"Days passed; an' now my patient steps
That maiden's walks attend;
My vows had reach'd that maiden's ear,
Ay, an' she ca'd me friend.
An' I was bless'd as bless'd can be;
The fond, daft dreamer Hope
Ne'er dream'd o' happier days than mine,
Or joys o' ampler scope."--HENRISON'S SANG.
I used, as I have said, to have occasional visitors when working in the
churchyard. My minister has stood beside me for hours together,
discussing every sort of subject, from the misdeeds of the Moderate
divines--whom he liked all the worse for being brethren of his own
cloth--to the views of Isaac Taylor on the corruptions of Christianity
or the possibilities of the future state. Strangers, too, occasionally
came the way, desirous of being introduced to the natural curiosities of
the district, more especially to its geology; and I remember first
meeting in the churchyard, in this way, the late Sir Thomas Dick Lauder;
and of having the opportunity afforded me of questioning, mallet in
hand, the present distinguished Professor of Humanity in the Edinburgh
University,[15] respecting the nature of the cohesive agent in the
non-calcareous sandstone which I was engaged in hewing. I had sometimes
a different, but not less interesting, class of visitors. The town had
its small but very choice circle of accomplished intellectual ladies,
who, earlier in the century, would have been perhaps described as
members of the blue-stocking sisterhood; but the advancing intelligence
of the age had rendered the phrase obsolete; and they simply took their
place as well-informed, sensible women, whose acquaintance with the best
authors was regarded as in no degree disqualifying them from their
proper duties as wives or daughters. And my circle of acquaintance
included the entire class. I used to meet them at delightful
tea-parties, and sometimes borrowed a day from my work to conduct them
through the picturesque burn of Eathie, or the wild scenes of Cromarty
Hill, or to introduce them to the fossiliferous deposits of the Lias or
the Old Red Sandstone. And not unfrequently their evening walks used to
terminate where I wrought, in the old chapel of St. Regulus, or in the
parish burying-ground, beside a sweet wooded dell known as the "Ladies'
Walk;" and my labours for the day closed in what I always very much
relished--a conversation on the last good book, or on some new organism,
recently disinterred, of the Secondary or Palaeozoic period.
I had been hewing, about this time, in the upper part of my uncle's
garden, and had just closed my work for the evening, when I was visited
by one of my lady friends, accompanied by a stranger lady, who had come
to see a curious old dial-stone which I had dug out of the earth long
before, when a boy, and which had originally belonged to the ancient
Castle-garden of Cromarty. I was standing with them beside the dial,
which I had placed in my uncle's garden, and remarking, that as it
exhibited in its structure no little mathematical skill, it had probably
been cut under the eye of the eccentric but accomplished Sir Thomas
Urquhart; when a third lady, greatly younger than the others, and whom I
had never seen before, came hurriedly tripping down the garden-walk,
and, addressing the other two apparently quite in a flurry--"O, come,
come away," she said, "I have been seeking you ever so long." "Is this
you, L----?" was the staid reply: "Why, what now?--you have run yourself
out of breath." The young lady was, I saw, very pretty; and though in
her nineteenth year at the time, her light and somewhat _petite_ figure,
and the waxen clearness of her complexion, which resembled rather that
of a fair child than of a grown woman, made her look from three to four
years younger. And as if in some degree still a child, her two lady
friends seemed to regard her. She stayed with them scarce a minute ere
she tripped off again; nor did I observe that she favoured me with a
single glance. But what else could be expected by an ungainly,
dust-besprinkled mechanic in his shirt sleeves, and with a leathern
apron before him? Nor _did_ the mechanic expect aught else; and when
informed long after, by one whose testimony was conclusive on the point,
that he had been pointed out to the young lady by some such
distinguished name as "the Cromarty Poet," and that she had come up to
her friends somewhat in a flurry, simply that she might have a nearer
look of him, he received the intelligence somewhat with surprise. All
the first interviews in all the novels I ever read are of a more
romantic and less homely cast than the special interview just related;
but I know not a more curious one.
Only a few evenings after, I met the same young lady, in circumstances
of which the writer of a tale might have made a little more. I was
sauntering, just as the sun was sinking, along one of my favourite walks
on the Hill--a tree-skirted glade--now looking out through the openings
on the ever fresh beauties of the Cromarty Firth, with its promontories,
and bays, and long lines of winding shore, and anon marking how redly
the slant light fell through intersticial gaps on pale lichened trunks
and huge boughs, in the deeper recesses of the wood--when I found myself
unexpectedly in the presence of the young lady of the previous evening.
