^B E'l'? O'^'* \it mm^ ti» irif i»t^-&!tfi!i^ii ^'v'^'IJ'vyT'^-J ' m^^m. {^^^ fe ll )! / iii V }i i«; i V »»>c / ^/ t^iJty'i i P( cJiAryxy /Oi^j /^/^ SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS. LIFE AND WORKS HUGH MILLER. New and neat Edition. 12 vols.^ uniform. $18.00. Any vol. sold separately at $1.50. Footprints of Creator. First Impressions of England Old Red Sandstone. Popular Geology. Schools and Schoolmasters. Tales ani> Sketches. Testimony of the Rocks. Essays. Cruise of the Betsey. Headship of Christ. Life and Letters. 2 vols. " Hugh Miller's writings have long since passed the period of criti- cism, and taken rank among standard works. From the times of the British Essayists and Oliver Goldsmith, no literary man has shown a greater mastery of the English language than Hugh Miller." — Edin- burgh Daily Review, " The name of Hugh Miller is more popularly connected with the science of geology than that of any other writer of the century. He devoted the entire of his mature life and clear and vigorous intellect to the science. ... It was said by the great Chalmers that, ' since Scott's death, he was the greatest Scotchman that was left.' " — Albany Evening Journal. ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, New York. AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY.. . Schools and Schoolmasters ; OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. BY HUGH MILLER, AUTHOR OF "the OLD RED SANDSTONE," *' FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR,'* "first impressions of ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE," ETC. '* Love had he found in huts where poor men lie ; His daily teachers had been woods and rills ; The silence that is in the starry sky, — The sleep that is among the lonely hills." Wordsworth. NINETEENTH THOUSAND. NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, 53Q Broadway. 1877. ib ^tf" r\ Entered according to Act of Congress, in the yeaKl854, bv GOUI>D AND LINCOIiN, In the Clerk's office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. €DUCATrON DEiPT. TO THE READER, It is now nearly a hundred years since Goldsmith remarked, in his httle educational treatise, that " few subjects have been more frequently written upon than the education of youth." And during the century which has well nigh elapsed since he said so, there have been so many more additional works given to the world on this fertile topic, that their number has been at least doubled. Almost all the men who ever taught a few pupils, with a great many more who* never taught any, deem themselves qualified to say something original on education; and perhaps few books of the kind have yet appeared, however medio- cre their general tone, in which something worthy oi being attended to has not actually been said. And fct, though I have read not a few volumes on the «ubject, and have dipped into a great many more, I aever yet found in them the sort of direction or en- couragement which, in working out my own education, [ most needed. They insisted much on the various 54 ^"^.97 , W : : , TO THE READER. modes of teaching others, but said nothing — or, what amounted to the same thing, nothing to the purpose — on the best mode of teaching one's self. And as my circumstances and position, at the time when I had most occasion to consult them, were those of by much the largest class of the people of this and every other civilized country, — ^for I was one of the many millions who need to learn, and yet have no one to teach them, — I could not help deeming the omission a serious one. I have since come to think, however, that a formal treatise on self-culture might fail to supply the want. Curiosity must be awakened ere it can be satisfied; nay, once awakened, it never fails in the end fully to satisfy itself ; and it has occurred to me, that by sim- ply laying before the working men of the country the "Story of my Education," I may succeed in first ex- citing their curiosity, and next, occasionally at least, in gratifying it also. They will find that by far the best schools I ever attended are schools open to them all, — that the best teachers I ever had are (though severe in their discipline) always easy of access, — -and that the special ybrm at which I was, if I may say so, most successful as a pupil, was a form to which I was drawn by a strong inclination, but at which I had less assist- ance from my brother men, or even from books, than at any of the others. There are few of the natural sciences which do not lie quite as open to the working men of Britain and America as geology did to me. My work, then, if I have not wholly failed in it, TO THE READER. V may be regarded as a sort of educational treatise, thrown into tlie narrative form, and addressed more especially to working men. They will find that a considerable portion of the scenes and incidents which it records, read their lesson, whether of encouragement or warning, or throw their occasional lights on pecii- iiarities of character or curious natural phenomena, to which their attention might be not unprofitably direct- ed. Should it be found to possess an interest to any other class, it will be an interest chiefly derivable from the glimpses which it furnishes of the inner life of the yfecottish people, and its bearing on what has been somewhat clumsily termed " the condition-of-the-coun- try question." My sketches will, I trust, be recognized as true to fact and nature. And as I have never pe- rused the autobiography of a working man of the more observant type, without being indebted to it for new facts and ideas respecting the circumstances and char- acter of some portion of the people with which I had been less perfectly acquainted before, I can hope that, regarded simply as the memoir of a protracted journey through districts of society not yet very sedulously ex- plored, and scenes which few readers have had an op- portunity of observing for themselves, my story may be found to possess some of the interest which attaches to the narratives of travellers who see what is not often seen, and know, in consequence, what is not generally known. In a Avork cast into the autobio- graphic form, the writer has always much to apologize •fj: : /. • TO THE EEADER. for. With himself for his subject, he usually tells not only more than he ought, but also, in not a few in- stances, more than he intends. For, as has been well remarked, whatever may be th-e character which a writer of his own Memoirs is desirous of assuming, he rarely fails to betray the real one. He has almost always his unintentional revelations, that exhibit pecu- liarities of which he is not conscious, and weaknesses which he has failed to recognize as such ; and it will, no doubt, be seen, that what is so generally done in works similar to mine, I have not escaped doing. But I cast myself full on the good nature of the reader. My aims have, I trust, been honest ones ; and should I in any degree succeed in rousing the humbler classes to the important work of self-culture and self-govern- ment, and in convincing the higher that there are in- stances in which working men have at least as legiti- mate a claim to their respect as to their pity, I shall not deem the ordinary penalties of the autobiographer a price too high for the accomplishment of ends so important CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. The Utile boy of the farm-house.— H is early education.— Enters the navy.— A mutiay, and its happy termination. — Instance of great physical slrensjth. — Quits the service. — Subsequent adventures.— Enters the coasting trade. — The master's home. — Unhappy accidents.— The curate of Nigg. — Vessel lost in a storm. — Jack's narrative of the shipwreck. — A second marriage. — Terrible anger of a good-natured man. 1 CHAPTEK IL My birth and parentage.— My thologic character of the recollections of early child- hood. — My father lost in a storm tn the sea. — An apparition. — A dreary season. — Stanzas.— My early education and reading.- Donald Roy.— Supernatural ele- ment in the religious character of the Highlanders.— Donald become aSeceder. — Some account of his descendants.— My two uncles li CHAPTER III. Blind Harry's " Wallace," and its effects upon me.— Enter the grammar school. —Early individual development correspondent with an early national one. Lessons learned at the grammar school.— Bellicose peat expeditions.— The pai* %h schoolmaster. — My progress in Latin. — Development of a talent for story telling,— Became a sort of favorite with the master.— The yearly cock-fight,- My dislike of such barbarous exhibitions. — Evils of fixing the foundation of ethics on the practices of old divines.— Old Francie, the retired clerk, and his curious collections.— ^^Lessons learned on the sea-shore. — The blank mica and garnet crystals of Cromarty.— Exploration of Cromarty Hill,— A wild paradise of P)cks. — " Getting siller in the stanes" Vlll CONTENTS. CHAPTER lY. Fieri Quiet hours in the Ebb with Uncle Sandy.— Curious anecdotes of crabs and lob- sters, — Notices of the lump-Ssh. — Ainphitrites and Ihei/ masonry. — Dye fish and beautiful exotic shells. — Evidence that the relative levels of sea and land are not altering. — Effect of winds upon the tides. — Philosophy of the drift current and gulf stream.— Instincts and habits of insects.— Wild bees and their robbers, —Important discoveries of fragmentary vegetable and animal remains. — Th9 dropping cave of the Cromarty Sutors. — Superstition of the townspeople. — An apparition.— The Sutor caves as seen by torchlight.— The " Puir Wife's Meal Kist" and the Pigeon Caves. — Exploration of Doocot,— formation of its stalao- tites and petrified moss, — view from the interior. — Imprwionment by the tide. — ^Want of wings sometimes a great inconvenience. — Night, and a storm. — Imaginary evils often greatly worse than real ones. — A midnight voice from the rocks.— Deliverance.— The incident immortalized in some enormously bad Terse 51 CHAPTER V. ** Letters of a Village Governess," and poor Miss Bond. — My dislike of the com- mon amusements of the school. — A run of ill-luck in my sports. — The sea-shore become a miniature muster-ground. — Essays in bark-building and navigation unsuccessful.— Unlucky accident, and " break" with a friend.— A visit to the Highlands.— Family worship.— Honesty a better security than locks and bolts. — ^The valley of the Gruids,— its interesting features.— Cousin William's guests. — Authenticity of Ossian.— A genuine Celtic breakfast.— Clan stories and legends >f the district.— « No fool like an old fool" 81 CHAPTER VL Another Journey to the Highlands.— A delightful residence.— Scenery of Loch Shin. — Memorials of the barbarism of our ancestors fast disappearing.— Charms and love-fillers.— Celtic theory of dreaming. — A congenial companion. — Luxury of seeing one's self in print.— A suit of tarlan inconsistent with a knowledge of Gaelic— Alt interesting excursion.— A sad story in a solitary valley.— The •iilmon leaj — A lodge in the wilderness. — A sublime pcem greatly damaged CONTENTS. IX PAOK In the roadingf.— Homeward bound. — A story thirty miles long suddenly broken off.— Night among strangers.— Cromarty.— The end of the righteous. — Further desolations of death. — Glimpses of the past. — Witch-burning. — Tales of CttUoden 108 CHAPTER YIL The subscription school and its schoolmasters. — Rory Shingles' Cave. — A wild, half-savage life.— A new friend.— Inflammability of shale due to the animal substance it contains. — Evils of leadership. — A serious scrape. — Discipline of a wholesome lesson. — The new schoolmaster.— Curious revelations of arithmetic and copy-books. — Increased warmth of the water in windy days accounted for. — A test poem. — Offences and punishments. — Abrupt termination of my school education. — A pasquinade. — A broken circle of companions. — Wise plans in- terrupted. — Johnstone, the old forty-two man. — A desperate enterprise success- ful.— The old soldier's difficulties i23 CHAPTER VIII. doiceof a profession.— Work in the Cromarty quarries.— Dreams of a hermit life not restricted to poets.— Nobility of toil.— Varieties of the quarry limestone. —A taste for the beauties of natural scenery a never-failing spring of delight. —Mental depression consequent upon physical fatigue. — Instances of great in- sensibility to personal danger. — Drinking usages of the profession. — Temptation overcome.— Organisms of the lias. — Use of spent thunderbolts. — F'ossil wonders »f the eathi ; lias.— An important discovery not followed up.— Journey into the 'lighlands,— the old shepherd's vision. — Forest of native Scotch pine. — A new xquaiatauce. — Moonlit exhibitions of natural scenery lil CHAPTER IX. L aon Side. — A midnight hour. — Gillie-Christ. — Spectral appearance m the Jiurchyard. — The poor maniac. — Origin of the soul. — Traditionary stories.— tsighland character.— The maniac's quarrel with her husband.— Something pe- culiarly unwholesome in the society of a strong-minded maniac. — Her anec- dotes of a brother.— A specimen of barrack-life.— A new school.— Professional characteristics - BotUy life of the North-<;ountry masons > 169 CONTENTS. CHAPTER X. PAGI lltc:«stlng objects around Conon Slde.~The poetic mood.— The accomplishment of verse distinct from the poetic faculty. — Stanzas. — Unio Marg-aritiferus, and the formation of pearls.— Bathing in the haunted pools of Conon. — Superstition has her figures as certainly as poesy.- The ruined chapel in the woods.— A dark rivulet and its trout. — Curious property of Flounders. — Lihellula. — DifTerenl stages of the animal creation. — Human contrivances anticipated in both animal and vegetable nature.— Jock, the story-teller of the barracks.— The faculty for extemporary fabrication a peculiarity of a rude society. — Musings.— Verses to the Conon 196 CHAPTER XL- Tlie young painter's home. — Symbolism of ancient Celtic sculpture. — ** Poor lame Danie." — Barrack-life again.— The conglomerate deposits of Conon.— Goblin * of Craighouse. — Highlanders of the border districts inferior to those of the in- terior—Superstition natural to a state of failing health.— Disastrous effects of the large farm system on the people of the agricultural districts.— Study of the old Scotch poets.— Alleged superiority of the old Greek and Roman writers accounted for S IQ CHAPTER XII. Disastrous consequences to the mechanic of being an inferior workman.— My friend of the Doocot Cave. — A perilous adventure. — Ludicrous expedient to fix a boundary-stone.— Click Clack, the Carter.— Unique features of the metamon phic system.- Recession of the shore of Loch Maree.— Music on the waters.— Island Mareo.— Comforts of a barrack.— Home of a Highlander. — "Without Gaelic in Gairioch."— Effect of a potato famine.— Disparity among people of contiguous districts due to a mixture of races.— Discrepancy in the appearance of the 86X3? on Ihe west coast of Scotland.— Gaelic Thinking in Scripture Eng- tish 231 CONT ENTS. CHAPTER XIII. A terra incognita.— Con\entment sometimes rather a vice than a virtue. — A ge- niu?. — A grave difference between porridge with, and porridge without milk. — Relative powers of fairies and ice to walk off with great stones. — Flora of Cairloch — Law of increase in the animal and vegetable world^ — the same ap- plies to maw.--View of the western islands. — Differences between the produc- tions of the eastern and western coasts of Scotland. — Submarine scenery. — Primitive arts of uncultivated districts. — Gloomy prospects of the cotters, — their Celtic blood not the only cause of their indolence. — A resurrectionist. — Sabbaths In Flowerdale. — Poverty of the Highlanders 25^ CHAPTER XIV. A sad Accident.— Belief in a particular Providence natural to the mind.— Tho last eagle of Cromarty Hill.— The ancient records of geology confirmed by the present extinction of animal species on the globe.— Resolve to seek my fortune among the stone-cutters of Edinburgh.— Scenery of the Frith of Forth.— Distant view of the Scottish capital.— An unfortunate patrimony.— Edinburgh a city of the past and present. — " A Highlander newly come to Scotland." — A culti- vated and fenced country less beloved by a people than a wild, open one.— The carboniferous system.— Visions of science.— Serfdom in the coal districts. — Collier women of Niddry.— The democratic watchword "Liberty and Equality" faulty in its phlosophy. — Moral degradation in the environs of Edinburgh.— My lodging..... i.» . 28i CHAPTER XY. Diaafifection toward religious establishments among the working-men of Scotland. —My fellow-lodgers.— Irreligion among the masons.— Family worship estab- lished in our cottage.— Habits of dissipation among the masons.— The province of intelligence in reforming the morals.— The nobler virtues unknown to black- guards.— Charles the hero of our part*^ — Evil effect of the practice of promis- cuous imprisonment. — Intolerance of new sects. — Strike among the masons.— Bcene in a public house.— Human nature a dilBcult problem.— Evils of strikes. — The self-conceit of the young a wise provision. — " Old Alie, the witch," and • Davie, the apprentice." — A city playhouse 308 Xll CONTENTS. CHAPTER XVI. PiOl h great fire in Edinburgh.— Special visitations of heaven difficult to be deter- mined. — Dr. MH]!rie. — My reading and Rambles. — JVox Ambrosiana. — We un- derstand an author the better for knowing how he looks. — Quit Edinburgh for Cromarty.— Superstition of sailors. — Stanzas written at sea. — Reflections on the condition of the lower classes, — causes of their degradation on the increase.— Renewed acquaintance with my friend at Doocot.— Man had no responsible Tedecessor on earth.— Intellectual superiority of the scholar over the work- ing-man not so great as has been supposed 333 pre CHAPTER XVII. My religious impressions,— Powerlessness of mere speculative theology.— Con- vinced that the ''Word made flesh" is the central object of *he Christian sys- tem,— importance of this belief.— Adaptation of the scheme of redemption to the heart of man, — practical power of this principle. — Teachings of geology on the doctrine of the union of two natures in Christ. — Failing health.— Stanzas. -^Convalescence .—Sketches of a gipsy party 351 CHAPTER XVIII. h new branch of employment.— Observations on the floras of Kirkmich»l,^~ tbeir bearing on the development hypothesis — Ansrus, the idiot of Nigg. — Jock Gordon, the imbecile of Cromarty,— their rivalship, and its issue. — An original theory of the mind.— The ministers of Cromarty.— Meeting with Mr. Stewart, — our subsequent intimacy. — His manner of preaching ...,,• i78 CHAPTER XIX. let out to seek employment at Inverness. — Interview with the parish minister,— The sort of patronage which letters of introduction procure— Planning to get employment.— Both verse and old English fail me.— A jiited bridegroom. — The Osars of Inverness. — Criticism on the magistrates. — Determine to publish a volume of poems.— Death of my uncle James, and of my fi lend William Ross. 398 CONTENTS. X113 CHAPTER XX. rxat Promce to my volume of verse.— Write for the Courier on the herring fishery, — ox tracts.— Reception of my verses by the critics.