MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS.

Morrison and Gibb, Edinburgh,
Printers to Her Majesty's Stationery Office.

Hugh Miller

MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS

OR

THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION.

BY HUGH MILLER,

AUTHOR OF 'THE OLD RED SANDSTONE,' 'FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR,'
ETC. ETC.

EDINBURGH:
W. P. NIMMO, HAY, & MITCHELL.
1889.

CONTENTS.

TO THE READER.

It is now nearly a hundred years since Goldsmith remarked, in his little educational treatise, that "few subjects have been more frequently written upon than the education of youth." And during the century which has well-nigh elapsed since he said so, there have been so many more additional works given to the world on this fertile topic, that their number has been at least doubled. Almost all the men who ever taught a few pupils, with a great many more who never taught any, deem themselves qualified to say something original on education; and perhaps few books of the kind have yet appeared, however mediocre their general tone, in which something worthy of being attended to has not actually been said. And yet, though I have read not a few volumes on the subject, and have dipped into a great many more, I never yet found in them the sort of direction or encouragement which, in working out my own education, I most needed. They insisted much on the various modes of teaching others, but said nothing—or, what amounted to the same thing, nothing to the purpose—on the best mode of teaching one's-self. And as my circumstances and position, at the time when I had most occasion to consult them, were those of by much the largest class of the people of this and every other civilized country—for I was one of the many millions who need to learn, and yet have no one to teach them—I could not help deeming the omission a serious one. I have since come to think, however, that a formal treatise on self-culture might fail to supply the want. Curiosity must be awakened ere it can be satisfied; nay, once awakened, it never fails in the end fully to satisfy itself; and it has occurred to me, that by simply laying before the working men of the country the "Story of my Education," I may succeed in first exciting their curiosity, and next, occasionally at least, in gratifying it also. They will find that by far the best schools I ever attended are schools open to them all—that the best teachers I ever had are (though severe in their discipline) always easy of access—and that the special form at which I was, if I may say so, most successful as a pupil, was a form to which I was drawn by a strong inclination, but at which I had less assistance from my brother men, or even from books, than at any of the others. There are few of the natural sciences which do not lie quite as open to the working men of Britain and America as Geology did to me.

My work, then, if I have not wholly failed in it, may be regarded as a sort of educational treatise, thrown into the narrative form, and addressed more especially to working men. They will find that a considerable portion of the scenes and incidents which it records read their lesson, whether of encouragement or warning, or throw their occasional lights on peculiarities of character or curious natural phenomena, to which their attention might be not unprofitably directed. Should it be found to possess an interest to any other class, it will be an interest chiefly derivable from the glimpses which it furnishes of the inner life of the Scottish people, and its bearing on what has been somewhat clumsily termed "the condition-of-the-country question." My sketches will, I trust, be recognised as true to fact and nature. And as I have never perused the autobiography of a working man of the more observant type, without being indebted to it for new facts and ideas respecting the circumstances and character of some portion of the people with which I had been less perfectly acquainted before, I can hope that, regarded simply as the memoir of a protracted journey through districts of society not yet very sedulously explored, and scenes which few readers have had an opportunity of observing for themselves, my story may be found to possess some of the interest which attaches to the narratives of travellers who see what is not often seen, and know, in consequence, what is not generally known. In a work cast into the autobiographic form, the writer has always much to apologize for. With himself for his subject, he usually tells not only more than he ought, but also, in not a few instances, more than he intends. For, as has been well remarked, whatever may be the character which a writer of his own Memoirs is desirous of assuming, he rarely fails to betray the real one. He has almost always his unintentional revelations, that exhibit peculiarities of which he is not conscious, and weaknesses which he has failed to recognise as such; and it will no doubt be seen that what is so generally done in works similar to mine, I have not escaped doing. But I cast myself full on the good-nature of the reader. My aims have, I trust, been honest ones; and should I in any degree succeed in rousing the humbler classes to the important work of self-culture and self-government, and in convincing the higher that there are instances in which working men have at least as legitimate a claim to their respect as to their pity, I shall not deem the ordinary penalties of the autobiographer a price too high for the accomplishment of ends so important.

MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS

OR

THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION.

CHAPTER I.

"Ye gentlemen of England,

Who live at home at ease,

Oh, little do ye think upon

The dangers of the seas."—Old Song.

Rather more than eighty years ago, a stout little boy, in his sixth or seventh year, was despatched from an old-fashioned farm-house in the upper part of the parish of Cromarty, to drown a litter of puppies in an adjacent pond. The commission seemed to be not in the least congenial. He sat down beside the pool, and began to cry over his charge; and finally, after wasting much time in a paroxysm of indecision and sorrow, instead of committing the puppies to the water, he tucked them up in his little kilt, and set out by a blind pathway which went winding through the stunted heath of the dreary Maolbuoy Common, in a direction opposite to that of the farm-house—his home for the two previous twelvemonths. After some doubtful wandering on the waste, he succeeded in reaching, before nightfall, the neighbouring seaport town, and presented himself, laden with his charge, at his mother's door. The poor woman—a sailor's widow, in very humble circumstances—raised her hands in astonishment: "Oh, my unlucky boy," she exclaimed, "what's this?—what brings you here?" "The little doggies, mither," said the boy; "I couldna drown the little doggies; and I took them to you." What afterwards befell the "little doggies," I know not; but trivial as the incident may seem, it exercised a marked influence on the circumstances and destiny of at least two generations of creatures higher in the scale than themselves. The boy, as he stubbornly refused to return to the farm-house, had to be sent on shipboard, agreeably to his wish, as a cabin-boy; and the writer of these chapters was born, in consequence, a sailor's son, and was rendered, as early as his fifth year, mainly dependent for his support on the sedulously plied but indifferently remunerated labours of his only surviving parent, at the time a sailor's widow.

The little boy of the farm-house we a descended from a long line of seafaring men,—skilful and adventurous sailors,—some of whom had coasted along the Scottish shores as early as the times of Sir Andrew Wood and the "bold Bartons," and mayhap helped to man that "verrie monstrous schippe the Great Michael," that "cumbered all Scotland to get her to sea." They had taken as naturally to the water as the Newfoundland dog or the duckling. That waste of life which is always so great in the naval profession had been more than usually so in the generation just passed away. Of the boy's two uncles, one had sailed round the world with Anson, and assisted in burning Paita, and in boarding the Manilla galleon; but on reaching the English coast he mysteriously disappeared, and was never more heard of. The other uncle, a remarkably handsome and powerful man,—or, to borrow the homely but not inexpressive language in which I have heard him described, "as pretty a fellow as ever stepped in shoe-leather,"—perished at sea in a storm; and several years after, the boy's father, when entering the Firth of Cromarty, was struck overboard, during a sudden gust, by the boom of his vessel, and, apparently stunned by the blow, never rose again. Shortly after, in the hope of screening her son from what seemed to be the hereditary fate, his mother had committed the boy to the charge of a sister, married to a farmer of the parish, and now the mistress of the farm-house of Ardavell; but the family death was not to be so avoided; and the arrangement terminated, as has been seen, in the transaction beside the pond.

In course of time the sailor boy, despite of hardship and rough usage, grew up into a singularly robust and active man, not above the middle size,—for his height never exceeded five feet eight inches,—but broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-limbed, and so compact of bone and muscle, that in a ship of the line, in which he afterwards sailed, there was not, among five hundred able-bodied seamen, a man who could lift so great a weight, or grapple with him on equal terms. His education had been but indifferently cared for at home: he had, however, been taught to read by a female cousin, a niece of his mother's, who, like her too, was both the daughter and the widow of a sailor; and for his cousin's only child, a girl somewhat younger than himself, he had contracted a boyish affection, which in a stronger form continued to retain possession of him after he grew up. In the leisure thrown on his-hands in long Indian and Chinese voyages, he learned to write; and profited so much by the instructions of a comrade, an intelligent and warm-hearted though reckless Irishman, that he became skilful enough to keep a log-book, and to take a reckoning with the necessary correctness,—accomplishments far from common at the time among ordinary sailors. He formed, too, a taste for reading. The recollection of his cousin's daughter may have influenced him, but he commenced life with a determination to rise in it,—made his first money by storing up instead of drinking his grog,—and, as was common in those times, drove a little trade with the natives of foreign parts in articles of curiosity and vertu, for which, I suspect, the custom-house dues were not always paid. With all his Scotch prudence, however, and with much kindliness of heart and placidity of temper there was some wild blood in his veins, derived, mayhap, from one or two buccaneering ancestors, that, when excited beyond the endurance point, became sufficiently formidable; and which, on at least one occasion, interfered very considerably with his plans and prospects.

On a protracted and tedious voyage in a large East Indiaman, he had, with the rest of the crew, been subjected to harsh usage by a stern, capricious captain; but, secure of relief on reaching port, he had borne uncomplainingly with it all. His comrade and quondam teacher, the Irishman, was, however, less patient; and for remonstrating with the tyrant, as one of a deputation of the seamen, in what was deemed a mutinous spirit, he was laid hold of, and was in the course of being ironed down to the deck under a tropical sun, when his quieter comrade, with his blood now heated to the boiling point, stepped aft, and with apparent calmness re-stated the grievance. The captain drew a loaded pistol from his belt; the sailor struck up his hand; and, as the bullet whistled through the rigging above, he grappled with him, and disarmed him in a trice. The crew rose, and in a few minutes the ship was all their own. But having failed to calculate on such a result, they knew not what to do with their charge; and, acting under the advice of their new leader, who felt to the full the embarrassing nature of the position, they were content simply to demand the redress of their grievances as their terms of surrender; when, untowardly for their claims, a ship of war hove in sight, much in want of men, and, bearing down on the Indiaman, the mutiny was at once suppressed, and the leading mutineers sent aboard the armed vessel, accompanied by a grave charge, and the worst possible of characters. Luckily for them, however, and especially luckily for the Irishman and his friend, the war-ship was so weakened by scurvy, at that time the untamed pest of the navy, that scarce two dozen of her crew could do duty aloft A fierce tropical tempest, too, which broke out not long after, pleaded powerfully in their favour; and the affair terminated in the ultimate promotion of the Irishman to the office of ship-schoolmaster, and of his Scotch comrade to the captaincy of the foretop.

My narrative abides with the latter. He remained for several years aboard a man-of-war, and, though not much in love with the service, did his duty in both storm and battle. He served in the action off the Dogger-Bank,—one of the last naval engagements fought ere the man[oe]uvre of breaking the line gave to British valour its due superiority, by rendering all our great sea-battles decisive; and a comrade who sailed in the same vessel, and from whom, when a boy, I have received kindness for my father's sake, has told me that, their ship being but indifferently manned at the time, and the extraordinary personal strength and activity of his friend well known, he had a station assigned him at his gun against two of the crew, and that during the action he actually outwrought them both. At length, however, the enemy drifted to leeward to refit; and when set to repair the gashed and severed rigging, such was his state of exhaustion, in consequence of the previous overstrain on every nerve and muscle, that he had scarce vigour enough left to raise the marlingspike employed in the work to the level of his face. Suddenly, when in this condition, a signal passed along the line, that the Dutch fleet, already refitted, was bearing down to renew the engagement. A thrill like that of an electric shock passed through the frame of the exhausted sailor; his fatigue at once left him; and, vigorous and strong as when the action first began, he found himself able, as before, to run out against his two comrades the one side of a four-and-twenty pounder. The instance is a curious one of the influence of that "spirit" which, according to the Wise King, enables a man to "sustain his infirmity."

It may be well not to inquire too curiously regarding the mode in which this effective sailor quitted the navy. The country had borrowed his services without consulting his will; and he, I suspect, reclaimed them on his own behalf without first asking leave. I have been told by my mother that he found the navy very intolerable;—the mutiny at the Nore had not yet meliorated the service to the common sailor. Among other hardships, he had been oftener than once under not only very harsh, but also very incompetent officers; and on one occasion, after toiling on the foreyard in a violent night-squall, with some of the best seamen aboard, in fruitless attempts to furl up the sail, he had to descend, cap in hand, at the risk of a flogging, and humbly implore the boy-lieutenant in charge that he should order the vessel's head to be laid in a certain direction. Luckily for him, the advice was taken by the young gentleman, and in a few minutes the sail was furled. He left his ship one fine morning, attired in his best, and having on his head a three-cornered hat, with tufts of lace at the corners, which I well remember, from the circumstance that it had long after to perform an important part in certain boyish masquerades at Christmas and the New Year; and as he had taken effective precautions for being reported missing in the evening, he got clear off.

Of some of the after-events of his life I retain such mere fragmentary recollections, dissociated from date and locality, as might be most readily seized on by the imagination of a child. At one time, when engaged in one of his Indian voyages, he was stationed during the night, accompanied by but a single comrade, in a small open boat, near one of the minor mouths of the Ganges; and he had just fallen asleep on the beams, when he was suddenly awakened by a violent motion, as if his skiff were capsizing. Starting up, he saw in the imperfect light a huge tiger, that had swam, apparently, from the neighbouring jungle, in the act of boarding the boat. So much was he taken aback, that though a loaded musket lay beside him, it was one of the loose beams, or foot-spars, used as fulcrums for the feet in rowing, that he laid hold of as a weapon; but such was the blow he dealt to the paws of the creature, as they rested on the gunwale, that it dropped off with a tremendous snarl, and he saw it no more. On another occasion, he was one of three men sent with despatches to some Indian port in a boat, which, oversetting in the open sea in a squall, left them for the greater part of three days only its upturned bottom for their resting-place. And so thickly during that time did the sharks congregate around them, that though a keg of rum, part of the boat's stores, floated for the first two days within a few yards of them, and they had neither meat nor drink, none of them, though they all swam well, dared attempt regaining it. They were at length relieved by a Spanish vessel, and treated with such kindness, that the subject of my narrative used ever after to speak well of the Spaniards, as a generous people, destined ultimately to rise. He was at one time so reduced by scurvy, in a vessel half of whose crew had been carried off by the disease, that, though still able to do duty on the tops, the pressure of his finger left for several seconds a dent in his thigh, as if the muscular flesh had become of the consistency of dough. At another time, when overtaken in a small vessel by a protracted tempest, in which "for many days neither sun nor moon appeared," he continued to retain his hold of the helm for twelve hours after every other man aboard was utterly prostrated and down, and succeeded, in consequence, in weathering the storm for them all. And after his death, a nephew of my mother's, a young man who had served his apprenticeship under him, was treated with great kindness on the Spanish Main, for his sake, by a West Indian captain, whose ship and crew he had saved, as the captain told the lad, by boarding them in a storm, at imminent risk to himself, and working their vessel into port, when, in circumstances of similar exhaustion, they were drifting full upon an iron-bound shore. Many of my other recollections of this manly sailor are equally fragmentary in their character; but there is a distinct bit of picture in them all, that strongly impressed the boyish fancy.

When not much turned of thirty, the sailor returned to his native town, with money enough, hardly earned, and carefully kept, to buy a fine large sloop, with which he engaged in the coasting trade; and shortly after he married his cousin's daughter. He found his cousin, who had supported herself in her widowhood by teaching a school, residing in a dingy, old-fashioned house, three rooms in length, but with the windows of its second story half-buried in the eaves, that had been left her by their mutual grandfather, old John Feddes, one of the last of the buccaneers. It had been built, I have every reason to believe, with Spanish gold; not, however, with a great deal of it, for, notwithstanding its six rooms, it was a rather humble erection, and had now fallen greatly into disrepair. It was fitted up with some of the sailor's money, and, after his marriage, became his home,—a home rendered all the happier by the presence of his cousin, now rising in years, and who, during her long widowhood, had sought and found consolation, amid her troubles and privations, where it was surest to be found. She was a meek-spirited, sincerely pious woman; and the sailor, during his more distant voyages,—for he sometimes traded with ports of the Baltic on the one hand, and with those of Ireland and the south of England on the other,—had the comfort of knowing that his wife, who had fallen into a state of health chronically delicate, was sedulously tended and cared for by a devoted mother. The happiness which he would have otherwise enjoyed was, however, marred in some degree by his wife's great delicacy of constitution, and ultimately blighted by two unhappy accidents.

He had not lost the nature which had been evinced at an early age beside the pond: for a man who had often looked death in the face, he had remained nicely tender of human life, and had often hazarded his own in preserving that of others; and when accompanied, on one occasion, by his wife and her mother to his vessel, just previous to sailing, he had unfortunately to exert himself in her presence, in behalf of one of his seamen, in a way that gave her constitution a shock from which it never recovered. A clear frosty moonlight evening had set in; the pier-head was glistening with new-formed ice; and one of the sailors, when engaged in casting over a haulser which he had just loosed, missed footing on the treacherous margin, and fell into the sea. The master knew his man could not swim; a powerful seaward tide sweeps past the place with the first hours of ebb; there was not a moment to be lost; and, hastily throwing off his heavy greatcoat, he plunged after him, and in an instant the strong current swept them both out of sight. He succeeded, however, in laying hold of the half-drowned man, and, striking with him from out the perilous tideway into an eddy, with a Herculean effort he regained the quay. On reaching it, his wife lay insensible in the arms of her mother; and as she was at the time in the delicate condition incidental to married women, the natural consequence followed, and she never recovered the shock, but lingered for more than a twelve-mouth, the mere shadow of her former self; when a second event, as untoward as the first, too violently shook the fast ebbing sands, and precipitated her dissolution.

A prolonged tempest from the stormy north-east had swept the Moray Firth of its shipping, and congregated the stormbound vessels by scores in the noble harbour of Cromarty, when the wind chopped suddenly round, and they all set out to sea,—the sloop of the master among the rest. The other vessels kept the open Firth; but the master, thoroughly acquainted with its navigation, and in the belief that the change of wind was but temporary, went on hugging the land on the weather side, till, as he had anticipated, the breeze set full into the old quarter, and increased into a gale. And then, when all the rest of the fleet had no other choice left them than just to scud back again, he struck out into the Firth in a long tack, and, doubling Kinnaird's Head and the dreaded Buchan Ness, succeeded in making good his voyage south. Next morning the wind-bound vessels were crowding the harbour of refuge as before, and only his sloop was amissing. The first war of the French Revolution had broken out at the time; it was known there were several French privateers hovering on the coast; and the report went abroad that the missing sloop had been captured by the French. There was a weather-brained tailor in the neighbourhood, who used to do very odd things, especially, it was said, when the moon was at the full, and whom the writer remembers from the circumstance that he fabricated for him his first jacket, and that, though he succeeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder, where it ought to be, he committed the slight mistake of sewing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket-holes. Poor Andrew Fern had heard that his townsman's sloop had been captured by a privateer, and, fidgety with impatience till he had communicated the intelligence where he thought it would tell most effectively, he called on the master's wife, to ask whether she had not heard that all the wind-bound vessels had got back again save the master's, and to wonder no one had yet told her that, if his had not got back, it was simply because it had been taken by the French. The tailor's communication told more powerfully than he could have anticipated: in less than a week after, the master's wife was dead; and long ere her husband's return she was lying in the quiet family burying-place, in which—so heavy were the drafts made by accident and violent death on the family—the remains of none of the male members had been deposited for more than a hundred years.

The mother, now left, by the death of her daughter, to a dreary solitude, sought to relieve its tedium, during the absence of her son-in-law when on his frequent voyages, by keeping, as she had done ere his return from foreign parts, a humble school. It was attended by two little girls, the children of a distant relation but very dear friend, the wife of a tradesman of the place,—a woman, like herself, of sincere though unpretending piety. Their similarity of character in this respect could hardly be traced to their common ancestor. He was the last curate of the neighbouring parish of Nigg; and, though not one of those intolerant Episcopalian ministers that succeeded in rendering their Church thoroughly hateful to the Scottish people,—for he was a simple, easy man, of much good nature,—he was, if tradition speak true, as little religious as any of them. In one of the earlier replies to that curious work, "Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed," I find a nonsensical passage from one of the curate's sermons, given as a set-off against the Presbyterian nonsense adduced by the other side. "Mr. James M'Kenzie, curate of Nigg in Ross," says the writer, "describing eternity to his parishioners, told them that in that state they would be immortalized, so that nothing could hurt them: a slash of a broadsword could not hurt you, saith he; nay, a cannon-ball would play but baff on you." Most of the curate's descendants were stanch Presbyterians, and animated by a greatly stronger spirit than his; and there were none of them stancher in their Presbyterianism than the two elderly women who counted kin from him in the fourth degree, and who, on the basis of a common faith, had become attached friends. The little girls were great favourites with the schoolmistress; and when, as she rose in years, her health began to fail, the elder of the two removed from her mother's house, to live with, and take care of her; and the younger, who was now shooting up into a pretty young woman, used, as before, to pass much of her time with her sister and her old mistress.

Meanwhile the shipmaster was thriving. He purchased a site for a house beside that of his buccaneering grandfather, and built for himself and his aged relative a respectable dwelling, which cost him about four hundred pounds, and entitled his son, the writer, to exercise the franchise, on the passing, considerably more than thirty years after, of the Reform Bill. The new house was, however, never to be inhabited by its builder; for, ere it was fully finished, he was overtaken by a sad calamity, that, to a man of less energy and determination, would have been ruin, and in consequence of which he had to content himself with the old house as before, and almost to begin the world anew. I have now reached a point in my narrative at which, from my connexion with the two little girls,—both of whom still live in the somewhat altered character of women far advanced in life,—I can be as minute in its details as I please; and the details of the misadventure which stripped the shipmaster of the earnings of long years of carefulness and toil, blended as they are with what an old critic might term a curious machinery of the supernatural, seem not unworthy of being given unabridged.

Early in November 1797, two vessels—the one a smack in the London and Inverness trade, the other the master's square-rigged sloop—lay wind-bound for a few days on their passage north, in the port of Peterhead. The weather, which had been stormy and unsettled, moderated towards the evening of the fifth day of their detention; and the wind chopping suddenly into the east, both vessels loosed from their moorings, and, as a rather gloomy day was passing into still gloomier night, they bore out to sea. The breeze soon freshened into a gale; the gale swelled into a hurricane, accompanied by a thick snow-storm: and when, early next morning, the smack opened the Firth, she was staggering under her storm-jib, and a mainsail reefed to the cross. Whatever wind may blow, there is always shelter within the Sutors; and she was soon riding at anchor in the roadstead; but she had entered the bay alone; and when day broke, and for a brief interval the driving snow-rack cleared up towards the east, no second sail appeared in the offing. "Poor Miller!" exclaimed the master of the smack; "if he does not enter the Firth ere an hour, he will never enter it at all. Good sound vessel, and better sailor never stepped between stem and stern; but last night has, I fear, been too much for him. He should have been here long ere now." The hour passed; the day itself wore heavily away in gloom and tempest; and as not only the master, but also all the crew of the sloop, were natives of the place, groups of the town's-folk might be seen, so long as the daylight lasted, looking out into the storm from the salient points of the old coast-line that, rising immediately behind the houses, commands the Firth. But the sloop came not, and before they had retired to their homes, a second night had fallen, dark and tempestuous as the first.

Ere morning the weather moderated: a keen frost bound up the wind in its icy fetters; and during the following day, though a heavy swell continued to roll shorewards between the Sutors, and sent up its white foam high against the cliffs, the surface of the sea had become glassy and smooth. But the day wore on, and evening again fell; and even the most sanguine relinquished all hope of ever again seeing the sloop or her crew. There was grief in the master's dwelling,—grief in no degree the less poignant from the circumstance that it was the tearless, uncomplaining grief of rigid old age. Her two youthful friends and their mother watched with the widow, now, as it seemed, left alone in the world. The town-clock had struck the hour of midnight, and still she remained as if fixed to her seat, absorbed in silent, stupifying sorrow, when a heavy foot was heard pacing along the now silent street. It passed, and anon returned; ceased for a moment nearly opposite the window; then approached the door, where there was a second pause; and then there succeeded a faltering knock, that struck on the very hearts of the inmates within. One of the girls sprang up, and on undoing the bolt, shrieked out, as the door fell open, "O mistress, here is Jack Grant the mate!" Jack, a tall, powerful seaman, but apparently in a state of utter exhaustion, staggered, rather than walked in, and flung himself into a chair. "Jack," exclaimed the old woman, seizing him convulsively by both his hands, "where's my cousin?—where's Hugh?" "The master's safe and well," said Jack; "but the poor Friendship lies in spales on the bar of Findhorn." "God be praised!" ejaculated the widow. "Let the gear go!"

I have often heard Jack's story related in Jack's own words, at a period of life when repetition never tires; but I am not sure that I can do it the necessary justice now. "We left Peterhead," he said, "with about half a cargo of coal,—for we had lightened ship a day or two before,—and the gale freshened as the night came on. We made all tight, however; and though the snow-drift was so blinding in the thick of the shower that I could scarce see my hand before me, and though it soon began to blow great guns, we had given the land a good offing, and the hurricane blew the right way. Just as we were loosening from the quay, a poor young woman, much knocked up, with a child in her arms, had come to the vessel's side, and begged hard of master to take her aboard. She was a soldier's wife, and was travelling to join her husband at Fort-George; but she was already worn out and penniless, she said; and now, as a snow-storm threatened to block up the roads, she could neither stay where she was, nor pursue her journey. Her infant, too,—she was sure, if she tried to force her way through the hills, it would perish in the snow. The master, though unwilling to cumber us with a passenger in such weather, was induced, out of pity for the poor destitute creature, to take her aboard. And she was now with her child, all alone, below in the cabin I was stationed a-head on the out-look beside the foresail horse: the night had grown pitch dark; and the lamp in the binnacle threw just light enough through the grey of the shower to show me the master at the helm. He looked more anxious, I thought, than I had almost ever seen him before, though I have been with him, mistress, in bad weather; and all at once I saw he had got company, and strange company too, for such a night: there was a woman moving round him, with a child in her arms. I could see her as distinctly as ever I saw anything,—now on the one side, now on the other,—at one time full in the light, at another half lost in the darkness. That, I said to myself, must be the soldier's wife and her child; but how in the name of wonder can the master allow a woman to come on deck in such a night as this, when we ourselves have just enough ado to keep footing? He takes no notice of her neither, but keeps looking on, quite in his wont, at the binnacle. 'Master,' I said, stepping up to him, 'the woman had surely better go below.' 'What woman, Jack?' said he; 'our passenger, you may be sure, is nowhere else.' I looked round, mistress, and found he was quite alone, and that the companion-head was hasped down. There came a cold sweat all over me. 'Jack,' said the master, 'the night is getting worse, and the roll of the waves heightening every moment. I'm convinced, too, our cargo is shifting: as the last sea struck us, I could hear the coals rattle below; and see how stiffly we heel to the larboard. Say nothing, however, to the men, but have all your wits about you; and look, meanwhile, to the boat-tackle and the oars. I have seen a boat live in as bad a night as this.' As he spoke, a blue light from above glimmered on the deck. We looked up, and saw a dead-fire sticking to the cross-trees. 'It's all over with us now, master,' said I. 'Nay, man,' replied the master, in his easy, humorous way, which I always like well enough except in bad weather, and then I see his humour is served out like his extra grog, to keep up hearts that have cause enough to get low,—'Nay, man,' he said, 'we can't afford to let your grandmother board us to-night. If you will insure me against the shifting coal, I'll be your guarantee against the dead-light. Why, it's as much a natural appearance, man, as a flash of lightning. Away to your berth, and keep up a good heart: we can't be far from Covesea now, where, when once past the Skerries, the swell will take off; and then, in two short hours, we may be snug within the Sutors.' I had scarcely reached my berth a-head, mistress, when a heavy sea struck us on the starboard quarter, almost throwing us on our beam-ends. I could hear the rushing of the coals below, as they settled on the larboard side; and though the master set us full before the wind, and gave instant orders to lighten every stitch of sail,—and it was but little sail we had at the time to lighten,—still the vessel did not rise, but lay unmanageable as a log, with her gunwale in the water. On we drifted, however, along the south coast, with little expectation save that every sea would send us to the bottom; until, in the first grey of the morning, we found ourselves among the breakers of the terrible bar of Findhorn. And shortly after, the poor Friendship took the ground right on the edge of the quicksands, for she would neither stay nor wear; and as she beat hard against the bottom, the surf came rolling over half-mast high.

