| By Author | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Title | [ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z | Other Symbols ] |
| By Language |
|
Download this book: [ ASCII ] Look for this book on Amazon Tweet |
Title: Scenes and legends of the North of Scotland : or, The traditional history of Cromarty
Author: Miller, Hugh
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.
*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Scenes and legends of the North of Scotland : or, The traditional history of Cromarty" ***
NORTH OF SCOTLAND ***
SCENES AND LEGENDS
OF
THE NORTH OF SCOTLAND.
SCENES AND LEGENDS
OF
THE NORTH OF SCOTLAND;
The Traditional History of Cromarty.
BY HUGH MILLER,
AUTHOR OF ‘THE OLD RED SANDSTONE,’ ETC. ETC.
_EIGHTH EDITION._
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM P. NIMMO.
1869.
DEDICATION
TO
SIR THOMAS DICK LAUDER
OF GRANGE AND FOUNTAINHALL, BARONET.
HONOURED SIR,
I am not much acquainted with what Goldsmith has termed the ceremonies
of a dedication. I know, however, that like other ceremonies, they are
sometimes a little tedious, and often more than a little insincere. But
it is well that, though dulness be involuntary, no one need deceive
unless he wills it. There are comparatively few who seem born to think
vigorously, or to express themselves well; but since all men may be
honest, though all cannot be original or elegant, every one, surely,
may express only what he feels. In dedicating this little volume to
you, I obey the dictates of a real, though perhaps barren, gratitude;
nor can I think of the kind interest which you have taken in my
amusements as a writer, and my fortunes as a man, without feeling that,
though I may be dull, I cannot be insincere.
There are other motives which have led to this address. He who
dedicates, more than expresses his gratitude. By his choice of a
Patron, he intimates also, as if by specimen, the class which he would
fain select as his readers; or, as I should perhaps rather express
myself, he specifies the peculiar cast of intellect and range of
acquirement from which he anticipates the justest appreciation of his
labours, and the deepest interest in the subject of them. Need I say
that I regard you, Sir Thomas, as a representative of the class whom
it is most my ambition to please? My stories, arranged as nearly as
possible in the chronological order, form a long vista into the past
of Scotland, with all its obsolete practices and all its exploded
beliefs. And where shall I find one better qualified to decide
regarding the truth of the scenery, the justness of the perspective, or
the proportions and costume of the figures, than he whom contemporary
genius has so happily designated as the “Poet and Painter of the great
Morayshire Floods?” I can form no higher wish than that my work may
prove worthy of so discerning a critic, or that you, Sir, may be as
fortunate in your _protégé_ as I in my patron.
I am, I trust, no _hypocrite_ in literature, but a right-hearted
devotee to whom composition is quite its own reward. If my little
volume succeed, I shall be gratified by reflecting that the pleasure
derived from it has not been confined to myself; if it fail, there
will be some comfort in the thought that it has proved, to at least
one mind, a copious source of entertainment. Besides, I am pretty
sure, I shall be sanguine enough to transfer to some production of the
future, the few hopes which, in the past, I had founded on it. And when
thinking of it as the “poor deceased,” I reflect that, at worst, it
was rather dull than wicked, and that it rather failed in performance
than erred in intention; I shall not judge the less tenderly regarding
it, when I further remember that it procured for me the honour of your
notice, and furnished me with this opportunity of subscribing myself,
Honoured Sir,
With sincere respect,
Your humble friend, and obedient Servant,
THE AUTHOR.
CROMARTY, 1834.
NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
The present edition contains about one-third more matter than the
first. The added chapters, however, like those which previously
composed the work, were almost all written about twenty years ago,[1]
in leisure hours snatched from a laborious employment, or during the
storms of winter, when the worker in the open air has to seek shelter
at home. But it is always less disadvantageous to a traditionary work,
that it should have been written early than late. Of the materials
wrought up into the present volume, the greater part was gathered about
from fifteen to twenty years earlier still; and though some thirty-five
or forty years may not seem a very lengthened period, such has been
the change that has taken place during the lapse of the generation
which has in that time disappeared from the earth, that perhaps scarce
a tithe of the same matter could be collected now. We live in an age
unfavourable to tradition, in which the written has superseded the
oral. As the sun rose in his strength, the manna wasted away like
hoar-frost from off the ground.
In preparing my volume a second time for the press, I have felt
rather gratified than otherwise, that, at least, much of what it
contains should have been preserved. The reader will here and there
find snatches of dissertation, which would perhaps not be missed if
away--which, at all events, had they not been written before, would
have remained unwritten now; but which I have spared, partly for the
sake of the associations connected with them, and partly under the
impression that the other portions of the work would have less of
character if they were wanting. Some of these dissertative fragments
I have, however, considerably abridged, and there were others of a
similar kind in the first edition which have been wholly suppressed. In
my longer stories I have, I find, exercised the same sort of liberty
in filling up the outlines as that taken by the ancient historians in
their earlier chapters. Livy in the the times of the Empire could write
speeches for Romulus and Junius Brutus, and introduce them into his
narrative as authentic; and Tacitus details as minutely, in his Life
of Agricola, the deliberations of the warlike Caledonians as if he
had formed one of their councils. Even the sober Hume puts arguments
for and against toleration into the mouths of Cardinal Pole and his
opponents which belonged to neither the men nor the age. But though I
have, in some cases, given shade and colour to the original lines, in
no case have I altered the character of the drawing. I have only to
state further, that the reader, when he finds reference made, in the
indefinite style of the traditionary historian, to the years which have
elapsed since the events related took place, must add in every instance
twenty additional twelvemonths to the number; the some thirty bygone
years of my narratives have stretched out into half a century, and the
half century into the threescore years and ten.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
PAGE
My Old Library and its Contents--The Three Classes of
Traditions--Legend of Sludach--Singular Test of
Character--The Writer’s Pledge, 1
CHAPTER II.
Alypos--Etymological Legends--Epic Poetry of the Middle
Ages--Astorimon--The Spectre Ships--Olaus Rudbeck, 10
CHAPTER III.
The Bay of Cromarty--The Old Coast Line--The Old Town--The
Storms of the Five Winters--Donald Miller’s Wars with the
Sea, 25
CHAPTER IV.
Macbeth--Our earlier Data--The Fions of Knock-Ferril--The King’s
Sons--The Obelisks of Easter Ross--Dunskaith--The Urquharts
of Cromarty--Wallace--The Foray of the Clans--Paterhemon, 36
CHAPTER V.
Remains of the Old Mythology--The Devotional Sentiment--Interesting
Usages--Rites of the Scottish Halloween--The Charm
of the Egg--The Twelfth Rig--Macculloch’s Courtship--The
Extinct Spectres--Legend of Morial’s Den--The Guardian Cock, 55
CHAPTER VI.
A Scottish Town of the 17th Century--The Old Castle of the
Urquharts--Hereditary Sheriffship, 75
CHAPTER VII.
Sir Thomas Urquhart, 86
CHAPTER VIII.
The Reformation--Outbreaking at Rosemarkie--Sir John Urquhart
of Craigfintrie--The Ousted Ministers--Mr. Fraser of
Brea--Luggie, 105
CHAPTER IX.
The Chaplain’s Lair, 124
CHAPTER X.
The Curates--Donald Roy of Nigg--The Breaking of the Burgh--George
Earl of Cromartie--The Union, 143
CHAPTER XI.
Important Events which affect the Religious Character--Kenneth
Ore--Thomas Hogg and the Man-horse--The Watchman of
Cullicuden--The Lady of Ardvrock--The Lady of Balconie, 157
CHAPTER XII.
The Fisherman’s Widow, 177
CHAPTER XIII.
The Story of John Feddes--Andrew Lindsay, 194
CHAPTER XIV.
The Chapel of St. Regulus--Macleod the Smuggler--The Story of
Sandy Wood, 209
CHAPTER XV.
The Poor Lost Lad--A Ballad in Prose--Morrison the Painter, 221
CHAPTER XVI.
The Economy of Accident--The Black Years--Progress of the
Pestilence--The Quarantine--The Cholera, 235
CHAPTER XVII.
Martinmas Market--The Herring Drove--The Whale-Fishers--The
Flight of the Drove--Urquhart of Greenhill--Poem--William
Forsyth--The Caithness Man’s Leap, 250
CHAPTER XVIII.
Sandy Wright and the Puir Orphan, 267
CHAPTER XIX.
Tarbat Ness--Stine Bheag o’ Tarbat, 279
CHAPTER XX.
The Mermaid--The Story of John Reid--Maculloch the Corn-Agent--The
Washing of the Mermaid, 290
CHAPTER XXI.
The Bad Year--Sandison’s Spulzie--The Meal Mob, 305
CHAPTER XXII.
The Forty-Five--Nanny Miller’s Onslaught--The Retreat--The
Battle of Culloden--Old John Dunbar--Jacobite Psalm, 319
CHAPTER XXIII.
The Dropping Cave--The Legend of Willie Millar--A Boy
Adventurer--Fiddler’s Well, 329
CHAPTER XXIV.
Wars of the Town’s-people--Maculloch the Lawyer--The
Law-Plea--Roderick and the Captain--Mr. Henderson, 342
CHAPTER XXV.
The Churchyard Ghost--My Writing Room--The Broken Promise--The
Polander--The One-eyed Stepmother--The Pedlar--The
Green Lady--Munro the Post, 357
CHAPTER XXVI.
The Literati of Cromarty--Johnie o’ the Shore--Meggie o’ the
Shore--David Henderson--Macculloch of Dun-Loth, 377
CHAPTER XXVII.
The Gudewife of Minitarf, 395
CHAPTER XXVIII.
The Old School, and what it produced--Dr. Hossack--The hard
Dominie--Mr. Russel the minister--The Cock-Fight--Maculloch
the Mechanician, 408
CHAPTER XXIX.
The Itinerant Sculptor--Kirk-Michael--The Apprentice’s Dream--The
Wild Wife--Gordon of Newhall--Sir Robert Munro--Babble
Hanah, 432
CHAPTER XXX.
George Ross, the Scotch Agent, 449
CHAPTER XXXI.
The Burn of Eathie--Donald Calder--The Story of Tom M’Kechan--Fause
Jamie, 461
CHAPTER XXXII.
Our Town Politics--The First Whig--The Revolution--The Democracy--The
Procession--Hossack’s Pledge--The County Meeting--The
French War--Whiggism of the People, 473
SCENES AND LEGENDS.
THE TRADITIONAL HISTORY OF CROMARTY.
CHAPTER I.
“Tradition is a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be
rekindled.”--JOHNSON.
Extremes may meet in the intellectual as certainly as in the moral
world. I find, in tracing to its first beginnings the slowly
accumulated magazine of facts and inferences which forms the stock in
trade on which my mind carries on its work of speculation and exchange,
that my greatest benefactors have been the philosophic Bacon and an
ignorant old woman, who, of all the books ever written, was acquainted
with only the Bible.
[Sidenote: MY OLD LIBRARY AND ITS CONTENTS.]
When a little fellow of about ten or twelve years of age, I was much
addicted to reading, but found it no easy matter to gratify the
propensity; until, having made myself acquainted with some people in
the neighbourhood who were possessed of a few volumes, I was permitted
to ransack their shelves, to the no small annoyance of the bookworm and
the spider. I read incessantly; and as the appetite for reading, like
every other kind of appetite, becomes stronger the more it is indulged,
I felt, when I had consumed the whole, a still keener craving than
before. I was quite in the predicament of the shipwrecked sailor, who
expends his last morsel when on the open sea, and, like him too, I set
myself to prey on my neighbours. Old greyheaded men, and especially
old women, became my books; persons whose minds, not having been
preoccupied by that artificial kind of learning which is the result of
education, had gradually filled, as they passed through life, with the
knowledge of what was occurring around them, and with the information
derived from people of a similar cast with themselves, who had been
born half an age earlier. And it was not long before I at least
_thought_ I discovered that their narratives had only to be translated
into the language of books, to render them as interesting as even the
better kind of written stories. They abounded with what I deemed as
true delineations of character, as pleasing exhibitions of passion, and
as striking instances of the vicissitudes of human affairs--with the
vagaries of imaginations as vigorous, and the beliefs of superstitions
as wild. Alas! the epitaph of the famous American printer may now be
written over the greater part of the volumes of this my second library;
and so unfavourable is the present age to the production of more,
that even that wise provision of nature which implants curiosity in
the young, while it renders the old communicative, seems abridged of
one-half its usefulness. For though the young must still learn, the
old need not teach; the press having proved such a supplanter of the
past-world schoolmaster, Tradition, as the spinning-wheel proved in
the last age to the distaff and spindle. I cannot look back on much
more than twenty years of the past; and yet in that comparatively
brief space, I see the stream of tradition rapidly lessening as it
flows onward, and displaying, like those rivers of Africa which lose
themselves in the burning sands of the desert, a broader and more
powerful volume as I trace it towards its source.
It has often been a subject of regret to me, that this oral knowledge
of the past, which I deem so interesting, should be thus suffered to be
lost. The meteor, says my motto, if it once fall, cannot be rekindled.
Perhaps had I been as conversant, some five or ten years ago, with the
art of the writer as with the narratives of my early monitors, no one
at this time of day would have to entertain a similar feeling; but I
was not so conversant with it, nor am I yet, and the occasion still
remains. The Sibyline tomes of tradition are disappearing in this part
of the country one by one; and I find, like Selkirk in his island when
the rich fruits of autumn were dropping around him, that if I myself
do not preserve them they must perish. I therefore set myself to the
task of storing them up as I best may, and urge as my only apology
the emergency of the case. Not merely do I regard them as the produce
of centuries, and like the blossoms of the Aloe, interesting on this
account alone, but also as a species of produce which the harvests of
future centuries may fail to supply. True it is, that superstition
is a weed indigenous to the human mind, and will spring up in the
half-cultivated corners of society in every coming generation; but then
the superstitions of the future may have little in common with those of
the past. True it is, that human nature is intrinsically the same in
all ages and all countries; but then it is not so with its ever-varying
garb of custom and opinion, and never again may it wear this garb in
the curious obsolete fashion of a century ago.--Geologists tell us
that the earth produced its plants and animals at a time when the very
stones of our oldest ruins existed only as mud or sand; but they were
certainly not the plants and animals of Linnæus or Buffon.
[Sidenote: THE THREE CLASSES OF TRADITIONS.]
The traditions of this part of the country, and of perhaps every
other, may be divided into three great classes. Those of the first
and simplest class are strictly local; they record real events, and
owe their chief interest to their delineations of character. Those of
the second are pure inventions. They are formed mostly after a set of
models furnished perhaps by the later bards, and are common--though
varying in different places according to the taste of the several
imitators who first introduced them, or the chance alterations which
they afterwards received--to almost every district of Scotland. The
traditions of the third and most complex class are combinations of
the two others, with in some instances a dash of original invention,
and in others a mixture of that superstitious credulity which can
misconceive as ingeniously as the creative faculty can invent. The
value of stories of the first class is generally in proportion to their
truth, and there is a simple test by which we may ascertain the degree
of credit proper to be attached to them. There is a habit of minute
attention almost peculiar to the common people (in no class, at least,
is it more perfect than in the commonest), which leads them to take a
kind of microscopic survey of every object suited to interest them;
and hence their narratives of events which have really occurred are
as strikingly faithful in all the minor details as Dutch paintings.
Not a trait of character, not a shade of circumstance, is suffered to
escape. Nay more, the _dramatis personæ_ of their little histories are
almost invariably introduced to tell their own stories in their own
language. And though this be the easiest and lowest style of narrative,
yet to invent in this style is so far from being either low or easy,
that with the exception of Shakspere, and one or two more, I know not
any who have excelled in it. Nothing more common than those faithful
memories which can record whole conversations, and every attendant
circumstance, however minute; nothing less so than that just conception
of character and vigour of imagination, which can alone construct a
natural dialogue, or depict, with the nice pencil of truth, a scene
wholly fictitious. And thus though any one, even the weakest, can
mix up falsehoods with the truths related in this way, not one of a
million can make them amalgamate. The iron and clay, to use Bacon’s
illustration, retain their separate natures, as in the feet of the
image, and can as easily be distinguished.
The traditions of the second class, being in most instances only
imperfect copies of extravagant and ill-conceived originals, are much
less interesting than those of the first; and such of them as are
formed on the commoner models, or have already, in some shape or other,
been laid before the public, I shall take the liberty of rejecting.
A very few of them, however, are of a superior and more local cast,
and these I shall preserve. Their merit, such as it is, consists
principally in their structure as stories--a merit, I am disposed
to think, which, when even at the best, is of no high order. I have
observed that there is more of plot and counter-plot in our commonest
novels and lowest kind of plays, than in the tales and dramas of our
best writers; and what can be more simple than the fables of the Iliad
and the Paradise Lost!--From the third class of traditions I trust
to derive some of my choicest materials. Like those of the first,
they are rich in character and incident, and to what is natural in
them and based on fact, there is added, as in Epic poetry, a kind of
machinery, supplied either by invention or superstition, or borrowed
from the fictions of the bards, or from the old classics. In one or
two instances I have met with little strokes of fiction in them, of a
similar character with, some of even the finest strokes in the latter,
but which seem to be rather coincidences of invention, if I may so
express myself, than imitations.--There occurs to me a story of this
class which may serve to illustrate my meaning.
[Sidenote: LEGEND OF SLUDACH.]
In the upper part of the parish of Cromarty there is a singularly
curious spring, termed Sludach, which suddenly dries up every year
early in summer, and breaks out again at the close of autumn. It
gushes from the bank with an undiminished volume until within a few
hours before it ceases to flow for the season, and bursts forth on its
return in a full stream. And it acquired this peculiar character, says
tradition, some time in the seventeenth century. On a very warm day of
summer, two farmers employed in the adjacent fields were approaching
the spring in opposite directions to quench their thirst. One of them
was tacksman of the farm on which the spring rises, the other tenanted
a neighbouring farm. They had lived for some time previous on no very
friendly terms. The tacksman, a coarse, rude man, reached the spring
first, and taking a hasty draught, he gathered up a handful of mud,
and just as his neighbour came up, flung it into the water. “Now,”
said he, turning away as he spoke, “you may drink your fill.” Scarcely
had he uttered the words, however, when the offended stream began to
boil like a caldron, and after bubbling a while among the grass and
rushes, sunk into the ground. Next day at noon the heap of grey sand
which had been incessantly rising and falling within it, in a little
conical jet, for years before, had become as dry as the dust of the
fields; and the strip of white flowering cresses which skirted either
side of the runnel that had issued from it, lay withering in the sun.
What rendered the matter still more extraordinary, it was found that
a powerful spring had burst out on the opposite side of the firth,
which at this place is nearly five miles in breadth, a few hours after
the Cromarty one had disappeared. The story spread; the tacksman,
rude and coarse as he was, was made unhappy by the forebodings of his
neighbours, who seemed to regard him as one resting under a curse; and
going to an elderly person in an adjoining parish, much celebrated for
his knowledge of the supernatural, he craved his advice. “Repair,”
said the seer, “to the old hollow of the fountain, and as nearly as
you can guess, at the hour in which you insulted the water, and after
clearing it out with a clean linen towel lay yourself down beside it
and abide the result.” He did so, and waited on the bank above the
hollow from noon until near sunset, when the water came rushing up
with a noise like the roar of the sea, scattering the sand for several
yards around; and then, subsiding to its common level, it flowed on as
formerly between the double row of cresses. The spring on the opposite
side of the firth withdrew its waters about the time of the rite of
the cleansing, and they have not since re-appeared; while those of
Sludach, from that day to the present, are presented, as if in scorn,
during the moister seasons, when no one regards them as valuable, and
withheld in the seasons of drought, when they would be prized. We
recognise in this singular tradition a kind of soul or Naiad of the
spring, susceptible of offence, and conscious of the attentions paid
to it; and the passage of the waters beneath the sea reminds us of the
river Alpheus sinking at Peloponnesus to rise in Sicily.
[Sidenote: SINGULAR TEST OF CHARACTER.]
Next in degree to the pleasure I have enjoyed in collecting these
traditions, is the satisfaction which I have felt in contemplating the
various cabinets, if I may so speak, in which I found them stored up
according to their classes. For I soon discovered that the different
sorts of stories were not lodged indiscriminately in every sort of
mind--the people who cherished the narratives of one particular class
frequently rejecting those of another. I found, for instance, that the
traditions of the third class, with all their machinery of wraiths
and witches, were most congenial to the female mind; and I think I
can now perceive that this was quite in character. Women, taken in
the collective, are more poetical, more timid, more credulous than
men. If we but add to these general traits one or two that are less
so, and a few very common circumstances; if we but add a judgment
not naturally vigorous, an imagination more than commonly active, an
ignorance of books and of the world, a long-cherished belief in the
supernatural, a melancholy old age, and a solitary fireside--we have
compounded the elements of that terrible poetry which revels among
skulls, and coffins, and enchantments, as certainly as Nature did
when she moulded the brain of a Shakspere. The stories of the second
class I have almost never found in communion with those of the third;
and never heard well told--except as jokes. To tell a story avowedly
untrue, and to tell it as a piece of humour, requires a very different
cast of mind from that which characterized the melancholy people who
were the grand depositories of the darker traditions: they entertained
these only because they deemed them mysterious and very awful truths,
while they regarded open fictions as worse than foolish. Nor were
their own stories better received by a third sort of persons, from
whom I have drawn some of my best traditions of the first class, and
who were mostly shrewd, sagacious men, who, having acquired such a
tinge of scepticism as made them ashamed of the beliefs of their weaker
neighbours, were yet not so deeply imbued with it as to deem these
beliefs mere matters of amusement. They did battle with them both
in themselves and the people around them, and found the contest too
serious an affair to be laughed at. Now, however (and the circumstance
is characteristic), the successors of this order of people venture
readily enough on telling a good ghost story, when they but get one to
tell. Superstition, so long as it was living superstition, they deemed,
like the live tiger in his native woods, a formidable, mischievous
thing, fit only to be destroyed; but now that it has perished, they
possess themselves of its skin and its claws, and store them up in
their cabinets.
[Sidenote: THE WRITER’S PLEDGE.]
I have thus given a general character of the contents of my departed
library, and the materials of my proposed work. My stories form a kind
of history of the district of country to which they belong--hence
the title I have chosen for them; and, to fill up some of those
interstices which must always be occurring in a piece of history
purely traditional, I shall avail myself of all the little auxiliary
facts with which books may supply me. The reader, however, need be
under no apprehension of meeting much he was previously acquainted
with; and, should I succeed in accomplishing what I have purposed, the
local aspect of my work may not militate against its interest. Human
nature is not exclusively displayed in the histories of only great
countries, or in the actions of only celebrated men; and human nature
may be suffered to assert its claim on the attention of the beings
who partake of it, even though the specimens exhibited be furnished
by the traditions of an obscure village. Much, however, depends on
the manner in which a story is told; and thus far I may vouch for the
writer. I have seriously resolved not to be tedious, unless I cannot
help it; and so, if I do not prove amusing, it will be only because I
am unfortunate enough to be dull. I shall have the merit of doing my
best--and what writer ever did more? I pray the reader, however, not to
form any very harsh opinion of me for at least the first four chapters,
and to be not more than moderately critical on the two or three that
follow. There is an obscurity which hangs over the beginnings of all
history--a kind of impalpable fog--which the writer can hardly avoid
transferring from the first openings of his subject to the first pages
of his book. He sees through this haze the men of an early period “like
trees walking;” and, even should he believe them to be beings of the
same race with himself, and of nearly the same shape and size--a belief
not always entertained--it is impossible for him, from the atmosphere
which surrounds them, to catch those finer traits of form and feature
by which he could best identify them with the species. And hence a
necessary lack of interest.
CHAPTER II.
“Consider it warilie; read aftiner than anis.”--GAVIN DOUGLAS.
[Sidenote: ALYPOS.]
The histories of single districts of country rarely ascend into so
remote an antiquity as to be lost like those of nations in the ages of
fable. It so happens, however, whether fortunately or otherwise, for
the writer, that in this respect the old shire of Cromarty differs from
every other in the kingdom. Sir Thomas Urquhart, an ingenious native
of the district, who flourished about the middle of the seventeenth
century, has done for it all that the chroniclers and senachies of
England and Ireland have done for their respective countries; and as
he united to a vigorous imagination a knowledge of what is excellent
in character, instead of peopling it with the caco-demons of the
one kingdom, or the resuscitated antediluvians of the other, he has
bestowed upon it a longer line of heroes and demigods than can be
exhibited by the annals of either. I avail myself of his writings on
the strength of that argument which O’Flaherty uses in his Ogygia as an
apology for the story of the three fishermen who were driven by tempest
into a haven of Ireland fifteen days before the universal deluge.
“Where there is no room,” says this historian, “for just disquisition,
and no proper field of inquiry, we must rely on the common suffrages of
the writers of our country; to whose opinions I voluntarily subscribe.”
Alypos, the forty-third in a direct line from Japhet, was the first,
says Sir Thomas, who discovered that part of Scotland which has since
been known by the name of Cromarty. He was contemporary with Rehoboam,
the fourth king of Israel, and a very extraordinary personage,
independent of his merits as a navigator. For we must regard him as
constituting a link which divides into ancestors and descendants--a
chain that depends unbroken from the creation of Adam to the present
times; and which either includes in itself, or serves to connect by its
windings and involutions, some of the most famous people of every age
of the world. His grandmother was a daughter of Calcido the Tyrian, who
founded Carthage, and who must have lived several ages before the Dido
of Virgil; his mother travelled from a remote eastern country to profit
by the wisdom of Solomon, and is supposed by many, says Sir Thomas,
to have been the queen of Sheba. Nor were his ancestors a whit less
happy in their friends than in their consorts. There was one of them
intimately acquainted with Nimrod, the founder of the Assyrian Empire,
and the builder of Babel; another sat with Abraham in the door of his
tent, sharing with him his feelings of sorrow and horror when the fire
of destruction was falling on the cities of the plain; a third, after
accompanying Bacchus in his expedition to the Indies, and receiving
from him in marriage the hand of Thymelica his daughter, was presented
with a rich jewel when passing through Syria, by Deborah, the judge
and prophetess of Israel. The gem might have been still in the family
had not one of his descendants given it to Penthesilea, that queen of
the Amazons who assisted the Trojans against Agamemnon. Buchanan has
expressed his astonishment that the chroniclers of Britain, instead of
appropriating to themselves honourable ancestors out of the works of
the poets, should rather, through a strange perversity, derive their
lineage from the very refuse of nations: Sir Thomas seems to have
determined not to furnish a similar occasion of surprise to any future
historian. There were princes of his family who reigned with honour
over Achaia and Spain, and a long line of monarchs who flourished in
Ireland before the expedition of Fergus I.
[Sidenote: ETYMOLOGICAL LEGENDS.]
The era of Alypos was one of the most important in the history of
Britain. It was that in which the inhabitants first began to build
cities, and to distinguish their several provinces by different names.
It witnessed the erection of the city of York by one Elborak, a
brother-in-law of Alypos, and saw the castle of Edinburgh founded by a
contemporary chieftain of Scotland, who had not the happiness of being
connected to him, and whose name has therefore been lost. The historian
assigns, too, to the same age the first use of the term Olbion as a
name for the northern division of the island--a term which afterwards,
“by an Eolic dialect,” came to be pronounced Albion, or Albyn; and
the first application of the name Sutors, from the Greek σωτηξες,
_preservers_, to those lofty promontories which guard the entrance of
the bay of Cromarty--a fact which Aikman the historian recommends, with
becoming gravity, to the consideration of Gaelic etymologists. Much
of a similar character, as appears from Sir Thomas, could have been
brought under their notice in the reign of Charles I., when, as he
states in one of his treatises, the names of all places in the shire of
Cromarty, whether promontories, fountains, rivers, or lakes, were of
pure and perfect Greek. Since that time, however, many of these names
have been converted into choice trophies of the learning and research
of those very etymologists;--even the derivation of the term Sutors
has been disputed, but by the partisans of languages less ancient than
either Greek or Gaelic. The one party write the contested dissyllable
Suitors, the other Soutars, and defend their different modes of
spelling each by a different legend--a species of argument practised at
one time with much ingenuity and success by the contending Orders of
St. Dominic and Loyola.
The promontories which bear this name are nearly equal in height, but
when viewed from the west they differ considerably in appearance.
The one, easy of access, crowned with a thick wood of pine, divided
into corn-fields, and skirted at the base by a broad line of ash
and elm, seems feminine in its character; while the other, abrupt,
stern, broken into precipices, and tufted with furze, is of a cast
as decidedly masculine. Two lovers of some remote age, had met by
appointment in a field of Cromarty which commands a full view of the
promontories in the aspect described. The young man urged his suit
with the characteristic warmth of his sex--his mistress was timid and
bashful. He accused her of indifference; and with all the fervour of
a passion which converts even common men into poets, he exclaimed,
pointing to the promontories, “See, Ada! they too are lovers--they are
hastening to embrace; and stern and rugged as that carle-hill of the
north may seem to others, he is not reckoned so by his lady-hill of
the south;--see how, with all her woods and her furrows, she advances
to meet him.”--“And think you,” rejoined the maiden, entering into the
poetry of the feeling, “that these tongueless _suitors_ cannot express
their mutual regards without the aid of language; or that that carle
of the north, rude as he is, would once think of questioning the faith
and affection of his advancing mistress, merely because she advances
in silence?” Her reply, say the people who contend for the English
derivation of the word, furnished the promontories with a name; and as
those alchemists of mind who can transmute etymology into poetry have
not been produced everywhere, few names have anecdotes equally pleasing
connected with their origin. The other legend is of a different
character, and has a merit peculiar to itself, to be amenable to any
known law of criticism.
In some age of the world more remote than even that of Alypos, the
whole of Britain was peopled by giants--a fact amply supported by
early English historians and the traditions of the north of Scotland.
Diocletian, king of Syria, say the historians, had thirty-three
daughters, who, like the daughters of Danaus, killed their husbands
on their wedding night. The king, their father, in abhorrence of the
crime, crowded them all into a ship, which he abandoned to the mercy of
the waves, and which was drifted by tides and winds till it arrived
on the coast of Britain, then an uninhabited island. There they lived
solitary, subsisting on roots and berries, the natural produce of the
soil, until an order of demons, becoming enamoured of them, took them
for their wives; and a tribe of giants, who must be regarded as the
true aborigines of the country, if indeed the demons have not a prior
claim, were the fruit of these marriages. Less fortunate, however,
than even their prototypes the Cyclops, the whole tribe was extirpated
a few ages after by Brutus the parricide, who, with a valour to which
mere bulk could render no effectual resistance, overthrew Gog-Magog,
and Termagol, and a whole host of others, with names equally terrible.
Tradition is less explicit than the historians in what relates to
the origin and extinction of the race, but its narratives of their
prowess are more minute. There is a large and very ponderous stone in
the parish of Edderton, which a giantess of the tribe is said to have
flung from the point of a spindle across the Dornoch Firth; and another
within a few miles of Dingwall, still larger and more ponderous,
which was thrown from a neighbouring eminence by a person of the same
family, and which still bears the marks of a gigantic finger and thumb
impressed on two of its sides. The most wonderful, however, of all
their achievements was that of a lady, distinguished even among the
tribe as the _Cailliach-more_, or great woman, who, from a pannier
filled with earth and stones, which she carried on her back, formed
almost all the hills of Ross-shire. When standing on the site of the
huge Ben-Vaichard, the bottom of the pannier is said to have given
way, and the contents falling through the opening, produced the hill,
which owes its great height and vast extent of base to the accident.
Prior to the invasion of Brutus, the promontories of Cromarty served as
work-stools to two giants of this tribe, who supplied their brethren
with shoes and buskins. They wrought together; for, being furnished
with only one set of implements, they could not carry on their trade
apart; and these, when needed, they used to fling to each other across
the opening of the firth, where the promontories are only about two
miles asunder. In process of time the name Soutar, a shoemaker,
was transferred by a common metonymy from the craftsmen to their
stools--the two promontories; and by this name they have ever since
been distinguished. Such are the etymological legends of the Sutors,
opposed each to the other, and both to the scholarlike derivation of
Sir Thomas; which must be confessed, however, to have been at one time
a piece of mere commonplace, though it has since become learning.
I have seen in the museum of the Northern Institution a very complete
collection of stone battle-axes, some of which were formed little
earlier than the last age by the rude natives of America and the
South Sea Islands; while others, which had been dug out of the cairns
and tumuli of our own country, witnessed to the unrecorded feuds and
forgotten battle-fields of twenty centuries ago. I was a good deal
struck by the resemblance which they bore to each other--a resemblance
so complete, that the most practised eye could hardly distinguish
between the weapons of the old Scot and those of the New Zealander.
Both seemed to have selected the same rude materials, employed the same
imperfect implements, and wrought after the same uncouth model. But man
in a savage state is the same animal everywhere, and his constructive
powers, whether employed in the formation of a legendary story or of
a battle-axe, seem to expatiate almost everywhere in the same rugged
track of invention. For even the traditions of this first stage may be
identified, like its weapons of war, all the world over. Mariner, in
his account of the Tonga Islands, tells us that the natives pointed
out to him a perforated rock, in the hollow of which, they said, one
of their gods, when employed in fishing, entangled his hook, and that,
pulling lustily to disengage it, he pulled up the whole island (one
of the largest of the group) from the bottom of the sea. Do not this
singular story, and the wild legend of Ben-Vaichard, though the product
of ages and countries so widely separated, belong obviously to the same
rude stage of invention?
[Sidenote: EPIC POETRY OF THE MIDDLE AGES.]
There may be some little interest in tracing the footprints of what
I may term the more savage traditions of a country in the earlier
pages of its history, and in marking how they blend with its imperfect
narratives of real but ill-remembered events, on the one hand, and its
mutilated imitations of the masterpieces of a classical literature, on
the other. The fabulous pages of English history furnish, when regarded
in this point of view, a not uninteresting field to the legendary
critic. They are suited to remind him of those huts of the wild Arab,
composed of the fragments of ruined grandeur which the traveller finds
amid the ruins of Palmyra or Balbec, and in which, as he prosecutes his
researches, he sees the capital totter over the architrave, the base
overtop the capital, masses of turf heaped round the delicate volute,
which emulated in granite the curled tresses of a beautiful female,
and the marble foliage of the acanthus crushed by the rude joist which
bends under a roof of clay and rushes. Perhaps the reader may indulge
me in a few brief remarks on this rather curious subject.
Diocletian, the Syrian king of the English legend, is, as Buchanan
justly remarks, a second Danaus, and owes his existence to the story
of his prototype; but the story of the marriages of his daughters with
an order of demons, which, according to that historian, the English
have invented through a pride of emulating the Gauls and Germans,
who derive their lineage from Pluto, does not appear to me to be so
legitimately traced to its original. The oldest of all the traditions
of Britain seem to be those which describe it as peopled at some remote
era by giants;--they are the broken vestiges, it is possible, of those
incidents of Mosaic history which are supposed to be shadowed out in
the fables of the giants of Grecian mythology, or they are perhaps
mutilated remains of the fables themselves. It seems more probable,
however, that they should have originated in that belief, common to the
vulgar of all countries, that the race of men is degenerating in size
and prowess with every succeeding generation, and that at some early
period their bulk and strength must have been gigantic. Judging of
them from their appearance, they must have been known in a very early
age--an age as early perhaps as that of the stone battle-axe; and what
more probable than that they should have attracted the notice of the
chroniclers, who would naturally consult tradition for the materials of
their first pages? But tradition, though it records the achievements
of the giants, is silent respecting their origin. A first link would
therefore be wanting, which could only be supplied by imagination; and
as, like every other class of writers, the chroniclers would find it
easier to imitate than to invent, it is not difficult to conceive how,
after having learned in their cloisters that in an early age of the
world the sons of God had contracted marriages with the daughters of
men, and that heroes and giants were the fruit of the connexion--they
should blend a legend imitative of the event with the stories of the
giants of Britain. Their next employment, for it would be too bold an
attempt to link so terrible a tribe to the people of their own times,
would be to show how this tribe became extinct, and the manner in which
the country was first peopled with men like themselves.
There is but one way in which anything probable can be acquired
concerning the origin of a people who have no early history; but the
process is both difficult and laborious. There is another sufficiently
easy, which barely reaches the possible, and which the historians of
eight hundred years ago would have deemed the more eligible of the
two. Instead of setting themselves to ascertain those circumstances
by which the several families of men are distinguished, or to compare
the language, character, and superstitions of the people of their own
country with those of the various tribes of the Continent, they would
apply for such assistance as the imitator derives from his copy, to
the histories of other kingdoms. From their connexion with the Latin
Church they would be conversant with Roman literature, and acquainted
with the story of Æneas as related by the historians, and amplified
and adorned by Virgil. And thus, what may be termed the third link of
their history, has come to bear a discernible resemblance to the early
history of Rome. The occasion of the wanderings of Brutus resembles
that of the expatriation of Tydeus, or rather that of the madness of
Œdipus, but he is the Æneas of England notwithstanding. His history
is a kind of national epic. Cornæus is his Achates. He finds hostile
Rutulians, headed by a Turnus, in the giants and their leader; and
Britain is both his Italy and his Trinacria, though, instead of fleeing
from the Cyclops, he conquers them.
The legend of Scotland may also be regarded as a national epic. It
is formed on the same model with the story of Brutus, but it has the
merit of being a somewhat more skilful imitation, and there is nothing
outrageously improbable in any of its circumstances. Galethus, its
hero, is the Æneas of Scotland. He was the son of Cecrops, the founder
of Athens, and, like Romulus, made himself famous as a captain of
robbers before he became the founder of a nation. Having repeatedly
invaded Macedonia and the neighbouring provinces of Greece, he was in
imminent danger of being overpowered by a confederacy of the states he
had injured, when, assembling his friends and followers, he retreated
into Egypt, at a time when that kingdom was ravaged from its southern
boundary to the gates of Memphis by an army of Ethiopians. Assuming on
the sudden a new character, he joined his forces to those of Pharaoh,
gave battle to the invaders, routed them with much slaughter, pursued
them into Ethiopia, and after a succession of brilliant victories over
them, compelled them to sue for peace. On his return he was presented
by the king with the hand of his daughter Scota, and made general in
chief of all the forces of the kingdom. Disgusted, however, by the
cruelties practised on the Israelites, and warned by Moses and an
oracle of the judgments by which these cruelties were to be punished,
he fitted out a fleet, and, accompanied by great numbers of Greeks and
Egyptians, set sail from the river Nile with the intention of forming a
settlement on the shores of the Mediterranean. After a tedious voyage
he arrived at a port of Numidia, where no better success awaited him
than was met with by Æneas in the scene of his first colony. Again
putting to sea, he passed the Pillars of Hercules, and after having
experienced in the navigation of the straits dangers similar to those
which appalled Ulysses when passing through the Straits of Messina,
he landed in that part of Spain which has ever since been known by
the name of Portugal. He found in this country a second Tiber in the
river Munda, and a fierce army of Rutulians in the inhabitants. But
his good fortune did not desert him. He vanquished his enemies in one
decisive battle, dispossessed them of their fairest provinces, built
cities, instituted laws, conquered and colonized Ireland, and, dying
after a long and prosperous reign, left his kingdom to his children.
Prior to his decease, his subjects, both Greeks and Egyptians, were
termed Scots, from their having sunk their original designations in
that name, out of courtesy to their Queen Scota--a name afterwards
transferred to Albyn by a colony from Ireland, who took possession of
it a few ages subsequent to the age of Galethus. Such is the fable of
what may be regarded both as the historic epic of Scotland, and as the
most classical of all the imitations of the Æneid which were fabricated
during the middle ages.
Sir Thomas has recorded nothing further of his ancestor Alypos, than
that he followed up his discovery of Cromarty by planting it with a
colony of his countrymen, who, though some of his ancestors had settled
in Portugal several ages before, seem to have been Greeks. Of sixteen
of his immediate descendants, it is only known that they were born,
and that they married--some of them finding honourable consorts in
Ireland, some in Greece, and one in Italy. The wife of that one was a
sister of Marcus Coriolanus--a daughter of Agesilaus the Spartan, a
daughter of Simeon Breck, the first crowned king of the Irish Scots, a
daughter of Alcibiades, the friend and pupil of Socrates, and a niece
of Lycurgus the lawgiver, were wives to some of the others. Never was
there a family that owed more to its marriages.
[Sidenote: ASTORIMON.]
Nomaster, the son-in-law of Alcibiades, disgusted by the treatment
which that great but ambitious statesman had received from his
country, took leave of Greece, and, “after many dangerous voyages
both by sea and land, he arrived at the harbour Ochoner, now called
Cromarty.” It owed its more ancient name to Bestius Ochoner, one of
the sixteen immediate descendants of Alypos, and the father, says the
genealogist, of the Irish O’Connors; the name which it now bears is
derived by Gaelic etymologists from the windings and indentations of
its shores.[2] Nomaster, immediately on his landing, was recognised
by the colonists as their legitimate prince, and he reigned over
them till his death, when he was succeeded by his son Astorimon, a
valiant and accomplished warrior, in whom the genius and heroism of
his grandfather seem to have been revived. And the events of his time
were suited to find employment. For in this age an immense body of
Scythians, after voyaging along the shores of Europe in quest of a
settlement, were incited by the great natural riches of the country
to make choice of Scotland; and, pouring in upon its western coasts,
they dispossessed the natives of some of their fairest provinces. But
the little territory of Astorimon, though one of the invaded, was
not one of the conquered provinces. The Scythians, under Ethus their
general, intrenched upon an extensive moor, which now forms the upper
boundary of the parish of Cromarty; and the grandson of Alcibiades
drew out his forces to oppose them. A battle ensued, in which the
Scythian general was killed in single combat by Astorimon; and his
followers, dispirited by his death, and unable to contend with an army
trained to every evolution of Greek and Roman discipline, were routed
with immense slaughter. The Scythians afterwards became famous as the
Picts of Scottish history; and _Ethus_, their leader, is reckoned
their first king. Sir Thomas, to the details of this battle, which he
terms the great battle of _Farna_,[3] has added, that “the trenches,
head-quarters, and castrametation” of the invading army can still be
traced on a moor of Cromarty.
This moor, which formed a few years ago an unappropriated common, but
which was lately divided among the proprietors whose lands border on
it, has evidently at some remote period been a field of battle. It is
sprinkled over with tumuli and little heathy ridges resembling the
graves of a churchyard. The southern shore of the Cromarty Firth runs
almost parallel to it for nearly fourteen miles; and upon a hill in the
parish of Resolis, which rises between it and the firth, and which is
separated from it by a deep valley, there are the vestiges of Danish
encampments. And there is perhaps scarcely an eminence in Scotland on
which in the early ages an invading army could have encamped with more
advantage than on this hill, or a moor upon which the invaders could
have been met with on more equal terms than on the moor adjacent. The
eminence is detached on the one side from the other rising grounds of
the country by a valley, the bottom of which is occupied by a bog, and
it commands on the other an extensive bay, in which whole fleets may
ride with safety; while the neighbouring moor is of great extent, and
has few inequalities of surface. Towards its eastern boundary, about
six miles from the town of Cromarty, there is a huge heap of stones,
which from time immemorial has been known to the people of the place as
_The Grey Cairn_, a name equally descriptive of other lesser cairns in
its vicinity, but which with the aid of the definite article serves to
distinguish it. Not more than thirty years ago the stones of a similar
cairn of the moor were carried away for building by a farmer of the
parish. There were found on their removal human bones of a gigantic
size, among the rest a skull sufficiently capacious, according to the
description of a labourer employed by the farmer, to contain “two
lippies of beer.”
[Sidenote: THE SPECTRE SHIPS.]
About fifteen years ago, a Cromarty fisherman was returning from
Inverness by a road which for several miles skirts the upper edge of
the moor, and passes within a few yards of the cairn. Night overtook
him ere he had half completed his journey; but, after an interval of
darkness, the moon, nearly at full, rose over the eminence on his
right, and restored to him the face of the country--the hills which
he had passed before evening, but which, faint and distant, were
sinking as he advanced, the wood which, bordering his road on the one
hand, almost reached him with its shadow, and the bleak, unvaried,
interminable waste, which, stretching away on the other, seemed lost
in the horizon. After he had entered on the moor, the stillness which,
at an earlier stage of his journey, had occasionally been broken by
the distant lowing of cattle, or the bark of a shepherd’s dog, was
interrupted by only his own footsteps, which, from the nature of the
soil, sounded hollow as if he trod over a range of vaults, and by
the low monotonous murmur of the neighbouring wood. As he approached
the cairn, however, a noise of a different kind began to mingle with
the other two; it was one with which his profession had made him
well acquainted--that of waves breaking against a rock. The nearest
shore was fully three miles distant, the nearest cliff more than
five, and yet he could hear wave after wave striking as if against a
precipice, then dashing upwards, and anon descending, as distinctly as
he had ever done when passing in his boat beneath the promontories of
Cromarty. On coming up to the cairn, his astonishment was converted
into terror.--Instead of the brown heath, with here and there a fir
seedling springing out of it he saw a wide tempestuous sea stretching
before him, with the large pile of stones frowning over it, like one
of the Hebrides during the gales of the Equinox. The pile appeared as
if half enveloped in cloud and spray, and two large vessels, with all
their sheets spread to the wind, were sailing round it.
The writer of these chapters had the good fortune to witness at this
cairn a scene which, without owing anything to the supernatural, almost
equalled the one described. He was, like the fisherman, returning from
Inverness to Cromarty in a clear frosty night in December. There was no
moon, but the whole sky towards the north was glowing with the Aurora
Borealis, which, shooting from the horizon to the central heavens,
in flames tinged with all the hues of the rainbow, threw so strong a
light, that he could have counted every tree of the wood, and every
tumulus of the moor. There is a long hollow morass which runs parallel
to the road for nearly a mile;--it was covered this evening by a dense
fleece of vapour raised by the frost, and which, without ascending, was
rolling over the moor before a light breeze. It had reached the cairn,
and the detached clump of seedlings which springs up at its base.--The
seedlings rising out of the vapour appeared like a fleet of ships, with
their sails dropping against their masts, on a sea where there were
neither tides nor winds;--the cairn, grey with the moss and lichens of
forgotten ages, towered over it like an island of that sea.
But I daresay I have imparted to the reader more of the fabulous
history of Cromarty than he will well know how to be grateful for. One
other remark, however, in better language, and a more vigorous style
of thinking than my own, and I shall have done;--it may show that Sir
Thomas, however unique as a man, forms, as a historian, only one of a
class.
[Sidenote: OLAUS RUDBECK.]
“The last century,” says the philosophic Gibbon, “abounded with
antiquarians of profound learning and easy faith, who, by the dim
light of legends and traditions, of conjectures and etymologies,
conducted the great-grandchildren of Noah from the tower of Babel to
the extremities of the globe. Of these judicious critics,” continues
the historian, “one of the most entertaining was Olaus Rudbeck,
professor in the university of Upsal. Whatever is celebrated either in
history or fable, this zealous patriot ascribes to his country. From
Sweden, the Greeks themselves derived their alphabetical characters,
their astronomy, and their religion. Of that delightful region (for
so it appeared to the eyes of a native), the Atlantis of Plato,
the country of the Hyperboreans, the Garden of the Hesperides, the
Fortunate Islands, and even the Elysian fields, were all but faint
and imperfect transcripts. A clime so profusely favoured by nature
could not long remain desert after the flood. The learned Rudbeck
allows the family of Noah a few years to multiply from eight to about
twenty thousand persons. He then disperses them into small colonies to
replenish the earth and to propagate the human species. The Swedish
detachment (which marched, if I am not mistaken, under the command of
Askenos, the son of Gomer, the son of Japhet), distinguished itself by
more than common diligence in the prosecution of this great work. The
northern hive cast its swarms over the greater part of Europe, Africa,
and Asia; and (to use the author’s metaphor), the blood circulated from
the extremities to the heart.”
CHAPTER III.
“The wild sea, baited by the fierce north-east,
So roar’d, so madly raged, so proudly swell’d,
As it would thunder full into our streets.”--ARMSTRONG.
[Sidenote: THE BAY OF CROMARTY]
The Bay of Cromarty was deemed one of the finest in the world at a time
when the world was very little known; and modern discovery has done
nothing to lower its standing or character. We find it described by
Buchanan in very elegant Latin as “formed by the waters of the German
Ocean, opening a way through the stupendous cliffs of the most lofty
precipices, and expanding within into a spacious basin, affording
certain refuge against every tempest.” The old poet could scarce have
described it better had he sat on the loftiest pinnacle of the southern
Sutor during a winter storm from the north-east, and seen vessel after
vessel pressing towards the opening through spray and tempest;--like
the inhabitants of an invaded country hurrying to the gateway of some
impregnable fortress, their speed quickened by the wild shouts of the
enemy, and pursued by the smoke of burning villages.
Viewed from the Moray Firth in a clear morning of summer, the entrance
of the bay presents one of the most pleasing scenes I have ever seen.
The foreground is occupied by a gigantic wall of brown precipices,
beetling for many miles over the edge of the Firth, and crested by
dark thickets of furze and pine. A multitude of shapeless crags lie
scattered along the base, and we hear the noise of the waves breaking
against them, and see the reflected gleam of the foam flashing at
intervals into the darker recesses of the rock. The waters of the
bay find entrance, as described by the historian, through a natural
postern scooped out of the middle of this immense wall. The huge
projection of cliff on either hand, with their alternate masses of
light and shadow, remind us of the out-jets and buttresses of an
ancient fortress; and the two Sutors, towering over the opening, of
turrets built to command a gateway. The scenery within is of a softer
and more gentle character. We see hanging woods, sloping promontories,
a little quiet town, and an undulating line of blue mountains, swelling
as they retire into a bolder outline and a loftier altitude, until they
terminate, some twenty miles away, in the snow-streaked, cloud-capped
Ben Wevis. When I last gazed on this scene, and contrasted the wild
sublimity of the foreground with the calm beauty of the interior, I was
led to compare it, I scarcely knew how, to the exquisite masterpiece of
his art which the Saxon sculptor Nahl placed over the grave of a lady
who had died in the full bloom of youth and loveliness. It represents
the ruins of a tomb shattered as if by the last trumpet; but the chisel
has not been employed on it in merely imitating the uncouth ravages of
accident and decay; for through the yawning rifts and fissures there
is a beautiful female, as if starting into life, and rising in all the
ecstasy of unmingled happiness to enjoy the beatitudes of heaven.
[Sidenote: THE OLD COAST LINE.]
There rises within the bay, to the height of nearly a hundred feet
over the sea level, a green sloping bank, in some places covered with
wood, in others laid out into gardens and fields. We may trace it at a
glance all along the shores of the firth, from where it merges into the
southern Sutor, till where it sinks at the upper extremity of the bay
of Udoll; and, fronting it on the opposite side, we may see a similar
escarpment, winding along the various curves and indentations of the
coast--now retiring far into the country, along the edge of the bay of
Nigg--now abutting into the firth, near the village of Invergordon.
The Moray and Dornoch firths are commanded by resembling ramparts
of bank of a nearly corresponding elevation, and a thorough identity
of character; and, as in the Firth of Cromarty, the space between
their bases and the shore is occupied by a strip of level country,
which in some places encroaches on the sea in the form of long low
promontories, and is hollowed out in others to nearly the base of the
escarpment. Wherever we examine, we find data to conclude, that in
some remote era this continuous bank formed the line of coast, and
that the plain at its base was everywhere covered by the waters of the
sea. We see headlands, rounded as if by the waves, advancing the one
beyond the other, into the waving fields and richly-swarded meadows
of this lower terrace; and receding bays with their grassy unbeaten
shores comparatively abrupt at the entrance, and reclining in a flatter
angle within. We may find, too, everywhere under the vegetable soil
of the terrace, alternate layers of sand and water-worn pebbles,
and occasionally, though of rarer occurrence, beds of shells of the
existing species, and the bones of fish. In the valley of Munlochy,
the remains of oyster-beds, which could not have been formed in less
than two fathoms of water, have been discovered a full half mile from
the sea; beds of cockles still more extensive, and the bones of a
porpoise, have been dug up among the fields which border on the bay of
Nigg; similar appearances occur in the vicinity of Tain; and in digging
a well about thirty years ago, in the western part of the town of
Cromarty, there was found in the gravel a large fir-tree, which, from
the rounded appearance of the trunk and branches, seems to have been
at one time exposed to the action of the waves. In a burying-ground
of the town, which lies embosomed in an angle of the bank, the sexton
sometimes finds the dilapidated spoils of our commoner shell-fish
mingling with the ruins of a nobler animal; and in another inflection
of the bank, which lies a short half mile to the east of the town,
there is a vast accumulation of drift peat, many feet in thickness, and
the remains of huge trees.
The era of this old coast line we find it impossible to fix; but
there are grounds enough on which to conclude that it must have been
remote--so remote, perhaps, as to lie beyond the beginnings of our more
authentic histories. We see, in the vicinity of Tain, one of the oldest
ruins of the province situated far below the base of the escarpment;
and meet in the neighbourhood of Kessock, at a still lower level, with
old Celtic cairns and tumuli. It is a well-established fact, too, that
for at least the last three hundred years the sea, instead of receding,
has been gradually encroaching on the shores of the Bay of Cromarty;
and that the place formerly occupied by the old burgh, is now covered
every tide by nearly two fathoms of water.
[Sidenote: THE OLD TOWN.]
The last vestige of this ancient town disappeared about eighteen
years ago, when a row of large stones, which had evidently formed the
foundation line of a fence, was carried away by some workmen employed
in erecting a bulwark. But the few traditions connected with it are
not yet entirely effaced. A fisherman of the last century is said to
have found among the title-deeds of his cottage a very old piece of
parchment, with a profusion of tufts of wool bristling on one of its
sides, and bearing in rude antique characters on the other a detail
of the measurement and boundaries of a garden which had occupied the
identical spot on which he usually anchored his skiff. I am old enough
to have conversed with men who remembered to have seen a piece of
corn land, and a belt of planting below two properties in the eastern
part of the town, that are now bounded by the sea. I reckon among my
acquaintance an elderly person, who, when sailing along the shore about
half a century ago in the company of a very old man, heard the latter
remark, that he was now guiding the helm where, sixty years before, he
had guided the plough. Of Elspat Hood, a native of Cromarty, who died
in the year 1701, it is said that she attained to the extraordinary age
of 120 years, and that in her recollection, which embraced the latter
part of the sixteenth century, the _Clach Malacha_, a large stone
covered with sea-weed, whose base only partially dries during the ebb
of Spring and Lammas tides, and which lies a full quarter of a mile
from the shore, was surrounded by corn fields and clumps of wood. And
it is a not less curious circumstance than any of these, that about
ninety years ago, after a violent night storm from the north-east,
the beach below the town was found in the morning strewed over with
human bones, which, with several blocks of hewn stone, had been washed
by the surf out of what had been formerly a burying-place. The bones
were carried to the churchyard, and buried beneath the eastern gable
of the church; and one of the stones--the corner stone of a ponderous
cornice--is still to be seen on the shore. In the firths of Beauly and
Dornoch the sea seems to have encroached to fully as great an extent as
in the bay of Cromarty. Below the town of Tain a strip of land, once
frequented by the militia of the county for drill and parade, has been
swept away within the recollection of some of the older inhabitants;
and there may be traced at low water (says Carey in his notes to Craig
Phadrig), on the range of shore that stretches from the ferry of
Kessock to nearly Redcastle, the remains of sepulchral cairns, which
must have been raised before the places they occupy were invaded by the
sea, and which, when laid open, have been found to contain beams of
wood, urns, and human bones.--But it is full time that man, the proper
inhabitant of the country, should be more thoroughly introduced into
this portion of its history. We feel comparatively little interest in
the hurricane or the earthquake which ravages only a desert, where
there is no intelligent mind to be moved by the majesty of power, or
the sublimity of danger; while on the other hand, there is no event,
however trivial in itself, which may not be deemed of importance if it
operate influentially on human character and human passion.
[Sidenote: THE STORMS OF THE FIVE WINTERS.]
It is not much more than twenty years since a series of violent
storms from the hostile north-east, which came on at almost regular
intervals for five successive winters, seemed to threaten the modern
town of Cromarty with the fate of the ancient. The tides rose higher
than tides had ever been known to rise before; and as the soil exposed
to the action of the waves was gradually disappearing, instead of
the gentle slope with which the land formerly merged into the beach,
its boundaries were marked out by a dark abrupt line resembling a
turf wall. Some of the people whose houses bordered on the sea looked
exceedingly grave, and affirmed there was no danger whatever; those who
lived higher up thought differently, and pitied their poor neighbours
from the bottom of their hearts. The consternation was heightened
too by a prophecy of Thomas the Rhymer, handed down for centuries,
but little thought of before. It was predicted, it is said, by the
old wizard, that Cromarty should be twice destroyed by the sea, and
that fish should be caught in abundance on the Castle-hill--a rounded
projection of the escarpment which rises behind the houses, and forms
the ancient coast line.
[Sidenote: DONALD MILLER’S WARS WITH THE SEA.]
Man owes much of his ingenuity to his misfortunes; and who does not
know that, were he less weak and less exposed as an animal, he would
be less powerful as a rational creature? On a principle so obvious,
these storms had the effect of converting not a few of the townsfolk
into builders and architects. In the eastern suburb of the town, where
the land presents a low yet projecting front to the waves, the shore is
hemmed in by walls and bulwarks, which might be mistaken by a stranger
approaching the place by sea for a chain of little forts. They were
erected during the wars of the five winters by the proprietors of
the gardens and houses behind; and the enemy against whom they had
to maintain them, was the sea. At first the contest seemed well-nigh
hopeless;--week after week was spent in throwing up a single bulwark,
and an assault of a few hours demolished the whole line. But skill and
perseverance prevailed at last;--the storms are all blown over, but
the gardens and houses still remain. Of the many who built and planned
during this war, the most indefatigable, the most skilful, the most
successful, was Donald Miller.
Donald was a true Scotchman. He was bred a shoemaker; and painfully
did he toil late and early for about twenty-five years with one
solitary object in view, which, during all that time, he had never
lost sight of--no, not for a single moment. And what was that
one?--independence--a competency sufficient to set him above the
necessity of further toil; and this he at length achieved, without
doing aught for which the severest censor could accuse him of meanness.
The amount of his savings did not exceed four hundred pounds; but,
rightly deeming himself wealthy, for he had not learned to love money
for its own sake, he shut up his shop. His father dying soon after,
he succeeded to one of the snuggest, though most perilously-situated
little properties within the three corners of Cromarty--the sea
bounding it on the one side, and a stream, small and scanty during the
droughts of summer, but sometimes more than sufficiently formidable in
winter, sweeping past it on the other. The series of storms came on,
and Donald found he had gained nothing by shutting up his shop.
He had built a bulwark in the old, lumbering, Cromarty style of
the last century, and confined the wanderings of the stream by two
straight walls. Across the walls he had just thrown a wooden bridge,
and crowned the bulwark with a parapet, when on came the first of the
storms--a night of sleet and hurricane--and lo! in the morning, the
bulwark lay utterly overthrown, and the bridge, as if it had marched
to its assistance, lay beside it, half buried in sea-wrack. “Ah,”
exclaimed the neighbours, “it would be well for us to be as sure of
our summer’s employment as Donald Miller, honest man!” Summer came;
the bridge strided over the stream as before; the bulwark was built
anew, and with such neatness and apparent strength, that no bulwark on
the beach could compare with it. Again came winter; and the second
bulwark, with its proud parapet, and rock-like strength, shared the
fate of the first. Donald fairly took to his bed. He rose, however,
with renewed vigour; and a third bulwark, more thoroughly finished than
even the second, stretched ere the beginning of autumn between his
property and the sea. Throughout the whole of that summer, from grey
morning to grey evening, there might be seen on the shore of Cromarty
a decent-looking, elderly man, armed with lever and mattock, rolling
stones, or raising them from their beds in the sand, or fixing them
together in a sloping wall--toiling as never labourer toiled, and ever
and anon, as a neighbour sauntered the way, straightening his weary
back, and tendering the ready snuff-box. That decent-looking, elderly
man, was Donald Miller. But his toil was all in vain. Again came winter
and the storms; again had he betaken himself to his bed, for his third
bulwark had gone the way of the two others. With a resolution truly
indomitable, he rose yet again, and erected a fourth bulwark, which has
now presented an unbroken front to the storms of twenty years.
Though Donald had never studied mathematics as taught in books or the
schools, he was a profound mathematician notwithstanding. Experience
had taught him the superiority of the sloping to the perpendicular wall
in resisting the waves; and he set himself to discover that particular
angle which, without being inconveniently low, resists them best.
Every new bulwark was a new experiment made on principles which he had
discovered in the long nights of winter, when, hanging over the fire,
he converted the hearth-stone into a tablet, and, with a pencil of
charcoal, scribbled it over with diagrams. But he could never get the
sea to join issue with him by changing in the line of his angles; for,
however deep he sunk his foundations, his insidious enemy contrived
to get under them by washing away the beach; and then the whole wall
tumbled into the cavity. Now, however, he had discovered a remedy.
First he laid a row of large flat stones on their edges in the line
of the foundation and paved the whole of the beach below until it
presented the appearance of a sloping street--taking care that his
pavement, by running in a steeper angle than the shore, should, at its
lower edge, lose itself in the sand. Then, from the flat stones which
formed the upper boundary of the pavement, he built a ponderous wall,
which, ascending in the proper angle, rose to the level of the garden;
and a neat firm parapet surmounted the whole.--Winter came, and the
storms came; but though the waves broke against the bulwark with as
little remorse as against the Sutors, not a stone moved out of its
place. Donald had at length fairly triumphed over the sea.
The progress of character is fully as interesting a study as the
progress of art; and both are curiously exemplified in the history of
Donald Miller. Now that he had conquered his enemy, and might realize
his long-cherished dream of unbroken leisure, he found that constant
employment had, through the force of habit, become essential to his
comfort. His garden was the very paragon of gardens; and a single
glance was sufficient to distinguish his furrow of potatoes from every
other furrow in the field; but, now that his main occupation was gone,
much time hung on his hands, notwithstanding his attentions to both.
First, he set himself to build a wall quite round his property; and a
very neat one he did build; but unfortunately, when once erected, there
was nothing to knock it down again. Then he whitewashed his house, and
built a new sty for his pig, the walls of which he also whitewashed.
Then he enclosed two little patches on the side of the stream, to serve
as bleaching-greens. Then he covered the upper part of his bulwark
with a layer of soil, and sowed it with grass. Then he repaired a
well, the common property of the town. Then he constructed a path for
foot-passengers on the side of a road, which, passing his garden on
the south, leads to Cromarty House. His labours for the good of the
public were wretchedly recompensed, by, at least, his more immediate
neighbours. They would dip their dirty pails into the well which he
had repaired, and tell him, when he hinted at the propriety of washing
them, that they were no dirtier than they used to be. Their pigs would
break into his bleaching-greens, and furrow up the sward with their
snouts: and when he threatened to pound them, he would be told “how
unthriving a thing it was to keep the puir brutes aye in the fauld,”
and how impossible a thing “to watch them ilka time they gae’d out.”
Herd-boys would gallop their horses and drive their cattle along the
path which he had formed for foot-passengers exclusively: and when he
stormed at the little fellows, they would canter past, and shout out,
from what they deemed a safe distance, that their “horses and kye had
as good a right to the road as himsel’.” Worse than all the rest, when
he had finished whitening the walls of his pigsty, and gone in for a
few minutes to the house, a mischievous urchin, who had watched his
opportunity, sallied across the bridge, and, seizing on the brush,
whitewashed the roof also. Independent of the insult, nothing could be
in worse taste; and yet, when the poor man preferred his complaint to
the father of the urchin, the boor only deigned to mutter in reply,
that “folk would hae nae peace till three Lammas tides, joined intil
ane, would come and roll up the _Clach Malacha_” (it weighs about
twenty tons) “frae its place i’the sea till flood watermark.” The
fellow, rude as he was, had sagacity enough to infer that a tide potent
enough to roll up the _Clach Malacha_, would demolish the bulwark, and
concentrate the energies of Donald for at least another season.
But Donald found employment, and the neighbours were left undisturbed
to live the life of their fathers without the intervention of the
three Lammas tides. Some of the gentlemen farmers of the parish who
reared fields of potatoes, which they sold out to the inhabitants in
square portions of a hundred yards, besought Donald to superintend the
measurement and the sale. The office was one of no emolument whatever,
but he accepted it with thankfulness; and though, when he had potatoes
of his own to dispose of, he never failed to lower the market for the
benefit of the poor, every one now, except the farmers, pronounced
him rigid and narrow to a fault. On a dissolution of Parliament,
Cromarty became the scene of an election, and the honourable
member-apparent deeming it proper, as the thing had become customary,
to whitewash the dingier houses of the town, and cover its dirtier
lanes with gravel, Donald was requested to direct and superintend the
improvements. Proudly did he comply; and never before did the same
sum of _election_-money whiten so many houses, and gravel so many
lanes. Employment flowed in upon him from every quarter. If any of his
acquaintance had a house to build, Donald was appointed inspector. If
they had to be enfeoffed in their properties Donald acted as bailie,
and tendered the earth and stone with the gravity of a judge. He
surveyed fields, suggested improvements, and grew old without either
feeling or regretting it. Towards the close of his last, and almost
only illness, he called for one of his friends, a carpenter, and gave
orders for his coffin; he named the seamstress who was to be employed
in making his shroud; he prescribed the manner in which his lykewake
should be kept, and both the order of his funeral and the streets
through which it was to pass. He was particular in his injunctions to
the sexton, that the bones of his father and mother should be placed
directly above his coffin; and professing himself to be alike happy
that he had lived, and that he was going to die, he turned him to the
wall, and ceased to breathe a few hours after. With all his rage for
improvement, he was a good old man of the good old school. Often has he
stroked my head, and spoken to me of my father, a friend and namesake,
though not a relative; and when, at an after period, he had learned
that I set a value on whatever was antique and curious, he presented me
with the fragment of a large black-letter Bible which had once belonged
to the Urquharts of Cromarty.
CHAPTER IV.
“All hail, Macbeth! thou shalt be king hereafter.”--SHAKSPERE.
[Sidenote: OUR EARLIER DATA.]
It is, perhaps, not quite unworthy of remark, that not only is Cromarty
the sole district of the kingdom whose annals ascend into the obscure
ages of fable, but that the first passage of even its real history
derives its chief interest, not from its importance as a fact, but from
what may be termed its chance union with a sublime fiction of poetry.
Few, I daresay, have so much as dreamed of connecting either its name
or scenery with the genius of Shakspere, and yet they are linked to
one of the most powerful of his achievements as a poet, by the bonds
of a natural association. The very first incident of its true history
would have constituted, had the details been minutely preserved, the
early biography of the celebrated Macbeth; who, according to our
black-letter historians, makes his first appearance in public life as
Thane of Cromarty, and Maormor, or great man of Ross. But I am aware I
do not derive from the circumstance any right to become his biographer.
For though his character was probably formed at a time when he may
be regarded as the legitimate property of the provincial annalist,
no sooner is it exhibited in action than he is consigned over to the
chroniclers of the kingdom.
For the earlier facts of our history the evidence is rather
circumstantial than direct. We see it stamped on the face of the
country, or inscribed on our older obelisks, or sometimes disinterred
from out of hillocks of sand, or accumulations of moss; but very
rarely do we find it deposited in our archives. Let us examine it,
however, wherever it presents itself, and strive, should it seem at
all intelligible, to determine regarding its purport and amount. Not
more than sixty years ago a bank of blown sand, directly under the
northern Sutor, which had been heaped over the soil ages before, was
laid open by the winds of a stormy winter, when it was discovered that
the nucleus on which the hillock had originally formed, was composed of
the bones of various animals of the chase, and the horns of deer. It
is not much more than twelve years since there were dug up in the same
sandy tract two earthen urns, the one filled with ashes and fragments
of half-burned bones, the other with bits of a black bituminous-looking
stone, somewhat resembling jet, which had been fashioned into beads,
and little flat parallelograms, perforated edgewise, with four holes
apiece. Nothing could be ruder than the workmanship: the urns were
clumsily modelled by the hand, unassisted by a lathe; the ornaments,
rough and unpolished, and still bearing the marks of the tool,
resembled nothing of modern production, except, perhaps, the toys which
herd-boys sometimes amuse their leisure in forming with the knife.
We find remains such as these fraught with a more faithful evidence
regarding the early state of our country than the black-letter pages
of our chroniclers. They testify of a period when the chase formed,
perhaps, the sole employment of the few scattered inhabitants; and of
the practice, so prevalent among savages, of burying with their dead
friends whatever they most loved when alive. It may be further remarked
as a curious fact, and one from which we may infer that trinkets
wrought in so uncouth a style could have belonged to only the first
stage of society, that man’s inventive powers receive their earliest
impulses rather from his admiration of the beautiful, than his sense
of the useful. He displays a taste in ornament, and has learned to dye
his skin, and to tatoo it with rude figures of the sun and moon, before
he has become ingenious enough to discover that he stands in need of a
covering.
[Sidenote: THE FIONS OF KNOCK-FERRIL.]
There is a tradition of this part of the country which seems not a
great deal more modern than the urns or their ornaments, and which
bears the character of the savage nearly as distinctly impressed on it.
On the summit of Knock-Ferril, a steep hill which rises a few miles to
the west of Dingwall, there are the remains of one of those vitrified
forts which so puzzle and interest the antiquary; and which was
originally constructed, says tradition, by a gigantic tribe of _Fions_,
for the protection of their wives and children, when they themselves
were engaged in hunting. It chanced in one of their excursions that a
mean-spirited little fellow of the party, not much more than fifteen
feet in height, was so distanced by his more active brethren, that,
leaving them to follow out the chase, he returned home, and throwing
himself down, much fatigued, on the side of the eminence, fell fast
asleep. Garry, for so the unlucky hunter was called, was no favourite
with the women of the tribe;--he was spiritless and diminutive, and
ill-tempered; and as they could make little else of him that they
cared for, they converted him into the butt of many a teasing little
joke, and the sport of many a capricious humour. On seeing that he had
fallen asleep, they stole out to where he lay, and after fastening
his long hair with pegs to the grass, awakened him with their shouts
and laughter. He strove to extricate himself, but in vain; until at
length, infuriated by their gibes and the pain of his own exertions, he
wrenched up his head, leaving half his locks behind him, and, hurrying
after them, set fire to the stronghold into which they had rushed for
shelter. The flames rose till they mounted over the roof, and broke out
at every slit and opening; but Garry, unmoved by the shrieks and groans
of the sufferers within, held fast the door until all was silent; when
he fled into the remote Highlands, towards the west. The males of the
tribe, who had, meanwhile, been engaged in hunting on that part of the
northern Sutor which bears the name of the hill of Nigg, alarmed by the
vast column of smoke which they saw ascending from their dwelling,
came pressing on to the Firth of Cromarty, and leaping across on their
hunting-spears, they hurried home. But they arrived to find only a huge
pile of embers, fanned by the breeze, and amid which the very stones of
the building were sputtering and bubbling with the intense heat, like
the contents of a boiling caldron. Wild with rage and astonishment,
and yet collected enough to conclude that none but Garry could be
the author of a deed so barbarous, they tracked him into a nameless
Highland glen, which has ever since been known as Glen-_Garry_, and
there tore him to pieces. And as all the women of the tribe perished in
the flames, there was an end, when this forlorn and widowed generation
had passed away, to the whole race of the _Fions_. The next incident
of our history bears no other connexion to this story, than that it
belongs to a very early age, that of the Viking and Sea-King, and
that we owe our data regarding it, not to written records, but to an
interesting class of ancient remains, and to a doubtful and imperfect
tradition.
[Sidenote: THE KING’S SONS.]
In this age, says the tradition, the Maormor of Ross was married to a
daughter of the king of Denmark, and proved so barbarous a husband,
that her father, to whom she at length found the means of escape,
fitted out a fleet and army to avenge on him the cruelties inflicted
on her. Three of her brothers accompanied the expedition; but, on
nearing the Scottish coast, a terrible storm arose, in which almost
all the vessels of the fleet either foundered or were driven ashore,
and the three princes were drowned. The ledge of rock at which this
latter disaster is said to have taken place, still bears the name of
the King’s Sons; a magnificent cave which opens among the cliffs of
the neighbouring shore is still known as the King’s Cave; and a path
that winds to the summits of the precipices beside it, as the King’s
Path. The bodies of the princes, says the tradition, were interred,
one at Shandwick, one at Hilton, and one at Nigg; and the sculptured
obelisks of these places, three very curious pieces of antiquity, are
said to be monuments erected to their memory by their father. In no
part of Scotland do stones of this class so abound as on the shores of
the Moray Firth. And they have often attracted the notice and employed
the ingenuity of the antiquary; but it still appears somewhat doubtful
whether we are to regard them as of Celtic or of Scandinavian origin.
It may be remarked, however, that though their style of sculpture
resembles, in its general features, that exhibited in the ancient
crosses of Wales, which are unquestionably British, and though they are
described in a tradition current on the southern shore of the Moray
Firth, as monuments raised by the inhabitants on the expulsion of the
Danes, the amount of evidence seems to preponderate in the opposite
direction; when we consider that they are invariably found bordering
on the sea; that their design and workmanship display a degree of
taste and mechanical ability which the Celtæ of North Britain seem
never to have possessed; that the eastern shores of the German Ocean
abound in similar monuments, which, to a complexity of ornament not
more decidedly Runic, add the Runic inscription; and that the tradition
just related--which, wild as it may appear, can hardly be deemed less
authentic than the one opposed to it, seeing that it belongs to a
district still peopled by the old inhabitants of the country, whereas
the other seems restricted to the lowlands of Moray--assigns their
erection not to the natives, but to their rapacious and unwelcome
visitors, the Danes themselves. The reader may perhaps indulge me
in a few descriptive notices of the three stones connected with the
tradition; they all lie within six miles of Cromarty, and their
weathered and mossy planes, roughened with complicated tracery and
doubtful hieroglyphics, may be regarded as pages of provincial
history--as pages, however, which we must copy rather than translate.
May I not urge, besides, that men who have visited Egypt to examine
monuments not much more curious, have written folios on their return?
[Sidenote: THE OBELISKS OF EASTER ROSS.]
The obelisk at Hilton, though perhaps the most elegant of its class
in Scotland, is less known than any of the other two, and it has
fared more hardly. For, about two centuries ago, it was taken down by
some barbarous mason of Ross, who converted it into a tombstone, and,
erasing the neat mysterious hieroglyphics of one of the sides, engraved
on the place which they had occupied a rude shield and label, and the
following laughable inscription; no bad specimen, by the bye, of the
taste and judgment which could destroy so interesting a monument,
and of that fortuitous species of wit which lies within the reach of
accident, and of accident alone.
HE · THAT · LIVES · WEIL · DYES · WEIL · SAYS · SOLOMON · THE · WISE.
HEIR · LYES · ALEXANDER · DVFF · AND · HIS · THRIE · WIVES.
The side of the obelisk which the chisel has spared is surrounded by
a broad border, embossed in a style of ornament that would hardly
disgrace the frieze of an Athenian portico;--the centre is thickly
occupied by the figures of men, some on horseback, some afoot--of wild
and tame animals, musical instruments, and weapons of war and of the
chase. The stone of Shandwick is still standing,[4] and bears on the
side which corresponds to the obliterated surface of the other, the
figure of a large cross, composed of circular knobs wrought into an
involved and intricate species of fretwork, which seems formed by the
twisting of myriads of snakes. In the spaces on the sides of the shaft
there are two huge, clumsy-looking animals, the one resembling an
elephant, and the other a lion; over each of these a St. Andrew seems
leaning forward from his cross; and on the reverse of the obelisk the
sculpture represents processions, hunting-scenes, and combats. These,
however, are but meagre notices; the obelisk at Nigg I shall describe
more minutely as an average specimen of the class to which it belongs.
It stands in the parish burying-ground, beside the eastern gable of
the church; and bears on one of its sides, like the stone at Shandwick,
a large cross, which, it may be remarked, rather resembles that of the
Greek than of the Romish Church, and on the other a richly embossed
frame, enclosing, like the border of the obelisk at Hilton, the figures
of a crowded assemblage of men and animals. Beneath the arms of the
cross the surface is divided into four oblong compartments, and there
are three above--one on each side, which form complete squares, and one
a-top, which, like the pediment of a portico, is of a triangular shape.
In the lower angle of this upper compartment, two priest-like figures,
attired in long garments, and furnished each with a book, incline
forwards in the attitude of prayer; and in the centre between them
there is a circular cake or wafer, which a dove, descending from above,
holds in its bill. Two dogs seem starting towards the wafer from either
side; and directly under it there is a figure so much weathered, that
it may be deemed to represent, as fancy may determine, either a little
circular table, or the sacramental cup. A pictorial record cannot
be other than a doubtful one; and it is difficult to decide whether
the hieroglyphic of this department denotes the ghostly influence of
the priest in delivering the soul from the evils of an intermediate
state; for, at a slight expense of conjectural analogy, we may premise
that the mysterious dove descends in answer to the prayer of the two
kneeling figures, to deliver the little emblematical cake from the
“power of the dog;”--or, whether it may not represent a treaty of
peace between rival chiefs whose previous hostility may be symbolized
by the two fierce animals below, and their pacific intentions by the
bird above, and who ratify the contract by an oath, solemnized over the
book, the cup, and the wafer. A very few such explanations might tempt
one to quote the well-known story of the Professor of signs and the
Aberdeen butcher; the weight of the evidence, however, rests apparently
with those who adopt the last. We see the locks of the kneeling figures
curling upon their shoulders in unclerical profusion, unbroken by the
tonsure; while the presence of the two books, with the absence of any
written inscription, seems characteristic of the mutual memorial of
tribes, who, though not wholly illiterate, possess no common language
save the very doubtful language of symbol. If we hold further that the
stone is of Scandinavian origin--and it seems a rather difficult matter
to arrive at a different conclusion--we can hardly suppose that the
natives should have left unmutilated the monument of a people so little
beloved had they had no part in what it records, or no interest in its
preservation.
We pass to the other compartments;--some of these and the plane of
the cross are occupied by a species of fretwork exceedingly involved
and complicated, but formed, notwithstanding, on regular mathematical
figures. There are others which contain squares of elegantly arrayed
tracery, designed in a style which we can almost identify with that of
the border illuminations of our older manuscripts, or of the ornaments,
imitative of these, which occur in works printed during the reigns of
Elizabeth and James. But what seem the more curious compartments of
the stone are embossed into rows of circular knobs, covered over, as
if by basket-work, with the intricate foldings of myriads of snakes;
and which may be either deemed to allude to the serpent and apple of
the Fall--thus placed in no inapt neighbourhood to the cross; or to
symbolize (for even the knobs may be supposed to consist wholly of
serpents) that of which the serpent has ever been held emblematic, and
which we cannot regard as less appositely introduced--a complex wisdom,
or an incomprehensible eternity.
The hieroglyphics of the opposite side are in lower relief, and though
the various fretwork of the border is executed in a style of much
elegance, the whole seems to owe less to the care of the sculptor.
The centre is occupied by what, from its size, we must deem the chief
figure of the group--that of a man attired in long garments, caressing
a fawn; and directly fronting him, there are the figures of a lamb
and a harp. The whole is, perhaps, emblematical of peace, and may be
supposed to tell the same story with the upper hieroglyphic of the
reverse. In the space beneath there is the figure of a man furnished
with cymbals, which he seems clashing with much glee, and that of a
horse and its rider, surrounded by animals of the chase; while in
the upper part of the stone there are dogs, deer, an armed huntsman,
and, surmounting the whole, an eagle or raven. It may not be deemed
unworthy of remark, that the style of the more complex ornaments of
this stone very much resembles that which obtains in the sculptures
and tatooings of the New-Zealander. We see exhibited in both the same
intricate regularity of pattern, and almost similar combinations
of the same waving lines. And we are led to infer, that though the
rude Scandinavian of perhaps nine centuries ago had travelled a long
stage in advance of the New-Zealander of our own times, he had yet
his ideas of the beautiful cast in nearly the same mould. Is it not a
curious fact, that man, in his advances towards the just and graceful
in design, proceeds not from the simple to the complex, but from the
complex to the simple?
[Sidenote: DUNSKAITH.]
The slope of the northern Sutor which fronts the town of Cromarty,
terminates about a hundred and fifty feet above the level of the shore
in a precipitous declivity surmounted by a little green knoll, which
for the last six centuries has borne the name of Dunskaith (_i.e._ the
fort of mischief). And in its immediate vicinity there is a high-lying
farm, known all over the country as the farm of Castle-Craig. The
prospect from the edge of the eminence is one of the finest in the
kingdom. We may survey the entire Firth of Cromarty spread out before
us as in a map; the town, though on the opposite shore, seems so
completely under our view that we think of looking down into its
streets; and yet the distance is sufficient to conceal all but what
is pleasing in it. The eye, in travelling over the country beyond,
ascends delighted through the various regions of corn, and wood, and
moor, and then expatiates unfatigued amid a wilderness of blue-peaked
hills. And where the land terminates towards the east, we may see
the dark abrupt cliffs of the southern Sutor flinging their shadows
half-way across the opening, and distinguish among the lofty crags,
which rise to oppose them, the jagged and serrated shelves of the
Diamond-rock, a tall beetling precipice which once bore, if we may
trust to tradition, a wondrous gem in its forehead. Often, says the
legend, has the benighted boatman gazed from amid the darkness, as he
came rowing along the shore, on its clear beacon-like flame, which,
streaming from the rock, threw a long fiery strip athwart the water;
and the mariners of other countries have inquired whether the light
which they saw shining so high among the cliffs, right over their mast,
did not proceed from the shrine of some saint, or the cell of some
hermit. But like the carbuncle of the Ward-hill of Hoy, of which the
author of Waverley makes so poetical a use, “though it gleamed ruddy as
a furnace to them who viewed it from beneath, it ever became invisible
to him whose daring foot had scaled the precipices from whence it
darted its splendour.” I have been oftener than once interrogated on
the western coast of Scotland regarding the “Diamond-rock of Cromarty;”
and an old campaigner who fought under Abercromby has told me that he
has listened to the familiar story of its diamond amid the sand wastes
of Egypt. But the jewel has long since disappeared, and we see only
the rock. It used never to be seen, it is said, by day, nor could the
exact point which it occupied be ascertained; and on a certain luckless
occasion an ingenious ship-captain, determined on marking its place,
brought with him from England a few balls of chalk, and, charging
with this novel species of shot, took aim at it in the night-time
with one of his great guns. Ere he had fired, however, it vanished,
as if suddenly withdrawn by some guardian hand; and its place on the
rock has ever since remained as undistinguishable as the scaurs and
cliffs around it. And now the eye, after completing its circuit, rests
on the eminence of Dunskaith;--the site of a royal fortress erected
by William the Lion, to repress, says Lord Hailes in his Annals of
Scotland, the oft-recurring rebellions and disorders of Ross-shire.
We can still trace the moat of the citadel, and part of an outwork
which rises towards the hill; but the walls have sunk into low grassy
mounds, and the line of the outer moat has long since been effaced by
the plough. The disorders of Ross-shire seem to have outlived, by many
ages, the fortress raised to suppress them. I need hardly advert to a
story so well known as that of the robber of this province who nailed
horse-shoes to the feet of the poor widow who had threatened him with
the vengeance of James I., and who, with twelve of his followers, was
brought to Edinburgh by that monarch, to be horse-shoed in turn. Even
so late as the reign of James VI. the clans of Ross are classed among
the peculiarly obnoxious, in an Act for the punishment of theft, rief,
and oppression.
[Sidenote: THE URQUHARTS OF CROMARTY.]
Between the times of Macbeth and an age comparatively recent, there
occurs a wide chasm in the history of Cromarty. The Thane, magnified
by the atmosphere of poetry which surrounds him, towers like a giant
over the remoter brink of the gap, while, in apparent opposition to
every law of perspective, the people on its nearer edge seem diminished
into pigmies. And yet the Urquharts of Cromarty--though Sir Thomas, in
his zeal for their honour, has dealt by them as the poets of ancient
Greece did by the early history of their country--were a race of
ancient standing and of no little consideration. The editor of the
second edition of Sir Thomas’s _Jewel_, which was not published until
the first had been more than a hundred years out of print, states in
his advertisement that he had compared the genealogy of his author
with another genealogy of the family in possession of the Lord Lyon of
Scotland, and that from the reign of Alexander II. to that of Charles
I. he had found them perfectly to agree. The lands of the family
extended from the furthest point of the southern Sutor to the hill of
_Kinbeakie_ (_i.e._ end of the living), a tract which includes the
parishes of Cromarty, Kirkmichael, and Cullicuden; and, prior to the
imprisonment and exile of Sir Thomas, he was vested with the patronage
of the churches of these parishes, and the admiralty of the eastern
coast of Scotland, from Caithness to Inverness.
[Sidenote: WALLACE.]
The first of his ancestors, whose story receives some shadow of
confirmation from tradition, was a contemporary of Wallace and the
Bruce. When ejected from his castle, he is said to have regained it
from the English by a stratagem, and to have held it out with only
forty men for about seven years. “During that time,” says Sir Thomas,
“his lands were wasted and his woods burnt; and having nothing he
could properly call his own but the moat-hill of Cromarty, which he
maintained in defiance of all the efforts of the enemy, he was agnamed
_Gulielmus de monte alto_. At length,” continues the genealogist,
“he was relieved by Sir William Wallace, who raised the siege after
defeating the English in a little den or hollow about two miles from
the town.” Tradition, though silent respecting the siege, is more
explicit than Sir Thomas in her details of the battle.
Somewhat more than four miles to the south of Cromarty, and about the
middle of the mountainous ridge which, stretching from the Sutors to
the village of Rosemarkie, overhangs at the one edge the shores of
the Moray Firth, and sinks on the other into a broken moor, there
is a little wooded eminence. Like the ridge which it overtops, it
sweeps gradually towards the east until it terminates in an abrupt
precipice that overhangs the sea, and slopes upon the west into a
marshy hollow, known to the elderly people of the last age and a very
few of the present as _Wallace-slack_--_i.e._, ravine. The direct line
of communication with the southern districts, to travellers who cross
the Firth at the narrow strait of Ardersier, passes within a few yards
of the hollow. And when, some time during the wars of Edward, a strong
body of English troops were marching by this route to join another
strong body encamped in the peninsula of Easter Ross, this circumstance
is said to have pointed it out to Wallace as a fit place for forming an
ambuscade. From the eminence which overtops it, the spectator can look
down on a wide tract of country, while the ravine itself is concealed
by a flat tubercle of the moor, which to the traveller approaching
from the south or west, seems the base of the eminence. The stratagem
succeeded; the English, surprised and panic-struck, were defeated
with much slaughter, six hundred being left dead in the scene of the
attack; and the survivors, closely pursued and wholly unacquainted
with the country, fled towards the north along the ridge of hill which
terminates at the bay of Cromarty. From the top of the ridge the two
Sutors seem piled the one over the other, and so shut up the opening,
that the bay within assumes the appearance of a lake; and the English
deeming it such, pressed onward, in the hope that a continued tract
of land stretched between them and their countrymen on the opposite
shore. They were only undeceived when, on climbing the southern Sutor,
where it rises behind the town, they saw an arm of the sea more than
a mile in width, and skirted by abrupt and dizzy precipices, opening
before them. The spot is still pointed out where they made their final
stand; and a few shapeless hillocks, that may still be seen among the
trees, are said to have been raised above the bodies of those who fell;
while the fugitives, for they were soon beaten from this position, were
either driven over the neighbouring precipices, or perished amid the
waves of the Firth. Wallace, on another occasion, is said to have fled
for refuge to a cave of the Sutors; and his metrical historian, Blind
Harry, after narrating his exploits at St. Johnstone’s, Dunotter, and
Aberdeen, describes him as
“Raiding throw the North-land into playne,
Till at _Crummade_ fell Inglismen he’d slayne.”
Hamilton, in his modernized edition of the “Achievements,” renders the
_Crummade_ here Cromarty; and as shown by an ancient custom-house seal
or cocket (supposed to belong to the reign of Robert II.), now in the
Inverness Museum, the place was certainly designated of old by a word
of resembling sound--_Chrombhte_.
Of all the humbler poets of Scotland--and where is there a country with
more?--there is hardly one who has not sung in praise of Wallace. His
exploit, as recorded in the Jewel, connected with the tradition of the
cave, has been narrated by the muse of a provincial poet, who published
a volume of poems at Inverness about five years ago; and, in the lack
of less questionable materials for this part of my history, I avail
myself of his poem.
Thus ran the tale:--proud England’s host
Lay ’trench’d on Croma’s winding coast.
And rose the Urquhart’s towers beneath
Fierce shouts of wars, deep groans of death.
The Wallace heard;--from Moray’s shore
One little bark his warriors bore.
But died the breeze, and rose the day,
Ere gained that bark the destined bay;
When, lo! these rocks a quay supplied,
These yawning caves meet shades to hide.
Secure, where rank the nightshade grew,
And patter’d thick th’ unwholesome dew,
Patient of cold and gloom they lay,
Till eve’s last light had died away.
It died away;--in Croma’s hall
No flame glanced on the trophied wall,
Nor sound of mirth nor revel free
Was heard where joy had wont to be.
With day had ceased the siege’s din,
But still gaunt famine raged within.
In chamber lone, on weary bed,
That castle’s wounded lord was laid;
His woe-worn lady watch’d beside.
To pain devote, and grief, and gloom,
No taper cheer’d the darksome room;
Yet to the wounded chieftain’s sight
Strange shapes were there, and sheets of light
And oft he spoke, in jargon vain,
Of ruthless deed and tyrant reign,
For maddening fever fired his brain.
O hark! the warder’s rousing call--
“Rise, warriors, rise, and man the wall!”
Starts up the chief, but rack’d with pain,
And weak, he backward sinks again:
“O Heaven, they come!” the lady cries,
“The Southrons come, and Urquhart dies!”
Nay, ’tis not fever mocks his sight;
His broider’d couch is red with light;
In light his lady stands confest,
Her hand clasp’d on her heaving breast.
And hark; wild shouts assail the ear,
Loud and more loud, near and more near
They rise!--hark, frequent rings the blade,
On crested helm relentless laid;
Yells, groans, sharp sounds of smitten mail,
And war-cries load the midnight gale;
O hark! like Heaven’s own thunder high,
Swells o’er the rest one ceaseless cry,
Racking the dull cold ear of night,
“The Wallace wight!--the Wallace wight!”
Yes, gleams the sword of Wallace there,
Unused his country’s foes to spare;
Roars the red camp like funeral pyre,
One wild, wide, wasteful sea of fire;
Glow red the low-brow’d clouds of night,
The wooded hill is bathed in light,
Gleams wave, and field, and turret height.
Death’s vassals dog the spoiler’s horde,
Burns in their front th’ unsparing sword;
The fired camp casts its volumes o’er;
Behind spreads wide a skiffless shore;
Fire, flood, and sword, conspire to slay.
How sad shall rest morn’s early ray
On blacken’d strand, and crimson’d main,
On floods of gore, and hills of slain;
But bright its cheering beams shall fall
Where mirth whoops in the Urquharts’ Hall.
* * *
There occurs in our narrative another wide chasm, which extends from
the times of Wallace to the reign of James IV. Like the earlier gap,
however, it might be filled up by a recital of events, which, though
they belong properly to the history of the neighbouring districts,
must have affected in no slight degree the interests and passions of
the people of Cromarty. Among these we may reckon the descents on Ross
by the Lords of the Isles, which terminated in the battles of Harlaw
and Driemderfat, and that contest between the Macintoshes and Munros,
which took place in the same century at the village of Clachnaherry. I
might avail myself, too, on a similar principle, of the pilgrimage of
James IV. to the neighbouring chapel of St. Dothus, near Tain. But as
all these events have, like the story of Macbeth, been appropriated by
the historians of the kingdom, they are already familiar to the general
reader. In an after age, Cromarty, like Tain, was honoured by a visit
from royalty. I find it stated by Calderwood, that in the year 1589,
on the discovery of Huntly’s conspiracy, and the discomfiture of his
followers at the Bridge of Dee, James VI. rode to Aberdeen, ostensibly
with the intention of holding justice-courts on the delinquents;
but that, deputing the business of trial to certain judges whom he
instructed to act with a lenity which the historian condemns, he set
out on a hunting expedition to Cromarty, from which he returned after
an absence of about twenty days.
[Sidenote: THE FORAY OF THE CLANS.]
We find not a great deal less of the savage in the records of these
later times than in those of the darker periods which went before.
Life and property seem to have been hardly more secure, especially
in those hapless districts which, bordering on the Highlands, may be
regarded as constituting the battle-fields on which needy barbarism,
and the imperfectly-formed vanguard of a slowly advancing civilisation,
contended for the mastery. Early in the reign of James IV. the lands of
Cromarty were wasted by a combination of the neighbouring clans, headed
by Hucheon Rose of Kilravock, Macintosh of Macintosh, and Fraser of
Lovat; and so complete was the spoliation, that the entire property of
the inhabitants, to their very household furniture, was carried away.
Restitution was afterwards enforced by the Lords of Council. We find it
decreed in the _Acta Dominorum Concilii_ for 1492, that Hucheon Rose
of Kilravock do restore, content, and pay to Mr. Alexander Urquhart,
sheriff of Cromarty, and his tenants, the various items carried off by
him and his accomplices; viz., six hundred cows, one hundred horses,
one thousand sheep, four hundred goats, two hundred swine, and four
hundred bolls of victual. Kilravock is said to have conciliated the
justice-general on this occasion by resigning into his hands his
grand-daughter, the heiress of Calder, then a child; and her lands the
wily magistrate secured to his family by marrying her to one of his
sons.
[Sidenote: PATERHEMON.]
There lived in the succeeding reign a proprietor of Cromarty, who,
from the number of his children, received, says the genealogist, the
title, or agname, of Paterhemon. He had twenty-five sons who arrived
at manhood, and eleven daughters who ripened into women, and were
married. Seven of the sons lost their lives at the battle of Pinkie;
and there were some of the survivors who, settling in England, became
the founders of families which, in the days of the Commonwealth,
were possessed of considerable property and influence in Devonshire
and Cumberland. Tradition tells the story of Paterhemon somewhat
differently. His children, whom it diminishes to twenty, are described
as robust and very handsome men; and he is said to have lived in the
reign of Mary. On the visit of that princess to Inverness, and when,
according to Buchanan, the Frasers and Munros, two of the most warlike
clans of the country, were raised by their respective chieftains to
defend her against the designs of Huntly, the Urquhart is said also
to have marched to her assistance with a strong body of his vassals,
and accompanied by all his sons, mounted on white horses. At the
moment of his arrival Mary was engaged in reviewing the clans, and
surrounded by the chiefs and her officers. The venerable chieftain
rode up to her, and, dismounting with all the ease of a galliard of
five-and-twenty, presented to her, as his best gift, his little troup
of children. There is yet a third edition of the story:--About the
year 1652, one Richard Franck, a native of the sister kingdom, and as
devoted an angler as Isaac Walton himself, made the tour of Scotland,
and then published a book descriptive of what he had seen. His notice
of Cromarty is mostly summed up in a curious little anecdote of the
patriarch, which he probably derived from some tradition current at
the time of his visit. Sir Thomas he describes as his eldest son; and
the number of his children who arrived at maturity he has increased
to forty. “He had thirty sons and ten daughters,” says the tourist,
“standing at once before him, and not one natural child amongst them.”
Having attained the extreme verge of human life, he began to consider
himself as already dead; and in the exercise of an imagination, which
the genealogist seems to have inherited with his lands, he derived
comfort from the daily repetition of a kind of ceremony, ingenious
enough to challenge comparison with any rite of the Romish Church. For
every evening about sunset, being brought out in his couch to the base
of a tower of the castle, he was raised by pulleys, slowly and gently,
to the battlements; and the ascent he deemed emblematical of the
resurrection. Or to employ the graphic language of the tourist--“The
declining age of this venerable laird of Urquhart, for he had now
reached the utmost limit of life, invited him to contemplate mortality,
and to cruciate himself by fancying his cradle his sepulchre; therein,
therefore, was he lodged night after night, and hauled up by pulleys
to the roof of his house, approaching, as near as the summits of its
higher pinnacles would let him, to the beautiful battlements and
suburbs of heaven.”
I find I must devote one other chapter to the consideration of the
interesting remains which form almost the sole materials of this
earlier portion of my history. But the class of these to which I am
now about to turn, are to be found, not on the face of the country,
but locked up in the minds of the inhabitants. And they are falling
much more rapidly into decay--mouldering away in their hidden recesses,
like bodies of the dead; while others, which more resemble the green
mound and the monumental tablet, bid fair to abide the inquiry of
coming generations. Those vestiges of ancient superstition, which are
to be traced in the customs and manners of the common people, share in
a polite age a very different fate from those impressions of it, if
I may so express myself, which we find stamped upon matter. For when
the just and liberal opinions which originate with philosophers and
men of genius are diffused over a whole people, a modification of the
same good sense which leads the scholar to treasure up old beliefs
and usages, serves to emancipate the peasant from their influence or
observance.
CHAPTER V.
“She darklins grapit for the bauks,
And in the blue clue throws then.”--BURNS.
[Sidenote: REMAINS OF THE OLD MYTHOLOGY.]
Violence may anticipate by many centuries the natural progress of
decay. There are some of our Scottish cathedrals less entire than some
of our old Picts’ houses, though the latter have been deserted for more
than a thousand years, and the former for not more than three hundred.
And the remark is not less applicable to the beliefs and usages of
other ages, than to their more material remains. It is a curious fact,
that we meet among the Protestants of Scotland with more marked traces
of the Paganism of their earlier, than of the Popery of their later
ancestors. For while Christianity seems to have been introduced into
the country by slow degrees, and to have travelled over it by almost
imperceptible stages--leaving the less obnoxious practices of the
mythology which it supplanted to the natural course of decay--it is
matter of history that the doctrines of the Reformation overspread
it in a single age, and that the observances of the old system were
effaced, not by a gradual current of popular opinion, but by the hasty
surges of popular resentment. The saint-days of the priest have in
consequence been long since forgotten--the festivals of the Druid still
survive.
There is little risk of our mistaking these latter; the rites of
Hallowe’en, and the festivities of Beltane, possess well-authenticated
genealogies. There are other usages, however, which, though they
bear no less strongly the impress of Paganism, show a more uncertain
lineage. And regarding these, we find it difficult to determine
whether they have come down to us from the days of the old mythology,
or have been produced in a later period by those sentiments of
the human mind to which every false religion owes its origin. The
subject, though a curious, is no very tangible one. But should I
attempt throwing together a few simple thoughts respecting it, in
that wandering desultory style which seems best to consort with its
irregularity of outline, I trust I may calculate on the forbearance of
the reader. I shall strive to be not very tedious, and to choose a not
very beaten path.
Man was made for the world, and the world for man. Hence we find that
every faculty of the human mind has in the things which lie without
some definite object, or particular class of circumstances, on which
to operate. There is a thorough adaptation of that which acts to that
which is acted upon--of the moving power to the machine; and woe be to
him who deranges this admirable order, in the hope of rendering it more
complete. It is prettily fabled by the Brahmins, that souls are moulded
by pairs, and then sent to the earth to be linked together in wedlock,
and that matches are unhappy merely in consequence of the parties
disuniting by the way, and choosing for themselves other consorts. One
might find more in this fable than any Brahmin ever found in it yet.
There is a prospective connexion of a similar kind formed between the
powers of the mind and the objects on which these are to be employed,
and should they be subsequently united to objects other than the
legitimate, a wretchedness quite as real as that which arises out of an
ill-mated marriage is the infallible result.
