"Far let me wander down thy craggy shore,
With rocks and trees bestrewn, dark Loch Maree."--SMALL.
The restorative powers of a constitution which at this time it took much
hard usage to injure, came vigorously into operation on my removal from
the wet ditch and the ruinous hovel; and ere the close of winter I had
got once more into my ordinary state of robust health. I read, wrote,
drew, corresponded with my friend William Ross (who had removed to
Edinburgh), re-examined the Eathie Lias, and re-explored the Eathie
Burn--a noble Old Red Sandstone ravine, remarkable for the wild
picturesqueness of its cliffs and the beauty of its cataracts. I spent,
too, many an evening in Uncle James's workshop, on better terms with
both my uncles than almost ever before--a consequence, in part, of the
sober complexion which, as the seasons passed, my mind was gradually
assuming, and in part, of the manner in which I had completed my
engagement with my master. "Act always," said Uncle James, "as you have
done in this matter. In all your dealings, give your neighbour the _cast
of the bauk_--'good measure, heaped up and running over'--and you will
not lose by it in the end." I certainly did not lose by faithfully
serving out my term of apprenticeship. It is not uninstructive to
observe how strangely the public are led at times to attach paramount
importance to what is in reality only subordinately important, and to
pass over the really paramount without thought or notice. The destiny in
life of the skilled mechanic is much more influenced, for instance, by
his second education--that of his apprenticeship--than by his
first--that of the school; and yet it is to the education of the school
that the importance is generally regarded as attaching, and we never
hear of the other. The careless, incompetent scholar has many
opportunities of recovering himself; the careless, incompetent
apprentice, who either fails to serve out his regular time, or who,
though he fulfils his term, is discharged an inferior workman, has very
few; and further, nothing can be more certain than that inferiority as a
workman bears much more disastrously on the condition of the mechanic
than inferiority as a scholar. Unable to maintain his place among
brother journeymen, or to render himself worthy of the average wages of
his craft, the ill-taught mechanic falls out of regular employment,
subsists precariously for a time on occasional jobs, and either, forming
idle habits, becomes a vagabond _tramper_, or, getting into the toils of
some rapacious task-master, becomes an enslaved _sweater_. For one
workman injured by neglect of his school-education, there are scores
ruined by neglect of their apprenticeship-education. Three-fourths of
the distress of the country's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of
the unhappy class who have to compete with machinery), and nine-tenths
of their vagabondism, will be found restricted to inferior workmen, who,
like Hogarth's "careless apprentice," neglected the opportunities of
their second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer
insight into this matter than most of our modern educationists.
My friend of the Doocot Cave had been serving a short apprenticeship to
a grocer in London during the latter years in which I had been working
out mine as a stone-mason in the north country; and I now learned that
he had just returned to his native place, with the intention of setting
up in business for himself. To those who move in the upper walks, the
superiority in status of the village shop-keeper over the journeyman
mason may not be very perceptible; but, surveyed from the lower levels
of society, it is quite considerable enough to be seen; even Gulliver
could determine that the Emperor of Lilliput was taller by almost the
breadth of a nail than any of his Court; and, though extremely desirous
of renewing my acquaintanceship with my old friend, I was sensible
enough of his advantage over me in point of position, to feel that the
necessary advances should be made on his part, not on mine. I, however,
threw myself in his way, though after a manner so fastidiously proud and
jealous, that even yet, every time the recollection crosses me, it
provokes me to a smile. On learning that he was engaged at the quay in
superintending the landing of some goods, for, I suppose, his future
shop, I assumed the leathern apron, which I had thrown aside for the
winter at Martinmas, and stalked past him in my working dress--a
veritable operative mason--eyeing him steadfastly as I passed. He looked
at me for a moment; and then, without sign of recognition, turned
indifferently away. I failed taking into account that he had never seen
me girt with a leathern apron before--that, since we had last parted, I
had grown more than half a foot--and that a young man of nearly five
feet eleven inches, with an incipient whisker palpably visible on his
cheek, might be a different-looking sort of person from a smooth-chinned
stripling of little more than five feet three. And certainly my friend,
as I learned from him nearly three years after, failed on this occasion
to recognise me. But believing that he did, and that he did not choose
to reckon among his friends a humble working man, I returned to my home
very sad, and, I am afraid, not a little angry; and, locking up the
supposed slight in my breast, as of too delicate a nature to be
communicated to any one, for more than two years from this time I did
not again cross his path.
