cascade, a few withered grass stalks. Overcome by the
heat of the day, one of the young men fell asleep; his companion watched
drowsily beside him; when all at once the watcher was aroused to
attention by seeing a little indistinct form, scarce larger than a
humble-bee, issue from the mouth of the sleeping man, and, leaping upon
the moss, move downwards to the runnel, which it crossed along the
withered grass stalks, and then disappeared amid the interstices of the
ruin. Alarmed by what he saw, the watcher hastily shook his companion by
the shoulder, and awoke him; though, with all his haste, the little
cloud-like creature, still more rapid in its movements, issued from the
interstice into which it had gone, and, flying across the runnel,
instead of creeping along the grass stalks and over the sward, as
before, it re-entered the mouth of the sleeper, just as he was in the
act of awakening. "What is the matter with you?" said the watcher,
greatly alarmed. "What ails you?" "Nothing ails me," replied the other;
"but you have robbed me of a most delightful dream. I dreamed I was
walking through a fine rich country, and came at length to the shores of
a noble river; and, just where the clear water went thundering down a
precipice, there was a bridge all of silver, which I crossed; and then,
entering a noble palace on the opposite side, I saw great heaps of gold
and jewels, and I was just going to load myself with treasure, when you
rudely awoke me, and I lost all." I know not what the asserters of the
clairvoyant faculty may think of the story; but I rather believe I have
occasionally seen them make use of anecdotes that did not rest on
evidence a great deal more solid than the Highland legend, and that
illustrated not much more clearly the philosophy of the phenomena with
which they profess to deal.
Of all my cousins, Cousin George was the one whose pursuits most nearly
resembled my own, and in whose society I most delighted to share. He did
sometimes borrow a day from his work, even after his marriage; but then,
according to the poet, it was
"The love he bore to science was in fault."
The borrowed day was always spent in transferring to paper some
architectural design, or in working out some mathematical problem, or in
rendering some piece of Gaelic verse into English, or some piece of
English prose into Gaelic; and as he was a steady, careful man, the
appropriated day was never seriously missed. The winter, too, was all
his own, for, in those northern districts, masons are never employed
from a little after Hallowday, till the second, or even third month of
spring, a circumstance which I carefully noted at this time in its
bearing on the amusements of my cousin, and which afterwards weighed not
a little with me when I came to make choice of a profession for myself.
And George's winters were always ingeniously spent. He had a great
command of Gaelic, and a very tolerable command of English; and so a
translation of Bunyan's "Visions of Heaven and Hell," which he published
several years subsequent to this period, was not only well received by
his country folk of Sutherland and Ross, but was said by competent
judges to be really a not inadequate rendering of the meaning and spirit
of the noble old tinker of Elstow. I, of course, could be no authority
respecting the merits of a translation, the language of which I did not
understand; but living much amid the literature of a time when almost
every volume, whether the Virgil of a Dryden, or the Meditations of a
Hervey, was heralded by its sets of complimentary verses, and having a
deep interest in whatever Cousin George undertook and performed, I
addressed to him, in the old style, a few introductory stanzas, which,
to indulge me in the inexpressible luxury of seeing myself in print for
the first time, he benevolently threw into type. They survive to remind
me that my cousin's belief in Ossian did exert some little influence
over my phraseology when I addressed myself to him, and that, with the
rashness natural to immature youth, I had at this time the temerity to
term myself "poet."
Yes, oft I've said, as oft I've seen
The men who dwell its hills among,
That Morven's land has ever been
A land of valour, worth, and song.
But Ignorance, of darkness dire,
Has o'er that land a mantle spread;
And all untuned and rude the lyre
That sounds beneath its gloomy shade.
With muse of calm untiring wing,
Oh, be it thine, my friend, to show
The Celtic swain how Saxons sing
Of Hell's dire gloom and Heaven's glow
So shall the meed of fame be thine,
The glistening bay-wreath green and gay;
Thy poet, too, though weak his line,
Shall frame for thee th' approving lay.