She was sauntering through the wood as leisurely as myself--now and then
dipping into a rather bulky volume which she carried, that had not in
the least the look of a novel, and which, as I subsequently ascertained,
was an elaborate essay on Causation. We, of course, passed each other
on our several ways without sign of recognition. Quickening her pace,
however, she was soon out of sight; and I just thought, on one or two
occasions afterwards, of the apparition that had been presented as she
passed, as much in keeping with the adjuncts--the picturesque forest and
the gorgeous sunset. It would not be easy, I thought, were the large
book but away, to furnish a very lovely scene with a more suitable
figure. Shortly after, I began to meet the young lady at the charming
tea-parties of the place. Her father, a worthy man, who, from
unfortunate speculations in business, had met with severe losses, was at
this time several years dead; and his widow had come to reside in
Cromarty, on a somewhat limited income, derived from property of her
own. Liberally assisted, however, by relations in England, she had been
enabled to send her daughter to Edinburgh, where the young lady received
all the advantages which a first-rate education could confer. By some
lucky chance, she was there boarded, with a few other ladies, in early
womanhood, in the family of Mr. George Thomson, the well-known
correspondent of Burns; and passed under his roof some of her happiest
years. Mr. Thomson--himself an enthusiast in art--strove to inoculate
the youthful inmates of his house with the same fervour, and to develop
whatever seeds of taste or genius might be found in them; and,
characterized till the close of a life extended far beyond the ordinary
term, by the fine chivalrous manners of the thorough gentleman of the
old school, his influence over his young friends was very great, and his
endeavours, in at least some of the instances, very successful. And in
none, perhaps, was he more so than in the case of the young lady of my
narrative. From Edinburgh she went to reside with the friends in England
to whose kindness she had been so largely indebted; and with them she
might have permanently remained, to enjoy the advantages of superior
position. She was at an age, however, which rarely occupies itself in
adjusting the balance of temporal advantage; and her only brother having
been admitted, through the interest of her friends, as a pupil into
Christ's Hospital, she preferred returning to her widowed mother, left
solitary in consequence, though with the prospect of being obliged to
add to her resources by taking a few of the children of the town as
day-pupils.
Her claim to take her place in the intellectual circle of the burgh was
soon recognised. I found that, misled by the extreme youthfulness of her
appearance, and a marked juvenility of manner, I had greatly mistaken
the young lady. That she should be accomplished in the ordinary sense of
the term--that she should draw, play, and sing well--would be what I
should have expected; but I was not prepared to find that, mere girl as
she seemed, she should have a decided turn, not for the lighter, but for
the severer walks of literature, and should have already acquired the
ability of giving expression to her thoughts in a style formed on the
best English models, and not in the least like that of a young lady. The
original shyness wore away, and we became great friends. I was nearly
ten years her senior, and had read a great many more books than she;
and, finding me a sort of dictionary of fact, ready of access, and with
explanatory notes attached, that became long or short just as she
pleased to draw them out by her queries, she had, in the course of her
amateur studies, frequent occasion to consult me. There were, she saw,
several ladies of her acquaintance, who used occasionally to converse
with me in the churchyard; but in order to make assurance doubly sure
respecting the perfect propriety of such a proceeding on her part, she
took the laudable precaution of stating the case to her mother's
landlord, a thoroughly sensible man, one of the magistrates of the
burgh, and an elder of the kirk; and he at once certified that there was
no lady of the place who might not converse, without remark, as often
and as long as she pleased with me. And so, fully justified, both by the
example of her friends--all very judicious women, some of them only a
few years older than herself--and by the deliberate judgment of a very
sensible man, the magistrate and elder--my young lady friend learned to
visit me in the churchyard, just like the other ladies; and, latterly
at least, considerably oftener than any of them. We used to converse on
all manner of subjects connected with the _belles-lettres_ and the
philosophy of mind, with, so far as I can at present remember, only one
marked exception. On that mysterious affection which sometimes springs
up between persons of the opposite sexes when thrown much
together--though occasionally discussed by the metaphysicians, and much
sung by the poets--we by no chance ever touched. Love formed the one
solitary subject which, from some curious contingency, invariably
escaped us.
And yet, latterly at least, I had begun to think about it a good deal.
Nature had not fashioned me one of the sort of people who fall in love
at first sight. I had even made up my mind to live a bachelor life,
without being very much impressed by the magnitude of the sacrifice; but
I daresay it did mean something, that in my solitary walks for the
preceding fourteen or fifteen years, a female companion often walked in
fancy by my side, with whom I exchanged many a thought, and gave
expression to many a feeling, and to whom I pointed out many a beauty in
the landscape, and communicated many a curious fact, and whose
understanding was as vigorous as her taste was faultless and her
feelings exquisite. One of the English essayists--the elder Moore--has
drawn a very perfect personage of this airy character (not, however, of
the softer, but of the masculine sex), under the name of the "maid's
husband;" and described him as one of the most formidable rivals that
the ordinary lover of flesh and blood can possibly encounter. My
day-dream lady--a person that may be termed with equal propriety the
"bachelor's wife,"--has not been so distinctly recognised; but she
occupies a large place in our literature, as the mistress of all the
poets who ever wrote on love without actually experiencing it, from the
days of Cowley down to those of Henry Kirke White; and her presence
serves always to intimate a heart capable of occupation, but still
unoccupied. I find the bachelor's wife delicately drawn in one the
posthumous poems of poor Alexander Bethune, as a "fair being"--the
frequent subject of his day-dreams--
"Whose soft voice
Should be the sweetest music to his ear,
Awakening all the chords of harmony;
Whose eye should speak a language to his soul,
More eloquent than aught which Greece or Rome
Could boast of in its best and happiest days;
Whose smile should be his rich reward for toil;
Whose pure transparent cheek, when press'd to his,
Should calm the fever of his troubled thoughts,
And woo his spirit to those fields Elysian--
The paradise which strong affection guards."
