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

by Hugh Miller

His facts wanted a vocabulary adequately fitted to represent them; but though they "lacked a commodity of good names," they were all founded on careful observation, and possessed that first element of respectability—perfect originality: they were all acquired by himself. I owed more, however, to the habit of observation which he assisted me in forming, than even to his facts; and yet some of these were of high value. He has shown me, for instance, that an immense granitic boulder in the neighbourhood of the town, known for ages as the Clach Malloch, or Cursed Stone, stands so exactly in the line of low water, that the larger stream-tides of March and September lay dry its inner side, but never its outer one;—round the outer side there are always from two to four inches of water; and such had been the case for at least a hundred years before, in his father's and grandfather's days—evidence enough of itself, I have heard him say, that the relative levels of sea and land were not altering; though during the lapsed century the waves had so largely encroached on the low flat shores, that elderly men of his acquaintance, long since passed away, had actually held the plough when young where they had held the rudder when old. He used, too, to point out to me the effect of certain winds upon the tides. A strong hasty gale from the east, if coincident with a spring-tide, sent up the waves high upon the beach, and cut away whole roods of the soil; but the gales that usually kept larger tides from falling during ebb were prolonged gales from the west. A series of these, even when not very high, left not unfrequently from one to two feet water round the Clach Malloch, during stream-tides, that would otherwise have laid its bottom bare—a proof, he used to say, that the German Ocean, from its want of breadth, could not be heaped up against our coasts to the same extent, by the violence of a very powerful east wind, as the Atlantic by the force of a comparatively moderate westerly one. It is not improbable that the philosophy of the Drift Current, and of the apparently reactionary Gulf Stream, may be embodied in this simple remark.

The woods on the lower slopes of the hill, when there was no access to the zones covered save at low ebb by the sea, furnished me with employment of another kind. I learned to look with interest on the workings of certain insects, and to understand some of at least their simpler instincts. The large Diadem Spider, which spins so strong a web, that, in pressing my way through the furze thickets, I could hear its white silken cords crack as they yielded before me, and which I found skilled, like an ancient magician, in the strange art of rendering itself invisible in the clearest light, was an especial favourite; though its great size, and the wild stories I had read about the bite of its cogener the tarantula, made me cultivate its acquaintance somewhat at a distance. Often, however, have I stood beside its large web, when the creature occupied its place in the centre, and, touching it with a withered grass stalk, I have seen it sullenly swing on the lines "with its hands," and then shake them with a motion so rapid, that—like Carathis, the mother of the Caliph Vathek, who, when her hour of doom had come, "glanced off in a rapid whirl, which rendered her invisible"—the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes together. Nothing appeals more powerfully to the youthful fancy than those coats, rings, and amulets of eastern lore, that conferred on their possessors the gift of invisibility. I learned, too, to take an especial interest in what, though they belong to a different family, are known as the Water Spiders; and have watched them speeding by fits and starts, like skaters on the ice, across the surface of some woodland spring or streamlet—fearless walkers on the waters, that, with true faith in the integrity of the implanted instinct, never made shipwreck in the eddy or sank in the pool. It is to these little creatures that Wordsworth refers in one of his sonnets on sleep:—

"O sleep, thou art to me

A fly that up and down himself doth shove

Upon a fretful rivulet; now above,

Now on the water, vexed with mockery."

