Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2

by John Wilson

Puck says he will put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes. At what rate is that per second, taking the circumference of the earth at 27,000 miles, more or less? There is a question for the mechanics, somewhat about as difficult of solution as Lord Brougham's celebrated one of the Smuggler and the Revenue Cutter—for the solution of which he recommended the aid of algebra. It is not so quick as you would imagine. We forget the usual rate of a cannon-ball in good condition, when he is in training—and before he is at all blown. So do we forget, we are sorry to confess, the number of centuries that it would take a good, stout, well-made, able-bodied cannon-ball, to accomplish a journey to our planet from one of the fixed stars. The great difficulty, we confess, would be to get him safely conveyed thither. If that could be done, we should have no fear of his finding his way back, if not in our time, in that of our posterity. However red-hot he might have been on starting, he would be cool enough, no doubt, on his arrival at the goal; yet we should have no objection to back him against Time for a trifle—Time, we observe, in almost all matches being beat, often indeed by the most miserable hacks, that can with difficulty raise a gallop. Time, however, possibly runs booty; for when he does make play, it must be confessed that he is a spanker, and that nothing has been seen with such a stride since Eclipse.

O beautiful and beloved Highland Parish! in whose dashing glens our beating heart first felt the awe of solitude, and learned to commune (alas! to what purpose?) with the tumult of its own thoughts! The circuit of thy skies was indeed a glorious arena spread over the mountain-tops for the combats of the great birds of prey! One wild cry or another was in the lift—of the hawk, or the glead, or the raven, or the eagle—or when those fiends slept, of the peaceful heron, and sea-bird by wandering boys pursued in its easy flight, till the snow-white child of ocean wavered away far inland, as if in search of a steadfast happiness unknown on the restless waves. Seldom did the eagle stoop to the challenge of the inferior fowl; but when he did, it was like a mailed knight treading down unknown men in battle. The hawks, and the gleads, and the ravens, and the carrion-crows, and the hooded-crows, and the rooks, and the magpies, and all the rest of the rural militia, forgetting their own feuds, sometimes came sallying from all quarters, with even a few facetious jackdaws from the old castle, to show fight with the monarch of the air. Amidst all that multitude of wings winnowing the wind, was heard the sough and whizz of those mighty vans, as the Royal Bird, himself an army, performed his majestic evolutions with all the calm confidence of a master in the art of aerial war, now shooting up half-a-thousand feet perpendicular, and now suddenly plump-down into the rear of the croaking, cawing, and chattering battalions, cutting off their retreat to the earth. Then the rout became general, the missing, however, far outnumbering the dead. Keeping possession of the field of battle, hung the eagle for a short while motionless—till with one fierce yell of triumph he seemed to seek the sun, and disappear like a speck in the light, surveying half of Scotland at a glance, and a thousand of her isles.

Some people have a trick of describing incidents as having happened within their own observation, when in fact they were at the time lying asleep in bed, and disturbing the whole house with the snore of their dormitory. Such is too often the character of the eyewitnesses of the present age. Now, we would not claim personal acquaintance with an incident we had not seen—no, not for a hundred guineas per sheet; and, therefore, we warn the reader not to believe the following little story about an eagle and child (by the way, that is the Derby crest, and a favourite sign of inns in the north of England) on our authority. "I tell the tale as 'twas told to me," by the schoolmaster of Naemanslaws, in the shire of Ayr; and if the incident never occurred, then must he have been one of the greatest liars that ever taught the young idea how to shoot. For our single selves, we are by nature credulous. Many extraordinary things happen in this life, and though "seeing is believing," so likewise "believing is seeing," as every one must allow who reads these our Recreations.

Almost all the people in the parish were leading in their meadow-hay (there were not in all its ten miles square twenty acres of ryegrass) on the same day of midsummer, so drying was the sunshine and the wind,—and huge heaped-up wains, that almost hid from view the horses that drew them along the sward, beginning to get green with second growth, were moving in all directions towards the snug farmyards. Never had the parish seemed before so populous. Jocund was the balmy air with laughter, whistle, and song. But the Tree-gnomons threw the shadow of "one o'clock" on the green dial-face of the earth—the horses were unyoked, and took instantly to grazing—groups of men, women, lads, lasses, and children collected under grove, and bush, and hedgerow—graces were pronounced, some of them rather too tedious in presence of the mantling milk-cans, bullion-bars of butter, and crackling cakes; and the great Being who gave them that day their daily bread, looked down from his Eternal Throne, well pleased with the piety of his thankful creatures.