Were I asked to illustrate my meaning by an example or two, I do not
know where I could find instances better suited to my purpose than in
the imaginative extravagancies of some of our wilder sectaries. There
is no principle which so deals in unhappy marriages, and as unhappy
divorces, as the fanatical; or that so ceaselessly employs itself in
separating what Heaven has joined, and in joining what Heaven has
separated. Man, I have said, was made for the world he lives in;--I
should have added, that he was intended also for another world.
Fanaticism makes a somewhat similar omission, only it is the other way.
It forgets that he is as certainly a denizen of the present as an heir
of the future; that the same Being who has imparted to him the noble
sentiment which leads him to anticipate an hereafter, has also bestowed
upon him a thousand lesser faculties which must be employed now; and
that, if he prove untrue to even the minor end of his existence, and
slight his proper though subordinate employments, the powers which
he thus separates from their legitimate objects must, from the very
activity of their nature, run riot in the cloisters in which they are
shut up, and cast reproach by their excesses on the cause to which
they are so unwisely dedicated. For it is one thing to condemn these
to a life of celibacy, and quite another to keep them chaste. We may
shut them up, like a sisterhood of nuns, from the objects to which
they ought to have been united, but they will infallibly discover some
less legitimate ones with which to connect themselves. Self-love, and
the natural desire of distinction--proper enough sentiments in their
own sphere--make but sad work in any other. The imagination, which
was so bountifully given us to raise its ingenious theories as a kind
of scaffolding to philosophical discovery, is active to worse purpose
when revelling intoxicated amid the dim fields of prophecy, or behind
the veil of the inner mysteries. Reason itself, though a monarch in
its own proper territories, can exert only a doubtful authority in the
provinces which lie beyond. Indeed, the whole history of fanaticism,
from when St. Anthony retired into the deserts of Upper Egypt to burrow
in a cell like a fox-earth, down to the times that witnessed some of
the wilder heresiarchs of our own country, working what they had faith
enough to deem miracles, is little else than a detail of the disorders
occasioned by perversions of this nature.
[Sidenote: THE DEVOTIONAL SENTIMENT.]
There is an exhibition of phenomena equally curious when the religious
sentiment, instead of thus swallowing up all the others, is deprived
of even its own proper object. I once saw a solitary hen bullfinch,
that retired one spring into a dark corner of her cage and laid an
egg, over which she sat until it was addled. It is always thus when
the devotional sentiment is left to form a religion for itself.
Encaged like the poor bullfinch, it proves fruitful in just a similar
way, and moping in its dark recesses, brings forth its pitiful
abortions unassisted and alone. I have ever thought of the pantheons
and mythological dictionaries of our libraries as a kind of museums,
stored, like those of the anatomist, with embryos and abortions.
It must be remarked further, that the devotional sentiment operates in
this way not only when its proper object is wanting, but even, should
the mind be dark and uninformed, when that is present. Every false
religion may be regarded as a wild irregular production, springing
out of that basis of sentiment (one of the very foundations of our
nature) which, when rendered the subject of a right course of culture,
and sown with the good seed, proves the proper field of the true. But
on this field, even when occupied the better way, there may be the
weeds of a rank indigenous mythology shooting up below--a kind of
subordinate superstition, which, in other circumstances, would have
been not the underwood, but the forest. Hence our difficulty in fixing
the genealogy of the Pagan-like usages to which I allude; there are
two opposite sources, from either of which they may have sprung:--they
may form a kind of undergrowth, thrown up at no very early period by
a soil occupied by beliefs the most serious and rational, or they may
constitute the ancient and broken vestiges of an obsolete and exploded
mythology. I shall briefly describe a few of the more curious.
[Sidenote: INTERESTING USAGES.]
I. People acquainted with seafaring men, and who occasionally accompany
them in their voyages, cannot miss seeing them, when the sails are
drooping against the mast, and the vessel lagging in her course,
earnestly invoking the wind in a shrill tremulous whistling--calling
on it, in fact, in its own language; and scarcely less confident of
being answered than if preferring a common request to one of their
companions. I rarely sail in calm weather with my friends the Cromarty
fishermen, without seeing them thus employed--their faces anxiously
turned in the direction whence they expect the breeze; now pausing, for
a light uncertain air has begun to ruffle the water, and now resuming
the call still more solicitously than before, for it has died away.
On thoughtlessly beginning to whistle one evening about twelve years
ago, when our skiff was staggering under a closely-reefed foresail, I
was instantly silenced by one of the fishermen with a “Whisht, whisht,
boy, we have more than wind enough already;” and I remember being much
struck for the first time by the singularity of the fact, that the
winds should be as sincerely invoked by our Scottish seamen of the
present day, as by the mariners of Themistocles. There was another
such practice common among the Cromarty fishermen of the last age, but
it is now obsolete. It was termed soothing the waves. When beating
up in stormy weather along a lee-shore, it was customary for one of
the men to take his place on the weather gunwale, and there continue
waving his hand in a direction opposite to the sweep of the sea, in
the belief that this species of appeal to it would induce it to lessen
its force. We recognize in both these singular practices the workings
of that religion natural to the heart, which, more vivid in its
personifications than poetry itself, can address itself to every power
of nature as to a sentient being endowed with a faculty of will, and
able, as it inclines, either to aid or injure. The seaman’s prayer to
the winds, and the thirty thousand gods of the Greek, probably derive
their origin from a similar source.
II. Viewed in the light of reason, an oath owes its sacredness, not
to any virtue in itself, but to the Great Being to whom it is so
direct an appeal, and to the good and rational belief that He knows
all things, and is the ultimate judge of all. But the same uninformed
principle which can regard the winds and waves as possessed of a
power independent of His, seems also to have conferred on the oath
an influence and divinity exclusively its own. I have met with many
among the more grossly superstitious, who deemed it a kind of ordeal,
somewhat similar to the nine ploughshares of the dark ages, which
distinguished between right and wrong, truth or falsehood, by some
occult intrinsic virtue. The innocent person swears, and like the
guiltless woman when she had drunk the waters of jealousy, thrives none
the worse;--the guilty perjure themselves, and from that hour cease to
prosper. I remember--by the way, a very early recollection--that when a
Justice of Peace Court was sitting in my native town, many years ago,
a dark cloud came suddenly over the sun; and that a man who had been
lounging on the street below, ran into the Court-room to see who it was
that, _by swearing a false oath_, had occasioned the obscuration. It is
a rather singular coincidence, and one which might lead us to believe
in the existence of something analogous to principle in even the
extravagancies of human belief, that the only oath deemed binding on
the gods of classical mythology--the oath by the river Styx--was one of
merely intrinsic power and virtue. Bacon, indeed, in his “Wisdom of the
Ancients” (a little book but a great work), has explained the fable as
merely an ingenious allegory; but who does not know that the Father of
modern philosophy found half the Novum Organum in superstitions which
existed before the days of Orpheus?
III. There seems to have once obtained in this part of the country
a belief that the natural sentiment of justice had its tutelary
spirit, which, like the Astræa of the Greeks, existed for it, and for
it alone; and which not only seconded the dictates of conscience,
but even punished those by whom they were disregarded. The creed of
superstition is, however, rarely a well defined or consistent one; and
this belief seems to have partaken, as much as any of the others, of
the incoherent obscurity in which it originated. The mysterious agent
(the object of it) existed no one knew where, and effected its purposes
no one knew how. But the traditions which illustrate it, narrate
better than they define. Many years ago, says one of these, a woman
of Tarbat was passing along the shores of Loch-Slin, with a large web
of linen on her back. There was a market held that morning at Tain,
and she was bringing the web there to be sold. In those times it was
quite as customary for farmers to rear the flax which supplied them
with clothing, as the corn which furnished them with food; and it was
of course necessary, in some of the earlier processes of preparing the
former, to leave it for weeks spread out on the fields, with little
else to trust to for its protection than the honesty of neighbours.
But to the neighbours of this woman the protection was, it would seem,
incomplete; and the web she carried on this occasion was composed of
stolen lint. She had nearly reached the western extremity of the lake,
when, feeling fatigued, she seated herself by the water edge, and laid
down the web beside her. But no sooner had it touched the earth than
up it bounded three Scots ells into the air, and slowly unrolling
fold after fold, until it had stretched itself out as when on the
bleaching-green, it flew into the middle of the lake, and disappeared
for ever. There are several other stories of the same class, but the
one related may serve as a specimen of the whole.
IV. The evils which men dread, and the appearances which they cannot
understand, are invariably appropriated by superstition: if her power
extend not over the terrible and the mysterious, she is without power
at all. And not only does she claim whatever is inexplicable in the
great world, but also in some cases what seems mysterious in the
little; some, for instance, of the more paradoxical phenomena of human
nature. It has been represented to me as a mysterious, unaccountable
fact, that persons who have been rescued from drowning regard their
deliverers ever after with a dislike which borders almost on enmity. I
have heard it affirmed, too, that when the crew of some boat or vessel
have perished, with the exception of one individual, the relatives of
the deceased invariably regard that one with a deep, irrepressible
hatred; and in both cases the feelings described are said to originate
in some occult and supernatural cause. Alas! neither envy nor
ingratitude lie out of our ordinary everyday walk. There occurs to me a
little anecdote illustrative of this kind of apotheosis of the envious
principle. Some fifty years ago there was a Cromarty boat wrecked on
the rough shores of Eathie. All the crew perished with the exception
of one fisherman; and the poor man was so persecuted by the relatives
of the drowned, who even threatened his life, that he was compelled,
much against his inclination, to remove to Nairn. There, however, only
a few years after, he was wrecked a second time, and, as in the first
instance, proved the sole survivor of the crew. And so he was again
subjected to a persecution similar to the one he had already endured;
and compelled to quit Nairn as he had before quitted Cromarty. And in
both cases the relatives of the deceased were deemed as entirely under
the influence of a mysterious, irresistible impulse, which acted upon
their minds from without, as the Orestes of the dramatist when pursued
by the Furies.
One may question, as I have already remarked, whether one sees, in
these several instances, polytheism in the act of forming, and but
barely forming, in the human mind, or the mutilated remnants of
a long-exploded mythology. The usages to which I have alluded as
more certain in their lineage, are perhaps less suited to employ
speculation. But they are curious; and the fact that they are fast
sinking into an oblivion, out of which the diligence of no future
excavator will be able to restore them, gives them of itself a kind of
claim on our notice. I pass over Beltane; its fires in this part of the
country have long since been extinguished; but to its half-surviving
partner, Halloween, I shall devote a few pages; and this the more
readily, as it chances to be connected with a story of humble life
which belongs to that period of my history at which I have now arrived.
True, the festival itself has already sat for its picture, and so
admirable was the skill of the artist, that its very name recalls to us
rather the masterly strokes of the transcript than the features of the
original. But, with all its truth and beauty, the portrait is not yet
complete.
[Sidenote: RITES OF THE SCOTTISH HALLOWEEN.]
The Scottish Halloween, as held in the solitary farmhouse and described
by Burns, differed considerably from the Halloween of our villages and
smaller towns. In the farmhouse it was a night of prediction only; in
our towns and villages there were added a multitude of wild mischievous
games, which were tolerated at no other season--a circumstance that
serves to identify the festival with those pauses of license peculiar
to the nonage of civil government, in which men are set free from
the laws they are just learning to respect;--partly, it would seem,
as a reward for the deference which they have paid them, partly to
serve them as a kind of breathing-spaces in which to recover from
the unwonted fatigue of being obedient. After nightfall, the young
fellows of the town formed themselves into parties of ten or a dozen,
and breaking into the gardens of the graver inhabitants, stole the
best and heaviest of their cabbages. Converting these into bludgeons,
by stripping off the lower leaves, they next scoured the streets and
lanes, thumping at every door as they passed, until their uncouth
weapons were beaten to pieces. When disarmed in this way, all the
parties united into one, and providing themselves with a cart, drove
it before them with the rapidity of a chaise and four through the
principal streets. Woe to the inadvertent female whom they encountered!
She was instantly laid hold of, and placed aloft in the cart--brothers,
and cousins, and even sons, it is said, not unfrequently assisting
in the capture; and then dragged backwards and forwards over the
rough stones, amid shouts, and screams, and roars of laughter. The
younkers within doors were meanwhile engaged in a manner somewhat less
annoying, but not a whit less whimsical. The bent of their ingenuity
for weeks before, had been turned to the accumulating of little hoards
of apples--all for this night; and now a large tub, filled with water,
was placed in the middle of the floor of some out-house, carefully
dressed up for the occasion; and into the tub every one of the party
flung an apple. They then approached it by turns, and, placing their
hands on the edges, plunged forward to fish for the fruit with their
teeth. I remember the main chance of success was to thrust the head
fearlessly into the tub, amid the booming of the water, taking especial
care to press down one of the apples in a line with the mouth, and to
seize it when jammed against the bottom. When the whole party, with
their dripping locks and shining faces, would seem metamorphosed into
so many mermaids, this sport usually gave place to another:--A small
beam of wood was suspended from the ceiling by a cord, and when fairly
balanced, an apple was fastened to the one end, and a lighted candle to
the other. It was then whirled round, and the boys in turn, as before,
leaped up and bit at the fruit; not unfrequently, however, merely to
singe their faces and hair at the candle. Neither of these games were
peculiar to the north of Scotland: we find it stated by Mr. Polewhele,
in his “Historical Views of Devonshire,” that the Irish peasants
assembled on the eve of _La Samon_ (the 2d November), to celebrate the
festival of the sun, with many rites derived from Paganism, among which
was the dipping for apples in a tub of water, and the catching at an
apple stuck on the one end of a kind of hanging beam.
[Sidenote: THE CHARM OF THE EGG.]
There belonged to the north of Scotland two Halloween rites of augury
which have not been described by Burns: and one of these, an elegant
and beautiful charm, is not yet entirely out of repute. An ale-glass
is filled with pure water, and into the water is dropped the white of
an egg. The female whose future fortunes are to be disclosed (for
the charm seems appropriated exclusively by the better sex) lays her
hand on the glass’s mouth, and holds it there for about the space of
a minute. In that time the heavier parts of the white settle to the
bottom, while the lighter shoot up into the water, from which they are
distinguished by their opacity, into a variety of fantastic shapes,
resembling towers and domes, towns, fleets, and forests; or, to speak
more correctly, into forms not very unlike those icicles which one sees
during a severe frost at the edge of a waterfall. A resemblance is next
traced, which is termed reading the glass, between the images displayed
in it and some objects of either art or nature; and these are regarded
as constituting a hieroglyphic of the person’s future fortunes. Thus,
the ramparts of a fortress surmounted by streamers, a plain covered
with armies, or the tents of an encampment, show that the female whose
hand covered the glass is to be united to a soldier, and that her life
is to be spent in camps and garrisons. A fleet of ships, a church or
pulpit, a half-finished building, a field stripped into furrows, a
garden, a forest--all these, and fifty other scenes, afford symbols
equally unequivocal. And there are melancholy hieroglyphics, too,
that speak of death when interrogated regarding marriage;--there are
the solitary tomb, the fringed shroud, the coffin, and the skull and
cross-bones. “Ah!” said a young girl, whom I overheard a few years ago
regretting the loss of a deceased companion, “Ah! I knew when she first
took ill that there was little to hope. Last Halloween we went together
to Mrs. ---- to break our eggs. Betsie’s was first cast, and there rose
under her hand an ugly skull. Mrs. ---- said nothing, but reversed the
glass, while poor Betsie laid her hand on it a second time, and then
there rose a coffin. Mrs. ---- called it a boat, and I said I saw the
oars; but Mrs. ---- well knew what it meant, and so did I.”
[Sidenote: THE TWELFTH RIG.]
The other north country charm, which, of Celtic origin, bears evidently
the impress of the romance and melancholy so predominant in the Celtic
character, is only known and practised (if, indeed, still practised
anywhere) in a few places of the remote Highlands. The person who
intends trying it must steal out unperceived to a field whose furrows
lie due south and north, and, entering at the western side, must
proceed slowly over eleven ridges, and stand in the centre of the
twelfth, when he will hear either low sobs and faint mournful shrieks,
which betoken his early death, or the sounds of music and dancing,
which foretell his marriage. But the charm is accounted dangerous.
About twelve years ago, I spent an autumn in the mid-Highlands of
Ross-shire, where I passed my Halloween, with nearly a dozen young
people, at a farmhouse. We burned nuts and ate apples; and when we
had exhausted our stock of both, some of us proposed setting out for
the steading of a neighbouring farm, and robbing the garden of its
cabbages; but the motion was overruled by the female members of the
party; for the night was pitch dark, and the way rough; and so we had
recourse for amusement to story-telling. Naturally enough most of our
stories were of Halloween rites and predictions; and much was spoken
regarding the charm of the rig. I had never before heard of it; and,
out of a frolic, I stole away to a field whose furrows lay in the
proper direction, and after pacing steadily across the ridges until
I had reached the middle of the twelfth, I stood and listened. But
spirits were not abroad:--I heard only the wind groaning in the woods,
and the deep sullen roar of the Conan. On my return I was greeted with
exclamations of wonder and terror, and it was remarked that I looked
deadly pale, and had certainly heard something very terrible. “But
whatever you may have been threatened with,” said the author of the
remark, “you may congratulate yourself on being among us in your right
mind; for there are instances of people returning from the twelfth rig
raving mad; and of others who went to it as light of heart as you, who
never returned at all.”
[Sidenote: MACCULLOCH’S COURTSHIP.]
The Maccullochs of the parish of Cromarty, a family now extinct, were,
for about two centuries, substantial respectable farmers. The first
of this family, says tradition, was Alaster Macculloch, a native of
the Highlands. When a boy he quitted the house of his widow mother,
and wandered into the low country in quest of employment, which he at
length succeeded in procuring in the parish of Cromarty, on the farm of
an old wealthy tacksman. For the first few weeks he seemed to be one
of the gloomiest little fellows ever bred among the solitudes of the
hills;--all the social feelings of his nature had been frozen within
him; but they began to flow apace; and it was soon discovered that
neither reserve nor melancholy formed any part of his real character.
A little of the pride of the Celt he still retained; when he attended
chapel he wore a gemmy suit of tartan, and his father’s dirk always
depended from his belt; but, in every other respect, he seemed a true
Lowland Scot, and not one of his companions equalled him in sly humour,
or could play off a practical joke with half the effect.
His master was a widower, and the father of an only daughter, a
laughing warm-hearted girl of nineteen. She had more lovers than half
the girls of the parish put together; and when they avowed to her their
very sincere attachment, she tendered them her very hearty thanks in
return. But then one’s affections are not in one’s own power; and as
certainly as they loved her just because they could not help it, so
certainly was she indifferent to them from the same cause. Their number
received one last accession in little Alaster the herd-boy. He shared
in the kindness of his young mistress, and his cattle shared in it too,
with every living thing connected with her father or his farm; but his
soul-engrossing love lay silent within him, and not only without words,
but, young and sanguine as he was, almost without hope. Not that he was
unhappy. He had the knack of dreaming when broad awake, and of making
his dreams as pleasant as he willed them; and so his passion rather
increased than diminished the amount of his happiness. It taught him,
too, the very best species of politeness--that of the heart; and young
Lillias could not help wondering where it was that the manners of the
red-cheeked Highland boy had received so exquisite a polish, and why it
was that she herself was so much the object of his quiet unobtrusive
attentions. When night released him from labour, he would take up his
seat in some dark corner of the house, that commanded a full view of
the fire, and there would he sit for whole hours gazing on the features
of his mistress. A fine woman looks well by any light, even by that of
a peat fire; and fine women, it is said, know it; but little thought
the maiden of the farmhouse of the saint-like halo which, in the
imagination of her silent worshipper, the red smoky flames shed around
her. How could she even dream of it? The boy Alaster was fully five
years younger than herself, and it surely could not be forgotten that
he herded her father’s cattle. The incident, however, which I am just
going to relate, gave her sufficient cause to think of him as a lover.
The Halloween of the year 1560 was a very different thing in the parish
of Cromarty from that of the year 1829. It is now as dark and opaque
a night--unless it chance to be brightened by the moon--as any in the
winter season; it was then clear as the glass of a magician;--people
looked through it and saw the future. Late in October that year,
Alaster overheard his mistress and one of her youthful companions--the
daughter of a neighbouring farmer--talking over the rites of the
coming night of frolic and prediction. “Will you really venture on
throwing the clue?” asked her companion; “the kiln, you ken, is dark
and lonely; and there’s mony a story no true if folk havena often been
frightened.” “Throw it?--oh, surely!” replied the other; “who would
think it worth while to harm the like o’ me? and, besides, you can bide
for me just a wee bittie aff. One would like, somehow, to know the name
o’ one’s gudeman, or whether one is to get a gudeman at all.” Alaster
was a lover, and lovers are fertile in stratagem. In the presence of
his mistress he sought leave from the old man, her father, with whom
he was much a favourite, to spend his Halloween at a cottage on a
neighbouring farm, where there were several young people to meet; and
his request was readily granted. The long-expected evening came; and
Alaster set out for the cottage, without any intention of reaching it
for at least two hours. When he had proceeded a little way he turned
back, crept warily towards the kiln, climbed like a wild-cat up the
rough circular gable, entered by the chimney, and in a few seconds
was snugly seated amid the ashes of the furnace. There he waited for
a full hour, listening to the beatings of his own heart. At length a
light footstep was heard approaching; the key was applied to the lock,
and as the door opened, a square patch of moonshine fell upon the rude
wall of the kiln. A tall figure stepped timidly forward, and stood in
the stream of faint light. It was Alaster’s young mistress. She looked
fearfully round her, and then producing a small clue of yarn, she threw
it towards Alaster, and immediately began to wind.[5] He suffered it
to turn round and round among the ashes, and then cautiously laid
hold of it. “Wha hauds?” said his mistress in a low startled whisper,
looking as she spoke, over her shoulder towards the door; “Alaster
Macculloch,” was the reply; and in a moment she had vanished like a
spectre. Soon after, the tread of two persons was heard approaching the
door. It was now Alaster’s turn to tremble. “Ah!” he thought, “I shall
be discovered, and my stratagem come to worse than nothing.” “An’ did
ye hear onything when you came out yon gate?” said one of the persons
without. “Oh, naething, lass, naething!” replied the other, in a voice
whose faintest echoes would have been recognised by the lover within;
“steek too the door an’ lock it;--it’s a foolish conceit.” The door
was accordingly locked, and Alaster left to find his way out in the
manner he had entered.
[Sidenote: THE EXTINCT SPECTRES.]
It was late that night before he returned from the cottage to which,
after leaving the kiln, he had gone. Next day he saw his mistress. She
by no means exhibited her most amiable phase of character, for she was
cold and distant, and not a little cross. In short, it was evident
she had a quarrel with destiny. This mood, however, soon changed for
the one natural to her; years passed away, and suitor after suitor
was rejected by the maiden, until, in her twenty-fourth year, Alaster
Macculloch paid her his addresses. He was not then a little herd-boy,
but a tall, handsome, young man of nineteen, who, active and faithful,
was intrusted by his master with the sole management of his farm. A
belief in destiny often becomes a destiny of itself; and it became such
to Alaster’s mistress. How could the predestined husband be other than
a successful lover? In a few weeks they were married; and when the
old man was gathered to his fathers, his son-in-law succeeded to his
well-stocked farm.
There are a few other traditions of this northern part of the
country--some of them so greatly dilapidated by the waste of years,
that they exist as mere fragments--which bear the palpable impress of a
pagan or semi-pagan origin. I have heard imperfectly-preserved stories
of a lady dressed in green, and bearing a goblin child in her arms, who
used to wander in the night-time from cottage to cottage, when all the
inhabitants were asleep. She would raise the latch, it is said, take
up her place by the fire, fan the embers into a flame, and then wash
her child in the blood of the youngest inmate of the cottage, who would
be found dead next morning. There was another wandering green lady,
her contemporary, of exquisite beauty and a majestic carriage, who
was regarded as the Genius of the smallpox, and who, when the disease
was to terminate fatally, would be seen in the grey of the morning,
or as the evening was passing into night, sitting by the bedside
of her victim. I have heard wild stories, too, of an unearthly,
squalid-looking thing, somewhat in the form of a woman, that used to
enter farmhouses during the day, when all the inmates, except perhaps
a solitary female, were engaged in the fields. More than a century
ago, it is said to have entered, in the time of harvest, the house of
a farmer of Navity, who had lost nearly all his cattle by disease a
few weeks before. The farmer’s wife, the only inmate at the time, was
engaged at the fireside in cooking for the reapers; the goblin squatted
itself beside her, and shivering, as if with cold, raised its dingy,
dirty-looking vestments over its knees. “Why, ye nasty thing,” said the
woman, “hae ye killed a’ our cattle?”--“An’ why,” inquired the goblin
in turn, “did the gudeman, when he last roosed them, forget to gie them
his blessing?”
[Sidenote: LEGEND OF MORIAL’S DEN.]
Immediately over the sea, the tract of table-land, which forms the
greater part of the parish of Cromarty, terminates, as has been already
said, in a green sloping bank, that for several miles sweeps along the
edge of the bay. In the vicinity of the town, a short half mile to the
west, we find it traversed by a deep valley, which runs a few hundred
yards into the interior; ’tis a secluded, solitary place, the sides
sprinkled over with the sea-hip, the sloe, and the bramble--the bottom
occupied by a blind pathway, that, winding through the long grass like
a snake, leads to the fields above. It has borne, from the earliest
recollections of tradition, the name of _Morial’s Den_, a name which
some, on the hint of Sir Thomas Urquhart, ingeniously derive from the
Greek, and others, still more ingeniously, from the Hebrew; and it has,
for at least the last six generations, been a scene of bird-nesting
and truant-playing during the day, and of witch and fairy meetings, it
is said, during the night. Rather more than a century ago, it was the
_locale_, says tradition, of an interesting rencounter with one of the
unknown class of spectres. On a Sabbath noon a farmer of the parish was
herding a flock of sheep in a secluded corner of the den. He was an old
greyhaired man, who for many years had been affected by a deafness,
which grew upon him as the seasons passed, shutting out one variety of
sounds after another, until at length he lived in a world of unbroken
silence. Though secluded, however, from all converse with his brother
men, he kept better company than ever, and became more thoroughly
acquainted with his Bible, and the fathers of the Reformation, than he
would have been had he retained his hearing, or than almost any other
person in the parish. He had just despatched his herd-boy to church,
for he himself could no longer profit by his attendance there; his
flock was scattered over the sides of the hollow; and with his Bible
spread out before him on a hillock of thyme and moss, which served him
for a desk, and sheltered on either hand from the sun and wind by a
thicket of sweetbriar and sloethorn, he was engaged in reading, when he
was startled by a low rushing sound, the first he had heard for many
months. He raised his eyes from the book; a strong breeze was eddying
within the hollow, waving the ferns and the bushes; and the portion of
sea which appeared through the opening was speckled with white;--but to
the old man the waves broke and the shrubs waved in silence. He again
turned to the book--the sound was again repeated; and on looking up a
second time, he saw a beautiful, sylph-looking female standing before
him. She was attired in a long flowing mantle of green, which concealed
her feet, but her breast and arms, which were of exquisite beauty, were
uncovered. The old man laid his hand on the book, and raising himself
from his elbow, fixed his eyes on the face of the lady. “Old man,” said
she, addressing him in a low sweet voice, which found prompt entrance
at the ears that had so long been shut up to every other sound, “you
are reading _the book_; tell me if there be any offer of salvation in
it to _us_.”--“The gospel of this book,” said the man, “is addressed
to the lost children of Adam, but to the creatures of no other race.”
The lady shrieked as he spoke, and gliding away with the rapidity of a
swallow on the wing, disappeared amid the recesses of the hollow.
About a mile further to the west, in an inflection of the bank, there
is the scene of a story, which, belonging to a still earlier period
than the one related, and wholly unlike it in its details, may yet be
deemed to resemble it in its mysterious, and, if I may use the term,
unclassified character.
[Sidenote: THE GUARDIAN COCK.]
A shipmaster, who had moored his vessel in the upper roadstead of the
bay, some time in the latter days of the first Charles, was one fine
evening sitting alone on deck, awaiting the return of some of his
seamen who had gone ashore, and amusing himself in watching the lights
that twinkled from the scattered farmhouses, and in listening in the
extreme stillness of the calm to the distant lowing of cattle, or
the abrupt bark of the watch-dog. As the hour wore later, the sounds
ceased, and the lights disappeared--all but one solitary taper, that
twinkled from the window of a cottage situated about two miles west of
the town. At length, however, it also disappeared, and all was dark
around the shores of the bay as a belt of black velvet. Suddenly a
hissing noise was heard overhead; the shipmaster looked up, and saw
one of those meteors that are known as falling stars, slanting athwart
the heavens in the direction of the cottage, and increasing in size
and brilliancy as it neared the earth, until the wooded ridge and the
shore could be seen as distinctly from the ship-deck as by day. A dog
howled piteously from one of the out-houses, an owl whooped from the
wood. The meteor descended until it almost touched the roof, when a
cock crew from within. Its progress seemed instantly arrested; it stood
still; rose about the height of a ship’s mast, and then began again
to descend. The cock crew a second time. It rose as before, and after
mounting much higher, sunk yet again in the line of the cottage. It
almost touched the roof, when a faint clap of wings was heard, as if
whispered over the water, followed by a still louder note of defiance
from the cock. The meteor rose with a bound, and continuing to ascend
until it seemed lost among the stars, did not again appear. Next night,
however, at the same hour, the same scene was repeated in all its
circumstances--the meteor descended, the dog howled, the owl whooped,
the cock crew. On the following morning the shipmaster visited the
cottage, and, curious to ascertain how it would fare when the cock was
away, he purchased the bird; and sailing from the bay before nightfall,
did not return until about a month after.
On his voyage inwards he had no sooner doubled an intervening headland,
than he stepped forward to the bows to take a peep at the cottage: it
had vanished. As he approached the anchoring ground, he could discern
a heap of blackened stones occupying the place where it had stood; and
he was informed, on going ashore, that it had been burnt to the ground,
no one knew how, on the very night he had quitted the bay. He had it
rebuilt and furnished, says the story, deeming himself, what one of the
old schoolmen would have perhaps termed, the _occasional_ cause of the
disaster. About fifteen years ago there was dug up, near the site of
the cottage, a human skeleton, with the skull and the bones of the feet
lying together, as if the body had been huddled up twofold into a hole;
and this discovery led to that of the story, which, though at one time
often repeated and extensively believed, had been suffered to sleep in
the memories of a few elderly people for nearly sixty years.
CHAPTER VI.
“Subtill muldrie wrocht mony day agone.”--GAVIN DOUGLASS.
[Sidenote: A SCOTTISH TOWN OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.]
As house after house in the old town of Cromarty was yielding its place
to the sea, the inhabitants were engaged in building new dwellings
for themselves in the fields behind. A second town was thus formed,
the greater part of which has since also disappeared, though under
the influence of causes less violent than those which annihilated the
first. Shortly after the Union, the trade of the place, which prior to
that event had been pretty considerable, fell into decay, and the town
gradually dwindled in size and importance until about the year 1750,
when it had sunk into an inconsiderable village. After this period,
however, trade began to revive, and the town again to increase; and
as the old site was deemed inconveniently distant from the harbour,
it was changed for the present. The main street of this second town,
which is still used as a road, and bears the name of the Old Causeway,
is situated about two hundred yards to the east of the houses, and is
now bounded by the fences of gardens and fields, with here and there an
antique-looking, high-gabled domicile rising over it. A row of large
trees, which have sprung up since the disappearance of the town, runs
along one of the fences.
About the beginning of the last century, the Old Causeway presented an
aspect which, though a little less rural than at present, was still
more picturesque. An irregular line of houses thrust forward their
gables on either side, like two parties of ill-trained cavalry drawn
up for the charge;--some jutted forward, others slunk backward,
some slanted sideways, as if meditating a retreat, others, as if
more decided, seemed in the act of turning round. They varied in
size and character, from the little sod-covered cottage, with round
moor stones sticking out of its mud walls, like skulls in the famous
pyramid of Malta, to the tall narrow house of three storeys, with
its court and gateway. Between every two buildings there intervened
a deep narrow close, bounded by the back of one tenement and the
front of another, and terminating in a little oblong garden, fringed
with a deep border of nettles, and bearing in the centre plots of
cabbage and parsnips;--the latter being a root much used before the
introduction of the potato. Here and there a gigantic ash or elm
sprung out of the fence, and shot its ponderous arms over the houses.
A low door, somewhat under five feet, and a few stone steps which
descended from the level of the soil to that of the floor (for the
latter was invariably sunk from one to three feet beneath the former),
gave access to each of the meaner class of buildings. One little
window, with the sill scarcely raised above the pavement, fronted the
street, another, still smaller and equally low, opened to the close:
they admitted through their unbevelled apertures and diminutive panes
of brownish-yellow, a sort of umbery twilight, which even the level
sunbeams, as they fell at eve or morn in long rules athwart the motty
atmosphere within, scarce served to dissipate. An immense chimney,
designed for the drying of fish, which formed the staple food of the
poorer inhabitants, stretched from the edge of the window in the gable
to near the opposite wall; and on the huge black lintel were inscribed,
in rude characters, the name of the builder of the tenement, and that
of his wife, with the date of the erection. The walls, naked and
uneven, were hollowed in several places into little square recesses,
termed _bowels_ or _boles_; and at a height of not more than six feet
above the floor, which was formed of clay and stone, and marvellously
uneven, were the bare rafters varnished over with smoke.
The larger houses were built in a style equally characteristic of
the age and country. A taste for ornamental masonry was considerably
more prevalent in our Scottish villages about the beginning of the
seventeenth century than at present. Palladio began to be studied
about that period by a few architects of the southern parts of the
kingdom; and some of our provincial builders had picked up from them an
imperfect acquaintance with the old classical style of architecture:
but as they could avail themselves of only a few of its forms, and
knew nothing of its proportions, they became, all unwittingly, the
founders of a kind of school of their own. And some of the houses of
the old town were no bad specimens of this half Grecian half Gothic
school. The high narrow gables, jagged like the teeth of a saw, the
diminutive, heavily-framed windows, and chamfered rybats, remained
unaltered; but there were stuck round the low doors, which still
retained their Gothic proportions, imitations of Palladio’s simpler
door-pieces; and huge Grecian cornices, more than sufficiently massy
for halls twenty feet in height, with circular pateras designed in the
same taste, and roughened with vile imitations of the vine and laurel,
adorned the better rooms within. The closes leading to buildings of
this superior class were lintelled at the entrance, and over each
lintel there was fixed a tablet of stone, bearing the arms and name
of the proprietor. A large house of this kind, on the eastern side
of the street, was haunted, it was said, by a _green lady_, one of
the old Scottish spectres, who flourished before the introduction
of shrouds and dead linens; and another on the opposite side, by a
capricious brownie, who disarranged the pieces of furniture and the
platters every night the domestics set them in order, and set them in
order every night they were left disarranged. Directly in the middle
of the street stood the town’s cross, over the low-browed entrance of
a stone vault, furnished with seats, also of stone. The formidable
_jougs_ depended from one of the abutments. A little higher up was
the jail, an antique ruinous structure, with stone floors, and a
roof of ponderous grey slate. The manse, a mean-looking house of two
low storeys, with very small windows, and bearing above the door the
initials of the first Protestant minister of the parish, nearly fronted
it: while the only shop of the place was situated so much lower down,
that, like the houses of the earlier town, it was carried away by the
sea during a violent storm from the north-east. There mingled with the
other domiciles a due proportion of roofless tenements, with their red
weather-wasted gables, and melancholy-looking unframed windows and
doors; and, as trade decayed, even the more entire began to fall to
pieces, and to show, like so many mouldering carcasses, their bare ribs
through the thatch. Such was the old town of Cromarty in the year 1720.
[Sidenote: THE OLD CASTLE OF THE URQUHARTS.]
Directly behind the site of the old town, the ground, as described in
a previous chapter, rises abruptly from the level to the height of
nearly a hundred feet, after which it forms a kind of table-land of
considerable extent, and then sweeps gently to the top of the hill. A
deep ravine, with a little stream running through it, intersects the
rising ground at nearly right angles with the front which it presents
to the houses; and on the eastern angle, towering over the ravine on
the one side, and the edge of the bank on the other, stood the old
castle of Cromarty. It was a massy, timeworn building, rising in some
places to the height of six storeys, battlemented at the top, and
roofed with grey stone. One immense turret jutted out from the corner,
which occupied the extreme point of the angle; and looking down from an
altitude of at least one hundred and sixty feet on the little stream,
and the struggling row of trees which sprung up at its edge, commanded
both sides of the declivity, and the town below. Other turrets of
smaller size, but pierced like the larger one with rows of little
circular apertures, which in the earlier ages had given egress to the
formidable bolt, and in the more recent, when the crossbow was thrown
aside for the petronel, to the still more formidable bullet, were
placed by pairs on the several projections that stood out from the main
body of the building, and were connected by hanging bartisans. There
is a tradition that some time in the seventeenth century a party of
Highlanders, engaged in some predatory enterprise, approached so near
the castle on this side, that their leader, when in the act of raising
his arm to direct their march, was shot at from one of the turrets
and killed, and that the party, wrapping up the body in their plaids,
carried it away.
The front of the castle opened to the lawn, from which it was divided
by a dry moat, nearly filled with rubbish, and a high wall indented
with embrasures, and pierced by an arched gateway. Within was a small
court, flagged with stone, and bounded on one of the sides by a
projection from the main building, bartisaned and turreted like all
the others, but only three storeys in height, and so completely fallen
into decay that the roof and all the floors had disappeared. From the
level of the court, a flight of stone steps led to the vaults below;
another flight of greater breadth, and bordered on both sides by an
antique balustrade, ascended to the entrance; and the architect, aware
of the importance of this part of the building, had so contrived it,
that a full score of loopholes in the several turrets and out-jets
which commanded the court, opened directly on the landing-place. Round
the entrance itself there jutted a broad, grotesquely-proportioned
moulding, somewhat resembling an old-fashioned picture-frame, and
directly over it there was a square tablet of dark blue stone, bearing
in high relief the arms of the old proprietors; but the storms of
centuries had defaced all the nicer strokes of the chisel, and the
lady with her palm and dagger, the boars’ heads, and the greyhounds,
were transformed into so many attenuated spectres of their former
selves;--no unappropriate emblem of the altered fortunes of the house.
The windows, small and narrow, and barred with iron, were thinly
sprinkled over the front: and from the lintel of each there rose a
triangular cap of stone, fretted at the edges, and terminating at
the top in two knobs fashioned into the rude semblance of thistles.
Initials and dates were inscribed in raised characters on these
triangular tablets. The aspect of the whole pile was one of extreme
antiquity. Flocks of crows and jays, that had built their nests in the
recesses of the huge tusked cornices which ran along the bartisans,
wheeled ceaselessly around the gables and the turrets, awakening with
their clamorous cries the echoes of the roof. The walls, grey and
weather-stained, were tapestried in some places with sheets of ivy; and
an ash sapling, which had struck its roots into the crevices of the
outer wall, rose like a banner over the half-dilapidated gateway.
The castle, for several years before its demolition, was tenanted by
only an old female domestic, and a little girl whom she had hired
to sleep with her. I have been told by the latter, who, at the time
when I knew her, was turned of seventy, that two threshers could have
plied their flails within the huge chimney of the kitchen; and that
in the great hall, an immense dark chamber lined with oak, a party
of a hundred men had exercised at the pike. The lower vaults she had
never the temerity to explore; they were dark and gousty, she said,
and the slits which opened into them were nearly filled up with long
rank grass. Some of her stories of the castle associated well with the
fantastic character of its architecture, and the ages of violence and
superstition which had passed over it. A female domestic who had lived
in it before the woman she was acquainted with, and who was foolhardy
enough to sleep in it alone, was frightened one night out of her wits,
and never again so far recovered them as to be able to tell for what.
At times there would echo through the upper apartments a series of
noises, as if a very weighty man was pacing the floors; and “Oh,” said
my informant, “if you could but have heard the shrieks, and moans, and
long whistlings, that used to come sounding in the stormy evenings of
winter from the chimneys and the turrets. Often have I listened to them
as I lay a-bed, with the clothes drawn over my face.” Her companion was
sitting one day in a little chamber at the foot of the great stair,
when, hearing a tapping against the steps, she opened the door. The
light was imperfect--it was always twilight in the old castle--but she
saw, she said, as distinctly as ever she saw any thing, a small white
animal resembling a rabbit, rolling from step to step, head over heels,
and dissolving, as it bounded over the last step, into a wreath of
smoke. On another occasion, a Cromarty shoemaker, when passing along
the front of the building in a morning of summer, was horrified by the
apparition of a very diminutive, greyheaded, greybearded old man, with
a withered meagre face scarcely bigger than one’s fist, that seemed
seated at one of the windows. On returning by the same path about half
an hour after, just as the sun was rising out of the Firth, he saw the
same figure wringing its hands over a little cairn in a neighbouring
thicket, but he had not courage enough to go up to it.
The scene of all these terrors has long since disappeared; the plough
and roller have passed over its foundations; and all that it recorded
of an ancient and interesting, though unfortunate family, with its
silent though impressive narratives of the unsettled lives, rude
manners, uncouth tastes, and warlike habits of our ancestors, has also
perished. It was pulled down by a proprietor of Cromarty, who had
purchased the property a few years before; and, as he was engaged at
the time in building a set of offices and a wall to his orchard, the
materials it furnished proved a saving to him of several pounds. He
was a man of taste, too, as well as of prudence, and by smoothing down
the eminence on which the building had stood, and then sowing it with
grass, he bestowed upon it, for its former wild aspect, so workmanlike
an appearance, that one might almost suppose he had made the whole of
it himself. Two curious pieces of sculpture were, by some accident,
preserved entire in the general wreck. In a vaulted passage which
leads from the modern house to the road, there is a stone slab about
five feet in length, and nearly two in breadth, which once served as
a lintel to one of the two chimneys of the great hall. It bears, in
low relief, the figures of hares and deer sorely beset by dogs, and
surrounded by a thicket of grapes and tendrils. The huntsman stands
in the centre, attired in a sort of loose coat that reaches to his
knees, with his horn in one hand, and his hunting-spear in the other,
and wearing the moustaches and peaked beard of the reign of Mary. The
lintel of the second chimney, a still more interesting relic, is now in
Kinbeakie Cottage, parish of Resolis: and a good lithographic print of
it may be seen in the museum of the Northern Institution, Inverness;
but of it more anon. All the other sculptures of the castle, including
several rude pieces of Gothic statuary, were destroyed by the workmen.
An old stone dial which had stood in front of the gate, was dug up by
the writer, out of a corner of the lawn, about twelve years ago, and
is now in his possession. When entire, it indicated the hour in no
fewer than nineteen different places, and though sorely mutilated and
divested of all its gnomons, it is still entire enough to show that the
mathematical ability of the artist must have been of no ordinary kind.
It was probably cut under the inspection of Sir Thomas, who, among his
other accomplishments, was a skilful geometrician.
“The old castle of Cromarty,” says the statistical account of the
parish (Sir John Sinclair’s), “was pulled down in the year 1772.
Several urns, composed of earthenware, were dug out of the bank
immediately around the building, with several coffins of stone. The
urns were placed in square recesses formed of flags, and when touched
by the labourers instantly mouldered away, nor was it possible to get
up one of them entire. They were filled with ashes mixed with fragments
of half-burned bones. The coffins contained human skeletons, some of
which wanted the head; while among the others which were entire, there
was one of a very uncommon size, measuring seven feet in length.”
[Sidenote: HEREDITARY SHERIFFSHIP.]
The old proprietors of the castle, among the other privileges derived
to them as the chiefs of a wide district of country, and the system of
government which obtained during the ages in which they flourished,
were hereditary Sheriffs of Cromarty, and vested with the power of pit
and gallows. The highest knoll of the southern Sutor is still termed
the Gallow-hill, from its having been a place of execution; and a low
cairn nearly hidden by a thicket of furze, which still occupies its
summit, retains the name of the gallows. It is said that the person
last sentenced to die at this place was a poor Highlander who had
insulted the Sheriff, and that when in the act of mounting the ladder,
he was pardoned at the request of the Sheriff’s lady. At a remoter
period the usual scene of execution was a little eminence in the
western part of the town, directly above the harbour, where there is
a small circular hollow still known to the children of the place as
the _Witch’s Hole_; and in which, says tradition, a woman accused of
witchcraft was burnt for her alleged crime some time in the reign of
Charles II. The Court-hill, an artificial mound of earth, on which, at
least in the earlier ages, the cases of the sheriffdom were tried and
decided, was situated several hundred yards nearer the old town. Some
of the sentences passed at this place are said to have been flagrantly
unjust. There is one Sheriff in particular, whom tradition describes
as a cruel, oppressive man, alike regardless of the rights and lives
of his poor vassals; and there are two brief anecdotes of him which
still survive. A man named Macculloch, a tenant on the Cromarty estate
(probably the same person introduced to the reader in the foregoing
chapter), was deprived of a cow through the injustice of one of the
laird’s retainers, and going directly to the castle, disposed rather to
be energetic than polite, he made his complaint more in the tone of
one who had a right to demand, than in the usual style of submission.
The laird, after hearing him patiently, called for the key of the
dungeon, and going out, beckoned on Macculloch to follow. He did so;
they descended a flight of stone steps together, and came to a massy
oak door, which the laird opened; when suddenly, and without uttering
a syllable, he laid hold of his tenant with the intention of thrusting
him in. But he had mistaken his man; the grasp was returned by one of
more than equal firmness, and a struggle ensued, in which Macculloch,
a bold, powerful Highlander, had so decidedly the advantage, that he
forced the laird into his own dungeon, and then locking the door,
carried away the key in his pocket. The other anecdote is of a sterner
cast:--A poor vassal had been condemned on the Court-hill under
circumstances more than usually unjust; and the laird, after sentence
had been executed on the eminence at the _Witch’s Hole_, was returning
homewards through the town, surrounded by his retainers, when he was
accosted in a tone of prophecy by an old man, one of the Hossacks of
Cromarty, who, though bedridden for years before, had crawled to a seat
by the wayside to wait his coming up. Tradition has preserved the words
which follow as those in which he concluded his prediction; but they
stand no less in need of a commentary than the obscurest prophecies of
Merlin or Thomas the Rhymer:--“Laird, laird, what mayna skaith i’ the
brock, maun skaith i’ the stock.” The seer is said to have meant that
the injustice of the father would be visited on the children.
The recollection of these stories was curiously revived in Cromarty
in the spring of 1829; when a labourer employed in digging a pit on
the eminence above the harbour, and within a few yards of the _Witch’s
Hole_, struck his mattock through a human skull, which immediately fell
in pieces. A pair of shin-bones lay directly below it, and on digging
a little further there were found the remains of two several skeletons
and a second skull. From the manner in which the bones were blended
together, it seemed evident that the bodies had been thrown into the
same hole, with their heads turned in opposite directions, either out
of carelessness or in studied contempt. And they had, apparently, lain
undisturbed in this place for centuries. A child, by pressing its
foot against the skull which had been raised entire, crushed it to
pieces like the other; and the whole of the bones had become so light
and porous, that when first seen by the writer, some of the smaller
fragments were tumbling over the sward before a light breeze, like
withered leaves, or pieces of fungous wood.
CHAPTER VII.
“He was a veray parfit, gentil knight.”--CHAUCER.
[Sidenote: SIR THOMAS URQUHART.]
Of Sir Thomas Urquhart very little is known but what is related by
himself, and though as much an egotist as most men, he has related but
little of a kind available to the biographer. But there are characters
of so original a cast that their more prominent features may be hit
off by a few strokes; and Sir Thomas’s is decidedly of this class. It
is impossible to mistake the small dark profile which he has left us,
small and dark though it be, for the profile of any mind except his
own. He was born in 1613, the eldest son of Sir Thomas Urquhart of
Cromarty, and of Christian, daughter of Alexander Lord Elphinston. Of
his earlier years there is not a single anecdote, nor is there anything
known of either the manner or place in which he pursued his studies.
Prior to the death of his father, and, as he himself expresses it,
“before his brains were yet ripened for eminent undertakings,” he made
the tour of Europe. In travelling through France, Spain, and Italy,
he was repeatedly complimented on the fluency with which he spoke the
languages of these countries, and advised by some of the people to
pass himself for a native. But he was too true a patriot to relish the
proposal. He had not less honour, he said, by his own poor country
than could be derived from any country whatever; for, however much it
might be surpassed in riches and fertility--in honesty, valour, and
learning, it had no superior. And this assertion he maintained at the
sword’s point, in single combat three several times, and at each time
discomfited his antagonist. He boasts on another occasion, that not
in all the fights in which he had ever been engaged, did he yield an
inch-breadth to the enemy before the day of Worcester battle.
On the breaking out of the troubles in 1638, he took part with the
King against the Covenanters, and was engaged in an obscure skirmish,
in which he saw the first blood shed that flowed in the protracted
quarrel, which it took half a century and two great revolutions to
settle. In a subsequent skirmish, he succeeded, with eight hundred
others, many of them “brave gentlemen,” in surprising a body of about
twelve hundred strong, encamped at Turriff, and broke up their array.
And then marching with his friends upon Aberdeen, which was held by the
Covenanters, he assisted in ejecting them, and in taking possession
of the place. Less gifted with conduct than courage, however, the
cavaliers suffered their troops to disperse, and were cooped up within
the town by the “Earl Marischal of Scotland,” who, hastily levying a
few hundred men, came upon them, when, according to Spalding, they
“were looking for nothing less;” and the “young laird of Cromartie,”
with a few others, were compelled to take refuge “aboard of Andrew
Finlay’s ship, then lying in the road,” and “hastily hoisted sail for
England.” Urquhart had undertaken to be the bearer of despatches to
Charles, containing the signatures of his associates and neighbours the
leading anti-covenanters; and in the audience which he obtained of the
monarch, he was very graciously received, and favoured with an answer,
“which gave,” he says, “great contentment to all the gentlemen of the
north that stood for the king.” In the spring of 1641 he was knighted
by Charles at Whitehall, and his father dying soon after, he succeeded
to the lands of Cromarty.
Never was there a proprietor less in danger of sinking into the easy
apathetical indolence of the mere country gentleman; for, impressed
with a belief that he was born to enlarge the limits of all science,
he applied himself to the study of every branch of human learning,
and, having _mastered what was already known_, and finding the _amount
but little_, he seriously set himself to add to it. And first, as
learning can be communicated only by the aid of language, “words
being the signs of things,” he deemed it evident that, if language
be imperfect, learning must of necessity be so likewise; quite on
the principle that a defect in the carved figure of a signet cannot
fail of being transmitted to the image formed by it on the wax. The
result of his inquiries on this subject differed only a very little
from the conclusion which, when pursuing a similar course of study,
the celebrated Lord Monboddo arrived at more than a hundred years
after. His Lordship believed that all languages, except Greek, are a
sort of vulgar dialects which have grown up rather through accident
than design, and exhibit, in consequence, little else than a tissue of
defects both in sound and sense. Greek, however, he deemed a perfect
language; and he accounted for its superiority by supposing that, in
some early age of the world, it had been constructed on philosophical
principles, out of one of the old jargons, by a society of ingenious
grammarians, who afterwards taught it to the common people. Sir Thomas
went a little further; for, not excepting even the Greek, he condemned
every language, ancient and modern, and set himself to achieve what,
according to Monboddo, had been already achieved by the grammarians of
Greece. And hence his ingenious but unfortunate work, “The Universal
Language.”
“A tree,” he thus reasoned, “is known by its leaves, a stone by its
grit, a flower by the smell, meats by the taste, music by the ear,
colours by the eye,” and, in short, all the several natures of things
by the qualities or aspects with which they address themselves to
the senses or the intellect. And it is from these obvious traits of
similarity or difference that the several classes are portioned by the
associative faculty into the corresponding cells of understanding and
memory. But it is not thus with words in any of the existing languages.
Things the most opposite in nature are often represented by signs so
similar that they can hardly be distinguished, and things of the same
class by signs entirely different. Language is thus formed so loosely
and unskilfully, that the associative faculty cannot be brought to
bear on it;--one great cause why foreign languages are so difficult
to learn, and when once learned, so readily forgotten. And there is a
radical defect in the alphabets of all languages; for in all, without
exception, do the nominal number of letters fall far short of the real,
a single character being arbitrarily made to represent a variety of
sounds. Hence it happens that the people of one country cannot acquaint
themselves by books alone with the pronunciation of another. The words,
too, proper to express without circumvolution all the multiform ideas
of the human mind, are not to be found in any one tongue; and though
the better languages have borrowed largely from each other to supply
their several deficiencies, even the more perfect are still very
incomplete. Hence the main difficulty of translation. Some languages
are fluent without exactness. Hence an unprofitable wordiness, devoid
of force and precision. Others, comparatively concise, are harsh
and inharmonious. Hence, perhaps, the grand cause why some of the
civilized nations (the Dutch for instance), though otherwise ingenious,
make but few advances compared with others, in philology and the
_belles-lettres_.
These, concluded Sir Thomas, are the great defects of language. In a
perfect language, then, it is fundamentally necessary that there should
be classes of resembling words to represent the classes of resembling
things--that every idea should have its sign, and every simple sound
its alphabetical character. It is necessary, too, that there should be
a complete union of sweetness, energy, and precision. Setting himself
down in the old castle of Cromarty to labour on these principles
for the benefit of all mankind, and the glory of his country, he
constructed his Universal Tongue. There is little difficulty, when we
remember where he wrote, in tracing the origin of his metaphor, when
he says of the existing languages, that though they may be improved in
structure “by the striking out of new light and doors, the outjetting
of kernels, and the erecting of prickets and barbicans,” they are yet
restricted to a certain base, beyond which they must not be enlarged.
In his own language the base was fitted to the superstructure. His
alphabet consisted of ten vowels, and twenty-five consonants. His
radical classes of words amounted to two hundred and fifty, and, to
use his own allegory, were the denizens of so many cities divided into
streets, which were again subdivided into lanes, the lanes into houses,
the houses into storeys, and the storeys into apartments. It was
impossible that the natives of one city should be confounded with those
of another; and by prying into their component letters and syllables,
the street, lane, house, storey, and apartment of every citizen, could
be ascertained without a possibility of mistake. Simple ideas were
expressed by monosyllables, and every added syllable expressed an added
idea. So musical was this language, that for poetical composition it
surpassed every other; so concise, that the weightiest thoughts could
be expressed in it by a few syllables, in some instances by a single
word; so precise, that even sounds and colours could be expressed by it
in all their varieties of tone and shade; and so comprehensive, that
there was no word in any language, either living or dead, that could
not be translated into it without suffering the slightest change of
meaning. And, with all its rich variety of phrase, so completely was it
adapted to the associative faculty, that it was possible for a boy of
ten years thoroughly to master it in the short space of three months!
The entire work, consisting of a preface, grammar, and lexicon, was
comprised in a manuscript of twelve hundred folio pages.
Laborious as this work must have proved, it was only one of a hundred
great works completed by Sir Thomas before he had attained his
thirty-eighth year, and all in a style so exquisitely original, that
neither in subject nor manner had he been anticipated in so much as
one of them. He had designed, and in part digested, four hundred more.
A complete list of these, with such a description of each as I have
here attempted of his Universal Language, would be, perhaps, one of
the greatest literary curiosities ever exhibited to the world; but so
unfortunate was he, as an author, that the very names of the greater
number of the works he finished have died with himself, while the names
of his projected ones were, probably, never known to any one else. He
prepared for the press a treatise on Arithmetic, intended to remedy
some defects in the existing system. The invention of what he terms
the “Trissotetrail Trigonometry for the facilitating of calculations
by representations of letters and syllables,” was the subject of a
second treatise; and the proving of the Equipollencic and Opposition
both of Plain and Modal Enunciations by rules of Geometry (I use his
own language, for I am not scholar enough to render it into common
English), he achieved in a third. A fourth laid open the profounder
recesses of the Metaphysics by a continued Geographical Allegory. He
was the author also of ten books of Epigrams, in all about eleven
hundred in number, which he “contryved, blocked, and digested,” he
says, “in a thirteen weeks tyme;” and of this work the manuscript still
exists. It is said to contain much bad verse, and much exceptionable
morality; but at least one of its stanzas, quoted by Dr. Irvine, in his
elaborate and scholarlike Biographies of Scottish writers, possesses
its portion of epigrammatic point.
“A certain poetaster, not long since,
Said I might follow him in verse and prose;
But, truly if I should, ’tis as a prince
Whose ushers walk before him as he goes.”
In Blackwood’s Magazine for 1820, in a short critique on the _Jewel_,
it is stated that the writer had “good reasons to believe Sir Thomas
to be the real author of that singular production, _A Century of
Names, and Scantlings of Inventions_, the credit or discredit of which
was dishonestly assumed by the Marquis of Worcester.” The “good”
reasons are not given; nor am I at all sure that they would be found
particularly good; for the Marquis is a well-known man; and yet,
were intrinsic evidence to be alone consulted, it might be held that
either this little tract was written by Sir Thomas, or, what might be
deemed less probable, that the world, nay, the same age and island,
had produced two Sir Thomases.[6] Some little weight, too, might be
attached to the facts, that many of his manuscripts were lost in the
city of Worcester, with which place, judging from his title, it is
probable the Marquis may have had some connexion, by residence or
otherwise; and that the “Century of Names” was not published until
1663, two years after death had disarmed poor Sir Thomas of his sword
and his pen, and rendered him insensible to both his country’s honour
and his own. If in reality the author of this piece, he must be
regarded, it is said, as the original inventor of the steam-engine.
But the merit of the most curious of all his treatises no one has
ventured to dispute with him--a work entitled “The True Pedigree and
Lineal Descent of the Ancient and Honourable Family of Urquhart.” It
records the names of all the fathers of the family, from the days
of Adam to those of Sir Thomas; and may be regarded as forming no
bad specimen of the inverted climax--beginning with God, the creator
of all things, and ending with the genealogist himself. One of his
ancestors he has married (for he was a professed lover of the useful)
to a daughter of what the Abbé Pluche deemed an Egyptian symbol of
husbandry, and another to a descendant of what Bacon regarded as a
personification of human fortitude. In his notice of the arms of
the family he has surpassed all the heralds who have flourished
before or since. The first whose bearings he describes is Esormon,
sovereign prince of Achaia, the father of all such as bear the name
of Urquhart, and the fifth from Japhet by lineal descent. His arms
were three banners, three ships, and three ladies in a field; _or_,
the crest, a young lady holding in her right hand a brandished sword,
and in her left a branch of myrtle; the supporters, two Javanites
attired after the soldier habit of Achaia; and the motto, Tαῦτα ἡ
τρια ἀξιοθεάτα--These three are worthy to behold. Heraldry and Greek
were alike anticipated by the genius of this family. The device of
Esormon was changed about six hundred years after, under the following
very remarkable circumstances. Molin, a celebrated descendant of this
prince, and a son-in-law of Deucalion and Pyrrha, accompanied Galethus,
the Æneas of Scotland, to the scene of his first colony, a province of
Africa, which in that age, as in the present, was infested with wild
beasts. He excelled in hunting; and having in one morning killed three
lions, he carried home their heads in a large basket, and presented it
to his wife Panthea, then pregnant with her first child. Unconscious
of what the basket contained, she raised the lid, and, filled with
horror and astonishment by the apparition of the heads, she struck
her hand against her left side, exclaiming, in the suddenness of her
surprise, “O Hercules! what is this?” By a wonderful sympathy, the
likeness of the three heads, grim and horrible as they appeared in the
basket, was impressed on the left side of the infant, who afterwards
became a famous warrior, and transferred to his shield the badge which
nature had thus bestowed upon him. The external ornaments of the
bearings remained unaltered until the days of Astorimon, who, after his
victory over Ethus, changed the myrtle branch of the lady for one of
palm, and the original motto for Eὐνοεῖτω, εὐλόγε, καὶ εὐπράττε--Mean,
speak, and do well. Both the shield and the supporters underwent
yet another change in the reign of Solvatious of Scotland, who, in
admiration of an exploit achieved by the Urquhart and his two brothers
in the great Caledonian forest, converted the lions’ heads into the
heads of bears, and the armed Javanites of Esormon into a brace of
greyhounds. And such were the arms of the family in the days of Sir
Thomas, as shown by the curious stone lintel now at Kinbeakie.
This singular relic, which has, perhaps, more of character impressed
upon it than any other piece of sandstone in the kingdom, is about
five feet in length, by three in breadth, and bears date A.M. 5612,
A.C. 1651. On the lower and upper edges it is bordered by a plain
moulding, and at the ends by belts of rich foliage, terminating in a
chalice or vase. In the upper corner two knights in complete armour on
horseback, and with their lances couched, front each other, as if in
the tilt-yard. Two Sirens playing on harps occupy the lower. In the
centre are the arms--the charge on the shield three bears’ heads, the
supporters two greyhounds leashed and collared, the crest a naked woman
holding a dagger and palm, the helmet that of a knight, with the beaver
partially raised, and so profusely mantled that the drapery occupies
more space than the shield and supporters, and the motto MEANE WEIL,
SPEAK WEIL, AND DO WEIL. Sir Thomas’s initials, S. T. V. C., are placed
separately, one letter at the outer side of each supporter, one in the
centre of the crest, and one beneath the label; while the names of the
more celebrated heroes of his genealogy, and the eras in which they
flourished, occupy, in the following inscription, the space between the
figures:--ANNO ASTORIMONIS, 2226. ANNO VOCOMPOTIS, 3892. ANNO MOLINI,
3199. ANNO RODRICI, 2958. ANNO CHARI, 2219. ANNO LUTORCI, 2000. ANNO
ESORMONIS, 3804. It is melancholy enough that this singular exhibition
of family pride should have been made in the same year in which the
family received its deathblow--the year of Worcester battle.
During the eventful period which intervened between the death of Sir
Thomas’s father and this unfortunate year, he was too busily engaged
with science and composition to take an active part in the affairs
of the kingdom. “In the usual sports of country gentlemen, he does
not seem,” says Dr. Irvine, “to have taken any great share;” and a
characteristic anecdote which he relates in his “Logopandacteision,”
shows that he rated these simply by what they produced, estimated at
their money value, and accordingly beneath the care of a man born to
extend the limits of all human knowledge. “There happened,” he says,
“a gentleman of very good worth to stay awhile at my house, who one
day, amongst many others, was pleased in the deadest time of all the
winter, with a gun upon his shoulder, to search for a shot of some
wild-fowl; and after he had waded through many waters, taken excessive
pains in quest of his game, and by means thereof had killed some five
or six moorfowls and partridges, which he brought along with him to
my house, he was, by some other gentlemen who chanced to alight at my
gate as he entered in, very much commended for his love of sport; and
as the fashion of most of our countrymen is not to praise one without
dispraising another, I was highly blamed for not giving myself in that
kind to the same exercise, having before my eyes so commendable a
pattern to imitate. I answered, though the gentleman deserved praise
for the evident proof he had given that day of his inclination to
thrift and laboriousness, that nevertheless I was not to blame, seeing,
whilst he was busied about that sport, I was employed in a diversion
of another nature, such as optical secrets, mysteries of natural
philosophie, reasons for the variety of colours, the finding out of
the longitude, the squaring of a circle, and wayes to accomplish all
trigonometrical calculations by signes, without tangents, with the same
comprehensiveness of computation; which, in the estimation of learned
men, would be accounted worth six hundred thousand partridges and as
many moorfowls. That night past--the next morning I gave sixpence to
a footman of mine to try his fortune with the gun during the time I
should disport myself in the breaking of a young horse; and it so fell
out, that by I had given myself a good heat by riding, the boy returned
with a dozen of wildfowls, half moorfowl half partridge; whereat,
being exceedingly well pleased, I alighted, gave him my horse to care
for, and forthwith entered in to see my gentlemen, the most especiall
whereof was unable to rise out of his bed by reason of the gout and
siatick, wherewith he was seized through his former day’s toil.”
Sir Thomas, though he had taken part with the king, was by no means a
cavalier of the extreme class. His grandfather, with all his ancestors
for centuries before, had been Papists; and he himself was certainly no
Presbyterian, and indeed not a man to contend earnestly about religion
of any kind. He hints somewhat broadly in one of his treatises, that
Tamerlane might possibly be in the right in supposing God to be best
pleased with a diversity of worship. But though lax in his religious
opinions, he was a friend to civil liberty; and loved his country
too well to be in the least desirous of seeing it sacrificed to the
ambition of even a native prince. And so we find him classing in one
sentence, the doctrine “_de jure divino_” with “_piæ fraudes_” and
“political whimsies,” and expressing as his earnest wish in another,
that a free school and standing library should be established in every
parish of Scotland. But if he liked ill the tyranny and intolerance
of Kings and Episcopalians, he liked the tyranny and intolerance of
Presbyterian churchmen still worse. And there was a circumstance which
rendered the Consistorial government much less tolerable to him than
the Monarchical. The Monarchical recognised him as a petty feudal
prince, vested with a prerogative not a whit less kingly in his own
little sphere than that which it challenged for itself; while the
Consistorial pulled him down to nearly the level of his vassals, and
legislated after the same fashion for both.
He found, too, that unfortunately for his peace, the churchmen were
much nearer neighbours than the King. He was patron, and almost sole
heritor of the churches of Cromarty, Kirkmichael, and Cullicuden,
and in desperate warfare did he involve himself with all the three
ministers at once. Two of them were born vassals of the house;
an ancestor of one of these “had shelter on the land, by reason
of slaughter committed by him, when there was no refuge for him
anywhere else in Scotland;” and the other owed his admission to his
charge solely to the zeal of Sir Thomas, by whom he was inducted in
opposition to the wishes of both the people and the clergy. And both
ministers, prior to their appointment, had faithfully promised, as
became good vassals, to remain satisfied with the salaries of their
immediate predecessors. Their party triumphed, however, and the promise
was forgotten. In virtue of a decree of Synod, they sued for an
augmentation of stipend; Sir Thomas resisted; and to such extremities
did they urge matters against him, as to “outlaw and declare him rebel,
by open proclamation, at the market-cross of the head town of his
own shire.” He joined issue with Mr. Gilbert Anderson, the minister
of Cromarty, on a different question. The church he regarded as
exclusively his own property; and the minister, who thought otherwise,
having sanctioned one of his friends to erect a desk in it, Sir Thomas,
who disliked the man, pulled it down. There was no attempt made at
replacing it; but for several Sabbaths together, all the worst parts
of Mr. Anderson’s sermons were devoted entirely to the benefit of the
knight; who was by much too fond of panegyric not to be affected by
censure. Even when a prisoner in the Tower, and virtually stripped of
all his possessions, he continued to speak of the “aconital bitterness”
of the preacher in a style that shows how keenly he must have felt it.
On the coronation of Charles II. at Scone, he quitted the old castle,
to which he was never again to return, and joined the Scottish army:
carrying with him, among his other luggage, three huge trunks filled
with his hundred manuscripts. He states that on this occasion he
“was his own paymaster, and took orders from himself.” The army was
heterogeneously composed of Presbyterians and Cavaliers; men who had
nothing in common but the cause which brought them together, and who,
according to Sir Thomas, differed even in that. He has produced no
fewer than four comparisons, all good, and all very original, to prove
that the obnoxious Presbyterians were rebels at heart. They make use
of kings, says he, as we do of card kings in playing at the hundred,
discard them without ceremony, if there be any chance of having a
better game without them;--they deal by them as the French do by their
_Roi de la fève_, or king of the bean--first honour them by drinking
their health, and then make them pay the reckoning; or as players at
nine-pins do by the king Kyle, set them up to have the pleasure of
knocking them down again; or, finally, as the wassailers at Christmas
serve their king of Misrule, invest him with the title for no other
end than that he may countenance all the riots and disorders of the
family. He accuses, too, some of the Presbyterian gentlemen, who
had been commissioned to levy troops for the army, of the practices
resorted to by the redoubtable Falstaff, when intrusted with a similar
commission; and of returning homewards when matters came to the push,
out of an unwillingness to “hazard their precious persons, lest they
should seem to trust to the arm of flesh.” Poor Sir Thomas himself
was not one of the people who, in such circumstances, are readiest at
returning home. At any rate he stayed long enough on the disastrous
field of Worcester to be taken prisoner. Indifferent, however, to
personal risk or suffering, he has detailed only the utter woe which
befell his hundred manuscripts.
He had lodged, prior to the battle, in the house of a Mr. Spilsbury, “a
very honest sort of man, who had an exceeding good woman to his wife;”
and his effects, consisting of “scarlet cloaks, buff suits, arms of
all sorts, and seven large portmantles full of precious commodity,”
were stored in an upper chamber. Three of the “portmantles,” as has
been said already, were filled with manuscripts in folio, “to the
quantity of six score and eight quires and a half, divided into six
hundred forty and two quinternions, the quinternion consisting of
five sheets, and the quire of five-and-twenty.” There were, besides,
law-papers and bonds to the value of about three thousand pounds
sterling. After the total rout of the king’s forces, the soldiers of
Cromwell went about ransacking the houses; and two of them having
broken into Mr. Spilsbury’s house, and finding their way to the upper
chamber, the scarlet cloaks, the buff suits, the seven “portmantles,”
and the hundred manuscripts fell a prey to their rapacity. The latter
had well-nigh escaped, for at first the soldiers merely scattered them
over the floor; but reflecting, after they had left the chamber, on
the many uses to which they might be applied, they returned and bore
them out to the street. Some they carried away with them, some they
distributed among their comrades, and the people of the town gathered
up the rest. One solitary quinternion, containing part of the preface
to the Universal Language, found its way into the kennel, and was
picked out two days after by a Mr. Broughton, “a man of some learning,”
who restored it to Sir Thomas. His Genealogy was rescued from the
tobacco-pipes of a file of musketeers, by an officer of Colonel
Pride’s regiment, and also restored. But the rest he never saw. He
was committed to the Tower, with some of the other Scottish gentlemen
taken at Worcester; and a body of English troops were garrisoned in
the old castle, “upon no other pretence but that the stance thereof
was stately, and the house itself of a notable good fabric and
contrivance.” So oppressive were their exactions, that though he had
previously derived from his lands an income of nearly a thousand pounds
per annum (no inconsiderable sum in the days of the Commonwealth), not
a single shilling found its way to the Tower.
The ingenuity which had hitherto been taxed for the good of mankind
and the glory of his country, had now to be exerted for himself. First
he published his Genealogy, to convince Cromwell and the Parliament
that a family “which Saturn’s scythe had not been able to mow in the
progress of all former ages, ought not to be prematurely cut off;” but
neither Cromwell nor the Parliament took any notice of his Genealogy.
Next he published, in a larger work entitled the Jewel, a prospectus of
his Universal Language: Cromwell thought there were languages enough
already. He described his own stupendous powers of mind; Cromwell was
not in the least astonished at their magnitude. He hinted at the vast
discoveries with which he was yet to enrich the country; Cromwell left
him to employ them in enriching himself. In short, notwithstanding the
much he offered in exchange for liberty and his forfeited possessions,
Cromwell disliked the bargain; and so he remained a close prisoner
in the Tower. It must be confessed that, with all his ingenuity he
was little skilled to conciliate the favour of the men in power. They
had beheaded Charles I., and he yet tells them how much he hated the
Presbyterians for the manner in which they had treated that unfortunate
monarch; and though they would fain have dealt with Charles II.
after the same fashion, he assures them, that in no virtue, moral or
intellectual, was that prince inferior to any of his hundred and ten
predecessors. Besides the Genealogy and the Jewel, he published, when
in the Tower, a translation of the three first books of Rabelais, which
has been described by a periodical critic as the “finest monument of
his genius, and one of the most perfect transfusions of an author,
from one language into another, that ever man accomplished.” And it
is remarked, with reference to this work, by Mr. Motteux, that Sir
Thomas “possessed learning and fancy equal to the task which he had
undertaken, and that his version preserves the very style and air of
the original.” What is known of the rest of his history may be summed
up in a few words. Having found means to escape out of prison, he fled
to the Continent, and there died on the eve of the Restoration (indeed,
as is said, out of joy at the event), in his forty-eighth year.
“The character of Sir Thomas Urquhart,” says a modern critic, “was
singular in the extreme. To all the bravery of the soldier and
learning of the scholar, he added much of the knight-errant, and
more of the _visionnaire_ and projector. Zealous for the honour of
his country, and fully determined to wage war, both with his pen and
his sword, against all the defaulters who disgraced it--credulous
yet sagacious--enterprising but rash, he appears to have chosen the
Admirable Crichton as his pattern and model for imitation. For his
learning he may be denominated the Sir Walter Raleigh of Scotland, and
his pedantry was the natural fruit of erudition deeply engrained in his
mind. To this I may add, he possessed a disposition prone to strike
out new paths in knowledge, and a confidence in himself that nothing
could weaken or disturb. In short, the characters of the humorist,
the braggadocio, the schemer, the wit, the pedant, the patriot, the
soldier, and the courtier, were all intermingled in his, and, together,
formed a character which can hardly ever be equalled for excess of
singularity, or excess of humour--for ingenious wisdom, or entertaining
folly.” He is described by another writer as “not only one of the most
curious and whimsical, but one of the most powerful also, of all the
geniuses our part of the island has produced.”
He was unquestionably an extraordinary man. There occur in some
characters anomalies so striking, that, on their first appearance, they
surprise even the most practised in the study of human nature. By a
careful process of analysis, however, we may arrive, in most instances,
at what may be regarded as the simple elements which compose them, and
see the mystery explained. But it is not thus with the character of
Sir Thomas. Anomaly seems to have formed its very basis, and the more
we analyse the more inexplicable it appears. It exhibits traits so
opposite, and apparently so discordant, that the circumstance of their
amazing contrariety renders him as decidedly an original as the Caliban
of Shakspere.
His inventive powers seem to have been of a high order. The new
chemical vocabulary, with all its philosophical ingenuity, is
constructed on principles exactly similar to those which he divulged
more than a hundred years prior to its invention, in the preface to
his Universal Language. By what process could it be anticipated that
the judgment which had enabled him to fix upon these principles,
should have suffered him to urge in favour of that language the
facility it afforded in the making of anagrams! As a scholar, he
is perhaps not much overrated by the critic whose character of him
I have just transcribed. It is remarked of the Greek language by
Monboddo, that, “were there nothing else to convince him of its being
a work of philosophers and grammarians, its dual number would of
itself be sufficient; for, as certainly as the principles of body
are the point, the line, and the surface, the principles of number
are the monad and the duad, though philosophers only are aware of
the fact.” His Lordship, in even this--one of the most refined of
his speculations--was anticipated by Sir Thomas. He, too, regarded
the duad, “not as number, but as a step towards number--as a medium
between multitude and unity;” and he has therefore assigned the dual
its proper place in his Universal Language. And is it not strikingly
anomalous, that, with all this learning, he should not only have
failed to detect the silly fictions of the old chroniclers, but that
he himself should have attempted to impose on the world with fictions
equally extravagant! We find him, at one time, seriously pleading with
the English Parliament that he had a claim, as the undoubted head
and representative of the family of Japhet, to be released from the
Tower. We see him at another producing solid and powerful arguments
to prove that a union of the two kingdoms would be productive of
beneficial effects to both. When we look at his literary character in
one of its phases, and see how unconsciously he lays himself open to
ridicule, we wonder how a writer of such general ingenuity should be
so totally devoid of that sense of the incongruous which constitutes
the perception of wit. But, viewing him in another, we find that he
is a person of exquisite humour, and the most successful of all the
translators of Rabelais. We are struck in some of his narratives
(his narrative of the death of Crichton, for instance) by a style of
description so gorgeously imaginative, that it seems to partake in no
slight degree of the grandeur and elevation of epic poetry. We turn
over a few of the pages in which these occur, and find some of the
meanest things in the language. And his moral character seems to have
been equally anomalous. He would sooner have died in prison than have
concealed, by a single falsehood, the respect which he entertained
for the exiled Prince, at the very time when he was fabricating a
thousand for the honour of his family. Must we not regard him as a kind
of intellectual monster--a sort of moral centaur! His character is
wonderful, not in any of its single parts, but in its incongruity as a
whole. The horse is formed like other animals of the same species, and
the man much like other men; but it is truly marvellous to find them
united.
CHAPTER VIII.
“----Times
Whose echo rings through Scotland to this hour.”--WORDSWORTH.
[Sidenote: THE REFORMATION.]
Prior to the Reformation there were no fewer than six chapels in the
parish of Cromarty. The site of one of these, though it still retains
the name of the Old Kirk, is now a sand-bank, the haunt of the crab and
the sea-urchin, which is covered every larger tide by about ten feet of
water; the plough has passed over the foundations of two of the others;
of two more the only vestiges are a heap of loose stones, and a low
grassy mound; and a few broken fragments of wall form the sole remains
of the sixth and most entire. The very names of the first three have
shared the fate of the buildings themselves; two of the others were
dedicated to St. Duthac and St. Bennet; and two fine springs, on which
time himself has been unable to effect any change, come bubbling out
in the vicinity of the ruins, and bear the names of their respective
saints. It is not yet twenty years since a thorn-bush, which formed a
little canopy over the spring of St. Bennet, used to be covered anew
every season with little pieces of rag, left on it as offerings to
the saint, by sick people who came to drink of the water; and near
the chapel itself, which was perched like an eyry on a steep solitary
ridge that overlooks the Moray Firth, there was a stone trough,
famous, about eighty years before, for virtues derived also from the
saint, like those of the well. For if a child was carried away by the
fairies, and some mischievous unthriving imp left in its place, the
parents had only to lay the changeling in this trough, and, by some
invisible process, their child would be immediately restored to them.
It was termed the fairies’ cradle; and was destroyed shortly before
the rebellion of 1745, by Mr. Gordon, the minister of the parish, and
two of his elders. The last, and least dilapidated of the chapels,
was dedicated to St Regulus; and there is a tradition, that at the
Reformation a valuable historical record, which had belonged to it--the
work probably of some literary monk or hermit--was carried away to
France by the priest. I remember a very old woman who used to relate,
that when a little girl, she chanced, when playing one day among the
ruins with a boy a few years older than herself, to discover a small
square recess in the wall, in which there was a book; but that she
had only time to remark that the volume was a very tattered one, and
apparently very old, and that there were beautiful red letters in it,
when the boy, laying claim to it, forced it from her. What became of
it afterwards she did not know, and, unconscious of the interest which
might have attached to it, never thought of making any inquiry.
There does not survive a single tradition of the circumstances which,
in this part of the country, accompanied the great event that consigned
the six chapels to solitude and decay. One may amuse one’s-self,
however, in conceiving of the more interesting of these, and, with
history and a little knowledge of human nature for one’s guide, run
no great risk of conceiving amiss. The port of Cromarty was one of
considerable trade for the age and country, and the people of the
town were Lowland Scots. A more inquisitive race live nowhere. First
there would come to them wild vague reports, by means of the seamen
and merchants, of the strange doctrines which had begun to disturb
the Continent and the sister kingdom. Shreds of heretic sermons would
be whispered over their ale; and stories brought from abroad, of the
impositions of the priests, would be eked out, in some instances with
little corroborative anecdotes, the fruit of an experience acquired at
home. For there were Liberals even then, though under another name;--a
certain proportion of the people of Scotland being born such in every
age of its independence. Then would come the story of the burning of
good Patrick Hamilton, pensionary of the neighbouring abbey of Fearn;
and everybody would be exceedingly anxious to learn the particular
nature of his crime. Statements of new doctrines, and objections urged
against some of the old, would in consequence be eagerly listened
to, and as eagerly repeated. Then there would come among them two or
three serious, grave people, natives of the place, who would have
acquired, when pursuing their occupations in the south, as merchants or
mechanics, a knowledge, not merely speculative, of the new religion. A
traveller of a different cast would describe with much glee to groups
of the younger inhabitants, the rare shows he had seen acted on the
Castle-hill of Cupar; and producing a black-letter copy of “The Thrie
Estaites” of Davy Lindsay, he would set all his auditors a-laughing
at the expense of the Church. One of the graver individuals, though
less openly, and to a more staid audience, would also produce a book,
done into plain English, out of a very old tongue, by one Tyndale, and
still more severe on the poor priests than even “The Thrie Estaites.”
They would learn from this book that what they were beginning to deem
a rational, but at the same time new religion, was in reality the old
one; and that Popery, with all its boasted antiquity, was by far the
more modern of the two. In the meantime, the priests of the chapels
would be the angriest men in the parish;--denouncing against all and
sundry the fire and fagots of this world, and the fire without fagots
of the next; but one of them, a good honest man, neither the son
of a churchman himself, nor yet burdened with a family of his own,
would set himself, before excommunicating any one, to study the old,
newly-translated book, that he might be better able to cope with the
maligners of his Church. Before half completing his studies, however,
his discourses would begin to assume a very questionable aspect. Little
would they contain regarding the Pope, and little concerning the
saints; and more and more would he press upon his hearers the doctrines
taught by the Apostles. Anon, however, he would assume a bolder style
of language; and sometimes conclude, after saying a great deal about
the spiritual Babylon, and the Man of sin, by praying for godly John
Knox, and all the other ministers of the Evangel. In short, the honest
priest would prove the rankest heretic in the whole parish. And thus
would matters go on from bad to worse. A few grey heads would be shaken
at the general defection, but these would be gradually dropping away;
and the young themselves would be growing old without changing their
newly-acquired opinions. They would not all be good Christians;--for
every one should know it is quite a possible thing to be a Protestant,
sound enough for all the purposes of party, without being a Christian
at all;--but they would almost all be reformers; and when the state
should at length set itself to annihilate root and branch of the old
establishment, and to build up a new one on the broad basis of the
kingdom, not a parish in the whole of it would enter more cordially
into the scheme than the parish of Cromarty.
But however readily the people might have closed with the doctrines of
the Reformation, they continued to retain a good deal of the spirit
of the old religion. Having made choice of a piece of land on the
edge of the ridge which rises behind the houses as a proper site for
their church, they began to collect the materials. It so chanced,
however, that the first few stones gathered for the purpose, being
thrown down too near the edge of the declivity, rolled to the bottom;
the circumstance was deemed supernaturally admonitory; and the church,
after due deliberation, was built at the base instead of the top of
the ridge, on exactly the spot where the stones had rested. The first
Protestant minister of the parish was a Mr. Robert Williamson. His
name occurs oftener than once in Calderwood’s Church History; and
his initials, with those of his wife, are still to be seen on a flat
triangular stone in the eastern part of the town, which bears date
1593. It is stated by Calderwood, that “Jesuits having libertie to
passe thorough the countrey in 1583, during the time of the Earle
of Huntlie’s lieutenantrie, great coldness of religion entered in
Ross;” and by an act of council passed five years after, this Robert
Williamson, and “John Urquhart, tutor of Cromartie,” were among the
number empowered to urge matters to an extremity against them.
[Sidenote: OUTBREAKING AT ROSEMARKIE.]
There awaited Scotland a series of no light evils in the short-sighted
policy which attempted to force upon her a religion which she abhorred.
The surplice and the service-book were introduced into her churches;
and the people, who would scarcely have bestirred themselves had
merely their civil rights been invaded, began to dread that they could
not, without being unhappy in more than the present world, conform to
the religion of the state. And so they set themselves seriously to
inquire whether the power of kings be not restricted to the present
world only. They learned, in consequence, that not merely is such
the case, but that it has yet other limitations; and the more they
sought to determine these, the more questionable did its grounds
become. The spirit manifested on this occasion by the people of this
part of the country, is happily exemplified by Spalding’s narrative
of a riot which took place at the neighbouring Chanonry of Ross, in
the spring of 1638. The service-book had been quietly established by
the bishop two years before; but the more thoroughly the people grew
acquainted with it, the more unpopular it became. At length, on the
second Sunday of March, just as the first bell had rung for sermon,
but before the ringing of the second, a numerous party of schoolboys
broke into the cathedral, and stripped it in a twinkling of all the
service books. Out they rushed in triumph, and, procuring a lighted
coal and some brushwood, they marched off in a body to the low sandy
promontory beneath the town, to make a bonfire of the whole set. But
a sudden shower extinguishing the coal, instead of burning they tore
the books into shreds, and flung the fragments into the sea. The bishop
went on with his sermon; but it was more than usually brief; and such
were the feelings exhibited at its close by the people, that, taking
hastily to his horse, he quitted the kingdom. “A very busy man was he
esteemed,” says the annalist, “in the bringing in of the service-book,
and therefore durst he not, for fear of his life, return again to
Scotland.” In short, the country was fully awakened; and before the
close of the following month, the National Covenant was subscribed in
the shires of Ross, Cromarty, and Nairn.
Some of the minor events which took place in the sheriffdom of
Cromarty, on the triumph of Presbyterianism, have been detailed,
as recorded by Sir Thomas, in the foregoing chapter. Even on his
own testimony, most men of the present day will not feel disposed
to censure very severely the churchmen of his district. It must be
confessed, however, that the principles of liberty, either civil or
ecclesiastical, were but little understood in Scotland in the middle
of the seventeenth century; the parties which divided it deeming
themselves too exclusively in the right to learn from the persecutions
to which they were in turn subjected, that the good old rule of doing
as we would be done by, should influence the conduct of politicians
as certainly as that of private men. And there is a simple fact which
ought to convince us, however zealous for the honour of our church,
that the Presbyterian synod of Ross, which Sir Thomas has termed “a
promiscuous knot of unjust men,” was by no means a very exemplary body.
Five-sixths of its members conformed at the Restoration, and became
curates; and as they were notoriously intolerant as Episcopalians,
it is not at all probable that they should have been strongly
characterized by liberality during the previous period, when they had
found it their interest to be Presbyterians.
[Sidenote: SIR JOHN URQUHART OF CRAIGFINTRIE.]
The restoration of Charles, and the appointment of Middleton as his
commissioner for Scotland, were followed by the fatal act which
overturned Presbyterianism, and set up Episcopacy in its place. It
is stated by Wodrow, that Middleton, previous to the bringing in of
this act, had been strengthened in the resolution which led to it, by
Mackenzie of Tarbat, and Urquhart of Cromarty; and that the latter,
who had lately “counterfeited the Protestor,” ended miserably some
time after. In what manner he ended, however, is not stated by the
historian, but tradition is more explicit. On the death of Sir Thomas,
he was succeeded by his brother Alexander, who survived him only a
year, and dying without male issue, the estate passed to Sir John
Urquhart of Craigfintrie, the head of a branch of the family which
had sprung from the main stock about a century before. This Sir John
was the friend and counsellor of Middleton. About eleven years after
the passing of the act, he fell into a deep melancholy, and destroyed
himself with his own sword in one of the apartments of the old castle.
The sword, it is said, was flung into a neighbouring draw-well by one
of the domestics, and the stain left by his blood on the walls and
floor of the apartment, was distinctly visible at the time the building
was pulled down.
[Sidenote: THE OUSTED MINISTERS.]
So well was the deprecated act received by the time-serving Synod of
Ross, that they urged it into effect against one of their own body,
more than a year before the ejection of the other nonconforming
clergymen. In a meeting of the Synod which took place in 1661,
the person chosen as moderator was one Murdoch Mackenzie;--a man
so strong in his attachments that he had previously sworn to the
National Covenant no fewer than fourteen times, and he had now fallen
desperately in love with the Bishopric of Moray. One of his brethren,
however, an unmanageable, dangerous person, for he was uncompromisingly
honest, and possessed of very considerable talent, stood directly in
the way of his preferment. This member, the celebrated Mr. Hogg of
Kiltearn, had not sworn to the Covenant half so often as his superior,
the Moderator, but then so wrong-headed was he as to regard his few
oaths as binding; and he could not bring himself to like Prelacy any
the better for its being espoused by the king. And so his expulsion
was evidently a matter of necessity. The Moderator had nothing to urge
against his practice,--for no one could excel him in the art of living
well; but his opinions lay more within his reach; and no sooner had
the Synod met, than, singling him out, he demanded what his thoughts
were of the Protestors--the party of Presbyterians who, about ten years
before, had not taken part with the king against the Republicans. Mr.
Hogg declined to answer; and on being removed, that the Synod might
deliberate, the Moderator rose and addressed them. Their brother of
Kiltearn, he said, was certainly a great man--a very great man--but
as certainly were the Protestors opposed to the king; and if any
member of Synod took part with them, whatever his character, it was
evidently the duty of the other members to have him expelled. Mr. Hogg
was then called in, and having refused, as was anticipated, judicially
to disown the Protestors, sentence of deposition was passed against
him. But the consciences of the men who thus dealt with him, betrayed
in a very remarkable manner their real estimate of his conduct. It is
stated by Wodrow, on the authority of an eye-witness, that sentence was
passed with a peculiar air of veneration, as if they were ordaining
him to some higher office; and that the Moderator was so deprived of
his self-possession as to remind him, in a consolatory speech, that
“our Lord Jesus Christ had suffered great wrong from the Scribes and
Pharisees.”
Mackenzie received the reward of his zeal shortly after in an
appointment to the Bishopric of Moray; and one Paterson, a man of
similar character, was ordained Bishop of Ross. On the order of
council, issued in the autumn of 1662, for all ministers of parishes
to attend the diocesan meetings, and take the newly-framed oaths, while
in some of the southern districts of the kingdom only a few ministers
attended, in the diocese of Ross there were but four absent, exclusive
of Mr. Hogg. These four were, Mr. Hugh Anderson of Cromarty, Mr. John
Mackilligen of Alness, Mr. Andrew Ross of Tain, and a Mr. Thomas Ross,
whose parish is not named in the list. And they were all in consequence
ejected from their charges. Mr. Anderson, a nephew of Sir Thomas’s
opponent, Mr. Gilbert, who was now dead, retired to Moray, accompanied
by his _bedral_, who had resolved on sharing the fortunes of his
pastor; and they returned together a few years after to a small estate,
the property of Mr. Anderson, situated in the western extremity of the
parish. Mr. Mackilligen remained at Alness, despite of the council and
the bishops, who had enacted that no nonconforming minister should take
up his abode within twenty miles of his former church. Mr. Ross of
Tain resided within the bounds of the same Presbytery; and Mr. Fraser
of Brea, a young gentleman of Cromartyshire, who was ordained to the
ministry about ten years after the expulsion of the others, had his
seat in the parish of Resolis. In short, as remarked by Wodrow, there
was more genuine Presbyterianism to be found on the shores of the Bay
of Cromarty, notwithstanding the general defection, than in any other
part of the kingdom north of the Tay.
And the current of popular feeling seems to have set in strongly
in its favour about the year 1666. Towards the close of this year,
Paterson the bishop, in a letter to his son, describes the temper of
the country about him as very cloudy; and complains of a change in
the sentiments of many who had previously professed an attachment
to Prelacy. Mr. Mackilligen, a faithful and active preacher of the
forbidden doctrines, seems to have given him so much trouble, that he
even threatened to excommunicate him, but the minister regarding his
threat in the proper light, replied to it by comparing him to Balaam
the wicked prophet, who went forth to curse Israel, and to Shimei the
son of Gera, who cursed David. The joke spread, for as such was it
regarded, and Paterson, who had only the sanctity of his office to
oppose to the personal sanctity of his opponent, deemed it prudent to
urge the threat no further: he had the mortification of being laughed
at for having urged it so far. There is a little hollow among the
hills, about three miles from the house of Fowlis, and not much farther
from Alness, in the gorge of which the eye commands a wide prospect
of the lower lands, and the whole Firth of Cromarty. It lies, too, on
the extreme edge of the cultivated part of the country, for beyond
there stretches only a brown uninhabited desert; and in this hollow the
neighbouring Presbyterians used to meet for the purpose of religious
worship. On some occasions they were even bold enough to assemble in
the villages. In the summer of 1675, Mr. Mackilligen, assisted by his
brethren of Tain and Cromarty, and the Laird of Brea, celebrated the
Communion at Obsdale, in the house of the Lady Dowager of Fowlis. There
was an immense concourse of people; and “so plentiful was the effusion
of the Spirit,” says the historian whom I have so often had occasion to
quote, “that the oldest Christians present never witnessed the like.”
Indisputably, even from natural causes, the time must have been one of
much excitement; and who that believes the Bible, will dare affirm that
God cannot comfort his people by extraordinary manifestations, when
deprived of the common comforts of earth for their adherence to him?
One poor man, who had gone to Obsdale merely out of curiosity, was so
affected by what he heard, that when some of his neighbours blamed him
for his temerity, and told him that the bishop would punish him for it
by taking away his horse and cow, he assured them that in such a cause
he was content to lose not merely all his worldly goods, but his head
also. A party had been despatched, at the instance of the bishop, to
take Mackilligen prisoner; but, misinformed regarding the place where
the meeting was held, they proceeded to his house at Alness, and spent
so much time in pillaging his garden, that before they reached Obsdale
he had got out of their way. But he fell into the hands of his enemy,
the bishop, in the following year, and during his long imprisonment on
the Bass Rock--for to such punishment was he subjected--he contracted
a disease of which he died. Mr. Ross of Tain, and Mr. Fraser of Brea,
were apprehended shortly after, and disposed of in the same manner.
Nor was it only a few clergymen that suffered in this part of the
country for their adherence to the church. Among the names of the
individuals who, in the shires of Ross and Cromarty, were subjected
to the iniquitous fine imposed by Middleton on the more rigid
Presbyterians, I find the name of Sir Robert Munro of Fowlis, the head
of a family which ranks among the most ancient and honourable in the
kingdom. Sir John Munro, son of Sir Robert, succeeded to the barony
in 1668. His virtues, and the persecutions to which he was subjected,
are recorded by the pen of Doddridge:--“The eminent piety of this
excellent person exposed him,” says this writer, “to great sufferings
in the cause of religion in those unhappy and infamous days, when the
best friends to their country were treated as the worst friends to the
government. His person was doomed to long imprisonment for no pretended
cause but what was found against him in the matters of his God; and his
estate, which was before considerable, was harassed by severe fines and
confiscations, which reduced it to a diminution much more honourable,
indeed, than any augmentation could have been, but from which it has
not recovered to this day.”
[Sidenote: MR. FRASER OF BREA.]
But, perhaps, a brief narrative of the sufferings of a single
individual may make a stronger impression on the reader than any
general detail of those of the party. Mr. James Fraser of Brea was
born in the western part of the shire of Cromarty, in the year 1639.
On the death of his father, whom he lost while in his infancy, he
succeeded to the little property of about £100 per annum, of which
the name, according to the fashion of Scotland, is attached to his
own. His childhood was passed much like the childhood of most other
people; but with this difference, that those little attempts at crime
which serve to identify the moral nature of children with that of
men, and which, in our riper years, are commonly either forgotten
altogether, or regarded with an interest which owes nought of its
intensity to remorse, were considered by him as the acts of a creature
accountable to the Great Judge for even its earliest derelictions from
virtue. But this trait belongs properly to his subsequent character.
In his seventeenth year, after a youth spent unhappily, in a series
of conflicts with himself, for he was imbued with a love of forbidden
pleasures, and possessed of a conscience exquisitely tender, a change
came over him, and he became one of the excellent few who live less
for the present world than for the future. As he was not wedded by
the prejudices of education to any set of religious opinions, he had,
with only the Scriptures for his guide, to frame a creed for himself;
and having come in contact, in Edinburgh, with some Quakers, he was
well-nigh induced to join with them. But on more serious consideration,
he deemed some of their tenets not quite in unison with those of
the Bible. He attended, for some time after the Restoration, the
preaching of the curates; but, profiting little by their doctrines, he
deliberated whether he did right in hearing them, and concluded in the
negative, in the very year in which all such conclusions were declared
treason by act of Parliament. In short, by dint of reasoning and
reading, he landed full in Presbyterianism, at a time when there was
nothing to be gained by it, and a great deal to be lost. And not merely
did he embrace it for himself, but deeming it the cause of God, he came
forward in this season of wrong and suffering, when the bad opposed it,
and the timid shrunk from it, to preach it to the people. He believed
himself called to the ministerial office in a peculiar manner, by the
Great Being who had fitted him for it; and the simple fact that he did
not, in Scotland at least, gain a single sixpence by all his preaching
until after the Revolution, ought surely to convince the most sceptical
that he did not mistake on this occasion the suggestions of interest
for those of duty. He began to preach the forbidden doctrines in the
year 1672; and he was married shortly after to a lady to whom he had
been long attached.
The sufferings to which he had been subjected prior to his marriage
affected only himself. He had been fined and exposed to ridicule;
and he had had to submit to loss and imposition, out of a despair of
finding redress from corrupt judges, whose decisions would have been
prompted rather by the feelings with which they regarded his principles
than by any consideration of the merits of his cause. No sooner,
however, had he married, and become a preacher, than he was visited by
evils greater in themselves, and which he felt all the more deeply from
the circumstance that their effects were no longer confined to himself.
He was summoned before councils for preaching without authority, and
in the fields, and denounced and outlawed for not daring to appear.
But he persevered, notwithstanding, wandering under hiding from place
to place, and preaching twice or thrice every week to all such as had
courage enough to hear him. He was among the number intercommuned by
public writ; all the people of Scotland, even his own friends and
relatives, being charged, under the severest penalties, not to speak to
him, or receive him into their houses, or minister even the slightest
comfort to his person. And yet still did he persevere on the strength
of the argument urged by St. Peter before the Jewish Sanhedrim. The
lady he married was a person every way worthy of such a husband. “In
her,” I use his own simple and expressive language, “did I behold as
in a glass the Lord’s love to me; and so effectually did she sweeten
the sorrows of my pilgrimage, that I have often been too nearly led
to exclaim, It is good for me to be here!” But she was lent him only
for a short season. Four years after his marriage, when under hiding,
word was brought him that she lay sick of a fever; and hurrying home
in “great horror and darkness of mind,” he reached her bedside only to
find that she had departed, and that he was left alone.
His sorrow at the bereavement oppressed, but it could not overwhelm
him; for, with an energy rendered more intense by a sense of
desolateness, and a feeling that the world had become as nothing
to him, he applied afresh to what he deemed his bounden duty, the
preaching of the Word. He was diligent in ministering to the comfort of
many who were less afflicted than himself; and enveloped in the very
flames of persecution, he confirmed, by his exhortations, such as were
shrinking from their approach. So well was his character understood by
the prelates, that he was one of three expressly named in an act of
council as peculiarly obnoxious, and a large sum of money was offered
to any who would apprehend him. Great rewards, too, were promised on
the same account by the Archbishop of St. Andrews, out of his private
purse; and after a series of hair-breadth escapes, he at length fell
into his hands through the treachery of a servant. The questions put to
him on his trial, with his replies to them, are given at full length
by Wodrow. Without in the least compromising his principles, he yet
availed himself of every legal argument which the circumstances of his
case admitted; and such was the ingenuity of his defence, that he was
repeatedly complimented on the score of ability by the noblemen on the
bench. He was charged, however, with a breach of good manners; for,
while he addressed his other judges with due respect, he replied to the
accusations of the archbishop as if they had been urged against him
by merely a private individual. In answer to the charge, he confessed
that he was but a rude man, and hinted, with some humour, that he
had surely been brought before their lordships for some other purpose
than simply to make proof of his breeding. And, after all, there was
little courtesy lost between himself and the archbishop. He had been
apprehended near midnight, and before sunrise next morning, the servant
of the latter was seen standing at the prison gate, instructing the
jailer that the prisoner should be confined apart, and none suffered
to have access to him. When the court met, the archbishop strove to
entrap him, with an eagerness which only served to defeat its object,
into an avowal of the sentiments with which he regarded the king and
his ministers; and failing to elicit these, for the preacher was shrewd
and sagacious, he represented him to the other members of council as a
person singularly odious and criminal, and an enemy to every principle
of civil government. He was a schismatic too, he affirmed--a render
asunder of the Church of Christ! To the charge that he was a preacher
of sedition, Mr. Fraser replied with apostolic fervour, that in “none
of his discourses had he urged aught disloyal or traitorous; but that
as the Spirit enabled him, had he preached repentance towards God, and
faith towards Jesus Christ, and no other thing but what was contained
in the Prophets and the New Testament. And so far,” he added, “was he
from being terrified or ashamed to own himself a minister of Christ,
that although of no despicable extraction, yet did he glory most to
serve God in the gospel of His Son, and deem it the greatest honour to
which he had ever attained.” After trial he was remanded to prison, and
awakened next morning by the jailer, for he had slept soundly, that he
might prepare for a journey to the Bass. He was escorted by the way by
a party of twelve horsemen and thirty foot, and delivered up on landing
in the island to the custody of the governor.