I was now my own master, and commenced work as a journeyman in behalf of
one of my maternal aunts--the aunt who had gone so many years before to
live with her aged relative, the cousin of my father, and the mother of
his first wife. Aunt Jenny had resided for many years after this time
with an aged widow lady, who had lived apart in quiet gentility on very
small means; and now that she was dead, my aunt saw her vocation gone,
and wished that she too could live apart, a life of humble independency,
supporting herself by her spinning-wheel, and by now and then knitting a
stocking. She feared, however, to encounter the formidable drain on her
means of a half-yearly room-rent; and, as there was a little bit of
ground at the head of the strip of garden left me by my father, which
bordered on a road that, communicating between town and country, bore,
as is common in the north of Scotland, the French name of the _Pays_, it
occurred to me that I might try my hand, as a skilled mechanic, in
erecting upon it a cottage for Aunt Jenny. Masons have, of course, more
in their power in the way of house-building than any other class of
mechanics. It was necessary, however, that there should be money
provided for the purchase of wood for the roof, and for the carting of
the necessary stones and mortar; and I had none. But Aunt Jenny had
saved a few pounds, and a very few proved sufficient; and so I built a
cottage in the _Pays_, of a single room and a closet, as my first job,
which, if not very elegant, or of large accommodation, came fully up to
Aunt Jenny's ideas of comfort, and which, for at least a quarter of a
century, has served her as a home. It was completed before Whitsunday,
and I then deliberated on setting myself to seek after employment of a
more remunerative kind, with just a little of the feeling to which we
owe one of the best-known elegiac poems in the language--the "Man was
made to Mourn" of Burns. "There is nothing that gives me a more
mortifying picture of human life," said the poet, "than a man seeking
work." The required work, however, came direct in my way without
solicitation, and exactly at the proper time. I was engaged to assist in
hewing a Gothic gateway among the woods of my old haunt, Conon-side; and
was then despatched, when the work was on the eve of being finished, to
provide materials for building a house on the western coast of
Ross-shire. My new master had found me engaged in the previous season,
amid the wild turmoil of the barrack, in studying practical geometry,
and had glanced approvingly over a series of architectural drawings
which I had just completed; and he now sought me out in consequence, and
placed me in charge of a small party which he despatched in advance of
his other workmen, and which I was instructed to increase, by employing
a labourer or two on arriving at the scene of our future employment.
We were to be accompanied by a carter from a neighbouring town; and on
the morning fixed for the commencement of our journey, his cart and
horse were early at Conon-side, to carry across the country the tools
required at our new job; but of himself we saw no trace; and about ten
o'clock we set off without him. Ascertaining, however, when about two
miles on our way, that we had left behind us a lever useful in the
setting of large stones, I bade my companion wait for me at the village
of Contin, where we expected meeting the carter; and, returning for the
tool, I quitted the high road on finding it, and, to save time, and
avoid a detour of about three miles, struck across the country direct on
the village. My way was, however, a very rough one; and in coming upon
the Conon, which it was necessary I should ford--for by avoiding the
detour I had missed the bridge--I found it tolerably heavy in flood.
Save for the iron lever which I carried, I would have selected, as my
point of crossing, one of the still deep pools, as much safer to a
vigorous swimmer than any of the apparent fords, with their powerful
currents, whirling eddies, and rough bottoms. But though the heroes of
antiquity--men such as Julius Caeesar and Horatius Cocles--could swim
across rivers and seas in heavy armour, the specific gravity of the
human subject in these latter ages of the world forbids such feats; and,
concluding that I had not levity enough in my framework to float across
the lever, I selected, with some hesitation, one of the better-looking
fords, and, with my trousers dangling from the iron beam on my shoulder,
entered the river. Such was the arrowy swiftness of the current,
however, that the water had scarce reached my middle when it began to
hollow out the stones and gravel from under my feet, and to bear me down
per force in a slanting direction. There was a foaming rapid just at
hand; and immediately beyond, a deep, dark pool, in which the chafed
current whirled around, as if exhausting the wrath aroused by its recent
treatment among rocks and stones, ere recovering its ordinary temper;
and had I lost footing, or been carried a little further down, I know
not how it might have fared with me in the wild foaming descent that lay
between the ford and the pool. Curiously enough, however, the one idea
which, in the excitement of the moment, filled my mind, was an intensely
ludicrous one. I would, of course, lose not only the lever in the
torrent, but my trousers also; and how was I ever to get home without
them? Where, in the name of wonder, should I get a kilt to borrow? I
have oftener than once experienced this strange sensation of the
ludicrous in circumstances with which a different feeling would have
harmonized better. Byron represents it as rising in extreme grief: it
is, however, I suspect, greatly more common in extreme danger; and all
the instances which the poet himself gives in his note--Sir Thomas More
on the scaffold, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, and those victims of the
French Revolution "with whom it became a fashion to leave some _mot_ as
a legacy"--were all jokers rather in circumstances of desperate and
hopeless peril than of sorrow. It is, however, in danger, us certainly
as in grief, a joyless sort of mirth.
"That playfulness of sorrow ne'er beguiles;
It smiles in bitterness: but still it smiles,
And sometimes with the wisest and the best.
Till even the scaffold echoes with their jest."
