"The bounding pulse, the languid limb
The changing spirit's rise and fall--
We know that these were felt by him,
For these are felt by all."--MONTGOMERY.
The apprenticeship of my friend William Ross had expired during the
working season of this year, when I was engaged at Conon-side; and he
was now living in his mother's cottage in the parish of Nigg, on the
Ross-shire side of the Cromarty Firth. And so, with the sea between us,
we could no longer meet every evening as before, or take long
night-walks among the woods. I crossed the Firth, however, and spent one
happy day in his society, in a little, low-roofed domicile, with a
furze-roughened ravine on the one side, and a dark fir-wood on the
other; and which, though picturesque and interesting as a cottage, must,
I fear, have been a very uncomfortable home. His father, whom I had not
before seen, was sitting beside the fire as I entered. In all except
expression he was wonderfully like my friend; and yet he was one of the
most vapid men I ever knew--a man literally without an idea, and almost
without a recollection or a fact. And my friend's mother, though she
showed a certain kindliness of disposition which her husband wanted, was
loquacious and weak. Had my quondam acquaintance, the vigorous-minded
maniac of Ord, seen William and his parents, she would have triumphantly
referred to them in evidence that Flavel and the Schoolmen were wholly
in the right in holding that souls are not "derived through parental
traduction."
My friend had much to show me: he had made an interesting series of
water-colour sketches of the old castles of the neighbourhood, and a
very elaborate set of drawings of what are known as the Runic obelisks
of Ross: he had made some first attempts, too, in oil-painting; but
though his drawing was, as usual, correct, there was a deadness and want
of transparency about his colouring, which characterized all his after
attempts in the same department, and which was, I suspect, the result of
some such deficiency in his perceptions of the harmonies of colour as
that which, in another department of sense, made me so insensible to the
harmonies of sound. His drawings of the obelisks were of singular
interest. Not only have the thirty years which have since elapsed
exerted their dilapidating effect on all the originals from which he
drew, but one of the number--the most entire of the group at that
time--has been since almost wholly destroyed; and so, what he was then
able to do, there can be no such opportunity of doing again. Further,
his representations of the sculptured ornaments, instead of being (what
those of artists too often are) mere picturesque approximations, were
true in every curve and line. He told me he had spent a fortnight in
tracing out the involved mathematical figures, curves, circles, and
right lines--on which the intricate fretwork of one of the obelisks was
formed, and in making separate drawings of each compartment, before
commencing his draught of the entire stone. And, looking with the eye of
the stone-cutter at his preliminary sketches, from the first meagre
lilies that formed the ground-work of some involved and difficult knot,
to the elaborate knot itself, I saw that, with such a series of drawings
before me, I myself could learn to cut Runic obelisks, in all the
integrity of the complex ancient style, in less than a fortnight. My
friend had formed some striking and original views regarding the
theology represented by symbol on these ancient stones--at that time
regarded as Runic, but now held to be rather of Celtic origin. In the
centre of each obelisk, on the more important and strongly relieved
side, there always occurs a large cross, rather of the Greek than of the
Roman type, and usually elaborately wrought into a fretwork, composed of
myriads of snakes, raised in some of the compartments over half-spheres
resembling apples. In one of the Ross-shire obelisks--that of Shadwick,
in the parish of Nigg--the cross is entirely composed of these
apple-like, snake-covered protuberances; and it was the belief of my
friend, that the original idea of the whole, and, indeed, the
fundamental idea of this school of sculpture, was exactly that so
emphatically laid down by Milton in the opening argument of his
poem--man's fall symbolized by the serpents and the apples, and the
great sign of his restoration, by the cross. But in order to indicate
that to the divine Man, the Restorer, the cross itself was a consequence
of the Fall, even it was covered over with symbols of the event, and, in
one curious specimen, built up of them. It was the snakes and apples
that had reared, _i.e._, rendered imperative, the cross. My friend
further remarked, that from this main idea a sort of fretwork had
originated, which seemed more modern in some of its specimens than the
elaborately-carved snakes, and strongly-relieved apples, but in which
the twistings of the one, and the circular outlines of the others might
be distinctly traced; and that it seemed ultimately to have passed from
a symbol into a mere ornament; as, in earlier instances, hieroglyphic
pictures had passed into mere arbitrary signs or characters. I know not
what may be thought of the theory of William Ross; but when, in
visiting, several years ago, the ancient ruins of Iona, I marked, on the
more ancient crosses, the snakes and apparent apples, and then saw how
the same combination of figures appeared as mere ornamental fretwork on
some of the later tombs, I regarded it as more probably the right one
than any of the others I have yet seen broached on the subject. I dined
with my friend this day on potatoes and salt, flanked by a jug of water;
nor were the potatoes by any means very good ones; but they formed the
only article of food in the household at the time. He had now dined and
breakfasted upon them, he said, for several weeks together; but though
not very strengthening, they kept in the spark of life; and he had saved
up money enough to carry him to the south of Scotland in the spring,
where he trusted to find employment. A poor friendless lad of genius,
diluting his thin consumptive blood on bad potatoes and water, and, at
the same time, anticipating the labours of our antiquarian societies by
his elaborate and truthful drawings of an interesting class of national
antiquities, must be regarded as a melancholy object of contemplation;
but such hapless geniuses there are in every age in which art is
cultivated, and literature has its admirers; and, shrinkingly modest and
retiring in their natures, the world rarely finds them out in time.