— A near criticism.— A severe attacX trom an itinerant elocutionist, — the lecturer barely escapes a drubbinar. —A generous critique from Edinburgh.— My circle of friends become consuJer- tbiy enlarged.— Interview with Dr. Baird.— Other llteiary enterprises.— Tlie terror of forsaking an honest calling. — An interesting group of literary ladies. 1w» cTesprit on a young naval officer Ill CHAPTER XXI. Laid wastes of Culbin. — Peculiarities of the sub-aSrlal formation.— Great age of J>e globe,— the Scriptures do not fix its antiquity.— Tremendous storm on the Hill of Cromarty,— extraordinary character of the scene.— Origin of Scottish mosses.— Molusca of the Shandwick lias.— Dissection of a loligo.— The oolitic and lias deposits.— Organism of the second age of vertebrate existence 437 CHAPTER XXII The Baptist cause at Cromarty.— Opposition to the Catholic Relief Bill.— Trouble in the parish,— a dire ecclesiastical dispute.— Approach of the cholera —Our Barrier Savitaire measure.— The virtues of the smoke of sulphur and chloride tested, — fumigation of Ihe Inverness politicians. — Ravages of the pestilence.— A time of peace favorable to the growth of opinion. — The Revolution in France, — reception of the news by the crew of a French lugger.— Efiects of the Reform Bill on the politics of Cromarty.— Beginning and ending of my municipal ftSl CHAPTER XXIII. iSTcnings with the ladies.— A pretty young lady and " the Cromarty poet." — A lovely apparition.— The propriety of conversing privately with an operative mason.— A dream maiden di8pla:ed by a real one.— Thoughts of a home in the XIV CONTENTS. backwoods oi America. — The business of the newspaper editor not always au independent one.— A special providence,— employed as accountant of the Branch Banjc. The ill-condition of the laboring classes often overdrawn.— Voy- age to Edinburgh,— object of the journey.— My slay at Linlithgow.— Organismi of the mountain limestone.— Return to Cromarty.— Comparative educational advantages of the mechanic and the clerk.— Reception of my traditional vol- nme.— The bank proves an admirable school, suited to cultivate a shrewd com- Bon sense.- My bridal excursion.— Cathedral of Elgm.— Return to Cromarty. — 8;&nza8.. 4U CHAPTER XXIV. Contributions to the *' Border Tales."— The reward of " pains-taking research."— Robert Chambers and his journal.— Ichthyolitic deposits of the old red sand- stone,— these have no representative among recent fishes.— Mr. Dinkel's alleged restoration of the Cephalaspeans disproved. — Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepsis, — Evening excursions to Moray Frith.— Triumph of the Liberals over Presby- terial bigotry. — An ability of efficient squabbling proved to be a very market- able one.— Memoir of William Forsyth.— A sad bereavement. — Stanzas 4Sfl CHAPTER XXY. The voluntary controversy. — My uncles become Receders. — Sympathy with the establishment— Critical position of the Church,— it is defended in a letter to Lord Brougham,— great success of the pamphlet.— Story of the ** Deserted Church."— Become editor of the Witness^— & non-intrusion paper.— Oratory of Dr. Chalmers,— great orators imperfectly represented in their written speeches. —Anecdotes of Dr. Chalmers.— Brief history of a friend.— Quit Cromarty. — 8uo- eeiB of the IFitne»».— Reflections on the past Ill MT SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS} OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. CHAPTER I. *• Ye gentlemen of England Who live at home at ease, O, little do you think upon The dangers of the seas." Old Sono. Rather more than eighty years ago, a stout little boy, in his sixth or seventh year, was despatched from an old-fashioned farm-house in the upper part of the parish of Cromarty, to drown a litter of puppies in an adjacent pond. The commis- sion seemed to be not in the least congenial. He sat down beside the pool, and began to cry over his charge ; and finally, after wasting some time in a paroxysm of indecision and sor- row, instead of committing the puppies to the water, he tucked them up in his little kilt, and set out by a blind pathway which went winding through the stunted heath of the dreary Maolbuoy Common, in a direction opposite to that of the farm house, — his home for the two previous twelvemonths. After some doubtful wandering on the waste, he succeeded in reach- ing, before nightfall, the neighbouring seaport town, and pre- sented himself laden with his charge, at his mother's door. My SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; l''he poor woman, — a sailor's widow, in very humble circum stances, — raised her hands in astonishment : " O, my unlucky boy," she exclaimed, " what's this ? — what brings you here 1" " The little doggies, mither," laA the boy ; " I could na drown the little doggies ; and I took them to you." What after- wards befell the " little doggies," I know not ; but trivial as thi3 incident may seem, it exercised a marked influence on tho circ umstances and destiny of at least two generations of crea- tures higher in the scale than themselves. The boy, as he stubbornly refused to return to the farm-house, had to be sent on shipboard, agreeably to his wish, as a cabin-boy ; and the writer of these chapters was born, in consequence, a sailor's son, and was rendered, as early as his fifth year, mainly de- pendent for his support on the sedulously plied but indiffer- ently remunerated labors of his only surviving parent at the time, a sailor's widow. The little boy of the farm-house was descended from a long line of seafaring men, — skilful and adventurous sailors, — some of whom had coasted along the Scottish shores as early as the times of Sir Andrew Wood and the " bold Bartons," and mayhap helped to man that " verrie monstrous schippe the Great Michael," that " cumbered all Scotland to get her to sea." They had taken as naturally to the water as the New- foundland dog or the duckling. That waste of life which is always so great in the naval profession had been more than usually so in the generation just passed away. Of the boy's two uncles, one had sailed around the world with Anson, and assisted in burning Paita, and in boarding the Manilla gal- leon ; but on reaching the English coast he mysteriously dis- appeared, and was never more heard of. The other uncle, a remarkably handsome and powerful man, — or, to borrow the homely but not inexpressive language in which I have heard him described, " as pretty a fellow as ever stepped in shoe- leather," — perished at sea in a storm ; and several years after, the boy's father, when entering the Frith of Cromarty, was struck overboard, during a sudden gust, by the boom of his vessel, and, apparently stunned by the blow, never rose again. OR, THE SrORY OF MY EDUCATION. ^ Shortly after, in the hope of securing her son from what seemed to be the hereditary fate, his mother had committed the boy to the charge of a sister, married to a farmer of the pari ih, and now the mistress of the farm-house of Ardavell ; but the family death w^as not to be so avoided; and the ar rangement terminated, as has been seen, in the transaction beside the pond. In course of time the sailor boy, despite of hardship and rough usage, grew up into a singularly robust and active man ; not above the middle size. — for his height never exceeded five feet eight inches, — but broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-limbed, and so compact of bone and muscle, that in a ship of the line, in which he afterwards sailed, there was not, among five hundred able-bodied seamen, a man who could lift so great a weight, or grapple with him on equal terms. His education had been but indifferently cared for at home ; he had, however, been taught to read by a female cousin, a niece of his mother's, who, like her too, was both the daughter and the widow of a sailor ; and for his cousin's only child, a girl somewhat younger than himself, he had contracted a boyish affection, which in a stronger form continued to retain possess- ion of him after he grew up. In the leisure thrown on his hands in long Indian and Chinese voyages, he learned to write ; and profited so much by the instruction of a comrade, an in- telligent and w^arm-hearted though reckless Irishman, that he became skilful enough to keep a log-book, and to take a reckoning with the necessary correctness, — accomplishments far from common at the time among ordinary sailors. He formed, too, a taste for reading. The recollection of his cousin's daughter may have influenced him, but he commenced life with a determination to rise in it, — made his first money by storing up instead of drinking his grog, — and, a3 was com- mon in those times, drove a little trade with the natives of foreign parts, in articles of curiosity and vertu, for which, I sus- pect, the custom-house dues were not always paid. With all his Scotch prudence, however, and with much kindliness of heart and placidity of temper, there was some wild blood in his 4. MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; veins, derived, mayhap, from one or two buccaneering ances tors, that, when excited beyond the endurance point, became sufficiently formidable ; and which, on at least one occasion, interfered very considerably with his plans and prospects. On a protracted and tedious voyage in a large East India- man, he had, with the rest of the crew, been subjected to harsh usage by a stern, capricious captain ; but, secure of re- lief on reaching port, he had borne uncomplainingly with it all. His comrade and quondam teacher the Irishman was, however, less patient ; and for remonstrating with the tyrant, as one of a deputation of the seamen, in what was deemed a mutinous spirit, he was laid hold of, and was in the course of being bound down to the deck under a tropical sun, when his quieter comrade, with his blood now heated to the boiling point, stepped aft, and with apparent calmness re-stated the grievance. The captain drew a loaded pistol from his belt ; the sailor struck up his hand ; and, as the bullet whistled through the rigging above, he grappled with him, and dis- armed him in a trice. The crew rose, and in a few minutes the ship was all their own. But having failed to calculate on such a result, they knew not what to do with their charge ; and, acting under the advice of their new leader, who felt to the full the embarrassing nature of the position, they were con- tent simply to demand the redress of their grievances as their terms of surrender ; when, untowardly for their claims, a ship of war hove in sight, much in want of men, and, bearing down on the Indiaman, the mutiny was at once suppressed, and the leading mutineers sent aboard the armed vessel, accompanied by a grave charge, and the worst possible of characters. Lucki- ly for them, however, and especially luckily for the Irishman and his friend, the war-ship was so weakened by scurvy, at that time the untamed pest of the navy, that scarce two dozen of her crew could do duty aloft. A fierce tropical tempest, too, which broke out not long after, pleaded powerfully in their favor ; and the affair terminated in the ultimate pro- motion of the Irishman to the office of ship-schoolmaster, and of his Scotch comrade to the captaincy of the foretop. OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 5 My narrative abides with the latter. He remained for seve- ral years aboard men-of-war, and, though not much in love with the service, did his duty in both storm and battle. He served in the action off the Dogger-Bank, — one of the last naval engagements fought ere the manoeuvre of breaking the line gave to British valor its due superiority, by rendering all our great sea-battles decisive; and a comrade who sail- ed in the same vessel, and from whom, when a boy, I have re- ceived kindness for my father's sake, has told me that, their ship being but indifferently manned at the time, and the ex- traordinary personal strength and activity of his friend well known, he had a station assigned him at his gun against two of the crew, and that during the action he actually outwrought them both. At length, however, the enemy drifted to leeward to refit ; and when set to repair the gashed and severed rig- ging, such was his state of exhaustion, in consequence of the previous overstrain on every nerve and muscle, that he had scarce vigor enough left to raise the marlinspike employed in the work to the level of his face. Suddenly, when in this condition, a signal passed along the line, that the Dutch fleet, already refitted, was bearing down to renew the engagement. A thrill like that of an electric shock passed through the frame of the exhausted sailor ; his fatigue at once left him ; and, vig- orous and strong as when the action first began, he found himself able, as before, to run out against his two comrades the one side of a four-and-twenty pounder. The instance is a curious one of the influence of that " spirit" which, accord- ing to the Wise King, enables a man to " sustain his infir- mity.' It may be well not to inquire too curiously regarding the mode in which this effective sailor quitted the navy. The country had borrowed his services without consulting his will ; and he, I suspect, reclaimed them on his own behalf without first asking leave. I have been told by my mother that he found the navy very intolerable ; the mutiny at the Nore had not yet meliorated the service to the common sailor. Among other hardships, he had been oftener than once under not only 6 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; very harsh, but also very incompetent officers ; and on one occasion, after toiling on the fore-yard in a violent night-squall, with some of the best seamen aboard, in fruitless attempts to furl up the sail, he had to descend, cap in hand, at the risk of a flogging, and humbly implore the boy-lieutenant in charge that he should order the vessel's head to be laid in a certain direction. Luckily for him, the advice was taken by the young gentlemen, and in a few minutes the sail was furled. He left his ship one fine morning, .attired in his best, and hav- ing on his head a three-cornered hat, with tufts of lace at the corners, which I well remember, from the circumstance that it had long after to perform an important part in certain boy- ish masquerades at Christmas and the New Year ; and as he had taken effective precautions for being reported missing in the evening, he got clear off. Of some of the after-events of his life, I retain such mere fragmentary recollections, dissociated from date and locality, as might be most readily seized on by the imagination of a child. At one time, when engaged in one of his Indian voy- ages, he was stationed during the night, accompanied by but a single comrade, in a small open boat, near one of the minor mouths of the Ganges ; and he had just fallen asleep on the beams, when he was suddenly awakened by a violent motion, as if his skiff were capsizing. Starting up, he saw in the im- perfect light, a huge tiger, that had swam, apparently, from the neighboring jungle, in the act of boarding the boat. So much was he taken aback, that though a loaded musket lay beside Aim, it was one of the loose beams, or foot-spars^ used as ful- crums for the feet in rowing, that he laid hold of as a weapon ; but such was the blow he dealt to the paws of the creature, as they rested on the gunwale, that it dropped off with a tremen dous snarl, and he saw it no more. On another occasion, h( was one of three men sent with despatches to some Indian port in a boat, which, oversetting in the open sea in a squall, left them for the greater part of three days only its upturned bot- tom for their resting-place. And so thickly, during that time, did the sharks congregate around them, that though a keg of OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 7 rum. part of the boat's stores, floated for the first two days within a few yards of them, and they had neither meat noi drink, none of them, though they all swam well, dared attempt regaining it. They were at length relieved by a Spanish vessel, and treated with such kindness, that the subject of my narrative used ever after to speak well of the Spaniards, as a generous people, destined ultimately to rise. He was at one time so reduced by scurvy, in a vessel half of whose crew had been carried off by the disease, that, though still able to do duty on the tops, the pressure of his finger left for several seconds a dent in his thigh, as if the muscular flesh had become of the consistency of dough. At another time, when over- taken in a small vessel by a protracted tempest, in which " for many days neither sun nor moon appeared," he continued to retain his hold of the helm for twelve hours after every other man aboard was utterly prostrated and down, and succeeded, in consequence, in weathering the storm for them all. And after his death, a nephew of my mother's, a young man who had served his apprenticeship under him, was treated with great kindness on the Spanish Main, for his sake, by a West Indian captain, whose ship and crew he had saved, as the captain told the lad, by boarding them in a storm, at immi- nent risk to himself, and working their vessel into port, when, in circumstances of similar exhaustion, they were drifting full upon an iron-bound shore. Many of my other recollections of this manly sailor are equally fragmentary in their character ; but there is a distinct bit of picture in them all, that strongly impressed the boyish fancy. When not much turned of thirty, the sailor returned to nia native town, with money enough, hardly earned and carefully kept, to buy a fine, large sloop, with which he engaged in the coasting trade ; and shortly after he married his cousin's daugh- ter. He found his cousin, who had supported herself in her widowhood by teaching school, residing in a dingy, old fashioned house, three rooms in length, but with the windowa of its second story half-buried in the eaves, that had been left her by their mutual grandfather, old John Feddes, one of 8 MY SCHOOL AND SCHOOLMASTERS; the last of the buccaneers. It had been built, I have every reason to believe, with Spanish gold ; not, however, with a great deal of it, for, notwithstanding its six rooms, it was a rather humble erection, and had now fallen greatly into dis- repair. It was fitted up, however, with some of the sailor's money, and after his marriage, became his home — a home rendered all the happier by the presence of his cousin, now rising in years, and who, during her long widowhood, had sought and found consolations amid her troubles and priva* tions, where it was surest to be found. She w^as a meek- spirited, sincerely pious woman, and the sailor during his more 'distant voyages — for he sometimes traded with ports of the Baltic on the one hand, and with those of Ireland and the south of England on the other — had the comfort of knowing that his wife, who had fallen into a state of health chronically delicate, was sedulously tended and cared for by a devoted mother. The happiness which he would have otherwise en- joyed was, however, marred in some degree by his wife's great