Here a new series of sufferings awaited him, not perhaps so harassing
in themselves as those to which he had recently been subjected--for
punishment in such cases is often less severe than the train of
persecution which leads to it; but he felt them all the more deeply,
because he could no longer, from his situation, exert that energy of
mind which had enabled him to divest, on former occasions, an evil
of more than half its strength, by meeting it, as it were, more than
half-way. He had now to wait in passive expectation until the evil
came. There were a number of other prisoners confined to the Bass for
their attachment to Presbyterianism; and the governor, a little-minded,
capricious man, who loved to display the extent of his authority, by
showing how many he could render unhappy, would sometimes deny them
all intercourse with each other, by closely confining them to their
separate cells. At times, too, when permitted to associate together,
some of the profaner officers would break in upon them, and annoy them
with the fashionable wit and blasphemy of the period. A dissolute woman
was appointed to wait upon them, and scandalous stories circulated at
their expense; all the letters brought them from the land were broken
open and made sport of by the garrison; they were neither allowed to
eat nor to worship together; and though their provisions and water were
generally of the worst kind, they had sometimes to purchase them--even
the latter--at an exorbitant price. But there were times at which the
preacher could escape from all his petty vexations. In the higher part
of the island there are solitary walks, which skirt the edge of the
precipices, and command an extensive view of the neighbouring headlands
and the ocean. On these, when his jailers were in their more tolerant
moods, would he be permitted to saunter for whole hours; indulging, as
the waves were breaking more than a hundred yards beneath him, and the
sea-fowl screaming over him, in a not unpleasing melancholy--musing
much on the future, with all its doubtful probabilities, or “looking
back on the days of old, when he joyed with the wife of his youth.” And
there was a considerable part of his time profitably spent in the study
of Greek and Hebrew. He besides read divinity, and wrote a treatise
on faith, with several other miscellanies: and at length, after an
imprisonment of two years and a half, during which period his old enemy
the archbishop had suffered the punishment which there was no law to
inflict upon him, he was set at liberty; and he quitted his prison with
not less zeal, and with more learning than he had brought into it.
He still deemed preaching as much his duty as before, and the state
regarded it as decidedly a crime; and so he had to resume his
wandering, unsettled life of peril and hardship; “labouring to be
of some use to every family he visited.” Falling sick of an ague,
contracted through this mode of living, he was cited before the
council, at the instance of some of his old friends the bishops; who,
reckoning on his inability to appear on the day named, took this way
of having him outlawed a second time. But they had miscalculated; for
no sooner had he received the citation, than dragging himself from
his bed, he set out on his journey to Edinburgh. Legal oppression he
respected as little as he had done six years before; but he was now
differently circumstanced--one of his friends, on his liberation from
the Bass, having bound himself as his surety; and sooner would he have
died by the way than have subjected him to any loss. When the day
arrived, he presented himself at the bar of the council; and defended
himself with such ability and spirit, that his lay judges were on the
eve of acquitting him. Not so the bishops; and the matter, after some
debate, being wholly referred to their judgment, he was sentenced to
be imprisoned at Blackness until he had paid a fine of five thousand
merks, and given security that he should not again preach in Scotland.
To Blackness he was accordingly sent; and there he remained in close
confinement, and subjected, as he had been at the Bass, to the caprice
of a tyrannical governor, for about seven weeks; when he was set at
liberty on condition that he should immediately quit the kingdom. He
passed therefore into England; and he soon found--for the Christian
is a genuine cosmopolite--“that a good Englishman was more truly
his countryman than a wicked Scot.” He was much esteemed by English
people of his own persuasion; and though he had at first resolved to
forbear preaching out of the dread of being reckoned a “barbarian,”
for he could not divest himself of his Scotticisms, he yielded to the
solicitations of his newly-acquired friends; and soon attained among
them, as he had done at home, the character of being a powerful and
useful preacher. But bonds and imprisonment awaited him even there. On
the execution of Russell and Sydney, he was arrested on the suspicion
of being one of their confederates; and on refusing to take what was
termed the Oxford Oath, he was committed to Newgate, where he was kept
for six months. But from his previous experience of the prisons of
Scotland, he seems, with Goldsmith’s sailor, to have deemed Newgate a
much better sort of place than it is usually esteemed;--his apartment
was large and lightsome, and the jailers were all very kind. Resuming,
on his release, his old mode of living, he continued to preach and
study by turns, until the Revolution; when, returning to Scotland, he
was invited by the people of Culross to preside over them as their
pastor;--a fit pastor for a parish which, during the reign of Prelacy,
had suffered and resisted more than almost any other in the kingdom. In
this place he continued until his death; grateful for all the mercies
bestowed upon him, and few men could reckon them better; but peculiarly
grateful that, in a season of hot persecution, he had been enabled to
take part with God.
Nor were strong-minded men, like Fraser of Brea, the only persons who
espoused this cause in the day of trouble, and dared to suffer for
it. There is a quiet passive fortitude in the better kind of women,
which lies concealed, as it ought, under a cover of real gentleness
and seeming timidity, until called forth by some occasion which
renders it a duty to resist; and this excellent spirit was exhibited
during this period by at least one lady of Cromarty. She was a Mrs.
Gordon, the wife of the parish minister;--a lady who, at an extreme
old age, retained much of the beauty of youth--a smooth unwrinkled
forehead, shaded by a profusion of black glossy hair without the
slightest tinge of grey: and it was said of her, so exquisite was her
complexion, that, when drinking a glass of wine, her neck and throat
would assume the ruddy hue of the liquid--an imaginary circumstance,
deemed characteristic at one time, by the common people of Scotland, of
the higher order of beauties, and which is happily introduced by Allan
Cunningham into one of the most pleasing of his ballads:--
“Fu’ white white was her bonny neck,
Twist wi’ the satin twine;
But ruddie ruddie grew her hawse,
While she sipp’d the bluid-red wine.”
[Sidenote: LUGGIE.]
Mrs. Gordon could scarcely have attained to her eighteenth year at the
Revolution; and yet she had been exposed to suffering on the score of
religion, in the previous troubles. There was a story among the people,
that her ears had been cut off; it was even observed, that her tresses
were always so arranged as to conceal the supposed mutilation; and
some of the wilder spirits of the place used to call her _Luggie_, in
allusion to the story; but she was too highly respected for the name
to take. When a very old woman, she was one day combing her hair in
the presence of a little girl, who was employed in dressing up the
apartment in which she sat, and who threw at her from time to time
a very inquisitive glance. “Come here, Maggie,” said the lady, who
guessed the cause of her solicitude; “you are a curious little girl,
and have heard that I have lost my ears--have you not? Here they are,
however,” she continued, shading back her hair as she spoke, and
displaying two very pretty ones; “wicked men once threatened to cut
them off, and a knife was sharpened for the purpose, but God permitted
them not.”
CHAPTER IX.
“The scart bears weel wi’ the winter’s cauld,
The aik wi’ the gurly win’;
But the bonny wee burds, and the sweet wee flowers,
Were made for the calm an’ the sun.”--OLD BALLAD.
[Sidenote: THE CHAPLAIN’S LAIR.]
The southern Sutor terminates, where it overhangs the junction of
the Cromarty and Moray Firths, in a noble precipice, which, planting
its iron feet in the sea, rears its ample forehead a hundred yards
over it. On the top there is a moss-covered, partially wooded knoll,
which, commanding from its abrupt height and semi-insular situation a
wide and diversified prospect, has been known from time immemorial to
the town’s-people as “the Look-out.” It is an exquisite little spot,
sweet in itself, and sublime in what it commands;--a fine range of
forest scenery stretches along the background, while in front the eye
may wander over the hills of seven different counties, and so vast an
extent of sea, that, on the soberest calculation, we cannot estimate it
under a thousand square miles. Nor need there be any lack of pleasing
association to heighten the effect of a landscape which, among its
other scenes of the wild and the wonderful, includes the bleak moor
of Culloden, and the “heath near Forres.” It is, however, to the
immense tract of sea which it overlooks that the little knoll owes its
deepest interest, and when, after a storm from the west has scattered
the shipping bound for port, and day after day has gone by without
witnessing their expected return--there are wistful eyes that turn from
it to the wide waste below, and anxious hearts that beat quicker and
higher, as sail after sail starts up, spark-like, on the dim horizon,
and grows into size and distinctness as it nears the shore. Nor is the
rock beneath devoid of an interest exclusively its own.
It is one of those magnificent objects which fill the mind with
emotions of the sublime and awful; and the effect is most imposing when
we view it from below. The strata, strangely broken and contorted, rise
almost vertically from the beach. Immense masses of a primary trap crop
out along their bases, or wander over the face of the precipice in
broad irregular veins, which contrast their deep olive-green with the
ferruginous brown of the mass. A whitened projection, which overhangs
the sea, has been for untold ages the haunt of the cormorant and the
sea-mew; the eagle builds higher up, and higher still there is a broad
inaccessible ledge in a deep angle of the rock, on which a thicket of
hip and sloethorn bushes and a few wild apple-trees have taken root,
and which, from the latter circumstance, bears among the town’s-boys
the name of the _apple-yardie_. The young imagination delights to dwell
amid the bosky recesses of this little spot, where human foot has never
yet trodden, and where the crabs and the wild berries ripen and decay
unplucked and untasted. There was a time, however, when the interest
which attached to it owed almost all its intensity to the horrible.
The eastern turret of the old castle of Cromarty has, with all its
other turrets, long since disappeared; but the deep foliage of the
ledge mantles as thickly as ever, and the precipice of the Look-out
rears its dark front as proudly over the beach. They were frightfully
connected--the shelf and the turret--in the associations of the
town’s-people for more than a hundred years; the one was known as the
Chaplain’s Turret--the other as the Chaplain’s Lair; but the demolition
of the castle has dissolved the union, and there are now scarcely a
dozen in the country who know that it ever existed.
I have said that the proprietor of the lands of Cromarty, in the
early part of the reign of Charles II., was a Sir John Urquhart of
Craigfintrie, celebrated by Wodrow, though the celebrity be of no
enviable character, as the person whose advice, strengthened by that of
Sir George Mackenzie of Tarbat, led Commissioner Middleton to introduce
the unhappy Act which overturned Presbyterianism in Scotland. He was
a shrewd, strong-minded man, thoroughly acquainted with all the worse
and some of the better springs of human action--cool, and cautious, and
skilful, in steering himself through the difficulties of so unsettled
a period by the shifts and evasions of a well-balanced expediency. The
current of the age had set in towards religion, and Sir John was by
much too prudent to oppose the current. There were few men who excelled
him in that most difficult art of computation, the art of estimating
the strength of parties; perhaps he was all the more successful in his
calculations from his never suffering himself to be disturbed in them
by an over-active zeal; and believing, with Tamerlane and Sir Thomas,
that the Deity usually declares for the stronger party, Sir John was
always religious enough to be of the stronger party too.
About twelve years before his death, which took place in 1673, there
resided in his family a young licentiate of the Scottish Church, a
nephew of his own, who officiated as chaplain. Dallas Urquhart was
naturally a soft-tempered, amiable man, of considerable attainments,
and of no inferior powers of mind, but his character lacked the severer
virtues; and it was his fate to live in an age in which a good-natured
facility of disposition was of all qualities the worst fitted to supply
their place. He was deemed a person of more than ordinary promise in
an age when the qualifications of the Presbyterian minister were fixed
at least as high as in any after period;--there was a charm, too,
in his pliant and docile disposition, which peculiarly recommended
him to his older friends and advisers; for even the wise are apt
to overvalue whatever flatters themselves, and to decide regarding
that modest facility which so often proves in after life the curse
of its possessor, according to an estimate very different from that
by which they rate the wilful, because partially developed strength
which thwarts and opposes them. Dallas therefore had many friends;
but the person to whom he was chiefly attached was the young minister
of Cromarty--the “good Maister Hugh Anderson,” whose tombstone, a
dark-coloured slab, roughened with uncouth sculpture, and a neat
Latin inscription, may still be seen in the eastern gable of the
parish church, and to whom I have already referred as one of the few
faithful in this part of the country in a time of fiery trial. The
two friends had passed through college together, associates in study
and recreation, and, what is better still, for they were both devout
young men, companions in all those acts of religious fellowship which
renders Christianity so true a nurse of the nobler affections. And yet
no two persons could be less similar in the original structure of their
minds. Dallas was gentle-tempered and imaginative, and imbued, through
a nature decidedly intellectual, with a love of study for its own sake.
His friend, on the contrary, was of a bold energetic temperament, and a
plain, practical understanding, which he had cultivated rather from a
sense of duty than under the influence of any direct pleasure derived
in the process. But it is probable that had they resembled one another
more closely, they would have loved one another less. Friendship, if
I may venture the metaphor, is a sort of ball-and-socket connexion.
It seems to be a first principle in its economy that its agreements
should be founded in dissimilarity--the stronger with the weaker--the
softer with the more rugged. And perhaps, in looking round to convince
ourselves of the fact, we have but to note how the sexes--formed for
each other by God himself--have been created, not after a similar, but
after a diverse pattern--and that their natures piece together, not
because they were made to resemble, but to correspond with each other.
The friends were often together; the huge old castle, grey with the
lichens of a thousand years, towered on its wooded eminence immediately
over the town; and the little antique manse, with its narrow serrated
gables, and with the triangular tablets of its upper windows, rising
high in the roof, occupied, nest-like, an umbrageous recess so directly
below, that the chaplain in his turret was scarcely a hundred yards
distant from the minister in his study. There hardly passed a day
in which Dallas did not spend an hour or two in the manse; at times
speculating on some abstruse scholastic question with his friend the
clergyman, whom he generally found somewhat less than his match on
such occasions; at times still more pleasingly engaged in conversing,
though on somewhat humbler terms, with his friend’s only sister.
Mary Anderson was a sylph-looking young creature, rather below the
middle size, and slightly though finely formed. Her complexion, which
was pale and singularly transparent, indicated no great strength of
constitution; but there was an easy grace in all her motions, that
no one could associate with the weakness of positive indisposition,
and an expression in her bright speaking eyes and beautiful forehead,
that impressed all who knew her rather with the idea of an active
and powerful spirit than of a delicate or feeble frame. There was an
unpretending quietness in her manners, and a simple good sense in all
she said and did on ordinary occasions, that seemed to be as much
the result of correct feeling as of a discriminating intellect; but
there were depths in the character beyond the reach of the ordinary
observer--powers of abstract thought which only a superior mind could
fully appreciate, and a vigorous but well-regulated imagination that
could bedeck the perfections of the moral world with all that is
exquisite among the forms and colours of the natural. No one ever
seemed less influenced by the tender feelings than Mary Anderson; she
loved her brother’s friend--loved to study, to read, to converse with
him, but in no respect did her regard for him seem to differ from her
regard for her brother himself. She was his friend--a tender and
attached one, it is true--but his friend only. But the young chaplain,
whose nature it was to cleave to everything nobler and more powerful
than himself, was of a different temper, and he had formed a deep
though silent attachment to the highly-gifted maiden of the manse.
Troublesome times came on; the politic and strong-minded proprietor
was no longer known as the friend of the Presbyterian Church, and the
comparatively weak and facile chaplain wavered in all the agonies
of irresolution, under the fascinating influences of the massier
and wilier character. All the persuasive powers of Sir John were
concentrated on the conversion of his nephew. Acts of kindness,
expressions of endearment and good-will, and a well-counterfeited
zeal for the interests of true religion formed with him merely a sort
of groundwork for arguments of real cogency so far as they went, and
facts which, though of partial selection, could not be well disputed.
He had passed, he said, over the ground which Dallas now occupied, and
was thus enabled to anticipate some of his opinions on the subject;
he, too, had once regarded Christianity and the Presbyterian form
of it as identical, and associated the excellencies of the one with
the peculiarities of the other. He now saw clearly, however; and his
nephew, he was assured, would soon see it too, that they were things
as essentially different as soul and body, and that the Presbyterian
form--the Presbyterian _body_, he might say--was by no means the best
which the true religion could inhabit! He pointed out what he deemed
the peculiar defects of Presbyterianism; and summed up with consummate
skill the various indications of the subdued and unresisting mood which
at this period formed that of the entire country.
“Men of all classes,” he said, “have been wearied in the long struggle
of twenty years, from which they have but just escaped, and stand in
need of rest. They see, too, that they have been contending, not for
themselves, but for others--striving to render kings less powerful,
that Churchmen might become more so. They see that they have thus
injured the character of a body of men, valuable in their own sphere,
but dangerous when invested with the power of the magistrate; and that
they have so weakened the hands of Government, that to escape from
anarchy they have to fling themselves into the arms of comparative
despotism. But there are better times coming; and the wiser sort of
men are beginning to perceive that religion must work more effectually
under the peaceable protection of a paternal Government, than when
united to a form which cannot exist without provoking political heats
and animosities. Not a few of our best men are more than prepared
for the movement. You already know something of Leighton; I need not
say what sort of a man _he_ is;--and young Burnet and Scougall are
persons of resembling character. But there are many such among the
belied and persecuted Episcopalians; and does it not augur well, that
since the one Church must fall, we should have materials of such value
for building up the other? I cannot anticipate much opposition to
the change. A few good men of narrow capacity, such as your friend
Anderson, will not acquiesce in it till they are made to distinguish
between form and spirit, which may take some time; and leaders in the
Church, who have become influential at the expense of their country’s
welfare, must necessarily be hostile to it for another cause; for no
man willingly parts with power. But certain I am it can meet with no
effectual opposition.”
Dallas had little to urge in reply. Sir John had ever been kind to him,
nor was his disposition a cold or ungrateful one; and, naturally facile
and diffident besides, he had been invariably in the habit of yielding
up his own judgment, in matters of a practical tendency, to the more
mature and powerful judgment of his uncle. He could feel, however, that
on this occasion there was something criminal in his acquiescence; but
his weakness overcame him. He passed sleepless nights, and days of
restless inquietude; at times half resolved to seek out Sir John and
say that, having cast in his lot with the sinking Church, he could not
quit her in the day of trouble--at times groaning under a despairing
sense of his thorough inability to oppose him--yielding to what seemed
to be the force of destiny, and summing up the various arguments so
often pressed upon him, less with the view of ascertaining their real
value, than of employing them in his own defence. Meanwhile whole
weeks elapsed ere he could muster up resolution enough to visit his
friend the clergyman; and the report had gone far and wide that he had
declared with his uncle for the court religion. He at length stole down
one evening to the manse with a sinking heart, and limbs that trembled
under him.
Mary was absent on a visit; her brother he found sitting moodily in
his study. The minister had but just returned from a Presbytery, at
which he had to contend single-handed against the arguments of Sir
John, and the votes of all the others; and, under the influence of
the angry feelings awakened in a conflict so hopeless and unequal,
and irritated by the gibes and taunts of his renegade brethren, he at
once denounced Dallas as a time-server and an apostate. The temper of
the chaplain gave way, and he retorted with a degree of spirit which
might have given a different colour to his after life, had it been
exerted during his earlier interviews with Sir John. The anger of the
friends, heightened by mutual reproaches, triumphed over the affection
of years; and, after a scene of bitter contention, they parted with the
determination of never meeting again. Dallas felt not the ground, as,
with throbbing pulses and a flushed brow, he hastily scaled the ascent
which led to the castle; and when, turning round from beside the wall
to look at the manse, he thought of Mary, and thought, too, that he
could now no longer visit her as before, his heart swelled almost to
bursting. “But I am like a straw on the current,” he said, “and must
drift wherever the force of events carries me. Coward that I am! Why do
I live in a world for which I am so wretchedly unfitted?”
He had now passed the Rubicon. His first impressions he had resisted;
and the feebler suggestions which afterwards arose in his mind, only
led him to entrench himself the more strongly in the arguments of Sir
John. Besides, he had declared himself a friend to Episcopacy, and thus
barred up his retreat by that shrinking dread of being deemed wavering
and inconsistent, which has so often merely the effect of rendering
such as lie openest to the imputation firm in the wrong place. There
was a secret bitterness in his spirit, that vented itself in caustic
remarks on all whom he had once admired and respected--all save Mary
and her brother, and of them he never spoke. His former habits of
application were broken up; yet, though no longer engrossed by the
studies which it had once seemed the bent of his nature to pursue, he
remained as indifferent as ever to the various pursuits of interest
and ambition which engaged his uncle. After passing a day of restless
inactivity among his books, he walked out a little before sunset in the
direction of the old chapel of St. Regulus, and, ere he took note of
where his wanderings led him, found himself among the graves.
It was a lovely evening of October. The ancient elms and wild
cherry-trees which surrounded the burying-ground still retained
their foliage entire, and the elms were hung in gold, and the wild
cherry-trees in crimson, and the pale yellow tint of the straggling
and irregular fields on the hill-side contrasted strongly with the
deepening russet of the surrounding moor. The tombs and the ruins were
bathed in the yellow light of the setting sun; but to the melancholy
and aimless wanderer the quiet and gorgeous beauty of the scene was
associated with the coming night and the coming winter, with the
sadness of inevitable decay and the gloom of the insatiable grave.
He passed moodily onward, and, on turning an angle of the chapel,
found Mary Anderson seated among the ruins, on the tombstone of her
mother, whom she had lost when a child. There was a slight flush on
her countenance as she rose to meet him, but she held out her hand as
usual, though the young man thought, but it might not be so, that the
grasp was less kindly.
“You have been a great stranger of late, Dallas,” she said; “how have
we been so unhappy as to offend you?”
The young chaplain looked as if he could have sunk into the ground, and
was silent.
“Can it be true,” resumed the maiden, “that you have left us in our
distress, and gone over to the prelates?”
Dallas stammered out an apology, and reminded her that Christianity,
not Presbyterianism, formed the basis of their friendship. “The
Church,” he said, “had too long paid an overweening regard to mere
forms; it was now full time to look to essentials. What mattered it
whether men went to heaven under the jurisdiction of a Presbyterian or
of an Episcopalian Church?” He passed rapidly over the arguments of Sir
John.
“You are deceived, my dear friend,” said Mary. “Look at these cottages
that glitter to the setting sun on the hill-side. Eighty years ago
their inmates were the slaves of gross superstition--creatures who
feared and worshipped they knew not what; and, with no discipline of
purity connected with their uncertain beliefs, they could, like mere
machines, be set in motion, either for good or ill, at the will of
their capricious masters. These cottages, Dallas, are now inhabited
by thinking men; there are Bibles in even the humblest of them--in
even yonder hovel where the old widow lives--and these Bibles are read
and understood. We may hear even now the notes of the evening psalm!
Wist ye how the change was wrought? or what it was that converted mere
animal men into rational creatures? Was it not that very Church which
you have, alas! so rashly forsaken, and now denounce as intolerant?
A strange intolerance, surely, that delivers men from the influence
of their grosser nature, and delights to arm its vassals with a
power before which all tyranny must eventually be overthrown. Be not
deceived, Dallas! Men sometimes suffer themselves to be misled by
theories of a perfect but impossible freedom--impossible, because
unsuited to the low natures and darkened minds of those on whom
they would bestow it--and then submit in despair to the quiet of a
paralysing despotism, because they cannot realize what they have so
fondly imagined. Know ye not that none but the wise and the good can
be truly free--that the vile and the ignorant are necessarily slaves
under whatever form of government they may chance to live? See you
not that the deprecated sway of the Scottish Church has been in truth
but a paternal tutelage--that her children were feeble in mind, and
rude and untoward, when she first laid the hand of her discipline upon
them--and that she has now well-nigh trained them up to be men? And
think you that these, our poor countrymen, already occupy that place
which He who died for them has willed they should attain to? or that
the _many_, no longer a brute herd, but moral and thoughtful, and with
the Bible in their hands, are to remain the willing, unresisting slaves
of the _few_? No, Dallas! when men increase in goodness and knowledge,
there must be also an onward progress towards civil liberty; and the
political bias which you denounce as unfavourable to religion, is
merely the onward groping of this principle. A strange intolerance,
surely, that has already broken the fetters of the bondsman; they
still clank about him, but being what he now is--intelligent and
conscientious--they must inevitably drop off, let his master fret as he
may, and leave him a freeman.”
There was a pause, during which Dallas doggedly fixed his eyes on the
ground. “I have viewed the subject,” he at length said, “with different
eyes. And of this I am sure, there are in the Episcopal Church truly
excellent men who cannot exist without doing good.”
“But look round you,” said Mary, “and say whether the great bulk of
those who are now watching as on tiptoe to swell its ranks, are of the
class you describe? Can you shut your eyes to the fact, that there is
a winnowing process going on in the one Church, and that the chaff and
dust are falling into the other? But, Dallas,” she said, laying her
hand on her breast, “I can no longer dispute with you; and ’twould be
unavailing if I could, for it is not argument but strength that you
want--strength to resist the influence of a more powerful but less
honest mind than your own. There is assuredly a time of trouble coming;
but I feel, Dallas, that your escape from it cannot be more certain
than mine.”
Dallas, who had hitherto avoided her glance, now regarded her with an
expression of solicitude and alarm. She was thin--much thinner than
usual--and her cheeks were crimsoned by a flush of deadly beauty.
The anger which she had excited--for she had convinced him of his
error, despite of his determination not to be convinced, and he was
necessarily angry--vanished in a moment. He grasped her hand, and
bursting into tears, “O Mary!” he exclaimed, “I am a weak, worthless
thing--pity me--pray for me; but no, it were vain, it were vain; I am
lost, and for ever!”
The maiden was deeply affected, and strove to console him. “Retrace
your steps,” she said, “in the might of Him whose strength is perfected
in weakness, and all shall yet be well. My poor brother has mourned
for your defection as he would have done for your death; but he loves
you still, and deeply regrets that an unfortunate quarrel should have
estranged you from him. Come and see him as usual; he has a keen
temper, but need I tell you that he has an affectionate heart? And I
did not think, Dallas, that you could have so soon forgotten myself;
but come, that I may have my revenge.”
The friends parted, and at this time neither of them thought they had
parted for ever. But so it was. Facile and wavering as nature had
formed the young chaplain, he yet indulged in a pride that, conscious
of weakness, would fain solace itself with at least an outside show
of strength and consistency; and he could not forget that he had now
chosen his side. Weeks and months passed, and the day arrived on which,
at the instance of the Bishop of Ross, the nonconforming minister of
Cromarty was to be ejected from his parish.
It was early in December. There had been a severe and still increasing
snow-storm for the two previous days; the earth was deeply covered;
and a strong biting gale from the north-east was now drifting the snow
half-way up the side-walls of the manse. The distant hills rose like
so many shrouded spectres over the dark and melancholy sea--their
heads enveloped in broken wreaths of livid cloud; nature lay dead;
and the very firmament, blackened with tempest, seemed a huge burial
vault. The wind shrieked and wailed like an unhappy spirit among the
turrets and chimneys of the old castle. Dallas undid the covering of
the shot-hole that looked down on the manse, and then hastily shutting
it, flung himself on his bed, where he lay with his face folded in
the bedclothes. Ere he had risen, the shades of evening, deepened by
a furious snow-shower, had set in. He again unbolted the shot-hole
and looked out. The flakes flew so thickly that they obscured every
nearer object, and wholly concealed the more remote: even the manse
had disappeared; but there was a faint gleam of light flickering in
that direction through the shower; and as the air cleared, the chaplain
could see that it proceeded from two lighted candles placed in one of
the windows. Dreading he knew not what, he descended the turret stair,
and on entering the hall found one of the domestics, an elderly woman,
preparing to quit it. “This,” he said, addressing her, “is surely no
night for going abroad, Martha?” “Ah, no!” replied the woman, “but I
am going to the manse; there is distress there. Mary Anderson died
this morning, and it will be a thin lykewake.” “Mary Anderson! thin
lykewake!” said Dallas, repeating her words as if unconscious of their
meaning: “I’ll go with you.” And, as if moved by some impulse merely
mechanical, he followed the woman.
The dead chamber was profusely lighted, according to the custom of the
country, and the bed, with every other piece of furniture which it
contained, was hung with white. The bereaved brother had shut himself
up in his room, where he might be heard at times as if struggling with
inexpressible anguish in the agony of prayer; and only two elderly
women, one of them the nurse of Mary, watched beside the corpse. With
an unsteady step and pallid countenance, on the lineaments of which
a quiescent but settled despair was frightfully impressed, Dallas
entered the apartment and stood fronting the bed. The nurse greeted
him in a few brief words, expressive of their mutual loss; but he saw
her not--heard her not. He saw only the long white shroud with its
fearfully significant outline--heard only the beatings of his own
heart. The eyes of the good old woman filled with tears as she gazed on
him, and, slowly rising, she uncovered the face of the dead. He bent
forward; _there_ was the open and beautiful forehead, and there the
exquisite features, thin and wasted ’tis true, but lovely as ever. A
faint smile still lingered on the lip; it was a smile that called upon
thoughts and feelings the most solemn and holy, and whispered of the
joys of immortality from amid the calm and awful sublimity of death.
“Ah, my bairn!” said the woman, “weel and lang did she loe you, and
meikle did she grieve for you and pray for you, when ye went o’er to
the prelates. But her griefs are a’ ended now. Ken ye, Dallas, that for
years an’ years she loed ye wi’ mair than a sister’s luve, an’ that
if she didna just meet wi’ your hopes, it was only because she kent
o’er weel she was to die young?” Dallas struck his open palm against
his forehead; a convulsive emotion shook his frame; and, bursting into
tears, he flung himself out of the room.
The funeral passed over; and the brother of Mary quitted the parish
a homeless and solitary man, with a grieving heart but an unbroken
spirit. He had to mourn both for the dead and the estranged; and found
that the low insults and cruel suspicions of the persecutor dogged
him wherever he went. But his state was one of comfort compared with
that of his hapless friend. Grief, terror, and remorse, lorded it over
the unfortunate chaplain by turns, and what was at first but mere
inquietude had become anguish. He was sitting a few weeks after the
interment in the eastern turret, his eyes fixed vacantly on the fire,
which was dying on the hearth at his feet, when Sir John abruptly
entered, and drew in his seat beside him.
“Your fire, nephew,” he said, as he trimmed it, “very much resembles
yourself. There is no lack of the right material, but it wants just a
little stirring, and is useless for want of it. It is no time, Dallas,
to be loitering away life when a bright prospect of honourable ambition
and extensive usefulness is opening full before you. Wot you not that
our neighbour the bishop, now a worn-out old man, has been confined
to his room for the last week? And should my cousin of Tarbat and
myself agree in recommending a successor, as we unquestionably shall,
where think you lies the influence powerful enough to thwart us? But a
diocese so important, nephew, can be the prize of no indolent dreamer.”
“Uncle,” said Dallas, in a tone of deep melancholy, “do you believe
that those who have been once awakened to the truth may yet fall away
and perish?”
“Why perplex yourself with such questions?” replied his uncle. “We are
creatures intended for both this world and the next; each demands that
certain duties be performed; and of all men, woe to him of a musing and
speculative turn, who, though not devoid of a sense of duty, fails in
the requirements of the present state. His thoughts become fiends to
torment him. But up, nephew, and act, and you will find that all will
be well.”
“Act! How?--to what purpose?--how read you the text--‘It is impossible
for those who were once enlightened, if they fall away, to renew them
to repentance?’ I have fallen--fallen for ever.”
“Dallas,” said Sir John, “what wild thought has now possessed you?--You
are but one of many thousands;--I know not a more hopeful clergyman of
your standing connected with the Church.”
“Wretched, wretched Church, if it be so! But what are her ministers?
Trees twice dead, plucked up by the roots--wandering stars, for whom
is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever. Yes, I am as hopeful
as most of her ministers. Mary Anderson told me what was coming; and,
hypocrite that I am! I believed her, and yet denied that I did. I saw
her last night;--she was beautiful as ever--but ah! there was no love,
no pity in her eye--and the wide, wide gulf was between us.”
“Dearest nephew, why talk so wildly?” exclaimed Sir John.
“Uncle, you have ever been kind to me,” replied Dallas; “but you have
ruined--no, wretched creature! ’twas I, myself, who have ruined my
soul; and there is neither love nor gratitude in the place to which I
am going. O leave me to myself! my thoughts become more fearful when I
embody them in words;--leave me to myself! and, uncle, while there is
yet space, seek after that repentance which is denied to me. Avoid the
unpardonable sin.”
The strong mind of Sir John was prostrated before the fearfully excited
feelings of his nephew, as a massy barrier of iron may be beaten down
by a cannon-ball; and he descended the turret stair rebuked and humbled
by an energy more potent than his own--as if, for the time, he and the
young man had exchanged characters. Next morning Dallas was nowhere to
be found.
He was seen about sunrise, by a farmer of the parish, passing hurriedly
along the ridge of the hill. The man, a staid Presbyterian, with
whom he had once loved to converse, had saluted him as he passed, and
then paused for half a second in the expectation that, as usual, he
would address him in turn; but he seemed wholly unconscious of his
presence. His face, he said, was of a deadly paleness, and his pace,
though hurried, seemed strangely unequal, as if he were exhausted
by indisposition or fatigue. The day wore on; and towards evening,
Sir John, who could no longer conceal the anxiety which he felt,
ordered out all his domestics in quest of him. But the night soon
fell dark and rainy, and the party was on the eve of relinquishing
the search, when, in passing along the edge of the _Look-out_, one of
the servants observed something white lying on the little grassy bank
which surmounts the precipice. It was an open Bible--the gift, as the
title-page intimated, of Mary Anderson to Dallas Urquhart. Sir John
struck his clenched fist against his forehead.
“Gracious heaven!” he exclaimed, “he has destroyed himself--to the foot
of the rock--to the foot of the rock;--and haste! for the tide is fast
rising. But stay--let me forward--I will lead the way myself.”
And, passing through his terrified attendants, he began to descend by
a path nearly invisible in the darkness, and which, winding along the
narrow shelves of the precipice, seemed barely accessible even by day
to the light foot of the schoolboy. There was only one of the many who
now thronged the rock edge who had courage enough to follow him--a tall
spare man, wrapped up in a dark-coloured cloak. As the path became
narrower and more broken, and overhung still more and more fearfully
the dizzy descent, the stranger, who passed lightly and steadily
along, repeatedly extended his arm to the assistance of the knight,
who, through agitation and the stiffness incident to a period of life
considerably advanced, stumbled frightfully as he hurried down. They
reached the shore in safety together. All was dismally solitary. They
could see only the dark rock towering over them, and the line of white
waves which were tumbling over the beach, and had now begun to lash the
base of the precipice.
“Alas! my poor lost friend!” ejaculated the stranger--“lost, alas!
for ever, when I had hoped most for thy return. Wretched, unfortunate
creature! with little care of thine own for the things of this world,
and yet ever led away by those who worshipped them as their only
god--alas! alas! how hast thou perished!”
“Spare me, Hugh Anderson!” said Sir John, “spare me!--do not, I implore
you, add to the anguish of this miserable night!”
They walked together in silence to where the waves barred their further
progress, and then returned to the top of the precipice. The search
was renewed in the morning, but as ineffectually as on the preceding
night--there was no trace of the body. Seasons passed away; Sir John,
as has been already related, perished by his own act; Episcopacy fell;
and Hugh Anderson, now a greyheaded elderly man, was reappointed, after
the lapse of more than thirty years, to his old charge, the parish of
Cromarty.
He had quitted it amid the snow-wreaths of a severe and boisterous
winter; he returned to it after a storm of wind and snow from the sea
had heaped the beach with wrack and tangle, and torn their mantles
of ivy from some of the higher precipices. He revisited with anxious
solicitude the well-remembered haunts endeared to him by so many fond,
yet mournful recollections--Mary’s favourite walks--the cliffs which he
had so often scaled with Dallas--and the path which he had descended
in the darkness with the hapless Sir John. He paused at the foot of
the precipice--the storm had swept fiercely over its iron forehead,
and an immense bush of ivy, that had fallen from the ledge of the
_apple-yardie_, lay withering at its base. His eye caught something of
unusual appearance amid the torn and broken foliage--it was a human
skull, bleached white by the rains and the sunshine of many seasons,
and a few disjointed and fractured bones lay scattered near it.
Painfully did he gather them up, and painfully scooping out with his
pointed stick a hollow in the neighbouring bank, he shed, as he covered
them up from the sight, the last tears that have fallen to the memory
of the lost Dallas Urquhart.
CHAPTER X.
“A mighty good sort of man.”--BONNEL THORNTON.
[Sidenote: THE CURATES.]
The Episcopalian minister of Cromarty was a Mr. Bernard Mackenzie, a
quiet, timid sort of man, with little force of character, but with what
served his turn equally well, a good deal of cunning. He came to the
parish in the full expectation of being torn to pieces, and with an
aspect so wo-begone and miserable--for his very countenance told how
unambitious he was of being a martyr--that the people pitied instead
of insulting him; and, in the course of a few weeks, he had not an
ill-wisher among them, however disaffected some of them were to his
Church. No one could be more conversant than the curate with the policy
of submission, or could become all things to all men with happier
effect. The people, who, like the great bulk of the people everywhere,
were better acquainted with the duties of ministers than with their
own, were liberal in giving advices, and no person could be more
submissive in listening to these than the curate. Some of them, too,
had found out the knack of being religious without being moral, and the
curate was by much too polite to hint to them that the knack was a bad
one. And thus he went on, suiting himself to every event, and borrowing
the tone of his character from those whom it was his duty rather to
lead than to follow, until the great event of the Revolution, which
he also surmounted by taking the oath of allegiance that recognised
William as king both in fact and in law. With all his policy, however,
he could not help dying a few years after, when he was succeeded by the
old ejected minister, Hugh Anderson.
The curate of the neighbouring parish of Nigg, a Mr. James Mackenzie,
was in some respects a different sort of person. He was nearly as quiet
and submissive as his namesake of Cromarty, and he was not much more
religious; for when, one Sunday morning, he chanced to meet the girls
of a fishing village returning home laden with shell-fish, he only
told them that they should strive to divide the day so as to avail
themselves both of the church and the ebb. He was, however, a simple,
benevolent sort of man, who had no harm in him, and never suspected
it in others; and so little was he given to notice what was passing
around him, as to be ignorant, it was said, of the exact number of
his children, though it was known to every one else in the parish
that they amounted to twenty. They were all sent out to nurse, as was
customary at the period; and when the usual term had expired, and they
were returned to the manse, it proved a sad puzzle to the poor curate
to recollect their names. On one occasion, when the whole twenty had
gathered round his table, there was a little red-cheeked girl among
them, who having succeeded in climbing to his knee, delighted him so
much with her prattle, that he told her, after half smothering her
with kisses, that “gin she were a bairn o’ his, he would gie her a
tocher o’ three hunder merk mair nor ony o’ the lave.” “Then haud ye,
gudeman,” said his wife; “for as sure as ye’re sitting there, it’s yer
ain Jenny.” The descendants of the curate, as might be anticipated from
the number of his children, are widely spread over the country, and
exhibit almost every variety of fortune and cast of mind. One of them,
a poor pauper, died a few years ago in the last extreme of destitution
and wretchedness; another, an eminent Scottish lawyer, now sits on
the Bench as one of the Lords of Session. One of his elder sons was
grandfather to the celebrated Henry Mackenzie of Edinburgh, and the
great-great-grandchild of the little prattling Jenny is the writer of
these chapters.
[Sidenote: DONALD ROY OF NIGG.]
The bulk of the people of Nigg had just as little religion as their
pastor. Every Sunday forenoon they attended church, but the evening
of the day was devoted to the common athletic games of the country. A
robust active young fellow, named Donald Roy, was deemed their best
club-player; and, as the game was a popular one, his Sabbath evenings
were usually spent at the club. He was a farmer, and the owner of a
small herd of black cattle. On returning home one Sabbath evening,
after vanquishing the most skilful of his competitors, he found the
carcase of one of his best cattle lying across the threshold, where
she had dropt down a few minutes before. Next Sabbath he headed the
club-players as usual, and on returning at the same hour, he found
the dead body of a second cow lying in exactly the same place. “Can
it be possible,” thought he, “that the Whigs are in the right after
all?” A challenge, however, had been given to the club-players of a
neighbouring parish, and, as the game was to be played out on the
following Sabbath, he could not bring himself to resolve the question.
When the day came, Donald played beyond all praise, and, elated by the
victory which his exertions had at length secured to his parish, he
was striding homeward through a green lane, when a fine cow, which he
had purchased only a few days before came pressing through the fence,
and flinging herself down before him, expired at his feet with a deep
horrible bellow. “This is God’s judgment!” exclaimed Donald, “the
Whigamores are in the right;--I have taken _His_ day, and he takes _my_
cattle.” He never after played at the club; and, such was the change
effected on his character, that shortly after the Revolution he was
ordained an elder of the church, and he became afterwards one of the
most notable worthies of the North. There are several stories still
extant regarding him, which show that he must have latterly belonged
to that extraordinary class of men (now extinct) who, living, as it
were, on the extreme verge of the natural world, and seeing far into
the world of spirits, had in their times of darkness to do battle with
the worst inmates of the latter, and saw in their seasons of light the
extreme bounds of the distant and the future. This class comprised at
one time some of the stanchest champions of the Covenant, and we find
at its head the celebrated Donald Cargill and Alexander Peden.
Some of the stories told of Donald Roy, which serve to identify him
with this class, are worthy of being preserved. On one occasion, it
is said, that when walking after nightfall on a solitary road, he was
distressed by a series of blasphemous thoughts, which came pouring into
his mind despite of all his exertions to exclude them. Still, however,
he struggled manfully, and was gradually working himself into a better
frame, when looking downwards he saw what seemed to be a black dog
trotting by his side. “Ah!” he exclaimed, “and so I have got company;
I might have guessed so sooner.” The thing growled as he spoke, and
bounding a few yards before him, emitted an intensely bright jet of
flame, which came streaming along the road until it seemed to hiss and
crackle beneath his feet. On he went, however, without turning to the
right hand or to the left, and the thing bounding away as before, stood
and emitted a second jet. “Na, na, it winna do,” said the imperturbable
Donald: “ye first tried to loose my haud o’ my Master, and ye would now
fain gie me a fleg; but I ken baith him and you ower weel for that.”
The appearance, however, went on bounding and emitting flame by turns,
until he had reached the outer limits of his farm, when it vanished.
About seventy years after the Revolution, he was engaged in what is
termed _proofing_ the stacks of a corn-yard, on the hilly farm of
Castle-Craig. There were other two men with him employed in handing
down and threshing the sheaves. The clay was exceedingly boisterous,
and towards evening there came on a heavy snow-storm. “Our elder,” said
one of the men to his companion, “will hae deep stepping home through
the snaw thraves; he would better stay at the Craig--will you no ask
him?” “Man, look,” said the other, “what is he about?--look--look!” At
a little distance, in a waste corner of the barn, sat the elder, his
broad blue bonnet drawn over his brow, his eyes fixed on the wall; and
ever and anon would he raise his hands and then clasp them together, as
if witnessing some scene of intense and terrible interest. At times,
too, he would mutter to himself like a deranged person; and the men,
who had dropped their flails and stood looking at him, could hear him
exclaiming in a rapid but subdued tone of voice, “Let her drive--let
her drive!--Dinna haud her side to the sea.” Then striking his palms
together, he shouted out, “She’s o’er--she’s o’er!--O the puir widows
o’ Dunskaith!--but God’s will be done.” “Elder,” said one of the men,
“are ye no weel?--ye wald better gang in till the house.” “No,” said
Donald, “let’s awa to the burn o’ Nigg;--there has been ill enough
come o’ this sad night already--let’s awa to the burn, or there’ll be
more.” And rising from his seat with the alacrity of his club-playing
days, though he was now turned of ninety, he strode out into the storm,
followed by the two men. “What’s that?” asked one of the men, pointing,
as he reached the burn, to a piece of red tartan which projected from
the edge of an immense wreath, “Od! but it’s our Jenny’s _brottie_
sticking out thro’ the snaw:--An’ oh! but here’s Jenny hersel’.” The
poor woman, who had been visiting a friend at the other end of the
parish, had set out for Castle-Craig at the beginning of the storm, and
exhausted with cold and fatigue, had sunk at the side of the stream a
few minutes before. She was carried to the nearest cottage, and soon
recovered. And the following morning afforded a sad explanation of the
darker vision--the wreck of a Dunskaith boat, and the dead bodies of
some of the crew being found on the beach below the Craig.
A grand-daughter of the elder who was married to a respectable Cromarty
tradesman, was seized in her thirtieth year by a dangerous fever, and
her life despaired of. At the very crisis of the disease her husband
was called by urgent business to the parish of Tarbat. On passing
through Nigg he waited on Donald, and, informing him of her illness,
expressed his fears that he would not again see her in life. “Step in
on your coming back,” said the elder, “and dinna tine heart--for she’s
in gude hands.” The husband’s journey was a hurried one, and in less
than three hours after he had returned to the cottage of Donald, who
came out to meet him. “Come in, Robert,” he said, “and cool yoursel’;
ye hae travelled ower hard;--come in, and dinna be sae distressed,
for there’s nae cause. Kettie will get o’er this, and live to see the
youngest o’ her bairns settled in the world, and doing for themselves.”
And his prediction was accomplished to the very letter. The husband,
on his return, found that the fever had abated in a very remarkable
manner a few hours before; and in less than a week after, his wife had
perfectly recovered. More than forty years from this time, when the
writer was a little kilted urchin of five summers, he has stood by
her knee listening to her stories of Donald Roy. “And now,” has she
said, after narrating the one in which she herself was so specially
concerned, “all my bairns are doing for themselves, as the good man
prophesied; and I have lived to tell of him to you, my little curious
boy, the bairn of my youngest bairn.” I have little of the pride of
family in my disposition; and, indeed, cannot plume myself much on the
score of descent, for, for the last two hundred years, my ancestors
have been merely shrewd honest people, who loved their country too well
to do it any discredit; but I am unable to resist the temptation of
showing that I can claim kindred with the good old seer of Nigg, and
the Addison of Scotland.
There is a still more wonderful story told of Donald Roy than any of
these. On one of the days of preparation set apart by the Scottish
Church previous to the dispensation of the sacrament, it is still
customary in the north of Scotland for the elders to address the people
on what may be termed the internal evidences of religion, tested by
their own experience. The day dedicated to this purpose is termed
_the day of the men_; and so popular are its duties, that there are
none of the other days which the clergyman might not more safely set
aside. When there is a lack of necessary talent among the elders of
a parish, they are called dumb elders, and their places are supplied
on the day of the men by the more gifted worthies of the parishes
adjoining. Such a lack occurred about a century ago in the eldership
of Urray, a semi-Highland parish, near Dingwall;--and at the request
of the minister to the Session of Nigg, that some of the Nigg elders,
who at that time were the most famous in the country, should come
and officiate in the room of his own, Donald Roy and three other men
were despatched to Urray. They reached the confines of the parish
towards evening, and when passing the house of a gentleman, one of
the heritors, they were greeted by the housekeeper, a woman of Nigg,
who insisted on their turning aside and spending the evening with
her. Her mistress, she said, was a stanch Roman Catholic, but one of
the best creatures that ever lived, and, if the thing was possible, a
Christian;--her master was a kind, good-natured man, of no religion at
all; she was a great favourite with both, and was very sure that any
of her friends would be made heartily welcome to the best their hall
afforded. Donald’s companions would have declined the invitation, as
beneath the dignity of men of independence and elders of the Church;
but he himself, though quite as much a Whig as any of them, joined with
the woman in urging them to accept of it. “I am sure,” he said, “we
have been sent here for some special end, and let us not suffer a silly
pride to turn us back without our errand.”
There was one of the closets of the house converted by the lady into a
kind of chapel or oratory. A small altar was placed in the centre; and
the walls were hollowed into twelve niches, occupied by little brass
images of the apostles. The lady was on the eve of retiring to this
place to her evening devotions, when the housekeeper came to inform her
of her guests, and to request that they should be permitted to worship
together, after the manner of their Church, in one of the out-houses.
Leave was granted, and the lady retired to her room. Instead, however,
of kneeling before the altar as usual, she seated herself at a window.
And first there rose from the out-house a low mellow strain of music,
swelling and sinking alternately, like the murmurs of the night wind
echoing through the apartments of an old castle. When it had ceased
she could hear the fainter and more monotonous sounds of reading. Anon
there was a short pause, and then a scarcely audible whisper, which
heightened, however, as the speaker proceeded. Donald Roy was engaged
in prayer. There were two wax tapers burning on the altar, and as the
prayer waxed louder the flames began to stream from the wicks, as if
exposed to a strong current of air, and the saints to tremble in their
niches. The lady turned hastily from the window, and as she turned, one
of the images toppling over, fell upon the floor; another and another
succeeded, until the whole twelve were overthrown. When the prayer
had ceased, the elders were summoned to attend the lady. “Let us take
our Bibles with us,” said Donald; “Dagon has fallen, and the ark o’
the Bible is to be set up in his place.” And so it was;--they found
the lady prepared to become a willing convert to its doctrines; and
on the following morning the twelve images were flung into the Conan.
Rather more than twenty years ago a fisherman, when dragging for salmon
in a pool of the river in the immediate neighbourhood of Urray, drew
ashore a little brass figure, so richly gilt, that for some time it
was supposed to be of gold; and the incident was deemed by the country
people an indubitable proof of the truth of the story.
Donald Roy, after he had been for full sixty years an elder of
the Church, was compelled by one of those high-handed acts of
ecclesiastical intrusion, which were unfortunately so common in
Scotland about the middle of the last century, to quit it for ever; and
all the people of the parish following him as their leader, they built
for themselves a meeting-house, and joined the ranks of the Secession.
Such, however, was their attachment to the National Church, that for
nearly ten years after the outrage had been perpetrated, they continued
to worship in its communion, encouraged by the occasional ministrations
of the most distinguished divine of the north of Scotland in that
age, Mr. Fraser of Alness, the author of a volume on Sanctification,
still regarded as a standard work by our Scottish theologians. The
presbytery, however, refusing to tolerate the irregularity, the people
were at length lost to the Established Church; and the dissenting
congregation which they formed still exists as one of the most numerous
and respectable in that part of the kingdom. We find it recorded by Dr.
Hetherington in his admirable Church History, that “great opposition
was made by the pious parishioners to the settlement of the obnoxious
presentee, and equal reluctance manifested by the majority of the
presbytery to perpetrate the outrage commanded by the superior courts.
But the fate of Gillespie was before their eyes; and, under a strong
feeling of sorrow and regret, four of the presbytery repaired to the
church at Nigg to discharge the painful duty. The church was empty;
not a single member of the congregation was to be seen. While in a
state of perplexity what to do in such a strange condition, one man
appeared who had it in charge to tell them. ‘That the blood of the
people of Nigg would be required of them if they should _settle a man
to the walls of the kirk_.’ Having delivered solemnly this appalling
message, he departed, leaving the presbytery astonished and paralysed.
And proceeding no further at the time, they reported the case to the
General Assembly of the following year; by whom, however, the intrusion
of the obnoxious presentee was ultimately compelled.” I need scarce
say, that the one man who on this occasion paralysed the presbytery
and arrested the work of intrusion for the day, was the venerable
patriarch of Nigg, at this time considerably turned of eighty. He died
in the month of January 1774, in the 109th year of his age and the 84th
of his eldership, and his death and character were recorded in the
newspapers of the time.
[Sidenote: THE BREAKING OF THE BURGH.]
In bearing Donald company into an age so recent, I have wandered far
from the era of the curates, and must now return. Their time-serving
dogmas seem to have had no very heightening effect on the morals of
the burghers of Cromarty. Prior to the year 1670, the town was a
royal burgh, and sent its commissioner to the Convention, and its
representative to Parliament. For the ten years previous, however, its
provost and bailies had set themselves with the most perfect unanimity
to convert its revenues into gin and brandy, the favourite liquors of
the period; and then to contract heavy debts on its various properties,
that they might carry on the process on a more extensive scale. And
in this year, when the whole was absorbed, they made over their lands
to Sir John Urquhart, the proprietor, “in consideration,” says the
document in which the transaction is recorded, “of his having instantly
advanced, paid, and delivered to them 5000 merks Scots, for outredding
them of their necessary and most urgent affairs.” The burgh was
disfranchised shortly after by an act of the Privy Council, in answer
to a petition from Sir John and the burghers. There is a tradition,
that in the previous ten years of license, in which the leading men
of Cromarty were so successful in imitating the leading men of the
kingdom, the council met regularly once a day in the little vaulted
cell beneath the cross, to discuss the affairs of the burgh; and so
sorely would they be exhausted, it is said, by a press of business and
the brandy, that it was generally found necessary to carry them home at
night. But it was all for the good of the place; and so perseveringly
were they devoted to its welfare, that their last meeting was prolonged
for three days together.
[Sidenote: GEORGE, EARL OF CROMARTIE.]
Sir John did not long enjoy this accession to his property, destroying
himself in a fit of melancholy, as has been already related, three
years after. He was succeeded by his son Jonathan, the last of the
Urquharts of Cromarty; for, finding the revenues of his house much
dilapidated by the misfortunes of Sir Thomas, and perceiving that
all his father’s exertions had failed to improve them, he brought
the estate to sale, when it was purchased by Sir George Mackenzie
of Tarbat. This accomplished courtier and able man was the scion of
a family that, in little more than a century, had buoyed itself up,
by mere dint of talent, from a state of comparative obscurity into
affluence and eminence. The founder, Roderick Mackenzie, was second son
of Colin of Kintail, a Highland chief of the sixteenth century, whose
eldest son, Kenneth, carried on the line of Seaforth. Roderick, who,
says Douglas in his Scottish Peerage, was a man of singular prudence
and courage, and highly instrumental in civilizing the northern parts
of the kingdom, was knighted by James VI., and left two sons, John
and Kenneth. John, the elder, was created a baronet in the succeeding
reign, and bequeathed at his death his lands to his son George of
Tarbat, the purchaser of the lands of Cromarty. Sir George was born in
the castle of Loch-Slin, near Tain, in the year 1630, and devoted a
long life to the study of human affairs, and the laws and antiquities
of the kingdom. He was one of those wary politicians who, according
to Dryden, neither love nor hate, but are honest as far as honesty is
expedient, and never glaringly vicious, because it is impolitic to be
wicked over-much. And never was there a man more thoroughly conversant
with the intrigues of a court, or more skilful in availing himself
of every chance combination of circumstances. Despite of the various
changes which took place in the government of the country, he rose
gradually into eminence and power during the reigns of Charles and
James, and reached, in the reign of Anne, when he was made secretary
of state and Earl of Cromartie, the apex of his ambition. He found
leisure, in the course of a very busy life, to write two historical
dissertations of great research--the one a vindication of Robert III.
of Scotland from the charge of bastardy, the other an account of the
Gowrie conspiracy. He wrote, besides, a _Synopsis Apocalyptica_,
and recorded several interesting facts regarding the formation of
peat-moss, which we find quoted by Mr. Rennie of Kilsyth in his
elaborate essay. He is the writer, too, of a curious letter on the
second sight, addressed to the Honourable Robert Boyle, which may be
found in an appendix attached to the fifth volume of Pepys’ Memoirs. On
his death, which took place in 1714, his eldest son John succeeded to
his titles and the lands of Tarbat, and his second son Sir Kenneth to
the estate of Cromarty.
Some time ago, when on a journey in Easter Ross, I had to take shelter
from a sudden shower in an old ruinous building, which had once been
the dwelling-house of Lord Cromartie’s chamberlain. The roof was not
yet gone, but the floors had fallen, and the windows were divested
of the frames. Miscellaneous heaps of rubbish were spread over the
pavement; and in one of the corners there was a pile of tattered
papers, partially glued to the floor and to each other by the rain,
which pattered upon them through the crevices of the roof. The first I
examined was written in a cramp old hand, and bore date 1682. At the
bottom was the name of the writer, George Mackenzie. The next, which
was dated nineteen years later, was in the same hand, but still more
cramp. It was signed Tarbat. The third was scarcely legible, but I
could decipher the word Cromartie, appended to it as a signature. Alas!
I exclaimed, for the sagacious statesman. He was, I perceive, becoming
old as he was growing great; and I doubt much whether the honours of
his age, when united to its infirmities, were half so productive of
happiness as the hopes and high spirits of his youth. And what _now_
is the result of all his busy hours, if they were not completely
satisfactory _then_? Here are a few sybilline-like leaves, the sole
records, perhaps, of his common everyday affairs; his literary labours
fill a few inches of the shelves of our older libraries; and a few
unnoticed pages in the more prolix histories of our country tell all
the rest. Life would not be worth one’s acceptance if it led to nothing
better; and yet of all the mere men of the world who ever designed
sagaciously, and laboured indefatigably, how very few have been so
fortunate as the Earl of Cromartie!
There was no very immediate effect produced by the Revolution in the
parish of Cromarty, and indeed but little in the north of Scotland.
The Episcopalian clergymen in this quarter were quite as unwilling to
relinquish their livings, as the Presbyterians had been twenty-eight
years before; and setting themselves to reconcile, as they best could,
their interest with what they deemed their duty, they professed their
willingness to recognise William as their king in _fact_, though not in
_law_. To meet this sophism, William demanded, in what was termed the
Assurance Oath, a recognition of his authority as not only actual but
legitimate; and a hundred Episcopal ministers, who complied by taking
the oath, were allowed to retain their livings without being restricted
to the jurisdiction of courts of Presbytery. So large a proportion of
these fell to the share of the northern counties, that in that part of
the kingdom which extends from the Firth of Beauly to John o’ Groat’s,
and from sea to sea, there was only one presbytery, consisting, for
several years after the Revolution, of only eight clergymen.
[Sidenote: THE UNION.]
The next political event of importance which agitated the kingdom was
the Union. And there was at least one of the people of Cromarty who
regarded it with no very complacent feeling. He was a Mr. William
Morrison, the parish schoolmaster. I have seen a manuscript of 230
pages, written by this person between the years 1710 and 1713,
containing a full detail of his religious experience; and as a good
deal of his religion consisted in finding fault, and a good deal more
in the vagaries of a wild imagination, though the residue seems to have
been sincere, he has introduced into his pages much foreign matter, of
a kind interesting to the local antiquary. He was one of that class
who read the Bible in a way it can be made to prove anything; and he
deemed it directly opposed not only to the Union and the Abjuration
Oath of the succeeding reign, but to the very Act of Toleration, which
secured to the poor curates the privilege of being, like himself, the
open opponents of both. “May we not truly account,” says he, “for the
deadness and carnality of the Church at this present time (1712), by
the great hand many of its members had in carrying on the late Union,
of sorrowful memory, whereby our country’s power to act for herself,
both as to religion and libertie, is hung under the belt of idolatrous
England? Woe unto thee, Scotland, for thou hast sold thy birth-right!
Woe unto thee for the too too much Erastian-like obedience of the most
part of thy Church to the laws of the men of this generation--men who,
having established a tolleration for all sorts of wickedness, have set
up Baal’s altars beside the altars of the Lord! Woe unto thee for that
Shibboleth, the oath of abjuration, which the Lord hath permitted to
try thy pulse to see how it did beat towards him! Alreadie hath thy
Church, through its unvaliant, faint, cowardly, and, I am bold to say,
ungodly spirit, suffered woful encroachments to be made on Christ’s
truths in this kingdom, and yet all under a biassing pretence of witt
and policy--leaving not only hoofs in Egypt, but also many of the best
of the flock of God’s revealed injunctions. Art thou not discouraged
and beaten back, O Church! from thy duty, by the sounding of the
shaking leaf of a parliament of the worms of the earth, that creep,
peep, and cry, appearing out of their holes and dens in this time in
Scotland’s dark night, when only such creatures come abroad in their
native shapes and colours. For if the sun did now as clearly shine on
the land as at former times, they would not so appear. It is in the
night-time that evil spirits and wild beasts seize on folk, and cry
in the streets to fleg and flichter them; and such as they find most
feared and apprehensive they haunt most. And so, O Scotland! is thy
Church affeared and flichtered with the scriekings and worryings of an
evil Parliament.”
CHAPTER XI.
“Give us, for our abstractions, solid facts--
For our disputes, plain pictures.”--WORDSWORTH.
[Sidenote: IMPORTANT EVENTS WHICH AFFECT THE RELIGIOUS CHARACTER.]
Religion never operates on the human mind without stamping upon it the
more prominent traits of its own character, and very rarely without
being impressed in turn (if I may so speak) with some of the peculiar
traits of every individual mind on which it acts. Like a chemical
test applied to a heterogeneous mixture, it meets much that it must
necessarily repel, and much also with which it combines. And we find
it not only accommodating itself in this way to the peculiarities of
character, but, in many instances, even adding a new force to these. In
the mind of the deep thinker it is moulded into a sublime and living
philosophy, and he cannot subsist under its influence without thinking
more deeply, and becoming more truly a philosopher than before. And
what does it prove to the ignorant and credulous man?--no superstition
certainly, and yet so exceedingly akin in some of its effects to
superstition, that we find it lending, as if it were really such, an
indirect sanction to at least the less heterodox of his superstitious
beliefs--the wonders of Revelation moulding themselves into a kind
of corroborate evidences of whatever else of the supernatural he
had previously credited. It imparts a higher tone of ecstasy to the
raptures of the enthusiast--furnishes the visionary with his brightest
dreams--gives a more intense gaiety to the joyous--a deeper gravity to
the serious--and not unfrequently a darker gloom to the melancholy.
Like the most fervent of its apostles, and in much the same degree,
it becomes all things to all men. And if this hold true in individual
character, its truth is not less strikingly apparent in the character
of an age or country. The schoolmaster of Cromarty and the elder of
Nigg belonged each to a numerous class; and the brief notices of
these men which I have introduced into the foregoing chapter, may
properly enough be regarded rather as national than individual in their
character. No one who has perused the more popular writings of the
Covenanters--Naphtali, the Hind let Loose, the Tracts of Peter Walker,
and the older editions of the Scots Worthies--will fail of recognising,
in my quotation from Morrison, the self-same spirit which animated the
writers of these volumes, or be disposed to question the propriety of
classing Donald Roy with our Cargills, Pedens, and Rutherfords.
The aspect of religion, when thus amalgamated with the enthusiasm
or the superstitions of a country, is always in accordance with the
direction which that enthusiasm has taken, or with the peculiar cast of
these superstitions, or with the nature of the circumstances and events
by which they were modified or produced. These last (circumstances
and events) must be regarded as primary agents in this process of
amalgamation; and they may be divided into three distinct classes. In
the first are great political convulsions, which agitate and unsettle
the minds of whole communities. In every period of the history of
every country, there exists a certain quantum of superstition and
enthusiasm--a certain proportion of the men who see visions and dream
dreams; but in times of quiet, when every visionary has his own
distinct province assigned to him by some little chance peculiar to
himself, the quantum is variously directed; and thus, flowing in a
thousand obscure channels, it can have no marked effect on the body of
a people. But it is not thus in times of convulsion, when all men look
one way, are interested in the same events, and direct their energies
on the same objects. The quantum, swollen in bulk by the workings of
these storms of the people, flows also in one channel; and thus, to
a force increased in all its details, there is added a collective
impetus. Hence its overmastering power. No one acquainted with English
history need be reminded of those times of the Commonwealth, in which,
through an atmosphere of lightning and tempest, whole hordes of
visionaries gazed on what they deemed a still brighter, but more placid
future, and called each one on his own little sect to rejoice in the
prospect. And the first French Revolution was productive of similar
effects. I need not refer to the singular interest elicited in our own
country among the humbler people by the wild predictions of Brothers,
or to the many soberer dreamers who were led, by the general excitement
and portentous events of the period, to interpret amiss a surer word
of prophecy. No one intimate enough with human nature to recognise its
impulses and passions in their various disguises of belief and opinion,
can be ignorant that there is a superstition of scepticism as surely as
of credulity, or fail of identifying the wild infidelity of the French
Commonwealth with the almost equally wild fanaticism of the English one.
The second class of circumstances includes famine, pestilence, and
persecution; and, in particular, the effects of the last are strikingly
singular. In the others, the mind, unsettled by suffering and terror,
ceases to deduce the evils which are overwhelming it from the old
fixed causes which govern the universe, and sends out imagination in
quest of the new. Demons are abroad--death itself becomes a living
spirit, voices of lamentation are heard in the air--spectres seen on
the earth. In such circumstances, however, the very prostration of the
mind sets limits to its delusions; the inventive powers are rather
passive than active; but it is not so in seasons of persecution, when
our fellow-creature--man--is the visible cause of the evils to which
we are subjected, and the combative principle, maddened by oppression,
is roused into an almost preternatural activity. Hence, and from the
energy of excitement and the melancholy of suffering, the persecuted
enthusiast becomes more enthusiastical, and the superstitions of
the credulous assume a darker aspect. Even the true religion seems
impressed with a new character. As Solomon has well expressed it--“wise
men become mad;” and, seen through the medium of their disturbed
imaginations, the common traits of character and of circumstance are
exaggerated into the supernatural. The oppression which is grinding
them to the earth, assumes for their destruction a visible form, and
a miraculous control over the laws of nature. The evil spirit is no
longer formidable merely from his power of biassing the will, and
obliterating the better feelings of the heart; for, assuming a still
more terrible character, and a real and tangible shape, he assails them
in their hiding-places--the cavern and the desert. Even their human
enemies, charmed against the stroke of sword and bullet, are rendered
invulnerable by the same power. And there are miracles wrought also in
their behalf. Their places of hiding are discovered by the persecutor;
but a sudden blindness falls on him, and he cannot avail himself of
the discovery. They are pursued on the hill-side by a troop of horse;
but, when exhausted in the flight, a thick cloud is dropped over
them, and they escape. The enemy is removed by judgments sudden and
fearful. Their curse becomes terribly potent. There is a power given
them of reading the inmost thoughts of the heart; they have visions of
the distant--revelations of the future. These, however, are but the
traits of a comparatively sober enthusiasm, which persecution cannot
altogether goad into madness. In some of the wilder instances we see
even the moral principle unsettled. The Huguenots of Languedoc, when
driven to their mountains by the intolerance of Louis XIV., were headed
by two leaders, a young man whom they named David, and a prophetess
whom they termed the Great Mary. These leaders exercised over them a
despotic authority; and, when any of them proved refractory, they were
condemned by the prophetess without form of trial, and put to death by
their infatuated companions. A few years after the battle of Bothwell
Bridge, a small party of Covenanters, of whom the greater part, says
Walker, “were serious and very gracious souls, though they then
stumbled and fell,” assembled in a moor near Stirling, and burned their
Bibles. Is it not probable that the terrible feuds which convulsed
Jerusalem during the siege of Titus, aggravating in a tenfold degree
the horrors of war and famine, were in part the effects of a similar
frenzy?
The third class of circumstances is of a quieter, but not less
influential character. When a false religion gives place in any country
to the true, there is commonly a mass of what may be termed neutral
superstitions which survive the change. Thor and Woden are dethroned
and forgotten, but the witch, the fairy, and the seer, the ghost of the
departed, and the wraith of the dying, the spirits of the moor and the
forest, of the sea and the river, remain as potent as before. The great
national colossuses of heathenism are prostrated before the genius of
Christianity; but the little idols of the household can be vanquished
by only philosophy and the arts. For religion, as has been already
remarked, instead of militating against the minor superstitions,
lends them, in at least the darker ages, the support of what seems a
corroborative evidence. And as, from natural causes, they must still be
receiving fresh accessions of strength in every country in which they
have taken root, and which remains unvisited by the arts, the testimony
of the heathen fathers regarding them is confirmed by what is deemed
the experience of the Christian children. The visions of the seer are
as distinct as ever, the witch as malignant, the spectre as terrible.
Enthusiasm and superstition go hand in hand together as before, and
under the supposed sanction of a surer creed. The one works miracles,
the other inspires a belief in them; the one predicts, the other traces
the prediction to its fulfilment; the one calls up the spirits of the
dead, the other sees them appear, even when uncalled.
From a peculiar circumstance in the past state of this country, its
traditional history presents us both with the appearance assumed by
superstition when thus connected with religion, and the very similar
aspect which it bears when left to itself. The country had its two
distinct tribes of people, believers in nearly the same superstitions,
but as unlike as can well be imagined in their degree of religious
feeling. No pagan of the past ages differed more in this respect from
the Christians of the present, than the clansmen of the Highland host
did from the poor Covenanters, on whom they were turned loose by the
Archbishop of St. Andrews. And yet neither Peden nor Cargill, nor any
of the other prophets of the Covenant, were favoured with clearer
revelations of the future than some of the Highland seers. What was
deemed prophecy in the one class, was reckoned indeed merely the
second-sight in the other; but there seems to be little danger of error
in referring what are so evidently the same effects to the same causes.
Donald Roy’s vision of the foundering boat, and of the woman perishing
in the snow, is quite in character with the visions of the seers. Peden
was forty miles from Bothwell Bridge on the day of the battle; but he
saw his friends “fleeing and falling before the enemy, with the hanging
and hashing, and the blood running like water.” “Oh the monzies! the
monzies!” he exclaimed on another occasion, when foretelling a bloody
invasion of the French which was to depopulate the country, “See how
they run! see how they run! they are at our firesides, slaying men,
women, and children.” “Be not afraid,” said Bruce of Anwoth, in a
sermon preached on the day the battle of Killiecrankie was stricken;
“be not afraid, I see the enemy scattered, and Claverhouse no longer a
terror to God’s people. This day I see him killed--lying a corpse!” But
there is no lack of such instances, nor of the stories of second-sight
with which they may be so clearly identified. The Tracts of Peter
Walker, and the Lives of the Scots Worthies, abound with the former;
some very striking specimens of the latter may be found in Pepys’
Correspondence with Lord Rea.
[Sidenote: KENNETH ORE.]
Kenneth Ore, a Highlander of Ross-shire, who lived some time in the
seventeenth century, may be regarded as the Peden of the class whom
I have described as superstitious without religion. It is said, that
when serving as a field labourer with a wealthy clansman, who resided
somewhere near Brahan Castle, he made himself so formidable to the
clansman’s wife by his shrewd sarcastic humour, that she resolved on
destroying him by poison. With this design, she mixed a preparation of
noxious herbs with his food, when he was one day employed in digging
turf in a solitary morass, and brought it to him in a pitcher. She
found him lying asleep on one of those conical fairy hillocks which
abound in some parts of the Highlands; and her courage failing her,
instead of awakening him, she set down the pitcher by his side, and
returned home. He awoke shortly after, and, seeing the food, would
have begun his repast, but feeling something press coldly against his
heart, he opened his waistcoat, and found a beautiful smooth stone,
resembling a pearl, but much larger, which had apparently been dropped
into his breast while he slept. He gazed at it in admiration, and
became conscious as he gazed that a strange faculty of seeing the
future as distinctly as the present, and men’s real designs and motives
as clearly as their actions, was miraculously imparted to him. And
it was well for him that he should have become so knowing at such a
crisis; for the first secret he became acquainted with was that of
the treachery practised against him by his mistress. But he derived
little advantage from the faculty ever after, for he led, it is said
till extreme old age, an unsettled, unhappy kind of life--wandering
from place to place, a prophet only of evil, or of little trifling
events, fitted to attract notice when they occurred, merely from the
circumstance of their having been foretold.
There was a time of evil, he said, coming over the Highlands, when
all things would appear fair and promising, and yet be both bad in
themselves, and the beginnings of what would prove worse. A road would
be opened among the hills from sea to sea, and a bridge built over
every stream; but the people would be degenerating as their country was
growing better; there would be ministers among them without grace, and
maidens without shame; and the clans would have become so heartless,
that they would flee out of their country before an army of sheep. Moss
and muir would be converted into corn-land, and yet hunger press as
sorely on the poor as ever. Darker days would follow, for there would
arise a terrible persecution, during which a ford in the river Oickel,
at the head of the Dornoch Firth, would render a passage over the dead
bodies of men, attired in the plaid and bonnet; and on the hill of
_Finnbheim_, in Sutherlandshire, a raven would drink her full of human
blood three times a day for three successive days. The greater part
of this prophecy belongs to the future; but almost all his minor ones
are said to have met their fulfilment. He predicted, it is affirmed,
that there would be dram-shops at the end of almost every furrow; that
a cow would calve on the top of the old tower of Fairburn; that a fox
would rear a litter of cubs on the hearth-stone of Castle Downie; that
another animal of the same species, but white as snow, would be killed
on the western coast of Sutherlandshire; that a wild deer would be
taken alive at Fortrose Point; that a rivulet in Western Ross would
be dried up in winter; and that there would be a deaf Seaforth. But
it would be much easier to prove that these events have really taken
place than that they have been foretold. Some of his other prophecies
are nearly as equivocal, it has been remarked, as the responses of the
old oracles, and true merely in the letter, or in some hidden meaning
capable of being elicited by only the events which they anticipated.
He predicted, it is said, that the ancient Chanonry of Ross, which is
still standing, would fall “full of Mackenzies;” and as the floor of
the building has been used, for time immemorial, as a burying-place
by several powerful families of this name, it is supposed that the
prophecy cannot fail, in this way, of meeting its accomplishment. He
predicted, too, that a huge natural arch near the Storhead of Assynt
would be thrown down, and with so terrible a crash that the cattle
of Led-more, a proprietor who lived twenty miles inland, would break
from their fastenings at the noise. It so happened, however, says the
story, that some of Led-more’s cattle, which were grazing on the lands
of another proprietor, were housed within a few hundred yards of the
arch when it fell. The prophet, shortly before his death, is said to
have flung the white stone into a lake near Brahan, uttering as his
last prediction, that it would be found many years after, when all his
prophecies would be fulfilled, by a lame humpbacked mendicant.
There is a superstitious belief which, in the extent to which it has
been received, ranks next in place to that enthusiasm which inspired
the visionary and the prophet; and it was alike common in the past age
to the Highlander and the Presbyterian. I allude to the belief that
evil spirits have a power of assuming visible forms, in which to tempt
and affright the good, and sometimes destroy the bad--a belief as old,
at least, as the days of St. Dunstan, perhaps much older. For it seems
probable that Satan is merely a successor in the class of stories which
illustrates this belief to the infernal deities; indeed, in some of
our more ancient Scottish traditions, nearly the old designation of
one of these is retained. The victims of Flowden were summoned at the
Cross of Edinburgh in the name of Platcock, _i.e._, Pluto. There is but
one story of this class which I at present remember in the writings of
Walker--that of Peden in the cave of Galloway; the author of Waverley,
however, in referring to the story, attests the prevalence of the
belief. The autobiographies of Methodists of the last century abound
with such; they form, too, in this part of the country (for the story
of Donald Roy and the dog is but one of a thousand) the most numerous
class of our traditions. Out of this multitudinous class I shall
select, by way of specimen, two stories which belong to the low country
party, and two others peculiar to the Highlands.
[Sidenote: THOMAS HOGG AND THE MAN-HORSE.]
Not much more than thirty years ago, a Cromarty fisherman of staid,
serious character, who had been visiting a friend in the upper part of
the parish, was returning home after nightfall by the Inverness road.
The night was still and calm, and a thick mantle of dull yellowish
clouds, which descended on every side from the centre to the horizon,
so obscured the light of the moon, though at full, that beyond the
hedges which bounded the road all objects seemed blended together
without colour or outline. The fisherman was pacing along in one of his
happiest moods; his mind occupied by serious thoughts, tempered by the
feelings of a genial devotion, when the stillness was suddenly broken
by a combination of the most discordant sounds he had ever heard. At
first he supposed that a pack of hounds had opened in full cry in the
field beside him; and then, for the sounds sunk as suddenly as they had
risen, that they were ranging the moors on the opposite side of the
hill. Anon there was a fresh burst, as if the whole pack were baying
at him through the hedge. He thrust his hand into his pocket, and drew
out a handful of crumbs, the residue of his last sea stock; but as he
held them out to the supposed dogs, instead of open throats and glaring
eyes, he saw only the appearance of a man, and the sounds ceased. “Ah!”
thought he, “here is the keeper of the pack;--I am safe.” He resumed
his walk homewards, the figure keeping pace with him as he went, until,
reaching a gap in the hedge, he saw it turning towards the road. He
paused to await its coming up; but what was his astonishment and horror
to see it growing taller and taller as it neared the gap, and then,
dropping on all fours, assume the form of a horse. He hurried onwards;
the horse hurried too. He stood still; the horse likewise stood. He
walked at his ordinary pace; the horse walked also, taking step for
step with him, without either outstripping him or falling behind. It
seemed an ugly misshapen animal, bristling all over with black shaggy
hair, and lame of a foot. It accompanied him until he reached the gate
of a burying-ground, which lies about two hundred yards outside the
town; where he was blinded for a moment by what seemed an intensely
bright flash of lightning; and, on recovering his sight, he found that
he was alone. There is a much older but very similar story told of
a man of Ferindonald, who, when on a night journey, is said to have
encountered the evil one in five different shapes, and to have lost his
senses through fright a few hours _after_; but this story, unlike the
one related, could be rationally enough accounted for, by supposing the
man to have lost his senses a few hours _before_.
[Sidenote: THE WATCHMEN OF CULLICUDEN.]
The parishes of Cullicuden and Kiltearn are situated on opposite sides
of the bay of Cromarty; and their respective manses, at the beginning
of the last century, nearly fronted each other; the waters of the bay
flowing between. Their clergymen, at that period, were much famed for
the sanctity of their lives, and their diligence in the duties of their
profession; and, from the similarity of their characters, they became
strongly attached. They were both hard students; and, for at least two
hours after midnight, the lights in their closet windows would be seen
as if twinkling at each other across the Firth. When the light of the
one was extinguished, the other regarded it as a signal to retire to
rest. “But, how now,” thought the minister of Kiltearn, as one night,
in answer to the accustomed sign, he dropped the extinguisher on his
candle, “how now are the sleeping watchmen to fulfil their duties?
Would it not be better that, like sentinels, we should relieve each
other by turns? There would then be at all times within the bounds
appointed us, open eyes and a praying heart.” He imparted the thought
to his friend; and ever after, as long as they lived, the one minister
never retired to bed until the casement of the other had given evidence
that he had risen to relieve him. A few years after this arrangement
had taken place, a parishioner of Cullicuden, who had been detained
by business till a late hour in some of the neighbouring parishes,
was walking homeward over the solitary Maolbuoy, when he was joined
by a stranger gentleman, who seemed journeying in the same direction,
and entered with him into conversation. He found him to be one of the
most intelligent, amusing men he had ever met with. He seemed to know
everything; and though he was evidently no friend to the Church, he did
nothing worse than laugh at it. The man of Cullicuden felt more than
half inclined to laugh at it too, and more than half convinced by the
ludicrous stories of the stranger, that its observances were merely
good jokes. In this mood they reached the extreme edge of the Maolbuoy,
where it borders on Cullicuden, when the stranger made a full stop.
“Our road runs this way,” said the man. “Ah!” replied the stranger,
“but I cannot accompany you: see you that?” pointing, as he spoke, to a
faint twinkling light on the opposite side of the bay--“The watchman is
stationed there, and I dare not come a step further.” It was only from
this confession that the Cullicuden man learned the true character of
his companion.
[Sidenote: THE LADY OF ARDVROCK.]
The merely superstitious stories of this class are generally of a
wilder and more imaginative cast than those which have sprung up within
the pale of the Church; and the chief actor in them is presented to
us in a more imposing attitude, and in some instances bears rather a
better character. Somewhat less than a century ago (I am wretchedly
uncertain in my dates), the ancient castle of Ardvrock in Assynt was
tenanted by a dowager lady--a wicked old woman, who had a singular
knack of setting the people in her neighbourhood together by the ears.
A gentleman who lived with his wife at a little distance from the
castle, was lucky enough to escape for the first few years; but on
the birth of a child his jealousy was awakened by some insinuations
dropped by the old lady, and he taxed his wife with infidelity, and
even threatened to destroy the infant. The poor woman in her distress
wrote to two of her brothers, who resided in a distant part of the
country; and in a few days after they both alighted at her gate. They
remonstrated with her husband, but to no effect. “We have but one
resource,” said the younger brother, who had been a traveller, and had
spent some years in Italy; “let us pass this evening in the manner we
have passed so many happy ones before, and visit to-morrow the old
lady of Ardvrock. I will confront her with perhaps as clever a person
as herself; and whatever else may come of our visit, we shall at least
arrive at the truth.” On the morrow they accordingly set out for the
castle--a grey, whinstone building, standing partly on a low moory
promontory, and partly out of a narrow strip of lake which occupies
a deep hollow between two hills. The lady received them with much
seeming kindness, and replied to their inquiries on the point which
mainly interested them with much apparent candour. “You can have no
objection,” said the younger brother to her, “that we put the matter
to the proof, by calling in a mutual acquaintance?” She replied in the
negative. The party were seated in the low-browed hall of the castle,
a large, rude chamber, roofed and floored with stone, and furnished
with a row of narrow, unglazed windows, which opened to the lake. The
day was calm, and the sun riding overhead in a deep blue sky, unspecked
by a cloud. The younger brother rose from his seat on the reply of
the lady, and bending towards the floor, began to write upon it with
his finger, and to mutter in a strange language; and as he wrote and
muttered, the waters of the lake began to heave and swell, and a deep
fleece of vapour, that rose from the surface like an exhalation, to
spread over the face of the heavens. At length a tall black figure,
as indistinct as the shadow of a man by moonlight, was seen standing
beside the wall. “Now,” said the brother to the husband, “put your
questions to _that_, but make haste;” and the latter, as bidden,
inquired of the spectre, in a brief tremulous whisper, whether his wife
had been faithful to him. The figure replied in the affirmative: as it
spoke, a huge wave from the lake came dashing against the wall of the
castle, breaking in at the hall windows; a tremendous storm of wind
and hail burst upon the roof and the turrets, and the floor seemed to
sink and rise beneath their feet like the deck of a ship in a tempest.
“He will not away from us without his _bountith_,” said the brother
to the lady, “whom can you best spare?” She tottered to the door, and
as she opened it, a little orphan girl, one of the household, came
rushing into the hall, as if scared by the tempest. The lady pointed
to the girl: “No, not the orphan!” exclaimed the appearance; “I dare
not take her.” Another immense wave from the lake came rushing in at
the windows, half filling the apartment, and the whole building seemed
toppling over. “Then take the old witch herself!” shouted out the elder
brother, pointing to the lady--“take her.”--“She is mine already,” said
the shadow, “but her term is hardly out yet; I take with me, however,
one whom your sister will miss more.” It disappeared as it spoke,
without, as it seemed, accomplishing its threat; but the party, on
their return home, found that the infant, whose birth had been rendered
the occasion of so much disquiet, had died at the very time the spectre
vanished. It is said, too, that for five years after the grain produced
in Assynt was black and shrivelled, and that the herrings forsook the
lochs. At the end of that period the castle of Ardvrock was consumed by
fire, kindled no one knew how; and luckily, as it would seem, for the
country, the wicked lady perished in the flames; for after her death
things went on in their natural course--the corn ripened as before, and
the herrings returned to the lochs.
The other Highland story of this class is, if possible, of a still
wilder character.
The river Auldgrande, after pursuing a winding course through the
mountainous parish of Kiltearn for about six miles, falls into the
upper part of the Firth of Cromarty. For a considerable distance it
runs through a precipitous gulf of great depth, and so near do the
sides approach each other, that herd-boys have been known to climb
across on the trees, which, jutting out on either edge, interweave
their branches over the centre. In many places the river is wholly
invisible: its voice, however, is ever lifted up in a wild, sepulchral
wailing, that seems the lament of an imprisoned spirit. In one part
there is a bridge of undressed logs thrown over the chasm. “And here,”
says the late Dr. Robertson in his statistical account of the parish,
“the observer, if he can look down on the gulf below without any uneasy
sensation, will be gratified by a view equally awful and astonishing.
The wildness of the steep and rugged rocks--the gloomy horror of the
cliffs and caverns, inaccessible to mortal tread, and where the genial
rays of the sun never yet penetrated--the waterfalls, which are heard
pouring down in different places of the precipice, with sounds various
in proportion to their distances--the hoarse and hollow murmuring of
the river, which runs at the depth of one hundred and thirty feet below
the surface of the earth--the fine groves of pines, which majestically
climb the sides of a beautiful eminence that rises immediately from
the brink of the chasm--all these objects cannot be contemplated
without exciting emotions of wonder and admiration in the mind of every
beholder.”
[Sidenote: THE LADY OF BALCONIE.]
The house and lands of Balconie, a beautiful Highland property, lie
within a few miles of the chasm. There is a tradition that, about
two centuries ago, the proprietor was married to a lady of very
retired habits; who, though little known beyond her narrow circle
of acquaintance, was regarded within that circle with a feeling of
mingled fear and respect. She was singularly reserved, and it was said
spent more of her waking hours in solitary rambles on the banks of
the Auldgrande, in places where no one else would choose to be alone,
than in the house of Balconie. Of a sudden, however, she became more
social, and seemed desirous to attach to herself, by acts of kindness
and confidence, one of her own maids, a simple Highland girl; but there
hung a mysterious wildness about her--a sort of atmosphere of dread
and suspicion--which the change had not removed; and her new companion
always felt oppressed, when left alone with her, by a strange sinking
of the vital powers--a shrinking apparently of the very heart--as if
she were in the presence of a creature of another world. And after
spending with her, on one occasion, a whole day, in which she had been
more than usually agitated by this feeling, and her ill-mated companion
more than ordinarily silent and melancholy, she accompanied her at her
bidding, as the evening was coming on, to the banks of the Auldgrande.
They reached the chasm just as the sun was sinking beneath the hill,
and flinging his last gleam on the topmost boughs of the birches and
hazels which then, as now, formed a screen over the opening. All
beneath was dark as midnight. “Let us approach nearer the edge,” said
the lady, speaking for the first time since she had quitted the house.
“Not nearer, ma’am,” said the terrified girl; “the sun is almost set,
and strange sights have been seen in the _gully_ after nightfall.”
“Pshaw,” said the lady, “how can you believe such stories? Come, I
will show you a path which leads to the water: it is one of the finest
places in the world; I have seen it a thousand times, and must see
it again to-night. Come,” she continued, grasping her by the arm, “I
desire it much, and so down we must go.” “No, lady!” exclaimed the
terrified girl, struggling to extricate herself, and not more startled
by the proposal than by the almost fiendish expression of mingled
anger and fear which now shaded the features of her mistress, “I shall
swoon with terror and fall over.” “Nay, wretch, there is no escape!”
replied the lady, in a voice heightened almost to a scream, as, with
a strength that contrasted portentously with her delicate form, she
dragged her, despite of her exertions, towards the chasm. “Suffer me,
ma’am, to accompany you,” said a strong masculine voice from behind;
“your surety, you may remember, must be a willing one.” A dark-looking
man, in green, stood beside them; and the lady, quitting her grasp with
an expression of passive despair, suffered the stranger to lead her
towards the chasm. She turned round on reaching the precipice, and,
untying from her belt a bunch of household keys, flung them up the bank
towards the girl; and then, taking what seemed to be a farewell look of
the setting sun, for the whole had happened in so brief a space that
the sun’s upper disk still peeped over the hill, she disappeared with
her companion behind the nearer edge of the gulf. The keys struck, in
falling, against a huge granitic boulder, and sinking into it as if it
were a mass of melted wax, left an impression which is still pointed
out to the curious visitor. The girl stood rooted to the spot in utter
amazement.
On returning home, and communicating her strange story, the husband of
the lady, accompanied by all the males of his household, rushed out
towards the chasm; and its perilous edge became a scene of shouts,
and cries, and the gleaming of torches. But, though the search was
prolonged for whole days by an eager and still increasing party, it
proved fruitless. _There_ lay the ponderous boulder impressed by the
keys; immediately beside it yawned the sheer descent of the chasm;
a shrub, half uprooted, hung dangling from the brink; there was a
faint line drawn along the green mould of the precipice a few yards
lower down; and that was just all. The river at this point is hidden
by a projecting crag, but the Highlanders could hear it fretting and
growling over the pointed rocks, like a wild beast in its den; and
as they listened and thought of the lady, the blood curdled at their
hearts. At length the search was relinquished, and they returned to
their homes to wonder, and surmise, and tax their memories, though
in vain, for a parallel instance. Months and years glided away, and
the mystery was at length assigned its own little niche among the
multitudinous events of the past.
About ten years after, a middle-aged Highlander, the servant of a
maiden lady who resided near the Auldgrande, was engaged one day in
fishing in the river, a little below where it issues from the chasm.
He was a shrewd fellow, brave as a lion and kindly-natured withal,
but not more than sufficiently honest; and his mistress, a stingy old
woman, trusted him only when she could not help it. He was more than
usually successful this day in his fishing; and picking out some of the
best of the fish for his aged mother, who lived in the neighbourhood,
he hid them under a bush, and then set out for his mistress with the
rest. “Are you quite sure, Donald,” inquired the old lady as she turned
over the contents of his basket, “that this is the whole of your
fishing?--where have you hid the rest?” “Not one more, lady, could I
find in the burn.” “O Donald!” said the lady. “No, lady,” reiterated
Donald, “devil a one!” And then, when the lady’s back was turned, off
he went to the bush to bring away the fish appropriated to his mother.
But the whole had disappeared; and a faintly marked track, spangled
with scales, remained to show that they had been dragged apparently by
some animal along the grass in the direction of the chasm.
The track went winding over grass and stone along the edge of the
stream, and struck off, as the banks contracted and became more steep
and precipitous, by a beaten path which ran along the edge of the crags
at nearly the level of the water, and which, strangely enough, Donald
had never seen before. He pursued it, however, with the resolution of
tracing the animal to its den. The channel narrowed as he proceeded;
the stream which, as he entered the chasm, was eddying beneath him in
rings of a mossy brown, became one milky strip of white, and, in the
language of the poet, “boiled, and wheeled, and foamed, and thundered
through;” the precipices on either hand, beetled in some places so
high over his head as to shut out the sky, while in others, where they
receded, he could barely catch a glimpse of it through a thick screen
of leaves and bushes, whose boughs meeting midway, seemed twisted
together like pieces of basket work. From the more than twilight gloom
of the place, the track he pursued seemed almost lost, and he was quite
on the eve of giving up the pursuit, when, turning an abrupt angle
of the rock, he found the path terminate in an immense cavern. As he
entered, two gigantic dogs, which had been sleeping one on each side of
the opening, rose lazily from their beds, and yawning as they turned up
their slow heavy eyes to his face, they laid themselves down again. A
little further on there was a chair and table of iron apparently much
corroded by the damps of the cavern. Donald’s fish, and a large mass of
leaven prepared for baking, lay on the table; in the chair sat the lady
of Balconie.
Their astonishment was mutual. “O Donald!” exclaimed the lady, “what
brings you here?” “I come in quest of my fish,” said Donald, “but, O
lady! what _keeps_ you here? Come away with me, and I will bring you
home; and you will be lady of Balconie yet.” “No, no!” she replied,
“that day is past; I am fixed to this seat, and all the Highlands
could not raise me from it.” Donald looked hard at the iron chair;
its ponderous legs rose direct out of the solid rock as if growing
out of it, and a thick iron chain red with rust, that lay under it,
communicated at the one end to a strong ring, and was fastened round
the other to one of the lady’s ankles. “Besides,” continued the lady,
“look at these dogs.--Oh! why have you come here? The fish you have
denied to your mistress in the name of my jailer, and his they have
become; but how are you yourself to escape!” Donald looked at the
dogs. They had again risen from their beds, and were now eyeing him
with a keen vigilant expression, very unlike that with which they
had regarded him on his entrance. He scratched his head. “’Deed,
mem,” he said, “I dinna weel ken;--I maun first durk the twa tykes,
I’m thinking.” “No,” said the lady, “there is but one way; be on the
alert.” She laid hold of the mass of leaven which lay on the table,
flung a piece to each of the dogs, and waved her hand for Donald to
quit the cave. Away he sprang; stood for a moment as he reached the
path to bid farewell to the lady; and after a long and dangerous
scramble among the precipices, for the way seemed narrower, and
steeper, and more slippery than when he had passed by it to the cave,
he emerged from the chasm just as the evening was beginning to darken
into night. And no one, since the adventure of Donald, has seen aught
of the lady of Balconie.
CHAPTER XII.
Fu’ mony a schriek that waefu’ nicht
Raise fra the boisterous main,
An’ vow’d was mony a bootless vow,
An’ praied war’ praiers vaine.
An’ sair-pyned widows moned forlorn
For mony a wearie daye,
An’ maidens, ance o’ blithsome mood,
Tined heart and dwyned away.--OLD BALLAD.
[Sidenote: THE FISHERMAN’S WIDOW.]
The headland which skirts the northern entrance of the Firth is of
a bolder character than even the southern one--abrupt, stern, and
precipitous as that is. It presents a loftier and more unbroken wall
of rock; and where it bounds on the Moray Firth there is a savage
magnificence in its cliffs and caves, and in the wild solitude of its
beach, which we find nowhere equalled on the shores of the other. It is
more exposed, too, in the time of tempest. The waves often rise, during
the storms of winter, more than a hundred feet against its precipices,
festooning them, even at that height, with wreaths of kelp and tangle;
and for miles within the bay, we may hear, at such seasons, the savage
uproar that maddens amid its cliffs and caverns coming booming over
the lashings of the nearer waves like the roar of artillery. There is
a sublimity of desolation on its shores, the effects of a conflict
maintained for ages, and on a scale so gigantic. The isolated,
spire-like crags that rise along its base, are so drilled and bored
by the incessant lashings of the surf, and are ground down to shapes
so fantastic, that they seem but the wasted skeletons of their former
selves; and we find almost every natural fissure in the solid rock
hollowed into an immense cavern, whose very ceiling, though the head
turns as we look up to it, owes evidently its comparative smoothness to
the action of the waves.
One of the most remarkable of these recesses occupies what we may term
the apex of a lofty promontory. The entrance, unlike that of most of
the others, is narrow and rugged, though of great height, but it widens
within into a shadowy chamber, perplexed, like the nave of a cathedral,
by uncertain cross lights, that come glimmering into it through two
lesser openings which perforate the opposite sides of the promontory.
It is a strange ghostly-looking place; there is a sort of moonlight
greenness in the twilight which forms its noon, and the denser shadows
which rest along its sides; a blackness so profound that it mocks the
eye, hangs over a lofty passage which leads from it, like a corridor,
still deeper into the bowels of the hill; the light falls on a
sprinkling of half-buried bones, the remains of animals that, in the
depth of winter, have creeped into it for shelter and to die; and when
the winds are up, and the hoarse roar of the waves comes reverberated
from its inner recesses, it needs no over-active fancy to people its
avenues with the shapes of beings long since departed from every gayer
or softer scene, but which still rise uncalled to the imagination in
those by-corners of nature which seem dedicated, like this cavern, to
the wild, the desolate, and the solitary.
A few hundred yards from where the headland terminates towards the
south, there is a little rocky bay, which has been known for ages
to the seafaring men of the town as the _Cova-Green_. It is such a
place as we are sometimes made acquainted with in the narratives of
disastrous shipwrecks. First, there is a broad semicircular strip of
beach, with a wilderness of insulated piles of rock in front; and so
steep and continuous is the wall of precipices which rises behind,
that, though we may see directly overhead the grassy slopes of the
hill, with here and there a few straggling firs, no human foot ever
gained the nearer edge. The bay of Cova-Green is a prison to which the
sea presents the only outlet; and the numerous caves which open along
its sides, like the arches of an amphitheatre, seem but its darker
cells. It is in truth a wild impressive place, full of beauty and
terror, and with none of the squalidness of the mere dungeon about it.
There is a puny littleness in our brick and lime receptacles of misery
and languor, which speaks as audibly of the feebleness of man as of his
crimes or his inhumanity; but here all is great and magnificent--and
there is much, too, that is pleasing. Many of the higher cliffs which
rise beyond the influence of the spray, are tapestried with ivy; we
may see the heron watching on the ledges beside her bundle of withered
twigs, or the blue hawk darting from her cell; there is life on every
side of us--life in even the wild tumbling of the waves, and in the
stream of pure water which, rushing from the higher edge of the
precipice in a long white cord, gradually untwists itself by the way,
and spatters ceaselessly among the stones over the entrance of one of
the caves. Nor does the scene want its old story to strengthen its hold
on the imagination.
Some time early in the reign of Queen Anne, a fishing yawl, after
vainly labouring for hours to enter the Bay of Cromarty during a
strong gale from the west, was forced at nightfall to relinquish
the attempt, and take shelter in the Cova-Green. The crew consisted
of but two persons--an old fisherman and his son. Both had been
thoroughly drenched by the spray, and chilled by the piercing wind,
which, accompanied by thick snow-showers, had blown all day through
the opening from off the snowy top of Ben-Wevis; and it was with no
ordinary satisfaction that, as they opened the bay on their last tack,
they saw the red gleam of a fire flickering from one of the caves, and
a boat drawn up on the beach.
“It must be some of the Tarbat fishermen,” said the old man, “wind
bound like ourselves; but wiser than us, in having made provision for
it. I’ll feel willing enough to share their fare with them for the
night.”
“But see,” remarked the younger, “that there be no unwillingness on the
other side. I am much mistaken if that be not the boat of my cousins
the Macinlas! Hap what may, however, the night is getting worse, and
we have no choice of quarters. Hard up your helm, father, or we shall
barely clear the Skerries;--there now--every nail an anchor!”
He leaped ashore, carrying with him the small hawser attached to the
stem, known technically as the _swing_, which he wound securely round
a jutting crag, and then stood for a few seconds until the old man,
who moved but heavily along the thwarts, had come up to him. All was
comparatively calm under the lee of the precipices; but the wind was
roaring fearfully in the woods above, and whistling amid the furze and
ivy of the higher cliffs; and the two boatmen as they entered the cave
could see the flakes of a thick snow-shower, that had just begun to
descend, circling round and round in the eddy.
The place was occupied by three men--two of them young, and
rather ordinary-looking persons; the third, a greyheaded old man,
apparently of great muscular strength, though long past his prime,
and of a peculiarly sinister cast of countenance. A keg of spirits,
which was placed before them, served as a table. There were little
drinking-measures of tin on it; and the mask-like, stolid expressions
of the two younger men, showed that they had been indulging freely. The
elder was comparatively sober. A fire, composed mostly of fragments of
wreck and drift wood, threw up its broad cheerful flame towards the
roof; but so spacious was the cavern, that, except where here and there
a whiter mass of stalactites, or bolder projection of cliff, stood out
from the darkness, the light seemed lost in it. A dense body of smoke,
which stretched its blue level surface from side to side, and concealed
the roof, went rolling onwards like an inverted river. On the entrance
of the fishermen, the three boatmen within started to their feet,
and one of the younger, laying hold of the little cask, pitched it
hurriedly into a dark corner of the cave.
“Ay, ye do well to hide it, Gibbie!” exclaimed the savage-looking old
man in a bitter ironical tone, as he recognised the intruders; “here
are your good friends, William and Ernest Beth come to see if they
cannot rob and maltreat us a second time. Well! they had better try.”
