During my period of convalescence, I amused myself in hewing for my uncles, from an original design, an ornate dial-stone; and the dial-stone still exists, to show that my skill as a stone-cutter rose somewhat above the average of the profession in those parts of the country in which it ranks highest. Gradually as I recovered health and strength, little jobs came dropping in. I executed sculptured tablets in a style not common in the north of Scotland; introduced into the churchyards of the locality a better type of tombstone than had obtained in them before, save, mayhap, at a very early period; distanced all my competitors in the art of inscription-cutting; and at length found that, without exposing my weakened lungs to the rough tear and wear to which the ordinary stone-cutter must subject himself, I could live. I deemed it an advantage, too, rather than the reverse, that my new branch of employment brought me not unfrequently for a few days into country districts sufficiently distant from home to present me with new fields of observation, and to open up new tracts of inquiry. Sometimes I spent half a week in a farm-house in the neighbourhood of some country churchyard—sometimes I lodged in a village—oftener than once I sheltered beside some gentleman's seat, where the august shadow of lairdship lay heavy on society; and in this way I came to see and know a good deal of the Scottish people, in their many-coloured aspects, of which otherwise I might have remained ignorant. At times, too, on some dusty cottage shelf I succeeded in picking up a rare book, or, what was not less welcome, got a curious tradition from the cottager; or there lay within the reach of an evening walk some interesting piece of antiquity, or some rock-section, which I found it profitable to visit. A solitary burying-ground, too, situated, as country burying-grounds usually are, in some pleasant spot, and surrounded by its groups of ancient trees, formed a much more delightful scene of labour than a dusty work-shed, or some open area in a busy town; and altogether I found my new mode of life a quiet and happy one. Nor, with all its tranquillity, was it a sort of life in which the intellect was in any great danger of falling asleep. There was scarce a locality in which new game might not be started, that, in running down, kept the faculties in full play. Let me exemplify by describing the courses of inquiry, physical and metaphysical, which opened up to me when spending a few days, first in the burying-ground of Kirkmichael, and next in the churchyard of Nigg.
I have elsewhere somewhat fancifully described the ruinous chapel and solitary grave-yard of Kirkmichael as lying on the sweep of a gentle declivity, within a few yards of a flat sea-beach, so little exposed to the winds, that it would seem as if "ocean muffled its waves in approaching this field of the dead." And so the two vegetations—that of the land and of the sea—undisturbed by the surf, which on opener coasts prevents the growth of either along the upper littoral line, where the waves beat heaviest, here meet and mingle, each encroaching for a little way on the province of the other. And at meal-times, and when returning homewards in the evening along the shore, it furnished me with amusement enough to mark the character of the several plants of both floras that thus meet and cross each other, and the appearances which they assume when inhabiting each the other's province. On the side of the land, beds of thrift, with its gay flowers the sea-pinks, occupied great prominent cushions, that stood up like little islets amid the flowing sea, and were covered over by salt water during stream-tides to the depth of from eighteen inches to two feet. With these there occasionally mingled spikes of the sea-lavender; and now and then, though more rarely, a sea-aster, that might be seen raising above the calm surface its composite flowers, with their bright yellow staminal pods, and their pale purple petals. Far beyond, however, even the cushions of thrift, I could trace the fleshy, jointed stems of the glass-wort, rising out of the mud, but becoming diminutive and branchless as I followed them downwards, till at depths where they must have been frequently swum over by the young coal-fish and the flounder, they appeared as mere fleshy spikes, scarce an inch in height, and then ceased. On the side of the sea it was the various fucoids that rose highest along the beach: the serrated focus barely met the salt-wort; but the bladder-bearing fucus (fucus nodosus) mingled its brown fronds not unfrequently with the crimson flowers of the thrift, and the vesicular fucus (fucus vesiculosus) rose higher still, to enter into strange companionship with the sea-side plantains and the common scurvy-grass. Green enteromorpha of two species—E. compressa and E. intestinalis—I also found abundant along the edges of the thrift-beds; and it struck me as curious at the time, that while most of the land-plants which had thus descended beyond the sea-level were of the high dicotyledonous division, the sea-weeds with which they mingled their leaves and seed-vessels were low in their standing—fuci and enteromorpha—plants at least not higher than their kindred cryptogamia, the lichens and mosses of the land. Far beyond, in the outer reaches of the bay, where land-plants never approached, there were meadows of a submarine vegetation, of (for the sea) a comparatively high character. Their numerous plants (zostera marina) had true roots, and true leaves, and true flowers; and their spikes ripened amid the salt waters towards the close of autumn, round white seeds, that, like many of the seeds of the land, had their sugar and starch. But these plants kept far aloof, in their green depths, from their cogeners the monocotyledons of the terrestrial flora. It was merely the low Fucaceæ and Conferveæ of the sea that I found meeting and mixing with the descending dicotyledons of the land. I felt a good deal of interest in marking, about this time, how certain belts of marine vegetation occurred on a vast boulder situated in the neighbourhood of Cromarty, on the extreme line of the ebb of spring-tides. I detected the various