Longing for some profession in which his proper work would give exercise
to the faculties which he most delighted to cultivate, my cousin
resolved on becoming candidate for a Gaelic Society school--a poor
enough sort of office then, as now; but which, by investing a little
money in cattle, by tilling a little croft, and by now and then emitting
from the press a Gaelic translation, might, he thought, be rendered
sufficiently remunerative to supply the very moderate wants of himself
and his little family. And so he set out for Edinburgh, amply furnished
with testimonials that meant more in his case than testimonials usually
mean, to stand an examination before a Committee of the Gaelic School
Society. Unluckily for his success, however, instead of bringing with
him his ordinary Sabbath-day suit of dark brown and blue (the kilt had
been assumed for but a few weeks, to please his brother William), he had
provided himself with a suit of tartan, as at once cheap and
respectable, and appeared before the Committee--if not in the garb, in
at least the many-coloured hues, of his clan--a robust manly Highlander,
apparently as well suited to enact the part of colour-serjeant to the
Forty-Second, as to teach children their letters. A grave member of the
Society, at that time in high repute for sanctity of character, but who
afterwards, becoming righteous overmuch, was loosened from his charge,
and straightway, spurning the ground, rose into an Irvingite angel, came
at once to the conclusion that no such type of man, encased in
clan-tartan, could possibly have the root of the matter in him; and so
he determined that Cousin George should be cast in the examination. But
then, as it could not be alleged with any decency that my cousin was
inadmissible on the score of his having too much tartan, it was agreed
that he should be declared inadmissible on the score of his having too
little Gaelic. And, of course, at this result the examinators arrived;
and George, ultimately to his advantage, was cast accordingly. I still
remember the astonishment evinced by a worthy catechist of the
north--himself a Gaelic teacher--on being told how my cousin had fared.
"George Munro not allowed to pass," he said, "for want of right Gaelic!
Why, he has more right Gaelic in his own self than all the Society's
teachers in this corner of Scotland put together. They are the
_curiousest_ people, some of these good gentlemen of the Edinburgh
Committees, that I ever heard of: they're just like our country
lawyers." It would, however, be far from fair to regard this
transaction, which took place, I may mention, so late as the year 1829,
as a specimen of the actings of either civic societies or country
lawyers. George's chief examinator on the occasion was the minister of
the Gaelic Chapel of the place, at that time one of the Society's
Committee for the year; and, not being a remarkably scrupulous man, he
seems to have stretched a point or two, in compliance with the pious
wishes and occult judgment of the Society's Secretary. But the anecdote
is not without its lesson. When devout Walter Taits set themselves
ingeniously to manoeuvre with the purest of intentions, and for what
they deem the best of purposes--when, founding their real grounds of
objection on one set of appearances, they found their ostensible grounds
of objection on another and entirely different set--they are always
exposed to the signal danger of--getting indevout Duncan M'Caigs to
assist them. Only two years from the period of my cousin's examination
before the Society, his reverend examinator received at the bar of the
High Court of Justiciary, in the character of a thief convicted of
eleven several acts of stealing, sentence of transportation for fourteen
years.
I had several interesting excursions with my cousin William. We found
ourselves one evening--on our way home from a mineral spring which he
had discovered among the hills--in a little lonely valley, which opened
transversely into that of the Gruids, and which, though its sides were
mottled with green furrow-marked patches, had not at the time a single
human habitation. At the upper end, however, there stood the ruins of a
narrow two-storied house, with one of its gables still entire from
foundation-stone to the shattered chimney-top, but with the other gable,
and the larger part of the front wall, laid prostrate along the sward.
My cousin, after bidding me remark the completeness of the solitude, and
that the eye could not command from the site of the ruin a single spot
where man had ever dwelt, told me that it had been the scene of the
strict seclusion, amounting almost to imprisonment, about eighty years
before, of a lady of high birth, over whom, in early youth, there had
settled a sad cloud of infamy. She had borne a child to one of the
menials of her father's house, which, with the assistance of her
paramour, she had murdered; and being too high for the law to reach in
these northern parts, at a time when the hereditary jurisdiction still
existed entire, and her father was the sole magistrate, possessed of the
power of life and death in the district, she was sent by her family to
wear out life in this lonely retreat, in which she remained secluded
from the world for more than half a century. And then, long after the
abolition of the local jurisdictions, and when her father and brother,
with the entire generation that knew of her crime, had passed away, she
was permitted to take up her abode in one of the seaport towns of the
north, where she was still remembered at this time as a crazy old lady,
invariably silent and sullen, that used to be seen in the twilight
flitting about the more retired lanes and closes, like an unhappy ghost.
