Mrs. Gordon could scarcely have attained to her eighteenth year at the Revolution; and yet she had been exposed to suffering on the score of religion, in the previous troubles. There was a story among the people, that her ears had been cut off; it was even observed, that her tresses were always so arranged as to conceal the supposed mutilation; and some of the wilder spirits of the place used to call her Luggie, in allusion to the story; but she was too highly respected for the name to take. When a very old woman, she was one day combing her hair in the presence of a little girl, who was employed in dressing up the apartment in which she sat, and who threw at her from time to time a very inquisitive glance. “Come here, Maggie,” said the lady, who guessed the cause of her solicitude; “you are a curious little girl, and have heard that I have lost my ears—have you not? Here they are, however,” she continued, shading back her hair as she spoke, and displaying two very pretty ones; “wicked men once threatened to cut them off, and a knife was sharpened for the purpose, but God permitted them not.”
CHAPTER IX.
“The scart bears weel wi’ the winter’s cauld,
The aik wi’ the gurly win’;
But the bonny wee burds, and the sweet wee flowers,
Were made for the calm an’ the sun.”
—Old Ballad.
THE CHAPLAIN’S LAIR.
The southern Sutor terminates, where it overhangs the junction of the Cromarty and Moray Firths, in a noble precipice, which, planting its iron feet in the sea, rears its ample forehead a hundred yards over it. On the top there is a moss-covered, partially wooded knoll, which, commanding from its abrupt height and semi-insular situation a wide and diversified prospect, has been known from time immemorial to the town’s-people as “the Look-out.” It is an exquisite little spot, sweet in itself, and sublime in what it commands;—a fine range of forest scenery stretches along the background, while in front the eye may wander over the hills of seven different counties, and so vast an extent of sea, that, on the soberest calculation, we cannot estimate it under a thousand square miles. Nor need there be any lack of pleasing association to heighten the effect of a landscape which, among its other scenes of the wild and the wonderful, includes the bleak moor of Culloden, and the “heath near Forres.” It is, however, to the immense tract of sea which it overlooks that the little knoll owes its deepest interest, and when, after a storm from the west has scattered the shipping bound for port, and day after day has gone by without witnessing their expected return—there are wistful eyes that turn from it to the wide waste below, and anxious hearts that beat quicker and higher, as sail after sail starts up, spark-like, on the dim horizon, and grows into size and distinctness as it nears the shore. Nor is the rock beneath devoid of an interest exclusively its own.
It is one of those magnificent objects which fill the mind with emotions of the sublime and awful; and the effect is most imposing when we view it from below. The strata, strangely broken and contorted, rise almost vertically from the beach. Immense masses of a primary trap crop out along their bases, or wander over the face of the precipice in broad irregular veins, which contrast their deep olive-green with the ferruginous brown of the mass. A whitened projection, which overhangs the sea, has been for untold ages the haunt of the cormorant and the sea-mew; the eagle builds higher up, and higher still there is a broad inaccessible ledge in a deep angle of the rock, on which a thicket of hip and sloethorn bushes and a few wild apple-trees have taken root, and which, from the latter circumstance, bears among the town’s-boys the name of the apple-yardie. The young imagination delights to dwell amid the bosky recesses of this little spot, where human foot has never yet trodden, and where the crabs and the wild berries ripen and decay unplucked and untasted. There was a time, however, when the interest which attached to it owed almost all its intensity to the horrible. The eastern turret of the old castle of Cromarty has, with all its other turrets, long since disappeared; but the deep foliage of the ledge mantles as thickly as ever, and the precipice of the Look-out rears its dark front as proudly over the beach. They were frightfully connected—the shelf and the turret—in the associations of the town’s-people for more than a hundred years; the one was known as the Chaplain’s Turret—the other as the Chaplain’s Lair; but the demolition of the castle has dissolved the union, and there are now scarcely a dozen in the country who know that it ever existed.