CLIMBING THE MOUNTAINS.
The Lyndsays, to their infinite mortification and disappointment, found
upon their arrival at Leith, that the _Chieftain_, in which vessel their
places had been taken for Canada, had sailed only two days before. To
make bad worse, Mrs. Waddel confidently affirmed, that it was the very
last vessel which would sail that season.
Lyndsay, who never yielded to despondency, took these contrary events
very philosophically, and lost no time in making inquiries among the
ship-owners, to ascertain whether Mrs. Waddel was right.
After several days of anxious and almost hopeless search, he was at last
informed that the _Flora_, Captain Ayre, was to leave for Canada in a
fortnight. The name seemed propitious, and that very afternoon he walked
down with his wife to inspect the vessel.
The _Flora_ was a small brig, very old, very dirty, and with wretched
accommodations. The captain was a brutal-looking person, blind of one
eye, and very lame. Every third word he uttered was an oath; and instead
of answering Mr. Lyndsay's inquiries, he was engaged in a blasphemous
dialogue with his two sons, who were his first and second mates. The
young men seemed worthy of their parentage; their whole conversation
being interloaded with frightful imprecations on their own limbs and
souls, and the limbs and souls of others.
They had a very large number of steerage passengers engaged, for the
very small size of the vessel, and these emigrants were of the very
lowest description.
"Don't let us go in this horrible vessel," whispered Flora to her
husband. "What a captain! what a crew! we shall be miserable, if we form
any part of her live cargo!"
"I fear, my dear girl, there is no alternative. We may, perhaps, hear of
another before she sails. I won't engage places in her until the last
moment."
The dread of going in the _Flora_ took a hold of the mind of her
namesake; and she begged Jim to be on the constant look-out for another
vessel.
During their stay at Leith, Lyndsay was busily employed in writing a
concluding chapter to his work on the Cape; and Flora amused herself by
taking long walks, accompanied by James, the maid, and the baby, in
order to explore all the beauties of Edinburgh. The lad, who was very
clever, and possessed a wonderful faculty of remembering places and of
finding his way among difficulties, always acted as guide on these
occasions. Before he had been a week at Leith, he knew every street in
Edinburgh; had twice or thrice climbed the heights of Arthur's Seat, and
visited every nook in the old castle. There was not a ship in the
harbour of Leith, but he not only knew her name and the name of her
captain, but he had made himself acquainted with some of her crew, and
could tell her freight and tonnage, her age and capabilities, the port
from which she last sailed and the port to which she was then bound, as
well as any sailor on the wharf. It was really extraordinary to listen
of an evening to the lad's adventures, and all the mass of information
he had acquired during his long rambles through the day.
Flora was always in an agony lest James should be lost, or meet with
some mishap during his exploring expeditions; but Mistress Waddel
comforted her with the assurance, "That a cat, throw her which way you
wu'd, lighted a' upon her feet. That nought was never tent--an' they
that war' born to be hanget wu'd never be drowned."
So, one fine afternoon in June, Flora took it into her head, that she
would climb to the top of the mountain, the sight of which from her
chamber window she was never tired of contemplating. She asked her
husband to go with her. She begged, she entreated, she coaxed; but he
was just writing the last pages of his long task, and he told her, that
if she would only wait until the next day, he would go with pleasure.
But with Flora, it was this day or none. She had set her whole heart and
soul upon going up to the top of the mountain, and to the top of the
mountain she determined to go. This resolution was formed, in direct
opposition to her husband's wishes; and with a perfect knowledge of the
tale of the dog Ball, which had been one of her father's stock stories,
the catastrophe of which she had known from a child. Lyndsay did not
tell her positively she should not go without him; and unable to control
her impatience, she gave him the slip, and set off with Jim, who was
only too eager for the frolic, on her mountain climbing expedition.
Flora was a native of a rich pastoral country; very beautiful in running
brooks, smooth meadows, and majestic parks; where the fat sleek cattle
so celebrated in the London markets, graze knee-deep in luxuriant
pastures, and the fallow deer browse and gambol beneath the shadow of
majestic oaks through the long bright summer days. She had never seen a
mountain before her visit to the North, in her life; had never risen
higher in the world than to the top of Shooter's Hill; and when they
arrived at the foot of this grand upheaving of nature, she began to
think the task more formidable than she had imagined at a distance. Her
young conductor, agile as a kid, bounded up the steep acclivity with as
much ease as if he was running over a bowling-green.
"Not so fast, Jim!" cried Flora, pausing to draw breath. "I cannot climb
like you."
Jim was already beyond hearing, and was lying on the ground peering over
a projecting crag at least two hundred feet above her head, and impishly
laughing at the slow progress she made.
"Now Jim! that's cruel of you, to desert me in my hour of need," said
Flora, shaking her hand at the young mad-cap. "Lyndsay was right after
all. I had better have waited till to-morrow."
Meanwhile, the path that wound round the mountain towards the summit
became narrower and narrower, and the ascent more steep and difficult.
Flora sat down upon a stone amid the ruins of the chapel to rest, and to
enjoy the magnificent prospect. The contemplation of this sublime
panorama for a while absorbed every other feeling. She was only alive to
a keen sense of the beautiful; and while her eye rested on the lofty
ranges of mountains to the north and south, or upon the broad bosom of
the silver Forth, she no longer wondered at the enthusiastic admiration
expressed by the bards of Scotland for their romantic land.
