HIR · LYE · SHEE · LIVED · BOTH · POOR · AND · IVST ·
AND · EY · IN · GOD · SHEE · PVT · HIR · TRVST ·
GOD’S · LAWES · OBYED · TO · SIN · WAS · LEATH ·
NO · DOVBT · SHEE · DYED · ANE · HAPPIE · DATH ·
IANET · IONSTON · 1679 ·
On the northern side of the burying-ground there is a low stone, sculptured like most of the others, but broken by some accident into three pieces. A few stinted shrubs of broom spread their tiny branches and bright blossoms over the figures; they are obscured, besides, by rank tufts of moss and patches of lichens; but, despite of neglect and accident, enough of the inscription remains legible to tell us that we stand on the burial-place of one John Macleod, a merchant of Cromarty. He kept, besides, the principal inn of the place. He had an only son, a tall, and very powerful man, who was engaged, as he himself had been in his earlier days, in the free trade, and who, for a series of years, had set the officers of the revenue at defiance. Some time late in the reign of Queen Anne, he had succeeded in landing part of a cargo among the rocks of the hill of Cromarty, and in transporting it, night after night, from the cavern in which he had first secreted it, to a vault in his father’s house, which opened into the cellar. After concealing the entrance, he had seated himself beside the old man at the kitchen fire, when two revenue-officers entered the apartment, and taking their places beside a table, called for liquor. Macleod drew his bonnet hastily over his brow, and edging away from the small iron lamp which lighted the kitchen, muffled himself up in the folds of his dreadnought greatcoat. His father supplied the officers. “Where is Walter, your son?” inquired the better-dressed of the two, a tall, thin man, equipped in a three-cornered hat, and a blue coat seamed with gold lace; “I trust he does not still sail the Swacker.” “Maybe no,” said the old man dryly. “For I have just had intelligence,” continued the officer, “that she was captured this morning by Captain Manton, after firing on her Majesty’s flag; and it will go pretty hard, I can tell you, with some of the crew.” A third revenue-officer now entered the kitchen, and going up to the table whispered something to the others. “Please, Mr. Macleod,” said the former speaker to the innkeeper, “bring us a light, and the key of your cellar.” “And wherefore that?” inquired the old man; “show me your warrant. What would ye do wi’ the key?” “Nay, sir, no trifling; you brought here last night three cart-loads of Geneva, and stored them up in a vault below your cellar; the key and a light.” There was no sign, however, of procuring either. “Away!” he continued, turning to the officer who had last entered; “away for a candle and a sledge-hammer!” He was just quitting the room when the younger Macleod rose from his seat, and took his stand right between him and the door. “Look ye, gentlemen,” he said in a tone of portentous coolness, “I shall take it upon me to settle this affair; you and I have met before now, and are a little acquainted. The man who first moves out of this place in the direction of the cellar, shall never move afterwards in any direction at all.” He thrust his hand, as he spoke, beneath the folds of his greatcoat, and seemed extricating some weapon from his belt. “In upon him, lads!” shouted out the tall officer, “devil though he be, he is but one; the rest are all captured.” In a moment, two of the officers had thrown themselves upon him; the third laid hold of his father. A tremendous struggle ensued;—the lamp was overturned and extinguished. The smuggler, with a Herculean effort, shook off both his assailants, and as they rushed in again to close with him, he dealt one of them so terrible a blow that he rolled, stunned and senseless, on the floor. The elder Macleod, a hale old man, had extricated himself at the same moment, and mistaking, in the imperfect light, his son for one of the officers, and the fallen officer for his son, he seized on the kitchen poker, and just as the champion had succeeded in mastering his other opponent, he struck at him from behind, and felled him in an instant. In less than half an hour after he was dead. The unfortunate old man did not long survive him; for after enduring, for a few days, the horrors of mingled grief and remorse, his anguish of mind terminated in insanity, and he died in the course of the month.