As shown, however, to the poet himself on one occasion, somewhat to his discomfort, by assuredly no mean authority—Mr. James Wilson—the "vexed" "fly," though one of the hemipterous insects, never uses its wings, and so never gets "above" the water. Among my other favourites were the splendid dragon-flies, the crimson-speckled Burnet moths, and the small azure butterflies, that, when fluttering among delicate harebells and crimson-tipped daisies, used to suggest to me, long ere I became acquainted with the pretty figure of Moore,[3] or even ere the figure had been produced, the idea of flowers that had taken to flying. The wild honey bees, too, in their several species, had peculiar charms for me. There were the buff-coloured carders, that erected over their honey-jars domes of moss; the lapidary red-tipped bees, that built amid the recesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone walls, and were so invincibly brave in defending their homesteads, that they never gave up the quarrel till they died; and, above all, the yellow-zoned humble-bees, that lodged deep in the ground along the dry sides of grassy banks, and were usually wealthier in honey than any of their cogeners, and existed in larger communities. But the herd-boys of the parish, and the foxes of its woods and brakes, shared in my interest in the wild honey bees, and, in the pursuit of something else than knowledge, were ruthless robbers of their nests. I often observed, that the fox, with all his reputed shrewdness, is not particularly knowing on the subject of bees. He makes as dead a set on a wasp's nest as on that of the carder or humble-bee, and gets, I doubt not, heartily stung for his pains; for though, as shown by the marks of his teeth, left on fragments of the paper combs scattered about, he attempts eating the young wasps in the chrysalis state, the undevoured remains seem to argue that he is but little pleased with them as food. There were occasions, however, in which even the herd-boys met with only disappointment in their bee-hunting excursions; and in one notable instance, the result of the adventure used to be spoken of in school and elsewhere, under our breath and in secret, as something very horrible. A party of boys had stormed a humble-bees' nest on the side of the old chapel-brae, and, digging inwards along the narrow winding earth passage, they at length came to a grinning human skull, and saw the bees issuing thick from out a round hole at its base—the foramen magnum. The wise little workers had actually formed their nest within the hollow of the head, once occupied by the busy brain; and their spoilers, more scrupulous than Samson of old, who seems to have enjoyed the meat brought forth out of the eater, and the sweetness extracted from the strong, left in very great consternation their honey all to themselves.

One of my discoveries of this early period would have been deemed a not unimportant one by the geologist. Among the woods of the hill, a short half-mile from the town, there is a morass of comparatively small extent, but considerable depth, which had been laid open by the bursting of a waterspout on the uplands, and in which the dark peaty chasm remained unclosed, though the event had happened ere my birth, until I had become old and curious enough thoroughly to explore it. It was a black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in depth. The bogs around waved thick with silvery willows of small size; but sticking out from the black sides of the ravine itself, and in some instances stretched across it from side to side, lay the decayed remains of huge giants of the vegetable world, that had flourished and died long ages ere, in at least our northern part of the island, the course of history had begun. There were oaks of enormous girth, into whose coal-black substance one could dig as easily with a pickaxe as one digs into a bank of clay; and at least one noble elm, which ran across the little stream that trickled, rather than flowed, along the bottom of the hollow, and which was in such a state of keeping, that I have scooped out of its trunk, with the unassisted hand, a way for the water. I have found in the ravine—which I learned very much to like as a scene of exploration, though I never failed to quit it sadly bemired—handfuls of hazel-nuts, of the ordinary size, but black as jet, with the cups of acorns, and with twigs of birch that still retained almost unchanged their silvery outer crust of bark, but whose ligneous interior existed as a mere pulp. I have even laid open, in layers of a sort of unctuous clay, resembling fuller's earth, leaves of oak, birch, and hazel, that had fluttered in the wind thousands of years before; and there was one happy day in which I succeeded in digging from out the very bottom of the excavation a huge fragment of an extraordinary-looking deer's horn. It was a broad, massive, strange-looking piece of bone, evidently old-fashioned in its type; and so I brought it home in triumph to Uncle James, as the antiquary of the family, assured that he could tell me all about it. Uncle James paused in the middle of his work; and, taking the horn in his hand, surveyed it leisurely on every side. "That is the horn, boy," he at length said, "of no deer that now lives in this country. We have the red deer, and the fallow deer, and the roe; and none of them have horns at all like that. I never saw an elk; but I am pretty sure this broad, plank-like horn can be none other than the horn of an elk." My uncle set aside his work; and, taking the horn in his hand, went out to the shop of a cabinet-maker in the neighbourhood, where there used to work from five to six journeymen. They all gathered round him to examine it, and agreed in the decision that it was an entirely different sort of horn from any borne by the existing deer of Scotland, and that this surmise regarding it was probably just. And, apparently to enhance the marvel, a neighbour, who was lounging in the shop at the time, remarked, in a tone of sober gravity, that it had lain in the Moss of the Willows "for perhaps half a century." There was positive anger in the tone of my uncle's reply. "Half a century, Sir!!" he exclaimed; "was the elk a native of Scotland half a century ago? There is no notice of the elk, Sir, in British history. That horn must have lain in the Moss of the Willows for thousands of years!" "Ah, ha, James, ah, ha," ejaculated the neighbour, with a sceptical shake of the head; but as neither he nor any one else dared meet my uncle on historical ground, the controversy took end with the ejaculation. I soon added to the horn of the elk that of a roe, and part of that of a red deer, found in the same ravine; and the neighbours, impressed by Uncle James's view, used to bring strangers to look at them. At length, unhappily, a relation settled in the south, who had shown me kindness, took a fancy to them; and, smit by the charms of a gorgeous paint-box which he had just sent me, I made them over to him entire. They found their way to London, and were ultimately lodged in the collection of some obscure virtuoso, whose locality or name I have been unable to trace.