delicacy of constitution, and ultimately blighted by two unhappy accidents. He had not lost the nature which had been evinced at an early age beside the pond : for a man who had often looked death in the face, he had remained nicely tender of human life, and had often hazarded his own in preserving that of others ; and when accompanied, on one occasion, by his wife and her mother to his vessel, just previous to sailing, he had unfortu- nately to exert himself in her presence, in behalf of one of his seamen, in a way that gave her constitution a shock from which it never recovered. A clear, frosty, moonlight evening had set in ; the pier-head was glistening with new-formed ice, and one of the sailors, when engaged in casting over a haulser which he had just loosed, missed footing on the treacherous margin, and fell into the sea. The master knew his man could not swim ; a powerful seaward tide sweeps past the place with the first hours of ebb ; there was not a moment to be lost; and, hastily throwing off his heavy great-coat, he plunged after him, and in an instant the strong current swept them both OE, THE STOKY OF MY EDUCATION; 9 ort of sight. He succeeded, however, in laying hold of the half-drowned man, and striking with him from out the peril ous tide-way into an eddy, with a Herculean effort he regained the quay. On reaching it, however, his wife lay insensible in the arms of her mother ; and as she was at the time in the de- licate condition incidental to married women, the natural con- sequence followed, and she never recovered the shock, but lin- gered for more than a twelvemonth, the mere shadow of hei former self; when a second event, as untoward as the first, too violently shook the fast-ebbing sands, and precipitated her dis- solution. A prolonged tempest from the stormy north-east, had swept the Moray Frith of its shipping, and congregated the storm- bound vessels by scores in the noble harbor of Cromarty, when the wind chopped suddenly round, and they all set out to sea, the sloop of the master among the rest. The other vessels kept the open Frith ; but the master, thoroughly ac- quainted with its navigation, and in the belief that the change of wind was but temporary, went on hugging the land on the weather side, till, as he had anticipated, the breeze set full into the old quarter, and increased into a gale. And then, when all the rest of the fleet had no other choice left them than just to scud back again, he struck out into the Frith in a long tack, and, doubling Kinnaird's Head and the dreaded Buchan Ness, succeeded in making good his voyage south. Next morning, the wind-bound vessels were crowding the harbor of refuge as before, and only his sloop was missing. The first war of the French Revolution had broken out at the time ; it was known there were several French privateers hovei-ing on the coast", and the report went abroad that the missing sloop had been captured by the French. There was a weather-brained tailor in the neighborhood, who used to do very odd things, especially, it was said, when the moon was at the full, and whom the writer remembers from the circumstance that he fabricated for him his first jacket, and that, though he suc- ceeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder where it 3ught to be, he committed the slight mistake of sew IC MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ing on the other sleeve to one of the pockot holes. Vkkji An drew Fern had heard that his townsman's sloop had been cap. tured by a privateer, and fidgety with impatience till he had communicated the intelligence where he thought it would tell most effectively, he called on the master's wife, to ask whether she had not heard that all the wind-bound vessels had got back again save the master's, and to wonder no one had yet told her that if his had not got back, it was simply because it had been taken by the French. The tailor's communication told more powerfully than he could have anticipated : in less than a week after, the master's wife was dead ; and long ere her husband's return, she was lying in the quiet family burying- place, in which — so heavy were the drafts made by accident and violent death on the family — the remains of none of the male members had been deposited for more than a hundred years. The mother, now left, by the death of her daughter, to a dreary solitude, sought to relieve its tedium, during the ab- sence of her son-in-law when on his frequent voyages, by keep- ing, as she had done ere his return from foreign parts, an hum- ble school. It was attended by two little girls, the children of a distant relation but very dear friend, the wife of a tradesman of the place — a woman, like herself, of sincere though unpre- tending piety. Their similarity of character in this respect could hardly be traced to their common ancestor. He was the last curate of the neighboring parish of Nigg ; and, though not one of those intolerant Episcopalian ministers that succeed- ed in rendering their church thoroughly hateful to the Scot- tish people — for he was a simple, easy man, of much good na- ture — he was, if tradition speaks true, as little religious as any of them. In one of the earlier replies to that curious work, " Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed," I find a nonsen- sical passage from one of the curate's sermons, given as a set- off against the Presbyterian nonsense adduced by the other side. " Mr. James M'Kenzie, curate of Nigg in Ross," says the writer, " describing eternity to his parishioners, told them that in tliat state they would be immortalized, so that nothing eould hurt them ; a slash of abroad sword could not hurt you< OU, THE STORr OF MY EDUCATION. 11 saith he ; nay, a cannon-ball would play but haff on you." Most of the curate's descendants were staunch Presbyterians, and animated by a greatly stronger spirit than his ; and there were none of them stauncher in their Presbyterianism than the two elderly women who counted kin from him in the fourth degree, and who, on the basis of a common faith, had become attached friends. The little girls were great favorites with the schoolmistress ; and when, as she rose in years, her health began to fail, the elder of the two removed from her mother's house, to live with and take care of her ; and the y ounger, who was now shooting up into a pretty young womaii, used, as before, to pass much of her time with her sister and Her old mistress. Meanwhile the shipmaster was thriving. He purchased a Bite for a house beside that of his buccaneering grandfather, and built for himself and his aged relative a respectable dwell- ing, which cost him about four hundred pounds, and entitled his son, the writer, to exercise the franchise, on the passing, considerably more than thirty years after, of the Reform Bill. The new house w^as, however, never to be inhabited by its builder ; for, ere it was fully finished, he was overtaken by a sad calamity, that, to a man of less energy and determina- tion, would have been ruin, and in consequence of which he had to content himself with the old house as before, and al- most to begin the world anew. I have now reached a point in my narrative at which, from my connection with the two little girls, — both of whom still live in the somewhat altered character of women far advanced in life, — I can be as minute in its details as I please ; and the details of the misadventure which stripped the shipmaster of the earnings of long years of carefulness and toil, blended as they are with what an old critic might term a curious machinery of the supernatural, seem not unworthy of being given unabridged. Early in November 1797, two vessels — the one a smack in the London and Inverness trade, the other the master's square-rigged sloop — ^lay wind-bound for a few days on their passage north, in the port of Peterhead. The weather, which 2 12 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; had been stormy and unsettled, nrioderated toward the even- ing of the fifth day of their detention ; and the wind chop- ping suddenly into the east, both vessels loosed from, their moorings, and, as a rather gloomy day was passing into ^k still gloomier night, they bore out to sea. The breeze soon freshened into a gale ; the gale swelled into a hurricane, accompanied by a thick snow-storm : and when, early next morning, the smack opened the Frith, she was staggering i;n ier her storm-jib, and a main-sail reefed tcfthe cross. What ver wind may blow, there is always shelter within the Su tors; and she was soon riding at anchor within the road- stead ; but she had entered the bay alone ; and when day broke, and for a brief interval the driving snow-rack cleared up toward the east, no second sail appeared in the offing. " Poor Miller !" exclaimed the master of the smack ; " if he does not enter the Frith ere an hour, he will never enter it at all. Good sound vessel, and better sailor never stepped be- tween stem and stern ; but last night has, I fear, been too much for him. He should have been here long ere now." The hour passed ; the day itself wore heavily away in gloom and tempest ; and as not only the master, but also all the crew of the sloop, were natives of the place, groupes of the town's folks might be seen, so long as the daylight lasted, looking out into the storm from the salient points of the old coast-line that, rising immediately behind the houses, commands the Frith. But the sloop came not, and before they had retired to their homes, a second night had fallen, dark and tempestuous as the first. Ere morning the weather moderated ; a keen frost bound up the wind in its icy fetters ; and during the following day, though a heavy swell continued to roll shorewards between the Sutors, and to send up its white foam high against the cliffs, the surface of the sea had become glassy and smooth. But the day wore on and evening again fell ; and even the most sanguine relinquished all hope of ever again seeing the sloop or her crew. There was grief in the master's dwelling, —grief in no degree the less poignant from the circumstanco 13 chat it was the tearless, uncomplaining grief of rigid old age. Her two youthful friends and their mother watched with the widow, now, as it seemed, left alone in the world. The town- clock had struck the hour of midnight, and still she remained as if fixed to her seat, absorbed in silent, stupefying sorrow, when a heavy foot was heard pacing along the now silent street. ft passed, and anon returned ; ceased for a moment nearly op- posite the window ; then approached the door, where there 'ipas a second pause ; and then there succeeded a faltering knock, that struck on the very hearts of the inmates within. One of the girls sprang up, and on undoing the bolt, shrieked out, as the door fell open, " O, mistress, here is Jack Grant the mate !" Jack, a tall, powerful seaman, but apparently in a state of utter exhaustion, staggered, rather than w^alked in, and flung himself into a chair. " Jack," exclaimed the old woman, seizing him convulsively by both his hands, " where'a my cousin ? — where's Hugh f " The master's safe and well," said Jack ; " but the poor Friendship lies in sjpales on the bar of Findhorn." " God be praised !" ejaculated the widow. " Let the gear go !" I have often heard Jack's story related in Jack's own words, at a period of life when repetition never tires ; but I am not sure that I can do it the necessary justice now. " We left Peterhead," he said, " with about half a cargo of coal ; for we had lightened ship a day or two before ; and the gale freshen- ed as the night came on. We made all tight, however ; and though the snow-drift was so blinding in the thick of the show er that I could scarce see my hand before me, and though it soon began to blow great guns, we had given the land a good offing, and the hurricane blew the right way. Just as we Avere loosening from the quay, a poor young woman, much knocked up, with a child in her arms, had come to the vessel's side, and begged hard of the master to take her aboard. She was a soldier's wife, and was travelling to join her husband at Fort- George ; but she was already worn out and penniless, she said ; and now, as a snow-storm threatened to block up the roads, she could neither stay where she was nor pursue her journey. 14 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; Her infant, too. — she was sure, if she tried to force her way through the hills, it would perish in the snow. The master, though unwilling to cumber us with a passenger in such weath- er, was induced, out of pity for the poor destitute creature, to take her aboard. And she was now, with her child, all alone, below in the cabin. I was stationed a-hcad on the out- look beside the foresail horse ; the night had grown pitch dark ; and the lamp in the binnacle threw just light enough through the gray of the shower to show me the master at the helm. He looked more anxious, I thought, than I had almost ever seen him before, though I have been with him, mistress, in very bad weather ; and all at once I saw he had got company, and strange company too, for such a night ; there Avas a woman moving round him, with a child in her arms. I could see her as distinctly as I ever saw anything, — ^now on the one side, now on the other, — at one time full in the light, at anothei' half lost in the darkness. That, I said to myself, must be the soldier's wife and her child ; but how in the name of wonder can the master allow a woman to come on deck in such a night as this, when we ourselves have just enough ado to keep foot- ing ! He takes no notice of her neither, but keeps looking on, quite in his wont, at the binnacle. * Master,' I said, step- ping up to him, ' the w^oman had surely better go below.' ' What woman. Jack V said he ; ' our passenger, you may be sure, is nowhere else.' I looked round, mistress, and found he was quite alone, and that the com j>ani on-head was hasped down. There came a cold sweat all over me. ' Jack,' said the master, ' the night is getting worse, and the roll of the waves heightening every moment. I'm convinced, too, our cargo is shifting. As the last sea struck us, I could hear the coals rattle below ; and see how stiffly we heel to the larboard. Say nothing, however, to the men, but have all your wits about you ; and look, meanwhile, to the boat-tackle and the oars, ] have seen a boat live in as bad a night as this.' As he spoke, a blue light from above glimmered on the deck. We looked up, and saw a dead fire sticking to the cross-trees. ' It's all over with us now, master,' said I. ' Nay, man,' replied the OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 16 master, ii: his easy, humorous way, which I always like well enough except in bad weather, and then I see his humor is served out like his extra grog, to keep up hearts that have cause enough to get low, — ' Nay, man,' he said, ' we can't af- ford to let your grandmother board us to-night. If you will ensure me against the shifting coal, I'll be your guarantee against the dead-light. Why, it's as much a natural appear- ance man, as a flash of lightning. Away to your berth, and Keep up a good heart ; we can't be far from Covesea now, where, when once past the Skerries, the swell will take off ; and then, in two short hours, we may be snug within the Su- tors.' I had scarcely reached my berth a-head, mistress, when a heavy sea struck us on the starboard quarter, almost throw- ing us on our beam-ends. I could hear the rushing of the coals below, as they settled on the larboard side ; and though the master set us full before the wind, and gave instant orders to lighten every stitch of sail, — and it was but little sail we had at the time to lighten, — still the vessel did not rise, but lay un- manageable as a log, with her gunwale in the water. On we drifted, however, along the south coast, with little expectation save that every other sea would send us to the bottom ; until, in the first gray of the morning, we found ourselves among the breakers of the terrible bar of Findhorn. And shortly after, the poor Friendship took the ground right on the edge of the quicksands, for she would neither stay nor wear ; and as she beat hard against the bottom, the surf came rolling over half- mast high. " Just as we struck," continued Jack, " the master made a desperate effort to get into the cabin. The vessel couldn't miss, we saw, to break up and fill ; and though there was little hope of any of us ever setting foot ashore, he wished to give the poor woman below a chance with the rest. All of us but himself, mistress, had got up into the shrouds, and so could E-ce round us a bit ; and he had just laid his hand on the companion hasp to undo the door, when I saw a tremendous sea coming rolling towards us like a moving wall, and shouted on him to h Id fast. He sprang to the weather back-stay. 16 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; and laid hold. The sea came tumbling on, and, breaking full twenty feet over his head, buried him for a minute's space in the foam. We thought we should never see him more ; but when it cleared away, there was he still, with his iron gripe on the stay, though the fearful wave had water-logged the Friendship from bow to stern, and swept her companion-head as cleanly off by the deck as if it had been cut with a saw. No human aid could avail the poor woman and her baby. Master could hear the terrible choaking noise of her dying agony right under his feet, with but a two-inch plank between ; and the sounds have haunted him ever since. But even had he suc- ceeded in getting her on deck, she could not possibly have sur- vive"d, mistress. For five long hours we clung to the rigging, with the seas riding over us all the time like wild horses ; and though we could see, through the snow drift and the spray, crowds on the shore, and boats lying thick beside the pier, none dared venture out to assist us, till near the close of the day, when the wind fell with the falling tide, and we were brought ashore, more dead than alive, by a volunteer crew from the harbor. The unlucky Friendship began to break up under us ere mid-day, and we saw the corpse of the drowned woman, with the dead infant still in its arms, come floating out through a hole in the side. But the surf soon tore mother and child asunder, and we lost sight of them as they drifted away to the west. Master would have crossed the Frith himself this morning to relieve your mind, but being less worn out than any of us, he thought it best to remain in charge of the wreck." Such, in eifect, was the narrative of Jack Grant the mate. The master, as I have said, had well nigh to commence the world anew, and was on the eve of selling his new house at a disadvantage, in order to make up the sum necessary for pro- viding himself with a new vessel, when a friend interposed and advanced him the balance required. He was assisted, too, hy a sister in Leith, who was in tolerably comfortable circum- stances ; and so he got a new sloop, which, though not quite equal in size to the one he had last, was built wholly of oak, everj? 