It may be always predicated of these bachelors' wives, that they never
closely resemble in their lineaments any living woman: poor Bethune's
would not have exhibited a single feature of any of his fair neighbours,
the lasses of Upper Rankeillour or Newburgh. Were the case otherwise,
the dream maiden would be greatly in danger of being displaced by the
real one whom she resembled; and it was a most significant event, which,
notwithstanding my inexperience, I learned by and bye to understand,
that about this time my old companion, the "bachelor's wife," utterly
forsook me, and that a vision of my young friend took her place. I can
honestly aver, that I entertained not a single hope that the feeling
should be mutual. On whatever other head my vanity may have flattered
me, it certainly never did so on the score of personal appearance. My
personal strength was, I knew, considerably above the average of that of
my fellows, and at this time my activity also; but I was perfectly
conscious that, on the other hand, my good looks rather fell below than
rose above the medial line. And so, while I suspected, as I well might,
that, as in the famous fairy story, "Beauty" had made a conquest of the
"Beast," I had not the most distant expectation that the "Beast" would,
in turn, make a conquest of "Beauty." My young friend had, I knew,
several admirers--men who were younger and dressed better, and who, as
they had all chosen the liberal professions, had fairer prospects than
I; and as for the item of good looks, had she set her affections on even
the least likely of them, I could have addressed him, with perfect
sincerity, in the words of the old ballad:--
"Nae wonder, nae wonder, Gil Morrice,
My lady lo'es ye weel:
The fairest part o' my body
Is blacker than thy heel."
Strange to say, however, much about the time that I made my discovery,
my young friend succeeded in making a discovery also;--the maid's
husband shared on her part the same fate as the bachelor's wife did on
mine; and her visits to the churchyard suddenly ceased.
A twelvemonth had passed ere we succeeded in finding all this out; but
the young lady's mother had seen the danger somewhat earlier; and
deeming, as was quite right and proper, an operative mason no very
fitting mate for her daughter, my opportunities of meeting my friend at
_conversazione_ or tea-party had become few. I, however, took my usual
evening walk through the woods of the Hill; and as my friend's
avocations set her free at the same delightful hour, and as she also was
a walker on the Hill, we did sometimes meet, and witness together, from
amid the deeper solitudes of its bosky slopes, the sun sinking behind
the distant Ben Wevis. These were very happy evenings; the hour we
passed together always seemed exceedingly short; but, to make amends for
its briefness, there were at length few working days in the milder
season of which it did not form the terminal one;--from the
circumstance, of course, that the similarity of our tastes for natural
scenery led us always into the same lonely walks about the same
delicious sun-set hour. For months together, even during this second
stage of our friendship, there was one interesting subject on which we
never talked. At length, however, we came to a mutual understanding. It
was settled that we should remain for three years more in Scotland on
the existing terms; and if during that time there should open to me no
suitable field of exertion at home, we should then quit the country for
America, and share together in a strange land whatever fate might be in
store for us. My young friend was considerably more sanguine than I. I
had laid faithfully before her those defects of character which rendered
me a rather inefficient man-at-arms for contending in my own behalf in
the battle of life. Inured to labour, and to the hardships of the bothie
and the barrack, I believed that in the backwoods, where I would have to
lift my axe on great trees, I might get on with my clearing and my crops
like most of my neighbours; but then the backwoods would, I feared, be
no place for her; and as for effectually pushing my way in the
long-peopled portions of the United States, among one of the most
vigorous and energetic races in the world, I could not see that I was in
the least fitted for that. She, however, thought otherwise. The tender
passion is always a strangely exaggerative one. Lodged in the male mind,
it gives to the object on which it rests all that is excellent in woman,
and in the female mind imparts to its object all that is noble in man;
and my friend had come to regard me as fitted by nature either to head
an army or lead a college, and to deem it one of the weaknesses of my
character, that I myself could not take an equally favourable view.
There was, however, one profession of which, measuring myself as
carefully as I could, I deemed myself capable: I saw men whom I regarded
as not my superiors in natural talent, and even possessed of no greater
command of the pen, occupying respectable places in the periodical
literature of the day, as the editors of Scotch newspapers, provincial,
and even metropolitan, and deriving from their labours incomes of from
one to three hundred pounds per annum; and were my abilities, such as
they were, to be fairly set by sample before the public, and so brought
into the literary market, they might, I thought, possibly lead to my
engagement as a newspaper editor. And so, as a first step in the
process, I resolved on publishing my volume of traditional history--a
work on which I had bestowed considerable care, and which, regarded as a
specimen of what I could do as a _litterateur_, would, I believed, show
not inadequately my ability of treating at least those lighter subjects
with which newspaper editors are occasionally called on to deal.