The story, as told me in that solitary valley, just as the sun was
sinking over the hill beyond, powerfully impressed my fancy. Crabbe
would have delighted to tell it; and I now relate it, as it lies fast
wedged in my memory, mainly for the peculiar light which it casts on the
times of the hereditary jurisdictions. It forms an example of one of the
judicial banishments of an age that used, in ordinary cases, to save
itself all sorts of trouble of the kind, by hanging its victims. I may
add, that I saw a good deal of the neighbourhood at this time in the
company of my cousin, and gleaned, from my visits to shieling and
cottage, most of my conceptions of the state of the Northern Highlands,
ere the clearance system had depopulated the interior of the country,
and precipitated its poverty-stricken population upon the coasts.
There was, however, one of my excursions with Cousin William, that
turned out rather unfortunately. The river Shin has its bold
salmon-leap, which even yet, after several hundred pounds' worth of
gunpowder have been expended in sloping its angle of ascent, to
facilitate the passage of the fish, is a fine picturesque object, but
which at this time, when it presented all its original abruptness, was a
finer object still. Though distant about three miles from my uncle's
cottage, we could distinctly hear its roarings from beside his door,
when October nights were frosty and still; and as we had been told many
strange stories regarding it--stories about bold fishers who had
threaded their dangerous way between the overhanging rock and the water,
and who, striking outwards, had speared salmon through the foam of the
cataract as they leaped--stories, too, of skilful sportsmen, who, taking
their stand in the thick wood beyond, had shot the rising animals, as
one shoots a bird flying,--both my Cromarty cousin and myself were
extremely desirous to visit the scene of such feats and marvels; and
Cousin William obligingly agreed to act as our guide and instructor by
the way. He did look somewhat askance at our naked feet; and we heard
him remark, in an under tone, to his mother, that when he and his
brothers were boys, she never suffered _them_ to visit her Cromarty
relations unshod; but neither Cousin Walter nor myself had the
magnanimity to say, that _our_ mothers had also taken care to see us
shod; but that, deeming it lighter and cooler to walk barefoot, the good
women had no sooner turned their backs than we both agreed to fling our
shoes into a corner, and set out on our journey without them. The walk
to the salmon-leap was a thoroughly delightful one. We passed through
the woods of Achanie, famous for their nuts; startled, as we went, a
herd of roe deer; and found the leap itself far exceeded all
anticipation. The Shin becomes savagely wild in its lower reaches.
Rugged precipices of gneiss, with scattered bushes fast anchored in the
crevices, overhang the stream, which boils in many a dark pool, and
foams over many a steep rapid; and immediately beneath, where it threw
itself headlong, at this time, over the leap--for it now merely rushes
in snow adown a steep slope--there was a caldron, so awfully dark and
profound, that, according to the accounts of the district, it had no
bottom; and so vexed was it by a frightful whirlpool, that no one ever
fairly caught in its eddies had succeeded, it was said, in regaining the
shore. We saw, as we stood amid the scraggy trees of an overhanging
wood, the salmon leaping up by scores, most of them, however, to fall
back again into the pool--for only a very few stray fish that attempted
the cataract at its edges seemed to succeed in forcing their upward way;
we saw, too, on a shelf of the precipitous but wooded bank, the rude
hut, formed of undressed logs, where a solitary watcher used to take his
stand, to protect them from the spear and fowlingpiece of the poacher,
and which in stormy nights, when the cry of the kelpie mingled with the
roar of the flood, must have been a sublime lodge in the wilderness, in
which a poet might have delighted to dwell. I was excited by the scene;
and, when heedlessly leaping from a tall lichened stone into the long
heath below, my right foot came so heavily in contact with a sharp-edged
fragment of rock concealed in the moss, that I almost screamed aloud
with pain. I, however, suppressed the shriek, and, sitting down and
setting my teeth close, bore the pang, until it gradually moderated, and
my foot, to the ankle, seemed as if almost divested of feeling. In our
return, I halted as I walked, and lagged considerably behind my
companions; and during the whole evening the injured foot seemed as if
dead, save that it glowed with an intense heat. I was, however, at ease
enough to write a sublime piece of blank verse on the cataract; and,
proud of my production, I attempted reading it to Cousin William. But
William had taken lessons in recitation under the great Mr. Thelwall,
politician and elocutionist; and deeming it proper to set me right in
all the words which I mispronounced--three out of every four at least,
and not unfrequently the fourth word also--the reading of the piece
proved greatly stiffer and slower work than the writing of it; and,
somewhat to my mortification, my cousin declined giving me any definite
judgment on its merits, even when I had done. He insisted, however, on
the signal advantages of reading well. He had an acquaintance, he said,
a poet, who had taken lessons under Mr. Thelwall, and who, though his
verses, when he published, met with no great success, was so indebted to
his admirable elocution, as to be invariably successful when he read
them to his friends.
