Scenes and legends of the north of Scotland

by Hugh Miller

Years of scarcity came on; taxes were high, and crops not abundant; and the soldiery abroad, whom the country had employed to fight against Bonaparte, had got an appetite at their work, and were consuming a good deal of meat and corn. The price of food rose tremendously; and many of the town’s-people, who were working for very little, were not in every case secure of that little when the work was done. Willie’s small congregation began to find that the times were exceedingly bad; there were no more morning pieces among them, and the porridge was less than enough. It was observed, however, that in the midst of their distresses Willie got in a large stock of meal, and that his sister began to bake as if she were making ready for a wedding. The children were wonderfully interested in the work, and watched it to the end; when, lo! to their great and joyous surprise, Willie divided the whole baking among them. Every member of the congregation got a cake; there were some who had little brothers and sisters at home who got two; and from that day forward, till times got better, none of Willie’s young people lacked their morning piece. The neighbours marvelled at Willie; and all agreed that there was something strangely puzzling in the character of the “poor lost lad.”

I have alluded to Willie’s garden. Never was there a little bit of ground better occupied; it looked like a piece of rich needlework. He had got wonderful flowers too—flesh-coloured carnations streaked with red, and double roses of a rich golden yellow. Even the commoner varieties—auriculas and anemones, and the party-coloured polyanthus—grew better with Willie than with anybody else. A Dutchman might have envied him his tulips, as they stood row beyond row on their elevated beds, like so many soldiers on a redoubt; and there was one mild dropping season in which two of these beautiful flowers, each perfect in its kind, and of different colours, too, sprang apparently from the same stem. The neighbours talked of them as they would have talked of the Siamese Twins; but Willie, though it lessened the wonder, was at pains to show them that the flowers sprang from different roots, and that what seemed to be their common stem, was in reality but a green hollow sheath formed by one of the leaves. Proud as Willie was of his flowers, and with all his humility he could not help being a little proud of them, he was yet conscientiously determined to have no miracle among them, unless, indeed, the miracle should chance to be a true one. It was no fault of Willie’s that all his neighbours had not as fine gardens as himself; he gave them slips of his best flowers, flesh-coloured carnation, yellow rose, and all; he grafted their trees for them too, and taught them the exact time for raising their tulip-roots, and the best mode of preserving them. Nay, more than all this, he devoted whole hours at times to give the finishing touches to their parterres and borders, just in the way a drawing-master lays in the last shadings, and imparts the finer touches, to the landscapes of his favourite pupils. All seemed impressed by the unselfish kindliness of his disposition; and all agreed that there could not be a warmer-hearted or more obliging neighbour than Willie Watson, “the poor lost lad.”

Everything earthly must have its last day. Willie was rather an elderly than an old man, and the childlike simplicity of his tastes and habits made people think of him as younger than he really was; but his constitution, never a strong one, was gradually failing; he lost strength and appetite; and at length there came a morning in which he could no longer open his shop. He continued to creep out at noon, however, for a few days after, to enjoy himself among his flowers, with only the Bible for his companion; but in a few days more he had declined so much lower, that the effort proved too much for him, and he took to his bed. The neighbours came flocking in; all had begun to take an interest in poor Willie; and now they had learned he was dying, and the feeling had deepened immensely with the intelligence. They found him lying in his neat little room, with a table bearing the one beloved volume drawn in beside his bed. He was the same quiet placid creature he had ever been; grateful for the slightest kindness, and with a heart full of love for all—full to overflowing. He said nothing about the Kirk, and nothing about the Baptists, but earnestly did he urge his visitors to be good men and women, and to be availing themselves of every opportunity of doing good. The volume on the table, he said, would best teach them how. As for himself, he had not a single anxiety; the great Being had been kind to him during all the long time he had been in the world, and He was now kindly calling him out of it. Whatever He did to him was good, and for his good, and why then should he be anxious or afraid? The hearts of Willie’s visitors were touched, and they could no longer speak or think of him as “the poor lost lad.”

A few short weeks went by, and Willie had gone the way of all flesh. There was silence in his shop, and his flowers opened their breasts to the sun, and bent their heads to the bee and the butterfly, with no one to take note of their beauty, or to sympathize in the delight of the little winged creatures that seemed so happy among them. There was many a wistful eye cast at the closed door and melancholy shutters by the members of Willie’s congregation, and they could all point out his grave. Yonder it lies, in the red light of the setting sun, with a carpeting of soft yellow moss spread over it. This little recess contains, doubtless, to use Wordsworth’s figure, many a curious and many an instructive volume, and all we lack is the ability of deciphering the characters; but a better or more practical treatise on toleration than that humble grave, it cannot contain. The point has often been argued in this part of the country—argued by men with long beards, who preached bad grammar in behalf of Johanna Southcote, and by men who spoke middling good sense for other purposes, and shaved once a day. But of all the arguments ever promulgated, those which told with best effect on the town’s-people were the life and death of Willie Watson, “the poor lost lad.”

A BALLAD IN PROSE.

