The Scottish Halloween, as held in the solitary farmhouse and described by Burns, differed considerably from the Halloween of our villages and smaller towns. In the farmhouse it was a night of prediction only; in our towns and villages there were added a multitude of wild mischievous games, which were tolerated at no other season—a circumstance that serves to identify the festival with those pauses of license peculiar to the nonage of civil government, in which men are set free from the laws they are just learning to respect;—partly, it would seem, as a reward for the deference which they have paid them, partly to serve them as a kind of breathing-spaces in which to recover from the unwonted fatigue of being obedient. After nightfall, the young fellows of the town formed themselves into parties of ten or a dozen, and breaking into the gardens of the graver inhabitants, stole the best and heaviest of their cabbages. Converting these into bludgeons, by stripping off the lower leaves, they next scoured the streets and lanes, thumping at every door as they passed, until their uncouth weapons were beaten to pieces. When disarmed in this way, all the parties united into one, and providing themselves with a cart, drove it before them with the rapidity of a chaise and four through the principal streets. Woe to the inadvertent female whom they encountered! She was instantly laid hold of, and placed aloft in the cart—brothers, and cousins, and even sons, it is said, not unfrequently assisting in the capture; and then dragged backwards and forwards over the rough stones, amid shouts, and screams, and roars of laughter. The younkers within doors were meanwhile engaged in a manner somewhat less annoying, but not a whit less whimsical. The bent of their ingenuity for weeks before, had been turned to the accumulating of little hoards of apples—all for this night; and now a large tub, filled with water, was placed in the middle of the floor of some out-house, carefully dressed up for the occasion; and into the tub every one of the party flung an apple. They then approached it by turns, and, placing their hands on the edges, plunged forward to fish for the fruit with their teeth. I remember the main chance of success was to thrust the head fearlessly into the tub, amid the booming of the water, taking especial care to press down one of the apples in a line with the mouth, and to seize it when jammed against the bottom. When the whole party, with their dripping locks and shining faces, would seem metamorphosed into so many mermaids, this sport usually gave place to another:—A small beam of wood was suspended from the ceiling by a cord, and when fairly balanced, an apple was fastened to the one end, and a lighted candle to the other. It was then whirled round, and the boys in turn, as before, leaped up and bit at the fruit; not unfrequently, however, merely to singe their faces and hair at the candle. Neither of these games were peculiar to the north of Scotland: we find it stated by Mr. Polewhele, in his “Historical Views of Devonshire,” that the Irish peasants assembled on the eve of La Samon (the 2d November), to celebrate the festival of the sun, with many rites derived from Paganism, among which was the dipping for apples in a tub of water, and the catching at an apple stuck on the one end of a kind of hanging beam.
THE CHARM OF THE EGG.
There belonged to the north of Scotland two Halloween rites of augury which have not been described by Burns: and one of these, an elegant and beautiful charm, is not yet entirely out of repute. An ale-glass is filled with pure water, and into the water is dropped the white of an egg. The female whose future fortunes are to be disclosed (for the charm seems appropriated exclusively by the better sex) lays her hand on the glass’s mouth, and holds it there for about the space of a minute. In that time the heavier parts of the white settle to the bottom, while the lighter shoot up into the water, from which they are distinguished by their opacity, into a variety of fantastic shapes, resembling towers and domes, towns, fleets, and forests; or, to speak more correctly, into forms not very unlike those icicles which one sees during a severe frost at the edge of a waterfall. A resemblance is next traced, which is termed reading the glass, between the images displayed in it and some objects of either art or nature; and these are regarded as constituting a hieroglyphic of the person’s future fortunes. Thus, the ramparts of a fortress surmounted by streamers, a plain covered with armies, or the tents of an encampment, show that the female whose hand covered the glass is to be united to a soldier, and that her life is to be spent in camps and garrisons. A fleet of ships, a church or pulpit, a half-finished building, a field stripped into furrows, a garden, a forest—all these, and fifty other scenes, afford symbols equally unequivocal. And there are melancholy hieroglyphics, too, that speak of death when interrogated regarding marriage;—there are the solitary tomb, the fringed shroud, the coffin, and the skull and cross-bones. “Ah!” said a young girl, whom I overheard a few years ago regretting the loss of a deceased companion, “Ah! I knew when she first took ill that there was little to hope. Last Halloween we went together to Mrs. —— to break our eggs. Betsie’s was first cast, and there rose under her hand an ugly skull. Mrs. —— said nothing, but reversed the glass, while poor Betsie laid her hand on it a second time, and then there rose a coffin. Mrs. —— called it a boat, and I said I saw the oars; but Mrs. —— well knew what it meant, and so did I.”
THE TWELFTH RIG.
The other north country charm, which, of Celtic origin, bears evidently the impress of the romance and melancholy so predominant in the Celtic character, is only known and practised (if, indeed, still practised anywhere) in a few places of the remote Highlands. The person who intends trying it must steal out unperceived to a field whose furrows lie due south and north, and, entering at the western side, must proceed slowly over eleven ridges, and stand in the centre of the twelfth, when he will hear either low sobs and faint mournful shrieks, which betoken his early death, or the sounds of music and dancing, which foretell his marriage. But the charm is accounted dangerous. About twelve years ago, I spent an autumn in the mid-Highlands of Ross-shire, where I passed my Halloween, with nearly a dozen young people, at a farmhouse. We burned nuts and ate apples; and when we had exhausted our stock of both, some of us proposed setting out for the steading of a neighbouring farm, and robbing the garden of its cabbages; but the motion was overruled by the female members of the party; for the night was pitch dark, and the way rough; and so we had recourse for amusement to story-telling. Naturally enough most of our stories were of Halloween rites and predictions; and much was spoken regarding the charm of the rig. I had never before heard of it; and, out of a frolic, I stole away to a field whose furrows lay in the proper direction, and after pacing steadily across the ridges until I had reached the middle of the twelfth, I stood and listened. But spirits were not abroad:—I heard only the wind groaning in the woods, and the deep sullen roar of the Conan. On my return I was greeted with exclamations of wonder and terror, and it was remarked that I looked deadly pale, and had certainly heard something very terrible. “But whatever you may have been threatened with,” said the author of the remark, “you may congratulate yourself on being among us in your right mind; for there are instances of people returning from the twelfth rig raving mad; and of others who went to it as light of heart as you, who never returned at all.”
