Many scientific men hold that the Chillinghams, or reputed wild cattle, are albinos. Apart from opinion, it is a fact that when the black calves are born, they are carefully sorted out and sold for their veal. The true Highland cattle, which we meet in herds on the moors and see painted lovingly by artists, are hardy, imposing, and well fitted to their climatic environment. With short, muscular limbs, wide and deep chests, long horns and short muzzle, and their coats of shaggy hair, they are noticeable in the landscape. They furnish much of the famed “roast beef of Old England.” The milk of the cows is very rich, though too scant in measure to make dairying profitable.
It seems now fairly well agreed that the original ancestor of these local and most of the domestic breeds of cattle in northern Europe was the auroch, or European bison, contemporary of the mammoth and cave man, which became extinct about the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Although Lochs Lomond and Katrine and the Trossachs are not in the Highlands, yet, since the majority of visiting Americans do not cross the boundary separating the Azoic and Crystalline rocks from the fertile lowlands, they accept this romantic portion of heather land as typical of the whole. It is not the oldest part of Scotia, yet, in a sense, this tourist’s route is typical of the entire peninsula, in suggesting the effect of Nature’s face and moods upon the human spirit.
One coming first to Scotland from a visit to Ireland asks questions.
Most striking in the history of mankind is the influence of the scenery of a country upon the national temperament. Compare, for example, the two peoples of the same race, the Celtic Irishmen and the Highlanders. The islander’s home has a mild climate, good soil, and a fairly level country, where men have been able to live without extreme toil. In spite of all the Irishman’s troubles, whether coming to him from within or without, he has maintained through the ages the traits of his ancestors. He is naturally buoyant in spirit, impulsive, excitable, rich in wit and good humor, but alleged to be without that profound conception of the claims of duty which mark some other races.
On the contrary, the Highlander is rather reserved, self-restrained, not merry or witty, but often sullen and morose. Yet he is courteous, dutiful, persevering, faithful as an ally and brave as a foe. Surely the differing environments explain, to a large extent, this differentiation between two peoples of the same original stock. The Highlander has lived in a glen, narrow, rocky, separated from his neighbors in the next glen by high and rugged hills. On a niggardly soil, stony and wet, and in a cold and uncertain climate, he has battled for ages with the elements, facing Nature in her wilder moods and has not played a winning game. Often he is near starvation, for on his little field much rain and little sunshine falls. His seed often rots in the soggy soil. The noise of storm and tempest, of whirlwind and swollen waters, is ever in his hearing. He cannot be mirthful and light-hearted like the Celt, but is often stolidly obstinate; or, it may be, undauntedly persevering. No one who has heard his music but has noted that melancholy which breathes like an undertone throughout his songs and bagpipe melodies, even when they cheer and inspire to duty. Nevertheless, the proud Scot will boast of his land so full of barren mountains. “Iron them all out flat, and Scotland will be found to be as large as England,” was the assertion, with triumphant air, of a native who loved the heather.
CHAPTER XXI
ROBERT BURNS AND HIS TEACHERS
One must not come to Scotland without seeing Ayr, the native village of Burns, any more than go to Tokio and not get a glimpse of the Mikado. It is said that more tourists hailing from America visit annually the village in which Robert Burns first saw the light than are seen at Stratford. This may mean that there are probably more prosperous and cultured descendants of Scotsmen in America than there are of ancestral English folk. In addition to the throng from trans-Atlantic lands must be counted a goodly company of passionate pilgrims from all parts of the British Empire. Theodore Cuyler tells us, in his “Recollections,” how Carlyle, when a boy, visited the grave of the poet, his feelings allowing him to say only, but over and over again, “Rabbie Burns, Rabbie Burns.”
The cottage in which the poet was born is probably in a much more substantial condition to-day than in Burns’s infancy. When the poet’s father took hold of the structure, it was a “clay bigging,” which the parent rebuilt with his own hands. On the night of Robert’s birth, a storm came on and part of the cottage fell in, so that the mother with the baby had to fly for shelter to the house of a neighbor until the house was repaired.
We moved down to the road opposite the new florid Gothic church of Alloway, where was a flight of steps, worn by the feet of thousands of pilgrims, leading over the wall to “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk.” In Burns’s day the edifice was whole and in use. All that is now left of the famous building are four bare walls, two of them gabled and one of them surmounted by a bell-cote. Burns’s progenitor is buried “where the rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.”