I found employment enough for my leisure during this winter in my books
and walks, and in my uncle James's workshop, which, now that Uncle James
had no longer to lecture me about my Latin, and my carelessness as a
scholar in general, was a very pleasant place, where a great deal of
sound remark and excellent information were always to be had. There was
another dwelling in the neighbourhood in which I sometimes spent a not
unpleasant hour. It was a damp underground room, inhabited by a poor old
woman, who had come to the town from a country parish in the previous
year, bringing with her a miserably deformed lad, her son, who, though
now turned of twenty, more resembled, save in his head and face, a boy
of ten, and who was so helpless a cripple, that he could not move from
off his seat. "Poor lame Danie," as he was termed, was, notwithstanding
the hard measure dealt him by nature, an even-tempered,
kindly-dispositioned lad, and was, in consequence, a great favourite
with the young people in the neighbourhood, especially with the humbly
taught young women, who--regarding him simply as an intelligence,
coupled with sympathies, that could write letters--used to find him
employment, which he liked not a little, as a sort of amanuensis and
adviser-general in their affairs of the heart. Richardson tells that he
learned to write his Pamela by the practice he acquired in writing
love-letters, when a very young lad, for half a score love-sick females,
who trusted and employed him. "Poor Danie," though he bore on a skeleton
body, wholly unfurnished with muscle, a brain of the average size and
activity, was not born to be a novelist; but he had the necessary
materials in abundance; and though secret enough to all his other
acquaintance, I, who cared not a great deal about the matter, might, I
found, have as many of his experiences as I pleased. I enjoyed among my
companions the reputation of being what they termed "close-minded;" and
Danie, satisfied, in some sort, that I deserved the character, seemed to
find it a relief to roll over upon my shoulders the great weight of
confidence which, rather liberally, as would seem, for his comfort, had
been laid upon his own. It is recorded of himself by Burns, that he
"felt as much pleasure in being in the secret of half the loves of the
parish of Tarbolton, as ever did statesman in knowing the intrigues of
half the Courts of Europe." And, writing to Dr. Moore, he adds, that it
was "with difficulty" his pen was "restrained from giving him a couple
of paragraphs on the love-adventures of his compeers, the humble inmates
of the farm-house and cottage." I, on the other hand, bore my
confidences soberly enough, and kept them safe and very close--regarding
myself as merely a sort of back-yard of mind, in which Danie might store
up at pleasure the precious commodities intrusted to his charge, which,
from want of stowage, it cumbered him to keep, but which were his
property, not mine. And though, I daresay, I could still fill more than
"a couple of paragraphs" with the love-affairs of townswomen, some of
whose daughters were courted and married ten years ago, I feel no
inclination whatever, after having kept their secrets so long, to begin
blabbing them now. Danie kept a draft-board, and used to take a pride in
beating all his neighbours; but in a short time he taught me--too
palpably to his chagrin--to beat himself; and finding the game a rather
engrossing one besides, and not caring to look on the woe-begone
expression that used to cloud the meek pale face of my poor
acquaintance, every time he found his men swept off the board, or cooped
up into a corner, I gave up drafts, the only game of the kind of which I
ever knew anything, and in the course of a few years succeeded in
unlearning pretty completely all the moves. It appeared wonderful that
the processes essential to life could have been carried on in so
miserable a piece of framework as the person of poor Danie: it was
simply a human skeleton bent double, and covered with a sallow skin. But
they were not carried on in it long. About eighteen months after the
first commencement of our acquaintance, when I was many miles away, he
was seized by a sudden illness, and died in a few hours. I have seen, in
even our better works of fiction, less interesting characters portrayed
than, poor gentle-spirited Danie, the love-depository of the young dames
of the village; and I learned a thing or two in his school.
It was not until after several weeks of the working season had passed,
that my master's great repugnance to doing nothing overcame his almost
equally great repugnance again to seek work as a journeyman. At length,
however, a life of inactivity became wholly intolerable to him; and,
applying to his former employer, he was engaged on the previous
terms--full wages for himself, and a very small allowance for his
apprentice, who was now, however, recognised as the readier and more
skilful stone-cutter of the two. In cutting mouldings of the more
difficult kinds, I had sometimes to take the old man under charge, and
give him lessons in the art, from which, however, he had become rather
too rigid in both mind and body greatly to profit. We both returned to
Conon-side, where there was a tall dome of hewn work to be erected over
the main archway of the steading at which we had been engaged during the
previous year; and, as few of the workmen had yet assembled on the
spot, we succeeded in establishing ourselves as inmates of the barrack,
leaving the hay-loft, with its inferior accommodation, to the later
comers. We constructed for ourselves a bed-frame of rough slabs, and
filled it with hay; placed our chests in front of it; and, as the rats
mustered by thousands in the place, suspended our sack of oatmeal by a
rope, from one of the naked rafters, at rather more than a man's height
over the floor. And, having both pot and pitcher, our household economy
was complete. Though resolved not to forego my evening walks, I had
determined to conform also to every practice of the barrack; and as the
workmen, drafted from various parts of the country, gradually increased
around us, and the place became crowded, I soon found myself engaged in
the rolicking barrack-life of the north-country mason. The rats were
somewhat troublesome. A comrade who slept in the bed immediately beside
ours had one of his ears bitten through one night as he lay asleep, and
remarked, that he supposed it would be his weasand they would attack
next time; and, on rising one morning, I found that the four brightly
plated jack-buttons to which my braces had been fastened had been fairly
cut from off my trousers, and carried away, to form, I doubt not, a
portion of some miser-hoard in the wall. But even the rats themselves
became a source of amusement to us, and imparted to our rude domicile,
in some little degree, the dignity of danger. It was not likely that
they would succeed in eating us all up, as they had done wicked Bishop
Hatto of old; but it was at least something that they had begun to try.
