THE POOR LOST LAD.
We have lingered long in the solitary burying-ground of St. Regulus; the sun hastens to its setting; and the slanting beam of red light that comes pouring in through an opening amid the trees, catches but the extreme tops of the loftier monuments, and the higher pinnacles of the ruin beyond. There is a little bird chirping among the graves; we may hear the hum of the bee as it speeds homeward, and the low soothing murmur of the stream in the dell below; all else is stillness and solitude in this field of the dead.
There are times when, amid scenes such as the present, one can almost forget the possible, and wish that the silence were less deep. The most contemplative of modern poets, in giving voice to a similar wish, has sublimed it into poetry. “Would,” he says of his churchyard among the hills, in the stanza I have already employed as a motto,
“Would that the silent earth
Of what it holds could speak, and every grave
Be as a volume, shut, yet capable
Of yielding its contents to ear and eye.”
The dead of a thousand years are sleeping at our feet; the poor peasant serf of ten centuries ago, whom the neighbouring baron could have hung up at his cottage door, with the intelligent mechanic of yesterday, who took so deep an interest in the emancipation of the negroes. What strange stories of the past, what striking illustrations of the destiny and nature of man, how important a chronicle of the progress of society, would this solitary spot present us with, were it not that, like the mysterious volume in the Apocalypse, no man can open the book or unloose the seals thereof! There are recollections associated with some of the more recent graves, of interest enough to show us how curious a record the history of the whole would have furnished.
It is now well-nigh thirty years since Willie Watson returned, after an absence of nearly a quarter of a century, to the neighbouring town. He had been employed as a ladies’ shoemaker in some of the districts of the south; but no one at home had heard of Willie in the interval, and there was little known regarding him at his return, except that when he had quitted town so many years before, he was a neat-handed industrious workman, and what the elderly people called a quiet decent lad. And he was now, though somewhat in the wane of life, even a more thorough master of his trade than before. He was quiet and unobtrusive, too, as ever, and a great reader of serious books. And so the better sort of the people were beginning to draw to Willie by a kind of natural sympathy; some of them had learned to saunter into his workshop in the long evenings, and some had grown bold enough to engage him in serious conversation when they met with him in his solitary walks; when out came the astounding fact—and important as it may seem, the simple-minded mechanic had taken no pains to conceal it—that, during his residence in the south country, he had laid down Presbyterianism, and become the member of a Baptist church. There was a sudden revulsion of feeling towards him, and all the people of the town began to speak of Willie Watson as “a poor lost lad.”
The “poor lost lad,” however, was unquestionably a very excellent workman; and as he made neater shoes than anybody else, the ladies of the place could see no great harm in wearing them. He was singularly industrious, too, and indulged in no extraordinary expense, except when he now and then bought a good book, or a few flower-seeds for his garden. He was withal a single man, with only himself, and an elderly sister who lived with him, to provide for; and, what between the regularity of his gains on the one hand, and the moderation of his desires on the other, Willie, for a person of his condition, was in easy circumstances. It was found that all the children in the neighbourhood had taken a wonderful fancy to his shop. Willie was fond of telling them good little stories out of the Bible, and of explaining to them the prints which he had pasted on the walls. Above all, he was anxiously bent on teaching them to read. Some of their parents were poor, and some of them were careless; and he saw that, unless they learned their letters from him, there was little chance of their ever learning them at all. Willie in a small way, and to a very small congregation, was a kind of missionary; and what between his stories and his pictures, and his flowers and his apples, his labours were wonderfully successful. Never yet was school or church half so delightful to the little men and women of the place as the workshop of Willie Watson, “the poor lost lad.”