THE STORMS OF THE FIVE WINTERS.
It is not much more than twenty years since a series of violent storms from the hostile north-east, which came on at almost regular intervals for five successive winters, seemed to threaten the modern town of Cromarty with the fate of the ancient. The tides rose higher than tides had ever been known to rise before; and as the soil exposed to the action of the waves was gradually disappearing, instead of the gentle slope with which the land formerly merged into the beach, its boundaries were marked out by a dark abrupt line resembling a turf wall. Some of the people whose houses bordered on the sea looked exceedingly grave, and affirmed there was no danger whatever; those who lived higher up thought differently, and pitied their poor neighbours from the bottom of their hearts. The consternation was heightened too by a prophecy of Thomas the Rhymer, handed down for centuries, but little thought of before. It was predicted, it is said, by the old wizard, that Cromarty should be twice destroyed by the sea, and that fish should be caught in abundance on the Castle-hill—a rounded projection of the escarpment which rises behind the houses, and forms the ancient coast line.
DONALD MILLER’S WARS WITH THE SEA.
Man owes much of his ingenuity to his misfortunes; and who does not know that, were he less weak and less exposed as an animal, he would be less powerful as a rational creature? On a principle so obvious, these storms had the effect of converting not a few of the townsfolk into builders and architects. In the eastern suburb of the town, where the land presents a low yet projecting front to the waves, the shore is hemmed in by walls and bulwarks, which might be mistaken by a stranger approaching the place by sea for a chain of little forts. They were erected during the wars of the five winters by the proprietors of the gardens and houses behind; and the enemy against whom they had to maintain them, was the sea. At first the contest seemed well-nigh hopeless;—week after week was spent in throwing up a single bulwark, and an assault of a few hours demolished the whole line. But skill and perseverance prevailed at last;—the storms are all blown over, but the gardens and houses still remain. Of the many who built and planned during this war, the most indefatigable, the most skilful, the most successful, was Donald Miller.
Donald was a true Scotchman. He was bred a shoemaker; and painfully did he toil late and early for about twenty-five years with one solitary object in view, which, during all that time, he had never lost sight of—no, not for a single moment. And what was that one?—independence—a competency sufficient to set him above the necessity of further toil; and this he at length achieved, without doing aught for which the severest censor could accuse him of meanness. The amount of his savings did not exceed four hundred pounds; but, rightly deeming himself wealthy, for he had not learned to love money for its own sake, he shut up his shop. His father dying soon after, he succeeded to one of the snuggest, though most perilously-situated little properties within the three corners of Cromarty—the sea bounding it on the one side, and a stream, small and scanty during the droughts of summer, but sometimes more than sufficiently formidable in winter, sweeping past it on the other. The series of storms came on, and Donald found he had gained nothing by shutting up his shop.
He had built a bulwark in the old, lumbering, Cromarty style of the last century, and confined the wanderings of the stream by two straight walls. Across the walls he had just thrown a wooden bridge, and crowned the bulwark with a parapet, when on came the first of the storms—a night of sleet and hurricane—and lo! in the morning, the bulwark lay utterly overthrown, and the bridge, as if it had marched to its assistance, lay beside it, half buried in sea-wrack. “Ah,” exclaimed the neighbours, “it would be well for us to be as sure of our summer’s employment as Donald Miller, honest man!” Summer came; the bridge strided over the stream as before; the bulwark was built anew, and with such neatness and apparent strength, that no bulwark on the beach could compare with it. Again came winter; and the second bulwark, with its proud parapet, and rock-like strength, shared the fate of the first. Donald fairly took to his bed. He rose, however, with renewed vigour; and a third bulwark, more thoroughly finished than even the second, stretched ere the beginning of autumn between his property and the sea. Throughout the whole of that summer, from grey morning to grey evening, there might be seen on the shore of Cromarty a decent-looking, elderly man, armed with lever and mattock, rolling stones, or raising them from their beds in the sand, or fixing them together in a sloping wall—toiling as never labourer toiled, and ever and anon, as a neighbour sauntered the way, straightening his weary back, and tendering the ready snuff-box. That decent-looking, elderly man, was Donald Miller. But his toil was all in vain. Again came winter and the storms; again had he betaken himself to his bed, for his third bulwark had gone the way of the two others. With a resolution truly indomitable, he rose yet again, and erected a fourth bulwark, which has now presented an unbroken front to the storms of twenty years.