There could not be a more luckless meeting. For years before had the
crew of the little fishing-yawl been regarded with the bitterest hatred
by the temporary inmates of the cave; nor was old Eachen of Tarbat one
of the class whose resentments may be safely slighted. He had passed
the first thirty years of his life among the buccaneers of South
America; he had been engaged in its latter seasons among the smugglers,
who even at this early period infested the eastern coasts of Scotland;
and Eachen, of all his associates, whether smugglers or buccaneers,
had ever been deemed one of the fiercest and most unscrupulous. On his
return from America the country was engaged in one of its long wars
with Holland, and William Beth, the elder fisherman, who had served
in the English fleet, was lying in a Dutch prison at the time, and a
report had gone abroad that he was dead. He had inherited some little
property from his father in the neighbouring town--a house and a little
field, which in his absence was held by an only sister; who, on the
report of his death, was of course regarded as a village heiress, and
whose affections, in that character, Eachen of Tarbat had succeeded in
engaging. They were married, but the marriage had turned out singularly
ill; Eachen was dissipated and selfish, and of a harsh, cruel temper;
and it was the fate of his poor wife, after giving birth to two boys,
the younger inmates of the cave, to perish in the middle of her days,
a care-worn, heart-broken creature. Her brother William had returned
from Holland shortly before, and on her death claimed and recovered
his property from her husband; and from that hour Eachen of Tarbat had
regarded him with the bitterest malice. A second cause of dislike, too,
had but lately occurred. Ernest Beth, William’s only son, and one of
his cousins, the younger son of Eachen, had both fixed their affections
on a lovely young girl, the toast of a neighbouring parish; and Ernest,
a handsome and high-spirited young man, had proved the successful
lover. On returning with his mistress from a fair, only a few weeks
previous to this evening, he had been waylaid and grossly insulted by
his two cousins; and the insult he might perhaps have borne for the
sake of what they seemed to forget--his relationship to their mother;
but there was another whom they also insulted, and that he could not
bear; and as they were mean enough to take odds against him on the
occasion, he had beaten the two spiritless fellows that did so.
The old fisherman had heard the ominous remark of the savage as if he
heard it not. “We have not met for many years, Eachen,” he said--“not
since the death of my poor sister, when we parted such ill friends;
but we are shortlived creatures ourselves, surely our anger should be
shortlived too. I have come to crave from you a seat by your fire.”
“It was no wish of mine, William Beth,” said Eachen, “that we should
ever meet; but there is room enough for us all beside the fire.”
He resumed his seat; the two fishermen took their places fronting him,
and for some time neither party exchanged a word.
“This is but a gousty lodging-place,” at length remarked the old
fisherman, looking round him; “but I have seen worse, and I wish the
folk at hame kent we were half sae snug.”
The remark seemed directed to no one in particular, and there was no
reply. In a second attempt he addressed himself to the old man.
“It has vexed me, Eachen,” he said, “that our young folk, were it but
for my sister’s sake, should not be on mair friendly terms; an’ we
ourselves too--why suld we be enemies?” The old man, without deigning a
reply, knit his grey shaggy brows, and looked doggedly at the fire.
“Nay, now,” continued the fisherman, “we are getting auld men now,
Eachen, an’ wald better bury our hard thoughts o’ ane anither afore we
come to be buried oursels.”
Eachen fixed his keen scrutinizing glance on the speaker, there was
a tremulous motion of the upper lip as he withdrew it, and a setting
of the teeth; but the tone of his reply savoured more of sullen
indifference than of passion.
“William Beth,” he said, “ye have tricked my boys out o’ the bit
property that suld have come to them by their mither; it’s no so long
since they barely escaped being murdered by your son. What more want
you? But, mayhap, ye think it better that the time should be passed in
making boss professions of good-will than employed in clearing off an
old score.”
“Ay,” hiccuped out the elder of the two sons, “the houses might come my
way then; an’, if Helen Henry were to lose her ae joe, the tither might
hae the better chance.”
“Look ye, uncle,” exclaimed the younger fisherman, “your threat might
be spared. Our little property was my grandfather’s and of right
descended to his only son. As for the affair at the tryst, I dare
either of my cousins to say the quarrel was of my seeking. I have no
wish to raise my hand against the sons or the husband of my aunt; but
if forced to it, you will find that neither my father nor myself are
wholly at your mercy.” He rose to his feet as he spoke.
“Whisht, Ernest,” said the old fisherman calmly, “sit down; your uncle
maun hae ither thoughts. It is now twenty years, Eachen,” he continued,
“since I was called to my sister’s deathbed. You cannot forget what
passed there. There had been grief and hunger beside that bed. I’ll
no say you were willingly unkind. Few folk are that but when they have
some purpose to serve by it, and you could have none; but you laid no
restraint on a harsh temper, and none on a craving habit, that forgets
everything but itself, and sae my poor sister perished in the middle of
her days, a wasted heart-broken thing. I have nae wish to hurt you. We
baith passed our youth in a bad school, and I owre aften feel I havena
unlearned a’ my own lessons to wonder that you suldna have unlearned a’
yours. But we’re getting old men, Eachen, why suld we die fools? and
fools we maun die, if we die enemies.”
“You are likely in the right,” said the stern old man. “But ye were aye
a luckier man than me, William--luckier for this warld, I’m sure--maybe
luckier for the next. I had aye to seek, and that without finding, the
good that came in your gate o’ itsel’. Now that age is coming upon
us, ye get a snug rental frae the little house and croft, and I have
naething; and ye have character and credit, but wha wald trust me, or
wha cares for me? Ye hae been made _an elder_ o’ the kirk, too, I hear,
and I am still a reprobate; but we were a’ born to be just what we are,
an’ sae we maun submit. And your son, too, shares in your luck: he has
heart and hand, and my whelps have neither; and the girl Henry, that
scouts that sot there, likes him; but what wonder of that!--William
Beth, we needna quarrel; but for peace’ sake let me alone--we have
naething in common, and friends we canna and winna be.”
“We had better,” whispered Ernest to his father, “not sleep in the cave
to-night.”
But why record the quarrels of this unfortunate evening? An hour or
two passed away in disagreeable bickerings, during which the patience
of even the old fisherman was well-nigh worn out, and that of Ernest
had failed him altogether. And at length they both quitted the cave,
boisterous as the night was, and it was now stormier than ever; and
heaving off their boat till she rode at the full length of her swing
from the shore, they sheltered themselves under the sail. The Macinlas
returned next evening to Tarbat; but though the wind moderated during
the day, the yawl of William Beth did not enter the Bay of Cromarty.
Weeks passed away during which the clergyman of the place corresponded
regarding the missing fishermen with all the lower ports of the Firth,
but they had disappeared as it seemed for ever; and Eachen Macinla,
in the name of his sons, laid claim to their property, and entered a
second time into possession of the house and the little field.
Where the northern headland of the Firth sinks into the low sandy
tract that nearly fronts the town of Cromarty, there is a narrow
grassy terrace raised but a few yards over the level of the beach. It
is sheltered behind by a steep undulating bank--for though the rock
here and there juts out, it is too rich in vegetation to be termed a
precipice. To the east, the coast retires into a semicircular rocky
recess, terminating seawards in a lofty, dark-browed precipice, and
bristling throughout all its extent with a countless multitude of crags
that at every heave of the wave break the surface into a thousand
eddies. Towards the west, there is a broken and somewhat dreary waste
of sand. The terrace itself, however, is a sweet little spot, with its
grassy slopes that recline towards the sun, partially covered with
thickets of wild-rose and honeysuckle, and studded in their season
with violets and daisies, and the delicate rock geranium. Towards
its eastern extremity, with the bank rising immediately behind, and
an open space in front which seemed to have been cultivated at one
time as a garden, there stood a picturesque little cottage. It was
that of the widow of William Beth. Five years had now elapsed since
the disappearance of her son and husband, and the cottage bore the
marks of neglect and decay. The door and window, bleached white by
the sea winds, shook loosely to every breeze; clusters of chickweed
luxuriated in the hollows of the thatch, or mantled over the eaves;
and a honeysuckle, that had twisted itself round the chimney, lay
withering in a tangled mass at the foot of the wall. But the progress
of decay was more marked in the widow than in her dwelling. She had had
to contend with grief and penury;--a grief not the less undermining
in its effects from the circumstance of its being sometimes suspended
by hope--a penury so extreme, that every succeeding day seemed as if
won by some providential interference from absolute want. And she was
now, to all appearance, fast sinking in the struggle. The autumn was
well-nigh over; she had been weak and ailing for months before; and she
had now become so feeble as to be confined for days together to her
bed. But happily, the poor solitary woman had at least one attached
friend in the daughter of a farmer of the parish, a young and beautiful
girl, who, though naturally of no melancholy temperament, seemed to
derive almost all she enjoyed of pleasure from the society of the widow.
Autumn we have said was near its close. The weather had given
indications of an early and severe winter; and the widow, whose
worn-out and delicate frame was affected by every change of atmosphere,
had for a few days been more than usually indisposed. It was now long
past noon, and she had but just risen. The apartment, however, bore
witness that her young friend had paid her the accustomed morning
visit; the fire was blazing on a clean, comfortable-looking hearth, and
every little piece of furniture was arranged with the most scrupulous
care. Her devotions were hardly over when the well-known tap and light
foot of her friend Helen Henry were again heard at the door.
“To-morrow, mother,” said Helen, as she took her seat beside her, “is
Ernest’s birthday. Is it not strange that, when our minds make pictures
of the dead, it is always as they looked best, and kindliest, and most
lifelike? I have been seeing Ernest all day long, as when I saw him on
his _last_ birthday.”
“Ah, my bairn!” said the widow, grasping her young friend by the hand,
“I see that, sae lang as we continue to meet, our thoughts will be aye
running the ae way. I had a strange dream last night, an’ must tell it
you. You see yon rock to the east, in the middle o’ the little bay,
that now rises through the back draught o’ the sea, like the hulk o’ a
ship, an’ is now buried in a mountain o’ foam. I dreamed I was sitting
on that rock, in what seemed a bonny simmer’s morning. The sun was
glancin’ on the water, an’ I could see the white sand far down at the
bottom, wi’ the reflection o’ the little waves aboon running over it in
long curls o’ gowd. But there was no way of leaving the rock, for the
deep waters were round an’ round me; an’ I saw the tide covering ae wee
bittie after anither, till at last the whole was covered. An’ yet I had
but little fear, for I remembered that baith Ernest an’ William were in
the sea afore me; an’ I had the feeling that I could hae rest nowhere
but wi’ them. The water at last closed o’er me, an’ I sank frae aff the
rock to the sand at the bottom. But death seemed to have no power given
him to hurt me, an’ I walked as light as ever I had done on a gowany
brae, through the green depths o’ the sea. I saw the silvery glitter o’
the trout an’ the salmon shining to the sun, far, far aboon me, like
white pigeons i’ the lift; and around me there were crimson star-fish,
an’ sea-flowers, and long trailing plants that waved in the tide like
streamers; an’ at length I came to a steep rock wi’ a little cave like
a tomb in it. Here, I said, is the end o’ my journey--William is here,
an’ Ernest. An’ as I looked into the cave, I saw there were bones in
it, an’ I prepared to take my place beside them. But, as I stooped to
enter, some one called on me, an’, on looking up, there was William.
‘Lillias,’ he said, ‘it is not night yet, nor is that your bed; you are
to sleep, not with me, but, lang after this, with Ernest; haste you
home, for he is waiting for you.’ ‘Oh, take me to him!’ I said; an’
then all at once I found mysel’ on the shore dizzied and blinded wi’
the bright sunshine; for at the cave there was a darkness like that o’
a simmer’s gloamin; an’ when I looked up for William, it was Ernest
that stood before me, lifelike and handsome as ever; an’ you were
beside him.”
The day had been gloomy and lowering, and though there was little wind,
a tremendous sea, that as the evening advanced rose higher and higher
against the neighbouring precipice, had been rolling ashore since
morning. The wind now began to blow in long hollow gusts among the
cliffs, and the rain to patter against the widow’s casement.
“It will be a storm from the sea,” she said; “the scarts an’ gulls
hae been flying landward sin’ daybreak, an’ I hae never seen the
ground-swell come home heavier against the rocks. Waes me for the puir
sailors that maun bide under it a’!”
“In the long stormy nights,” said her companion, “I cannot sleep
for thinking of them; though I have no one to bind me to them now.
Only look how the sea rages among the rocks as if it were a thing of
life--that last wave rose to the crane’s nest. And look, yonder is a
boat rounding the rock with only one man in it. It dances on the surf
as if it were a cork, and the little bit sail, so black and wet, seems
scarcely bigger than a napkin. Is it not bearing in for the boat-haven
below?”
“My poor old eyes,” replied the widow, “are growing dim, an’ surely
no wonder; but yet I think I should ken that boatman. Is it no Eachen
Macinla o’ Tarbat?”
“Hard-hearted old man!” exclaimed the maiden, “what can be taking him
here? Look how his skiff shoots in like an arrow on the long roll o’
the surf!--and now she is high on the beach. How cruel it was of him to
rob you of your little property in the very first of your grief! But
see, he is so worn out that he can hardly walk over the rough stones.
Ah me, he is down!--wretched old man, I must run to his assistance;
but no, he has risen again. See, he is coming straight to the house;
and now he is at the door.” In a moment after, Eachen entered the
cottage.
“I am perishing, Lillias,” he said, “with cold and hunger, an’ can gang
nae farther--surely ye’ll no shut your door on me in a night like this?”
The poor widow had been taught in a far different school. She
relinquished to the worn-out boatman her seat by the fire, now
hurriedly heaped with fresh fuel, and hastened to set before him the
simple viands which her cottage afforded.
As the night darkened, the storm increased. The wind roared among the
rocks like the rattling of a thousand carriages over a paved street;
and there were times when, after a sudden pause, the blast struck the
cottage as if it were a huge missile flung against it, and pressed on
its roof and walls till the very floor rocked, and the rafters strained
and quivered like the beams of a stranded vessel. There was a ceaseless
patter of mingled rain and snow--now lower, now louder; and the fearful
thunderings of the waves as they raged among the pointed crags, were
mingled with the hoarse roll of the stones along the beach. The old man
sat beside the fire fronting the widow and her companion, with his head
reclined nearly as low as his knee, and his hands covering his face.
There was no attempt at conversation. He seemed to shudder every time
the blast yelled along the roof, and as a fiercer gust burst open the
door, there was a half-muttered ejaculation.
“Heaven itsel’ hae mercy on them! for what can man do in a night like
this?”
“It is black as pitch!” exclaimed the maiden, who had risen to draw the
bolt, “and the drift flees so thick that it feels to the hand like a
solid snow-wreath. And, oh, how it lightens!”
“Heaven itsel’ hae mercy on them!” again ejaculated the old man. “My
two boys,” said he, addressing the widow, “are at the far Firth; an’
how can an open boat live in a night like this!”
There seemed something magical in the communication--something that
awakened all the sympathies of the poor bereaved woman; and she felt
she could forgive him every unkindness.
“Waes me!” she exclaimed, “it was in such a night as this, an’ scarcely
sae wild, that my Ernest perished.”
The old man groaned and wrung his hands.
In one of the pauses of the hurricane there was a gun heard from the
sea, and shortly after a second. “Some puir vessel in distress,” said
the widow, “but, alas! where can succour come frae in sae terrible a
night? There is help only in Ane! Waes me! would we no better light up
a blaze on the floor, an’, dearest Helen, draw off the cover frae the
window? My puir Ernest has told me that my light has aften showed him
his bearings frae the deadly bed o’ Dunskaith. That last gun,” for a
third was now heard booming over the mingled roar of the sea and the
wind, “cam frae the very rock edge. Waes me! maun they perish, an’ sae
near?” Helen hastily lighted a bundle of mire-fir, that threw up its
red sputtering blaze half-way to the roof, and dropping the covering,
continued to wave it opposite the window. Guns were still heard at
measured intervals, but apparently from a safer offing; and the last,
as it sounded faintly against the wind, came evidently from the
interior of the bay.
“She has escaped,” said the old man; “it’s a feeble hand that canna do
good when the heart is willing;--but what has mine been doing a’ life
lang?” He looked at the widow and shuddered.
Towards morning the wind fell, and the moon in her last quarter rose
red and glaring out of the Firth, lighting the melancholy roll of the
waves, and the broad white belt of surf that skirted the shore. The
old fisherman left the cottage, and sauntered along the beach. It was
heaped with huge wreaths of kelp and tangle, uprooted by the storm,
and in the hollow of the rocky bay lay the scattered fragments of a
boat. Eachen stooped to pick up a piece of the wreck, in the fearful
expectation of finding some known mark by which to recognise it; when
the light fell full on the swollen face of a corpse, that seemed
staring at him from out a wreath of sea-weed. It was that of his eldest
son; and the body of the younger, fearfully gashed and mangled by the
rocks, lay a few yards further to the east.
The morning was as pleasant as the night had been boisterous; and,
except that the distant hills were covered with snow, and that a heavy
swell continued to roll in from the sea, there remained scarce any
trace of the recent tempest. Every hollow of the neighbouring hill had
its little runnel, formed by the rains of the previous night, that now
splashed and glistened to the sun. The bushes round the cottage were
well-nigh divested of their leaves; but their red berries--hips and
haws, and the juicy fruit of the honeysuckle--gleamed cheerfully to the
light, and a warm steam of vapour, like that of a May morning, rose
from the roof and the little mossy platform in front. But the scene
seemed to have something more than merely its beauty to recommend it
to a young man, drawn apparently to the spot, with many others, by the
fate of the two unfortunate fishermen, and who now stood gazing on the
rocks, and the hill, and the cottage, as a lover on the features of his
mistress. The bodies had been carried to an old storehouse, which may
still be seen, a short mile to the west; and the crowds that, during
the early part of the morning, had been perambulating the beach, gazing
at the wreck, and discussing the various probabilities of the accident,
had gradually dispersed. But this solitary individual, whom no one
knew, remained behind. He was a tall and somewhat swarthy, though very
handsome man, of about seven-and-twenty, with a slight scar on the
left cheek; and his dress, which was plain and neat, was distinguished
from that of the common seaman by three narrow strips of gold lace
on the upper part of one of the sleeves. He had twice stepped towards
the cottage door, and twice drawn back, as if influenced by some
unaccountable feeling--timidity, perhaps, or bashfulness; and yet the
bearing of the man gave little indication of either. But at length, as
if he had gathered heart, he raised the latch and went in.
The widow, who had had many visitors that morning, seemed to be
scarcely aware of his entrance; she was sitting on a low seat beside
the fire, her face covered with her hands, while the tremulous
rocking motion of her body showed that she was still brooding over
the distresses of the previous night. Her companion, who, without
undressing, had thrown herself across the bed, was fast asleep. The
stranger seated himself beside the fire, which seemed dying amid its
ashes, and, turning sedulously from the light of the window, laid his
hand gently on the widow’s shoulder. She started and looked up.
“I have strange news for you,” he said. “You have long mourned for your
husband and your son; but though the old man has been dead for years,
your son Ernest is still alive, and is now in the harbour of Cromarty.
He is lieutenant of the vessel whose guns you must have heard during
the night.”
The poor woman seemed to have lost all power of reply.
“I am a friend of Ernest’s,” continued the stranger, “and have come to
prepare you to meet with him. It is now five years since his father
and he were blown off to sea by a strong gale from the land. They
drove before it for four days, when they were picked up by an armed
vessel cruising in the North Sea, and which soon after sailed for the
coast of Spanish America. The poor old man sank under the fatigues he
had undergone; though Ernest, better able from his youth to endure
hardship, was little affected by them. He accompanied us on our Spanish
expedition--indeed, he had no choice, for we touched at no British
port after meeting with him; and through good fortune, and what his
companions call merit, he has risen to be the second man aboard; and
has now brought home with him gold enough from the Spaniards to make
his old mother comfortable. He saw your light yester evening, and
steered by it to the roadstead, blessing you all the way. Tell me, for
he anxiously wished me to inquire of you, whether Helen Henry is yet
unmarried?”
“It is Ernest--it is Ernest himself!” exclaimed the maiden, as she
started from the widow’s bed. In a moment after he had locked her in
his arms.
It was ill before evening with old Eachen Macinla. The fatigues of
the previous day, the grief and horror of the following night, had
prostrated his energies bodily and mental; and he now lay tossing in a
waste apartment of the storehouse in the delirium of fever. The bodies
of his two sons occupied the floor below. He muttered unceasingly in
his ravings, of William and Ernest Beth. They were standing beside him,
he said, and every time he attempted to pray for his poor boys and
himself, the stern old man laid his cold swollen hand on his lips.
“Why trouble me?” he exclaimed. “Why stare with your white dead eyes
on me? Away, old man! the little black shells are sticking in your
grey hairs; away to your place! Was it I who raised the wind or the
sea?--was it I--was it I? Aha!--no--no--you were asleep--you were fast
asleep, and could not see me cut the _swing_; and, besides, it was only
a piece of rope. Keep away--touch me not! I am a freeman, and will
plead for my life. Please your honour, I did not murder these two men;
_I only cut the rope that fastened their boat to the land_. Ha! ha! ha!
he has ordered them away, and they have both left me unskaithed.” At
this moment Ernest Beth entered the apartment, and approached the bed.
The miserable old man raised himself on his elbow, and, regarding him
with a horrid stare, shrieked out--“Here is Ernest Beth come for me a
second time!” and, sinking back on the pillow, instantly expired.
CHAPTER XIII.
“The silent earth
Of what it holds shall speak, and every grave
Be as a volume, shut, yet capable
Of yielding its contents to ear and eye.”--WORDSWORTH.
[Sidenote: THE STORY OF JOHN FEDDES.]
In the woods to the east of Cromarty, occupying the summit of a green
insulated eminence, is the ancient burying-ground and chapel of St.
Regulus. Bounding the south there is a deep narrow ravine, through
which there runs a small tinkling streamlet, whose voice, scarcely
heard during the droughts of summer, becomes hoarser and louder towards
the close of autumn. The sides of the eminence are covered with wood,
which, overtopping the summit, forms a wall of foliage that encloses
the burying-ground except on the east, where a little opening affords
a view of the northern Sutor over the tops of trees which have not
climbed high enough to complete the fence. In this burying-ground the
dead of a few of the more ancient families of the town and parish
are still interred; but by far the greater part of it is occupied by
nameless tenants, whose descendants are unknown, and whose bones have
mouldered undisturbed for centuries. The surface is covered by a short
yellow moss, which is gradually encroaching on the low flat stones of
the dead, blotting out the unheeded memorials which tell us that the
inhabitants of this solitary spot were once men, and that they are now
dust--that they lived, and that they died, and that they shall live
again.
Nearly about the middle of the burying-ground there is a low flat
stone, over which time is silently drawing the green veil of oblivion.
It bears date 1690, and testifies, in a rude inscription, that it
covers the remains of Paul Feddes and his son John, with those of their
respective wives. Concerning Paul, tradition is silent; of John Feddes,
his son, an interesting anecdote is still preserved. Some time early
in the eighteenth century, or rather perhaps about the close of the
seventeenth, he became enamoured of Jean Gallie, one of the wealthiest
and most beautiful young women of her day in this part of the country.
The attachment was not mutual; for Jean’s affections were already
fixed on a young man, who, both in fortune and elegance of manners,
was superior, beyond comparison, to the tall red-haired boatman, whose
chief merit lay in a kind brave heart, a clear head, and a strong arm.
John, though by no means a dissipated man, had been accustomed to
regard money as merely the price of independence, and he had sacrificed
but little to the graces. His love-suit succeeded as might have been
expected; the advances he made were treated with contempt; and the day
was fixed on which his mistress was to be married to his rival. He
became profoundly melancholy; and late on the evening which preceded
the marriage-day, he was seen traversing the woods which surrounded the
old castle; frequently stopping as he went, and, by wild and singular
gestures, giving evidence of an unsettled mind. In the morning after
he was nowhere to be found. His disappearance, with the frightful
conjectures to which it gave rise, threw a gloom over the spirits of
the town’s-folk, and affected the gaiety of the marriage party; it was
remembered, even amid the festivities of the bridal, that John Feddes
had had a kind warm heart; and it was in no enviable frame that the
bride, as her maidens conducted her to her chamber, caught a glimpse
of several twinkling lights that were moving beneath the brow of the
distant Sutor. She could not ask the cause of an appearance so unusual;
her fears too surely suggested that her unfortunate lover had destroyed
himself, and that his friends and kinsfolk kept that night a painful
vigil in searching after the body. But the search was in vain, though
every copse and cavern, and the base of every precipice within several
miles of the town, were visited; and though, during the succeeding
winter, every wreath of sea-weed which the night-storms had rolled
upon the beach, was approached with a fearful yet solicitous feeling
scarcely ever associated with bunches of sea-weed before. Years passed
away, and, except by a few friends, the kind enterprising boatman was
forgotten.
In the meantime it was discovered, both by herself and the neighbours,
that Jean Gallie was unfortunate in her husband. He had, prior to his
marriage, when one of the gayest and most dashing young fellows in the
village, formed habits of idleness and intemperance which he could not,
or would not shake off; and Jean had to learn that a very gallant lover
may prove a very indifferent husband, and that a very fine fellow may
care for no one but himself. He was selfish and careless in the last
degree; and unfortunately, as his carelessness was of the active kind,
he engaged in extensive business, to the details of which he paid no
attention, but amused himself with wild vague speculations, which,
joined to his habits of intemperance, stripped him in the course of a
few years of all the property which had belonged to himself and his
wife. In proportion as his means decreased he became more worthless,
and more selfishly bent on the gratification of his appetites; and he
had squandered almost his last shilling, when, after a violent fit of
intemperance, he was seized by a fever, which in a few days terminated
in death. And thus, five years after the disappearance of John Feddes,
Jean Gallie found herself a poor widow, with scarce any means of
subsistence, and without one pleasing thought connected with the memory
of her husband.
A few days after the interment, a Cromarty vessel was lying at anchor,
before sunrise, near the mouth of the Spey. The master, who had been
one of Feddes’s most intimate friends, was seated near the stern,
employed in angling for cod and ling. Between his vessel and the
shore, a boat appeared in the grey light of morning, stretching along
the beach under a tight, well-trimmed sail. She had passed him nearly
half a mile, when the helmsman slackened the sheet, which had been
close-hauled, and suddenly changing the tack, bore away right before
the wind. In a few minutes the boat dashed alongside. All the crew,
except the helmsman, had been lying asleep upon the beams, and now
started up alarmed by the shock. “How, skipper,” said one of the men,
rubbing his eyes, “how, in the name of wonder, have we gone so far
out of our course? What brings us here?” “You come from Cromarty,”
said the skipper, directing his speech to the master, who, starting at
the sound from his seat, flung himself half over the gunwale to catch
a glimpse of the speaker. “John Feddes,” he exclaimed, “by all that
is miraculous!” “You come from Cromarty, do you not?” reiterated the
skipper; “Ah, Willie Mouat! is that you?”
The friends were soon seated in the snug little cabin of the vessel;
and John, apparently the less curious of the two, entered, at the
others’ request, into a detail of the particulars of his life for the
five preceding years. “You know, Mouat,” he said, “how I felt and what
I suffered for the last six months I was in Cromarty. Early in that
period I had formed the determination of quitting my native country for
ever; but I was a weak foolish fellow, and so I continued to linger,
like an unhappy ghost, week after week, and month after month, hoping
against hope, until the night which preceded the wedding-day of Jean
Gallie. Captain Robinson was then on the coast unloading a cargo of
Hollands. I had made it my business to see him; and after some little
conversation, for we were old acquaintance, I broached to him my
intention of leaving Scotland. It is well, said he; for friendship
sake I will give you a passage to Flushing, and, if it suits your
inclination, a berth in the privateer I am now fitting out for cruising
along the coast of Spanish America. I find the free trade doesn’t
suit me; it has no scope. I considered his proposals, and liked them
hugely. There was, indeed, some risk of being knocked on the head in
the cruising affair, but that weighed little with me; I really believe
that, at the time, I would as lief have run to a blow as avoided
one;--so I closed with him, and the night and hour were fixed when he
should land his boat for me in the _hope_ of the Sutors. The evening
came, and I felt impatient to be gone. You wonder how I could leave so
many excellent friends without so much as bidding them farewell. I have
since wondered at it myself; but my mind was filled, at the time, with
one engrossing object, and I could think of nothing else. Positively, I
was mad. I remember passing Jean’s house on that evening, and catching
a glimpse of her through the window. She was so engaged in preparing
a piece of dress, which I suppose was to be worn on the ensuing day,
that she didn’t observe me. I can’t tell you how I felt--indeed, I do
not know; for I have scarcely any recollection of what I did or thought
until a few hours after, when I found myself aboard Robinson’s lugger,
spanking down the Firth. It is now five years since, and, in that time,
I have both given and received some hard blows, and have been both poor
and rich. Little more than a month ago, I left Flushing for Banff,
where I intend taking up my abode, and where I am now on the eve of
purchasing a snug little property.” “Nay,” said Mouat, “you must come
to Cromarty.” “To Cromarty! no, that will scarcely do.” “But hear me,
Feddes--Jean Gallie is a widow.” There was a long pause. “Well, poor
young thing,” said John at length with a sigh, “I should feel sorry for
that; I trust she is in easy circumstances?” “You shall hear.”
The reader has already anticipated Mouat’s narrative. During the
recital of the first part of it, John, who had thrown himself on the
back of his chair, continued rocking backwards and forwards with the
best counterfeited indifference in the world. It was evident that Jean
Gallie was nothing to him. As the story proceeded, he drew himself up
leisurely, and with firmness, until he sat bolt upright, and the motion
ceased. Mouat described the selfishness of Jean’s husband, and his
disgusting intemperance. He spoke of the confusion of his affairs. He
hinted at his cruelty to Jean when he squandered all. John could act
no longer--he clenched his fist and sprang from his seat. “Sit down,
man,” said Mouat, “and hear me out--the fellow is dead.”--“And the poor
widow?” said John. “Is, I believe, nearly destitute;--you have heard of
the box of broad-pieces left her by her father?--she has few of them
now.” “Well, if she hasn’t, I have; that’s all. When do you sail for
Cromarty?” “To-morrow, my dear fellow, and you go along with me; do you
not?”
Almost any one could supply the concluding part of my narrative. Soon
after John had arrived at his native town, Jean Gallie became the
wife of one who, in almost every point of character, was the reverse
of her first husband; and she lived long and happily with him. Here
the novelist would stop; but I write from the burying-ground of St.
Regulus, and the tombstone of my ancestor is at my feet. Yet why should
it be told that John Feddes experienced the misery of living too
long--that, in his ninetieth year, he found himself almost alone in
the world? for, of his children, some had wandered into foreign parts,
where they either died or forgot their father, and some he saw carried
to the grave. One of his daughters remained with him, and outlived him.
She was the widow of a bold enterprising man, who lay buried with his
two brothers, one of whom had sailed round the world with Anson, in the
depths of the ocean; and her orphan child, who, of a similar character,
shared, nearly fifty years after, a similar fate, was the father of the
writer.
[Sidenote: ANDREW LINDSAY.]
A very few paces from the burying-ground of John Feddes, there is a
large rude stone reared on two shapeless balusters, and inscribed
with a brief record of the four last generations of the Lindsays of
Cromarty--an old family now extinct. In its early days this family was
one of the most affluent in the burgh, and had its friendships and
marriages among the aristocracy of the country; but it gradually sank
as it became older, and, in the year 1729, its last scion was a little
ragged boy of about ten years of age, who lived with his widow mother
in one of the rooms of a huge dilapidated house at the foot of the
Chapel hill. Dilapidated as it was, it formed the sole remnant of all
the possessions of the Lindsays. Andrew, for so the boy was called,
was a high-spirited, unlucky little fellow, too careless of the school
and of his book to be much a favourite with the schoolmaster, but
exceedingly popular among his playfellows, and the projector of half
the pieces of petty mischief with which they annoyed the village. But,
about the end of the year 1731, his character became the subject of a
change, which, after unfixing almost all its old traits, and producing
a temporary chaos, set, at length, much better ones in their places. He
broke off from his old companions, grew thoughtful and melancholy, and
fond of solitude, read much in his Bible, took long journeys to hear
the sermons of the more celebrated ministers of other parishes, and
became the constant and attentive auditor of the clergyman of his own.
He felt comfortless and unhappy. Like the hero of that most popular of
all allegories, the Pilgrim’s Progress, “he stood clothed in rags, with
his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a burden on his
back. And opening the book, he read thereon, and, as he read, he wept
and trembled, and, not being able to contain himself, he broke out into
a lamentable cry, saying, What shall I do?” Indeed, the whole history
of Andrew Lindsay, from the time of his conversion to his death, is
so exact a counterpart of the journey of Christian, from the day on
which he quitted the City of Destruction until he had entered the
river, that, in tracing his course, I shall occasionally refer to the
allegory; regarding it as the well-known chart of an imperfectly known
country. All other allegories are mere mediums of instruction, and owe
their chief merit to their transparency as such; but it is not thus
with the dream of Bunyan, which, through its intrinsic interest alone,
has become more generally known than even the truths which are couched
under it.
Some time in the year 1732, a pious Scottish clergyman who resided
in England--a Mr. Davidson of Denham, in Essex, visited some of
his friends who lived in Cromarty. He was crossing the Firth at
this time on a Sabbath morning, to attend the celebration of the
Supper in a neighbouring church, when a person pointed out to him a
thoughtful-looking little boy, who sat at the other end of the boat.
“It is Andrew Lindsay,” said the person, “a poor young thing seeking
anxiously after the truth.” “I had no opportunity of conversing with
him,” says Mr. Davidson in his printed tract, “but I could not observe
without thankfulness a poor child, on a cold morning, crossing the sea
to hear the Word, without shoe or stocking, or anything to cover his
head from the inclemency of the weather.” He saw him again when in
church--his eyes fixed steadfastly on the preacher, and the expression
of his countenance varying with the tone of the discourse. Feeling much
interested in him, he had no sooner returned to Cromarty than he waited
upon him at his mother’s, and succeeded in engaging him in a long and
interesting conversation, which he has recorded at considerable length.
“How did it happen, my little fellow,” said he, “that you went so far
from home last week to hear sermon, when the season was so cold, and
you had neither shoes nor stockings?” The boy replied in a bashful,
unassuming manner, that he was in that state of nature which is
contrasted by our Saviour with that better state of grace, the denizens
of which can alone inherit the kingdom of heaven. But, though conscious
that such was the case, he was quite unaffected, he said, by a sense
of his danger. He was anxious, therefore, to pursue those means by
which such a sense might be awakened in him; and the Word preached
was one of these. For how, he continued, unless I be oppressed by the
weight of the evil which rests upon me, and the woe and misery which it
must necessarily entail in the future, how can I value or seek after
the only Saviour? “But what,” said Mr. Davidson, “if God himself has
engaged to work this affecting sense of sin in the heart?”--“Has he so
promised?” eagerly inquired the boy. The clergyman took out his Bible,
and read to him the remarkable text in John, in which our Saviour
intimates the coming of the Spirit to convince the world of _sin_, of
righteousness, and of judgment. Andrew’s countenance brightened as he
listened, and, losing his timidity in the excitement of the moment, he
took the book out of Mr. Davidson’s hand, and, for several minutes,
contemplated the passage in silence.
“Do you ever pray?” inquired Mr. Davidson; Andrew shut the book, and,
hanging down his head, timidly replied in the negative. “What! not
pray! Do you go so far from home to attend sermons, and yet not bow the
knee to God in prayer?”--“Ah!” he answered, “I do bow the knee perhaps
six or seven times a day, but I cannot call that praying to God--I want
the spirit of prayer; I often ask I hardly know what, and with scarce
any desire to receive; and often, when a half sense of my condition has
compelled me to kneel, a vicious wandering imagination carries me away,
and I rise again, not knowing what I have said.”--“Oh!” rejoined the
clergyman, “only persist. But tell me, was it your ordinary practice,
in past years, to attend sermons as you do now?” “No, sir, quite
the reverse; once or twice in a season, perhaps, I went to church,
but I used to quit it through weariness ere the service was half
completed.”--“And how do you account for the change?” “I cannot account
for it; I only know, that formerly I had no heart to go and hear of
God at any time, and that now I dare not keep away.” Mr. Davidson
then inquired whether he had ever conversed on these matters with Mr.
Gordon, the minister of the parish; but was asked with much simplicity,
in return, what Mr. Gordon would think of a poor boy like him presuming
to call on him? “I have many doubts and uncertainties,” said he, “but
I am afraid to ask any one to solve them. Once, indeed, but only once,
I plucked up resolution enough to inquire of a friend how I might
glorify God. He bade me obey God’s commandments, for that was the way
to glorify Him, and I now see the value of the advice; but I see, also,
that only through faith in Jesus Christ can fallen man acquire an
ability to profit by it.”
“This last answer, so much above his years,” says Mr. Davidson,
“occasioned my asking him how he had become so intimately acquainted
with these truths? He modestly answered, ‘I hear Mr. Gordon preach,’ as
if he had said, My knowledge bears no proportion to the advantages I
enjoy.” And thus ended the conference; for, after exhorting him to be
much in secret prayer, and to testify to the world the excellence of
what he sought after, by being a diligent scholar and a dutiful son,
Mr. Davidson bade him farewell. The poor little fellow was wandering,
at this period, over that middle space which lies between the devoted
city and the wicket gate; struggling at times in the deep mire of the
slough, at times journeying beside the hanging hill. He had received,
however, the roll from Evangelist, and saw the shining light of the
wicket becoming clearer and brighter as he advanced.
About half a year from the time of this conversation, Mr. Davidson had
again occasion to visit Cromarty; he called on Andrew, and was struck,
in the moment he saw him, by a remarkable change in his appearance.
Formerly, the expression of his countenance, though interesting, was
profoundly melancholy; it was now lighted up by a quiet tranquil joy;
and, though modest and unassuming as before, he was less timid. He had
passed the wicket. He felt he had become one of the family of God; and
found a new principle implanted within him, which so operated on his
affections, that he now hated the evil he had previously loved, and was
enamoured of the good he had formerly rejected. Standing, as Bacon has
beautifully expressed it, on the “vantage ground of truth,” he could
overlook the windings of the track on which he had lately journeyed,
not knowing whither he went. “I see,” said he to Mr. Davidson, “that
the very bent of my mind was contrary to God--especially to the way
of salvation by Christ--and that I could no more get rid of this
disposition through any effort of my own, than I could pull the sun
out of the heavens. I see, too, that not only were all my ordinary
actions tainted by sin, but that even my religious duties were sins
also. And yet, out of these actions and duties, was I accumulating to
myself a righteousness which I meant to barter for the favour of God;
and, though he was at much pains with me in scattering the hoard in
which I trusted, yet, after every fresh dispersal, would I set myself
to gather anew.”--When passing the wicket, he had been shot at from
the castle. He was conscious that a power, detached from his mind, had
been operating upon it; for, as it fluctuated on its natural balance
between gaiety and depression, he had felt this power weighing it
into despair as it sunk towards the lower extreme, and urging it into
presumption as it ascended towards the upper. He had seen, also, the
rarities at the house of the Interpreter. Religion had communicated to
him the art of thinking. It first inspired him with a belief in God,
and an anxious desire to know what was his character; and, as he read
his Bible, and heard sermons, his mental faculties, like the wheels
of a newly-completed engine, felt for the first time the impulse of a
moving power, and began to revolve. It next stirred him up to stand
sentinel over the various workings of his mind, and, as he stood and
pondered, he became a skilful metaphysician, without so much as knowing
the name of the science. As a last step in the process, it brought him
acquainted with those countless analogies by which the natural world is
rendered the best of all commentaries on the moral. “I am unable,” said
he to his friend the clergyman, “to describe the state of my soul as I
see it, but I am somewhat helped to conceive of it by the springs which
rise by the wayside, as I pass westward from the town, along the edge
of the bay. They contain only a scanty supply of water, and are matted
over with grass and weeds; but even now in August, when the fierce heat
has dried up all the larger pools, that scanty supply does not fail
them. On disentangling the weeds I see the water sparkling beneath. It
is thus, I trust, with my heart. The life of God is often veiled in it
by the rank luxuriance of evil thoughts, but, when a new manifestation
draws these aside, I can catch a glimpse of what they conceal. I can
hope, too, that as the love of Christ is unchangeable, this element of
life will continue to spring up in my soul, however dry and arid the
atmosphere which surrounds it.”
Bunyan has described a green pleasant valley, besprinkled with lilies,
which lies between the palace of the virgins and the valley of the
shadow of death. “It is blessed,” says he, “with an exceedingly
fertile soil, and there have been many labouring men who have been
fortunate enough to get estates in it.” Andrew was one of these. He
was humble and unobtrusive, and but little confident in himself--a
true freeman of the valley of humiliation. Though no longer the
leader of his schoolfellows--for he had now so little influence among
them, that he could not prevail on so much as one of them to follow
him--he was much happier than before. Leaving them at their wild
games, he would retire to his solitudes, and there hold converse with
the Deity in prayer, or seek out in meditation some of the countless
parallelisms of the two great works which had been spread out before
him--Creation and the Bible. He was no longer a leader even to himself.
“I have been taught,” said he, “by experience, that my heart is too
stubborn a thing for my own management, and so have given it up to the
management of Christ.” Mr. Davidson saw him, for the last time, about
the beginning of the year 1740, when he complained to him of being
exposed to many sore temptations. He had met with wild beasts, and
had to contend with giants--he had been astonished amid the gloom of
the dark valley, and bewildered in the mists of the enchanted ground.
The interesting little tract from which I have drawn nearly all the
materials of my memoir, and which at the time of its first appearance
passed through several editions, and was printed more recently at
Edinburgh by the publishers for the Sabbath-schools, concludes with a
brief notice of this conference. The rest of Andrew’s story may be told
in a few words. He lived virtuously and happily, supporting himself
by the labour of his hands, without either seeking after wealth or
attaining to it; he bore a good name, though not a celebrated one, and
lived respected, and died regretted. It is recorded on his tombstone,
in an epitaph whose only merit is its truth, that “he was truly pious
from a child--his whole life and conversation agreeable thereto;” and
that his death took place in 1769, in the fiftieth year of his age.
I am aware that, in thus tracing the course of my townsman, I lay
myself open to a charge of fanaticism. I shall venture, however, on
committing myself still further.
One night, towards the close of last autumn, I visited the old chapel
of St. Regulus. The moon, nearly at full, was riding high overhead in a
troubled sky, pouring its light by fits, as the clouds passed, on the
grey ruins, and the mossy, tilt-like hillocks, which had been raised
ages before over the beds of the sleepers. The deep, dark shadows
of the tombs seemed stamped upon the sward, forming, as one might
imagine, a kind of general epitaph on the dead, but inscribed, like
the handwriting on the wall, in the characters of a strange tongue. A
low breeze was creeping through the long withered grass at my feet; a
shower of yellow leaves came rustling, from time to time, from an old
gnarled elm that shot out its branches over the burying-ground--and,
after twinkling for a few seconds in their descent, silently took up
their places among the rest of the departed; the rush of the stream
sounded hoarse and mournful from the bottom of the ravine, like a
voice from the depths of the sepulchre; there was a low, monotonous
murmur, the mingled utterance of a thousand sounds of earth, air, and
water, each one inaudible in itself; and, at intervals, the deep,
hollow roar of waves came echoing from the caves of the distant
promontory, a certain presage of coming tempest. I was much impressed
by the melancholy of the scene. I reckoned the tombs one by one. I
pronounced the names of the tenants. I called to remembrance the
various narratives of their loves and their animosities, their joys
and their sorrows. I felt, and there was a painful intensity in the
feeling, that the gates of death had indeed closed over them, and shut
them out from the world for ever. I contrasted the many centuries which
had rolled away ere they had been called into existence, and the ages
which had passed since their departure, with the little brief space
between--that space in which the Jordan of their hopes and fears had
leaped from its source, and after winding through the cares, and toils,
and disappointments of life, had fallen into the Dead Sea of the grave;
and as I mused and pondered--as the flood of thought came rushing over
me--my heart seemed dying within me, for I felt that, as one of this
hapless race, vanity of vanity was written on all my pursuits and all
my enjoyments, and that death, as a curse, was denounced against me.
But there was one tomb which I had not reckoned, one name which I had
not pronounced, one story which I had not remembered. I had not thought
of the tomb, the name, the story of that sleeper of hope, who had lived
in the world as if he were not of the world, and had died in the
full belief that because God was his friend, death could not be his
enemy. My eye at length rested on the burial-ground of the Lindsays,
and the feeling of deep despondency which had weighed on my spirits
was dissipated as if by a charm. I saw time as the dark vestibule of
eternity;--the gate of death which separates the porch from the main
building, seemed to revolve on its hinges, and light broke in as it
opened; for the hall beyond was not a place of gloom and horror, nor
strewed, as I had imagined, with the bones of dead men. I felt that
the sleeper below had, indeed, lived well; the world had passed from
him as from the others, but he had wisely fixed his affections, not
on the transitory things of the world, but on objects as immortal as
his own soul; and as I mused on his life and his death, on the quiet
and comfort of the one, and the high joy of the other, I wondered how
it was that men could deem it wisdom to pursue an opposite course.--I
could not, at that time, regard Lindsay as a fanatic, nor am I ashamed
to confess that I have not since changed my opinion.
CHAPTER XIV.
“Around swells mony a grassy heap,
Stan’s mony a sculptured stane;
An’ yet in a’ this peopled field
No being thinks but ane.”--ANON.
[Sidenote: THE CHAPEL OF ST. REGULUS.]
The ruins of the old chapel of St. Regulus occupy the edge of a narrow
projecting angle, in which the burying-ground terminates towards the
east. Accident and decay seem to have wrought their worst upon them.
The greater part of the front wall has been swallowed up piecemeal by
the ravine, which, from the continual action of the stream, and the
rains, and snows, of so many winters, has been gradually widening and
deepening, until it has at length reached the site of the building,
and is now scooping out what was once the floor. The other walls have
found enemies nearly as potent as the stream and the seasons, in the
little urchins of the town, who, for the last two centuries, have been
amusing themselves, generation after generation, in tearing out the
stones, and rolling them down the sides of the eminence. What is now,
however, only a broken-edged ruin, and a few shapeless mounds, was,
three hundred years ago, a picturesque-looking, high-gabled house, of
one story, perforated by a range of narrow, slit-like windows, and
roofed with ponderous grey slate. A rude stone cross surmounted the
eastern gable. Attached to the gable which fronted the west, there was
a building roofed over like the chapel, but much superior to it in
its style of masonry. It was the tomb of the Urquharts. A single tier
of hewn ashlar, with a sloping basement, and surmounted by a Gothic
moulding, are now almost its only remains; but from the line of the
foundation, which we can still trace on the sward, we see that it was
laid out in the form of a square, with a double buttress rising at each
of the angles. The area within is occupied by a mouldy half-dilapidated
vault, partially filled with bones and the rubbish of the chapel.
A few yards farther away, and nearly level with the grass, there is
an uncouth imitation of the human figure with the hands folded on the
breast. It bears the name of the “burnt cook;” and from time immemorial
the children of the place spit on it as they pass. But though tradition
bears evidence to the antiquity of the practice, it gives no account
of its origin, or what perhaps might prove the same thing, of the
character of the poor cook; which we may infer, however, from the
nature of the observance, to have been a bad one. I find it stated by
Mr. Brady in his _Clavis Calendaria_, that as late as the last century
it was customary, in some places of England, for people to spit every
time they named the devil.
Viewed from the ruins, the tombstones of the burying-ground seem
clustered together beneath the fence of trees which overtops the
eminence on the west. I have compared them, in some of my imaginative
moods, to a covey of waterfowl sleeping beside the long rank grass and
rushes of a lake. They are mostly all fashioned in that heavy grotesque
style of sculpture, which, after the Reformation had pulled down both
the patterns and patrons of the stone-cutter, succeeded, in this part
of the country, to the lighter and more elegant style of the time
of the Jameses. The centres of the stones are occupied by the rude
semblances of skulls and cross-bones, dead-bells and sand-glasses,
shovels and sceptres, coffins and armorial bearings; while the
inscriptions, rude and uncouth as the figures, run in continuous lines
round the margins. They tell us, though with as little variety as
elegance of phrase, that there is nothing certain in life except its
termination; and, taken collectively, read us a striking lesson on
the vicissitudes of human affairs. For we learn from them that we have
before us the burial-place of no fewer than seven landed proprietors,
none of whose families now inherit their estates. One of the
inscriptions, and but only one, has some little merit as a composition.
It is simple and modest; and may be regarded, besides, as a specimen of
the language and orthography of Cromarty in the reign of Charles II. It
runs thus--
HEIR · LYES · AT · REST · AN · FAITHFVL · ONE ·
WHOM · GOD · HAITH · PLEASIT · TO · CAL · VPON ·
HIR · LYE · SHEE · LIVED · BOTH · POOR · AND · IVST ·
AND · EY · IN · GOD · SHEE · PVT · HIR · TRVST ·
GOD’S · LAWES · OBYED · TO · SIN · WAS · LEATH ·
NO · DOVBT · SHEE · DYED · ANE · HAPPIE · DATH ·
IANET · IONS^{TON} · 1679 ·
On the northern side of the burying-ground there is a low stone,
sculptured like most of the others, but broken by some accident into
three pieces. A few stinted shrubs of broom spread their tiny branches
and bright blossoms over the figures; they are obscured, besides, by
rank tufts of moss and patches of lichens; but, despite of neglect
and accident, enough of the inscription remains legible to tell us
that we stand on the burial-place of one John Macleod, a _merchant_ of
Cromarty. He kept, besides, the principal inn of the place. He had an
only son, a tall, and very powerful man, who was engaged, as he himself
had been in his earlier days, in the free trade, and who, for a series
of years, had set the officers of the revenue at defiance. Some time
late in the reign of Queen Anne, he had succeeded in landing part of a
cargo among the rocks of the hill of Cromarty, and in transporting it,
night after night, from the cavern in which he had first secreted it,
to a vault in his father’s house, which opened into the cellar. After
concealing the entrance, he had seated himself beside the old man at
the kitchen fire, when two revenue-officers entered the apartment, and
taking their places beside a table, called for liquor. Macleod drew
his bonnet hastily over his brow, and edging away from the small iron
lamp which lighted the kitchen, muffled himself up in the folds of his
dreadnought greatcoat. His father supplied the officers. “Where is
Walter, your son?” inquired the better-dressed of the two, a tall, thin
man, equipped in a three-cornered hat, and a blue coat seamed with gold
lace; “I trust he does not still sail the Swacker.” “Maybe no,” said
the old man dryly. “For I have just had intelligence,” continued the
officer, “that she was captured this morning by Captain Manton, after
firing on her Majesty’s flag; and it will go pretty hard, I can tell
you, with some of the crew.” A third revenue-officer now entered the
kitchen, and going up to the table whispered something to the others.
“Please, Mr. Macleod,” said the former speaker to the innkeeper,
“bring us a light, and the key of your cellar.” “And wherefore that?”
inquired the old man; “show me your warrant. What would ye do wi’
the key?” “Nay, sir, no trifling; you brought here last night three
cart-loads of Geneva, and stored them up in a vault below your cellar;
the key and a light.” There was no sign, however, of procuring either.
“Away!” he continued, turning to the officer who had last entered;
“away for a candle and a sledge-hammer!” He was just quitting the room
when the younger Macleod rose from his seat, and took his stand right
between him and the door. “Look ye, gentlemen,” he said in a tone of
portentous coolness, “I shall take it upon me to settle this affair;
you and I have met before now, and are a little acquainted. The man
who first moves out of this place in the direction of the cellar,
shall never move afterwards in any direction at all.” He thrust his
hand, as he spoke, beneath the folds of his greatcoat, and seemed
extricating some weapon from his belt. “In upon him, lads!” shouted
out the tall officer, “devil though he be, he is but one; the rest are
all captured.” In a moment, two of the officers had thrown themselves
upon him; the third laid hold of his father. A tremendous struggle
ensued;--the lamp was overturned and extinguished. The smuggler, with a
Herculean effort, shook off both his assailants, and as they rushed in
again to close with him, he dealt one of them so terrible a blow that
he rolled, stunned and senseless, on the floor. The elder Macleod, a
hale old man, had extricated himself at the same moment, and mistaking,
in the imperfect light, his son for one of the officers, and the fallen
officer for his son, he seized on the kitchen poker, and just as the
champion had succeeded in mastering his other opponent, he struck at
him from behind, and felled him in an instant. In less than half an
hour after he was dead. The unfortunate old man did not long survive
him; for after enduring, for a few days, the horrors of mingled grief
and remorse, his anguish of mind terminated in insanity, and he died in
the course of the month.
For some time after, the house he had inhabited lay without a tenant,
and stories were circulated among the town’s-folks of it being haunted.
One David Hood, a tailor of the place, was frightened almost out of
his wits in passing it on a coarse winter night, when neither fire
nor candle in the whole range of houses on either side, showed him
that there was anybody awake in town but himself. A fearful noise
seemed to proceed from one of the lower rooms, as if a party of men
were engaged in some desperate struggle;--he could hear the dashing
of furniture against the floor, and the blows of the assailants; and
after a dull hollow sound twice repeated, there was a fearful shriek,
and a mournful exclamation in the voice of the deceased shopkeeper, “I
have murdered my son! I have murdered my son!” The house was occupied,
notwithstanding, some years after, though little to the comfort of the
tenants. Often were they awakened at midnight, it is said, by noises,
as if every piece of furniture in the apartment was huddled into the
middle of the floor, though in the morning not a chair or table would
be found displaced; at times, too, it would seem as if some person
heavily booted was traversing the rooms overhead; and some of the
inmates, as they lay a-bed, have seen clenched fists shaken at them
from outside the windows, and pale, threatening faces looking in upon
them through half-open doors. There is one of the stories which, but
for a single circumstance, I should deem more authentic, not merely
than any of the others, but than most of the class to which it belongs.
It was communicated to me by a sensible and honest man--a man, too,
of very general information. He saw, he said, what he seriously
believed to be the apparition of the younger Macleod; but as he was a
child of only six years at the time, his testimony may, perhaps, be
more rationally regarded as curiously illustrative of the force of
imagination at a very early age, than as furnishing any legitimate
proof of the reality of such appearances. He had a sister, a few
years older than himself, who attended some of the younger members
of the family, which tenanted, about sixty years ago, the house once
occupied by the shopkeeper. One Sunday forenoon, when all the inmates
had gone to church except the girl and her charge, he stole in to see
her, and then amused himself in wandering from room to room, gazing
at the furniture and the pictures. He at length reached one of the
garrets, and was turning over a heap of old magazines in quest of
the prints, when he observed something darken the door, and looking
up, found himself in the presence of what seemed to be a very tall,
broad-shouldered man, with a pale, ghastly countenance, and wrapt up
in a brown dreadnought greatcoat. A good deal surprised, but not at
all alarmed, for he had no thought at the time that the appearance was
other than natural, he stepped down stairs and told his sister that
there was a “muckle big man i’ the top of the house.” She immediately
called in a party of the neighbours, who, emboldened by the daylight,
explored every room and closet from the garrets to the cellar, but they
saw neither the tall man nor the dreadnought greatcoat.
[Sidenote: THE STORY OF SANDY WOOD.]
The old enclosure of the burying-ground, which seems originally to
have been an earthen wall, has now sunk into a grassy mound, and
on the southern and western sides some of the largest trees of the
fence--a fine stately ash, fluted like a Grecian column, a huge elm
roughened over with immense wens, and a low bushy larch with a bent
twisted trunk, and weeping branches--spring directly out of it. At one
place we see a flat tombstone lying a few yards outside the mound.
The trees which shoot up on every side fling so deep a gloom over it
during the summer and autumn months, that we can scarcely decipher the
epitaph; and in winter it is not unfrequently buried under a wreath
of withered leaves. By dint of some little pains, however, we come to
learn from the darkened and half-dilapidated inscription, that the
tenant below was one Alexander Wood, a native of Cromarty, who died
in the year 1690; and that he was interred in this place at his own
especial desire. His wife and some of his children have taken up their
places beside him; thus lying apart like a family of hermits; while his
story--which, almost too wild for tradition itself, is yet as authentic
as most pieces of written history--affords a curious explanation of the
circumstance which directed their choice.
Wood was a man of strong passions, sparingly gifted with common sense,
and exceedingly superstitious. No one could be kinder to one’s friends
or relatives, or more hospitable to a stranger; but when once offended,
he was implacable. He had but little in his power either as a friend or
an enemy--his course through the world lying barely beyond the bleak
edge of poverty. If a neighbour, however, dropped in by accident at
meal-time, he would not be suffered to quit his house until he had
shared with him his simple fare. There was benevolence in the very
grasp of his hand and the twinkle of his eye, and in the little set
speech, still preserved by tradition, in which he used to address his
wife every time an old or mutilated beggar came to the door:--“Alms,
gudewife,” he would say; “alms to the cripple, and the blin’, and
the broken-down.” When injured or insulted, however, and certainly
no one could do either without being very much in the wrong, there
was a toad-like malignity in his nature, that would come leaping out
like the reptile from its hole, and no power on earth could shut it
up again. He would sit hatching his venom for days and weeks together
with a slow, tedious, unoperative kind of perseverance, that achieved
nothing. He was full of anecdote; and, in all his stories, human nature
was exhibited in only its brightest lights and its deepest shadows,
without the slightest mixture of that medium tint which gives colour
to its working, everyday suit. Whatever was bad in the better class,
he transferred to the worse, and _vice versa_; and thus not even his
narratives of the supernatural were less true to nature and fact than
his narratives of mere men and women. And he dealt with the two classes
of stories after one fashion--lending the same firm belief to both
alike.
In the house adjoining the one in which he resided, there lived a stout
little man, a shoemaker, famous in the village for his great wit and
his very considerable knavery. His jokes were mostly practical, and
some of the best of them exceedingly akin to felonies. Poor Wood could
not understand his wit, but, in his simplicity of heart, he deemed
him honest, and would fain have prevailed on the neighbours to think
so too. He knew it, he said, by his very look. Their gardens, like
their houses, lay contiguous, and were separated from each other, not
by a fence, but by four undressed stones laid in a line. Year after
year was the garden of Wood becoming less productive; and he had a
strange misgiving, but the thing was too absurd to be spoken of, that
it was growing smaller every season by the breadth of a whole row of
cabbages. On the one side, however, were the back walls of his own and
his neighbour’s tenements; the four large stones stretched along the
other; and nothing, surely, could be less likely than that either the
stones or the houses should take it into their heads to rob him of
his property. But the more he strove to exclude the idea the more it
pressed upon him. He measured and remeasured to convince himself that
it was a false one, and found that he had fallen on just the means of
establishing its truth. The garden was actually growing smaller. But
how? Just because it was bewitched! It was shrinking into itself under
the force of some potent enchantment, like a piece of plaiding in the
fulling-mill. No hypothesis could be more congenial; and he would have
held by it, perhaps, until his dying day, had it not been struck down
by one of those chance discoveries which destroy so many beautiful
systems and spoil so much ingenious philosophy, quite in the way that
Newton’s apple struck down the vortices of Descartes.
He was lying a-bed one morning in spring, about daybreak, when his
attention was excited by a strange noise which seemed to proceed from
the garden. Had he heard it two hours earlier, he would have wrapped
up his head in the bedclothes and lain still; but now that the cock
had crown, it could not, he concluded, be other than natural. Hastily
throwing on part of his clothes, he stole warily to a back window, and
saw, between him and the faint light that was beginning to peep out
in the east, the figure of a man, armed with a lever, tugging at the
stones. Two had already been shifted a full yard nearer the houses,
and the figure was straining over a third. Wood crept stealthily out
at the window, crawled on all fours to the intruder, and, tripping up
his heels, laid him across his lever. It was his knavish neighbour the
shoemaker. A scene of noisy contention ensued; groups of half-dressed
town’s-folk, looming horrible in their shirts and nightcaps through the
grey of morning, came issuing through the lanes and the closes; and
the combatants were dragged asunder. And well was it for the shoemaker
that it happened so; for Wood, though in his sixtieth year, was strong
enough, and more than angry enough, to have torn him to pieces. Now,
however, that the warfare had to be carried on by words, the case was
quite reversed.
“Neebours,” said the shoemaker, who had the double advantage of being
exceedingly plausible, and decidedly in the wrong, “I’m desperately
ill-used this morning--desperately ill-used;--he would baith rob and
murder me. I lang jaloused, ye see, that my wee bit o’ a yard was
growing littler and littler ilka season; and, though no very ready
to suspect folk, I just thought I would keep watch, and see wha was
shifting the mark-stanes. Weel, and I did;--late and early did I watch
for mair now than a fortnight; and wha did I see this morning through
the back winnock but auld Sandy Wood there in his verra sark--Oh, it’s
no him that has ony thought o’ his end!--poking the stones wi’ a lang
kebar, intil the very heart o’ my grun’? See,” said he, pointing to the
one that had not yet been moved, “see if he hasna shifted it a lang
ell; and only notice the craft o’ the bodie in tirring up the yird
about the lave, as if they had been a’ moved frae my side. Weel, I came
out and challenged him, as wha widna?--says I, Sawney my man, that’s
no honest; I’ll no bear that; and nae mair had I time to say, when up
he flew at me like a wull-cat, and if it wasna for yoursels I daresay
he would hae throttled me. Look how I am bleedin’;--and only look till
him--look till the cankart deceitful bodie, if he has one word to put
in for himsel’.”
There was truth in, at least, this last assertion; for poor Wood, mute
with rage and astonishment, stood listening, in utter helplessness,
to the astounding charge of the shoemaker,--almost the very charge he
himself had to prefer. Twice did he spring forward to grapple with him,
but the neighbours held him back, and every time he essayed to speak,
his words--massed and tangled together, like wreaths of sea-weed in a
hurricane--stuck in his throat. He continued to rage for three days
after, and when the eruption had at length subsided, all his former
resentments were found to be swallowed up, like the lesser craters of a
volcano, in the gulf of one immense hatred.
His house, as has been said, lay contiguous to the house of the
shoemaker, and he could not avoid seeing him, every time he went out
and came in--a circumstance which he at first deemed rather gratifying
than otherwise. It prevented his hatred from becoming vapid by setting
it a-working at least ten times a day, as a musket would a barrel of
ale if discharged into the bunghole. Its frequency, however, at length
sickened him, and he had employed a mason to build a stone wall,
which, by stretching from side to side of the close, was to shut up
the view, when he sickened in right earnest, and at the end of a few
days found himself a-dying. Still, however, he was possessed by his one
engrossing resentment. It mingled with all his thoughts of the past
and the future; and not only was he to carry it with him to the world
to which he was going, but also to leave it behind him as a legacy to
his children. Among his many other beliefs, there was a superstition,
handed down from the times of the monks, that at the day of final doom
all the people of the sheriffdom were to be judged on the moor of
Navity; and both the judgment and the scene of it he had indissolubly
associated with the shoemaker and the four stones. Experience had
taught him the importance of securing a first hearing for his story;
for was his neighbour, he concluded, to be beforehand with him, he
would have as slight a chance of being righted at Navity as in his own
garden. After brooding over the matter for a whole day, he called his
friends and children round his bed, and raised himself on his elbow to
address them.
“I’m wearing awa, bairns and neebours,” he said, “and it vexes me sair
that that wretched bodie should see me going afore him. Mind, Jock,
that ye’ll build the dike, and make it heigh, heigh, and stobbie on
the top; and oh! keep him out o’ my lykewake, for should he but step
in at the door, I’ll rise, Jock, frae the verra straiking-board,
and do murder! Dinna let him so muckle as look on my coffin. I have
been pondering a’ this day about the meeting at Navity, and the
march-stanes; and I’ll tell you, Jock, how we’ll match him. Bury
me ayont the saint’s dike on the Navity side, and dinna lay me
deep. Ye ken the bonny green hillock, spreckled o’er wi’ gowans and
puddock-flowers--bury me there, Jock; and yoursel’, and the auld wife,
may just, when your hour comes, tak up your places beside me. We’ll a’
get up at the first tout--the ane helping the other; and I’se wad a I’m
worth i’ the warld, we’ll be half-way up at Navity afore the shochlan,
short-legged bodie wins o’er the dike.” Such was the dying injunction
of Sandy Wood: and his tombstone still remains to testify that it
was religiously attended to. An Englishman who came to reside in the
parish, nearly an age after, and to whom the story must have been
imparted in a rather imperfect manner, was shocked by what he deemed
his unfair policy. The litigants, he said, should start together; he
was certain it would be so in England where a fair field was all that
would be given to St. Dunstan himself though he fought with the devil.
And that it might be so here, he buried the tombstone of Wood in an
immense heap of clay and gravel. It would keep him down, he said, until
the little fellow would have clambered over the wall. The town’s-folk,
however, who were better acquainted with the merits of the case,
shovelled the heap aside; and it now forms two little hillocks which
overtop the stone, and which, from the nature of the soil, are still
more scantily covered with verdure than any part of the surrounding
bank.
CHAPTER XV.
“Oh! I do ponder with most strange delight
On the calm slumbers of the dead-man’s night.”
HENRY K. WHITE.
[Sidenote: THE POOR LOST LAD.]
We have lingered long in the solitary burying-ground of St. Regulus;
the sun hastens to its setting; and the slanting beam of red light that
comes pouring in through an opening amid the trees, catches but the
extreme tops of the loftier monuments, and the higher pinnacles of the
ruin beyond. There is a little bird chirping among the graves; we may
hear the hum of the bee as it speeds homeward, and the low soothing
murmur of the stream in the dell below; all else is stillness and
solitude in this field of the dead.
There are times when, amid scenes such as the present, one can almost
forget the possible, and wish that the silence were less deep. The most
contemplative of modern poets, in giving voice to a similar wish, has
sublimed it into poetry. “Would,” he says of his churchyard among the
hills, in the stanza I have already employed as a motto,
“Would that the silent earth
Of what it holds could speak, and every grave
Be as a volume, shut, yet capable
Of yielding its contents to ear and eye.”
The dead of a thousand years are sleeping at our feet; the poor peasant
serf of ten centuries ago, whom the neighbouring baron could have hung
up at his cottage door, with the intelligent mechanic of yesterday,
who took so deep an interest in the emancipation of the negroes.
What strange stories of the past, what striking illustrations of the
destiny and nature of man, how important a chronicle of the progress of
society, would this solitary spot present us with, were it not that,
like the mysterious volume in the Apocalypse, no man can open the book
or unloose the seals thereof! There are recollections associated with
some of the more recent graves, of interest enough to show us how
curious a record the history of the whole would have furnished.
It is now well-nigh thirty years since Willie Watson returned, after an
absence of nearly a quarter of a century, to the neighbouring town. He
had been employed as a ladies’ shoemaker in some of the districts of
the south; but no one at home had heard of Willie in the interval, and
there was little known regarding him at his return, except that when he
had quitted town so many years before, he was a neat-handed industrious
workman, and what the elderly people called a quiet decent lad. And
he was now, though somewhat in the wane of life, even a more thorough
master of his trade than before. He was quiet and unobtrusive, too,
as ever, and a great reader of serious books. And so the better sort
of the people were beginning to draw to Willie by a kind of natural
sympathy; some of them had learned to saunter into his workshop in
the long evenings, and some had grown bold enough to engage him in
serious conversation when they met with him in his solitary walks;
when out came the astounding fact--and important as it may seem, the
simple-minded mechanic had taken no pains to conceal it--that, during
his residence in the south country, he had laid down Presbyterianism,
and become the member of a Baptist church. There was a sudden revulsion
of feeling towards him, and all the people of the town began to speak
of Willie Watson as “a poor lost lad.”
The “poor lost lad,” however, was unquestionably a very excellent
workman; and as he made neater shoes than anybody else, the ladies of
the place could see no great harm in wearing them. He was singularly
industrious, too, and indulged in no extraordinary expense, except
when he now and then bought a good book, or a few flower-seeds for
his garden. He was withal a single man, with only himself, and an
elderly sister who lived with him, to provide for; and, what between
the regularity of his gains on the one hand, and the moderation of
his desires on the other, Willie, for a person of his condition, was
in easy circumstances. It was found that all the children in the
neighbourhood had taken a wonderful fancy to his shop. Willie was
fond of telling them good little stories out of the Bible, and of
explaining to them the prints which he had pasted on the walls. Above
all, he was anxiously bent on teaching them to read. Some of their
parents were poor, and some of them were careless; and he saw that,
unless they learned their letters from him, there was little chance of
their ever learning them at all. Willie in a small way, and to a very
small congregation, was a kind of missionary; and what between his
stories and his pictures, and his flowers and his apples, his labours
were wonderfully successful. Never yet was school or church half so
delightful to the little men and women of the place as the workshop of
Willie Watson, “the poor lost lad.”
Years of scarcity came on; taxes were high, and crops not abundant; and
the soldiery abroad, whom the country had employed to fight against
Bonaparte, had got an appetite at their work, and were consuming a
good deal of meat and corn. The price of food rose tremendously; and
many of the town’s-people, who were working for very little, were not
in every case secure of that little when the work was done. Willie’s
small congregation began to find that the times were exceedingly bad;
there were no more morning _pieces_ among them, and the porridge was
less than enough. It was observed, however, that in the midst of their
distresses Willie got in a large stock of meal, and that his sister
began to bake as if she were making ready for a wedding. The children
were wonderfully interested in the work, and watched it to the end;
when, lo! to their great and joyous surprise, Willie divided the whole
baking among them. Every member of the congregation got a cake; there
were some who had little brothers and sisters at home who got two;
and from that day forward, till times got better, none of Willie’s
young people lacked their morning _piece_. The neighbours marvelled at
Willie; and all agreed that there was something strangely puzzling in
the character of the “poor lost lad.”
I have alluded to Willie’s garden. Never was there a little bit of
ground better occupied; it looked like a piece of rich needlework.
He had got wonderful flowers too--flesh-coloured carnations streaked
with red, and double roses of a rich golden yellow. Even the
commoner varieties--auriculas and anemones, and the party-coloured
polyanthus--grew better with Willie than with anybody else. A Dutchman
might have envied him his tulips, as they stood row beyond row on their
elevated beds, like so many soldiers on a redoubt; and there was one
mild dropping season in which two of these beautiful flowers, each
perfect in its kind, and of different colours, too, sprang apparently
from the same stem. The neighbours talked of them as they would have
talked of the Siamese Twins; but Willie, though it lessened the wonder,
was at pains to show them that the flowers sprang from different roots,
and that what seemed to be their common stem, was in reality but a
green hollow sheath formed by one of the leaves. Proud as Willie was
of his flowers, and with all his humility he could not help being a
little proud of them, he was yet conscientiously determined to have no
miracle among them, unless, indeed, the miracle should chance to be a
true one. It was no fault of Willie’s that all his neighbours had not
as fine gardens as himself; he gave them slips of his best flowers,
flesh-coloured carnation, yellow rose, and all; he grafted their
trees for them too, and taught them the exact time for raising their
tulip-roots, and the best mode of preserving them. Nay, more than all
this, he devoted whole hours at times to give the finishing touches to
their parterres and borders, just in the way a drawing-master lays in
the last shadings, and imparts the finer touches, to the landscapes
of his favourite pupils. All seemed impressed by the unselfish
kindliness of his disposition; and all agreed that there could not be a
warmer-hearted or more obliging neighbour than Willie Watson, “the poor
lost lad.”
Everything earthly must have its last day. Willie was rather an
elderly than an old man, and the childlike simplicity of his tastes
and habits made people think of him as younger than he really was; but
his constitution, never a strong one, was gradually failing; he lost
strength and appetite; and at length there came a morning in which
he could no longer open his shop. He continued to creep out at noon,
however, for a few days after, to enjoy himself among his flowers,
with only the Bible for his companion; but in a few days more he had
declined so much lower, that the effort proved too much for him, and
he took to his bed. The neighbours came flocking in; all had begun
to take an interest in poor Willie; and now they had learned he was
dying, and the feeling had deepened immensely with the intelligence.
They found him lying in his neat little room, with a table bearing
the one beloved volume drawn in beside his bed. He was the same quiet
placid creature he had ever been; grateful for the slightest kindness,
and with a heart full of love for all--full to overflowing. He said
nothing about the Kirk, and nothing about the Baptists, but earnestly
did he urge his visitors to be good men and women, and to be availing
themselves of every opportunity of doing good. The volume on the table,
he said, would best teach them how. As for himself, he had not a single
anxiety; the great Being had been kind to him during all the long time
he had been in the world, and He was now kindly calling him out of it.
Whatever He did to him was good, and for his good, and why then should
he be anxious or afraid? The hearts of Willie’s visitors were touched,
and they could no longer speak or think of him as “the poor lost lad.”
A few short weeks went by, and Willie had gone the way of all flesh.
There was silence in his shop, and his flowers opened their breasts
to the sun, and bent their heads to the bee and the butterfly, with
no one to take note of their beauty, or to sympathize in the delight
of the little winged creatures that seemed so happy among them.
There was many a wistful eye cast at the closed door and melancholy
shutters by the members of Willie’s congregation, and they could all
point out his grave. Yonder it lies, in the red light of the setting
sun, with a carpeting of soft yellow moss spread over it. This little
recess contains, doubtless, to use Wordsworth’s figure, many a curious
and many an instructive volume, and all we lack is the ability of
deciphering the characters; but a better or more practical treatise on
toleration than that humble grave, it cannot contain. The point has
often been argued in this part of the country--argued by men with long
beards, who preached bad grammar in behalf of Johanna Southcote, and
by men who spoke middling good sense for other purposes, and shaved
once a day. But of all the arguments ever promulgated, those which told
with best effect on the town’s-people were the life and death of Willie
Watson, “the poor lost lad.”
[Sidenote: A BALLAD IN PROSE.]
We have perused the grave of the “poor lost lad,” and it turns out to
be a treatise on toleration. The grave beside it may be regarded as
a ballad--a short plaintive ballad--moulded in as common a form of
invention, if I may so express myself, as any, even the simplest, of
those old artless compositions which have welled out from time to time
from among the people. Indeed, so simple is the story of it, that we
might almost deem it an imitation, were we not assured that all the
volumes of this solitary recess are originals from beginning to end.
It was forty years last March since the Champion man-of-war entered
the bay below, with her _ancient_ suspended half-way over the deck.
Old seamen among the town’s-folk, acquainted with that language of
signs and symbols in which fleets converse when they meet at sea,
said that either the captain or one of his officers was dead; and the
town’s-people, interested in the intelligence, came out by scores to
gaze on the gallant vessel as she bore up slowly and majestically in
the calm, towards the distant roadstead. The sails were furled, and the
anchors cast; and as the huge hull swung round to the tide, three boats
crowded with men were seen to shoot off from her side, and a strain of
melancholy music came floating over the waves to the shore. A lighter
shallop, with only a few rowers, pulled far ahead of the others, and
as she reached the beach, the shovels and pickaxes, for which the crew
relinquished their oars, revealed to the spectators more unequivocally
than even the half-hoisted ensign or the music, the sad nature of their
errand. The other boats approached with muffled and melancholy stroke,
and the music waxed louder and more mournful. They reached the shore;
the men formed at the water’s edge round a coffin covered by a flag,
and bearing a sword a-top, and then passed slowly amid the assembled
crowds to the burying-ground of St. Regulus. Arms glittered to the sun.
The echoes of the tombs and of the deep precipitous dell below were
awakened awhile by unwonted music, and then by the sharp rattle of
musketry; the smoke went curling among the trees, or lingered in a blue
haze amid the dingier recesses of the hollow; the coffin was covered
over: a few of the officers remained behind the others; and there was
one of the number, a tall handsome young man, who burst out, as he was
turning away, into an uncontrollable fit of weeping. At length the
whole pageant passed, and there remained behind only a darkened little
hillock, with whose history no one was acquainted, but which was known
for many years after as the “officer’s grave.”
Twenty years went by, and the grave came to be little thought of,
when a townsman, on going up one evening to the burying-ground, saw a
lady in deep mourning sitting weeping beside it, and a tall handsome
gentleman in middle life, the same individual who had been so much
affected at the funeral, standing, as if waiting for her, a little
apart. They were brother and sister. The storms of twenty seasons had
passed over the little mossy hillock. The deep snows had pressed upon
it in winter; the dead vegetation of succeeding summers and autumns
had accumulated around it, and it had gradually flattened to nearly
the level of the soil. It had become an old grave; but the grief, that
for the first time was now venting itself over it, had remained fresh
as at first. There are cases, though rare, in which sorrow does not
yield to time. A mother loses her child just as its mind has begun to
open, and it has learned to lay hold of her heart by those singularly
endearing signs of infantine affection and regard, which show us how
the sympathies of our nature, which serve to bind us to the species,
are awakened to perform their labour of love with even the first dawn
of intelligence. Little missed by any one else, or at least soon to
be forgotten, it passes away; but there is one who seems destined to
remember it all the more vividly just because it _has_ passed. To
her, death serves as a sort of _mordant_ to fix the otherwise flying
colours in which its portraiture had been drawn on her heart. Time is
working out around her his thousand thousand metamorphoses. The young
are growing up to maturity, the old dropping into their graves; but the
infant of her affections ever remains an infant--her charge in middle
life, when all her other children have left her and gone out into the
world, and, amid the weakness of decay and decrepitude, the child of
her old age. There arises, however, a more enduring sorrow than even
that of the mother, when, in the midst of hopes all but gratified, and
wishes on the eve of fulfilment, the ties of the softer passion are
rudely dissevered by death. Feelings, evanescent in their nature, and
restricted to one class of circumstances and one stage of life, are
uneradicably fixed through the event in the mind of the survivor. Youth
first passes away, then the term of robust and active life, and last
of all, the cold and melancholy winter of old age; but through every
succeeding change, until the final close, the bereaved lover remains a
lover still. Death has fixed the engrossing passion in its tenderest
attitude by a sort of petrifying process; and we are reminded by the
fact of those delicate leaves and florets of former creations, which
a common fate would have consigned to the usual decay, but which were
converted, when they died by some sudden catastrophe, into a solid
marble that endures for ever. The lady who wept this evening beside the
“officer’s grave,” was indulging in a hopeless, enduring passion of the
character described; but all that now remains of her story forms but a
mere outline for the imagination to fill up at pleasure. Her lover had
been the sole heir of an ancient and affluent family; the lady herself
belonged to rather a humbler sphere. He had fixed his affections upon
her when almost a boy, and had succeeded in engaging hers in turn; but
his parents, who saw nothing desirable in a connexion which was to
add to neither the wealth nor the honours of the family, interfered,
and he was sent to sea; where a disappointed attachment, preying on
a naturally delicate constitution, soon converted their fears for
his marriage into regret for his death. Did I not say truly that the
“officer’s grave” was a simple little ballad, moulded in one of the
commonest forms of invention?
[Sidenote: MORRISON THE PAINTER.]
Let us peruse one other grave ere we quit the burying-ground--the
grave of Morrison the painter. It treats of morals, like that of “the
poor lost lad,” but it enforces them after a different mode. We shall
find it in the strangers’ corner, beside the graves of the two foreign
seamen, whose bodies were cast upon the beach after a storm.
Morrison, some sixty or seventy years ago, was a tall, thin,
genteel-looking young man, who travelled the country as a portrait and
miniature painter. The profession was new at the time to the north
of Scotland; and the people thought highly of an artist who made
likenesses that could be recognised. But they could not think more
highly of him than Morrison did of himself. He was one of the class who
mistake the imitative faculty for genius, and the ambition of rising
in a genteel profession for that energy of talent whose efforts, with
no higher object often than the mere pleasure of exertion, buoy up
the possessor to his proper level among men. There was a time when
Morrison’s pictures might be seen in almost every house--in little
turf cottages even among halfpenny prints and broadsheet ballads; nor
were instances wanting of their finding place among the paintings of a
higher school:--some proprietor of the district retained an eccentric
piper or gamekeeper in his establishment, or, like the baron of a
former age, kept a fool, and Morrison had been employed to confer on
all that was droll or picturesque in his appearance, the immortality of
colour and canvas. Like the painter in the fable who pleased everybody,
he drew, in his serious portraits, all his men after one model, and
all his women after another; but, unlike the painter, he copied from
neither Apollo nor Venus. His gentlemen had sloping shoulders and long
necks, and looked exceeding grave and formidable; his ladies, on the
contrary, were sweet simpering creatures, with waists almost tapering
to a point, and cheeks and lips of as bright a crimson as that of the
bunch of roses which they bore in their hands.
I have said that Morrison thought more highly of his genius than even
his country-folk. As the member of a highly liberal profession, too,
he naturally enough took rank as a gentleman. Geniuses were eccentric
in those days, and gentlemen not very moral; and Morrison, in his
double capacity of genius and gentleman, was skilful enough to catch
the eccentricity of the one class and the immorality of the other. He
raked a little, and drank a great deal; and when in his cups said and
did things which were thought very extraordinary indeed. But though
all acknowledged his genius, he was less successful in establishing
his gentility. There was, indeed, but one standard of gentility in the
country at the time, and fate had precluded the painter from coming
up to it; no one was deemed a gentleman whose ancestors had not been
useless to the community for at least five generations. It must be
confessed, too, that some of Morrison’s schemes for establishing his
claims were but ill laid. On one occasion he attended an auction of
valuable furniture in the neighbouring town, and though a wanderer
at the time, as he had been all his life long, and miserably poor to
boot, he deemed it essential to the maintenance of his character,
that, as all the other gentlemen present were bidding with spirit,
he should now and then give a spirited bid too. He warmed gradually
as the sale proceeded, offered liberally for beds and carpets, and
made a dead set on a valuable pianoforte. The purchasers were sadly
annoyed; and the auctioneer, who was a bit of a wag, and laboured to
put down the painter by sheer force of wit, found that he had met
with as accomplished a wit as himself. Morrison lost the piano, and
then fell in love with a moveable wooden house, which had served as
a sort of meat preserve, and was secured by a strong lock. “You had
better examine it inside, Mr. Morrison,” said the auctioneer; “in fact,
the whole merit of the thing lies inside.” Morrison went in, and the
auctioneer shut and locked the door. There could not be a more grievous
outrage on the feelings of a gentleman; but though the poor man went
bouncing against the cruel walls of his prison like an incarcerated
monkey, and grinned with uncontrollable wrath at all and sundry through
its little wire-woven window, pity or succour was there none; he was
kept in close durance for four long hours till the sale terminated, and
found his claim to gentility not in the least strengthened when he got
out.
After living, as he best could, for about forty years, the painter
took to himself a wife. No woman should ever have thought of marriage
in connexion with such a person as Morrison, nor should Morrison
have ever thought of marriage in connexion with such a person as
himself. But so it was--for ladies are proverbially courageous in such
matters, and Morrison could bid as dauntlessly for a wife as for a
pianoforte--that he determined on marrying, and succeeded in finding a
woman bold enough to accept of him for her husband. She was a rather
respectable sort of person, who had lived for many years as housekeeper
in a gentleman’s family, and had saved some money. They took lodgings
in the neighbouring town; Morrison showed as much spirit, and got as
often drunk as before; and in little more than a twelvemonth they came
to be in want. They lingered on, however, in miserable poverty for a
few months longer, and then quitted the place, leaving behind them all
Mrs. Morrison’s well-saved wardrobe under arrestment for debt. The
large trunk which contained it lay unopened till about five years after
the poor woman had been laid in her grave, the victim of her miserable
marriage; and the contents formed a strange comment on her history.
_There_ were fine silk gowns, sadly marred by mildew, and richly
flowered petticoats eaten by the moths. _There_, too, were there pretty
little heads of the virgin and the apostles, and beads and a crucifix
of some value; the loss of which, as the poor owner had been a zealous
Roman Catholic, had affected her more than the loss of all the rest.
And there, also, like the Babylonish garment among the goods of Achan,
there was a packet of Morrison’s letters, full of flames and darts, and
all those little commonplaces of love which are used by men clever on
a small scale, who think highly of their own parts, and have no true
affection for any one but themselves.
It has been told me by an acquaintance, who resided for some time in
one of our northern towns, that when hurrying to his lodgings on a wet
and very disagreeable winter evening, his curiosity was attracted by
a red glare of light which he saw issuing through the unglazed window
and partially uncovered rafters of a deserted hovel by the wayside. He
went up to it, and found the place occupied by two miserable-looking
wretches, a man and woman, who were shivering over a smouldering fire
of damp straw. These were Morrison and his wife, neither of them wholly
sober; for the woman had ere now broken down in character as well
as in circumstances. They had neither food nor money; the rain was
dropping upon them through the roof, and the winter wind fluttering
through their rags; and yet, as if there was too little in all this
to make them unhappy enough, they were adding to their miseries by
mutual recriminations. The woman, as I have said, soon sank under
the hardships of a life so entirely wretched; her unlucky partner
survived until the infirmities of extreme old age were added to his
other miseries. It is not easy to conceive how any one who passed
such a life as Morrison should have lived for the greater part of a
century; and yet so it was, that, when he visited the neighbouring
town for the last time, he was in his eighty-fifth year. And never,
certainly, was the place visited by a more squalid, miserable-looking
creature; he resembled rather a corpse set a-walking than a living man.
He was still, however, Morrison the painter, feebly eccentric, and
meanly proud: even when compelled to beg, which was often, he could
not forget that he was an artist and a gentleman. In his younger days
he had skill enough to make likenesses that could be recognised; the
things he now made scarcely resembled human creatures at all; but he
went about pressing his services on every one who had children and
spare sixpences, till he had at length well-nigh filled the town with
pictures of little boys and girls, which, in every case, the little
boys and girls got to themselves. On one occasion he went into the
shop of one of the town traders, and insisted on furnishing the trader
with the picture of one of his daughters, a little laughing _blonde_,
who was playing in front of the counter. He produced his colours,
and began the drawing; but the girl, after wondering at him till his
work was about half finished, escaped into the street, and one of her
sisters, a sober-eyed _brunette_, who had heard of the strange old
man who was “making pictures,” came running in, and took her place.
The painter held fast the intruder, and continued his drawing. “Hold,
hold, Mr. Morrison, that is another little girl you have got!” said the
trader; “that is but the sister of the first.” “Heaven bless the dear
sweet creature!” said Morrison, still plying the pencil, “they are so
very like that there can be no mistake.”
The closing scene to poor Morrison came at last. He left his bed one
day after an illness of nearly a week, and crawled out into the street
to beg. A gentleman in passing dropped him a few coppers, and Morrison
felt indignant that any one should have offered an artist less than
silver. But on second thoughts he corrected himself. “Heaven help me!”
he ejaculated, “I have been a fool all life long, and I am not wise
yet!” He crept onwards along the pavement to the house of a gentleman
whom he had known thirty years before. “I am dying,” he said, “and I
am desirous that you should see my body laid decently under ground; I
shall be dead in less than a week.” The gentleman promised to attend
the funeral; Morrison crept back to his lodgings, and was dead in
less than a day. Yonder he lies in the strangers’ corner; the parish
furnished the shroud and the coffin, and the gentleman whom he had
invited to his burial carried his head to the grave, and paid the
sexton. There are few real stories consistently gloomy throughout.
Nature delights in strange compounds of the _bizarre_ and the serious;
and Morrison’s story, like some of the old English dramas that
terminate unfortunately, has a mixture of the comic in it. And yet,
notwithstanding its lighter touches, I question whether we shall be
able to find a deeper tragedy among all the volumes of the churchyard.
CHAPTER XVI.
“Like a timeless birth, the womb of fate
Bore a new death of unrecorded date,
And doubtful name.”--MONTGOMERY.
[Sidenote: THE ECONOMY OF ACCIDENT.]
In the history of every community there are periods of comparative
quiet, when the great machine of society performs all its various
movements so smoothly and regularly, that there is nothing to remind
us of its being in motion. And who has not remarked that when an
unlooked-for accident sets it a-jarring, by breaking up some minor
wheel or axis, there follows a whole series of disasters--pressing
the one upon the other, with stroke after stroke. We live, perhaps,
in some quiet village, and see our neighbours, the inhabitants,
moving noiselessly around us--the young rising up to maturity, the
old descending slowly to the grave. Death for a long series of years
drafts out his usual number of conscripts from among only the weak
and the aged; and there is no irregular impressment of the young and
vigorous in the way of accident. Anon, however, there succeeds a
series of disasters. One of the villagers topples over a precipice,
one is engulfed in a morass, one is torn to pieces by the wheels of
an engine, one perishes in fording a river, one falls by the hand of
an enemy, one dies by his own. And then in a few months, perhaps, the
old order of things is again established, and all goes on regularly
as before. In the phenomena of even the inanimate world we see marks
of a similar economy. Whoever has mused for a single half hour by the
side of a waterfall, must have remarked that, without any apparent
change in the volume of the stream, the waters descend at one time
louder and more furious, at another gentler and more subdued. Whoever
has listened to the howlings of the night wind, must have heard it
sinking at intervals into long hollow pauses, and then rising and
sweeping onwards, gust after gust. Whoever has stood on the sea-shore
during a tempest, must have observed that the waves roll towards their
iron barrier in alternate series of greater and lesser--now fretting
ineffectually against it, now thundering irresistibly over. But between
the irregularities of the inanimate world, and those of the rational,
there exists one striking difference. We may assign natural causes for
the alternate rises and falls of the winds and waters; but it is not
thus in most instances with those ebbs and flows, gusts and pauses,
which occur in the world of man. They set our reasonings at defiance,
and we can refer them to only the will of Deity. We can only say
regarding them, that the climax is a favourite figure in the book of
Providence;--that God speaks to us in His dispensations, and, in the
more eloquent turns of His discourse, piles up instance upon instance
with sublime and impressive profusion.
[Sidenote: THE BLACK YEARS.]
To the people of Scotland the whole of the seventeenth century was
occupied by one continuous series of suffering and disaster. And though
we can assign causes for every one of the evils which compose the
series, just as we can assign causes for every single accident which
befalls the villagers, or for the repeated attacks and intervening
pauses of the hurricane, it is a rather different matter to account
for the series itself. In flinging a die we may chance on any one
certain number as readily as on any other; but it would be a rare
occurrence, indeed, should the same number turn up some eight or ten
times together. And is there nothing singular in the fact, that, for
a whole century, a nation should have been invariably unfortunate in
every change with which it was visited, and have met with only disaster
in all its undertakings? There turned up an unlucky number at every
cast of the die. Even when the shout of the persecutor, and the groans
of his victim, had ceased to echo among our rocks and caverns, the very
elements arrayed themselves against the people, and wasting famine and
exterminating pestilence did the work of the priest and the tyrant. I
am acquainted with no writer who has described this last infliction of
the series so graphically, and with such power, as Peter Walker in his
Life of Cargill. Other contemporary historians looked down on this part
of their theme from the high places of society;--they were the soldiers
of a well-victualled garrison, situated in the midst of a wasted
country, and sympathized but little in the misery that approached
them no nearer than the outer gate. But it was not thus with the poor
Pedlar;--he was barred out among the sufferers, and exposed to the
evils which he so feelingly describes.
One night in the month of August 1694, a cold east wind, accompanied by
a dense sulphurous fog, passed over the country, and the half-filled
corn was struck with mildew. It shrank and whitened in the sun, till
the fields seemed as if sprinkled with flour, and where the fog had
remained longest--for in some places it stood up like a chain of hills
during the greater part of the night--the more disastrous were its
effects. From this unfortunate year, till the year 1701, the land
seemed as if struck with barrenness, and such was the change on the
climate, that the seasons of summer and winter were cold and gloomy in
nearly the same degree. The wonted heat of the sun was with-holden,
the very cattle became stunted and meagre, the moors and thickets were
nearly divested of their feathered inhabitants, and scarcely a fly
or any other insect was to be seen even in the beginning of autumn.
November and December, and in some places January and February, became
the months of harvest; and labouring people contracted diseases which
terminated in death, when employed in cutting down the corn among ice
and snow. Of the scanty produce of the fields, much was left to rot on
the ground, and much of what was carried home proved unfit for the
sustenance of either man or beast. There is a tradition that a farmer
of Cromarty employed his children, during the whole winter of 1694, in
picking out the sounder grains of corn from a blasted heap, the sole
product of his farm, to serve for seed in the ensuing spring.
In the meantime the country began to groan under famine. The little
portions of meal which were brought to market were invariably disposed
of at exorbitant prices, before half the people were supplied; “and
then,” says Walker, “there would ensue a screaming and clapping of
hands among the women.” “How shall we go home,” he has heard them
exclaim, “and see our children dying of hunger?--they have had no
food for these two days and we have nothing to give them.” There was
many “a black and pale face in Scotland;” and many of the labouring
poor, ashamed to beg, and too honest to steal, shut themselves up
in their comfortless houses, to sit with their eyes fixed on the
floor till their very sight failed them. The savings of the careful
and industrious were soon dissipated; and many who were in easy
circumstances when the scarcity came on, had sunk into abject poverty
ere it passed away. Human nature is a sad thing when subjected to
the test of circumstances so trying. As the famine increased, people
came to be so wrapped up in their own sufferings, that “wives thought
not of their husbands, nor husbands of their wives, parents of their
children, nor children of their parents.” “And their staff of bread,”
says the Pedlar, “was so utterly broken, that when they ate they were
neither satisfied nor nourished. They could think of nothing but food,
and being wholly unconcerned whether they went to heaven or hell, the
success of the gospel came to a stand.”
[Sidenote: PROGRESS OF THE PESTILENCE.]
The pestilence which accompanied this terrible visitation broke out in
November 1694, when many of the people were seized by “strange fevers,
and sore fluxes of a most infectious nature,” which defied the utmost
power of medicine. “For the oldest physicians,” says Walker, “had
never seen the like before, and could make no help.” In the parish of
West Calder, out of nine hundred “examinable persons” three hundred
were swept away; and in Livingston, in a little village called the
Craigs, inhabited by only six or eight families, there were thirty
corpses in the space of a few days. In the parish of Resolis whole
villages were depopulated, and the foundations of the houses, for they
were never afterwards inhabited, can still be pointed out by old men
of the place. So violent were the effects of the disease, that people,
who in the evening were in apparent health, would be found lying dead
in their houses next morning, “the head resting on the hand, and the
face and arms not unfrequently gnawed by the rats.” The living were
wearied with burying the dead; bodies were drawn on sledges to the
place of interment, and many got neither coffin nor winding-sheet. “I
was one of four,” says the Pedlar, “who carried the corpse of a young
woman a mile of way; and when we came to the grave, an honest poor man
came and said--‘You must go and help me to bury my son; he has lain
dead these two days.’ We went, and had two miles to carry the corpse,
many neighbours looking on us, but none coming to assist.” “I was
credibly informed,” he continues, “that in the north, two sisters, on
a Monday morning, were found carrying their brother on a barrow with
bearing-ropes, resting themselves many times, and none offering to help
them.” There is a tradition that in one of the villages of Resolis the
sole survivor was an idiot, whose mother had been, of all its more
sane inhabitants, the last victim to the disease. He waited beside the
corpse for several days, and then taking it up on his shoulders carried
it to a neighbouring village, and left it standing upright beside a
garden wall.
Such were the sufferings of the people of Scotland in the seventeenth
century, and such the phenomena of character which the sufferings
elicited. We ourselves have seen nearly the same process repeated in
the nineteenth, and with nearly the same results. The study of mind
cannot be prosecuted in quite the same manner as the study of matter.
We cannot subject human character, like an earth or metal, to the
test of experiments which may be varied or repeated at pleasure; on
the contrary, many of its most interesting traits are developed only
by causes over which we have no control. But may we not regard the
whole world as an immense laboratory, in which the Deity is the grand
chemist, and His dispensations of Providence a course of experiments?
We are admitted into this laboratory, both as subjects to be acted upon
and as spectators; and, though we cannot in either capacity materially
alter the course of the exhibition, we may acquire much wholesome
knowledge by registering the circumstances of each process, and its
various results.
In the year 1817 a new and terrible pestilence broke out in a
densely-peopled district of Hindostan. During the twelve succeeding
years it was “going to and fro, and walking up and down,” in that
immense tract of country which intervenes between British India and the
Russian dominions in Europe. It passed from province to province, and
city to city. Multitudes, “which no man could number,” stood waiting
its approach in anxiety and terror; a few solitary mourners gazed at
it from behind. It journeyed by the highways, and strewed them with
carcases. It coursed along the rivers, and vessels were seen drifting
in the current with their dead. It overtook the caravan in the desert,
and the merchant fell from his camel. It followed armies to the field
of battle, struck down their standards, and broke up their array. It
scaled the great wall of China, forded the Tigris and the Euphrates,
threaded with the mountaineer the passes of the frozen Caucasus, and
traversed with the mariner the wide expanse of the Indian Ocean. Vainly
was it deprecated with the rites of every religion, exorcised in the
name every god. The Brahmin saw it rolling onwards, more terrible than
the car of Juggernaut, and sought refuge in his temple; but the wheel
passed over him, and he died. The wild Tartar raised his war-cry to
scare it away, and then, rushing into a darkened corner of his hut,
prostrated himself before his idol, and expired. The dervish ascended
the highest tower of his mosque to call upon Allah and the prophet;
but it grappled with him ere he had half repeated his prayer, and he
toppled over the battlements. The priest unlocked his relics, and then,
grasping his crucifix, hied to the bedside of the dying; but, as he
doled out the consolations of his faith, the pest seized on his vitals,
and he sunk howling where he had kneeled. And alas for the philosopher!
silent and listless he awaited its coming; and had the fountains of the
great deep been broken up, and the proud waves come rolling, as of old,
over wide-extended continents, foaming around the summit of the hills,
and prostrating with equal ease the grass of the field and the oak of
the forest, he could not have met the inundation with a less effective
resistance. It swept away in its desolating progress a hundred millions
of the human species.
[Sidenote: THE QUARANTINE.]
In the spring of 1831 the disease entered the Russian dominions,
and in a few brief months, after devastating the inland provinces,
began to ravage the shores of the Baltic. The harbours, as is usual
in the summer season, were crowded with vessels from every port of
Britain: and the infection spread among the seamen. To guard against
its introduction into this country, a rigid system of quarantine was
established by the Government; and the Bay of Cromarty was one of the
places appointed for the reception of vessels until their term of
restriction should have expired. The whole eastern coast of Britain
could not have afforded a better station; as, from the security and
great extent of the bay, entire fleets can lie in it safe from every
tempest, and at a distance of more than two miles from any shore.
On a calm and beautiful evening in the month of July 1831, a little
fleet of square-rigged vessels were espied in the offing, slowly
advancing towards the bay. They were borne onwards by the tide, which,
when flowing, rushes with much impetuosity through the narrow opening,
and, as they passed under the northern Sutor, there was seen from the
shore, relieved by the dark cliffs which frowned over them, a pale
yellow flag dropping from the mast-head of each. As they advanced
farther on, the tide began to recede. The foremost was towed by her
boats to the common anchoring-ground; and the burden of a Danish song,
in which all the rowers joined, was heard echoing over the waves
with a cadence so melancholy, that, associating in the minds of the
town’s-people with ideas of death and disease, it seemed a coronach
of lamentation poured out over the dead and the expiring. The other
vessels threw out their anchors opposite the town;--groups of people,
their countenances shaded by anxiety, sauntered along the beach;
and children ran about, shouting at the full pitch of their voices
that the ships of the plague had got up as far as the ferry. As the
evening darkened, little glimmering lights, like stars of the third
magnitude, twinkled on the mast-heads from whence the yellow flags had
lately depended; and never did astrologer experience greater dismay
when gazing at the two comets, the fiery and the pale, which preceded
those years of pestilence and conflagration that wasted the capital of
England, than did some of the people of Cromarty when gazing at these
lights.