"Just as we struck," continued Jack, "the master made a desperate effort to get into the cabin. The vessel couldn't miss, we saw, to break up and fill; and though there was little hope of any of us ever setting foot ashore, he wished to give the poor woman below a chance with the rest. All of us but himself, mistress, had got up into the shrouds, and so we could see round us a bit; and he had just laid his hand on the companion-hasp to undo the door, when I saw a tremendous sea coming rolling towards us, like a moving wall, and shouted on him to hold fast. He sprang to the weather back-stay, and laid hold. The sea came tumbling on, and, breaking full twenty feet over his head, buried him for a minute's space in the foam. We thought we should never see him more; but when it cleared away, there was he still, with his iron grip on the stay, though the fearful wave had water-logged the Friendship from bow to stem, and swept her companion-head as cleanly off by the deck as if it had been cut with a saw. No human aid could avail the poor woman and her baby. Master could hear the terrible choking noise of her dying agony right under his feet, with but a two-inch plank between; and the sounds have haunted him ever since. But even had he succeeded in getting her on deck, she could not possibly have survived, mistress. For five long hours we clung to the rigging, with the seas riding over us all the time like wild horses; and though we could see, through the snow-drift and the spray, crowds on the shore, and boats lying thick beside the pier, none dared venture out to assist us, till near the close of the day, when the wind fell with the falling tide, and we were brought ashore, more dead than alive, by a volunteer crew from the harbour. The unlucky Friendship began to break up under us ere mid-day, and we saw the corpse of the drowned woman, with the dead infant still in its arms, come floating out through a hole in the side. But the surf soon tore mother and child asunder, and we lost sight of them as they drifted away to the west. Master would have crossed the Firth himself this morning to relieve your mind, but being less worn out than any of us, he thought it best to remain in charge of the wreck."

Such, in effect, was the narrative of Jack Grant, the mate. The master, as I have said, had well-nigh to commence the world anew, and was on the eve of selling his new house at a disadvantage, in order to make up the sum necessary for providing himself with a new vessel, when a friend interposed, and advanced him the balance required. He was assisted, too, by a sister in Leith, who was in tolerably comfortable circumstances; and so he got a new sloop, which, though not quite equal in size to the one he had lost, was built wholly of oak, every plank and beam of which he had superintended in the laying down, and a prime sailer to boot; and so, though he had to satisfy himself with the accommodation of the old domicile, with its little rooms and its small windows, and to let the other house to a tenant, he began to thrive again as before. Meanwhile his aged cousin was gradually sinking. The master was absent on one of his longer voyages, and she too truly felt that she could not survive till his return. She called to her bedside her two young friends, the sisters, who had been unwearied in their attentions to her, and poured out her blessing on them; first on the elder, and then on the younger. "But as for you, Harriet," she added, addressing the latter, "there waits for you one of the best blessings of this world also—the blessings of a good husband: you will be a gainer in the end, even in this life, through your kindness to the poor childless widow." The prophecy was a true one: the old woman had shrewdly marked where the eyes of her cousin had been falling of late; and in about a twelvemonth after her death her young friend and pupil had become the master's wife. There was a very considerable disparity between their ages,—the master was forty-four, and his wife only eighteen,—but never was there a happier marriage. The young wife was simple, confiding, and affectionate; and the master of a soft and genial nature, with a large amount of buoyant humour about him, and so equable of temper, that, during six years of wedded life, his wife never saw him angry but once. I have heard her speak of the exceptional instance, however, as too terrible to be readily forgotten.

She had accompanied him on ship-board, during their first year of married life, to the upper parts of the Cromarty Firth, where his sloop was taking in a cargo of grain, and lay quietly embayed within two hundred yards of the southern shore. His mate had gone away for the night to the opposite side of the bay, to visit his parents, who resided in that neighbourhood; and the remaining crew consisted of but two seamen, both young and somewhat reckless men, and the ship-boy. Taking the boy with them to keep the ship's boat afloat, and wait their return, the two sailors went ashore, and, setting out for a distant public-house, remained there drinking till a late hour. There was a bright moon overhead, but the evening was chilly and frosty; and the boy, cold, tired, and half-overcome by sleep, after waiting on till past midnight, shoved off the boat, and, making his way to the vessel, got straightway into his hammock and fell asleep. Shortly after, the two men came to the shore much the worse of liquor; and, failing to make themselves heard by the boy, they stripped off their clothes, and chilly as the night was, swam aboard. The master and his wife had been for hours snug in their bed, when they were awakened by the screams of the boy: the drunken men were unmercifully bastinading him with a rope's end apiece. The master, hastily rising, had to interfere in his behalf, and with the air of a man who knew that remonstrance in the circumstances would be of little avail, he sent them both off to their hammocks. Scarcely, however, had he again got into bed, when he was a second time aroused by the cries of the boy, uttered on this occasion in the shrill tones of agony and terror; and, promptly springing up, now followed by his wife, he found the two sailors again belabouring the boy, and that one of them, in his blind fury, had laid hold of a rope-end, armed, as is common on shipboard, with an iron thimble or ring, and that every blow produced a wound. The poor boy was streaming over with blood. The master, in the extremity of his indignation, lost command of himself. Rushing in, the two men were in a moment dashed against the deck;—they seemed powerless in his hands as children; and had not his wife, although very unfit at the time for mingling in a fray, run in and laid hold of him,—a movement which calmed him at once,—it was her serious impression that, unarmed as he was, he would have killed them both upon the spot. There are, I believe, few things more formidable than the unwonted anger of a good-natured man.

CHAPTER II.

"Three stormy nights and stormy days

We tossed upon the raging main;

And long we strove our barque to save,

But all our striving was in vain."—Lowe.

I was born, the first child of this marriage, on the 10th day of October 1802, in the low, long house built by my great-grandfather the buccaneer. My memory awoke early. I have recollections which date several months ere the completion of my third year; but, like those of the golden age of the world, they are chiefly of a mythologic character. I remember, for instance, getting out unobserved one day to my father's little garden, and seeing there a minute duckling covered with soft yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red colour. I know not what prodigy of the vegetable kingdom produced the little duckling; but the plant with the shells must, I think, have been a scarlet runner, and the shells themselves the papilionaceous blossoms. I have a distinct recollection, too,—but it belongs to a later period,—of seeing my ancestor, old John Feddes the buccaneer, though he must have been dead at the time considerably more than half a century. I had learned to take an interest in his story, as preserved and told in the antique dwelling which he had built more than a hundred years before. To forget a love disappointment, he had set out early in life for the Spanish Main, where, after giving and receiving some hard blows, he succeeded in filling a little bag with dollars and doubloons; and then coming home, he found his old sweetheart a widow, and so much inclined to listen to reason, that she ultimately became his wife. There were some little circumstances in his history which must have laid hold of my imagination; for I used over and over to demand its repetition; and one of my first attempts at a work of art was to scrabble his initials with my fingers, in red paint, on the house-door. One day, when playing all alone at the stair-foot—for the inmates of the house had gone out—something extraordinary had caught my eye on the landing-place above; and looking up, there stood John Feddes—for I somehow instinctively divined that it was none other than he—in the form of a large, tall, very old man, attired in a light-blue greatcoat He seemed to be steadfastly regarding me with apparent complacency; but I was sadly frightened; and for years after, when passing through the dingy, ill-lighted room out of which I inferred he had come, I used to feel not at all sure that I might not tilt against old John in the dark.

I retain vivid recollections of the joy which used to light up the household on my father's arrival; and I remember that I learned to distinguish for myself his sloop when in the offing, by the two slim stripes of white which ran along her sides, and her two square topsails. I have my golden memories, too, of splendid toys that he used to bring home with him,—among the rest, of a magnificent four-wheeled waggon of painted tin, drawn by four wooden horses and a string; and of getting it into a quiet corner, immediately on its being delivered over to me, and there breaking up every wheel and horse, and the vehicle itself, into their original bits, until not two of the pieces were left sticking together. Further, I still remember my disappointment at not finding something curious within at least the horses and the wheels; and as unquestionably the main enjoyment derivable from such things is to be had in the breaking of them, I sometimes wonder that our ingenious toymen do not fall upon the way of at once extending their trade, and adding to its philosophy, by putting some of their most brilliant things where nature puts the nut-kernel,—inside. I shall advert to but one other recollection of this period. I have a dreamlike memory of a busy time, when men with gold lace on their breasts, and at least one gentleman with golden epaulets on his shoulders, used to call at my father's house, and fill my newly acquired pockets with coppers; and how they wanted, it was said, to bring my father along with them, to help them to sail their great vessel; but he preferred remaining, it was added, with his own little one. A ship of war, under the guidance of an unskilful pilot, had run aground on a shallow flat on the opposite side of the Firth, known as the Inches; and as the flood of a stream tide was at its height at the time, and straightway began to fall off, it was found, after lightening her of her guns and the greater part of her stores, that she still stuck fast. My father, whose sloop had been pressed into the service, and was loaded to the gunwale with the ordnance, had betrayed an unexpected knowledge of the points of a large war-vessel; and the commander, entering into conversation with him, was so impressed by his skill, that he placed his ship under his charge, and had his confidence repaid by seeing her hauled off into deep water in a single tide. Knowing the nature of the bottom,—a soft arenaceous mud, which if beat for some time by the foot or hand, resolved itself into a sort of quicksand, half-sludge, half-water, which, when covered by a competent depth of sea, could offer no effectual resistance to a ship's keel,—the master had set half the crew to run in a body from side to side, till, by the motion generated in this way, the portion of the bank immediately beneath was beaten soft; and then the other moiety of the men, tugging hard on kedge and haulser, drew the vessel off a few feet at a time, till at length, after not a few repetitions of the process, she floated free. Of course, on a harder bottom the expedient would not have availed; but so struck was the commander by its efficacy and originality, and by the extent of the master's professional resources, that he strongly recommended him to part with his sloop, and enter the navy, where he thought he had influence enough, he said, to get him placed in a proper position. But as the master's previous experience of the service had been of a very disagreeable kind, and as his position, as at once master and owner of the vessel he sailed, was at least an independent one, he declined acting on the advice.

Such are some of my earlier recollections. But there was a time of sterner memories at hand. The kelp trade had not yet attained to the importance which it afterwards acquired, ere it fell before the first approaches of Free Trade; and my father, in collecting a supply for the Leith Glass Works, for which he occasionally acted both as agent and shipmaster, used sometimes to spend whole months amid the Hebrides, sailing from station to station, and purchasing here a few tons and there a few hundredweights, until he had completed his cargo. In his last kelp voyage he had been detained in this way from the close of August till the end of October; and at length, deeply laden, he had threaded his way round Cape Wrath, and through the Pentland and across the Moray Firths, when a severe gale compelled him to seek shelter in the harbour of Peterhead. From that port, on the 9th of November 1807, he wrote my mother the last letter she ever received from him; for on the day after he sailed from it there arose a terrible tempest, in which many seamen perished, and he and his crew were never more heard of. His sloop was last seen by a brother townsman and shipmaster, who, ere the storm came on, had been fortunate enough to secure an asylum for his barque in an English harbour on an exposed portion of the coast. Vessel after vessel had been coming ashore during the day; and the beach was strewed with wrecks and dead bodies; but he had marked his townsman's sloop in the offing from mid-day till near evening, exhausting every nautical shift and expedient to keep aloof from the shore; and at length, as the night was falling, the skill and perseverance exerted seemed successful; for, clearing a formidable headland that had lain on the lee for hours, and was mottled with broken ships and drowned men, the sloop was seen stretching out in a long tack into the open sea. "Miller's seamanship has saved him once more!" said Matheson, the Cromarty skipper, as, quitting his place of outlook, he returned to his cabin; but the night fell tempestuous and wild, and no vestige of the hapless sloop was ever after seen. It was supposed that, heavy laden, and labouring in a mountainous sea, she must have started a plank and foundered. And thus perished,—to borrow from the simple eulogium of his seafaring friends, whom I heard long after condoling with my mother,—"one of the best sailors that ever sailed the Moray Firth."

The fatal tempest, as it had prevailed chiefly on the eastern coasts of England and the south of Scotland, was represented in the north by but a few bleak, sullen days, in which, with little wind, a heavy ground-swell came rolling in coastwards from the cast, and sent up its surf high against the precipices of the Northern Sutor. There were no forebodings in the master's dwelling; for his Peterhead letter—a brief but hopeful missive—had been just received; and my mother was sitting, on the evening after, beside the household fire, plying the cheerful needle, when the house door, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side to shut it. What follows must be regarded as simply the recollection, though a very vivid one, of a boy who had completed his fifth year only a mouth before. Day had not wholly disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a grey haze spread a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance; and directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I was fearfully startled, and ran shrieking to my mother, telling what I had seen; and the house-girl whom she next sent to shut the door, apparently affected by my terror, also returned frightened, and said that she too had seen the woman's hand; which, however, did not seem to be the case. And finally, my mother going to the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the extremeness of my terror and the minuteness of my description. I communicate the story, as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting to explain it. The supposed apparition may have been merely a momentary affection of the eye, of the nature described by Sir Walter Scott in his "Demonology," and Sir David Brewster in his "Natural Magic." But if so, the affection was one of which I experienced no after-return; and its coincidence, in the case, with the probable time of my father's death, seems at least curious.

There followed a dreary season, on which I still look back in memory, as on a prospect which, sunshiny and sparkling for a time, has become suddenly enveloped in cloud and storm. I remember my mother's long fits of weeping, and the general gloom of the widowed household; and how, after she had sent my two little sisters to bed,—for such had been the increase of the family,—and her hands were set free for the evening, she used to sit up late at night engaged as a seamstress, in making pieces of dress for such of the neighbours as chose to employ her. My father's new house lay untenanted at the time; and though his sloop had been partially insured, the broker with whom he dealt was, it would seem, on the verge of insolvency, and having raised objections to paying the money, it was long ere any part of it could be realized. And so, with all my mother's industry, the household would have fared out ill, had it not been for the assistance lent her by her two brothers, industrious, hard-working men, who lived with their aged parents, and an unmarried sister, about a bow-shot away, and now not only advanced her money as she needed it, but also took her second child, the elder of my two sisters, a docile little girl of three years, to live with them. I remember I used to go wandering disconsolately about the harbour at this season, to examine the vessels which had come in during the night; and that I oftener than once set my mother a-crying, by asking her why the shipmasters who, when my father was alive, used to stroke my head and slip halfpence into my pockets, never now took any notice of me, or gave me anything? She well knew that the shipmasters—not an ungenerous class of men—had simply failed to recognise their old comrade's child; but the question was only too suggestive, notwithstanding, of both her own loss and mine. I used, too, to climb, day after day, a grassy protuberance of the old coast-line immediately behind my mother's house, that commands a wide reach of the Moray Firth, and to look wistfully out, long after every one else had ceased to hope, for the sloop with the two stripes of white and the two square topsails. But months and years passed by, and the white stripes and the square topsails I never saw.

The antecedents of my father's life impressed me more powerfully during my boyhood than at least aught I acquired at school; and I have submitted them to the reader at considerable length, as not only curious in themselves, but as forming a first chapter in the story of my education. And the following stanzas, written at a time when, in opening manhood, I was sowing my wild oats in verse, may serve to show that they continued to stand out in bold relief on my memory, even after I had grown up:—

"Round Albyn's western shores, a lonely skiff

Is coasting slow:—the adverse winds detain:

And now she rounds secure the dreaded cliff,[1]

Whose horrid ridge beats back the northern main;

And now the whirling Pentland roars in rain

Her stern beneath, for favouring breezes rise;

The green isles fade, whitens the watery plain.

O'er the vexed waves with meteor speed she flies.

Till Moray's distant hills o'er the blue waves arise.

Who guides that vessel's wanderings o'er the wave;

A patient, hardy man, of thoughtful brow;

Serene and warm of heart, and wisely brave,

And sagely skill'd, when gurly breezes blow,

To press through angry waves the adventurous prow.

Age hath not quell'd his strength, nor quench'd desire

Of generous deed, nor chill'd his bosom's glow;

Yet to a better world his hopes aspire.

Ah! this must sure be thee! All hail, my honoured Sire!

Alas! thy latest voyage draws near a close,

For Death broods voiceless in the darkening sky;

Subsides the breeze; the untroubled waves repose;

The scene is peaceful all. Can Death be nigh,

When thus, mute and unarm'd, his vassals lie?

Mark ye that cloud! There toils the imprisoned gale;

E'en now it comes, with voice uplifted high;

Resound the shores, harsh screams the rending sail,

And roars th' amazed wave, and bursts the thunder peal!

Three days the tempest raged; on Scotia's shore

Wreck piled on wreck, and corse o'er corse was thrown;

Her rugged cliffs were red with clotted gore;

Her dark caves echoed back th' expiring moan;

And luckless maidens mourned their lovers gone,

And friendless orphans cried in vain for bread;

And widow'd mothers wandered forth alone;—

Restore, O wave, they cried,—restore our dead!

And then the breast they bared, and beat th' unsheltered head.

Of thee, my Sire, what mortal tongue can tell!

No friendly bay thy shattered barque received;

Ev'n when thy dust reposed in ocean cell,

Strange baseless tales of hope thy friends deceived

Which oft they doubted sad, or gay believed.

At length, when deeper, darker, wax'd the gloom,

Hopeless they grieved; but 'twas in vain they grieved:

If God be truth, 'tis sure no voice of doom,

That bids the accepted soul its robes of joy assume."

I had been sent, previous to my father's death, to a dame's school, where I was taught to pronounce my letters to such effect in the old Scottish mode, that still, when I attempt spelling a word aloud, which is not often,—for I find the process a perilous one,—the aa's and ee's, and uh's and vaus, return upon me and I have to translate them with no little hesitation as I go along, into the more modish sounds. A knowledge of the letters themselves I had already acquired by studying the signposts of the place,—rare works of art, that excited my utmost admiration, with jugs, and glasses, and bottles, and ships, and loaves of bread upon them; all of which could, as the artists had intended, be actually recognised. During my sixth year I spelt my way, under the dame, through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then entered upon her highest form, as a member of the Bible class; but all the while the process of acquiring learning had been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended, when at once my mind awoke to the meaning of that most delightful of all narratives,—the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made before! I actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books, and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a corner at the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph; nor did one perusal serve; the other Scripture stories followed,—in especial, the story of Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works,—Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with several others of resembling character. Those intolerable nuisances the useful-knowledge books had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars, on the educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting influence on the opening intellect of the "youth-hood;" and so, from my rudimental books—books that made themselves truly such by their thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind—I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children's books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admirably for little folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy of which,—in the only true translation extant,—for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be,—I found in the house of a neighbour. Next came the Iliad; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lintot. With what power, and at how early an age, true genius impresses! I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next succeeded in discovering for myself a child's book, of not less interest than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a magnificent old edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," printed on coarse whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous woodcuts, each of which occupied an entire page, that, on principles of economy, bore letter-press on the other side. And such delightful prints as these were! It must have been some such volume that sat for its portrait to Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as

"Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts,

Strange and uncouth; dire faces, figures dire,

Sharp-knee'd, sharp elbow'd, and lean-ankled too,

With long and ghastly shanks,—forms which, once seen,

Could never be forgotten."

In process of time I had devoured, besides these genial works Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the "judgment chapter" in Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the Adventures of Philip Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. It was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir. Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's Voyages, all the volumes were now absent save the first; and a very tantalizing romance, in four volumes,—Mrs. Ratcliff's "Mysteries of Udolpho," was represented by only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained some rare books,—among the rest, a curious little volume, entitled "The Miracles of Nature and Art," to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day, and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge, between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of the "Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion,"—a work interesting from the circumstance that—though it bore another name on its title-page—it had been translated from the French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith, in his days of obscure literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellencies of his style. The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an English sailor who had spent his best years of life as a slave in Morocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff controversy,—Flavel's Works, and Henry's Commentary, and Hutchinson on the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelation, with the title-page away, and blind Jameson's volume on the Hierarchy, with first editions of Naphthali, the Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind let Loose. But with these solid authors I did not venture to grapple until long after this time. Of the works of fact and incident which it contained, those of the voyagers were my especial favourites. I perused with avidity the voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods Rogers; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and hunt wild beasts and fight battles. I have already made mention of my two maternal uncles; and referred, at least incidentally, to their mother, as the friend and relative of my fathers aged cousin, and, like her, a great-grand-child of the last curate of Nigg. The curate's youngest daughter had been courted and married by a somewhat wild young farmer, of the clan Ross, but who was known, like the celebrated Highland outlaw, from the colour of his hair, as Roy, or the Red. Donald Roy was the best club-player in the district; and as King James's "Book of Sports" was not deemed a very bad one in the semi-Celtic parish of Nigg, the games in which Donald took part were usually played on the Sabbath. About the time of the Revolution, however, he was laid hold of by strong religious convictions, heralded, say the traditions of the district, by events that approximated in character to the supernatural; and Donald became the subject of a mighty change. There is a phase of the religious character, which in the south of Scotland belongs to the first two ages of Presbytery, but which disappeared ere its third establishment under William of Nassau, that we find strikingly exemplified in the Welches, Pedens, and Cargills of the times of the persecution, and in which a sort of wild machinery of the supernatural was added to the commoner aspects of a living Christianity. The men in whom it was exhibited were seers of visions and dreamers of dreams; and, standing on the very verge of the natural world, they looked far into the world of spirits, and had at times their strange glimpses of the distant and the future. To the north of the Grampians, as if born out of due season, these seers pertain to a later age. They flourished chiefly in the early part of the last century; for it is a not uninstructive fact, that in the religious history of Scotland, the eighteenth century of the Highland and semi-Highland districts of the north corresponded in many of its traits to the seventeenth century of the Saxon-peopled districts of the south; and Donald Roy was one of the most notable of the class. The anecdotes regarding him which still float among the old recollections of Ross-shire, if transferred to Peden or Welch, would be found entirely in character with the strange stories that inlay the biographies of these devoted men, and live so enduringly in the memory of the Scottish people. Living, too, in an age in which, like the Covenanters of a former century, the Highlander still retained his weapons, and knew how to use them, Donald had, like the Patons, Hackstons, and Balfours of the south, his dash of the warlike spirit; and after assisting his minister, previous to the rebellion of 1745, in what was known as the great religious revival of Nigg, he had to assist him, shortly after, in pursuing a band of armed Caterans, that, descending from the hills, swept the parish of its cattle. And coming up with the outlaws in the gorge of a wild Highland glen, no man of his party was more active in the fray that followed than old Donald, or exerted himself to better effect in re-capturing the cattle. I need scarce add, that he was an attached member of the Church of Scotland: but he was not destined to die in her communion.

Donald's minister, John Balfour of Nigg—a man whose memory is still honoured in the north—died in middle life, and an unpopular presentee was obtruded on the people. The policy of Robertson prevailed at the time; Gillespie had been deposed only four years previous, for refusing to assist in the disputed settlement of Inverkeithing; and four of the Nigg Presbytery, overawed by the stringency of the precedent, repaired to the parish church to conduct the settlement of the obnoxious licentiate, and introduce him to the parishioners. They found, however, only an empty building; and, notwithstanding the ominous absence of the people, they were proceeding in shame and sorrow with their work, when a venerable man, far advanced in life, suddenly appeared before them, and, solemnly protesting against the utter mockery of such a proceeding, impressively declared, "that if they settled a man to the walls of that kirk, the blood of the parish of Nigg would be required at their hands." Both Dr. Hetherington and Dr. Merle d'Aubigné record the event; but neither of these accomplished historians seems to have been aware of the peculiar emphasis which a scene that would have been striking in any circumstances derived from the character of the protester—old Donald Roy. The Presbytery, appalled, stopt short in the middle of its work; nor was it resumed till an after day, when, at the command of the Moderate majority of the Church—a command not unaccompanied by significant reference to-the fate of Gillespie—the forced settlement was consummated. Donald, who carried the entire parish with him, continued to cling to the National Church for nearly ten years after, much befriended by one of the most eminent and influential divines of the north—Fraser of Alness—the author of a volume on Sanctification, still regarded as a standard work by Scottish theologians. But as neither the people nor their leader ever entered on any occasion the parish church, or heard the obnoxious presentee, the Presbytery at length refused to tolerate the irregularity by extending to them as before the ordinary Church privileges; and so they were lost to the Establishment, and became Seceders. And in the communion of that portion of the Secession known as the Burghers, Donald died several years after, at a patriarchal old age.

Among his other descendants, he had three grand-daughters, who were left orphans at an early age by the death of both their parents, and whom the old man, on their bereavement, had brought to his dwelling to live with him. They had small portions apiece, derived from his son-in-law, their father, which did not grow smaller under the care of Donald; and as each of the three was married in succession out of his family, he added to all his other kindnesses the gift of a gold ring. They had been brought up under his eye sound in the faith; and Donald's ring had, in each case, a mystic meaning;—they were to regard it, he told them, as the wedding ring of their other Husband, the Head of the Church, and to be faithful spouses to Him in their several households. Nor did the injunction, nor the significant symbol with which it was accompanied, prove idle in the end. They all brought the savour of sincere piety into their families. The grand-daughter with whom the writer was more directly connected, had been courted and married by an honest and industrious but somewhat gay young tradesman, but she proved, under God, the means of his conversion; and their children, of whom eight grew up to be men and women, were reared in decent frugality, and the exercise of honest principles carefully instilled. Her husband's family had, like that of my paternal ancestors, been a seafaring one. His father, after serving for many years on shipboard, passed the latter part of his life as one of the armed boatmen that, during the last century, guarded the coasts in behalf of the revenue; and his only brother, the boatman's son, an adventurous young sailor had engaged in Admiral Vernon's unfortunate expedition, and left his bones under the walls of Carthagena; but he himself pursued the peaceful occupation of a shoemaker, and, in carrying on his trade, usually employed a few journeymen, and kept a few apprentices. In course of time the elder daughters of the family married, and got households of their own; but the two sons, my uncles, remained under the roof of their parents, and at the time when my father perished, they were both in middle life. And, deeming themselves called on to take his place in the work of instruction and discipline, I owed to them much more of my real education than to any of the teachers whose schools I afterwards attended. They both bore a marked individuality of character, and were much the reverse of commonplace or vulgar men.

My elder uncle, James, added to a clear head and much native sagacity, a singularly retentive memory, and great thirst of information. He was a harness-maker, and wrought for the farmers of an extensive district of country; and as he never engaged either journeyman or apprentice, but executed all his work with his own hands, his hours of labour, save that he indulged in a brief pause as the twilight came on, and took a mile's walk or so, were usually protracted from six o'clock in the morning till ten at night. Such incessant occupation left him little time for reading; but he often found some one to read beside him during the day; and in the winter evenings his portable bench used to be brought from his shop at the other end of the dwelling, into the family sitting-room, and placed beside the circle round the hearth, where his brother Alexander, my younger uncle, whose occupation left his evenings free, would read aloud from some interesting volume for the general benefit,—placing himself always at the opposite side of the bench, so as to share in the light of the worker. Occasionally the family circle would be widened by the accession of from two to three intelligent neighbours, who would drop in to listen; and then the book, after a space, would be laid aside, in order that its contents might be discussed in conversation. In the summer months Uncle James always spent some time in the country, in looking after and keeping in repair the harness of the farmers for whom he wrought; and during his journeys and twilight walks on these occasions there was not an old castle, or hill-fort, or ancient encampment, or antique ecclesiastical edifice, within twenty miles of the town, which he had not visited and examined over and over again. He was a keen local antiquary; knew a good deal about the architectural styles of the various ages, at a time when these subjects were little studied or known; and possessed more traditionary lore, picked up chiefly in his country journeys, than any man I ever knew. What he once heard he never forgot; and the knowledge which he had acquired he could communicate pleasingly and succinctly, in a style which, had he been a writer of books, instead of merely a reader of them, would have had the merit of being clear and terse, and more laden with meaning than words. From his reputation for sagacity, his advice used to be much sought after by the neighbours in every little difficulty that came their way; and the counsel given was always shrewd and honest. I never knew a man more entirely just in his dealings than Uncle James, or who regarded every species of meanness with a more thorough contempt. I soon learned to bring my story-books to his workshop, and became, in a small way, one of his readers,—greatly more, however, as may be supposed, on my own account than his. My books were not yet of the kind which he would have chosen for himself; but he took an interest in my interest; and his explanations of all the hard words saved me the trouble of turning over a dictionary. And when tired of reading, I never failed to find rare delight in his anecdotes and old-world stories, many of which were not to be found in books, and all of which, without apparent effort on his own part, he could render singularly amusing. Of these narratives, the larger part died with him; but a portion of them I succeeded in preserving in a little traditionary work published a few years after his death. I was much a favourite with Uncle James,—even more, I am disposed to think, on my father's account than on that of his sister, my mother. My father and he had been close friends for years; and in the vigorous and energetic sailor he had found his beau-idéalof a man.