17 plank and beam of which he had superintended in the laying down, and a prime sailer to boot ; and so, though he had to satisfy himself with the accommodation of the old domicile, with its little rooms and its small windows, and to let the other house to a tenant, he began to thrive again as before. Mean- while his aged cousin was gradually sinking. Tlie master was absent on one of his 1 3nger voyages, and she too truly felt that she could not survive till his return. She called to her bed- side her two young friends, the sisters, who had been unwea- ried in their attentions to her, and poured out her blessing on them ; first on the elder, and then on the younger. " But as for you, Harriet," she added, addressing the latter, — " there waits for you one of the best blessings of this world also, — the blessing of a good husband ; you will be a gainer in the end, even in this life, through your kindness to the poor childless widow." The prophesy was a true one ; the old woman had shrewdly marked where the eyes of her cousin had been fall- ing of late ; and in about a twelvmonth after her death, her young friend and pupil had become the master's w^ife. There was a very considerable disparity between their ages, — the master was forty -four, and his wife only eighteen, — ^but never was there a happier marriage. The young wife was simple, confiding, and affectionate, and the master of a soft and genial nature, with a large amount of buoyant humor about him, and so equable in temper, that, during six years of wedded life, his wife never saw him angry but once. I have heard her speak of the exceptional instance, however, as too terrible to be readily forgotten. She had accompanied him on ship-board, during their first year of married life, to the upper parts of the Cromarty Frith, where his sloop was taking in a cargo of grain, and lay quietly embayed within two hundred yards cf the southern shore. His mate had gone away for the night to the opposite side of the bay, to visit his parents, who resided in that neighbor- hood ; and the remaining crew consisted of but two seamen, both young and somewhat reckless men, and the ship-boy, Takin CHAPTER II. •♦Three stormy nights and stormy days We tossed upon the raging main; And long we strove our bark to save, But all our striving was in vain." Low\. I WAS born, the first child of this marriage, on the 10th day of October, 1802, in the low, long house built by my great- grandfather, the buccaneer. My memory awoke early. I have recollections which date several months ere the completion of my third year ; but, like those of the golden age of the world, jhey are chiefly of a mythologic character. I remember, for instance, getting out unobserved one day to my father's little garden, and seeing there a minute duckling covered with soft yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red color. I know not what prodigy of the vegetable kingdom produced the little duckling ; but the plant with the shells must, I think, have been a scarlet runner, and the shells themselves the papilionaceous blossoms. I have a distinct "ecollection, too — but it belongs to a later period — of seeing ny ancestor, old John Feddes, the buccaneer, though he must .lave been dead at the time considerably more than half a cen- tury. I had learned to take an interest in his story, as pre- served and told in the antique dwelling which he had built more than a hundred years before. To forget a love disap- 20 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEl^ ; pointment, he had set out early in life for the Spanish Main, where, after giving and receiving some hard blows, he suc- ceeded in filling a little bag with dollars and doubloons ; and then coming home, he found his old sweetheart a widow, and so much inclined to listen to reason, that she ultimately be- came his w^ife. There were some little circumstances in his history which must have laid hold of my imagination ; for I used over and over to demand its repetition ; and one of my first attempts at a work of art was to scribble his initials with my fingers, in red paint, on the house-door. One day, when playing all alone at the stair-foot, — for the inmates of the house had gone out, — something extraordinary caught my eye on the landing-place above ; and looking up, there stood John Fcddes, — for I somehow instinctively divined that it was none other than he, — in the form of a large, tall, very old man, attired in a light-blue great-coat. He seemed to be steadfastly regarding me with apparent complacency ; uul I w^as sadly frightened ; and for years after, when passing througli the dingy, ill-lighted room, out of which I inferred he had come, I used to feel not at all sure that I might not tilt against old John in the dark. I retain a vivid recollection of the joy which used to light up the household on my father's arrival ; and how I learned to distinguish for myself his sloop wdien in the offing, by the two slim stripes of white that ran along her sides, and her two square topsails. I have my golden memories, too, of splendid toys that he used to bring home with him, — among the rest, of a magnificent four-wheeled wagon of painted tin, drawn by four wooden horses and a string ; and of getting it into a quiet corner, immediately on its being deTivered over to me, and there breaking up every wheel and horse, and the vehicle itself, into their original bits, until not two of the pieces were lefl sticking together. Farther, I still remember my disap- pointment at not finding something curious within at least the horses and the wheels ; and as unquestionably the main en- joyment derivable from such things is to be had in the break- ing of them, I sometimes wonder that our ingenious toymen OR, THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 21 dc not fall upon the way of at once extending their trade> and adding to its philosophy, by putting some of their most bril- liant things where nature puts the nut-kernel, — inside. 1 shall advert to but one other recollection of this period. 1 have a dream-like memory of a busy time, when men with gold lace on their breasts, and at least one gentleman with golden epaulets on his shoulders, used to call at my father's house, and fill my newly-acquired pockets with coppers ; and how they wanted, it is said, to bring my father along with them, to help them to sail their great vessel ; but he preferred re- maining, it was added, w^ith his own little one. A ship of war, under the guidance of an unskilful pilot, had run aground on a shallow flat oft the opposite side of the Frith, known as the Inches ; and as the flood of a stream-tide was at its height at the time, and straightway began to fall off", it was found, after lightening her of her guns and the greater part of her stores, that she still stuck fast. My father, whose sloop hau been pressed into the service, and was loaded to the gun- wale with the ordnance, had betrayed an unexpected knowl- edge of the points of a large war vessel ; and the command- er, entering into conversation with him, was so impressed by his skill, that he placed his ship under his charge, and had hig confidence repaid by seeing her hauled off* into deep water in a single tide. Knowing the nature of the bottom, — a sot't arenaceous mud, which, if beat for some time by the foot ot hand, resolved itself into a sort of quicksand, half sludge, half water, which, when covered by a competent depth of sea, could offer no effectual resistance to a ship's keel,---the master had set half the crew to run in a body from side to side, till, by the motion generated in this way, the portion of the bank mmediately beneath was beaten soft ; and then the othei moiety of the men. tugging hard on kedge and haulser, drew the vessel off* a few feet at a time, till at length, after not a few repetitions of the process, she floated free. Of course, on a harder bottom the experiment would not have availed ; but so struck was the commander by its efficacy and originality, and by the extent of the master's professional resources, that 22 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; he strongly recommended him to part with his sloop, and en ter the navy, where he thought he had influence enough, he said, to get him placed in a proper position. But as the mas- ter's previous experience of the service had been of a very disagreeable kind, and as his position, as at once master and owner of the vessel he sailed, was at least an independent one, he declined acting on the advice. Such are some of my earlier recollections. But there wa» a time of sterner memories at hand. The kelp trade had no yet attained to the importance which it afterwards acquired, (ire it fell before the first approaches of Free Trade ; and my father, in collecting a supply for the Leith Glass Works, for which he occasionally acted both as ageiit and shipmaster, used sometimes to spend whole months amid the Hebrides, sailing from station to station, and purchasing here a few tons and there a few hundredweights, until he had completed his cargo. In his last kelp voyage, he had been detained in this way from the close of August to the end of October ; and at length, deeply laden, he had threaded his way round Cape Wrath, and through the Pentland and across the Moray Friths, when a severe gale compelled him to seek shelter in the har- bor of Peterhead. From that port, on the 9th of Novem- ber, 1807, he wrote my mother the last letter she ever re- ceived from him ; for on the day after he sailed from it, there arose a terrible tempest, in which many seamen perished, and he and his crew were never more heard of. His sloop was last seen by a brother townsman and shipmaster, who, ere the storm came on, had been fortunate enough to secure an asylum for his bark in an English harbor on an exposed por- tion of the coast. Vessel after vessel had been coming ashore during the day ; and the beach was strewed with wrecks and dead bodies ; but he had marked his townsman's sloop in the offing from mid-day till near evening, exhausting every nauti- cal shift and expedient to keep aloof from the shore ; and at length, as the night was falling, the skill and perseverance exerted seemed successful ; for, clearing a formidable head- land that had lain on the lee for hours, and was mottled with OB, THE STOKY OF MY EDUCATION. 23 broken ships and drowned men, the sloop was seen stretching out in a long tack into the open sea. " Miller's seamanship has «^aved him once more !" said Matheson, the Cromarty skip- per, as, quitting his place of outlook, he returned to his cabin ; but the night fell tempestuous and wild, and no vestige of the hapless sloop was ever after seen. It was supposed that, heavi- ly laden, and laboring in a mountainous sea, she must have stiirted a plank and foundered. And thus perished — to bor row from the simple eulogium of one of his seafaring friends whom I heard long after condoling with my mother — " one of the best sailors that ever sailed the Moray Frith." The fatal tempest, as it had prevailed chiefly on the eastern coasts of England and the south of Scotland, was represented in the north by but a few bleak, sullen days, in which, with little wind, a heavy ground-swell came rolling in coastwards from the east, and sent up its surf high against the precipices of the Northern Sutor. There were no forebodings in the mas- ter's dwelling ; for his Peterhead letter — a brief but hopeful missive — had been just received ; and my mother was sitting, on the evening after, beside the household fire, plying the cheerful needle, when the house-door, which had been left un- fastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side to shut it. What follows must simply be regarded as^the recollection, though a very vivid one, of a boy who had completed his fifth year only a month before. Day had not wholly disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a gray haze spread a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at !\^e open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards mo. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female ; they bore a livid and sodden appearance ; and directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I was fearfully startled, and ran shriek- ing to my mother, telling what I had seen ; and the house- girl, whom she next sent to shut the door, apparently afl^ected 24 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS by my terror, also returned frightened, and said that she too had seen the woman's hand ; which, however, did not seem to be the case. And finally, my mother going to the door, saw nothing, tHough she appeared much impressed by the ex- tremeness of my terror and the minuteness of my description. I communicate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, with out attempting to explain it. The supposed apparition ma} 'lave been merely a momentary affection of the eye, of the na ure described by Sir Walter Scott in his " Demonology," and Sir David Brewster in his " Natural Magic." But if so, the affection was one of which I experienced no after-return ; and its coincidence, in the case, with the probable time of my fa- ther's death, seems at least curious. There followed a dreary season, on which I still look back in memory, as on a prospect which, sunshiny and sparkling for a time, has become suddenly enveloped in cloud and storm. I remember my mother's long fits of weeping, and the general gloom of the widowed household ; and how, after she had sent my two little sisters to bed, — for such had been the increase of the family, — and her hands were set free for the evening, she used to sit up late at night, engaged as a seamstress, in making pieces of dress for such of the neighbors as chose to employ her. My father's new house lay untenanted at the time ; and though his sloop had been partially insured, the broker with whom he dealt was, it would seem, on the verge of insolvency, and having raised objections to paying the money, it was long ere any part of it cauld be realized. And so, with all my mother's industry, the household would have fared but ill had it not been for the assistance lent her by her two brothers, in- dustrious, hard-working men, who lived with their aged parents and an unmarried sister, about a bow-shot away, and now not only advanced her money as she needed it, but also took her second child, the elder of my two sisters, a docile little giil of three years, to live with them. I remember I used to go wan- dering disconsolately about the harbor at this season, to ex- amine the vessels which had come in during the night ; an^ Uiat I oflener than once set my mother a crying by asking hei OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 25 why the shipmasters who, when my father was alive, used to stroke my head, and slip halfpence into my pockets, never now took any notice of me, or gave me anything ? She well knew that the shipmasters — not an ungenerous class of men — had simply failed to recognize their old comrade's child ; but the question was only too suggestive, notwithstanding, of both her own loss and mine. I used, too, to >elimb, day after day, a grassy protuberance of the old coast-line immediately behind my mother's house, that commands a wide reach of the Mo- ray Frith, and to look wistfully out, long after every one else had ceased to hope, for the sloop with the two stripes of white and the two square topsails. But months and years passed by, and the white stripes and the square topsails I never saw. The antecedents of my father's life impressed me more powerfully during my boyhood than at least aught I acquired at school ; and I have submitted them to the reader at consid- erable length, as not only curious in themselves, but as form- ing a first chapter in the story of my education. And the fol- lowing stanzas, written at a time when, in opening manhood, I was sowing my wild oats in verse, may at least serve to show that they continued to stand out in bold relief on my memo- ry even after I had grown up. ** Round Albyn's western shores, a lonely skiff Is coasting slow ; — the adverse winds detain ; And now she rounds secure the dreaded cliff,* Whose horrid ridge beats bade the northern main; And now the whirling Pentland roars in vain Her stern beneath, for favoring breezes rise ; The green isles fade, whitens the watery plain, O'er the vexed waves with meteor speed she fliea, Till Moray's distant hills o'er the blue waves arise. Who guides that vessel's wanderings o'er the wave? A patient, hardy man, of thoughtful brow ; Serene and warm of heart, and wisely brave, And sagely skill'd, when burly breezes blow, To press through angry waves the adventurous prow. ♦ Cape Wrath. 26 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS Age hath not quell'd his strength, nor quench'd desiro Of generous deed, nor chill'd his bosom- » glow ; Yet to a better world his hopes aspire. Ah ! this must sure be thee ! All hail my honored Sire! Alas ! thy latest voyage draws near a close, For Death broods voiceless in the darkening sky; Subsides the breeze ; th' untroubled waves repose ; The scene is peaceful all. Can Death be nigh, When thus, mute and unarmed, his vassals lie? Mark ye that cloud ! There toils the imprisoned galo; E'en now it comes, with voice uplifted high ; Resound the shores, harsh screams the rending sail, And roars th' amazed wave, and bursts the thunder peal Three days the tempest raged ; on Scotia's shore Wreck piled on wreck, and corse o'er corse was thrown; Her rugged cliffs were red with clotted gore ; Her dark caves echoed back the expiring moan ; And luckless maidens mourned their lovers gone ; And friendless orphans cried in vain for bread ; And widow'd mothers wandered forth alone ;— Restore, O wave, they cried, — restore our dead ! And then the breast they bar'd, and beat the uushelter'il head* Of thee, ray Sire, what mortal tongue can tell I No friendly bay thy shattered bark received; Ev'n when thy dust repos'd in ocean cell. Strange baseless tales of hope thy friends deceived ; Which oft they doubted sad, or gay believed. At length, when deeper, darker waxed the gloom. Hopeless they grieved, but 'twas in vain they grieved: If God be truth, 'lis sure no voice of doom, That bids the accepted soul its robes of joy assume." y- I had been sent, previous to my father's death, to a dame's yi^-— school, where I was taught to pronounce my letters to such effect in the old Scottish mode, that still, when I attempt spell- ing a word aloud, which is not often, — for I find the process a ver}' perilous one, — the acCs and ee's^ and uhs and vaus^ leturrj iipDi: me, and I have to translate them with no little hesita tion, as I go along, into the more modish sounds. A knowl edge of the letters themselves I had already acquired by study- ing the sign-posts of the place, — rare v/orks of art, that ex- cited my utmost admiration, wdth jugs, and glasses, and bottles. OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 27 and ships, and loaves of bread upon them, all of which could, as the artists had intended, be actually recognized. During my sixth year I spelt my way, under the dame, through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then entered upon her highest form, as a member of the Bible class ; but all the while the process of acquiring learn- ing had been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not Knowing whither it tended ; when at once my mind awoke t( the meaning of the most delightful of all narratives, — th story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made be- fore ! I actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books ; and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a corner on the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph ; nor did one perusal serve ; — the other Scripture stories followed, — in especial, the story of Samson and the Philis- tines, of David and Goliah, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha ; and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, too, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works. Jack the Giant-Killer, and JacK and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with several others of resembling character. Those intolerable nuisances the useful-knowledge books had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars, on the educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting influence on the opening in- tellect of the " youthhood ;" and so, from my rudimental oooks, — books that made themselves truly such by their thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind, — I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice chil dren's books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote adni3 28 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; rably for 1 ttle folk, especially in the Odyssey ; a cop} of which, — in the only true translation extant, — for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such 1 hold that of Pope to be, — I found in the house of a neighbor. Next came the Iliad ; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lin tot With w^hat power, and at how early an age, true genius in) presses ! I saw, even at this immature period, that no othci writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles wxnt whizzing athwart his pages ; and 1 could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. 