Day after day vessels from the Baltic came sailing up the bay, and the
fears of the people, exposed to so continual a friction, began to wear
out. The first terror, however, had been communicated to the nearer
parishes, and from them to the more remote; and so on it went, escorted
by a train of vagabond stories, that, like felons flying from justice,
assumed new aspects at every stage. The whole country talked of nothing
but Cholera and the Quarantine port. Such of the shopkeepers of
Cromarty as were most in the good graces of the countrywomen who came
to town laden with the produce of the dairy and hen-cot, and return
with their little parcels of the luxuries of the grocer, experienced
a marked falling away in their trade. Occasionally, however, a few of
the more courageous housewives might be seen creeping warily along our
streets; but, in coming in by the road which passes along the edge of
the bay, they invariably struck up the hill if the wind blew from off
the quarantine vessels, and, winding by a circuitous route among the
fields and cottages, entered the town on the opposite side. A lad who
ran errands to a neighbouring burgh, found that few of the inhabitants
were so desperately devoted to business as to incur the risk of
receiving the messages he brought them; and, from the inconvenient
distance at which he was held by even the less cautious, he entertained
serious thoughts of providing himself with a speaking-trumpet. Our poor
fishermen, too, fared but badly in the little villages of the Firth
where they went to sell their fish. It was asserted on the very best
authority, by the villagers, that dead bodies were flung out every day
over the sides of the quarantine vessels, and might be seen, bloated
by the water and tanned yellow by disease, drifting along the surface
of the bay. Who could eat fish in such circumstances? There was one
person, indeed, who remarked to them, that he might perhaps venture on
eating a haddock or whiting; but no man in his senses, he said, would
venture on eating a cod. He himself had once found a bunch of furze
in the stomach of a fish of this species, and what might not that
throat contrive to swallow that had swallowed a bunch of furze? The
very fishermen themselves added to the general terror by their wild
stories. They were rowing homewards one morning, they said, in the
grey uncertain light which precedes sunrise, along the rough edge of
the northern Sutor, when, after doubling one of the rocky promontories
which jut into the sea from beneath the crags of the hill, they saw
a gigantic figure, wholly attired in white, winding slowly along the
beach. It was much taller than any man, or as Cowley would perhaps
have described it, than the shadow of any man in the evening; and at
intervals, after gliding round the base of some inaccessible cliff,
it would remain stationary for a few seconds, as if gazing wistfully
upon the sea. No one who believed this apparition to be other than a
wreath of vapour, entertained at the time the slightest doubt of its
portending the visitation of some terrible pestilence, which was to
desolate the country.
About eighty or a hundred years ago the port of Cromarty was occupied,
as in 1831, by a fleet performing quarantine. Of course none of the
town’s-people recollected the circumstance; but a whole host of
traditions connected with it, which had been imparted to them by their
fathers, and had lain asleep in the recesses of some of their memories
for a full half century, were awakened at this time, and sent wandering
over the town, like so many ghosts. Some one had heard it told that a
crew of Cromarty fishermen had, either in ignorance or contempt of the
quarantine laws, boarded one of the vessels on this occasion; and that
aboard they were compelled to remain for six tedious weeks, exposed
to the double, but very unequally appreciated hardship of getting a
great deal to drink and very little to eat. Another vessel had, it was
said, entered the bay deeply laden; but every morning, for the time
she remained there, she was seen to sit lighter on the water, and when
she quitted it on her return to Flushing, she had scarcely ballast
enough aboard to render the voyage practicable. Gin and tobacco were
rife in Cromarty for twelve months thereafter. A third vessel carried
with her into the bay the disease to guard against which the quarantine
had been established; and opposite the place where the fleet lately
lay, there are a few little mounds on a patch of level sward, still
known to children of the town as the Dutchmen’s graves. About fifty
years ago, when the present harbour of Cromarty was in building, a poor
half-witted man, one of the labourers employed in quarrying stone,
was told one day by some of his companions, that a considerable sum
of money had been deposited in this place with the bodies. In the
evening he stayed on some pretext in the quarry until the other workmen
had gone home, and then repairing to the graves, with his shovel
and pickaxe he laid one of them open; but, instead of the expected
treasure, he found only human bones and wasted fragments of woollen
cloth. Next morning he was seized by a putrid fever, and died a few
days after. Miss Seward tells a similar story in one of her letters;
but in the case of the Cromarty labourer no person suffered from his
imprudence except himself; whereas, in the one narrated by Miss Seward,
a malignant disease was introduced into a village near which the graves
were opened, which swept away seventy of the inhabitants.
[Sidenote: THE CHOLERA.]
In a central part of the churchyard of Nigg there is a rude undressed
stone, near which the sexton never ventures to open a grave. A wild
apocryphal tradition connects the erection of this stone with the times
of the quarantine fleet. The plague, as the story goes, was brought
to the place by one of the vessels, and was slowly flying along the
ground, disengaged from every vehicle of infection, in the shape of
a little yellow cloud. The whole country was alarmed, and groups of
people were to be seen on every eminence, watching with anxious horror
the progress of the little cloud. They were relieved, however, from
their fears and the plague by an ingenious man of Nigg, who, having
provided himself with an immense bag of linen, fashioned somewhat in
the manner of a fowler’s net, cautiously approached the yellow cloud,
and, with a skill which could have owed nothing to previous practice,
succeeded in enclosing the whole of it in the bag. He then secured it
by wrapping it up carefully, fold after fold, and fastening it down
with pin after pin; and as the linen was gradually changing, as if
under the hands of the dyer, from white to yellow, he consigned it to
the churchyard, where it has slept ever since. But to our narrative.
The cholera was at length introduced into Britain, and shortly after
into Ireland; not, however, at any of the quarantine ports, but at
places where scarcely any precautions had been taken to exclude it, or
any danger apprehended; much in the manner that a beleaguered garrison
is sometimes surprised at some unnoticed bastion, or untented angle,
after the main points of attack have withstood the utmost efforts
of the besiegers. It had previously been remarked that the disease
traversed the various countries which it visited, at nearly the same
pace with the inhabitants. In Persia, where there is little trade, and
neither roads nor canals to facilitate intercourse, it was a whole year
in passing over a distance of somewhat less than three hundred leagues;
while among the more active people of Russia, it performed a journey
of seven hundred in less than six months. In Britain it travelled
through the interior with the celerity of the mail, and voyaged along
the coasts with the speed of the trading vessels; and in a few weeks
after its first appearance, it was ravaging the metropolis of England,
and the southern shores of the Firth of Forth. It was introduced by
some south country fishermen into the town of Wick, and a village of
Sutherlandshire, in the month of July 1832; and from the latter place
in the following August, into the fishing villages of the peninsula of
Easter Ross. It visited Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall, Urquhart,
and Rosemarkie, a few weeks after.
I shall pass hurriedly over the sad story of its ravages. Were I
to dwell on it to the extent of my information, and I know only a
little of the whole, the reader might think I was misanthropically
accumulating into one gloomy heap all that is terrible in the judgments
of God, and all that is mean and feeble in the character of man. The
pangs of the rack, the boot, the thumbscrew--all that the Dominican
or the savage has inflicted on the heretic or the white man, were
realized in the tortures of this dreadful disease. Utter debility,
intense thirst, excruciating cramps of the limbs, and an unimpaired
intellect, were its chief characteristics. And the last was not the
least terrible. Amid the ruins of the body, from which it was so soon
to part, the melancholy spirit looked back upon the past with regret,
and on the future with terror. Or even if the sufferer amid his fierce
pain “laid hold on the hope that faileth not;” with what feelings must
he have looked around the deserted cottage, when the friends in whom
he had trusted proved unfaithful--or, more melancholy still, on the
affectionate wife or the dutiful child struck down by the bedside in
agonies as mortal as his own.
In the villages of Ross the disease assumed a more terrible aspect
than it had yet presented in any other part of Britain. In the little
village of Portmahomack one-fifth of the inhabitants were swept away;
in the still smaller village of Inver, one-half. So abject was the
poverty of the people, that in some instances there was not a candle
in any house in a whole village; and when the disease seized on the
inmates in the night-time, they had to grapple in darkness with its
fierce agonies and mortal terrors, and their friends, in the vain
attempt to assist them, had to grope round their beds. The infection
spread with frightful rapidity. At Inver, though the population did
not much exceed a hundred persons, eleven bodies were committed to the
earth, without shroud or coffin, in one day; in two days after they had
buried nineteen more. Many of the survivors fled from the village, and
took shelter, some in the woods, some among the hollows of an extensive
tract of sandhills. But the pest followed them to their hiding-places,
and they expired in the open air. Whole families were found lying
dead on their cottage floor. In one instance, an infant, the only
survivor, lay grovelling on the body of its mother--the sole mourner in
a charnel-house of the pestilence. Rows of cottages, entirely divested
of their inhabitants, were set on fire and burned to the ground. The
horrors of the times of Peter Walker were more than realized. Two young
persons, a lad and his sister, were seen digging a grave for their
father in the churchyard of Nigg; and then carrying the corpse to it
on a cart, no one venturing to assist them. The body of a man who
died in a cottage beside the ferry of Cromarty, was borne to a hole,
hurriedly scooped out of a neighbouring sand-bank, by his brother and
his wife. During the whole of the preceding day, the unfortunate woman
had been seen from the opposite shore, flitting around the cottage
like an unhappy ghost; during the whole of the preceding night had she
watched alone by the dead. The coffin lay beside the door; the corpse
in the middle of the apartment.--Never shall I forget the scene which
I witnessed from the old chapel of St. Regulus on the evening of the
following Sabbath.
It was one of those lovely evenings which we so naturally associate
with ideas of human enjoyment; when, from some sloping eminence, we
look over the sunlit woods, fields, and cottages, of a wide extent of
country, and dream that the inhabitants are as happy as the scene is
beautiful. The sky was without a cloud, and the sea without a wrinkle.
The rocks and sandhills on the opposite shore lay glistening in the
sun, each with its deep patch of shadow resting by its side; and the
effect of the whole, compared with the aspect which it had presented
a few hours before, was as if it had been raised on its groundwork of
sea and sky from the low to the high relief of the sculptor. There were
boats drawn up on the beach, and a line of houses behind; but where
were the inhabitants? No smoke rose from the chimneys; the doors and
windows were fast closed; not one solitary lounger sauntered about
the harbour or the shore; the inanity of death and desertion pervaded
the whole scene. Suddenly, however, the eye caught a little dark
speck moving hurriedly along the road which leads to the ferry. It
was a man on horseback. He reached the cottages of the boatmen, and
flung himself from his horse; but no one came at his call to row him
across. He unloosed a skiff from her moorings, and set himself to tug
at the oar. The skiff flew athwart the bay. The watchmen stationed
on the shore of Cromarty moved down to prevent her landing. There was
a loud cry passed from man to man; a medical gentleman came running
to the beach, he leapt into the skiff, and laying hold of an oar as
if he were a common boatman, she again shot across the bay. A case of
cholera had just occurred in the parish of Nigg. I never before felt so
strongly the force of contrast. There is a wild poem of the present age
which presents the reader with a terrible picture of a cloak of utter
darkness spread over the earth, and the whole race of man perishing
beneath its folds, like insects of autumn in the chills of a night of
October. There is another modern poem, less wild, but not less sublime,
in which we see, as in a mirror of a magician, the sun dying in the
heavens, and the evening of an eternal night closing around the last of
our species. I trust I am able in some degree to appreciate the merits
of both; and yet, since witnessing the scene which I have so feebly
attempted to describe, I am led to think that the earth, if wholly
divested of its inhabitants, would present a more melancholy aspect,
should it still retain its fertility and beauty, than if wrapped up in
a pall of darkness, surrounded by dead planets and extinguished suns.
CHAPTER XVII.
“He sat upon a rock and bobbed for whale.”--KENRICK.
[Sidenote: MARTINMAS MARKET.]
On the fourth Tuesday of November every year, there is a kind of market
held at Cromarty, which for the last eighty years has been gradually
dwindling in importance, and is now attended by only the children of
the place, and a few elderly people, who supply them with toys and
sweetmeats. Early in the last century, however, it was one of the most
considerable in this part of the country; and the circumstance of its
gradual decline is curiously connected with the great change which has
taken place since that period in the manners and habits of the people.
It flourished as long as the Highlander legislated for himself and
his neighbour on the good old principle so happily described by the
poet,[7] and sunk into decay when he had flung down his broadsword,
and become amenable to the laws of the kingdom. The town of Cromarty,
as may be seen by consulting the map, is situated on the extremity
of a narrow promontory, skirted on three of its sides by the sea,
and bordered on the fourth by the barren uninhabited waste described
in a previous chapter. And though these are insurmountable defects
of situation for a market of the present day, which ought always to
be held in some central point of the interior that commands a wide
circumference of country, about a century ago they were positive
advantages. It was an important circumstance that the merchants who
attended the fair could convey their goods to it by sea, without
passing through any part of the Highlands; and the extent of moor which
separated it by so broad a line from the seats of even the nearer
clans, afforded them no slight protection when they had arrived at it.
For further security the fair was held directly beneath the walls of
the old castle, in the gorge of a deep wooded ravine, which now forms
part of the pleasure-grounds of Cromarty House.
The progress of this market, from what it was once to what it is at
present, was strongly indicative of several other curious changes which
were taking place in the country. The first achievement of commerce
is the establishment of a market. In a semi-barbarous age the trader
journeys from one district to another, and finds only, in a whole
kingdom, that demand for his merchandise which, when in an after period
civilisation has introduced her artificial wants among the people, may
be found in a single province. So late as the year 1730, one solitary
shopkeeper more than supplied the people of Cromarty with their few,
everyday necessaries, of foreign manufacture or produce; I say more
than supplied them, for in summer and autumn he travelled the country
as a pedlar. For their occasional luxuries and finery they trusted to
the traders of the fair. Times changed, however, and the shopkeeper
wholly supplanted the travelling merchant; but the fair continued to
be frequented till a later period by another class of traders, who
dealt in various articles, the produce and manufacture of the country.
Among these were a set of dealers who sold a kind of rude harness for
horses and oxen, made of ropes of hair and twisted birch; a second
set who dealt in a kind of conical-shaped carts made of basket-work;
and a third who supplied the house-builders of the period with split
lath, made of moss-fir, for thatched roofs and partitions. In time,
however, the harness-maker, cart-wright, and house-carpenter of modern
times, dealt by these artists as the shopkeeper had done by the
market-trader. The broguer, or maker of Highland shoes, kept the field
in spite of the regular shoemaker half a century later, and disappeared
only about five years ago. The dealer in home-grown lint frequented
it until last season; but the low wages, and sixteen-hour-per-day
employment of the south country weaver, were gradually undermining his
trade, and the steam-loom seems to have given it its deathblow.
[Sidenote: THE HERRING DROVE.]
Prior to the Revolution, and as late as the reign of Queen Anne,
Cromarty drove a considerable trade in herrings. About the middle of
July every year, immense bodies of this fish came swimming up the
Moray Firth; and after they had spawned on a range of banks not more
than eight miles from the town, quitted it for the main sea in the
beginning of September. In the better fishing seasons they filled the
bays and creeks of the coast, swimming in some instances as high as the
ferries of Fowlis and Ardersier. There is a tradition that, shortly
after the Union, a shoal of many hundred barrels, pursued by a body
of whales and porpoises, were stranded in a little bay of Cromarty,
a few hundred yards to the east of the town. The beach was covered
with them to the depth of several feet, and salt and casks failed the
packers when only an inconsiderable part of the shoal was cured. The
residue was carried away for manure by the neighbouring farmers; and so
great was the quantity used in this way, and the stench they caused so
offensive, that it was feared disease would have ensued. The season in
which this event took place is still spoken of as the “har’st of the
Herring-drove.”
About thirty years ago some masons, in digging a foundation in the
eastern extremity of the town, discovered the site of a packing-yard of
this period; and threw out vast quantities of scales which glittered
as bright as if they had been stripped from the fish only a few weeks
before. Near the same place, there stood about twenty years earlier
a little grotesque building two storeys in height, and with only a
single room on each floor. The lower was dark and damp, and had the
appearance of a cellar or storehouse; the upper was lighted on three
sides, and finished in a style which, at the period of its erection,
must have led to a high estimate of the taste of the builder. A rich
cornice, designed doubtless on the notion of Ramsay, that good herrings
and good claret are very suitable companions, curiously united bunches
of grapes with clusters of herrings, and divided the walls from the
ceiling. The walls were neatly panelled, the centre of the ceiling was
occupied by a massy circular patera, round which a shoal of neatly
relieved herrings were swimming in a sea of plaster. This building was
the place of business of Urquhart of Greenhill, a rich herring merchant
and landed proprietor, and a descendant of the old Urquharts of
Cromarty. But it was destined long to survive the cause of its erection.
[Sidenote: THE WHALE-FISHERS.]
In a fishing season late in this period, two men of the place,
who, like most of the other inhabitants, were both tradesfolks and
fishermen, were engaged one morning in discussing the merits of an
anker of Hollands which had been landed from a Dutch lugger a few
evenings before. They nodded to each other across the table with
increasing heartiness and good-will, until at length their heads
almost met; and as quaich after quaich was alternately emptied and
replenished, they began to find that the contents of the anker were
best nearest the bottom. They were interrupted, however, before they
had fully ascertained the fact, by the woman of the house tapping at
the window, and calling them out to see something extraordinary; and,
on going to the door, they saw a plump of whales blowing, and tumbling,
and pursuing one another, in a long line up the bay. A sudden thought
struck one of the men: “It would be gran’ fun, Charlie man,” said he,
addressing his companion, “to hook ane o’ yon chiels on Nannie Fizzle’s
crook.” “Ay, if we had but bait,” rejoined the other; “but here’s a gay
fresh codling on Nannie’s hake, an’ the yawl lies on the tap o’ the
fu’ sea.” The crook--a chain about six feet in length, with a hook at
one end, and a large ring at the other, and which, when in its proper
place, hung in Nannie’s chimney to suspend her pots over the fire--was
accordingly baited with the cod, and fastened to a rope; and the two
men, tumbling into their yawl rowed out to the _cossmee_. Like the
giant of the epigram they sat bobbing for whale, but the plump had gone
high up the Firth; and, too impatient to wait its return, they hollowed
to a friend to row out his skiff for them; and leaving their own at
anchor, with the crook hanging over the stern, they returned to Nannie
Fizzle’s, where they soon forgot both the yawl and the whales.
They were not long, however, in being reminded of both. A person came
bellowing to the window, “Charlie, Willie, the yawl! the yawl!” and, on
staggering out, they saw the unfortunate yawl darting down the Firth
with twice the velocity of a king’s cutter in a fresh breeze. Ever and
anon she would dance, and wheel, and plunge, and then shoot off in a
straight line. Wonderful to relate! one of the whales had swallowed
the crook; the little skiff was launched and manned; but the Hollands
had done its work; one of the poor fellows tumbled over the thaft, the
other snapped his oar;--all was confusion. Luckily, however, the rope
fastened to the crook broke at the ring; and the yawl, after gradually
losing way, began to drift towards the shore. The adventure was bruited
all over the town; and every one laughed at the whale-fishers except
Nannie Fizzle, who was inconsolable for the loss of her crook.
It was rumoured a few weeks after that the carcass of a whale had
been cast ashore somewhere in the Firth of Beauly, near Redcastle,
and the two fishermen set off together to the place, in the hope of
identifying the carcass with the fish in which they had enfeoffed
themselves at the expense of Nannie Fizzle. The day of the journey
chanced to be also that of a Redcastle market; and, as they approached
the place, they were encountered by parties of Highlanders hurrying
to the fair. Most of them had heard of the huge fish, but none of
them of the crook. When the Cromarty men came up to the carcass,
they found it surrounded by half the people of the fair, who were
gazing, and wondering, and pacing it from head to tail, and poking
at it with sticks and broadswords. “It is our property every inch,”
said one of the men, coming forward to the fish; “we hooked it three
weeks ago on the _cossmee_, but it broke off; and we have now come
here to take possession. It carried away our tackle, a chain and a
hook. Lend me your dirk, honest man,” he continued, addressing a
Highlander; “we shall cut out hook and chain, and make good our claim.”
“O ay! nae doubt,” said the Highlander, as he obligingly handed him
the weapon; “but och! it’s no me that would like to eat her, for
she maun be a filthy meat.” The crowd pressed round to witness the
dissection, which ended in the Cromarty man pulling out the crook
from among the entrails, and holding it up in triumph. “Did I no tell
you?” he exclaimed; “the fish is ours beyond dispute.” “Then,” said a
smart-looking little pedlar, who had just joined the throng, “ye have
made the best o’ this day’s market. I’se warrant your fishing worth
a’ the plaiding sold to-day.” The Highlanders stared. “For what is it
worth?” asked a tacksman of the place. “Oh, look there! look there!”
replied the pedlar, tapping the blubber with his elwand, “ulzie clear
as usquebaugh. I’se be bound it’s as richly worth four hunder punds
Scots as ony booth at the fair.” This piece of mischievous information
entirely altered the circumstances of the case as it regarded the two
fishermen; for the tacksman laid claim to the fish on his own behalf
and the laird’s, and, as he could back his arguments by a full score
of broadswords, the men were at length fain to content themselves
with being permitted to carry away with them Nannie Fizzle’s crook. I
am afraid it is such of our naturalists as are best acquainted with
the habits of the _cetacea_ that will be most disposed to question
the truth of the tradition just related. But, however doubtful its
foundation, a tradition it is.
[Sidenote: THE FLIGHT OF THE DROVE.]
The mishap of the whale-fishers was followed by a much greater
mishap--the total failure of the herring fishery. The herring is one
of the most eccentric little fishes that frequents our seas. For many
years together it visits regularly in its season some particular firth
or bay;--fishing villages spring up on the shores, harbours are built
for the reception of vessels; and the fisherman and merchant calculate
on their usual quantum of fish, with as much confidence as the farmer
on his average quantum of grain. At length, however, there comes a
season, as mild and pleasant as any that have preceded it, in which the
herring does not visit the firth. On each evening, the fisherman casts
out his nets on the accustomed bank, on each morning he draws them in
again, but with all the meshes as brown and open as when he flung them
out; in the following season he is equally unsuccessful; and, ere the
shoal returns to its accustomed haunts, the harbour has become a ruin,
and the village a heap of green mounds. It happened thus, late in the
reign of Queen Anne, with the herring trade of the Moray Firth. After
a busy and successful fishing, the shoal as usual left the Firth in a
single night; preparations were made for the ensuing season; the season
came, but not the herrings; and for more than half a century from this
time Cromarty derived scarcely any benefit from its herring fishery.
My town’s-folk in this age--an age in which every extraordinary effect
was coupled with a supernatural cause--were too ingenious to account
for the failure of the trade by a simple reference to the natural
history of the herring; and two stories relating to it still survive,
which show them to have been strangely acute in rendering a reason,
and not a little credulous in forming a belief. Great quantities of
fish had been caught and brought ashore on a Saturday, and the packers
continued to work during the night; yet on the Sunday morning much
still remained to be done. The weather was sultry, and the fish were
becoming soft; and the merchants, unwilling to lose them, urged on the
work throughout the Sabbath. Towards evening the minister of the parish
visited the packers; and, as they had been prevented from attending
church, he made them a short serious address. They soon, however,
became impatient; the diligent began to work, the mischievous to pelt
him with filth; and the good man abruptly concluded his exhortation
by praying that the besom of judgment would come and sweep every
herring out of the Firth. On the following Monday the boats went to
sea as usual, but returned empty; on the Tuesday they were not more
successful, and it was concluded that the shoal had gone off for the
season; but it proved not for the season merely; for another and
another season came, and still no herrings were caught. In short, the
prayer, as the story goes, was so fully answered, that none of the
unlucky packers who had insulted the minister witnessed the return of
the shoal.
The other story accounts for its flight in a different and somewhat
conflicting manner. Tradition, who, as I have already shown, is even
a more credulous naturalist than historian, affirms that herrings
have a strong antipathy to human blood, especially when spilt in a
quarrel. On the last day of the fishing, the nets belonging to two
boats became entangled; the crew that first hauled applied the knife
to their neighbours’ baulks and meshes, and, with little trouble or
damage to themselves, succeeded in unravelling their own. A quarrel was
the consequence; and one of the ancient modes of naval warfare, the
only one eligible in their circumstances, was resorted to--they fought
leaning over the gunwales of their respective boats. Blood was spilt,
unfortunately spilt in the sea; the affronted herrings took their
departure, and for more than half a century were not the cause, in even
the remotest degree, of any quarrel which took place on the Moray Firth
or its shores. One of the combatants, who distinguished himself either
by doing or suffering in this unlucky fray, was known ever after by the
name of Andrew _Bleed_; and there are men still living who remember to
have seen him.
[Sidenote: URQUHART OF GREENHILL.]
The failure of the herring trade was followed by that of Urquhart of
Greenhill. He is said to have been a shrewd industrious man, of great
force of character, and admirably fitted by nature and habit, had he
lived in better times, to have restored the dilapidated fortunes of
his house. During the reign of William he was adding ship to ship, and
field to field, until about the year 1700, when he was possessed of
nearly one-half the lands of the parish, and of five large vessels.
But it was his lot to speculate in an unfortunate age; and having,
with almost all the other merchants of Scotland, suffered severely
from the Union, the failure of the herring fishery completed his ruin.
He sank by inches; striving to the last, with a proud heart and a
bitter spirit, against the evils which assailed him. All his ships
were at length either knocked down by the hammer of the auctioneer,
or broken up by the maul of the carpenter, except one; and that one,
the Swallow of Cromartie, when returning homewards from some port
of the Continent, was driven ashore in a violent night-storm on the
rocky coast of Cadboll, and beaten to pieces before morning. It was
with difficulty the crew was saved. One of them, a raw young fellow,
a much better herdsman than sailor, escaped to his friends, full of
the wild scenes he had just witnessed, and set himself to relate to
them the particulars of his voyage;--it was his first and his last.
Smooth water and easy sailing may be delineated in common language;
he warmed, however, as the narrative proceeded. He described the
gathering of the tempest, the darkening of the night, the dashing of
the waves, the howling of the winds, and the rolling of the vessel; but
being unfortunately no master of climax, language failed him in the
concluding scene, where there were rocks, and breakers, and midnight
darkness, and a huge ship wallowing in foam, like a wounded boar in
the toils of the hunters. “Oh!” exclaimed the sailor herdsman, “I can
think o’ nae likening to that puir ship, and the awfu’ crags and awfu’
jaws, except the nowt i’ the byre, when they break their fastenings
i’ the mirk night, and rout and gore, and rout and gore, till the
roof-tree shakes wi’ the brattle.” The people of the present age may
not think much of the comparison; but it was deemed a piece of very
tolerable humour in Cromarty in the good year 1715. Greenhill’s remark,
when informed of the disaster, had more of philosophy in it. “Aweel,”
said he, taking a deliberate pinch of snuff, and then handing the box
to his informant, “I have lang warstled wi’ the warld, and fain would I
have got on the tap o’t; but I may be just as weel as I am. Diel haet
can harm me now, if the laird o’ Cadboll, honest man, doesna put me to
the law for dinting the Swallow against his march-stanes.”
One other passage relating to the Greenhill branch of the family of the
Urquharts, ere I take leave of it for the time. It has produced, in a
lady of Aberdeenshire, one of the most pleasing poetesses of our age
and country--not, however, one of the most celebrated. Her exquisite
little pieces, combining with singular felicity the simplicity and
pathos of the old ballad with the refinement and elegance of our
classical poets, have been flung as carelessly into the world as the
rich plumes of the birds of the tropics on the plains and forests of
the south. But they have not lain altogether unnoticed. The nameless
little foundlings have been picked out from among the crowd, and
introduced into the best company on the score of merit alone.--The
genealogist was of a different spirit from his relative; he would have
inscribed his name on the face of the sun could he have but climbed to
it;--but may not there be something to regret in even the more amiable
extreme? The prophecies of that sibyl who committed her writings to
the loose leaves of the forest, were lost to the world on the first
slight breeze. I present the reader with a pleasing little poem of
this descendant of the Urquharts, in which, though perhaps not one of
the most finished of her pieces, he will find something better than
mere finish. It may not be quite new to him, having found its way into
Macdiarmid’s Scrap-Book, and several other collections of merit; but he
may peruse it with fresh interest, as the production of a relative of
Sir Thomas, who seems to have inherited all his genius, undebased by
any mixture of his eccentricity.
[Sidenote: POEM.]
ON HEARING A LIVELY PIECE OF MUSIC,
“THE WATERLOO WALTZ.”
A moment pause, ye British fair,
While pleasure’s phantom ye pursue,
And say if dance and sprightly air
Suit with the name of Waterloo.
Dearly bought the victory,
Chasten’d should the triumph be;
’Midst the laurels she has won,
Britain weeps for many a son.
Veil’d in clouds the morning rose,
Nature seem’d to mourn the day
Which consign’d before its close
Thousands to their kindred clay.
How unfit for courtly ball,
Or the giddy festival,
Was the grim and ghastly view
Ere evening closed on Waterloo.
See the Highland warrior rushing,
First in danger, on the foe,
Till the life-blood, stemless gushing,
Lays the plaided hero low.
His native pipe’s heart-thrilling sound,
’Mid war’s infernal concert drown’d,
Cannot soothe his last adieu,
Nor wake his sleep on Waterloo.
Crashing o’er the cuirassier,
See the foaming charger flying,
Trampling in his wild career,
All alike, the dead and dying.
See the bullets pierce his side,
See, amid a crimson tide,
Helmet, horse, and rider too,
Roll on bloody Waterloo.
Shall sights like these the dance inspire,
Or wake the jocund notes of mirth?
Oh, shiver’d be the recreant lyre
That gave the base idea birth!
Other sounds, I ween, were there,
Other music rent the air,
Other _Waltz_ the warriors knew,
When they closed at Waterloo.
Forbear, till time with lenient hand
Has heal’d the wounds of recent sorrow,
And let the picture distant stand,
The softening hue of years to borrow.
When our race has pass’d away,
Hands unborn may wake the lay,
And give to joy alone the view
Of victory at Waterloo.
[Sidenote: WILLIAM FORSYTH.]
About the time of the Rebellion, or a little after, the trade of
the place began to recover itself much through the influence of a
vigorous-minded man, a merchant of the period. Urquhart of Greenhill
had sunk with the sinking trade of the country; his townsman, William
Forsyth, enjoyed the advantage of being born at least forty years
later, and rose as it revived. The nature of the business which the
latter pursued may be regarded as illustrating, not inaptly, the
condition of society in the north of Scotland at the time. It was of
a miscellaneous character, as became the state of a country so poor
and so thinly peopled, and in which, as there was scarce any division
of labour, one merchant had to perform the part of many. He supplied
the proprietors with teas, wines, and spiceries; with broad-cloths,
glass, Delft ware, Flemish tiles, and pieces of japanned cabinet-work;
he furnished the blacksmith with iron from Sweden, the carpenter with
tar and spars from Norway, and the farmer with flax-seed from Holland.
He found, too, in other countries, markets for the produce of our own.
The exports of the north of Scotland, at this period, were mostly malt,
wool, and salmon. Almost all rents were paid in kind or in labour--the
proprietors retaining in their hands a portion of their estates, termed
demesnes or _mains_, which was cultivated mostly by their tacksmen or
feuars as part of their proper service. Each proprietor, too, had his
storehouse or girnal--a tall narrow building, the strong-box of the
time--which, at the Martinmas of every year, used to be filled from
gable to gable with the grain-rents paid him by his tenants, and the
produce of his own farm. His surplus cattle found their way south under
charge of the drovers of the period; but it proved a more difficult
matter to dispose to advantage of his surplus corn, mostly barley,
until some one, more fertile in speculation than the others, originated
the scheme of converting it into malt, and exporting it into England
and Flanders. And to so great an extent was this trade carried on about
the middle of the last century, that in the town of Inverness the
English under Cumberland found almost every second building a malt-barn.
It is quite according to the nature of the herrings to resume their
visits as suddenly and unexpectedly as they have broken them off,
though not until after a lapse of so many seasons, that the fishermen
have ceased to watch for their appearance in their old haunts, or to
provide the tackle necessary for their capture; and in this way a
number of years are sometimes suffered to pass after the return of
the fish, ere the old trade is re-established. It was a main object
with William Forsyth to guard against any such waste of opportunity
on the part of his town’s-people; and representing the case to the
more intelligent gentlemen of the district, and some of the wealthier
merchants of Inverness, he succeeded in forming them, for the
encouragement of the herring fishery, into a society, which provided a
yearly premium of twenty merks Scots for the first barrel of herrings
caught every season in the Moray Firth. The sum was small; but as
money at the time was greatly more valuable than now, it proved a
sufficient inducement to the fishermen and tradespeople of the place
to fit out, about the beginning of autumn every year, a few boats that
swept over the various fishing banks for the herrings; and there were
not many seasons in which some one crew or other did not catch enough
to entitle them to the premium. At length, however, their tackle wore
out, and Mr. Forsyth, in pursuance of his scheme, provided himself,
at some little expense, with a complete _drift_ of nets, which were
carried to sea each season by a crew of boatmen, and the search kept
up. His exertions, however, could only merit success, without securing
it. The fish returned for a few seasons in considerable bodies, and
the fishermen procuring nets, several thousand barrels were caught;
but they soon deserted the Firth as entirely as before. It was at the
period of this second return that the “Herring Fishery,” according to
Goldsmith, “employed all Grub Street;” and “formed the topic of every
coffee-house, and the burden of every ballad.” The sober English of
the times of George II. had got sanguine on the subject, and hope had
broken out into poetry. They were “to drag up oceans of gold from the
bottom of the sea, and to supply all Europe with herrings on their
own terms;” but their expectations outran the capabilities of the
speculation; “they fished up very little gold” that the essayist “ever
heard of, nor did they furnish the world with herrings.” Their herring
fishery turned out in short to be a mere herring fishery, and not even
that for any considerable length of time.
[Sidenote: THE CAITHNESS-MAN’S LEAP.]
Sir John Sinclair marks the autumn of the year 1770 as a season in
which the herring fishery of Caithness suddenly doubled its amount.
“From that time,” he adds, “the fishery gradually increased for a
few years, but afterwards fell off again, and did not revive with
spirit until the year 1788.” During the short period in which it was
plied with success, it was prosecuted by several crews of Cromarty
fishermen; and their first visit to the coast of this northern county,
I find connected with a curious anecdote of the class whose extreme
singularity gives in some measure evidence of their truth. Invention
generally loves a beaten track--it has its rules and its formulas,
beyond which it rarely ventures to expatiate; but the course of
real events is narrowed by no such contracting barrier; the range
of possibility is by far too extensive to be fully occupied by the
anticipative powers of imagination; and hence it is that true stories
are often stranger than fictions, and that their very strangeness, and
their dissimilarity from all the models of literary plot and fable,
guarantee in some measure their character as authentic.
The hill of Cromarty is skirted, as I have said, by dizzy precipices,
some of them more than a hundred yards in height; and one of these,
for the last hundred and fifty years, has borne the name of the
Caithness-man’s Leap. The sheer descent is broken by projecting
shelves, covered with a rank vegetation, and furrowed by deep sloping
hollows, filled at the bottom with long strips of loose _débris_,
which, when set in motion by the light foot of the goat, falls rattling
in continuous streams on the beach. The upper part of the precipice is
scooped out by a narrow and perilous pathway, which, rising slantways
from the shore, along the face of the neighbouring precipices, makes
an abrupt turn on the upper edge of the “leap,” and then gains the
top. Immediately above, on a sloping acclivity, covered for the last
century by a thick wood, there was a little field, the furrows of which
can still be distinctly traced among the trees, and which, about the
time of the Revolution, was tenanted by a wild young fellow, quite
as conversant with his fowling-piece as with his plough. He was no
favourite with such of the neighbouring proprietors as most resembled
himself; the game-laws in Scotland were not quite so stringent at
that period as they are now, but game had its value; and sheriffs and
barons, addicted to hunting and the chase, who had dungeons in their
castles, and gibbets on their Gallow Hills, neither lacked the will nor
the power to protect it. And so the tacksman of the the little field
found poaching no safe employment; but the dangers he incurred had
only the effect common in such cases, of imparting to his character
a sort of Irish-like recklessness--a carelessness both of his own
life and the lives of others. He had laid down his little field with
peas, and was seriously annoyed, when they began to ripen, by the
town’s boys--mischievous little fellows--who, when on their fishing
excursions, would land in a little rocky bay, immediately below the
pathway, and ascending the cliffs, carry away his property by armfuls
at a time. The old northern pirates were scarcely more obnoxious to
the early inhabitants of Scotland than the embryo fishermen to the
man of the gun: nay, the man of the gun was himself scarcely more
obnoxious to the proprietors. There was no possibility of laying hold
of the intruders; a few minutes were sufficient on the first alarm,
to bring them from the top to the bottom of the cliffs--a few strokes
of the oar set them beyond all reach of pursuit--and he saw that,
unless he succeeded in terrifying them into honesty with his gun, they
might go on robbing him with impunity until they had left nothing
behind them to rob. Matters were in this state when a Caithness boat,
laden with timber, moored one morning in the bay below, and one of
the crew, a young fellow of eighteen, after climbing the pathway on
an excursion of discovery, found out the field of peas. The farmer,
on this unlucky morning, had been rated and collared by the laird for
shooting a hare, and, very angry, and armed with the gun as usual, he
came up to his field, and found the Caithness-man employed in leisurely
filling his pockets. He presented his piece and drew the trigger,
but the powder flashed in the pan. “The circumstance of being shot,”
says the ingenious author of Cyril Thornton, “produces a considerable
confusion in a man’s ideas.” The ideas of the Caithness-man became
confused in circumstances one degree less trying; for starting away
with the headlong speed of a hare roused out of her form, instead of
following the windings of the path, he shot right over the precipice
at the abrupt angle. Downwards he went from shelf to shelf--now
tearing away with him a huge bush of ivy--now darting along a stream
of _débris_--now making somersets in mid-air over the perpendicular
walls of rock which alternate with the shelving terraces. The fear of
the gun precluded every other fear; he reached the beach unharmed,
except by a few slight sprains and a few scratches, and bolting up,
tumbled himself into the boat, and dived for shelter under the folds of
the sail. The farmer had pursued him to the top of the rock, and had
turned the angle just in time to see him dash over; when, horror-struck
at so terrible an accident, for he had intended only to shoot the
man, he flung away his gun and ran home. Years and generations passed
away; the good King William was succeeded by the good Queen Anne,
and Anne by the three Georges, successively; the farmer and all his
contemporaries passed to the churchyard--his very fields were lost
in the thickets of a deep wood;--the story of the Caithness-man
had become traditional--elderly men said it had happened in their
grandfather’s days, and pointing out to the “leap,” they adverted to
the name which the rock still continued to bear, as proofs that the
incident had really occurred--incredible as it might seem that a human
creature could possibly have survived such a fall. Ninety years had
elapsed from the time, ere the Cromarty fishermen set out on their
Caithness expedition. In the first year of the enterprise one of their
fleet was storm-bound in a rocky bay, and the crew found shelter in a
neighbouring cottage. There was a spectral-looking old man seated in
a corner beside the fire. On learning they had come from Cromarty, he
seemed to shake off the apathy of extreme age, and began to converse
with them; and they were astonished to learn from his narrative that
they had before them the hero of the “leap,” at that time in his
hundred and eighth year.
CHAPTER XVIII.
“He whom my restless gratitude has sought
So long in vain.”--THOMSON.
[Sidenote: SANDY WRIGHT AND THE PUIR ORPHAN.]
Early in the month of April 1734, three Cromarty boatmen, connected
with the custom-house, were journeying along the miserable road which
at this period winded between the capital of the Highlands and that
of the kingdom. They had already travelled since morning more than
thirty miles through the wild highlands of Inverness-shire, and were
now toiling along the steep side of an uninhabited valley of Badenoch.
A dark sluggish morass, with a surface as level as a sheet of water,
occupied the bottom of the valley; a few scattered tufts of withered
grass were mottled over it, but the unsolid, sooty-coloured spaces
between were as bare of vegetation as banks of sea-mud left by the
receding tide. On either hand, a series of dreary mountains thrust up
their jagged and naked summits into the middle sky. A scanty covering
of heath was thrown over their bases, except where the frequent streams
of loose _débris_ which had fallen from above, were spread over them;
but higher up, the heath altogether disappeared, and the eye rested on
what seemed an endless file of bare gloomy cliffs, partially covered
with snow.
The evening, for day was fast drawing to a close, was as melancholy
as the scene. A dense volume of grey cloud hung over the valley like
a ceiling, and seemed descending along the cliffs. There was scarcely
any wind, but at times a wreath of vapour would come rolling into a
lower region of the valley, as if shot out from the volume above; and
the chill bleak air was filled with small specks of snow, so light
and fleecy that they seemed scarcely to descend, but, when caught by
the half perceptible breeze, went sailing past the boatmen in long
horizontal lines. It was evident there impended over them one of those
terrible snow-storms which sometimes overwhelm the hapless traveller in
these solitudes; and the house in which they were to pass the night was
still nearly ten miles away.
The gloom of evening, deepened by the coming storm, was closing around
them as they entered one of the wildest recesses of the valley, an
immense precipitous hollow scooped out of the side of one of the hills;
the wind began to howl through the cliffs, and the thickening flakes of
snow to beat against their faces. “It will be a terrible night, lads,
in the Moray Firth,” said the foremost traveller, a broad-shouldered,
deep-chested, strong-looking man, of about five feet eight; “I would
ill like to hae to beat up through the drift along the rough shores o’
Cadboll. It was in just such a night as this, ten year ago, that old
Walter Hogg went down in the Red Sally.”--“It will be as terrible a
night, I’m feared, just where we are, in the black strath o’ Badenoch,”
said one of the men behind, who seemed much fatigued; “I wish we were
a’ safe i’ the clachan.”--“Hoot, man,” said Sandy Wright, the first
speaker, “it canna now be muckle mair than sax miles afore us, an’
we’ll hae the tail of the gloamin’ for half an hour yet. But, gude safe
us! what’s that?” he exclaimed, pointing to a little figure that seemed
sitting by the side of the road, about twenty yards before him; “it’s
surely a fairy!” The figure rose from its seat, and came up, staggering
apparently from extreme weakness, to meet them. It was a boy scarcely
more than ten years of age. “O my puir boy!” said Sandy Wright, “what
can hae taken ye here in a night like this?”--“I was going to Edinburgh
to my friends,” replied the boy, “for my mother died and left me among
the _freme_; but I’m tired, and canna walk farther; and I’ll be lost,
I’m feared, in the _yowndrift_.”--“That ye winna, my puir bairn,” said
the boatman, “if I can help it; gi’es a haud o’ your han’,” grasping,
as he spoke, the extended hand of the boy; “dinna tine heart, an’ lean
on me as muckle’s ye can.” But the poor little fellow was already
exhausted, and, after a vain attempt to proceed, the boatman had to
carry him on his back. The storm burst out in all its fury; and the
travellers, half suffocated, and more than half blinded, had to grope
onwards along the rough road, still more roughened by the snow-wreaths
that were gathering over it. They stopped at every fiercer blast,
and turned their backs to the storm to recover breath; and every few
yards they advanced, they had to stoop to the earth to ascertain the
direction of their path, by catching the outline of the nearer objects
between them and the sky. After many a stumble and fall, however, and
many a groan and exclamation from the two boatmen behind, who were
well-nigh worn out, they all reached the clachan in safety about two
hours after nightfall.
The inmates were seated round an immense peat fire, placed, according
to the custom of the country, in the middle of the floor. They made way
for the travellers; and Sandy Wright, drawing his seat nearer the fire,
began to chafe the hands and feet of the boy, who was almost insensible
from cold and fatigue. “Bring us a mutchkin o’ brandy here,” said the
boatman, “to drive out the cauld frae our hearts; an’, as supper canna
be ready for a while yet, get me a piece bread for the boy. He has had
a narrow escape, puir little fellow; an’ maybe there’s some that would
miss him, lanerly as he seems. Only hear how the win’ roars on the
gable, an’ rattles at the winnocks and the door. It’s an awfu’ night in
the Moray Firth.”
“It’s no gude,” continued the boatman, as he tendered a half glass
of the brandy and a cake of bread to his _protégé_, “it’s no gude to
be ill-set to boys. My own loon, Willie, that’s the liftenant now,
taught me a lesson o’ that. He was a wild roytous laddie, fu’ o’ droll
mischief, an’ desperately fond o’ doos an’ rabbits. He had a doo’s
nest out in the Crookburn Wood; but he was muckle in the dread o’
fighting Rob Moffat, the gamekeeper; an’, on the day it was ripe for
harrying, what did he do but set himself to watch Rob, at his house
at the Mains? He saw him setting off to the hill, as he thought, wi’
his gun an’ his twa dogs; an’ then awa sneaks he to the burn, thinking
himsel’ out o’ Rob’s danger. He could climb like a cat, an’ so up he
clamb to the nest; an’ then wi’ his bonnet in his teeth, an’ the twa
doos in his bonnet, he drapped down frae branch to branch. But, as ill
luck would hae it, the first thing he met at the bottom was muckle Rob.
The cankered wretch raged like a madman, an’ laying hold on the twa
birds by the feet, he dawded them about Willie’s face till they were
baith massacred. It was an ill-hearted cruel thing; an’, had I been
there, I would hae tauld him sae on the deafest side o’ his head, lang
though he be. Willie cam’ hame wi’ his chafts a’ swelled an’ bluidy,
an’ the greet, puir chield, in his throat, for he was as muckle vexed
as hurt. He was but a thin slip o’ a callant at the time; but he had a
high spirit, an’, just out o’ the healey, awa he went in young Captain
Robinson’s lugger, an’ didna come near the place, though he sent his
mither pennies now an’ then by the Campvere traders, for about five
years. Weel, back he cam’ at last, a stalwart young fallow o’ sax feet,
wi’ a grip that would spin the bluid out at the craps o’ a chield’s
fingers; an’ we were a’ glad to see him! ‘Mither,’ said he, ‘is
fighting Rob Moffat at the Mains yet?’ ‘O ay!’ quo’ she. ’Weel, then, I
think I’ll call on him in the morning,’ says he, ‘an’ clear aff an old
score wi’ him;’ an’ his brow grew black as he spoke. We baith kent what
was working wi’ him; an’, after bedtime, his mither, puir body, gaed up
a’ the length o’ the Mains to warn Rob to keep out o’ the way. An’ weel
did he do that; for, for the three weeks that Willie stayed at hame wi’
us, not a bit o’ Rob was to be seen at either kirk or market.--Puir
Willie! he has got fighting enough sinsyne.”
Sandy Wright shared with the boy his supper and his bed; and, on
setting out on the following morning, he brought him along with him,
despite the remonstrances of the other boatmen, who dreaded his proving
an incumbrance. The story of the little fellow, though simple, was very
affecting. His mother, a poor widow, had lived for the five preceding
years in the vicinity of Inverness, supporting herself and her boy by
her skill as a seamstress. As early as his sixth year he had shown
a predilection for reading; and, with the anxious solicitude of a
Scottish mother, she had wrought late and early to keep him at school.
But her efforts were above her strength, and, after a sore struggle of
nearly four years, she at length sank under them. “Oh!” said the boy to
his companion, “often would she stop in the middle of her work, and lay
her hand on her breast, and then she would ask me what would I do when
she would be dead--and we would both greet. Her fingers grew white and
sma’, and she couldna sit up at nights as before; but her cheeks were
redder and bonnier than ever, and I thought that she surely wouldna
die;--she has told me that she wasna eighteen years older than mysel’.
Often, often when I waukened in the morning, she would be greetin’ at
my bedside; and I mind one day, when I brought home the first prize
from school, that she drew me till her, an’ told me wi’ the tear in
her ee, that the day would come, when her head would be low, that my
father’s gran’ friends, who were ashamed o’ her because she was poor,
would be proud that I was connected wi’ them. She soon couldna hold
up her head at all, and if it wasna for a neighbour woman, who hadna
muckle to spare, we would have starved. I couldna go to the school,
for I needed to stay and watch by her bedside, and do things in the
house; and it vexed her more that she was keeping me from my learning,
than that hersel’ was sae ill. But I used to read chapters to her out
of the Bible. One day when she was very sick, two neighbour women came
in, and she called me to her and told me, that when she would be dead
I would need to go to Edinburgh, for I had no friends anywhere else.
Her own friends were there, she said, but they were poor, and couldna
do muckle for me; and my father’s friends were there too, and they were
gran’ and rich, though they wadna own her. She told me no to be feared
by the way, for that Providence kent every bit o’t, and He would make
folk to be kind to me; and then she kissed me, and grat, and bade me go
to the school. When I came out she was lying wi’ a white cloth on her
face, and the bed was all white. She was dead; and I could do nothing
but greet a’ that night; and she was dead still. I’m now travelling to
Edinburgh, as she bade me, and folk are kind to me just as she said;
and I have letters to show me the way to my mother’s friends when I
reach the town; for I can read write.” Such was the narrative of the
poor boy.
Throughout the whole of the journey, Sandy Wright was as a father to
him. He shared with him his meals and his bed, and usually for the
last half dozen miles of every stage, he carried him on his back. On
reaching the Queensferry, however, the boatman found that his money
was well-nigh expended. I must just try and get him across, thought
he, without paying the fare. The boat had reached the middle of the
ferry, when one of the ferrymen, a large gruff-looking fellow, began to
collect the freight. He passed along the passengers one after one, and
made a dead stand at the boy. “Oh!” said Sandy Wright, who sat by him,
“dinna stop at the boy;--it’s a puir orphan; see, here’s my groat.”
The ferryman still held out his hand. “It’s a puir orphan,” reiterated
the boatman; “we found him bewildered, on the bursting out o’ the last
storm, in a dismal habitless glen o’ Badenoch, an’ we’ve ta’en him wi’
us a’ the way, for he’s going to seek his friends at Edinburgh; surely
ye’ll no grudge him a passage?” The ferryman, without deigning him a
reply, plucked off the boy’s bonnet; the boatman instantly twitched
it out of his hand. “Hoot, hoot, hoot!” he exclaimed, “the puir
fatherless and motherless boy!--ye’ll no do that?” “Take tent, my man,”
he added, for the ferryman seemed doggedly resolved on exacting the
hire; “take tent; we little ken what may come o’ oursel’s yet, forbye
our bairns.” “By ----, boatman, or whatever ye be,” said the ferryman,
“I’ll hae either the fare or the fare’s worth, though it should be his
jacket;” and he again laid hold on the boy, who began to cry. Sandy
Wright rose from his seat in a towering passion. “Look ye, my man,”
said he, as he seized the fellow by the collar with a grasp that would
have pulled a bull to the ground, “little hauds me from pitching ye
out owre the gunwale. Only crook a finger on the poor thing, an’ I’ll
knock ye down, man, though ye were as muckle as a bullock. Shame!
shame ye for a man!--ye hae nae mair natural feeling than a sealchie’s
bubble.”[8] The cry of shame! shame! was echoed from the other
passengers, and the surly ferryman gave up the point.
“An’ now, my boy,” said the boatman as they reached the West Port, “I
hae business to do at the Customhouse, an’ some money to get; but I
maun first try and find out your friends for ye. Look at the letters
and tell me the street where they put up.” The boy untied his little
bundle, which contained a few shirts and stockings, a parcel of papers,
and a small box.--“What’s a’ the papers about?” inquired the boatman;
“an’ what hae ye in the wee box?” “My mither,” said the boy, “bade me
be sure to keep the papers, for they tell of her marriage to my father;
and the box hauds her ring. She could have got money for it when she
was sick and no able to work, but she would sooner starve, she said,
than part wi’ it; and I widna like to part wi’ it, either, to ony bodie
but yoursel’--but if ye would take it?” He opened the box and passed
it to his companion. It contained a valuable diamond ring. “No, no, my
boy,” said the boatman, “that widna do; the ring’s a bonny ring, an’
something bye ordinar, though I be no judge; but, blessings on your
heart! tak ye care o’t, an’ part wi’t on no account to ony bodie;--Hae
ye found out the direction?” The boy named some place in the vicinity
of the Cowgate, and in a few minutes they were both walking up the
Grassmarket.
“O, yonder’s my aunt!” exclaimed the boy, pointing to a young woman who
was coming down the street; “yonder’s my mither’s sister;” and away he
sprang to meet her. She immediately recognised and welcomed him; and he
introduced the boatman to her as the kind friend who had rescued him
from the snow-storm and the ferryman. She related in a few words the
story of the boy’s parents. His father had been a dissipated young man
of good family, whose follies had separated him from his friends; and
the difference he had rendered irreconcilable by marrying a low-born
but industrious and virtuous young woman, who, despite of her birth,
was deserving of a better husband. In a few years he had sunk into
indigence and contempt; and in the midst of a wretchedness which
would have been still more complete had it not been for the efforts
of his wife, he was seized by a fever, of which he died. “Two of his
brothers,” said the woman, “who are gentlemen of the law, were lately
inquiring about the boy, and will, I hope, interest themselves in his
behalf.” In this hope the boatman cordially acquiesced. “An’ now, my
boy,” said he, as he bade him farewell, “I have just one groat left
yet;--here it is; better in your pocket than wi’ the gruff carle at the
ferry. It’s an honest groat, anyhow; an’ I’m sure I wish it luck.”
Eighteen years elapsed before Sandy Wright again visited Edinburgh. He
had quitted it a robust, powerful man of forty-seven, and he returned
to it a greyheaded old man of sixty-five. His humble fortunes, too,
were sadly in the wane. His son William, a gallant young fellow, who
had risen in a few years, on the score of merit alone, from the
forecastle to a lieutenancy, had headed, under Admiral Vernon, some
desperate enterprise, from which he never returned: and the boatman
himself, when on the eve of retiring on a small pension from his
long service in the Customhouse, was dismissed without a shilling,
on the charge of having connived at the escape of a smuggler. He was
slightly acquainted with one of the inferior clerks in the Edinburgh
Customhouse; and in the slender hope that this person might use his
influence in his behalf, and that that influence might prove powerful
enough to get him reinstated, he had now travelled from Cromarty to
Edinburgh, a weary journey of nearly two hundred miles. He had visited
the clerk, who had given him scarcely any encouragement, and he was now
waiting for him in a street near Brown Square, where he had promised
to meet him in less than half an hour. But more than two hours had
elapsed; and Sandy Wright, fatigued and melancholy, was sauntering
slowly along the street, musing on his altered circumstances, when a
gentleman, who had passed him with the quick hurried step of a person
engaged in business, stopped abruptly a few yards away, and returning
at a much slower pace, eyed him steadfastly as he repassed. He again
came forward and stood. “Are you not Mr. Wright?” he inquired. “My
name, sir, is Sandy Wright,” said the boatman, touching his bonnet.
The face of the stranger glowed with pleasure, and grasping him by
the hand, “Oh, my good kind friend, Sandy Wright!” he exclaimed,
“often, often, have I inquired after you, but no one could tell me
where you resided, or whether you were living or dead. Come along with
me--my house is in the next square. What! not remember me; ah, but it
will be ill with me when I cease to remember you! I am Hamilton, an
advocate--but you will scarcely know me as that.”
The boatman accompanied him to an elegant house in Brown Square,
and was ushered into a splendid apartment, where there sat a
Madonna-looking young lady engaged in reading. “Who of all the world
have I found,” said the advocate to the lady, “but good Sandy Wright,
the kind brave man who rescued me when perishing in the snow, and who
was so true a friend to me when I had no friend besides.” The lady
welcomed the boatman with one of her most fascinating smiles, and held
out her hand. “How happy I am,” she said, “that we should have met
with you! Often has Mr. Hamilton told me of your kindness to him, and
regretted that he should have no opportunity of acknowledging it.” The
boatman made one of his best bows, but he had no words for so fine a
lady.
The advocate inquired kindly after his concerns, and was told of his
dismissal from the Customhouse. “I’ll vouch!” he exclaimed, “it was
for nothing an honest man should be ashamed of.” “Oh! only a slight
matter, Mr. Hamilton,” said the boatman; “an’ troth I couldna’ weel do
other than what I did though I should hae to do’t o’er again. Captain
Robinson o’ the Free Trade was on the coast o’ Cadboll last har’st,
about the time o’ the _Equinoxal_, unlading a cargo o’ Hollands, whan
on cam’ the storm o’ the season, an’ he had to run for Cromarty to
avoid shipwreck. His loading was mostly out, except a few orra kegs
that might just make his lugger seizable if folk gied a wee owre
strict. If he could but show, however, that he had been at the Isle o’
Man, an’ had been forced into the Firth by mere stress o’ weather frae
his even course to Flushing, it would set him clear out o’ our danger.
I had a strong liking to the Captain, for he had been unco kind to my
poor Willie, that’s dead now; an’ when he tauld our officer that he had
been at Man, an’ the officer asked for proof, I contrived to slide twa
Manks baubees intil his han’, an’ he held them out just in a careless
way, as if he had plenty mair proof besides. Weel, this did, an’ the
puir chield wan off; but hardly was he down the Firth when out cam’
the haill story. Him they coudna harm, but me they could; an’ after
muckle ill words, (an’ I had to bear them a’, for I’m an auld failed
man now,) instead o’ getting retired on a pension for my forty years’
service, I was turned aff without a shilling. I have an acquaintance
in the Customhouse here, Mr. Scrabster the clerk; an’ I came up ance
errand to Edinburgh in the hope that he might do something for me; but
he’s no verra able I’m thinking, an’ I’m feared no verra willing; an’
so, Mr. Hamilton, I just canna help it. My day, o’ coorse o’ nature,
canna be verra lang, an’ Providence, that has aye carried me through
as yet, winna surely let me stick now.”--“Ah no, my poor friend!” said
the advocate. “Make up your mind, however, to stay for a few weeks with
Helen and me, and I’ll try in the meantime what my little influence may
be able to do for you at the Customhouse.”
A fortnight passed away very agreeably to the boatman. Mrs. Hamilton,
a fascinating young creature of very superior mental endowments, was
delighted with his character and his stories:--the latter opened to her
a new chapter in her favourite volume--the book of human life; and the
advocate, a man of high talent and a benevolent heart, seemed to regard
him with the feelings of an affectionate son. At length, however, he
began to weary sadly of what he termed the life of a gentleman, and to
sigh after his little smoky cottage, and “the puir auld wife.” “Just
remain with us one week longer,” said the advocate, “and I shall learn
in that time the result of my application. You are not now quite so
active a man as when you carried me ten miles through the snow, and
frightened the tall ferryman, and so I shall secure for you a passage
in one of the Leith traders.” In a few days after, when the boatman
was in the middle of one of his most interesting stories, and Mrs.
Hamilton hugely delighted, the advocate entered the apartment, his eyes
beaming with pleasure, and a packet in his hand. “This is from London,”
he said, as he handed it to the lady; “it intimates to us, that
‘Alexander Wright, Customhouse boatman,’ is to retire from the service
on a pension of twenty pounds per annum.”--But why dwell longer on
the story? Sandy Wright parted from his kind friends, and returned to
Cromarty, where he died in the spring of 1769, in the eighty-second
year of his age. “Folk hae aye to learn,” he used to say, “an’, for my
own pairt, I was a saxty-year-auld scholar afore I kent the meaning o’
the verse, ‘Cast thy bread on the waters, and thou shalt find it after
many days.’”
CHAPTER XIX.
“I’ll give thee a wind.”--SHAKSPERE.
[Sidenote: TARBAT NESS.]
For about thirty years after the failure of the herring fishery, the
population of the town of Cromarty gradually decreased. Many of the
young men became sailors and went into foreign parts, from whence few
of them returned. One of their number, poor Lieutenant Wright, the
boatman’s son, served in the unfortunate expedition of Vernon, and
left his bones under the walls of Carthagena; another, after sailing
round the world with Anson, died on his passage homewards when within
sight of the white cliffs of England; a third was barbarously murdered
on the high seas by the notorious Captain James Lowrie. Such of the
town’s-people as had made choice of the common mechanical professions,
plied their respective trades in the fishing towns of the north of
Scotland; and I have seen, among old family papers, letters of these
emigrants written from Lerwick, Kirkwall, and Stornoway. As the
population gradually decreased in this way, house after house became
tenantless and fell into decay; until the main street was skirted by
roofless tenements, and the town’s cross, which bears date 1578, was
bounded by a stone wall on the one side, and a hawthorn hedge on the
other.
The domestic economy of the people, who still continue to inhabit
the town, differed considerably from what it had been when their
circumstances were more prosperous. There was now no just division of
labour among them--working people of all the different denominations
encroaching each on the bounds of the others’ profession. Fishermen
wrought as labourers, tradesfolk as fishermen, and both as farmers.
In the latter part of spring every year, and the two first months of
summer, the town’s-people spent their evenings in angling with rods and
hand-lines in their boats, or from the rocks at the entrance of the
bay; towards the end of July they formed themselves into parties of
eight or ten, and sailed to Tarbat Ness, a fishing station of the Moray
Firth, where they remained for several weeks catching and storing up
fish for winter. At night they converted their sails into tents, ranged
in the manner of an encampment, at the edge of the little bay where
they moored their boats.
The long low promontory of Tarbat Ness forms the north-eastern
extremity of Ross-shire. Etymologists derive its name from the practice
which prevailed among mariners in this country during the infancy
of navigation, of drawing their light shallops across the necks of
such promontories instead of sailing round them. On a moor of this
headland there may be traced the vestiges of an encampment, which
some have deemed Roman, and others Danish; and there is a cave among
the low rocks by which it is skirted, which, according to tradition,
communicates with another cave on the coast of Caithness. The scenery
of Tarbat Ness is of that character which Addison regarded as the
most sublime; but it has something more to recommend it than a mere
expansiveness, like that predicated by the poet, in which no object,
tree, house, or mountain, contracts the view of the vast arch of
heaven or the huge circle of earth. Instead of a low plain bounded by
the sky, there is here a wide expanse of ocean encircling a narrow
headland--brown, sterile, solitary, edged with rock, and studded with
fragments of stone. On the one hand, the mountains of Sutherland
are seen rising out of the sea like a volume of blue clouds; on the
other, at a still greater distance, the hills of Moray stretch along
the horizon in a long undulating strip, so faintly defined in the
outline that they seem almost to mingle with the firmament. Instead,
however, of contracting the prospect, they serve but to enhance, by
their diminished bulk, the immense space in which they are included.
Space--wide, interminable space--in which he who contemplates it finds
himself lost, and is oppressed by a sense of his own littleness, is
at all times the circumstance to which the prospect owes most of its
power; but it is only during the storms of winter, when the firmament
in all its vastness seems converted into a hall of the tempest, and
the earth in all its extent into a gymnasium for contending elements,
that the scene assumes its full sublimity and grandeur. On the north
a chain of alternate currents and whirlpools howl, toss, and rage, as
if wrestling with the hurricane; on the east the huge waves of the
German ocean come rolling against the rocky barrier, encircling it with
a broad line of foam, and join their voices of thunder to the roar
of current and whirlpool; cloud after cloud sweeps along the brown
promontory, flinging on it their burdens as they pass; the sea-gull
shrieks over it as he beats his wings against the gale; the distant
hills seem blotted from the landscape; occasionally a solitary bark,
half enveloped in cloud and spray, with its dark sails furled to the
yards, and its topmasts lowered to the deck, comes drifting over the
foam; and the mariner, anxious, afraid, and lashed to the helm, looks
wistfully over the waves for the headlands of the distant haven.
A party of Cromarty tradesfolk, who had prosecuted the fishing on the
promontory of Tarbat Ness for part of the summer and autumn of 1738,
had been less successful that season than most of their neighbours,
and had lingered for several days on the station after the tents of
the encampment had been struck, and the boats had sailed for home. At
length, however, a day was fixed for their return, but when it arrived
the wind had set in strongly from the south-west; and, instead of
prosecuting their voyage, they were compelled to haul up their boat
to the site of the encampment. The storm continued for more than two
weeks, accompanied by heavy showers, which extinguished their fire,
and so saturated the cover of their tent, that the water dropped on
their faces as they lay folded in the straw and blankets with which
they had covered the floor. Their provisions too, except the salted
fish, which they had secured in barrels, began to fail them; and they
became exceedingly anxious for a change of wind. But the storm seemed
to mock at their anxiety; night after night were they awakened by the
rain pattering against the sail, and when they raised its edge every
succeeding morning, they saw the sea whitened by the gale, and clouds
laden with water rolling heavily from the south-west.
[Sidenote: STINE BHEAG O’ TARBAT.]
Not more than a mile from the tent there stood an inhabited cottage.
The solitary tenant, an elderly woman, still known to tradition as
_Stine Bheag o’ Tarbat_, was famous at this time as one in league with
Satan, and much consulted by seafaring men when windbound in any of
the neighbouring ports. And her history, as related by her neighbours,
formed, like the histories of all the other witches of Scotland,
a strange medley of the very terrible and the very ludicrous. A
shipmaster, who had unwittingly offended her, had moored his vessel one
evening within the rocky bay of Portmahomack, a haven of Tarbat; but on
going on deck next morning, he found that the vessel had been conveyed
during the night over the rocks and the beach, a broad strip of meadow,
two corn-fields, and a large moor, into a deep muddy ditch; and there
would she have lain till now had he not found means to conciliate
the witch, who on the following night transported her to her former
moorings. With all this power, however, it so happened, that only a few
weeks after a farmer of the parish, whom she had long annoyed in the
shape of a black beetle, succeeded in laying hold of her as she hummed
round his bonnet, and confined her for four days in his snuff-box.
Shortly before the arrival of the Cromarty men, a small sloop had been
weather-bound for a few days in a neighbouring port; and the master
applied to _Stine_ for a wind. Part of his cargo consisted of foreign
spirits; and on taking leave of the witch he brought with him two empty
bottles, which he promised to fill, and send to her by the ship-boy. It
was evening, however, before he reached the vessel; the boy would not
venture on carrying the bottles by night to the witch’s cottage; and on
the following morning they were forgotten in the hurry of sailing. The
wind blew directly off the land, from what the master deemed the very
best point of the compass; the vessel scudded down the Firth before it
under a tight sail; it freshened as the land receded, and the mainsail
was lowered reef after reef, until as the evening was darkening it
had increased into a hurricane. The master stood by the helm, and in
casting an anxious glance at the binnacle, to ascertain his course, his
eye caught the two bottles of _Stine Bheag_. “Ah, witch!” he muttered,
“I must get rid of thee;” and taking up one of the bottles he raised
his arm to throw it over the side, when he was interrupted by a hoarse
croaking above-head, and on looking up saw two ravens hovering round
the vane. The bottle was replaced. An immense wave came rolling behind
in the wake of the vessel; it neared; it struck the stern, and, rushing
over the deck, washed everything before it, spars, coops, cordage;
but only the bottles were carried overboard. In the moment they rose
to the surface the ravens darted upon them like sea-gulls on a shoal
of coal-fish; and the master, as the vessel swept along, could see
them bearing the bottles away. The hurricane gradually subsided into
a moderate breeze, and the rest of the voyage was neither rough nor
unprosperous; but the shipmaster, it was said, religiously determined
never again to purchase a wind. And the Cromarty men, who had heard the
story, were so much of the master’s opinion, that it was not until the
second week after the wind had set so stiffly into the south-west, and
when all their provisions were expended, that they resolved on risking
a visit to _Stine Bheag_.
One of them, a tall robust young fellow, named Macglashan, accompanied
by two others, after collecting all the placks and boddles of the
party--little pieces of copper coin, with the head of Charles II.
on one side, and the Scotch thistle on the other--set out for the
hovel of the witch. It was situated on the shore of a little sandy
bay, which opens into the Dornoch Firth, and formed one of a range,
four in number, three of which were now deserted. The roof of one
had fallen in; the two others, with their doors ajar, the casements
of the windows bleached white by the sea winds, and with wreaths of
chickweed mantling over the sloping sides, and depending from the
eaves, seemed very dwellings of desolation. From the door and window
of the inhabited hovel, which joined to the one which had fallen, and
which in appearance was as ruinous and weather-beaten as either of
the other two, there issued dense volumes of smoke, accompanied by a
heavy oppressive scent, occasioned apparently by the combustion of some
marine vegetable. The range had been inhabited about ten years before
by a crew of fishermen and their families; one of them the husband,
another the son of _Stine Bheag_. The son had unluckily chanced to come
upon her when she was engaged in some of her orgies, and telling his
father of what he had seen, they deliberated together, it was said, on
delating her as a witch before the presbytery of Tain; but ere they
came to a full determination they unluckily went to sea. _Stine_ was
not idle;--there arose a terrible hurricane, and the boat was driven on
a quicksand, where she was swallowed up with all her crew. The widows,
disturbed by supernatural sights and noises, deserted their cottages
soon after, and _Stine Bheag_ became the sole tenant of the range.
Macglashan walked up to the door, which hung half open, and tapped
against it, but the sound was lost in a loud crackling noise,
resembling a ceaseless discharge of pocket pistols, which proceeded
from the interior. He tapped a second time, but the crackling
continued, and, despairing of making himself heard, he stooped and
entered. The apartment was so filled with smoke, that for the first
few seconds he could only distinguish a red glare of light upon the
hearth, and a small patch of sky, which appeared of a rusty-brown
colour through the dense volume which issued out at the window. The hag
sat on a low stool beside the wall, and fronting the fire, into which
at intervals she flung handfuls of dried sea-weed, of that kind (_Fucus
nodosus_) which consists of chains of little brown bladders filled with
air, and which is used in the making of kelp. As the bladders, one
after one, expanded and burst with the heat, she continued to mutter a
Gaelic rhyme. The thick smoke circled round her as she bent over the
fire, and when the flame shot up through the eddies, Macglashan could
see her long sharp features, but when it sunk her eyes were alone
visible. Her grizzled hair escaped from a red coif, and fell over her
shoulders, round which there was wrapped a square of red tartan, held
on by a large silver brooch. The imagination of a poet could scarcely
have invested one of the ancient sibyls with more circumstances of
the wild and terrible, or have placed her in a scene of a character
so suited to her own. “Sad weather this,” said Macglashan;--the hag
started at the unexpected address, and rising up gazed at the intruder
with a mixed expression of anger and surprise. “I come,” he continued,
“from _the point_, where I and my companions have been windbound for
the last fortnight, and half starved with cold and hunger to boot.
Could you not favour us with a breeze that would serve for Cromarty?”
Without waiting a reply, he thrust into her hand the joint contribution
of the crew. She spread out her palm to the light, looked at the
coins, then at Macglashan, and shook her head. “For _that_!!” she
said contemptuously. He shook his head in turn. “Bad times, mother,
bad times; not a rap more among us; but we will not forget you should
we once reach home.” “Then send one of your companions,” said the
witch, “for your lugged water-stoup.”--“Ay, an’ so you know of them,
and of the stoup,” muttered Macglashan;--“Jock, Sandy, this way,
lads.” The two men entered the apartment. “Run, Sandy,” continued the
young fellow, “for the muckle stoup,” and drawing in a huge settle of
plank which stood in the middle of the floor, he seated himself, all
unbidden, before the fire of _Stine Bheag_.
The place was darkened, as I have said, with smoke, but at intervals
the flames glanced on the naked walls of turf and stone, and on
a few rude implements of housewifery which were ranged along the
sides, together with other utensils of a more questionable form and
appearance. A huge wooden trough, filled with water, from whence there
proceeded a splashing bubbling noise, as if it were filled with live
fish, occupied one of the corners; and was sentinelled by a black cat,
that sat purring on a stool beside it, and that on every louder splash
rose from her seat, and stretched her neck over the water. A bundle of
dried herbs; a table bearing the skeleton of some animal, round part
of which a kind of red clay had been moulded, as if by a statuary; a
staff, with the tail of a fish fastened to one end, and the wings of
a raven to the other; and a large earthen vessel, like that in which
Hercules sailed to release Prometheus, with a white napkin tied in the
manner of a sail to a stick, which served for a mast, were ranged along
the wall. As Macglashan surveyed the apartment, _Stine_ seemed lost
in a reverie, with her head bent, and her eyes fixed upon the fire;
but as if struck by a sudden thought, she started into a more erect
posture, and regarded him with a malignant scowl, clutched her hands
into a hill of dried weed, and flung a fresh heap on the fire, which
for a few seconds seemed extinguished. “Od, mother,” said the young
fellow, nothing appalled by the darkness, “ye lead a terrible lonely
life of it here; were I in your place I would die of sheer longing in
less than a fortnight.” “Lonely,” muttered the hag, who seemed in no
communicative mood; “how ken ye that?” As she spoke the croak of a
raven was heard from the chimney, accompanied by the flutter of wings.
“Ug, ug!” ejaculated Macglashan’s companion; “let’s out, Mac, and see
what’s keeping Sandy.” “Nay, here he comes,” said the other; and as he
spoke Sandy entered with the stoup. “And now,” said _Stine_, rising and
laying hold of it, “ye maun out, an’ bide at the rock yonder till I
call.”
Macglashan and his companions waited for nearly half an hour; night
was fast falling, and the ruinous cottages, as the twilight darkened
round them, assumed a more dismal appearance. From the window of the
inhabited one there glimmered a dull red light, which was repeatedly
eclipsed, as if by the shadows of persons passing between the window
and the fire. At length the door opened, and the sharp harsh voice of
_Stine Bheag_ was heard calling from the entrance. Macglashan stepped
up to her, and received the stoup, stoppled with a bunch of straw. “Set
off,” said she, as she delivered it, “on the first blink of to-morrow;
but as ye love life, touch not the wisp till ye reach Cromarty.”
Macglashan promised a strict observance of the injunction, and, taking
his leave, set out with his companions for the tent.
The wind lowered during the night, and when early next morning
Macglashan raised the edge of the sail, the wide extent of the Moray
Firth presented a surface as glassy as that of a mirror; though it
still heaved in long ridges, on which the reflection of the red light
that preceded sunrise, danced and flickered like sheets of flame. He
roused his companions; the tent was struck, the boat launched, the
thwarts manned; and before the sun had risen, the whole party were
toiling at the oar. A light breeze from the north-east began to ruffle
the surface of the water; it increased into a brisk gale, and the boat,
with both her sails set, was soon scudding before it. The ancient
towers of Balone, the still more ancient towers of Cadboll, Hilton
with its ruinous chapel, and Shandwick with its sculptured obelisk,
neared and then receded, as she swept along the shore; and the sun
was yet low in the sky, when, after passing the steep overhanging
precipices of the hill of Nigg, she opened the bay of Cromarty. “What
in the name of wonder,” asked one of the crew, “can _Stine Bheag_
hae put in the stoup?” “Rax it this way,” said another; “we would
better be ony gate than in Cromarty should the minister come to hear
of it; I’m thinking Mac had as weel fling out the wisp here as on the
shore.”--“Think you so?” said Macglashan, “then send the stoup this
way.” He drew out the stopple, and flung it over his head into the sea;
but in the next moment, when half-a-dozen necks were stretched out
to pry into the vessel, which proved empty, the man stationed at the
bows roared out, “For heaven’s sake, lads, mind your haulyards! lower,
lower, a squall from the land! we shall back-fill and go down like a
mussel-shell.” The crew clustered round the sails, and had succeeded
in lowering them, when the squall struck the boat ahead with the fury
of a tornado, and almost forced her out of the water. The thwarts were
maimed, but ere the rowers had bent to the first stroke, the oars were
wrested out of their hands by the force of the hurricane. The bay
around them was agitated as if beaten by rods; the wind howled in one
continuous gust, without pause or intermission; and a cloud of spray
which arose from the waves, like a sheet of drift from a field of snow,
swept over them in so dense a volume, that it hid the land and darkened
the heavens. As the boat drifted before the tempest, the bay receded,
the cliffs, the villages, the castles, were passed in hasty succession,
and before noon the crew had landed at Tarbat Ness, where they found
_Stine Bheag_ sitting on the shore, as if waiting their arrival.
“Donnart deevils, what tak’s ye here?” was the first salutation of
the witch. “Ah, mother, that cursed wisp!” groaned out Macglashan.
“Wisp!--Look ye, my frack young man, your weird may have hemp in it,
an’ sae ye may tempt salt water when ye like; but a’ the ither drookit
bodies there have nae such protection. An’ now ye may tak’ the road,
for here maun your boat gizzen till the drift o’ Januar be heapit
oure her gunwale.” “Ah, mother!” said Macglashan, “what could we do
on the road? and home were but a cold home without either our fish or
our winbread. Od, it were better for us to plenish the old bothies at
the bay, and go and live wi’ yoursel’; but ye must just try and put
another wisp in the stoup.” To this she at length consented; and on
the following morning the party arrived in Cromarty without any new
adventure. The one detailed did not become history until many years
after, when it was related by Macglashan. He was probably well enough
acquainted with the tenth book of Homer’s Odyssey to know of that
ill-improved gift bestowed on Ulysses by old king Æolus, when
“The adverse winds in leathern bags he braced,
Compressed their force, and locked each struggling blast,
Securely fettered by a silver thong.”
CHAPTER XX.
“Implore his aid, for Proteus only knows
The secret cause and cure of all thy woes,
But first the wily wizard must be caught,
For unconstrain’d he nothing tells for naught,
Nor is with prayers, or bribes, or flattery bought,
Surprise him first, and with strong fetters bind.”--GEORGICS.
[Sidenote: THE MERMAID.]
Of all the old mythologic existences of Scotland--half earth, half
air--there was none with whom the people of Cromarty were better
acquainted than with the mermaid. Thirty years have not yet gone by
since she has been seen by moonlight sitting on a stone in the sea,
a little to the east of the town; and scarce a winter passed, forty
years earlier, in which she was not heard singing among the rocks,
or seen braiding up her long yellow tresses on the shore. Like her
contemporaries the river-wraiths and fairies--like the nymphs and
deities, too, of the Greeks and Romans--she was deemed scarcely less
material than the favoured individuals of our own species, who, in
the grey of the morning or at the close of evening, had marked her
sitting on some desert promontory, or frolicking amid the waves of some
solitary arm of the sea. But it is not so generally known, that though
in some respects less potent even than men--than at least the very
strong and very courageous--she had a power through her connexion with
the invisible world over human affairs, and could control and remodel
even the decrees of destiny. A robust, fearless man might treat her, it
is said, as Ulysses did Circe, or Diomedes Venus; but then, more potent
than these goddesses, she could render all his future undertakings
either successful or unfortunate, or, if a seafaring man, could either
bury him in the waves or protect him from their fury. It is said, too,
that like the Proteus of classical mythology (and the coincidence,
if merely such, is at least a curious one), she never exerted this
power in a good direction except when compelled to it. She avoided in
the daytime shores frequented by man, and when disturbed by him in
her retreats, escaped into her native element; but if he succeeded
in seizing and overpowering her, she always purchased her release by
granting him any three wishes he might form, connected with either
his own fortunes or those of his friends. Her strength, however, was
superior to that of most men; and, if victorious in the struggle, she
carried the unfortunate assailant with her into the sea.
[Sidenote: THE STORY OF JOHN REID.]
It is now nearly a hundred and twenty years since honest John Reid, the
Cromarty shipmaster, was positively the most unhappy man in the place.
He was shrewd, sensible, calculating, good-humoured, in comparatively
easy circumstances, and at this time in his thirtieth year. The early
part of his life had been spent abroad; he had voyaged over the
wide Pacific, and traded to China and both the Indies; and to such
purpose--for he was quite the sort of person one would most like to
have for one’s grandfather--that in about fourteen years after sailing
from Cromarty a poor ship-boy, he had returned to it with money enough
to purchase a fine large sloop, with which he engaged in the lucrative
trade carrying on at this period between Holland and the northern ports
of Scotland. His good luck still followed him; nor was he of the class
who are ingenious in discovering imaginary misfortunes. What is more,
too, he was of so cool a temperament, that when nature rendered him
capable of the softer passion at all, it seemed as if she had done so
by way of after-thought, and contrary to her original intention. And
yet, John Reid, with all his cool prudence, and his good humour and
good fortune to boot, was one of the unhappiest men in the place--and
all this because he had been just paying his addresses to one of its
prettiest girls.
He had first seen Helen Stuart when indulging in a solitary walk on the
hill of Cromarty, shortly after his return from the Indies. Helen was
fully twelve years younger than himself, slightly but elegantly formed,
with small regular features, and a complexion in which the purest white
was blended with the most exquisite red. Never before had the sailor
seen a creature half so lovely; he thought of her all the evening
after, and dreamed of her all the night. But there was no corresponding
impression on the other side; the maiden merely remembered that she had
met in the wood with the newly-arrived shipmaster and described him
to one of her companions as a strongly-built man of barely the middle
size, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a set of irregular,
good-humoured features, over which a tropical sun had cast its tinge
of the deepest bronze. Helen was a village heiress, with a good deal
of the pride of beauty in her composition, and a very little of the
pride of wealth, and, with what was perhaps as unfavourable to the
newly-formed passion of Reid as either, a romantic attachment to that
most perfect man of the imagination, the _maid’s husband_--a prince in
disguise, the Admirable Crichton in a revised edition, or the hero of
an old ballad.
This dangerous, though shadowy rival of the true lover, who assumes
in almost every feminine mind a shape of its own, was in the present
instance handsome as Helen herself, with just such a complexion and
such eyes and hair; and, excelling all men in fine clothes, fine
speeches, and fine manners, he excelled them in parts, and wealth,
and courage too. What had the robust, sunburned sailor of thirty to
cast into the opposite scale? Besides, Helen, though she had often
dreamed of courtship, had never seriously thought of marriage; and
so, partly for the sake of her ideal suitor, partly through a girlish
unwillingness to grapple with the realities of life, the real suitor
was rejected. Grave natures, says Bacon, are ever the most constant in
their attachments. Weeks and months passed away, and still there was
an uneasy void in the mind of the sailor, which neither business nor
amusement could fill--a something which differed from grief, without
affecting him less painfully. He could think and dream of only Helen
Stuart. Her image followed him into Holland among the phlegmatic
Dutchmen, who never break their hearts for the sake of a mistress, and
watched beside him for many a long hour at the helm. He ever saw her as
he had first seen her on the hill; there were trees in the background,
and the warm mellow flush of a setting sun, while in front there
tripped lightly along a sylph-looking creature, with bright happy eyes,
and cheeks glowing with crimson.
He had returned from one of his voyages late in April, and had risen,
when May-day arrived, ere the first peep of daylight, in the hope of
again meeting Helen among the woods of the hill. Were he but to see
her, barely see her, he could be happy, he thought, for months to
come; and he knew she would be gathering May-dew this morning, with
all her companions, on the green slopes of Drieminory. Morning rose
upon him as he sauntered eastward along the edge of the bay; the stars
sunk one by one into the blue; and on reaching a piece of rocky beach
that stretches along the brow of the hill, the sun rose all red and
glorious out of the Firth, and flung a broad pathway of flame across
the waters to the shore. The rocks, the hill, the little wavelets which
came toppling against the beach, were tinged with the orange light of
morning; and yet, from the earliness of the hour, and the secluded
character of the scene, a portion of terror might well have mingled
with one’s quieter feelings of admiration when in the vicinity of a
place so famous for the wild and the wonderful as the Dropping-Cave.
But of the cave more anon. Darkness and solitude are twin sisters, and
foster nearly the same emotions; but they failed this morning to awaken
a single fear in the mind of the shipmaster, sailor as he was, and
acquainted, too, with every story of the cave. He could think of only
Helen Stuart.
An insulated pile of rock, roughened with moss and lichens, which
stands out of the beach like an old ruinous castle, surmounted by
hanging bartisans and broken turrets, conceals the cave itself, and the
skerries abreast of it, from the traveller who approaches them from the
west. It screened them this morning from the view of the shipmaster,
as, stepping lightly along the rough stones, full of impossible wishes
and imaginings, he heard the low notes of a song. He looked round to
ascertain whether a boat might not be passing, or a shepherd seated on
the hill; but he could see only a huge overgrown seal that had raised
its head over the waves, and seemed listening to the music with its
face towards the east. On turning, however, the edge of the cliff, he
saw the musician, apparently a young girl, who seemed bathing among the
cliffs, and who was now sitting half on the rock, half in the water,
on one of the outer skerries, opposite the cave. Her long yellow hair
fell in luxuriant profusion on her snowy shoulders, and as she raised
herself higher on the cliff, the sun shone on the parts below her waist
with such dazzling brightness, that the sailor raised his hands to his
eyes, and a shifting speck of light, like the reflection of a mirror,
went dancing over the shaded roughnesses of the opposite precipice.
Her face was turned towards the cave, and the notes of her song seemed
at times to be answered from it in a chorus, faint and low indeed, but
which could not, he thought, be wholly produced by echo.
Reid was too well acquainted with the beliefs of the age not to know
that he looked upon the mermaid. And were he less a lover than he
was, he would have done nothing more. But, aware of her strange power
over the destinies of men, he only thought that now or never was his
opportunity for gaining the hand of Helen. “Would that there were some
of my lads here to see fair play!” he muttered, as, creeping amid the
crags, and availing himself of every brake that afforded the slightest
cover, he stole towards the shelf on which the creature was seated. She
turned round in the moment he had gained it; the last note of her song
lengthened into a shriek; and with an expression of mingled terror and
surprise, which clouded a set of the loveliest features, she attempted
to fling herself into the water; but in the moment of the attempt, the
brawny arms of the shipmaster were locked round her waist. Her arms
clasped his shoulders in turn, and with a strength scarcely inferior
to that exerted by the snake of India when struggling with the tiger,
she strove to drag him to the edge of the rock; but though his iron
sinews quivered under her grasp like the beams of his vessel when
straining beneath a press of canvas, he thought of Helen Stuart, and
bore her down by main force in the opposite direction. A fainter and
a still fainter struggle ensued, and she then lay passive against the
cliff. Never had Reid seen aught so beautiful--and he was convinced of
it, lover as he was--as the half-fish half-woman creature that now lay
prostrate before him.
“Man, what with me?” she said, in a tone of voice which, though sweet
as the song of a bird, had something so unnatural in it that it made
his blood run cold. “Wishes three,” he replied, in the prescribed
formula of the demonologist, and then proceeded to state them. His
father, a sailor like himself, had been drowned many years before;
and the first wish suggested to him by the circumstance was, that
neither he himself nor any of his friends should perish by the sea.
The second--for he feared lest Helen, so lady-looking a person, and an
heiress to boot, might yet find herself the wife of a poor man--was,
that he should be uninterruptedly fortunate in all his undertakings.
The third wish he never communicated to any one except the mermaid,
and yet no one ever failed to guess it. “Quit, and have,” replied
the creature. Reid slackened his hold; and pressing her tail against
the rock until it curled to her waist, and raising her hands, the
palms pressed together, and the edge to her face, she sprang into the
sea. The spray dashed to the sun; the white shoulders and silvery
tail gleamed for a moment through the green depths of the water. A
slight ripple splashed against the beach, and when it subsided, every
trace of the mermaid had vanished. Reid wiped his brow, and ascending
by one of the slopes of the hill towards the well-known resorts of
his town’s-women--not the less inclined to hope from the result of
his strange contest--he found Helen Stuart seated with one of her
companions, a common acquaintance, on the grassy knoll over the Lover’s
Leap. The charm, thought he, already begins to work.
He bowed to Helen, and addressed her companion. “The man of all the
world,” said the latter, “whom we most wished to see. Helen has been
telling me one of the strangest dreams; and it is not half an hour
yet since we both thought we were going to see it realized; but you
must assist us in reading it. She had just fallen asleep last night,
when she found herself on the green slope covered with primroses and
cuckoo-flowers, that lies, you know, to the west of the Dropping-Cave;
and there she was employed, she thought, as we have been this morning,
in gathering May-dew. But the grass and bushes seemed dry and parched,
and she had gathered only a few drops, when, on hearing some one
singing among the rocks beside the cave, she looked that way, and saw
you sleeping on the beach, and the singer, a beautiful lady, watching
beside you. She turned again to the bushes, but all was dry; and she
was quite unhappy that she could get no dew, and unhappy, too, lest the
strange lady should suffer you to sleep till you were covered by the
tide; when suddenly you stood beside her, and began to assist her in
shaking the bushes. She looked for the lady, and saw her far out among
the skerries, floating on the water like a white sea-gull; and as she
looked and wondered, she heard a shower of drops which you had shaken
down, tinkling against the bottom of the pitcher. And only think of the
prettiness of the fancy!--the drops were all drops of pure gold, and
filled the pitcher to the brim. So far the dream. But this is not all.
We both passed the green primrose slope just as the sun was rising,
and--can you believe it?--we heard from among the rocks the identical
song which Helen heard in her dream. It was like nothing else I ever
listened to; and now here are you to fill our pitchers with gold, like
the genie of a fairy tale.”
“And so you have really heard music from among the rocks?” said Reid.
“Well, but I have more than heard it--I have seen and conversed with
the musician; the strange unearthly lady of Helen’s dream. I have
visited every quarter of the globe, and sailed over almost every ocean,
but never saw the mermaid before.”
“Seen the mermaid!” exclaimed Helen.
“Seen and conversed with the mermaid!” said her companion; “Heaven
forbid! The last time she appeared at the Dropping-Cave was only a few
days before the terrible storm in which you lost your father. Take care
you repeat not her words--for they thrive ill who carry tales from the
other world to this.”
“But I am the creature’s master,” said the sailor, “and need not be so
wary.”
He told his story; how he had first seen the mysterious creature
sitting in the sea, and breathing exquisite music, as she combed down
her long yellow tresses; how he had stolen warily among the crags,
with a heart palpitating betwixt dread and eagerness; and how, after
so fearful a struggle, she had lain passive against the cliff. Helen
listened with feelings of wonder and admiration, dashed with terror;
and in returning home, though the morning was far advanced, and the
Dropping-Cave a great way below, she leaned for support and protection
on the arm of the sailor--a freedom which no one would have remarked as
over great at May-day next year, for the sailor had ere then become
her husband. For nearly a century after, the family was a rising
one; but it is now extinct. Helen, for the last seventy years, has
been sleeping under a slab of blue marble within the broken walls of
the Chapel of St. Regulus; her only daughter, the wife of Sir George
Mackenzie of Cromarty, lies in one of the burying-grounds of Inverness,
with a shield of I know not how many quarterings over her grave; and
it is not yet twenty years since her grandson, the last of the family,
died in London, bequeathing to one of his Cromarty relatives several
small pieces of property, and a legacy of many thousand pounds.
[Sidenote: THE POT.]
There is on the northern side of the Firth of Cromarty, a shallow arm
of the sea several miles in length, which dries during stream tides
throughout almost its entire extent, and bears the name of the sands
of Nigg. Like the sands of the Solway, it has been a frequent scene of
accidents. Skirting a populous tract of country on both sides, it lies
much in the way of travelers; and the fords, which shift during land
floods and high winds, are often attempted at night, and occasionally
at improper times of the tide. A narrow river-like channel in the
middle, fed by the streams which discharge themselves into the estuary
from the interior, and which never wholly dries, bears the name of
“The Pot,” and was infamous during even the present century for its
death-lights and its wraiths, and for the strange mysterious noises
which used to come sounding from its depths to either shore previous
to “a drowning.” Little more than half a century ago, a farmer of the
district who had turned aside to see an acquaintance, an old man who
lived on the northern shore of the sands of Nigg, found him leaning
over the fence of his little garden, apparently so lost in thought
that he seemed unconscious of his presence. “What ails you, Donald?”
inquired the visitor. “There will be a drowning to-day in the Pot,”
replied Donald. “A drowning in the Pot!--what makes you say so?” “Do
you hear nothing?” “No’o--and yet I rather think I do;--there are faint
sounds as of a continual knocking--are there not?--so very faint, that
they seem rather within the ear, than without; and yet they surely come
from the Pot;--knock, knock, knock--what can it mean?” “That knocking,”
said the old man, “has been sounding in my ears all this morning. I
have never known a life lost on the sands but that knocking has gone
before.” As he spoke, a horseman was seen riding furiously along the
road which skirts the opposite shore of the estuary. On reaching the
usual ford, though the rise of the tide had rendered it impracticable
for more than an hour before, he spurred his horse across the beach
and entered the water. “Surely,” said the old man to his friend, “that
madman is not taking the ford, and the sea nearly at full?” “Ay, but
he is though,” said the other; “if the distance does not deceive me,
it is Macculloch the corn-agent, in hot haste for the Tain market. See
how he spurs through the shallows; and see, he has now reached the Pot,
and the water deepens--he goes deeper, and deeper, and deeper. Merciful
heavens! he is gone!” Horse and rider had sunk into one of the hollows.
The horse rose to the surface a moment after, and swam to the shore;
but the rider had disappeared for ever. A story of nearly the same part
of the country connects the mysterious knocking with the mermaid.
[Sidenote: MACCULLOCH THE CORN-AGENT.]
In the immediate neighbourhood of the Old Abbey of Fearn, famous for
its abbot, Patrick Hamilton, our first Protestant martyr, there stood,
rather more than ninety years ago, a little turf cottage, inhabited by
a widow, whose husband, a farmer of the parish, had died suddenly in
the fields about ten years before. The poor woman had been within doors
with her only child, a little girl of seven years of age, at the time;
and when, without previous preparation, she had opened the door on a
hurried summons, and seen the corpse of her husband on the threshold,
her mind was totally unhinged by the shock. For the ten following years
she went wandering about like a ghost, scarce conscious apparently of
anything; no one ever heard her speak, or saw her listen; and save
that she retained a few of the mechanical neatnesses of her earlier
years--which, standing out alone on a groundwork of vacuity, seemed
akin to the instincts of the inferior animals--her life appeared to be
nearly as much a blank as that of the large elm-tree which stretched
its branches over her cottage. Her husband’s farm, shortly after his
death, had been put into the hands of a relation of the family, a
narrow sordid man who had made no generous use, it was thought, of
the power which the imbecility of the poor woman and the youth of her
daughter gave him over their affairs; it was at least certain that he
became comparatively wealthy, and they very poor; and in the autumn of
1742, the daughter, now a pretty girl of seventeen, had to leave her
mother on the care of a neighbour, and to engage as a reaper with a
farmer in the neighbouring parish of Tarbat. She had gone with a heavy
heart to work for the first time among strangers, but her youth and
beauty, added to a quiet timidity of manner, that showed how conscious
she was of having no one to protect her, had made her friends; and now
that harvest was over, she was returning home, proud of her slender
earnings, and full of hope and happiness. It was early on a Sabbath
morning, and her path winded along the southern bank of Loch-Slin,
where the parish of Tarbat borders on that of Fearn.
[Sidenote: THE WASHING OF THE MERMAID.]
Loch-Slin is a dark sluggish sheet of water, bordered on every side
by thick tangled hedges of reeds and rushes; nor has the surrounding
scenery much to recommend it. It is comparatively tame--tamer perhaps
for the last thirty years than at any former period; for the plough
has been busy among its green undulating slopes, and many of its
more picturesque thickets of alders and willows have disappeared. It
possesses, however, its few points of interest; and its appearance
at this time in the quiet of the Sabbath morning, was one of extreme
seclusion. The tall old castle of Loch-Slin, broken and weather-worn,
and pregnant with associations of the remote past, stood up over it
like some necromancer beside his mirror; and the maiden, as she tripped
homewards along the little blind pathway that went winding along the
quiet shore--now in a hollow, anon on a height--could see the red image
of the ruins heightened by the flush of the newly-risen sun, reflected
on the calm surface that still lay dark and grey under the shadow of
the eastern bank. All was still as death, when her ear suddenly caught
a low indistinct sound as of a continuous knocking, which heightened
as she went, until it was at length echoed back from the old walls;
and which, had she heard it on a week morning, she would have at once
set down as that of the knocking of clothes at a washing. But who,
she thought, can be “knocking claes” on the Sabbath? She turned a
projecting angle of the bank, and saw, not ten yards away, what seemed
to be a tall female standing in the water immediately beyond the line
of flags and rushes which fringed the shore, and engaged apparently in
knocking clothes on a stone, with the sort of bludgeon still used in
the north country for the purpose. The maiden hurried past, convinced
that the creature before her could be none other than the mermaid of
Loch-Slin; but in the midst of her terror she was possessed enough
to remark that the beautiful goblin seemed to ply its work with a
malignant pleasure, and that on a grass plot directly opposite where it
stood, there were spread out as if to dry, more than thirty smocks and
shirts, all horribly dabbled with blood. As the poor girl entered her
mother’s cottage, the excitement that had borne her up in her flight
suddenly failed, and she sunk insensible upon the floor. For a moment
the mother seemed roused by the circumstance, but as her daughter
recovered, she again relapsed into her accustomed apathy.
The spirits of the maiden were much flurried, and there was one to
whom she would have fain communicated her strange story, and sought
relief in his society from the terror that made her heart still
palpitate against her side. But her young cousin (the son of her
unkind relation, the farmer), with whom she had so often herded on
the same knoll, and wrought on the same harvest-furrow, had set out
for a neighbouring farm, on his way to church, and so there was no
probability of her seeing him before evening. She sickened at the gloom
of her mother’s cottage, where the scowling features of the mermaid
seemed imprinted on every darker recess; and, taking her mother by the
hand, she walked out with her to the fields. It was now about an hour
after noon, and the sun in his strength was looking down in the calm
on the bare stubbly campaign, and the old abbey in the midst, with
its steep roof of lichened stone, and its rows of massy buttresses.
The maiden could hear the higher notes of the congregational psalm as
they came floating along the slope from the building, when--fearful
catastrophe!--sudden as the explosion of a powder magazine, or the
shock of an earthquake, there was a tremendous crash heard, accompanied
by a terrific cry; a dense cloud of dust enveloped the ancient abbey,
and when it cleared away, it was seen that the ponderous stone roof
of the building had sunk in. “O wretched day!” exclaimed the widow,
mysteriously restored by the violence of one shock to that full command
of her faculties which she had lost by another, and starting at once
from the deathlike apathy of years, “O wretched day! the church has
fallen, and the whole congregation are buried in the ruins. Fearful
calamity!--a parish destroyed at a blow. Dear, dear child, let us haste
and see whether something cannot be done--whether some may not be
left.” The maiden followed her mother to the scene of the accident in
distraction and terror.
As they approached the churchyard gate they met two young women covered
with blood, who were running shrieking along the road, and shortly
after an elderly man so much injured, that he was creeping for support
along the wall. “Go on,” he said to the widow, who had stopped to
assist him; “I have gotten my life as a ransom, but there are hundreds
perishing yonder.” They entered the churchyard; two-thirds of the
roof had fallen, and nearly half the people were buried in the ruins;
and they could see through the shattered windows men all covered with
blood and dust, yelling, like maniacs, and tearing up the stones
and slates that were heaped over their wives and children. As the
sufferers were carried out one by one, and laid on the flat tombstones
of the churchyard, the widow, so strangely restored to the energies
of her better years, busied herself in stanching their wounds, or
restoring them to animation; and her daughter, gathering heart, strove
to assist her. A young man came staggering from among the ruins, his
face suffused with blood, and bearing a dead body on his shoulders,
when, laying down his charge beside them, he sunk over it in a swoon.
It was the young cousin of the maiden, and the mutilated corpse which
he carried was that of his father. She sobbed over him in an agony
of grief and terror; but the exertions of the widow, who wonderfully
retained her self-possession, soon recovered him to consciousness,
though in so weak a state from exhaustion and loss of blood, that some
time elapsed ere he was able to quit the burying-ground, leaning on
the arm of his cousin. Thirty-six persons were killed on the spot, and
many more were so dreadfully injured that they never recovered. The
tombstones were spread over with dead bodies, some of them so fearfully
gashed and mangled that they could scarce be recognised, and the paths
that wended throughout the churchyard literally ran with blood. It
was not until the maiden had reached her mother’s cottage, and the
heart-rending clamour had begun to fall more faintly on the ear, that
she thought of the mysterious washing of Loch-Slin, with its bloody
shirts, and felt that she could understand it.