Nearly two of the three twelvemonths passed by, however, and I was still
an operative mason. With all my solicitude, I could not give myself
heartily to seek work of the kind which I saw newspaper editors had at
that time to do. It might be quite well enough, I thought, for the
lawyer to be a special pleader. With special pleadings equally extreme
on the opposite sides of a case, and a qualified judge to hold the
balance between, the cause of truth and justice might be even more
thoroughly served than if the antagonist agents were to set themselves
to be as impartial and equal-handed as the magistrate himself. But I
could not extend the same tolerance to the special pleading of the
newspaper editor. I saw that, to many of the readers of his paper, the
editor did not hold the place of a law-agent, but of a judge: it was his
part to submit to them, therefore, not ingenious pleadings, but, to the
best of his judgment, honest decisions. And not only did no place
present itself for me in the editorial field, but I really could see no
place in it that, with the views which I entertained on this head, I
would not scruple to occupy. I saw no party cause for which I could
honestly plead. My ecclesiastical friends had, with a few exceptions,
cast themselves into the Conservative ranks; and there I could not
follow them. The Liberals, on the other hand, being in office at the
time, had become at least as like their old opponents as their former
selves, and I could by no means defend all that _they_ were doing. In
Radicalism I had no faith; and Chartism--with my recollection of the
kind of treatment which I had received from the workmen of the south
still strongly impressed on my mind--I thoroughly detested. And so I
began seriously to think of the backwoods of America. But there was
another destiny in store for me. My native town, up till this time,
though a place of considerable trade, was unfurnished with a branch
bank; but on the representation of some of its more extensive traders,
and of the proprietors of the neighbouring lands, the Commercial Bank of
Scotland had agreed to make it the scene of one of its agencies, and
arranged with a sagacious and successful merchant and shipowner of the
place to act as its agent. It had fixed, too, on a young man as its
accountant, at the suggestion of a neighbouring proprietor; and I heard
of the projected bank simply as a piece of news of interest to the town
and its neighbourhood, but, of course, without special bearing on any
concern of mine. Receiving, however, one winter morning, an invitation
to breakfast with the future agent--Mr. Ross--I was not a little
surprised, after we had taken a quiet cup of tea together, and beaten
over half-a-dozen several subjects, to be offered by him the
accountantship of the branch bank. After a pause of a full half-minute,
I said that the walk was one in which I had no experience whatever--that
even the little knowledge of figures which I had acquired at school had
been suffered to fade and get dim in my mind from want of practice--and
that I feared I would make but a very indifferent accountant. I shall
undertake for you, said Mr. Ross, and do my best to assist you. All you
have to do at present is just to signify your acceptance of the offer
made. I referred to the young man who, I understood, had been already
nominated accountant. Mr. Ross stated that, being wholly a stranger to
him, and as the office was one of great trust, he had, as the
responsible party, sought the security of a guarantee, which the
gentleman who had recommended the young man declined to give; and so his
recommendation had fallen to the ground. "But _I_ can give you no
guarantee," I said. "From you," rejoined Mr. Ross, "none shall ever be
asked." And such was one of the more special _Providences_ of my life;
for why should I give it a humbler name?
In a few days after, I had taken leave of my young friend in good hope,
and was tossing in an old and somewhat crazy coasting vessel, on my way
to the parent bank at Edinburgh, to receive there the instructions
necessary to the branch accountant. I had wrought as an operative mason,
including my term of apprenticeship, for fifteen years--no
inconsiderable portion of the more active part of a man's life; but the
time was not altogether lost. I enjoyed in these years fully the average
amount of happiness, and learned to know more of the Scottish people
than is generally known. Let me add--for it seems to be very much the
fashion of the time to draw dolorous pictures of the condition of the
labouring classes--that from the close of the first year in which I
wrought as a journeyman up till I took final leave of the mallet and
chisel, I never knew what it was to want a shilling; that my two uncles,
my grandfather, and the mason with whom I served my apprenticeship--all
working men--had had a similar experience; and that it was the
experience of my father also. I cannot doubt that deserving mechanics
may, in exceptional cases, be exposed to want; but I can as little doubt
that the cases _are_ exceptional, and that much of the suffering of the
class is a consequence either of improvidence on the part of the
competently skilled, or of a course of trifling during the term of
apprenticeship--quite as common as trifling at school--that always lands
those who indulge in it in the hapless position of the inferior workman.
I trust I may further add, that I was an honest mechanic. It was one of
the maxims of Uncle James, that as the Jews, restricted by law to their
forty stripes, always fell short of the legal number by one, lest they
should by any accident exceed it, so a working man, in order to balance
any disturbing element of selfishness in his disposition, should bring
his charges for work done, slightly but sensibly within what he deemed
the proper mark, and so give, as he used to express himself, his
"customers the cast of the baulk." I do think I acted up to the maxim;
and that, without injuring my brother workmen by lowering their prices,
I never yet charged an employer for a piece of work that, fairly
measured and valued, would not be rated at a slightly higher sum than
that at which it stood in my account.