1 next succeeded in discovering for my- self a child's book, of not less interest than even the Iliad, which might, I w^as told, be read on Sabbaths, in a magnifi- cent old edition of the " Pilgrim's Progress," printed on coarse w^hity-brown paper, and charged with numerous wood-cuts, each of which occupied an entire page, that, on principles of economy, bore letter-press on the other side. And such de- lightful prints as they were ! It must have been some such volume that sat for its portrait to Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as "Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts, Strange and uncouth ; dire faces, figures dire, Sharp-knee'd, sharp-elbow'd, and lean ancled too, With long and ghastly shanks, — tonus which, once seen, Could never be forgotten." In process of time I had devoured, bf asides these genial works, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the "judgment chapter" in Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the adventures of Philip Quarll, with a good nany other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. t was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard nis vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's V^oyages, all the volumes were now absent save the first ; and a very tantalizing romance, in four volumes,— Mrs. B^tclitfs OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 29 " Mysteries of Udolpho," — was represented by only the earliei two. Small as the collection was, it contained some rare books, — among the rest, a curious little volume, entitled " The Mir- acles of Nature and Art," to which we find Dr. Johnson re- ferring, in one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day, and which had been published, ke said, some time in the seventeenth century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge, between sky and water It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of the " Memoir^ of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Re- ligion," — a work interesting from the circumstance that — though it bore another name on its title-page — it had been translated from the French for a few guineas by poor Gold- smith, in his days of obscure literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellencies of his style. The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an English sailor who had spent the best years of his life as a slave in Mo rocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff controversy, — Flavel's Works, and Henry's Commentary, and Hutchinson on the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelations, with the title page away, and blind Jame- son's volume on the Hierarchy, with first editions of Naphtali, the Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind Let Loose. But with these solid authors I did not venture to grapple until long after this time. Of the w^orks of fact and incident which it contained, those of the voyages were my especial favorites. I perused with avidity the voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods Rogers ; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and hunt wild beasts and fight battles. 1 have already made mention of my two maternal uncles ; and referred, at least incidentally, to their mother, as the friend and relative of my father's aged cousins, and, like her, a great- grand-child of the last curate of Nigg. The curate's youngest 30 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; daughter had been courted and married by a somewhat wild young farmer, of the clan Ross, but who was known, like the celebrated Highland outlaw, from the color of his hair, as Roy, or the red. Donald Roy was the best club-player in the district ; and as King James's " Book of Sports" was not deem- ed a very bad book in the semi-Celtic parish of Nigg, the games in which Donald took part were usually played on the Sabbath. About the time of the Revolution, however, he was laid hold of by strong religious convictions, heralded, say the traditions of the district, by events that approximated in cha- racter to the supernatural ; and Donald became the subject of a mighty change. There is a phase of the religious character, which in the South of Scotland belongs to the first two ages of Presbytery, but which disappeared ere its third establishment under William of Nassau, that we find strikingly exemplified in the Welches, Pedens, and Cargills of the times of the perse- cution, and in which a sort of wild machinery of the supernatu- ral was added to the commoner aspects of a living Christianity. The men in whom it was exhibited were seers of visions and dreamers of dreams ; and, standing on the very verge of the natural world, they looked far into the world of spirits, and had at times their strange glimpses of the distant and the fu- ture. To the north of the Grampians, as if born out of due season, these seers pertain to a later age. They flourished chiefly in the early part of the last century ; for it is a not un- instructive fact, that in the religious history of Scotland, the eighteenth century of the Highland and semi-Highland dis- tricts of the north corresponds in many of its traits to the seven- teenth century of the Saxon-peopled districts of the south ; and Donald Roy was one of the most notable of the class. The anecdotes regarding him which still float among the old recol lections of Ross-shire, if transferred to Peden or Welch, would be found entirely in character with the strange stories that inlay the biographies of these devoted men, and live so enduringly in the memory of the Scottish people. Living, too, in an age m which, like the Covenanters of a former century, the High- lander still retained his weapons, and knew how to use them. 81 Donald had, like the Patons, Hackstons, and Balfours of the south, his dash of the warlike spirit ; and after assisting his minister, previous to the rebellion of 1745, in what was known as the great religious revival of Nigg, he had to assist him, shortly after, in pursuing a band of armed Caterans, that, de- scending from the hills, swept the parish of its cattle. And coming up w^ith the outlaws in the gorges of a wild Highland len, no man of his party was more active in the fray that fol- owed than old Donald, or exerted himself to better effect in re-capturing the cattle. I need scarce add, that he was an at- tached member of the Church of Scotland. But he v/as not destined to die in her communion. Donald's minister, John Balfour of Nigg, — a man w^hose memory is still honored in the north, died in middle life, and an unpopular presentee was obtruded on the people. The policy of Robertson prevailed at the time ; Gillespie had been deposed only four years previous, for refusing to assist in the disputed settlement of Inverkeithing ; and four of the Nigg Presbytery, overawed by the stringency of the precedent, re- paired to the parish church to conduct the settlement of the obnoxious licentiate, and introduce him to the parishoners. They found, however, only an empty building ; and, notwith- standing the ominous absence of the people, they were pro- ceeding in shame and sorrow with their work, when a solitary and venerable man, far advanced in life, appeared before them, and, solemnly protesting against the utter mockery of such a proceeding, impressively declared, " that if they settled a man to the walls of that kirk, the blood of the parish of Nigg would be required at their hands." Both Dr. Hetherington and Dr. Merle D'Aubigne record the event ; but neither of these ac- complished historians seem to have been aware of the pecu- liar emphasis which a scene that would have been striking in any circumstances derived from the character of the protester, —old Donald Roy. The Presbytery, appalled, stopt short in the middle of its work ; nor was it resumed till an after day, when, at the command of the Moderate majority of the Church, — a command not unaccompanied by significant reference to 32 the fate of Gillespie, — the forced settlement was consuininated. Donald, who carried the entire parish with him, continued to cling by the National Church for nearly ten years after, much befriended by one of the most eminent and influential divines of the north, — Fraser of Alness, — the author of a volume on Sanctification, still regarded as a standard work by Scottish theologians. But as neither the people nor their leader ever entered on any occasion the parish church, or heard the ob- noxious presentee, the Presbytery at length refused to tolerate the irregularity by extending to them, as before, the ordinary Church privileges ; and so they were lost to the Establish- ment, and became Seceders. And in the communion of that portion of the Secession known as the Burghers, Donald died several years after, at a patriarchal old age. Among his other descendants, he had three grand-daughters, who were left orphans at an early age by the death of both their parents, and whom the old man, on their bereavement, had brought to his dwelling to live with him. They had small portions apiece, derived from his son-in-law, their father, v/hich did not grow smaller under the care of Donald ; and as each of the three was married in succession out of his family, he added to all his other kindnesses the gift of a gold ring. They had been brought up under his eye sound in the faith ; and Donald's ring had, in each case, a mystic meaning ; — they were to regard it, he told them, as the wedding ring of their other Husband^ the Head of the Church, and to be faithful spouses to Him in their several households. Nor did the injunction, nor the significant symbol with which it was accompanied, prove idle in the end. They all brought the savor of sincere piety into their families. The grand-daughter, with whom the writer was more directly connected, had been married to an honest and industrious but somewhat gay young tx'ades- man, but she proved, under God, the means of his conversion • and their children, of whom eight grew up to be men and women, were reared in decent frugality, and the exercise of honest principles carefully instilled. Her husband's family nad, like that of my paternal ancestors, been a seafaring one. OB, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. S3 IJis fatlier, after serving on shipboard, had passed the latter part of his life as one of the armed boatmen that, during the last century, guarded the coasts in behalf of the revenue ; and his only brother, the boatman's son, an adventurous young sailor, had engaged in Admiral Vernon's unfortunate expedi- tion, and left his bones under the walls of Carthagena ; but he himself pursued the peaceful occupation of a shoemaker, and in carrying on his trade, usually employed a few journeymen, and kept a few apprentices. In course of time, the elder daughters of the family married and got households of their own ; but the two sons, my uncles, remained under the roof of their parents, and at the time when my father perished they were both in middle life ; and, deeming themselves called on to take his place in the work of instruction and discipline, ] owed to them much more of my real education than to any of the teachers whose schools I afterwards attended. They botl bore a marked individuality of character, and were much the reverse of common-place or vulgar men. My elder uncle, James, added to a clear head and much native sagacity, a singularly retentive memory, and great thirst of information. He was a harness-maker, and wrought for the farmers of an extensive district of country ; and as he never engaged either journeymen or apprentice, but executed all his work with his own hands, his hours of labor, save that he indulged in a brief pause as the twilight came on, and took a mile's walk or so, were usually protracted from six o'clock in the morning till ten at night. Such incessant occupa tion, of course, left him little time for reading ; but he oftei found some one to read beside him during the day ; and ip the winter evenings, his portable bench used to be brought from his shop at the other end of the dwelling, into the family sitting-room, and placed beside the circle round the hearth, where his brother Alexander, my younger uncle, whose occu pation left his evenings free, would read aloud from some inter esting volume for the general benefit, — placing himself al ways at the opposite side of the bench, so as to share in the light of the worker. Occasionally the family circle would be 84 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; widened by the accession of from two to three intelligent neighbors, who would drop in to listen ; and then the book, after a space, would be laid aside, in order that its contents might be discussed in conversation. In the summer months, Uncle James always spent some time in the country, in look- ing after and keeping in repair the harness of the farmers for whom he wrought ; and during his journeys and twilight walks on these occasions, there was not an old castle, or hill-fort, or ancient encampment, or antique ecclesiastical edifice, within twenty miles of the town, which he had not visited and ex amined over and over again. He was a keen, local antiquary ; knew a good deal about the architectural styles of the various ages, at a time when these subjects were little studied or known, and possessed more traditionary lore, picked up chiefly in his country journeys, than any man I ever knew. What he once heard he never forgot ; and the knowledge which he had acquired he could communicate pleasingly and succinctly, in a style which, had he been a writer of books, instead of merely a reader of them, would have had the merit of being clear and terse, and more laden with meaning than words. From his reputation for sagacity, his advice used to be much sought after by the neighbors in every little difficulty that came their way ; and the counsel given was always shrewd and honest. I never knew a man more entirely just in his deal- ings than Uncle James, or who regarded every species of mean- ness with a more thorough contempt. I soon learned to bring my story-books to his workshop, and became, in a small way, one of his readers — greatly more, however, as may be suppos- ed, on my own account than his. My books were not yet of the kind which he would have chosen for himself; but he took an interest in my interest ; and his explanations of all the han words saved me the trouble of turning over a dictionary. An when tired of reading, I never failed to find rare delight in his anecdotes and old-world stories, many of which were not to be found in books, and all of which, without apparent effort on his own part, he could render singularly amusing. Of these narratives, the larger part died with him ; but a portion of OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 85 them I succeeded in preserving in a little traditionary work published a few years after his death. I was much a favorite with Uncle James — even more, I am disposed to think, on my father's account, than on that of his sister, my mother. My father and he had been close friends for years ; and in the vigorous and energetic sailor, he had found his beau ideal of a man. My Uncle Alexander was of a different cast from his brother b« th in intellect and temperament ; but he was characterized by the same strict integrity ; and his religious feelings, though quiet and unobtrusive, were perhaps more deep. James was somewhat of a humorist, and fond of a good joke. Alexan- der was grave and serious ; and never, save on one solitary occasion, did I know him even attempt a jest. On hearing an intelligent but somewhat eccentric neighbor observe that " all flesh is grass," in a strictly physical sense, seeing that all the flesh of the herbiverous animals is elaborated from vege- tation, and all the flesh of the carnivorous animals from that of the herbiverous ones. Uncle Sandy remarked that, knowing, as he did, the pisciverous habits of the Cromarty folk, he should surely make an exception in his generalization, by ad- mitting that in at least one village, " all flesh is fish." My ancle had acquired the trade of the cartwright, and was em- ployed in a workshop at Glasgow at the time the first war of the French Revolution broke out ; when, moved by some such spirit as possessed his uncle — the victim of Admiral Vernon's unlucky expedition — or of old Donald Roy, when he buckled himself to his Highland broadsword, and set out in pursuit of the Caterans — ^he entered the navy. And during the event- ful period which intervened between the commencement of the war and the peace of 1802, there was little either sufl^ered or achieved by his countrymen in which he had not a share. He sailed with Nelson ; witnessed the mutiny at the Nort- ; fought under Admiral Duncan at Camperdown, and under Sir John Borlase Warren ofl* Loch S willy ; assisted in capturing the Generoux and Guillaum Tell, two French ships of the line; was one