species ranged in zones, just as on lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpine zones rising in succession the one over the other. At the base of the huge mass, at a level to which the tide rarely falls, the characteristic vegetable is the rough-stemmed tangle—Laminaria digitata. In the zone immediately above the lowest, the prevailing vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle—Laminaria saccharina. Higher still there occurs a zone of the serrated fucus—F. serratus—blent with another familiar fucus—F. nodosus. Then comes a yet higher zone of Fucus vesiculosus; and higher still, a few scattered tufts of Fucus canaliculatus; and then, as on lofty mountains that rise above the line of perpetual snow, vegetation ceases, and the boulder presents a round bald head, that rises over the surface after the first few hours of ebb have passed. But far beyond its base, where the sea never falls, green meadows of zostera flourish in the depths of the water, where they unfold their colourless flowers, unfurnished with petals, and ripen their farinaceous seeds, that, wherever they rise to the surface, seem very susceptible of frost. I have seen the shores strewed with a line of green zostera, with its spikes charged with seed, after a smart October frost, that had been coincident with the ebb of a low spring-tide, had nipt its rectilinear fronds and flexible stems.
But what, it may be asked, was the bearing of all this observation? I by no means saw its entire bearing at the time: I simply observed and recorded, because I found it pleasant to observe and record. And yet one of the wild dreams of Maillet in his Telliamed had given a certain degree of unity, and a certain definite direction, to my gleanings of fact on the subject, which they would not have otherwise possessed. It was held by this fanciful writer, that the vegetation of the land had been derived originally from that of the ocean. "In a word," we find him saying, "do not herbs, plants, roots, grains, and all of this kind that the earth produces and nourishes, come from the sea? Is it not at least natural to think so, since we are certain that all our habitable lands came originally from the sea? Besides, in small islands far from the Continent, which have appeared a few ages ago at most, and where it is manifest that never any men had been, we find shrubs, herbs, and roots. Now, you must be forced to own that either those productions owed their origin to the sea, or to a new creation, which is absurd." And then Maillet goes on to show, after a manner which—now that algaeology has become a science—must be regarded as at least curious, that the plants of the sea, though not so well developed as those of the land, are really very much of the same nature. "The fishermen of Marseilles find daily," he says, "in their nets, and among their fish, plants of a hundred kinds, with their fruits still upon them; and though these fruits are not so large nor so well nourished as those of our earth, yet their species is in no other respects dubious. There they find clusters of white and black grapes, peach-trees, pear-trees, prune-trees, apple-trees, and all sorts of flowers." Such was the sort of wild fable invented in a tract of natural science in which I found it of interest to acquaint myself with the truth. I have since seen the extraordinary vision of Maillet revived, first by Oken, and then by the author of the "Vestiges of Creation;" and when, in grappling with some of the views and statements of the latter writer, I set myself to write the chapter of my little work which deals with this special hypothesis, I found that I had in some sort studied in the school in which the education necessary to its production was most thoroughly to be acquired. Had the ingenious author of the "Vestiges" taken lessons for but a short time at the same form, he would scarce have thought of reviving in those latter ages the dream of Oken and Maillet. A knowledge of the facts would to a certainty have protected him against the reproduction of the hypothesis.
The lesson at Nigg was of a more curious kind, though, mayhap, less certainly conclusive in its bearings. The house of the proprietor of Nigg bordered on the burying-ground. I was engaged in cutting an inscription on the tombstone of his wife, recently dead; and a poor idiot, who found his living in the kitchen, and to whom the deceased had shown kindness; used to come every day to the churchyard, to sit beside me, and jabber in broken expressions his grief. I was struck with the extremeness of his idiocy: he manifested even more than the ordinary inability of his class to deal with figures, for he could scarce tell whether nature had furnished him with one head or with two; and no power of education could have taught him to count his fingers. He was equally defective, too, in the mechanical. Angus could not be got into trousers; and the contrivance of the button remained a mystery which he was never able to comprehend. And so he wore a large blue gown, like that of a beadsman, which slipped over his head, and was bound by a belt round his middle, with a stout woollen shirt underneath. But, though unacquainted with the mystery of the button, there were mysteries of another kind with which he seemed to have a most perfect acquaintance: Angus—always a faithful attendant at church—was a great critic in sermons; nor was it every preacher that satisfied him; and such was his imitative turn, that he himself could preach by the hour, in the manner—so far at least as voice and gesture went—of all the popular ministers of the district. There was, however, rather a paucity of idea in his discourses: in his more energetic passages, when he struck the book and stamped with his foot, he usually iterated, in sonorous Gaelic—"The wicked, the wicked, O wretches the wicked!" while a passage of a less depreciatory character served him for setting off his middle tones and his pathos. But that for which his character was chiefly remarkable was an instinctive, foxlike cunning, that seemed to lie at its very basis—a cunning which co-existed, however, with perfect honesty, and a devoted attachment to his patron the proprietor.