I had quitted Cromarty for the south late in November, and landed at
Leith on a bleak December morning, just in time to escape a tremendous
storm of wind and rain from the west, which, had it caught the smack in
which I sailed on the Firth, would have driven us all back to
Fraserburgh, and, as the vessel was hardly sea-worthy at the time,
perhaps a great deal further. The passage had been stormy; and a very
noble, but rather unsocial fellow-passenger--a fine specimen of the
golden eagle--had been sea-sick, and evidently very uncomfortable, for
the greater part of the way. The eagle must have been accustomed to
motion a great deal more rapid than that of the vessel, but it was
motion of a different kind; and so he fared as persons do who never feel
a qualm when hurried along a railway at the rate of forty miles an hour,
but who yet get very squeamish in a tossing boat, that creeps through a
rough sea at a speed not exceeding, in the same period of time, from
four to five knots. The day preceding the storm was leaden-hued and
sombre, and so calm, that though the little wind there was blew the
right way, it carried us on, from the first light of morning, when we
found ourselves abreast of the Bass, to only near Inchkeith; for when
night fell, we saw the May light twinkling dimly far astern, and that of
the Inch rising bright and high right a-head. I spent the greater part
of the day on deck, marking, as they came into view, the various
objects--hill, and island, and seaport town, of which I had lost sight
nearly ten years before; feeling the while, not without some craven
shrinkings, that having got to the end, in the journey of life, of one
very definite stage, with its peculiar scenery and sets of objects, I
was just on the eve of entering upon another stage, in which the scenery
and objects would be all unfamiliar and new. I was now two years turned
of thirty; and though I could not hold that any very great amount of
natural endowment was essentially necessary to the bank accountant, I
knew that most men turned of thirty might in vain attempt acquiring the
ability even of heading a pin with the necessary adroitness, and that I
might fail, on the same principle, to pass muster as an accountant. I
determined, however, obstinately to set myself to acquire, whatever
might be the result; and entered Edinburgh in something like spirits on
the strength of the resolution. I had transmitted the manuscript of my
legendary work, several months before, to Sir Thomas Dick Lauder; and as
he was now on terms, in its behalf, with Mr. Adam Black, the well-known
publisher, I took the liberty of waiting on him, to see how the
negotiation was speeding. He received me with great kindness; hospitably
urged that I should live with him, so long as I resided in Edinburgh, in
his noble mansion, the Grange House; and, as an inducement, introduced
me to his library, full charged with the best editions of the best
authors, and enriched with many a rare volume and curious manuscript.
"Here," he said, "Robertson the historian penned his last work--the
_Disquisition_; and here," opening the door of an adjoining room, "he
died." I, of course, declined the invitation. The Grange House, with its
books, and its pictures, and its hospitable master, so rich in anecdote,
and so full of the literary sympathies, would have been no place for a
poor pupil-accountant, too sure that he was to be stupid, but not the
less determined on being busy. Besides, on calling immediately after at
the bank, I found that I would have to quit Edinburgh on the morrow for
some country agency, in which I might be initiated into the system of
book-keeping proper to a branch bank and where the business transacted
would be of a kind similar to what might be expected in Cromarty. Sir
Thomas, however, kindly got Mr. Black to meet me at dinner; and, in the
course of the evening, that enterprising bookseller agreed to undertake
the publication of my work, on terms which the nameless author of a
volume somewhat local in its character, and very local in its name,
might well regard as liberal.
Linlithgow was the place fixed on by the parent bank as the scene of my
initiation into the mysteries of branch banking; and, taking my passage
in one of the track-boats which at that time plied on the Canal between
Edinburgh and Glasgow, I reached the fine old burgh as the brief winter
day was coming to a close, and was seated next morning at my desk, not a
hundred yards from the spot on which Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh had taken
his stand when he shot the good Regent. I was, as I had anticipated,
very stupid; and must have looked, I suppose, even more obtuse than I
actually was: for my temporary superior the agent, having gone to
Edinburgh a few days after my arrival, gave expression, in the head
bank, to the conviction that it would be in vain attempting making "yon
man" an accountant. Altogether deficient in the cleverness that can
promptly master isolated details, when in ignorance of their bearing on
the general scheme to which they belong, I could literally do nothing
until I had got a hold of the system; which, locked up in the ponderous
tomes of the agency, for some little time eluded my grasp. At length,
however, it gradually unrolled itself before me in all its nice
proportions, as one of perhaps the completest forms of "book-keeping"
which the wit of man has yet devised; and I then found that the details
which, when I had approached them as if from the outside, had repulsed
and beaten me back, could, like the outworks of a fortress, be commanded
from the centre with the utmost ease. Just as I had reached this stage,
the regular accountant of the branch was called away to an appointment
in one of the joint stock banks of England; and the agent, again going
into Edinburgh on business, left me for the greater part of a day in