of the seamen who, in the Egyptian expedition, were 3 86 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; drafted out of Lord Keith's fleet to supply the lack of artillery men in the army of Sir Ralph Abercromby ; had a share in the dangers and glory of the landing in Egypt ; and fought in the battle of the 13th March, and in that which deprived our country of one of her most popular generals. He served, too, at the siege of Alexandria. And then, as he succeeded in pro- curing his discharge during the short peace of 1802, he re- turned home with a small sum of hardly-earned prize moneyj neartily sick of war and bloodshed. I w^as asked, not long ago, by one of his few surviving comrades, whether my uncle had ever told me that their gun was the first landed in Egy pt, and the first dragged up the sand-bank immediately over the beach, and how hot it grew under their hands, as, with a rapid- ity unsurpassed, along the line they poured out in thick suc- cession its iron discharges upon the enemy. I had to reply in the negative. All my uncle's narratives were narratives of what he had seen — not of what he had done ; and, when perusing, late in life, one of his favorite works — " Dr. Keith's Signs of the Times" — he came to the chapter in which that ekcellent writer describes the time of hot naval warfare which immediately followed the breaking out of war, as the period in which the second vial was poured out on the sea, and in which the waters '* became as the blood of a dead man, so that every living soul died in the sea," I saw him bend his head in rever- ence as he remarked, " Prophecy, I find, gives to all oui glories but a single verse, and it is a verse of judgment." Uncle Sandy, however, did not urge the peace principles which he had acquired amid scenes of death and carnage, into any extravagant consequences ; and on the breaking out, in 1803, of the second war of the Revolution, when Napole^'^ threatened invasion from Brest to Boulogne, he at once shouldered his musket as a volunteer. He had not his brother's fluency of speech ; but his narratives of what he had seen were singu larly truthful and graphic ; and his descriptions of foreign plants and animals, and of the aspect of the distant regions which he had visited, had all the careful minuteness of thoso of a Dampier. He had a decided turn for natural histc^ry. OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 37 My collection contains a mnrex, not unfrcquent in the Medi- terranean, which he found time enough to transfer, during the heat of the landing in Egypt, from the beach to his pock- et ; and the first amjnonite I ever saw was a specimen, which I still retain, that he brought home with him from one of the, liasic deposits of England. Early on the Sabbath evenings I used regularly to attend at ray uncles' with two of my maternal cousins, boys of about my own age, and latterly w^ith my two sisters, to be cate- chised, first on the Shorter Catechism, and then on the Moth- er's Catechism of Willison. On Willison my uncles always cross-examined us, to make sure that we understood the short and simple questions ; but, apparently regarding the questions of the Shorter Catechism as seed sown for a future day, they were content with having them well fixed in our memories. There was a Sabbath class taught in the parish church at the time by one of the elders ; but Sabbath schools my uncles regarded as merely compensatory institutions, highly credit- able to the teachers, but very discreditable indeed to the pa- rents and relatives of the taught ; and so they of course never thought of sending us there. Later in the evening, after a short twilight walk, for which the sedentary occupation of my Uncle James formed an apology, but in which my Uncle Alex- ander ahvays shared, and which usually led them into solitary woods, or along an unfrequented sea-shore, some of the old divines were read ; and I used to take my place in the circle, though, I am afraid, not to very much advantage. I occasion- ally caught a fact, or had my attention arrested for a moment by a simile or metaphor ; but the trains of close argument, w:d the passages of dreary " applicatio'i," were always lost. 38 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEBS : CHAPTER III. ** At Wallace name what Scottish blood But boils up in a spring-tide flood I Oft have our fearless fathers strode By Wallace side, Still pressing onward, red wat shod, Or glorious died." Burns. I FIRST became thoroughly a Scot some time in my tenth year; and the consciousness of country has remained tolerably strong within me ever since. My Uncle James had procured for me from a neighbor the loan of a common stall-edition of Blind Harry's " Wallace," as modernized by Hamilton ; but after reading the first chapter, — a piece of dull genealogy, broken into very rude rhyme, — I tossed the volume aside as uninter- esting ; and only resumed it at the request of my uncle, who urged that, simply for his amusement and gratification, I should read some three or four chapters more. Accordingly, the three or four chapters more I did read ; — I read " how Wallace kill- ed young Selbie the Constable's son ;" " how Wallace fished in Irvine Water ;" and " how Wallace killed the Churl with his own staff in Ayr ;" and then Uncle James told me, hi the quiet way in which he used to make a joke tell, that the book seemed to be rather a rough sort of production, filled with accoimts of quarrels and bloodshed, and that I might read no more of it unless I felt inclined. But I now did feel inclined very strongly, and read on with increasing astonishment and OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 89 delight. I was intoxicated with the fiery narratives of the blind minstrel, — with his fierce breathings of hot, intolerant patriotism, and his stories of astonishing prowess ; and, glory- ing in being a Scot, and the countryman of Wallace and the Graham, I longed for a war with the Southron, that the wrongs and sufferings of these noble heroes might yet be avenged A.11 I had previously heard and read of the marvels of foreign parts, or the glories of modern battles, seemed tame and com- monplace compared with the incidents in the life of Wallace and I never after vexed my mother by wishing myself big enough to be a sailor. My Uncle Sandy, who had some taste for the refinements of poetry, would fain have led me on from the exploits of Wallace to the " Life of the Bruce," which, in the form of a not very vigorous imitation of Dryden's " Vir- gil," by one Harvey, was bound up in the same volume, and which my uncle deemed the better-written life of the two. And so far as the mere amenities of style were concerned, he was, I dare say, right. But I could not agree with him. Harvey was by much too fine and too learned for me ; and it was not until some years after, when I was fortunate enough to pick up one of the later editions of Barbour's " Bruce," that the Hero-King of Scotland assumed his right place in my mind beside its Hero-Guardian. There are stages of develop- ment in the immature youth of individuals, that seem to cor- respond with stages of development in the immature youth of nations ; and the recollections of this early time enable me, in some measure, to understand how it was that, for hundreds of years, Blind Harry's " Wallace," with its rude and naked narrative, and its exaggerated incident, should have been, ao cording to Lord Hailes, the Bible of the Scotch people. I quitted the d ame's sc hool at the end of the first twel\t5- month, after mastering that grand acquirement of my life, — the art of holding converse with books ; and was transferred straightforth to the gram mar scho ol,^ the parish, at which there attended at the time^about ahundred and twenty boys, with a class of about thirty individuals more, much looked down upon by the others, and not deemed greatly worth the 40 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; counting seeing that it consisted of only lassies. And here, too, the early individual development seems nicely correspond- ent with an early national one. In his depreciatory estimate ^j/of contemporary woman, the boy is always a true savage. The old parisli school of the place had been nobly situated in a snug corner, between the parish churchyard and a thick wood ; and from the interesting centre which it formed, the boys, when tired of making dragon-horses of the erect head-stones, or of leaping along the flat-laid memorials, from end to end of the graveyard, " without touching grass," could repair to the tall- er trees, and rise in the world by climbing among them. As, however, they used to encroach, on these latter occasions, upon the laird's pleasure-grounds, the school had been removed ere my time to the sea-shore ; where, though there were neither tombstones nor trees, there were some balancing advantages, of a kind which, perhaps, only boys of the old school could have adequately appreciated. As the school-windows fronted the opening of the Frith, not a vessel could enter the harbor that we did not see ; and, improving through our opportuni- ties, there was perhaps no educational institution in the king- dom in which all sorts of barks and carvels, from the fishing yawl to the frigate, could be more correctly drawn on the slate, or where any defect in bulk or rigging, in some faulty delineation, was surer of being more justly and unsparingly criticised. Further, the town, which drove a great trade in salted pork at the time, had a killing-place not thirty yards from the school-door, where from eighty to a hundred pigs used sometimes to die for the general good in a single day ; and it was a great matter to hear, at occasional intervals, the roar of death outside rising high over the general murmur within ; or to be told by some comrade, returned from his five minutes' leave of absence, that a hero of a pig had taken three blows of the hatchet ere it fell, and that even after its subjection to the sticking process, it had got hold of Jock Keddie's hand in its mouth, and almost smashed his thumb. We learned, too, to know, from our signal opportunities of observation, not only a good deal about pig anatomy, — especially about the detached OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 41 edible parts of the animal, such as the spleen and the pancreas, and at least one other very palatable viscus besides, — but be came knowing also about the take and the curing of herrings, All the herring-boats during the fishing season passed our win dows on their homeward way to the harbor ; and, from rheir depth in the water, w^e became skilful enough to predicate the number of crans aboard of each with wonderful judgment and correctness. In days of good general fishings, too, when the curing-yards proved too small to accommodate the quantifies brought ashore, the fish used to be laid in glittermg heaps op- posite the school-house door ; and an exciting scene, that com- bined the bustle of the workshop with the confusion of the crowded fair, would straightway spring up within twenty yards of the farms at which we sat, greatly to our enjoyment, and, of course, not a little to our instruction. We could see, sim- ply by peering over book or slate, the curers going about rous- ing their fish with salt, to counteract the effects of the dog-day sun ; bevies of young women employed as gutters, and hor- ridly incarnadined with blood and viscera, squatting around the heaps, knife in hand, and plying with busy fingers their well-paid labors, at the rate of a sixpence per hour ; relays of heavily-laden fish-wives bringing ever and anon fresh heaps of herrings in their creels ; and outside of all, the coopers hammering as if for life and death, — now tightening hoops, and now slackening them, and anon caulking with bullrush the leaky seems. It is not every grammar school in which such lessons are taught as those, in w^hich all were initiated, and in which all became in some degree accomplished, in the grammar school of „Cromarty ! •^"-■TEe building in which we met was a low, long, straw thatched cottage, open from gable to gable, with a mud floor below, and an unlathed roof above ; and stretching along the naked rafters, which, when the master chanced to be absent for a few minutes, gave noble exercise in climbing, there used frequently to lie a helm, or oar, or boathook, or even a foresail, —-the spoil of some hapless peat-boat from the opposite side of the Frith. The Highland boatmen of Ross had carried on 42 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; a trade it peats for ages with the Saxons of the town ; and aa r^every boat owed a long-derived perquisite of twent21i)eats to v^thejjrammar school, and as payment was at times foolishly refused, the party of boys commissioned by the master to ex- act it almost always succeeded, either by force or stratagem, in securing and bringing along with them, in behalf of the insti- tution, some spar, or sail, or piece of rigging, which, until re- deemed by special treaty, and the payment of the peats, was stowed up over the rafters. These peat-exhibitions, which were intensely popular in the school, gave noble exercise tc the faculties. It was always a great matter to see, just as the school met, some observant boy appear, cap in hand, before the master, and intimate the fact of an arrival at the shore, by the simple words, " Peat-boat, Sir." The master would then proceed to name a party, more or less numerous, according to the exigency ; but it seemed to be matter of pretty correct cal- culation that, in the cases in which the peat claim was dis- puted, it required about twenty boys to bring home the twenty peats, or, lacking these, the compensatory sail or spar. There were certam ill-conditioned boatmen who almost always re- sisted, and who delighted to tell us — invariably, too, in very bad English — that our perquisite was properly the hangman's perquisite, made over to us because we were like him ; not seeing — blockheads that they were ! — that the very admission established in full the rectitude of our claim, and gave to us, umid our dire perils and faithful contendings, the strengthen- ing consciousness of a just quarrel. In dealing with these re- cusants, we used ordinarily to divide our forces into two bodies, the larger portion of the party filling their pockets with stones, and ranging themselves on some point of vantage, such as the pier-head ; and the smaller stealing down as near the boat as possible, and mixing themselves up with the purchasers of the peats. We then, after due warning given, opened fire upon the boatmen ; and, when the pebbles were hopping about them like hailstones, the boys below commonly succeeded in se- curing, mider cover of the fire, the desired boathook or oar. And such were the ordinary circumstances and details of thii J OB, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 41 piece of Spartan education ; of which a townsman has told mt? he was strongly reminded when boarding, on one occasion, under cover of a well-sustained discharge of musketry, the vessel of an enemy that had been stranded on the shores of Berbice. The parish schoolmaster was a scholar and an honest man, and if a boy really wished to learn, he certainly could teach him. He had attended the classes at Aberdeen duiing tho same sessions as the late Dr. Mearns, and in mathematics and the languages had disputed the prize with the Doctor ; but he had failed to get on equally well in the world ; and now, in middle life, though a licentiate of the Church, he had settled down to be what he subsequently remained, — the teacher of a parish school. There were usually a few grown-up lads under his tuition, — careful sailors, that had staid ashore during the winter quarter to study navigation as a science, — or tall fel lows happy in the patronage of the great, who, in the hope of being made excisemen, had come to school to be initiated in the mysteries of gauging, — or grown young men, who, on second thoughts, and somewhat late in the day, had recog- nized the Church as their proper vocation ; and these used to speak of the master's acquirements and teaching ability in the very highest terms. He himself, too, could appeal to the fact that no teacher in the north had ever sent more students to college, and that his better scholars almost always got on well m life. But then, or? the other hand, th^ pupils who wished to do nothing, — a description of individuals that comprised fully two-thirds of all the younger ones, — were not required to do much more than they wished ; and parents and guardians were loud in their complaints that he was no suitable school- master for them ; though the boys themselves usually thought him quite suitable enough. He was in the habit of advising the parents or relations of those he deemed his clever lads, to give them a classical edu* cation ; and meeting one day with Uncle James, he urged that I should be put on Latin. I was a great reader, he said ; and he found that when I missed a word in my English tasks, I 1 44 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS, almost always substituted a synonym in the place of it. An* «o, as UnoJe James had arrived, on data of his own, at a simi r lar conclusion, I was transferred from the English to the Latin ^ form, and, with four other boys, fairly entered on the " Rudi- ments." I labored with tolerable diligence for a day or two ; but there was no one to tell me what the rules meant, or whether they really meant anything ; and when I got on as far as penna^ a pen, and saw how the changes were rung on one poor word, that did not seem to be of more importance in the old language than in the modern one, I began miser ably to flag, and to long for my English reading, with its nice amusing stories, and its picture-like descriptions. The ^Rudiments was by far the dullest book I had ever seen. It embodied no thought that I could perceive, — it certainly con- tained no narrative, — it was a perfect contrast to not only the " Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace," but to even the Voyages of Cook and Anson. None of my class-fel- lows were by any means bright ; — they had been all set on Latin without advice of the master ; and yet, when he learn- ed, which he soon did, to distinguish and call us up to our tasks by the name of the " heavy class," I was, in most in- stances, to be found at its nether end. Shortly after, however, when we got a little farther on, it was seen that I had a de- cided turn for translation. The master, good simple man that he was, always read to us in English, as the school met, the piece of Latin given i5s as our task for the day ; and as my memory was strong enough to carry away the whole transla- tion in its order, I used to give him back in the evening, word for word, his own rendering, which satisfied him on most oc- casions tolerably well. There were none of us much looked after ; and I soon learned to bring books of amusement to the school with me, which, amid the Babel confusion of the- place I contrived to read undetected. Some of them, save in th( language in which they were written, were almost identical with the books proper to the place. I remember perusing ]>y stealth in this way, Dryden's " Virgil," and the " Ovid" of D^'yden and his friends ; m bile Ovid's own " Ovid," and Vir OR, TBE STORY OF MY EDUCATION-. 