The dwellers in the hay-loft had not been admitted in the previous
season to the full privileges of the barrack, nor had they been required
to share in all its toils and duties. They had to provide their quota of
wood for the fire, and of water for general household purposes: but they
had not to take their turn of cooking and baking for the entire mess,
but were permitted, as convenience served, to cook and bake for
themselves. And so, till now, I had made cakes and porridge, with at
times an occasional mess of brose or _brochan_, for only my master and
myself--a happy arrangement, which, I daresay, saved me a few
_rammings_; seeing that, in at least my earlier efforts, I had been
rather unlucky as a cook, and not very fortunate as a baker. My
experience in the Cromarty caves had rendered me skilful in both boiling
and roasting potatoes, and in preparing shell-fish for the table,
whether molluscous or crustacean, according to the most approved
methods; but the exigencies of our wild life had never brought me fairly
in contact with the cerealia; and I had now to spoil a meal or two, in
each instance, ere my porridge became palatable, or my cakes crisp, or
my brose free and knotty, or my _brochan_ sufficiently smooth and void
of knots. My master, poor man, did grumble a little at first; but there
was a general disposition in the barrack to take part rather with his
apprentice than with himself; and after finding that the cases were to
be given against him, he ceased making complaints. My porridge was at
times, I must confess, very like leaven; but then, it was a standing
recipe in the barrack, that the cook should continue stirring the mess
and adding meal, until, from its first wild ebullitions in full boil, it
became silent over the fire; and so I could show that I had made my
porridge like leaven, quite according to rule. And as for my _brochan_,
I succeeded in proving that I had actually failed to satisfy, though I
had made two kinds of it at once in the same pot. I preferred this viand
when of a thicker consistency than usual, whereas my master liked it
thin enough to be drunk out of the bowl; but as it was I who had the
making of it, I used more instead of less meal than ordinary, and
unluckily, in my first experiment, mixed up the meal in a very small
bowl. It became a dense dough-like mass; and on emptying it into the
pot, instead of incorporating with the boiling water, it sank in a solid
cake to the bottom. In vain I stirred, and manipulated, and kept up the
fire. The stubborn mass refused to separate or dilute, and at length
burnt brown against the bottom of the pot--a hue which the gruel-like
fluid which floated over also assumed; and at length, in utter despair
of securing aught approaching to an average consistency for the whole,
and hearing my master's foot at the door, I took the pot from off the
fire, and dished up for supper a portion of the thinner mixture which it
contained, and which, in at least colour and consistency, not a little
resembled chocolate. The poor man ladled the stuff in utter dismay. "Od,
laddie," he said, "what ca' ye this? Ca' ye this _brochan_?" "Onything
ye like, master," I replied; "but there are two kinds in the pot, and it
will go hard if none of them please you." I then dished him a piece of
the cake, somewhat resembling in size and consistency a small brown
dumpling, which he of course found wholly inedible, and became angry.
But this bad earth of ours "is filled," according to Cowper, "with wrong
and outrage;" and the barrack laughed and took part with the defaulter.
Experience, however, that does so much for all, did a little for me. I
at length became a tolerably fair plain cook, and not a very bad baker;
and now, when the exigencies required that I should take my full share
in the duties of the barrack, I was found adequate to their proper
fulfilment. I made cakes and porridge of fully the average excellence;
and my brose and _brochan_ enjoyed at least the negative happiness of
escaping animadversion and comment.
Some of the inmates, however, who were exceedingly nice in their eating,
were great connoisseurs in porridge; and it was no easy matter to please
them. There existed unsettled differences--the results of a diversity of
tastes--regarding the time that should be given to the boiling of the
mess, respecting the proportion of salt that should be allotted to each
individual, and as to whether the process of "mealing," as it was
termed, should be a slow or a hasty one, and, of course, as in all
controversies of all kinds, the more the matters in dispute were
discussed, the more did they grow in importance. Occasionally the
disputants had their porridge made at the same time in the same pot:
there were, in especial, two of the workmen who differed upon the
degree-of-salt question, whose bickers were supplied from the same
general preparation; and as these had usually opposite complaints to
urge against the cooking, their objections served so completely to
neutralize each other, that they in no degree told against the cook. One
morning the cook--a wag and a favourite--in making porridge for both the
controversialists, made it so exceedingly fresh as to be but little
removed from a poultice; and, filling with the preparation in this state
the bicker of the salt-loving connoisseur, he then took a handful of
salt, and mixing it with the portion which remained in the pot, poured
into the bicker of the fresh man, porridge very much akin to a pickle.
Both entered the barrack sharply set for breakfast, and sat down each to
his meal; and both at the first spoonful dropped their spoons. "A
ramming to the cook!" cried the one--"he has given me porridge without
salt!" "A ramming to the cook!" roared out the other--"he has given me
porridge like brine!" "You see, lads," said the cook, stepping out into
the middle of the floor, with the air of a much-injured orator--"you
see, lads, what matters have come to at last: there is the very pot in
which I made in one mess the porridge in both their bickers. I don't
think we should bear this any longer; we have all had our turn of it,
though mine happens to be the worst; and I now move that these two
fellows be rammed." No sooner said than done. There was a terrible
struggling, and a burning sense of injustice; but no single man in the
barrack was match for half-a-dozen of the others. The disputants, too,
instead of making common cause together, were prepared to assist in
ramming each the other; and so rammed they both were. And at length,
when the details of the stratagem came out, the cook--by escaping for
half an hour into the neighbouring wood, and concealing himself there,
like some political exile under ban of the Government--succeeded in
escaping the merited punishment.