There were lights that evening in many a cottage, and mourners beside
many a bed. The widow and her daughter watched beside the bed of their
young relative, and though the struggle for life was protracted and
doubtful, the strength of his constitution at length prevailed, and
he rose, pale and thin, and taller than before, with a scar across
his left temple. But ere the first spring had passed, with its balmy
mornings and clear sunshine days, he had recovered his former bloom,
and more than his former strength. The widow retained the powers so
wonderfully restored to her; for the dislocation of faculty effected by
one shock had been completely reset by another, and the whole intellect
refitted. She had, however, her season of grief to pass through, as if
her husband had died only a few days before; and when the relations of
the lately perished came to weep over the newly-formed graves that rose
so thickly in the burying-place, and around which the grass and hemlock
stalks still bore the stain of blood, the widow might be seen seated by
a grave covered with moss and daisies, and sunk so low that it was with
difficulty its place could be traced on the sward. Of the ten previous
years she retained only a few doubtful recollections, resembling those
of a single night spent in broken and feverish dreams. At length,
however, her grief subsided; and though there were louder and gayer
guests at the bridal of her daughter and her young cousin, which took
place about two years after the washing of the mermaid, there were none
more sincerely happy on that occasion than the widow.
CHAPTER XXI.
“They said they were an hungry; sigh’d forth proverbs--
That hunger broke stone walls; that dogs must eat;
That meat was made for mouths; that the gods sent not
Corn for the rich men only:--With these shreds
They vented their complainings.”--CORIOLANUS.
[Sidenote: THE BAD YEAR.]
The autumn and winter of the year 1740 were, like the black years
which succeeded the Revolution, long remembered all over Scotland, and
more especially to the north of the Grampians. One evening late in the
summer of this year, crops of rich promise were waving on every field,
and the farmer anticipated an early harvest; next morning, a chill
dense fog had settled on the whole country, and when it cleared up, the
half-filled ears drooped on their stalks, and the long-pointed leaves
slanted towards the soil, as if scathed by fire. The sun looked out
with accustomed heat and brilliancy, and a light breeze from the south
rolled away every lingering wreath of vapour; there succeeded pleasant
days and mild evenings: but the hope of the season was blasted; the sun
only bleached and shrivelled the produce of the fields, and the breeze
rustled through unproductive straw. Harvest came on, but it brought
with it little of the labour and none of the joy of other harvests.
The husbandman, instead of carousing with his reapers, brooded in the
recesses of his cottage over the ruin which awaited him; and the poor
craftsman, though he had already secured his ordinary store of fish,
launched his boat a second time to provide against the impending famine.
Towards the close of autumn not an ounce of meal was to be had in
the market; and the housewives of Cromarty began to discover that the
appetites of their children had become appallingly voracious. The
poor things could not be made to understand why they were getting so
much less to eat than usual, and the monotonous cry of “Bread, mammy,
bread!” was to be heard in every house. Groups of the inhabitants
might be seen on the beach below the town watching the receding tide,
in the expectation of picking up a few shell-fish; and the shelves
and ledges of the hill were well-nigh stripped by them of their dulce
and tangle: but with all their industry they throve but ill. Their
eyes receded, and their cheekbones stuck out; they became sallow, and
lank of jaw, and melancholy; and their talk was all about the price
of corn, bad times, and a failing trade. Poor people! it was well for
both themselves and the Government, that politics had not yet come into
fashion; for had they lived and been subjected to such misery eighty
years later, they would have become Radicals to a man: they would have
set themselves to reform the State; and, as they were very hungry, no
moderate reform would have served.
The winter was neither severe nor protracted, but to the people of
Cromarty it was a season of much suffering; and with the first month of
spring there came down upon them whole shoals of beggars from the upper
part of the country, to implore the assistance which they were, alas!
unable to render them, and to share with them in the spoils of the sea.
The unfortunate paupers, mostly elderly men and women, were so modest
and unobtrusive, so unlike common beggars in their costume, which in
most instances was entire and neat, and so much more miserable in
aspect, for they were wasted by famine, that the hearts of the people
of the town bled for them. It is recorded of a farmer of the parish,
whose crops did not suffer quite so much as those of his neighbours,
that he prepared every morning a pot of gruel, and dealt it out by
measure to the famishing strangers--giving to each the full of a small
ladle. There was a widow gentlewoman, too, of the town, who imparted
to them much of her little, and yet, like the widow of Zarephath,
found enough in what remained. On a morning of this spring, she saw a
thin volume of smoke rising from beside the wall of a corn-yard, which
long before had been emptied of its last stack; and approaching it,
she found that it proceeded from a little fire, surrounded by four old
women, who were anxiously watching a small pot suspended over the fire
by a pin fixed in the wall. Curiosity induced her to raise the lid; and
as she stretched out her hand the women looked up imploringly in her
face. The little pot she found about half filled with fish entrails,
which had been picked up on dunghills and the shore; her heart smote
her, and hastening home for a cake of bread, she divided it among the
women. And never till her dying day did she forget the look which they
gave her when, breaking the cake, she doled out a portion to each.
Towards the end of the month of February, when the sufferings of
the people seemed almost to have reached their acme, a Mr. Gordon,
one of the most considerable merchants of the town, set out to the
country, armed with a warrant from the Sheriff, and backed by a small
party in quest of meal. The old laws of the sheriffdom, though still
unrepealed, were well-nigh exploded, but what was lacking in authority
was made up by force; and so, when Mr. Gordon entered their houses to
ransack the girnals and meal-chests, there were many attempts made at
concealment, but none at open resistance. The magistrate found one
ingenious gudewife buried in a mountainous heap of bedclothes; the
gudeman, it was said, had gone for the _howdie_; but one of the party
mistrusting the story, raised the edge of a blanket, and lo! two sacks
were discovered lying quietly by her side. She was known ever after by
the name of “the pocks’ mither.” The meal procured by the party was
carefully portioned out, a quantity deemed sufficient for the farmer
and his household being left with him, and the remainder, which was
paid for by Mr. Gordon, was carried to town, and sold out to the people
in pounds and half-pounds.
In the midst of the general distress, a small sloop from the village
of Gourac entered the Firth, to take in a lading of meal, which, by
dint of grievous pinching and hoarding, had been scraped together by
some of the farmers of Easter Ross. The vessel was the property of a
Mr. Matthew Simpson, who acted as skipper and supercargo; and she lay
on the sands of Nigg, the creek or inlet to which, in the foregoing
chapter, I have had occasion to refer. Twice every twenty-four hours
was she stranded on the bottom of the inlet, and the wicker carts,
laden with sacks, could be seen from the shore of Cromarty driving
up to her side;--it was evident, too, that she floated heavier every
tide; and many were the execrations vented by the half-starved
town’s-people against Simpson and the farmers. Plans innumerable were
formed among them for seizing on the vessel and disposing of her cargo;
but their schemes fell to the ground, for there was none of them bold
or skilful enough to take the lead in such an enterprise; and, in all
such emergencies, a party without a leader is a body without a soul.
Meanwhile the sloop left the creek deeply laden, and threw out her
anchors opposite the town, where she lay waiting a fair wind.
Towards the evening of the 9th of April 1741, a shopkeeper of Cromarty
was half sitting, half reclining, on his counter, humming a tune,
and beating time with his ellwand on the point of his shoe. He was a
spruce, dapper, little personage, of great flexibility of countenance,
full of trick and intrigue, and much noted among his simple town’s-folk
for a lawyer-like ingenuity. He was, withal, a man of considerable
courage when contemplating a distant danger, but somewhat of a coward
when it came near. His various correspondents addressed him by the name
of Mr. Alexander Ross--the town’s-people called him Silken Sawney.
On an opposite angle of the counter sat Donald Sandison, a tall,
robust, red-haired man, who wrought in wood, but whose shop, from
the miserable depression of trade, had been shut up for the last two
months. He had resided at Edinburgh about five years before; and when
there, with another man at Cromarty named Bain, had the satisfaction of
escorting the notorious Porteous from the Tolbooth to the Grassmarket;
and had been much edified, for he was in at the death, by the earnest
remonstrances and dying ejaculations of that worthy. A few days
afterwards, however, he found his services to the commonwealth on this
occasion so ill appreciated, that he deemed it prudent to quit the
metropolis for the place of his nativity. No one had ever heard him
boast of the exploit; but Bain, who was a tailor, was not so prudent,
and so the story came out.
[Sidenote: SANDISON’S SPULZIE.]
“Weel, Sandison, what are we gaun to do wi’ the meal ship?” said the
shopkeeper, laying down his ellwand, and sitting up erect.
“Do wi’ the ship?” replied the mechanic, scratching his head with a
half-perplexed, half-humorous expression; “man, I dinna weel ken. It’s
bad enough to see a’ yon meal going down the Firth, an’ folk at hame
dying o’ hunger!”
“But, Sandison,” rejoined the wily shopkeeper, “if it does a’ go down
the Firth, I’m just thinking it will be nobodie’s wyte but your ain.”
“How that, man?” rejoined Sandison.
“I’ll tell you how that, an’ in your ain words too. Whig as ye are, ye
say that all men are no born alike. Some come intil the world to do
just what they’re bid, an’ go just where they’re bid, and say just what
they hear their neebours saying; while ithers, again, come into it to
think baith for themsels an’ the folk round them.--Is that no your own
sentiment?”
“Weel, an’ is it no true?”
“Ay, an’ I’ll gie you a proof o’t. What takes the town’s-folk to your
shop when any thrawart matter comes in their way that they canna redd
up o’ themselves? And why do they ask your advice before entering
into a law-plea? or whether they should try the fishing? or whether
the strange minister gied a gude discoorse; you’re no a lawyer, nor a
boatman, nor a divine. Why do they call for you to lay a tulzie when
you’re no a magistrate? and why do folk that quarrel wi’ everybody
else, take care an’ no quarrel wi’ you? Just because they ken that you
were born wi’ a bigger mind an’ a bolder heart than themsels--born a
gentleman, as it were, in spite o’ your hamely birth an’ your serge
coat; an’ now that the puir folk are starving, an’ a shipful o’ meal
going down the Firth, you slink awa from your proper natural office o’
leader, an’ just let them starve on.”
“Sawney,” said the mechanic, “ye have such a natural turn for flattery,
that ye fleech without hope o’ fee or bountith. But even allowing that
I am a clever enough chiel to make an onslaught on the shipman’s meal
(a man wi’ mair wit, I’m fear’d, would be hungrier than ony o’ us afore
he would think o’t), I may hesitate a wee in going first in the ploy.
I have a wife an’ twa bairnies. Were there naething to fear but the
stroke o’ a cutlass, or the flash o’ a musket, I widna muckle hesitate,
maybe; but the law’s a rather bad thing in these quiet times; an’ I
daresay ’twould be better to want cravat an’ nightcap a’ thegither than
to hae the ane o’ brown hemp an’ the ither o’ white cotton.”
“Hoot, man, ye’re thinking o’ Jock Porteous--we can surely get the meal
without hanging onybodie. Hunger breaks through stone walls, an’ our
apology will be written on the verra face o’ the affair. Besides, we’re
no going to steal the meal; we’re only going to sell it out on behalf
o’ the inhabitants, as Mr. Gordon did the meal o’ the parish. An’ as
for risk--gang ye first, and here’s my hand I’ll go second:--if I had
only your brow, I would willingly go first mysel.”
But why record the whole dialogue? Sandison, though characteristically
wary, was, in reality, little averse from the scheme: he entered into
it; and, after fully digesting it with the wily shopkeeper, set out to
impart it to some of the bolder townsmen. “Now haud ye in readiness,”
said he to the man of silk as he quitted his shop; “I shall call ye up
at midnight.”
The hour of midnight arrived, and a party of about thirty men, their
faces blackened, and their persons enveloped, some in women’s cloaks,
some in their own proper vestments turned inside out, marched down
the lane which, passing the shopkeeper’s door, led to the beach. They
were headed by a tall active-looking man, wrapped up in a seaman’s
greatcoat. No one, in the uncertain gloom of midnight, could have
identified his sooty features with those of the peaceable mechanic
Sandison; but there was light enough to show the but-ends of two
pistols stuck in the leathern belt which clasped his middle, and that
there hung by his side an enormous basket-hilted broadsword. Stopping
short at the domicile of the shopkeeper, he tapped gently against a
window;--no one made answer. He tapped again. “Wha’s there?” exclaimed
a shrill female voice from within. “Sawney, man, Sawney, wauken
up!”--“Oh, Sawney’s frae hame!” rejoined the voice; “there came an
express for him ance errand, just i’ the gloamin’, an’ he’s awa to
the sheriffdom to see his sick mither.”--“Daidlin’ deceitfu’ body!”
exclaimed Sandison; “wha could hae reckoned on this! But it were shame,
lads, to turn back now that we hae gane sae far; an’ besides, if ill
comes o’ the venture, he canna escape. An’ now, shaw yoursels to be
men, an’ keep as free frae fear or anger as if ye were in the parish
kirk. Launch down the yawls ane by ane, and dinna let their keels
skreigh alang the stanes; an’ be sure an’ put in the spile plugs,
that we mayna swamp by the way. Let ilk rower muffle his oar wi’ his
neckcloth, just i’ the clamp; an’, for gudesake, skaith nane o’ the
crew. Willie, dinna forget the nails an’ the hammer; Bernard, man,
bring up the rear.” The cool resolution of the leader seemed imparted
to his followers; and, in a few minutes after, they were portioned into
three boats, which, with celerity and in silence, glided towards the
meal sloop.
The first was piloted by Sandison. It contained nearly two-thirds of
the whole party; and when the other two boats prepared to moor close
to the vessel, one on each side, and their crews, as they had been
instructed, remained at their respective posts, Sandison steered under
the stern, and laying hold of the taffrail, leaped aboard. He was
followed by about twelve of his companions, and the boat then dropped
alongside. Every manœuvre had been planned with the utmost deliberation
and care. One of Sandison’s apprentices nailed down the forecastle
hatchway, and thus imprisoned the crew; the others opened the hold,
unslung the tackling on each side, and immediately commenced lowering
the meal-sacks into their boats; while Sandison himself, accompanied
by a neighbour, groped his way down the cabin stairs to secure the
master. Simpson, a large powerful man, had got out of bed, alarmed by
the trampling on deck, and, with no other covering than his shirt, was
cautiously climbing the stairs, when, coming in sudden contact with the
descending mechanic, he lost footing, and rolled down the steps he had
ascended, drawing the other along with him. “Murder, murder, thieves!”
he roared out; and a desperate struggle ensued on the floor of the
cabin. The place was pitch dark, and when the other Cromarty man rushed
into the fray, he received, all unwittingly, from his Herculean leader,
who had half wrested himself out of the grasp of Simpson, a blow that
sent him reeling against the vessel’s side. Again the combatants closed
in an iron grapple, and rolled over the floor. But the mechanic proved
the more powerful; he rose over his antagonist, and then flinging
himself upon him, the basket-hilt of the broadsword dashed full against
his breast. “Oh, oh, oh!” he exclaimed; “mercy, hae mercy--onything
but the sweet life;” and coiling himself up like a huge snake, he lay
passive under the grasp of the mechanic, who, kneeling by his side,
drew a pistol, which he had taken the precaution to load with powder
only, and discharged it right above his face; disclosing to him for a
moment the blackened features that frowned over him, and a whole group
of dingy faces that now thronged the cabin stairs. Meanwhile the work
proceeded; the sloop gradually lightened as the boats became heavier,
and at length a signal from the deck informed Sandison that the object
of the expedition was accomplished. Before liberating Simpson, however,
the Cromarty men forced him upon his knees, and extorted an oath from
him that he should not again return to the north of Scotland for meal.
[Sidenote: THE MEAL MOB.]
Before morning, about sixty large sacks, the lading of the three
boats, were lodged in a cellar, possessed, says my authority, by Mr.
James Rabson, a meal and corn merchant of Cromarty; but James, though
fully authorized by all his neighbours to dole out the contents to the
inhabitants, and account to Simpson for the money, prudently lodged
his key under the door, and set out for the country on some pretext
of business. In the meanwhile Simpson applied to the Sheriff of the
county, a warrant was granted him, the meal was seized in behalf of
the proper owner; and the pacific Mr. Donald Sandison was appointed,
on the recommendation of the Sheriff, to stand sentry over it. On the
following day, a posse of law-officers from the ancient burgh of Tain,
the farmers and farm-servants of Easter-Ross, and Simpson and the
sailors, were to come, it was said, to transport his charge from the
cellar to the vessel. Sandison, with a half-ludicrous, half-melancholy
expression of face, took up his station before the door; and enveloped
in his greatcoat, but encumbered with neither pistols nor broadsword,
he stalked up and down before it until morning.
About two hours after sunrise, four large boats, crowded with
people, were seen approaching the town, and, in a few minutes after,
seven-eighths of the whole inhabitants, men, women, and children, armed
with stones and bludgeons, were drawn out on the beach to oppose their
landing. Such an assemblage! _There_ were the parish schoolboys, active
little fellows, that could hit to a hair’s-breadth; and _there_ the
town apprentices of all denominations, stripped of their jackets, and
with their aprons puffed out before them with well-selected pebbles.
_There_, too, were the women of the place, ranged tier beyond tier,
from the water’s edge to the houses behind, and of all ages and
aspects, from the girl that had not yet left school, to the crone
that had hobbled from her cottage assisted by her crutch. The lanes
were occupied by full-grown men, who, armed with bludgeons, reserved
themselves for the final charge, and now crouched behind their wives
and sisters to avoid being seen from the boats. A few young lads,
choice spirits of the place, had climbed up to the ridges of the low
cottages, which at that time presented, in this part of the town, a
line parallel to the beach. Some of them were armed with pistols, some
with satchels full of stones; and farther up the lanes there was a
second party of women, who meditated an attack on Rabson’s cellar. Dire
was the combination of sound. The boys shouted, the girls shrieked,
the apprentices, tapping their fingers against their throats, bleated
like sheep in mockery of the farmers, the women yelled out their
defiance in one continuous howl, interrupted occasionally by the
hoarse exclamations and loud huzzas of the men. The boats advanced by
inches. After every few strokes, the rowers would pause over their
oars, and wrench themselves half round to reconnoitre the myriads of
waving arms and threatening faces which thronged the beach. As they
creeped onwards, a few stones flung from slings by some of the boys
went whizzing over their heads, “Now pull hard, and at once!” shouted
out Simpson; “we have to deal with but women and children, and shall
disperse them before they have fired half a broadside.” The rowers
bent them to their oars, the boats started shorewards like arrows from
the string, there arose a shout from the assembled multitude, which
the distant hills echoed back to them in low thunder, and a shower of
stones from the boys, the apprentices, the women, the men--from the
shore, the lanes, the cottage roofs, the chimney tops, came hailing
down upon them thick and ceaseless, rattling, pattering, crashing,
like the _débris_ of a mountain rolled over its precipices by an
earthquake. The water was beaten into foam as if lashed by a hurricane.
Every individual of the four crews disappeared in an instant; the oars
swung loose on the gunwales, or slipped overboard. At length, however,
the boats, propelled partly by the wind, partly by the force of the
missiles, drifted from the shore; and melancholy was the appearance
of the people within, when, after the stones began to fall short,
they gathered themselves up, and looked cautiously over the sides.
There were broken and contused heads among them beyond all reach of
reckoning; and one poor man of Easter-Ross, who had been marked out
by a young fellow named Junor, the best slinger in town, had carried
two good eyes with him into the conflict, and only one out of it. They
rowed slowly to the other side, and the victors could see them, until
they landed, unfolding neckcloths and handkerchiefs, and binding up
heads and limbs.
The attack on the boats had no sooner commenced, than the female party,
who had been stationed in the lanes, proceeded to Rabson’s cellar. “We
maun hae meal!” said the women to Sandison, who was lounging before
the door with his arms folded in his greatcoat, and a little black
tobacco-pipe in his mouth. “Puff,” replied the mechanic, shooting a
huge burst of smoke into the face of the fairest of the speakers. “We
maun hae meal!” reiterated the women. “Puff--weel neebours--puff--I
mauna betray trust, ye ken--puff; an’ what else am I stationed here
for, but just to keep the meal frae you?--puff, puff.” “But we maun
hae’t, an’ we will hae’t, an’ we sall hae’t, whether you will or no!”
shrieked out a virago armed with a huge axe, which the mechanic at once
recognised as his own, and who dealt, as she spoke, a tremendous blow
on the door. “Gudesake, Jess!” said the mechanic, losing in his fear
for his favourite tool somewhat of his self-possession; “Gudesake,
Jess, keep the edge frae the nails!” Stepping back a few paces, he
leisurely knocked out the ashes of his pipe against his thumb-nail; and
with the remark, that “strong han’ (force) was a masterfu’ argument;
and that one puir working man, who hadna got his night’s rest, was no
match for a score o’ idle queans,” he relinquished his post, and took
sanctuary in his own dwelling. In less than half an hour after, the
whole contents of the cellar had disappeared. There was a hale old
woman, a pauper of the place, who did not claim her customary goupens
for two whole years thereafter; and a shoemaker named Millar was not
seen purchasing an ounce of meal for a much longer time.
Ninety years after the year of the meal mob, and when every one who
had either shared in it or remembered it were sleeping in their
graves, I was amusing myself, one wet day, in turning over some old
papers stored up in the drawers of a moth-eaten scrutoire, which had
once belonged to Donald Sandison, when a small parcel of manuscripts,
wrapped up with a piece of tape, which had once been red, attracted
my notice. The first manuscript I drew out bore date 1742, and was
entitled, “Representation, Condescendence, and Interlocutors, in the
process of Matthew Simpson against the Cromarty men.” It contained
a grievous complaint made by the town’s-folk to the Right Hon. Lord
Balmerino. “Simpson was a person of a rancorous and very litigious
spirit,” urged the paper; “and it was surely not a little unreasonable
in him to expect, as he did in the suit, that the people of a whole
country-side, indubitably innocent of every act of violence alleged
against them, should be compelled to undertake a weary pilgrimage to
Edinburgh to answer to his charges, when, from the circumstances of
the case, anything they could have to depone anent the spulzie, would
yield exactly the same result, whether deponed at Edinburgh, Cromarty,
or Japan.” It went on to show that the people were miserably depressed
by poverty; and that, if compelled to set out on such a journey, they
would have to beg by the way; while their wives and children would be
reduced to starvation at home, without even the resource of begging
itself, seeing that all their neighbours were as wretchedly poor as
themselves. Next in order in the parcel followed the statements of
Mr. Matthew Simpson, addressed also to his Lordship. He had been
robbed, he affirmed, by the men of the north three several times;
twice by the people, and once by the lawyers; and having lost in this
way a great deal of money, he could not well afford to lose more.
It was stated, further, by the master, that Edinburgh could not be
farther from Cromarty than Cromarty from Edinburgh; and that it was
quite as reasonable, and fully as safe for the weaker party, that the
conspirators should have to defend themselves in the metropolis, as
that he, the prosecutor, should have to assail them in the village.
Both manuscripts seemed redolent of that old school of Scotch law in
which joke was so frequently called in to the assistance of argument,
and dry technicalities relieved by dry humour. A third paper of the
parcel bore date 1750, and was entitled, “Discharge from Matthew
Simpson to Donald Sandison and others.” The fourth and last was a piece
of barbarous rhyme, dignified, however, with the name of poetry, and
which, after describing mealmongers as “damned rascals,” and “the worst
of all men,” assured them, with a proper contempt for both the law of
the land and the doctrine of purgatory, that there is an executive
power vested in the people, which enables them to take summary justice
on their oppressors, and that the “devil gets villains as soon as they
are dead.”
Silken Sawney, the first projector of the spulzie, did not escape
in the process, though he contrived a few years after to save his
coin by running the country. He was the only person in Cromarty who,
in the year 1745, assumed the white cockade; and no sooner had he
appeared with it on the street than he was apprehended by a party of
his neighbours, who were kingsmen, and incarcerated in an ale-house.
A guard was mounted before the door, and, on the morrow, the poor
man of silk was to be sent aboard a sloop of war then lying in the
bay; but as his neighbours, when they took the precaution of mounting
guard, did not think proper to call to memory that his apartment
had a door of its own, which opened into a garden behind, he deemed
it prudent, instead of waiting the result, to pass through it on a
journey to the Highlands, and he never again returned to Cromarty.
The other conspirators suffered in proportion, not to what they had
perpetrated, but to what they possessed. A proprietor named Macculloch
was stripped of his little patrimony, while some of his poorer
companions escaped scot-free. Sandison contrived to pay his portion
of the fine, and made chairs and tables for forty years after. He was
deemed one of the most ingenious mechanics in the north of Scotland.
I have spent whole days in the house of his grandson, half buried in
dusty volumes and moth-eaten drawings which had once been his; and
derived my earliest knowledge of building from Palladio’s First Book of
Architecture, in the antique translation of Godfrey Richards, which,
as the margins testified, he had studied with much care. At a sale of
household furniture, which took place in Cromarty about thirty years
ago, the auctioneer, after examining a very handsome though somewhat
old-fashioned table with minute attention, recommended it to the
purchasers by assuring them, in a form of speech at least as old as the
days of Erasmus, that it was certainly the workmanship of either the
Devil or of Donald Sandison.
CHAPTER XXII.
“Old sithes they had with the rumples set even,
And then into a tree fast driven;
And some had hatchets set on a pole--
Mischievous weapons, antic and droll.
Each where they lifted tax and cess,
And did the lieges sore oppress,
And cocks and hens, and churns and cheese,
Did _kill_ and eat when they could seize.”
DUGALD GRAHAM’S _History of the Rebellion._
[Sidenote: THE FORTY-FIVE.]
With the solitary exception mentioned in the previous chapter, the
whole people of Cromarty were loyal to the house of Hanover. They were
all sound Protestants to the utmost of their ability, and never failed
doing justice in a bumper to the “best in Christendom” but when the
liquor was bad. It was therefore with no feelings of complacency, that,
in the autumn of 1745, they learned that the Pretender, after landing
in the western Highlands, had set off with a gathering of Gaelic Roman
Catholics to take London from the King. They affirmed, however, that
the redcoats were too numerous, and London too strong, to leave the
enterprise a chance of success; and it was not until Cope had been set
a-scampering, and the bayonets of England proved insufficient to defend
it on the Scottish side, that they began to pity George Rex (poor man),
and to talk about the downfall of the Kirk. Their attention, however,
was called off from all such minor matters to a circumstance connected
with the outbreaking which directly affected themselves. Parties of
wild Highlanders, taking advantage of the defenceless state of the
Lowlands, and the cause of the Pretender, went prowling about the
country, robbing as the smith fought, “every man to his own hand;”
and stories of their depredations began to pour into the town. They
were doing great skaith, it was said, to victual and drink, spulzieing
women of their yarn, and men of their shoes and bonnets; as for money,
there was luckily very little in the country. Nor was it possible to
conciliate them by any adaptation whatever of one’s politics to the
Jacobite code. A man of Ferindonald, a genuine friend to the Stuart,
had gone out to meet with them, and in the fulness of his heart, after
perching himself on a hillock by the wayside, he continued to cry out,
“You’re welcome! you’re welcome!” from their first appearance until
they had come up to him. “Welcomes or na welcomes,” said a bareheaded,
barefooted Highlander, as stooping down he seized him by the ankles;
“welcomes or na welcomes, _thoir dho do brougan_.” (Give me your shoes.)
Every day brought a new story of the marauders;--a Navity tacksman,
who had listened himself half crazy, and could speak or think of
nothing else, was enough of himself to destroy the quiet of the whole
parish. Some buried casks of meal under their barn floors, others
chests of plaiding and yarn. The tacksman interred an immense girnal,
containing five bolls of oatmeal, which escaped the rebels only to be
devoured by the rats. So thoroughly had he prepared himself for the
worst, that, when week after week went by, and still no Highlanders,
he seemed actually disappointed. One morning, however, in the end of
January 1746, he was called out to his cottage door to see something
unusual on the hill of Eathie; a number of fairy-like figures seemed
moving along the ridge, and then, as they descended in a dark compact
body to the hollow beneath, there were seen to shoot out from them,
at uncertain intervals, quick, sudden flashes, like lightnings from
a cloud. “Och, och!” exclaimed the tacksman, who well knew what the
apparition indicated, “the longest day that e’er came, even came at
last.” And away he went to reside, until the return of quieter times,
in a solitary cave of the hill.
[Sidenote: NANNIE MILLER’S ONSLAUGHT.]
The marauders entered the town about mid-day. They were armed every
one after his own fashion, some with dirks and broadswords, some with
pistols and fowling-pieces, and not a few with scythes, pikes, and
Lochaber-axes. Some carried immense bunches of yarn, some webs of
plaiding, some bundles of shirts and stockings. Most of the men of the
place, who would readily enough have joined issue with them at the
cudgel, but bore no marked affection to broadswords and Lochaber-axes,
had conveyed themselves out of the way, leaving their wives to settle
with them as they best might. They entered the better-looking houses
by half-dozens, turned the furniture topsy-turvy, emptied chests and
drawers, did wonderful execution on dried salmon and hung beef, and
set ale-barrels abroach. One poor woman, in attempting to rescue a
bundle of yarn, had her cheek laid open by a fellow who dashed the
muzzle of his pistol into her face; another was thrown down and robbed
of her shoes. There lived at this time one Nannie Miller, a matron
of the place, who sold ale. She was a large-boned, amazon-looking
woman, about six feet in height, of immense strength, and no ordinary
share of courage. Two of the Highlanders entered her cottage, and
with much good-nature (for they had had a long walk, she said) she
set down before them a pint of her best ale and a basket of scones,
with some dried fish. They ate and drank, and then rose to spulzie;
but they were too few, as it proved, for the enterprise; for when one
of them was engaged in ransacking a large meal-barrel, and the other
in breaking open a chest, Nannie made a sudden onslaught, bundled the
one fellow head-foremost into the barrel, and turning on his companion
as he rushed in to the rescue, floored him with a single blow. The
day was all her own in a twinkling; the Highlanders fled, one of them
half-choked by the meal, the other more than half-throttled by Nannie;
but glad, notwithstanding, to get off so well.
[Sidenote: THE RETREAT.]
In the middle of the spulzie a sloop of war hove in sight, and a boat
was seen shooting out to meet her from under the rocks of the hill.
Sail after sail was run out on her yards as soon as the boat touched
her side, and she came careering up the Firth like an angry giant. The
Highlanders gathered in the street, and, according to old Dunbar,
Fu’ loud in Ershe they begowt to clatter,
And rouped like revin and ruke.
One of them, who seemed to have drunk freely, was hacking with his
broadsword at the rails of a wooden bridge, and swearing furiously at
the ship; and a little girl, who chanced to be passing with a jug of
milk, was so terrified that she fell and broke the jug. “Poor sing,
poor sing!” said the Highlander, as he raised her and wiped her face
with the corner of his plaid, “hersel’ widna hurt a pit o’ you.” The
party, in their retreat, took the road that passes towards the west,
along the edge of the bay; and no sooner had the sloop cleared the
intervening headland, than she began to fire on them. One of the
bullets struck off a piece from a large granite boulder on the shore
termed the _Pindler_, and in less than half a minute the Highlanders
were scattered over the face of the hill. They did not again return to
Cromarty. Though they fared better in their predatory excursions than
most of their countrymen who accompanied the Prince, and transferred to
their homes much of the “plenishing” of the Lowlands, it was observed
that in few instances did their gains enrich their descendants. I once
wrought in the same shed with an old mason, a native of the parish of
Urquhart, who, in giving me a history of his early life, told me that
his father had left at his death a considerable sum of money to himself
and three brothers, and that not one of them was sober for two days
together until they had squandered the whole. “And no wonder,” remarked
another mason from the same parish, who was hewing beside him; “your
father went out a-harrying in the Forty-Five, and muckle did he bring
back with him, but it was ill gotten, and couldna last.”
As spring came on, a new set of stories began to pass current among
the people of the town. The Pretender had failed, it was said, in
his enterprise, and was falling back on the Highlands. But there was
something anomalous in the stories; for it was affirmed that he was
both running away and gaining all the battles. This they could not
understand; and when, early in March, Lord Louden entered the town at
the head of sixteen hundred men, in full retreat before the rebels,
they began to ask whether it was customary for one flying army to
pursue another. His Lordship dealt by them more hardly than even
the marauders; for, after transporting his men across the ferry, he
broke all their boats. “It’s a sair time for puir folk,” said an old
fisherman when witnessing the destruction of his skiff; “gain King,
gain Pretender, waes me, I’m the loser gain wha like.”
[Sidenote: THE BATTLE OF CULLODEN.]
Amid all the surmises and uncertainties of the town’s-people, matters
were fast drawing to a crisis with the Highlanders. On the 15th
of April a sloop from Lossiemouth entered the Firth, and brought
intelligence that Duke William and his army had crossed the Spey, and
were on the march for Inverness, then occupied by the rebels. On the
following morning nearly all the males of the place, and not a few of
the women, had climbed the neighbouring hill to watch the progress of
their march. The weather was dull and unpleasant. There was a cold
breeze from the east, accompanied by a thick drizzling rain, and the
hills of Moray and Inverness were girdled with wreaths of mist. The
lower grounds, which lie along the Firth, looked dim and blue through
the haze, and the eye vainly commanded the whole tract of country
which stretches between Inverness and Nairn. A little after noon,
however, the weather began to clear up, and a sailor, who had brought
with him the ship-glass, thought he could discover something unusual
on the moor of Culloden. Every eye was turned in that direction.
Suddenly there rose a little dense cloud of smoke, as if a volcano had
burst out on the moor; then succeeded the booming of cannon and the
rattle of musketry. “They are at it, God wi’ the right!” shouted out
Donald Sandison; “look, Sandy Wright, is the smoke no going the way
o’ Inverness?” “It’s but the easterly haar,” said Sandy; “auld as I
am, Donald, I could wish to be near enough to gae ae stroke for the
king!” The smoke continued to rise in clouds that went rolling towards
the west, and the roar of cannon to rebound among the hills. At length
they could hear only the smart pattering of musketry, and the tide of
battle seemed evidently sweeping towards Inverness. The cloud passed
from the moor; and when, at intervals, a fresh burst shot up through
the haze, it seemed to rise from among the fields in the vicinity of
the town. Anon all was silence; and the people, after lingering till
near nightfall, returned to their homes to tell that Duke William had
beaten the rebels, and to drink healths to the King. They spoke always
of the Duke’s army as “our folk,” and his victory as “our victory.” I
have heard an old woman of the place repeat a rude song, expressive of
their triumph on this occasion, which she had learned from her nurse
when almost an infant. My memory has retained only one of the verses,
and a horrible verse it is:--
Lovat’s head i’ the pat,
Horns and a’ thegither,
We’ll mak brose o’ that,
An’ gie the swine their supper.
[Sidenote: OLD JOHN DUNBAR.]
In after years they thought less hardly of the cause of the Stuarts;
and I have heard some of their old men relate stories of the poor
people who suffered at this time, with a good deal of feeling. There
was a Highlander named Robertson, a man of rare wit and humour, who
had been crippled of an arm at Culloden. He used, in after years,
to come to the place as a sort of travelling merchant, and always
met with much kindness from them. So much attached was he to the
Prince that he would willingly have lost the other arm for him too.
Another Highlander, who had also been wounded on the moor, was a great
favourite with them likewise. On seeing the battle irretrievably lost,
and further resistance unavailing, he was stealing warily out of the
field, when two English dragoons came galloping up to him to cut him
down. He turned round, drew a pistol from his belt, shot the foremost
through the body, and then hurled his weapon at the head of the other,
who immediately drew rein and rode off. The sword of the dying man
wounded him in its descent in the fleshy part of the hand, between the
thumb and the forefinger; and he retained the scar while he lived.
There was another Highlander who resided near Kessock, who had vowed,
immediately after the battle of Preston, that he would neither cut nor
comb the hair of his head until Charles Stuart was placed on the throne
of his ancestors. And he religiously observed his vow. My grandfather
saw him twenty years after the battle. He was then a strange,
grotesque-looking thing, not very unlike a huge cabbage set a-walking;
for his hair stuck out nearly a foot on each side of his head, and was
matted into a kind of felt. But truce with such stories! Fifty years
ago they formed an endless series; but they have now nearly all passed
away, or only live, if I may so express myself, in those echoes of the
departed generations which still faintly reverberate among the quieter
recesses of the present. Of all the people who witnessed the smoke of
Culloden from the hill of Cromarty I remember only three.
About eighteen years ago, when quite a boy, I was brought by a
relation to see a very old man then on his deathbed, who resided in a
small cottage among the woods of the hill. My kinsman for the twenty
preceding years had lived with him on terms of the closest intimacy,
and had been with him, about ten months before, when he met with an
accident from a falling tree, by which he received so serious an
injury that it proved the occasion of this his final illness. A thick
darkness, however, had settled over all the events of his latter life,
and he remembered neither his acquaintance of twenty years nor the
accident. His daughter named the father of my friend, in the hope of
awakening some early train of thought that might lead him into the
more recent period; but his knowledge of even the father had commenced
during the forty previous years, and his name sounded as strangely to
him as that of his son. “He is a great-grandchild,” said the woman,
“of your old friend Donald Roy, the Nigg elder.” “Of Donald Roy!--a
great-grandchild of Donald Roy!” he exclaimed, holding out his hard
withered hand; “oh, how glad I am to see him! How kind it is of him,”
he added, “thus to visit a poor bedridden old man! I have now lived in
the world for more than a hundred years, and during my long sojourn
have known few men I could compare with Donald Roy.”
The old man raised himself in his bed, for his strength had not yet
quite failed him, and began to relate to my friend, in a full unbroken
voice, some of the stories regarding the Nigg elder, which I have
imparted to the reader in a former chapter. His mind was full of the
early past, and he seemed to see its events all the more clearly from
the darkness of the intervening period--just as the stars may be
discerned at noonday at the bottom of a deep mine, impenetrably gloomy
in all its nearer recesses, when they are invisible from the summit
of a hill. He ran over the incidents of his early life. He told how,
in his thirtieth year, when the country resounded with the clash of
arms, he had quitted his peaceful avocations as a gardener, and joined
the army of the king. He fought at Culloden, and saw the clans broken
before the bayonets of Cumberland. His heart bled, he said, for his
countrymen. They lay bleeding on the moor, or were scattered over it;
and he saw the long swords of the horsemen plied incessantly in the
pursuit. Still more melancholy were his feelings, when, from a hill of
Inverness-shire, he looked down on a wide extent of country, and saw
the smoke of a hundred burning cottages ascending in the calm morning
air.--He died a few weeks after our visit, aged a hundred years and ten
months. His death took place in winter;--it was an open, boisterous
winter, that bore heavy on the weak and aged; and in less than a month
after, two very old men besides were also gathered to their fathers.
And they, too, had had a share in the Forty-five.
The younger was a ship-boy at the time, and the ship in which he
sailed was captured with a lading of Government stores, by a party
of the rebels. He was named Robertson, and there were several of the
Robertsons of Struan among the party. He was soon on excellent terms
with them; and on one occasion, when rallying some of the Struans on
their undertaking, he spoke of their leader as the Pretender. “Beware,
my boy,” said an elderly Highlander, “and do not again repeat that
word; there are men in the ship who, if they but heard you, would
perhaps take your life for it; for remember we are not all Robertsons.”
The other old man who died at this time, had been an officer, it was
said, in the Prince’s army; but he was a person of a distant, reserved
cast of character; and there was little known of his history, except
that he had been bred to the profession of medicine, and had been
unfortunate through his adherence to the Prince. It was remarked by
the town’s-people that his spirit and manners were superior to his
condition.
Among the old papers in Sandison’s scrutoire, I found a curious version
of the 137th Psalm, the production of some unfortunate Jacobite of
this period. It seems to have been written at Paris shortly after the
failure of the enterprise, and when the Prince and his party were in
no favour at court; for the author, a man apparently of keen feelings,
applies, with all the sorrowful energy of a wounded spirit, the curses
denounced against Edom and Babylon to England and France.
[Sidenote: JACOBITE PSALM.]
PSALM CXXXVII.
By the sad Seine we sat and wept
When Scotland we thought on;
Reft of her brave and true, and all
Her ancient spirit gone.
“Revenge,” the sons of Gallia said,
“Revenge your native land;
Already your insulting foes
Crowd the Batavian strand.”
How shall the sons of freedom e’er
For foreign conquest fight?
How wield anew the luckless sword
That fail’d in Scotland’s right?
If thee, O Scotland! I forget
Till fails my latest breath,
May foul dishonour stain my name,
Be mine a coward’s death!
May sad remorse for fancied guilt
My future days employ,
If all thy sacred rights are not
Above my chiefest joy!
Remember England’s children, Lord,
Who on Drumossie day,
Deaf to the voice of kindred love,
“Raze, raze it quite,” did say.
And thou, proud Gallia! faithless friend,
Whose ruin is not far,
Just Heaven on thy devoted head
Pour all the woes of war!
When thou thy slaughter’d little ones
And ravish’d dames shalt see,
Such help, such pity mayst thou have
As Scotland had from thee.
CHAPTER XXIII.
“_Mop._--Is it true, think you?
_Aut._--Very true;--why should I carry lies abroad?”
WINTER’S TALE.
[Sidenote: THE DROPPING-CAVE.]
In perusing in some of our older Gazetteers the half page devoted to
Cromarty, we find that, among the natural curiosities of the place,
there is a small cavern termed the Dropping-Cave, famous for its
stalactites and its petrifying springs. And though the progress of
modern discovery has done much to lower the wonder, by rendering it
merely one of thousands of the same class--for even among the cliffs
of the hill in which the cavern is perforated, there is scarcely a
spring that has not its border of coral-like petrifactions, and its
moss and grass and nettle-stalks of marble--the Dropping-Cave may well
be regarded as a curiosity still. It is hollowed, a few feet over
the beach, in the face of one of the low precipices which skirt the
entrance of the bay. From a crag which overhangs the opening there
falls a perpetual drizzle, which, settling on the moss and lichens
beneath, converts them into stone; and on entering the long narrow
apartment within, there may be seen by the dim light of the entrance
a series of springs, which filter through the solid rock above,
descending in so continual a shower, that even in the sultriest days
of midsummer, when the earth is parched and the grass has become brown
and withered, we may hear the eternal drop pattering against the rough
stones of the bottom, or tinkling in the recess within, like the
string of a harp struck to ascertain its tone. A stone flung into the
interior, after rebounding from side to side of the rock, falls with a
deep hollow plunge, as if thrown into the sea. Had the Dropping-Cave
been a cavern of Greece or Sicily, the classical mythology of these
countries would have tenanted it with the goddess of rains and vapour.
The walk to the cave is one of the most agreeable in the vicinity of
the town, especially in a fine morning of midsummer, an hour or so
after the sun has risen out of the Firth. The path to it has been
hollowed out of the hill-side by the feet of men and animals, and goes
winding over rocks and stones--now in a hollow, now on a height, anon
lost in the beach. In one of the recesses which open into the hill, a
clump of forest-trees has sprung up, and, lifting their boughs to the
edge of the precipice above, cover its rough iron features as if with
a veil; while, from the shade below, a fine spring, dedicated in some
remote age to “Our Ladye,” comes bubbling to the light with as pure and
copious a stream as in the days of the priest and the pilgrim. We see
the beach covered over with sea-shells and weeds, the cork buoys of the
fishermen, and fragments of wrecks. The air is full of fragrance. Only
look at yonder white patch in the hollow of the hill; ’tis a little
city of flowers, a whole community of one species--the meadow-sweet.
The fisherman scents it over the water, as he rows homeward in the cool
of the evening, a full half-mile from the shore. And see how the hill
rises above us, roughened with heath and fern and foxglove, and crested
a-top with a dark wood of fir. See how the beeches which have sprung
up on the declivity recline in nearly the angle of the hill, so that
their upper branches are only a few feet from the soil; reminding us,
in the midst of warmth and beauty, of the rough winds of winter and
the blasting influence of the spray. The insect denizens of the heath
and the wood are all on wing; see, there is the red bee, and there the
blue butterfly, and yonder the burnet-moth with its wings of vermilion,
and the large birdlike dragon-fly, and a thousand others besides,
all beautiful and all happy. And then the birds;--But why attempt a
description? The materials of thought and imagination are scattered
profusely around us; the wood the cliffs and the spring--the flowers
the insects and the birds--the shells the broken fragments of wreck and
the distant sail--the sea the sky and the opposite land--are all tones
of the great instrument Nature, which need only to be awakened by the
mind to yield its sweet music. And now we have reached the cave.
The Dropping-Cave ninety years ago was a place of considerable
interest; but the continuous shower which converted into stone the
plants and mosses on which it fell, and the dark recess which no one
had attempted to penetrate, and of whose extent imagination had formed
a thousand surmises, constituted some of merely the minor circumstances
that had rendered it such. Superstition had busied herself for ages
before in making it a scene of wonders. Boatmen, when sailing along
the shore in the night-time, had been startled by the apparition of a
faint blue light, which seemed glimmering from its entrance: on other
occasions than the one referred to in a former chapter, the mermaid
had been seen sitting on a rock a few yards before it, singing a low
melancholy song, and combing her long yellow hair with her fingers; and
a man who had been engaged in fishing crabs among the rocks, and was
returning late in the evening by the way of the cave, almost shared
the fate of its moss and lichens, when, on looking up, he saw an old
greyheaded man, with a beard that descended to his girdle, sitting in
the opening, and gazing wistfully on the sea.
I find some of these circumstances of terror embodied in verse by the
provincial poet whom I have quoted in an early chapter as an authority
regarding the Cromarty tradition of Wallace; and now, as then, I will
avail myself of his description:--
----“When round the lonely shore
The vex’d waves toil’d with deaf’ning roar,
And Midnight, from her lazy wain,
Heard wild winds roar and tides complain,
And groaning woods and shrieking sprites;--
Strange sounds from thence, and fearful lights,
Had caught the sailor’s ear and eye,
As drove his storm-press’d vessel by.
More fearful still, Tradition told
Of that dread cave a story old--
So very old, ages had pass’d
Since he who made had told it last.
’Twas thus it ran:--Of strange array
An aged man, whose locks of grey,
Like hill stream, flow’d his shoulders o’er,
For three long days on that lone shore
Sat moveless as the rocks around,
Moaning in low unearthly sound;
But whence he came, or why he stay’d,
None knew, and none to ask essay’d.
At length a lad drew near and spoke,
Craving reply. The figure shook
Like mirror’d shape on dimpling brook,
Or shadow flung on eddying smoke--
And the boy fled. The third day pass’d--
Fierce howl’d at night the angry blast
Brushing the waves; wild shrieks of death
Were heard these bristling cliffs beneath,
And cries for aid. The morning light
Gleam’d on a scene of wild affright.
Where yawns the cave, the rugged shore
With many a corse lay cover’d o’er,
And many a gorgeous fragment show’d
How fair the bark the storm subdued.”
[Sidenote: THE LEGEND OF WILLIE MILLAR.]
There was a Cromarty mechanic of the last age, named Willie Millar,
who used to relate a wonderful adventure which befell him in the cave.
Willie was a man of fertile invention, fond of a good story, and
zealous in the improvement of bad ones; but his zeal was evil spoken
of--the reformations he effected in this way being regarded as little
better than sinful, and his finest inventions as downright lying. There
was a smithy in the place, which, when he had become old and useless,
was his favourite resort. He would take up his seat on the forge
each evening, regularly as the evening came, and relate to a group
of delighted but too incredulous youngsters, some new passage in his
wonderful autobiography; which, though it seemed long enough to stretch
beyond the flood, received new accessions every night. So little,
indeed, had he in common with the small-minded class who, possessed of
only a limited number of narratives and ideas, go over and over these
as the hands of a clock pass continually over the same figures, that,
with but one exception in favour of the adventure of the cave, he
hardly ever told the same story twice.
There was a tradition current in Cromarty, that a town’s-man had once
passed through the Dropping-Cave, until he heard a pair of tongs rattle
over his head on the hearth of a farmhouse of Navity, a district of
the parish which lies fully three miles from the opening; and Willie,
who was, it seems, as hard of belief in such matters as if he himself
had never drawn on the credulity of others, resolved on testing the
story by exploring the cave. He sewed sprigs of rowan and wych-elm in
the hem of his waistcoat, thrust a Bible into one pocket and a bottle
of gin into the other, and providing himself with a torch, and a staff
of buckthorn which had been cut at the full of the moon, and dressed
without the assistance of iron or steel, he set out for the cave on a
morning of midsummer. It was evening ere he returned--his torch burnt
out, and his clothes stained with mould and slime, and soaked with
water.
After lighting the torch, he said, and taking a firm grasp of the
staff, he plunged fearlessly into the gloom before him. The cavern
narrowed and lowered as he proceeded; the floor, which was of a white
stone resembling marble, was hollowed into cisterns, filled with a
water so exceedingly pure that it sparkled to the light like spirits in
crystal, and from the roof there depended clusters of richly embossed
icicles of white stone, like those which, during a severe frost, hang
at the edge of a waterfall. The springs from above trickled along
their channelled sides, and then tinkled into the cisterns, like rain
from the eaves of a cottage after a thunder-shower. Perhaps he looked
too curiously around him when remarking all this; for so it was, that
at the ninth and last cistern he missed his footing, and, falling
forwards shattered his bottle of gin against the side of the cave.
The liquor ran into a little hollow of the marble, and, unwilling to
lose what he regarded as very valuable, and what certainly had cost
him some trouble and suffering to procure (for he had rowed half way
across the Firth for it in terror of the custom-house and a cockling
sea), he stooped down and drank till his breath failed him. Never was
there better Nantz; and, pausing to recover himself, he stooped and
drank, again and again. There were strange appearances when he rose.
A circular rainbow had formed round his torch; there was a blue mist
gathering in the hollows of the cave; the very roof and sides began to
heave and reel, as if the living rock were a Flushing lugger riding on
the ground-swell; and there was a low humming noise that came sounding
from the interior, like that of bees in a hawthorn thicket on an
evening of midsummer. Willie, however, had become much less timorous
than at first, and, though he could not well account for the fact, much
less disposed to wonder. And so on he went.
He found the cavern widen, and the roof rose so high that the light
reached only the snowy icicles which hung meteor-like over his head.
The walls were formed of white stone, ridged and furrowed like pieces
of drapery, and all before and around him there sparkled myriads of
crystals, like dewdrops in a spring morning. The sound of his footsteps
was echoed on either hand by a multitude of openings, in which the
momentary gleam of his torch was reflected, as he passed, on sheets of
water and ribs of rock, and which led, like so many arched corridors,
still deeper into the bowels of the hill. Nor, independently of the
continuous humming noise, were all the sounds of the cave those of
echo. At one time he could hear the wind moaning through the trees of
the wood above, and the scream of a hawk as if pouncing on its prey;
then there was the deafening blast of a smith’s bellows, and the clang
of hammers on an anvil; and anon a deep hollow noise resembling the
growling of a wild beast. All seemed terribly wild and unnatural; a
breeze came moaning along the cave, and shook the marble drapery of
the sides, as if it were formed of gauze or linen; the entire cave
seemed turning round like the cylinder of an engine, till the floor
stood upright and the adventurer fell heavily against it; and as the
torch hissed and sputtered in the water, he could see by its expiring
gleam that a full score of dark figures, as undefined as shadows by
moonlight, were flitting around him in the blue mist which now came
rolling in dense clouds from the interior. In a moment more all was
darkness, and he lay insensible amid the chill damps of the cave.
The rest of the adventure wonderfully resembled a dream. On returning
to consciousness, he found that the gloom around him had given place to
a dim red twilight, which flickered along the sides and roof like the
reflection of a distant fire. He rose, and grasping his staff staggered
forward. “It is sunlight,” thought he, “I shall find an opening
among the rocks of Eathie, and return home over the hill.” Instead,
however, of the expected outlet, he found the passage terminate in a
wonderful apartment, so vast in extent, that though an immense fire
of pine-trees, whole and unbroken from root to branch, threw up a red
wavering sheet of flame many yards in height, he could see in some
places neither the walls nor the roof. A cataract, like that of Foyers
during the long-continued rains of an open winter, descended in thunder
from one of the sides, and presenting its broad undulating front of
foam to the red gleam of the fire, again escaped into darkness through
a wide broken-edged gulf at the bottom. The floor of the apartment
appeared to be thickly strewed with human bones, half-burned and
blood-stained, and gnawed as if by cannibals; and directly in front of
the fire there was a low tomblike erection of dark-coloured stone, full
twenty yards in length, and roughened with grotesque hieroglyphics,
like those of a Runic obelisk. An enormous mace of iron, crusted with
rust and blood, reclined against the upper end; while a bugle of gold
hung by a chain of the same metal from a column at the bottom. Willie
seized the bugle, and winded a blast till the wide apartment shook
with the din; the waters of the cataract disappeared, as if arrested at
their source; and the ponderous cover of the tomb began to heave and
crackle, and pass slowly over the edge, as if assailed by the terrific
strength of some newly-awakened giant below. Willie again winded the
bugle; the cover heaved upwards, disclosing a corner of the chasm
beneath; and a hand covered with blood, and of such fearful magnitude
as to resemble only the conceptions of Egyptian sculpture, was slowly
stretched from the darkness towards the handle of the mace. Willie’s
resolution gave way, and, flinging down the horn, he rushed hurriedly
towards the passage. A yell of blended grief and indignation burst from
the tomb, as the immense cover again settled over it; the cataract came
dashing from its precipice with a heavier volume than before; and a
furious hurricane of mingled wind and spray that rushed howling from
the interior, well-nigh dashed the adventurer against the sides of the
rock. He succeeded, however, in gaining the passage, sick at heart
and nearly petrified with terror; a state of imperfect consciousness
succeeded, like that of a feverish dream, in which he retained a sort
of half conviction that he was lingering in the damps and darkness of
the cave, obstinately and yet unwillingly; and, on fully regaining his
recollection, he found himself lying across the ninth cistern, with the
fragments of the broken bottle on the one side, and his buckthorn staff
on the other. He could hear from the opening the dash of the advancing
waves against the rocks, and on leaping to the beach below, found that
his exploratory journey had occupied him a whole day.
[Sidenote: A BOY ADVENTURER.]
The adventure of Willie Millar formed at one time one of the most
popular traditions of Cromarty. It was current among the children not
more than eighteen years ago, when the cave was explored a second time,
but with a very different result, by a boy of the school in which the
writer of these legends had the misfortune of being regarded as the
greatest dunce and truant of his time. The character of Willie forms
the best possible commentary on _his_ story--the character of the boy
may perhaps throw some little light on his. When in his twelfth year,
he was by far the most inquisitive little fellow in the place. His
curiosity was insatiable. He had broken his toys when a child, that
he might see how they were constructed; and a watch which the owner
had thoughtlessly placed within his reach, narrowly escaped sharing a
similar fate. He dissected frogs and mice in the hope of discovering
the seat of life; and when one day found dibbling at the edge of a
spring, he said he was trying to penetrate to the source of water.
His schoolmaster nicknamed him “The _Senachie_,” for the stories with
which he beguiled his class-fellows of their tasks were without end or
number; the neighbours called him _Philosopher_, for he could point out
the star of the pole, with the Great Bear that continually walks round
it; and he used to affirm that there might be people in the moon, and
that the huge earth is only a planet. Having heard the legend of Willie
Millar, he set out one day to explore the cave; and when he returned
he had to tell that the legend was a mere legend, and that the cave,
though not without its wonders, owed, like the great ones of the earth,
much of its celebrity to the fears and the ignorance of mankind.
In climbing into the vestibule of the recess, his eye was attracted by
a piece of beautiful lacework, gemmed by the damps of the place, and
that stretched over a hollow in one of the sides. It was not, however,
a work of magic, but merely the web of a field-spider, that from its
acquaintance with lines and angles, seemed to have discovered a royal
road to geometry. The petrifying spring next attracted his notice. He
saw the mosses hardening into limestone--the stems already congealed,
and the upper shoots dying that they might become immortal. And there
came into his mind the story of one Niobe, of whom he had read in a
school-book, that, like the springs of the cave, wept herself into
stone, and the story too of the half-man half-marble prince of the
Arabian tale. “Strange,” thought the boy, “that these puny dwarfs of
the vegetable kingdom should become rock and abide for ever, when its
very giants, the chestnut trees of Etna and the cedars of Lebanon,
moulder away in the deep solitude of their forests, and become dust or
nothing.” Lighting his torch, he proceeded to examine the cavern. A
few paces brought him to the first cistern. He found the white table
of marble in which it is hollowed raised knee-height over the floor,
and the surface fretted into little cavities by the continual dropping,
like the surface of a thawing snow-wreath when beaten by a heavy
shower. As he strided over the ledge, a drop from above extinguished
his torch;--he groped his way back and rekindled it. He had seen the
first cistern described by the adventurer; and of course all the
others, with the immense apartment, the cataract, the tomb, the iron
mace, and the golden bugle, lay in the darkness beyond. But, alas!
when he again stepped forward, instead of the eight other hollows he
found the floor covered with one continuous pool, over which there rose
fast-contracting walls and a descending roof; and though he pressed
onward amid the water that splashed below, and the water that fell from
above--for his curiosity was unquenchable, and his clothes of a kind
which could not be made worse--it was only to find the rock closing
hopelessly before him, after his shoulders had at once pressed against
the opposite sides, and the icicles had passed through his hair. There
was no possibility of turning round, and so, creeping backwards like
a crab, he reached the first cistern, and in a moment after stood in
the lighted part of the cave. His feelings on the occasion were less
melancholy than those of the traveller, who, when standing beside the
two fountains of the Nile, “began in his sorrow to treat the inquiry
concerning its source as the effort of a distempered fancy.” But next
to the pleasure of erecting a system, is the pleasure of pulling
one down; and he felt it might be so even with regard to a piece of
traditionary history. Besides, there was a newly-fledged thought
which had come fluttering round him for the first time, that more than
half consoled him under his disappointment. He remembered that when
a child no story used to please him that was not both marvellous and
true--that a fact was as nothing to him disunited from the wonderful,
nor the wonderful disunited from fact. But the marvels of his childhood
had been melting away, one after one--the ghost, and the wraith, and
the fairy had all disappeared; and the wide world seemed to spread out
before him a tame and barren region, where truth dwelt in the forms of
commonplace, and in these only. He now felt for the first time that
it was far otherwise; and that so craving an instinct, instead of
perishing for lack of sustenance, would be fed as abundantly in the
future by philosophy and the arts, as it had been in the past by active
imaginations and a superstitious credulity.
[Sidenote: FIDDLER’S WELL.]
The path which, immediately after losing itself on the beach where it
passes the cave, rises by a kind of natural stair to the top of the
precipices, continues to ascend till it reaches a spring of limpid
water, which comes gushing out of the side of a bank covered with
moss and daisies: and which for more than a century has been known to
the town’s-people by the name of Fiddler’s Well. Its waters are said
to be medicinal, and there is a pretty tradition still extant of the
circumstance through which their virtues were first discovered, and to
which the spring owes its name.
Two young men of the place, who were much attached to each other, were
seized at nearly the same time by consumption. In one the progress
of the disease was rapid--he died two short months after he was
attacked by it; while the other, though wasted almost to a shadow,
had yet strength enough left to follow the corpse of his companion
to the grave. The name of the survivor was Fiddler--a name still
common among the seafaring men of the town. On the evening of the
interment he felt oppressed and unhappy; his imagination was haunted
by a thousand feverish shapes of open graves with bones mouldering
round their edges, and of coffins with the lids displaced; and after
he had fallen asleep, the images, which were still the same, became
more ghastly and horrible. Towards morning, however, they had all
vanished; and he dreamed that he was walking alone by the sea-shore
in a clear and beautiful day of summer. Suddenly, as he thought, some
person stepped up behind, and whispered in his ear, in the voice of
his deceased companion, “Go on, Willie; I shall meet you at _Stormy_.”
There is a rock in the neighbourhood of Fiddler’s Well, so called from
the violence with which the sea beats against it when the wind blows
strongly from the east. On hearing the voice he turned round, and
seeing no one, he went on, as he thought, to the place named, in the
hope of meeting his friend, and sat down on a bank to wait his coming;
but he waited long--lonely and dejected; and then remembering that he
for whom he waited was dead, he burst into tears. At this moment a
large field-bee came humming from the west, and began to fly round his
head. He raised his hand to brush it away; it widened its circle, and
then came humming into his ear as before. He raised his hand a second
time, but the bee would not be scared off; it hummed ceaselessly round
and round him, until at length its murmurings seemed to be fashioned
into words, articulated in the voice of his deceased companion--“Dig,
Willie, and drink!” it said; “Dig, Willie, and drink!” He accordingly
set himself to dig, and no sooner had he torn a sod out of the bank
than a spring of clear water gushed from the hollow; and the bee
taking a wider circle, and humming in a voice of triumph that seemed
to emulate the sound of a distant trumpet, flew away. He looked after
it, but as he looked the images of his dream began to mingle with those
of the waking world; the scenery of the hill seemed obscured by a dark
cloud, in the centre of which there glimmered a faint light; the rocks,
the sea, the long declivity, faded into the cloud; and turning round
he saw only a dark apartment, and the faint beams of morning shining in
at a window. He rose, and after digging the well, drank of the water
and recovered. And its virtues are still celebrated; for though the
water be only simple water, it must be drunk in the morning, and as it
gushes from the bank; and with pure air, exercise, and early rising for
its auxiliaries, it continues to work cures.
CHAPTER XXIV.
“Fechtam memorate blodæam,
Fechtam terribilem.”--DRUMMOND’S _Polemo Middinia_.
“Tulzies lang-remember’d an’ bluidy,
Terrible tulzies.”--_Muckle-Vennel Translation._
[Sidenote: WARS OF THE TOWN’S-PEOPLE.]
It is well for human happiness in the ruder ages, that cowardice is
rarely or never the characteristic of a people who have either no laws,
or laws that cannot protect them; for, in the more unsettled stages of
society, personal courage is a necessary policy, and no one is less
safe than he who attempts to escape danger by running away. During
the early part of the last century, Cromarty was well-nigh as rude a
village of the kingdom as any it contained. The statute-book had found
its way into the place at a much remoter period, but its authority had
not yet travelled so far; and so the inhabitants were left to protect
themselves by their personal courage and address, in the way their
ancestors had done for centuries before. It was partly a consequence
of the necessity, and partly from the circumstance that two or three
families of the place were deeply imbued for several generations with
a warlike spirit, which seemed born with them, that for years, both
before and after the Rebellion, the prowess of the people, as exhibited
in their quarrels with folk of the neighbouring districts, was
celebrated all over the country. True it was, they had quailed before
the rebels, but then the best soldiers of the crown had done the same.
On one occasion two of them, brothers of the name of Duff--gigantic
fellows of six feet and a half--had stood back to back for an entire
hour in the throng of a Redcastle market, defending themselves against
half the cudgels of Strathglass. On another, at the funeral of a
town’s-man, who was interred in the burial-ground of Kilmuir, a party
of them had fought with the people of the parish, and defeated them
in their own territories. On a third, after a battle which lasted for
several hours, they had beaten off the men of Rosemarkie and Avoch
from a peat-moss in an unappropriated moor; and this latter victory
they celebrated in a song, in which it was humorously proposed that,
as their antagonists had been overpowered by the _men_ of the parish,
they should, in their next encounter, try their chance of war with
the women. In short, their frays at weddings, funerals, and markets,
were multiplied beyond number, until at length the cry of “Hiloa! Help
for Cromarty!” had become as formidable as the war-cry of any of the
neighbouring clans.
But there are principles which are good or evil according to the
direction in which they operate; and of this class is that warlike
principle whose operations I am attempting to describe. It was well
for the people of Cromarty that, when there was no law powerful enough
to protect them, they had courage enough to protect themselves; and
particularly well at a period when the neighbouring Highlanders were
still united by the ties of clanship into formidable bodies, ready to
assert to a man the real or pretended rights of any individual of their
number. It was not well, however, that these men of Cromarty should
have broken the heads of half the men of Kilmuir, for merely insisting
on a prescriptive right of carrying the corpse of a native to the
churchyard when it had entered the limits of their own parish, and such
was the sole occasion of the quarrel; or that, after appropriating to
themselves, much at the expense of justice, the moss of the Maolbuoy
Common, they should have deemed it legitimate sport to insult, in
bad rhyme, the poor people whom they had deprived of their winter’s
fuel, and who were starving for want of it. Occasionally, however,
they avenged on themselves the wrongs done to their neighbours;
for, though no tribe of men could be more firmly united at a market
or tryst, where an injury done to any one of them was regarded as an
injury done to every one, they were not quite so friendly when in town,
where their interests were separate, and not unfrequently at variance.
Their necessities abroad had taught them how to fight, and their
resentments at home often engaged them in repeating the lesson. Their
very enjoyments had caught hold of it, and Martinmas and the New-Year
were not more the festivals of good ale than of broken heads. The
lesson, sufficiently vexatious at any time, except when conned in its
proper school, became peculiarly a misfortune to them upon the change
which began to take place in the northern counties about the year
1740, when the law of Edinburgh--as it was termed by a Strathcarron
freebooter--arrived at the ancient burgh of Tain, and took up its seat
there, much to the terror and annoyance of the neighbouring districts.
[Sidenote: MACCULLOCH THE LAWYER.]
Subsequent to this unfortunate event, a lawyer named Macculloch fixed
his place of residence among the people of Cromarty, that he might live
by their quarrels; and, under the eye of this sagacious personage, the
stroke of a cudgel became as potent as that of the wand of a magician.
Houses, and gardens, and corn-furrows vanished before it. Law was not
yet sold at a determined price. It was administered by men who, having
spent the early part of their lives amid feuds and bickerings, were
still more characterized by the leanings of the partisan than the
impartiality of the judge; and, under these men, the very statute-book
itself became a thing of predilections and antipathies; for while in
some instances justice, and a great deal more, cost almost nothing, in
others it was altogether beyond price. Macculloch, however, who dealt
it out by retail, rendered it sufficiently expensive, even when at the
cheapest. Fines and imprisonments, and accounts which his poor clients
could not read, but which they were compelled to pay, were only the
minor consequences of his skill; for on one occasion he contrived that
almost half the folk of the town should be cited, either as pannels
or witnesses, to the circuit court of Inverness; where, through the
wrongheadedness of a jury, and the obstinacy of a judge, a good
town’s-man and powerful combatant, who would willingly harm no one, but
fight with anybody, ran a very considerable risk of being sent to the
plantations. The people were distressed beyond measure, and their old
antagonists of Kilmuir and Rosemarkie fully avenged.
In course of time, however, they became better acquainted with law;
and their knowledge of the lawyer (which, like every other species of
knowledge, was progressive), while it procured him in its first stages
much employment, prevented him latterly from being employed at all.
He was one of the most active of village attorneys. No one was better
acquainted with the whole art of recovering a debt, or of entering on
the possession of a legacy--of reclaiming property, or of conveying
it; but it was ultimately discovered that his own particular interests
could not always be identified with those of the people who employed
him; and that the same lawsuit might be gained by him and lost by his
client. It was one thing, too, for Macculloch to recover a debt, and
quite another for the person to whom it had been due. In cases of
the latter description he was an adept in the art of promising. Day
after day would he fix his term of settlement; though the violation
of the promise of yesterday proved only a prelude to the violation
of that of to-day, and though both were found to be typical of the
promise which was to be passed on the morrow. He had determined, it
was obvious, to render his profession as lucrative as possible; but
somehow or other--it could only be through an excess of skill--he
completely overshot the mark. No one would, at length, believe his
promises, or trust to his professions; his great skill began to border
in its effects, as these regarded himself, on the opposite extreme;
and he was on the eve of being starved out of the place, when Sir
George Mackenzie, the proprietor, made choice of him as his factor, and
intrusted to him the sole management of all his concerns.
Sir George in his younger days had been, like his grandfather the Earl,
a stirring, active man of business. He was a stanch Tory, and on the
downfall of Oxford, and the coming in of the Whigs, he continued to
fret away the energies of his character, in a fruitless, splenetic
opposition; until at length, losing heart in the contest, he became,
from being one of the most active, one of the most indolent men in
the country. He drank hard, lived grossly, and seemed indifferent to
everything. And never were there two persons better suited to each
other than the lawyer and Sir George. The lawyer was always happiest
in his calculations when his books were open to the inspection of no
one but himself; and the laird, though he had a habit of reckoning
over the bottle, commonly fell asleep before the amount was cast up.
But an untoward destiny proved too hard for Macculloch in even this
office. Apathetical as Sir George was deemed, there was one of his
feelings which had survived the wreck of all the others;--that one a
rooted aversion to the town of Cromarty, and in particular to that part
of the country adjacent which was his own property. No one--least of
all himself--could assign any cause for the dislike, but it existed
and grew stronger every day: and the consequences were ruinous to
Macculloch; for in a few years after he had appointed him to the
factorship, he disposed of all his lands to a Mr. William Urquhart
of Meldrum--a transaction which is said to have had the effect of
converting his antipathy into regret. The factor set himself to seek
out for another master; and in a manner agreeable to his character. He
professed much satisfaction that the estate should have passed into the
hands of so excellent a gentleman as Mr. Urquhart; and proposed to some
of the town’s-folk that they should eat to his prosperity in a public
dinner, and light up a constellation of bonfires on the heights which
overlook the bay. The proposal took; the dinner was attended by a party
of the more respectable inhabitants of the place, and the bonfires by
all the children.
A sister of Sir George’s, the Lady Margaret, who a few years before
had shared in the hopes of her attainted cousin, Lord Cromartie, and
had witnessed, with no common sensations of grief, the disastrous
termination of the enterprise in which he had been led to engage, was
at this time the only tenant of Cromarty Castle. She had resided in
the house of Lord George previous to his attainder, but on that event
she had come to Cromarty to live with her brother. His low habits of
intemperance proved to her a fruitful source of vexation; but how was
the feeling deepened when, in about a week after he had set out on a
hasty journey, the purpose of which he refused to explain, she received
a letter from him, informing her that he had sold all his lands! She
saw, in a step so rash and unadvised, the final ruin of her family, and
felt with peculiar bitterness that she had no longer a home. Leaning
over a window of the castle, she was indulging in the feelings which
her circumstances suggested, and looking with an unavailing but natural
regret on the fields and hamlets that had so soon become the property
of a stranger, when Macculloch and his followers came marching out on
the lawn below from the adjoining wood, and began to pile on a little
eminence in front of the castle the materials of a bonfire. It seemed,
from the effect produced on the poor lady, that, in order entirely
to overpower her, it was only necessary she should be shown that the
circumstance which was so full of distress to her, was an occasion of
rejoicing to others. For a few seconds she seemed stupified by the
shouts and exultations of the party below; and then, clasping her hands
upon her breast, she burst into tears and hurried to her apartment. As
the evening darkened into night, the light of the huge fire without was
reflected through a window on the curtains of her bed. She requested
her attendant to shut it out; but the wild shouts of Macculloch’s
followers, which were echoed until an hour after midnight by the
turrets above and the vaults below, could not be excluded. In the
morning Lady Margaret was in a high fever, and in a few days after she
was dead.
The first to welcome the new laird to his property was Macculloch the
factor. Urquhart of Meldrum, or Captain Urquhart, as he was termed, had
made his money on sea--some said as a gallant officer in the Spanish
service, some as the master of a privateer, or even, it was whispered,
as a pirate. He was a rough unpolished man, fond of a rude joke, and
disposed to seek his companions among farmers and mechanics, rather
than among the people of a higher sphere. But, with all his rudeness,
he was shrewd and intelligent, and qualified, by a peculiar tact, to
be a judge of men. When Macculloch was shown into his room, he neither
returned his bow nor motioned him to a seat, though the lawyer, no
way daunted, proceeded to address him in a long train of compliments
and congratulations. “Humph!” replied the Captain. “Ah!” thought the
lawyer, “you will at least hear reason.” He proceeded to state, that
as he had been intrusted with the sole management of Sir George’s
affairs, he was better acquainted than any one else with the resources
of the estate and the character of the tenants; and that, should Mr.
Urquhart please to continue him in his office, he would convince him
he was the fittest person to occupy it to his advantage. “Humph!”
replied the Captain; “for how many years, Sir lawyer, have you been
factor to Mackenzie?” “For about five,” was the reply. “And was he not
a good master?” “Yes, sir, rather good, certainly--but his unfortunate
habits.” “His habits!--he drank grog, did he not? and served it out
for himself? So do I. Mark me, Sir factor! You are a ---- mean rascal,
and shall never finger a penny of mine. You found in Mackenzie a good
simple fellow, who employed you when no one else would; but no sooner
had he unshipped himself than you hoisted colours for me, ---- you,
whom, I suppose, you could tie up to the yard-arm for somewhat less
than a bred hangman would tie up a thief for;--ay, that you would! I
have heard of your dinner, sir, and your bonfires, and of the death
of Lady Margaret (had you another bonfire for that?) and now tell you
once for all, that I despise you as one of the meanest ---- rascals
that ever turned tail on a friend in distress. Off, sir--there is the
door!” Such was the reward of Macculloch. In a few years after, he had
sunk into poverty and contempt; one instance of many, that rascality,
however profitable in the degree, may be carried to a ruinous extreme,
and that he who sets out with a determination of cheating every one,
may at length prove too cunning for even himself.
The people of the town, not excepting some of those who had shouted
round the bonfires and sat down to the dinner, were much gratified by
the result of Macculloch’s application; and for some time the laird was
so popular that there was no party in opposition to him. An incident
soon occurred, however, which had the effect of uniting nine-tenths of
the whole parish into a confederacy, so powerful and determined, that
it contended with him in a lawsuit for three whole years.
[Sidenote: THE LAW PLEA.]
The patronage of the church of Cromarty, on the attainder of Lord
George Mackenzie, in whom it had been vested, devolved upon the
Crown. It was claimed, however, by Captain Urquhart, and the Crown,
unacquainted with the extent of many of the privileges derived to it
by the general forfeiture of the late Rebellion, and of this privilege
among the others, seemed no way inclined to dispute with him the claim.
He therefore nominated to the parish, on the first vacancy, a Mr.
Simpson of Meldrum as a proper minister. This Meldrum was a property
of Mrs. Urquhart’s, and the chief qualification of Mr. Simpson arose
from the circumstance of his having been born on it. The Captain was
himself a Papist, and had not set a foot within the church of Cromarty
since he had come to the estate; his wife was an Episcopalian, and,
more liberal than her husband, she had on one occasion attended it
in honour of the wedding of a favourite maid. The people of the town,
in the opinion that the presentation could not be in worse hands, and
dissatisfied with the presentee, rejected the latter on the ground that
Captain Urquhart was not the legitimate patron; and, binding themselves
by contract, they subscribed a considerable sum that they might join
issue with him in a lawsuit. They were, besides, assisted by the
neighbouring parishes; and, after a tedious litigation, the suit was
decided in their favour; but not until they had expended upon it, as I
have frequently heard affirmed with much exultation, the then enormous
sum of five hundred pounds. They received from the Crown their choice
of a minister.
[Sidenote: RODERICK AND THE CAPTAIN.]
Urquhart, whose obstinacy, sufficiently marked at any time, had been
roused by the struggle into one of its most determined attitudes,
resisted the claims of the people until the last; and, when he could
no longer dictate to them as a patron, he set himself to try whether
he could not influence them as a landlord. A day was fixed for the
parishioners to meet in the church, that they might avail themselves
of the gift of the Crown by making choice of a minister; and, before
it arrived, the Captain made the round of his estate, visiting his
tenants and dependants, and every one whom he had either obliged, or
had the power of obliging, with the intention of forming a party to
vote for Mr. Simpson. All his influence, however, proved insufficient
to accomplish his object. His tenants preserved either a moody silence
when he urged them to come into his plans, or replied to his arguments,
which savoured sadly of temporal interests, in rude homilies about
liberty of conscience and the rights of the people. Urquhart was not
naturally a very patient man; he had been trained, too, in a rough
school; and, long before he had accomplished the purposed round, he
had got into one of his worst moods. His arguments had been converted
into threats, and his threats met by sturdy defiances. In the evening
of this vexatious day he stood in front of the steadings of Roderick
Ross of the Hill, a plain decent farmer, much beloved by the poor for
the readiness with which he imparted to them of his substance, and not
a little respected by Urquhart himself for his rough strong sense and
sterling honesty. A grey, weather-wasted headstone still marks out his
grave; but of the cottage which he inhabited, of his garden fence,
and the large gnarled elms which sprung out of it, of his barns, his
cow-houses, and his sheep-folds, there is not a single vestige. They
occupied, eighty years ago, the middle of one of the parks which are
laid out on the hill of Cromarty where it overlooks the town--the third
park in the upper range from the eastern corner. In rainy seasons,
the spring which supplied his well comes bursting out from among the
furrows. Roderick came from the barn to meet the laird; and, after the
customary greeting, was informed of the cause of his visit. The merits
of the case he had discussed at mill and smithy with every farmer on
the estate; and, with his usual bluntness, he now inquired at the laird
what interest he, a Papist, could have in the concerns of a Protestant
church. “For observe, Captain,” said he, “if ye ettle at serving us wi’
a minister, sound after your way o’ belief, I maun in conscience gie
you a’ the hinderance I can, as the man must be an unsound Papisher
to me; an’ if, what’s mair likely, ye only wuss to oblige the callant
Simpson wi’ a glebe, stipend, an’ manse, without meddling wi’ ony
religion, it’s surely my part to oppose ye baith;--you, for making
God’s kirk meat an’ drink to a hireling; him, for taking it on sic
terms.” The Captain, though he used to admire Roderick’s natural logic,
regarded it with a very different feeling when he found it brandished
against himself. “Roderick,” said he, and he swore a deadly oath, “you
shall either vote for Mr. Simpson or quit your farm at Whitsunday
first.” “You at least gie me my choice,” said the honest farmer, and
turning abruptly from him he stalked into the barn.
Roderick left his plough in the furrow on the day fixed for the
meeting, and went into the house to prepare for it, by dressing
himself in his best clothes. His wife had learned the result of his
conference with the laird, and, in her opinion, the argument of
threatened ejection was a more powerful one than any that could be
advanced by the opposite party. Repeatedly did she urge it, but to
no effect; Roderick was stubborn as an old Covenanter. She watched,
however, her opportunity; and when he went in to dress, which he always
did in a small apartment formed by an outjet of the cottage, she
followed him, as if once more to repeat what she had so often repeated
already, but in reality with a very different intention. She suffered
him to throw off his clothes, piece by piece, without the slightest
attempt to prevent him; but at the moment when his head and arms were
involved in the intricacies of a stout linen shirt, she snatched up
his holiday bonnet, coat, and waistcoat, together with the articles of
dress he had just relinquished, and rushing out of the apartment with
them, shut and bolted the door behind her. To place against it every
article of furniture which the outer room afforded, was the work of the
first minute; and to advise her liege lord to betake himself to the
bed which his prison contained until the kirk should have _skailed_,
was her employment in the second. Roderick was not to be baulked so.
There was a window in the apartment, which, had the walls been of
stone, would scarcely have afforded passage to an ordinary-sized cat,
but luckily they were of turf. Into this opening he insinuated first
his head, next his shoulders, and wriggling from side to side until
the whole wall heaved with the commotion, he wormed himself into
liberty; and then set off for the church of Cromarty, without bonnet,
coat, or waistcoat. An angry man was Roderick; and the anger, which
he well knew would gain him nothing if wreaked on the gudewife, was
boiling up against the Captain and Mr. Simpson. He entered the church,
and in a moment every eye in it was turned on him. The schoolmaster,
a thin serious-looking person, sat in the precentor’s desk, with his
writing materials before him, to take down the names of the voters,
hundreds of whom thronged the body of the church. Captain Urquhart, in
an attitude between sitting and standing, occupied one of the opposite
pews; about half a dozen of his servants lounged behind him. He was a
formidable-looking, dark-complexioned, square-shouldered man, of about
fifty; and over his harsh weather-beaten features, which were in some
little degree the reverse of engaging at any time, the occasion of
the meeting seemed to have flung a darker expression than was common
to them. As Roderick advanced, he started up as if to reconnoitre so
terrible an apparition. Roderick’s shirt and breeches were stained by
the damp mouldy turf of the window, his face had not escaped, and,
instead of being marked by its usual expression of quiet good-nature,
bore a portentous ferocity of aspect, which seemed to indicate a man
not rashly to be meddled with. “In the name of wonder, what brings you
here in such plight?” was the question put to him by an acquaintance
in the aisle. “I come here,” said Roderick, in a voice sufficiently
audible all over the building, “to gie my vote as a free member o’
this kirk in the election o’ this day; an’ as for the particular
plight,” lowering his tone into a whisper, “speer about that at the
gudewife.”--“And whom do you vote for?” said the schoolmaster, “for
the time is up;--there are two candidates, Simpson and Henderson.”
“For honest Mr. Henderson,” said the farmer; “an’ ill be his luck this
day wha votes for ae Roman out o’ the fear o’ anither, or lets the
luve o’ warld’s gear stan’ atween him an’ his conscience.” The Captain
grasped his stick; Roderick clenched his fist. “Look ye, Captain,” he
continued, “after flinging awa, for the sake o’ the puir kirk, the
bonny rigs o’ Driemonorie, an’ I ken I have done it, ye needna think
to daunt me wi’ a kent. Come out, Captain, yoursel, or ony twa o’ your
gang, an’ in this quarrel I shall bide the warst. Nay, man, glower as
ye list; I’m no obliged to be feart though ye choose to be angry.”
The shout of “No Popish patron!--no Popish patron!” which shook the
very roof that stretched over the heads of the hundreds who joined in
it, served as a kind of chorus to this fearless defiance. The Captain
suffered his stick to slip through his fingers until the knob rested
on his palm, and then, striding over the pew, he walked out of church.
In less than half an hour after, the popular candidate was declared
duly elected, and at Whitsunday first Roderick was ejected from his
farm. His character, however, as a man of probity and a skilful farmer,
was so well established throughout the country, that he suffered less
on the occasion than almost any other person would have done. He died
many years after, the tacksman of Peddieston, possessed of ingear and
outgear, and of a very considerable sum of money, with which he had the
temerity to intrust a newfangled kind of money-borrower, termed a bank.
[Sidenote: MR. HENDERSON.]
After all they had achieved and suffered on this occasion, the people
of Cromarty were unfortunate in their minister. He was a person of
considerable talent, and an amiable disposition; and beloved by
every class of his parishoners. The young spoke well of him for his
good-nature; the old for the deference which he paid to the opinions
of his lay advisers. He was, besides, deeply read in theology, and
acquainted with the various workings of religion in the various
constitutions of mind. But of all his friends and advisers, there
were none sufficiently acquainted with his character to give him the
advice which he most needed. He was naturally amiable and unassuming,
and when he became a convert to Christianity, scarcely any change took
place in his external conduct. He continued to act from principle
in the manner he had previously acted from the natural bent of his
disposition. For the first few years he was much impressed by a sense
of the importance of spiritual concerns, and he became a minister of
the church that he might press their importance upon others; but there
are ebbs and flows of the mind in its moral as certainly as in its
intellectual operations; and that flow of zeal which characterizes the
young convert is very often succeeded by a temporary ebb, during which
he sinks into comparative indifference. It was thus with Henderson.
His first impressions became faint, and he continued to walk the round
of his duties, rather from their having become matters of custom to
him, and that it was necessary for him to maintain the character
of being consistent, than from a due sense of their importance. He
continued, too, to instruct his people by delineations of character
and expositions of doctrine; but his knowledge of the first was the
result of studies which he had ceased to prosecute, and in which he
himself had been both the student and the thing studied, and the
efficacy of the latter was neutralized by their having become to him
less the objects of serious belief than of metaphysical speculation.
His peculiar character, too, with all its seeming advantages of natural
constitution, was perhaps as much exposed to evil as others of a less
amiable stamp. There are passions and dispositions so unequivocally
bad, that even indifference itself is roused to oppose them; but when
the current of nature and the course of duty seem to run parallel,
we suffer ourselves to be borne away by the stream, and are seldom
sufficiently watchful to ascertain whether the parallelism be alike
exact in every stage of our progress. Henderson’s character precluded
both suspicion and advice. What were the feelings of his people, when,
on summoning the elders of the church, he told them, that, having
formed an improper connexion with a girl of the place, he had become a
disgrace to the order to which he belonged! He was expelled from his
office, and after remaining in town until a neighbouring clergyman
had dealt to him the censures of the Church, from the pulpit which he
himself had lately occupied, and in presence of a congregation that had
once listened to him with pleasure, and now beheld him with tears, he
went away, no one knew whither, and was never again seen in Cromarty.
About twenty years after, a young lad, a native of the place, was
journeying after nightfall between Elgin and Banff, when he was joined
by two persons who were travelling in the same direction, and entered
into conversation with them. One of them seemed to be a plain country
farmer; the other was evidently a man of education and breeding. The
farmer, with a curiosity deemed characteristic of Scotchmen of a
certain class, questioned him about the occasion of his journey, and
his place of residence. The other seemed less curious; but no sooner
had he learned that he was a native of Cromarty, than he became the
more inquisitive of the two; and his numberless inquiries regarding the
people of the town, showed that at some period he had been intimately
acquainted with them. But many of those after whom he inquired had been
long dead, or had removed from the place years before. The lad whose
curiosity was excited, was mustering up courage to ask him whether he
had not at some time or other resided in Cromarty, when the stranger,
hastily seizing his hand with the cordiality of an old friend, bade him
farewell, and turning off at a cross-road, left him to the company of
the farmer. “Who is that gentleman?” was his first question. “The Mr.
Henderson,” was the reply, “who was at one time minister of Cromarty.”
The lad learned further, that he supported himself as a country
schoolmaster, and was a devout, excellent man, charitable and tender
to others, but severe to himself beyond the precedents of Reformed
Churches. “I wish,” said the farmer, “you had seen him by day;--he has
the grey locks and bent frame of old age though he is not yet turned
of fifty. There is a hill in a solitary part of the country, near his
school, on which he frequently spends the long winter nights in prayer
and meditation; and a little below its summit there is a path which
runs quite round, and which can be seen a full mile away, that has been
hollowed out by his feet.”
CHAPTER XXV.
“Unquiet souls
Risen from the grave, to ease the heavy guilt
Of deeds in life concealed.”--AKENSIDE.
[Sidenote: THE CHURCHYARD GHOST.]
Of all the wilder beliefs of our forefathers, there is none which so
truly continues to exist as the belief in the churchyard spectre.
Treat it as we may, it has assuredly a fast hold of our nature. We
may conceal, but we cannot smother it;--we may deny it as pointedly
as the lackey does his master when the visitor is an unwelcome one,
but it is not from that circumstance a whit the less at home. True or
false, too, it seems to act no unimportant part in the moral economy of
the world. For without a deeper sense of religion to set in its place
than most people entertain, men would be greatly the worse for wanting
it. There are superstitions which perform, in some measure, the work
of the devotional sentiment, when the latter is either undeveloped
or misdirected; and the superstition of the churchyard ghost is
unquestionably one of the number.
[Sidenote: MY WRITING-ROOM.]
I am fortunate, so far as the sympathy of place can have any influence
on the mind, in the little antique room in which I have set myself to
illustrate the belief. Just look round you for one brief minute, and
see how the little narrow windows rise into the thatch, and how very
profoundly one requires to stoop ere one can enter by the door. The
ceiling rises far into the roof. There is a deep recess in the wall
occupied by a few pieces of old china, and a set of shelves laden
with old books; and only see how abruptly the hearth-stone rises
over the sanded floor, and how well the fashion of yonder old oaken
table agrees with that of the old oaken scrutoire in the opposite
corner. Humble as my apartment may seem, it is a place of some little
experience in the affairs of both this world and the other. It has
seen three entire generations come into being and pass away, and it
now shelters the scion of a fourth. It has been a frequent scene of
christenings, bridals, and lykewakes--of the joys and sorrows, the
cares and solicitudes of humble life. Nor were these all. There is the
identical door at which it is said a great-grand-aunt of the writer
saw a sheeted spectre looking in upon her as she lay a-bed; and there
the window at which another and nearer relative was sitting in a
stormy winter evening, thinking of her husband far at sea, when, after
a dismal gust had howled over the roof, the flapping of a sail and
the cry of distress were heard, and she wrung her hands in anguish,
convinced that her sailor had perished. And so indeed it was. Strange
voices have echoed from the adjoining apartment; the sounds of an
unknown foot have been heard traversing its floor; and I have only to
descend the stair ere I stand on the place where a shadowy dissevered
hand was once seen beckoning on one of the inmates. How incalculably
numerous must such stories have once been, when the history of one
little domicile furnishes so many?
[Sidenote: THE BROKEN PROMISE.]
About sixteen years ago, I accompanied an elderly relative--now,
alas! no more--on a journey through the parishes of Nigg, Fearn, and
Tarbat. He was a shrewd, clear-headed man, of great warmth of heart,
who continued to bear a balmy atmosphere of the enthusiasm of early
youth about him, despite of the hard-earned experience of fifty-five.
There could not be a more delightful companion even to a boy. I never
knew one half so well acquainted with the traditionary history of the
country. Every hamlet we passed, almost every green mound, had its
story; and there was that happy mixture of point and simplicity in
his style of narrative, which almost every one knows how to admire,
and scarcely one of a thousand how to imitate. He had, I suspect, a
good deal of the sceptic in his composition, and regarded his ghost
stories rather as the machinery of a sort of domestic poetry than as
pieces of real history; but then, no one could value them more as
curious illustrations of human belief, or show less of the coldness
of infidelity in his mode of telling them. “Yonder lofty ridge,” said
he, as we passed along, “is the hill of Nigg, so famous, you know,
as a hunting-place of the Fions. Were we on the other side, where it
overhangs the sea, I could point out to you the remains of a cottage
that has an old ghost story connected with it--a story that dates, I
believe, some time in the early days of your grandmother. Two young
girls, who had grown up together from the days of their childhood,
and were mutually attached, had gone to the lykewake of a female
acquaintance, a poor orphan, and found some women employed in dressing
the body. There was an indifference and even light-heartedness shown
on the occasion that shocked the two friends; and they solemnly
agreed before parting, that should one of them outlive the other, the
survivor, and no one besides, should lay out the corpse of the departed
for the grave. The feeling, however, passed with the occasion out of
which it arose, and the mutual promise was forgotten, until several
years after, when one of the girls, then the mistress of a solitary
farmhouse on the hill of Nigg, was informed one morning, by a chance
passenger, that her old companion, who had become the wife of a farmer
in the neighbouring parish of Fearn, had died in childbed during the
previous night. She called to mind her promise, but it was only to
reflect how impossible it was for her to fulfill it. She had her infant
to tend, and no one to intrust it to--her maid having left her scarcely
an hour before for a neighbouring fair, to which her husband and his
ploughman had also gone. She spent an anxious day, and it was with no
ordinary solicitude, as she saw the evening gradually darkening, and
thought of her promise and her deceased companion, that she went out
to a little hillock beside the house, which commanded a view of the
moor over which her husband and the servants had to pass on their way
from the fair, to ascertain whether any of them were yet returning.
At length she could discern through the deepening twilight, a female
figure in white coming along the moor, and supposing it to be the
maid, and unwilling to appear so anxious for her return, she went into
the house. The outer apartment, as was customary at the period, was
occupied as a cow-house; some of the animals were in their stalls,
and on their beginning to snort and stamp as if disturbed by some one
passing, the woman half turned her to the door. What, however, was her
astonishment to see, instead of the maid, a tall figure wrapped up
from head to foot in a winding-sheet! It passed round to the opposite
side of the fire, where there was a chair drawn in for the farmer, and
seating itself, raised its thin chalky arms and uncovered its face.
The features, as shown by the flame, were those of the deceased woman;
and it was with an expression of anger, which added to the horror of
the appearance, that the dead and glassy eyes were turned to her old
companion, who, shrinking with a terror that seemed to annihilate
every feeling and faculty except the anxious solicitude of the mother,
strained her child to her bosom, and gazed as if fascinated on the
terrible apparition before her. She could see every fold of the sheet;
the black hair seemed to droop carelessly over the forehead; the livid,
unbreathing lips were drawn apart, as if no friendly hand had closed
them after the last agony; and the reflection of the flame seemed to
rise and fall within the eyes--varying by its ceaseless flicker the
statue-like fixedness of the features. As the fire began to decay,
the woman recovered enough of her self-possession to stretch her hand
behind her, and draw from time to time out of the child’s cradle a
handful of straw, which she flung on the embers; but she had lost all
reckoning of time, and could only guess at the duration of the visit
by finding the straw nearly expended. She was looking forward with a
still deepening horror to being left in darkness with the spectre, when
voices were heard in the yard without. The apparition glided towards
the door; the cattle began to snort and stamp, as on its entrance;
and one of them struck at it with its feet in the passing; when it
uttered a faint shriek and disappeared. The farmer entered the cottage
a moment after, barely in time to see his wife fall over in a swoon on
the floor, and to receive the child. Next morning, says the story, the
woman attended the lykewake, to fulfil all of her engagement that she
yet could; and on examining the body, discovered that, by a strange
sympathy, the mark of a cow’s hoof was distinctly impressed on its left
side.”
[Sidenote: THE POLANDER.]
We passed onwards, and paused for a few seconds where the parish of
Nigg borders on that of Fearn, beside an old hawthorn hedge and a few
green mounds. “And here,” said my companion, “is the scene of another
ghost story, that made some noise in its day; but it is now more than
a century old, and the details are but imperfectly preserved. You
have read, in Johnson’s Life of Denham, that Charles II., during his
exile in France, succeeded in procuring a contribution of ten thousand
pounds from the Scotch that at that time wandered as itinerant traders
over Poland. The old hedge beside you, and the few green mounds beyond
it, once formed the dwelling-house and garden fence of one of these
Polish traders, who had returned in old age to his native country,
possessed, as all supposed, of very considerable wealth. He was known
to the country folk as the ‘Rich Polander.’ On his death, however,
which took place suddenly, his strong-box was found to contain only a
wall, bequeathing to his various relations large sums that were vested,
no one knew where. Some were of opinion that he had lent money to a
considerable amount to one or two neighbouring proprietors; and some
had heard him speak of a brother in Poland, with whom he had left the
greater part of his capital, and who had been robbed and murdered by
banditti, somewhere on the frontier territories, when on his return
to Scotland. In the middle of these surmisings, however, the Polander
himself returned, as if to settle the point. The field there to the
right, in front of the ruins, was at that time laid out as a lawn;
there was a gate in the eastern corner, and another in the west; and
there ran between them a road that passed the front of the house. And
almost every evening the apparition of the Polander, for years after
his decease, walked along that road. It came invariably from the east,
lingered long in front of the building, and then, gliding towards
the west, disappeared in passing through the gateway. But no one had
courage enough to meet with it, or address it; and till this day the
legacies of the Polander remain unpaid. I was acquainted in my younger
days with a very old man, who has assured me that he repeatedly saw
the apparition when on its twilight peregrinations along the road; and
once as he lay a-bed in the morning in his mother’s cottage, long after
the sun had risen. There was a broad stream of light falling through
an opening in the roof, athwart the grey and mottled darkness of the
interior, and the apparition stood partly in the light, partly in the
shadow. The richly-embroidered waistcoat, white cravat, and small
clothes of crimson velvet, were distinctly visible; but he could see
only the faint glitter of the laced hat and of the broad shoe-buckles;
and though the thin withered hands were clearly defined, the features
were wholly invisible.”
[Sidenote: THE ONE-EYED STEPMOTHER.]
We had now entered the parish of Fearn. “And here,” continued my
companion, as we approached the abbey, “is the scene of two other
ghost stories, both, like the last, somewhat meagre in their details,
but they may serve to show how, in a rude and lawless age, the cause
of manners and of morals must have found no inefficient ally in a
deeply-seated belief in the supernatural. A farmer of the parish, who
had just buried his wife, had gone on the evening of the funeral to
pay his addresses to a young woman who lived in a cottage beside the
burying-ground yonder. There was, it would seem, little of delicacy
on either side; and his suit proved so acceptable, that shortly
after nightfall he had his new mistress seated on his knee. They
were laughing and joking together beside a window that opened to the
churchyard, when the mother of the young girl entered the apartment,
and, shocked by their levity, reminded him that the corpse of the woman
so lately deceased lay in all the entireness and almost all the warmth
of life not forty yards from where they sat. ‘No, no, mother,’ said
the man; ‘entire she may be, but she was cold enough in all conscience
before we laid her there.’ He turned round as he spoke, and saw his
deceased wife looking in upon him through the window. And returning
home, he took to his bed, and died of a brain fever only a fortnight
after. Depend on’t, that widowers in this part of the country would be
less hasty ever after in courting their second wives.
“The cottage higher up the hill--that one with the roof nearly gone,
and the old elm beside it--was occupied about sixty years ago by a
farmer of the parish and a harsh-tempered one-eyed woman, his wife.
He had a son and daughter, the children of a former marriage, who
found the dame a very stepmother. The boy was in but his fifth, the
daughter in but her seventh year; and yet the latter was shrewd enough
to remark on one occasion, when beaten by the woman for transferring
a little bit of leaven from the baking-trough to her mouth, that her
second mother could see better with her one eye than her first mother
with her two. The deceased, an industrious housewife, had left behind
her large store of blankets and bed-linen; but the bed of the two
children for the summer and autumn after the marriage of their father,
was covered by only a few worn-out rags, and when the winter set in,
the poor things had to lie in one another’s arms for the early part of
every night shuddering with cold. For a week together, however, they
were found every morning closely wrapt up in some of their mother’s
best blankets. The stepdame stormed, and threatened, and replaced the
blankets in a large store-chest, furnished with lock and hasp; but it
was all in vain--they were found, notwithstanding, each morning on the
children’s bed regularly as the morning came; and the poor things,
though threatened and beaten, could give no other account of the
matter than that they had been very cold when they fell asleep, and
warm and comfortable when they awoke. At length, however, the girl was
enabled to explain the circumstance in a manner that had the effect
of tempering the severity of the stepmother all her life after. Her
brother had fallen asleep, she said, but _she_ was afraid, and could
not sleep; she was, besides, very cold, and so she lay awoke till near
the middle of the night, when the door opened, and there entered a lady
all dressed in white. The fire was blazing brightly, and she could
see as clearly as by day the large chest lying locked in the corner;
but when the lady went to it the hasp flew open, and she took out the
blankets and wrapt them carefully round her brother and herself in the
bed. The lady then kissed her brother, and was going to kiss her too,
when she looked up in her face, and saw it was her first mother. And
then she went away without opening the door.
[Sidenote: THE PEDLAR.]
“I remember another ghost story,” continued my companion, “the scene
of which I shall point out to you when we have entered the parish of
Tarbat. There is a little muddy lake in the upper part of the parish
which almost dries up in the warmer seasons, and on the further edge
of which we shall be able to trace the remains of what was once a
farmhouse. Considerably more than a century ago, a young man who
travelled the country as a packman suddenly disappeared, no one knew
how; and several years after, in a dry summer, which reduced the lake
to less than half its usual size, there was found a human skeleton
among the mud and rushes at the bottom. Long ere the discovery,
however, the farmhouse was haunted by a restless, mischievous spectre,
wrapped up in a grey plaid. Like most murdered folk of those days, the
pedlar walked, restricting his appearance, however, to the interior
of the cottage, which at length came to be deserted; and falling into
decay, it lay for the greater part of a half century as a roofless
grass-covered ruin. Its old inmates had died off in extreme penury and
wretchedness, and both they and the pedlar were nearly forgotten, when
a young man, no way related to either, availing himself of the site of
the cottage and the portions of its broken walls which still remained,
rebuilt it when on the eve of his marriage, and removed to it with
his young wife. On the third evening, when all the wedding guests had
returned to their respective homes, the young couple were disturbed by
strange noises in an adjoining room, and shortly after the door of the
apartment fell open, and there entered a figure wrapped up in a grey
plaid. ‘Who are you?’ said the man, leaping out of bed and stretching
forth his arms to grapple with the figure. ‘The unhappy pedlar,’
replied the spectre, stepping backwards, ‘who was murdered sixty years
ago in this very room, and his body thrown into the loch below. But I
shall trouble you no more. The murderer has gone to his place, and in
two short hours the permitted time of my wanderings on earth shall be
over; for had I escaped the cruel knife, I would have died in my bed
this evening a greyheaded old man.’ It disappeared as it spoke; and
from that night was never more seen nor heard by the inmates of the
farmhouse.” According to Hogg--
“Certain it is, from that day to this,
The ghaist of the pedlar was never mair seen.”