45 giPs own " Virgil," lay beside me, sealed up in the fine old tongue, which 1 was thus throw^ing away my only chance of acquiring. One morning, having the master's English rendering of the day's task well fixed in my memory, and no book of amuse- ment to read, I began gossiping with my nearest class-fellow, a very tall boy, who ultimately shot up into a lad of six feet four, and who on most occasions sat beside me, as lowest in the form save one. I told him about the tall Wallace and his exploits ; and so effectually succeeded in awakening his curios ity, that I had to communicate to him, from beginning to end, every adventure recorded by the blind minstrel. My story- telling vocation once fairly ascertained, there was, I found, no stopping in my course. I had to tell all the stories I had ever heard or read ; — all my father's adventures, so far as I knew them, and all my Uncle Sandy's, — with the story of Gulliver, and Philip Quarll,and Robinson Crusoe, — of Sinbad,and Ulys- ses, and Mrs. Ratcliffe's heroine Emily, with, of course, the love-passages left out ; and at length, after weeks and months of narrative, I found my available stock of acquired fact and fiction fairly exhausted. The demand on the part of my class- fellows was, however, as great and urgent as ever ; and, set- ting myself, in the extremity of the case, to try my ability of original production, I began to dole out to them by the hour and the diet, long extempore biographies, which proved won- derfully popular and successful. My heroes were usually war- riors like Wallace, and voyagers like Gulliver, and dwellers in desolate islands like Robinson Crusoe ; and they had not unfrequently to seek shelter in huge deserted castles, abound- ing in trap-doors and secret passages, like that of Udolpho. And finally, after much destruction of giants and wild beasts, and frightful encounters with magicians and savages, they al- most invariably succeeded in disentombing hidden treasures to an enormous amount, or in laying open gold mines, and then passed a luxurious old age, like that of Sinbad the Sailor, at peace with all mankind, in the midst of confectionary and ftuits. The master had a tolerably correct notion of what was 46 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; going on in the " heavy class ;" — the stretched-out necks, and the heads clustered together, always told their own special story when I was engaged in telling mine ; but, without hating the child, he spared the rod, and simply did what he some- times allowed himself to do, — bestowed a nickname upon me. I was the Sennachie, he said ; and as the Sennachie I might have been known so long as I remained under his charge, had it not been that, priding himself upon his Gaelic, he used to bestow upon the word the full Celtic pronunciation, which, agreeing but ill with the Teutonic mouths of my school- fel lows, militated against its use ; and so the name failed to take. With all my carelessness, I continued to be a sort of favorite with the master ; and, when at the general English lesson, he used to address to me little quiet speeches, vouchsafed to no other pupil,' indicative of a certain literary ground common to us, on which the others had not entered. " That, Sir," he has said, after the class had just perused, in the school collection, a Tatler^ or Spectator^ — " That, Sir, is a good paper ; — it's an Addison ;" or, "That's one of Steele's, Sir ;" and on finding in my copy-book on one occasion, a page filled with rhymes, which I had headed " Poem on Care," he brought it to his desk, and, after reading it carefully over, called me up, and with his closed penknife, which served as a pointer, in the one hand, and the copy-book brought down to the level of my eyes in the other, began his criticism. " That's bad grammar, Sir," he said, resting the knife-handle on one of the lines ; "and here's an ill-spelt word ; and there's another ; and you have not at all attended to the punctuation ; — but the general sense of the piece is good, — very good, indeed. Sir." And then he added, with a grim smile, " Care^ Sir, is, I dare say, as you re mark, a very bad thing ; but you may safely bestow a littl more of it on your spelling and your grammar." / The school, like almost all the other grammar-schools of the /period in Scotland, had its yearly cock-fight, preceded by two [ holidays and a half, during which the boys occupied them- \ selves in collecting and bringing up their cocks. And such \ always was the array of fighting birds mustered on the occa- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 47 si on, that the day of the festival, from morning till night, used to be spent in fighting out the battle. For weeks after it had passed, the school-floor would continue to retain its deeply- stained blotches of blood, and the boys would be full of ex- citing narratives regarding the glories of gallant birds, who had continued to fight until both their eyes had been picked out, or who, in the moment of victory, had dropped dead in the middle of the cock-pit. The yearly fight was the relic of a barbarous age ; and, in at least one of its provisions, there seemed evi- dence that it was that of an intolerant age also ; every pupil at school, without exception, had his name entered on the subscription-list as a cock-fighter, and was obliged to pay the master at the rate of twopence per head, ostensibly for leave to bring his birds to the pit ; but, amid the growing humani- ties of a better time, though the twopence continued to be ex- acted, it was no longer imperative to bring the birds ; and, availing myself of the liberty, I never brought any. Nor, save for a few minutes, on two several occasions, did I ever attend the fight. Had ihe combat been one among the boys them- selves, I would readily enough have done my part, by meeting with any opponent of my years and standing ; but I could not bear to look at the bleeding birds. And so I continued to pay my yearly sixpence, as a holder of three cocks, — the lowest sum deemed in any degree genteel, — but remained simply a fictitious or paper cock-fighter, and contributed in no degree to the success of the head-stock or leader, to whose party, in the general division of the school, it was my lot to fall. Neither, I must add, did I learn to take an interest in tlio sacrificial orgies of the adjoining slaughter-house. A few of the chosen schoolboys were permitted by the killers to exer- cise at times the privilege of knocking down a pig, and even, on rare occasions, to essay the sticking ; but I turned witJi horror from both processes ; and if I drew near at all, it was only when some animal, scraped and cleaned, and suspended from the beam, was in the course of being laid open by the butcher's knife, that I might mark the forms of the viscera and the positions which they occupied. To my dislike of th.. 48 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS* ariQual cock-fight my uncles must have contributed. The were loud in their denunciation of the enormity ; and on on . occasion, when a neighbor was unlucky enough to remark in extenuation, that the practice had been handed down t^ us by pious and excellent men, who seemed to see nothing wrong in it, I saw their habitual respect for the old divine give way, for at least a moment. Uncle Sandy hesitate*, mder apparent excitement; but quick and fiery as lig]it ing, Uncle James came to his rescue. "Yes, excellent nen !" said my uncle, " but the excellent men of a rude and barbarous age ; and, in some parts of their character, tinged by its barbarity. For the cock-fight which these excellent men have bequeathed to us they ought to have been sent to Bridewell for a week, and fed upon bread and water.' Uncle James was, no doubt, over hasty, and felt so a minute after ; but the practice of fixing the foundation of ethics on a TheT/ themselves did it, much after the manner in which the Schoolmen fixed the foundations of their nonsensical philo- sophy on a " He himself said it,^"* is a practice which, though not yet exploded in even very pure Churches, is always pro- voking, and not quite free from peril to the worthies, whether dead or alive, in whose precedents the moral right is made to rest. In the class of minds represented among the people by that of Uncle James, for instance, it would be much easier to bring down even the old divines, than to bring up cock-fight- ing. My native town had possessed, for at least an age or two previous to that of my boyhood, its moiety of intelligent, book- consulting mechanics and tradesfolk ; and as my acquaintance gradually extended among their representatives and descend- ants, I was permitted to rummage, in the pursuit of knowl- edge, delightful old chests and cupboards, filled with tattered and dusty volumes. The moiety of my father's library which remained to me consisted of about sixty several works ; my uncles possessed about a hundred and fifty more ; and there was a literary cabinetmaker m the neighborhood, who had once actually composed a poem of thirty lines on the Hill o/ OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 49 Ct-^marty, whose collection of books, chiefly poetical, amount, ed to from about eighty to a hundred. I used to be often at nights in the workshop of the cabinetmaker, and was some- times privileged to hear him repeat his poem. There was not much admiration of poets or poetry m the place ; and my praise, though that of a very young critic, had always the double merit of being both ample and sincere. I knew the very rocks and trees which his description embraced — had aeard the birds to which he referred, and seen the flowers; and as the hill had been of old a frequent scene of execu- tions, and had borne the gallows of the sheriflclom on its crest, nothing could be more definite than the grave reference, in hia opening line, to "The verdant rising of the Oallow-hWl." And so I thought a very great deal of his poem, and w^hat I thought I said ; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There w^as another mechanic in the neighborhood, — a house-carpenter, who, though not a poet, was deeply read in books of all kinds, from the plays of Farquhar to the ser- mons of riavel ; and as both his father and grandfather, — the latter, by the way, a Porteous-mob man, and the former a per- sonal friend of poor Fergusson, the poet, — had also been read- ers and collectors of books, he possessed a whole pressful of tattered, hard-working volumes, some of them very curious ones ; and to me he liberally extended, what literary men always value, " the full freedom of the press." But of all my occasional benefactors in this way, by far the greatest was poor old Francie, the retired clerk and supercargo. Francie w^as naturally a man of fair talent and active curios ity. Nor was he by any means deficient in acquirement. He wrote and figured well, and knew a good deal about a least the theory of business ; and when articled in early life to a Cromarty merchant and shopkeeper, it was with tolerably fair prospects of getting on in the world. He had, however a certain infirmity of brain which rendered both talent and 50 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; acquirement of but little avail, and that began to manifest itself very early. While yet an apprentice, on ascertaining that the way was clear, he used, though grown a tall lad, to bolt out from behind the counter into the middle of a green directly opposite, and there, joining in the sports of some group of youngsters, which the place rarely wanted, he would play out half a game at marbles, or honey-pots, or hy-spy, and when ho saw his master or a customer approaching, bolt back again The thing was not deemed seemly ; but Francie, when spoken to on the subject, could speak as sensibly as any young person of his years. He needed relaxation, he used to say, though he never suffered it to interfere with his proper business ; and where was safer relaxation to be found than among innocent children ? This, of course, was eminently rational and virtu- ous. And so, when his term of apprenticeship had expired, Francie was despatched, not without hope of success, to New- foundland, — where he had relations extensively engaged in the fishing trade, — to serve as one of their clerks. He was found to be a competent clerk ; but unluckily there was but little known of the interior of the island at the time, and some of the places most distant from St. John's, such as the Bay and River of Exploits, bore tempting names ; and so, after Francie had made many inquiries of the older inhabitants regarding what was to be seen amid the scraggy brushwood and broken rocks of the inner country, a morning came in which he was reported missing a^ the office ; and little else could be learned respecting him, than that at early dawn he had been seen setting out for the woods, provided with staff" and knapsack. He returned in about a week, worn out and half-starved. He had not been so successful as he had anticipated, he said, in pro- viding himself by the way with food, and so he had to turn back ere he could reach the point on which he had previously letermined ; but he was sure he would be happier in his next journey. It was palpably unsafe to suffer him to remain ex- posed to the temptation of an unexplored country ; and as his friends and superiors at St. John's had just laden a vessel with fisliforthe taL'an market during Lent, Francie was despatch OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 61 ed with her as supercargo, to look after the sales^ in a land of which every footbreadth had been familiar to men for thou- sands of years, and in which it was supposed he w^ould have no inducement to wander. Francie, however, had read much about Italy ; and finding, on landing at Leghorn, that he was within a short distance of Pisa, he left ship and cargo to take care of themselves, and set out on foot to see the famous hang- ing tower, and the great marble cathedral. And tower and cathedral he did see : but it was meanwhile found that he was not quite suited for a supercargo, and he had shortly after to return to Scotland, where his friends succeeded in establishing him in the capacity of clerk and overseer upon a small prop- erty in Forfarshire, which was farmed by the proprietor on what was then the newly-introduced modern system. He was acquainted, however, with the classical description of Glammis Castle, in the letters of the poet Gray ; and after visiting the castle, he set out to examine the ancient encampment at Ar- doch, — the Lindum of the Romans. Finally, all hopes of getting him settled at a distance being given up by his friends, he had to fall back upon Cromarty, where he was yet once more appointed to a clerkship. The establishment with which he was now connected was a large hempen manufactory ; and it was his chief employment to register the quantities of hemp given out to the spinners, and the number of hanks of yarn into which they had converted it, when given in. He soon, however, began to take long walks ; and the old women, with their yarn, would be often found accumulated, ere his return, by tens and dozens at the office-door. At length, after taking a very long walk indeed, for it stretched from near the open- ing to the head of the Cromarty Frith, a distance of about twenty miles, and included in its survey the antique tower of Kinkell and the old Castle of Craighouse, he was relieved from the duties of his ckrkship, and left to pursue his researches undisturbed, on a small annuity, the gift of his friends. He was considerably advanced in life ere I knew him, profoundly grave, and very taciturn, and, though he never discussed poli- ticv««, a mighty reader of the newspapers. " Oh ' tliis is ter- 52 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS: riblo," I have heard him exclaim, when on one occasion h snow storm had blocked up both the coast and the Highland roads for a week together, and arrested the northward com'se of the ma Is, — "It is terrible to be left in utter ignorance of the public business of the country T' Francie, whom every one called Mr. , to his face, and always Francie when his back was turned, chiefly because u was known that he was punctilious on the point, and did not like the more familiar term, used in the winter evenings to be a regular member of the circle that met beside my Uncle James's work-table. And, chiefly through the influence, in the first instance, of my uncles, I was permitted to visit him in his own room, — a privilege enjoyed by scarce any one else, — and even invited to borrow his books. His room — a dark and mel- ancholy chamber, gray with dust — always contained a number of curious but not very rare things, which he had picked up in his walks, — prettily colored fungi, — vegetable monstrosi- ties of the commoner kind, such as " fause craws' nests," and flattened twigs of pine, — and with these, as the representatives of another department of natural science, fragments of semi- transparent quartz or of glittering feldspar, and sheets of mica a little above the ordinary size. But the charm of the apart- ment lay in its books. Francie was a book-fancier, and lacked only the necessary wealth to be in the possession of a very pretty collection. As it was, he had some curious vol- umes ; among others, a first-edition copy of the " Nineteen Years' Travels of William Lithgow," with an ancient wood- cut, representing the said William in the background, with his head brushing the skies, and, far in front, two of the tombs which covered the heroes of Ilium, barely tall enough to reach half-way to his knee, and of the length, in proportion to the size of the traveller, of ordinary octavo volumes. He had black-letter books, too, on astrology, and on the planetary properties of vegetables ; and an ancient book on medicine, that recommended as a cure for the toothache a bit of the jaw of a suicide, well triturated ; and, as an infallible remedy for the falling- sickness, an ounce or two of the brains of a young man, OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 63 carefully dried over the fire. Better, however, than these, for at least my purposes, he had a tolerably complete collection of the British essayists, from Addison to Mackenzie, with the " Essays " and " Citizen of the World " of Goldsmith ; several interesting works of travels and voyages, translated from the French ; and translations from the German, of Lavater, Zim- merman, and Klopstock. He had a good many of the minor poets too ; and I was enabled to cultivate, mainly from his collection, a tolerably adequate acquaintance with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne. Poor Francie was at bottom a kindly and honest man ; but the more intimately one knew him, the more did the weakness and brokenness of his intellect appear. His mind was a labyrinth without a clue, in whose recesses there lay stored up a vast amount of