The cause of justice was never, I found, in greater danger in our little
community, than when a culprit succeeded in getting the laughers on his
side. I have said that I became a not very bad baker. Still less and
less sorely, as I improved in this useful art, did my cakes try the
failing teeth of my master, until at length they became crisp and nice;
and he began to find that my new accomplishment was working serious
effects upon the contents of his meal-chest. With a keenly whetted
appetite, and in vigorous health, I was eating a great deal of bread;
and, after a good deal of grumbling, he at length laid it down as law
that I should restrict myself for the future to two cakes per week. I at
once agreed; but the general barrack, to whose ears some of my master's
remonstrances had found their way, was dissatisfied; and it would
probably have overturned in conclave our agreement, and punished the old
man, my master, for the niggardly stringency of his terms, had I not
craved, by way of special favour, to be permitted to give them a week's
trial. One evening early in the week, when the old man had gone out, I
mixed up the better part of a peck of meal in a pot, and placing two of
the larger chests together in the same plane, kneaded it out into an
enormous cake, at least equal in area to an ordinary-sized Newcastle
grindstone. I then cut it up into about twenty pieces, and, forming a
vast semicircle of stones round the fire, raised the pieces to the heat
in a continuous row, some five or six feet in length. I had ample and
ready assistance vouchsafed me in the "firing"--half the barrack were
engaged in the work--when my master entered, and after scanning our
employment in utter astonishment--now glancing at the ring of meal which
still remained on the united chests, to testify to the huge proportions
of the disparted bannock, and now at the cones, squares, rhombs, and
trapeziums of cake that hardened to the heat in front of the fire, he
abruptly asked--"What's this, laddie?--are ye baking for a wadding?"
"Just baking one of the two cakes, master," I replied; "I don't think
we'll need the other one before Saturday night." A roar of laughter from
every corner of the barrack precluded reply; and in the laughter, after
an embarrassed pause, the poor man had the good sense to join. And
during the rest of the season I baked as often and as much as I pleased.
It is, I believe, Goldsmith who remarks, that "wit generally succeeds
more from being happily addressed, than from its native poignancy," and
that "a jest calculated to spread at a gaming table, may be received
with perfect indifference should it happen to drop in a mackerel-boat."
On Goldsmith's principle, the joke of what was termed, from the
well-known fairy tale, "the big bannock wi' the Malison," could have
perhaps succeeded in only a masons' barrack; but never there at least
could joke have been more successful.
As I had not yet ascertained that the Old Red Sandstone of the north of
Scotland is richly fossiliferous, Conon-side and its neighbourhood
furnished me with no very favourable field for geologic exploration. It
enabled me, however, to extend my acquaintance with the great
conglomerate base of the system, which forms here, as I have already
said, a sort of miniature Highlands, extending between the valleys of
the Conon and the Peffer, and which--remarkable for its picturesque
cliffs, abrupt eminences, and narrow steep-sided dells--bears in its
centre a pretty wood-skirted loch, into which the old Celtic prophet
Kenneth Ore, when, like Prospero, he relinquished his art, buried "deep
beyond plummet sound" the magic stone in which he was wont to see both
the distant and the future. Immediately over the pleasure-grounds of
Brahan, the rock forms exactly such cliffs as the landscape gardener
would make, if he could--cliffs with their rude prominent pebbles
breaking the light over every square foot of surface, and furnishing
footing, by their innumerable projections, to many a green tuft of moss,
and many a sweet little flower; while far below, among the deep woods,
there stand up enormous fragments of the same rock, that must have
rolled down in some remote age from the precipices above, and which,
mossy and hoar, and many of them ivy-bound, resemble artificial
ruins--obnoxious, however, to none of the disparaging associations which
the make-believe ruin is sure always to awaken. It was inexpressibly
pleasant to spend a quiet evening hour among these wild cliffs, and
imagine a time when the far distant sea beat against their bases; but
though their enclosed pebbles evidently owed their rounded form to the
attrition of water, the imagination seemed paralyzed when it attempted
calling up a still earlier time, when these solid rocks existed as but
loose sand and pebbles, tossed by waves or scattered by currents; and
when, for hundreds and thousands of square miles, the wild tract around
existed as an ancient ocean, skirted by unknown lands. I had not yet
collected enough of geologic fact to enable me to grapple with the
difficulties of a restoration of the more ancient time. There was a
later period, also, represented in the immediate neighbourhood by a
thick deposit of stratified sand, of which I knew as little as of the
conglomerate. We dug into it, in founding a thrashing-mill, for about
ten feet, but came to no bottom; and I could see that it formed the
subsoil of the valley all around the policies of Conon-side, and
underlay most of its fields and woods. It was white and pure, as if it
had been washed by the sea only a few weeks previous; but in vain did I
search its beds and layers for a fragment of shell by which to determine
its age. I can now, however, entertain little doubt that it belonged to
the boulder clay period of submergence, and that the fauna with which it
was associated bore the ordinary sub-arctic character. When this
stratified sand was deposited, the waves must have broken against the
conglomerate precipices of Brahan, and the sea have occupied, as firths
and sounds, the deep Highland valleys of the interior. And on such of
the hills of the country as had their heads above water at the time,
that interesting but somewhat meagre Alpine Flora must have flourished,
which we now find restricted to our higher mountain summits.
