“My father and mother,” writes Hawkie, “were Burghers, and possessing the works of Ralph Erskine of Dunfermline, whose sermons my mother took great pleasure in reading and hearing read. I had often to read them aloud to her, which, although to her a pleasure, was to me a punishment; and having a good memory, which was much improved at school, I preached one of Ralph Erskine’s sermons. I had got a number of lessons in elocution, for which I had a peculiar liking, and my voice at that time not being broken, I made a favourable impression on the people. We had an elder chosen to go round with the hat, but the money came in so quick that there was no need for that.” Such was Hawkie’s first public appearance as an orator.
For the following Sabbath another sermon was planned, but in the interim the budding preacher vacated the city. He is next found keeping a school at Bloack, in Ayrshire, behaving exemplary, and carefully studying the nature of his scholars. Soon again he is in Glasgow, working at the tailor trade, and anon keeping a school at a coal work at Plean Muir, in the vicinity of his birthplace. Next move, the tawse are thrown once more aside. He attaches himself to a band of strolling players, and “stars” it through part of the county of Fife. The stage turns out an unprofitable speculation, and the scene again changes. He is now a toy manufacturer. This proves too laborious an occupation, and he next becomes a china-mender. No cement will, however, bind the unsettled changeling. At the end of nine months he abandons the china trade, starts for Newcastle, and embarks in field-preaching among the collier population, who were nearly all Methodists. This he found to be a lucrative job.
“I got so dexterous at that craft,” he writes, “that I might have had a church, and was approved to be admitted into the brotherhood, but was afraid that the holes of my robe would not hold a button, and a small breeze of wind would expose the inside work.”
He abandons preaching, quits Newcastle, sets out for Carlisle, and remains there until his money is done. He then starts for Scotland, coming through Annandale, and asks charity for the first time in his life in the village of Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire. In his brief career he has already acted many and varied parts, and each one has left him a little lower down than it found him. At the age of thirty he lets slip the spirit of independence that had hitherto struggled against his natural inclination towards utter depravity, and becomes a common beggar. Attempts to rescue him had been put forth time and again, but all to no purpose; his nature was predisposed gutterwards, and down he went.
“Oh, man,” he was once heard to say, when remonstrated with about his dissolute life, “if I hadna the heart o’ a hyena, my mither’s tears would hae saftened it lang afore now. My conscience yet gies me sair stangs when I think aboot her, and I hae just to huzzh’t asleep wi’ whisky.”
Begging from door to door, and occasionally selling chap books in the streets, he wandered over the most of Scotland, as well as over a large part of England, and had many strange experiences, which, in course of time, were faithfully recorded in his “Autobiography” already referred to. These records, I may state in passing, edited by John Strathesk, the well-known author of Bits from Blinkbonny, were recently published by David Robertson & Co., of Glasgow. The book is a revelation of beggar-life well calculated to do good, as its perusal will convince any unbiased mind that ninety-nine per cent. of your door-to-door beggars are arrant rogues and vagabonds. Read alongside of Hawkie’s Autobiography, Burns’s “Jolly Beggars” is found to be no fancy picture. In his description of Beggars’ Dens of any consequence all over the land there are found life-like portraits of the various “randie gangrel bodies,” who, “in Poosie Nansie’s held the splore to drink their orra duddies.” Andrew Gemmells, the original of Scott’s “Edie Ochiltree,” averred, in his remoter time, that begging had become scarcely the profession of a gentleman. As a trade it was forty pounds in the year worse than when he practised it, and, if he had twenty sons, he would not be easily induced to breed one of them up in his own line. Even in Hawkie’s time the profession, however, was not quite played out. The Canonmills Road in Edinburgh, when he first started, was, he says, worth on an average five shillings and a few pence daily. The King’s Park was not worth anything except on Sunday, but the first Sunday he begged in it, standing hat in hand from three in the afternoon until nine at night, he lifted over seventeen shillings. Paisley and a number of villages in the neighbourhood are admitted to be excellent ground for the “cadger.” A beggar may remain in Paisley, Hawkie avers, and live on the best of the land. Gangrel bodies will therefore do well to take Hawkie’s experience along with Lord Beaconsfields hint and “keep” their “eye on Paisley.”
But we must return to what is more particularly our present subject—Hawkie and his witticisms. Glasgow was the scene of his triumph as a street orator and wit. Whilst he wandered to and fro in the earth, he was a nameless, unknown gangrel, drifting towards a “cadger pownie’s death at some dykeside.” But settling down in the mercantile capital, the keen struggle for existence which obtains there roused his dormant energies into full play, and he soon became a “man of mark.” Diogenes with his tub was not better known in the streets of Athens than was Hawkie with his crutch for many years in the streets of St. Mungo. He first made his presence felt there some time subsequent to 1818. About this time an impostor of the name of Ross had been gulling the gaping mob with a prediction that the Bridgegate of Glasgow, with its swarm of motley inhabitants, was doomed to sudden and complete destruction. Cameron possessed a ready turn for satirical burlesque; so, envying Ross his following, he set up a claim for prophetic vision also, and made his Seer “Hawkie, a twa-year-auld quey frae Aberdour, in the County of Fife, and sister-german to Ross.” She also foretold the destruction of the Bridgegate, but from a different cause than that given by Ross. “It is to be destroyed,” said the Aberdour stirk, “by a flood o’ whisky, and the wives will be ferrying in washing tubs frae ae door to anither, and mony o’ their lives will be lost, that itherwise micht hae been saved, by louting ower their tubs to try the flood, whether it was Sky-blue or the real Ferintosh.” This production was a profitable speculation for some time, and Cameron continued to cry it so frequently that the name of the “stirk” took the place of his own.
Hawkie was ever ready to enter into a religious discussion, and frequently showed great skill in the management of an argument. One day he fell into a discussion on the doctrine of Baptism with a spirit-dealer in the city, who maintained that the mere observance of the external ceremony was all that was required.
“Do you,” says the gangrel, “insist that sprinkling wi’ water constitutes baptism?”