Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

The Christian friend, the man of feeling heart;)

And in his skilful, heaven-directed hand,

Put his best pleasing, only fee, my cure.”

Sunday Thoughts, Part iv.

THE HARD DOMINIE.

The reputation of the old school necessarily varied with the character and acquirements of its several teachers. About a century ago, it was one of the most celebrated in this part of the kingdom, and was attended by the children of country gentlemen for sixty miles round. The teacher, a Mr. David Macculloch, was a native of the parish; and so highly were his services appreciated by the people, especially by such among them as kept lodgers, that they used to allege he was the means of circulating more money among them than all their shopkeepers and tradesfolk put together. He was a licentiate of the Church, and was lost to the place by receiving an appointment to a semi-Highland parish somewhere in Perthshire; when his fame as a teacher was transferred for half an age to the parish schoolmaster of Fortrose, a Mr. Smith. It was under this man, who is said to have done for the burghers of Chanonry and Rosemarkie all that Mr. Macculloch had done for the householders of Cromarty, that Sir James Mackintosh, so well known in after years as a statesman and philosopher, received the rudiments of his education. Next in course the burgh of Nairn became famous for the skill of its parish teacher, a Mr. Strath; and there still survive a few of his pupils to testify to his merits and to express their gratitude. Since his death, however, the fame of educational ability has failed to be associated in any very marked degree with our northern parochial schools—in part a consequence, it is probable, of that change in the tactics of tuition which, by demanding a division of labour in the educational as in other departments, at once lessens the difficulty and increases the efficiency of teaching. It is at least obvious that few succeed well in what is very difficult; and that every improvement in any art must add either to the value of what the art produces, or, what seems to have happened in this case, to the facility of production.

The successor of Mr. Macculloch in the old school—a Mr. Russel—though not equally celebrated as a teacher, was in other respects a more remarkable man. About twelve years after his appointment, he relinquished his pedagogical charge for a chapel in Kilmarnock, and there he came in contact and quarrelled with our great national poet, who, bold and unyielding as he was, seems to have regarded the stern pedagogue of the north as no weak or puny antagonist; at least, against none of his other clerical opponents did he open so powerful a battery. We find him figuring in the “Holy Fair,” in the “Ordination,” in the “Kirk’s Alarm,” and in the “Twa Herds,” one of whom was the “wordy Russel.” Some degree of interest must necessarily attach to the memory of a man who seems destined never to be wholly forgotten; and as I have known and often conversed with several of his pupils, and remember even some of his mature contemporaries, I must communicate to the reader a few of their more characteristic recollections of the man of whom they were accustomed to speak and think as Russel the “hard schoolmaster.”

It is now somewhat more than eighty years since John Russel, a native of Moray, and one of the Church’s probationers, was appointed to the parish school of Cromarty. He was a large, robust, dark-complexioned man, imperturbably grave, and with a singularly stern expression stamped on his dusky forehead, that boded the urchins of the place little good. And in a few months he had acquired for himself the character of being by far the most rigid disciplinarian in the country. He was, I believe, a good, conscientious man, but unfortunate in a temper at once violent and harsh, and in sometimes mistaking its dictates for those of duty. At any rate, whatever the nature of the mistake, never was there a schoolmaster more thoroughly feared and detested by his pupils; and with dread and hatred did many of them continue to regard him long after they had become men and women. His memory was a dark morning cloud resting on their saddened boyhood, that cast its shadows into after life. I have heard of a lady who was so overcome by sudden terror on unexpectedly seeing him, many years after she had quitted school, in one of the pulpits of the south, that she fainted away in the pew; and of another of his scholars named M’Glashan—a robust, daring young man of six feet—who, when returning to Cromarty from some of the colonies, solaced himself by the way with thoughts of the hearty drubbing with which he was to clear off all his old scores with the dominie. Ere his return, however, Mr. Russel had quitted the parish; nor, even if it had chanced otherwise, might the young fellow have gained much in an encounter with one of the boldest and most powerful men in the country.

But Polyphemus himself, giant as he was, and a demigod to boot, could not always be cruel with impunity. The schoolmaster had his vulnerable point; he was a believer in ghosts; at all events he feared them very heartily, whether he believed in them or no; and some of his boys, much as they dreaded him, contrived on one occasion to avenge themselves upon him through his fears. In the long summer evenings he was in the habit of prosecuting his studies to a late hour in the schoolroom; from which, in returning to his lodgings, he had to pass through the churchyard. And when striding homewards one night, laden with books and papers, so affrighted was he by a horrible apparition, all over white, which started up beside him from beneath one of the tombstones, that, casting his burden to the winds, and starting off like wildfire, he never once looked behind him until he had gained his landlady’s fireside. It is said that he never after prosecuted his evening studies in the school. The late minister of Knockbain, Mr. Roderick M’Kenzie, for many years father of the Presbytery of Chanonry, used to tell with much glee that he knew a very great deal about the urchin who, in behalf of the outraged youthhood of the place, wore the white sheet on this interesting occasion. “I was quite as much afraid of ghosts,” he used to say, “as Mr. Russel himself; but three of my companions lay fast ensconced, to keep me in heart and countenance, under a neighbouring gravestone.”

There was among Russel’s pupils a poor boy named Skinner, who, as was customary in Scottish schools of the period, blew the horn for gathering the scholars, and kept the catalogue and the key, and who, in return for his services, was educated by the master, and received some little gratuity from the boys besides. To the south of the Grampians he would have been termed the Janitor of the school; whereas in the north, in those days, the name attached to him, in virtue of his office, was the humbler one of “The Pauper.” Unluckily, on one occasion, the key dropped out of his pocket; and, when school time came, the irascible dominie had to burst open the door with his foot. He raged at the boy with a fury so insane, and beat him with such relentless severity, that in the extremity of the case, the other boys rose up shrieking around him as if they were witnessing the perpetration of a murder; and the tyrant, brought suddenly to himself by so strange an exhibition, flung away the rod and sat down. And such, it is said, was the impression made on the mind of poor “Pauper Skinner,” that though he quitted the school shortly after, and plied the profession of a fisherman until he died an old man, he was never from that day seen disengaged for a moment, without mechanically thrusting his hand into the key-pocket. If excited too by any unexpected occurrence, whatever its nature, he was sure to grope hastily, in his agitation, for the missing key. One other anecdote illustrative of Mr. Russel’s temper. He was passing along the main street of the town, in a day of wind and rain from the sea, with his head half-buried in his breast, when he came violently in contact with a thatcher’s ladder, which had been left sloping from the roof of one of the houses. A much less matter would have sufficed to awaken the wrath of Mr. Russel: he laid hold of the ladder, and, dashing it on the pavement, broke with his powerful foot, ere he quitted it, every one of the “rounds.”