Once every six weeks I was permitted to visit Cromarty, and pass a
Sabbath there; but as my master usually accompanied me, and as the way
proved sufficiently long and weary to press upon his failing strength
and stiffening limbs, we had to restrict ourselves to the beaten road,
and saw but little. On, however, one occasion this season, I journeyed
alone, and spent so happy a day in finding my homeward road along blind
paths--that ran now along the rocky shores of the Cromarty Firth in its
upper reaches, now through brown, lonely moors, mottled with Danish
encampments, and now beside quiet, tomb-besprinkled burying-grounds, and
the broken walls of deserted churches--that its memory still lives
freshly in my mind, as one of the happiest of my life. I passed whole
hours among the ruins of Craighouse--a grey fantastic rag of a castle,
consisting of four heavily-arched stories of time-eaten stone, piled
over each other, and still bearing a-top its stone roof and its ornate
turrets and bartizans--
"A ghastly prison, that eternally
Hangs its blind visage out to the one sea."
It was said in these days to be haunted by its goblin--a
miserable-looking, grey-headed, grey-bearded, little old man, that might
be occasionally seen late in the evening, or early in the morning,
peering out through some arrow-slit or shot-hole at the chance
passenger. I remember getting the whole history of the goblin this day
from a sun-burnt herd-boy, whom I found tending his cattle under the
shadow of the old castle-wall. I began by asking him whose _apparition_
he thought it was that could continue to haunt a building, the very name
of whose last inhabitant had been long since forgotten. "_Oh, they're
saying_," was the reply, "it's the spirit of the man that was killed on
the foundation-stone, just after it was laid, and then built intil the
wa' by the masons, that he might _keep_ the castle by coming back again;
and _they're saying_ that a' the verra auld houses in the kintra had
murderit men builded intil them in that way, and that they have a' o'
them their bogle." I recognised in the boy's account of the matter an
old and widely-spread tradition, which, whatever may have been its
original basis of truth, seems to have so far influenced the buccaneers
of the 17th century, as to have become a reality in their hands. "If
time," says Sir Walter Scott, "did not permit the buccaneers to lavish
away their plunder in their usual debaucheries, they were wont to hide
it, with many superstitious solemnities, in the desert islands and
_keys_ which they frequented, and where much treasure, whose lawless
owners perished without reclaiming it, is still supposed to be
concealed. The most cruel of mankind are often the most superstitious;
and those pirates are said to have had recourse to a horrid ritual, in
order to secure an unearthly guardian to their treasures. They killed a
negro or Spaniard, and buried him with the treasure, believing that his
spirit would haunt the spot, and terrify away all intruders." There is a
figurative peculiarity in the language in which Joshua denounced the man
who should dare rebuild Jericho, that seems to point at some ancient
pagan rite of this kind. Nor does it seem improbable that a practice
which existed in times so little remote as those of the buccaneers, may
have first begun in the dark and cruel ages of human sacrifices. "Cursed
be the man before the Lord," said Joshua, "that riseth up and buildeth
this city of Jericho: _he shall lay the foundation thereof in his
firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it_."
The large-farm system had been already introduced into the part of the
country in which I at this time resided, on the richer and more level
lands; but many a Gaelic-speaking cottar and small tenant still lived on
the neighbouring moors and hill-sides. Though Highland in their surnames
and language, they bore a character considerably different from that of
the simpler Highlanders of the interior of Sutherland, or of a class I
had shortly afterwards an opportunity of studying--the Highlanders of
the western coast of Ross-shire. Doors were not left unbarred at night
in the neighbourhood; and there were wretched hovels among the moors,
very zealously watched and guarded indeed. There was much illicit
distillation and smuggling at this time among the Gaelic-speaking people
of the district; and it told upon their character with the usual
deteriorating effect. Many of the Highlanders, too, had wrought as
labourers at the Caledonian Canal, where they had come in contact with
south-country workmen, and had brought back with them a confident,
loquacious smartness, that, based on a ground-work of ignorance, which
it rendered active and obtrusive, had a bizarre and disagreeable effect,
and formed but an indifferent substitute for the diffident and taciturn
simplicity which it had supplanted. But I have ever found the people of
those border districts of the Highlands which join on to the low
country, or that inhabit districts much traversed by tourists, of a
comparatively inferior cast: the finer qualities of the Highland
character seem easily injured: the hospitality, the simplicity, the
unsuspecting honesty, disappear; and we find, instead, a people
rapacious, suspicious, and unscrupulous, considerably beneath the
Lowland average. In all the unopened districts of the remote Highlands
into which I have penetrated, I have found the people strongly engage my
sympathies and affections--much more strongly than in any part of the
Lowlands; whereas, on the contrary, in the deteriorated districts I have
been sensible of an involuntary revulsion of feeling, when in contact
with the altered race, of which, among the low-country Scotch or the
English, I have had no experience. I remember being impressed, in
reading, many years ago, one of Miss Ferrier's novels, with the truth of
a stroke that brought out very practically the ready susceptibility of
injury manifested by the Celtic character. Some visitors of condition
from the Highlands are represented as seeking out in one of our larger
towns of the south, a simple Highland lad, who had quitted a remote
northern district only a few months before; and when they find him, it
is as a prisoner in Bridewell.