For some time after, the house he had inhabited lay without a tenant, and stories were circulated among the town’s-folks of it being haunted. One David Hood, a tailor of the place, was frightened almost out of his wits in passing it on a coarse winter night, when neither fire nor candle in the whole range of houses on either side, showed him that there was anybody awake in town but himself. A fearful noise seemed to proceed from one of the lower rooms, as if a party of men were engaged in some desperate struggle;—he could hear the dashing of furniture against the floor, and the blows of the assailants; and after a dull hollow sound twice repeated, there was a fearful shriek, and a mournful exclamation in the voice of the deceased shopkeeper, “I have murdered my son! I have murdered my son!” The house was occupied, notwithstanding, some years after, though little to the comfort of the tenants. Often were they awakened at midnight, it is said, by noises, as if every piece of furniture in the apartment was huddled into the middle of the floor, though in the morning not a chair or table would be found displaced; at times, too, it would seem as if some person heavily booted was traversing the rooms overhead; and some of the inmates, as they lay a-bed, have seen clenched fists shaken at them from outside the windows, and pale, threatening faces looking in upon them through half-open doors. There is one of the stories which, but for a single circumstance, I should deem more authentic, not merely than any of the others, but than most of the class to which it belongs. It was communicated to me by a sensible and honest man—a man, too, of very general information. He saw, he said, what he seriously believed to be the apparition of the younger Macleod; but as he was a child of only six years at the time, his testimony may, perhaps, be more rationally regarded as curiously illustrative of the force of imagination at a very early age, than as furnishing any legitimate proof of the reality of such appearances. He had a sister, a few years older than himself, who attended some of the younger members of the family, which tenanted, about sixty years ago, the house once occupied by the shopkeeper. One Sunday forenoon, when all the inmates had gone to church except the girl and her charge, he stole in to see her, and then amused himself in wandering from room to room, gazing at the furniture and the pictures. He at length reached one of the garrets, and was turning over a heap of old magazines in quest of the prints, when he observed something darken the door, and looking up, found himself in the presence of what seemed to be a very tall, broad-shouldered man, with a pale, ghastly countenance, and wrapt up in a brown dreadnought greatcoat. A good deal surprised, but not at all alarmed, for he had no thought at the time that the appearance was other than natural, he stepped down stairs and told his sister that there was a “muckle big man i’ the top of the house.” She immediately called in a party of the neighbours, who, emboldened by the daylight, explored every room and closet from the garrets to the cellar, but they saw neither the tall man nor the dreadnought greatcoat.
THE STORY OF SANDY WOOD.
The old enclosure of the burying-ground, which seems originally to have been an earthen wall, has now sunk into a grassy mound, and on the southern and western sides some of the largest trees of the fence—a fine stately ash, fluted like a Grecian column, a huge elm roughened over with immense wens, and a low bushy larch with a bent twisted trunk, and weeping branches—spring directly out of it. At one place we see a flat tombstone lying a few yards outside the mound. The trees which shoot up on every side fling so deep a gloom over it during the summer and autumn months, that we can scarcely decipher the epitaph; and in winter it is not unfrequently buried under a wreath of withered leaves. By dint of some little pains, however, we come to learn from the darkened and half-dilapidated inscription, that the tenant below was one Alexander Wood, a native of Cromarty, who died in the year 1690; and that he was interred in this place at his own especial desire. His wife and some of his children have taken up their places beside him; thus lying apart like a family of hermits; while his story—which, almost too wild for tradition itself, is yet as authentic as most pieces of written history—affords a curious explanation of the circumstance which directed their choice.
Wood was a man of strong passions, sparingly gifted with common sense, and exceedingly superstitious. No one could be kinder to one’s friends or relatives, or more hospitable to a stranger; but when once offended, he was implacable. He had but little in his power either as a friend or an enemy—his course through the world lying barely beyond the bleak edge of poverty. If a neighbour, however, dropped in by accident at meal-time, he would not be suffered to quit his house until he had shared with him his simple fare. There was benevolence in the very grasp of his hand and the twinkle of his eye, and in the little set speech, still preserved by tradition, in which he used to address his wife every time an old or mutilated beggar came to the door:—“Alms, gudewife,” he would say; “alms to the cripple, and the blin’, and the broken-down.” When injured or insulted, however, and certainly no one could do either without being very much in the wrong, there was a toad-like malignity in his nature, that would come leaping out like the reptile from its hole, and no power on earth could shut it up again. He would sit hatching his venom for days and weeks together with a slow, tedious, unoperative kind of perseverance, that achieved nothing. He was full of anecdote; and, in all his stories, human nature was exhibited in only its brightest lights and its deepest shadows, without the slightest mixture of that medium tint which gives colour to its working, everyday suit. Whatever was bad in the better class, he transferred to the worse, and vice versa; and thus not even his narratives of the supernatural were less true to nature and fact than his narratives of mere men and women. And he dealt with the two classes of stories after one fashion—lending the same firm belief to both alike.