The Cromarty Sutors have their two lines of caves—an ancient line hollowed by the waves many centuries ago, when the sea stood, in relation to the land, from fifteen to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does now; and a modern line, which the surf is still engaged in scooping out. Many of the older caves are lined with stalactites, deposited by springs that, filtering through the cracks and fissures of the gneiss, find lime enough in their passage to acquire what is known as a petrifying, though, in reality, only an incrusting quality. And these stalactites, under the name of "white stones made by the water," formed of old—as in that Cave of Slains specially mentioned by Buchanan and the Chroniclers, and in those caverns of the Peak so quaintly described by Cotton—one of the grand marvels of the place. Almost all the old gazetteers sufficiently copious in their details to mention Cromarty at all, refer to its "Dropping Cave" as a marvellous marble-producing cavern; and this "Dropping Cave" is but one of many that look out upon the sea from the precipices of the southern Sutor, in whose dark recesses the drops ever tinkle, and the stony ceilings ever grow. The wonder could not have been deemed a great or very rare one by a man like the late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, well known from his travels in Iceland, and his experiments on the inflammability of the diamond; but it so happened, that Sir George, curious to see the sort of stones to which the old gazetteers referred, made application to the minister of the parish for a set of specimens; and the minister straightway deputed the commission, which he believed to be not a difficult one, to one of his poorer parishioners, an old nailer, as a means of putting a few shillings in his way.

It so happened, however, that the nailer had lost his wife by a sad accident, only a few weeks before; and the story went abroad that the poor woman was, as the townspeople expressed it, "coming back." She had been very suddenly hurried out of the world. When going down the quay after nightfall one evening, with a parcel of clean linen for a sailor, her relative, she had missed footing on the pier edge, and, half-brained, half-drowned, had been found in the morning, stone dead, at the bottom of the harbour. And now, as if pressed by some unsettled business, she used to be seen, it was said, hovering after nightfall about her old dwelling, or sauntering along the neighbouring street; nay, there were occasions, according to the general report, in which she had even exchanged words with some of the neighbours, little to their satisfaction. The words, however, seemed in every instance to have wonderfully little to do with the affairs of another world. I remember seeing the wife of a neighbour rush into my mother's one evening about this time, speechless with terror, and declare, after an awful pause, during which she had lain half-fainting in a chair, that she had just seen Christy. She had been engaged, as the night was falling, but ere darkness had quite set in, in piling up a load of brushwood for fuel outside the door, when up started the spectre on the other side of the heap, attired in the ordinary work-day garb of the deceased, and, in a light and hurried tone, asked, as Christy might have done ere the fatal accident, for a share of the brushwood. "Give me some of that hag," said the ghost; "you have plenty—I have none." It was not known whether or no the nailer had seen the apparition; but it was pretty certain he believed in it; and as the "Dropping Cave" is both dark and solitary, and had forty years ago a bad name to boot—for the mermaid had been observed disporting in front of it even at mid-day, and lights and screams heard from it at nights—it must have been a rather formidable place to a man living in the momentary expectation of a visit from a dead wife. So far as could be ascertained—for the nailer himself was rather close in the matter—he had not entered the cave at all. He seemed, judging from the marks of scraping left along the sides for about two or three feet from the narrow opening, to have taken his stand outside, where the light was good, and the way of retreat clear, and to have raked outwards to him, as far as he could reach, all that stuck to the walls, including ropy slime and mouldy damp, but not one particle of stalactite. It was, of course, seen that his specimens would not suit Sir George; and the minister, in the extremity of the case, applied to my uncles, though with some little unwillingness, as it was known that no remuneration for their trouble could be offered to them. My uncles were, however, delighted with the commission—it was all for the benefit of science; and, providing themselves with torches and a hammer, they set out for the caves. And I, of course, accompanied them—a very happy boy—armed, like themselves, with hammer and torch, and prepared devotedly to labour in behalf of science and Sir George.