It seems curious enough that such a story should have been received
for many years as true in a district of country in which the people
hold, as strict Calvinists, that no man, however sudden or violent his
death, can die before his appointed time. It may, however, belong to
a somewhat remoter period than that assigned to it--some time in the
early half of the last century--and may have originated in the age
of the curates, whose theology is understood to have been Arminian.
Another of my companion’s stories, communicated on this occasion, had
its scene laid in a district of country full sixty miles away.
[Sidenote: THE GREEN LADY.]
The wife of a Banffshire proprietor, of the minor class, had been about
six months dead, when one of her husband’s ploughmen, returning on
horseback from the smithy in the twilight of an autumn evening, was
accosted, on the banks of a small stream, by a stranger lady, tall and
slim, and wholly attired in green, with her face wrapped up in the hood
of her mantle--who requested to be taken up behind him on the horse,
and carried across. There was something in the tones of her voice that
seemed to thrill through his very bones, and to insinuate itself in the
form of a chill fluid between his skull and the scalp. The request,
too, seemed a strange one; for the rivulet was small and low, and could
present no serious bar to the progress of the most timid traveller. But
the man, unwilling ungallantly to disoblige a lady, turned his horse
to the bank, and she sprang up lightly behind him. She was, however,
a personage that could be better seen than felt; and came in contact
with the ploughman’s back, he said, as if she had been an ill-filled
sack of wool. And when, on reaching the opposite side of the streamlet,
she leaped down as lightly as she had mounted, and he turned fearfully
round to catch a second glimpse of her, it was in the conviction
that she was a creature considerably less earthly in her texture
than himself. She opened with two pale, thin arms, the enveloping
hood, exhibiting a face equally pale and thin, which seemed marked,
however, by the roguish, half-humorous expression of one who had just
succeeded in playing off a good joke. “My dead mistress!” exclaimed the
ploughman. “Yes, John, _your mistress_,” replied the ghost. “But ride
home, my bonny man, for it’s growing late; you and I will be better
acquainted erelong.” John accordingly rode home, and told his story.
Next evening, about the same hour, as two of the laird’s servant-maids
were engaged in washing in an out-house, there came a slight tap to
the door. “Come in,” said one of the maids; and the lady entered,
dressed, as on the previous night, in green. She swept past them to
the inner part of the washing-room; and seating herself on a low
bench, from which, ere her death, she used occasionally to superintend
their employment, she began to question them, as if still in the body,
about the progress of their work. The girls, however, were greatly too
frightened to reply. She then visited an old woman who had nursed the
laird, and to whom she used to show, ere her departure, considerably
more kindness than her husband. And she now seemed as much interested
in her welfare as ever. She inquired whether the laird was kind to her;
and, looking round her little smoky cottage, regretted she should be so
indifferently lodged, and that her cupboard, which was rather of the
emptiest at the time, should not be more amply furnished. For nearly
a twelvemonth after, scarce a day passed in which she was not seen by
some of the domestics--never, however, except on one occasion, after
the sun had risen, or before it had set. The maids could see her in the
grey of the morning flitting like a shadow round their beds, or peering
in upon them at night through the dark window-panes, or at half-open
doors. In the evening she would glide into the kitchen or some of the
out-houses--one of the most familiar and least dignified of her class
that ever held intercourse with mankind--and inquire of the girls
how they had been employed during the day; often, however, without
obtaining an answer, though from a different cause from that which
had at first tied their tongues. For they had become so regardless of
her presence, viewing her simply as a troublesome mistress who had no
longer any claim to be heeded, that when she entered, and they had
dropped their conversation, under the impression that their visitor
was a creature of flesh and blood like themselves, they would again
resume it, remarking that the entrant was “only the green lady.” Though
always cadaverously pale and miserable-looking, she affected a joyous
disposition, and was frequently heard to laugh, even when invisible.
At one time, when provoked by the studied silence of a servant girl,
she flung a pillow at her head, which the girl caught up and returned;
at another, she presented her first acquaintance, the ploughman, with
what seemed to be a handful of silver coin, which he transferred to
his pocket, but which, on hearing her laugh immediately after she
had disappeared, he drew out again, and found to be merely a handful
of slate-shivers. On yet another occasion, the man, when passing on
horseback through a clump of wood, was repeatedly struck from behind
the trees by little pellets of turf; and, on riding into the thicket,
he found that his assailant was the green lady. To her husband she
never appeared; but he frequently heard the tones of her voice echoing
from the lower apartments, and the faint peal of her cold unnatural
laugh.
One day at noon, a year after her first appearance, the old nurse was
surprised to see her enter the cottage, as all her previous visits had
been made early in the morning or late in the evening; whereas now,
though the day was dark and lowering, and a storm of wind and rain had
just broken out, still it _was_ day. “Mammie!” she said, “I cannot
open the heart of the laird, and I have nothing of my own to give you;
but I think I can do something for you now. Go straight to the White
House [that of a neighbouring proprietor], and tell the folk there to
set out, with all the speed of man and horse, for the black rock at
the foot of the crags, or they’ll rue it dearly to their dying day.
Their bairns, foolish things, have gone out to the rock, and the sea
has flowed round them; and if no help reach them soon, they’ll be all
scattered like seaware on the shore ere the fall of the tide. But if
you go and tell your story at the White House, mammie, the bairns will
be safe for an hour to come; and there will be something done by their
mother to better you, for the news.” The woman went as directed, and
told her story; and the father of the children set out on horseback
in hot haste for the rock--a low, insulated skerry, which, lying on
a solitary part of the beach, far below the line of flood, was shut
out from the view of the inhabited country by a wall of precipices,
and covered every tide by several feet of water. On reaching the edge
of the cliffs, he saw the black rock, as the woman had described,
surrounded by the sea, and the children clinging to its higher crags.
But, though the waves were fast rising, his attempts to ride out
through the surf to the poor little things were frustrated by their
cries, which so frightened his horse as to render it unmanageable; and
so he had to gallop on to the nearest fishing village for a boat. So
much time was unavoidably lost, in consequence, that nearly the whole
beach was covered by the sea, and the surf had begun to lash the feet
of the precipices behind; but, until the boat arrived, not a single
wave dashed over the black rock; though immediately after the last of
the children had been rescued, an immense wreath of foam rose twice a
man’s height over its topmost pinnacle.
The old nurse, on her return to the cottage, found the green lady
sitting beside the fire. “Mammie,” she said, “you have made friends to
yourself to-day, who will be kinder to you than your foster-son. I must
now leave you: my time is out, and you’ll be all left to yourselves;
but I’ll have no rest, mammie, for many a twelvemonth to come. Ten
years ago a travelling pedlar broke into our garden in the fruit
season, and I sent out our old ploughman, who is now in Ireland, to
drive him away. It was on a Sunday, and everybody else was in church.
The men struggled and fought, and the pedlar was killed. But though I
at first thought of bringing the case before the laird, when I saw
the dead man’s pack with its silks and its velvets, and this unhappy
piece of green satin (shaking her dress), my foolish heart beguiled me,
and I bade the ploughman bury the pedlar’s body under our ash-tree, in
the corner of our garden, and we divided his goods and money between
us. You must bid the laird raise his bones, and carry them to the
churchyard; and the gold, which you will find in the little _bole_
under the tapestry in my room, must be sent to a poor old widow, the
pedlar’s mother, who lives on the shore of Leith. I must now away
to Ireland to the ploughman; and I’ll be e’en less welcome to him,
mammie, than at the laird’s; but the hungry blood cries loud against us
both--him and me--and we must suffer together. Take care you look not
after me till I have passed the knowe.” She glided away as she spoke in
a gleam of light; and when the old woman had withdrawn her hand from
her eyes, dazzled by the sudden brightness, she saw only a large black
greyhound crossing the moor. And the green lady was never afterwards
seen in Scotland. But the little hoard of gold pieces, stored in a
concealed recess of her former apartment, and the mouldering remains
of the pedlar under the ash-tree, gave evidence to the truth of her
narrative.
[Sidenote: MUNRO THE POST.]
I shall present the reader with one other story under this head--a
ghost story of the more frightful class; which, though not at all
inexplicable on natural principles, has as many marks of authenticity
about it as any of the kind I am acquainted with. For many years the
Cromarty Post-office, which, from the peninsular situation of the
place, lies considerably out of the line of the mail, was connected
with Inverness by a brace of pedestrian postmen, who divided the road
between them into two stages; the last, or Cromarty stage, commencing
at Fortrose. The post who, about half a century ago, travelled over
this terminal stage six times every week was an elderly Highlander
of the clan Munro--a staid, grave-featured man, somewhat tinged, it
was said, by the constitutional melancholy of his country-folk, and
not a little influenced by their peculiar beliefs. He had set out
for Fortrose on his way home one evening, when he was overtaken by
two acquaintances--the one a miller of Resolis, the other a tacksman
of the parish of Cromarty--both considerably in liquor, and loud and
angry in dispute. One of the Fortrose fairs had been held that day;
and they had quarrelled in driving a bargain. Saunders Munro strove to
pacify them, but to little purpose--they bickered idly on with drunken
pertinacity; and it was with no little anxiety that, as they reached
the Burn of Rosemarkie, where the White-bog and Scarfs-craig roads part
company, he saw them pause for a moment, as if to determine their route
homewards. The miller was a tall athletic Highlander; the tacksman
a compact, nervous man, not above the middle size, but resolute and
strongly built. He could scarce, however, be deemed a full match for
the Highlander; and under some such impression, old Saunders, unluckily
as it proved, laid hold of him as he stood hesitating. “You must not
go by that White-bog road,” he said; “it is the near road for the
miller, but not for you; you must come with me by the Scarfs-craig.”
“No, Saunders,” said the tacksman; “I know what you mean; you do not
like that I should cross the Maolbuie moor with the miller; but, big
as he is, he’ll be bigger yet or he daunt me; and I’ll just go by
the White-bog road to show him that.” “Hoot, man,” replied Saunders,
“I’m no thinking o’ that at all; I’m just no very weel to-night, and
would be the better for your company; and so ye’ll come hame this way
with me.” “Not a foot,” doggedly rejoined the tacksman; and, shaking
off the old man, he took the White-bog road with the miller. Saunders
stood gazing anxiously after them as they descended the precipitous
sides of the burn, until a jutting crag hid them from his sight. And
for the rest of the evening, when pursuing his journey homewards, he
felt burdened by an overpowering anxiety, which, disproportioned as it
seemed to the occasion, he could not shake off.
The tacksman reached his home in less than two hours after he had
parted from old Saunders; but two full days elapsed ere any one heard
of the miller. In the evening of the second day, two young girls, the
miller’s sisters, who, after many fruitless inquiries regarding him,
had at length come to learn in whose company he had quitted the fair,
called at the farmhouse, and found the tacksman sitting moodily beside
the fire. He started up, however, as one of them addressed him, and
seemed strangely confused on being asked where he had parted from their
brother. “I do not remember,” he said, “being with your brother at all;
and yet, now that I think of it, we must surely have left Rosemarkie
together. The truth is, we had both rather too much drink in our heads.
But I have some remembrance of passing the Grey Cairn in his company;
and--and;--but--I must surely have left him at the Grey Cairn.” “It
must be ill with my brother,” exclaimed one of the girls, “if he be
still at the Grey Cairn!” “In truth,” replied the tacksman, “I cannot
well say where we parted, or whether I did not leave him at Rosemarkie
with old Saunders Munro the post.”
The evening was by this time merging into night, but the two terrified
girls set out for the cairn; and the tacksman, taking down his bonnet,
seemed as if he purposed accompanying them. On reaching, however, the
outer wall of his yard, he stood for a few seconds as if undecided, and
then, turning fairly round, left them to proceed alone. They entered
one of the blind pathways that go winding in every direction through
the long heath of the Maolbuie--a bleak, desolate, tumulus-mottled
moor--the scene in some remote age of a battle unrecorded by the
historian; and its grey cairn, a vast accumulation of lichened stone,
is said to cover, as I have already stated in an early chapter, the
grave of a Pictish monarch, who, with half his army, perished in the
fray. They reached the cairn; but all was silent, save that a chill
breeze was moaning through the interstices of the shapeless pile, and
sullenly waving the few fir seedlings that skirt its base; and they
had turned to leave the spot, when they were startled by the howling
of a dog a few hundred yards away. There was a dolorous wildness blent
with an ominous familiarity in the sounds, that smote upon their
hearts; and they struck out into the moor in the direction whence they
proceeded, convinced that they were at length to learn the worst. On
coming up to the animal, they found it standing beside the dead body
of its master, their brother. The corpse was examined next morning by
some of the neighbouring farmers; but nothing could be conclusively
determined respecting the manner in which the unfortunate man had met
his death. The neckcloth seemed straitened, and the folds somewhat
compressed, as if it had been grasped by the hand; but then the throat
and neck were scarce at all discoloured, nor were the features more
distorted than if the death had been a natural one. The heath and
mosses, too, in which the body had half sunk, rose as unbroken on every
side of it as if they had never been pressed by the foot. There was no
interference of the magistrate in the case, nor examination of parties.
The body was conveyed to the churchyard and buried; and a little pile
of moor-stones, erected by the herd-boys who tend their cattle on the
moor, continued to mark, when I last passed the way, the spot where it
had been found.
One evening, a few weeks after the interment, as old Saunders the
postman was coming slowly down upon the town of Cromarty through the
dark Navity woods, his eye caught a tall figure coming up behind him,
and mistaking it in the uncertain light for an acquaintance, a farmer,
he paused for a moment by the wayside, and placed his hand almost
mechanically on the ready snuff-box. What, however, was his horror and
astonishment to find, that what he had mistaken for his acquaintance
the farmer was the dead miller of Resolis, attired, as was the wont of
the deceased when in holiday trim, in the Highland costume. He could
see, scarce less distinctly than when he had parted from him at the
Burn of Rosemarkie, the chequers of the tartan and the scarlet of the
gay hose garter, and--a circumstance I have never known omitted in any
edition of the story--the glimmer of the large brass pin which fastened
the kilt at the waist. For an instant Saunders felt as if rooted to
the spot; and then starting forward he hurried homewards, half beside
himself with a terror that seemed to obliterate every idea of space
and time, but collected enough to remark that the spectre kept close
beside him, taking step for step with him as he went, until, at the
gate of a burying-ground immediately over the town, it disappeared. On
the following evening, when again passing through the Navity woods,
nervous with the recollection of the previous night’s adventure, he was
startled by a rustling in the bushes; a shadowy figure came gliding
out from among them to the middle of the road, and he found himself
a second time in the presence of the spectre, which accompanied him,
as before, to the gate of the burying-ground. He contrived on the day
after to leave Fortrose at so early an hour, that he had reached the
outer skirts of the town of Cromarty as the sun was setting; but on
crossing the street to his own house, the spectre started up beside him
in the clear twilight, and, regarding him with an expression of grieved
anxiety, disappeared as he entered the door. An aunt of the writer, who
had occasion to call at his house on this evening, found him in bed in
a corner of the sitting-room of his domicile, and on inquiring whether
he was ill, was informed by his wife, who sat beside him, the cause of
his indisposition.
On his next day’s journey, Saunders, instead of following his usual
road, struck, on his return, across the fields in the direction of a
wooded ravine, which, forming part of the pleasure-grounds of Cromarty
House, bears the name of the Ladies’ Walk. The evening was cloudless
and bright; and the sun had but just disappeared behind the hill,
when he entered the wooded hollow and crossed the little stream which
runs along its bottom. But on rising along the opposite acclivity,
he found that the apparition of the dead miller, true to him as his
shadow, was climbing the hill by his side; and where the path becomes
so narrow--bounded on the one side by a steep descending bank, and
on the other by a line of flowering shrubs--that two can hardly walk
abreast, it glided onwards through the bushes as lightly as a column of
smoke, not a leaf stirring as it passed. On reaching the broken wall
which separates the pleasure-grounds from the old parish-churchyard,
it stood, and, as Saunders was stepping over the fence, spoke for the
first time. “Stop, Saunders,” it said, “I must speak to you.” “I have
neither faith nor strength,” replied Saunders, hurrying away, “to speak
to the like of you.”
The minister of the parish at the time was a gentleman of strong
good sense and a liberal tone of mind; and when the old man waited
on him in the course of the evening, and imparted to him his story,
he questioned him regarding the state of his nerves and stomach, and
gave him an advice which very considerably resembled the prescription
of a physician. But though it might be the best possible in the
circumstances, it wholly failed to satisfy Saunders; and so he
unburdened his mind on the matter to one of the elders of the parish,
a worthy sensible Udoll farmer, a high specimen of the class well
known in the north country as “the Men,” who, considerably advanced in
life, had formed his beliefs at an earlier period than his minister,
and was not in the least disposed to treat the case medicinally. He
arranged with Saunders a meeting for the following evening at the hill
of Eathie, a few miles from his journey’s end; and at Eathie they
accordingly met, and passed on through the Navity woods together. But
though it was late and long ere they reached town, the details of what
befell them by the way they never communicated to any one. Saunders
Munro, however, did not again see the apparition, though he travelled
for years after at all hours of the day and night. The elder, when
rallied regarding the story by a town’s-man whom I well knew, and who
related the circumstance to me, looked him full in the face, and, with
an expression of severe gravity, “bade him never select that subject
for a joke again.” “Young man,” he said, “it was no joking business!”
No one, however, evinced so deep an anxiety on the subject of the
miller’s ghost, and its supposed interview with the elder, as the
suspected tacksman. It is known that on one occasion he placed himself
in the elder’s way when the latter was returning from a funeral, and
solicited a few minutes’ private conversation with him; but was sternly
repelled. “You can have but one business with me,” the elder said;
“and, if your conscience be clear from blood, not one itself.” Whatever
hand the tacksman may have had in the miller’s death, no one who knew
him, or the circumstances in which he had parted on the fatal night
from old Saunders, could regard him as a murderer; though few real
murderers ever wore out life in greater apparent unhappiness than he.
He never after held up his head, but went about his ordinary labours
dejected and spiritless, and invincibly taciturn; and, some few years
subsequent to the event, he fell into a lingering illness, of which
he died. Were one _making_ a ghost story, it would be no difficult
matter to make a more satisfactory one. Never was there a ghost that
appeared to less purpose than that of the miller, or was less fortunate
in securing a publisher for its secret; but sure I am, never was there
a ghost story more firmly believed in the immediate scene of it, or
narrated with greater truth-like minuteness of detail, or with less
suspicion of at least the _honesty_ of the parties on whose testimony
it rested. Nor was it without its effect in adding strength, within the
sphere of its influence, to the fence set around the sacred tabernacle
of the human soul. Where such stories are credited, the violent
spilling of man’s life is never regarded as merely “the diverting of a
little red puddle from its source.”
CHAPTER XXVI.
“Oh, many are the poets that are sown
By nature; men endow’d with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse.”--WORDSWORTH.
[Sidenote: THE LITERATI OF CROMARTY.]
During even the early part of last century, there were a few of the
mechanics of Cromarty conversant in some little degree with books and
the pen. They had their libraries of from ten to twenty volumes of
sermons and controversial divinity, purchased at auctions or from the
booksellers of the south; and I have seen letters and diaries written
by them, which would have done no discredit to the mechanics of a more
literary age. Donald Sandison’s library consisted of nearly a hundred
volumes; and his son, whom I remember a very old man, and who had at
one time been the friend and companion of the unfortunate Ferguson
the poet, had made so good a use of his opportunities of improvement,
that in his latter days, when his sight began to fail him, he used to
bring with him to church a copy of Beza’s Latin New Testament, which
happened to be printed in a clearer type than his English one. The
people in general, however, were little acquainted with the better
literary models. So late as the year 1750, a copy of Milton’s Paradise
Lost, which had been brought to town by a sailor, was the occasion of
much curious criticism among them; some of them alleging that it was
heterodox, and ought to be burnt, others deeming it prophetic. One
man affirmed it to be a romance, another said it was merely a poem;
but a Mr. Thomas Hood, a shopkeeper of the place, set the matter at
rest by remarking, that it seemed to him to be a great book, full of
mystery like the Revelation of St. John, but certainly no book for
the reading of simple unlearned people like him or them. And yet, at
even this period, Cromarty had its makers of books and writers of
verses; men of a studious imitative turn--prototypes in some respects
of those provincial poets of our own times, who become famous for
nearly half an age in almost an entire county. A few brief notices of
the more remarkable of my town’s-men of this first class may prove
not unacceptable to the reader; for, of all imitators, the poetical
imitator is the most eccentric;--though his verses be imitations, in
character he is always an original.
[Sidenote: JOHNIE O’ THE SHORE.]
On the southern shore of the Bay of Cromarty, two miles to the west
of the town, there stood, about ninety years ago, a meal-mill and the
cottage of the miller. The road leading to the country passed in front,
between the mill and the beach; and a ridge of low hills, intersected
by deep narrow ravines, and covered with bushes of birch and hazel,
rose directly behind. There was a straggling line of alders which
marked the course of the stream that turned the mill-wheel; while
two gigantic elms, which rose out of the fence of a little garden,
spread their arms over both the mill and the cottage. The view of the
neighbouring farm-steadings was shut out by the windings of the coast
and the ridge behind; and to the traveller who passed along the road
in front, and saw no other human dwelling nearer him than the little
speck-like houses which mottled the opposite shore of the bay, this
one seemed to occupy one of the most secluded spots in the parish. Its
inmates at this period were John Williamson, the miller, or, as he was
more commonly termed, Johnie o’ the Shore, and his sister Margaret--two
of the best and most eccentric people of their day in the country-side.
John was a poet and a Christian, and much valued by all the serious
and all the intelligent people of the place; while his sister, who was
remarkable in the little circle of her acquaintance for the acuteness
of her judgment in nice points of divinity, was scarcely less esteemed.
The duties of John’s profession left him much leisure to write and to
pray. During the droughts of summer, his mill-pond would be dried up
for months together; and in these seasons he used to retire almost
every day to a green hillock in the vicinity of his cottage, which
commands an extensive view of the bay and the opposite coast. And
there, in a grassy opening among the bushes, would he remain until
sunset, with only the Bible and his pen for his companions. He was so
much attached to this spot, that he was once heard to say there was no
place in which he thought he could so patiently await the resurrection,
and he intimated to his friends his wish of being buried in it; but, on
his deathbed, he changed his mind, and requested to be laid beside his
mother. It is now covered by a fir-wood, and roughened by thickets of
furze and juniper, but enough may still be seen to justify his choice.
On one side it descends somewhat abruptly into a narrow ravine, through
the bottom of which there runs a little tinkling streamlet; on the
other, it slopes gently towards the shore. We look on the one hand,
and see, through the chance vistas which have been opened in the wood,
the country rising above us in long undulations of surface, like waves
of the sea after a storm, and variegated with fields, hedge-rows, and
clumps of copse-wood. On the other, the wide expanse of the bay lies
stretched at our feet, with all its winding shores and blue jutting
headlands: we look down on the rower as he passes, and hear the notes
of his song and the measured dash of his oars; and when the winds
are abroad, we may see them travelling black over the water before
they wave the branches that spread over our heads. Many of the poet’s
happiest moments were passed in the solitude of this retreat; and from
the experience derived in it, though one of the most benevolent of men,
and at times one of the most sociable, whenever he wished to be happy
he sought to be alone. In going to church every Sabbath, instead of
following the public road, he used invariably to strike across the
beach and walk by the edge of the sea; and, on reaching the churchyard,
he always retired into some solitary corner, to ponder in silence among
the graves. To a person of so serious a cast, a life of solitude and
self-examination cannot be a happy, unless it be a blameless one; and
Johnie o’ the Shore was one of the rigidly just. Like the Pharisees of
old, he tithed mint, and anise, and cumin; but, unlike the Pharisees,
he did not neglect the weightier matters of the law. It is recorded of
him, that on descending one evening from his hillock, he saw his only
cow browsing on the grass-plot of a neighbour, and that, after having
her milked as usual, he despatched his sister with the milk to the
owner of the grass.
Ninety years ago, the press had not found its way into the north
of Scotland, and the people were unacquainted with the scheme of
publishing by subscription. And so the writings of Johnie o’ the Shore,
like those of the ancients before the invention of printing, existed
only in manuscript; and, like them too, they have suffered from the
Goths. A closely written fragment of about eighty pages, which once
composed part of a bulky quarto volume, is now all that survives of his
works, though at his death they formed of themselves a little library.
One of the volumes, written wholly in prose, and which minutely
detailed, it is said, all the incidents of his life, with his thoughts
on God and heaven, the world and himself, fell into the hands of a
distant relative who resided somewhere in Easter-Ross. It must have
been no small curiosity in its way, and for some time I was flattered
by the hope that it still existed and might be recovered; but I have
come to find that it has shared the fate of all his other volumes. The
existing fragment is now in my possession. It bears date 1743, and is
occupied mostly with hymns, catechisms, and prayers. His models for
the hymns seem to have been furnished by our Scotch version of the
Psalms; his catechisms were formed, some on the catechisms of Craig and
the Palatine, and some on that of the Assembly Divines; his prayers
remind me of those which are still to be heard in the churches of our
northern parishes on “the day of the men.” Some of his larger poems are
alphabetical acrostics;--the first line of the first stanza of each
beginning with the letter A, and the first line in the last with the
letter Z. Most of them, however--and the fact is a singular one, for
John and his sister were stanch Presbyterians--are commemorative of
the festival-days of the English Church. There are hymns for Passion
Friday, for Christ’s Incarnation-day, for Circumcision-day, and for
Christmas:--a proof that he must have had little in him of that
abhorrence of Prelacy which characterized most of the Presbyterians of
his time. And he seems, too, to have been of a more tolerating spirit;
and, in the simple benevolence of his heart, to have come perhaps as
near the truth on some dark points as men considerably more skilled
in dialectics, and more deeply learned. “There are some people,”
remarks the querist in one of his catechisms, “who say that those who
have never heard of Christ cannot be saved?” “It is surely not our
business,” is the reply, “to search into the deep things of God, except
so far as He is pleased to reveal them; and, as He has not revealed to
us that He condemns all those who have not heard of Christ, it is rash
to say so, and uncharitable besides.”[9]
One of the most curious poems in the manuscript, is a little piece
entitled “An Imagination on the Thunder-claps.” It was written before
the discoveries of Franklin; and so the imagination is rather a wild
one--not wilder, however, than some of the soberest speculations of
the ancients on the same phenomena. The green hillock on this occasion
appears to have been both his Observatory and his Parnassus;--he seems
to have watched upon it every change of the heavens and earth, from
the first rising of the thunder-clouds until they had broken into a
deluge, and a blue sky looked down on the red tumbling of streams as
they leaped over the ridges, or came rushing from out the ravines.
Though quite serious himself, his uncouth phraseology will hardly fail
in eliciting the smile of the reader.
AN IMAGINATION ON THE THUNDER-CLAPS.
Lo! pillars great of wat’ry clouds
On firmament appear,
And mounting up with curléd heads,
Towards the north do steer.
East wind the same doth contradict,
And round and round they run;
And earth and sea are dark below,
And blackness hides the sun.
Like wrestling tides that in the bay
Do bubble, boil, and foam,
When seas grow angry at the wind,
And boatmen long for home;
Ev’n so the black and heavy clouds
Do fierce together jar--
They meet, and rage, and toss, and whirl,
And break, and broken are.
Up to the place where fire abides
These wat’ry clouds have gone
And all the waters which they hold
Are flung the fire upon.
And the vex’d fire boils in the cloud,
And lifts a fearful voice,
Like rivers toss’d o’er mighty rocks,
Or stormy ocean’s noise.
It roars, and rolls, and hills do shake,
And heavens do seem to rend;
And should the fierce unquenchéd flame
Through the dark clouds descend,
Like clay ’twould grind the hardest rocks,
Like dust the strongest brass,
And prostrate pride and strength of man
Like pride and strength of grass.
And now the broken clouds fall down
In _groff_ rain from on high;
And many streams do rise and roar,
That heretofore were dry.
And when the red speat will be o’er,
And wild storm pass’d away,
Rough stones will lie upon the fields,
And heaps of sand and clay.
But I, though great my sins, am spared,
These fields to turn and tread:
Which surely had not been the case
If Jesus had not died.
_Quod_ JOHNIE O’ THE SHORE.
[Sidenote: MEGGIE O’ THE SHORE.]
Johnie’s sister Margaret (after his death she seems to have fallen
heir to his title, for she then became Meggie o’ the Shore) survived
her brother for many years, and died at an extreme old age, about the
year 1785. The mill, on its falling into other hands, was thrown down,
and rebuilt a full half mile further to the west, but the cottage was
spared for Meggie. She had always been characterized by the extreme
neatness of her dress and her personal cleanliness, by her taste in
arranging the homely furniture of her cottage, and her hospitality: and
now, though the death of her brother had rendered her as poor as it is
possible for a contented person to become, she was as much marked by
her neatness, and as hospitable as ever. On one occasion, a Christian
friend who had come to visit her (the late Mr. Forsyth of Cromarty),
was so charmed with her conversation, as to prolong his stay from
noon until evening, when he rose to go away. She asked him, somewhat
hesitatingly, whether he would not first “break bread with her.” He
accordingly sat down again; and a half cake of bread and a jug of water
(it was all her larder afforded) were set before him. It was the feast
of the promise, she said, “Thy bread shall be given thee, and thy water
shall be sure.” Her circumstances, she added, were not quite so easy as
they had been during the lifetime of her brother, but the change was
perhaps for the better; for it had led her to think much oftener than
before, when rising from one meal, that God had kindly pledged Himself
for the next.
Meggie lived in a credulous age, and she was one of the credulous
herself. Like most of her acquaintance, she heard at times the voices
of spirits in the dash of waves and the roar of winds, and saw wraiths
and dead-lights; but she was naturally courageous, and had a strong
reliance on Providence; and so, with all her credulity, she was not
afraid to live alone, with, as she used to say, only God for her
neighbour. On a boisterous winter evening, two young girls who were
travelling from the country to the town, were forced by the breaking
out of a fierce snow-storm to take shelter in her cottage. She received
them with her wonted kindness, and entertained them as she had done
her friend. They heard the waves thundering on the beach, and the wind
howling in the woods, but peace and safety were with them at Meggie’s
fireside. About midnight there was a pause in the storm, and they could
hear strange sounds, like the cries of people in distress, mingling
with the roar of the sea. “Raise the window-curtain,” said Meggie, “and
look out.” The terrified girls raised the curtain. “Do you see aught?”
she inquired. “There is a bright light,” said the girls, “in the middle
of the bay of Udoll. It hangs over the water at about the height of a
ship’s mast; and we can see something below it like a boat riding at
anchor, with the white sea raging round her.” “Now drop the curtain,”
she replied; “I am no stranger, my lassies, to sights and noises like
these--sights and noises of another world; but I have been taught that
God is nearer to me than any other spirit can be; and so have learned
not to be afraid.” A few nights after, as the story goes, a Cromarty
yawl foundered in the bay of Udoll, and all on board perished.
Meggie was always a rigid Presbyterian, and jealous of innovations in
the Church; and, as she advanced in years, she became more rigid and
more jealous. She is said to have regarded with no great reverence the
young divines that filled up in the parishes around her the places
of her departed contemporaries; and who too often substituted, as
she alleged, the learning which they had acquired at college for a
knowledge of the human heart and of the Bible. She could ill brook,
too, any interference of the State in the concerns of the Kirk:--an
Act of Parliament, when read from the pulpit, she deemed little better
than blasphemy, and a King’s fast a day desecrated above every other.
Her zeal in one unlucky instance brought her in contact with the civil
law. Her favourite preacher was Mr. Porteous of Kilmuir, a divine of
the old and deeply learned cast--eloquent and pious--not unacquainted
with the book of nature, and thoroughly conversant with that of God.
After hearing him deliver, in the church of Nigg, a powerful and
impressive discourse, what was her horror and indignation when she
saw him descending from the pulpit to read from the precentor’s desk
some Proclamation or Act of Council! Had he been less a favourite, or
anybody else than Mr. Porteous, she could have shut her ears and sat
still; as it was, she sprang from her seat, and twitching the paper out
of his hand, flung it to the floor and stamped upon it with her feet.
She was apprehended and sent to the jail of Tain; but she found the
jail a very comfortable sort of place, and, for the three days during
which she was confined to it, she had for her visitors some of the very
best people in the country; among the rest, Mr. Porteous himself, who
had enough of the old Covenanter in him to feel that she had, perhaps,
done only her duty, and that he had very possibly failed in his.
The story of her death is curious and affecting. A friend, in passing
her cottage on a journey to the country called in, as usual, to see
her. She was as neatly dressed as ever, and the little apartment in
which she sat was fastidiously clean; but her countenance was of a
deadly paleness, and there was an air of languor about her that seemed
the effect of indisposition. “You are unwell, Meggie?” said her friend.
“Not quite well, perhaps,” she replied, “but I shall be so very soon.
You must stay and take breakfast with me.” The visitor knew too well
the value of one of Meggie’s breakfasts to refuse, and the simple fare
which her cottage afforded was set before him; but he was disappointed
of the better part of the repast, for she spoke but little, and seemed
unable to eat. “God has been exceedingly good to me,” she remarked,
as she rose when he had eaten to replace in her cupboard the viands
which still remained before him; “with no one to provide for me but
Himself, I have not known what it was to want a meal since the death of
my brother. You return this way in the evening?” said she, addressing
her friend. He replied in the affirmative. “Then promise that you will
not pass without coming in to see me; I am indisposed at present, but I
feel--nay, am certain--that you will find me quite well. Do promise.”
Her friend promised, and set out on his journey. Twilight had set in
before his return. He raised the latch and entered her apartment,
where all was silent, and the fire dying on the hearth. In a window
which opened to the west, sat Meggie, with her brother’s Bible lying
open before her, and her face turned upwards. The faint light of
evening shone full on her features, and their expression seemed to be
that of a calm yet joyous devotion. “I have returned, Meggie,” said
the man after a pause of a few minutes. There was no answer. “I have
returned, Meggie,” he reiterated, “and have come to see you, to redeem
my promise.” Still there was no answer. He went up to her and found she
was dead.
About twenty years after her death, the grave in which she had been
buried was opened to admit the corpse of a distant relative. A woman of
my acquaintance, who was then a little girl, was at play at the time
among the stones of the churchyard; but on seeing an elderly female,
a person much of Meggie’s cast of character, go up to the grave, she
went up to it too. She saw the woman looking anxiously at the bones and
there was one skull in particular which seemed greatly to engage her
attention. It still retained a few locks of silvery hair, and over the
hair there were the remains of a linen cap fastened on by two pins.
She stooped down, and drawing out the pins, put them up carefully in a
needle case, which she then thrust into her bosom. “Not death itself
shall part us!” she muttered, as if addressing herself to the pins;
“you shall do for me what you have done for Meggie o’ the Shore.”
[Sidenote: DAVID HENDERSON.]
But, in holding this _tête-à-tête_ with Meggie, I have suffered myself
to lose sight of the poets, and must now return to them. Next in the
list to Johnie o’ the Shore was David Henderson, a native of Cromarty,
born some time in the early part of the last century, and who died in
the beginning of the present. He was one of that interesting class,
concerning whom Nature and Fortune seem at variance; the one marking
them out for a high, the other for a low destiny. They are fitted, by
the gifts of mind bestowed upon them by the one, to think and act for
themselves and others; and then flung by the other into some obscure
lumber-corner of the world, where these gifts prove useless to them at
best, and not unfrequently serve only to encumber them. From Nature
David received talents of a cast considerably superior to those which
she commonly bestows; by Fortune he was placed in one of the obscurest
walks of life, and prevented from ever quitting it. He acquired his
little education when employed in tending a flock of sheep; the
herd-boys with whom he associated taught him to read, and he learned to
write by imitating the letters of one of the copy-books used in schools
upon the smooth flat stones which he found on the sea-shore.
From his earliest years his life was one of constant toil. He was a
herd-boy in his seventh, and a ploughman in his sixteenth year. He was
then indentured to a mason; and he soon became one of the most skilful
workmen in this part of the country, especially in hewing tombstones
and engraving epitaphs. There is not a churchyard within ten miles
of Cromarty in which there may not be seen some of his inscriptions.
His heart was an affectionate one, and open to love and friendship;
and when he had served his apprenticeship, and began to be known as a
young man of superior worth and a good clear head, his company came
to be much courted by the better sort of people. In his twenty-fifth
year he became attached to a young girl of Cromarty, named Annie
Watson, much celebrated in her day for her charms personal and mental.
She was beautiful to admiration, rationally yet fervently pious, and
possessed of a mind at once powerful and delicate. It was no wonder
that David should love such a one; and, as no disparity of condition
formed an obstacle to the union--as she was a woman of sense and he a
man of merit--in all probability she would have made him happy. But,
alas! in the bloom of youth she was taken from him by that insidious
disease, which, while it preys on the vitals of its victims, renders
their appearance more interesting, as if to make their loss the more
regretted. She died of consumption, and David was left behind to mourn
over her grave, and, when his grief had settled into a calm melancholy,
to write a simple ballad-like elegy to her memory. I have heard my
mother say, that it was left by David at the grave of his mistress,
where it was afterwards picked up by a person who gave copies of it
to several of his acquaintance; but I do not know that any of these
are now to be found. I have failed in recovering more than a few
stanzas of it; and these I took down as they were repeated to me by my
mother, who had committed them to memory when a child. They may prove
interesting, rude and fragmentary as they are, to such of my readers
as love to contemplate the poetic faculty wrapt up in the dishabille
of an imperfect education. Besides, the writer may be regarded less as
an insulated individual than as representative of a class. The unknown
authors of some of our simpler old ballads, such as Edom o’ Gordon,
Gilmorice, and the Bonny Earl of Moray, were, it is probable, men of
similar acquirements, and a resembling cast of intellect.
ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF A YOUNG WOMAN.
She’s slain by death, that spareth none,
An object worthy love;
And for her sake was many a sigh,--
No doubt she’s now above.
* * *
In dress she lovéd to be neat,
In handsome trim would go;
She lovéd not to be above
Her station, nor below.
* * *
But, in brief sentence, to have done
Of all I have to say--
In midst of all her prospects here,
She on a deathbed lay.
And when she on a deathbed lay,
To her were visits made
By good and reverend elders, who
In her great pleasure had.
For she though in her pleasant youth,
When time speeds sweetly by,
Esteem’d it, trusting in her God,
A blessed thing to die.
And she their questions unto them
Who sought her state to know,
Did answer wisely every one,
In pleasant words and low.
* * *
Her lykewake it was piously spent
In social prayer and praise,
Performéd by judicious men,
Who stricken were in days.
And many a sad and heavy heart
Was in that mournful place;
And many a weary thought was there
On her who slept in peace.
And then the town’s-folk gather’d all
To bear her corpse away,
And bitter tears by young and old
Were shed that mournful day.
And sure, if town’s-folk grievéd sore,
Sore grieve may I and pine;
They much deplored their heavy loss--
But what was theirs to mine?
For her loved voice, I only hear
Winds o’er her dust that sigh
For her sweet smile, I only see
The rank grass waving high.
And I no option have but think
How I am left alone;
With none on earth to care for me,
Since she who cared is gone.
* * *
She was the first that ever I
In beauty’s bloom did see
Departing from the stage of time,
Into eternity.
O may her sex her imitate,
Example from her take,
And strive t’ employ the day of grace,
And wicked ways forsake!
David survived his mistress for more than forty years. For thirty of
these he was an elder of the Church--a man conversant with deathbeds,
and a visitor of the fatherless and the widow. Few persons die so
regretted as David died, or leave behind them so fair a name; nor will
the reader fail to recognise something uncommon in his character when
I tell him, that he was steady and prudent though a poet, and of a
grave deportment, good-natured, and a Christian, though of a ready wit.
He left behind him, treasured up in the memories of his many friends,
shrewd, pithy remarks on men and things--specimens of mind, if I may so
express myself, which exhibit the quality of the mass from off which
they were struck. His wit, too, was equally popular. I have heard some
of his _bon-mots_ repeated and laughed at more than twenty years after
his death; but his writings were so much less fortunate, that there
were few of the people with whom I have conversed concerning him, who
even knew that he made verses, though none of them were ignorant of his
having been a good man.
[Sidenote: MACCULLOCH OF DUN-LOTH.]
The last of the Cromarty poets who lived and wrote before the beginning
of the present century, was Macculloch of Dun-Loth. He was, for nearly
sixty years, a Society schoolmaster in that parish of Sutherlandshire
whose name, for some cause or other, is always attached to his own. But
I shall attempt introducing him to the reader in the manner in which he
has been introduced to myself.
“About twenty-eight years ago,” said my informant, “I resided for a few
weeks with the late Dr. R---- at the manse of Kiltearn. I was lounging
one evening beside the front door, when a singular-looking old man came
up to me, and asked for the Doctor. He was such an equivocal-looking
sort of person, that it was quite a puzzle to me whether I should show
him into the parlour;--he might be little better than a beggar; he
might be worth half a million; but whether a rich man or a poor one,
no one could look at him and doubt of his being a _particular_ man. He
was very little, and very much bent, with just such a grotesque cast of
countenance as I have seen carved on the head of a walking-stick. His
outer man was cased in an old-fashioned suit of raven grey, and he had
immense plated buckles in his shoes and in his breeches. I thought of
the legend of the Seven Sleepers, and wondered where this fragment of
the old world could have lain for the last hundred years. The Doctor
relieved me from my perplexity. He had seen him from a window, and,
coming out, he welcomed the little old man with his wonted cordiality,
and ushered him into the parlour as the poet of Dun-Loth.
“He stayed with us this evening, and never was there a gayer evening
spent in the manse. The Doctor had the art of eliciting all that was
eccentric in the little man’s character, and that was not a little.
He plied him with compliments and jokes, and rallied him on his
love-adventures and his poetry. The old man seemed swelling like a
little toad, only it was with conceit, not venom. He chuckled, every
now and then, at the more piquant of the Doctor’s good things, with a
strange unearthly gaiety that seemed to savour of another world--of
another age at least; and then he would jest and compliment in turn.
What he said was, to be sure, great nonsense; but then it was the most
original nonsense that might be, full of small conceits and quibbles,
and so old-fashioned that we all felt it could not be other than
the identical nonsense that had flourished in the early days of our
great-grandmothers. The young people were all delighted--the little
old man seemed delighted too, and laughed as heartily as any of us.
Mrs. R----, when a young lady, had been eminently beautiful, and the
poet had celebrated her in a song. It was a miserable composition,
and some of his neighbours, who wrote nearly as ill as himself, made
it the occasion of a furious attack upon him. There were remarks,
replies, and rejoinders beyond number; until at length, by mere dint of
perseverance, the poet silenced all his opponents, and took to himself
the credit of having gained a signal victory. The Doctor brought up
the story of the song, and got him to repeat all the replies and
rejoinders, which he did with much glee. Next morning he took leave of
us, and I never again saw the poet of Dun-Loth.”
Macculloch was, as I have stated, a native of the parish of Cromarty,
and passed the greater part of a long life as a Society schoolmaster,
on a salary of twelve pounds per annum. Out of this pittance he
contrived to furnish himself with a library, which, among other works
of value, contained the whole of the Encyclopædia Britannica in its
second edition. Though full of compliment and gallantry in his younger
days, he was for the last forty years of his life, so thoroughly a
woman-hater, that he would not suffer one of the sex to enter his
cottage, cook his victuals, or wash his linen. His wardrobe consisted
of four suits--one of black, one of brown, one of raven grey, and
one of tartan; and he wore them week about, without suffering the
separate pieces of any one suit to encroach on the week of another.
It has been told me that, in his eightieth year, he attended the
dispensation of the sacrament in the Highland parish of Lairg, dressed
in his tartans--kilt, hose, and bonnet. I do not well know whether to
consider his singularities as those of the rhymer, the most eccentric
of all men, or his predilection for rhyming as merely one of his
singularities. His compositions were mostly satirical; but his only art
of satire was the art of calling names in rhyme; and he seems to have
had no positive pleasure in bestowing these, but to have flung them,
just as he used to do his taws when in school, at the heads of all who
offended him. His death took place about twenty years ago. I subjoin
two of the “pasquils” pointed against him in his war with his brother
rhymers, and the pieces in which he replied to them. They may show,
should they serve no other purpose, what marvellous bad verse could be
written in the classical age of Johnson and Goldsmith, and with what
justice Dun-Loth piqued himself on having vanquished his opponents.
TO DUN-LOTH.
Dunloth, be wise, take my advice,
Silence thy muse in time;
For thy thick skull it is too dull
To furnish prose or rhyme.
But if thy pride will still thee guide
To sing thy horrid lays;
For any sake, my counsel take,
And ne’er attempt to praise.
Thy wit’s too low, thyself says so,
In this we both agree;
The Kilmote flower is, I am sure,
A theme too high for thee.
ANSWER.
To notice much, base trash as such,
I think it were a crime;
Or yet to stoop, thou nincompoop,
For thy poor paltry rhyme.
Thy saucy gee shows thee to be
Like a blind muzzled mole:
Or like a rat chased by the cat
To a dark muddy hole.
The first time I thy place pass by,
For thy poetic lesson,
Thou’lt crouch, be sure, behind the door,
Like a poor yelping messan.
TO ----
How hard is thy lot, fair flower of Kilmote,
To be sung by a poet so dull;
Thy symmetry fine, is a theme too divine
For a blockhead with such a thick skull.
ANSWER.
So hard is thy lot, poor scurrilous sot,
Thy poetry brings thee to shame;
So high to aspire, thou’rt thrust in the mire,
And laugh’d at by all for the same.
CHAPTER XXVII.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”--HAMLET.
[Sidenote: THE GUDEWIFE OF MINITARF.]
I had passed the three first milestones after leaving Forres, when the
clouds began to lour on every side of me, as if earth and sky were
coming together, and the rain to descend in torrents. The great forest
of Darnaway looked shaggy and brown through the haze, as if greeting
the heavens with a scowl as angry as their own; and a low, long wreath
of vapour went creeping over the higher lands to the left, like a huge
snake. On the right, the _locale_ of Shakspere’s witch scene, half moor
half bog, with the old ruinous castle of Inshoch standing sentry over
it, seemed ever and anon to lessen its area as the heavily-laden clouds
broke over its farther edge like waves of the sea; and the intervening
morass--black and dismal at all times--grew still blacker and more
dismal with every fitful thickening of the haze and the rain. And then,
how the furze waved to the wind, and the few scattered trees groaned
and creaked! The thunder and the witches were alone wanting.
I passed on, and the storm gradually sank. The evening, however,
was dark and damp, and more melancholy than even the day, and I was
thoroughly wet, and somewhat fatigued to boot. I could not, however,
help turning a little out of my way to pause for a few minutes amid
the ruins of the old farmhouse of Minitarf, just as I had paused
in the middle of the storm to fill my mind with the sublimities of
the Harmoor, and do homage to the genius of Shakspere. But why at
Minitarf? Who is not acquainted with the legend of the “Heath near
Forres”--who knows anything of the history of the Farm-house? Both
stories, however, are characteristic of the very different ages to
which they belong; and the moral of the humbler story is at once the
more general in its application, and the more obvious of the two.
Isabel Rose, the gudewife of Minitarf, was a native of Easter-Ross,
and having lost both her parents in infancy, she had passed some of
the earlier years of her life with a married sister in the town of
Cromarty. She had been famed for her beauty, and for being the toast of
three parishes; and of all her lovers, and few could reckon up more,
she had been lucky enough to lose her heart to one of the best. The
favoured suitor was a handsome young farmer of the province of Moray--a
person somewhat less shrewd, perhaps, than many of his countrymen, but
inflexibly honest, and perseveringly industrious; and, as he was a
namesake of her own, she became his wife and the mistress of Minitarf,
and yet remained Isabel Rose as before. The wife became a mother--the
mother of two boys. Years passed by; the little drama of her life, like
one of the dramas of antiquity, had scarce any change of circumstance,
and no shifting of scenes; and her two sons grew up to maturity, as
unlike one another in character as if they had not been born to the
same parents, nor brought up under the same roof.
John, the elder son, was cautious and sensible, and of great kindliness
of disposition. There was nothing bright or striking about him; but
he united to his father’s integrity and firmness of purpose much more
than his father’s shrewdness, and there was a homely massiveness in
the character that procured him respect. He was of a mechanical turn;
and making choice of the profession of a house-carpenter--for he
was as little ambitious as may be--he removed to Glasgow, where his
steadiness and skill recommended him to the various contractors of
the place, until in the course of years he became, a good deal to
his own surprise, a contractor himself. Sandy, the younger son, was
volatile and unsettled, and impatient of labour and restraint, and yet
no piece of good fortune could have surprised Sandy. He had somehow
come to the conclusion that he was born to be a gentleman, and took
rank accordingly, by being as little useful, and dressing as showily as
he could. His principles were of a more conventional cast than those
of his brother, and his heart less warm; still, however, there was
no positive vice in the character; and as he was decidedly cleverer
than John, and a great deal more genteel, his mother could not help
sharing with him in the hope that he was born to be the gentleman of
the family--a hope which, of course, was not lessened when she saw him
bound apprentice in his seventeenth year to a draper in a neighbouring
town.
Sandy’s master was what is termed a clever man of business; one of
those smart fellows who want only honesty, and that soundness of
judgment which seems its natural accompaniment to make headway in the
world. He had already threaded his way through the difficulties of
three highly respectable failures; he had thrice paid his debts at the
rate of fifteen shillings per pound, and had thus realized on each
occasion a profit of twenty-five per cent. on the whole. And yet, from
some inexplicable cause, he was not making more money than traders much
less fertile in expedient than himself. His ordinary gains were perhaps
the less considerable from the circumstance, that men came to deal with
him as completely on their guard as if they had come to fight with
him; and, though a match for any single individual, he was, somehow,
no match for every body, even though, after the manner of Captain
Bobadil’s opponents, they came only one at a time. His scheme, too, of
occasionally suspending his payments, had this disadvantage, that the
oftener it was resorted to, the risk became greater and the gain less.
The shop of such a person could not be other than a rare school of
ingenuity--a place of shifts and expedients--and where, according to
the favourite phrase of its master, things were done in a business-like
manner; and Sandy Rose was no very backward pupil. There are ingenious
young men who are a great deal too apt to confound the idea of talent
itself with the knavish exercise of it; and who, seeing nothing very
knowing in simple honesty, exert their ingenuity in the opposite
tract, rather out of a desire of doing clever things than from any
very decided bias to knavery. And Sandy Rose was unfortunately one of
the number. It is undoubtedly an ingenious thing to get possession
of a neighbour’s money without running the risk of stealing it; and
there can be no question that it requires more of talent to overreach
another than to be overreached one’s-self. The three years of Sandy’s
apprenticeship came to their close, and with the assistance of his
father, who in a long course of patient industry had succeeded in
saving a few hundred pounds, he opened shop for himself in one of the
principal streets of the town.
Sandy’s shop, or _warehouse_, as he termed it--for the latter name
was deemed the more respectable of the two--was decidedly the most
showy in the street. He dealt largely in fancy goods, and no other
kind in the “soft way” show equally well in a window. True, the risk
was greater, for among the ordinary chances of loss he had to reckon
on the continual changes of fashion; but then, from the same cause,
the profits were greater too, and Sandy had a decided turn for the
more adventurous walks of his profession. Nothing so respectable as a
large stock in trade; the profits of a thousand pounds are necessarily
greater than the profits of five hundred. And so, what between the
ready money advanced to him by his father, and the degree of credit
which the money procured for him, Sandy succeeded in rendering his
stock a large one. He had omitted only two circumstances in his
calculation--the proportion which one’s stock should bear to one’s
capital, and the proportion which it should bear to the trade of the
place in which one has settled. When once fairly behind his counter,
however, no shopkeeper could be more attentive to his customers, or
to the appearance of his shop; and all allowed that Sandy Rose was
a clever man of business. He wrote and figured with such amazing
facility, and made such dashes at the end of every word! He was so
indefatigable in his assertions, too, that he made it a rule in every
case to sell under prime cost! He was, besides, so amazingly active--a
squirrel in its cage was but a type of Sandy! He was withal so
unexceptionably genteel! His finest cloths did not look half so well on
his shelves as they did on his dapper little person; and it was clear,
from his everyday appearance, that he was one of his own best customers.
Sandy’s first half year of business convinced him that a large stock
in trade may resemble a showy equipage in more points than one: it may
look as respectable in its way, but then it may cost as much. Bills
were now falling due almost every week, and after paying away the money
saved during the earlier months, the everyday custom of the shop proved
too little to meet the everyday demand. Fortunately, however, there
were banks in the country--“_more banks than one_;” and his old master
was content to lend him the use of his name, simply on the condition of
being accommodated with Sandy’s name in turn. Bill, therefore, was met
by bill, and the paper of one bank pitted against the paper of another;
and as Sandy was known to have started in trade with a few hundreds,
there was no demur for the first twelvemonth or so on the part of the
bankers. They then, however, began to demand indorsations, and to
hint that the farmer, his father, was a highly respectable man. Sandy
expressed his astonishment that any such security should be deemed
necessary; his old master expressed his astonishment too; nothing could
be more unbusiness-like, he said; but the bankers, who were quite
accustomed to the astonishment of all their more doubtful customers,
were inflexible notwithstanding, and the old man’s name was procured.
The indorsation was quite a matter of course, he was told--a thing
“neither here nor there,” but necessary just for form’s sake; and from
that day forward all the accommodation-bills of Sandy and his master
bore the name of the simple-minded old man.
I have said that Sandy was one of the most indefatigable of
shopkeepers. It was but for the first few months, however, when all
was smooth water and easy sailing; in a few months more, when the tide
had begun to set in against him, he became less attentive. Some of his
fancy goods were becoming old-fashioned, and in consequence unsaleable,
and his stock, large at first, was continuing large still. What between
the price of stamps, too, the rate of discount, and the expense of
travelling to the several banks in which he did business, he found that
the profits of his trade were more than balanced by the expenditure.
Sandy’s heart, therefore, began to fail him; and, setting himself to
seek amusement elsewhere than behind his counter, he got a smart young
lad to take charge of the shop in his absence; and, as it could not add
very materially to the inevitable expense, he provided himself with
a horse. He was now every day on the road doing business as his own
traveller. He rode twenty miles at a time to secure a five-shilling
order, or crave payment of a five-shilling debt. He attended every
horse-race and fox-hunt in the country, and paid the king’s duty for
a half-starved greyhound: Sandy was happy outside his shop, and his
lad was thriving within. Matters went on in this train for so long as
two years, and the hapless shopkeeper began to perceive that the few
hundreds advanced him by his father had totally disappeared in the
time, and to wonder what had become of them. Still, however, his stock
in trade, though somewhat less showy than at first, was nearly equal in
value to one-third his liabilities; the other two-thirds were debts
incurred by his old master; and at worst there lay no other obstacle
between him and a highly respectable settlement with his creditors than
the unlucky indorsations of his father. He rose, however, one morning
to learn that his master had absconded during the night, leaving the
shop-key under the door-sill; in a few days after, Sandy had absconded
too; and his poor father, who had paid all his debts till now, and had
taken a pride in paying them, found that his unfortunate indorsations
had involved him in irretrievable ruin. Bankruptcy was a very different
matter to the rigidly honest old man from what it was to either Sandy
or his master.
For the first few days after the shock, he went wandering about his
fields, muttering ceaselessly to himself, and wringing his hands.
His whole faculties seemed locked up in a feeling of bewilderment
and terror, and every packet of letters which the postman brought
him--letters urging the claims of angry creditors, or intimating the
dishonour of bills--added to his distress. His son was in hiding no one
knew where; and though it was perhaps well that he should have kept out
of the way at such a time, poor Isabel could not help feeling that it
was unkind. He might surely be able to do something, she thought, to
lighten the distress of which he had been so entirely the cause, were
it but to tell them what course yet remained for them to pursue. It was
in vain that, almost broken-hearted herself, she strove by soothing
the old man to restore him to himself: he remained melancholy and
abstracted as at first, as if the suddenness of his ruin had deprived
him of his faculties. He hardly ever spoke, took scarce any food during
the day, and scarce any sleep during the night; and, finally, taking
to his bed, he died after a few days’ illness--died of a broken heart.
On the evening after the interment, his son John Rose, the carpenter,
arrived from Glasgow, and found his mother sitting alone in the
farmhouse, wholly overwhelmed with grief for the loss of her husband,
and the utter ruin which she saw closing around her.
Their meeting was a sad one; but after the widow’s first burst of
sorrow was over, her son strove to comfort her, and in part succeeded.
She might yet look forward, he said, to better days. He was in rather
easy circumstances, employing about half-a-dozen workmen, and at times
finding use for more. And though he could not well be absent from
them, he would remain with her until he saw how far it was possible
to wind up his father’s affairs, and she would then go with him, and
find what he trusted she should deem a comfortable home in Glasgow.
Isabel was soothed by his kindness; but it did not escape the anxious
eye of the mother, that her son, at one time so robust and strong, had
grown thin, and pale, and hollow-eyed, like a person in the latter
stages of consumption, and that, though he seemed anxious to appear
otherwise, he was evidently much exhausted by his journey. He rallied,
however, on the following day. The sale of his father’s effects was
coming on in about a week; and as the farmhouse at such a time could be
no comfortable home for the widow, he brought her with him across the
Firth to her sister’s in Cromarty, and then returned to Minitarf.
Her sister’s son was a saddler, a sagacious, well-informed man,
truthful and honest, and as little imaginative as may be. He was
employed at the time at the _Mains_ of Invergordon--some six or seven
miles from Cromarty--and slept in an apartment of the old castle, since
burnt down. No one could be less influenced by superstitious beliefs
of the period; and yet when, after scaling the steep circular stair
that led to his solitary room, he used to shut the ponderous door and
pass his eye along the half-lighted walls, here and there perforated
by a narrow arched window, there was usually something in the tone of
his feelings which served to remind him that there is a dread of the
supernatural too deeply implanted in man’s nature to be ever wholly
eradicated. On going to bed one evening, and awakening as he supposed
after a short slumber, he was much surprised to see the room filled
as with a greyish light, in which the walls and the floor could be
seen nearly as distinctly as by day. Suddenly the door fell open and
there entered a tall young man in black, his hat wrapped up in crape,
and with muslin weepers on his sleeves. Another and another entered,
attired after the same fashion, until their number might, as he
supposed, amount to about fifty. He lay gazing at them in astonishment,
conscious of a kind of indistinct wish to ascertain whether he was in
reality waking or asleep--a feeling of common enough experience in
the dreams of imperfect slumber--when the man who had first come in,
gliding up to his bedside, moved his lips as if addressing him, and
passing off entered the staircase and disappeared. A second then came
up, and heartily shaking him by the hand, also quitted the apartment,
followed by all the others in the order in which they had entered, but
without shutting the door; and the last recollection of the sleeper
was of an emotion of intense terror, which seemed wholly to overpower
him when gazing on the dark opening of the stair beyond. It was broad
daylight ere he awoke, and his first glance, as the dream of the
previous evening flashed on his mind, was at the door, which sure
enough lay open. “I must have missed slipping on the latch,” he said,
“or some of the servants must have entered during the night;--but how
strange a coincidence!” The particulars of his dream--and it cost him
no slight effort to deem it such--employed his thoughts until evening;
when, setting out for his mother’s, he found his aunt Isabel, in much
grief and dejection, seated beside the fire. He had taken his place
beside her, and was striving as he best could to lighten the melancholy
which he saw preying on her spirits, when a young man, bespattered
with travel, and apparently much fatigued, entered the apartment.
Isabel started from her seat, and clasping her hands with a fearful
presentiment of some overwhelming calamity, inquired of him what had
happened at Minitarf? He stood speechless for a few seconds as if
overcome by some fearful emotion, and then bursting into tears, “Your
son John,” he said, “died this morning!” The poor woman fainted away.
“For the two last days of the sale,” said the messenger, “there was
a marked alteration in John’s manner and appearance. There was a
something so fixed-like in his expression, and so mournful in his way
of looking at things; and then his face was deadly pale, and he took
scarce any food. It was evident that the misfortunes of his family
preyed deeply on his mind. Yester evening,” continued the lad, “he
complained for the first time of being unwell, and retired to bed
before the usual hour. The two servant-maids rose early in the morning
to prepare for leaving the place, and were surprised, on entering the
‘ha’,’ to find him sitting in the great arm-chair fronting the fire.
His countenance had changed during the night; he looked much older,
and very like his father; and he was so weak that he could hardly sit
up in the chair. The girls were alarmed, and would have called for
assistance, but he forbade them. ‘My watch,’ he said, ‘hangs over my
pillow; go tell me what o’clock it is.’ It was just twenty minutes past
four. ‘Well,’ said he, when they had told him, ‘it is the last hour
to me! there is a crook in my lot; but it’s God’s doing, not man’s.’
And, leaning back in the chair, he never spake more.” The messenger had
seen the corpse laid on the bed, and wrapped up in a winding-sheet,
before setting out on his melancholy journey. Need I say aught of the
feelings of Isabel? The saddler and his mother strove to persuade her
to remain with them till at least after the funeral, but she would not;
she would go and take one last look of her son, she said--of her _only_
son, for the other was a murderer. Early, therefore, on the following
morning, the saddler hired a small yawl to bring her across the Firth,
and, taking his place in the stern beside her, the boatmen bent them to
their oars, and the hill of Nigg soon lessened behind them.
After clearing the bay, however, their progress was much impeded
by adverse currents; there came on a chill drizzling rain, and the
wind, which was evidently rising, began, after veering about oftener
than once, to blow right ahead, and to raise a short tumbling sea.
Grief of itself is cold and comfortless, and the widow, wrapped up in
her cloak, sat shivering in the bottom of the yawl, drenched by the
rain and the spray. But she thought only of her son and her husband.
The boatmen toiled incessantly till evening; and when night came
on, dark and boisterous, they were still two long miles from their
landing-place--the effluence of the Nairn. Directly across the mouth of
the river there runs a low dangerous bar, and as they approached they
could hear the roaring of the breakers above all the hoarse sighings
of the wind, and the dash of the lesser waves that were bursting
around them. “There,” said the saddler, as his eye caught a few faint
lights that seemed twinkling along the beach; “there is the town of
Nairn right abreast of us; but has not the tide fallen too low for
our attempting the bar?” The boatmen replied in the negative, and in
a minute after they were among the breakers. For a single instant the
skiff seemed riding on the crest of an immense wave, which came rolling
from the open sea, and which, as it folded over and burst into foam,
dashed her forward like an arrow from the string. She sank, however, as
it receded, till her keel grated against the bar beneath. Another huge
wave came rolling behind, and, curling its white head like the former,
rushed over her stern, filling her at once to the gunwale, and at the
same instant propelling her into the deep water within. The saddler
sprang from his seat, and raising his aunt to the hinder thwart, and
charging her to hold fast, he shouted to the boatmen to turn the boat’s
head to the shore. In a few minutes after, they had landed.
Poor Isabel, well-nigh insensible--for grief and terror, added to cold
and fatigue, had prostrated all her energies, bodily and mental--was
carried to the town and lodged in the house of an acquaintance. When
morning came she was unable to leave her bed, and so the saddler had
to set out for Minitarf alone, which he reached about noon; and on
being recognised as a cousin of the deceased, he was ushered into the
room where the body lay. He seated himself on the edge of the bed,
and raising the coffin-lid, gazed for a few seconds on the face of
the dead; on hearing a footstep approaching the door, he replaced
the cover. There entered a genteel-looking young man dressed for the
funeral; but not the apparition of an inhabitant of the other world
would have started the saddler more. He recognised in the stranger
the young man of his dream. Another person entered, and him he also
recognised as the man who had shaken hands with him; and who now, on
being introduced to him as a relative of the deceased tacksman of
Minitarf, sure enough, grasped him warmly by the hand. As the room
filled around him with the neighbouring farmers attired in their
soberest and best, he felt as if he still dreamed, for these were
the very men whom he had seen in the old castle; and it was almost
mechanically, when the coffin was carried out and laid on the bier,
that, as the nearest relative of the dead he took his place as chief
mourner. As the funeral proceeded, however, he collected his scattered
thoughts. “Have I indeed had experience,” said he to himself, “of one
of those mysterious intimations of coming evil, the bare possibility
of which few thinking men, in these latter times, seem disposed to
credit on testimony alone? And little wonder, truly, that they should
be so sceptical; for, for what purpose could such a warning have been
given? It has enabled me to ward off no impending disaster;--nay, it
has told its story so darkly and doubtfully, that the event alone has
enabled me to interpret it. Could a purpose so idle have employed an
agent of the invisible world? And yet,” thought he again, as the train
of his cogitations found way into the deeper recesses of his mind, “an
end _has_ been accomplished by it, and a not unimportant end either.
The evil has befallen as certainly and heavily as if there had been
no previous warning; but, is _my mind_ in every respect the same?
Something _has_ been accomplished. And surely He who in His providence
cares for all my bodily wants, without sinking, in the littleness of
the object cared for, aught of the _greatness_ of His character, might,
without lessening in aught His character for _wisdom_, have taken this
way of making me see, more distinctly than in all my life before, that
there is indeed an invisible world, and that all the future is known to
Him.” There was seriousness in the thought, and never did he feel more
strongly that the present scene of things is not the last, than when
bending over the open grave he saw the corpse lowered down and heard
the earth falling hollow on the coffin-lid.
But why dwell longer on the details of a story so mournful! The
saddler, on his return to Nairn, found the widow in the delirium of a
fever, from which she never recovered. Her younger son was seen in the
West Indies ten years after, a miserable slave-driver, with a broken
constitution and an unquiet mind. And there he died--no one caring
where or how. I am not fond of melancholy stories; but “to purge the
heart by pity and terror” is the true end of tragedy--an end which the
gorgeous creations of the poets are not better suited to accomplish
than the domestic tragedies which we see every day enacting around us.
It is well, too, to note how immensely the folly and knavery of mankind
add to the amount of human suffering; and how, according to the wise
saying of the Preacher, “One sinner destroyeth much good.”
CHAPTER XXVIII.
“Alack-a-day! it was the school-house indeed; but, to be sure, sir,
the squire has pulled it down, because it stood in the way of his
prospects.”--MACKENZIE.
[Sidenote: THE OLD SCHOOL AND WHAT IT PRODUCED.]
The old school of Cromarty was situated in a retired little corner,
behind the houses where the parish burying-ground bordered on the
woods of the old castle. It was a low, mean-looking building, with
its narrow latticed windows, which were half buried in the thatch,
opening on the one side to the uncouth monuments of the churchyard,
and on the other, through a straggling line of willows which fringed
the little stream in front, to the ancient timeworn fortalice perched
on the top of the hill. Mean, however, as it seemed--and certainly
no public edifice could owe less to the architect--it formed one of
Knox’s strongholds of the Reformation, and was erected by the united
labours of the parishioners, agreeably to the scheme laid down in the
First Book of Discipline, long previous to the Education Act of 1646.
It had become an old building ere the Restoration, and fell into such
disrepair during the reign of Episcopacy, that for a time it no longer
sheltered the scholars. I find it enacted in the summer of 1682, by
the Kirk-Session--for, curious as it may seem, even the curates in
the north of Scotland had their kirk-sessions and their staffs of
elders--that “the hail inhabitants of the burgh, especially masons and
such as have horse, do repayre and bigg the samin in the wonted place,
and that the folk upland do provide them with feal and diffiot.” And,
in the true spirit of the reign of Charles II., a penalty of four
pounds Scots enforced the enactment.
The scheme of education drawn up by our first Reformers was stamped
by the liberality of men who had learned from experience that tyranny
and superstition derive their chief support from ignorance. Almost all
the knowledge which books could supply at the time was locked up in
the learned languages; and so it was necessary that these languages
even the common people should acquire. It was appointed, therefore,
“that young men who purposed to travail in some handicraft for the
good of the commonwealth, should first devote ane certaine time to
Grammar and the Latin tongue, and ane certaine time to the other
tongues and the study of philosophy.” Even long after the enactment,
when we had got authors of our own in every department of literature,
and a man could have become learned, if knowledge be learning,
simply as an English reader, an acquaintance with Latin formed no
unimportant part of a common Scotch education. Our fathers pursued
the course which circumstances had rendered imperative in the days of
their great-grandfathers, merely because their great-grandfathers had
pursued it, and because people find it easier to persist in hereditary
practices than to think for themselves. And so the few years which
were spent in school by the poorer pupils of ordinary capacity, were
absurdly frittered away in acquiring a little bad Latin and a very
little worse Greek. So strange did the half-learning of our common
people (derived in this way) appear to our southern neighbours, that
there are writers of the last century who, in describing a Scotch
footman or mechanic, rarely omit making his knowledge of the classics
an essential part of his character. The barber in Roderick Random
quotes Horace in the original; and Foote, in one of his farces,
introduces a Scotch valet, who, when some one inquires of him whether
he be a Latinist, indignantly exclaims, “Hoot awa, man! a Scotchman and
no understand Latin!”
The school of Cromarty produced, like most of the other schools of the
kingdom, its Latinists who caught fish and made shoes; and it is not
much more than thirty years since the race became finally extinct. I
have heard stories of an old house-painter of the place, who, having
survived most of his schoolfellows and contemporaries, used to regret,
among his other vanished pleasures, the pleasure he could once derive
from an inexhaustible fund of Latin quotation, which the ignorance of
a younger generation had rendered of little more value to him than the
paper-money of an insolvent bank; and I have already referred to an
old cabinetmaker whom I remember, who was in the practice, when his
sight began to fail him, of carrying his Latin New Testament with him
to church, as it chanced to be printed in a clearer type than any of
his English ones. It is said, too, of a learned fisherman of the reign
of Queen Anne, that when employed one day among his tackle, he was
accosted in Latin by the proprietor of Cromarty, who, accompanied by
two gentlemen from England, was sauntering along the shore, and that,
to the surprise of the strangers, he replied with no little fluency in
the same language.
The old castle rose, I have said, direct in front of the old school,
about three hundred yards away; and, tall itself, and elevated by the
green hill on which it stood, it formed, with all its timeworn turrets,
and all its mouldering bartisans, a formidable spectre of the past.
Little thought the proud hereditary sheriffs of the stern old tower,
that the humble building at the foot of the hill was a masked battery
raised against their authority, which was to burst open their dungeon
door and to beat down their gallows. But a very formidable battery it
proved. There is a class of nature’s aristocracy that has but to arise
from among the people, in order that the people may become influential
and free; and the lowly old school did its part in separating from
the general mass its due proportion of these, as mercury separates
gold from the pulverized rock in which it is contained. If, in passing
along the streets, we see a handsomer domicile than the low tenements
around it, we may safely conclude that the builder spent his boyhood
in the old school; that if he went out to some of the colonies, he
carried with him as his stock in trade a knowledge of figures and the
pen, and returned with both that and a few thousands on which to employ
it; or if his inclination led him to sea, that he became, through his
superior intelligence, the commander of a vessel; if to London, that
he rose into wealth as a merchant; or if he remained at home, that
he gained a competency as a shopkeeper, general trader, or master
mechanic. I am not making too much of my subject when I affirm, that
the little thatched hovel at the foot of the Castle-hill gave merchants
to the Exchange, ministers to the Church, physicians to the Faculty,
professors to Colleges, and members to Parliament.
[Sidenote: DR. HOSSACK.]
One of the pupils reared within its walls--the son of old Clerk
Davidson, a humble subordinate of the hereditary sheriff--became
a wealthy London merchant, and, after establishing in the city a
respectable firm, which still exists, represented his native county in
Parliament. Another of its boys, the late Mr. William Forsyth, to whom
I have already had occasion to refer, revived the sinking trade of the
town; and, though the son of a man who had once worked as a mechanic,
he took his well-merited place among the aristocracy of the district,
not less from the high tone of his character, and the liberality of
his views and sentiments, than from the extent of his resources. Yet
another of its boys, a Mr. James Ross, entered life as a common sailor,
and, after rising by his professional skill to a command in the navy,
published a work on the management of nautical affairs, which attracted
a good deal of notice at the time among the class to which it was
specially addressed. The late Dr. James Robertson, librarian of the
University of Edinburgh, and its Professor of the Oriental Tongues, was
a native of Cromarty, of humble parentage, and experienced his first
stirrings of scholastic ambition in the old school. He was the author
of a Hebrew grammar, to which the self-taught linguist, Dr. Alexander
Murray, owed, as he tells us in his interesting Autobiography, his
first introduction to Hebrew; and we learn from Boswell, in his Journal
of a Tour to the Hebrides, that Dr. Johnson, when in Edinburgh, “was
much pleased with the College library, and with the conversation of Dr.
James Robertson, the librarian.” Provost Hossack of Inverness, whom
the author of the “Jacobite Memoirs” terms, in relating his spirited
remonstrance with the Duke of Cumberland in behalf of the conquered
rebels, “a man of humanity, and the Sir Robert Walpole of Inverness,
under the direction of President Forbes,” was also a Cromarty man, the
child of seafaring parents, and received the education through which
he rose, in its school. And his namesake and contemporary, Dr. Hossack
of Greenwich, one of the first physicians of his time, was likewise
a native of Cromarty--not of the town, however, but of the landward
part of the parish; and owed his first knowledge of letters to the
charity of the schoolmaster. There is, unfortunately, not much of the
Doctor’s story known; but to the little which survives there attaches a
considerable amount of interest.
He had lost both his parents when an infant; all his other nearer
kindred were also dead: and so he was dependent in his earlier years
for a precarious subsistence on the charity of a few distant relatives,
not a great deal richer than himself. Among the rest there was a poor
widow, a namesake of his own, who earned a scanty subsistence by her
wheel, but who had heart enough to impart a portion of her little
to the destitute scholar. The boy was studious and thoughtful, and
surpassed in his tasks most of his schoolfellows; and after passing
with singular rapidity through the course pursued at school, he
succeeded in putting himself to college. The struggle was arduous and
protracted; sometimes he wrought as a common labourer, sometimes he
taught an adventure school; he deemed no honest employment too mean or
too laborious that forwarded his scheme; and thus he at length passed
through the University course. His town’s-people then lost sight of
him for nearly twenty years. It was understood, meanwhile, that some
nameless friend in the south had settled a small annuity on poor old
Widow Hossack; and that a Cromarty sailor, who had been attacked by a
dangerous illness when at London, had owed his life to the gratuitous
attentions of a famous physician of the place, who had recognised him
as a town’s-man. No one, however, thought of the poor scholar; and it
was not until his carriage drove up one day through the main street of
the town, and stopped at the door of his schoolfellow, William Forsyth,
that he was identified with “the great Doctor” who had attended the
seaman, and the benefactor of the poor widow. On entering the cottage
of the latter, he found her preparing gruel for supper, and was asked,
with the anxiety of a gratitude that would fain have rendered him some
return, “O Sir! will ye no tak’ _brochan_?” He is said to have been a
truly excellent and benevolent man--the Abercromby of a former age;
and the ingenious and pious Moses Browne (a clergyman who, to the
disgrace of the English Church, was suffered to languish through life
in a curacy of fifty pounds per annum) thus addresses him in one of his
larger poems, written immediately after the recovery of the author from
a long and dangerous illness:--
“The God I trust with timeliest kind relief
Sent the beloved physician to my aid,
(Generous, humanest, affable of soul,
Thee, dearest Hossack;--Oh! long known, long loved,
Long proved; in oft found tenderest watching cares,
The Christian friend, the man of feeling heart;)
And in his skilful, heaven-directed hand,
Put his best pleasing, _only_ fee, my cure.”
SUNDAY THOUGHTS, Part iv.
[Sidenote: THE HARD DOMINIE.]
The reputation of the old school necessarily varied with the character
and acquirements of its several teachers. About a century ago, it
was one of the most celebrated in this part of the kingdom, and was
attended by the children of country gentlemen for sixty miles round.
The teacher, a Mr. David Macculloch, was a native of the parish; and
so highly were his services appreciated by the people, especially by
such among them as kept lodgers, that they used to allege he was the
means of circulating more money among them than all their shopkeepers
and tradesfolk put together. He was a licentiate of the Church, and was
lost to the place by receiving an appointment to a semi-Highland parish
somewhere in Perthshire; when his fame as a teacher was transferred for
half an age to the parish schoolmaster of Fortrose, a Mr. Smith. It was
under this man, who is said to have done for the burghers of Chanonry
and Rosemarkie all that Mr. Macculloch had done for the householders of
Cromarty, that Sir James Mackintosh, so well known in after years as
a statesman and philosopher, received the rudiments of his education.
Next in course the burgh of Nairn became famous for the skill of its
parish teacher, a Mr. Strath; and there still survive a few of his
pupils to testify to his merits and to express their gratitude. Since
his death, however, the fame of educational ability has failed to
be associated in any very marked degree with our northern parochial
schools--in part a consequence, it is probable, of that change in the
tactics of tuition which, by demanding a division of labour in the
educational as in other departments, at once lessens the difficulty and
increases the efficiency of teaching. It is at least obvious that few
succeed well in what is very difficult; and that every improvement in
any art must add either to the value of what the art produces, or, what
seems to have happened in this case, to the facility of production.
The successor of Mr. Macculloch in the old school--a Mr. Russel--though
not equally celebrated as a teacher, was in other respects a more
remarkable man. About twelve years after his appointment, he
relinquished his pedagogical charge for a chapel in Kilmarnock, and
there he came in contact and quarrelled with our great national poet,
who, bold and unyielding as he was, seems to have regarded the stern
pedagogue of the north as no weak or puny antagonist; at least, against
none of his other clerical opponents did he open so powerful a battery.
We find him figuring in the “Holy Fair,” in the “Ordination,” in the
“Kirk’s Alarm,” and in the “Twa Herds,” one of whom was the “wordy
Russel.” Some degree of interest must necessarily attach to the memory
of a man who seems destined never to be wholly forgotten; and as I have
known and often conversed with several of his pupils, and remember even
some of his mature contemporaries, I must communicate to the reader a
few of their more characteristic recollections of the man of whom they
were accustomed to speak and think as Russel the “hard schoolmaster.”
It is now somewhat more than eighty years since John Russel, a native
of Moray, and one of the Church’s probationers, was appointed to the
parish school of Cromarty. He was a large, robust, dark-complexioned
man, imperturbably grave, and with a singularly stern expression
stamped on his dusky forehead, that boded the urchins of the place
little good. And in a few months he had acquired for himself the
character of being by far the most rigid disciplinarian in the country.
He was, I believe, a good, conscientious man, but unfortunate in a
temper at once violent and harsh, and in sometimes mistaking its
dictates for those of duty. At any rate, whatever the nature of the
mistake, never was there a schoolmaster more thoroughly feared and
detested by his pupils; and with dread and hatred did many of them
continue to regard him long after they had become men and women. His
memory was a dark morning cloud resting on their saddened boyhood,
that cast its shadows into after life. I have heard of a lady who was
so overcome by sudden terror on unexpectedly seeing him, many years
after she had quitted school, in one of the pulpits of the south, that
she fainted away in the pew; and of another of his scholars named
M’Glashan--a robust, daring young man of six feet--who, when returning
to Cromarty from some of the colonies, solaced himself by the way with
thoughts of the hearty drubbing with which he was to clear off all his
old scores with the dominie. Ere his return, however, Mr. Russel had
quitted the parish; nor, even if it had chanced otherwise, might the
young fellow have gained much in an encounter with one of the boldest
and most powerful men in the country.
But Polyphemus himself, giant as he was, and a demigod to boot, could
not always be cruel with impunity. The schoolmaster had his vulnerable
point; he was a believer in ghosts; at all events he feared them very
heartily, whether he believed in them or no; and some of his boys, much
as they dreaded him, contrived on one occasion to avenge themselves
upon him through his fears. In the long summer evenings he was in the
habit of prosecuting his studies to a late hour in the schoolroom;
from which, in returning to his lodgings, he had to pass through the
churchyard. And when striding homewards one night, laden with books
and papers, so affrighted was he by a horrible apparition, all over
white, which started up beside him from beneath one of the tombstones,
that, casting his burden to the winds, and starting off like wildfire,
he never once looked behind him until he had gained his landlady’s
fireside. It is said that he never after prosecuted his evening studies
in the school. The late minister of Knockbain, Mr. Roderick M’Kenzie,
for many years father of the Presbytery of Chanonry, used to tell with
much glee that he knew a very great deal about the urchin who, in
behalf of the outraged youthhood of the place, wore the white sheet
on this interesting occasion. “I was quite as much afraid of ghosts,”
he used to say, “as Mr. Russel himself; but three of my companions
lay fast ensconced, to keep me in heart and countenance, under a
neighbouring gravestone.”
There was among Russel’s pupils a poor boy named Skinner, who, as
was customary in Scottish schools of the period, blew the horn for
gathering the scholars, and kept the catalogue and the key, and who, in
return for his services, was educated by the master, and received some
little gratuity from the boys besides. To the south of the Grampians he
would have been termed the Janitor of the school; whereas in the north,
in those days, the name attached to him, in virtue of his office, was
the humbler one of “The Pauper.” Unluckily, on one occasion, the key
dropped out of his pocket; and, when school time came, the irascible
dominie had to burst open the door with his foot. He raged at the boy
with a fury so insane, and beat him with such relentless severity, that
in the extremity of the case, the other boys rose up shrieking around
him as if they were witnessing the perpetration of a murder; and the
tyrant, brought suddenly to himself by so strange an exhibition, flung
away the rod and sat down. And such, it is said, was the impression
made on the mind of poor “Pauper Skinner,” that though he quitted the
school shortly after, and plied the profession of a fisherman until
he died an old man, he was never from that day seen disengaged for a
moment, without mechanically thrusting his hand into the key-pocket. If
excited too by any unexpected occurrence, whatever its nature, he was
sure to grope hastily, in his agitation, for the missing key. One other
anecdote illustrative of Mr. Russel’s temper. He was passing along the
main street of the town, in a day of wind and rain from the sea, with
his head half-buried in his breast, when he came violently in contact
with a thatcher’s ladder, which had been left sloping from the roof of
one of the houses. A much less matter would have sufficed to awaken the
wrath of Mr. Russel: he laid hold of the ladder, and, dashing it on the
pavement, broke with his powerful foot, ere he quitted it, every one of
the “rounds.”
[Sidenote: MR. RUSSEL THE MINISTER.]
For at least the last six years of his residence in Cromarty he
was not a little popular as a preacher. His manner was strong and
energetic, and the natural severity of his temper seems to have been
more than genius to him when expatiating, which he did often, on the
miseries of the wicked in a future state. The reader will scarce fail
to remember the picture of the preacher dashed off by Burns in the Holy
Fair; or to see that the poet’s arrows, however wickedly shot, came
from no bow drawn at venture:--
“Black Russel is nae spairin’;
His piercing words, like Highland swords,
Divide the joints an’ marrow
His talk o’ hell, where devils dwell,
Our verra sauls does harrow
Wi’ fright that day.
“A vast unbottom’d, boundless pit,
Fill’d fou o’ lowin’ brunstane,
Whase ragin’ flame and scorchin’ heat
Wad melt the hardest whunstane.
The half-asleep start up wi’ fear,
And think they hear it roarin’,
When presently it does appear
’Twas but some neebor snorin’
Asleep that day.”
I have seen one of Russel’s sermons in print; it is a controversial
one, written in a bold rough style, and by no means inferior as a piece
of argument; but he was evidently a person rather to be listened to
than read. He was quite as stern in Church matters, it is said, as in
those of the school; but men are less tractable than boys; and his
severity proved more effectual in making his pupils diligent than in
reforming the town’s-people. He converted a few rather careless boys
into not very inferior scholars; but though he set himself so much
against the practice of Sabbath-evening walking, that he used to take
his stand every Sunday, after the church had dismissed, full in the
middle of the road which leads from the town to the woods and rocks
of the Southern Sutor, and sometimes turned back the walkers by the
shoulders after he had first shaken them by the breast, the practice of
Sabbath-evening walking became even more common than before. Instead
of addressing himself to the moral sense of the people, he succeeded in
but arousing their combative propensities; and these, once awakened,
took part against a good cause, simply because it had been unwisely and
unjustifiably defended.
I have an uncle in Cromarty, now an elderly man, who, when residing in
Glasgow in the year 1792, walked about ten miles into the country to
attend a sacramental _occasion_, at which he was told Mr. Russel was
to officiate, and which proved to be such a one as Burns has described
in his “Holy Fair.” There were excellent sermons to be heard from the
_tent_, and very tempting drink to be had in an ale-house scarcely a
hundred yards away; and between the tent and the ale-house were the
people divided, according to their tastes and characters. A young man
preached in the early part of the day--his discourse was a long one;
and, ere it had come to a close, the mirth of the neighbouring topers,
which became louder the more deeply they drank, had begun to annoy the
congregation. Mr. Russel was standing beside the tent. At every fresh
burst of sound he would raise himself on tiptoe, look first, with a
portentous expression of countenance, towards the ale-house, and then
at the clergyman; who at length, concluding his part of the service,
yielded to him his place. He laid aside the book, and, without psalm
or prayer, or any of the usual preliminaries, launched at once into a
powerful extempore address, directed, over the heads of the people,
at the ale-house. I have been assured by my relative that he never
before or since heard any thing half so energetic. His ears absolutely
tingled, as the preacher thundered out, in a voice almost superhuman,
his solemn and terrible denunciations. Every sound of revelry ceased
in a moment; and the Bacchanals, half-drunk, as most of them had ere
now become, were so thoroughly frightened as to be fain to steal out
through a back window, and slink away along bypaths through the fields.
Mr. Russel was ultimately appointed one of the ministers of Stirling.
A Cromarty man, a soldier in a Highland regiment, when stationed in
Stirling Castle, had got involved one day in some street quarrel,
and was swearing furiously, when a tall old man in black came and
pulled him out of the crowd. “Wretched creature that ye are!” said
the old man; “come along with me.” He drew him into a quiet corner,
and began to expostulate with him on his profanity, in a style to
which the soldier, an intelligent though by no means steady man, and
the child of religious parents, could not but listen. Mr. Russel--for
it was no other than he--seemed pleased with the attention he paid
him; and on learning whence he had come, and the name of his parents,
exclaimed with much feeling, “Wae’s me! that your father’s son should
be a blackguard soldier on the streets of Stirling! But come awa.”
He brought him home with him, and added to the serious advice he had
given him an excellent dinner. The temper of the preacher softened a
good deal as he became old; and he was much a favourite with the more
serious part of his congregation. He was, with all his defects, an
honest, pious man; and had he lived in the days of Renwick or Cargill,
or, a century earlier, in the days of Knox or Wishart, he might have
been a useful one. But he was unlucky in the age in which he lived,
in his temper, and in coming in contact with as hard-headed people as
himself.
[Sidenote: THE COCK-FIGHT.]
The parish schools of Scotland had their annual saturnalian feast, of
what may be well deemed an extraordinary character, if we consider
their close connexion with the National Church, and that their teachers
were in so many instances licensed clergymen waiting for preferment.
On Fasten’s-eve, just when all Rome was rejoicing in the license of
the Carnival, the schoolmaster, after closing the service of the day
with prayer, would call on the boys to divide and choose for themselves
“_Head-stocks_,” _i.e._, leaders, for the yearly cock-fight of the
ensuing Shrove-Tuesday. A sudden rush would immediately take place
among the pigmy population of the school to two opposing desks, which,
piled up with urchin a-top of urchin half-way to the rafters, would
straightway assume the appearance of two treacled staves, covered with
black-bottle flies in a shopkeeper’s yard, on a day of midsummer. The
grave question of leadership soon settled, in consequence of previous
out-of-door arrangement, the master, producing the catalogue, would
next proceed to call the boys in alphabetical order; and each boy
to intimate, in reply, under what “head-stock” he purposed fighting
his cocks, and how many cocks he intended bringing into the pit. The
master, meanwhile, went on recording both items in a book--in especial
the number of the cocks--as, according to the registered figure, which
always exceeded the array actually brought into the fight, he received,
as a fixed perquisite of his office, a fee of twopence per head. The
school then broke up; and for the two ensuing days, which were given
as holidays for the purpose of preparation, the parish used to be
darkened by wandering scholars going about from farmhouse to farmhouse
in quest of cocks. Most boys brought at least one cock to the pit; and
“head-stocks”--selected usually for the wealth of their parents, and
with an eye to the entertainment with which the festival was expected
to close--would sometimes bring up as many as ten or twelve. The
cock-fight ball, given by the victorious “head-stock” on the eve of his
victory, was always regarded as the crowning item in the festival.
On the morning of Shrove Tuesday, the floor of the school, previously
cleared of all the forms, and laid out into a chalked circle,
representative of the cockpit, became a scene of desperate battle.
The master always presided on these occasions as umpire; while his
boys clustered in a ring, immediately under his eye, a little beyond
the chalked line. The cocks of the lads who ranged under the one
“head-stock” were laid down one after one on the left, those of the
other, as a bird dropped exhausted or ran away, upon the right; and
thus the fight went on from morning till far in the evening; when
the “head-stock” whose last bird remained in possession of the field,
and whose cocks had routed the greatest number in the aggregate, was
declared victor, and formally invested with a tinsel cap, in a ceremony
termed the “crowning.” The birds, however, were permitted to share in
the honour of their masters--and in many schools there was a small
silver bell, the property of the institution, attached to the neck of
the poor cock who had beaten the largest number of opponents; but very
rarely did he long survive the honour. I remember seeing one gallant
bird, who had vanquished six cocks in succession, stand in the middle
of the pit, one of his eyes picked out, and his comb and bells all
in a clot of blood, and then, in about half a minute after his last
antagonist had fled, fall dead upon the floor. It is really wonderful
how ingenious boys can be made, in even the more occult mysteries of
the cockpit, when their training has been good. Some hopeful scholars
had learned to provide themselves with medicated grains for drugging,
as the opportunity offered, the birds of an opponent; and it was no
unusual thing for a lad who carried his cock under his arm in the
crowd, to find the creature rendered unfit for the combat by the
skilful application of the pin of an antagonist, who, having stolen
stealthily upon him from behind, succeeded in serving the poor animal
as the minions of Mortimer served the hapless Edward II. Game-birds
who, in inconsistency with their previous character, refused to fight,
were often found, on examination, to have pins thrust up more than two
inches into their bowels. The birds who, without any such apology,
preferred running away to fighting, were converted into _droits_,
under the ill-omened name of _fugies_, and forfeited to the master of
the school. And these were rendered by him the subject of yet another
licensed amusement of the period. The _fugies_ were fastened to a
stake in the playground, and destroyed, one after one, in the noble
game of cock-throwing, by such of the pupils or of the town’s-people
as could indulge in the amusement at the rate of a halfpenny the
throw. The master not only pocketed all the halfpennies, but he also
carried home with him all the carcases. It is perhaps not very strange
that good men, of naturally severe temper, like Mr. Russel, should
have said grace over their _cock-a-leekie_ thus procured, without once
suspecting that there was anything wrong in the practice; but that
schoolmasters like M’Culloch, who was a person of humanity, should
have done so, serves strikingly to show how blinding and tyrannical
must be that influence which custom exercises over even the best of
men; and that not only does religion exert a beneficial effect on
civilisation, but that civilisation may, in turn, react with humanizing
influence on the religious. The very origin of the festival is said
to have been ecclesiastical. It was instituted, we find it intimated
in the _Clavis Calendaria_, “in allusion to the indignities offered
to our Saviour by the Jews before the crucifixion;” but how it should
have survived the Reformation, and been permitted not only to shelter,
like the Gibeonites of old, in the house of the enemy, but have also
become an object of the direct patronage of many of our best men of the
evangelical school, seems a problem of somewhat difficult solution.
It is just possible, however, that the Reformers, who were well
enough acquainted with human nature to be aware of the necessity of
relaxation, might have seen nothing very barbarous in the practice;
seeing that the tone of men’s feelings in such matters depends more
on the degree of refinement which has been attained to by the age or
country in which they live, than on the severity of their general
morals or the purity of their creed. I may add, that the practice
of cock-throwing was abolished in the old school of Cromarty by Mr.
Russel’s immediate successor--the late Rev. Mr. Macadam of Nigg; but
the annual cock-fight survived until put down, a few years ago,[10] by
the present incumbent of the parish.
[Sidenote: M’CULLOCH THE MECHANICIAN.]
There was one other Cromarty man of the last century who became eminent
in his own walk and day, and to whom I must therefore refer; but I know
not that he owed much, if anything, to the old school of the burgh.
In the _Scots Magazine_ for May 1789, there is a report by Captain
Philip d’Auvergne, of the Narcissus frigate, on the practical utility
of Kenneth M’Culloch’s sea compasses. The captain, after an eighteen
months’ trial of their merits, compared with those of all the other
kinds in use at the time, describes them as immensely superior, and
earnestly recommends to the Admiralty their general introduction into
the navy. In passing, on one occasion, through the race of Alderney in
the winter of 1787, there broke out a frightful storm, and so violent
was the opposition of the wind and tide, that while his vessel was
sailing at the rate of eleven miles on the surface, she was making
scarce any headway by the land. The sea rose tremendously--at once
short, high, and irregular; and the motions of the vessel were so
fearfully abrupt and violent, that scarce a seaman aboard could stand
on deck. At a time so critical, when none of the compasses supplied
from his Majesty’s stores _would stand_, but vacillated more than
three points on each side, “it commanded,” says the captain, “the
admiration of the whole crew, winning the confidence of even the most
timorous--to see how quickly and readily M’Culloch’s steering compass
recovered the vacillations communicated to it by the motion of the
ship and the shocks of the sea, and how truly in every brief interval
of rest the needle pointed to the Pole.” It is further added, that on
the Captain’s recommendation these compasses were tried on board the
Andromeda, commanded at the time by Prince William Henry, our present
king, and so satisfied was the Prince of the utility of the invention,
that he too became a strenuous advocate for their general introduction,
and testified his regard for the ingenious inventor, by appointing
him his compass-maker. M’Culloch, however, did not long survive the
honour, dying a few years after, and I have been unable to trace with
any degree of certainty the further history of his improved compasses.
But though only imperfectly informed regarding his various inventions,
and they are said to have been many, and singularly practical, I am
tolerably well acquainted with the story of his early life; and as it
furnishes a striking illustration of that instinct of genius, if I may
so express myself, which leads the possessor to exactly the place in
which his services may be of most value to the community, by rendering
him useless and unhappy in every other, I think I cannot do better than
communicate it to the reader.
There stood, about forty years ago, on the northern side of the parish
of Cromarty, an old farmhouse--one of those low, long, dark-looking
erections of turf and stone which still survive in the remoter
districts of Scotland, as if to show how little man may sometimes
improve, in even a civilized country, on the first rude shelter which
his necessities owed to his ingenuity. A worn-out barrel, fixed
slantwise in the ridge, served as a chimney for the better apartment
(the spare room of the domicile), which was also furnished with a
glazed window; but in the others the smoke was suffered to escape, and
the light to enter, as chance or accident might direct. The eaves,
overhung by stonecrop and studded by bunches of the houseleek, drooped
heavily above the small blind openings and low door; and a row of
ancient elms, which rose from out the fence of a neglected garden,
spread their gnarled and ponderous arms over the roof. Such was the
farmhouse of Woodside, in which Kenneth M’Culloch, the son of the
farmer, was born some time in the early half of the last century. The
family from which he sprang--a race of honest, plodding tacksmen--had
held the place from the proprietor of Cromarty for considerably more
than a hundred years before, and it was deemed quite a matter of
course that Kenneth, the eldest son, should succeed his father in the
farm. Never was there a time, in at least this part of the country,
in which agriculture stood more in need of the services of original
and inventive minds. There was not a wheeled cart in the parish, nor
a plough constructed on the modern principle. There was no changing
of seed to suit the varieties of soil, no green cropping, no rotatory
system of production; it almost seemed as if the main object of the
farmer was to raise the least possible amount of grain at the greatest
possible expense of labour. The farm of Woodside was primitive enough
in its usages and modes of tillage to have formed a study to the
antiquary. Towards autumn, when the fields vary most in colour, it
resembled a rudely executed chart of some large island, so irregular
were the patches which composed it, and so broken on every side by
a surrounding sea of brown sterile moor, that went here and there
winding into the interior in long river-like strips, or expanded within
into firths and lakes. In one corner there stood a heap of stones,
in another a thicket of furze--here a piece of bog--there a broken
bank of clay. The implements, too, with which the fields were tilled,
were quite as uncouth in their appearance as the fields themselves.
There was the single-stilted plough, that did little more than scratch
the surface; the wooden-toothed harrow, that did hardly so much; the
cumbrous sledge--no inconsiderable load of itself, for carrying home
the corn in harvest; and the basket-woven conical cart, with its
rollers of wood, for bearing out the manure in spring. With these, too,
there was the usual misproportion to the extent and produce of the
farm, of lean inefficient cattle--four half-starved animals performing,
with incredible labour, the work of one. And yet, now that a singularly
inventive mind had come into existence on this very farm, and though
its attentions had been directed, as far as external influences could
direct them, on the various employments of the farmer, the interests
of husbandry were to be in no degree improved by the circumstance.
Nature, in the midst of her wisdom, seems to cherish a dash of the
eccentric. The ingenuity of the farmer’s son was to be employed, not
in facilitating the labours of the farmer, but in inventing binnacle
lamps, which would yield an undiminished light amid the agitations of
a tempest, and in constructing mariners’ compasses on a new principle.
There are instances of similar character furnished by the experience of
almost every one. In passing, some years since, over a dreary moor in
the interior of the country, my curiosity was excited by a miniature
mast, furnished, like that of a ship, with shrouds and yards, and
bearing a-top a gaudy pinnet, which rose beside a little Highland
cottage. And on inquiring regarding it at the door, I was informed
that it was the work of the cottager’s son, a lad who, though he had
scarcely ever seen the sea, had taken a strange fancy to the life of
a sailor, and had left his father only a few weeks before, to serve
aboard a man-of-war.
Kenneth’s first employment was the tending of a flock of sheep, the
property of his father; and wretchedly did he acquit himself of the
charge. The farm was bounded on the eastern side by a deep bosky
ravine, through the bottom of which a scanty runnel rather trickled
than flowed; and when it was discovered on any occasion that Kenneth’s
flock had been left to take care of themselves, and of his father’s
corn to boot--and such occasions were wofully frequent--Kenneth
himself was almost invariably to be found in the ravine. There would
he sit for hours among the bushes, engaged with his knife in carving
uncouth faces on the heads of walking-sticks, or in constructing little
water-mills, or in making Liliputian pumps of the dried stalks of the
larger hemlock, and in raising the waters of the runnel to basins dug
in the sides of the hollow. Sometimes he quitted his charge altogether,
and set out for a meal-mill about a quarter of a mile from the farm,
where he would linger for half a day at a time watching the motion
of the wheels. His father complained that he could make nothing of
him--“The boy,” he said, “seemed to have nearly as much sense as other
boys of his years, and yet for any one useful purpose he was nothing
better than an idiot.” His mother, as is common with mothers, and who
was naturally an easy kind-hearted sort of woman, had better hopes of
him. Kenneth, she affirmed, was only a little peculiar, and would turn
out well after all. He was growing up, however, without improving in
the slightest, and when he became tall enough for the plough, he made
a dead stand. He would go and be a tradesman, he said--a mason, or
smith, or house-carpenter--anything his friends chose to make him; but
a farmer he would not be. His father, after a fruitless struggle to
overcome his obstinacy, carried him with him to a friend in Cromarty,
our old acquaintance, Donald Sandison, and after candidly confessing
that he was of no manner of use at home, and would, he was afraid, be
of little use anywhere, bound him by indenture to the mechanic for four
years.