Next morning my injured foot was stiff and sore; and, after a few days
of suffering, it suppurated and discharged great quantities of blood and
matter. It was, however, fast getting well again, when, tired of
inaction, and stirred up by my cousin Walter, who wearied sadly of the
Highlands, I set out with him, contrary to all advice, on my homeward
journey, and, for the first six or eight miles, got on tolerably well.
My cousin, a stout, active lad, carried the bag of Highland
luxuries--cheese, and butter, and a full peck of nuts--with which we had
been laden by my aunt; and, by way of indemnity for taking both my share
of the burden and his own, he demanded of me one of my long extempore
stories, which, shortly after leaving my aunt's cottage, I accordingly
began. My stories, when I had cousin Walter for my companion, were
usually co-extensive with the journey to be performed: they became ten,
fifteen, or twenty miles long, agreeably to the measure of the road, and
the determination of the mile-stones; and what was at present required
was a story of about thirty miles in length, whose one end would touch
the Barony of Gruids, and the other the Cromarty Ferry. At the end,
however, of the first six or eight miles, my story broke suddenly down,
and my foot, after becoming very painful, began to bleed. The day, too,
had grown raw and unpleasant, and after twelve o'clock there came on a
thick wetting drizzle. I limped on silently in the rear, leaving at
every few paces a blotch of blood upon the road, until, in the parish of
Edderton, we both remembered that there was a short cut through the
hills, which two of our older cousins had taken during the previous
year, when on a similar journey; and as Walter deemed himself equal to
anything which his elder cousins could perform, and as I was exceedingly
desirous to get home as soon as possible, and by the shortest way, we
both struck up the hill-side, and soon found ourselves in a dreary
waste, without trace of human habitation.
Walter, however, pushed on bravely and in the right direction; and,
though my head was now becoming light, and my sight dim, I succeeded in
struggling after him, until, just as the night was falling, we reached a
heathy ridge, which commands the northern sea-board of the Cromarty
Firth, and saw the cultivated country and the sands of Nigg lying only a
few miles below. The sands are dangerous at certain hours of the tide,
and accidents frequently happen in the fords; but then there could, we
thought, be no fear of us; for though Walter could not swim, I could;
and as I was to lead the way, he of course would be safe, by simply
avoiding the places where I lost footing. The night fell rather thick
than dark, for there was a moon overhead, though it could not be seen
through the cloud; but, though Walter steered well, the downward way was
exceedingly rough and broken, and we had wandered from the path. I
retain a faint but painful recollection of a scraggy moor, and of dark
patches of planting, through which I had to grope onwards, stumbling as
I went; and then, that I began to feel as if I were merely dreaming, and
that the dream was a very horrible one, from which I could not awaken.
And finally, on reaching a little cleared spot on the edge of the
cultivated country, I dropped down as suddenly as if struck by a bullet,
and, after an ineffectual attempt to rise, fell fast asleep. Walter was
much frightened; but he succeeded in carrying me to a little rick of
dried grass which stood up in the middle of the clearing; and after
covering me well up with the grass, he laid himself down beside me.