direction of the agency. Little more than a fortnight had elapsed since
he had given his unfavourable verdict; and he was now asked how, in the
absence of the accountant, he could have got away from his charge. He
had left _me_ in the office, he said. "What! the _Incompetent_?" "O,
that," he replied, "is all a mistake; the Incompetent has already
mastered our system." The mechanical ability, however, came but slowly;
and I never acquired the facility, in running up columns of summations,
of the early-taught accountant; though, making up by diligence what I
wanted in speed, I found, after my first few weeks of labour in
Linlithgow, that I could give as of old an occasional hour to literature
and geology. The proof-sheets of my book began to drop in upon me,
demanding revision; and to a quarry in the neighbourhood of the town,
rich in the organisms of the Mountain Limestone, and overflown by a bed
of basalt so regularly columnar, that one of the legends of the district
attributed its formation to the "ancient Pechts," I was able to devote,
not without profit, the evenings of several Saturdays. I formed, at this
time, my first acquaintance with the Palaeozoic shells, as they occur in
the rock--an acquaintance which has since been extended in some measure
through the Silurian deposits, Upper and Lower; and these shells, though
marked, in the immensely extended ages of the division to which they
belong, by specific, and even generic variety, I have found exhibiting
throughout a unique family type or pattern, as entirely different from
the family type of the Secondary shells as both are different from the
family types of the Tertiary and the existing ones. Each of the three
great periods of creation had its own peculiar fashion; and after having
acquainted myself with the fashions of the second and third periods, I
was now peculiarly interested in the acquaintance which I was enabled to
commence with that of the first and earliest also. I found, too, in a
bed of trap beside the Edinburgh road, scarce half a mile to the east
of the town, numerous pieces of carbonized lignite, which still retained
the woody structure--probably the broken remains of some forest of the
Carboniferous period, enveloped in some ancient lava bed, that had
rolled over its shrubs and trees, annihilating all save the fragments of
charcoal, which, locked up in its viscid recesses, had resisted the
agency that dissipated the more exposed embers into gas. I had found, in
like manner, when residing at Conon-side and Inverness, fragments of
charcoal locked up in the glassy vesicular stone of the old vitrified
forts of Craig Phadrig and Knock Farril, and existing as the sole
representatives of the vast masses of fuel which must have been employed
in fusing the ponderous walls of these unique fortalices. And I was now
interested to find exactly the same phenomena among the _vitrified_
rocks of the Coal Measures. Brief as the days were, I had always a
twilight hour to myself in Linlithgow; and as the evenings were fine for
the season, the old Royal Park of the place, with its noble church, its
massive palace, and its sweet lake, still mottled by the hereditary
swans whose progenitors had sailed over its waters in the days when
James IV. worshipped in the spectre aisle, formed a delightful place of
retreat, little frequented by the inhabitants of the town, but only all
the more my own in consequence; and in which I used to feel the fatigue
of the day's figuring and calculation drop away into the cool breezy
air, like cobwebs from an unfolded banner, as I climbed among the ruins,
or sauntered along the grassy shores of the loch. My stay at Linlithgow
was somewhat prolonged, by the removal, first of the accountant of the
branch, and then of its agent, who was called south to undertake the
management of a newly-erected English bank; but I lost nothing by the
delay. An admirable man of business, one of the officials of the parent
bank in Edinburgh (now its agent in Kirkcaldy, and recently provost of
the place), was sent temporarily to conduct the business of the agency;
and I saw, under him, how a comparative stranger arrived at his
conclusions respecting the standing and solvency of the various
customers with whom, in behalf of the parent institute, he was called on
to deal. And, finally, my brief term of apprenticeship expired--about
two months in all--I returned to Cromarty; and, as the opening of the
agency there waited only my arrival, straightway commenced my new course
as an accountant. My minister, when he first saw me seated at the desk,
pronounced me "at length fairly caught;" and I must confess I did feel
as if my latter days were destined to differ from my earlier ones, well
nigh as much as those of Peter of old, who, when he was "young, girded
himself, and walked whither he would, but who, when old, was girded by
others, and carried whither he would not."
Two long years had to pass from this time ere my young friend and I
could be united--for such were the terms on which we had to secure the
consent of her mother; but, with our union in the vista, we could meet
more freely than before; and the time passed not unpleasantly away. For
the first six months of my new employment, I found myself unable to make
my old use of the leisure hours which, I found, I could still command.
There was nothing very intellectual, in the higher sense of the term, in
recording the bank's transactions, or in summing up columns of figures,
or in doing business over the counter; and yet the fatigue induced was a
fatigue, not of sinew and muscle, but of nerve and brain, which, if it
did not quite disqualify me for my former intellectual amusements, at
least greatly disinclined me towards them, and rendered me a
considerably more indolent sort of person than either before or since.