Towards the end of September, my master, who had wholly failed in
overcoming his repugnance to labour as a mere journeyman, succeeded in
procuring a piece of work by contract, in a locality about fourteen
miles nearer our home than Conon-side, and I accompanied him to assist
in its completion. Our employment in our new scene of labour was of the
most disagreeable kind. Burns, who must have had a tolerably extensive
experience of the evils of hard work, specifies in his "Twa Dogs" three
kinds of labour in especial that give poor "cot-folk" "fash enough."
"Trowth, Caesar, whiles they're fash'd eneugh;
A cottar howkin' in a sheugh,
Wi' dirty stanes biggin' a dyke.
Baring a quarry, and sic like."
All very disagreeable employments, as I also can testify; and our work
here unfortunately combined the whole three. We were engaged in
rebuilding one of those old-fashioned walls of gentlemen's
pleasure-grounds known as "_ha has_," that line the sides of deep
ditches, and raise their tops to but the level of the sward; and as the
ditch in this special instance was a wet one, and as we had to clear it
of the old fallen materials, and to dig it out for our new line of
foundation, while at the same time we had to furnish ourselves with
additional materials from a neighbouring quarry, we had at once the
"baring of the quarry," the "howkin' in the sheugh," and the "biggin' of
the dyke wi' dirty stanes," to "fash" us. The last-named employment is
by far the most painful and trying. In most kinds of severe labour the
skin thickens, and the hand hardens, through a natural provision, to
suit the requirements of the task imposed, and yield the necessary
protection to the integuments below; but the "dirty stanes" of the
dyke-builder, when wet as well as dirty, try the reproductive powers of
the cuticle too severely, and wear it off, so that under the rough
friction the quick is laid bare. On this occasion, and on at least one
other, when engaged in building in a wet season in the Western
Highlands, I had all my fingers oozing blood at once; and those who
think that in such circumstances labour protracted throughout a long day
can be other than torture, would do well to try. How these poor hands of
mine burnt and beat at night at this time, as if an unhappy heart had
been stationed in every finger! and what cold chills used to run, sudden
as electric shocks, through the feverish frame!
My general health, too, had become far from strong. As I had been almost
entirely engaged in hewing for the two previous seasons, the dust of the
stone, inhaled at every breath, had exerted the usual weakening effects
on the lungs--those effects under which the life of the stone-cutter is
restricted to about forty-five years; but it was only now, when working
day after day with wet feet in a water-logged ditch, that I began to be
sensibly informed, by a dull, depressing pain in the chest, and a
blood-stained mucoidal substance, expectorated with difficulty, that I
had already caught harm from my employment, and that my term of life
might fall far short of the average one. I resolved, however, as the
last year of my apprenticeship was fast drawing to its close, to
complete, at all hazards, my engagement with my master. It had been
merely a verbal engagement, and I might have broken it without blame,
when, unable to furnish me with work in his character as a master-mason,
he had to transfer my labour to another; but I had determined not to
break it, all the more doggedly from the circumstance that my uncle
James, in a moment of irritation, had said at its commencement that he
feared I would no more persist in being a mason than I had done in being
a scholar; and so I wrought perseveringly on; and slowly and painfully,
rood after rood, the wall grew up under our hands. My poor master, who
suffered even more from chopped hands and bleeding fingers than I did,
was cross and fretful, and sometimes sought relief in finding fault with
his apprentice; but, sobered by my forebodings of an early death, I used
to make no reply; and the hasty, ill-tempered expressions in which he
gave vent virtually to but his sense of pain and discomfort, were almost
always followed by some conciliatory remark. Superstition takes a strong
hold of the mind in circumstances such as those in which I was at this
time placed. One day when on the top of a tall building, part of which
we were throwing down to supply us with materials for our work, I raised
up a broad slab of red micaceous sandstone, thin as a roofing slate, and
exceedingly fragile, and, holding it out at arm's length, dropped it
over the wall. I had been worse than usual all that morning, and much
depressed; and, ere the slab parted from my hand, I said--looking
forward to but a few months of life--I shall break up like that
sandstone slab, and perish as little known. But the sandstone slab did
not break up: a sudden breeze blew it aslant as it fell; it cleared the
rough heap of stones below, where I had anticipated it would have been
shivered to fragments; and, lighting on its edge, stuck upright like a
miniature obelisk, in the soft green sward beyond. None of the
Philosophies or the Logics would have sanctioned the inference which I
immediately drew; but that curious chapter in the history of human
belief which treats of signs and omens abounds in such postulates and
such conclusions. I at once inferred that recovery awaited me: I was "to
live and not die;" and felt lighter, during the few weeks I afterwards
toiled at this place, under the cheering influence of the conviction.
