"Whose elfin prowess scaled the orchard wall."--ROGERS.
Some of the wealthier tradesmen of the town, dissatisfied with the small
progress which their boys were making under the parish schoolmaster,
clubbed together and got a schoolmaster of their own; but, though a
rather clever young man, he proved an unsteady one, and, regular in his
irregularities, got diurnally drunk, on receiving the instalments of his
salary at term-days, as long as his money lasted. Getting rid of him,
they procured another--a licentiate of the Church--who for some time
promised well. He seemed steady and thoughtful, and withal a painstaking
teacher; but coming in contact with some zealous Baptists, they
succeeded in conjuring up such a cloud of doubt around him regarding the
propriety of infant baptism, that both his bodily and mental health
became affected by his perplexities, and he had to resign his charge.
And then, after a pause, during which the boys enjoyed a delightfully
long vacation, they got yet a third schoolmaster, also a licentiate, and
a person of a high, if not very consistent religious profession, who was
always getting into pecuniary difficulties, and always courting, though
with but little success, wealthy ladies, who, according to the poet, had
"acres of charms." To the subscription school I was transferred, at the
instance of Uncle James, who remained quite sure, notwithstanding the
experience of the past, that I was destined to be a scholar. And,
invariably fortunate in my opportunities of amusement, the transference
took place only a few weeks ere the better schoolmaster, losing health
and heart in a labyrinth of perplexity resigned his charge. I had
little more than time enough to look about me on the new forms, and to
renew, on a firmer foundation than ever, my friendship with my old
associate of the cave--who had been for the two previous years an inmate
of the subscription school, and was now less under maternal control than
before--when on came the long vacation; and for four happy months I had
nothing to do.
My amusements had undergone very little change: I was even fonder of the
shores and woods than ever, and better acquainted with the rocks and
caves. A very considerable change, however, had taken place in the
amusements of the school-fellows my contemporaries, who were now from
two to three years older than when I had been associated with them in
the parish school. Hy-spy had lost its charms; nor was there much of its
old interest for them in French and English; whereas my rock excursions
they came to regard as very interesting indeed. With the exception of my
friend of the cave, they cared little about rocks or stones; but they
all liked brambles, and sloes, and _craws-apples_, tolerably well, and
took great delight in assisting me to kindle fires in the caverns of the
old-coast line, at which we used to broil shell-fish and crabs, taken
among the crags and boulders of the ebb below, and roast potatoes,
transferred from the fields of the hill above. There was one cave, an
especial favourite with us, in which our fires used to blaze day after
day for weeks together. It is deeply hollowed in the base of a steep
ivy-mantled precipice of granitic gneiss, a full hundred feet in height;
and bears on its smoothed sides and roof, and along its uneven
bottom,--fretted into pot-like cavities, with large rounded pebbles in
them,--unequivocal evidence that the excavating agent to which it owed
its existence had been the wild surf of this exposed shore. But for more
than two thousand years wave had never reached it: the last general
elevation of the land had raised it beyond the reach of the highest
stream-tides; and when my gang and I took possession of its twilight
recesses, its stony sides were crusted with mosses and liverworts; and
a crop of pale, attenuated, sickly-looking weeds, on which the sun had
never looked in his strength, sprang thickly up over its floor. In the
remote past it had been used as a sort of garner and thrashing-place by
a farmer of the parish, named Marcus, who had succeeded in rearing crops
of bere and oats on two sloping plots at the foot of the cliffs in its
immediate neighbourhood; and it was known, from this circumstance, to my
uncles and the older inhabitants of the town, as Marcus's Cave. My
companions, however, had been chiefly drawn to it by a much more recent
association. A poor Highland pensioner--a sorely dilapidated relic of
the French-American War, who had fought under General Wolfe in his
day--had taken a great fancy to the cave, and would fain have made it
his home. He was ill at ease in his family;--his wife was a termagant,
and his daughter disreputable; and, desirous to quit their society
altogether, and live as a hermit among the rocks, he had made
application to the gentleman who tenanted the farm above, to be
permitted to fit up the cave for himself as a dwelling. So bad was his
English, however, that the gentleman failed to understand him; and his
request was, as he believed, rejected, while it was in reality only not
understood. Among the younger folk the cave came to be known, from the
incident, as "Rory Shingles' Cave;" and my companions were delighted to
believe that they were living in it as Rory would have lived, had his
petition been granted. In the wild half-savage life which we led, we did
contrive to provide for ourselves remarkably well. The rocky shores
supplied us with limpets, periwinkles, and crabs, and now and then a
lump-fish; the rugged slopes under the precipices, with hips, sloes, and
brambles; the broken fragments of wreck along the beach, and the wood
above, furnished abundance of fuel; and as there were fields not half a
mile away, I fear the more solid part of our diet consisted often of
potatoes which we had not planted, and of pease and beans which we had
not sown. One of our number contrived to bring away a pot unobserved
from his home; another succeeded in providing us with a pitcher; there
was a good spring not two hundred yards from the cave mouth, which
supplied us with water; and, thus possessed of not merely all that
nature requires, but a good deal more, we contrived to fare sumptuously
every day. It has been often remarked, that civilized man, when placed
in circumstances at all favourable, soon learns to assume the savage. I
shall not say that my companions or myself had been particularly
civilized in our previous state; but nothing could be more certain, than
that during our long vacation, we became very happy, and tolerably
perfect savages. The class which we attended was of a kind not opened in
any of our accredited schools, and it might be difficult to procure
testimonials in its behalf, easily procurable as these usually are; and
yet there were some of its lessons which might be conned with some
little advantage, by one desirous of cultivating the noble sentiment of
self-reliance, or the all-important habit of self-help. At the time,
however, they appeared quite pointless enough; and the moral, as in the
case of the continental apologue of Reynard the Fox, seemed always
omitted.