It is asserted by artists of discriminating eye, that the human hand
bears an expression stamped upon it by the general character, as surely
as the human face; and I certainly used to be struck, during this
transition period, by the relaxed and idle expression that had on the
sudden been assumed by mine. And the slackened hands represented, I too
surely felt, a slackened mind. The unintellectual toils of the
labouring man have been occasionally represented as less favourable to
mental cultivation than the semi-intellectual employments of that class
immediately above him, to which our clerks, shopmen, and humbler
accountants belong; but it will be found that exactly the reverse is the
case, and that, though a certain conventional gentility of manner and
appearance on the side of the somewhat higher class may serve to conceal
the fact, it is on the part of the labouring man that the real advantage
lies. The mercantile accountant or law-clerk, bent over his desk, his
faculties concentrated on his columns of figures, or on the pages which
he has been carefully engrossing, and unable to proceed one step in his
work without devoting to it all his attention, is in greatly less
favourable circumstances than the ploughman or operative mechanic, whose
mind is free though his body labours, and who thus finds, in the very
rudeness of his employments, a compensation for their humble and
laborious character. And it will be found that the humbler of the two
classes is much more largely represented in our literature than the
class by one degree less humble. Ranged against the poor clerk of
Nottingham, Henry Kirke White, and the still more hapless Edinburgh
engrossing clerk, Robert Fergusson, with a very few others, we find in
our literature a numerous and vigorous phalanx, composed of men such as
the Ayrshire Ploughman, the Ettrick Shepherd, the Fifeshire Foresters,
the sailors Dampier and Falconer--Bunyan, Bloomfield, Ramsay, Tannahill,
Alexander Wilson, John Clare, Allan Cunningham, and Ebenezer Elliot. And
I was taught at this time to recognise the simple principle on which the
greater advantages lie on the side of the humbler class. Gradually,
however, as I became more inured to sedentary life, my mind recovered
its spring, and my old ability returned of employing my leisure hours,
as before, in intellectual exertion. Meanwhile my legendary volume
issued from the press, and was, with a few exceptions, very favourably
received by the critics. Leigh Hunt gave it a kind and genial notice in
his _Journal_; it was characterized by Robert Chambers not less
favourably in _his_; and Dr. Hetherington, the future historian of the
Church of Scotland and of the Westminster Assembly of Divines--at that
time a licentiate of the Church--made it the subject of an elaborate and
very friendly critique in the _Presbyterian Review_. Nor was I less
gratified by the terms in which it was spoken of by the late Baron Hume,
the nephew and residuary legatee of the historian--himself very much a
critic of the old school--in a note to a north-country friend. He
described it as a work "written in an English style which" he "had begun
to regard as one of the lost arts." But it attained to no great
popularity. For being popular, its subjects were too local, and its
treatment of them perhaps too quiet. My publishers tell me, however,
that it not only continues to sell, but moves off considerably better in
its later editions that it did on its first appearance.
The branch bank furnished me with an entirely new and curious field of
observation, and formed a very admirable school. For the cultivation of
a shrewd common sense, a bank office is one of perhaps the best schools
in the world. Mere cleverness serves often only to befool its possessor.
He gets entangled among his own ingenuities, and is caught as in a net.
But ingenuities, plausibilities, special pleadings, all that make the
stump-orator great, must be brushed aside by the banker. The question
with him comes always to be a sternly naked one:--Is, or is not, Mr.
---- a person fit to be trusted with the bank's money? Is his sense of
monetary obligations nice, or obtuse? Is his judgment good, or the
contrary? Are his speculations sound, or precarious? What are his
resources?--what his liabilities? Is he facile in lending the use of his
name? Does he float on wind bills, as boys swim on bladders? or is his
paper representative of only real business transactions? Such are the
topics which, in the recesses of his own mind, the banker is called on
to discuss; and he must discuss them, not merely plausibly or
ingeniously, but solidly and truly; seeing that error, however
illustrated or adorned, or however capable of being brilliantly defended
in speech or pamphlet, is sure always with him to take the form of
pecuniary loss. My superior in the agency--Mr. Ross, a good and
honourable-minded man, of sense and experience--was admirably fitted for
calculations of this kind; and I learned, both in his behalf, and from
the pleasure which I derived from the exercise, to take no little
interest in them also. It was agreeable to mark the moral effects of a
well-conducted agency such as his. However humbly honesty and good sense
may be rated in the great world generally, they always, when united,
bear premium in a judiciously managed bank office. It was interesting
enough, too, to see quiet silent men, like "honest Farmer Flamburgh,"
getting wealthy, mainly because, though void of display, they were not
wanting in integrity and judgment; and clever unscrupulous fellows, like
"Ephraim Jenkinson," who "spoke to good purpose," becoming poor, very
much because, with all their smartness, they lacked sense and principle.