The tenant of the farm on which our work was situated, and who had been
both a great distiller and considerable fanner in his day, had become
bankrupt shortly before, and was on the eve of quitting the place, a
broken man. And his forlorn circumstances seemed stamped on almost every
field and out-house of his farm. The stone fences were ruinous; the
hedges gapped by the almost untended cattle; a considerable sprinkling
of corn-ears lay rotting on the lea; and here and there an entire sheaf,
that had fallen from the "leading-cart" at the close of harvest, might
be seen still lying among the stubble, fastened to the earth by the
germination of its grains. Some of the out-houses were miserable beyond
description. There was a square of modern offices, in which the cattle
and horses of the farm--appropriated by the landlord, at the time under
the law of hypothec--were tolerably well lodged; but the hovel in which
three of the farm-servants lived, and in which, for want of a better, my
master and I had to cook and sleep, was one of the most miserable
tumble-down erections I ever saw inhabited. It had formed part of an
ancient set of offices that had been condemned about fourteen years
before; but the proprietor of the place becoming insolvent, it had been
spared, in lack of a better, to accommodate the servants who wrought on
the farm; and it had now become not only a comfortless, but also a very
unsafe dwelling. It would have formed no bad subject, with its bulging
walls and gapped roof, that showed the bare ribs through the breaches,
for the pencil of my friend William Koss; but the cow or horse that had
no better shelter than that which it afforded could not be regarded as
other than indifferently lodged. Every heavier shower found its way
through the roof in torrents: I could even tell the hour of the night by
the stars which passed over the long opening that ran along the ridge
from gable to gable; and in stormy evenings I have paused at every ruder
blast, in the expectation of hearing the rafters crack and give way over
my head. The distiller had introduced upon his farm, on a small scale,
what has since been extensively known as the bothy system; and this
hovel was the bothy. There were, as I have said, but three farm-servants
who lived in it at the time--young, unmarried lads, extremely ignorant,
and of gay, reckless dispositions, whose care for their master's
interests might be read in the germinating sheaves that lay upon his
fields, and who usually spoke of him, when out of his hearing, as "the
old sinner." He too evidently cared nothing for them; and they detested
him, and regarded the ruin which had overtaken him, and which their own
recklessness and indifference to his welfare must have at least assisted
to secure, with open satisfaction. "It was ae comfort, anyhow," they
said, "that the blastit old sinner, after a' his near-goingness wi'
them, was now but a dyvour bankrupt." Bad enough certainly; and yet
natural enough, and, in a sense, proper enough too. The Christian divine
would have urged these men to return their master good for evil.
Cobbett, on the contrary, would have advised them to go out at nights a
rick-burning. The better advice will to a certainty not be taken by
ninety-nine out of every hundred of our bothy-men; for it is one of the
grand evils of the system, that it removes its victims beyond the
ennobling influences of religion; and, on the other hand, at least this
much may be said for the worse counsel, that the system costs the
country every year the price of a great many corn-ricks.
The three lads lived chiefly on brose, as the viand at all edible into
which their oatmeal could be most readily converted; and never baked or
made for themselves a dish of porridge or gruel, apparently to avoid
trouble, and that they might be as little as possible in the hated
bothy. I always lost sight of them in the evening; but towards midnight
their talk frequently awoke me as they were going to bed; and I heard
them tell of incidents that had befallen them at the neighbouring
farm-houses, or refer to blackguard bits of scandal which they had
picked up. Sometimes a fourth voice mingled in the dialogue. It was that
of a reckless poacher, who used to come in, always long after
nightfall, and fling himself down on a lair of straw in a corner of the
bothy; and usually ere day broke he was up and away. The grand enjoyment
of the three farm-lads--the enjoyment which seemed to counterbalance,
with its concentrated delights, the comfortless monotony of weeks--was a
rustic ball which took place once every month, and sometimes oftener, at
a public-house in the neighbouring village, and at which they used to
meet some of the farm-lasses of the locality, and dance and drink whisky
till morning. I know not how their money stood such frequent carousals;
but they were, I saw, bare of every necessary article of clothing,
especially of underclothing and linen; and I learned from their
occasional talk about justice-of-peace summonses, that the previous
term-day had left in the hands of their shoemakers and drapers unsettled
bills. But such matters were taken very lightly: the three lads, if not
happy, were at least merry; and the monthly ball, for which they
sacrificed so much, furnished not only its hours of pleasure while it
lasted, but also a week's talking in anticipation ere it came, and
another week's talking over its various incidents after it had passed.
And such was my experience of the bothy system in its first beginnings.
It has since so greatly increased, that there are now single counties in
Scotland in which there are from five to eight hundred farm-servants
exposed to its deteriorating influences; and the rustic population bids
fair in those districts fully to rival that of our large towns in
profligacy, and greatly to outrival them in coarseness. Were I a
statesman, I would, I think, be bold enough to try the efficacy of a tax
on bothies. It is long since Goldsmith wrote regarding a state of
society in which "wealth accumulates and men decay," and since Burns
looked with his accustomed sagacity on that change for the worse in the
character of our rural people which the large-farm system has
introduced. "A fertile improved country is West Lothian," we find the
latter poet remarking, in one of his journals, "but the more elegance
and luxury among the farmers, I always observe in equal proportion the
rudeness and stupidity of the peasantry. This remark I have made all
over the Lothians, Merse, Roxburgh, &c.; and for this, among other
reasons, I think that a man of romantic taste--'a man of feeling'--will
be better pleased with the poverty but intelligent minds of the
peasantry of Ayrshire (peasantry they all are, below the Justice of
Peace), than the opulence of a club of Merse farmers, when he at the
same time considers the Vandalism of their plough-folks." The
deteriorating effect of the large-farm system, remarked by the poet, is
inevitable. It is impossible that the modern farm-servant, in his
comparatively irresponsible situation, and with his fixed wages of
meagre amount, can be rendered as thoughtful and provident a person as
the small farmer of the last age, who, thrown on his own resources, had
to cultivate his fields and drive his bargains with his Martinmas and
Whitsunday settlement with the landlord full before him; and who often
succeeded in saving money, and in giving a classical education to some
promising son or nephew, which enabled the young man to rise to a higher
sphere of life. Farm-servants, as a class, _must_ be lower in the scale
than the old tenant-farmers, who wrought their little farms with their
own hands; but it is possible to elevate them far above the degraded
level of the bothy; and unless means be taken to check the spread of the
ruinous process of brute-making which the system involves, the Scottish
people will sink, to a certainty, in the agricultural districts, from
being one of the most provident, intelligent, and moral in Europe, to be
one of the most licentious, reckless, and ignorant.