MACCULLOCH’S COURTSHIP.
The Maccullochs of the parish of Cromarty, a family now extinct, were, for about two centuries, substantial respectable farmers. The first of this family, says tradition, was Alaster Macculloch, a native of the Highlands. When a boy he quitted the house of his widow mother, and wandered into the low country in quest of employment, which he at length succeeded in procuring in the parish of Cromarty, on the farm of an old wealthy tacksman. For the first few weeks he seemed to be one of the gloomiest little fellows ever bred among the solitudes of the hills;—all the social feelings of his nature had been frozen within him; but they began to flow apace; and it was soon discovered that neither reserve nor melancholy formed any part of his real character. A little of the pride of the Celt he still retained; when he attended chapel he wore a gemmy suit of tartan, and his father’s dirk always depended from his belt; but, in every other respect, he seemed a true Lowland Scot, and not one of his companions equalled him in sly humour, or could play off a practical joke with half the effect.
His master was a widower, and the father of an only daughter, a laughing warm-hearted girl of nineteen. She had more lovers than half the girls of the parish put together; and when they avowed to her their very sincere attachment, she tendered them her very hearty thanks in return. But then one’s affections are not in one’s own power; and as certainly as they loved her just because they could not help it, so certainly was she indifferent to them from the same cause. Their number received one last accession in little Alaster the herd-boy. He shared in the kindness of his young mistress, and his cattle shared in it too, with every living thing connected with her father or his farm; but his soul-engrossing love lay silent within him, and not only without words, but, young and sanguine as he was, almost without hope. Not that he was unhappy. He had the knack of dreaming when broad awake, and of making his dreams as pleasant as he willed them; and so his passion rather increased than diminished the amount of his happiness. It taught him, too, the very best species of politeness—that of the heart; and young Lillias could not help wondering where it was that the manners of the red-cheeked Highland boy had received so exquisite a polish, and why it was that she herself was so much the object of his quiet unobtrusive attentions. When night released him from labour, he would take up his seat in some dark corner of the house, that commanded a full view of the fire, and there would he sit for whole hours gazing on the features of his mistress. A fine woman looks well by any light, even by that of a peat fire; and fine women, it is said, know it; but little thought the maiden of the farmhouse of the saint-like halo which, in the imagination of her silent worshipper, the red smoky flames shed around her. How could she even dream of it? The boy Alaster was fully five years younger than herself, and it surely could not be forgotten that he herded her father’s cattle. The incident, however, which I am just going to relate, gave her sufficient cause to think of him as a lover.
The Halloween of the year 1560 was a very different thing in the parish of Cromarty from that of the year 1829. It is now as dark and opaque a night—unless it chance to be brightened by the moon—as any in the winter season; it was then clear as the glass of a magician;—people looked through it and saw the future. Late in October that year, Alaster overheard his mistress and one of her youthful companions—the daughter of a neighbouring farmer—talking over the rites of the coming night of frolic and prediction. “Will you really venture on throwing the clue?” asked her companion; “the kiln, you ken, is dark and lonely; and there’s mony a story no true if folk havena often been frightened.” “Throw it?—oh, surely!” replied the other; “who would think it worth while to harm the like o’ me? and, besides, you can bide for me just a wee bittie aff. One would like, somehow, to know the name o’ one’s gudeman, or whether one is to get a gudeman at all.” Alaster was a lover, and lovers are fertile in stratagem. In the presence of his mistress he sought leave from the old man, her father, with whom he was much a favourite, to spend his Halloween at a cottage on a neighbouring farm, where there were several young people to meet; and his request was readily granted. The long-expected evening came; and Alaster set out for the cottage, without any intention of reaching it for at least two hours. When he had proceeded a little way he turned back, crept warily towards the kiln, climbed like a wild-cat up the rough circular gable, entered by the chimney, and in a few seconds was snugly seated amid the ashes of the furnace. There he waited for a full hour, listening to the beatings of his own heart. At length a light footstep was heard approaching; the key was applied to the lock, and as the door opened, a square patch of moonshine fell upon the rude wall of the kiln. A tall figure stepped timidly forward, and stood in the stream of faint light. It was Alaster’s young mistress. She looked fearfully round her, and then producing a small clue of yarn, she threw it towards Alaster, and immediately began to wind.[5] He suffered it to turn round and round among the ashes, and then cautiously laid hold of it. “Wha hauds?” said his mistress in a low startled whisper, looking as she spoke, over her shoulder towards the door; “Alaster Macculloch,” was the reply; and in a moment she had vanished like a spectre. Soon after, the tread of two persons was heard approaching the door. It was now Alaster’s turn to tremble. “Ah!” he thought, “I shall be discovered, and my stratagem come to worse than nothing.” “An’ did ye hear onything when you came out yon gate?” said one of the persons without. “Oh, naething, lass, naething!” replied the other, in a voice whose faintest echoes would have been recognised by the lover within; “steek too the door an’ lock it;—it’s a foolish conceit.” The door was accordingly locked, and Alaster left to find his way out in the manner he had entered.
THE EXTINCT SPECTRES.