The town of Cromarty had its poor imbecile man of quite a different stamp. Jock Gordon had been, it was said, "like other people" till his fourteenth year, when a severe attack of illness left him bankrupt in both mind and body. He rose from his bed lame of a foot and hand, his one side shrunken and nerveless, the one lobe of his brain apparently inoperative, and with less than half his former energy and intellect; not at all an idiot, however, though somewhat more helpless—the poor mutilated fragment of a reasoning man. Among his other failings, he stuttered lamentably. He became an inmate of the kitchen of Cromarty House; and learned to run, or, I should rather say, to limp, errands—for he had risen from the fever that ruined him to run no more—with great fidelity and success. He was fond of church-going, of reading good little books, and, notwithstanding his sad stutter, of singing. During the day, he might be heard, as he hobbled along the streets on business, "singing in into himself," as the children used to say, in a low unvaried under-tone, somewhat resembling the humming of a bee; but when night fell, the whole town heard him. He was no patronizer of modern poets or composers. "There was a ship, and a ship of fame," and "Death and the fair Lady," were his especial favourites; and he could repeat the "Gosport Tragedy," and the "Babes in the Wood," from beginning to end. Sometimes he stuttered in the notes, and then they lengthened on and on into a never-ending quaver that our first-rate singers might have envied. Sometimes there was a sudden break—Jock had been consulting the pocket in which he stored his bread; but no sooner was his mouth half-cleared than he began again. In middle-life, however, a great calamity overtook Jock. His patron, the occupant of Cromarty House, quitted the country for France: Jock was left without occupation or aliment; and the streets heard no more of his songs. He grew lank and thin, and stuttered and limped more painfully than before, and was in the last stage of privation and distress; when the benevolent proprietor of Nigg, who resided half the year in a town-house in Cromarty, took pity upon him, and introduced him to his kitchen. And in a few days Jock was singing and limping errands with as much energy as ever. But the time at length came when his new benefactor had to quit his house in town for his seat in the country; and it behoved Jock to take temporary leave of Cromarty, and follow him. And then the poor imbecile man of the town-kitchen had, of course, to measure himself against his formidable rival, the vigorous idiot of the country one.
On Jock's advent at Nigg—which had taken place a few weeks previous to my engagement in the burying-ground of the parish—the character of Angus seemed to dilate in energy and power. He repaired to the churchyard with spade and pickaxe, and began digging a grave. It was a grave, he said, for wicked Jock Gordon; and Jock, whether he thought it or no, had come to Nigg, he added, only to be buried. Jock, however, was not to be dislodged so; and Angus, professing sudden friendship for him, gave expression to the magnanimous resolution, that he would not only tolerate Jock, but also be very kind to him, and show him the place where he kept all his money. He had lots of money, he said, which he had hidden in a dike; but he would show the place to Jock Gordon—to poor cripple Jock Gordon: he would show him the very hole, and Jock would get it all. And so he brought Jock to the hole—a cavity in a turf-wall in the neighbouring wood—and, taking care that his own way of retreat was clear, he bade him insinuate his hand. No sooner had he done so, however, than there issued forth from between his fingers a cloud of wasps, of the variety so abundant in the north country, that build their nests in earthy banks and old mole-hills; and poor Jock, ill fitted for retreat in any sudden emergency, was stung within an inch of his life. Angus returned in high glee, preaching about "wicked Jock Gordon, whom the very wasps wouldn't let alone;" but though he pretended no further friendship for a few days after, he again drew to him in apparent kindness; and on the following Saturday, on Jock being despatched to a neighbouring smithy with a sheep's head to singe, Angus volunteered his services to show him the way.
Angus went trotting before; Jock came limping behind: the fields were open and bare; the dwellings few and far between; and after having passed, in about an hour's walking, half-a-dozen little hamlets, Jock began to marvel exceedingly that there should be no sign of the smith's shop. "Poor foolish Jock Gordon!" ejaculated Angus, quickening his trot into a canter; "what does he know about carrying sheep's heads to the smithy?" Jock laboured hard to keep up with his guide; quavering and semi-quavering, as his breath served—for Jock always began to sing, when in solitary places, after nightfall, as a protection against ghosts. At length the daylight died entirely away, and he could only learn from Angus that the smithy was further off than ever; and, to add to his trouble and perplexity, the roughness of the ground showed him that they were wandering from the road. First they went toiling athwart what seemed an endless range of fields, separated from one another by deep ditches and fences of stone; then they crossed over a dreary moor, bristling with furze and sloe-thorn; then over a waste of bogs and quagmires; then across a track of newly-ploughed land; and then they entered a second wood. At length, after a miserable night's wandering, day broke upon the two forlorn satyrs; and Jock found himself in a strange country, with a long narrow lake in front and a wood behind. He had wandered after his guide into the remote parish of Tarbet.
