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

by Hugh Miller

"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 littérateur, 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 Palæozoic 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."