Our parties in these excursions used at times to swell out to ten or
twelve--at times to contract to two or three; but what they gained in
quantity they always lost in quality, and became mischievous with the
addition of every new member, in greatly more than the arithmetical
ratio. When most innocent, they consisted of only a brace of members--a
warm-hearted, intelligent boy from the south of Scotland, who boarded
with two elderly ladies of the place, and attended the subscription
school; and the acknowledged leader of the band, who, belonging to the
permanent irreducible staff of the establishment, was never off duty. We
used to be very happy, and not altogether irrational, in these little
skeleton parties. My new friend was a gentle, tasteful boy, fond of
poetry, and a writer of soft, simple verses in the old-fashioned
pastoral vein, which he never showed to any one save myself; and we
learned to love one another all the more, from the circumstance that I
was of a somewhat bold, self-relying temperament, and he of a clinging,
timid one. Two of the stanzas of a little pastoral, which he addressed
to me about a twelvemonth after this time, when permanently quitting the
north country for Edinburgh, still remain fixed in my memory; and I must
submit them to the reader, both as adequately representative of the many
others, their fellows, which have been lost, and of that juvenile poetry
in general which "is written," according to Sir Walter Scott, "rather
from the recollection of what has pleased the author in others, than
what has been suggested by his own imagination."
"To you my poor sheep I resign,
My colly, my crook, and my horn:
To leave you, indeed, I repine,
But I must away with the morn.
New scenes shall evolve on my sight,
The world and its follies be new;
But ah! can such scenes of delight
Ere arise, as I witnessed with you!"
Timid as he naturally was, he soon learned to abide in my company
terrors which most of my bolder companions shrank from encountering. I
was fond of lingering in the caves until long after nightfall,
especially in those seasons when the moon at full, or but a few days in
her wane, rose out of the sea as the evening wore on, to light up the
wild precipices of that solitary shore, and to render practicable our
ascending path to the hill above. And Finlay was almost the only one of
my band who dared to encounter with me the terrors of the darkness. Our
fire has often startled the benighted boatman as he came rowing round
some rocky promontory, and saw the red glare streaming seawards from the
cavern mouth, and partially lighting up the angry tumbling of the surf
beyond; and excise-cutters have oftener than once altered their tack in
middle Firth, and come bearing towards the coast, to determine whether
the wild rocks of Marcus were not becoming a haunt of smugglers.
Immediately beyond the granitic gneiss of the hill there is a subaqueous
deposit of the Lias formation, never yet explored by geologist, because
never yet laid bare by the ebb; though every heavier storm from the sea
tells of its existence, by tossing ashore fragments of its dark
bituminous shale. I soon ascertained that the shale is so largely
charged with inflammable matter as to burn with a strong flame, as if
steeped in tar or oil, and that I could repeat with it the common
experiment of producing gas by means of a tobacco-pipe luted with clay.
And, having read in Shakspere of a fuel termed "sea-coal," and unaware
at the time that the poet merely meant coal brought to London by sea, I
inferred that the inflammable shale cast up from the depths of the Firth
by the waves could not be other than the veritable "sea-coal" which
figured in the reminiscences of Dame Quickly; and so, assisted by
Finlay, who shared in the interest which I felt in the substance, as at
once classical and an original discovery, I used to collect it in large
quantities and convert it into smoky and troubled fires, that ever
filled our cavern with a horrible stench, and scented all the shore.