My Uncle Alexander was of a different cast from his brother both in intellect and temperament; but he was characterized by the same strict integrity; and his religious feelings, though quiet and unobtrusive, were perhaps more deep. James was somewhat of a humorist, and fond of a good joke. Alexander was grave and serious; and never, save on one solitary occasion, did I know him even attempt a jest. On hearing an intelligent but somewhat eccentric neighbour observe, that "all flesh is grass," in a strictly physical sense, seeing that all the flesh of the herbivorous animals is elaborated from vegetation, and all the flesh of the carnivorous animals from that of the herbivorous ones, Uncle Sandy remarked that, knowing, as he did, the piscivorous habits of the Cromarty folk, he should surely make an exception in his generalization, by admitting that in at least one village "all flesh is fish." My uncle had acquired the trade of the cartwright, and was employed in a workshop at Glasgow at the time the first war of the French Revolution broke out; when, moved by some such spirit as possessed his uncle,—the victim of Admiral Vernon's unlucky expedition,—or Old Donald Roy, when he buckled himself to his Highland broadsword, and set out in pursuit of the Caterans,—he entered the navy. And during the eventful period which intervened between the commencement of the war and the peace of 1802, there was little either suffered or achieved by his countrymen in which he had not a share. He sailed with Nelson; witnessed the mutiny at the Nore; fought under Admiral Duncan at Camperdown, and under Sir John Borlase Warren at Loch Swilly; assisted in capturing the Généroux and Guillaume Tell, two French ships of the line; was one of the seamen who, in the Egyptian expedition, were drafted out of Lord Keith's fleet to supply the lack of artillerymen in the army of Sir Ralph Abercromby; had a share in the danger and glory of the landing in Egypt; and fought in the battle of 13th March, and in that which deprived our country of one of her most popular generals. He served, too, at the siege of Alexandria. And then, as he succeeded in procuring his discharge during the short peace of 1802, he returned home with a small sum of hardly-earned prize-money, heartily sick of war and bloodshed. I was asked not long ago by one of his few surviving comrades, whether my uncle had ever told me that their gun was the first landed in Egypt, and the first dragged up the sand-bank immediately over the beach, and how hot it grew under their hands, as, with a rapidity unsurpassed along the line, they poured out in thick succession its iron discharges upon the enemy. I had to reply in the negative. All my uncle's narratives were narratives of what he had seen—not of what he had done; and when, perusing, late in life, one of his favourite works—Dr. Keith's "Signs of the Times"—he came to the chapter in which that excellent writer describes the time of hot naval warfare which immediately followed the breaking out of war, as the period in which the second vial was poured out on the sea, and in which the waters "became as the blood of a dead man, so that every living soul died in the sea," I saw him bend his head in reverence as he remarked, "Prophecy, I find, gives to all our glories but a single verse, and it is a verse of judgment." Uncle Sandy, however, did not urge the peace principles which he had acquired amid scenes of death and carnage, into any extravagant consequences; and on the breaking out, in 1803, of the second war of the Revolution, when Napoleon threatened invasion from Brest and Boulogne, he at once shouldered his musket as a volunteer. He had not his brother's fluency of speech; but his narratives of what he had seen were singularly truthful and graphic; and his descriptions of foreign plants and animals, and of the aspect of the distant regions which he had visited, had all the careful minuteness of those of a Dampier. He had a decided turn for natural history. My collection contains a murex, not unfrequent in the Mediterranean, which he found time enough to transfer, during the heat of the landing in Egypt, from the beach to his pocket; and the first ammonite I ever saw was a specimen, which I still retain, that he brought home with him from one of the Liassic deposits of England.

Early on the Sabbath evenings I used regularly to attend at my uncle's with two of my maternal cousins, boys of about my own age, and latterly with my two sisters, to be catechized, first on the Shorter Catechism, and then on the Mother's Catechism of Willison. On Willison my uncles always cross-examined us, to make sure that we understood the short and simple questions; but, apparently regarding the questions of the Shorter Catechism as seed sown for a future day, they were content with having them well fixed in our memories. There was a Sabbath class taught in the parish church at the time by one of the elders; but Sabbath-schools my uncles regarded as merely compensatory institutions, highly creditable to the teachers, but very discreditable indeed to the parents and relatives of the taught; and so they of course never thought of sending us there. Later in the evening, after a short twilight walk, for which the sedentary occupation of my Uncle James formed an apology, but in which my Uncle Alexander always shared, and which usually led them into solitary woods, or along an unfrequented sea-shore, some of the old divines were read; and I used to take my place in the circle, though, I am afraid, not to much advantage. I occasionally caught a fact, or had my attention arrested for a moment by a simile or metaphor; but the trains of close argument, and the passages of dreary "application," were always lost.

FOOTNOTE:

[1] Cape Wrath.

CHAPTER III.

"At Wallace' name what Scottish blood

But boils up in a spring-tide flood!

Oft have our fearless fathers strode

By Wallace' side,

Still pressing onward, red wat shod,

Or glorious died."—Burns.

I first became thoroughly a Scot some time in my tenth year; and the consciousness of country has remained tolerably strong within me ever since. My uncle James had procured for me from a neighbour the loan of a common stall-edition of Blind Harry's "Wallace," as modernized by Hamilton; but after reading the first chapter,—a piece of dull genealogy, broken into very rude rhyme,—I tossed the volume aside as uninteresting; and only resumed it at the request of my uncle, who urged that, simply for his amusement and gratification, I should read some three or four chapters more. Accordingly, the three or four chapters more I did read;—I read "how Wallace killed young Selbie the Constable's son;" "how Wallace fished in Irvine Water;" and "how Wallace killed the Churl with his own staff in Ayr;" and then Uncle James told me, in the quiet way in which he used to make a joke tell, that the book seemed to be rather a rough sort of production, filled with accounts of quarrels and bloodshed, and that I might read no more of it unless I felt inclined. But I now did feel inclined very strongly, and read on with increasing astonishment and delight. I was intoxicated with the fiery narratives of the blind minstrel,—with his fierce breathings of hot, intolerant patriotism, and his stories of astonishing prowess; and, glorying in being a Scot, and the countryman of Wallace and the Graham, I longed for a war with the Southron, that the wrongs and sufferings of these noble heroes might yet be avenged. All I had previously heard and read of the marvels of foreign parts, of the glories of modern battles, seemed tame and commonplace, compared with the incidents in the life of Wallace; and I never after vexed my mother by wishing myself big enough to be a sailor. My Uncle Sandy, who had some taste for the refinements of poetry, would fain have led me on from the exploits of Wallace to the "Life of the Bruce," which, in the form of a not very vigorous imitation of Dryden's "Virgil," by one Harvey, was bound up in the same volume, and which my uncle deemed the better-written life of the two. And so far as the mere amenities of style were concerned, he was, I daresay, right. But I could not agree with him. Harvey was by much too fine and too learned for me; and it was not until some years after, when I was fortunate enough to pick up one of the later editions of Barbour's "Bruce," that the Hero-King of Scotland assumed his right place in my mind beside its Hero-Guardian. There are stages of development in the immature youth of individuals, that seem to correspond with stages of development in the immature youth of nations; and the recollections of this early time enable me, in some measure, to understand how it was that, for hundreds of years, Blind Harry's "Wallace," with its rude and naked narrative, and its exaggerated incident, should have been, according to Lord Hailes, the Bible of the Scotch people.

I quitted the dame's school at the end of the first twelvemonth, after mastering that grand acquirement of my life,—the art of holding converse with books; and was transferred straightforth to the grammar school of the parish, at which there attended at this time about a hundred and twenty boys, with a class of about thirty individuals more, much looked down upon by the others, and not deemed greatly worth the counting, seeing that it consisted of only lassies. And here, too, the early individual development seems nicely correspondent with an early national one. In his depreciatory estimate of contemporary woman, the boy is always a true savage. The old parish school of the place had been nobly situated in a snug corner, between the parish churchyard and a thick wood; and from the interesting centre which it formed, the boys, when tired of making dragoon-horses of the erect head-stones, or of leaping along the flat-laid memorials, from end to end of the grave-yard, "without touching grass," could repair to the taller trees, and rise in the world by climbing among them. As, however, they used to encroach, on these latter occasions, upon the laird's pleasure-grounds, the school had been removed ere my time to the sea-shore; where, though there were neither tombstones nor trees, there were some balancing advantages, of a kind which perhaps only boys of the old school could have adequately appreciated. As the school-windows fronted the opening of the Firth, not a vessel could enter the harbour that we did not see; and, improving through our opportunities, there was perhaps no educational institution in the kingdom in which all sorts of barques and carvels, from the fishing yawl to the frigate, could be more correctly drawn on the slate, or where any defect in hulk or rigging, in some faulty delineation, was surer of being more justly and unsparingly criticised. Further, the town, which drove a great trade in salted pork at the time, had a killing-place not thirty yards from the school-door, where from eighty to a hundred pigs used sometimes to die for the general good in a single day; and it was a great matter to hear, at occasional intervals, the roar of death outside rising high over the general murmur within, or to be told by some comrade, returned from his five minutes' leave of absence, that a hero of a pig had taken three blows of the hatchet ere it fell, and that even after its subjection to the sticking process, it had got hold of Jock Keddie's hand in its mouth, and almost smashed his thumb. We learned, too, to know, from our signal opportunities of observation, not only a good deal about pig-anatomy,—especially about the detached edible parts of the animal, such as the spleen and the pancreas, and at least one other very palatable viscus besides,—but became knowing also about the take and curing of herrings. All the herring boats during the fishing season passed our windows on their homeward way to the harbour; and, from their depth in the water, we became skilful enough to predicate the number of crans aboard of each with wonderful judgment and correctness. In days of good general fishings, too, when the curing-yards proved too small to accommodate the quantities brought ashore, the fish used to be laid in glittering heaps opposite the school-house door; and an exciting scene, that combined the bustle of the workshop with the confusion of the crowded fair, would straightway spring up within twenty yards of the forms at which we sat, greatly to our enjoyment, and, of course, not a little to our instruction. We could see, simply by peering over book or slate, the curers going about rousing their fish with salt, to counteract the effects of the dog-day sun; bevies of young women employed as gutters, and horridly incarnadined with blood and viscera, squatting around the heaps, knife in hand, and plying with busy fingers their well-paid labours, at the rate of sixpence per hour; relays of heavily-laden fish-wives bringing ever and anon fresh heaps of herrings in their creels; and outside of all, the coopers hammering as if for life and death,—now tightening hoops, and now slackening them, and anon caulking with bulrush the leaky seams. It is not every grammar school in which such lessons are taught as those in which all were initiated, and in which all became in some degree accomplished, in the grammar school of Cromarty!

The building in which we met was a low, long, straw-thatched cottage, open from gable to gable, with a mud floor below, and an unlathed roof above; and stretching along the naked rafters, which, when the master chanced to be absent for a few minutes, gave noble exercise in climbing, there used frequently to lie a helm, or oar, or boathook, or even a foresail,—the spoil of some hapless peat-boat from the opposite side of the Firth. The Highland boatmen of Ross had carried on a trade in peats for ages with the Saxons of the town; and as every boat owed a long-derived perquisite of twenty peats to the grammar school, and as payment was at times foolishly refused, the party of boys commissioned by the master to exact it almost always succeeded, either by force or stratagem, in securing and bringing along with them, in behalf of the institution, some spar, or sail, or piece of rigging, which, until redeemed by special treaty, and the payment of the peats, was stowed up over the rafters. These peat-expeditions, which were intensely popular in the school, gave noble exercise to the faculties. It was always a great matter to see, just as the school met, some observant boy appear, cap in hand, before the master, and intimate the fact of an arrival at the shore, by the simple words, "Peat-boat, Sir." The master would then proceed to name a party, more or less numerous, according to the exigency; but it seemed to be matter of pretty correct calculation that, in the cases in which the peat claim was disputed, it required about twenty boys to bring home the twenty peats, or, lacking these, the compensatory sail or spar. There were certain ill-conditioned boatmen who almost always resisted, and who delighted to tell us—invariably, too, in very bad English—that our perquisite was properly the hangman's perquisite,[2] made over to us because we were like him; not seeing—blockheads as they were!—that the very admission established in full the rectitude of our claim, and gave to us, amid our dire perils and faithful contendings, the strengthening consciousness of a just quarrel. In dealing with these recusants, we used ordinarily to divide our forces into two bodies, the larger portion of the party filling their pockets with stones, and ranging themselves on some point of vantage, such as the pier-head; and the smaller stealing down as near the boat as possible, and mixing themselves up with the purchasers of the peats. We then, after due warning, opened fire upon the boatmen; and, when the pebbles were hopping about them like hailstones, the boys below commonly succeeded in securing, under cover of the fire, the desired boathook or oar. And such were the ordinary circumstances and details of this piece of Spartan education; of which a townsman has told me he was strongly reminded when boarding, on one occasion, under cover of a well-sustained discharge of musketry, the vessel of an enemy that had been stranded on the shores of Berbice.

The parish schoolmaster was a scholar and an honest man, and if a boy really wished to learn, he certainly could teach him. He had attended the classes at Aberdeen during the same sessions as the late Dr. Mearns, and in mathematics and the languages had disputed the prize with the Doctor; but he had failed to get on equally well in the world; and now, in middle life, though a licentiate of the Church, he had settled down to be what he subsequently remained—the teacher of a parish school. There were usually a few grown-up lads under his tuition—careful sailors, that had stayed ashore during the winter quarter to study navigation as a science,—or tall fellows, happy in the patronage of the great, who, in the hope of being made excisemen, had come to school to be initiated in the mysteries of gauging,—or grown young men, who, on second thoughts, and somewhat late in the day, had recognised the Church as their proper vocation; and these used to speak of the master's acquirements and teaching ability in the very highest terms. He himself, too, could appeal to the fact, that no teacher in the north had ever sent more students to college, and that his better scholars almost always got on well in life. But then, on the other hand, the pupils who wished to do nothing—a description of individuals that comprised fully two-thirds of all the younger ones—were not required to do much more than they wished; and parents and guardians were loud in their complaints that he was no suitable schoolmaster for them; though the boys themselves usually thought him quite suitable enough.

He was in the habit of advising the parents or relations of those he deemed his clever lads, to give them a classical education; and meeting one day with Uncle James, he urged that I should be put on Latin. I was a great reader, he said; and he found that when I missed a word in my English tasks, I almost always substituted a synonym in the place of it. And so, as Uncle James had arrived, on data of his own, at a similar conclusion, I was transferred from the English to the Latin form, and, with four other boys, fairly entered on the "Rudiments." I laboured with tolerable diligence for a day or two; but there was no one to tell me what the rules meant, or whether they really meant anything; and when I got on as far as penna, a pen, and saw how the changes were rung on one poor word, that did not seem to be of more importance in the old language than in the modern one, I began miserably to flag, and to long for my English reading, with its nice amusing stories, and its picture-like descriptions. The Rudiments was by far the dullest book I had ever seen. It embodied no thought that I could perceive,—it certainly contained no narrative,—it was a perfect contrast to not only the "Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace," but to even the Voyages of Cook and Anson. None of my class-fellows were by any means bright;—they had been all set on Latin without advice of the master; and yet, when he learned, which he soon did, to distinguish and call us up to our tasks by the name of the "heavy class," I was, in most instances, to be found at its nether end. Shortly after, however, when we got a little farther on, it was seen that I had a decided turn for translation. The master, good simple man that he was, always read to us in English, as the school met, the piece of Latin given us as our task for the day; and as my memory was strong enough to carry away the whole translation in its order, I used to give him back in the evening, word for word, his own rendering, which satisfied him on most occasions tolerably well. There were none of us much looked after; and I soon learned to bring books of amusement to the school with me, which, amid the Babel confusion of the place, I contrived to read undetected. Some of them, save in the language in which they were written, were identical with the books proper to the place. I remember perusing by stealth in this way, Dryden's "Virgil," and the "Ovid" of Dryden and his friends; while Ovid's own "Ovid," and Virgil's own "Virgil," lay beside me, sealed up in the fine old tongue, which I was thus throwing away my only chance of acquiring.

One morning, having the master's English rendering of the day's task well fixed in my memory, and no book of amusement to read, I began gossiping with my nearest class-fellow, a very tall boy, who ultimately shot up into a lad of six feet four, and who on most occasions sat beside me, as lowest in the form save one. I told him about the tall Wallace and his exploits; and so effectually succeeded in awakening his curiosity, that I had to communicate to him, from beginning to end, every adventure recorded by the blind minstrel. My story-telling vocation once fairly ascertained, there was, I found, no stopping in my course. I had to tell all the stories I ever heard or read; all my father's adventures, so far as I knew them, and all my Uncle Sandy's,—with the story of Gulliver, and Philip Quarll, and Robinson Crusoe,—of Sinbad, and Ulysses, and Mrs. Radcliffe's heroine Emily, with, of course, the love-passages left out; and at length, after weeks and months of narrative, I found my available stock of acquired fact and fiction fairly exhausted. The demand on the part of my class-fellows was, however, as great and urgent as ever; and, setting myself, in the extremity of the case, to try my ability of original production, I began to dole out to them by the hour and the diet, long extempore biographies, which proved wonderfully popular and successful. My heroes were usually warriors like Wallace, and voyagers like Gulliver, and dwellers in desolate islands like Robinson Crusoe; and they had not unfrequently to seek shelter in huge deserted castles, abounding in trap-doors and secret passages, like that of Udolpho. And finally, after much destruction of giants and wild beasts, and frightful encounters with magicians and savages, they almost invariably succeeded in disentombing hidden treasures to an enormous amount, or in laying open gold mines, and then passed a luxurious old age, like that of Sinbad the Sailor, at peace with all mankind, in the midst of confectionery and fruits. The master had a tolerably correct notion of what was going on in the "heavy class;"—the stretched-out necks, and the heads clustered together, always told their own special story when I was engaged in telling mine; but, without hating the child, he spared the rod, and simply did what he sometimes allowed himself to do—bestowed a nickname upon me. I was the Sennachie, he said; and as the Sennachie I might have been known so long as I remained under his charge, had it not been that, priding himself upon his Gaelic, he used to bestow upon the word the full Celtic pronunciation, which, agreeing but ill with the Teutonic mouths of my school-fellows, militated against its use; and so the name failed to take. With all my carelessness, I continued to be a sort of favourite with the master; and, when at the general English lesson, he used to address to me little quiet speeches, vouchsafed to no other pupil, indicative of a certain literary ground common to us, on which the others had not entered. "That, Sir," he has said, after the class had just perused, in the school collection, a Tatler or Spectator,—"That, Sir, is a good paper;—it's an Addison;" or, "That's one of Steele's, Sir;" and on finding in my copy-book, on one occasion, a page filled with rhymes, which I had headed "Poem on Care," he brought it to his desk, and, after reading it carefully over, called me up, and with his closed penknife, which served as a pointer, in the one hand, and the copy-book brought down to the level of my eyes in the other, began his criticism. "That's bad grammar, Sir," he said, resting the knife-handle on one of the lines; "and here's an ill-spelt word; and there's another; and you have not at all attended to the punctuation; but the general sense of the piece is good,—very good indeed, Sir." And then he added, with a grim smile, "Care, Sir, is, I daresay, as you remark, a very bad thing; but you may safely bestow a little more of it on your spelling and your grammar."

The school, like almost all the other grammar-schools of the period in Scotland, had its yearly cock-fight, preceded by two holidays and a half, during which the boys occupied themselves in collecting and bringing up their cocks. And such always was the array of fighting birds mustered on the occasion, that the day of the festival, from morning till night, used to be spent in fighting out the battle. For weeks after it had passed, the school-floor would continue to retain its deeply-stained blotches of blood, and the boys would be full of exciting narratives regarding the glories of gallant birds, who had continued to fight until both their eyes had been picked out, or who, in the moment of victory, had dropped dead in the middle of the cock-pit. The yearly fight was the relic of a barbarous age; and, in at least one of its provisions, there seemed evidence that it was that of an intolerant age also: every pupil at school, without exemption, had his name entered on the subscription-list, as a cock-fighter, and was obliged to pay the master at the rate of twopence per head, ostensibly for leave to bring his birds to the pit; but, amid the growing humanities of a better time, though the twopences continued to be exacted, it was no longer imperative to bring the birds; and availing myself of the liberty I never brought any. Nor, save for a few minutes, on two several occasions, did I ever attend the fight. Had the combat been one among the boys themselves, I would readily enough have done my part, by meeting with any opponent of my years and standing; but I could not bear to look at the bleeding birds. And so I continued to pay my yearly sixpence, as a holder of three cocks,—the lowest sum deemed in any degree genteel,—but remained simply a fictitious or paper cock-fighter, and contributed in no degree to the success of the head-stock or leader, to whose party, in the general division of the school, it was my lot to fall. Neither, I must add, did I learn to take an interest in the sacrificial orgies of the adjoining slaughter-house. A few of the chosen school-boys were permitted by the killers to exercise at times the privilege of knocking down a pig, and even, on rare occasions, to essay the sticking; but I turned with horror from both processes; and if I drew near at all, it was only when some animal, scraped and cleaned, and suspended from the beam, was in the course of being laid open by the butcher's knife, that I might mark the forms of the viscera, and the positions which they occupied. To my dislike of the annual cock-fight my uncles must have contributed. They were loud in their denunciations of the enormity; and on one occasion, when a neighbour was unlucky enough to remark, in extenuation, that the practice had been handed down to us by pious and excellent men, who seemed to see nothing wrong in it, I saw the habitual respect for the old divines give way, for at least a moment. Uncle Sandy hesitated under apparent excitement; but, quick and fiery as lightning, Uncle James came to his rescue. "Yes, excellent men!" said my uncle, "but the excellent men of a rude and barbarous age; and, in some parts of their character, tinged by its barbarity. For the cock-fight which these excellent men have bequeathed to us, they ought to have been sent to Bridewell for a week, and fed upon bread and water." Uncle James was, no doubt, over hasty, and felt so a minute after; but the practice of fixing the foundations of ethics on a They themselves did it, much after the manner in which the Schoolmen fixed the foundations of their nonsensical philosophy on a "He himself said it," is a practice which, though not yet exploded in even very pure Churches, is always provoking, and not quite free from peril to the worthies, whether dead or alive, in whose precedents the moral right is made to rest. In the class of minds represented among the people by that of Uncle James, for instance, it would be much easier to bring down even the old divines, than to bring up cock-fighting.

My native town had possessed, for at least an age or two previous to that of my boyhood, its sprinkling of intelligent, book-consulting mechanics and tradesfolk; and as my acquaintance gradually extended among their representatives and descendants, I was permitted to rummage, in the pursuit of knowledge, delightful old chests and cupboards, filled with tattered and dusty volumes. The moiety of my father's library which remained to me consisted of about sixty several works; my uncle possessed about a hundred and fifty more; and there was a literary cabinet-maker in the neighbourhood, who had once actually composed a poem of thirty lines on the Hill of Cromarty, whose collection of books, chiefly poetical, amounted to from about eighty to a hundred. I used to be often at nights in the workshop of the cabinet-maker, and was sometimes privileged to hear him repeat his poem. There was not much admiration of poets or poetry in the place; and my praise, though that of a very young critic, had always the double merit of being both ample and sincere. I knew the very rocks and trees which his description embraced,—had heard the birds to which he referred, and seen the flowers; and as the Hill had been of old a frequent scene of executions, and had borne the gallows of the sheriffdom on its crest, nothing could be more definite than the grave reference, in his opening line, to

"The verdant rising of the Gallow-hill."

And so I thought a very great deal of his poem, and what I thought I said; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There was another mechanic in the neighbourhood,—a house-carpenter, who, though not a poet, was deeply read in books of all kinds, from the plays of Farquhar to the sermons of Flavel; and as both his father and grandfather—the latter, by the way, a Porteous-mob man, and the former a personal friend of poor Fergusson the poet—had also been readers and collectors of books, he possessed a whole pressful of tattered, hard-working volumes, some of them very curious ones; and to me he liberally extended, what literary men always value, "the full freedom of the press." But of all my occasional benefactors in this way, by far the greatest was poor old Francie, the retired clerk and supercargo.

Francie was naturally a man of fair talent and active curiosity. Nor was he by any means deficient in acquirement. He wrote and figured well, and knew a good deal about at least the theory of business; and when articled in early life to a Cromarty merchant and shopkeeper, it was with tolerably fair prospects of getting on in the world. He had, however, a certain infirmity of brain, which rendered both talent and acquirement of but little avail, and that began to manifest itself very early. While yet an apprentice, on ascertaining that the way was clear, he used, though grown a tall lad, to bolt out from behind the counter into the middle of a green directly opposite, and there, joining in the sports of some group of youngsters, which the place rarely wanted, he would play out half a game at marbles, or honey-pots, or hy-spy, and, when he saw his master or a customer approaching, bolt back again The thing was not deemed seemly; but Francie, when spoken to on the subject, could speak as sensibly as any young person of his years. He needed relaxation, he used to say, though he never suffered it to interfere with his proper business; and where was there safer relaxation to be found than among innocent children? This, of course, was eminently rational, and even virtuous. And so, when his term of apprenticeship had expired, Francie was despatched, not without hope of success, to Newfoundland,—where he had relations extensively engaged in the fishing trade,—to serve as one of their clerks. He was found to be a competent clerk; but unluckily there was but little known of the interior of the island at the time; and some of the places most distant from St. John's, such as the Bay and River of Exploits, bore tempting names; and so, after Francie had made many inquiries at the older inhabitants regarding what was to be seen amid the scraggy brushwood and broken rocks of the inner country, a morning came in which he was reported missing at the office; and little else could be learned respecting him, than that at early dawn he had been seen setting out for the woods, provided with staff and knapsack. He returned in about a week, worn out and half-starved. He had not been so successful as he had anticipated, he said, in providing himself by the way with food, and so he had to turn back ere he could reach the point on which he had previously determined; but he was sure he would be happier in his next journey. It was palpably unsafe to suffer him to remain exposed to the temptation of an unexplored country; and as his friends and superiors at St. John's had just laden a vessel with fish for the Italian market during Lent, Francie was despatched with her as supercargo, to look after the sales, in a land of which every footbreadth had been familiar to men for thousands of years, and in which it was supposed he would have no inducement to wander. Francie, however, had read much about Italy; and finding, on landing at Leghorn, that he was within a short distance of Pisa, he left ship and cargo to take care of themselves, and set out on foot to see the famous hanging tower, and the great marble cathedral. And tower and cathedral he did see: but it was meanwhile found that he was not quite suited for a supercargo; and he had shortly after to return to Scotland, where his friends succeeded in establishing him in the capacity of clerk and overseer upon a small property in Forfarshire, which was farmed by the proprietor on what was then the newly introduced modern system. He was acquainted, however, with the classical description of Glammis Castle, in the letters of the poet Gray; and after visiting the castle, he set out to examine the ancient encampment at Ardoch—the Lindum of the Romans. Finally, all hopes of getting him settled at a distance being given up by his friends, he had to fall back upon Cromarty, where he was yet once more appointed to a clerkship. The establishment with which he was now connected was a large hempen manufactory; and it was his chief employment to register the quantities of hemp given out to the spinners, and the number of hanks of yarn into which they had converted it, when given in. He soon, however, began to take long walks; and the old women, with their yarn, would be often found accumulated, ere his return, by tens and dozens at his office-door. At length, after taking a very long walk indeed, for it stretched from near the opening to the head of the Cromarty Firth, a distance of about twenty miles, and included in its survey the antique tower of Kinkell and the old Castle of Craighouse, he was relieved from the duties of his clerkship, and left to pursue his researches undisturbed, on a small annuity, the gift of his friends. He was considerably advanced in life ere I knew him, profoundly grave, and very taciturn, and, though he never discussed politics, a mighty reader of the newspapers. "Oh! this is terrible," I have heard him exclaim, when on one occasion a snow storm had blocked up both the coast and the Highland roads for a week together, and arrested the northward course of the mails,—"It is terrible to be left in utter ignorance of the public business of the country!"

