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

by Hugh Miller

Conqueror of death, joy of the accepted soul,

Oh, wonders raise no doubt when told of thee!

Thy way past finding out,

Thy love, can tongue declare?

Cheered by thy smile, Peace dwells amid the storm;

Held by thy hand, the floods assail in vain;

With grief is blent a joy,

And beams the vault of death.

Passing, in one of my walks this autumn, the cave in which I used to spend in boyhood so many happy hours with Finlay, I found it smoking, as of old, with a huge fire, and occupied by a wilder and more careless party than even my truant schoolfellows. It had been discovered and appropriated by a band of gipsies, who, attracted by the soot-stains on its roof and sides, and concluding that it had been inhabited by the gipsies of other days, had without consulting factor or landlord, at once entered upon possession, as the proper successors of its former occupants. They were a savage party, with a good deal of the true gipsy blood in them, but not without mixture of a broken-down class of apparently British descent; and one of their women was purely Irish. From what I had previously heard about gipsies, I was not prepared for a mixture of this kind; but I found it pretty general, and ascertained that at least one of the ways in which it had taken place was exemplified by the case of the one Irish woman. Her gipsy husband had served as a soldier, and had married her when in the army. I have been always exceedingly curious to see man in his rude elements—to study him as the savage, whether among the degraded classes of our own country, or, as exhibited in the writings of travellers and voyagers, in his aboriginal state; and I now did not hesitate to visit the gipsies, and to spend not unfrequently an hour or two in their company. They at first seemed jealous of me as a spy; but finding me inoffensive, and that I did not bewray counsel, they came at length to recognise me as the "quiet, sickly lad," and to chatter as freely in my presence as in that of the other pitchers with ears, which they used to fabricate out of tin by the dozen and the score, and the manufacture of which, with the making of horn spoons, formed the main branch of business carried on in the cave. I saw in these visits curious glimpses of gipsy life. I could trust only to what I actually witnessed: what was told me could on no occasion be believed; for never were there lies more gross and monstrous than those of the gipsies; but even the lying formed of itself a peculiar trait. I have never heard lying elsewhere that set all probability so utterly at defiance—a consequence, in part, of their recklessly venturing, like unskilful authors, to expatiate in walks of invention over which their experience did not extend. On one occasion an old gipsy woman, after pronouncing my malady consumption, prescribed for me as an infallible remedy, raw parsley minced small and made up into balls with fresh butter; but seeing, I suppose, from my manner, that I lacked the necessary belief in her specific, she went on to say, that she had derived her knowledge of such matters from her mother, one of the most "skeely women that ever lived." Her mother, she said, had once healed a lord's son of a grievous hurt in half a minute, after all the English doctors had shown they could do nothing for him. His eye had been struck out of its socket by a blow, and hung half-way down his cheek; and though the doctors could of course return it to its place, it refused to stick, always falling out again. Her mother, however, at once understood the case; and, making a little slit at the back of the young man's neck, she got hold of the end of a sinew, and pulling in the dislodged orb at a tug, she made all tight by running a knot on the controlling ligament, and so kept the eye in its place. And, save that the young lord continued to squint a little, he was well at once. The peculiar anatomy on which this invention was framed must have, of course, resembled that of a wax-doll with winking eyes; but it did well enough for the woman; and, having no character for truth to maintain, she did not hesitate to build on it. On asking her whether she ever attended church, she at once replied, "O yes, at one time very often. I am the daughter of a minister—a natural daughter, you know: my father was the most powerful preacher in all the south, and I always went to hear him." In about an hour after, however, forgetting her extemporary sally, and the reverend character with which she had insisted her sire, she spoke of him, in another equally palpable invention, as the greatest "king of the gipsies" that the gipsies ever had. Even the children had caught this habit of monstrous mendacity. There was one of the boys of the band, considerably under twelve, who could extemporize lying narratives by the hour, and seemed always delighted to get a listener; and a little girl, younger still, who "lisped in fiction, for the fiction came." There were two things that used to strike me as peculiar among these gipsies—a Hindu type of head, small of size, but with a considerable fulness of forehead, especially along the medial line, in the region, as the phrenologist would perhaps say, of individuality and comparison; and a singular posture assumed by the elderly females of the tribe in squatting before their fires, in which the elbow rested on the knees brought close together, the chin on the palms, and the entire figure (somewhat resembling in attitude a Mexican mummy) assumed an outlandish appearance, that reminded me of some of the more grotesque sculptures of Egypt and Hindustan. The peculiar type of head was derived, I doubt not, from an ancestry originally different from that of the settled races of the country; nor is it impossible that the peculiar position—unlike any I have ever seen Scottish females assume—was also of foreign origin.