Kenneth’s new master, as I have already had occasion to state, was one
of the best workmen in his profession in the north of Scotland. His
scrutoires and wardrobes were in repute up to the close of the last
century, and in the ancient art of wainscot-carving he had no equal
in the country. He was an intelligent man too, as well as a superior
mechanic; but with all his general intelligence, and all his skill,
he failed to discover the latent capabilities of his apprentice.
Kenneth was dull and absent, and had no heart to his work; and though
he seemed to understand the principles on which his master’s various
tools were used and the articles of his trade constructed, as well as
any workman in the shop, there were none among them who used the tools
so awkwardly, or constructed the articles so ill. An old botching
carpenter who wrought in a little shop at the other end of the town,
was known to the boys of the place by the humorous appellation of
“Spull (_i.e._ spoil)-the-wood,” and a lean-sided, ill-conditioned,
dangerous boat which he had built, as “the Wilful Murder.” Kenneth came
to be regarded as a sort of second “Spull-the-Wood,” as a fashioner of
rickety tables, ill-fitted drawers, and chairs that, when sat upon,
creaked like badly-tuned organs; and the boys, who were beginning to
regard him as fair game, sometimes took the liberty of asking him
whether he, too, was not going to build a Wilful Murder? Such, in
short, were his deficiencies as a mechanic, that in the third year of
his apprenticeship his master advised his father to take him home with
him and set him to the plough--an advice, however, on which the farmer,
warned by his previous experience, sturdily refused to act.
It was remarked that Kenneth acquired more of his profession in the
last year of his apprenticeship than in all the others. His skill
as a workman came to rank but little below the average ability of
his shopmates; and he seemed to enjoy more, and had become less
bashful and awkward. His master on one occasion brought him aboard a
vessel in the harbour, to repair some injury which her bulwarks had
sustained in a storm; and Kenneth, for the first time in his life, was
introduced to the mariner’s compass. The master in after days, when
his apprentice had become a great man, used to relate the circumstance
with much complacency, and compare him, as he bent over the instrument
in wonder and admiration, to a negro of the Kanga tribe worshipping
the elephant’s tooth. On the close of his apprenticeship he left this
part of the country for London, accompanied by his master’s eldest
son, a lad of a rather careless disposition, but, like his father, a
first-rate workman.
Kenneth soon began to experience the straits and hardships of the
inferior mechanic. His companion found little difficulty in procuring
employment, and none at all in retaining it when once procured.
Kenneth, on the contrary, was tossed about from shop to shop, and from
one establishment to another; and for a full twelvemonth, during the
half of which he was wholly unemployed, he did not work for more than a
fortnight together with any one master. It would have fared worse with
him than it did, had it not been for his companion, Willie Sandison,
who generously shared his earnings with him every time he stood in
need of his assistance. In about a year after they had gone to London,
however, Willie, an honest and warm-hearted but thoughtless lad, was
inveigled into a disreputable marriage, and lost in consequence his
wonted ability to assist his companion. I have seen one of Kenneth’s
letters to his old master, written about this time, in which he bewails
Willie’s mishap, and dwells gloomily on his own prospects. How these
first began to brighten I am unable to say, for there occurs about this
period a wide gap in his story, which all my inquiries regarding him
have not enabled me to fill; but in a second letter to his master, now
before me, which bears date 1772, just ten years after the other, there
are the evidences of a surprising improvement in his circumstances and
condition.
He writes in high spirits. Just before sitting down to his desk he
had heard from his old friend Willie, who had gone out to one of the
colonies, where he was thriving in spite of his wife. He had heard,
too, by the same post from his mother, who had been so kind to him
during his luckless boyhood; and the old woman was well. He had,
besides, been enabled to remove from his former lodgings to a fine
airy house in Duke’s Court, opposite St. Martin’s Church, for which
he had engaged, he said, to pay a rent of forty-two pounds per annum,
a very considerable sum nearly sixty years ago. Further, he had
entered into an advantageous contract with Catherine of Russia, for
furnishing all the philosophical instruments of a new college then
erecting in Petersburgh--a contract which promised to secure about two
years’ profitable employment to himself and seven workmen. In the ten
years which intervened between the dates of his two letters, Kenneth
M’Culloch had become one of the most skilful and inventive mechanicians
of London. He rose gradually into affluence and celebrity, and for
a considerable period before his death his gains were estimated at
about a thousand a year. His story, however, illustrates rather the
wisdom of nature than that of Kenneth M’Culloch. We think all the more
highly of Franklin for being so excellent a printer, and of Burns for
excelling all his companions in the labours of the fields; nor did the
skill or vigour with which they pursued their ordinary employments
hinder the one from taking his place among the first philosophers and
first statesmen of the age, nor prevent the other from achieving his
widespread celebrity as the most original and popular of modern poets.
Be it remembered, however, that there is a narrow and limited cast
of genius, unlike that of either Burns or Franklin, which, though of
incalculable value in its own sphere, is of no use whatever in any
other; and to precipitate it on its proper object by the pressure of
external circumstances, and the general inaptitude of its possessor for
other pursuits, seems to be part of the wise economy of Providence. Had
Kenneth M’Culloch betaken himself to the plough, like his father and
grandfather, he would have been, like them, the tacksman of Woodside,
and nothing more; had he found his proper vocation in cabinet-making,
he would have made tables and chairs for life, like his ingenious
master, Donald Sandison.
CHAPTER XXIX.
“To a mysteriously consorted pair
This place is consecrate, to Death and Life,
And to the best affections that proceed
From their conjunction.”--WORDSWORTH.
[Sidenote: THE ITINERANT SCULPTOR.]
Were I to see a person determined on becoming a hermit, through a
disgust of the tame aspect of manners and low tone of feeling which
seem characteristic of what is termed civilized society, I should be
inclined to advise that, instead of retiring into a desert, he should
take up his place of residence in a country churchyard.
Perhaps no personage of real life can be more properly regarded as a
hermit of the churchyard than the itinerant sculptor, who wanders from
one country burying-ground to another, recording on his tablets of
stone the tears of the living and the worth of the dead. If possessed
of an ordinary portion of feeling and imagination, he can scarce fail
of regarding his profession as a school of benevolence and poetry. For
my own part, I have seldom thrown aside the hammer and trowel of the
stone-mason for the chisel of the itinerant sculptor, without receiving
some fresh confirmation of the opinion. How often have I suffered
my mallet to rest on the unfinished epitaph, when listening to some
friend of the buried expatiating, with all the eloquence of grief, on
the mysterious warning--and the sad deathbed--on the worth that had
departed--and the sorrow that remained behind! How often, forgetting
that I was merely an auditor, have I so identified myself with the
mourner as to feel my heart swell, and my eyes becoming moist! Even
the very aspect of a solitary churchyard seems conducive to habits of
thought and feeling. I have risen from my employment to mark the shadow
of tombstone and burial-mound creeping over the sward at my feet, and
have been rendered serious by the reflection, that as those gnomons
of the dead marked out no line of hours, though the hours passed as
the shadows moved, so, in that eternity in which even the dead exist,
there is a nameless tide of continuity, but no division of time. I
have become sad, when, looking on the green mounds around me, I have
regarded them as waves of triumph which time and death have rolled over
the wreck of man; and the feeling has deepened, when, looking down with
the eye of imagination through this motionless sea of graves, I have
marked the sad remains of both the long-departed and the recent dead
thickly strewed over the bottom. I have grieved above the half-soiled
shroud of her for whom the tears of bereavement had not yet been dried
up, and sighed over the mouldering bones of him whose very name had
long since perished from the earth.
[Sidenote: KIRK-MICHAEL.]
Not long ago I wrought for about a week in the burying-ground of
Kirk-Michael, a ruinous chapel in the eastern extremity of the parish
of Resolis, distant about six miles from the town of Cromarty. It is
a pleasant solitary spot, lying on the sweep of a gentle declivity.
The sea flows to within a few yards of the lower wall; but the beach
is so level, and so little exposed to the winds, that even in the time
of tempest there is heard within its precincts only a faint rippling
murmur, scarcely loud enough to awaken the echoes of the ruin. Ocean
seems to muffle his waves in approaching this field of the dead. A row
of elms springs out of the fence, and half encircles the building in
the centre. Standing beside the mouldering walls, the foreground of the
scene appears thickly sprinkled over with graves and tablets; and we
see the green moss creeping round the rude sculptures of a primitive
age, imparting lightness and beauty to that on which the chisel had
bestowed a very opposite character. The flake-like leaves and gnarled
trunks of the elms fill up what a painter would term the midground of
the picture; and seen from between the boughs, the Bay of Cromarty,
shut in by the Sutors so as to present the appearance of a huge lake,
and the town beyond half enveloped in blue smoke--the windows sparkling
through the cloud like spangles on a belt of azure--occupy the distance.
The western gable of the ruin is still entire, though the very
foundations of part of the walls can no longer be traced on the
sward, and it is topped by a belfry of hewn stone, in which the _dead
bell_ is still suspended. From the spires and balls with which the
cornice is surmounted, the moss and lichens which bristle over the
mouldings, and the stalks of ragweed which shoot out here and there
from between the joints, the belfry, though designed in a barbarous
style of architecture, is rich in the true picturesque. It furnished
me, when the wind blew from the east, with an agreeable music, not,
indeed, either gay or very varied, but of a character which suited well
with that of the place. I wrought directly under it, and frequently
paused in my labours to hearken the blast moaning amid its spires, and
whistling through its apertures; and I have occasionally been startled
by the mingling deathlike tones produced by the hammer, when forced
by the wind against the sides of the bell. I was one day listening
to this music, when, by one of those freaks which fling the light of
recollection upon the dark recesses of the past, much in the manner
that I have seen a child throwing the gleam of a mirror from the
sunshine into the shade, there were brought before me the circumstances
of a dream, deemed prophetic of the death of him whose epitaph I was
then inscribing. It was one of those auguries of contingency which,
according to Bacon, men mark when they hit, and never mark when they
miss.
[Sidenote: THE APPRENTICE’S DREAM.]
In the latter part of 1822 a young lad, a mason’s apprentice,
was employed with his master in working within the policies of
Pointzfield--a gentleman’s seat about a mile from the burying-ground.
He wished much to visit the tombs and chapel, but could find no
opportunity; for the day had so shortened that his employments engaged
him from the first peep of light in the morning until half an hour
after sunset. And perhaps the wish was the occasion of the dream.
He had no sooner fallen asleep, after the fatigues of the day, than
he found himself approaching the chapel in one of the finest of
midsummer evenings. The whole western heavens were suffused with the
blush of sunset--the hills, the woods, the fields, the sea, all the
limbs and members of the great frame of nature, seemed enveloped in
a mantle of beauty. He reached the burying-ground, and deemed it the
loveliest spot he had ever seen. The tombs were finished after the most
exquisite designs, chastely Grecian, or ornately Gothic; and myriads
of flowering shrubs winded around the urns, and shaded the tablets
in every disposition of beauty. The building seemed entire, but it
was so encrusted with moss and lichens as to present an appearance of
extreme antiquity; and on the western gable there was fixed a huge
gnomon of bronze, fantastically carved like that of an antique dial,
and green with the rust of ages. Suddenly a low breeze began to moan
through the shrubs and bushes, the heavens became overcast, and the
dreamer, turning towards the building, beheld with a sensation of fear
the gnomon revolving slowly as on an axis, until the point rested
significantly on the sward. He fled the place in deep horror, the
night suddenly fell, and when floundering on in darkness and terror,
through a morass that stretches beyond the southern wall of the chapel,
he awoke, and lo! it was a dream. Only five weeks elapsed from this
evening, until he followed to the burying-ground the corpse of a
relative, and saw that the open grave occupied the identical spot on
which the point of the gnomon had rested.
During the course of the week which I spent in the burying-ground, I
became acquainted with several interesting traditions connected with
its mute inhabitants. There are some of these which show how very
unlike the beliefs entertained in the ages which have departed, are
to those deemed rational in the present; while there are others which
render it evident that though men at different eras think and believe
differently, human nature always remains the same. The following
partakes in part of the character of both.
[Sidenote: THE WILD WIFE.]
There lived, about a century ago, in the upper part of the parish of
Cromarty, an elderly female of that disposition of mind which Bacon
describes as one of the very errors of human nature. Her faculties of
enjoyment and suffering seemed connected by some invisible tie to the
fortunes of her neighbours; but the tie, unlike that of sympathy, which
binds pleasure to pleasure, and sorrow to sorrow, united by a strange
perversity the opposite feelings; for she was happy when the people
around her were unfortunate, and miserable when they prospered. So
decided a misanthropy was met by a kindred feeling in those acquainted
with her; nor was she regarded with only that abhorrence which attaches
to the evil wish, and the malignant intention, but also with the
contempt due to that impotency of malice which can only wish and intend.
Her sphere of mischief, however, though limited by her circumstances,
was occupied to its utmost boundary; and she frequently made up
for her want of power by an ingenuity, derived from what seemed an
almost instinctive knowledge of the weaknesses of human nature. It
was difficult to tell how she effected her schemes, but certain it
was that in her neighbourhood lovers became estranged, and families
divided. Late in the autumn of her last year, she formed one of a
band of reapers employed in cutting down the crops of a Cromarty
farmer. Her partner on the ridge was a poor widow, who had recently
lost her husband, and who, though wasted by grief and sickness, was
now toiling for her three fatherless children. Every person on the
field pitied her but one; and the malice of even that one, perverted
as her dispositions were, would probably have been disarmed by the
helplessness of its object, had it not chanced, that about five years
before, when the poor woman and her deceased husband were on the eve of
their marriage, she had attempted to break off the match, by casting
some foul aspersions on her character. Those whom the wicked injure,
says the adage, they never forgive; and with a demoniac abuse of her
knowledge of the dispositions of the people with whom she wrought,
she strained beyond her strength to get ahead of them, knowing that
a competition would necessarily take place, in which, she trusted,
the widow would have either to relinquish her employment as above her
strength, or so exhaust herself in the contest as to relapse into
sickness. The expected struggle ensued, but, to the surprise of every
one, the widow kept up her place in the foremost rank until evening,
when she appeared less fatigued than almost any individual of the
party. The wretch who had occasioned the contest, and who had fallen
behind all the others, seemed dreadfully agitated for the two last
hours it continued; and she was heard by the persons who bound up the
sheaves, muttering, during the whole time, words apparently of fearful
meaning, which were, however, drowned amid the rustling of the corn,
and the hurry and confusion of the competition. Next morning she alone
of all the reapers was absent; and she was found by the widow, who
seemed the only one solicitous to know what had become of her, and who
first entered her hovel to inquire after her, tossing in the delirium
of fever. The poor woman, though shocked and terrified by her ravings
and her agony, tended her till within half an hour of midnight, when
she expired.
At that late hour a solitary traveller was passing the road which winds
along the southern shore of the bay. The moon, in her last quarter,
had just risen over the hill on his right, and, half-veiled by three
strips of cloud, rather resembled a heap of ignited charcoal seen
through the bars of a grate, than the orb which only a few nights
before had enabled the reaper to prosecute his employments until near
morning. The blocks of granite scattered over the neighbouring beach,
and bleached and polished by the waves, were relieved by the moonshine,
and resembled flocks of sheep ruminating on a meadow; but not a single
ray rested on the sea beyond, or the path or fields before;--the
beam slided ineffectually along the level;--it was light looking at
darkness. On a sudden, the traveller became conscious of that strange
mysterious emotion which, according to the creed of the demonologist,
indicates the presence or near approach of an evil spirit. He felt his
whole frame as if creeping together, and his hair bristling on his
head; and, filled with a strange horror, he heard, through the dead
stillness of the night, a faint uncertain noise, like that of a sudden
breeze rustling through a wood at the close of autumn. He blessed
himself, and stood still. A tall figure, indistinct in the darkness,
came gliding along the road from the east, and inquired of him in a
voice hollow and agitated, as it floated past, whether it could not
reach Kirk-Michael before midnight? “No living person could,” answered
the traveller; and the appearance, groaning at the reply, was out of
sight in a moment. The sounds still continued, as if a multitude of
leaves were falling from the boughs of a forest, and striking with a
pattering sound on the heaps congregated beneath, when another figure
came up, taller, but even less distinct, than the former. It bore the
appearance of a man on horseback. “Shall I reach Kirk-Michael before
midnight?” was the query again put to the terrified traveller; but
before he could reply, the appearance had vanished in the distance, and
a shriek of torment and despair, which seemed re-echoed by the very
firmament, roused him into a more intense feeling of horror. The moon
shone out with supernatural brightness; the noise, which had ceased for
a moment, returned, but the sounds were different--for they now seemed
to be those of faint laughter, and low indistinct murmurings in the
tone of ridicule; and the gigantic rider of a pale horse, with what
appeared to be a female shape bent double before him, and accompanied
by two dogs, one of which tugged at the head and the other at the feet
of the figure, was seen approaching from the west. As this terrible
apparition passed the traveller, the moon shone full on the face of
the woman bent across the horse, and he distinctly perceived, though
the features seemed convulsed with agony, that they were those of the
female who, unknown to him, had expired a few minutes before. None of
the other stories are of so terrible a character.
[Sidenote: GORDON OF NEWHALL.]
Attached to the eastern gable of the ruin, there is a tomb which
encloses several monuments; among the rest a plain slab of marble
bearing an epitaph, the composition of which would reflect honour
on the pen even of Pope. Like most of the other tablets of the
burying-ground, it has its history. Somewhat more than fifty years
ago, the proprietor of Newhall, an estate in the neighbourhood, was a
young man of very superior powers of mind, and both a gentleman and a
scholar. When on a visit at the house of his uncle, the proprietor of
Invergordon, he was suddenly taken ill, and died a few hours after,
leaving behind him a sister, who entertained for him the warmest
affection, and the whole of his tenants, who were much attached to him,
to regret his loss. He was buried in the family vault of his uncle, who
did not long survive him; and whose estate, including the vault, was
sold soon after by the next of kin--a circumstance which aggravated, in
no slight degree, the grief of his sister. There was one gloomy idea
that continually occupied her mind--the idea that even the dust of her
brother had, like the earth and stones of his cemetery, become the
property of a stranger. Sleeping or waking, the interior of the vault
was continually before her. I have seen it. It is a damp melancholy
apartment of stone, so dimly lighted that the eye cannot ascertain its
extent, with the sides hollowed into recesses, partly occupied by the
dead, and with a few rusty iron lamps suspended from the ceiling, that
resemble in the darkness a family of vampire bats clinging to the roof
of a cavern. A green hillock, covered with moss and daisies, would have
supplied the imagination of the mourner with a more pleasing image, and
have associated better with the character of the dead.
His sister was the wife of a gentleman who was at that time the
proprietor of Braelanguil. One evening, about half a year after the
sale of her uncle’s property, she was prevailed upon by her husband to
quit her apartment, to which she had been confined for months before,
and to walk with him in a neighbouring wood. She spoke of the virtues
and talents of the deceased, the only theme from which she could derive
any pleasure; and she found that evening in her companion a more deep
and tender sympathy than usual. The walk was insensibly prolonged,
and she was only awakened from her reverie of tenderness and sorrow,
by finding herself among the graves of Kirk-Michael. The door of her
husband’s burying-ground lay open. On entering it, she perceived that a
fresh grave had been added to the number of those which had previously
occupied the space, and that one of the niches in the wall was filled
up by a new slab of marble. It was the grave and monument of her
brother. The body had been removed from the vault, and re-interred in
this place by her consort; and it would perhaps be difficult to decide
whether the more delicate satisfaction was derived by the sister or the
husband from the walk of the evening. The epitaph is as follows:--
What science crown’d him, or what genius blest,
No flattering pencil bids this stone attest;
Yet may it witness with a purer pride,
How many virtues sunk when Gordon died.
Clear truth and nature, noble rays of mind,
Open as day, that beam’d on all mankind;
Warm to oblige, too gentle to offend,
He never made a foe nor lost a friend.
Nor yet from fortune’s height, or learning’s shade,
It boasts the tribute to his memory paid;
But that around, in grateful sorrow steep’d,
The humble tenants of the cottage wept;
Those simple hearts that shrink from grandeur’s blaze,
Those artless tongues that know not how to praise,
Feel and record the worth that hallow here
A friend’s remembrance, and a sister’s tear.[11]
Half-way between the chapel and the northern wall of the
burying-ground, there is a square altar-like monument of hewn ashlar,
enclosing in one of its sides a tablet of grey freestone. It was
erected about sixty years ago by a baronet of Fowlis to the memory of
his aunt, Mrs. Gordon of Ardoch, a woman whose singular excellence of
character is recorded by the pen of Doddridge. She was the only sister
of three brothers--men who ranked among the best and bravest of their
age, and all of whom died in the service of their country--two in the
field of battle, the third when pursuing a flying enemy.
[Sidenote: SIR ROBERT MUNRO.]
The eldest son of the family was Sir Robert Munro, twenty-seventh
baronet of Fowlis, a man whose achievements, as recorded by the sober
pen of Doddridge, seem fitted to associate rather with ideas derived
from the high conceptions of poetry and romance, than with those
which we usually acquire from our experience of real life. He was a
person of calm wisdom, determined courage, and unassuming piety. On
quitting the university, which he did when very young, he passed into
Flanders, where he served for several years under Marlborough, and
became intimate with the celebrated James Gardiner, then a cornet of
dragoons. And the intimacy ripened into a friendship which did not
terminate until death; perhaps not even then. On the peace of 1712 he
returned to Scotland; and the Rebellion broke out three years after.
At the head of his clan, the Munros, in union with the good Earl of
Sutherland, he so harassed a body of three thousand Highlanders, who,
under the Earl of Seaforth, were on the march to join the insurgents at
Perth, that the junction was retarded for nearly two months--a delay
which is said to have decided the fate of the Stuarts in Scotland. In
the following year he was appointed one of the commissioners of inquiry
into the forfeited estates of the attainted; and he exerted himself
in this office in erecting parishes in the remote Highlands, which
derived their stipends from the confiscated lands. In this manner, says
his biographer, new presbyteries were formed in counties where the
discipline and worship of Protestant Churches had before no footing. It
is added, that by his influence with Government he did eminent service
to the wives and children of the proscribed. He was for thirty years a
member of Parliament, and distinguished himself as a liberal consistent
Whig--the friend both of the people and of the king. In the year 1740,
when the country was on the eve of what he deemed a just war, though
he had arrived at an age at which the soldier commonly begins to think
of retiring from the fatigues of the military life, he quitted the
business of the senate for the dangers of the field, and passed a
second time into Flanders. He now held the rank of lieutenant-colonel,
and such was his influence over the soldiers under him, and such
their admiration of his character, that his spirit and high sense of
honour seemed to pervade the whole regiment. When a guard was granted
to the people of Flanders for the protection of their property, they
prayed that it should be composed of Sir Robert’s Highlanders; and the
Elector-Palatine, through his envoy at the English court, tendered to
George I. his thanks for this excellent regiment; for the sake of whose
lieutenant-colonel, it was added, he would for the future always esteem
a Scotchman.
The life of Sir Robert resembled a well-wrought drama, whose scenes
become doubly interesting as it hastens to a close. In the battle of
Fontenoy he was among the first in the field, and having obtained
leave that his Highlanders should fight after the manner of their
country, he surprised the whole army by a display of extraordinary yet
admirable tactics, directed against the enemy with the most invincible
courage. He dislodged from a battery, which he was ordered to attack,
a force superior to his own, and found a strong body of the enemy,
who were stationed beyond it, preparing to open on him a sweeping
fire. Commanding his regiment to prostrate itself to avoid the shot,
he raised it when the French were in the act of reloading, and, sword
in hand, rushed at its head upon them with so irresistible a charge
as forced them precipitately through their lines. Then retreating,
according to the tactics of his country, he again brought his men to
the charge as before, and with similar effect. And this manœuvre of
alternate flight and attack was frequently repeated during the day.
When after the battle had become general, the English began to give
ground before the superior force of the enemy, Sir Robert’s regiment
formed the rearguard in the retreat. A strong body of French horse came
galloping up behind; but, when within a few yards of the Highlanders,
the latter turned suddenly round, and received them with a fire so well
directed and effectual, that nearly one-half of them were dismounted.
The rest, wheeling about, rode off, and did not again return to the
attack. It was observed, that during the course of this day, when
the Highlanders had thrown themselves on the ground immediately as
the enemy had levelled their pieces for firing, there was one person
of the regiment who, instead of prostrating himself with the others,
stood erect, exposed to the volley. That one was Sir Robert Munro.
The circumstances of his death, which took place about eight months
after, at the battle of Falkirk, were adapted to display still more
his indomitable heroism of character. He had recently been promoted
to the command of a regiment, which, unlike his brave Highlanders at
Fontenoy, deserted him in the moment of attack, and left him enclosed
by the enemy. Defending himself with his half-pike against six of their
number, two of whom he killed, he was not overpowered, though alone,
until a seventh coming up shot him dead with a musket. His younger
brother, who accompanied the regiment, and who had been borne along by
the current of the retreat, returned in time only to witness his fate
and to share it.
It has been told me by a friend, who, about forty years ago,
resided for some time in the vicinity of Fowlis, that he could have
collected, at that period, anecdotes of Sir Robert from among his
tenantry sufficient to have formed a volume. They were all of one
character:--tints of varied but unequivocal beauty, which animated into
the colour and semblance of life the faint outline of heroism traced by
Doddridge. There was an old man who used to sit by my friend for hours
together narrating the exploits of his chief. He was a tall, upright,
greyhaired Highlander, of a warm heart and keen unbending spirit, who
had fought at Dettingen, Fontenoy, Culloden, and Quebec. One day, when
describing the closing scene in the life of his almost idolized leader,
after pouring out his curse on the dastards who had deserted him, he
started from his seat, and grasping his staff as he burst into tears,
exclaimed in a voice almost smothered by emotion, “Ochon, ochon, had
his ain folk been there!!”
The following anecdote of Sir Robert, which I owe to tradition, sets
his character in a very amiable light. On his return from Flanders
in 1712, he was introduced to a Miss Jean Seymour, a beautiful
English lady. The young soldier was smitten by her appearance, and
had the happiness of perceiving that he had succeeded in at least
attracting her notice. So happy an introduction was followed up into
an intimacy, and at length, what had been only a casual impression on
either side, ripened into a mutual passion of no ordinary warmth and
delicacy. On Sir Robert’s quitting England for the north, he arranged
with his mistress the plan of a regular correspondence, and wrote to
her immediately on his arrival at Fowlis. After waiting for a reply
with all the impatience of the lover, he sent off a second letter
complaining of her neglect, which had no better success than the first,
and shortly after a third, which shared the fate of the two others.
The inference seemed too obvious to be missed; and he strove to forget
Miss Seymour. He hunted, fished, visited his several friends, involved
himself in a multiplicity of concerns, but all to no purpose; she
still continued the engrossing object of his affections, and, after
a few months’ stay in the Highlands, he again returned to England, a
very unhappy man. When waiting on a friend in London, he was ushered
precipitately into the midst of a fashionable party, and found himself
in the presence of his mistress. She seemed much startled by the
rencounter; the blood mounted to her cheeks; but, suppressing her
emotion, she turned to the lady who sat next her, and began to converse
on some common topic of the day. Sir Robert retired, and beckoning on
his friend, entreated him to procure for him an interview with Miss
Seymour, which was effected, and an explanation ensued. The lady had
not received a single letter; and forming at length, from the seeming
neglect of her lover, an opinion of him similar to that from which she
herself was suffering in his esteem, she attempted to banish him from
her affections;--an attempt, however, in which she was scarcely more
successful than Sir Robert. They were gratified to find that they had
not been mistaken in their first impressions of each other, and parted
more attached, and more convinced that the attachment was mutual, than
ever. And in less than two months after Miss Seymour had become Lady
Munro.
Sir Robert succeeded in tracing all his letters to one point, a kind of
post-office on the confines of Inverness-shire. There was a proprietor
in the neighbourhood, who was deeply engaged in the interests of the
Stuarts, and decidedly hostile to Sir Robert, the scion of a family
which had distinguished itself from the first dawn of the Reformation
in the cause of civil and religious liberty. There was, therefore,
little difficulty in assigning an author to the contrivance; but Sir
Robert was satisfied in barely tracing it to a discovery; for, squaring
his principles of honour rather by the morals of the New Testament than
by the dogmas of that code which regards death as the only expiation of
insult or injury, he was no duellist. An opportunity, however, soon
occurred of his avenging himself in a manner agreeable to his character
and principles. On the breaking out of the Rebellion of 1715, the
person who had so wantonly sported with his happiness joined the Earl
of Mar, and, after the failure of the enterprise, was among the number
of the proscribed. Sir Robert’s influence with the Government, and
the peculiar office to which he was appointed, gave him considerable
power over the confiscated properties, and this power he exerted to its
utmost in behalf of the wife and children of the man by whom he had
been injured. “Tell your husband,” said he to the lady, “that I have
now repaid him for the interest he took in my correspondence with Miss
Seymour.”
[Sidenote: BABBLE HANAH.]
Sir Robert’s second brother (the other, as has been related, died with
him at Falkirk) was killed, about seven months after the battle, in
the Highlands of Lochaber. His only sister survived him for nearly
twenty years, “a striking example (I use the language of Doddridge)
of profound submission and fortitude, mingled with the most tender
sensibility of temper.” She was the wife of a Mr. Gordon of Ardoch (now
Pointzfield), whom she survived for several years; and her later days
were spent in Cromarty, where there are still a few elderly people who
remember her, and speak of her many virtues and gentle manners with a
feeling bordering on enthusiasm. There was a poor half-witted girl who
lived in her neighbourhood, known among the town’s-people by the name
of _Babble_ Hanah. The word in italics is a Scottish phrase applied to
persons of an idiotical cast of mind, and yet though poor Hanah had
no claim to dispute the propriety of its application in her own case,
her faint glimmering of reason proved quite sufficient to light her
on the best possible track of life. She had learned from revelation
of the immortality of the soul, and the two states of the future;
and experience had taught even her, what indeed it would teach every
one, did every one but attend to its lessons, that there is a radical
depravity in the nature of man, and a continual succession of evil
in the course of life. She had learned, too, that she was one of the
least wise of a class of creatures exceedingly foolish at best, and
that to escape from evil needed much wisdom. She was, therefore earnest
in her prayers to the Great Spirit who was so kind to her--and to even
those feeble animals who, though they enjoy no boon of after life, have
a wisdom to provide for the winter, and to dig their houses in the
rocks--that in this world He would direct her walk agreeably to His own
will, and render her wiser in the world to come. Socrates could have
taught all this to Xenophon and Plato, but God only could have taught
it to Hanah. The people of the place, with dispositions like those
of the great bulk of people in every place, were much more disposed
to laugh at the poor thing for what she wanted, than to form right
estimates of the value of what she had. Not so Lady Ardoch;--Hanah
was one of her friends. The lady’s house was a place where, in the
language of Scripture, “prayer was wont to be made;” and no one was
a more regular attendant on the meetings held for this purpose, than
her friend the half-witted girl. The poor thing always sat at her
feet, and was termed by her, her own Hanah. Years, however, began to
weigh down the frame of the good lady; and after passing through all
the gradations of bodily decay, with a mind which seemed to brighten
and grow stronger as it neared to eternity, she at length slept with
her fathers. Hanah betrayed no emotion of grief; she spoke to no one
of the friend whom she had lost; but she moped and pined away, and
became indifferent to everything; and a few months after, when on her
deathbed, she told a friend of the deceased who had come to visit her,
that she was going to the country of Lady Ardoch.
CHAPTER XXX.
“Rise, honest muse, and sing the man of Ross.”--POPE.
[Sidenote: GEORGE ROSS, THE SCOTCH AGENT.]
In the letter in which Junius accuses the Duke of Grafton of having
sold a patent place in the collection of customs to one Mr. Hine, he
informs the reader that the person employed by his Grace in negotiating
the business, was “George Ross, the Scotch Agent and worthy confidant
of Lord Mansfield. And no sale by the candle,” he adds, “was ever
conducted with greater formality.” Now, slight as this notice is, there
is something in it sufficiently tangible for the imagination to lay
hold of. If the reader thinks of the Scotch Agent at all, he probably
thinks of him as one of those convenient creatures so necessary to the
practical statesman, whose merit does not consist more in their being
ingenious in a great degree, than in their being honest in a small
one. So mixed a thing is poor human nature, however, that though the
statement of Junius has never been fairly controverted, no possible
estimate of character could be more unjust. The Scotch Agent, whatever
may have been the nature of his services to the Duke of Grafton, was
in reality a high-minded, and, what is more, a truly patriotic man;
so good a person indeed, that, in a period of political heats and
animosities like the present, his story, fairly told, may teach us a
lesson of charity and moderation. I wish I could transport the reader
to where his portrait hangs, side by side with that of his friend the
Lord Chief-Justice, in the drawing-room of Cromarty House. The air of
dignified benevolence impressed on the features of the handsome old
man, with his grey hair curling round his temples, would secure a fair
hearing for him from even the sturdiest of the class who hate their
neighbours for the good of their country. Besides, the very presence
of the noble-looking lawyer, so much more like the Murray eulogized by
Pope and Lyttelton, than the Mansfield denounced by Junius, would of
itself serve as a sort of guarantee for the honour of his friend.
George Ross was the son of a petty proprietor of Easter-Ross, and
succeeded, on the death of his father, to the few barren acres on
which, for a century or two before, the family had been ingenious
enough to live. But he possessed besides what was more valuable than
twenty such patrimonies--an untiring energy of disposition, based on a
substratum of sound good sense; and, what was scarcely less important
than either, ambition enough to turn his capacity of employment to the
best account. Ross-shire, a century ago, was no place for such a man;
and as the only road to preferment at this period was the road that
led south, George Ross left, when very young, his mother’s cottage
for England, where he spent nearly fifty years amongst statesmen
and courtiers, and in the enjoyment of the friendship of such men
as President Forbes and Lord Mansfield. At length he returned, when
an old greyheaded man, to rank amongst the greatest capitalists and
proprietors of the county; and purchased, with other lesser properties
in the neighbourhood, the whole estate of Cromarty. Perhaps he had
come to rest him ere he died; but there seems to be no such thing
as changing one’s natural bent when confirmed by the habits of half
a lifetime; and the energies of the Scotch Agent, now that they had
gained him fortune and influence, were as little disposed to fall
asleep as they had been forty years before. As it was no longer
necessary, however, that they should be employed on his own account, he
gave them full scope in behalf of his poorer neighbours. The country
around him lay dead. There were no manufactories, no knowledge of
agriculture, no consciousness that matters were ill, and consequently
no desire of making them better; and the herculean task imposed upon
himself by the Scotch Agent, now considerably turned of sixty, was to
animate and revolutionize the whole. And such was his statesmanlike
sagacity in developing the hitherto undiscovered resources of the
country, joined to a high-minded zeal that could sow liberally, in the
hope of a late harvest for others to reap, that he fully succeeded.
He first established in the town an extensive manufactory of hempen
cloth, which has ever since employed about two hundred persons within
its walls, and fully twice that number without. He next built an ale
brewery, which, at the time of its erection, was by far the largest in
the north of Scotland. He then furnished the town at a great expense
with an excellent harbour, and set on foot a trade in pork, which,
for the last thirty years, has been carried on by the people of the
place to an extent of from about fifteen to twenty thousand pounds
annually. He set himself, too, to initiate his tenantry in the art of
rearing wheat; and finding them wofully unwilling to become wiser on
the subject, he tried the force of example, by taking an extensive
farm under his own management, and conducting it on the most approved
principles of modern agriculture. He established a nail and spade
manufactory; brought women from England to instruct the young girls in
the art of working lace; provided houses for the poor; presented the
town with a neat substantial building, the upper part of which still
serves for a council-room and court-house, and the lower as a prison;
and built for the accommodation of the poor Highlanders, who came
thronging into the town to work on his lands and his manufactories, a
handsome Gaelic chapel. He built for his own residence an elegant house
of hewn stone; surrounded it with pleasure-grounds designed in the best
style of the art; planted many hundred acres of the less improvable
parts of his property, and laid open the hitherto scarcely accessible
beauties of the hill of Cromarty, by crossing and recrossing it with
well-nigh as many walks as there are veins in the human body. He was
proud of his exquisite landscapes, and of his own skill in heightening
their beauty, and fully determined, he said, if he but lived long
enough, to make Cromarty worth an Englishman’s while coming all the way
from London to see.
When Oscar fell asleep, says the old Irish bard, it was impossible to
awaken him before his time except by cutting off one of his fingers,
or flinging a rock at his head; and wo to the poor man who disturbed
him! The Agent found it every whit as difficult to awaken a sleeping
country, and in some respects almost as unsafe. I am afraid human
nature is nearly the same thing in the people that it is in their
rulers, and that both are alike disposed to prefer the man who flatters
them to the man who merely does them good. George Ross was by no means
the most popular of proprietors--he disturbed old prejudices, and
unfixed old habits. The farmers thought it hard that they should have
to break up their irregular maplike patches of land, divided from each
other by little strips and corners not yet reclaimed from the waste,
into awkward-looking rectangular fields; and that they durst no longer
fasten their horses to the plough by the tail--a piece of natural
harness evidently formed for the purpose. The town’s-people deemed the
hempen manufactory unwholesome, and found that the English lacewomen,
who to a certainty were tea-drinkers, and even not very hostile, it was
said, to gin, were in a fair way of teaching their pupils something
more than the mere weaving of lace. What could be more heathenish, too,
than the little temple covered with cockle-shells which the laird had
just reared on a solitary corner of the hill; but the temple they soon
sent spinning over the cliff into the sea, a downward journey of a
hundred yards. And then his odious pork trade! There was no prevailing
on the people to rear pigs for him, and so he had to build a range of
offices in an out-of-the-way nook of his lands, which he stocked with
hordes of these animals, that he might rear them for himself. The
herds increased in size and number, and, voracious beyond calculation,
almost occasioned a famine. Even the great wealth of the speculatist
proved insufficient to supply them with the necessary food, and the
very keepers were in danger of being eaten alive. The poor animals
seemed departing from their very nature, for they became long, and
lank, and bony as the griffins of heraldry, until they looked more like
race-horses than pigs; and as they descended with every ebb in huge
droves to browse on the sea-weed, or delve for shell-fish among the
pebbles, there was no lack of music befitting their condition, when the
large rock-crab revenged with his nippers on their lips the injuries
inflicted on him by their teeth. Now, all this formed a fine subject
for joking to people who indulged in a half-Jewish dislike of the pig,
and who could not guess that the pork trade was one day to pay the
rents of half the widows’ cottages in the country. But no one could lie
more open than George Ross to that species of ridicule which the men
who see further than their neighbours, and look more to the advantage
of others than to their own, cannot fail to encounter. He was a worker
in the dark, and that at no slight expense; for though all his many
projects were ultimately found to be benefits conferred on his country,
not one of them proved remunerative to himself. But he seems to have
known mankind too well to have expected a very great deal from their
gratitude; though, on one occasion at least, his patience gave way.
The town in the course of years had so entirely marched to the west,
that, as I have already had occasion to remark, the town’s cross came
at length to be fairly left behind, with a hawthorn hedge on the one
side and a garden fence on the other; and when the Agent had completed
the house which was to serve as council-room and prison to the place,
the cross was taken down from its stand of more than two centuries,
and placed in front of the new building. That people might the better
remember the circumstance, there was a showy procession got up;
healths were drunk beside the cross in the Agent’s best wine, and not
a little of his crystal broken against it; and the evening terminated
in a ball. It so happened, however, through some cross chance, that,
though all the gentility of the place were to be invited, three young
men, who deemed themselves as genteel as the best of their neighbours,
were passed over--the foreman of the hemp manufactory had received no
invitation, nor the clever superintendent of the nail-work, nor yet
the spruce clerk of the brewery; and as they were all men of spirit,
it so happened that, during the very next night, the cross was taken
down from its new pedestal, broken into three pieces, and carried
still further to the west, to an open space where four lanes met; and
there it was found in the morning--the pieces piled over each other,
and surrounded by a profusion of broken ale-bottles. The Agent was
amazingly angry--angrier, indeed, than even those who best knew him had
deemed him capable of becoming; and in the course of the day the town’s
crier went through the streets proclaiming a reward of ten pounds in
hand, and a free room in Mr. Ross’s new buildings for life, to any one
who would give such information as might lead to the conviction of the
offenders.
In one of his walks a few days after, the Agent met with a poor
miserable-looking Highland woman, who had been picking a few withered
sticks out of one of his hedges, and whose hands and clothes seemed
torn by the thorns. “Poor old creature!” he said, as she dropped her
courtesy in passing; “you must go to my manager and tell him I have
ordered you a barrel of coals. And stay--you are hungry; call at my
house in passing, and the servants will find you something to take home
with you.” The poor woman blessed him, and looked up hesitatingly in
his face. She had never betrayed any one, she said; but his honour was
so good a gentleman--so very good a gentleman; and so she thought she
had best tell him all she knew about the breaking of the cross. She
lived in a little garret over the room of Jamie Banks the nailer; and
having slept scarcely any all the night in which the cross was taken
down, for the weather was bitterly cold, and her bedclothes very thin,
she could hear weighty footsteps traversing the streets till near
morning, when the house-door opened and in came Jamie with a tottering
unequal step, and disturbed the whole family by stumbling over a stool
into his wife’s washing tub. Besides, she had next day overheard his
wife rating him for staying out to so _untimeous_ an hour, and his
remark in reply, that she would do well to keep quiet unless she wished
to see him hanged. This was the sort of clue the affair required, and
in following it up, the unlucky nailer was apprehended and examined;
but it was found, that, through a singular lapse of memory, he had
forgotten every circumstance connected with the night in question,
except that he had been in the very best company, and one of the
happiest men in the world.
Jamie Banks was decidedly the most eccentric man of his day in at
least one parish; full of small wit and little conceits, and famous
for a faculty of invention fertile enough to have served a poet. On
one occasion when the gill of whisky had risen to three-halfpence
in Cromarty, and could still be bought for a penny in Avoch, he had
prevailed on a party of his acquaintance to accompany him to the latter
place, that they might drink themselves rich on the strength of the old
proverb; and as they actually effected a saving of two shillings in
spending six, it was clear, he said, that had not their money failed
them, they would have made fortunes apiece. Alas for the littleness
of that great passion, the love of fame! I have observed that the
tradespeople among whom one meets with most instances of eccentricity,
are those whose shops, being places of general resort, furnish them
with space enough on which to achieve a humble notoriety, by rendering
themselves unlike everybody else. To secure to Jamie Banks due leisure
for recollection, he was committed to jail.
He was sitting one evening beside the prison fire with one of his
neighbours and the jailer, and had risen to exclude the chill night air
by drawing a curtain over the open barred window of the apartment, when
a man suddenly started from behind the wall outside, and discharged
a large stone with tremendous force at his head. The missile almost
brushed his ear as it sung past, and, rebounding from the opposite
wall, rolled along the floor. “That maun be Rob Williamson!” exclaimed
Jamie, “wanting to keep _me_ quiet; out, neebour Jonathan, an’ after
him.” Neebour Jonathan, an active young fellow, sprang to the door,
caught the sounds of retreating footsteps as he turned the gate,
and dashing after like a greyhound, succeeded in laying hold of the
coat-skirts of Rob Williamson, as he strained onwards through the gate
of the hemp manufactory. He was immediately secured and lodged in
another apartment of the prison; and in the morning Jamie Banks was
found to have recovered his memory.
He had finished working, he said, on the evening after the ball, and
was just putting on his coat preparatory to leaving the shop, when
the superintendent called him into his writing-room, where he found
three persons sitting at a table half covered with bottles. Rob
Williamson, the weaver, was one of them; the other two were the clerk
of the brewery and the foreman of the hemp manufactory; and they were
all arguing together on some point of divinity. The superintendent
cleared a seat for him beside himself, and filled his glass thrice in
succession, by way of making up for the time he had lost--nothing could
be more untrue than that the superintendent was proud! They then all
began to speak about morals and Mr. Ross; the clerk was certain that,
what with his harbour and his piggery, and his heathen temples and his
lacewomen, he would not leave a rag of morality in the place; and Rob
was quite as sure he was no friend to the gospel. He a builder of
Gaelic kirks, forsooth! had he not, yesterday, put up a Popish Dagon of
a cross, and made the silly mason bodies worship it for the sake o’ a
dram? And then, how common ale-drinking had become in the place since
he had built his brewery--in his young days they drank naething but
gin;--and what would their grandfathers have said to a _whigmaleerie_
of a ball! “I sipped and listened,” continued Jamie, “and thought the
time couldna have been better spent at an elder’s meeting in the kirk;
and as the night wore later, the conversation became more edifying
still, until at length all the bottles were emptied, when we sallied
out in a body, to imitate the old reformers by breaking the cross. ‘We
may suffer, Jamie, for what we have done,’ said Rob to me, as we parted
for the night; ‘but remember it was duty, Jamie--it was duty. We have
been testifying wi’ our hands, an’ when the hour o’ trial comes, we
mauna be slow in testifying wi’ our tongues too.’ He wasna slack, the
deceitfu’ bodie!” concluded Jamie, “in trying to stop mine.” And thus
closed the evidence. The Agent was no vindictive man; he dismissed
his two superintendents and the clerk, to find for themselves a more
indulgent master; but the services of Jamie Banks he still retained,
and the first employment which he found for him after his release, was
the fashioning of four iron bars for the repair of the cross.
The Agent, in the closing scene of his life, was destined to experience
the unhappiness of blighted hope. He had an only son, a weak and very
obstinate young man, who, without intellect enough to appreciate his
well-calculated schemes, and yet conceit enough to sit in judgment
on them, was ever showing his spirit by opposing a sort of selfish
nonsense, that aped the semblance of common sense, to the expansive and
benevolent philosophy of his father. But the old man bore patiently
with his conceit and folly. Like the great bulk of the class who attain
to wealth and influence through their own exertions, he was anxiously
ambitious to live in his posterity, and be the founder of a family; and
he knew it was quite as much according to the nature of things, that a
fool might be the father, as that he should be the son, of a wise man.
He secured, therefore, his lands to his posterity by the law of entail;
did all that education and example could do for the young man; and
succeeded in getting him married to a sweet amiable Englishwoman, the
daughter of a bishop. But, alas! his precautions and the hopes in which
he indulged, proved equally vain. The young man, only a few months
after his marriage, was piqued when at table by some remark of his
father regarding his mode of carving--some slight allusion, it is said,
to the maxim, that little men cannot afford to neglect little matters;
and rising with much apparent coolness from beside his wife, he stepped
into an adjoining room, and there blew out his brains with a pistol.
The stain of his blood may still be seen in two large brownish-coloured
blotches on the floor.
It was impossible that so sad an event should have occurred in this
part of the country fifty years ago, without exciting as marked an
interest in the supernatural world as in our own. For weeks before,
strange unearthly sounds had been heard after nightfall from among
the woods of the hill. The forester, when returning homewards in the
stillness of evening, had felt the blood curdling round his heart,
as low moans, and faint mutterings, and long hollow echoes, came
sounding along the pathways, which then winded through the thick wood
like vaulted passages through an Egyptian cemetery; and boys of the
town who had lingered among the thickets of the lower slopes until
after sunset, engaged in digging sweet-knots or pig-nuts, were set
a-scampering by harsh sudden screams and loud whistlings, continued in
one unvaried note for minutes together. On the evening that preceded
the commission of the rash act, a party of schoolboys had set out for
the hill to select from among the young firs some of the straightest
and most slender, for fishing-rods; and aware that the forester might
have serious objections to any such appropriation of his master’s
property, they lingered among the rocks below till the evening had set
in; when they stole up the hill-side, and applied themselves to the
work of choosing and cutting down, in a beautiful little avenue which
leads from the edge of the precipices into the recesses of the wood.
All at once there arose, as if from the rock-edge, a combination of
the most fearful sounds they had ever heard;--it seemed as if every
bull in the country had congregated in one little spot, and were
bellowing together in horrid concert. The little fellows looked at
one another, and then, as if moved by some general impulse--for they
were too panic-struck to speak--they darted off together like a shoal
of minnows startled from some river-side by a shadow on the bank. The
terrible sounds waxed louder and louder, like the sounds of the dread
horn which appalled Wallace at midnight in the deserted fortress, after
the death of Faudon; and, long ere they had reached the town, the
weaker members of the party began to fall behind. One little fellow,
on finding himself left alone, began to scream in utter terror, scarce
less loudly than the mysterious bellower in the wood; but he was waited
for by a bold, hardy boy--a grandchild and name-son of old Sandy Wright
the boatman--who had not even relinquished his rod, and who afterwards
did his country no dishonour when, in like fashion, he grasped his pike
at the landing in Egypt. To him I owe the story. He used to say, it
was not until he had reached with his companions the old chapel of St.
Regulus, a full mile from the avenue, that the sounds entirely ceased.
They were probably occasioned by some wandering bittern, of that
species whose cry is said by naturalists to resemble the interrupted
bellowings of a bull, but so much louder that it may be distinctly
heard at a mile’s distance.
George Ross survived his son for several years, and he continued,
though a sadder and graver man, to busy himself with all his various
speculations as before. It was observed, however, that he seemed to
care less than formerly for whatever was exclusively his own--for
his fine house and his beautiful lands--and that he chiefly employed
himself in maturing his several projects for the good of his
country-folk. Time at length began to set his seal on his labours, by
discovering their value; though not until death had first affixed _his_
to the character of the wise and benevolent projector. He died full of
years and honour, mourned by the poor, and regretted by every one; and
even those who had opposed his innovations with the warmest zeal, were
content to remember him, with all the others, as “the good laird.”
CHAPTER XXXI.
“Friends, _No-man_ kills me; _No-man_ in the hour
Of sleep oppresses me with fraudful power.
If no man hurt thee, but the hand divine
Inflict disease, it fits thee to resign.”--ODYSSEY.
[Sidenote: THE BURN OF EATHIE.]
Some of the wildest and finest pieces of scenery in the neighbourhood
of Cromarty, must be sought for in an upper corner of the parish, where
it abuts on the one hand on the parish of Rosemarkie, and on the other
on the Moray Firth. We may saunter in this direction over a lonely
shore, overhung by picturesque crags of yellow sandstone, and roughened
by so fantastic an arrangement of strata, that one might almost
imagine the riblike bands, which project from the beach, portions of
the skeleton of some huge antediluvian monster. No place can be more
solitary, but no solitude more cheerful. The natural rampart, that
rises more than a hundred yards over the shore, as if to shut us out
from the world, sweeps towards the uplands in long grassy slopes and
green mossy knolls;--or juts out into abrupt and weathered crags,
crusted with lichens and festooned with ivy;--or recedes into bosky
hollows, roughened by the sloethorn, the wild-rose, and the juniper.
On the one hand, there is a profusion of the loveliest light and
shadow--the softest colours and the most pleasing forms; on the other,
the wide extent of the Moray Firth stretches out to the dim horizon,
with all its veinlike currents and its undulating lines of coast;
while before us we see far in the distance the blue vista of the great
Caledonian valley, with its double wall of jagged and serrated hills;
and directly in the opening the grey diminished spires of Inverness.
We saunter onwards towards the west, over the pebbles and the shells,
till where a mossy streamlet comes brattling from the hill; and see,
on turning a sudden angle, the bank cleft to its base, as if to yield
the waters a passage. ’Tis the entrance to a deeply-secluded dell, of
exquisite though savage beauty; one of those hidden recesses of nature,
in which she gratefully reserves the choicest of her sweets for the
more zealous of her admirers; and mingles for them in her kindliest
mood all that expands and delights the heart in the contemplation of
the wild and beautiful, with all that gratifies it in the enjoyment of
a happy novelty, in which pleasure comes so unlooked for, that neither
hope nor imagination has had time to strip it of a single charm.
We enter this singular recess along the bed of the stream, and find
ourselves shut out, when we have advanced only a few paces, from
well-nigh the entire face of nature and the whole works of man. A line
of mural precipices rises on either hand--here advancing in gigantic
columns, like those of an Egyptian portico--there receding into deep
solitary recesses tapestried with ivy, and darkened by birch and
hazel. The cliffs vary their outline at every step, as if assuming in
succession all the various combinations of form which constitute the
wild and the picturesque; and the pale yellow hue of the stone seems,
when brightened by the sun, the very tint a painter would choose to
heighten the effect of his shades, or to contrast most delicately with
the luxuriant profusion of bushes and flowers that waves over every
shelve and cranny. A colony of swallows have built from time immemorial
in the hollows of one of the loftiest precipices; the fox and the
badger harbour in the clefts of the steeper and more inaccessible
banks. As we proceed, the dell becomes wilder and more deeply wooded,
the stream frets and toils at our feet--here leaping over an opposing
ridge, there struggling in a pool, yonder escaping to the light from
under some broken fragment of cliff--there is a richer profusion of
flowers; a thicker mantling of ivy and honeysuckle;--and, after passing
a semicircular inflection of the bank, which, waving from summit to
base with birch and hawthorn, seems suited to remind one of some vast
amphitheatre on the morning of a triumph, we find the passage shut up
by a perpendicular wall of rock about thirty feet in height, over which
the stream precipitates itself in a slender column of foam into a dark
mossy basin. The long arms of an intermingled clump of birches and
hazels stretch half-way across, trebling with their shade the apparent
depth of the pool, and heightening in an equal ratio the whole flicker
of the cascade, and the effect of the little bright patches of foam
which, flung from the rock, incessantly revolve on the eddy.
[Sidenote: DONALD CALDER.]
There is a natural connexion, it is said, between wild scenes and
wild legends; and some of the traditions connected with this romantic
and solitary dell illustrate the remark. Till a comparatively late
period, it was known at many a winter fireside as a favourite haunt
of the fairies, the most poetical of all our old tribes of spectres,
and at one time one of the most popular. I have conversed with an old
woman, one of the perished volumes of my library, who, when a very
little girl, had seen myriads of them dancing as the sun was setting
on the further edge of the dell; and with a still older man, who had
the temerity to offer one of them a pinch of snuff at the foot of the
cascade. Nearly a mile from where the ravine opens to the sea, it
assumes a gentler and more pastoral character; the sides, no longer
precipitous, descend towards the stream in green sloping banks; and
a beaten path, which runs between Cromarty and Rosemarkie, winds
down the one side and ascends the other. More than sixty years ago,
one Donald Calder, a shopkeeper of Cromarty, was journeying by this
path shortly after nightfall. The moon, at full, had just risen, but
there was a silvery mist sleeping on the lower grounds that obscured
the light, and the dell in all its extent was so overcharged by the
vapour, that it seemed an immense overflooded river winding through
the landscape. Donald had reached its further edge, and could hear the
rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when
there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music
he had ever heard. He stood and listened: the words of a song of such
simple beauty, that they seemed, without effort on his part, to stamp
themselves on his memory, came wafted on the music, and the chorus, in
which a thousand tiny voices seemed to join, was a familiar address
to himself. “He! Donald Calder! ho! Donald Calder!” There are none of
my Navity acquaintance, thought Donald, who sing like that; “Wha can
it be?” He descended into the cloud; but in passing the little stream
the music ceased; and on reaching the spot on which the singers had
seemed stationed, he saw only a bare bank sinking into a solitary moor,
unvaried by either bush or hollow, or the slightest cover in which the
musician could have lain concealed. He had hardly time, however, to
estimate the marvels of the case when the music again struck up, but on
the opposite side of the dell, and apparently from the very knoll on
which he had so lately listened to it; the conviction that it could not
be other than supernatural overpowered him, and he hurried homewards
under the influence of a terror so extreme, that, unfortunately for our
knowledge of fairy literature, it had the effect of obliterating from
his memory every part of the song except the chorus. The sun rose as
he reached Cromarty; and he found that, instead of having lingered at
the edge of the dell for only a few minutes--and the time had seemed no
longer--he had spent beside it the greater part of the night.
[Sidenote: THE MEAL-MILL OF EATHIE.]
Above the lower cascade the lofty precipitous banks of the dell recede
into a long elliptical hollow, which terminates at the upper extremity
in a perpendicular precipice, half cleft to its base by a narrow chasm,
out of which the little stream comes bounding in one adventurous
leap to the bottom. A few birch and hazel bushes have anchored in the
crannies of the rock, and darkened by their shade an immense rounded
block of granite many tons in weight, which lies in front of the
cascade. Immediately beside the huge mass, on a level grassy spot,
which occupies the space between the receding bank and the stream,
there stood about a century ago a meal-mill. It was a small and very
rude erection, with an old-fashioned horizontal water-wheel, such as
may still be met with in some places of the remote Highlands; and so
inconsiderable was the power of the machinery, that a burly farmer of
the parish, whose bonnet a waggish neighbour had thrown between the
stones, succeeded in arresting the whole with his shoulder until he
had rescued his Kilmarnock. But the mill of Eathie was a celebrated
mill notwithstanding. No one resided near it, nor were there many men
in the country who would venture to approach it an hour after sunset;
and there were nights when, though deserted by the miller, its wheels
would be heard revolving as busily as ever they had done by day, and
when one who had courage enough to reconnoitre it from the edge of the
dell, might see little twinkling lights crossing and recrossing the
windows in irregular but hasty succession, as if a busy multitude were
employed within. On one occasion the miller, who had remained in it
rather later than usual, was surprised to hear outside the neighing
and champing of horses and the rattling of carts, and on going to the
door he saw a long train of basket-woven vehicles laden with sacks,
and drawn by shaggy little ponies of every diversity of form and
colour. The attendants were slim unearthly-looking creatures, about
three feet in height, attired in grey, with red caps; and the whole
seemed to have come out of a square opening in the opposite precipice.
Strange to relate, the nearer figures seemed to be as much frightened
at seeing the miller as the miller was at seeing them; but, on one of
them uttering a shrill scream, the carts moved backwards into the
opening, which shut over them like the curtain of a theatre as the last
disappeared.
[Sidenote: THE STORY OF TAM M’KECHAN.]
There lived in the adjoining parish of Rosemarkie, when the fame of
the mill was at its highest, a wild unsettled fellow, named M’Kechan.
Had he been born among the aristocracy of the country, he might have
passed for nothing worse than a young man of spirit; and after sowing
his wild oats among gentlemen of the turf and of the fancy, he would
naturally have settled down into the shrewd political landlord, who,
if no builder of churches himself, would be willing enough to exert
the privilege of giving clergymen, exclusively of his own choosing,
to such churches as had been built already. As a poor man, however,
and the son of a poor man, Tam M’Kechan seemed to bid pretty fair for
the gallows; nor could he plead ignorance that such was the general
opinion. He had been told so when a herd-boy; for it was no unusual
matter for his master, a farmer of the parish, to find him stealing
pease in the corner of one field, when the whole of his charge were
ravaging the crops of another. He had been told so too when a sailor,
ere he had broken his indentures and run away, when once caught among
the casks and packages in the hold, ascertaining where the Geneva
and the sweetmeats were stowed. And now that he was a drover and a
horse-jockey, people, though they no longer told him so, for Tam had
become dangerous, seemed as certain of the fact as ever. With all his
roguery, however, when not much in liquor he was by no means a very
disagreeable companion; few could match him at a song or the bagpipe,
and though rather noisy in his cups, and somewhat quarrelsome, his
company was a good deal courted by the bolder spirits of the parish,
and among the rest by the miller. Tam had heard of the piebald horses
and their ghostly attendants; but without more knowledge than fell to
the share of his neighbours, he was a much greater sceptic, and after
rallying the miller on his ingenuity and the prettiness of his fancy,
he volunteered to spend a night at the mill, with no other companion
than his pipes.
Preparatory to the trial the miller invited one of his neighbours, the
young farmer of Eathie, that they might pass the early part of the
evening with Tam; but when, after an hour’s hard drinking, they rose
to leave the cottage, the farmer, a kind-hearted lad, who was besides
warmly attached to the jockey’s only sister, would fain have dissuaded
him from the undertaking. “I’ve been thinking, Tam,” he said, “that
flyte wi’ the miller as ye may, ye would better let the _good people_
alone;--or stay, sin’ ye are sae bent on playing the fule, I’ll e’en
play it wi’ you;--rax me my plaid; we’ll trim up the fire in the
killogie thegether; an’ you will keep me in music.” “Na, Jock Hossack,”
said Tam, “I maun keep my good music for the _good people_, it’s rather
late to flinch now; but come to the burn-edge wi’ me the night, an’ to
the mill as early in the morning as ye may; an’ hark ye, tak a double
caulker wi’ you.” He wrapt himself up closely in his plaid, took the
pipes under his arm, and, accompanied by Jock and the miller, set out
for the dell, into which, however, he insisted on descending alone.
Before leaving the bank, his companions could see that he had succeeded
in lighting up a fire in the mill, which gleamed through every bore and
opening, and could hear the shrill notes of a pibroch mingling with the
dash of the cascade.
The sun had risen high enough to look aslant into the dell, when Jock
and the miller descended to the mill, and found the door lying wide
open. All was silent within; the fire had sunk into a heap of white
ashes, though there was a bundle of fagots untouched beside it, and the
stool on which Tam had been seated lay overturned in front. But there
were no traces of Tam, except that the miller picked up, beside the
stool, a little flat-edged instrument, used by the unfortunate jockey
in concealing the age of his horses by effacing the marks on their
teeth, and that Jock Hossack found one of the drones of his pipes
among the extinguished embers. Weeks passed away and there was still
nothing heard of Tam; and as every one seemed to think it would be in
vain to seek for him anywhere but in the place where he had been lost,
Jock Hossack, whose marriage was vexatiously delayed in consequence of
his strange disappearance, came to the resolution of unravelling the
mystery, if possible, by passing a night in the mill.
For the first few hours he found the evening wear heavily away; the
only sounds that reached him were the loud monotonous dashing of
the cascade, and the duller rush of the stream as it swept past the
mill-wheel. He piled up fuel on the fire till the flames rose half-way
to the ceiling, and every beam and rafter stood out from the smoke as
clearly as by day; and then yawning, as he thought how companionable a
thing a good fire is, he longed for something to amuse him. A sudden
cry rose from the further gable, accompanied by a flutter of wings,
and one of the miller’s ducks, a fine plump bird came swooping down
among the live embers. “Poor bird!” said Jock, “from the fox to the
fire; I had almost forgotten that I wanted my supper.” He dashed the
duck against the floor--plucked and embowelled it--and then, suspending
the carcass by a string before the fire, began to twirl it round and
round to the heat. The strong odoriferous fume had begun to fill the
apartment, and the drippings to hiss and sputter among the embers, when
a burst of music rose so suddenly from the green without, that Jock,
who had been so engaged with the thoughts of his supper as almost to
have forgotten the fairies, started half a yard from his seat. “That
maun be Tam’s pipes,” he said; and giving a twirl to the duck he rose
to a window. The moon, only a few days in her wane, was looking aslant
into the dell, lighting the huge melancholy cliffs with their birches
and hazels, and the white flickering descent of the cascade. The little
level green on the margin of the stream lay more in the shade; but Jock
could see that it was crowded with figures marvellously diminutive in
stature, and that nearly one-half of them were engaged in dancing. It
was enough for him, however, that the music was none of Tam’s making;
and, leaving the little creatures to gambol undisturbed, he returned to
the fire.
He had hardly resumed his seat when a low tap was heard at the door,
and shortly after a second and a third. Jock sedulously turned his duck
to the heat, and sat still. He had no wish for visitors, and determined
on admitting none. The door, however, though firmly bolted, fell open
of itself, and there entered one of the strangest-looking creatures
he had ever seen. The figure was that of a man, but it was little
more than three feet in height; and though the face was as sallow and
wrinkled as that of a person of eighty, the eye had the roguish sparkle
and the limbs all the juvenile activity of fourteen. “What’s your name,
man?” said the little thing, coming up to Jock, and peering into his
face till its wild elfish features were within a few inches of his.
“What’s your name?” “_Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_,”--_i.e._, myself--said Jock,
with a policy similar to that resorted to by Ulysses in the cave of
the giant. “Ah, _Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_!” rejoined the creature; “_Mysel’
an’ Mysel’!_ and what’s that you have got there, _Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_?”
touching the duck as it spoke with the tip of its finger, and then
transferring part of the scalding gravy to the cheek of Jock. Rather
an unwarrantable liberty, thought the poor fellow, for so slight an
acquaintance; the creature reiterated the question, and dabbed Jock’s
other cheek with a larger and still more scalding application of the
gravy. “What is it?” he exclaimed, losing in his anger all thought of
consequences, and dashing the bird, with the full swing of his arm,
against the face of his visitor, “It’s that!” The little creature,
blinded and miserably burnt, screamed out in pain and terror till the
roof rung again; the music ceased in a moment, and Jock Hossack had
barely time to cover the fire with a fresh heap of fuel, which for a
few seconds reduced the apartment to total darkness, when the crowd
without came swarming like wasps to every door and window of the mill.
“Who did it, Sanachy--who did it?” was the query of a thousand voices
at once. “Oh, ’twas _Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_,” said the creature; “’twas
_Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_.” “And if it was yoursel’ and yoursel’, who, poor
Sanachy,” replied his companions, “can help that?” They still, however,
clustered round the mill; the flames began to rise in long pointed
columns through the smoke, and Jock Hossack had just given himself up
for lost, when a cock crew outside the building, and after a sudden
breeze had moaned for a few seconds among the cliffs and the bushes,
and then sunk in the lower recesses of the dell, he found himself
alone. He was married shortly after to the sister of the lost jockey,
and never again saw the _good people_, or, what he regretted nearly
as little, his unfortunate brother-in-law. There were some, however,
who affirmed, that the latter had returned from fairyland seven years
after his mysterious disappearance, and supported the assertion by the
fact, that there was one Thomas M’Kechan who suffered at Perth for
sheep-stealing a few months after the expiry of the seventh year.
[Sidenote: FAUSE JAMIE.]
One other tradition of the burn of Eathie, and I have done. But I need
run no risk of marring it in the telling. More fortunate than most of
its contemporaries, it has been preserved by the muse of one of those
forgotten poets of our country, who, thinking more of their subjects
than of themselves, “saved others’ names and left their own unsung.”
And I have but to avail myself of his ballad.
FAUSE JAMIE.
PART FIRST.
“Whar hae ye been, my dochter deir,
I’ the cauld an’ the plashy weet?
There’s snaw i’ the faulds o’ your silken hair,
An’ bluid on your bonny feet.
There’s grief and fright, my dochter deir,
I’ the wand’rin’ blink o’ your ee;
An’ ye’ve stayed arout i’ the sleet an’ the cauld
The livelang nicht frae me.”
“O mither deir! mak’ ye my bed,
For my heart it’s flichtin’ sair;
An’ oh! gin I’ve vexed ye, mither deir,
I’ll never vex ye mair.
I’ve stayed arout the lang mirk nicht,
I’ the sleet an’ the plashy rain;
But, mither deir, mak’ ye my bed,
An’ I’ll ne’er gang out again.
An’ oh, put by that maiden snood,
Whar nane may evir see;
For Jamie’s ta’en a richer joe,
An’ left but shame to me.”
An’ she has made her dochter’s bed,
An’ her auld heart it was wae;
For as the lang mirk hours gaed by,
Her lassie wore away.
The dead wirk i’ her bonny hause
Was wirkin’ a’ that day an’ nicht;
An’ or the morning she was gane,
Wi’ the babe that nevir saw the licht.
The mither grat by her dochter’s bed,
An’ she has cursed curses three:
That he wha wrocht her deidly ill
Ane happy man mocht never be.
FAUSE JAMIE.
PART SECOND.
There was licht i’ the widow’s lonesome shiel.
An’ licht i’ the farmer’s ha’;
For the widow was sewin’ her dochter’s shroud,
An’ the bride’s folk dancin’ a’.
But aye or the tither reel was danced out,
The wae bridegroom begoud to tire;
An’ a spale on the candil turn’d to the bride,
An’ a coffin loup’d frae the fire.
An’ whan to the kirkin’ the twasome went
Sae trig, i’ the burrow’s toune below,
Their first feet as they left the kirk
Was the burial o’ Jamie’s joe.
Jamie he labourt air an’ late,
An’ mickle carit for pleugh an’ kye;
But laigher aye he sank i’ the warl’
As the weary years gaed by.
His puir gudewife was dowie an’ wae;
His threesome bairns a grief to see--
The tane it was deaf, the tither blin’,
The third a lamiter like to be.
The burns were rinnin’ big wi’ spate,
Lentron win’s blew gurly and snell;
Whan Jamie cam to Cromartie town
Wi’ a cart o’ bear to sell.
“O why do ye daidle so late i’ the toune,
Jamie, it’s time ye were boune to ride?”
“It’s because that I dinna like to gang,
An’ I kenna how to bide.
Pic-mirk nicht it’s settin’ in,
The wife at hame sits dowie and wae;
An’, Elder, I maunna bide i’ the toune,
An’ I kenna how to gae.
_It_ saw’d on my rigs or the drouchts cam on,
_It_ milk’d i’ my byre or my kye did dee;
_It_ follows me aye wharevir I gang,
An’ I see _it_ now though ye canna see.”
“Gin it follows ye aye wharevir ye gang,
There’s anither Jamie that follows ye too;
An’ gin that ye nevir wrangit the dead,
The dead will nevir be mastir o’ you.”
Jamie he gripit the elder’s han’,
An’ syne he slackit the branks to ride,
An’ doun he gied to the Eathie burn;
But he nevir cam up on the ither side.
There’s a maisterless colly at Jamie’s door,
Eerie it manes to the wife arin,
There’s a gled an’ a craw on the Eathie crag,
And a broken corp at the fit o’ the linn.
CHAPTER XXXII.
“----He heard amazed, on every side
His church insulted, and her priests belied,
The laws reviled, the ruling powers abused,
The land derided, and her foes excused,
He heard and ponder’d. What to men so vile
Should be his language? For his threatening style
They were too many. If his speech were meek,
They would despise such vain attempts to speak:
----These were reformers of each different sort.”--CRABBE.
[Sidenote: OUR TOWN POLITICS.]
In former times people knocked one another on the head for the sake
of their masters--fellows whom they had made too great to care at
all about them; in the present age they have become so much wiser,
that they quarrel on their own behalf alone. An entire people might
be regarded in the past as an immense engine, with perhaps a single
mind for its moving power; we may now compare every petty district
to a magazine, stored like the warehouse of a watchmaker with little
detached machines, each one furnished with a moving power of its own.
But though politics and party spirit change almost every ten years,
human nature is always the same;--aspects vary, and circumstances
alter, but the active principle, through all its windings and amid all
its disguises, is ever consistent with itself.
The people of Cromarty who lived ninety years ago were quite as
unskilled in politics as their neighbours, and thought as little
for themselves. They were but the wheels and pinions of an immense
engine; and regarding their governors as men sent into the world to
rule--themselves, as men born to obey--they troubled their heads no
more about the matter. Even the two Rebellions had failed of converting
them into politicians; for, viewing these in only their connexion
with religion, they exulted in the successes of Hanover as those of
Protestantism, and identified the cause of the Stuarts with Popery and
persecution. Their Whiggism was a Whiggism of the future world only;
and the liberty of preparing themselves for heaven was the only liberty
they deemed worth fighting for.
Principles such as these, and the dominancy of the Protestant
interest, rendered the people of Cromarty, for two whole reigns, as
quiet subjects as any in the kingdom. In latter times, too, there
was a circumstance which thoroughly attached them to the Government,
by shutting out from among them the Radicalism of modern times for
well-nigh a whole age. The Scotch, early in the reign of George
III., had risen high at court;--Earl Bute had become Premier, and
Mansfield Lord Chief-Justice; and the English, who would as lief have
witnessed the return of William and his Normans, grumbled exceedingly.
The Premier managed his business like most other premiers;--the
Chief-Justice conducted _his_ rather better than most other
chief-justices; but both gentlemen, says Smollett, “had the misfortune
of being born natives of North Britain; and this circumstance was,
in the opinion of the people, more than sufficient to counterbalance
all the good qualities which human nature could possess.” Junius,
and Wilkes, and Churchhill, and hundreds more, who, with as much
ill-nature, but less wit, were forgotten as soon as the public ceased
to be satisfied with ill-nature alone, opened in full cry against the
King, the Ministry, and the Scotch. The hollo reached Cromarty, and
the town’s-folk were told, with all the rest of their countrymen, that
they were proud, and poor, and dirty, and not very honest, and that
they had sold their King; all this, too, as if they hadn’t known the
whole of it before. Now it so happened, naturally enough I suppose,
that they could bear to be dirty, but not to be told of it, and poor,
but not to be twitted with their poverty, and that they could be quite
as angry as either Junius or Churchhill, though they could not write
letters like the one, nor make verses like the other. And angry they
were--desperately angry at Whiggism and the English, and devotedly
attached to the King, poor man, who was suffering so much for his
attachment to the Scotch. Nothing could come amiss to them from so
thorough a friend of their country; and when, on any occasion, they
could not wholly defend his measures, they contented themselves with
calling him an honest man.
On came the ill-fated, ill-advised American War, and found the
people of Cromarty as loyal as ever. Washington, they said, was a
rascal; Franklin, an ill-bred mechanic; and the people of the United
States, rebels to a man. There was a ballad, the composition of some
provincial poet of this period, which narrated, in very rude verse, the
tragical death of two brothers, natives of Ross-shire, who were killed
unwittingly by their father, a soldier of the Republic; and this simple
ballad did more for the cause of the King among the people of Cromarty,
than all the arguments in Locke could have done for that of the
Americans; there was not an old woman in either town or parish who did
not thoroughly understand it. The unfortunate father, Donald Munro, had
emigrated to America, says the ballad, many years before; leaving his
two infant sons with his brother, a farmer of Ross-shire. The children
had shot up into active young men, when the war broke out; and, unable
to pay for their passage, had enlisted into a regiment destined for
the colonies, in the hope of meeting with their father. They landed in
America; and finding themselves one evening, after a long and harassing
march, within a few miles of the place where he resided, they set out
together to pay him a visit; but in passing through a wood on their
way, they were shot at from among the trees, and with so fatal an
aim that the one was killed, and the other mortally wounded. A stout
elderly man, armed with a double-barrelled rifle, came pressing
towards them through the bushes, as a fowler would to the game he had
just knocked down. It was their father, Donald Munro; and the ballad
concludes with the ravings of his horror and despair on ascertaining
the nature of his connexion with his victims, blent with the wild
expressions of his grief and remorse for having joined in so unnatural
a rebellion.
[Sidenote: THE FIRST WHIG.]
Even in this age, however, as if to show that there can be nothing
completely perfect that has human nature in it, Cromarty had its one
Whig;--a person who affirmed that Franklin was a philosopher, and
Washington a good man, and that the Americans were very much in the
right. Could anything be more preposterous? The town’s-folk lacked
patience to reason with a fellow so amazingly absurd. He was a slater,
and his name was John Holm;--a name which became so proverbial in the
place for folly, that, when any one talked very great nonsense, it was
said of him that he talked like John Holm. The very children, who had
carried the phrase with them to the playground and the school, used to
cut short the fudge of a comrade, or, at times, even some unpopular
remark of the master, with a “Ho! ho! John Holm!” John, however, held
stiffly to his opinions, and the defence of Washington; and some of the
graver town’s-men, chafed by his pertinacity, were ill-natured enough
to say that he was little better than Washington himself. Curious as it
may appear, he was, notwithstanding the modern tone of his politics,
a rare and singular piece of antiquity;--one of that extinct class of
mechanics described by Coleridge, “to whom every trade was an allegory,
and had its own guardian saint.” He was a connecting link between two
different worlds--the worlds of popular opinion and of popular mystery;
and, strange as it may seem, both a herald of the Reform Bill, and a
last relic of the age “in which” (to use the language of the writer
just quoted) “the detail of each art was ennobled in the eyes of its
professors, by being spiritually improved into symbols and mementos
of all doctrines and all duties.” John had, besides, a strong turn for
military architecture, and used to draw plans and construct models. He
was one evening descanting to an old campaigner on the admirable works
at Fort George (a very recent erection at that time), and illustrating
his descriptions with his stick on a hearth-stone strewed over with
ashes, when by came the cat, and with one sweep of her tail demolished
the entire plan. “Och, Donald!” said John, “it’s all in vain;” a remark
which, simple as it may seem, passed into a proverb. When an adventure
proved unsuccessful, or an effort unavailing, it was said to be “All
in vain, like John Holm’s plan of the fort.” But John’s day was at
hand.--We, the people, are excellent fellows in our way, but I must
confess not very consistent. I have seen the principles which we would
hang a man for entertaining at the beginning of one year, becoming
quite our own before the end of the next.
[Sidenote: THE REVOLUTION.]
The American War was followed by the French Revolution, and the crash
of a falling throne awakened opinion all over Europe. The young
inquired whether men are not born equal; the old shook their heads,
and asked what was to come next? There were gentlemen of the place who
began to remark that the tradesfolk no longer doffed to them their
bonnets, and tradesfolk that the gentlemen no longer sent them their
newspapers. But the people got newspapers for themselves;--these,
too, of a very different stamp from the ones they had been accustomed
to; and a crop of young Whigs began to shoot up all over the place,
like nettles in spring. They could not break into the meanings of
all the new, hard-shelled words they were meeting with--words ending
in _acy_ and _archy_; but no people could understand better that a
king is only a kind of justice of the peace, who may be cashiered for
misconduct just like any other magistrate; that all men are naturally
equal; and that one whose grandfather had mended shoes, was every
whit as well-born as one whose grandfather was the bastard of an
emperor. And seldom were there people more zealous or less selfish in
their devotion than the new-made politicians of Cromarty. Their own
concerns gave place, as they ought, to the more important business of
the state; and they actually hurt their own heads, and sometimes, when
the ale was bad, their own bellies, in drinking healths to the French.
Light after light gleamed upon them, like star after star in a frosty
evening. First of all, Paine’s Rights of Man shone upon them through
the medium of the newspapers, with the glitter of fifty constellations;
then the Resolutions of the Liberty and Equality clubs of the south
looked down upon them with the effulgence of fifty more; at length,
up rose the scheme for the division of property, like the moon at
full, and, flaring with portentous splendour, cast all the others into
comparative obscurity. The people looked round them at the parks which
the modern scheme of agriculture had so conveniently fenced in with
dikes and hedges; and spoke of the high price of potato-land and the
coming Revolution.--A countryman went into one of the shops about this
time, craving change for a pound-note. “A pound-note!” exclaimed the
shopkeeper, snapping his fingers;--“a pound-note!--Man, I widna gie you
tippence for’t.”
[Sidenote: THE DEMOCRACY.]
There was a young man of the place, the son of a shopkeeper, who
had been marked from his earliest boyhood by a smart precocity of
intellect, and the boldness of his opinions; his name (for I must not
forget that, to borrow one of Johnson’s figures, I am walking over
ashes the fires of which are not yet extinguished) I shall conceal. He
was one of those persons who, like the stormy petrel of the tropics,
come abroad when the seas begin to rise, and the heavens to darken;
and who find their proper element in a wild mixture of all the four
elements jumbled into one. He read the newspapers, and, it was said,
wrote for them; he corresponded, too, with the Jacobin clubs of the
south, and strove to form similar clubs at home; but the people were
not yet sufficiently ripe. No one could say that he was disobliging or
ill-tempered; on the contrary, he was a favourite with, at least, his
humbler town’s-men for being much the reverse of both; but he was poor
and clever, and alike impatient of poverty, and of seeing the wealth
of the country in the hands of duller men than himself; and so the
man who was unfortunate enough to be born to a thousand pounds a year
had little chance of finding him either well-tempered or obliging. He
had stept into the ferry-boat one morning, and the ferrymen had set
themselves to their oars, when a neighbouring proprietor came down to
the beach, and called on them to return and take him aboard. “Get on!”
shouted the Democrat, “and let the fellow wait;--’tis I who have hired
you this time.” “O Sir! it’s a shentleman,” said one of the ferrymen,
propelling the boat sternwards, as he spoke, by a back stroke of the
oar. “Gentleman!” exclaimed the Democrat, seizing the boat-hook and
pushing lustily in a contrary direction--“Gentleman truly!--we are all
gentlemen, or shall be so very soon.” The proprietor, meanwhile, made
a dash at the rudder, and held fast, but with such good-will did the
other ply the boat-hook, that ere he had made good a lodgment he was
drenched to the armpits. “Nothing like being accustomed to hardship in
time,” muttered the Democrat, as, glancing his eye contemptuously on
the dripping vestments of the proprietor, he laid down the pole and
quietly resumed his seat.
[Sidenote: THE PROCESSION.]
There were about a dozen young men in the place who were so excited by
the newspaper accounts of the superb processions of their south-country
friends, that they resolved on having a procession of their own.
They procured a long pole with a Kilmarnock cap fixed to the one end
of it, which they termed the cap of liberty, and a large square of
cotton, striped blue, white, and red, which they called the tricolor of
independence. In the middle stripe there were inscribed in huge Roman
capitals, the words Liberty and Equality; and a stuffed cormorant,
intended to represent an eagle, was perched on the top of the staff.
They got a shipmaster of the place prevailed on to join with them. He
was a frank, hearty sailor, who saw nothing unfair in the anticipated
division of property, and hated a pressgang as he hated the devil. “But
how,” said he, “will we manage, after all hands have been served out,
should a few of us take a _bouse_ and melt our portions? just divide
again, I suppose?” “Highly probable,” replied the revolutionists; “but
we have not yet fully determined on that.” “I see, I see,” rejoined
the sailor; “everything can’t be done at once.” On the day of the
procession he brought with him his crew attired in their best, and
with all the ship flags mounted on poles. The revolutionists demurred.
“To be sure,” they said, “nothing could be finer; but then the flags
were British flags.” “And ---- it,” said the master, “would you have
me bring French flags?” It was no time, however, to dispute the point;
and the procession moved on, followed by all the children of the
place. It reached an eminence directly above the links; and drawing
up beside an immense pile of brushwood, and a few empty tar-barrels,
its leader planted the tree of liberty amid shouts, and music, and
the shooting of muskets, on the very spot on which the town gallows
had been planted about two centuries before. No one, however, so
much as thought of the circumstance; for people were too thoroughly
excited to employ themselves with anything but the future; besides,
a very little ingenuity could have made it serve the purpose of
either party. After planting the tree, the brushwood was fired, and a
cask of whisky produced, out of which the republicans drank healths
to liberty and the French. “The French! the French!” exclaimed the
shipmaster. “Well, ---- them, I don’t care though I do; here’s health
to the French; may they and I live long enough to speak to one another
through twelve-pounders!” All the boys and all the sailors huzza’d; the
republicans said nothing, but thought they had got rather a queer ally.
The evening, however, passed off in capital style; and, ere the crowd
dispersed, they had burnt two fishing-boats, a salmon coble, and almost
all the paling of the neighbouring fields and gardens.
[Sidenote: HOSSACK’S PLEDGE.]
The day of the procession was also that of a Redcastle market; at
that time one of the chief cattle fairs of the north. It was largely
attended on this occasion by Highlanders from the neighbouring straths,
many of whom had fought for the Prince, and remembered the atrocities
of Cumberland; it was attended, too, by parties of drovers from
England and the southern counties of Scotland, all of them brimful of
the modern doctrines, and scarcely more loyal than the Highlanders
themselves; it was attended, besides, by a Cromarty salmon-fisher,
George Hossack, a man of immense personal strength and high spirit,
now a little past his prime perhaps, but so much a politician of the
old school, that he would have willingly fought for his namesake the
King with any two men at the fair. But he was no match for everybody,
and everybody to-day seemed to hold but one opinion. “Awfu’ expensive
government this of ours,” said an East-Lothian drover; “we maun just
try whether we canna manage it mair cheaply for ourselves.” “Ay, and
what a blockhead of a king have we got!” said an Englishman; “not
fit, as Tom Paine says, for a country constable; but, poor wretch, we
must turn him about his business, and see whether he can’t work like
ourselves.” “Och, but he’s a limmer anyhow, and a creat plack whig!”
remarked an old Highlander, “and has nae right till ta crown. Na,
na, Charlie my king!” Poor George was almost broken-hearted by the
abuse poured out against his sovereign on every side of him; but what
could he do? He would look first at one speaker, then at another, and
repress his rising wrath by the consideration, that there was little
wit in being angry with about three thousand people at once. He had
driven a bargain with two Englishmen, and on going in to drink with
them, according to custom, was shown into a room which chanced at
the time, unlike every other room in the house, to be unoccupied. The
Englishmen seated themselves at the table; George cautiously fastened
the door, and took his place fronting them. “Now, gentlemen,” said
he, filling the glasses, “permit me to propose a toast:--Health and
prosperity to George the Third.” He drank off his glass, and set it
down before him. One of the Englishmen, a bit of a wag in his way,
looked at him with a droll, quizzical expression, and took up his.
“Health and prosperity,” he said, “to George the _herd_.”--“Well, young
man,” remarked George, “he is, as you say, a herd, and a very excellent
one;--allow me, however, to wish him a less unruly charge.” “Health
and prosperity,” shouted out the other, “to George the ----.” This was
unbearable: George sprang from his seat, and repaid the insult with a
blow on the ear, which drove both man and glass to the floor. Up rose
the other Englishman--up rose, too, the fallen one, and fell together
upon George; but the cause of the king was never yet better supported.
Down they both went, the one over the other, and down they went a
second, and a third, and a fourth time; till at length, convinced that
nothing could be more imprudent than their attempts to rise, they lay
just where they fell. George departed, after discharging the reckoning,
leaving them to congratulate one another on their liberalism and their
wit; and reached Cromarty as the last gleam of the Jacobin bonfire was
dancing on the chimney-tops, to learn that there was scarcely more
loyalty among his town’s-men than at the market, and that his favourite
salmon-coble had perished among the flames about two hours before. I
remember George--a shrewd, clear-headed man of eighty-two, full of
anecdote and remark; and I have derived not a few of my best traditions
from him. But he is gone, and well-nigh forgotten; and when the sexton
of some future age shall shovel up his huge bones, the men who come to
gaze on them may descant, as they turn them over, on modern degeneracy
and the might of their fathers, but who among them all will know that
they belonged to the last of the loyalists!
[Sidenote: THE COUNTY MEETING.]
The day after the procession came on, pregnant with mystery and
conjecture. Rider after rider entered the town, and assembled in front
of the council-house;--the town’s officer was sent for, together with
the sergeant of a small recruiting party that barracked in one of the
neighbouring lanes; they then entered the hall, and made fast the
doors. The country gentlemen, it was said, had come in to put down the
revolutionists. Shortly after, two of the soldiers and a constable
glided into the house of the young democrat, and producing a warrant
for his apprehension, and the seizure of all his papers, hurried him
away to the hall--the soldiers, with their bayonets fixed, guarding him
on either side, and the constable, laden with a hamper of books and
papers, bringing up the rear. In they all went, and the door closed as
before. The curiosity of the town’s-people was now awakened in right
earnest, and an immense crowd gathered in front of the council-house;
but they could see or hear nothing. At length the door opened, and the
sergeant came out; he looked round about him, and beckoned on George
Hossack. “George,” he said, “one of the London smacks has just entered
the bay; you must board her and seize on all the parcels addressed to
* * * * the Jacobin merchant; there is an information lodged that he
is getting a supply of pikes from London for arming the town’s-people.
Take the custom-house boatmen with you; and bring whatever you find
to the hall. And, hark ye, we must see and get up an effigy of the
blackguard Tom Paine;--try and procure some oakum and train-oil, and
I’ll furnish powder enough to blow him to Paris.” Away went George,
delighted with the commission, and returned in about an hour after,
accompanied by some boatmen bearing two boxes large enough to contain
pistols and pike-heads for all the men of the place. They were admitted
into the hall, where they found the bench occupied by the town and
county gentlemen--the soldiers ranged in the area in front, and the
Republican, nothing abashed, standing at the bar. He had baffled all
his judges, and had given them so much more wit and argument than they
wanted, that they had ceased questioning him, and were now employed
in turning over his papers. A letter written in cipher had been found
on his person, and a gentleman, somewhat skilled in such matters, was
examining it with much interest, while his more immediate neighbours
were looking over his shoulders. “Bring forward the boxes, George,”
said one of the gentlemen. George placed them both on the large table
fronting the bench, and proceeded to uncord them. The first he opened
was filled with gingerbread, the other with girls’ dolls and boys’
whistles, and an endless variety of trinkets and toys of a similar
class. Some of the elderly gentlemen took snuff and looked at one
another;--the younger laughed outright. “Have you deciphered that
scrawl, Pointzfield?” inquired one of the more serious, with a view
of restoring the court to its gravity. “Yes,” said Pointzfield dryly
enough, “I rather think I have.”--“Treasonable of course,” remarked the
other. “No, not quite that now,” rejoined the other, “whatever it might
have been fifty years ago. It is merely a copy in shorthand of the old
Jacobitical ballad, the Sow’s Tail to Geordie.” A titter ran along the
bench as before, and the court broke up after determining that the
Democrat should be sent to the jail of Tain to abide further trial,
and that Paine should be burnt in effigy at the expense of the county.
Paine was accordingly burnt; and all the children were gratified with
a second procession and a second bonfire, quite as showy in their way
as those of the preceding evening. The prisoner was escorted to Tain
by a party of soldiers; and on his release, which took place shortly
after, he quitted the country for London, where he became the editor
of a newspaper on the popular side, which he conducted for many years
with much spirit and some ability. Meanwhile the revolutionary cause
languished for lack of a leader; and, on the declaration of war with
France, sunk entirely amid the stormy ebullitions of a feeling still
more popular than the Republican one.
[Sidenote: THE FRENCH WAR.]
There are some passions and employments of the human mind which give
it a sceptical bias, and others, apparently of a very similar nature,
which incline it to credulity. So long as the revolutionary spirit
stalked abroad, it seemed as if every other spirit stayed at home. The
spectre slept quietly in its churchyard, and the wraith in its pool;
the dead-light was hooded by an extinguisher, and the witch minded
her own business without interfering with that of her neighbours. On
the breaking out of the war, however, there came on a season of omens
and prodigies, and the whole supernatural world seemed starting into
as full activity as the fears and hopes of the community. Armies were
seen fighting in the air, amid the waving of banners and the frequent
flashing of cannon; and the whole northern sky appeared for three
nights together as if deluged with blood. In the vicinity of Inverness,
shadowy bands of armed men were descried at twilight marching across
the fields--at times half enveloped in smoke, at times levelling their
arms as if for the charge. There was an ominously warlike spirit, too,
among the children, which the elderly people did not at all like;--they
went about, just as before the American war, with their mimic drums and
fifes, and their muskets and halberts of elder, disturbing the whole
country with uncouth music, and their zeal against the French. Then
came the tug of war; trade sank; and many of the mechanics of the place
flung aside their tools and entered either the army or navy. Party
spirit died; the Whigs forgot everything but that they were Britons;
and when orders came that such of the males of the place as volunteered
their services should be embodied into a kind of domestic militia, old
men of seventy and upwards, some of whom had fought at Culloden, and
striplings of fifteen, who had not yet left school, came to the house
of their future colonel, begging to be enrolled and furnished with
arms. In less than two days every man in the town and parish was a
soldier. Then came the stories of our great sea victories: the glare of
illuminations and bonfires; the general anxiety when the intelligence
first arrived that a battle had been fought, and the general sadness
when it was ascertained that a town’s-man had fallen. When the news of
Duncan’s victory came to the town, a little girl, who had a brother a
sailor, ran more than three miles into the country, to a field in which
her mother was employed in digging potatoes, and falling down at her
feet, had just breath enough left to say, “Mither, mither, the Dutch
are beaten, and Sandy’s safe.” The report of a threatened invasion
knit the people still more firmly together, and they began to hate
the French, not merely as national, but also as personal enemies. And
thus they continued to feel, till at length the battle of Waterloo,
by terminating the war, reduced them to the necessity of seeking, as
before, their enemies at home.
[Sidenote: WHIGGISM OF THE PEOPLE.]
For more than twenty years the words Whig and Tory had well-nigh gone
out; and the younger town’s-men were for some time rather doubtful
about their meaning. At length, however, they learned that _the Whigs_
meant the people, and _the Tories_ those who wished to live by them,
and yet call them names. The town’s-people, therefore, became Whigs
to a man, execrated the Holy Alliance and the massacre at Manchester,
drank healths to Queen Caroline and Henry Brougham; and though they
petitioned against Catholic emancipation--for, like most Scotch folks,
they had too thorough a respect for their grandfathers to be wholly
consistent--they were yet shrewd enough to inquire whether any one had
ever boasted of his country because the great statesmen opposed to that
measure were his countrymen. The Reform Bill, however, set them all
right again, by turning them full in the wake of their old leaders; and
yet, no sooner was Whiggism intrusted with the keys of office, than
they began to make discoveries which had the effect of considerably
modifying the tone of their politics. They began to discover--will it
be believed?--that all men are not born equal, and that there exists an
aristocracy in the very economy of nature. It was not merely the choice
of his countrymen that made Washington a great general, or Franklin
a profound statesman. They have also begun to discover, that a good
Whig may be a bad man; nay, that one may be at once Whig and Tory--a
Tory to his servants and dependants, a Whig to his superiors and his
country. For my own part, I am a Whig--a born Whig; but no similarity
of political principle will ever lead me to put any confidence in
the man to whom I could not intrust my private concerns; and as for
the Whiggism that horsewhipped the poor woman who was picking a few
withered sticks out of its hedge, it may wear the laurel leaf and the
blue ribbon in any way it pleases, but I assure it--it won’t be of my
party.
_Sanson & Co., Printers, Edinburgh._
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Chiefly between the years 1829 and 1832, inclusive. A few of the
paragraphs were, however, introduced at a later time.
[2] _Cromba_, _i.e._, crooked bay.
[3] Two ancient farms in the neighbourhood bear the names of Meikle and
Little _Farness_, and a third that of _Eathie_.
[4] Since, however, blown down during a storm, and broken into three
pieces.
[5] See Burns’s Halloween.
[6] The resemblance between the inventions of Sir Thomas as described
in the _Jewel_, and of the Marquis as intimated in the _Century_, is
singularly close. The following passages, selected chiefly for their
brevity as specimens, may serve to show how very much the minds that
produced them must have been of a piece.
FROM THE JEWEL. FROM THE CENTURY.
“In the denominations of the “To write
fixed stars, the Universal by a knotted silk string, so
Language affordeth the most that every knot shall signify
significant way imaginary; for any letter, with a comma,
by the single word alone which full point, or interrogation,
represents the star you shall and as legible as with pen
know the magnitude, together with and ink upon white paper. The
the longitude and latitude, both like by the smell, by the
in degrees and minutes, of the taste, by the touch, by these
star that is expressed by it. three senses, as perfectly,
distinctly, and unconfusedly,
yea, as readily as by the
“Such as will hearken to my sight.
instructions, if some strange
word be proposed to them, whereof “How to compose
there are many thousands of an universal character,
millions devisable by the wit methodical, and easy to be
of man, which never hitherto by written, yet intelligible
any breathing have been uttered, in any language; so that
shall be able, although they know if an Englishman write it
not the ultimate signification in English, a Frenchman,
thereof, to declare what part Italian, Spaniard, Irish,
of speech it is; or if a noun, Welch, being scholars, yea,
to what predicament or class it Grecian or Hebritan, shall
is to be reduced; whether it be as perfectly understand
the sign of a real or natural it in their own tongue,
thing, or somewhat concerning distinguishing the verbs
mechanic trades in their tools from the nouns, the numbers,
or terms; or if real, whether tenses, and cases, as
natural or artificial, complete properly expressed in their
or incomplete.” own language as it was in
English.”
[7]
For why? because the good old rule
Sufficeth them, the simple plan,
That they should take who have the power,
And they should keep who can.
[8] Sea-nettle.
[9] Cowper has said quite as much, and rather more, in his “TRUTH.”
“Let heathen worthies, whose exalted mind
Left sensuality and dross behind,
Possess for me their undisputed lot,
And take unenvied the reward they sought.”
[10] It was abolished by the late Rev. Mr. Stewart, in the second year
of his incumbency (1826.)
[11] These fine couplets were written, I have since learned, by
Henry Mackenzie, “The Man of Feeling,” an attached friend of the
deceased. Mackenzie has also dedicated to his memory one of his most
characteristic _Mirrors_--the ninetieth. After making a few well-turned
remarks on the unhappiness of living too long, “I have been led to
these reflections,” we find him saying, “by a loss I lately sustained
in the sudden and unlooked-for death of a friend, to whom, from my
earliest youth, I have been attached by every tie of the most tender
affection. Such was the confidence that subsisted between us, that in
his bosom I was wont to repose every thought of my mind, and every
weakness of my heart. In framing him, nature seemed to have thrown
together a variety of opposite qualities, which, happily tempering
each other, formed one of the most engaging characters I have ever
known;--an elevation of mind, a manly firmness, a Castilian sense of
honour, accompanied with a bewitching sweetness, proceeding from the
most delicate attention to the feelings of others. In his manners,
simple and unassuming; in the company of strangers, modest to a degree
of bashfulness; yet possessing a fund of knowledge and an extent of
ability, which might have adorned the most exalted station. But it was
in the small circle of his friends that he appeared to the highest
advantage; there the native benignity of his soul diffused, as it were,
a kindly influence on all around him, while his conversation never
failed at once to amuse and instruct.
“Not many months ago, I paid him a visit at his seat in a remote part
of the kingdom. I found him engaged in embellishing a place, of which
I had often heard him talk with rapture, and the beauties of which
I found his partiality had not exaggerated. He showed me all the
improvements he had made, and pointed out those he had meant to make.
He told me all his schemes and all his projects. And while I live I
must ever retain a warm remembrance of the pleasure I then enjoyed in
his society.
“The day I meant to set out on my return he was seized with a slight
indisposition, which he seemed to think somewhat serious; and indeed,
if he had a weakness, it consisted in rather too great anxiety with
regard to his health. I remained with him till he thought himself
almost perfectly recovered; and, in order to avoid the unpleasant
ceremony of taking leave, I resolved to steal away early in the
morning, before any of the family should be astir. About daybreak I got
up and let myself out. At the door I found an old and favourite dog of
my friend’s, who immediately came and fawned upon me. He walked with
me through the park. At the gate he stopped and looked up wistfully
in my face; and though I do not well know how to account for it, I
felt at that moment, when I parted with the faithful animal, a degree
of tenderness, joined with a melancholy so pleasing, that I had no
inclination to check it. In that frame of mind I walked on (for I
had ordered my horses to wait me at the first stage) till I reached
the summit of a hill, which I knew commanded the last view I should
have of the habitation of my friend. I turned to look back on the
delightful scene. As I looked, the idea of the owner came full into
my mind; and while I contemplated his many virtues, and numberless
amiable qualities, the suggestion arose, if he should be cut off, what
an irreparable loss it would be to his family, to his friends, and to
society. In vain I endeavoured to combat this melancholy foreboding by
reflecting on the uncommon vigour of his constitution, and the fair
prospect it afforded of his enjoying many days. The impression still
recurred, and it was some considerable time before I had strength of
mind sufficient to conquer it.
“I had not been long at home, when I received accounts of his being
attacked by a violent distemper; and, in a few days after, I learned it
had put an end to his life.”
Transcriber’s Notes
Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.
Italics are represented thus _italic_, bold thus =bold=, and
superscripts thus y^{n}.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Scenes and legends of the North of Scotland : or, The traditional history of Cromarty" ***
Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.