Though unaware of the fact at the time, it owed its inflammability, not
to vegetable, but to animal substance; the tar which used to boil in it
to the heat, like resin in a fagot of moss-fir, was as strange a mixture
as ever yet bubbled in witches' caldron--blood of pterodactyle and
grease of ichthyosaur--eye of belemnite and hood of nautilus; and we
learned to delight in its very smell, all oppressive as that was, as
something wild, strange, and inexplicable. Once or twice I seemed on the
eve of a discovery: in splitting the masses, I occasionally saw what
appeared to be fragments of shells embedded in its substance; and at
least once I laid open a mysterious-looking scroll or volute, existing
on the dark surface as a cream-coloured film; but though these organisms
raised a temporary wonder, it was not until a later period that I
learned to comprehend their true import, as the half-effaced but still
decipherable characters of a marvellous record of the grey,
dream-encircled past.
With the docile Finlay as my companion, and left to work out my own will
unchallenged, I was rarely or never mischievous. On the occasions,
however, in which my band swelled out to ten or a dozen, I often
experienced the ordinary evils of leadership, as known in all gangs and
parties, civil and ecclesiastical; and was sometimes led, in
consequence, to engage in enterprises which my better judgment
condemned. I fain wish that among the other "Confessions" with which our
literature is charged, we had the _bona fide_ "Confessions of a Leader,"
with examples of the cases in which, though he seems to overbear, he is
in reality overborne, and actually follows, though he appears to lead.
Honest Sir William Wallace, though seven feet high, and a hero, was at
once candid and humble enough to confess to the canons of Hexham, that,
his "soldiers being evil-disposed men," whom he could neither "justify
nor punish," he was able to protect women and Churchmen only so long as
they "abided in his sight." And, of course, other leaders, less tall and
less heroic, must not unfrequently find themselves, had they but
Wallace's magnanimity to confess the fact, in circumstances much akin to
those of Wallace. When bee-masters get hold of queen bees, they are
able, by controlling the movements of these natural leaders of hives, to
control the movements of the hives themselves; and not unfrequently in
Churches and States do there exist inconspicuous bee-masters, who, by
influencing or controlling the leader-bees, in reality influence and
control the movements of the entire body, politic or ecclesiastical,
over which these natural monarchs seem to preside. But truce with
apology. Partly in the character of leader--partly being my self led--I
succeeded about this time in getting one of my larger parties into a
tolerably serious scrape. We passed every day, on our way to the cave, a
fine large orchard, attached to the manor-house of the Cromarty estate;
and in ascending an adjacent hill over which our path lay, and which
commands a bird's-eye view of the trim-kept walks and well-laden trees,
there used not unfrequently to arise wild speculations among us
regarding the possibility and propriety of getting a supply of the
fruit, to serve as desserts to our meals of shell-fish and potatoes.
Weeks elapsed, however, and autumn was drawing on to its close, ere we
could quite make up our minds regarding the adventure, when at length I
agreed to lead; and, after arranging the plan of the expedition, we
broke into the orchard under the cloud of night, and carried away with
us whole pocketfuls of apples. They were all intolerably bad--sour,
hard, baking apples; for we had delayed the enterprise until the better
fruit had been pulled: but though they set our teeth on edge, and we
flung most of them into the sea, we had "snatched" in the foray, what
Gray well terms "a fearful joy," and had some thought of repeating it,
merely for the sake of the excitement induced and the risk encountered,
when out came the astounding fact, that one of our number had "peached,"
and, in the character of king's evidence, betrayed his companions.
The factor of the Cromarty property had an orphan nephew, who formed at
times a member of our gang, and who had taken a willing part in the
orchard foray. He had also engaged, however, in a second enterprise of a
similar kind wholly on his own account, of which we knew nothing. An
out-house pertaining to the dwelling in which he lodged, though itself
situated outside the orchard, was attached to another house inside the
walls, which was employed by the gardener as a store-place for his
apples; and finding an unsuspected crevice in the partition which
divided the two buildings, somewhat resembling that through which
Pyramus and Thisbe made love of old in the city of Babylon, our comrade,
straightway availing himself of so fair an opening, fell a-courting the
gardener's apples. Sharpening the end of a long stick, he began
harpooning, through the hole, the apple-heap below; and though the hole
was greatly too small for admitting the finer and larger specimens, and
they, in consequence, fell back, disengaged from the harpoon, in the
attempt to land them, he succeeded in getting a good many of the smaller
ones. Old John Clark the gardener--far advanced in life at the time, and
seeing too imperfectly to discover the crevice which opened high amid
the obscurity of the loft--was in a perfect maze regarding the evil
influence that was destroying his apples. The harpooned individuals lay
scattered over the floor by scores; but the agent that had dispersed and
perforated them remained for weeks together an inscrutable mystery to
John. At length, however, there came a luckless morning, in which our
quondam companion lost hold, when busy at work, of the pointed stick;
and when John next entered his storehouse, the guilty harpoon lay
stretched across the harpooned apples. The discovery was followed up;
the culprit detected; and, on being closeted with his uncle the factor,
he communicated not only the details of his own special adventure, but
the particulars of ours also. And early next day there was a message
sent us by a safe and secret messenger, to the effect that we would be
all put in prison in the course of the week.