Anxiety, however, kept him awake; and he was frightened, as he lay, to
hear the sounds of psalm-singing, in the old Gaelic style, coming
apparently from a neighbouring clump of wood. Walter believed in the
fairies; and, though psalmody was not one of the reputed accomplishments
of the "good people" in the low country, he did not know but that in the
Highlands the case might be different. Some considerable time after the
singing had ceased, there was a slow, heavy step heard approaching the
rick; an exclamation in Gaelic followed; and then a rough hard hand
grasped Walter by the naked heel. He started up, and found himself
confronted by an old, grey-headed man, the inmate of a cottage, which,
hidden in the neighbouring clump, had escaped his notice.
The old man, in the belief that we were gipsies, was at first disposed
to be angry at the liberty we had taken with his hayrick; but Walter's
simple story mollified him at once, and he expressed deep regret that
"poor boys, who had met with an accident," should have laid them down in
such a night under the open sky, and a house so near. "It was putting
disgrace," he said, "on a Christian land." I was assisted into his
cottage, whose only other inmate, an aged woman, the old Highlander's
wife, received us with great kindness and sympathy; and on Walter's
declaring our names and lineage, the hospitable regrets and regards of
both host and hostess waxed stronger and louder still. They knew our
maternal grandfather and grandmother, and remembered old Donald Roy; and
when my cousin named my father, there was a strongly-expressed burst of
sorrow and commiseration, that the son of a man whom they had seen so
"well to do in the world" should be in circumstances so deplorably
destitute. I was too ill to take much note of what passed. I only
remember, that of the food which they placed before me, I could partake
of only a few spoonfuls of milk; and that the old woman, as she washed
my feet, fell a-crying over me. I was, however, so greatly recruited by
a night's rest in their best bed, as to be fit in the morning to be
removed, in the old man's _rung_-cart, to the house of a relation in the
parish of Nigg, from which, after a second day's rest, I was conveyed in
another cart to the Cromarty Ferry. And thus terminated the last of my
boyish visits to the Highlands.
Both my grandfather and grandmother had come of long-lived races, and
Death did not often knock at the family door. But the time when the
latter "should cross the river," though she was some six or eight years
younger than her husband, came first; and so, according to Bunyan, she
"called for her children, and told them that her hour had come." She was
a quiet, retiring woman, and, though intimately acquainted with her
Bible, not in the least fitted to make a female Professor of Theology:
she could _live_ her religion better than _talk_ it; but she now
earnestly recommended to her family the great interests once more; and,
as its various members gathered round her bed, she besought one of her
daughters to read to her, in their hearing, that eighth chapter of the
Romans which declares that "there is now no condemnation to them which
are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the
Spirit." She repeated, in a sinking voice, the concluding verses,--"For
I am persuaded, that neither death nor life, nor angels nor
principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor
height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us
from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." And, resting
in confidence on the hope which the passage so powerfully expresses, she
slept her last sleep, in simple trust that all would be well with her in
the morning of the general awakening. I retain her wedding-ring, the
gift of Donald Roy. It is a sorely-wasted fragment, worn through on one
of the sides, for she had toiled long and hard in her household, and the
breach in the circlet, with its general thinness, testify to the fact;
but its gold is still bright and pure; and, though not much of a
relic-monger, I would hesitate to exchange it for the Holy Coat of
Treves, or for waggon-loads of the wood of the "true cross."
