One playfellow, who afterwards gave up his life at Bull Run for the land that had given him welcome, was my first tutor in Scottish history. If native enthusiasm, naïve sincerity, and, what seemed to one mind at least, unlimited knowledge, were the true bases of reputation, one might call this lad a professor and scholar. As matter of fact, however, we were schoolboys together on the same bench and our combined ages would not amount to twenty-five. He it was who first pictured with vivid phrase and in genuine dialect the exploits of Robert the Bruce and of William Wallace. He told many a tale of the heather land, in storm and calm, not only with wit and jollity, but all the time with a clear conviction of the absolute truth of what had been handed down verbally for many generations.
He it was who, without knowing of the books written in English which I afterwards found in my father’s rich library of travel, stirred my curiosity and roused my enthusiasm to read the “Scottish Chiefs” and Sir Walter’s fascinating fiction, and, by and by, to wander over the flowery fields of imagination created by that “illegitimate child of Calvinism,” Robert Burns.
Though the boy who became a Union soldier was the first, he was by no means the last of Scottish folk whose memories of the old country were fresh, keen, and to me very stimulating. In church and Sunday school, in prayer-meeting and Bible class, I met with many a good soul who loved the heather. I heard often the words of petition and exhortation that had on them the burr and flange of a pronunciation that belonged to the Lowlands. As years of experience and discrimination came, I could distinguish, even on American soil, between the Highlander’s brogue and the more polished speech of Glasgow and Edinburgh.
When the time for college preparation came, I had, for private tutor in the classics, a theological student, who in physical frame and mental traits, as well as in actual occupation, was Hugh Miller all over again. He had been a stonecutter, believed in “the testimony of the rocks,” and could lift, move, or chisel a block of mortuary material with muscles furnished for the occasion. In character, he resembled in hard beauty the polished rose-red granite of his native hills. Strictly accurate himself, a master whose strength had grown through his own surmounting of difficulties, he was not too ready to help either a lazy boy or an earnest student, while ever willing to give aid in really hard places. He introduced me to Xenophon, and his criticisms and comments on the text were like flashlights, while his sympathy for Klearchus and his comrades illuminated for me my own memories of the camp life, the hard marching, and the soldier’s experiences during the Gettysburg campaign. From the immortal Greek text he made vivid to me the reality of human relations and their virtual identity, whether in B.C. 400 or A.D. 1863.
By this Scotsman I had a window opened into the Caledonian mind in maturity. Through him I realized something, not only of its rugged strength, its sanity, and its keen penetration, but I gained some notion also of the Scottish philosophy of common sense, which so long dominated colonial America and especially Princeton—the mother of statesmen and presidents, over which McCosh presided in my earlier days.
It was this Caledonia of mind, made by the deposits of human thought through many ages and experiences, which seemed and yet appears to me as an eternal Scotland, which, despite change of fashions, of wars and calamities, shall never pass away. So I must confess to the spell of invisible Scotland, as well as to the fascination of the storm-swept peninsula of heaths and rugged hills.
Besides boyhood’s companions of Scottish blood and descent, there were odd characters in the Pennsylvania regiment in which I served as flag corporal. My comrades under the Stars and Stripes came from various shires of Caledonia. Then, too, besides the bonnie maidens, like those Burns and Ramsay talked with, whose ancestry I knew, because I was often in their homes and met their parents and their kinsmen, there was the glamour of the dramatic poet’s creation. Immediately in front of my father’s home, in Philadelphia, was the famous Walnut Street Theatre, where that mighty figure in histrionic art, Edwin Forrest, was often seen. The tragedy of “Macbeth,” which I have seen rendered more times by famous actors than I have seen any other of Shakespeare’s creations, gave a background, which built in my imagination a picture of Scotland that had in it the depths of eternal time. The land and people had thus a perspective of history such as nothing else could suggest, even though I knew enough of the background of actual record to realize that Shakespeare’s chronology often passed the limits of Usher.
So with boyhood’s memories and the reading of poets and romancers, with the more or less undefined horizons of picture, painting, book, and the drama, reinforced by what a college student might be supposed to have absorbed, I was ready for wondrous revelations when, with Quandril, my eldest sister, I embarked in the Scottish Anchor Line steamer Europa, Captain Macdonald, master, on the 26th of June, 1869. It was after graduation and at the end of the month of roses. We were bound for the land of Macbeth, Bruce, Wallace, Scott, and Burns.
CHAPTER II
THE OUTPOST ISLES
It was fitting that our first sight of the Old World should be also that of the homeland of those who settled the Scottish Peninsula. It is commonplace knowledge that, until well into the Middle Ages, Europe’s most western isle was called “The Land of the Scots.” Not until after the Norsemen had frequently visited this “Isle of the Saints” was Ireland called by its modern name. From the ocean outpost, the natives left their ancestral seats and crossed to a strange land—the larger island of Britain, of which the northern half became in time the country now, and for nearly a millennium past, known to the world as Scotland.