The feeling, however, though an inharmoniously toned, is not a
weakening one. I laughed in the stream, but I did not yield to it; and,
making a violent effort, when just on the edge of the rapid, I got into
stiller water, and succeeded in making my way to the opposite bank,
drenched to the arm-pits. It was in nearly the same reach of the Conon
that my poor friend the maniac of Ord lost her life a few days after.
I found my companion in charge of the cart with our tools, baiting at an
inn a little beyond Contin; but there was no sign of the carter; and we
were informed by the innkeeper, to whom he was well known, that we might
have to wait for him all day, and perhaps not see him at night.
Click-Clack--a name expressive of the carter's fluency as a talker, by
which he was oftener designated than by the one in the parish
register--might no doubt have purposed in the morning joining us at an
early hour, but that was when he was sober; and what his intention might
be now, said the innkeeper, when in all probability he was drunk, no
living man could say. This was rather startling intelligence to men who
had a long journey through a rough country before them; and my
comrade--a lad a year or two older than myself, but still an
apprentice--added to my dismay by telling me he had been sure from the
first there was something wrong with Click-Clack, and that his master
had secured his services, not from choice, but simply because, having
thoughtlessly become surety for him at a sale for the price of a horse,
and being left to pay for the animal, he had now employed him, in the
hope of getting himself reimbursed. I resolved, however, on waiting for
the carter until the last moment after which it would be possible for us
to reach our ultimate stage without perilously encroaching on the night;
and, taking it for granted that he would not very soon join us, I set
out for a neighbouring hill, which commands an extensive view, to take
note of the main features of a district with which I had formed, during
the two previous years, not a few interesting associations, and to dry
my wetted clothes in the breeze and the sun. The old tower of Fairburn
formed one of the most striking objects in the prospect; and the eye
expatiated beyond from where the gneiss region begins, on a tract of
broken hill and brown moor, uncheered by a single green field or human
dwelling. There are traditions that, in their very peculiarity, and
remoteness from the tract of ordinary intention, give evidence of their
truth; and I now called up a tradition, which I owed to my friend the
maniac, respecting the manner in which the Mackenzies of Fairburn and
the Chisholms of Strathglass had divided this barren tract between them.
It had lain, from the first settlement of the country, an unappropriated
waste, and neither proprietor could tell where his own lands terminated,
or those of his neighbour began; but finding that the want of a proper
line of demarcation led to quarrels between their herdsmen when baiting
in their summer shielings with their cattle, they agreed to have the
tract divided. The age of land-surveyors had not yet come; but,
selecting two old women of seventy-five, they sent them out at the same
hour, to meet among the hills, the one from Fairburn Tower, the other
from Erchless Castle, after first binding themselves to accept their
place of meeting as the point at which to set up the boundary-stone of
the two properties. The women, attended by a bevy of competent
witnesses, journeyed as if for life and death; but the Fairburn woman,
who was the laird's foster-mother, either more zealous or more active
than the Chisholm one, travelled nearly two miles for her one; and when
they came in sight of each other in the waste, it was far from the
fields of Fairburn, and comparatively at no great distance from those of
the Chisholm. It is not easy knowing why they should have regarded one
another in the light of enemies; but at a mile's distance their flagging
pace quickened into a run, and, meeting at a narrow rivulet, they would
fain have fought; but lacking, in their utter exhaustion, strength for
fighting and breath for scolding, they could only seat themselves on the
opposite banks, and _girn_ at one another across the stream. George
Cruikshank has had at times worse subjects for his pencil. It is, I
believe, Landor, in one of his "imaginary conversations," who makes a
Highland laird inform Adam Smith that, desirous to ascertain, in some
sort of conceivable degree, the size of his property, he had placed a
line of pipers around it, each at such a distance from his nearest
neighbour that he could barely catch the sound of his bagpipe; and that
from the number of pipers required he was able to form an approximate
estimate of the extent of his estate. And here, in a Highland tradition,
genuine at least as such, are we introduced to an expedient of the kind
scarce less ludicrous or inadequate than that which Landor must, in one
of his humorous moods, have merely imagined.