Francie, whom every one called Mr. —— to his face, and always Francie when his back was turned, chiefly because it was known he was punctilious on the point, and did not like the more familiar term, used in the winter evenings to be a regular member of the circle that met beside my Uncle James's work-table. And, chiefly through the influence, in the first instance, of my uncles, I was permitted to visit him in his own room—a privilege enjoyed by scarce any one else—and even invited to borrow his books. His room—a dark and melancholy chamber, grey with dust—always contained a number of curious but not very rare things, which he had picked up in his walks—prettily coloured fungi—vegetable monstrosities of the commoner kind, such as "fause craws' nests," and flattened twigs of pine—and with these, as the representatives of another department of natural science, fragments of semi-transparent quartz or of glittering feldspar, and sheets of mica a little above the ordinary size. But the charm of the apartment lay in its books. Francie was a book-fancier, and lacked only the necessary wealth to be in the possession of a very pretty collection. As it was, he had some curious volumes; among others, a first-edition copy of the "Nineteen Years' Travels of William Lithgow," with an ancient woodcut, representing the said William in the background, with his head brushing the skies, and, far in front, two of the tombs which covered the heroes of Ilium, barely tall enough to reach half-way to his knee, and of the length, in proportion to the size of the traveller, of ordinary octavo volumes. He had black-letter books, too, on astrology, and on the planetary properties of vegetables; and an ancient book on medicine, that recommended as a cure for the toothache a bit of the jaw of a suicide, well triturated; and, as an infallible remedy for the falling-sickness, an ounce or two of the brains of a young man, carefully dried over the fire. Better, however, than these, for at least my purpose, he had a tolerably complete collection of the British essayists, from Addison to Mackenzie, with the "Essays" and "Citizen of the World" of Goldsmith; several interesting works of travels and voyages, translated from the French; and translations from the German, of Lavater, Zimmerman, and Klopstock. He had a good many of the minor poets too; and I was enabled to cultivate, mainly from his collection, a tolerably adequate acquaintance with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne. Poor Francie was at bottom a kindly and honest man; but the more intimately one knew him, the more did the weakness and brokenness of his intellect appear. His mind was a labyrinth without a clue, in whose recesses there lay stored up a vast amount of book-knowledge, that could never be found when wanted, and was of no sort of use to himself, or any one else. I got sufficiently into his confidence to be informed, under the seal of strict secrecy, that he contemplated producing a great literary work, whose special character he had not quite determined, but which was to be begun a few years hence. And when death found him, at an age which did not fall far short of the allotted threescore and ten, the great unknown work was still an undefined idea, and had still to be begun.

There were several other branches of my education going on at this time outside the pale of the school, in which, though I succeeded in amusing myself, I was no trifler. The shores of Cromarty are strewed over with water-rolled fragments of the primary rocks, derived chiefly from the west during the ages of the boulder clay; and I soon learned to take a deep interest in sauntering over the various pebble-beds when shaken up by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their numerous components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary; and as, according to Cowper, "the growth of what is excellent is slow," it was not until long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of representing the various species of simple rocks, by certain numerals, and the compound ones by the numerals representative of each separate component, ranged, as in vulgar fractions, along a medial line, with the figures representative of the prevailing materials of the mass above, and those representative of the materials in less proportions below. Though, however, wholly deficient in the signs proper to represent what I knew, I soon acquired a considerable quickness of eye in distinguishing the various kinds of rock, and tolerably definite conceptions of the generic character of the porphyries, granites, gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, and mica-schists, which everywhere strewed the beach. In the rocks of mechanical origin I was at this time much less interested; but in individual, as in general history, mineralogy almost always precedes geology. I was fortunate enough to discover, one happy morning, among the lumber and debris of old John Feddes's dark room, an antique-fashioned hammer, which had belonged, my mother told me, to old John himself more than a hundred years before. It was an uncouth sort of implement, with a handle of strong black oak, and a short, compact head, square on the one face and oblong on the other. And though it dealt rather an obtuse blow, the temper was excellent, and the haft firmly set; and I went about with it, breaking into all manner of stones, with great perseverance and success. I found, in a large-grained granite, a few sheets of beautiful black mica, that, when split exceedingly thin, and pasted between slips of mica of the ordinary kind, made admirably-coloured eye-glasses, that converted the landscapes around into richly-toned drawings in sepia; and numerous crystals of garnet embedded in mica-schist, that were, I was sure, identical with the stones set in a little gold brooch, the property of my mother. To this last surmise, however, some of the neighbours to whom I showed my prize demurred. The stones in my mother's brooch were precious stones, they said; whereas what I had found was merely a "stone upon the shore." My friend the cabinet-maker went so far as to say that the specimen was but a mass of plum-pudding stone, and its dark-coloured enclosures simply the currants; but then, on the other hand, Uncle Sandy took my view of the matter: the stone was not plum-pudding stone, he said: he had often seen plum-pudding stone in England, and knew it to be a sort of rough conglomerate of various components; whereas my stone was composed of a finely-grained silvery substance, and the crystals which it contained were, he was sure, gems like those in the brooch, and, so far as he could judge, real garnets. This was a great decision; and, much encouraged in consequence, I soon ascertained that garnets are by no means rare among the pebbles of the Cromarty shore. Nay, so mixed up are they with its sands even,—a consequence of the abundance of the mineral among the primary rocks of Ross,—that after a heavy surf has beaten the exposed beach of the neighbouring hill, there may be found on it patches of comminuted garnet, from one to three square yards in extent, that resemble, at a little distance, pieces of crimson carpeting, and nearer at hand, sheets of crimson bead-work, and of which almost every point and particle is a gem. From some unexplained circumstance, connected apparently with the specific gravity of the substance, it separates in this style from the general mass, on coasts much beaten by the waves; but the garnets of these curious pavements, though so exceedingly abundant, are in every instance exceedingly minute. I never detected in them a fragment greatly larger than a pin-head; but it was always with much delight that I used to fling myself down on the shore beside some newly-discovered patch, and bethink me, as I passed my fingers along the larger grains, of the heaps of gems in Aladdin's cavern, or of Sinbad's valley of diamonds.

The Hill of Cromarty formed at this time at once my true school and favourite play-ground; and if my master did wink at times harder than master ought, when I was playing truant among its woods or on its shores, it was, I believe, whether he thought so or no, all for the best. My uncle Sandy had, as I have already said, been bred a cartwright; but finding, on his return, after his seven years' service on board a man-of-war, that the place had cartwrights enough for all the employment, he applied himself to the humble but not unremunerative profession of a sawyer, and used often to pitch his saw-pit, in the more genial seasons of the year, among the woods of the hill. I remember, he never failed setting it down in some pretty spot, sheltered from the prevailing winds under the lee of some fern-covered rising ground or some bosky thicket, and always in the near neighbourhood of a spring; and it used to be one of my most delightful exercises to find out for myself among the thick woods, in some holiday journey of exploration, the place of a newly-formed pit. With the saw-pit as my baseline of operations, and secure always of a share in Uncle Sandy's dinner, I used to make excursions of discovery on every side,—now among the thicker tracts of wood, which bore among the town-boys, from the twilight gloom that ever rested in their recesses, the name of "the dungeons;" and anon to the precipitous sea-shore, with its wild cliffs and caverns. The Hill of Cromarty is one of a chain belonging to the great Ben Nevis line of elevation; and, though it occurs in a sandstone district, is itself a huge primary mass, upheaved of old from the abyss, and composed chiefly of granitic gneiss and a red splintery horn-stone. It contains also numerous veins and beds of hornblend rock and chlorite-schist, and of a peculiar-looking granite, of which the quartz is white as milk, and the feldspar red as blood. When still wet by the receding tide, these veins and beds seem as if highly polished, and present a beautiful aspect; and it was always with great delight that I used to pick my way among them, hammer in hand, and fill my pockets with specimens.

There was one locality which I in especial loved. No path runs the way. On the one side, an abrupt iron-tinged promontory, so remarkable for its human-like profile, that it seems part of a half-buried sphinx, protrudes into the deep green water. On the other—less prominent, for even at full tide the traveller can wind between its base and the sea—there rises a shattered and ruined precipice, seamed with blood-red ironstone, that retains on its surface the bright metallic gleam, and amid whose piles of loose and fractured rock one may still detect fragments of stalactite. The stalactite is all that remains of a spacious cavern, which once hollowed the precipice, but which, more than a hundred years before, had tumbled down during a thunder-storm, when filled with a flock of sheep, and penned up the poor creatures for ever. The space between these headlands forms an irregular crescent of great height, covered with wood a-top, and amid whose lichened crags, and on whose steep slopes, the hawthorn, and bramble, and wild rasp, and rock strawberry, take root, with many a scraggy shrub and sweet wild flower besides; while along its base lie huge blocks of green hornblend, on a rude pavement of granitic gneiss, traversed at one point, for many yards, by a broad vein of milk-white quartz. The quartz vein formed my central point of attraction in this wild paradise. The white stone, thickly traversed by threads of purple and red, is a beautiful though unworkable rock; and I soon ascertained that it is flanked by a vein of feldspar broader than itself, of a brick-red tint, and the red stone flanked, in turn, by a drab-coloured vein of the same mineral, in which there occur in great abundance masses of a homogeneous mica,—mica not existing in lamina, but, if I may use the term, as a sort of micaceous felt. It would almost seem as if some gigantic experimenter of the old world had set himself to separate into their simple mineral components the granitic rocks of the hill, and that the three parallel veins were the results of his labour. Such, however, was not the sort of idea which they at this time suggested to me. I had read in Sir Walter Raleigh's voyage to Guiana, the poetic description of that upper country in which the knight's exploration of the river Corale terminated, and where, amid lovely prospects of rich valleys, and wooded hills, and winding waters, almost every rock bore on its surface the yellow gleam of gold. True, according to the voyager, the precious metal was itself absent. But Sir Walter, on afterwards showing "some of the stones to a Spaniard of the Caraccas, was told by him they were la madre de oro, that is, the mother of gold, and that the mine itself was further in the ground." And though the quartz vein of the Cromarty Hill contained no metal more precious than iron, and but little even of that, it was, I felt sure, the "mother" of something very fine. As for silver, I was pretty certain I had found the "mother" of it, if not, indeed, the precious metal itself, in a cherty boulder, enclosing numerous cubes of rich galena; and occasional masses of iron pyrites gave, as I thought, large promise of gold. But though sometimes asked in humble irony, by the farm-servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed along the Cromarty beach, whether I was "getting siller in the stanes," I was so unlucky as never to be able to answer their question in the affirmative.

FOOTNOTE:

[2] There may have been truth in the allegation; at least the hangman of Inverness enjoyed, from time immemorial, a similar perquisite,—a peat out of every creel brought to the burgh market.

CHAPTER IV.

"Strange marble stones, here larger and there less,

And of full various forms, which still increase

In height and bulk by a continual drop.

Which upon each distilling from the top,

And falling still exactly on the crown.

There break themselves to mists, which, trickling down.

Crust into stone, and (but with leisure) swell

The sides, and still advance the miracle."—Charles Cotton.

It is low water in the Firth of Cromarty during stream tides, between six and seven o'clock in the evening; and my uncle Sandy, in returning from his work at the close of the day, used not unfrequently, when, according to the phrase of the place, "there was a tide in the water," to strike down the hillside, and spend a quiet hour in the ebb. I delighted to accompany him on these occasions. There are professors of Natural History that know less of living nature than was known by Uncle Sandy; and I deemed it no small matter to have all the various productions of the sea with which he was acquainted pointed out to me in these walks, and to be in possession of his many curious anecdotes regarding them.

He was a skilful crab and lobster fisher, and knew every hole and cranny, along several miles of rocky shore, in which the creatures were accustomed to shelter, with not a few of their own peculiarities of character. Contrary to the view taken by some of our naturalists, such as Agassiz, who hold that the crab—a genus comparatively recent in its appearance in creation—is less embryotic in its character, and higher in its standing, than the more ancient lobster, my uncle regarded the lobster as a more highly developed and more intelligent animal than the crab. The hole in which the lobster lodges has almost always two openings, he has said, through one of which it sometimes contrives to escape when the other is stormed by the fisher; whereas the crab is usually content, like the "rat devoid of soul," with a hole of only one opening; and, besides, gets so angry in most cases with his assailant, as to become more bent on assault than escape, and so loses himself through sheer loss of temper. And yet the crab has, he used to add, some points of intelligence about him too. When, as sometimes happened, he got hold, in his dark narrow recess in the rock, of some luckless digit, my uncle showed me how that, after the first tremendous squeeze, he began always to experiment upon what he had got, by alternately slackening and straitening his grasp, as if to ascertain whether it had life in it, or was merely a piece of dead matter; and that the only way to escape him, on these trying occasions, was to let the finger lie passively between his nippers, as if it were a bit of stick or tangle; when, apparently deeming it such, he would be sure to let it go; whereas, on the least attempt to withdraw it, he would at once straiten his gripe, and not again relax it for mayhap half an hour. In dealing with the lobster, on the other hand, the fisher had to beware that he did not depend too much on the hold he had got of the creature, if it was merely a hold of one of the great claws. For a moment it would remain passive in his grasp; he would then be sensible of a slight tremor in the captured limb, and mayhap hear a slight crackle; and, presto, the captive would straightway be off like a dart through the deep-water hole, and only the limb remain in the fisher's hand. My uncle has, however, told me that lobsters do not always lose their limbs with the necessary judgment. They throw them off when suddenly frightened, without first waiting to consider whether the sacrifice of a pair of legs is the best mode of obviating the danger. On firing a musket immediately over a lobster just captured, he has seen it throw off both its great claws in the sudden extremity of its terror, just as a panic-struck soldier sometimes throws away his weapons. Such, in kind, were the anecdotes of Uncle Sandy. He instructed me, too, how to find, amid thickets of laminaria and fuci, the nest of the lump-fish, and taught me to look well in its immediate neighbourhood for the male and female fish, especially for the male; and showed me further, that the hard-shelled spawn of this creature may, when well washed, be eaten raw, and forms at least as palatable a viand in that state as the imported caviare of Russia and the Caspian. There were instances in which the common crow acted as a sort of jackal to us in our lump-fish explorations. We would see him busied at the side of some fuci-covered pool, screaming and cawing as if engaged in combating an enemy; and, on going up to the place, we used to find the lump-fish he had killed fresh and entire, but divested of the eyes, which we found, as a matter of course, that the assailant, in order to make sure of victory, had taken the precaution of picking out at an early stage of the contest.

Nor was it with merely the edible that we busied ourselves on these journeys. The brilliant metallic plumage of the sea mouse (Aphrodita), steeped as in the dyes of the rainbow, excited our admiration time after time; and still higher wonder used to be awakened by a much rarer annelid, brown, and slender as a piece of rope-yarn, and from thirty to forty feet in length, which no one save my uncle had ever found along the Cromarty shores, and which, when broken in two, as sometimes happened in the measuring, divided its vitality so equally between the pieces, that each was fitted, we could not doubt, though unable to repeat in the case the experiment of Spallanzani, to set up as an independent existence, and carry on business for itself. The annelids, too, that form for themselves tubular dwellings built up of large grains of sand (amphitrites), always excited our interest. Two hand-shaped tufts of golden-hued setæ—furnished, however, with greatly more than the typical number of fingers—rise from the shoulders of these creatures, and must, I suspect, be used as hands in the process of building; at least the hands of the most practised builder could not set stones with nicer skill than is exhibited by these worms in the setting of the grains which compose their cylindrical dwellings—dwellings that, from their form and structure, seem suited to remind the antiquary of the round towers of Ireland, and, from the style of their masonry, of old Cyclopean walls. Even the mason-wasps and bees are greatly inferior workmen to these mason amphitrites. I was introduced also, in our ebb excursions, to the cuttle-fish and the sea-hare, and shown how the one, when pursued by an enemy, discharges a cloud of ink to conceal its retreat, and that the other darkens the water around it with a lovely purple pigment, which my uncle was pretty sure would make a rich dye, like that extracted of old by the Tyrians from a whelk which he had often seen on the beach near Alexandria. I learned, too, to cultivate an acquaintance with some two or three species of doris, that carry their arboraceous, tree-like lungs on their backs, as Macduff's soldiers carried the boughs of Birnam wood to the Hill of Dunsinane; and I soon acquired a sort of affection for certain shells, which bore, as I supposed, a more exotic aspect than their neighbours. Among these were, Trochus Zizyphinus, with its flame-like markings of crimson, on a ground of paley-brown; Patella pellucida, with its lustrous rays of vivid blue on its dark epidermis, that resemble the sparks of a firework breaking against a cloud; and, above all, Cypræa Europea, a not rare shell further to the north, but so little abundant in the Firth of Cromarty, as to render the live animal, when once or twice in a season I used to find it creeping on the laminaria at the extreme outer edge of the tide-line, with its wide orange mantle flowing liberally around it, somewhat of a prize. In short, the tract of sea-bottom laid dry by the ebb formed an admirable school, and Uncle Sandy an excellent teacher, under whom I was not in the least disposed to trifle; and when, long after, I learned to detect old-marine bottoms far out of sight of the sea—now amid the ancient forest-covered Silurians of central England, and anon opening to the light on some hillside among the Mountain Limestones of our own country—I have felt how very much I owed to his instructions.

His facts wanted a vocabulary adequately fitted to represent them; but though they "lacked a commodity of good names," they were all founded on careful observation, and possessed that first element of respectability—perfect originality: they were all acquired by himself. I owed more, however, to the habit of observation which he assisted me in forming, than even to his facts; and yet some of these were of high value. He has shown me, for instance, that an immense granitic boulder in the neighbourhood of the town, known for ages as the Clach Malloch, or Cursed Stone, stands so exactly in the line of low water, that the larger stream-tides of March and September lay dry its inner side, but never its outer one;—round the outer side there are always from two to four inches of water; and such had been the case for at least a hundred years before, in his father's and grandfather's days—evidence enough of itself, I have heard him say, that the relative levels of sea and land were not altering; though during the lapsed century the waves had so largely encroached on the low flat shores, that elderly men of his acquaintance, long since passed away, had actually held the plough when young where they had held the rudder when old. He used, too, to point out to me the effect of certain winds upon the tides. A strong hasty gale from the east, if coincident with a spring-tide, sent up the waves high upon the beach, and cut away whole roods of the soil; but the gales that usually kept larger tides from falling during ebb were prolonged gales from the west. A series of these, even when not very high, left not unfrequently from one to two feet water round the Clach Malloch, during stream-tides, that would otherwise have laid its bottom bare—a proof, he used to say, that the German Ocean, from its want of breadth, could not be heaped up against our coasts to the same extent, by the violence of a very powerful east wind, as the Atlantic by the force of a comparatively moderate westerly one. It is not improbable that the philosophy of the Drift Current, and of the apparently reactionary Gulf Stream, may be embodied in this simple remark.

The woods on the lower slopes of the hill, when there was no access to the zones covered save at low ebb by the sea, furnished me with employment of another kind. I learned to look with interest on the workings of certain insects, and to understand some of at least their simpler instincts. The large Diadem Spider, which spins so strong a web, that, in pressing my way through the furze thickets, I could hear its white silken cords crack as they yielded before me, and which I found skilled, like an ancient magician, in the strange art of rendering itself invisible in the clearest light, was an especial favourite; though its great size, and the wild stories I had read about the bite of its cogener the tarantula, made me cultivate its acquaintance somewhat at a distance. Often, however, have I stood beside its large web, when the creature occupied its place in the centre, and, touching it with a withered grass stalk, I have seen it sullenly swing on the lines "with its hands," and then shake them with a motion so rapid, that—like Carathis, the mother of the Caliph Vathek, who, when her hour of doom had come, "glanced off in a rapid whirl, which rendered her invisible"—the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes together. Nothing appeals more powerfully to the youthful fancy than those coats, rings, and amulets of eastern lore, that conferred on their possessors the gift of invisibility. I learned, too, to take an especial interest in what, though they belong to a different family, are known as the Water Spiders; and have watched them speeding by fits and starts, like skaters on the ice, across the surface of some woodland spring or streamlet—fearless walkers on the waters, that, with true faith in the integrity of the implanted instinct, never made shipwreck in the eddy or sank in the pool. It is to these little creatures that Wordsworth refers in one of his sonnets on sleep:—

"O sleep, thou art to me

A fly that up and down himself doth shove

Upon a fretful rivulet; now above,

Now on the water, vexed with mockery."

As shown, however, to the poet himself on one occasion, somewhat to his discomfort, by assuredly no mean authority—Mr. James Wilson—the "vexed" "fly," though one of the hemipterous insects, never uses its wings, and so never gets "above" the water. Among my other favourites were the splendid dragon-flies, the crimson-speckled Burnet moths, and the small azure butterflies, that, when fluttering among delicate harebells and crimson-tipped daisies, used to suggest to me, long ere I became acquainted with the pretty figure of Moore,[3] or even ere the figure had been produced, the idea of flowers that had taken to flying. The wild honey bees, too, in their several species, had peculiar charms for me. There were the buff-coloured carders, that erected over their honey-jars domes of moss; the lapidary red-tipped bees, that built amid the recesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone walls, and were so invincibly brave in defending their homesteads, that they never gave up the quarrel till they died; and, above all, the yellow-zoned humble-bees, that lodged deep in the ground along the dry sides of grassy banks, and were usually wealthier in honey than any of their cogeners, and existed in larger communities. But the herd-boys of the parish, and the foxes of its woods and brakes, shared in my interest in the wild honey bees, and, in the pursuit of something else than knowledge, were ruthless robbers of their nests. I often observed, that the fox, with all his reputed shrewdness, is not particularly knowing on the subject of bees. He makes as dead a set on a wasp's nest as on that of the carder or humble-bee, and gets, I doubt not, heartily stung for his pains; for though, as shown by the marks of his teeth, left on fragments of the paper combs scattered about, he attempts eating the young wasps in the chrysalis state, the undevoured remains seem to argue that he is but little pleased with them as food. There were occasions, however, in which even the herd-boys met with only disappointment in their bee-hunting excursions; and in one notable instance, the result of the adventure used to be spoken of in school and elsewhere, under our breath and in secret, as something very horrible. A party of boys had stormed a humble-bees' nest on the side of the old chapel-brae, and, digging inwards along the narrow winding earth passage, they at length came to a grinning human skull, and saw the bees issuing thick from out a round hole at its base—the foramen magnum. The wise little workers had actually formed their nest within the hollow of the head, once occupied by the busy brain; and their spoilers, more scrupulous than Samson of old, who seems to have enjoyed the meat brought forth out of the eater, and the sweetness extracted from the strong, left in very great consternation their honey all to themselves.

One of my discoveries of this early period would have been deemed a not unimportant one by the geologist. Among the woods of the hill, a short half-mile from the town, there is a morass of comparatively small extent, but considerable depth, which had been laid open by the bursting of a waterspout on the uplands, and in which the dark peaty chasm remained unclosed, though the event had happened ere my birth, until I had become old and curious enough thoroughly to explore it. It was a black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in depth. The bogs around waved thick with silvery willows of small size; but sticking out from the black sides of the ravine itself, and in some instances stretched across it from side to side, lay the decayed remains of huge giants of the vegetable world, that had flourished and died long ages ere, in at least our northern part of the island, the course of history had begun. There were oaks of enormous girth, into whose coal-black substance one could dig as easily with a pickaxe as one digs into a bank of clay; and at least one noble elm, which ran across the little stream that trickled, rather than flowed, along the bottom of the hollow, and which was in such a state of keeping, that I have scooped out of its trunk, with the unassisted hand, a way for the water. I have found in the ravine—which I learned very much to like as a scene of exploration, though I never failed to quit it sadly bemired—handfuls of hazel-nuts, of the ordinary size, but black as jet, with the cups of acorns, and with twigs of birch that still retained almost unchanged their silvery outer crust of bark, but whose ligneous interior existed as a mere pulp. I have even laid open, in layers of a sort of unctuous clay, resembling fuller's earth, leaves of oak, birch, and hazel, that had fluttered in the wind thousands of years before; and there was one happy day in which I succeeded in digging from out the very bottom of the excavation a huge fragment of an extraordinary-looking deer's horn. It was a broad, massive, strange-looking piece of bone, evidently old-fashioned in its type; and so I brought it home in triumph to Uncle James, as the antiquary of the family, assured that he could tell me all about it. Uncle James paused in the middle of his work; and, taking the horn in his hand, surveyed it leisurely on every side. "That is the horn, boy," he at length said, "of no deer that now lives in this country. We have the red deer, and the fallow deer, and the roe; and none of them have horns at all like that. I never saw an elk; but I am pretty sure this broad, plank-like horn can be none other than the horn of an elk." My uncle set aside his work; and, taking the horn in his hand, went out to the shop of a cabinet-maker in the neighbourhood, where there used to work from five to six journeymen. They all gathered round him to examine it, and agreed in the decision that it was an entirely different sort of horn from any borne by the existing deer of Scotland, and that this surmise regarding it was probably just. And, apparently to enhance the marvel, a neighbour, who was lounging in the shop at the time, remarked, in a tone of sober gravity, that it had lain in the Moss of the Willows "for perhaps half a century." There was positive anger in the tone of my uncle's reply. "Half a century, Sir!!" he exclaimed; "was the elk a native of Scotland half a century ago? There is no notice of the elk, Sir, in British history. That horn must have lain in the Moss of the Willows for thousands of years!" "Ah, ha, James, ah, ha," ejaculated the neighbour, with a sceptical shake of the head; but as neither he nor any one else dared meet my uncle on historical ground, the controversy took end with the ejaculation. I soon added to the horn of the elk that of a roe, and part of that of a red deer, found in the same ravine; and the neighbours, impressed by Uncle James's view, used to bring strangers to look at them. At length, unhappily, a relation settled in the south, who had shown me kindness, took a fancy to them; and, smit by the charms of a gorgeous paint-box which he had just sent me, I made them over to him entire. They found their way to London, and were ultimately lodged in the collection of some obscure virtuoso, whose locality or name I have been unable to trace.

The Cromarty Sutors have their two lines of caves—an ancient line hollowed by the waves many centuries ago, when the sea stood, in relation to the land, from fifteen to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does now; and a modern line, which the surf is still engaged in scooping out. Many of the older caves are lined with stalactites, deposited by springs that, filtering through the cracks and fissures of the gneiss, find lime enough in their passage to acquire what is known as a petrifying, though, in reality, only an incrusting quality. And these stalactites, under the name of "white stones made by the water," formed of old—as in that Cave of Slains specially mentioned by Buchanan and the Chroniclers, and in those caverns of the Peak so quaintly described by Cotton—one of the grand marvels of the place. Almost all the old gazetteers sufficiently copious in their details to mention Cromarty at all, refer to its "Dropping Cave" as a marvellous marble-producing cavern; and this "Dropping Cave" is but one of many that look out upon the sea from the precipices of the southern Sutor, in whose dark recesses the drops ever tinkle, and the stony ceilings ever grow. The wonder could not have been deemed a great or very rare one by a man like the late Sir George Mackenzie of Coul, well known from his travels in Iceland, and his experiments on the inflammability of the diamond; but it so happened, that Sir George, curious to see the sort of stones to which the old gazetteers referred, made application to the minister of the parish for a set of specimens; and the minister straightway deputed the commission, which he believed to be not a difficult one, to one of his poorer parishioners, an old nailer, as a means of putting a few shillings in his way.

