My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education

by Hugh Miller

And painted kings and cinctured warriors reign,

Nations there are who native worth possess,—

Whom every art shall court, each science bless:

And tribes there are, heavy of heart and slow,

On whom no coming age a change shall know."

There was, I suspect, a waste of effort in all this planning; but some men seem destined to do things clumsily and ill, at many times the expense which serves to secure success to the more adroit. I despatched my Ode to the newspaper, accompanied by a letter of explanation; but it fared as ill as my Address to the Institution; and a single line in italics in the next number intimated that it was not to appear. And thus both my schemes were, as they ought to be, knocked on the head. I have not schemed any since. Strategy is, I fear, not my forte; and it is idle to attempt doing in spite of nature what one has not been born to do well. Besides, I began to be seriously dissatisfied with myself: there seemed to be nothing absolutely wrong in a man who wanted honest employment taking this way of showing he was capable of it; but I felt the spirit within rise against it; and so I resolved to ask no more favours of any one, even should poets' corners remain shut against me for ever, or however little Institutions, literary or scientific, might favour me with their notice. I strode along the streets, half an inch taller on the strength of the resolution; and straightway, as if to reward me for my magnanimity, an offer of employment came my way unsolicited. I was addressed by the recruiting serjeant of a Highland regiment, who asked me if I did not belong to the Aird? "No, not to the Aird; to Cromarty," I replied. "Ah, to Cromarty—very fine place! But would you not better bid adieu to Cromarty, and come along with me? We have a capital grenadier company; and in our regiment a stout steady man is always sure to get on." I thanked him, but declined his invitation; and, with an apology on his part, which was not in the least needed or expected, we parted.

Though verse and old English failed me, the simple statement made by my Cromarty friend to my townsman located in Inverness, that I was a good workman, and wanted work, procured me at once the cutting of an inscription, and two little jobs in Cromarty besides, which I was to execute on my return home. The Inverness job was soon completed; but I had the near prospect of another; and as the little bit of the public that came my way approved of my cutting, I trusted employment would flow in apace. I lodged with a worthy old widow, conscientious and devout, and ever doing her humble work consciously in the eye of the Great Taskmaster—one of a class of persons not at all so numerous in the world as might be desirable, but sufficiently common to render it rather a marvel that some of our modern masters of fiction should never have chanced—judging from their writings—to come in contact with any of them. She had an only son, a working cabinetmaker, who used occasionally to annoy her by his silly jokes at serious things, and who was courting at this time a sweetheart who had five hundred pounds in the bank—an immensely large sum to a man in his circumstances. He had urged his suit with such apparent success, that the marriage-day was fixed and at hand, and the house which he had engaged as his future residence fully furnished. And it was his prospective brother-in-law who was to be my new employer, so soon as the wedding should leave him leisure enough to furnish epitaphs for two tombstones recently placed in the family burying-ground. The wedding-day arrived; and, to be out of the way of the bustle and the pageant, I retired to the house of a neighbour, a carpenter, whom I had obliged by a few lessons in practical geometry and architectural drawing. The carpenter was at the wedding; and, with the whole house to myself, I was engaged in writing, when up flew the door, and in rushed my pupil the carpenter. "What has happened?" I asked. "Happened!" said the carpenter,—"Happened!! The bride's away with another man!! The bridegroom has taken to his bed, and raves like a madman; and his poor old mother—good honest woman—is crying like a child. Do come and see what can be done." I accompanied him to my landlady's, where I found the bridegroom in a paroxysm of mingled grief and rage, congratulating himself on his escape, and bemoaning his unhappy disappointment, by turns. He lay athwart the bed, which he told me in the morning he had quitted for the last time; but as I entered, he half rose, and, seizing on a pair of new shoes which had been prepared for the bride, and lay on a table beside him, he hurled them against the wall, first the one and then the other, until they came rebounding back across the room; and then, with an exclamation that need not be repeated, he dashed himself down again. I did my best to comfort his poor mother, who seemed to feel very keenly the slight done to her son, and to anticipate with dread the scandal and gossip of which it would render her humble household the subject. She seemed sensible, however, that he had made an escape, and at once acquiesced in my suggestion, that all that should now be done would be to get every expense her son had been at in his preparations for housekeeping and the wedding transferred to the shoulders of the other party. And such an arrangement could, I thought, be easily effected through the bride's brother, who seemed to be a reasonable man, and who would be aware also that a suit at law could be instituted in the case against his sister; though in any such suit I held it might be best for both parties not to engage. And at the old woman's request, I set out with the carpenter to wait on the bride's brother, in order to see whether he was not prepared for some such arrangement as I suggested, and, besides, able to furnish us with some explanation of the extraordinary step taken by the bride.