We have perused the grave of the “poor lost lad,” and it turns out to be a treatise on toleration. The grave beside it may be regarded as a ballad—a short plaintive ballad—moulded in as common a form of invention, if I may so express myself, as any, even the simplest, of those old artless compositions which have welled out from time to time from among the people. Indeed, so simple is the story of it, that we might almost deem it an imitation, were we not assured that all the volumes of this solitary recess are originals from beginning to end.

It was forty years last March since the Champion man-of-war entered the bay below, with her ancient suspended half-way over the deck. Old seamen among the town’s-folk, acquainted with that language of signs and symbols in which fleets converse when they meet at sea, said that either the captain or one of his officers was dead; and the town’s-people, interested in the intelligence, came out by scores to gaze on the gallant vessel as she bore up slowly and majestically in the calm, towards the distant roadstead. The sails were furled, and the anchors cast; and as the huge hull swung round to the tide, three boats crowded with men were seen to shoot off from her side, and a strain of melancholy music came floating over the waves to the shore. A lighter shallop, with only a few rowers, pulled far ahead of the others, and as she reached the beach, the shovels and pickaxes, for which the crew relinquished their oars, revealed to the spectators more unequivocally than even the half-hoisted ensign or the music, the sad nature of their errand. The other boats approached with muffled and melancholy stroke, and the music waxed louder and more mournful. They reached the shore; the men formed at the water’s edge round a coffin covered by a flag, and bearing a sword a-top, and then passed slowly amid the assembled crowds to the burying-ground of St. Regulus. Arms glittered to the sun. The echoes of the tombs and of the deep precipitous dell below were awakened awhile by unwonted music, and then by the sharp rattle of musketry; the smoke went curling among the trees, or lingered in a blue haze amid the dingier recesses of the hollow; the coffin was covered over: a few of the officers remained behind the others; and there was one of the number, a tall handsome young man, who burst out, as he was turning away, into an uncontrollable fit of weeping. At length the whole pageant passed, and there remained behind only a darkened little hillock, with whose history no one was acquainted, but which was known for many years after as the “officer’s grave.”

Twenty years went by, and the grave came to be little thought of, when a townsman, on going up one evening to the burying-ground, saw a lady in deep mourning sitting weeping beside it, and a tall handsome gentleman in middle life, the same individual who had been so much affected at the funeral, standing, as if waiting for her, a little apart. They were brother and sister. The storms of twenty seasons had passed over the little mossy hillock. The deep snows had pressed upon it in winter; the dead vegetation of succeeding summers and autumns had accumulated around it, and it had gradually flattened to nearly the level of the soil. It had become an old grave; but the grief, that for the first time was now venting itself over it, had remained fresh as at first. There are cases, though rare, in which sorrow does not yield to time. A mother loses her child just as its mind has begun to open, and it has learned to lay hold of her heart by those singularly endearing signs of infantine affection and regard, which show us how the sympathies of our nature, which serve to bind us to the species, are awakened to perform their labour of love with even the first dawn of intelligence. Little missed by any one else, or at least soon to be forgotten, it passes away; but there is one who seems destined to remember it all the more vividly just because it has passed. To her, death serves as a sort of mordant to fix the otherwise flying colours in which its portraiture had been drawn on her heart. Time is working out around her his thousand thousand metamorphoses. The young are growing up to maturity, the old dropping into their graves; but the infant of her affections ever remains an infant—her charge in middle life, when all her other children have left her and gone out into the world, and, amid the weakness of decay and decrepitude, the child of her old age. There arises, however, a more enduring sorrow than even that of the mother, when, in the midst of hopes all but gratified, and wishes on the eve of fulfilment, the ties of the softer passion are rudely dissevered by death. Feelings, evanescent in their nature, and restricted to one class of circumstances and one stage of life, are uneradicably fixed through the event in the mind of the survivor. Youth first passes away, then the term of robust and active life, and last of all, the cold and melancholy winter of old age; but through every succeeding change, until the final close, the bereaved lover remains a lover still. Death has fixed the engrossing passion in its tenderest attitude by a sort of petrifying process; and we are reminded by the fact of those delicate leaves and florets of former creations, which a common fate would have consigned to the usual decay, but which were converted, when they died by some sudden catastrophe, into a solid marble that endures for ever. The lady who wept this evening beside the “officer’s grave,” was indulging in a hopeless, enduring passion of the character described; but all that now remains of her story forms but a mere outline for the imagination to fill up at pleasure. Her lover had been the sole heir of an ancient and affluent family; the lady herself belonged to rather a humbler sphere. He had fixed his affections upon her when almost a boy, and had succeeded in engaging hers in turn; but his parents, who saw nothing desirable in a connexion which was to add to neither the wealth nor the honours of the family, interfered, and he was sent to sea; where a disappointed attachment, preying on a naturally delicate constitution, soon converted their fears for his marriage into regret for his death. Did I not say truly that the “officer’s grave” was a simple little ballad, moulded in one of the commonest forms of invention?

MORRISON THE PAINTER.

Let us peruse one other grave ere we quit the burying-ground—the grave of Morrison the painter. It treats of morals, like that of “the poor lost lad,” but it enforces them after a different mode. We shall find it in the strangers’ corner, beside the graves of the two foreign seamen, whose bodies were cast upon the beach after a storm.