THE POT.
There is on the northern side of the Firth of Cromarty, a shallow arm of the sea several miles in length, which dries during stream tides throughout almost its entire extent, and bears the name of the sands of Nigg. Like the sands of the Solway, it has been a frequent scene of accidents. Skirting a populous tract of country on both sides, it lies much in the way of travelers; and the fords, which shift during land floods and high winds, are often attempted at night, and occasionally at improper times of the tide. A narrow river-like channel in the middle, fed by the streams which discharge themselves into the estuary from the interior, and which never wholly dries, bears the name of “The Pot,” and was infamous during even the present century for its death-lights and its wraiths, and for the strange mysterious noises which used to come sounding from its depths to either shore previous to “a drowning.” Little more than half a century ago, a farmer of the district who had turned aside to see an acquaintance, an old man who lived on the northern shore of the sands of Nigg, found him leaning over the fence of his little garden, apparently so lost in thought that he seemed unconscious of his presence. “What ails you, Donald?” inquired the visitor. “There will be a drowning to-day in the Pot,” replied Donald. “A drowning in the Pot!—what makes you say so?” “Do you hear nothing?” “No’o—and yet I rather think I do;—there are faint sounds as of a continual knocking—are there not?—so very faint, that they seem rather within the ear, than without; and yet they surely come from the Pot;—knock, knock, knock—what can it mean?” “That knocking,” said the old man, “has been sounding in my ears all this morning. I have never known a life lost on the sands but that knocking has gone before.” As he spoke, a horseman was seen riding furiously along the road which skirts the opposite shore of the estuary. On reaching the usual ford, though the rise of the tide had rendered it impracticable for more than an hour before, he spurred his horse across the beach and entered the water. “Surely,” said the old man to his friend, “that madman is not taking the ford, and the sea nearly at full?” “Ay, but he is though,” said the other; “if the distance does not deceive me, it is Macculloch the corn-agent, in hot haste for the Tain market. See how he spurs through the shallows; and see, he has now reached the Pot, and the water deepens—he goes deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Merciful heavens! he is gone!” Horse and rider had sunk into one of the hollows. The horse rose to the surface a moment after, and swam to the shore; but the rider had disappeared for ever. A story of nearly the same part of the country connects the mysterious knocking with the mermaid.
MACCULLOCH THE CORN-AGENT.
In the immediate neighbourhood of the Old Abbey of Fearn, famous for its abbot, Patrick Hamilton, our first Protestant martyr, there stood, rather more than ninety years ago, a little turf cottage, inhabited by a widow, whose husband, a farmer of the parish, had died suddenly in the fields about ten years before. The poor woman had been within doors with her only child, a little girl of seven years of age, at the time; and when, without previous preparation, she had opened the door on a hurried summons, and seen the corpse of her husband on the threshold, her mind was totally unhinged by the shock. For the ten following years she went wandering about like a ghost, scarce conscious apparently of anything; no one ever heard her speak, or saw her listen; and save that she retained a few of the mechanical neatnesses of her earlier years—which, standing out alone on a groundwork of vacuity, seemed akin to the instincts of the inferior animals—her life appeared to be nearly as much a blank as that of the large elm-tree which stretched its branches over her cottage. Her husband’s farm, shortly after his death, had been put into the hands of a relation of the family, a narrow sordid man who had made no generous use, it was thought, of the power which the imbecility of the poor woman and the youth of her daughter gave him over their affairs; it was at least certain that he became comparatively wealthy, and they very poor; and in the autumn of 1742, the daughter, now a pretty girl of seventeen, had to leave her mother on the care of a neighbour, and to engage as a reaper with a farmer in the neighbouring parish of Tarbat. She had gone with a heavy heart to work for the first time among strangers, but her youth and beauty, added to a quiet timidity of manner, that showed how conscious she was of having no one to protect her, had made her friends; and now that harvest was over, she was returning home, proud of her slender earnings, and full of hope and happiness. It was early on a Sabbath morning, and her path winded along the southern bank of Loch-Slin, where the parish of Tarbat borders on that of Fearn.
THE WASHING OF THE MERMAID.
Loch-Slin is a dark sluggish sheet of water, bordered on every side by thick tangled hedges of reeds and rushes; nor has the surrounding scenery much to recommend it. It is comparatively tame—tamer perhaps for the last thirty years than at any former period; for the plough has been busy among its green undulating slopes, and many of its more picturesque thickets of alders and willows have disappeared. It possesses, however, its few points of interest; and its appearance at this time in the quiet of the Sabbath morning, was one of extreme seclusion. The tall old castle of Loch-Slin, broken and weather-worn, and pregnant with associations of the remote past, stood up over it like some necromancer beside his mirror; and the maiden, as she tripped homewards along the little blind pathway that went winding along the quiet shore—now in a hollow, anon on a height—could see the red image of the ruins heightened by the flush of the newly-risen sun, reflected on the calm surface that still lay dark and grey under the shadow of the eastern bank. All was still as death, when her ear suddenly caught a low indistinct sound as of a continuous knocking, which heightened as she went, until it was at length echoed back from the old walls; and which, had she heard it on a week morning, she would have at once set down as that of the knocking of clothes at a washing. But who, she thought, can be “knocking claes” on the Sabbath? She turned a projecting angle of the bank, and saw, not ten yards away, what seemed to be a tall female standing in the water immediately beyond the line of flags and rushes which fringed the shore, and engaged apparently in knocking clothes on a stone, with the sort of bludgeon still used in the north country for the purpose. The maiden hurried past, convinced that the creature before her could be none other than the mermaid of Loch-Slin; but in the midst of her terror she was possessed enough to remark that the beautiful goblin seemed to ply its work with a malignant pleasure, and that on a grass plot directly opposite where it stood, there were spread out as if to dry, more than thirty smocks and shirts, all horribly dabbled with blood. As the poor girl entered her mother’s cottage, the excitement that had borne her up in her flight suddenly failed, and she sunk insensible upon the floor. For a moment the mother seemed roused by the circumstance, but as her daughter recovered, she again relapsed into her accustomed apathy.