The great Golden Eagle, the pride and the pest of the parish, stooped down, and away with something in his talons. One single sudden female shriek—and then shouts and outcries as if a church spire had tumbled down on a congregation at a sacrament. "Hannah Lamond's bairn! Hannah Lamond's bairn!" was the loud fast-spreading cry. "The Eagle's taen aff Hannah Lamond's bairn!" and many hundred feet were in another instant hurrying towards the mountain. Two miles of hill and dale, and copse and shingle, and many intersecting brooks, lay between; but in an incredibly short time the foot of the mountain was alive with people. The eyrie was well known, and both old birds were visible on the rock-ledge. But who shall scale that dizzy cliff, which Mark Steuart the sailor, who had been at the storming of many a fort, once attempted in vain? All kept gazing, or weeping, or wringing of hands, rooted to the ground, or running back and forwards, like so many ants, essaying their new wings, in discomfiture. "What's the use—what's the use o' ony puir human means? We have nae power but in prayer!" And many knelt down—fathers and mothers thinking of their own babies—as if they would force the deaf heavens to hear.

Hannah Lamond had been all this while sitting on a stone, with a face perfectly white, and eyes like those of a mad person, fixed on the eyrie. Nobody noticed her; for strong as all sympathies with her had been at the swoop of the Eagle, they were now swallowed up in the agony of eyesight. "Only last Sabbath was my sweet wee wean baptised in the name o' the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost!" and on uttering these words, she flew off through the brakes and over the huge stones, up—up—up—faster than ever huntsman ran in to the death—fearless as a goat playing among the precipices. No one doubted, no one could doubt, that she would soon be dashed to pieces. But have not people who walk in their sleep, obedient to the mysterious guidance of dreams, clomb the walls of old ruins, and found footing, even in decrepitude, along the edge of unguarded battlements, and down dilapidated stair-cases deep as draw-wells or coal-pits, and returned with open, fixed, and unseeing eyes, unharmed, to their beds at midnight? It is all the work of the soul, to whom the body is a slave; and shall not the agony of a mother's passion—who sees her baby, whose warm mouth had just left her breast, hurried off by a demon to a hideous death—bear her limbs aloft wherever there is dust to dust, till she reach that devouring den, and fiercer and more furious than any bird of prey that ever bathed its beak in blood, throttle the fiends that with their heavy wing would fain flap her down the cliffs, and hold up her child in deliverance?

No stop—no stay—she knew not that she drew her breath. Beneath her feet Providence fastened every loose stone, and to her hands strengthened every root. How was she ever to descend? That fear, then, but once crossed her heart, as up—up—up—to the little image made of her own flesh and blood. "The God who holds me now from perishing—will not the same God save me when my child is at my breast?" Down came the fierce rushing of the Eagle's wings—each savage bird dashing close to her head, so that she saw the yellow of their wrathful eyes. All at once they quailed, and were cowed. Yelling, they flew off to the stump of an ash jutting out of a cliff, a thousand feet above the cataract; and the Christian mother, falling across the eyrie, in the midst of bones and blood, clasped her child—dead—dead—no doubt—but unmangled and untorn, and swaddled up just as it was when she laid it down asleep among the fresh hay in a nook of the harvest-field. Oh! what pang of perfect blessedness transfixed her heart from that faint, feeble cry—"It lives! it lives! it lives!" and baring her bosom, with loud laughter, and eyes dry as stones, she felt the lips of the unconscious innocent once more murmuring at the fount of life and love. "O, thou great and thou dreadful God! whither hast thou brought me—one of the most sinful of thy creatures? Oh! save me lest I perish, even for thy own name's sake! O Thou, who died to save sinners, have mercy upon me!" Cliffs, chasms, blocks of stone, and the skeletons of old trees—far—far down—and dwindled into specks a thousand creatures of her own kind, stationary, or running to and fro! Was that the sound of the waterfall, or the faint roar of voices? Is that her native strath?—and that tuft of trees, does it contain the hut in which stands the cradle of her child? Never more shall it be rocked by her foot! Here must she die—and when her breast is exhausted—her baby too. And those horrid beaks, and eyes, and talons, and wings will return, and her child will be devoured at last, even within the dead arms that can protect it no more.

