"Gude gracious, Tibby Fowler!" he exclaimed, "is that you? Poor creature! are ye seeking charity? Weel, I think ye'll mind what I said to you now, that your pride would have a fa'!"
While the heartless owner of the cottage yet spoke, a voice behind her was heard exclaiming, "It is her! it is her! my ain Tibby and her bairns!"
At the well-known voice, Tibby uttered a wild scream of joy, and fell senseless on the earth; but the next moment her husband, William Gordon, raised her to his breast. Three weeks before he had returned to Britain, and traced her from village to village, till he found her in the midst of their children, on the threshold of the place of her nativity. His story we need not here tell. He had fallen into the hands of the enemy; he had been retained for months on board of their vessel; and when a storm had arisen, and hope was gone, he had saved her from being lost and her crew from perishing. In reward for his services, his own vessel had been restored to him, and he was returned to his country, after an absence of eighteen months, richer than when he left, and laden with honours. The rest is soon told. After Tibby and her husband had wept upon each other's neck, and he had kissed his children, and again their mother, with his youngest child on one arm, and his wife resting on the other, he hastened from the spot that had been the scene of such bitterness and transport. In a few years more, William Gordon having obtained a competency, they re-purchased the cottage in the glen, where Tibby Fowler lived to see her children's children, and died at a good old age in the house in which she had been born—the remains of which, we have only to add, for the edification of the curious, may be seen until this day.
THE CRADLE OF LOGIE.
It is not very easy, when we consider the great desire manifested by authors and editors to serve up piquant dishes of fiction on the broad table of literature, to account for the fact that the undoubtedly true story of the Cradle of Logie and the Indian Princess, as she is often called, should never have appeared in print. It has apparently escaped the sharpest eyes of our chroniclers. Sir Walter Scott did not appear to have much fancy for Angus; but it would seem that the facts of this strange occurrence in a civilised country, and not very far back, had never reached him. Even the histories of Forfarshire are silent; and the pictures of Scotland for tourists, which generally seize on any romantic trait connected with a locality or an old ruin, have also overlooked them. Yet the principal personage in the drama was one whose name was for years in the mouths of the people, not only for peculiarities of character, but retribution of fate; and this local fame has died away only within a comparatively recent period. It was in my very early years that I saw the Cradle, and heard, imperfectly, its tale from my mother; but her account was comparatively meagre. I sought long for details; nor was I by any means successful till I fell in with a man named Aminadab Fairweather, a resident at the Scouring Burn, in Dundee, who was in the habit of frequenting Logie House, and who, though very old, remembered many of the circumstances.
The truth is, there were rich flesh-pots in Logie House—richer than those which supplied the muscles of the Theban mummies, so enduring through long ages, no doubt, from being so well fed; for Mr. Fletcher of Lindertes,[*] who was proprietor of the mansion, was the greatest epicurean and glossogaster that ever lived since Leontine times. Then a woman called Jenny McPherson, who had in early life, like "a good Scotch louse," who "aye travels south," found her way from Lochaber to London, where she had got into George's kitchen, and learned something better than to make sour kraut, was the individual who administered to her master's epicureanism, if not gulosity. Nay, it was said she had a hand in the tragedy of the Cradle; but, however that may be, it is certain she was deep in the confidences of Fletcher. But then Mrs. McPherson, as she chose to call herself—though the never a McPherson was connected with her except by the ties of blood, which, like those of all Celts, had their loose terminations dangling into infinity at the beginning of the world's history—was given to administering the contents of her savoury flesh-pots to others than the family of Logie; yea, like a true Highlander, she delighted in having henchmen—or haunchmen truly, in this instance—who gave her love in return for her edible luxuries. It happened that our said Aminadab was one of those favoured individuals; and it is lucky for this generation that he was, for if he had not been, there would assuredly have been no records of the Cradle and the black lady.
[note *: Mr. Fletcher had also the property of Balinsloe as well as Logie. They've all passed into other hands.]
It was in a little parlour off the big kitchen that Janet received her henchmen. And was there ever man so happy as our good Aminadab?—and that for several human reasons, whereof the first was certainly the Logie flesh-pots; the second, the stories about the romantic place wherewith she contrived to garnish and spice these savoury mouthfuls; and last, Janet herself, who was always under the feminine delusion that she was the corporate representative of the first of these reasons, if, indeed, the others were not mere adjecta, not to be taken into account; whereas there were doubts if she was for herself ever counted at all, except as the mere "old-pot" which contained the realities. And their happiness would certainly have been complete if it had not been—at least in the case of Aminadab—that it could be enjoyed only by passing through that grim medium, a churchyard. But then, is not all celestial bliss burdened by this condition; nay, is not even our earthly bliss, which is a foretaste of heaven, only a flower raised upon the rottenness of other flowers—a type of the soul as it issues from corruption? Yes, Aminadab could not get to the holy of holies except by passing through Logie kirkyard, a small and most romantic Golgotha, on the left of the road leading to Lochee, whose inhabitants it contained, and which was so limited and crowded, that one might prefigure it as one of those holes or dungeons in Michael Angelo's pictures, belching forth spirits in the shape of inverted tadpoles, the tail uppermost, and yet representing ascending sparks. The wickets that surrounded Logie House—lying as it does upon the south side of Balgay Hill, and flanked on the east by a deep gully, wherethrough runs a small stream, which, so far as I know, has no name—were locked at night. The terrors of this place, at the late hours when these said henchmen behoved to seek their savoury rewards, were the only drawback to Aminadab's supreme bliss.
And if the time of these symposial meetings had been somewhat later in the century, how much more formidable would have been a passage through this contracted valley of tumuli and bones! No churchyard, except those of Judea, was ever invested with such terrors—not the mystical fears of a divine fate seen in the descending cloud, with Justice gleaming with fiery eyes on Sin, and holding those scales, the decision of which would destine to eternal bliss or eternal woe, and that Justice personified in Him "whose glory is a burning like the burning of a fire,"—no, but the revolting fears produced by the profanity of that poor worm of very common mud, which has been since the beginning of time acting the God. Ay, the aurelia-born image of grace sees a difference when it looks from the sun to the epigenetic thing which He raises out of corruption. There was, in that small place of skulls, a rehearsal of the great day. We hear little of these freaks now-a-days; but it was different then, when men made themselves demons by drink. One night William Maule of Panmure, then in his days of graceless frolic; Fletcher Read, the nephew of the laird, and subsequently the laird himself, of Logie; Rob Thornton, the merchant, Dudhope, and other kindred spirits, who used to sing in the inn of Sandy Morren, the hotel-keeper, "Death begone, here's none but souls," sallied drunk from the inn. The story goes that the night was dark, and there stood at the door a hearse, which had that day conveyed to the "howf," now about to be shut up because of its offence against the nostrils of men who are not destined to need a grave, the wife of an inconsolable husband and the mother of children; and thereupon came from Maule's mouth—for wickedness will seek its playful function in a pun—the proposition that the bacchanals should have a rehearsal in the kirkyard of Logie. Well, it signified, of course, nothing that the Black Princess had been buried there, so far away from the land of "the balmy East,"
"Where the roses blow and the oranges grow,
And all is divine but man below."