I returned to the inn at the hour from which, as I have said, it would
be possible for us, and not more than possible, to complete our day's
journey; and finding, as I had anticipated, no trace of Click-Clack, we
set off without him. Our way led us through long moory straths, with
here and there a blue lake and birch wood, and here and there a group of
dingy cottages and of irregular fields; but the general scenery was that
of the prevailing schistose gneiss of the Scotch Highlands, in which
rounded confluent hills stand up over long-withdrawing valleys, and
imposing rather from its bare and lonely expansiveness, than from aught
bold or striking in its features. The district had been opened up only a
few seasons previous by the Parliamentary road over which we travelled,
and was at that time little known to the tourist; and the thirty years
which have since passed have in some respects considerably changed it,
as they have done the Highlands generally. Most of the cottages, when I
last journeyed the way, were represented by but broken ruins, and the
fields by mossy patches that remained green amid the waste. I marked at
one spot an extraordinary group of oak-trees, in the last stage of
decay, which would have attracted notice from their great bulk and size
in even the forests of England. The largest of the group lay rotting
upon the ground--a black, doddered shell, fully six feet in diameter,
but hollow as a tar-barrel; while the others, some four or five in
number, stood up around it, totally divested of all their larger boughs,
but green with leaves, that, from the minuteness of the twigs on which
they grew, wrapped them around like close-fitting mantles. Their period
of "tree-ship"--to borrow a phrase from Cowper--must have extended far
into the obscure past of Highland history--to a time, I doubt not, when
not a few of the adjacent peat mosses still lived as forests, and when
some of the neighbouring clans--Frasers, Bissets, and Chisholms--had, at
least under the existing names (French and Saxon in their derivation),
not yet begun to be. Ere we reached the solitary inn of
Auchen-nasheen--a true Highland clachan of the ancient type, the night
had fallen dark and stormy for a night in June; and a grey mist which
had been descending for hours along the hills--blotting off their brown
summits bit by bit, as an artist might his pencilled hills with a piece
of India rubber, but which, methodical in its encroachments, had
preserved in its advances a perfect horizontality of line--had broken
into a heavy, continuous rain. As, however, the fair weather had lasted
us till we were within a mile of our journey's end, we were only
partially wet on our arrival, and soon succeeded in drying ourselves in
front of a noble turf fire. My comrade would fain have solaced himself,
after our weary journey, with something nice. He held that a Highland
inn should be able to furnish at least a bit of mutton-ham or a cut of
dried salmon, and ordered a few slices, first of ham, and then of
salmon; but his orders served merely to perplex the landlord and his
wife, whose stores seemed to consist of only oatmeal and whisky; and,
coming down in his expectations and demands, and intimating that he was
very hungry, and that anything edible would do, we heard the landlady
inform, with evident satisfaction, a red-armed wench, dressed in blue
plaiding, that "the lads would take porridge." The porridge was
accordingly prepared; and, when engaged in discussing this familiar
viand, a little before midnight--for we had arrived late--a tall
Highlander entered the inn, dropping like a mill-wheel. He was charged,
he said, with messages to the landlord, and to two mason lads in the
inn, from a forlorn carter with whom he had travelled about twenty
miles, but who, knocked up by the "drap drink" and a pair of bad shoes,
had been compelled to shelter for the night in a cottage about seven
miles short of Auchen-nasheen. The carter's message to the landlord was
simply to the effect that the two mason lads having stolen his horse and
cart, he instructed him to detain his property for him until he himself
should come up in the morning. As for his message to the lads, said the
Highlander, "it was no meikle worth gaun o'er again; but if we liked to
buckle on a' the Gaelic curses to a' the English ones, it would be
something like that."
We were awakened next morning by a tremendous hubbub in the adjoining
apartment. "It is Click-Clack the carter," said my comrade: "oh, what
shall we do?" We leaped up; and getting into our clothes in doubly-quick
time, set ourselves to reconnoitre through the crannies of a deal
partition, and saw the carter standing in the middle of the next room,
storming furiously, and the landlord, a smooth-spoken, little old man,
striving hard to conciliate him. Click-Clack was a rough-looking fellow,
turned of forty, of about five feet ten, with a black unshaven beard,
like a shoe-brush stuck under his nose, which was red as a coal, and
attired in a sadly-breached suit of Aberdeen grey, topped by a brimless
hat, that had been borrowed, apparently, from some obliging scare-crow.
I measured him in person and expression; and, deeming myself his match,
even unassisted by my comrade, on whose discretion I could calculate
with more certainty than on his valour, I entered the apartment, and
taxed him with gross dereliction of duty. He had left us to drive his
horse and cart for a whole day, and had broken, for the sake of his
wretched indulgence in the public-house, his engagement with our master;
and I would report him to a certainty. The carter turned upon me with
the fierceness of a wild beast; but, first catching his eye, as I would
that of a maniac, I set my face very near his, and he calmed down in a
moment. He could not help being late, he said: he had reached the inn at
Contin not an hour after we had left it; and it was really very hard to
have to travel a long day's journey in such bad shoes. We accepted his
apology; and, ordering the landlord to bring in half a mutchkin of
whisky, the storm blew by. The morning, like the previous night, had
been thick and rainy; but it gradually cleared up as the day rose; and
after breakfast we set out together along a broken footpath, never
before traversed by horse and cart. We passed a solitary lake, on whose
shores the only human dwelling was a dark turf shieling, at which,
however, Click-Clack ascertained there was whisky to be sold; and then
entered upon a tract of scenery wholly different in its composition and
character from that through which our journey had previously lain.