We were terribly frightened; so much so, that the strong point of our
position--the double-dyed guilt of the factor's nephew--failed to occur
to any of us; and we looked for only instant incarceration. I still
remember the intense feeling of shame I used to experience every time I
crossed my mother's door for the street--the agonizing, all-engrossing
belief that every one was looking at and pointing me out--and the
terror, when in my uncles'--akin to that of the culprit who hears from
his box the footsteps of the returning jury--that, having learned of my
offence, they were preparing to denounce me as a disgrace to an honest
family, on which, in the memory of man, no stain had before rested. The
discipline was eminently wholesome, and I never forgot it. It did seem
somewhat strange, however, that no one appeared to know anything about
our misdemeanour: the factor kept our secret remarkably well; but we
inferred he was doing so in order to pounce upon us all the more
effectually; and, holding a hasty council in the cave, we resolved that,
quitting our homes for a few weeks, we should live among the rocks till
the storm that seemed rising should have blown by.
Marcus's Cave was too accessible and too well known; but my knowledge of
the locality enabled me to recommend to my lads two other caves in which
I thought we might be safe. The one opened in a thicket of furze, some
forty feet above the shore; and, though large enough within to contain
from fifteen to twenty men, it presented outside much the appearance of
a fox-earth, and was not known to half-a-dozen people in the country. It
was, however, damp and dark; and we found that we could not venture on
lighting a fire in it without danger of suffocation. It was pronounced
excellent, however, as a temporary place of concealment, were the search
for us to become very hot. The other cavern was wide and open; but it
was a wild, ghostly-looking place, scarcely once visited from one
twelvemonth's end to another: its floor was green with mould, and its
ridgy walls and roof bristled over with slim pale stalactites, which
looked like the pointed tags that roughen a dead-dress. It was certain,
too, that it was haunted. Marks of a cloven foot might be seen freshly
impressed on its floor, which had been produced either by a stray goat,
or by something worse; and the few boys to whom its existence and
character were known used to speak of it under their breath as "the
Devil's Cave." My lads did at first look round them as we entered, with
an awe-struck and disconsolate expression; but falling busily to work
among the cliffs, we collected large quantities of withered grass and
fern for bedding, and, selecting the drier and less exposed portions of
the floor, soon piled up for ourselves a row of little lairs, formed in
a sort of half-way style between that of the wild beast and the gipsy,
on which it would have been possible enough to sleep. We selected, too,
a place for our fire, gathered a little heap of fuel, and secreted in a
recess, for ready use, our Marcus' Cave pot and pitcher, and the lethal
weapons of the gang, which consisted of an old bayonet so corroded with
rust that it somewhat resembled a three-edged saw and an old horseman's
pistol tied fast to the stock by cobbler's ends, and with lock and
ramrod wanting. Evening surprised us in the middle of our preparations;
and as the shadows fell dark and thick, my lads began to look most
uncomfortably around them. At length they fairly struck work: there was
no use, they said, for being in the Devil's Cave so late--no use,
indeed, for being in it at all, until we were made sure the factor did
actually intend to imprison us; and, after delivering themselves to this
effect, they fairly bolted, leaving Finlay and myself to bring up the
rear at our leisure. My well-laid plan was, in short, found unworkable,
from the inferior quality of my materials. I returned home with a heavy
heart, somewhat grieved that I had not confided my scheme to only
Finlay, who could, I ascertained, do braver things, with all his
timidity, than the bolder boys, our occasional associates. And yet,
when, in passing homewards through the dark lonely woods of the Hill, I
bethought me of the still deeper solitude and gloom of the haunted cave
far below, and thought further, that at that very moment the mysterious
being with the cloven foot might be traversing its silent floor, I felt
my blood run cold, and at once leaped to the conclusion that, save for
the disgrace, a cave with an evil spirit in it could be not a great deal
better than a prison. Of the prison, however, we heard no more; though I
never forgot the grim but precious lesson read me by the factor's
threat; and from that time till the present--save now and then, by
inadvertently admitting into my newspaper a paragraph written in too
terse a style by some good man in the provinces, against some very bad
man his neighbour--I have not been fairly within wind of the law. I
would, however, seriously advise such of my young friends as may cast a
curious eye over these pages to avoid taking any such lesson as mine at
first-hand. One half-hour of the mental anguish which I at this time
experienced, when I thought of my mother and uncles, and the infamy of a
prison, would have vastly more than counterbalanced all that could have
been enjoyed from banqueting on apples, even had they been those of the
Hesperides or of Eden, instead of being, what they were in this case,
green masses of harsh acid, alike formidable to teeth and stomach. I
must add, in justice to my friend of the Doocot Cave, that, though an
occasional visitor at Marcus, he had prudently avoided getting into this
scrape.