It was worthy of being noted, too, that in looking around from my
peculiar point of view on the agricultural classes, I found the farmers,
on really good farms, usually thriving, if not themselves in fault,
however high their rents; and that, on the other hand, farmers on
sterile farms were _not_ thriving, however moderate the demands of the
landlord. It was more melancholy, but not less instructive, to learn,
from authorities whose evidence could not be questioned--bills paid by
small instalments, or lying under protest--that the small-farm system,
so excellent in a past age, was getting rather unsuited for the
energetic competition of the present one; and that the _small_
farmers--a comparatively comfortable class some sixty or eighty years
before, who used to give dowries to their daughters, and leave
well-stocked farms to their sons--were falling into straitened
circumstances, and becoming, however respectable elsewhere, not very
good men in the bank. It was interesting, too, to mark the character
and capabilities of the various branches of trade carried on in the
place--how the business of its shopkeepers fell always into a very few
hands, leaving to the greater number, possessed, apparently, of the same
advantages as their thriving compeers, only a mere show of custom--how
precarious in its nature the fishing trade always is, especially the
herring fishery, not more from the uncertainty of the fishings
themselves, than from the fluctuations of the markets--and how in the
pork trade of the place a judicious use of the bank's money enabled the
curers to trade virtually on a doubled capital, and to realize, with the
deduction of the bank discounts, doubled profits. In a few months my
acquaintance with the character and circumstances of the business men of
the district became tolerably extensive, and essentially correct; and on
two several occasions, when my superior left me for a time to conduct
the entire business of the agency, I was fortunate enough not to
discount for him a single bad bill. The implicit confidence reposed in
me by so good and sagacious a man was certainly quite enough of itself
to set me on my metal. There was, however, at least one item in my
calculations in which I almost always found myself incorrect: I found I
could predict every bankruptcy in the district; but I usually fell short
from ten to eighteen months of the period in which the event actually
took place. I could pretty nearly determine the time when the
difficulties and entanglements which I saw _ought_ to have produced
their proper effects, and landed in failure; but I missed taking into
account the desperate efforts which men of energetic temperament make in
such circumstances, and which, to the signal injury of their friends and
the loss of their creditors, succeed usually in staving off the
catastrophe for a season. In short, the school of the branch bank was a
very admirable school; and I profited so much by its teachings, that
when questions connected with banking are forced on the notice of the
public, and my brother editors have to apply for articles on the
subject to literary bankers, I find I can write my banking articles for
myself.
The seasons passed by; the two years of probation came to a close, like
all that had gone before; and after a long, and, in its earlier stages,
anxious courtship of in all five years, I received from the hand of Mr.
Ross that of my young friend, in her mother's house, and was united to
her by my minister, Mr. Stewart. And then, setting out, immediately
after the ceremony, for the southern side of the Moray Firth, we spent
two happy days together in Elgin; and, under the guidance of one of the
most respected citizens of the place, my kind friend Mr. Isaac Forsyth,
visited the more interesting objects connected with the town or its
neighbourhood. He introduced us to the Elgin Cathedral;--to the
veritable John Shanks, the eccentric keeper of the building, who could
never hear of the Wolf of Badenoch, who had burnt it four hundred years
before, without flying into a rage, and becoming what the dead man would
have deemed libellous;--to the font, too, under a dripping vault of
ribbed stone, in which an insane mother used to sing to sleep the poor
infant, who, afterwards becoming Lieutenant-General Anderson, built for
poor paupers like his mother, and poor children such as he himself had
once been, the princely institution which bears his name. And then,
after passing from the stone font to the institution itself, with its
happy children, and its very unhappy old men and women, Mr. Forsyth
conveyed us to the pastoral, semi-Highland valley of Pluscardine, with
its beautiful wood-embosomed priory--one of perhaps the finest and most
symmetrical specimens of the unornamented Gothic of the times of
Alexander II. to be seen anywhere in Scotland. Finally, after passing a
delightful evening at his hospitable board, and meeting, among other
guests, my friend Mr. Patrick Duff--the author of the "Geology of
Moray"--I returned with my young wife to Cromarty, and found her mother,
Mr. Ross, Mr. Stewart, and a party of friends, waiting for us in the
house which my father had built for himself forty years before, but
which it had been his destiny never to inhabit. It formed our home for
the three following years. The subjoined verses--prose, I suspect,
rather than poetry, for the mood in which they were written was too
earnest a one to be imaginative--I introduce, as representative of my
feelings at this time: they were written previous to my marriage, on one
of the blank pages of a pocket-Bible, with which I presented my future
wife:--
TO LYDIA.
Lydia, since ill by sordid gift
Were love like mine express'd,
Take Heaven's best boon, this Sacred Book,
From him who loves thee best.
Love strong as that I bear to thee
Were sure unaptly told
By dying flowers, or lifeless gems,
Or soul-ensnaring gold.
I know 'twas He who formed this heart
Who seeks this heart to guide;
For why?--He bids me love thee more
Than all on earth beside.[16]
Yes, Lydia, bids me cleave to thee,
As long this heart has cleaved:
Would, dearest, that His other laws
Were half so well received!
Full many a change, my only love,
On human life attends;
And at the cold sepulchral stone
Th' uncertain vista ends.
How best to bear each various change,
Should weal or woe befall,
To love, live, die, this Sacred Book,
Lydia, it tells us all.
Oh, much-beloved, our coming day
To us is all unknown,
But sure we stand a broader mark
Than they who stand alone.
_One_ knows it all: not His an eye,
Like ours, obscured and dim;
And knowing us, He gives this book,
That we may know of Him.
His words, my love, are gracious words,
And gracious thoughts express:
He cares e'en for each little bird
That wings the blue abyss.
Of coming wants and woes He thought,
Ere want or woe began;
And took to Him a human heart.
That He might feel for man.
Then oh! my first, my only love,
The kindliest, dearest, best!
On Him may all our hopes repose,--
On Him our wishes rest.
His be the future's doubtful day,
Let Joy or grief befall:
In life or death, in weal or woe,
Our God, our guide, our all.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Professor Pillans.
[16] "For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall
cleave to his wife; and they twain shall be one flesh."