There runs along the west coast of Scotland, from the island of Rum to
the immediate neighbourhood of Cape Wrath, a formation, laid down by
Macculloch, in his Geological Map of the Kingdom, as Old Red Sandstone,
but which underlies formations deemed primary--two of these of quartz
rock, and a third of that unfossiliferous limestone in which the huge
Cave of Smoo is hollowed, and to which the Assynt marbles belong. The
system, which, taken as a whole--quartz-rock, lime, and
sandstone--corresponds bed for bed with the Lower Old Red of the east
coast, and is probably a highly metamorphic example of that great
deposit, exhibits its fullest development in Assynt, where all its four
component beds are present. In the tract on which we now entered, it
presents only two of these--the lower quartz-rock, and the underlying
red sandstone; but wherever any of its members appear, they present
unique features--marks of enormous denudation, and a bold style of
landscape altogether its own; and, in now entering upon it for the first
time, I was much impressed by its extraordinary character. Loch Maree,
one of the wildest of our Highland lakes, and at this time scarce at all
known to the tourist, owes to it all that is peculiar in its
appearance--its tall pyramidal quartz mountains, that rise at one
stride, steep, and well-nigh as naked as the old Pyramids, from nearly
the level of the sea, to heights on which at midsummer the snows of
winter gleam white in streaks and patches; and a picturesque sandstone
tract of precipitous hills, which flanks its western shore, and bore at
this period the remains of one of the old pine forests. A continuous
wall of gneiss mountains, that runs along the eastern side of the lake,
sinks sheer into its brown depths, save at one point, where a level
tract, half-encircled by precipices, is occupied by fields and
copsewood, and bears in the midst a white mansion-house; the blue
expanse of the lake greatly broadens in its lower reaches; and a group
of partially submerged hillocks, that resemble the forest-covered ones
on its western shores, but are of lower altitude, rise over its waters,
and form a miniature archipelago, grey with lichened stone, and bosky
with birch and hazel. Finding at the head of the loch that no horse and
cart had ever forced their way along its sides, we had to hire a boat
for the transport of at least cart and baggage; and when the boatmen
were getting ready for the voyage, which was, with the characteristic
dilatoriness of the district, a work of hours, we baited at the clachan
of _Kinlochewe_--a humble Highland inn, like that in which we had passed
the night. The name--that of an old farm which stretches out along the
_head_ or upper end of Loch Maree--has a remarkable etymology: it means
simply the head of _Loch Ewe_--the salt-water loch into which the waters
of Loch Maree empty themselves by a river little more than a mile in
length, and whose present _head_ is some sixteen or twenty miles distant
from the farm which bears its name. Ere that last elevation of the
land, however, to which our country owes the level marginal strip that
stretches between the present coast-line and the ancient one, the sea
must have found its way to the old farm. Loch Maree (Mary's Loch), a
name evidently of mediaeval origin, would then have existed as a
prolongation of the marine Loch Ewe, and _Kinlochewe_ would have
actually been what the compound words signify--the head of Loch Ewe.
There seems to be reason for holding that, ere the latest elevation of
the land took place in our island, it had received its first human
inhabitants--rude savages, who employed tools and weapons of stone, and
fashioned canoes out of single logs of wood. Are we to accept
etymologies such as the instanced one--and there are several such in the
Highlands--as good, in evidence that these aboriginal savages were of
the Celtic race, and that Gaelic was spoken in Scotland at a time when
its strips of grassy links, and the sites of many of its seaport towns,
such as Leith, Greenock, Musselburgh, and Cromarty, existed as oozy
sea-beaches, covered twice every day by the waters of the ocean?
It was a delightful evening--still, breathless, clear--as we swept
slowly across the broad breast of Loch Maree; and the red light of the
sinking sun fell on many a sweet wild recess, amid the labyrinth of
islands purple with heath, and overhung by the birch and mountain-ash;
or slanted along the broken glades of the ancient forest; or lighted up
into a blush the pale stony faces of the tall pyramidal hills. A boat
bearing a wedding party was crossing the lake to the white house on the
opposite side, and a piper stationed in the bows, was discoursing sweet
music, that, softened by distance, and caught up by the echoes of the
rocks, resembled no strain I had ever heard from the bagpipe before.
Even the boatmen rested on their oars, and I had just enough of Gaelic
to know that they were remarking how very beautiful it was. "I wish,"
said my comrade, "you understood these men: they have a great many
curious stories about the loch, that I am sure you would like. See you
that large island? It is Island-Maree. There is, they tell me, an old
burying-ground on it, in which the Danes used to bury long ages ago, and
whose ancient tomb-stones no man can read. And yon other island beside
it is famous as the place in which the _good_ people meet every year to
make submission to their queen. There is, they say, a little loch in the
island, and another little island in the loch; and it is under a tree on
that inner island that the queen sits and gathers kain for the Evil One.