I have witnessed scenes among these gipsies, of which the author of the "Jolly Beggars" might have made rare use, but which formed a sort of materials that I lacked the special ability rightly to employ. It was reported on one occasion that a marriage ceremony and wedding were to take place in the cave, and I sauntered the way, in the hope of ascertaining how its inmates contrived to do for themselves what of course no clergyman could venture to do for them—seeing that, of the parties to be united, the bridegroom might have already as many wives living as "Peter Bell," and the bride as many husbands. A gipsy marriage had taken place a few years previous in a cave near Rosemarkie. An old male gipsy, possessed of the rare accomplishment of reading, had half-read, half-spelled the English marriage-service to the young couple, and the ceremony was deemed complete at its close. And I now expected to witness something similar. In an opening in the wood above, I encountered two very drunk gipsies, and saw the first-fruits of the coming merriment. One of the two was an uncouth-looking monster, sallow-skinned, flat-faced, round-shouldered, long and thinly limbed, at least six feet two inches in height, and, from his strange misproportions, he might have passed for seven feet any day, were it not that his trousers, made for a much shorter man, and rising to the middle of his calfless leg, gave him much the appearance of a big boy walking on stilts. The boys of the place called him "Giant Grimbo;" while his companion, a tight dapper little fellow, who always showed off a compact, well-rounded leg in corduroy inexpressibles, they had learned to distinguish as "Billy Breeches." The giant, who carried a bagpipe, had broken down ere I came up with them; and now, sitting on the grass, he was droning out in fitful blasts a diabolical music, to which Billy Breeches was dancing; but, just as I passed, Billy also gave way, after wasting an infinity of exertion in keeping erect; and, falling over the prostrate musician, I could hear the bag groaning out its soul as he pressed against it, in a lengthened melancholious squeal. I found the cave bearing an aspect of more than ordinary picturesqueness. It had its two fires, and its double portion of smoke, that went rolling out in the calm like an inverted river; for it clung close to the roof, as if by a reversed gravitation, and turned its foaming surface downwards. At the one fire an old gipsy woman was engaged in baking oaten cakes; and a great pot, that dispensed through the cave the savoury odour of unlucky poultry out short in the middle of their days, and of hapless hares destroyed without the game licence, depended over the other. An ass, the common property of the tribe, stood meditating in the foreground; two urchins, of about from ten to twelve years a-piece—wretchedly supplied in the article of clothing—for the one, provided with only a pair of tattered trousers, was naked from the waist upwards, and the other, furnished with only a dilapidated jacket, was naked from the waist downwards—were engaged in picking up fuel for the fire, still further in front; a few of the ordinary inmates of the place lounged under cover of the smoke, apparently in a mood not in the least busy; and on a couch of dried fern sat evidently the central figure of the group, a young, sparkling-eyed brunette, more than ordinarily marked by the Hindu peculiarities of head and feature, and attended by a savage-looking fellow of about twenty, dark as a mulatto, and with a profusion of long flexible hair, black as jet, hanging down to his eyes, and clustering about his cheeks and neck. These were, I ascertained, the bride and bridegroom. The bride was engaged in sewing a cap—the bridegroom in watching the progress of the work. I observed that the party, who were less communicative than usual, seemed to regard me in the light of an intruder. An elderly tinker, the father of the bride, grey as a leafless thorn in winter, but still stalwart and strong, sat admiring a bit of spelter of about a pound weight. It was gold, he said, or, as he pronounced the word, "guild," which had been found in an old cairn, and was of immense value, "for it was peer guild and that was the best o' guild;" but if I pleased, he would sell it to me, a very great bargain. I was engaged with some difficulty in declining the offer, when we were interrupted by the sounds of the bagpipe. Giant Grimbo and Billy Breeches had succeeded in regaining their feet, and were seen staggering towards the cave. "Where's the whisky, Billy!" inquired the proprietor of the gold, addressing himself to the man of the small clothes. "Whisky!" said Billy, "ask Grimbo." "Where's the whisky, Grimbo?" reiterated the tinker. "Whisky!" replied Grimbo, "Whisky!" and yet again, after a pause and a hiccup, "Whisky!" "Ye confounded blacks!" said the tinker, springing to his feet with an agility wonderful for an age so advanced as his, "Have you drunk it all? But take that, Grimbo," he added, planting a blow full on the side of the giant's head, which prostrated his vast length along the floor of the cave. "And take that, Billy," he iterated, dealing such another blow to the shorter man, which sent him right athwart his prostrate comrade. And then, turning to me, he remarked with perfect coolness, "That, master, I call smart hitting." "Honest lad," whispered one of the women immediately after, "it will be a reugh time wi' us here the nicht: you had just better be stepping your ways." I had already begun to think so without prompting; and so, taking my leave of the gipsies, I failed being, as I had proposed, one of the witnesses of the wedding.