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