It so happened, however, that the nailer had lost his wife by a sad accident, only a few weeks before; and the story went abroad that the poor woman was, as the townspeople expressed it, "coming back." She had been very suddenly hurried out of the world. When going down the quay after nightfall one evening, with a parcel of clean linen for a sailor, her relative, she had missed footing on the pier edge, and, half-brained, half-drowned, had been found in the morning, stone dead, at the bottom of the harbour. And now, as if pressed by some unsettled business, she used to be seen, it was said, hovering after nightfall about her old dwelling, or sauntering along the neighbouring street; nay, there were occasions, according to the general report, in which she had even exchanged words with some of the neighbours, little to their satisfaction. The words, however, seemed in every instance to have wonderfully little to do with the affairs of another world. I remember seeing the wife of a neighbour rush into my mother's one evening about this time, speechless with terror, and declare, after an awful pause, during which she had lain half-fainting in a chair, that she had just seen Christy. She had been engaged, as the night was falling, but ere darkness had quite set in, in piling up a load of brushwood for fuel outside the door, when up started the spectre on the other side of the heap, attired in the ordinary work-day garb of the deceased, and, in a light and hurried tone, asked, as Christy might have done ere the fatal accident, for a share of the brushwood. "Give me some of that hag," said the ghost; "you have plenty—I have none." It was not known whether or no the nailer had seen the apparition; but it was pretty certain he believed in it; and as the "Dropping Cave" is both dark and solitary, and had forty years ago a bad name to boot—for the mermaid had been observed disporting in front of it even at mid-day, and lights and screams heard from it at nights—it must have been a rather formidable place to a man living in the momentary expectation of a visit from a dead wife. So far as could be ascertained—for the nailer himself was rather close in the matter—he had not entered the cave at all. He seemed, judging from the marks of scraping left along the sides for about two or three feet from the narrow opening, to have taken his stand outside, where the light was good, and the way of retreat clear, and to have raked outwards to him, as far as he could reach, all that stuck to the walls, including ropy slime and mouldy damp, but not one particle of stalactite. It was, of course, seen that his specimens would not suit Sir George; and the minister, in the extremity of the case, applied to my uncles, though with some little unwillingness, as it was known that no remuneration for their trouble could be offered to them. My uncles were, however, delighted with the commission—it was all for the benefit of science; and, providing themselves with torches and a hammer, they set out for the caves. And I, of course, accompanied them—a very happy boy—armed, like themselves, with hammer and torch, and prepared devotedly to labour in behalf of science and Sir George.

I had never before seen the caves by torch-light; and though what I now witnessed did not quite come up to what I had read regarding the Grotto of Antiparos, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably both strange and fine. The celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior—as is not unfrequently the case with the celebrated—to a cave almost entirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little further to the east; and yet even it had its interest. It widened, as one entered, into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp and the shade; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave, however, we found to be of much greater extent, and of more varied character. It is one of three caves of the old coast line, known as the Doocot or Pigeon Caves, which open upon a piece of rocky beach, overhung by a rudely semicircular range of gloomy precipices. The points of the semicircle project on either side into deep water—into at least water so much deeper than the fall of ordinary neaps, that it is only during the ebb of stream tides that the place is accessible by land; and in each of these bold promontories—the terminal horns of the crescent—there is a cave of the present coast-line, deeply hollowed, in which the sea stands from ten to twelve feet in depth when the tide is at full, and in which the surf thunders, when gales blow hard from the stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave in the western promontory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of the "Puir Wife's Meal Kist," has its roof drilled by two small perforations—the largest of them not a great deal wider than the blow-hole of a porpoise—that open externally among the cliffs above; and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore like green moving walls, there are certain times of the tide in which they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within, that it rushes upwards through the openings, roaring in its escape as if ten whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in two white jets of vapour, distinctly visible, to the height of from sixty to eighty feet. If there be critics who have deemed it one of the extravagances of Goethe that he should have given life and motion, as in his famous witch-scene in "Faust," to the Hartz crags, they would do well to visit this bold headland during some winter tempest from the east, and find his description perfectly sober and true:

"See the giant crags, oh ho!

How they snort and how they blow!"

Within, at the bottom of the crescent, and where the tide never reaches when at the fullest, we found the large pigeon cave which we had come to explore, hollowed for about a hundred and fifty feet in the line of a fault. There runs across the opening the broken remains of a wall erected by some monopolizing proprietor of the neighbouring lands, with the intention of appropriating to himself the pigeons of the cavern; but his day, even at this time, had been long gone by, and the wall had sunk into a ruin. As we advanced, the cave caught the echoes of our footsteps, and a flock of pigeons, startled from their nests, came whizzing out, almost brushing us with their wings. The damp floor sounded hollow to the tread; we saw the green mossy sides, which close in the uncertain light, more than twenty feet overhead, furrowed by ridges of stalactites, that became whiter and purer as they retired from the vegetative influences; and marked that the last plant which appeared as we wended our way inwards was a minute green moss, about half an inch in length, which slanted outwards on the prominence of the sides, and overlay myriads of similar sprigs of moss, long before converted into stone, but which, faithful in death to the ruling law of their lives, still pointed, like the others, to the free air and the light. And then, in the deeper recesses of the cave, where the floor becomes covered with uneven sheets of stalagmite, and where long spear-like icicles and drapery-like foldings, pure as the marble of the sculptor, descend from above, or hang pendent over the sides, we found in abundance magnificent specimens for Sir George. The entire expedition was one of wondrous interest; and I returned next day to school, big with description and narrative, to excite, by truths more marvellous than fiction, the curiosity of my class-fellows.

I had previously introduced them to the marvels of the hill; and during our Saturday half-holidays, some of them had accompanied me in my excursions to it. But it had failed, somehow, to catch their fancy. It was too solitary, and too far from home, and, as a scene of amusement, not at all equal to the town-links, where they could play at "shinty" and "French and English," almost within hail of their parents' homesteads. The very tract along its flat, moory summit, over which, according to tradition, Wallace had once driven before him in headlong rout a strong body of English, and which was actually mottled with sepulchral tumuli, still visible amid the heath, failed in any marked degree to engage them; and though they liked well enough to hear about the caves, they seemed to have no very great desire to see them. There was, however, one little fellow, who sat in the Latin form—the member of a class lower and brighter than the heavy one, though it was not particularly bright either—who differed in this respect from all the others. Though he was my junior by about a twelvemonth, and shorter by about half a head, he was a diligent boy in even the Grammar School, in which boys were so rarely diligent, and, for his years, a thoroughly sensible one, without a grain of the dreamer in his composition. I succeeded, however, notwithstanding his sobriety, in infecting him thoroughly with my peculiar tastes, and learned to love him very much, partly because he doubled my amusements by sharing in them, and partly, I daresay—on the principle on which Mahomet preferred his old wife to his young one—because "he believed in me." Devoted to him as Caliban in the Tempest to his friend Trinculo—

"I showed him the best springs, I plucked him berries.

And I with my long nails did dig him pig-nuts."

His curiosity on this occasion was largely excited by my description of the Doocot Cave; and, setting out one morning to explore its wonders, armed with John Feddes's hammer, in the benefits of which my friend was permitted liberally to share, we failed, for that day at least, in finding our way back.

It was on a pleasant spring morning that, with my little curious friend beside me, I stood on the beach opposite the eastern promontory, that, with its stern granitic wall, bars access for ten days out of every fourteen to the wonders of the Doocot; and saw it stretching provokingly out into the green water. It was hard to be disappointed, and the caves so near. The tide was a low neap, and if we wanted a passage dry-shod, it behoved us to wait for at least a week; but neither of us understood the philosophy of neap-tides at the period. I was quite sure I had got round at low water with my uncles not a great many days before, and we both inferred, that if we but succeeded in getting round now, it would be quite a pleasure to wait among the caves inside until such time as the fall of the tide should lay bare a passage for our return. A narrow and broken shelf runs along the promontory, on which, by the assistance of the naked toe and the toe-nail, it is just possible to creep. We succeeded in scrambling up to it; and then, crawling outwards on all fours—the precipice, as we proceeded, beetling more and more formidable from above, and the water becoming greener and deeper below—we reached the outer point of the promontory; and then doubling the cape on a still narrowing margin—the water, by a reverse process, becoming shallower and less green as we advanced inwards—we found the ledge terminating just where, after clearing the sea, it overhung the gravelly beach at an elevation of nearly ten feet. Adown we both dropped, proud of our success; up splashed the rattling gravel as we fell; and for at least the whole coming week—though we were unaware of the extent of our good luck at the time—the marvels of the Doocot Cave might be regarded as solely and exclusively our own. For one short seven days—to borrow emphasis from the phraseology of Carlyle—"they were our own, and no other man's."

The first few hours were hours of sheer enjoyment The larger cave proved a mine of marvels; and we found a great deal additional to wonder at on the slopes beneath the precipices, and along the piece of rocky sea-beach in front. We succeeded in discovering for ourselves, in creeping, dwarf bushes, that told of the blighting influences of the sea-spray; the pale yellow honeysuckle, that we had never seen before, save in gardens and shrubberies; and on a deeply-shaded slope that leaned against one of the steeper precipices, we detected the sweet-scented woodroof of the flower-plot and parterre, with its pretty verticillate leaves, that become the more odoriferous the more they are crushed, and its white delicate flowers. There, too, immediately in the opening of the deeper cave, where a small stream came pattering in detached drops from the over-beetling precipice above, like the first drops of a heavy thunder-shower, we found the hot, bitter scurvy grass, with its minute cruciform flowers, which the great Captain Cook had used in his voyages; above all, there were the caves with their pigeons—white, variegated, and blue—and their mysterious and gloomy depths, in which plants hardened into stone, and water became marble. In a short time we had broken off with our hammers whole pocketfuls of stalactites and petrified moss. There were little pools at the side of the cave, where we could see the work of congelation going on, as at the commencement of an October frost, when the cold north wind ruffles, and but barely ruffles, the surface of some mountain lochan or sluggish moorland stream, and shows the newly-formed needles of ice projecting mole-like from the shores into the water. So rapid was the course of deposition, that there were cases in which the sides of the hollows seemed growing almost in proportion as the water rose in them; the springs, lipping over, deposited their minute crystals on the edges; and the reservoirs deepened and became more capacious as their mounds were built up by this curious masonry. The long telescopic prospect of the sparkling sea, as viewed from the inner extremity of the cavern, while all around was dark as midnight—the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen for a moment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sunshine—the black heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of spray, and then, turning downwards, displayed its glossy back and vast angular fin—even the pigeons, as they shot whizzing by, one moment scarce visible in the gloom, the next radiant in the light—all acquired a new interest, from the peculiarity of the setting in which we saw them. They formed a series of sun-gilt vignettes, framed in jet; and it was long ere we tired of seeing and admiring in them much of the strange and the beautiful. It did seem rather ominous, however, and perhaps somewhat supernatural to boot, that about an hour after noon, the tide, while there was yet a full fathom of water beneath the brow of the promontory, ceased to fall, and then, after A quarter of an hour's space, began actually to creep upwards on the beach. But just hoping that there might be some mistake in the matter, which the evening tide would scarce fail to rectify, we continued to amuse ourselves, and to hope on. Hour after hour passed, lengthening as the shadows lengthened, and yet the tide still rose. The sun had sunk behind the precipices, and all was gloom along their bases, and double gloom in their caves; but their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose higher and higher, chased by the shadows; and then, after lingering for a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and the whole became sombre and grey. The sea-gull sprang upwards from where he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in his deep-sea stack; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf high on the precipice; the pigeons came whizzing downwards from the uplands and the opposite land, and disappeared amid the gloom of their caves; every creature that had wings made use of them in speeding homewards; but neither my companion nor myself had any; and there was no possibility of getting home without them. We made desperate efforts to scale the precipices, and on two several occasions succeeded in reaching mid-way shelves among the crags, where the sparrowhawk and the raven build; but though we had climbed well enough to render our return a matter of bare possibility, there was no possibility whatever of getting farther up: the cliffs had never been scaled before, and they were not destined to be scaled now. And so, as the twilight deepened, and the precarious footing became every moment more doubtful and precarious still, we had just to give up in despair. "Wouldn't care for myself," said the poor little fellow, my companion, bursting into tears, "if it were not for my mother; but what will my mother say?" "Wouldn't care neither," said I, with a heavy heart; "but it's just back water, and we'll get out at twall." We retreated together into one of the shallower and drier caves, and, clearing a little spot of its rough stones, and then groping along the rocks for the dry grass that in the spring season hangs from them in withered tufts, we formed for ourselves a most uncomfortable bed, and lay down in one another's arms. For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising dark and stormy in the sea-mouth: they had flared portentously in the setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre thundrous brown, and from sombre brown to doleful black. And we could now at least hear what they portended, though we could no longer see. The rising wind began to howl mournfully amid the cliffs, and the sea, hitherto so silent, to beat heavily against the shore, and to boom, like distress-guns, from the recesses of the two deep-sea caves. We could hear, too, the beating rain, now heavier, now lighter, as the gusts swelled or sank; and the intermittent patter of the streamlet over the deeper cave, now driving against the precipices, now descending heavily on the stones.

My companion had only the real evils of the case to deal with, and so, the hardness of our bed and the coldness of the night considered, he slept tolerably well; but I was unlucky enough to have evils greatly worse than the real ones to annoy me. The corpse of a drowned seaman had been found on the beach about a month previous, some forty yards firm where we lay. The hands and feet, miserably contracted, and corrugated into deep folds at every joint, yet swollen to twice their proper size, had been bleached as white as pieces of alumed sheep-skin; and where the head should have been, there existed only a sad mass of rubbish. I had examined the body, as young people are apt to do, a great deal too curiously for my peace; and, though I had never done the poor nameless seaman any harm, I could not have suffered more from him during that melancholy night, had I been his murderer. Sleeping or waking, he was continually before me. Every time I dropped into a doze, he would come stalking up the beach from the spot where he had lain, with his stiff white fingers, that stuck out like eagle's toes, and his pale, broken pulp of a head, and attempt striking me; and then I would awaken with a start, cling to my companion, and remember that the drowned sailor had lain festering among the identical bunches of sea-weed that still rotted on the beach not a stone-cast away. The near neighbourhood of a score of living bandits would have inspired less horror than the recollection of that one dead seaman.

Towards midnight the sky cleared and the wind fell, and the moon, in her last quarter, rose red as a mass of heated iron out of the sea. We crept down, in the uncertain light, over the rough slippery crags, to ascertain whether the tide had not fallen sufficiently far to yield us a passage; but we found the waves chafing among the rocks just where the tide-line had rested twelve hours before, and a full fathom of sea enclasping the base of the promontory. A glimmering idea of the real nature of our situation at length crossed my mind. It was not imprisonment for a tide to which we had consigned ourselves, it was imprisonment for a week. There was little comfort in the thought, arising, as it did, amid the chills and terrors of a dreary midnight; and I looked wistfully on the sea as our only path of escape. There was a vessel crossing the wake of the moon at the time, scarce half a mile from the shore; and, assisted by my companion, I began to shout at the top of my lungs, in the hope of being heard by the sailors. We saw her dim bulk falling slowly athwart the red glittering belt of light that had rendered her visible, and then disappearing in the murky blackness, and just as we lost sight of her for ever, we could hear an indistinct sound mingling with the dash of the waves—the shout, in reply, of the startled helmsman. The vessel, as we afterwards learned, was a large stone-lighter, deeply laden, and unfurnished with a boat; nor were her crew at all sure that it would have been safe to attend to the midnight voice from amid the rocks, even had they had the means of communication with the shore. We waited on and on, however, now shouting by turns, and now shouting together; but there was no second reply; and at length, losing hope, we groped our way back to our comfortless bed, just as the tide had again turned on the beach, and the waves began to roll upwards higher and higher at every dash.

As the moon rose and brightened, the dead seaman became less troublesome; and I had succeeded in dropping as soundly asleep as my companion, when we were both aroused by a loud shout. We started up and again crept downwards among the crags to the shore; and as we reached the sea the shout was repeated. It was that of at least a dozen harsh voices united. There was a brief pause, followed by another shout; and then two boats, strongly manned, shot round the western promontory, and the men, resting on their oars, turned towards the rock, and shouted yet again. The whole town had been alarmed by the intelligence that two little boys had straggled away in the morning to the rocks of the southern Sutor, and had not found their way back. The precipices had been a scene of frightful accidents from time immemorial, and it was at once inferred that one other sad accident had been added to the number. True, there were cases remembered of people having been tide-bound in the Doocot Caves, and not much the worse in consequence; but as the caves were inaccessible during neaps, we could not, it was said, possibly be in them; and the sole remaining ground of hope was, that, as had happened once before, only one of the two had been killed, and that the survivor was lingering among the rocks, afraid to come home. And in this belief, when the moon rose and the surf fell, the two boats had been fitted out. It was late in the morning ere we reached Cromarty, but a crowd on the beach awaited our arrival; and there were anxious-looking lights glancing in the windows, thick and manifold; nay, such was the interest elicited, that some enormously bad verses, in which the writer described the incident a few days after, became popular enough to be handed about in manuscript, and read at tea-parties by the élite of the town. Poor old Miss Bond, who kept the town boarding-school, got the piece nicely dressed up, somewhat on the principle upon which Macpherson translated Ossian; and at our first school-examination—proud and happy day for the author!—it was recited with vast applause, by one of her prettiest young ladies, before the assembled taste and fashion of Cromarty.

FOOTNOTE:

[3]

"The beautiful blue damsel flies,

That fluttered round the jasmine steins,

Like wingéd flowers or flying gems."

Paradise and the Peel.

CHAPTER V.

"The wise

Shook their white aged heads o'er me, and said.

Of Such materials wretched men were made."—Byron.

The report went abroad about this time, not without some foundation, that Miss Bond purposed patronizing me. The copy of my verses which had fallen into her hands—a genuine holograph—bore a-top a magnificent view of the Doocot, in which horrid crags of burnt umber were perforated by yawning caverns of Indian ink, and crested by a dense pine-forest of sap-green; while vast waves blue on the one side and green on the other, and bearing blotches of white lead a-top, rolled frightfully beneath. And Miss Bond had concluded, it was said, that such a genius as that evinced by the sketch and the "poem" for those sister arts of painting and poesy in which she herself excelled, should not be left to waste itself uncared for in the desert wilderness. She had published, shortly before, a work, in two slim volumes, entitled, "Letters of a Village Governess"—a curious kind of medley, little amenable to the ordinary rules, but a genial book notwithstanding, with more heart than head about it; and not a few of the incidents which it related had the merit of being true. It was an unlucky merit for poor Miss Bond. She dated her book from Fortrose, where she taught what was designated in the Almanac as the boarding-school of the place, but which, according to Miss Bond's own description, was the school of the "village governess." And as her tales were found to be a kind of mosaics composed of droll bits of fact picked up in the neighbourhood, Fortrose soon became considerably too hot for her. She had drawn, under the over-transparent guise of the niggardly Mrs. Flint, the skinflint wife of a "paper minister," who had ruined at one fell blow her best silk dress, and a dozen of good eggs to boot, by putting the eggs in her pocket when going out to a party, and then stumbling over a stone. And, of course, Mrs. Skinflint and the Rev. Mr. Skinflint, with all their blood-relations, could not be other than greatly gratified to find the story furbished up in the printed form, and set in fun. There were other stories as imprudent and as amusing—of young ladies caught eavesdropping at their neighbours' windows; and of gentlemen, ill at ease in their families, sitting soaking among vulgar companions in the public-house; and so the authoress, shortly after the appearance of her work, ceased to be the village governess of Fortrose, and became the village governess of Cromarty.

It was on this occasion that I saw, for the first time, with mingled admiration and awe, a human creature—not dead and gone, and merely a printed name—that had actually published a book. Poor Miss Bond was a kindly sort of person, fond of children, and mightily beloved by them in turn; and, though keenly alive to the ludicrous, without a grain of malice in her. I remember how, about this time, when, assisted by some three or four boys more, I had succeeded in building a huge house, full four feet long and three feet high, that contained us all, and a fire, and a great deal of smoke to boot, Miss Bond the authoress came, and looked in upon us, first through the little door, and then down through the chimney, and gave us kind words, and seemed to enjoy our enjoyment very much; and how we all deemed her visit one of the greatest events that could possibly have taken place. She had been intimate with the parents of Sir Walter Scott; and, on the appearance of Sir Walter's first publication, the "Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border," she had taken a fit of enthusiasm, and written to him; and, when in the cold paroxysm, and inclined to think she had done something foolish, had received from Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, a characteristically warm-hearted reply. She experienced much kindness at his hands ever after; and when she herself became an author, she dedicated her book to him. He now and then procured boarders for her; and when, after leaving Cromarty for Edinburgh, she opened a school in the latter place, and got on with but indifferent success, Sir Walter—though straggling with his own difficulties at the time—sent her an enclosure of ten pounds, to scare, as he said in his note, "the wolf from the door." But Miss Bond, like the original of his own Jeanie Deans, was a "proud bodie;" and the ten pounds were returned, with the intimation that the wolf had not yet come to the door. Poor lady! I suspect he came to the door at last. Like many other writers of books, her voyage through life skirted, for the greater part of the way, the bleak lee-shore of necessity; and it cost her not a little skilful steering at times to give the strand a respectable offing. And in her solitary old age, she seemed to have got fairly aground. There was an attempt made by some of her former pupils to raise money enough to purchase for her a small annuity; but when the design was in progress, I heard of her death. She illustrated in her life the remark recorded by herself in her "Letters," as made by a humble friend:—"It's no an easy thing, Mem, for a woman to go through the world without a head," i.e., single and unprotected.

From some unexplained cause, Miss Bond's patronage never reached me. I am sure the good lady intended giving me lessons in both drawing and composition; for she had said it, and her heart was a kind one; but then her time was too much occupied to admit of her devoting an occasional hour to myself alone; and as for introducing me to her young-lady classes, in my rough garments, ever greatly improved the wrong way by my explorations in the ebb and the peat-moss, and frayed, at times, beyond even my mother's ability of repair, by warping to the tops of great trees, and by feats as a cragsman—that would have been a piece of Jack-Cadeism, on which, then or now, no village governess could have ventured. And so I was left to get on in verse and picture-making quite in the wild way, without care or culture.

My schoolfellows liked my stories well enough—better at least, on most occasions, than they did the lessons of the master; but, beyond the common ground of enjoyment which these extempore compositions furnished to both the "sennachie" and his auditors, our tracts of amusement lay widely apart. I disliked, as I have said, the yearly cock-fight—found no pleasure in cat-killing, or in teasing at nights, or on the street, the cross-tempered, half-witted eccentrics of the village—usually kept aloof from the ordinary play-grounds, and very rarely mingled in the old hereditary games. On the other hand, with the exception of my little friend of the cave, who, even after that disastrous incident, evinced a tendency to trust and follow me as implicitly as before, my schoolmates cared as little for my amusements as I did for theirs; and, having the majority on their side, they of course voted mine to be the foolish ones. And certainly a run of ill-luck followed me in my sports about this time, that did give some show of reason to their decision.

In the course of my book-hunting, I had fallen in with two old-fashioned military treatises, part of the small library of a retired officer lately deceased, of which the one entitled the "Military Medley," discussed the whole art of marshalling troops, and contained numerous plans, neatly coloured, of battalions drawn up in all possible forms, to meet all possible exigencies; while the other, which also abounded in prints, treated of the noble science of fortification according to the system of Vauban. I poured over both works with much perseverance; and, regarding them as admirable toy-books, set myself to construct, on a very small scale, some of the toys with which they specially dealt. The sea-shore in the immediate neighbourhood of the town appeared to my inexperienced eye an excellent field for the carrying on of a campaign. The sea-sand I found quite coherent enough, when still moistened by the waters of the receding tide, to stand up in the form of towers and bastions, and long lines of rampart; and there was one of the commonest of the Littorinidæ—Littorina litoralis, that in one of its varieties is of a rich yellow colour, and in another of a bluish-green tint—which supplied me with soldiers enough to execute all the evolutions figured and described in the "Medley." The warmly-hued yellow shells represented Britons in their scarlet—the more dingy ones, the French in their uniforms of dirty blue; well-selected specimens of Purpura lapillus, just tipped on their backs with a speck of paint, blue or red, from my box, made capital dragoons; while a few dozens of the slender pyramidal shells of Turritella communis formed complete parks of artillery. With such unlimited stores of the matériel of war at my command, I was enabled, more fortunate than Uncle Toby of old, to fight battles and conduct retreats, assault and defend, build up fortifications, and then batter them down again, at no expense at all; and the only drawback on such a vast amount of advantage that I could at first perceive consisted in the circumstance, that the shore was exceedingly open to observation, and that my new amusements, when surveyed at a little distance, did greatly resemble those of the very young children of the place, who used to repair to the same arenaceous banks and shingle-beds, to bake dirt-pies in the sand, or range lines of shells on little shelves of stone, imitative of the crockery cupboard at home. Not only my school-fellows, but also some of their parents, evidently arrived at the conclusion that the two sets of amusements—mine and those of the little children—were identical; for the elder folk said, that "in their time, poor Francie had been such another boy, and every one saw what he had come to;" while the younger, more energetic in their manifestations, and more intolerant of folly, have even paused in their games of marbles, or ceased spinning their tops, to hoot at me from a safe distance. But the campaign went on; and I solaced myself by reflecting, that neither the big folk nor the little folk could bring a battalion of troops across a bridge of boats in the face of an enemy, or knew that a regular fortification could be constructed on only a regular polygon.

I at length discovered however, that as a sea-shore is always a sloping plane, and the Cromarty beach, in particular, a plane of a rather steep slope, it afforded no proper site for a fortress fitted to stand a protracted siege, seeing that, fortify the place as I might, it could be easily commanded by batteries raised on the higher side. And so fixing upon a grassy knoll among the woods, in the immediate neighbourhood of a scaur of boulder clay, capped by a thick stratum of sand, as a much better scene of operations, I took possession of the knoll somewhat irregularly; and carrying to it large quantities of sand from the scaur, converted it into the site of a magnificent stronghold. First I erected an ancient castle, consisting of four towers built on a rectangular base, and connected by straight curtains embrasured a-top. I then surrounded the castle by outworks in the modern style, consisting of greatly lower curtains than the ancient ones, flanked by numerous bastions, and bristling with cannon of huge calibre, made of the jointed stalks of the hemlock; while, in advance of these, I laid down ravelins, horn-works, and tenailles. I was vastly delighted with my work: it would, I was sure, be no easy matter to reduce such a fortress; but observing an eminence in the immediate neighbourhood which could, I thought, be occupied by a rather annoying battery, I was deliberating how I might best take possession of it by a redoubt, when out started, from behind a tree, the factor of the property on which I was trespassing, and rated me soundly for spoiling the grass in a manner so wantonly mischievous. Horn-work and half-moon, tower and bastion, proved of no manner of effect in repelling an attack of a kind so little anticipated. I did think that the factor, who was not only an intelligent man, but had also seen much service in his day on the town links, as the holder of a commission in the Cromarty volunteers, might have perceived that I was labouring on scientific principles, and so deem me worthy of some tolerance on that account; but I suppose he did not; though, to be sure, his scold died out good-naturedly enough in the end, and I saw him laugh as he turned away. But so it was, that in the extremity of my mortification I gave up generalship and bastion-building for the time; though, alas! my next amusement must have worn in the eyes of my youthful compeers as suspicious an aspect as either.