The spirits of the maiden were much flurried, and there was one to whom she would have fain communicated her strange story, and sought relief in his society from the terror that made her heart still palpitate against her side. But her young cousin (the son of her unkind relation, the farmer), with whom she had so often herded on the same knoll, and wrought on the same harvest-furrow, had set out for a neighbouring farm, on his way to church, and so there was no probability of her seeing him before evening. She sickened at the gloom of her mother’s cottage, where the scowling features of the mermaid seemed imprinted on every darker recess; and, taking her mother by the hand, she walked out with her to the fields. It was now about an hour after noon, and the sun in his strength was looking down in the calm on the bare stubbly campaign, and the old abbey in the midst, with its steep roof of lichened stone, and its rows of massy buttresses. The maiden could hear the higher notes of the congregational psalm as they came floating along the slope from the building, when—fearful catastrophe!—sudden as the explosion of a powder magazine, or the shock of an earthquake, there was a tremendous crash heard, accompanied by a terrific cry; a dense cloud of dust enveloped the ancient abbey, and when it cleared away, it was seen that the ponderous stone roof of the building had sunk in. “O wretched day!” exclaimed the widow, mysteriously restored by the violence of one shock to that full command of her faculties which she had lost by another, and starting at once from the deathlike apathy of years, “O wretched day! the church has fallen, and the whole congregation are buried in the ruins. Fearful calamity!—a parish destroyed at a blow. Dear, dear child, let us haste and see whether something cannot be done—whether some may not be left.” The maiden followed her mother to the scene of the accident in distraction and terror.
As they approached the churchyard gate they met two young women covered with blood, who were running shrieking along the road, and shortly after an elderly man so much injured, that he was creeping for support along the wall. “Go on,” he said to the widow, who had stopped to assist him; “I have gotten my life as a ransom, but there are hundreds perishing yonder.” They entered the churchyard; two-thirds of the roof had fallen, and nearly half the people were buried in the ruins; and they could see through the shattered windows men all covered with blood and dust, yelling, like maniacs, and tearing up the stones and slates that were heaped over their wives and children. As the sufferers were carried out one by one, and laid on the flat tombstones of the churchyard, the widow, so strangely restored to the energies of her better years, busied herself in stanching their wounds, or restoring them to animation; and her daughter, gathering heart, strove to assist her. A young man came staggering from among the ruins, his face suffused with blood, and bearing a dead body on his shoulders, when, laying down his charge beside them, he sunk over it in a swoon. It was the young cousin of the maiden, and the mutilated corpse which he carried was that of his father. She sobbed over him in an agony of grief and terror; but the exertions of the widow, who wonderfully retained her self-possession, soon recovered him to consciousness, though in so weak a state from exhaustion and loss of blood, that some time elapsed ere he was able to quit the burying-ground, leaning on the arm of his cousin. Thirty-six persons were killed on the spot, and many more were so dreadfully injured that they never recovered. The tombstones were spread over with dead bodies, some of them so fearfully gashed and mangled that they could scarce be recognised, and the paths that wended throughout the churchyard literally ran with blood. It was not until the maiden had reached her mother’s cottage, and the heart-rending clamour had begun to fall more faintly on the ear, that she thought of the mysterious washing of Loch-Slin, with its bloody shirts, and felt that she could understand it.
There were lights that evening in many a cottage, and mourners beside many a bed. The widow and her daughter watched beside the bed of their young relative, and though the struggle for life was protracted and doubtful, the strength of his constitution at length prevailed, and he rose, pale and thin, and taller than before, with a scar across his left temple. But ere the first spring had passed, with its balmy mornings and clear sunshine days, he had recovered his former bloom, and more than his former strength. The widow retained the powers so wonderfully restored to her; for the dislocation of faculty effected by one shock had been completely reset by another, and the whole intellect refitted. She had, however, her season of grief to pass through, as if her husband had died only a few days before; and when the relations of the lately perished came to weep over the newly-formed graves that rose so thickly in the burying-place, and around which the grass and hemlock stalks still bore the stain of blood, the widow might be seen seated by a grave covered with moss and daisies, and sunk so low that it was with difficulty its place could be traced on the sward. Of the ten previous years she retained only a few doubtful recollections, resembling those of a single night spent in broken and feverish dreams. At length, however, her grief subsided; and though there were louder and gayer guests at the bridal of her daughter and her young cousin, which took place about two years after the washing of the mermaid, there were none more sincerely happy on that occasion than the widow.