My grandmother's term of life had exceeded by several twelvemonths the
full threescore and ten; but when, only a few years after, Death next
visited the circle, it was on its youngest members that his hand was
laid. A deadly fever swept over the place, and my two sisters--the one
in her tenth, the other in her twelfth year--sank under it within a few
days of each other. Jean, the elder, who resided with my uncles, was a
pretty little girl, of fine intellect, and a great reader; Catherine,
the younger, was lively and affectionate, and a general favourite; and
their loss plunged the family in deep gloom. My uncles made little show
of grief, but they felt strongly: my mother for weeks and months wept
for her children, like Rachel of old, and refused to be comforted,
because they were not; but my grandfather, now in his eighty-fifth year,
seemed to be rendered wholly bankrupt in heart by their loss. As is
perhaps not uncommon in such cases, his warmer affections strode across
the generation of grown-up men and women--his sons and daughters--and
luxuriated among the children their descendants. The boys, his
grandsons, were too wild for him; but the two little girls--gentle and
affectionate--had seized on his whole heart; and now that they were
gone, it seemed as if he had nothing in the world left to care for. He
had been, up till this time, notwithstanding his great age, a hale and
active man. In 1803, when France threatened invasion, he was, though on
the verge of seventy, one of the first men in the place to apply for
arms as a volunteer; but now he drooped and gradually sunk, and longed
for the rest of the grave. "It is God's will," I heard him say about
this time, to a neighbour who congratulated him on his long term of life
and unbroken health--"It is God's will, but not my desire." And in
rather more than a twelvemonth after the death of my sisters, he was
seized by almost his only illness--for, for nearly seventy years he had
not been confined to bed for a single day--and was carried off in less
than a week. During the last few days, the fever under which he sank
mounted to his brain; and he talked in unbroken narrative of the events
of his past life. He began with his earliest recollections; described
the battle of Culloden as he had witnessed it from the Hill of Cromarty,
and the appearance of Duke William and the royal army as seen during a
subsequent visit to Inverness; ran over the after events of his
career--his marriage, his interviews with Donald Roy, his business
transactions with neighbouring proprietors, long dead at the time; and
finally, after reaching, in his oral history, his term of middle life,
he struck off into another track, and began laying down, with singular
coherency, the statements of doctrine in a theological work of the old
school, which he had been recently perusing. And finally, his mind
clearing as his end approached, he died in good hope. It is not
uninteresting to look back on two such generations of Scotchmen as those
to which my uncles and grandfather belonged. They differed very
considerably in some respects. My grandfather, with most of his
contemporaries of the same class, had a good deal of the Tory in his
composition. He stood by George III. in the early policy of his reign,
and by his adviser Lord Bute; reprobated Wilkes and Junius; and gravely
questioned whether Washington and his coadjutors, the American
Republicans, were other than bold rebels. My uncles, on the contrary,
were stanch Whigs, who looked upon Washington as perhaps the best and
greatest man of modern times--stood firm by the policy of Fox, as
opposed to that of Pitt--and held that the war with France, which
immediately succeeded the First Revolution, was, however thoroughly it
changed its character afterwards, one of unjustifiable aggression. But
however greatly my uncles and grandfather may have differed on these
points, they were equally honest men.
The rising generation can perhaps form no very adequate conception of
the number and singular interest of the links which serve to connect the
recollections of a man who has seen his fiftieth birth-day, with what to
them must appear a remote past. I have seen at least two men who fought
at Culloden--one on the side of the King, the other on that of the
Prince--and, with these, not a few who witnessed the battle from a
distance. I have conversed with an aged woman that had conversed, in
turn, with an aged man who had attained to mature manhood when the
persecutions of Charles and James were at their height, and remembered
the general regret excited by the death of Renwick. My eldest maternal
aunt--the mother of Cousin George--remembered old John Feddes--turned of
ninety at the time; and John's buccaneering expedition could not have
dated later than the year 1687. I have known many who remembered the
abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions; and have listened to stories
of executions which took place on the gallows-hills of burghs and
sheriffdoms, and of witch-burnings perpetrated on town Links and
baronial Laws. And I have felt a strange interest in these glimpses of a
past so unlike the present, when thus presented to the mind as personal
reminiscences, or as well-attested traditions, removed from the
original witnesses by but a single stage. All, for instance, which I
have yet read of witch-burnings has failed to impress me so strongly as
the recollections of an old lady who in 1722 was carried in her nurse's
arms--for she was almost an infant at the time--to witness a
witch-execution in the neighbourhood of Dornoch--the last which took
place in Scotland. The lady well remembered the awe-struck yet excited
crowd, the lighting of the fire, and the miserable appearance of the
poor fatuous creature whom it was kindled to consume, and who seemed to
be so little aware of her situation, that she held out her thin
shrivelled hands to warm them at the blaze. But what most impressed the
narrator--for it must have been a frightful incident in a sad
spectacle--was the circumstance that, when the charred remains of the
victim were sputtering and boiling amid the intense heat of the flames,
a cross gust of wind suddenly blew the smoke athwart the spectators, and
she felt in her attendant's arms as if in danger of being suffocated by
the horrible stench. I have heard described, too, by a man whose father
had witnessed the scene, an execution which took place, after a brief
and inadequate trial, on the burgh-gallows of Tain. The supposed
culprit, a Strathcarron Highlander, had been found lurking about the
place, noting, as was supposed, where the burghers kept their cattle,
and was hung as a spy; but they all, after the execution, came to deem
him innocent, from the circumstance that, when his dead body was
dangling in the wind, a white pigeon had come flying the way, and, as it
passed over, half-encircled the gibbet.
