Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 1

by John Wilson

If we be in error, we shall be forgiven at least by all lovers of the past, and what to the elderly seems the olden time. Oh, misery for that Moor! Hundreds, thousands, loved it as well as we did; for though it grew no grain, many a glorious crop it bore—shadows that glided like ghosts—the giants stalked—the dwarfs crept; yet sometimes were the dwarfs more formidable than the giants, lying like blackamoors before your very feet, and as you stumbled over them in the dark, throttling as if they sought to strangle you, and then leaving you at your leisure to wipe from your mouth the mire by the light of a straggling star;—sunbeams that wrestled with the shadows in the gloom—sometimes clean flung, and then they cowered into the heather, and insinuated themselves into the earth; sometimes victorious, and then how they capered in the lift, ere they shivered away—not always without a hymn of thunder—in behind the clouds, to refresh themselves in their tabernacle in the sky.

Won't you be done with this Moor, you monomaniac? Not for yet a little while—for we see Kitty North all by himself in the heart of it, a boy apparently about the age of twelve, and happy as the day is long, though it is the Longest Day in all the year. Aimless he seems to be, but all alive as a grasshopper, and is leaping like a two-year-old across the hags. Were he to tumble in, what would become of the personage whom Kean's Biographer would call "the future Christopher the First?" But no fear of that—for at no period of his life did he ever overrate his powers—and he knows now his bound to an inch. Cap, bonnet, hat, he has none; and his yellow hair, dancing on his shoulders like a mane, gives him the look of a precocious lion's whelp. Leonine too in his aspect, yet mild withal; and but for a certain fierceness in his gambols, you would not suspect he was a young creature of prey. A fowling-piece is in his left hand, and in his right a rod. And what may he be purposing to shoot? Anything full-fledged that may play whirr or sugh. Good grouse-ground this; but many are yet in the egg, and the rest are but cheepers—little bigger than the small brown moorland bird that goes birling up with its own short epithalamium, and drops down on the rushes still as a stone. Them he harms not on their short flight—but marking them down, twirls his piece like a fugleman, and thinks of the Twelfth. Safer methinks wilt thou be a score or two yards further off, O Whaup! for though thy young are yet callow, Kit is beginning to think they may shift for themselves; and that long bill and that long neck, and those long legs and that long body—the tout-ensemble so elegant, so graceful, and so wild—are a strong temptation to the trigger;—click— clack—whizz—phew—fire—smoke and thunder—head-over-heels topsy-turvy goes the poor curlew—and Kit stands over him leaning on his single-barrel, with a stern but somewhat sad aspect, exulting in his skill, yet sorry for the creature whose wild cry will be heard no more.

'Tis an oasis in the desert. That green spot is called a quagmire—an ugly name enough—but itself is beautiful; for it diffuses its own light round about it, like a star vivifying its halo. The sward encircling it is firm—and Kit lays him down, heedless of the bird, with eyes fixed on the oozing spring. How fresh the wild cresses! His very eyes are drinking! His thirst is at once excited and satisfied by looking at the lustrous leaves—composed of cooling light without spot or stain. What ails the boy? He covers his face with his hands, and in the silence sighs. A small white hand, with its fingers spread, rises out of the spring, as if it were beckoning to heaven in prayer—and then is sucked slowly in again out of sight with a gurgling groan. The spring so fresh and fair—so beautiful with its cresses and many another water-loving plant beside—is changed into the same horrid quagmire it was that day—a holiday—three years ago—when racing in her joy Amy Lewars blindly ran into it, among her blithe companions, and suddenly perished. Childhood, they say, soon dries its tears, and soon forgets. God be praised for all his goodness! true it is that on the cheek of childhood tears are dried up as if by the sunshine of joy stealing from on high—but, God be praised for all his goodness! false it is that the heart of childhood has not a long memory, for in a moment the mournful past revives within it—as often as the joyful—sadness becomes sorrow, sorrow grief, and grief anguish, as now it is with the solitary boy seated by that ghastly spot in the middle of the wide moor.

Away he flies, and he is humming a tune. But what's this? A merry-making in the moor? Ay, merry-making; but were you to take part in it, you would find it about the hardest work that ever tried the strength of your spine. 'Tis a party of divot-flaughters. The people in the parish are now digging their peats, and here is a whole household, provident of winter, borrowing fuel from the moss. They are far from coals, and wood is intended by nature for other uses; but fire in peat she dedicated to the hearth, and there it burns all over Scotland, Highland and Lowland, far and near, at many a holy altar. 'Tis the mid-day hour of rest. Some are half asleep, some yet eating, some making a sort of under-voiced, under-hand love. "Mr North! Mr North! Mr North!" is the joyful cry—horny-fists first—downy-fists next—and after heartiest greeting, Master Kitty is installed, enthroned on a knowe, Master of the Ceremonies—and in good time gives them a song. Then "galliards cry a hall, a hall," and hark and lo! preluded by six smacks—three foursome reels! "Sic hirdum-dirdum and sic din," on the sward, to a strathspey frae the fiddle o' auld blin' Hugh Lyndsay, the itinerant musicianer, who was noways particular about the number of his strings, and when one, or even two snapped, used to play away at pretty much of the same tune with redoubled energy and variations. He had the true old Niel-Gow yell, and had he played on for ever, folk would have danced on for ever till they had all, one after the other, dropped down dead. What steps!