Our long vacation came at length to an end, by the appointment of a
teacher to the subscription school; but the arrangement was not the most
profitable possible for the pupils. It was an ominous circumstance, that
we learned in a few days to designate the new master by a nickname, and
that the name stuck--a misfortune which almost never befalls the truly
superior man. He had, however, a certain dash of cleverness about him;
and observing that I was of potent influence among my school-fellows, he
set himself to determine the grounds on which my authority rested. Copy
and arithmetic books, in schools in which there was liberty, used in
those ancient times to be charged with curious revelations. In the
parish school, for instance, which excelled, as I have said, every other
school in the world in its knowledge of barques and carvels, it was not
uncommon to find a book which, when opened at the right end, presented
only copy-lines or arithmetical questions, that, when opened at the
wrong one, presented only ships and boats. And there were cases on
record in which, on the grand annual examination-day that heralded the
vacation, the worthy parish minister, by beginning to turn over the
leaves of some exhibited book at the reverse end, found himself engaged,
when expecting only the questions of Cocker, or the slip-lines of
Butterworth, amid whole fleets of smacks, frigates, and brigantines. My
new master, professionally acquainted with this secret property of
arithmetic and copy-books, laid hold of mine, and, bringing them to his
desk, found them charged with very extraordinary revelations indeed. The
blank spaces were occupied with deplorably scrabbled couplets and
stanzas, blent with occasional remarks in rude prose, that dealt chiefly
with natural phenomena. One note, for instance, which the master took
the trouble of deciphering, referred to the supposed _fact_, familiar as
a matter of sensation to boys located on the sea-coast, that during the
bathing season the water is warmer in windy days, when the waves break
high, than during dead calms; and accounted for it (I fear not very
philosophically) on the hypothesis that the "waves, by slapping against
each other, engender heat, as heat may be engendered by clapping the
hands." The master read on, evidently with much difficulty, and
apparently with considerable scepticism: he inferred that I had been
borrowing, not inventing: though where such prose and such verse could
have been borrowed, and, in especial, such grammar and such spelling,
even cleverer men than he might well have despaired of ever finding out.
And in order to test my powers, he proposed furnishing me with a theme
on which to write. "Let us see," he said, "let us see: the
dancing-school ball comes on here next week--bring me a poem on the
dancing-school ball." The subject did not promise a great deal; but,
setting myself to work in the evening, I produced half-a-dozen stanzas
on the ball, which were received as good, in evidence that I actually
could rhyme; and for some weeks after I was rather a favourite with the
new master.
I had, however, ere now become a wild insubordinate boy, and the only
school in which I could properly be taught was that world-wide school
which awaited me, in which Toil and Hardship are the severe but noble
teachers. I got into sad scrapes. Quarrelling, on one occasion, with a
boy of my own standing, we exchanged blows across the form; and when
called up for trial and punishment, the fault was found to attach so
equally to both sides, that the same number of _palmies_, well laid on,
were awarded to each. I bore mine, however, like a North American
Indian, whereas my antagonist began to howl and cry; and I could not
resist the temptation of saying to him in a whisper that unluckily
reached the ear of the master, "Ye big blubbering blockhead, take that
for a drubbing from me." I had of course to receive a few palmies
additional for the speech; but then, "who cared for that?" The master,
however, "cared" considerably more for the offence than I did for the
punishment. And in a subsequent quarrel with another boy--a stout and
somewhat desperate mulatto--I got into a worse scrape still, of which he
thought still worse. The mulatto, in his battles, which were many, had a
trick, when in danger of being over-matched, of drawing his knife; and
in our affair--the necessities of the fight seeming to require it--he
drew his knife upon me. To his horror and astonishment, however, instead
of running off, I immediately drew mine, and, quick as lightning,
stabbed him in the thigh. He roared out in fright and pain, and, though
more alarmed than hurt, never after drew knife upon a combatant. But the
value of the lesson which I gave was, like most other very valuable
things, inadequately appreciated; and it merely procured for me the
character of being a dangerous boy. I had certainly reached a dangerous
stage; but it was mainly myself that was in jeopardy. There is a
transition-time in which the strength and independence of the latent man
begin to mingle with the wilfulness and indiscretion of the mere boy,
which is more perilous than any other, in which many more downward
careers of recklessness and folly begin, that end in wreck and ruin,
than in all the other years of life which intervene between childhood
and old age. The growing lad should be wisely and tenderly dealt with at
this critical stage. The severity that would fain compel the implicit
submission yielded at an earlier period, would probably succeed, if his
character was a strong one, in insuring but his ruin. It is at this
transition-stage that boys run off to sea from parents and masters, or,
when tall enough, enlist in the army for soldiers. The strictly orthodox
parent, if more severe than wise, succeeds occasionally in driving,
during this crisis, his son into Popery or infidelity; and the sternly
moral one, in landing _his_ in utter profligacy. But, leniently and
judiciously dealt with, the dangerous period passes: in a few years at
most--in some instances in even a few months--the sobriety incidental to
a further development of character ensues, and the wild boy settles down
into a rational young man.
