The woods!—I was born in the woods; man lives originally in the primeval forests, with the exception, perhaps, of the Arab, the Babylonian, and Egyptian; wherever there was sufficient soil and suitable climate, there was wood, from Lapland to Capetown, from the Bay of Biscay to the Yellow Sea. The American forests still exist, where even the axe of European civilization has not reached them. There woods are natural to man; he turns to them as to something, he cannot well tell how or why, congenial to his nature. At least so I have felt it, and feel it still in my recollections of early life. Plantations are stiff and artificial, generally consisting of a dense field of regular similarity; but natural wood, the offspring of our own soil, the indigenous plants of Scotland—the birch, for example, with its bending and elegant twigs, its white stem, and grateful fragrance; the eternal oak, with its leafy shade; the tough ash, with its pointed leaf; the lowly hazel, with its straight stems and fragrant nuts; the saugh, the willow, the thorn-sloe, the haw, the elder, the bourtree, the crabtree, the briar, and the bramble—all these consociate lovingly, and actually did consociate around, and almost over, the humble but snug cot where I first drew breath. There, my first herald of day was the song of the linnet, thrush, or blackbird; there, my first efforts were made in gaining the top of some little ash or birch; there, my first riches consisted in a few pints of ripened and browned nuts, kept in the leg of a footless stocking, against the ensuing Halloween. But Halloween has now become a mere name—et preterea nihil, still stat nominis umbra, sufficient to make me recollect with delight the exquisite pleasure which I enjoyed in anticipating as well as in observing this festival. The crabtree yielded its reddest and ripest fruit for the occasion; a casual apple was hooked over the hedge of the castle orchard for the same purpose; but, above and beyond all, nuts were gathered, dried and stored away into sly corners and out-of-the-way places. What amusement so delightful as nut-gathering! There they hang to the afternoon sun, brown and ready to escape from their husks or shells. There are twosome clusters, and threesome clusters; and if you could reach without shaking that topmost branch (but there is the difficulty and the danger), you may even secure a twelvesome cluster—a glorious knot of lovely associates, that would crumble from their abodes into your hands like dried leaves! You pass on from bush to bush; but you have been anticipated. Will or Tam, or Jock or Jamie, or all four, have been there before you, and have left you nothing but a scanty gleaning. Here and there, you are enabled to extract from the centre of a leafy shade, an ill-ripened, because an unsound, single nut, which serves no better purpose than to break your jaws with its emptiness, in cracking it. But you push away into the interior—the terra incognita of the woodland; and, standing out by itself, aired and sunned all over, you find a little branch of scroggs, stinted and ill-leaved, but really covered all over with the most exquisite fruitage. Long, large, are the nuts you have thus acquired; and you chuckle inwardly, as you contemplate a prize which has been reserved for your exclusive use. With what despatch are cluster after cluster accumulated into handfuls, and then again into pocketfuls, and then, at last, into cap, hat, or bonnetfuls, till you become a kind of shellicoat, a walking nuttery, a thing of husks and kernels! The voice of your companions is loud and frequent, in the language of inquiry into the state of your success; but you preserve a deep silence, or answer prevaricatingly, by, "you have got a few—not many—very bad place this," &c. &c. At last you come upon them with the astonishment of display, and expose your treasure with ineffable feelings of triumph. You have distanced them all. Your Halloween fortune is made—you are a happy being.
But Halloween comes at last—Scotland's Halloween—Burns' Halloween—the Halloween of centuries upon centuries—of the Celt amidst his mountains, the Saxon in his valley, the Druid in his woods, King James the First in his palace—and old Janet Smith in her humble cottage. It was at Janet Smith's that I held the first Halloween of which I have any distinct recollection. There was a kind of couthiness about old Janet, which made her hearth the resort of all the young lads and lasses, boys and girls, around. On Halloween, Janet had on her best head-gear, her check apron, and clean neck napkin.
We had such burning of nuts, such pu'ing of stocks, such singing of songs, such gibing, laughing, cracking, tale-telling, and, to crown all, such a gallant bowl of punch, made from a sonsy greybeard, which the young men had taken care to store previously with the needful, that I went home half crazy, and, my mother affirmed, continued so for several days to come.