"Who will try me," cries Kit, "at loup-the-barrows?" "I will," quoth Souple Tam. The barrows are laid—how many side by side we fear to say—for we have become sensitive on our veracity—on a beautiful piece of springy turf, an inclined plane with length sufficient for a run; and while old and young line both sides of the lane near the loup, stript to the sark and the breeks, Souple Tam, as he fondly thinks, shows the way to win, and clears them all like a frog or a roebuck. "Clear the way, clear the way for the callant, Kit's comin!" cries Ebenezer Brackenrigg, the Elder, a douce man now, but a deevil in his youth, and like "a waff o' lichtnin'" past their een, Kit clears the barrows a foot beyond Souple Tam, and at the first fly is declared victor by acclamation. Oh, our unprophetic soul, did the day indeed dawn—many long years after this our earliest great conquest yet traditional in the parish—that ere nightfall witnessed our defeat by—a tailor! The Flying Tailor of Ettrick—the Lying Shepherd thereof—would they had never been born—the one to triumph and the other to record that triumph;—yet let us be just to the powers of our rival—for though all the world knows we were lame when we leapt him, long past our prime, had been wading all day in the Yarrow with some stones-weight in our creel, and allowed him a yard,

"Great must I call him, for he vanquish'd me."

What a place at night was that Moor! At night! That is a most indeterminate mode of expression, for there are nights of all sorts and sizes, and what kind of a night do we mean? Not a mirk night, for no man ever walked that moor on a mirk night, except one, and he, though blind-fou, was drowned. But a night may be dark without being mirk, with or without stars; and on many such a night have we, but not always alone—who was with us you shall never know—threaded our way with no other clue than that of evolving recollections, originally notices, across that wilderness of labyrinths, fearlessly, yet at times with a beating heart. Our companion had her clue too, one in her pocket, of blue worsted, with which she kept in repair all the stockings belonging to the family, and one in her memory, of green ethereal silk, which, finer far than any spider's web, she let out as she tript along the moor, and on her homeward way she felt, by some spiritual touch, the invisible lines, along which she retript as safely as if they had been moonbeams. During such journeyings we never saw the moor, how then can you expect us to describe it?

But oftener we were alone. Earthquakes abroad are dreadful occurrences, and blot out the obituary. But here they are so gentle that the heedless multitude never feel them, and on hearing you tell of them, they incredulously stare. That moor made no show of religion, but was a Quaker. We had but to stand still for five minutes or so, no easy matter then, for we were more restless than a wave, or to lie down with our ear to the ground, and the spirit was sure to move the old Quaker, who forthwith began to preach and pray and sing Psalms. How he moaned at times as if his heart were breaking! At times, as if some old forgotten sorrow were recalled, how he sighed! Then recovering his self-possession, as if to clear his voice, he gave a hem, and then a short nasty cough like a patient in a consumption. Now all was hush, and you might have supposed he had fallen asleep, for in that hush you heard what seemed an intermitting snore. When all at once, whew, whew, whew, as if he were whistling, accompanied with a strange rushing sound as of diving wings. That was in the air—but instantly after you heard something odder still in the bog. And while wondering, and of your wonder finding no end, the ground, which a moment before had felt firm as a road, began to shrink, and sink, and hesitate, and hurry, and crumble, and mumble all around you, and close up to your very feet—the quagmires gurgling as if choked—and a subterranean voice distinctly articulating Oh! Oh! Oh!

We have heard of people who pretend not to believe in ghosts—geologists who know how the world was created; but will they explain that moor? And how happened it that only by nights and dark nights it was so haunted? Beneath a wakeful moon and unwinking stars it was silent as a frozen sea. You listened then, and heard but the grass growing, and beautiful grass it was, though it was called coarse, and made the sweetest-scented hay. What crowds of bum-bees' bikes—foggies—did the scythe not reveal as it heaped up the heavy swathes—three hundred stone to the acre—by guess,—for there was neither weighing nor measuring there then-a-days, but all was in the lump—and there the rush-roped stacks stood all the winter through, that they might be near the "eerie outlan' cattle," on places where cart-wheel never circled, nor axle-tree creaked—nor ever car of antique make trailed its low load along—for the horse would have been laired. We knew not then at all—and now we but imperfectly know—the cause of the Beautiful. Then we believed the Beautiful to be wholly extern; something we had nothing to do with but to look at, and lo! it shone divinely there! Happy creed if false—for in it, with holiest reverence, we blamelessly adored the stars. There they were in millions as we thought—every one brighter than another, when by chance we happened to fix on any individual among them, that we might look through its face into its heart. All above gloriously glittering, all below a blank. Our body here, our spirit there—how mean our birthplace, our death-home how magnificent! "Fear God and keep his commandments," said a small still voice—and we felt that if He gave us strength to obey that law, we should live for ever beyond all those stars.

But were there no Lochs in our parish? Yea. Four. The Little Loch—the White Loch—the Black Loch—and the Brother Loch. Not a tree on the banks of any one of them—yet he had been a blockhead who called them bare. Had there been any need for trees, Nature would have sown them on hills she so dearly loved. Nor sheep nor cattle were ever heard to complain of those pastures. They bleated and they lowed as cheerily as the moorland birdies sang—and how cheerily that was nobody knew who had not often met the morning on the brae, and shaken hands with her the rosy-fingered like two familiar friends. No want of lown places there, in which the creatures could lie with wool or hair unruffled among surrounding storms. For the hills had been dropt from the hollow of His hand who "tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"—and even high up, where you might see tempest-stricken stones—some of them like pillars—but placed not there by human art—there were cosy bields in wildest weather, and some into which the snow was never known to drift, green all the winter through—perennial nests. Such was the nature of the region where lay our Four Lochs. They were some quarter of a mile—some half mile—and some whole mile—not more—asunder; but there was no great height—and we have a hundred times climbed the highest—from which they could be all seen at once—so cannily were they embosomed, so needed not to be embowered.