Where, all this while, was Mark Steuart, the sailor? Half-way up the cliffs. But his eyes had got dim, and his head dizzy, and his heart sick—and he who had so often reefed the topgallant-sail, when at midnight the coming of the gale was heard afar, covered his face with his hands, and dared look no longer on the swimming heights. "And who will take care of my poor bedridden mother?" thought Hannah, who, through exhaustion of so many passions, could no more retain in her grasp the hope she had clutched in despair. A voice whispered, "God." She looked round expecting to see a spirit; but nothing moved except a rotten branch, that, under its own weight, broke off from the crumbling rock. Her eye—by some secret sympathy with the inanimate object—watched its fall; and it seemed to stop, not far off, on a small platform. Her child was bound upon her shoulders—she knew not how or when—but it was safe—and scarcely daring to open her eyes, she slid down the shelving rocks, and found herself on a small piece of firm root-bound soil, with the tops of bushes appearing below. With fingers suddenly strengthened into the power of iron, she swung herself down by brier, and broom, and heather, and dwarf-birch. There, a loosened stone leapt over a ledge and no sound was heard, so profound was its fall. There, the shingle rattled down the screes, and she hesitated not to follow. Her feet bounded against the huge stone that stopped them; but she felt no pain. Her body was callous as the cliff. Steep as the wall of a house was now the side of the precipice. But it was matted with ivy centuries old—long ago dead, and without a single green leaf—but with thousands of arm-thick stems petrified into the rock, and covering it as with a trellice. She felt her baby on her neck—and with hands and feet clung to that fearful ladder. Turning round her head, and looking down, she saw the whole population of the parish—so great was the multitude—on their knees. She heard the voice of psalms—a hymn breathing the spirit of one united prayer. Sad and solemn was the strain—but nothing dirge-like—sounding not of death, but deliverance. Often had she sung that tune—perhaps the very words—but them she heard not—in her own hut, she and her mother—or in the kirk, along with all the congregation. An unseen hand seemed fastening her fingers to the ribs of ivy, and in sudden inspiration, believing that her life was to be saved, she became almost as fearless as if she had been changed into a winged creature. Again her feet touched stones and earth—the psalm was hushed—but a tremulous sobbing voice was close beside her, and a she-goat, with two little kids at her feet. "Wild heights," thought she, "do these creatures climb—but the dam will lead down her kids by the easiest paths; for in the brute creatures holy is the power of a mother's love!" and turning round her head, she kissed her sleeping baby, and for the first time she wept.

Overhead frowned the front of the precipice, never touched before by human hand or foot. No one had ever dreamt of scaling it, and the Golden Eagles knew that well in their instinct, as, before they built their eyrie, they had brushed it with their wings. But the downwards part of the mountain-side, though scarred, and seamed, and chasmed, was yet accessible—and more than one person in the parish had reached the bottom of the Glead's Cliff. Many were now attempting it—and ere the cautious mother had followed her dumb guides a hundred yards, through among dangers that, although enough to terrify the stoutest heart, were traversed by her without a shudder, the head of one man appeared, and then the head of another, and she knew that God had delivered her and her child into the care of their fellow-creatures. Not a word was spoken—she hushed her friends with her hands—and with uplifted eyes pointed to the guides sent to her by Heaven. Small green plats, where those creatures nibble the wildflowers, became now more frequent—trodden lines, almost as plain as sheep-paths, showed that the dam had not led her young into danger; and now the brushwood dwindled away into straggling shrubs, and the party stood on a little eminence above the stream, and forming part of the strath.

There had been trouble and agitation, much sobbing and many tears, among the multitude, while the mother was scaling the cliffs—sublime was the shout that echoed afar the moment she reached the eyrie—then had succeeded a silence deep as death—in a little while arose that hymning prayer, succeeded by mute supplication—the wildness of thankful and congratulatory joy had next its sway—and now that her salvation was sure, the great crowd rustled like a wind-swept wood. And for whose sake was all this alternation of agony? A poor humble creature, unknown to many even by name—one who had had but few friends, nor wished for more—contented to work all day, here—there—anywhere—that she might be able to support her aged mother and her child—and who on Sabbath took her seat in an obscure pew, set apart for paupers, in the kirk.