It so chanced, however, that in what proved the closing scene in my term
of school attendance, I was rather unfortunate than guilty. The class to
which I now belonged read an English lesson every afternoon, and had its
rounds of spelling; and in these last I acquitted myself but ill; partly
from the circumstance that I spelt only indifferently, but still more
from the further circumstance, that, retaining strongly fixed in my
memory the broad Scotch pronunciation acquired at the dames' school, I
had to carry on in my mind the double process of at once spelling the
required word, and of translating the old sounds of the letters of which
it was composed into the modern ones. Nor had I been taught to break the
words into syllables; and so, when required one evening to spell the
word "_awful_," with much deliberation--for I had to translate, as I
went on, the letters _a-w_ and _u_--I spelt it word for word, without
break or pause, as a-w-f-u-l. "No," said the master, "a-w, _aw_, f-u-l,
_awful_; spell again." This seemed preposterous spelling. It was
sticking in an _a_, as I thought, into the middle of the word, where, I
was sure, no _a_ had a right to be; and so I spelt it as at first. The
master recompensed my supposed contumacy with a sharp cut athwart the
ears with his tawse; and again demanding the spelling of the word, I yet
again spelt it as at first. But on receiving a second cut, I refused to
spell it any more; and, determined on overcoming my obstinacy, he laid
hold of me and attempted throwing me down. As wrestling, however, had
been one of our favourite Marcus' Cave exercises, and as few lads of my
inches wrestled better than I, the master, though a tall and tolerably
robust fellow, found the feat considerably more difficult than he could
have supposed. We swayed from side to side of the school-room, now
backwards, now forwards, and for a full minute it seemed to be rather a
moot point on which side the victory was to incline. At length, however,
I was tripped over a form; and as the master had to deal with me, not as
master usually deals with pupil, but as one combatant deals with
another, whom he has to beat into submission, I was mauled in a way that
filled me with aches and bruises for a full month thereafter. I greatly
fear that, had I met the fellow on a lonely road five years subsequent
to our encounter, when I had become strong enough to raise breast-high
the "great lifting stone of the Dropping Cave," he would have caught as
sound a thrashing as he ever gave to little boy or girl in his life; but
all I could do at this time was to take down my cap from off the pin,
when the affair had ended, and march straight out of school. And thus
terminated my school education. Before night I had avenged myself, in a
copy of satiric verses, entitled "The Pedagogue," which--as they had
some little cleverness in them, regarded as the work of a boy, and as
the known eccentricities of their subject gave me large
scope--occasioned a good deal of merriment in the place; and of the
verses a fair copy, written out by Finlay, was transmitted through the
Post-Office to the pedagogue himself. But the only notice he ever took
of them was incidentally, in a short speech made to the copyist a few
days after. "I _see_, Sir," he said,--"I _see_ you still associate with
that fellow Miller; perhaps he will make you a poet!" "I had thought,
Sir," said Finlay very quietly, in reply, "that poets were born--not
made."
As a specimen of the rhyme of this period, and as in some degree a
set-off against my drubbing, which remains till this day an unsettled
score, I submit my pasquinade to the reader:--
THE PEDAGOGUE.
With solemn mien and pious air,
S--k--r attends each call of grace;
Loud eloquence bedecks his prayer,
And formal sanctity his face.
All good; but turn the other side,
And see the smirking beau displayed;
The pompous strut, exalted air,
And all that marks the fop, is there.
In character we seldom see
Traits so diverse meet and agree:
Can the affected mincing trip,
Exalted brow, and pride-pressed lip,
In strange incongruous union meet,
With all that stamps the hypocrite?
We see they do: but let us scan
Those secret springs which move the man.