My friend of the cave had lent me what I had never seen before—a fine quarto edition of Anson's Voyages, containing the original prints (my father's copy had only the maps); among the others, Mr. Brett's elaborate delineation of that strangest of vessels, a proa of the Ladrone Islands. I was much struck by the singularity of the construction of a barque that, while its head and stern were exactly alike, had sides that totally differed from each other, and that, with the wind upon the beam, outsailed, it was said, all other vessels in the world; and having the command of the little shop in which my Uncle Sandy made occasional carts and wheelbarrows when unemployed abroad, I set myself to construct a miniature proa, on the model given in the print, and succeeded in fabricating a very extraordinary proa indeed. While its lee side was perpendicular as a wall, its windward one, to which there was an outrigger attached, resembled that of a flat-bottomed boat; head and stern were exactly alike, so as to fit each for performing in turn the part of either; a moveable yard, which supported the sail, had to be shifted towards the end converted into the stern for the time, at each tack; while the sail itself—a most uncouth-looking thing—formed a scalene triangle. Such was the vessel—some eighteen inches long or so—with which I startled from their propriety the mimic navigators of a horse-pond in the neighbourhood—all very masterly critics in all sorts of barques and barges known on the Scottish coast. According to Campbell,

"'Twas a thing beyond

Description wretched: such a wherry,

Perhaps, ne'er ventured on a pond,

Or crossed a ferry."

And well did my fellows appreciate its extreme ludicrousness. It was certainly rash to "venture" it on this especial "pond;" for, greatly to the damage of the rigging, it was fairly pelted off, and I was sent to test elsewhere its sailing qualities, which were, as I ascertained, not very remarkable after all. And thus, after a manner so unworthy, were my essays in strategy and barque-building received by a censorious age, that judged ere it knew. Were I sentimental, which lucidly I am not, I might well exclaim, in the very vein of Rousseau, Alas! it has been ever the misfortune of my life that, save by a few friends, I have never been understood!

I was evidently out-Francieing Francie; and the parents of my young friend, who saw that I had acquired considerable influence over him, and were afraid lest I should make another Francie of him, had become naturally enough desirous to break off our intimacy, when there occurred an unlucky accident, which served materially to assist them in the design. My friend's father was the master of a large trading smack, which, in war times, carried a few twelve-pounders, and was furnished with a small magazine of powder and shot; and my friend having secured for himself from the general stock, through the connivance of the ship-boy, an entire cannon cartridge, containing some two or three pounds of gunpowder, I was, of course, let into the secret, and invited to share in the sport and the spoil We had a glorious day together in his mother's garden: never before did such magnificent volcanoes break forth out of mole-hills, or were plots of daisies and violets so ruthlessly scorched and torn by the explosion of deep laid mines; and though a few mishaps did happen to over-forward fingers, and to eye-brows that were in the way, our amusements passed off innocuously on the whole, and evening saw nearly the half of our precious store unexhausted. It was garnered up by my friend in an unsuspected corner of the garret in which he slept, and would have been safe, had he not been seized, when going to bed, with a yearning desire to survey his treasure by candle-light; when an unlucky spark from the flame exploded the whole. He was so sadly burnt about the face and eyes as to be blind for several days after; but, amid smoke and confusion, he gallantly bolted his garret-door, and, while the inmates of the household, startled by the shock and the noise, came rushing up stairs, sturdily refused to let any of them in. Volumes of gunpowder reek issued from every crack and cranny, and his mother and sisters were prodigiously alarmed. At length, however, he capitulated—terms unknown; and I, next morning, heard with horror and dismay of the accident. It had been matter of agreement between us on the previous day, mainly in order to screen the fine fellow of a ship-boy, that I should be regarded as the owner of the powder; but here was a consequence on which I had not calculated; and the strong desire to see my poor friend was dashed by the dread of being held responsible by his parents and sisters for the accident. And so, more than a week elapsed ere I could muster up courage enough to visit him. I was coldly received by his mother, and, what vexed me to the heart, coldly received by himself; and suspecting that he had been making an ungenerous use of our late treaty, I took leave in high dudgeon, and came away. My suspicions, however, wronged him: he had stoutly denied, as I afterwards learned, that I had any share in the powder; but his friends deeming the opportunity a good one for breaking with me, had compelled him, very unwillingly, and after much resistance, to give me up. And from this period more than two years elapsed, though our hearts beat quick and high every time we accidentally met, ere we exchanged a single word. On one occasion, however, shortly after the accident, we did exchange letters. I wrote to him from the school-form, when, of course, I ought to have been engaged with my tasks, a stately epistle, in the style of the billets in the "Female Quixote," which began, I remember, as follows:—"I once thought I had a friend whom I could rely upon; but experience tells me he was only nominal. For, had he been a real friend, no accident could have interfered with, or arbitrary command annihilated, his affection," &c., &c. As I was rather an indifferent scribe at the time, one of the lads, known as the "copperplate writers" of the class, made for me a fair copy of my lucubration, full of all manner of elegant dashes, and in which the spelling of every word was scrupulously tested by the dictionary. And, in due course, I received a carefully engrossed note in reply, of which the manual portion was performed by my old companion, but the composition, as he afterwards told me, elaborated by some one else. It assured me he was still my friend, but that there were "certain circumstances" which would prevent us from meeting for the future on our old terms. We were, however, destined to meet pretty often in the future, notwithstanding; and narrowly missed going to the bottom together many years after, in the Floating Manse, grown infirm in her nether parts at the time, when he was the outed minister of Small Isles, and I editor of the Witness newspaper.

I had a maternal aunt long settled in the Highlands of Sutherland, who was so much older than her sister, my mother, that, when nursing her eldest boy, she had, when on a visit to the low country, assisted also in nursing her. The boy had shot up into a very clever lad, who, having gone to seek his fortune in the south, rose, through the several degrees of clerkship in a mercantile firm, to be the head of a commercial house of his own, which, though ultimately unsuccessful, seemed for some four or five years to be in a fair way of thriving. For about three of these the portion of the profits which fell to my cousin's share did not fall short of fifteen hundred pounds per annum; and on visiting his parents in their Highland home in the heyday of his prosperity, after an absence of years, it was found that he had a great many friends in his native district on whom he had not calculated, and of a class that had not been greatly in the habit of visiting his mother's cottage, but who now came to lunch, and dine, and take their wine with him, and who seemed to value and admire him very much. My aunt, who was little accustomed to receive high company, and found herself, like Martha of old, "cumbered about much serving," urgently besought my mother, who was young and active at the time, to visit and assist her; and, infinitely to my delight, I was included in the invitation. The place was not much above thirty miles from Cromarty; but then it was in the true Highlands, which I had never before seen, save on the distant horizon; and, to a boy who had to walk all the way, even thirty miles, in an age when railways were not, and ere even mail gigs had penetrated so far, represented a journey of no inconsiderable distance. My mother, though rather a delicate-looking woman, walked remarkably well; and early on the evening of the second day, we reached together my aunt's cottage, in the ancient Barony of Gruids. It was a low, long, dingy edifice of turf, four or five rooms in length, but only one in height, that, lying along a gentle acclivity, somewhat resembled at a distance a huge black snail creeping up the hill. As the lower apartment was occupied by my uncle's half-dozen milk-cows, the declination of the floor, consequent on the nature of the site, proved of signal importance, from the free drainage which it secured; the second apartment, reckoning upwards, which was of considerable size, formed the sitting-room of the family, and had, in the old Highland style, its fire full in the middle of the floor, without back or sides; so that, like a bonfire kindled in the open air, all the inmates could sit around it in a wide circle—the women invariably ranged on the one side, and the men on the other; the apartment beyond was partitioned into small and very dark bed-rooms; while, further on still, there was a closet with a little window in it, which was assigned to my mother and me; and beyond all lay what was emphatically "the room," as it was built of stone, and had both window and chimney, with chairs, and table, and chest of drawers, a large box-bed, and a small but well-filled bookcase. And "the room" was, of course, for the time, my cousin the merchant's apartment,—his dormitory at night, and the hospitable refectory in which he entertained his friends by day.

My aunt's family was one of solid worth. Her husband—a compactly-built, stout-limbed, elderly Highlander, rather below the middle size, of grave and somewhat melancholy aspect, but in reality of a temperament rather cheerful than otherwise—had been somewhat wild in his young days. He had been a good shot and a skilful angler, and had danced at bridals, and, as was common in the Highlands at the time, at lykewakes; nay, on one occasion he had succeeded in inducing a new-made widow to take the floor in a strathspey, beside her husband's corpse when every one else had failed to bring her up, by roguishly remarking, in her hearing, that whoever else might have refused to dance at poor Donald's death wake, he little thought it would have been she. But a great change had passed over him; and he was now a staid, thoughtful, God-fearing man, much respected in the Barony for honest worth and quiet unobtrusive consistency of character. His wife had been brought, at an early age, under the influence of Donald Roy's ring, and had, like her mother, been the means of introducing the vitalities of religion into her household. They had two other sons besides the merchant—both well-built, robust men, somewhat taller than their father, and of such character, that one of my Cromarty cousins, in making out his way, by dint of frequent and sedulous inquiry, to their dwelling, found the general verdict of the district embodied in the very bad English of a poor old woman, who, after doing her best to direct him, certified her knowledge of the household by remarking, "It's a goot mistress;—it's a goot maister;—it's a goot, goot two lads." The elder of the two brothers superintended, and partly wrought, his father's little farm; for the father himself found employment enough in acting as a sort of humble factor for the proprietor of the Barony, who lived at a distance, and had no dwelling upon the land. The younger was a mason and slater, and was usually employed, in the working seasons, at a distance; but in winter, and, on this occasion, for a few weeks during the visit of his brother the merchant, he resided with his father. Both were men of marked individuality of character. The elder, Hugh, was an ingenious, self-taught mechanic, who used in the long winter evenings to fashion a number of curious little articles by the fireside—among the rest, Highland snuff-mulls, with which he supplied all his friends; and he was at this time engaged in building for his father a Highland barn, and, to vary the work, fabricating for him a Highland plough. The younger, George, who had wrought for a few years at his trade in the south of Scotland, was a great reader, wrote very tolerable prose, and verse which, if not poetry, to which he made no pretensions, was at least quaintly-turned rhyme. He had, besides, a competent knowledge of geometry, and was skilled in architectural drawing; and—strange accomplishment for a Celt—he was an adept in the noble science of self-defence. But George never sought out quarrels; and such was his amount of bone and muscle, and such the expression of manly resolution stamped on his countenance, that they never came in his way unsought.

At the close of the day, when the members of the household had assembled in a wide circle round the fire, my uncle "took the Book," and I witnessed, for the first time, family-worship conducted in Gaelic. There was, I found, an interesting peculiarity in one portion of the services which he conducted. He was, as I have said, an elderly man, and had worshipped in his family ere Dr. Stewart's Gaelic translation of the Scriptures had been introduced into the county; and as he possessed in those days only the English Bible, while his domestics understood only Gaelic, he had to acquire the art, not uncommon in Sutherland at the time, of translating the English chapter for them, as he read, into their native tongue; and this he had learned to do with such ready fluency, that no one could have guessed it to be other than a Gaelic work from which he was reading. Nor had the introduction of Dr. Stewart's translation rendered the practice obsolete in his household. His Gaelic was Sutherlandshire Gaelic, whereas that of Dr. Stewart was Argyleshire Gaelic. His family understood his rendering better, in consequence, than that of the Doctor; and so he continued to translate from his English Bible ad aperturam libri, many years after the Gaelic edition had been spread over the country. The concluding evening prayer was one of great solemnity and unction. I was unacquainted with the language in which it was couched; but it was impossible to avoid being struck, notwithstanding, with its wrestling earnestness and fervour. The man who poured it forth evidently believed there was an unseen ear open to it, and an all-seeing presence in the place, before whom every secret thought lay exposed. The entire scene was a deeply impressive one; and when I saw, in witnessing the celebration of high mass in a Popish cathedral many years after, the altar suddenly enveloped in a dim and picturesque obscurity, amid which the curling smoke of the incense ascended, and heard the musically-modulated prayer sounding in the distance from within the screen, my thoughts reverted to the rude Highland cottage, where, amid solemnities not theatric, the red umbry light of the fire fell with uncertain glimmer upon dark walls, and bare black rafters, and kneeling forms, and a pale expanse of dense smoke, that, filling the upper portion of the roof, overhung the floor like a ceiling, and there arose amid the gloom the sounds of prayer truly God-directed, and poured out from the depths of the heart; and I felt that the stoled priest of the cathedral was merely an artist, though a skilful one, but that in the "priest and father" of the cottage there were the truth and reality from which the artist drew. No bolt was drawn across the outer door as we retired for the night. The philosophic Biot, when employed with his experiments on the second pendulum, resided for several months in one of the smaller Shetland islands; and, fresh from the troubles of France—his imagination bearing about with it, if I may so speak, the stains of the guillotine—the state of trustful security in which he found the simple inhabitants filled him with astonishment. "Here, during the twenty-five years in which Europe has been devouring herself," he exclaimed, "the door of the house I inhabit has remained open day and night." The interior of Sutherland was at the time of my visit in a similar condition. The door of my uncle's cottage, unfurnished with lock or bar, opened, like that of the hermit in the ballad, with a latch; but, unlike that of the hermit, it was not because there were no stores within to demand the care of the master, but because at that comparatively recent period the crime of theft was unknown in the district.

I rose early next morning, when the dew was yet heavy on grass and lichen, curious to explore a locality so new to me. The tract, though a primary one, forms one of the tamer gneiss districts of Scotland; and I found the nearer hills comparatively low and confluent, and the broad valley in which lay my uncle's cottage, flat, open, and unpromising. Still there were a few points to engage me; and the more I attached myself to them, the more did their interest grow. The western slopes of the valley are mottled by grassy tomhans—the moraines of some ancient glacier, around and over which there rose, at this period, a low widely-spreading wood of birch, hazel, and mountain ash—of hazel, with its nuts fast filling at the time, and of mountain ash, with its berries glowing bright in orange and scarlet. In looking adown the hollow, a group of the green tomhans might be seen relieved against the blue hills of Ross; in looking upwards, a solitary birch-covered hillock of similar origin, but larger proportions, stood strongly out against the calm waters of Loch Shin and the purple peaks of the distant Ben-Hope. In the bottom of the valley, close beside my uncle's cottage, I marked several low swellings of the rock beneath, rising above the general level; and, ranged along these, there were groups of what seemed to be huge boulder stones, save that they were less rounded and water-worn than ordinary boulders, and were, what groups of boulders rarely are, all of one quality. And on examination, I ascertained that some of their number, which stood up like broken obelisks, tall, and comparatively narrow of base, and all hoary with moss and lichen, were actually still connected with the mass of rock below. They were the wasted upper portions of vast dikes and veins of a grey, large-grained syenite, that traverse the fundamental gneiss of the valley, and which I found veined, in turn, by threads and seams of a white quartz, abounding in drusy cavities, thickly lined along their sides with sprig crystals. Never had I seen such lovely crystals on the shores of Cromarty, or anywhere else. They were clear and transparent as the purest spring water, furnished each with six sides, and sharpened a-top into six facets. Borrowing one of Cousin George's hammers, I soon filled a little box with these gems, which even my mother and aunt were content to admire, as what of old used, they said, to be called Bristol diamonds, and set in silver brooches and sleeve buttons. Further, within less than a hundred yards of the cottage, I found a lively little stream, brown, but clear as a cairngorm of the purest water, and abounding, as I soon ascertained, in trout, lively and little like itself, and gaily speckled with scarlet. It wound through a flat, dank meadow, never disturbed by the plough; for it had been a burying-ground of old, and flat undressed stones lay thick amid the rank grass. And in the lower corner, where the old turf-wall had sunk into an inconspicuous mound, there stood a mighty tree, all solitary, for its fellows had long before disappeared, and so hollow-hearted in its corrupt old age, that though it still threw out every season a mighty expanse of foliage, I was able to creep into a little chamber in its trunk, from which I could look out through circular openings where boughs once had been, and listen, when a sudden shower came sweeping down the glen, to the pattering of the rain-drops amid the leaves. The valley of the Gruids was perhaps not one of the finest or most beautiful of Highland valleys, but it was a very admirable place after all; and amid its woods, and its rocks, and its tomhans, and at the side of its little trouting stream, the weeks passed delightfully away.

My cousin William, the merchant, had, as I have said, many guests; but they were all too grand to take any notice of me. There was, however, one delightful man, who was said to know a great deal about rocks and stones, that, having heard of my fine large crystals, desired to see both them and the boy who had found them; and I was admitted to hear him talk about granites, and marbles, and metallic veins, and the gems that lie hid among the mountains in nooks and crannies. I am afraid I would not now deem him a very accomplished mineralogist: I remember enough of his conversation to conclude that he knew but little, and that little not very correctly: but not before Werner or Hutton could I have bowed down with a profounder reverence. He spoke of the marbles of Assynt—of the petrifactions of Helmsdale and Brora—of shells and plants embedded in solid rocks, and of forest trees converted into stone; and my ears drank in knowledge eagerly, as those of the Queen of Sheba of old when she listened to Solomon. But all too soon did the conversation change. My cousin was mighty in Gaelic etymology, and so was the mineralogist; and while my cousin held that the name of the Barony of Gruids was derived from the great hollow tree, the mineralogist was quite as certain that it was derived from its syenite, or, as he termed it, its granite, which resembled, he remarked, from the whiteness of its feldspar, a piece of curd. Gruids, said the one, means the place of the great tree; Gruids, said the other, means the place of the curdled stone. I do not remember how they settled the controversy; but it terminated, by an easy transition, in a discussion respecting the authenticity of Ossian—a subject on which they were both perfectly agreed. There could exist no manner of doubt regarding the fact that the poems given to the world by Macpherson had been sung in the Highlands by Ossian, the son of Fingal, more than fourteen hundred years before. My cousin was a devoted member of the Highland Society; and the Highland Society, in these days, was very much engaged in ascertaining the right cut of the philabeg, and in determining the chronology and true sequence of events in the Ossianic age.

Happiness perfect and entire is, it is said, not to be enjoyed in this sublunary state; and even in the Gruids, where there was so much to be seen, heard, and found out, and where I was separated by more than thirty miles from my Latin—for I had brought none of it from home with me—this same Ossianic controversy rose like a Highland fog on my horizon, to chill and darken my hours of enjoyment. My cousin possessed everything that had been written on the subject, including a considerable amount of manuscript of his own composition; and as Uncle James had inspired him with the belief that I could master anything to which in good earnest I set my mind, he had determined that it should be no fault of his if I did not become mighty in the controversy regarding the authenticity of Ossian. This was awful. I liked Blair's Dissertation well enough, nor did I greatly quarrel with that of Kames; and as for Sir Walter's critique in the Edinburgh, on the opposite side, I thought it not only thoroughly sensible, but, as it furnished me with arguments against the others, deeply interesting to boot. But then there succeeded a vast ocean of dissertation, emitted by Highland gentlemen and their friends, as the dragon in the Apocalypse emitted the great flood which the earth swallowed up; and, when once fairly embarked upon it, I could see no shore and find no bottom. And so at length, though very unwillingly—for my cousin was very kind—I fairly mutinied and struck work, just as he had begun to propose that, after mastering the authenticity controversy, I should set myself to acquire Gaelic, in order that I might be able to read Ossian in the original. My cousin was not well pleased; but I did not choose to aggravate the case by giving expression to the suspicion which, instead of lessening, has rather grown upon me since, that as I possessed an English copy of the poems, I had read the true Ossian in the original already. With Cousin George, however, who, though strong on the authenticity side, liked a joke rather better than he did Ossian, I was more free; and to him I ventured to designate his brother's fine Gaelic copy of the poems, with a superb head of the ancient bard affixed, as "The Poems of Ossian in Gaelic, translated from the original English by their author." George looked grim, and called me infidel, and then laughed, and said he would tell his brother. But he didn't; and as I really liked the poems, especially "Temora" and some of the smaller pieces, and could read them with more real pleasure than the greater part of the Highlanders who believed in them, I did not wholly lose credit with my cousin the merchant. He even promised to present me with a finely bound edition of the "Elegant Extracts," in three bulky octavo volumes, whenever I should have gained my first prize at College; but I unluckily failed to qualify myself for the gift; and my copy of the "Extracts" I had to purchase for myself ten years after, at a book-stall, when working in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh as a journeyman mason.

It is not every day one meets with so genuine a Highlander as my cousin the merchant; and though he failed to inspire me with all his own Ossianic faith and zeal, there were some of the little old Celtic practices which he resuscitated pro tempore in his father's household, that I learned to like very much. He restored the genuine Highland breakfasts; and, after hours spent in busy exploration outside, I found I could as thoroughly admire the groaning table, with its cheese, and its trout, and its cold meat, as even the immortal Lexicographer himself. Some of the dishes, too, which he revived, were at least curious. There was a supply of gradden-meal prepared—i.e., grain dried in a pot over the fire, and then coarsely ground in a handmill—which made cakes that, when they had hunger for their sauce, could be eaten; and on more than one occasion I shared in a not unpalatable sort of blood-pudding, enriched with butter, and well seasoned with pepper and salt, the main ingredient of which was derived, through a judicious use of the lancet, from the yeld cattle of the farm. The practice was an ancient, and by no means unphilosophic one. In summer and early autumn there is plenty of grass in the Highlands; but, of old at least, there used to be very little grain in it before the beginning of October; and as the cattle could, in consequence, provide themselves with a competent supply of blood from the grass, when their masters, who could not eat grass, and had little else that they could eat, were able to acquire very little, it was opportunely discovered that, by making a division in this way of the all-essential fluid, accumulated as a common stock, the circumstances of the cattle and their owners could be in some degree equalized. With these peculiarly Highland dishes there mingled others not less genuine—now and then a salmon from the river, and a haunch of venison from the hill-side—which I relished better still; and if all Highlanders live but as well in the present day as I did during my stay with my aunt and cousins, they would be rather unreasonable were they greatly to complain.

There were some of the other Highland restorations effected by my cousin that pleased me much. He occasionally gathered at night around the central Ha' fire a circle of the elderly men of the neighbourhood, to repeat long-derived narratives of the old clan feuds of the district, and wild Fingalian legends; and though, of course, ignorant of the language in which the stories were conveyed, by taking my seat beside Cousin George, and getting him to translate for me in an under tone, as the narratives went on, I contrived to carry away with me at least as much of the clan stories and legends as I ever after found use for. The clan stories were waxing at the time rather dim and uncertain in Sutherland. The county, through the influence of its good Earls and its godly Lords Reay, had been early converted to Protestantism; and its people had in consequence ceased to take liberties with the throats and cattle of their neighbours, about a hundred years earlier than in any other part of the Scotch Highlands. And as for the Fingalian legends, they were, I found, very wild legends indeed. Some of them immortalized wonderful hunters, who had excited the love of Fingal's lady, and whom her angry and jealous husband had sent out to hunt monstrous wild boars with poisonous bristles on their backs,—secure in this way of getting rid of them. And some of them embalmed the misdeeds of spiritless diminutive Fions, not very much above fifteen feet in height, who, unlike their more active companions, could not leap across the Cromarty or Dornoch Firths on their spears, and who, as was natural, were very much despised by the women of the tribe. The pieces of fine sentiment and brilliant description discovered by Macpherson seemed never to have found their way into this northern district. But, told in fluent Gaelic, in the great "Ha'," the wild legends served every necessary purpose equally well. The "Ha'" in the autumn nights, as the days shortened and the frosts set in, was a genial place; and so attached was my cousin to its distinctive principle—the fire in the midst—as handed down from the "days of other years," that in the plan of a new two-storied house for his father, which he had procured from a London architect, one of the nether rooms was actually designed in the circular form; and a hearth like a millstone, placed in the centre, represented the place of the fire. But there was, as I remarked to Cousin George, no corresponding central hole in the room above, through which to let up the smoke; and I questioned whether a nicely plastered apartment, round as a band-box, with the fire in the middle, like the sun in the centre of an Orrery, would have been quite like anything ever seen in the Highlands before. The plan, however, was not destined to encounter criticism, or give trouble in the execution of it.

On Sabbaths my cousin and his two brothers attended the parish church, attired in the full Highland dress; and three handsome, well-formed men they were; but my aunt, though mayhap not quite without the mother's pride, did not greatly relish the exhibition; and oftener than once I heard her say so to her sister my mother; though she, smitten by the gallant appearance of her nephews, seemed inclined rather to take the opposite side. My uncle, on the other hand, said nothing either for or against the display. He had been a keen Highlander in his younger days; and when the inhibition against wearing tartan and the philabeg had been virtually removed, in consideration of the achievements of the "hardy and dauntless men" who, according to Chatham, conquered for England "in every quarter of the globe," he had celebrated the event in a merrymaking, at which the dance was kept up from night till morning; but though he retained, I suspect, his old partialities, he was now a sobered man; and when I ventured to ask him, on one occasion, why he too did not get a Sunday kilt, which, by the way, he would "have set," notwithstanding his years, as well as any of his sons, he merely replied with a quiet "No, no; there's no fool like an old fool."

CHAPTER VI.

"When they sawe the darksome night,

They sat them downe and cryed."—Babes in the Wood.

I spent the holidays of two other autumns in this delightful Highland valley. On the second, as on the first occasion, I had accompanied my mother, specially invited; but the third journey was an unsanctioned undertaking of my own and a Cromarty cousin, my contemporary, to whom, as he had never travelled the way, I had to act as protector and guide. I reached my aunt's cottage without mishap or adventure of any kind; but found, that during the twelvemonth which had just elapsed, great changes had taken place in the circumstances of the household. My cousin George, who had married in the interim, had gone to reside in a cottage of his own; and I soon ascertained that my cousin William, who had been for several months resident with his father, had not nearly so many visitors as before; nor did presents of salmon and haunches of venison come at all so often the way. Immediately after the final discomfiture of Napoleon, an extensive course of speculation in which he had ventured to engage had turned out so ill, that, instead of making him a fortune, as at first seemed probable, it had landed him in the Gazette; and he was now tiding over the difficulties of a time of settlement, six hundred miles from the scene of disaster, in the hope of being soon enabled to begin the world anew. He bore his losses with quiet magnanimity; and I learned to know and like him better during his period of eclipse than in the previous time, when summer friends had fluttered around him by scores. He was a generous, warm-hearted man, who felt, with the force of an implanted instinct not vouchsafed to all, that it is more blessed to give than to receive; and it was doubtless a wise provision of nature, and worthy, in this point of view, the special attention of moralists and philosophers, that his old associates, the grand gentlemen, did not now often come his way; seeing that his inability any longer to give would cost him, in the circumstances, great pain.

I was much with my cousin George in his new dwelling. It was one of the most delightful of Highland cottages, and George was happy in it, far above the average lot of humanity, with his young wife. He had dared, in opposition to the general voice of the district, to build it half-way up the slope of a beautiful tomhan, that, waving with birch from base to summit, rose regular as a pyramid from the bottom of the valley, and commanded a wide view of Loch Shin on the one hand, with the moors and mountains that lie beyond; and overlooked, on the other, with all the richer portions of the Barony of Gruids, the church and picturesque hamlet of Lairg. Half-hidden by the graceful birchen trees that sprang up thick around, with their silvery boles and light foliage, it was rather a nest than a house; and George, emancipated, by his reading, and his residence for a time in the south, from at least the wilder beliefs of the locality, failed to suffer, as had been predicted, for his temerity; as the "good people," who, much to their credit, had made choice of the place for themselves long before, never, to his knowledge, paid him a visit. He had brought his share of the family library with him; and it was a large share. He had mathematical instruments too, and a colour-box, and the tools of his profession; in especial, large hammers fitted to break great stones; and I was generously made free of them all,—books, instruments, colour-box, and hammers. His cottage, too, commanded, from its situation, a delightful variety of most interesting objects. It had all the advantages of my uncle's domicile, and a great many more.