They tell me that, for certain, the fairies have not left this part of
the country yet." We landed, a little after sunset, at the point from
which our road led across the hills to the sea-side, but found that the
carter had not yet come up; and at length, despairing of his appearance,
and unable to carry off his cart and the luggage with us, as we had
succeeded in bringing off cart, horse, and luggage on the previous day,
we were preparing to take up our night's lodging under the shelter of an
overhanging crag, when we heard him coming soliloquizing through the
wood, in a manner worthy of his name, as if he were not one, but twenty
carters. "What a perfect shame of a country!" he exclaimed--"perfect
shame! Road for a horse, forsooth!--more like a turnpike stair. And not
a feed of corn for the poor beast; and not a public-house atween this
and Kinlochewe; and not a drop of whisky: perfect, perfect shame of a
country!" On his coming up in apparently very bad humour, we found him
disposed to transfer the shame of the country to our shoulders. What
sort of people were we, he asked, to travel in such a land without
whisky! Whisky, however, there was none to produce: there was no whisky
nearer, we told him, than the public-house at the sea-side, where we
proposed spending the night; and, of course, the sooner we got there the
better. And after assisting him to harness his horse, we set off in the
darkening twilight, amid the hills. Rough grey rocks, and little blue
lochans, edged with flags, and mottled in their season with
water-lilies, glimmered dim and uncertain in the imperfect light as we
passed; but ere we reached the inn of Flowerdale in Gairloch, every
object stood out clear, though cold, in the increscent light of morning;
and a few light streaks of cloud, poised in the east over the unrisen
sun, were gradually exchanging their gleam of pale bronze for a deep
flush of mingled blood and fire.
After the refreshment of a few hours' sleep and a tolerable breakfast,
we set out for the scene of our labours, which lay on the sea-shore,
about two miles further to the north and west; and were shown an
out-house--one of a square of dilapidated offices--which we might fit
up, we were told, for our barrack. The building had been originally what
is known on the north-western coast of Scotland, with its ever-weeping
climate, as a hay-barn; but it was now merely a roof-covered tank of
green stagnant water, about three-quarters of a foot in depth, which had
oozed through the walls from an over-gorged pond in the adjacent court,
that in a tract of recent rains had overflowed its banks, and not yet
subsided. Our new house did look exceedingly like a beaver-dam, with
this disadvantageous difference, that no expedient of diving could bring
us to better chambers on the other side of the wall. My comrade, setting
himself to sound the abyss with his stick, sung out in sailor style,
"three feet water in the hold." Click-Clack broke into a rage: "That a
dwelling for human creatures!" he said. "If I was to put my horse
intil't, poor beast! the very hoofs would rot off him in less than a
week. Are we eels or puddocks, that we are sent to live in a loch?"
Marking, however, a narrow portion of the ridge which dammed up the
waters of the neighbouring pool whence our domicile derived its supply,
I set myself to cut it across, and had soon the satisfaction of seeing
the general surface lowered fully a foot, and the floor of our future
dwelling laid bare. Click-Clack, gathering courage as he saw the waters
ebbing away, seized a shovel, and soon showed us the value of his many
years' practice in the labours of the stable; and then, despatching him
for a few cart-loads of a dry shell-sand from the shore, which I had
marked by the way as suitable for mixing with our lime, we had soon for
our tank of green water a fine white floor. "Man wants but little here
below," especially in a mason's barrack. There were two square openings
in the apartment, neither of them furnished with frame or glass; but the
one we filled up with stone, and an old unglazed frame, which, with the
assistance of a base and border of turf, I succeeded in fitting into the
other, gave at least an air of respectability to the place. Boulder
stones, capped with pieces of mossy turf, served us for seats; and we
had soon a comfortable peat fire blazing against the gable; but we were
still sadly in want of a bed: the fundamental damp of the floor was, we
saw, fast gaining on the sand; and it would be neither comfortable nor
safe to spread our dried grass and blankets over _it_. My comrade went
out to see whether the place did not furnish materials enough of any
kind to make a bedstead, and soon returned in triumph, dragging after
him a pair of harrows which he placed side by side in a snug corner
beside the fire, with of course the teeth downwards. A good Catholic,
prepared to win heaven for himself by a judicious use of sharp points,
might have preferred having them turned the other way; but my comrade
was an enlightened Protestant; and besides, like Goldsmith's sailor, he
loved to lie soft. The second piece of luck was mine. I found lying
unclaimed in the yard an old barn-door, which a recent gale had blown
from off its hinges; and by placing it above the harrows, and driving a
row of stakes around it into the floor, to keep the outer sleeper from
rolling off--for the wall served to secure the position of the inner
one--we succeeded in constructing, by our joint efforts, a luxurious
bed. There was but one serious drawback on its comforts: the roof
overhead was bad, and there was an obstinate drop, that used, during
every shower which fell in the season of sleep, to make a dead set at
my face, and try me at times with the water torture of the old story,
mayhap half a dozen times in the course of a single night.