One of the two Culloden soldiers whom I remember was an old forester who
lived in a picturesque cottage among the woods of the Cromarty Hill; and
in his last illness, my uncles, whom I had always leave to accompany,
used not unfrequently to visit him. He had lived at the time his full
century, and a few months more: and I still vividly remember the large
gaunt face that used to stare from the bed as they entered, and the
huge, horny hand. He had been settled in life, previous to the year
1745, as the head gardener of a northern proprietor, and little dreamed
of being engaged in war; but the rebellion broke out; and as his master,
a stanch Whig, had volunteered to serve on behalf of his principles in
the royal army, his gardener, a "mighty man of his hands," went with
him. As his memory for the later events of his life was gone at this
time, its preceding forty years seemed a blank, from which not a single
recollection could be drawn; but well did he remember the battle, and
more vividly still, the succeeding atrocities of the troops of
Cumberland. He had accompanied the army, after its victory at Culloden,
to the camp at Fort-Augustus, and there witnessed scenes of cruelty and
spoliation of which the recollection, after the lapse of seventy years,
and in his extreme old age, had still power enough to set his Scotch
blood aboil. While scores of cottages were flaming in the distance, and
blood not unfrequently hissing on the embers, the men and women of the
army used to be engaged in racing in sacks, or upon Highland ponies; and
when the ponies were in request, the women, who must have sat for their
portraits in Hogarth's "March to Finchley," took their seats astride
like the men. Gold circulated and liquor flowed in abundance; and in a
few weeks there were about twenty thousand head of cattle brought in by
marauding parties of the soldiery from the crushed and impoverished
Highlanders; and groups of drovers from Yorkshire and the south of
Scotland--coarse vulgar men--used to come every day to share in the
spoil, by making purchases at greatly less than half-price.
My grandfather's recollections of Culloden were merely those of an
observant boy of fourteen, who had witnessed the battle from a distance.
The day, he has told me, was drizzly and thick; and on reaching the brow
of the Hill of Cromarty, where he found many of his townsfolk already
assembled, he could scarce see the opposite land. But the fog gradually
cleared away; first one hill-top came into view, and then another; till
at length the long range of coast, from the opening of the great
Caledonian valley to the promontory of Burgh-head, was dimly visible
through the haze. A little after noon there suddenly rose a round white
cloud from the Moor of Culloden, and then a second round white cloud
beside it. And then the two clouds mingled together, and went rolling
slantways on the wind towards the west; and he could hear the rattle of
the smaller fire-arms mingling with the roar of the artillery. And then,
in what seemed an exceedingly brief space of time, the cloud dissipated
and disappeared, the boom of the greater guns ceased, and a sharp
intermittent patter of musketry passed on towards Inverness. But the
battle was presented to the imagination, in these old personal
narratives, in many a diverse form. I have been told by an ancient
woman, who, on the day of the fight, was engaged in tending some sheep
on a solitary common near Munlochy, separated from the Moor of Culloden
by the Firth, and screened by a lofty hill, that she sat listening in
terror to the boom of the cannon; but that she was still more scared by
the continuous howling of her dog, who sat upright on his haunches all
the time the firing lasted, with his neck stretched out towards the
battle, and "looking as if he saw a spirit." Such are some of the
recollections which link the memories of a man who has lived his
half-century, to those of the preceding age, and which serve to remind
him how one generation of men after another break and disappear on the
shores of the eternal world, as wave after wave breaks in foam upon the
beach, when storms are rising, and the ground-swell sets in heavily from
the sea.