Though now he wields the knotty birch,
His better hope lies in the Church:
For this the sable robe he wears,
For this in pious guise appears.
But then, the weak will cannot hide
Th' inherent vanity and pride;
And thus he acts the coxcomb's part,
As dearer to his poor vain heart:
Nature's born fop! a saint by art!!
But hold! he wears no fopling's dress
Each seam, each thread, the eye can trace
His garb all o'er;--the dye, though true,
Time-blanch'd, displays a fainter hue:
Dress forms the fopling's better part;
Reconcile this, and prove your art.
"Chill penury represses pride;"--
A maxim by the wise denied;
For 'tis alone tame plodding souls,
Whose spirits bend when it controls,--
Whose lives run on in one dull same,
Plain honesty their highest aim.
With him it merely can repress--
Tailor o'er-cow'd--the pomp of dress;
His spirit, unrepressed, can soar
High as e'er folly rose before;
Can fly pale study, learn'd debate,
And ape proud fashion's idle state:
Yet fails in that engaging grace
That lights the practised courtier's face.
His weak affected air we mark,
And, smiling, view the would-be spark;
Complete in every act and feature,--
An ill-bred, silly, awkward creature.
My school-days fairly over, a life of toil frowned full in front of me;
but never yet was there a half-grown lad less willing to take up the man
and lay down the boy. My set of companions was fast breaking up;--my
friend of the Doocot Cave was on the eve of proceeding to an academy in
a neighbouring town; Finlay had received a call from the south, to
finish his education in a seminary on the banks of the Tweed; one
Marcus' Cave lad was preparing to go to sea; another to learn a trade; a
third to enter a shop; the time of dispersal was too evidently at hand;
and, taking counsel one day together, we resolved on constructing
something--we at first knew not what--that might serve as a monument to
recall to us in after years the memory of our early pastimes and
enjoyments. The common school-book story of the Persian shepherd, who,
when raised by his sovereign to high place in the empire, derived his
chief pleasure from contemplating, in a secret apartment, the pipe,
crook, and rude habiliments of his happier days, suggested to me that we
also should have our secret apartment, in which to store up, for future
contemplation, our bayonet and pistol, pot and pitcher; and I
recommended that we should set ourselves to dig a subterranean chamber
for that purpose among the woods of the Hill, accessible, like the
mysterious vaults of our story-books, by a trap-door. The proposal was
favourably received; and, selecting a solitary spot among the trees as a
proper site, and procuring spade and mattock, we began to dig.
Soon passing through the thin crust of vegetable mould, we found the red
boulder clay beneath exceedingly stiff and hard; but day after day saw
us perseveringly at work; and we succeeded in digging a huge square
pit, about six feet in length and breadth, and fully seven feet deep.
Fixing four upright posts in the corners, we lined our apartment with
slender spars nailed closely together; and we had prepared for giving it
a massive roof of beams formed of fallen trees, and strong enough to
bear a layer of earth and turf from a foot to a foot and a half in
depth, with a little opening for the trap-door; when we found, one
morning, on pressing onwards to the scene of our labours, that we were
doggedly tracked by a horde of boys considerably more numerous than our
own party. Their curiosity had been excited, like that of the Princess
Nekayah in Rasselas, by the tools which we carried, and by "seeing that
we had directed our walk every day to the same point;" and in vain, by
running and doubling, by scolding and remonstrating, did we now attempt
shaking them off. I saw that, were we to provoke a general _melee_, we
could scarce expect to come off victors; but deeming myself fully a
match for their stoutest boy, I stepped out and challenged him to come
forward and fight me. He hesitated, looked foolish, and refused; but
said, he would readily fight with any of my party except myself. I
immediately named my friend of the Doocot Cave, who leaped out with a
bound to meet him; but the boy, as I had anticipated, refused to fight
him also; and, observing the proper effect produced, I ordered my lads
to march forward; and from an upper slope of the hill we had the
satisfaction of seeing that our pursuers, after lingering for a little
while on the spot on which we had left them, turned homewards, fairly
cowed, and pursued us no more. But, alas! on reaching our secret
chamber, we ascertained, by marks all too unequivocal, that it was to be
secret no longer. Some rude hand had torn down the wooden lining, and
cut two of the posts half through with a hatchet; and on returning
disconsolately to the town, we ascertained that Johnstone the forester
had just been there before us, declaring that some atrociously wicked
persons--for whose apprehension a proclamation was to be instantly
issued--had contrived a diabolical trap, which he had just discovered,
for maiming the cattle of the gentleman, his employer, who farmed the
Hill. Johnstone was an old Forty-Second man, who had followed Wellington
over the larger part of the Peninsula; but though he had witnessed the
storming and sack of San Sebastian, and a great many other bad things,
nothing had he ever seen on the Peninsula, or anywhere else, he said,
half so mischievous as the cattle-trap. We, of course, kept our own
secret; and as we all returned under the cloud of night, and with heavy
hearts filled up our excavation level with the soil, the threatened
proclamation was never issued. Johnstone, however--who had been watching
my motions for a considerable time before, and whom, as he was a
formidable fellow, very unlike any of the other foresters, I had been
sedulously watching in turn--had no hesitation in declaring that I, and
I only, could be the designer of the cattle-trap. I had acquainted
myself in books, he said, with the mode of entrapping by pitfalls wild
beasts in the forests abroad; and my trap for the Colonel's cattle was,
he was certain, a result of my book-acquired knowledge.