Ye gods! what superstitious notions peopled my brain ever since! I recollect such fears about the invisible world becoming visible—I walked amidst a multitude of unseen terrors, ever ready to burst the casement of immateriality, and to stand, naked, confessed, in material semblance, before me. There was the fairy, the inhabitant of the green unploughed knowe, the green-coated imp, intent on child-stealing, or rather barter, and jingling her bridle through the high air on Halloween; there was the ghost, awful, solemn, and admonishing, pointing with the finger to buried treasure or murder glen; there was the wraith, little less terrible, and clothed in a well-known presence, prognosticating death or sore affliction; there was the death-watch, distinctly heard tick, ticking, all night long, in the bed-post; there were the blue lights seen in round spots on the bed-head, on the very night when three lads and three lasses perished in the boat; there was the muckle deil himself, driving in a post-chaise, over the "chaise-craig," or panting, like a bull-dog, at the nightly traveller's feet; and, over and above all these, was "Will o' the Wisp," skipping about from one side of the moss to the other, and always placing itself betwixt you and your home.
"D'ye see that?" said my cousin, Nelly Laurie, a girl of eighteen, to me, when my years could be reckoned by the number of the muses.
"What! what is it!" I exclaimed; and my attention was directed towards a moss, or morass, through which our footpath lay, on our way home, about ten o'clock of a dark, damp, and cloudy night.
"There! there it's again!"
There is something in the word "it" most indefinitely terrific. Had she said he or she, or even that ghost, or that wraith, or that bogle, it would not have been half so startling; but "it"—do you see it?—see a thing without a name, a definition—a mere object, shorn of its accidents or qualities! This is indeed most awful. With fear and trembling, I lifted up mine eyes, and beheld—O mercy, mercy!—a light in the middle of the moss, where no light should have been; and it was floating and playing about, blue as indigo, and making the darkness around it visible. My joints relaxed, and I fell to the earth, incapable of motion. I was a mere bundle of loose and unconnected bones, sinews, and muscles. My cousin stood over me, incapable of deciding what would be done; at last, it was discovered that to advance homewards was better than to retrograde, as we were already more than half-way on our course. I was instructed to repeat, and to continue repeating, aloud, the Lord's prayer; whilst she, on whose shoulders I lay like a dead sheep, continued to give audible note to the tune of the twenty-third psalm. It was, indeed, an odd concert for the devil, or his emissary, Mr. William yclept "of the Wisp," to listen to; for, whilst I was roaring out, in perfect desperation, "Our Father which art in Heaven," she was articulating, in a clear and overpowering tone, "The Lord's my shepherd;" whilst I slipt into "Hallowed be thy name," she advanced with, "I'll not want—he makes me down to lie!"—and, sure enough, down both of us lay, with a vengeance, in the midst of a moss-hole, into which, from terror and the darkness of the night, we had inadvertently plunged. "What's the meaning of all this, sirs!" exclaimed a well-known voice. It was my mother's, God bless her! I clung to her like grim death, and never quitted my hold till I was snugly lodged above the fire, near to the lamp, and with dog, cat, my cousin, and my mother, betwixt me and the dark doorway passage! I did not get a sound sleep for months and years afterwards! Such are thy miseries, unhallowed, unmanly superstition! Disease may relax the body and enervate the whole frame; but thou art the disease of the soul, the fever of the brain. Misfortunes may be borne—pain must be endured till it is cured—but superstition such as this, is neither endurable nor curable. I am not yet completely cured of it, now that I have entered my sixtieth year. Were you to send me into an empty, dark church, at midnight, and through a surrounding churchyard, peopled with the bodies of the dead, I durst not go, though you gave me large sums of money. And is my judgment or reason in fault? Not at all; it is my feelings, my moral nature; my very blood has got such a blue tinge that I verily believe it would look like the blue ink I am writing with, were it caught in a tea-cup! Sir Walter Scott was bit, too, and so are nine-tenths of the living, though they won't allow it. It has now become, like latent heat, an unseen agency; but it still acts, and powerfully, on civilized, and even learned man!
