Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

The sun had risen high enough to look aslant into the dell, when Jock and the miller descended to the mill, and found the door lying wide open. All was silent within; the fire had sunk into a heap of white ashes, though there was a bundle of fagots untouched beside it, and the stool on which Tam had been seated lay overturned in front. But there were no traces of Tam, except that the miller picked up, beside the stool, a little flat-edged instrument, used by the unfortunate jockey in concealing the age of his horses by effacing the marks on their teeth, and that Jock Hossack found one of the drones of his pipes among the extinguished embers. Weeks passed away and there was still nothing heard of Tam; and as every one seemed to think it would be in vain to seek for him anywhere but in the place where he had been lost, Jock Hossack, whose marriage was vexatiously delayed in consequence of his strange disappearance, came to the resolution of unravelling the mystery, if possible, by passing a night in the mill.

For the first few hours he found the evening wear heavily away; the only sounds that reached him were the loud monotonous dashing of the cascade, and the duller rush of the stream as it swept past the mill-wheel. He piled up fuel on the fire till the flames rose half-way to the ceiling, and every beam and rafter stood out from the smoke as clearly as by day; and then yawning, as he thought how companionable a thing a good fire is, he longed for something to amuse him. A sudden cry rose from the further gable, accompanied by a flutter of wings, and one of the miller’s ducks, a fine plump bird came swooping down among the live embers. “Poor bird!” said Jock, “from the fox to the fire; I had almost forgotten that I wanted my supper.” He dashed the duck against the floor—plucked and embowelled it—and then, suspending the carcass by a string before the fire, began to twirl it round and round to the heat. The strong odoriferous fume had begun to fill the apartment, and the drippings to hiss and sputter among the embers, when a burst of music rose so suddenly from the green without, that Jock, who had been so engaged with the thoughts of his supper as almost to have forgotten the fairies, started half a yard from his seat. “That maun be Tam’s pipes,” he said; and giving a twirl to the duck he rose to a window. The moon, only a few days in her wane, was looking aslant into the dell, lighting the huge melancholy cliffs with their birches and hazels, and the white flickering descent of the cascade. The little level green on the margin of the stream lay more in the shade; but Jock could see that it was crowded with figures marvellously diminutive in stature, and that nearly one-half of them were engaged in dancing. It was enough for him, however, that the music was none of Tam’s making; and, leaving the little creatures to gambol undisturbed, he returned to the fire.

He had hardly resumed his seat when a low tap was heard at the door, and shortly after a second and a third. Jock sedulously turned his duck to the heat, and sat still. He had no wish for visitors, and determined on admitting none. The door, however, though firmly bolted, fell open of itself, and there entered one of the strangest-looking creatures he had ever seen. The figure was that of a man, but it was little more than three feet in height; and though the face was as sallow and wrinkled as that of a person of eighty, the eye had the roguish sparkle and the limbs all the juvenile activity of fourteen. “What’s your name, man?” said the little thing, coming up to Jock, and peering into his face till its wild elfish features were within a few inches of his. “What’s your name?” “Mysel’ an’ Mysel’,”—i.e., myself—said Jock, with a policy similar to that resorted to by Ulysses in the cave of the giant. “Ah, Mysel’ an’ Mysel’!” rejoined the creature; “Mysel’ an’ Mysel’! and what’s that you have got there, Mysel’ an’ Mysel’?” touching the duck as it spoke with the tip of its finger, and then transferring part of the scalding gravy to the cheek of Jock. Rather an unwarrantable liberty, thought the poor fellow, for so slight an acquaintance; the creature reiterated the question, and dabbed Jock’s other cheek with a larger and still more scalding application of the gravy. “What is it?” he exclaimed, losing in his anger all thought of consequences, and dashing the bird, with the full swing of his arm, against the face of his visitor, “It’s that!” The little creature, blinded and miserably burnt, screamed out in pain and terror till the roof rung again; the music ceased in a moment, and Jock Hossack had barely time to cover the fire with a fresh heap of fuel, which for a few seconds reduced the apartment to total darkness, when the crowd without came swarming like wasps to every door and window of the mill. “Who did it, Sanachy—who did it?” was the query of a thousand voices at once. “Oh, ’twas Mysel’ an’ Mysel’,” said the creature; “’twas Mysel’ an’ Mysel’.” “And if it was yoursel’ and yoursel’, who, poor Sanachy,” replied his companions, “can help that?” They still, however, clustered round the mill; the flames began to rise in long pointed columns through the smoke, and Jock Hossack had just given himself up for lost, when a cock crew outside the building, and after a sudden breeze had moaned for a few seconds among the cliffs and the bushes, and then sunk in the lower recesses of the dell, he found himself alone. He was married shortly after to the sister of the lost jockey, and never again saw the good people, or, what he regretted nearly as little, his unfortunate brother-in-law. There were some, however, who affirmed, that the latter had returned from fairyland seven years after his mysterious disappearance, and supported the assertion by the fact, that there was one Thomas M’Kechan who suffered at Perth for sheep-stealing a few months after the expiry of the seventh year.

FAUSE JAMIE.

One other tradition of the burn of Eathie, and I have done. But I need run no risk of marring it in the telling. More fortunate than most of its contemporaries, it has been preserved by the muse of one of those forgotten poets of our country, who, thinking more of their subjects than of themselves, “saved others’ names and left their own unsung.” And I have but to avail myself of his ballad.

FAUSE JAMIE.

PART FIRST.

“Whar hae ye been, my dochter deir,

I’ the cauld an’ the plashy weet?

There’s snaw i’ the faulds o’ your silken hair,