While absorbed in thought, and contrasting the present with the past, a
lovely boy of four years of age, in kilt and hose, his golden curls
flying in the wind, ran at full speed up the steep side of the hill; a
panting woman, without bonnet or shawl, following hard upon his track,
shaking her fist at him, and vociferating her commands (doubtless for
him to return) in Gaelic, fled by.
On ran the laughing child, the mother after him; but as well might a
giant pursue a fairy.
Flora followed the path they had taken, and was beginning to enjoy the
keen bracing air of the hills, when she happened to cast her eyes to the
far-off meadows beneath. Her head grew suddenly giddy, and she could not
divest herself of the idea, that one false step would send her to the
plains below. Here was a most ridiculous and unromantic position: she
neither dared to advance nor retreat; and she stood grasping a ledge of
the rocky wall in an agony of cowardice and irresolution. At this
critical moment, the mother of the run-away child returned panting from
the higher ledge of the mountain, and, perceiving Flora pale and
trembling, very kindly stopped and asked what ailed her.
Flora could not help laughing while she confessed her fears, lest she
should fall from the narrow footpath on which she stood. The woman,
though evidently highly amused at her distress, had too much native
kindliness of heart, which is the mother of genuine politeness, to yield
to the merriment which hovered about her lips.
"Ye are na accustomed to the hills," she said, in her northern dialect,
"or ye wa'd na dread a hillock like this. Ye suld ha' been born whar I
wa' born, to ken a mountain fra' a mole-hill. There is my bairn, noo, I
canna' keep him fra' the mountain. He will gang awa' to the tap, an'
only laughs at me when I spier to him to come doon. It's a' because he
is sae weel begotten--an' all his forbears war reared amang the hills."
The good woman sat down upon a piece of the loose rock, and commenced a
long history of herself, of her husband, and of the great clan of
Macdonald (to which they belonged), which at last ended in the
discovery, that her aristocratic spouse was a Corporal in the Highland
regiment then stationed in Edinburgh, and that Flora, his wife, washed
for the officers in the said regiment--that the little Donald, with his
wild-goat propensities, was their only child, and so attached to the
hills, that she could not keep him confined to the meadows below! The
moment her eye was off him, his great delight was to lead her a dance up
the mountain, which, as she never succeeded in catching him, was quite
labour in vain.
All this, and more, the good-natured woman communicated in her frank,
desultory manner, as she led Flora down the steep, narrow path which led
to the meadows below. Her kindness did not end here, for she walked some
way up the road to put Mrs. Lyndsay in the right track to regain her
lodgings, for Flora, trusting to the pilotage of Jim, was perfectly
ignorant of the location.
This Highland Samaritan indignantly refused the piece of silver Flora
proffered in return for her services. "Hout, leddy! keep the siller! I
wudna' tak' aught fra' ye o' the Sabbath-day for a trifling act o'
courtesy--na, na, I come of too gude bluid for that!"
There was a noble simplicity about the honest-hearted woman, which was
not lost upon Flora.
"If I were not English," thought Flora, "I should like to be Scotch."
She looked rather crest-fallen, as she presented herself before her
Scotch husband, who laughed heartily over her misadventure, and did not
cease to tease her about her expedition to the mountain, as long as they
remained in its vicinity.
This did not deter her from taking a long stroll on the sands "o'
Leith," the next afternoon, with James, who delighted in these Quixotish
rambles; and was always on the alert, to join in any scheme which
promised an adventure. It was a lovely afternoon. The sun glittered on
the distant waters, which girdled the golden sands with a zone of blue
and silver. The air was fresh and elastic, and diffused a spirit of life
and joyousness around. Flora, as she followed the footsteps of her young
agile conductor, felt like a child again; and began to collect shells
and sea-weeds, with as much zest as she had done along her native coast,
in those far-off happy days, which at times returned to her memory like
some distinct, but distant dream.
For hours they wandered hither and thither, lulled by the sound of the
waters, and amused by their child-like employment; until Flora remarked,
that her footprints filled with water at each step, and the full deep
roaring of the sea gave notice of the return of the tide. Fortunately
they were not very far from the land; and oh, what a race they had to
gain the "Peir o' Leith," before they were overtaken by the waves. How
thankful they felt that they were safe, as the billows chased madly
past, over the very ground, which a few minutes before, they had so
fearlessly trod.
"This is rather worse than the mountain, mamma Flora," (a favourite name
with James for his friend Mrs. Lyndsay,) "and might have been fatal to
us both. I think Mr. Lyndsay would scold this time, if he knew our
danger."
"We won't quarrel on the score of prudence. But what is this?" said
Flora; and she stepped up to a blank wall, on their homeward path, and
read aloud the following advertisement:--
"To sail on the first of July, via Quebec and Montreal; the fast
sailing brig _Anne_, Captain Williams. For particulars, inquire
at the office of P. Gregg, Bank Street, Leith.
"N.B. The _Anne_ is the last ship which leaves this port, for
Canada, during the season."
"Hurra!" cried the volatile Jim, flinging his cap into the air; "a fig
for Captain Ayre and the _Flora_. I'd lay sixpence if I had it, that we
shall sail in the _Anne_."
"Let us go, James, and look at the vessel," cried Flora, clapping her
hands with delight. "Oh, if it had not been for our fright on the sands,
we should not have seen this."
Flora hastened home to inform her husband of the important discovery
they had made; and before half an hour had elapsed, she found herself in
company with him and Jim, holding a conference with Captain Williams, in
the little cabin of the _Anne_.