Tarbet abounded at that time in little muddy lakes, edged with water-flags and reeds, and swarming with frogs and eels; and it was one of the largest and deepest of these that now lay before Jock and his guide. Angus tucked up his blue gown, as if to wade across. Jock would have as soon thought of fording the German Ocean. "Oh, wicked Jock Gordon!" exclaimed the fool, when he saw him hesitate; "the colonel's waiting, poor man, for his head, and Jock will no' take it to the smithy." He stepped into the water. Jock followed in sheer desperation; and, after clearing the belt of reeds, both sank to the middle in the mingled water and mud. Angus had at length accomplished the object of his journey. Extricating himself in a moment—for he was lithe and active—he snatched the sheep's head and trotters from Jock, and, leaping ashore, left the poor man sticking fast. It was church-time ere he reached, on his way back, the old Abbey of Fearn, still employed as a Protestant place of worship; and as the sight of the gathering people awakened his church-going propensity, he went in. He was in high spirits—seemed, by the mouths he made, very much to admire the sermon, and paraded the sheep's head and trotters through the passages and gallery a score of times at least, like a monk of the order of St. Francis exhibiting the relics of some favourite saint. In the evening he found his way home, but learned, to his grief and astonishment, that "wicked Jock Gordon" had got there shortly before him in a cart. The poor man had remained sticking in the mud for three long hours after Angus had left him, until at length the very frogs began to cultivate his acquaintance, as they had done that of King Log of old; and in the mud he would have been sticking still, had he not been extricated by a farmer of Fearn, who, in coming to church, had taken the lake in his way. He left Nigg, however, for Cromarty on the following day, convinced that he was no match for his rival, and dubious how the next adventure might terminate.
Such was the story which I found current in Nigg, when working in its churchyard, with the hero of the adventure often beside me. It led me to take special note of his class, and to collect facts respecting them, on which I erected a sort of semi-metaphysical theory of human character, which, though it would not now be regarded as by any means a novel one, I had thought out for myself, and which possessed for me, in consequence, the charm of originality. In these poor creatures, I thus argued, we find, amid much general dilapidation and brokenness of mind, certain instincts and peculiarities remaining entire. Here, in Angus, for instance, there is that instinctive cunning which some of the lower animals, such as the fox, possess, existing in a wonderful degree of perfection. Pope himself, who "could not drink tea without a stratagem," could scarce have possessed a larger share of it. And yet how distinct must not this sort of ingenuity be from the mechanical ingenuity! Angus cannot fix a button in its hole. I even see him baffled by a tall snuff-box, with a small quantity of snuff at its bottom, that lies beyond the reach of his finger. He has not ingenuity enough to lay it on its side, or to empty its snuff on his palm; but stretches and ever stretches towards it the unavailing digit, and then gets angry to find it elude his touch. There are other idiots, however, who have none of Angus's cunning, in whom this mechanical ability is decidedly developed. Many of the crétins of the Alps are said to be remarkable for their skill as artisans; and it is told of a Scotch idiot, who lived in a cottage on the Maolbuie Common in the upper part of the Black Isle, and in whom a similar mechanical ability existed, abstracted from ability of almost every other kind, that, among other things, he fabricated, out of a piece of rude metal, a large sacking needle. Angus is attached to his patron, and mourns for the deceased lady; but he seems to have little general regard for the species—simply courting for the time those from whom he expects snuff. The Cromarty idiot, on the contrary, is obliging and kindly to all, and bears a peculiar love to children; and, though more an imbecile in some respects than even Angus, he has a turn for dress, and can attire himself very neatly. In this last respect, however, the Cromarty fool was excelled by an idiot of the last age, known to the children of many a village and hamlet as Fool Charloch, who used to go wandering about the country, adorned, somewhat in the style of an Indian chief, with half a peacock's tail stuck in his cap. Yet another idiot, a fierce and dangerous creature, seemed as invariably malignant in his dispositions as the Cromarty one is benevolent, and died in a prison, to which he was committed for killing a poor half-witted associate. Yet another idiot of the north of Scotland had a strange turn for the supernatural. He was a mutterer of charms, and a watcher of omens, and possessed, it was said, the second sight. I collected not a few other facts of a similar kind, and thus reasoned regarding them:—