Though Donald had never studied mathematics as taught in books or the schools, he was a profound mathematician notwithstanding. Experience had taught him the superiority of the sloping to the perpendicular wall in resisting the waves; and he set himself to discover that particular angle which, without being inconveniently low, resists them best. Every new bulwark was a new experiment made on principles which he had discovered in the long nights of winter, when, hanging over the fire, he converted the hearth-stone into a tablet, and, with a pencil of charcoal, scribbled it over with diagrams. But he could never get the sea to join issue with him by changing in the line of his angles; for, however deep he sunk his foundations, his insidious enemy contrived to get under them by washing away the beach; and then the whole wall tumbled into the cavity. Now, however, he had discovered a remedy. First he laid a row of large flat stones on their edges in the line of the foundation and paved the whole of the beach below until it presented the appearance of a sloping street—taking care that his pavement, by running in a steeper angle than the shore, should, at its lower edge, lose itself in the sand. Then, from the flat stones which formed the upper boundary of the pavement, he built a ponderous wall, which, ascending in the proper angle, rose to the level of the garden; and a neat firm parapet surmounted the whole.—Winter came, and the storms came; but though the waves broke against the bulwark with as little remorse as against the Sutors, not a stone moved out of its place. Donald had at length fairly triumphed over the sea.
The progress of character is fully as interesting a study as the progress of art; and both are curiously exemplified in the history of Donald Miller. Now that he had conquered his enemy, and might realize his long-cherished dream of unbroken leisure, he found that constant employment had, through the force of habit, become essential to his comfort. His garden was the very paragon of gardens; and a single glance was sufficient to distinguish his furrow of potatoes from every other furrow in the field; but, now that his main occupation was gone, much time hung on his hands, notwithstanding his attentions to both. First, he set himself to build a wall quite round his property; and a very neat one he did build; but unfortunately, when once erected, there was nothing to knock it down again. Then he whitewashed his house, and built a new sty for his pig, the walls of which he also whitewashed. Then he enclosed two little patches on the side of the stream, to serve as bleaching-greens. Then he covered the upper part of his bulwark with a layer of soil, and sowed it with grass. Then he repaired a well, the common property of the town. Then he constructed a path for foot-passengers on the side of a road, which, passing his garden on the south, leads to Cromarty House. His labours for the good of the public were wretchedly recompensed, by, at least, his more immediate neighbours. They would dip their dirty pails into the well which he had repaired, and tell him, when he hinted at the propriety of washing them, that they were no dirtier than they used to be. Their pigs would break into his bleaching-greens, and furrow up the sward with their snouts: and when he threatened to pound them, he would be told “how unthriving a thing it was to keep the puir brutes aye in the fauld,” and how impossible a thing “to watch them ilka time they gae’d out.” Herd-boys would gallop their horses and drive their cattle along the path which he had formed for foot-passengers exclusively: and when he stormed at the little fellows, they would canter past, and shout out, from what they deemed a safe distance, that their “horses and kye had as good a right to the road as himsel’.” Worse than all the rest, when he had finished whitening the walls of his pigsty, and gone in for a few minutes to the house, a mischievous urchin, who had watched his opportunity, sallied across the bridge, and, seizing on the brush, whitewashed the roof also. Independent of the insult, nothing could be in worse taste; and yet, when the poor man preferred his complaint to the father of the urchin, the boor only deigned to mutter in reply, that “folk would hae nae peace till three Lammas tides, joined intil ane, would come and roll up the Clach Malacha” (it weighs about twenty tons) “frae its place i’the sea till flood watermark.” The fellow, rude as he was, had sagacity enough to infer that a tide potent enough to roll up the Clach Malacha, would demolish the bulwark, and concentrate the energies of Donald for at least another season.
But Donald found employment, and the neighbours were left undisturbed to live the life of their fathers without the intervention of the three Lammas tides. Some of the gentlemen farmers of the parish who reared fields of potatoes, which they sold out to the inhabitants in square portions of a hundred yards, besought Donald to superintend the measurement and the sale. The office was one of no emolument whatever, but he accepted it with thankfulness; and though, when he had potatoes of his own to dispose of, he never failed to lower the market for the benefit of the poor, every one now, except the farmers, pronounced him rigid and narrow to a fault. On a dissolution of Parliament, Cromarty became the scene of an election, and the honourable member-apparent deeming it proper, as the thing had become customary, to whitewash the dingier houses of the town, and cover its dirtier lanes with gravel, Donald was requested to direct and superintend the improvements. Proudly did he comply; and never before did the same sum of election-money whiten so many houses, and gravel so many lanes. Employment flowed in upon him from every quarter. If any of his acquaintance had a house to build, Donald was appointed inspector. If they had to be enfeoffed in their properties Donald acted as bailie, and tendered the earth and stone with the gravity of a judge. He surveyed fields, suggested improvements, and grew old without either feeling or regretting it. Towards the close of his last, and almost only illness, he called for one of his friends, a carpenter, and gave orders for his coffin; he named the seamstress who was to be employed in making his shroud; he prescribed the manner in which his lykewake should be kept, and both the order of his funeral and the streets through which it was to pass. He was particular in his injunctions to the sexton, that the bones of his father and mother should be placed directly above his coffin; and professing himself to be alike happy that he had lived, and that he was going to die, he turned him to the wall, and ceased to breathe a few hours after. With all his rage for improvement, he was a good old man of the good old school. Often has he stroked my head, and spoken to me of my father, a friend and namesake, though not a relative; and when, at an after period, he had learned that I set a value on whatever was antique and curious, he presented me with the fragment of a large black-letter Bible which had once belonged to the Urquharts of Cromarty.