We were overtaken, as we passed along the street, by a person who was, he said, in search of us, and who now requested us to accompany him; and, threading our way, under his guidance, through a few narrow lanes that traverse the assemblage of houses on the west bank of the Ness, we stopped at the door of an obscure alehouse. This, said our conductor, we have found to be the retreat of the bride. He ushered us into a room occupied by some eight or ten persons, drawn up on the opposite sides, with a blank space between. On the one side sat the bride, a high-coloured, buxom young girl, serene and erect as Britannia on the halfpennies, and guarded by two stout fellows, masons or slaters apparently, in their working dresses. They looked hard at the carpenter and me as we entered, of course regarding us as the assailants against whom they would have to maintain their prize. On the other side sat a group of the bride's relatives—among the rest her brother—silent, and all apparently very much grieved; while in the space between them there stumped up and down a lame, sallow-complexioned oddity, in shabby black, who seemed to be making a set oration, to which no one replied, about the sacred claims of love, and the cruelty of interfering with the affections of young people. Neither the carpenter nor myself felt any inclination to debate with the orator, or fight with the guards, or yet to interfere with the affections of the young lady; and so, calling out the brother into another room, and expressing our regret at what had happened, we stated our case, and found him, as we had expected, very reasonable. We could not, however, treat for the absent bridegroom, nor could he engage for his sister; and so we had to part without coming to any agreement. There were points about the case which at first I could not understand. My jilted acquaintance the cabinetmaker had not only enjoyed the countenance of all his mistress's relatives, but he had been also as well received by herself as lovers usually are: she had written him kind letters, and accepted of his presents; and then, just as her friends were sitting down to the marriage breakfast, she had eloped with another man. The other man, however—a handsome fellow, but great scamp—had a prior claim to her regards: he had been the lover of her choice, though detested by her brother and all her friends, who were sufficiently well acquainted with his character to know that he would land her in ruin; and during his absence in the country, where he was working as a slater, they had lent their influence and countenance to my acquaintance the cabinetmaker, in order to get her married to a comparatively safe man, out of the slater's reach. And, not very strong of will, she had acquiesced in the arrangement. On the eve of the marriage, however, the slater had come into town; and, exchanging clothes with an acquaintance a Highland soldier, he had walked unsuspected opposite her door, until, finding an opportunity of conversing with her on the morning of the wedding-day, he had represented her new lover as a silly, ill-shaped fellow, who had just head enough to be mercenary, and himself as one of the most devoted and disconsolate of lovers. And, his soft tongue and fine leg gaining the day, she had left the marriage guests to enjoy their tea and toast without her, and set off with him to the change-house. Ultimately the affair ended ill for all parties. I lost my job, for I saw no more of the bride's brother; the wrong-headed cabinetmaker, contrary to the advice of his mother and her lodger, entered into a law-suit, in which he got small damages and much vexation; and the slater and his mistress broke out into such a course of dissipation after becoming man and wife, that they and the five hundred pounds came to an end almost together. Shortly after, my landlady and her son quitted the country for the United States. So favourably had the poor woman impressed me as one of the truly excellent, that I took a journey from Cromarty to Inverness—a distance of nineteen miles—to bid her farewell; but I found, on my arrival, her house shut up, and learned that she had left the place for some sailing port on the west coast two days before. She was a humble washerwoman; but I am convinced that in the other world, which she must have entered long ere now, she ranks considerably higher!

I waited on in Inverness, in the hope that, according to Burns, "my brothers of the earth would give me leave to toil;" but the hope was a vain one, as I succeeded in procuring no second job. There was no lack, however, of the sort of employment which I could cut out for myself; but the remuneration—only now in the process of being realized, and that very slowly—had to be deferred to a distant day. I had to give more than twelve years' credit to the pursuits that engaged me: and as my capital was small, it was rather a trying matter to be "kept so long out of my wages." There is a wonderful group of what are now termed osars, in the immediate neighbourhood of Inverness—a group to which that Queen of Scottish tomhans, the picturesque Tomnahuirich, belongs, and to the examination of which I devoted several days. But I learned only to state the difficulty which they form—not to solve it; and now that Agassiz has promulgated his glacial theory, and that traces of the great ice agencies have been detected all over Scotland, the mystery of the osars remains a mystery still. I succeeded, however, in determining at this time, that they belong to a later period than the boulder clay, which I found underlying the great gravel formation of which they form a part, in a section near Loch Ness that had been laid open shortly before, in excavating for the great Caledonian Canal. And as all, or almost all, the shells of the boulder clay are of species that still live, we may infer that the mysterious osars were formed not very long ere the introduction upon our planet of the inquisitive little creature that has been puzzling himself—hitherto at least with no satisfactory result—in attempting to account for their origin. I examined, too, with some care, the old coast-line, so well developed in this neighbourhood as to form one of the features of its striking scenery, and which must be regarded as the geological memorial and representative of those latter ages of the world in which the human epoch impinged on the old Pre-Adamite periods. The magistrates of the place were engaged at the time in doing their duty, like sensible men, as they were, in what I could not help thinking a somewhat barbarous instance. The neat, well proportioned, very uninteresting jail-spire of the burgh, about which, in its integrity, no one cares anything, had been shaken by an earthquake, which took place in the year 1816, into one of the greatest curiosities in the kingdom. The earthquake, which, for a Scotch one, had been unprecedentedly severe, especially in the line of the great Caledonian Valley, had, by a strange vorticose motion, twisted round the spire, so that, at the transverse line of displacement, the panes and corners of the octagonal broach which its top formed overshot their proper positions fully seven inches. The corners were carried into nearly the middle of the panes, as if some gigantic hand, in attempting to twirl round the building by the spire, as one twirls round a spinning top by the stalk or bole, had, from some failure in the coherency of the masonry, succeeded in turning round only the part of which it had laid hold. Sir Charles Lyell figures, in his "Principles," similar shifts in stones of two obelisks in a Calabrian convent, and subjoins the ingenious suggestion on the subject of Messrs. Darwin and Mallet. And here was there a Scotch example of the same sort of mysterious phenomena, not less curious than the Calabrian one, and certainly unique in its character as Scotch, which, though the injured building had already stood twelve years in its displaced condition, and might stand for as many more as the hanging tower of Pisa, the magistrates were laboriously effacing at the expense of the burgh. They were completely successful too; and the jail spire was duly restored to its state of original insignificance, as a fifth-rate piece of ornamental masonry. But how very absurd, save, mayhap, here and there to a geologist, must not these remarks appear!