Our barrack fairly fitted up, I set out with my comrade, whose knowledge
of Gaelic enabled him to act as my interpreter, to a neighbouring group
of cottages, to secure a labourer for the work of the morrow. The
evening was now beginning to darken; but there was still light enough to
show me that the little fields I passed through on my way resembled very
much those of Liliput, as described by Gulliver. They were, however,
though equally small, greatly more irregular, and had peculiarities,
too, altogether their own. The land had originally been stony; and as it
showed, according to the Highland phrase, its "bare bones through its
skin"--large bosses of the rock beneath coming here and there to the
surface--the Highlanders had gathered the stones in great pyramidal
heaps on the bare bosses; and so very numerous were these in some of the
fields, that they looked as if some malignant sorcerer had, in the time
of harvest, converted all their shocks into stone. On approaching the
cottage of our future labourer, I was attracted by a door of very
peculiar construction that lay against the wall. It had been brought
from the ancient pine forest on the western bank of Loch Maree, and was
formed of the roots of trees so curiously interlaced by nature, that
when cut out of the soil, which it had covered over like a piece of
network, it remained firmly together, and now formed a door which the
mere imitator of the rustic might in vain attempt to rival. We entered
the cottage, and plunging downwards two feet or so, found ourselves upon
the dunghill of the establishment, which in this part of the country
usually occupied at the time an ante-chamber which corresponded to that
occupied by the cattle a few years earlier, in the midland districts of
Sutherland. Groping in this foul outer chamber through a stifling
atmosphere of smoke, we came to an inner door raised to the level of
the soil outside, through which a red umbry gleam escaped into the
darkness; and, climbing into the inner apartment, we found ourselves in
the presence of the inmates of the mansion. The fire, as in the cottage
of my Sutherlandshire relative, was placed in the middle of the floor:
the master of the mansion, a red-haired, strongly-built Highlander, of
the middle size and age, with his son, a boy of twelve, sat on the one
side; his wife, who, though not much turned of thirty, had the haggard,
drooping cheeks, hollow eyes, and pale, sallow complexion of old age,
sat on the other. We broke our business to the Highlander through my
companion--for, save a few words caught up at school by the boy, there
was no English in the household--and found him disposed to entertain it
favourably. A large pot of potatoes hung suspended over the fire, under
a dense ceiling of smoke; and he hospitably invited us to wait supper,
which, as our dinner had consisted of but a piece of dry oaten cake, we
willingly did. As the conversation went on, I became conscious that it
turned upon myself, and that I was an object of profound commiseration
to the inmates of the cottage. "What," I inquired of my companion, "are
these kind people pitying me so very much for?" "For your want of
Gaelic, to be sure. How can a man get on in the world that wants
Gaelic?" "But do not they themselves," I asked, "want English?" "O yes,"
he said, "but what does that signify? What is the use of English in
Gairloch?" The potatoes, with a little ground salt, and much unbroken
hunger as sauce, ate remarkably well. Our host regretted that he had no
fish to offer us; but a tract of rough weather had kept him from sea,
and he had just exhausted his previous supply; and as for bread, he had
used up the last of his grain crop a little after Christmas, and had
been living, with his family, on potatoes, with fish when he could get
them, ever since.
Thirty years have now passed since I shared in the Highlander's evening
meal, and during the first twenty of these, the use of the
potatoe--unknown in the Highlands a century before--greatly increased. I
have been told by my maternal grandfather, that about the year 1740,
when he was a boy of about eight or nine years of age, the head-gardener
at Balnagown Castle used, in his occasional visits to Cromarty, to bring
him in his pocket, as great rarities, some three or four potatoes; and
that it was not until some fifteen or twenty years after this time that
he saw potatoes reared in fields in any part of the Northern Highlands.
But, once fairly employed as food, every season saw a greater breadth of
them laid down. In the North-western Highlands, in especial, the use of
these roots increased from the year 1801 to the year 1846 nearly a
hundredfold, and came at length to form, as in Ireland, not merely the
staple, but in some localities almost the only food of the people; and
when destroyed by disease in the latter year, famine immediately ensued
in both Ireland and the Highlands. A writer in the _Witness_, whose
letter had the effect of bringing that respectable paper under the eye
of Mr. Punch, represented the Irish famine as a direct judgment on the
Maynooth Endowment; while another writer, a member of the Peace
Association--whose letter did not find its way into the _Witness_,
though it reached the editor--challenged the decision on the ground that
the Scotch Highlanders, who were greatly opposed to Maynooth, suffered
from the infliction nearly as much as the Irish themselves, and that the
offence punished must have been surely some one of which both
Highlanders and Irish had been guilty in common. _He_, however, had
found out, he said, what the crime visited actually was. Both the Irish
and Highland famines were judgments upon the people for their great
homicidal efficiency as soldiers in the wars of the empire--an
efficiency which, as he truly remarked, was almost equally
characteristic of both nations. For my own part, I have been unable
hitherto to see the steps which conduct to such profound conclusions;
and am content simply to hold, that the superintending Providence who
communicated to man a calculating, foreseeing nature, does occasionally
get angry with him, and inflict judgments upon him, when, instead of
exercising his faculties, he sinks to a level lower than his own, and
becomes content, like some of the inferior animals, to live on a single
root.