Candle-light is a luxury in which no one ever thinks of indulging in a
barrack; and in a barrack such as ours at this time, riddled with gaps
and breaches, and filled with all manner of cold draughts, it was not
every night in which a candle would have burnt. And as our fuel, which
consisted of sorely decayed wood--the roofing of a dilapidated
out-house which we were pulling down--formed but a dull fire, it was
with difficulty I could read by its light. By spreading out my book,
however, within a foot or so of the embers, I was enabled, though
sometimes at the expense of a headache, to prosecute a new tract of
reading which had just opened to me, and in which, for a time, I found
much amusement. There was a vagabond pedlar who travelled at this time
the northern counties, widely known as Jack from Dover, but whose true
name was Alexander Knox, and who used to affirm that he was of the same
family as the great Reformer. The pedlar himself was, however, no
reformer. Once every six weeks or two months he got madly drunk, and not
only "perished the pack," as he used to say, but sometimes got into
prison to boot. There were, however, some kind relations in the south,
who always set him up again; and Jack from Dover, after a fortnight of
misery, used to appear with the ordinary bulk of merchandise at his
back, and continue thriving until he again got drunk. He had a turn for
buying and reading curious books, which, after mastering their contents,
he always sold again; and he learned to bring them, when of a kind which
no one else would purchase, to my mother, and recommend them as suitable
for me. Poor Jack was always conscientious in his recommendations. I
know not how he contrived to take the exact measure of my tastes in the
matter, but suitable for me they invariably were; and as his price
rarely exceeded a shilling per volume, and sometimes fell below a
sixpence, my mother always purchased, when she could, upon his judgment.
I owed to his discrimination my first copy of Bacon's "Wisdom of the
Ancients," "done into English by Sir Arthur Gorges," and a book to which
I had long after occasion to refer in my geological writings--Maillet's
"Telliamed"--one, of the earlier treatises on the development
hypothesis; and he had now procured for me a selection, in one volume,
of the Poems of Gawin Douglas and Will Dunbar, and another collection
in a larger volume, of "Ancient Scottish Poems," from the MSS. of George
Bannatyne. I had been previously almost wholly unacquainted with the
elder Scotch poets. My uncle James had introduced me, at a very early
age, to Burns and Ramsay, and I had found out Fergusson and Tannahill
for myself; but that school of Scotch literature which nourished between
the reigns of David the Second and James the Sixth had remained to me,
until now, well-nigh a _terra incognita_, and I found no little pleasure
in exploring the antique recesses which it opened up. Shortly after, I
read Ramsay's "Evergreen," the "King's Quair," and the true "Actes and
Deides of ye illuster and vailyeand campioun Shyr Wilham Wallace," not
modernized, as in my first copy, but in the tongue in which they had
been recited of old by Henry the Minstrel: I had previously gloated over
Harbour's Bruce; and thus my acquaintance with the old Scots poets, if
not very profound, became at least so respectable, that not until many
years after did I meet with an individual who knew them equally well.
The strange picturesque allegories of Douglas, and the terse sense and
racy humour of Dunbar, delighted me much. As I had to con my way slowly
amid the difficulties of a language which was no longer that spoken by
my country-folk, I felt as if I were creating the sense which I found;
it came gradually out like some fossil of the rock, from which I had
laboriously to chip away the enveloping matrix; and in hanging
admiringly over it, I thought I perceived how it was that some of my old
schoolfellows, who were prosecuting their education at college, were
always insisting on the great superiority of the old Greek and Roman
writers over the writers of our own country. I could not give them
credit for much critical discernment: they were indifferent enough, some
of them, to both verse and prose, and hardly knew in what poetry
consisted; and yet I believed them to be true to their perceptions when
they insisted on what they termed the high excellence of the ancients.
With my old schoolfellows, I now said, the process of perusal, when
reading an English work of classical standing, is so sudden, compared
with the slowness with which they imagine or understand, that they slide
over the surface of their author's numbers, or of his periods, without
acquiring a due sense of what lies beneath; whereas, in perusing the
works of a Greek or Latin author, they have just to do what I am doing
in deciphering the "Palice of Honour" or the "Goldin Terge,"--they have
to proceed slowly, and to render the language of their author into the
language of their own thinking. And so, losing scarce any of his meaning
in consequence, and not reflecting on the process through which they
have entered into it, they contrast the little which they gain from a
hurried perusal of a good English book, with the much which they gain
from the very leisurely perusal of a good Latin or Greek one; and term
_the little_ the poverty of modern writers, and _the much_ the fertility
of the ancients. Such was my theory, and it was at least not an
uncharitable one to my acquaintance. I was, however, arrested in the
middle of my studies by a day of soaking rain, which so saturated with
moisture the decayed spongy wood, our fuel, that, though I succeeded in
making with some difficulty such fires of it as sufficed to cook our
victuals, it defied my skill to make one by which I could read. At
length, however, this dreary season of labour--by far the gloomiest I
ever spent--came to a close, and I returned with my master to Cromarty
about Martinmas, our heavy job of work completed, and my term of
apprenticeship at a close.