Seeking of birds' nests is a glorious amusement, and the knowledge of a large amount of these is a possession to be boasted of. I know of a linnet's nest, says one—and I of a robin's, says another—I of shilfa's, says a third; but a fourth party comes in with his mavis, and all competition is at an end. The mavis is indeed a Scottish nightingale; he sings so mellow, and so varied—his brown spreckled breast turned up to the rising or the setting sun, he pours o'er the woodland a whole concert of harmony; and then he awakens into competition the blackbird, with his Æolian whistle; the green and grey linnet, with their sharp and sweet tweedle-twee; the goldfinch, with his scarlet hood and song of flame; and the lark on the far-off fell, with his minstrelsy of heaven's border. But what to a boy, a boy of eight or nine, is all this song and sunshine, in comparison with the fact—"I know of five birds' nests!" Why, this annunciation is enough to settle your doom—you may almost apprehend assassination, so much must you be envied. But true it is, and of verity; I once knew five birds' nests—all containing eggs or young. Oh, I remember them as it were only of yesterday. Time has only engraved, with a tool of adamant, the impression deeper and deeper. There was the snug and pendulous abode of the little kitty-wren. It was beneath the brow of the burn, covered over from winds and rains by the incumbent bank and brushwood. It was a plum-pudding, with a hole made by your thumb on one side; a stationary football, composed of all things soft and comfortable, covered on the outside with fog or moss, and in the inside lined with the down of feathers; and there were from sixteen to twenty little blue peas in it; and the little hen sat on them daily, and opposed her little bill vigorously to my intrusive finger. She was not afraid—not she! she fought manfully, "pro aris et focis;" if not, as the Romans say, "manibus pedibusque;" nor, as the savage Saxons say, "tooth and nail," nor, as the shepherd of Ettrick says, "knees and elbows an' a',"—still she fought with the instruments with which nature had endowed her, with her bill and her little claws, and she fought it most vigorously. O Nature! thou art a fearful mystery of wisdom—thou makest the meekest and most timid natures bold as lions when their progeny are concerned. Look at the hen—poor chucky, that scrapes her pittance from the doorway or dunghill, whom the veriest whelp which can bark and tumble over will scare into wing and screech—put the hen on eggs, give her an infant brood, show her danger from dog, man, bear, or lion—who's afraid? Not she at least; she will dance on the nose of the mastiff, she will fly in the face of humanity, whether in the shape of man, woman, boy, or child. The warrior looks fierce in his regimentals and armour; but what cares she for guns, bayonets, swords, and pistols? Not a peppercorn! Her young ones are behind her, and she will meet the armed monster, with foot, bill, wing, and with a fearful intonation of terrifying sounds. No Highland regiment, even at Prestonpans, ever set up a more alarming battle shout. She is never conquered—like Achilles, she is "invincible;" but so soon as her progeny need no more her care or her protection—so soon as they have been pecked into estrangement, and sent to scrape and provide for themselves—she resumes all her mild and feminine qualities—she is plain "chucky" again! The linnet's nest is covered with scales of a silky whiteness—the fine thin laminæ which cover the bark of the oak, of that very tree in the cleft of whose branches her nursery is fixed. Inside of this little nicely-proportioned cup, there are five beautifully-spotted eggs—a white ground with a grey spot, flung over the whole shell with a most charming regularity. And there is a nest in that stone wall which surrounds the plantation—it is that of the stone-chatter—filthy, unsonsy bird, fit companion for the yellow yeldring, which conceals her treasure 'neath a tuft of grass on the bent, and is trodden under foot. They are both deserving of all detestation; the one for drinking every May morning of the devil's-blood, and the other for many an impertinent jest and chatter. Let them perish in one day—let their eggs be blown, and hung up as ornaments in strings along the brow of the household looking-glass, or smashed to atoms by the stroke of an urchin previously blinded.
"For he ne'er would be true, she averred,
That would rob a poor bird."