I was one day lounging in front of my mother's dwelling, when up came
Johnstone to address me. As the evidence regarding the excavation had
totally broken down, I was aware of no special offence at the time that
could have secured for me such a piece of attention, and inferred that
the old soldier was labouring under some mistake; but Johnstone's
address soon evinced that he was not in the least mistaken. "He wished
to be acquainted with me," he said. "It was all nonsense for us to be
bothering one another, when we had no cause to quarrel." He used
occasionally to eke out his pension, and his scanty allowance as
forester, by catching a basket of fish for himself from off the rocks of
the Hill; and he had just discovered a projecting rock at the foot of a
tall precipice, which would prove, he was sure, one of the best fishing
platforms in the Firth. But then, in the existing state, it was wholly
inaccessible. He was, however, of opinion, that it was possible to lay
it open by carrying a path adown the shelving face of the precipice. He
had seen Wellington address himself to quite as desperate-looking
matters in the Peninsula; and were I but to assist him, he was sure, he
said, we could construct between us the necessary path. The undertaking
was one wholly according to my own heart; and next morning Johnstone and
I were hard at work on the giddy brow of the precipice. It was topped by
a thick bed of boulder clay, itself--such was the steepness of the
slope--almost a precipice; but a series of deeply-cut steps led us
easily adown the bed of clay; and then a sloping shelf, which, with much
labour, we deepened and flattened, conducted us not unsafely some
five-and-twenty or thirty feet along the face of the precipice proper. A
second series of steps, painfully scooped out of the living rock, and
which passed within a few yards of a range of herons' nests perched on a
hitherto inaccessible platform, brought us down some five-and-twenty or
thirty feet more; but then we arrived at a sheer descent of about twenty
feet, at which Johnstone looked rather blank, though, on my suggesting a
ladder, he took heart again, and, cutting two slim taper trees in the
wood above, we flung them over the precipice into the sea; and then
fishing them up with a world of toil and trouble, we squared and bored
them upwards, and, cutting tenons for them in the hard gneiss, we placed
them against the rock front, and nailed over them a line of steps. The
precipice beneath sloped easily on to the fishing rock, and so a few
steps more completed our path. I never saw a man more delighted than
Johnstone. As being lighter and more active than he--for though not
greatly advanced in life, he was considerably debilitated by severe
wounds--I had to take some of the more perilous parts of the work on
myself. I had cut the tenons for the ladder with a rope round my waist,
and had recovered the trees flung into the sea by some adroit swimming;
and the old soldier became thoroughly impressed with the conviction that
my proper sphere was the army. I was already five feet three, he said;
in little more than a twelvemonth I would be five feet seven; and were I
then but to enlist, and to keep from the "drop drink"--a thing which he
never could do--I would, he was certain, rise to be a serjeant. In
brief, such were the terms on which Johnstone and I learned to live ever
after, that, had I constructed a _score_ of traps for the Colonel's
cattle, I believe he would have winked at them all. Poor fellow! he got
into difficulties a good many years after, and, on the accession of the
Whigs to power, mortgaged his pension, and emigrated to Canada. Deeming
the terms hard, however, as he well might, he first wrote a letter to
his old commander, the Duke of Wellington--I holding the pen for him--in
which, in the hope that their stringency might be relaxed in his behalf,
he stated both his services and his case. And promptly did the Duke
reply, in an essentially kind holograph epistle, in which, after stating
that he had no influence at the time with the Ministers of the Crown,
and no means of getting a relaxation of their terms in behalf of any
one, he "earnestly recommended William Johnstone, _first_, not to seek a
provision for himself in Canada, unless he were able-bodied, and fit to
provide for himself in circumstances of extreme hardship; and, _second_,
on no account to sell or mortgage his pension." But the advice was not
taken;--Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mortgage his pension;
and I fear--though I failed to trace his after history--that he suffered
in consequence.