The nearer shores of Loch Shin were scarce half a mile away; and there was a low long promontory which shot out into the lake, that was covered at that time by an ancient wood of doddered time-worn trees, and bore amid its outer solitudes, where the waters circled round its terminal apex, one of those towers of hoary eld—memorials, mayhap, of the primeval stone-period in our island, to which the circular erections of Glenelg and Dornadilla belong. It was formed of undressed stones of vast size, uncemented by mortar; and through the thick walls ran winding passages—the only covered portions of the building, for the inner area had never been furnished with a roof—in which, when a sudden shower descended, the loiterer amid the ruins could find shelter. It was a fascinating place to a curious boy. Some of the old trees had become mere whitened skeletons, that stretched forth their blasted arms to the sky, and had so slight a hold of the soil, that I have overthrown them with a delightful crash, by merely running against them; the heath rose thick beneath, and it was a source of fearful joy to know that it harboured snakes full three feet long; and though the loch itself is by no means one of our finer Highland lochs, it furnished, to at least my eye at this time, a delightful prospect in still October mornings, when the light gossamer went sailing about in white filmy threads, and birch and hazel, glorified by decay, served to embroider with gold the brown hillsides which, standing up on either hand in their long vista of more than twenty miles, form the barriers of the lake; and when the sun, still struggling with a blue diluted haze, fell delicately on the smooth surface, or twinkled for a moment on the silvery coats of the little trout, as they sprang a few inches into the air, and then broke the water into a series of concentric rings in their descent. When I last passed the way, both the old wood and the old tower were gone; and for the latter, which, though much a ruin, might have survived for ages, I found only a long extent of dry-stone dike, and the wide ring formed by the old foundation-stones, which had proved too massive to be removed. A greatly more entire erection of the same age and style, known of old as Dunaliscag—which stood on the Ross-shire side of the Dornoch Firth, and within whose walls, forming, as it did, a sort of half-way stage, I used, on these Sutherlandshire journeys, to eat my piece of cake with a double relish—I found, on last passing the way, similarly represented. Its grey venerable walls, and dark winding passages of many steps—even the huge pear-shaped lintel, which had stretched over its little door, and which, according to tradition, a great Fingalian lady had once thrown across the Dornoch Firth from off the point of her spindle—had all disappeared, and I saw instead, only a dry-stone wall. The men of the present generation do certainly live in a most enlightened age—an age in which every trace of the barbarism of our early ancestors is fast disappearing; and were we but more zealous in immortalizing the public benefactors who efface such dark memorials of the past as the tower of Dunaliscag and the promontory of Loch Shin, it would be, doubtless, an encouragement to others to speed us yet further on in the march of improvement. It seems scarce fair that the enlightened destroyers of Arthur's Oven or of the bas-relief known as Robin of Redesdale, or of the Town-cross of Edinburgh, should enjoy all the celebrity attendant on such acts, while the equally deserving iconoclasts of Dunaliscag and the tower of Loch Shin should be suffered to die without their fame.

I remember spending one singularly delightful morning with Cousin George beside the ancient tower. He pointed out to me, amid the heath, several plants to which the old Highlanders used to attach occult virtues,—plants that disenchanted bewitched cattle, not by their administration as medicines to the sick animals, but by bringing them in contact, as charms, with the injured milk; and plants which were used as philters, either for procuring love, or exciting hatred. It was, he showed me, the root of a species of orchis that was employed in making the philters. While most of the radical fibres of the plant retain the ordinary cylindrical form, two of their number are usually found developed into starchy tubercles; but, belonging apparently to different seasons, one of the two is of a dark colour, and of such gravity that it sinks in water; while the other is light-coloured, and floats. And a powder made of the light-coloured tubercle formed the main ingredient, said my cousin, in the love philter; while a powder made of the dark-coloured one excited, it was held, only antipathy and dislike. And then George would speculate on the origin of a belief which could, as he said, neither be suggested by reason, nor tested by experience. Living, however, among a people with whom beliefs of the kind were still vital and influential, he did not wholly escape their influence; and I saw him, in one instance, administer to an ailing cow a little live trout, simply because the traditions of the district assured him, that a trout swallowed alive by the creature was the only specific in the case. Some of his Highland stories were very curious. He communicated to me, for example, beside the broken tower, a tradition illustrative of the Celtic theory of dreaming, of which I have since often thought. Two young men had been spending the early portion of a warm summer day in exactly such a scene as that in which he communicated the anecdote. There was an ancient ruin beside them, separated, however, from the mossy bank on which they sat, by a slender runnel, across which there lay, immediately over a miniature cascade, a few withered grass stalks. Overcome by the heat of the day, one of the young men fell asleep; his companion watched drowsily beside him; when all at once the watcher was aroused to attention by seeing a little indistinct form, scarce larger than a humble-bee, issue from the mouth of the sleeping man, and, leaping upon the moss, move downwards to the runnel, which it crossed along the withered grass stalks, and then disappeared amid the interstices of the ruin. Alarmed by what he saw, the watcher hastily shook his companion by the shoulder, and awoke him; though, with all his haste, the little cloud-like creature, still more rapid in its movements, issued from the interstice into which it had gone, and, flying across the runnel, instead of creeping along the grass stalks and over the sward, as before, it re-entered the mouth of the sleeper, just as he was in the act of awakening. "What is the matter with you?" said the watcher, greatly alarmed. "What ails you?" "Nothing ails me," replied the other; "but you have robbed me of a most delightful dream. I dreamed I was walking through a fine rich country, and came at length to the shores of a noble river; and, just where the clear water went thundering down a precipice, there was a bridge all of silver, which I crossed; and then, entering a noble palace on the opposite side, I saw great heaps of gold and jewels, and I was just going to load myself with treasure, when you rudely awoke me, and I lost all." I know not what the asserters of the clairvoyant faculty may think of the story; but I rather believe I have occasionally seen them make use of anecdotes that did not rest on evidence a great deal more solid than the Highland legend, and that illustrated not much more clearly the philosophy of the phenomena with which they profess to deal.

Of all my cousins, Cousin George was the one whose pursuits most nearly resembled my own, and in whose society I most delighted to share. He did sometimes borrow a day from his work, even after his marriage; but then, according to the poet, it was

"The love he bore to science was in fault."

The borrowed day was always spent in transferring to paper some architectural design, or in working out some mathematical problem, or in rendering some piece of Gaelic verse into English, or some piece of English prose into Gaelic; and as he was a steady, careful man, the appropriated day was never seriously missed. The winter, too, was all his own, for, in those northern districts, masons are never employed from a little after Hallowday, till the second, or even third month of spring, a circumstance which I carefully noted at this time in its bearing on the amusements of my cousin, and which afterwards weighed not a little with me when I came to make choice of a profession for myself. And George's winters were always ingeniously spent. He had a great command of Gaelic, and a very tolerable command of English; and so a translation of Bunyan's "Visions of Heaven and Hell," which he published several years subsequent to this period, was not only well received by his country folk of Sutherland and Ross, but was said by competent judges to be really a not inadequate rendering of the meaning and spirit of the noble old tinker of Elstow. I, of course, could be no authority respecting the merits of a translation, the language of which I did not understand; but living much amid the literature of a time when almost every volume, whether the Virgil of a Dryden, or the Meditations of a Hervey, was heralded by its sets of complimentary verses, and having a deep interest in whatever Cousin George undertook and performed, I addressed to him, in the old style, a few introductory stanzas, which, to indulge me in the inexpressible luxury of seeing myself in print for the first time, he benevolently threw into type. They survive to remind me that my cousin's belief in Ossian did exert some little influence over my phraseology when I addressed myself to him, and that, with the rashness natural to immature youth, I had at this time the temerity to term myself "poet."

Yes, oft I've said, as oft I've seen

The men who dwell its hills among,

That Morven's land has ever been

A land of valour, worth, and song.

But Ignorance, of darkness dire,

Has o'er that land a mantle spread;

And all untuned and rude the lyre

That sounds beneath its gloomy shade.

With muse of calm untiring wing,

Oh, be it thine, my friend, to show

The Celtic swain how Saxons sing

Of Hell's dire gloom and Heaven's glow

So shall the meed of fame be thine,

The glistening bay-wreath green and gay;

Thy poet, too, though weak his line,

Shall frame for thee th' approving lay.

Longing for some profession in which his proper work would give exercise to the faculties which he most delighted to cultivate, my cousin resolved on becoming candidate for a Gaelic Society school—a poor enough sort of office then, as now; but which, by investing a little money in cattle, by tilling a little croft, and by now and then emitting from the press a Gaelic translation, might, he thought, be rendered sufficiently remunerative to supply the very moderate wants of himself and his little family. And so he set out for Edinburgh, amply furnished with testimonials that meant more in his case than testimonials usually mean, to stand an examination before a Committee of the Gaelic School Society. Unluckily for his success, however, instead of bringing with him his ordinary Sabbath-day suit of dark brown and blue (the kilt had been assumed for but a few weeks, to please his brother William), he had provided himself with a suit of tartan, as at once cheap and respectable, and appeared before the Committee—if not in the garb, in at least the many-coloured hues, of his clan—a robust manly Highlander, apparently as well suited to enact the part of colour-serjeant to the Forty-Second, as to teach children their letters. A grave member of the Society, at that time in high repute for sanctity of character, but who afterwards, becoming righteous overmuch, was loosened from his charge, and straightway, spurning the ground, rose into an Irvingite angel, came at once to the conclusion that no such type of man, encased in clan-tartan, could possibly have the root of the matter in him; and so he determined that Cousin George should be cast in the examination. But then, as it could not be alleged with any decency that my cousin was inadmissible on the score of his having too much tartan, it was agreed that he should be declared inadmissible on the score of his having too little Gaelic. And, of course, at this result the examinators arrived; and George, ultimately to his advantage, was cast accordingly. I still remember the astonishment evinced by a worthy catechist of the north—himself a Gaelic teacher—on being told how my cousin had fared. "George Munro not allowed to pass," he said, "for want of right Gaelic! Why, he has more right Gaelic in his own self than all the Society's teachers in this corner of Scotland put together. They are the curiousest people, some of these good gentlemen of the Edinburgh Committees, that I ever heard of: they're just like our country lawyers." It would, however, be far from fair to regard this transaction, which took place, I may mention, so late as the year 1829, as a specimen of the actings of either civic societies or country lawyers. George's chief examinator on the occasion was the minister of the Gaelic Chapel of the place, at that time one of the Society's Committee for the year; and, not being a remarkably scrupulous man, he seems to have stretched a point or two, in compliance with the pious wishes and occult judgment of the Society's Secretary. But the anecdote is not without its lesson. When devout Walter Taits set themselves ingeniously to man[oe]uvre with the purest of intentions, and for what they deem the best of purposes—when, founding their real grounds of objection on one set of appearances, they found their ostensible grounds of objection on another and entirely different set—they are always exposed to the signal danger of—getting indevout Duncan M'Caigs to assist them. Only two years from the period of my cousin's examination before the Society, his reverend examinator received at the bar of the High Court of Justiciary, in the character of a thief convicted of eleven several acts of stealing, sentence of transportation for fourteen years.

I had several interesting excursions with my cousin William. We found ourselves one evening—on our way home from a mineral spring which he had discovered among the hills—in a little lonely valley, which opened transversely into that of the Gruids, and which, though its sides were mottled with green furrow-marked patches, had not at the time a single human habitation. At the upper end, however, there stood the ruins of a narrow two-storied house, with one of its gables still entire from foundation-stone to the shattered chimney-top, but with the other gable, and the larger part of the front wall, laid prostrate along the sward. My cousin, after bidding me remark the completeness of the solitude, and that the eye could not command from the site of the ruin a single spot where man had ever dwelt, told me that it had been the scene of the strict seclusion, amounting almost to imprisonment, about eighty years before, of a lady of high birth, over whom, in early youth, there had settled a sad cloud of infamy. She had borne a child to one of the menials of her father's house, which, with the assistance of her paramour, she had murdered; and being too high for the law to reach in these northern parts, at a time when the hereditary jurisdiction still existed entire, and her father was the sole magistrate, possessed of the power of life and death in the district, she was sent by her family to wear out life in this lonely retreat, in which she remained secluded from the world for more than half a century. And then, long after the abolition of the local jurisdictions, and when her father and brother, with the entire generation that knew of her crime, had passed away, she was permitted to take up her abode in one of the seaport towns of the north, where she was still remembered at this time as a crazy old lady, invariably silent and sullen, that used to be seen in the twilight flitting about the more retired lanes and closes, like an unhappy ghost. The story, as told me in that solitary valley, just as the sun was sinking over the hill beyond, powerfully impressed my fancy. Crabbe would have delighted to tell it; and I now relate it, as it lies fast wedged in my memory, mainly for the peculiar light which it casts on the times of the hereditary jurisdictions. It forms an example of one of the judicial banishments of an age that used, in ordinary cases, to save itself all sorts of trouble of the kind, by hanging its victims. I may add, that I saw a good deal of the neighbourhood at this time in the company of my cousin, and gleaned, from my visits to shieling and cottage, most of my conceptions of the state of the Northern Highlands, ere the clearance system had depopulated the interior of the country, and precipitated its poverty-stricken population upon the coasts.

There was, however, one of my excursions with Cousin William, that turned out rather unfortunately. The river Shin has its bold salmon-leap, which even yet, after several hundred pounds' worth of gunpowder have been expended in sloping its angle of ascent, to facilitate the passage of the fish, is a fine picturesque object, but which at this time, when it presented all its original abruptness, was a finer object still. Though distant about three miles from my uncle's cottage, we could distinctly hear its roarings from beside his door, when October nights were frosty and still; and as we had been told many strange stories regarding it—stories about bold fishers who had threaded their dangerous way between the overhanging rock and the water, and who, striking outwards, had speared salmon through the foam of the cataract as they leaped—stories, too, of skilful sportsmen, who, taking their stand in the thick wood beyond, had shot the rising animals, as one shoots a bird flying,—both my Cromarty cousin and myself were extremely desirous to visit the scene of such feats and marvels; and Cousin William obligingly agreed to act as our guide and instructor by the way. He did look somewhat askance at our naked feet; and we heard him remark, in an under tone, to his mother, that when he and his brothers were boys, she never suffered them to visit her Cromarty relations unshod; but neither Cousin Walter nor myself had the magnanimity to say, that our mothers had also taken care to see us shod; but that, deeming it lighter and cooler to walk barefoot, the good women had no sooner turned their backs than we both agreed to fling our shoes into a corner, and set out on our journey without them. The walk to the salmon-leap was a thoroughly delightful one. We passed through the woods of Achanie, famous for their nuts; startled, as we went, a herd of roe deer; and found the leap itself far exceeded all anticipation. The Shin becomes savagely wild in its lower reaches. Rugged precipices of gneiss, with scattered bushes fast anchored in the crevices, overhang the stream, which boils in many a dark pool, and foams over many a steep rapid; and immediately beneath, where it threw itself headlong, at this time, over the leap—for it now merely rushes in snow adown a steep slope—there was a caldron, so awfully dark and profound, that, according to the accounts of the district, it had no bottom; and so vexed was it by a frightful whirlpool, that no one ever fairly caught in its eddies had succeeded, it was said, in regaining the shore. We saw, as we stood amid the scraggy trees of an overhanging wood, the salmon leaping up by scores, most of them, however, to fall back again into the pool—for only a very few stray fish that attempted the cataract at its edges seemed to succeed in forcing their upward way; we saw, too, on a shelf of the precipitous but wooded bank, the rude hut, formed of undressed logs, where a solitary watcher used to take his stand, to protect them from the spear and fowlingpiece of the poacher, and which in stormy nights, when the cry of the kelpie mingled with the roar of the flood, must have been a sublime lodge in the wilderness, in which a poet might have delighted to dwell. I was excited by the scene; and, when heedlessly leaping from a tall lichened stone into the long heath below, my right foot came so heavily in contact with a sharp-edged fragment of rock concealed in the moss, that I almost screamed aloud with pain. I, however, suppressed the shriek, and, sitting down and setting my teeth close, bore the pang, until it gradually moderated, and my foot, to the ankle, seemed as if almost divested of feeling. In our return, I halted as I walked, and lagged considerably behind my companions; and during the whole evening the injured foot seemed as if dead, save that it glowed with an intense heat. I was, however, at ease enough to write a sublime piece of blank verse on the cataract; and, proud of my production, I attempted reading it to Cousin William. But William had taken lessons in recitation under the great Mr. Thelwall, politician and elocutionist; and deeming it proper to set me right in all the words which I mispronounced—three out of every four at least, and not unfrequently the fourth word also—the reading of the piece proved greatly stiffer and slower work than the writing of it; and, somewhat to my mortification, my cousin declined giving me any definite judgment on its merits, even when I had done. He insisted, however, on the signal advantages of reading well. He had an acquaintance, he said, a poet, who had taken lessons under Mr. Thelwall, and who, though his verses, when he published, met with no great success, was so indebted to his admirable elocution, as to be invariably successful when he read them to his friends.

Next morning my injured foot was stiff and sore; and, after a few days of suffering, it suppurated and discharged great quantities of blood and matter. It was, however, fast getting well again, when, tired of inaction, and stirred up by my cousin Walter, who wearied sadly of the Highlands, I set out with him, contrary to all advice, on my homeward journey, and, for the first six or eight miles, got on tolerably well. My cousin, a stout, active lad, carried the bag of Highland luxuries—cheese, and butter, and a full peck of nuts—with which we had been laden by my aunt; and, by way of indemnity for taking both my share of the burden and his own, he demanded of me one of my long extempore stories, which, shortly after leaving my aunt's cottage, I accordingly began. My stories, when I had cousin Walter for my companion, were usually co-extensive with the journey to be performed: they became ten, fifteen, or twenty miles long, agreeably to the measure of the road, and the determination of the mile-stones; and what was at present required was a story of about thirty miles in length, whose one end would touch the Barony of Gruids, and the other the Cromarty Ferry. At the end, however, of the first six or eight miles, my story broke suddenly down, and my foot, after becoming very painful, began to bleed. The day, too, had grown raw and unpleasant, and after twelve o'clock there came on a thick wetting drizzle. I limped on silently in the rear, leaving at every few paces a blotch of blood upon the road, until, in the parish of Edderton, we both remembered that there was a short cut through the hills, which two of our older cousins had taken during the previous year, when on a similar journey; and as Walter deemed himself equal to anything which his elder cousins could perform, and as I was exceedingly desirous to get home as soon as possible, and by the shortest way, we both struck up the hill-side, and soon found ourselves in a dreary waste, without trace of human habitation.

Walter, however, pushed on bravely and in the right direction; and, though my head was now becoming light, and my sight dim, I succeeded in struggling after him, until, just as the night was falling, we reached a heathy ridge, which commands the northern sea-board of the Cromarty Firth, and saw the cultivated country and the sands of Nigg lying only a few miles below. The sands are dangerous at certain hours of the tide, and accidents frequently happen in the fords; but then there could, we thought, be no fear of us; for though Walter could not swim, I could; and as I was to lead the way, he of course would be safe, by simply avoiding the places where I lost footing. The night fell rather thick than dark, for there was a moon overhead, though it could not be seen through the cloud; but, though Walter steered well, the downward way was exceedingly rough and broken, and we had wandered from the path. I retain a faint but painful recollection of a scraggy moor, and of dark patches of planting, through which I had to grope onwards, stumbling as I went; and then, that I began to feel as if I were merely dreaming, and that the dream was a very horrible one, from which I could not awaken. And finally, on reaching a little cleared spot on the edge of the cultivated country, I dropped down as suddenly as if struck by a bullet, and, after an ineffectual attempt to rise, fell fast asleep. Walter was much frightened; but he succeeded in carrying me to a little rick of dried grass which stood up in the middle of the clearing; and after covering me well up with the grass, he laid himself down beside me. Anxiety, however, kept him awake; and he was frightened, as he lay, to hear the sounds of psalm-singing, in the old Gaelic style, coming apparently from a neighbouring clump of wood. Walter believed in the fairies; and, though psalmody was not one of the reputed accomplishments of the "good people" in the low country, he did not know but that in the Highlands the case might be different. Some considerable time after the singing had ceased, there was a slow, heavy step heard approaching the rick; an exclamation in Gaelic followed; and then a rough hard hand grasped Walter by the naked heel. He started up, and found himself confronted by an old, grey-headed man, the inmate of a cottage, which, hidden in the neighbouring clump, had escaped his notice.

The old man, in the belief that we were gipsies, was at first disposed to be angry at the liberty we had taken with his hayrick; but Walter's simple story mollified him at once, and he expressed deep regret that "poor boys, who had met with an accident," should have laid them down in such a night under the open sky, and a house so near. "It was putting disgrace," he said, "on a Christian land." I was assisted into his cottage, whose only other inmate, an aged woman, the old Highlander's wife, received us with great kindness and sympathy; and on Walter's declaring our names and lineage, the hospitable regrets and regards of both host and hostess waxed stronger and louder still. They knew our maternal grandfather and grandmother, and remembered old Donald Roy; and when my cousin named my father, there was a strongly-expressed burst of sorrow and commiseration, that the son of a man whom they had seen so "well to do in the world" should be in circumstances so deplorably destitute. I was too ill to take much note of what passed. I only remember, that of the food which they placed before me, I could partake of only a few spoonfuls of milk; and that the old woman, as she washed my feet, fell a-crying over me. I was, however, so greatly recruited by a night's rest in their best bed, as to be fit in the morning to be removed, in the old man's rung-cart, to the house of a relation in the parish of Nigg, from which, after a second day's rest, I was conveyed in another cart to the Cromarty Ferry. And thus terminated the last of my boyish visits to the Highlands.

Both my grandfather and grandmother had come of long-lived races, and Death did not often knock at the family door. But the time when the latter "should cross the river," though she was some six or eight years younger than her husband, came first; and so, according to Bunyan, she "called for her children, and told them that her hour had come." She was a quiet, retiring woman, and, though intimately acquainted with her Bible, not in the least fitted to make a female Professor of Theology: she could live her religion better than talk it; but she now earnestly recommended to her family the great interests once more; and, as its various members gathered round her bed, she besought one of her daughters to read to her, in their hearing, that eighth chapter of the Romans which declares that "there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." She repeated, in a sinking voice, the concluding verses,—"For I am persuaded, that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." And, resting in confidence on the hope which the passage so powerfully expresses, she slept her last sleep, in simple trust that all would be well with her in the morning of the general awakening. I retain her wedding-ring, the gift of Donald Roy. It is a sorely-wasted fragment, worn through on one of the sides, for she had toiled long and hard in her household, and the breach in the circlet, with its general thinness, testify to the fact; but its gold is still bright and pure; and, though not much of a relic-monger, I would hesitate to exchange it for the Holy Coat of Trèves, or for waggon-loads of the wood of the "true cross."

My grandmother's term of life had exceeded by several twelvemonths the full threescore and ten; but when, only a few years after, Death next visited the circle, it was on its youngest members that his hand was laid. A deadly fever swept over the place, and my two sisters—the one in her tenth, the other in her twelfth year—sank under it within a few days of each other. Jean, the elder, who resided with my uncles, was a pretty little girl, of fine intellect, and a great reader; Catherine, the younger, was lively and affectionate, and a general favourite; and their loss plunged the family in deep gloom. My uncles made little show of grief, but they felt strongly: my mother for weeks and months wept for her children, like Rachel of old, and refused to be comforted, because they were not; but my grandfather, now in his eighty-fifth year, seemed to be rendered wholly bankrupt in heart by their loss. As is perhaps not uncommon in such cases, his warmer affections strode across the generation of grown-up men and women—his sons and daughters—and luxuriated among the children their descendants. The boys, his grandsons, were too wild for him; but the two little girls—gentle and affectionate—had seized on his whole heart; and now that they were gone, it seemed as if he had nothing in the world left to care for. He had been, up till this time, notwithstanding his great age, a hale and active man. In 1803, when France threatened invasion, he was, though on the verge of seventy, one of the first men in the place to apply for arms as a volunteer; but now he drooped and gradually sunk, and longed for the rest of the grave. "It is God's will," I heard him say about this time, to a neighbour who congratulated him on his long term of life and unbroken health—"It is God's will, but not my desire." And in rather more than a twelvemonth after the death of my sisters, he was seized by almost his only illness—for, for nearly seventy years he had not been confined to bed for a single day—and was carried off in less than a week. During the last few days, the fever under which he sank mounted to his brain; and he talked in unbroken narrative of the events of his past life. He began with his earliest recollections; described the battle of Culloden as he had witnessed it from the Hill of Cromarty, and the appearance of Duke William and the royal army as seen during a subsequent visit to Inverness; ran over the after events of his career—his marriage, his interviews with Donald Roy, his business transactions with neighbouring proprietors, long dead at the time; and finally, after reaching, in his oral history, his term of middle life, he struck off into another track, and began laying down, with singular coherency, the statements of doctrine in a theological work of the old school, which he had been recently perusing. And finally, his mind clearing as his end approached, he died in good hope. It is not uninteresting to look back on two such generations of Scotchmen as those to which my uncles and grandfather belonged. They differed very considerably in some respects. My grandfather, with most of his contemporaries of the same class, had a good deal of the Tory in his composition. He stood by George III. in the early policy of his reign, and by his adviser Lord Bute; reprobated Wilkes and Junius; and gravely questioned whether Washington and his coadjutors, the American Republicans, were other than bold rebels. My uncles, on the contrary, were stanch Whigs, who looked upon Washington as perhaps the best and greatest man of modern times—stood firm by the policy of Fox, as opposed to that of Pitt—and held that the war with France, which immediately succeeded the First Revolution, was, however thoroughly it changed its character afterwards, one of unjustifiable aggression. But however greatly my uncles and grandfather may have differed on these points, they were equally honest men.

The rising generation can perhaps form no very adequate conception of the number and singular interest of the links which serve to connect the recollections of a man who has seen his fiftieth birth-day, with what to them must appear a remote past. I have seen at least two men who fought at Culloden—one on the side of the King, the other on that of the Prince—and, with these, not a few who witnessed the battle from a distance. I have conversed with an aged woman that had conversed, in turn, with an aged man who had attained to mature manhood when the persecutions of Charles and James were at their height, and remembered the general regret excited by the death of Renwick. My eldest maternal aunt—the mother of Cousin George—remembered old John Feddes—turned of ninety at the time; and John's buccaneering expedition could not have dated later than the year 1687. I have known many who remembered the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions; and have listened to stories of executions which took place on the gallows-hills of burghs and sheriffdoms, and of witch-burnings perpetrated on town Links and baronial Laws. And I have felt a strange interest in these glimpses of a past so unlike the present, when thus presented to the mind as personal reminiscences, or as well-attested traditions, removed from the original witnesses by but a single stage. All, for instance, which I have yet read of witch-burnings has failed to impress me so strongly as the recollections of an old lady who in 1722 was carried in her nurse's arms—for she was almost an infant at the time—to witness a witch-execution in the neighbourhood of Dornoch—the last which took place in Scotland. The lady well remembered the awe-struck yet excited crowd, the lighting of the fire, and the miserable appearance of the poor fatuous creature whom it was kindled to consume, and who seemed to be so little aware of her situation, that she held out her thin shrivelled hands to warm them at the blaze. But what most impressed the narrator—for it must have been a frightful incident in a sad spectacle—was the circumstance that, when the charred remains of the victim were sputtering and boiling amid the intense heat of the flames, a cross gust of wind suddenly blew the smoke athwart the spectators, and she felt in her attendant's arms as if in danger of being suffocated by the horrible stench. I have heard described, too, by a man whose father had witnessed the scene, an execution which took place, after a brief and inadequate trial, on the burgh-gallows of Tain. The supposed culprit, a Strathcarron Highlander, had been found lurking about the place, noting, as was supposed, where the burghers kept their cattle, and was hung as a spy; but they all, after the execution, came to deem him innocent, from the circumstance that, when his dead body was dangling in the wind, a white pigeon had come flying the way, and, as it passed over, half-encircled the gibbet.