There are two periods favourable to observation--an early and a late
one. A fresh eye detects external traits and peculiarities among a
people, seen for the first time, which disappear as they become
familiar; but it is not until after repeated opportunities of study, and
a prolonged acquaintanceship, that internal characteristics and
conditions begin to be rightly known. During the first fortnight of my
residence in this remote district, I was more impressed than at a later
stage by certain peculiarities of manner and appearance in the
inhabitants. Dr. Johnson remarked that he found fewer very tall or very
short men among the people of the Hebrides than in England: I was now
struck by a similar mediocrity of size among the Highlanders of Western
Ross; five-sixths of the grown men seemed to average between five feet
seven and five feet nine inches in height, and either tall or short men
I found comparatively rare. The Highlanders of the eastern coast were,
on the contrary, at that period, mayhap still, very various of
stature--some of them exceedingly diminutive, others of great bulk and
height; and, as might be seen in the congregations of the parish
churches removed by but a few miles, there were marked differences in
this respect between the people of contiguous districts--certain tracts
of plain or valley producing larger races than others. I was inclined to
believe at the time that the middle-sized Highlanders of the west coast
were a less mixed race than the unequally-sized Highlanders of the east:
I at least found corresponding inequalities among the higher-born
Highland families, that, as shown by their genealogies, blended the
Norman and Saxon with the Celtic blood; and as the unequally-sized
Highland race bordered on that Scandinavian one which fringes the
greater part of the eastern coast of Scotland, I inferred that there had
been a similar blending of blood among _them_. I have since seen, in
Gustav Kombst's Ethnographic Map of the British Islands, the difference
which I at this time but inferred, indicated by a different shade of
colour, and a different name. The Highlanders of the east coast Kombst
terms "Scandinavian-Gaelic;" those of the west,
"Gaelic-Scandinavian-Gaelic,"--names indicative, of course, of the
proportions in which he holds that they possess the Celtic blood.
Disparity of bulk and size appears to be one of the consequences of a
mixture of races; nor does the induced inequality seem restricted to the
physical framework. Minds of large calibre, and possessed of the kingly
faculty, come first into view, in our history, among the fused tribes,
just as of old it was the mixed marriages that first produced the
giants. The difference in size which I remarked in particular districts
of the Scandinavian-Gaelic region, separated, in some instances, by but
a ridge of hills or an expanse of moor, must have been a result of the
old clan divisions, and is said to have marked the clans themselves very
strongly. Some of them were of a greatly more robust, and some of a
slimmer type, than others.
I was struck by another peculiarity in the west coast Highlanders. I
found the men in general greatly better-looking than the women, and that
in middle life they bore their years much more lightly. The females
seemed old and haggard at a period when the males were still
comparatively fresh and robust. I am not sure whether the remark may not
in some degree apply to Highlanders generally. The "rugged form" and
"harsher features," which, according to Sir Walter, "mark the mountain
band," accord worse with the female than with the male countenance and
figure. But I at least found this discrepancy in the appearance of the
sexes greatly more marked on the west than on the eastern coast; and saw
only too much reason to conclude that it was owing in great part to the
disproportionately large share of crushing labour laid, in the
district, in accordance with the practice of a barbarous time, on the
weaker frame of the female. There is, however, a style of female
loveliness occasionally though rarely exemplified in the Highlands,
which far transcends the Saxon or Scandinavian type. It is manifested
usually in extreme youth--at least between the fourteenth and eighteenth
year; and its effect we find happily indicated by Wordsworth--who seems
to have met with a characteristic specimen--in his lines to a Highland
girl. He describes her as possessing as her "dower," "a very _shower_ of
beauty." Further, however, he describes her as very young.
"Twice seven consenting years had shed
Their utmost bounty on her head."
I was, besides, struck at this time by finding, that while almost all
the young lads under twenty with whom I came in contact had at least a
smattering of English, I found only a single Highlander turned of forty
with whom I could exchange a word. The exceptional Highlander was,
however, a curiosity in his way. He seemed to have a natural turn for
acquiring languages, and had derived his English, not from conversation,
but, in the midst of a Gaelic-speaking people, from the study of the
Scriptures in our common English version. His application of Bible
language to ordinary subjects told at times with rather ludicrous
effect. Upon inquiring of him, on one occasion, regarding a young man
whom he wished to employ as an extra labourer, he described him in
exactly the words in which David is described in the chapter that
records the combat with Goliath, as "but a youth, and ruddy, and of a
fair countenance;" and on asking where he thought we could get a few
loads of water-rolled pebbles for causewaying a floor, he directed us to
the bed of a neighbouring rivulet, where we might "choose us," he said,
"smooth stones out of the brook." He spoke with great deliberation,
translating evidently his Gaelic thinking, as he went on, into
scriptural English.