One of the two Culloden soldiers whom I remember was an old forester who lived in a picturesque cottage among the woods of the Cromarty Hill; and in his last illness, my uncles, whom I had always leave to accompany, used not unfrequently to visit him. He had lived at the time his full century, and a few months more: and I still vividly remember the large gaunt face that used to stare from the bed as they entered, and the huge, horny hand. He had been settled in life, previous to the year 1745, as the head gardener of a northern proprietor, and little dreamed of being engaged in war; but the rebellion broke out; and as his master, a stanch Whig, had volunteered to serve on behalf of his principles in the royal army, his gardener, a "mighty man of his hands," went with him. As his memory for the later events of his life was gone at this time, its preceding forty years seemed a blank, from which not a single recollection could be drawn; but well did he remember the battle, and more vividly still, the succeeding atrocities of the troops of Cumberland. He had accompanied the army, after its victory at Culloden, to the camp at Fort-Augustus, and there witnessed scenes of cruelty and spoliation of which the recollection, after the lapse of seventy years, and in his extreme old age, had still power enough to set his Scotch blood aboil. While scores of cottages were flaming in the distance, and blood not unfrequently hissing on the embers, the men and women of the army used to be engaged in racing in sacks, or upon Highland ponies; and when the ponies were in request, the women, who must have sat for their portraits in Hogarth's "March to Finchley," took their seats astride like the men. Gold circulated and liquor flowed in abundance; and in a few weeks there were about twenty thousand head of cattle brought in by marauding parties of the soldiery from the crushed and impoverished Highlanders; and groups of drovers from Yorkshire and the south of Scotland—coarse vulgar men—used to come every day to share in the spoil, by making purchases at greatly less than half-price.

My grandfather's recollections of Culloden were merely those of an observant boy of fourteen, who had witnessed the battle from a distance. The day, he has told me, was drizzly and thick; and on reaching the brow of the Hill of Cromarty, where he found many of his townsfolk already assembled, he could scarce see the opposite land. But the fog gradually cleared away; first one hill-top came into view, and then another; till at length the long range of coast, from the opening of the great Caledonian valley to the promontory of Burgh-head, was dimly visible through the haze. A little after noon there suddenly rose a round white cloud from the Moor of Culloden, and then a second round white cloud beside it. And then the two clouds mingled together, and went rolling slantways on the wind towards the west; and he could hear the rattle of the smaller fire-arms mingling with the roar of the artillery. And then, in what seemed an exceedingly brief space of time, the cloud dissipated and disappeared, the boom of the greater guns ceased, and a sharp intermittent patter of musketry passed on towards Inverness. But the battle was presented to the imagination, in these old personal narratives, in many a diverse form. I have been told by an ancient woman, who, on the day of the fight, was engaged in tending some sheep on a solitary common near Munlochy, separated from the Moor of Culloden by the Firth, and screened by a lofty hill, that she sat listening in terror to the boom of the cannon; but that she was still more scared by the continuous howling of her dog, who sat upright on his haunches all the time the firing lasted, with his neck stretched out towards the battle, and "looking as if he saw a spirit." Such are some of the recollections which link the memories of a man who has lived his half-century, to those of the preceding age, and which serve to remind him how one generation of men after another break and disappear on the shores of the eternal world, as wave after wave breaks in foam upon the beach, when storms are rising, and the ground-swell sets in heavily from the sea.

CHAPTER VII.

"Whose elfin prowess scaled the orchard wall."—Rogers.

Some of the wealthier tradesmen of the town, dissatisfied with the small progress which their boys were making under the parish schoolmaster, clubbed together and got a schoolmaster of their own; but, though a rather clever young man, he proved an unsteady one, and, regular in his irregularities, got diurnally drunk, on receiving the instalments of his salary at term-days, as long as his money lasted. Getting rid of him, they procured another—a licentiate of the Church—who for some time promised well. He seemed steady and thoughtful, and withal a painstaking teacher; but coming in contact with some zealous Baptists, they succeeded in conjuring up such a cloud of doubt around him regarding the propriety of infant baptism, that both his bodily and mental health became affected by his perplexities, and he had to resign his charge. And then, after a pause, during which the boys enjoyed a delightfully long vacation, they got yet a third schoolmaster, also a licentiate, and a person of a high, if not very consistent religious profession, who was always getting into pecuniary difficulties, and always courting, though with but little success, wealthy ladies, who, according to the poet, had "acres of charms." To the subscription school I was transferred, at the instance of Uncle James, who remained quite sure, notwithstanding the experience of the past, that I was destined to be a scholar. And, invariably fortunate in my opportunities of amusement, the transference took place only a few weeks ere the better schoolmaster, losing health and heart in a labyrinth of perplexity resigned his charge. I had little more than time enough to look about me on the new forms, and to renew, on a firmer foundation than ever, my friendship with my old associate of the cave—who had been for the two previous years an inmate of the subscription school, and was now less under maternal control than before—when on came the long vacation; and for four happy months I had nothing to do.

My amusements had undergone very little change: I was even fonder of the shores and woods than ever, and better acquainted with the rocks and caves. A very considerable change, however, had taken place in the amusements of the school-fellows my contemporaries, who were now from two to three years older than when I had been associated with them in the parish school. Hy-spy had lost its charms; nor was there much of its old interest for them in French and English; whereas my rock excursions they came to regard as very interesting indeed. With the exception of my friend of the cave, they cared little about rocks or stones; but they all liked brambles, and sloes, and craws-apples, tolerably well, and took great delight in assisting me to kindle fires in the caverns of the old-coast line, at which we used to broil shell-fish and crabs, taken among the crags and boulders of the ebb below, and roast potatoes, transferred from the fields of the hill above. There was one cave, an especial favourite with us, in which our fires used to blaze day after day for weeks together. It is deeply hollowed in the base of a steep ivy-mantled precipice of granitic gneiss, a full hundred feet in height; and bears on its smoothed sides and roof, and along its uneven bottom,—fretted into pot-like cavities, with large rounded pebbles in them,—unequivocal evidence that the excavating agent to which it owed its existence had been the wild surf of this exposed shore. But for more than two thousand years wave had never reached it: the last general elevation of the land had raised it beyond the reach of the highest stream-tides; and when my gang and I took possession of its twilight recesses, its stony sides were crusted with mosses and liverworts; and a crop of pale, attenuated, sickly-looking weeds, on which the sun had never looked in his strength, sprang thickly up over its floor. In the remote past it had been used as a sort of garner and thrashing-place by a farmer of the parish, named Marcus, who had succeeded in rearing crops of bere and oats on two sloping plots at the foot of the cliffs in its immediate neighbourhood; and it was known, from this circumstance, to my uncles and the older inhabitants of the town, as Marcus's Cave. My companions, however, had been chiefly drawn to it by a much more recent association. A poor Highland pensioner—a sorely dilapidated relic of the French-American War, who had fought under General Wolfe in his day—had taken a great fancy to the cave, and would fain have made it his home. He was ill at ease in his family;—his wife was a termagant, and his daughter disreputable; and, desirous to quit their society altogether, and live as a hermit among the rocks, he had made application to the gentleman who tenanted the farm above, to be permitted to fit up the cave for himself as a dwelling. So bad was his English, however, that the gentleman failed to understand him; and his request was, as he believed, rejected, while it was in reality only not understood. Among the younger folk the cave came to be known, from the incident, as "Rory Shingles' Cave;" and my companions were delighted to believe that they were living in it as Rory would have lived, had his petition been granted. In the wild half-savage life which we led, we did contrive to provide for ourselves remarkably well. The rocky shores supplied us with limpets, periwinkles, and crabs, and now and then a lump-fish; the rugged slopes under the precipices, with hips, sloes, and brambles; the broken fragments of wreck along the beach, and the wood above, furnished abundance of fuel; and as there were fields not half a mile away, I fear the more solid part of our diet consisted often of potatoes which we had not planted, and of pease and beans which we had not sown. One of our number contrived to bring away a pot unobserved from his home; another succeeded in providing us with a pitcher; there was a good spring not two hundred yards from the cave mouth, which supplied us with water; and, thus possessed of not merely all that nature requires, but a good deal more, we contrived to fare sumptuously every day. It has been often remarked, that civilized man, when placed in circumstances at all favourable, soon learns to assume the savage. I shall not say that my companions or myself had been particularly civilized in our previous state; but nothing could be more certain, than that during our long vacation, we became very happy, and tolerably perfect savages. The class which we attended was of a kind not opened in any of our accredited schools, and it might be difficult to procure testimonials in its behalf, easily procurable as these usually are; and yet there were some of its lessons which might be conned with some little advantage, by one desirous of cultivating the noble sentiment of self-reliance, or the all-important habit of self-help. At the time, however, they appeared quite pointless enough; and the moral, as in the case of the continental apologue of Reynard the Fox, seemed always omitted.

Our parties in these excursions used at times to swell out to ten or twelve—at times to contract to two or three; but what they gained in quantity they always lost in quality, and became mischievous with the addition of every new member, in greatly more than the arithmetical ratio. When most innocent, they consisted of only a brace of members—a warm-hearted, intelligent boy from the south of Scotland, who boarded with two elderly ladies of the place, and attended the subscription school; and the acknowledged leader of the band, who, belonging to the permanent irreducible staff of the establishment, was never off duty. We used to be very happy, and not altogether irrational, in these little skeleton parties. My new friend was a gentle, tasteful boy, fond of poetry, and a writer of soft, simple verses in the old-fashioned pastoral vein, which he never showed to any one save myself; and we learned to love one another all the more, from the circumstance that I was of a somewhat bold, self-relying temperament, and he of a clinging, timid one. Two of the stanzas of a little pastoral, which he addressed to me about a twelvemonth after this time, when permanently quitting the north country for Edinburgh, still remain fixed in my memory; and I must submit them to the reader, both as adequately representative of the many others, their fellows, which have been lost, and of that juvenile poetry in general which "is written," according to Sir Walter Scott, "rather from the recollection of what has pleased the author in others, than what has been suggested by his own imagination."

"To you my poor sheep I resign,

My colly, my crook, and my horn:

To leave you, indeed, I repine,

But I must away with the morn.

New scenes shall evolve on my sight,

The world and its follies be new;

But ah! can such scenes of delight

Ere arise, as I witnessed with you!"

Timid as he naturally was, he soon learned to abide in my company terrors which most of my bolder companions shrank from encountering. I was fond of lingering in the caves until long after nightfall, especially in those seasons when the moon at full, or but a few days in her wane, rose out of the sea as the evening wore on, to light up the wild precipices of that solitary shore, and to render practicable our ascending path to the hill above. And Finlay was almost the only one of my band who dared to encounter with me the terrors of the darkness. Our fire has often startled the benighted boatman as he came rowing round some rocky promontory, and saw the red glare streaming seawards from the cavern mouth, and partially lighting up the angry tumbling of the surf beyond; and excise-cutters have oftener than once altered their tack in middle Firth, and come bearing towards the coast, to determine whether the wild rocks of Marcus were not becoming a haunt of smugglers.

Immediately beyond the granitic gneiss of the hill there is a subaqueous deposit of the Lias formation, never yet explored by geologist, because never yet laid bare by the ebb; though every heavier storm from the sea tells of its existence, by tossing ashore fragments of its dark bituminous shale. I soon ascertained that the shale is so largely charged with inflammable matter as to burn with a strong flame, as if steeped in tar or oil, and that I could repeat with it the common experiment of producing gas by means of a tobacco-pipe luted with clay. And, having read in Shakspere of a fuel termed "sea-coal," and unaware at the time that the poet merely meant coal brought to London by sea, I inferred that the inflammable shale cast up from the depths of the Firth by the waves could not be other than the veritable "sea-coal" which figured in the reminiscences of Dame Quickly; and so, assisted by Finlay, who shared in the interest which I felt in the substance, as at once classical and an original discovery, I used to collect it in large quantities and convert it into smoky and troubled fires, that ever filled our cavern with a horrible stench, and scented all the shore. Though unaware of the fact at the time, it owed its inflammability, not to vegetable, but to animal substance; the tar which used to boil in it to the heat, like resin in a fagot of moss-fir, was as strange a mixture as ever yet bubbled in witches' caldron—blood of pterodactyle and grease of ichthyosaur—eye of belemnite and hood of nautilus; and we learned to delight in its very smell, all oppressive as that was, as something wild, strange, and inexplicable. Once or twice I seemed on the eve of a discovery: in splitting the masses, I occasionally saw what appeared to be fragments of shells embedded in its substance; and at least once I laid open a mysterious-looking scroll or volute, existing on the dark surface as a cream-coloured film; but though these organisms raised a temporary wonder, it was not until a later period that I learned to comprehend their true import, as the half-effaced but still decipherable characters of a marvellous record of the grey, dream-encircled past.

With the docile Finlay as my companion, and left to work out my own will unchallenged, I was rarely or never mischievous. On the occasions, however, in which my band swelled out to ten or a dozen, I often experienced the ordinary evils of leadership, as known in all gangs and parties, civil and ecclesiastical; and was sometimes led, in consequence, to engage in enterprises which my better judgment condemned. I fain wish that among the other "Confessions" with which our literature is charged, we had the bona fide "Confessions of a Leader," with examples of the cases in which, though he seems to overbear, he is in reality overborne, and actually follows, though he appears to lead. Honest Sir William Wallace, though seven feet high, and a hero, was at once candid and humble enough to confess to the canons of Hexham, that, his "soldiers being evil-disposed men," whom he could neither "justify nor punish," he was able to protect women and Churchmen only so long as they "abided in his sight." And, of course, other leaders, less tall and less heroic, must not unfrequently find themselves, had they but Wallace's magnanimity to confess the fact, in circumstances much akin to those of Wallace. When bee-masters get hold of queen bees, they are able, by controlling the movements of these natural leaders of hives, to control the movements of the hives themselves; and not unfrequently in Churches and States do there exist inconspicuous bee-masters, who, by influencing or controlling the leader-bees, in reality influence and control the movements of the entire body, politic or ecclesiastical, over which these natural monarchs seem to preside. But truce with apology. Partly in the character of leader—partly being my self led—I succeeded about this time in getting one of my larger parties into a tolerably serious scrape. We passed every day, on our way to the cave, a fine large orchard, attached to the manor-house of the Cromarty estate; and in ascending an adjacent hill over which our path lay, and which commands a bird's-eye view of the trim-kept walks and well-laden trees, there used not unfrequently to arise wild speculations among us regarding the possibility and propriety of getting a supply of the fruit, to serve as desserts to our meals of shell-fish and potatoes. Weeks elapsed, however, and autumn was drawing on to its close, ere we could quite make up our minds regarding the adventure, when at length I agreed to lead; and, after arranging the plan of the expedition, we broke into the orchard under the cloud of night, and carried away with us whole pocketfuls of apples. They were all intolerably bad—sour, hard, baking apples; for we had delayed the enterprise until the better fruit had been pulled: but though they set our teeth on edge, and we flung most of them into the sea, we had "snatched" in the foray, what Gray well terms "a fearful joy," and had some thought of repeating it, merely for the sake of the excitement induced and the risk encountered, when out came the astounding fact, that one of our number had "peached," and, in the character of king's evidence, betrayed his companions.

The factor of the Cromarty property had an orphan nephew, who formed at times a member of our gang, and who had taken a willing part in the orchard foray. He had also engaged, however, in a second enterprise of a similar kind wholly on his own account, of which we knew nothing. An out-house pertaining to the dwelling in which he lodged, though itself situated outside the orchard, was attached to another house inside the walls, which was employed by the gardener as a store-place for his apples; and finding an unsuspected crevice in the partition which divided the two buildings, somewhat resembling that through which Pyramus and Thisbe made love of old in the city of Babylon, our comrade, straightway availing himself of so fair an opening, fell a-courting the gardener's apples. Sharpening the end of a long stick, he began harpooning, through the hole, the apple-heap below; and though the hole was greatly too small for admitting the finer and larger specimens, and they, in consequence, fell back, disengaged from the harpoon, in the attempt to land them, he succeeded in getting a good many of the smaller ones. Old John Clark the gardener—far advanced in life at the time, and seeing too imperfectly to discover the crevice which opened high amid the obscurity of the loft—was in a perfect maze regarding the evil influence that was destroying his apples. The harpooned individuals lay scattered over the floor by scores; but the agent that had dispersed and perforated them remained for weeks together an inscrutable mystery to John. At length, however, there came a luckless morning, in which our quondam companion lost hold, when busy at work, of the pointed stick; and when John next entered his storehouse, the guilty harpoon lay stretched across the harpooned apples. The discovery was followed up; the culprit detected; and, on being closeted with his uncle the factor, he communicated not only the details of his own special adventure, but the particulars of ours also. And early next day there was a message sent us by a safe and secret messenger, to the effect that we would be all put in prison in the course of the week.

We were terribly frightened; so much so, that the strong point of our position—the double-dyed guilt of the factor's nephew—failed to occur to any of us; and we looked for only instant incarceration. I still remember the intense feeling of shame I used to experience every time I crossed my mother's door for the street—the agonizing, all-engrossing belief that every one was looking at and pointing me out—and the terror, when in my uncles'—akin to that of the culprit who hears from his box the footsteps of the returning jury—that, having learned of my offence, they were preparing to denounce me as a disgrace to an honest family, on which, in the memory of man, no stain had before rested. The discipline was eminently wholesome, and I never forgot it. It did seem somewhat strange, however, that no one appeared to know anything about our misdemeanour: the factor kept our secret remarkably well; but we inferred he was doing so in order to pounce upon us all the more effectually; and, holding a hasty council in the cave, we resolved that, quitting our homes for a few weeks, we should live among the rocks till the storm that seemed rising should have blown by.

Marcus's Cave was too accessible and too well known; but my knowledge of the locality enabled me to recommend to my lads two other caves in which I thought we might be safe. The one opened in a thicket of furze, some forty feet above the shore; and, though large enough within to contain from fifteen to twenty men, it presented outside much the appearance of a fox-earth, and was not known to half-a-dozen people in the country. It was, however, damp and dark; and we found that we could not venture on lighting a fire in it without danger of suffocation. It was pronounced excellent, however, as a temporary place of concealment, were the search for us to become very hot. The other cavern was wide and open; but it was a wild, ghostly-looking place, scarcely once visited from one twelvemonth's end to another: its floor was green with mould, and its ridgy walls and roof bristled over with slim pale stalactites, which looked like the pointed tags that roughen a dead-dress. It was certain, too, that it was haunted. Marks of a cloven foot might be seen freshly impressed on its floor, which had been produced either by a stray goat, or by something worse; and the few boys to whom its existence and character were known used to speak of it under their breath as "the Devil's Cave." My lads did at first look round them as we entered, with an awe-struck and disconsolate expression; but falling busily to work among the cliffs, we collected large quantities of withered grass and fern for bedding, and, selecting the drier and less exposed portions of the floor, soon piled up for ourselves a row of little lairs, formed in a sort of half-way style between that of the wild beast and the gipsy, on which it would have been possible enough to sleep. We selected, too, a place for our fire, gathered a little heap of fuel, and secreted in a recess, for ready use, our Marcus' Cave pot and pitcher, and the lethal weapons of the gang, which consisted of an old bayonet so corroded with rust that it somewhat resembled a three-edged saw and an old horseman's pistol tied fast to the stock by cobbler's ends, and with lock and ramrod wanting. Evening surprised us in the middle of our preparations; and as the shadows fell dark and thick, my lads began to look most uncomfortably around them. At length they fairly struck work: there was no use, they said, for being in the Devil's Cave so late—no use, indeed, for being in it at all, until we were made sure the factor did actually intend to imprison us; and, after delivering themselves to this effect, they fairly bolted, leaving Finlay and myself to bring up the rear at our leisure. My well-laid plan was, in short, found unworkable, from the inferior quality of my materials. I returned home with a heavy heart, somewhat grieved that I had not confided my scheme to only Finlay, who could, I ascertained, do braver things, with all his timidity, than the bolder boys, our occasional associates. And yet, when, in passing homewards through the dark lonely woods of the Hill, I bethought me of the still deeper solitude and gloom of the haunted cave far below, and thought further, that at that very moment the mysterious being with the cloven foot might be traversing its silent floor, I felt my blood run cold, and at once leaped to the conclusion that, save for the disgrace, a cave with an evil spirit in it could be not a great deal better than a prison. Of the prison, however, we heard no more; though I never forgot the grim but precious lesson read me by the factor's threat; and from that time till the present—save now and then, by inadvertently admitting into my newspaper a paragraph written in too terse a style by some good man in the provinces, against some very bad man his neighbour—I have not been fairly within wind of the law. I would, however, seriously advise such of my young friends as may cast a curious eye over these pages to avoid taking any such lesson as mine at first-hand. One half-hour of the mental anguish which I at this time experienced, when I thought of my mother and uncles, and the infamy of a prison, would have vastly more than counterbalanced all that could have been enjoyed from banqueting on apples, even had they been those of the Hesperides or of Eden, instead of being, what they were in this case, green masses of harsh acid, alike formidable to teeth and stomach. I must add, in justice to my friend of the Doocot Cave, that, though an occasional visitor at Marcus, he had prudently avoided getting into this scrape.

Our long vacation came at length to an end, by the appointment of a teacher to the subscription school; but the arrangement was not the most profitable possible for the pupils. It was an ominous circumstance, that we learned in a few days to designate the new master by a nickname, and that the name stuck—a misfortune which almost never befalls the truly superior man. He had, however, a certain dash of cleverness about him; and observing that I was of potent influence among my school-fellows, he set himself to determine the grounds on which my authority rested. Copy and arithmetic books, in schools in which there was liberty, used in those ancient times to be charged with curious revelations. In the parish school, for instance, which excelled, as I have said, every other school in the world in its knowledge of barques and carvels, it was not uncommon to find a book which, when opened at the right end, presented only copy-lines or arithmetical questions, that, when opened at the wrong one, presented only ships and boats. And there were cases on record in which, on the grand annual examination-day that heralded the vacation, the worthy parish minister, by beginning to turn over the leaves of some exhibited book at the reverse end, found himself engaged, when expecting only the questions of Cocker, or the slip-lines of Butterworth, amid whole fleets of smacks, frigates, and brigantines. My new master, professionally acquainted with this secret property of arithmetic and copy-books, laid hold of mine, and, bringing them to his desk, found them charged with very extraordinary revelations indeed. The blank spaces were occupied with deplorably scrabbled couplets and stanzas, blent with occasional remarks in rude prose, that dealt chiefly with natural phenomena. One note, for instance, which the master took the trouble of deciphering, referred to the supposed fact, familiar as a matter of sensation to boys located on the sea-coast, that during the bathing season the water is warmer in windy days, when the waves break high, than during dead calms; and accounted for it (I fear not very philosophically) on the hypothesis that the "waves, by slapping against each other, engender heat, as heat may be engendered by clapping the hands." The master read on, evidently with much difficulty, and apparently with considerable scepticism: he inferred that I had been borrowing, not inventing: though where such prose and such verse could have been borrowed, and, in especial, such grammar and such spelling, even cleverer men than he might well have despaired of ever finding out. And in order to test my powers, he proposed furnishing me with a theme on which to write. "Let us see," he said, "let us see: the dancing-school ball comes on here next week—bring me a poem on the dancing-school ball." The subject did not promise a great deal; but, setting myself to work in the evening, I produced half-a-dozen stanzas on the ball, which were received as good, in evidence that I actually could rhyme; and for some weeks after I was rather a favourite with the new master.

I had, however, ere now become a wild insubordinate boy, and the only school in which I could properly be taught was that world-wide school which awaited me, in which Toil and Hardship are the severe but noble teachers. I got into sad scrapes. Quarrelling, on one occasion, with a boy of my own standing, we exchanged blows across the form; and when called up for trial and punishment, the fault was found to attach so equally to both sides, that the same number of palmies, well laid on, were awarded to each. I bore mine, however, like a North American Indian, whereas my antagonist began to howl and cry; and I could not resist the temptation of saying to him in a whisper that unluckily reached the ear of the master, "Ye big blubbering blockhead, take that for a drubbing from me." I had of course to receive a few palmies additional for the speech; but then, "who cared for that?" The master, however, "cared" considerably more for the offence than I did for the punishment. And in a subsequent quarrel with another boy—a stout and somewhat desperate mulatto—I got into a worse scrape still, of which he thought still worse. The mulatto, in his battles, which were many, had a trick, when in danger of being over-matched, of drawing his knife; and in our affair—the necessities of the fight seeming to require it—he drew his knife upon me. To his horror and astonishment, however, instead of running off, I immediately drew mine, and, quick as lightning, stabbed him in the thigh. He roared out in fright and pain, and, though more alarmed than hurt, never after drew knife upon a combatant. But the value of the lesson which I gave was, like most other very valuable things, inadequately appreciated; and it merely procured for me the character of being a dangerous boy. I had certainly reached a dangerous stage; but it was mainly myself that was in jeopardy. There is a transition-time in which the strength and independence of the latent man begin to mingle with the wilfulness and indiscretion of the mere boy, which is more perilous than any other, in which many more downward careers of recklessness and folly begin, that end in wreck and ruin, than in all the other years of life which intervene between childhood and old age. The growing lad should be wisely and tenderly dealt with at this critical stage. The severity that would fain compel the implicit submission yielded at an earlier period, would probably succeed, if his character was a strong one, in insuring but his ruin. It is at this transition-stage that boys run off to sea from parents and masters, or, when tall enough, enlist in the army for soldiers. The strictly orthodox parent, if more severe than wise, succeeds occasionally in driving, during this crisis, his son into Popery or infidelity; and the sternly moral one, in landing his in utter profligacy. But, leniently and judiciously dealt with, the dangerous period passes: in a few years at most—in some instances in even a few months—the sobriety incidental to a further development of character ensues, and the wild boy settles down into a rational young man.

It so chanced, however, that in what proved the closing scene in my term of school attendance, I was rather unfortunate than guilty. The class to which I now belonged read an English lesson every afternoon, and had its rounds of spelling; and in these last I acquitted myself but ill; partly from the circumstance that I spelt only indifferently, but still more from the further circumstance, that, retaining strongly fixed in my memory the broad Scotch pronunciation acquired at the dames' school, I had to carry on in my mind the double process of at once spelling the required word, and of translating the old sounds of the letters of which it was composed into the modern ones. Nor had I been taught to break the words into syllables; and so, when required one evening to spell the word "awful," with much deliberation—for I had to translate, as I went on, the letters a-w and u—I spelt it word for word, without break or pause, as a-w-f-u-l. "No," said the master, "a-w, aw, f-u-l, awful; spell again." This seemed preposterous spelling. It was sticking in an a, as I thought, into the middle of the word, where, I was sure, no a had a right to be; and so I spelt it as at first. The master recompensed my supposed contumacy with a sharp cut athwart the ears with his tawse; and again demanding the spelling of the word, I yet again spelt it as at first. But on receiving a second cut, I refused to spell it any more; and, determined on overcoming my obstinacy, he laid hold of me and attempted throwing me down. As wrestling, however, had been one of our favourite Marcus' Cave exercises, and as few lads of my inches wrestled better than I, the master, though a tall and tolerably robust fellow, found the feat considerably more difficult than he could have supposed. We swayed from side to side of the school-room, now backwards, now forwards, and for a full minute it seemed to be rather a moot point on which side the victory was to incline. At length, however, I was tripped over a form; and as the master had to deal with me, not as master usually deals with pupil, but as one combatant deals with another, whom he has to beat into submission, I was mauled in a way that filled me with aches and bruises for a full month thereafter. I greatly fear that, had I met the fellow on a lonely road five years subsequent to our encounter, when I had become strong enough to raise breast-high the "great lifting stone of the Dropping Cave," he would have caught as sound a thrashing as he ever gave to little boy or girl in his life; but all I could do at this time was to take down my cap from off the pin, when the affair had ended, and march straight out of school. And thus terminated my school education. Before night I had avenged myself, in a copy of satiric verses, entitled "The Pedagogue," which—as they had some little cleverness in them, regarded as the work of a boy, and as the known eccentricities of their subject gave me large scope—occasioned a good deal of merriment in the place; and of the verses a fair copy, written out by Finlay, was transmitted through the Post-Office to the pedagogue himself. But the only notice he ever took of them was incidentally, in a short speech made to the copyist a few days after. "I see, Sir," he said,—"I see you still associate with that fellow Miller; perhaps he will make you a poet!" "I had thought, Sir," said Finlay very quietly, in reply, "that poets were born—not made."

As a specimen of the rhyme of this period, and as in some degree a set-off against my drubbing, which remains till this day an unsettled score, I submit my pasquinade to the reader:—

THE PEDAGOGUE.

With solemn mien and pious air,

S—k—r attends each call of grace;

Loud eloquence bedecks his prayer,