book-knowl- edge, that could never be found when wanted, and was of no sort of use to himself or any one else. I got sufficiently into his confidence to be informed, under the seal of strict secrecy, that he contemplated producing a great literary work, whose special character he had not quite determined, but which was to be begun a few years hence. And when death found him, at an age which did not fall short of the allotted three score and ten, the great unknown work was still an undefined idea, and had still to be begun. There were several other branches of my education going on at this time, outside the pale of the school, in which, though I succeeded in amusing myself, I was no trifler. The shores of Cromarty are strewed over with water-rolled fragments of the primary rocks, derived chiefly from the w^est during the ages of the boulder clay ; and I soon learned to take a deep inter- est in sauntering over the various pebble-beds when shaken up by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their nu merous components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary ; and as, according to Cowper, " the growth of w^hat is excellent is slow," it was not until long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of representing the various species of simple rocks by certain numerals, and the compound ones by the numerals representative of each separate component 64 Mr SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ranged, as in vulgar fractions, along a niedial line, with the figures representative of the prevailing materials of the mass above, and those representative of the materials in less pro- portions below. Though, however, wholly deficient in the signs proper to represent what I knew, I soon acquired a consider- able quickness of eye in distinguishing the various kinds of rock, and tolerably definite conceptions of the generic character of the porphyries, granites, gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, and mica-schists, which everywhere strewed the beach. In the rocks of mechanical origin I was at the time much less inter- ested ; but in individual, as in general history, mineralogy almost always precedes geology. I was fortunate enough to discover, one happy morning, among the lumber and debris of old John Feddes dark room, an antique-fashioned hammer, which had belonged, my mother told me, to old John himself more than a hundred years before. It was an uncouth sort of implement, with a handle of strong black oak, and a short, compact head, square on the one face and oblong on the other. And though it dealt rather an obtuse blow, the temper was excellent, and the haft firmly set ; and I went about with it, breaking into all manner of stones, with great perseverance and success. I found, in a large-grained granite, a few sheets of beautiful black mica, that when split exceedingly thin, and pasted between slips of mica of the ordinary kind, made ad- mirably-colored eye-glasses, that converted the landscapes around into richly-toned drawings in sepia ; and numerous crystals of garnet embedded in mica-schist, that were, I was sure, identical with the stones set in a little gold brooch, the property of my mother. To this last surmise, however, some of the neighbors to whom I showed my prize demurred. The stones in my mother's brooch were precious stones, they said ; whereas w^hat I had found, w^as merely a " stone upon che shore." My friend the cabinetmaker went so far as to say that the specimen was but a mass of plum-pudding st( ne, and its dark-colored enclosures simply the currants ; but then, on the other hand. Uncle Sandy took my view of the matter : the stone was not plum-pudding stone, he said : he had often OE, THE STORY OF MV EDUCATION. 55 seen plum-pudding stone in England, had knew it to be a sort of rough conglomerate of various components ; whereas my stone was composed of a finely-grained silvery substance, and the crystals which it contained were, he was sure, gems like those in the brooch, and, so far as he could judge, real gar- nets. This was a great decision ; and, much encouraged in consequence, I soon ascertained that garnets are by no means rare among the pebbles of the Cromarty shore. Nay, so mix. ed up are they with its sands even, — a consequence of the abundance of the mineral among the primary rocks of Ross, — that after a heavy surf has beaten the exposed beach of the neighboring hill, there may be found on it patches of commi- nuted garnet, from one to three square yards in extent, that resemble, at a little distance, pieces of crimson carpeting, and nearer at hand sheets of crimson bead-work, and of which al- most every point and particle is a gem. From some unex- plained circumstance, connected apparently with the specific gravity of the substance, it separates in this style from the general mass, on coasts much beaten by the waves ; but the garnets of these curious pavements, though so exceedingly abundant, are in every instance exceedingly minute. I never detected in them a fragment greatly larger than a pin-head ; but it was always with much delight that I used to fling my self down on the shore beside some newly-discovered patch, and bethink me, as I passed my fingers along the larger grains, of the heaps of gems in Aladdin's cavern, or of Sinbad's val- ley of diamonds. The Hill of Cromarty formed at this time at once my true school and favorite play-ground ; and if my master did wink at times harder than master ought, when I was playing truant among its woods or on its shores, it was, I believe, whether he thought so or no, all for the best. My Uncle Sandy had, as 1 nave already said, been bred a cartwright ; but finding, on hig return, after his seven years' service aboard man-of-war, that the place had cartwrights enough for all the employment, he applied himself to the humble but not unremunerative pro- fessi yn of a sawyer, and used often to pitch his saw-pit, in the 56 MY SOHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; more genial seasons of the year, among the woods of the hilL I remember, he never failed setting it down in some pretty spot, sheltered from the prevailing winds under the lee of some fern-covered rising ground, or some bosky thicket, and always in the near neighborhood of a spring ; and it used to be one of my most delightful exercises to find out for myself among the thick woods, in some holiday journey of explora- tion, the place of a newly-formed pit. With the saw-pit as my base-line of operations, and secure always of a share in Uncle Sandy's dinner, I used to make excursions of discovery on every side, — now among the thicker tracks of wood, which bore among the town-boys, from the twilight gloom that ever rested in their recesses, the name of" the dungeons ;" and anon to the precipitous sea-shore, with its wild cliffs and caverns. The Hill of Cromarty is one of a chain belonging to the great Ben Nevis line of elevation ; and, though it occurs in a sand- stone district, is itself a huge primary mass, upheaved of old from the abyss, and composed chiefly of granitic gneiss and a red splintery hornstone. It contains also numerous veins and beds of hornblend-rock and chlorite-schist, and of a peculiar- looking granite, of which the quartz is white as milk, and the feldspar red as blood. When still wet by the receding tide, these veins and beds seem as if highly polished, and present a beautiful aspect ; and it was always with great delight that I used to pick my way among them, hammer in hand, and fill my pockets with specimens. There was one locality which I in especial loved. No path runs the way. On the one side an abrupt iron-tinged pro- montory, so remarkable for its human-like profile, that it seems part of a half-buried sphyLx, protrudes into the deep green water. On the other, — less prominent, for even at full tide jhe traveller can wind between its base and the sea, — there rises a shattered and ruinous precipice, seamed with blood-red ironstone, that retains on its surface the bright metallic gleam, and amid wh : se piles of loose and fractured rock one may still dete3t fragments of stalactite. The stalactite is all that remains of a spa^ i« us cavern, 'vhich once hollowed the precipice, but OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 57 which, more than a hundred years before, had tumbled dowD during a thunder-storm, when filled with a flock of sheep, and penned up the poor creatures forever. The space between these headlands forms an irregular crescent of great height, covered with wood a-top, and amid whose lichened crags, and on whose steep slopes, the hawthorn, and bramble, and A^ild- rasp, and rock-strawberry, take root, with many a scraggy shrub and sweet wild flower besides ; while along its basvi lie huge blocks of green hornblend, on a rude pavement of granitic gneiss, traversed at one point, for many rods, by a broad vein of milk-white quartz. The quartz vein formed my central point of attraction in this wild paradise. The white stone, thickly traversed by threads of purple and red, is a beautiful though unworkable rock ; and I soon ascertained that it is flanked by a vein of feldspar broader than itself, of a brick-red tint, and the red stone flanked, in turn, by a drab- colored vein of the same mineral, in which there occurs in great abundance masses of a homogeneous mica, — mica not existing in lamina, but, if I may use the term, as a sort of mi- caceous felt. It would almost seem as if some gigantic exper- imenter of the old world had set himself to separate into their simple mineral components the granitic rocks of the hill, and that the three parallel veins were the results of his labor. Such, however, was not the sort of idea which they at this time suggested to me. I had read in Sir Walter Raieigh's voyage to Guinea, the poetic description of that upper country in which the knight's exploration of the river Corale terminated, and where, amid lovely prospects of rich valleys, a^id wooded hills, and winding waters, almost every rock bore on its surface the yellow gleam of gold. True, according to the voyager, the precious metal was itself absent. But Sir Walter, on after- ivards showing " some of the stones to a Spaniard of the Ca- raccas, was told by him they were el madre del ora^ that iSj the mother of gold, and that the mine itself was farther in the ground." And though the quartz vein of the Cromarty Hill contained no metal more precious than iron, and but little even of that, it was, I felt sure the " mother ' of something 58 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES ; very fine. As for silver, I was pretty certain I had fc und the " mother" of it^ if not indeed the precious metal itself, in a cherty boulder, inclosing numerous cubes of rich galena ; and occasional masses of iron pyrites gave, as I thought, large promise of gold. But though sometimes asked, in humble irony, by the farm servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed along the Cromarty beach, whether I was " getting siller in the stanes," I was so unlucky as never to be able to answer their question in the affirmative. OB. THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 59 CHAPTER IV. *• Strange marble stones, here larger and there less, And of full various forms, which still increase In height and bulk by a continual drop, Which upon each distilling from the top, And falling still exactly on the crown, There break themselves to mists, which, trickling down, Crust into stone, and (but with leisure) swell The sides, and still advance the miracle." Charles Cottoit. It is low water in the Frith of Cromarty during stream tides, between six and seven o'clock in the evening ; and my Uncle Sandy, in returning from his work at the close of the day, used not unfrequently, when, according to the phrase of the place, " there was a tide in the water," to strike down the hill side, and spend a quiet hour in the ebb. I delighted to accom pany him on these occasions. There are Professors of Natu- ral History that know less of living nature than was known by Uncle Sandy ; and I deemed it no small matter to have all the various productions of the sea with which he was acquaint- ed pointed out to me in these walks, and to be put in possess- i( n of his many curious anecdotes regarding them. He was a skilful crab and lobster fisher, and knew every hole and crannie, along several miles of rocky shore, in which the creatures were accustomed to shelter, with not a few of their own peculiarities of character. Contrary to the view taken by some of our naturalists, euch as Agassiz, who held 4 bO MY SCHOOLS AKD SCHOOLMASTERS: that the crab — a genus comparatively recent in its appearance in creation — is less embryotic in its character, and higher in its standing, than the more ancient lobster, my uncle regarded the lobster as a more intelligent animal than the crab. The hole in which the lobster lodges has almost always two open ings, he has said, through one of which it sometimes contrives to escape when the other is stormed by the fisher ; whereas the crab is usually content, like the " rat devoid of soul," with a lole of only one opening ; and, besides, gets so angry in mosi *ases with his assailant, as to become more bent on assault than escape, and so loses himself through sheer loss of temper. And yet the crab has, he used to add. some points of intelli- gence about him too. When, as sometimes happened, he got 'lold, in his dark narrow recess in the rock, of some luckless iigit, my uncle showed me how^ that after the first tremendous squeeze he began always to experiment upon what he had got, by alternately slackening and straitening his grasp, as if to as- certain whether it Jiad life in it, or was merely a piece of dead matter; and that the only way to escape him, on these trying occasions, was to let the finger lie passively between his nip- pers, as if it were a bit of stick or tangle ; w^hen, apparently deeming it such, he would be sure to let it go ; whereas, on the least attempt to withdraw it, he would at once straiten his gripe, and not again relax it for mayhap half an hour. In dealing wdth the lobster, on the other hand, the fisher had to bew^are that he did not depend too much on the hold he had got of the creature, if it was merely a hold of one of the great claws. For a moment it would remain passive in his grasp ; he would then be sensible of a slight tremor in the captured limb, and mayhap hear a slight crackle ; and, presto, the cap tive w^ould straightway be off like a dart through tne deep water hole, and only the limb remain in the fisher's hand. My uncle has, however, told me, that lobsters do not always lose their limbs with the necessary judgment. They throw them DfF when suddenly frightened, without first w^aiting to consider whether the sacrifice of a pair of legs is the best mode of ob- viating the danger. On firing a musket immediately 6ver a OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOISr. 61 lobster just captured, he has seen it throw off both its great claws in the sudden extremity of its terror, just as a panic- struck soldier sometimes throws away his weapons. Such, in kind, were the anecdotes of Uncle Sandy. He instructed me, to ), how to find, amid thickets of laminaria and fuci, the nest of the lump-fish, and taught me to look well in its immediat^i neighborh jod for the male and female fish, especially for the male ; and showed me further, that the hard-shelled spawn of this creature may, when well washed, be eaten raw, and forms at least as palatable a viand in that state as the imported ca- viare of Russia and the Caspian. There were instances in which the common crow acted as a sort of jackall to us in our lump-fish explorations. We would see him busied at the side of some fuci-covered pool, screaming and cawing as if engaged in combating an enemy ; and, on going up to the place, we used to find the lump-fish he had killed fresh and entire, but divested of the eyes, which we found, as a matter of course, the assailant, in order to make sure of victory, had taken the precaution of picking out at an early stage of the contest. Nor was it with merely the edible that we busied ourselves on these journeys. The brilliant metallic plumage of the sea- mouse [Aphrodita), steeped as in the dyes of the rainbow, ex- cited our admiration time after time ; and still higher wonder used to be awakened by a much rarer annelid, brown, and slender as a piece of rope-yarn, and from thirty to forty feet in length, which no one save my uncle had ever found along the Cromarty shores, and which, when broken in two, as some- times happened in the measuring, divided its vitality so equally between the pieces, that each was fitted, we could not doubt, though unable to repeat in the case the experiment of Spal- lanzani to set up as an independent existence, and carry on business for itself. The annelids, too, that form for them selves tubular dwellings built up of large grains of sand {am phitrites), always excited our interest. Two hand-shaped tufts of golden-hued seto3, — furnished, however, with greatly more Uian the typical number of fingers, — rise from the shoulders 62 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; of these creatures, and must, I suspect, be used as hands in the process of building ; at least the hands of the most practised builder could not set stones with nicer skill than is exhibited by these worms in the setting of the grains which compose their cylindrical dwellings,— dwellings that, from their form and structure, seem suited to remind the antiquary of the round towers of Ireland, and, from the style of their masonry, of old Cyclopean walls. Even the mason- wasps and bees are greatly inferior workmen to these mason amphitrites, I was introduced also, in cur ebb excursions, to the cuttle-fish and the sea-hare, and shown how the one, when pursued by an enemy, dis- charges a cloud of ink to conceal its retreat, and that the other darkens the water around it with a lovely purple pigment, which my uncle was pretty sure would make a rich dye, like that extracted of old by the Tyrians from a whelk which he had often seen on the beach near Alexandria. I learned, too, to cultivate an acquaintance with some two or three species of doris, that carry their arboraceous, tree-like lungs on their backs, as Macduff's soldiers carried the boughs of Birnam wood to the Hill of Dunsinane ; and I soon acquired a sort of affection for certain shells, w^hich bore, as I supposed, a more exotic aspect than their neighbors. Among these were, TrO' chus Zizypkinus, with its flame-like markings of crimson, on a ground of paley-brown ; Patella pellucida^ with its lustrous rays of vivid blue on its dark epidermis, that resemble the sparks of a firework breaking against a cloud ; and above all, Cyprcea Europea^ a not rare shell farther to the north, but so little abundant in the Frith of Cromarty, as to render the live animal, when once or twice in a season I used to find it creep- ing on the laminaria at the extreme outer edge of the tide- line, with its wide orange mantle flow^ing liberally around it somewhat of a prize. In short, the tract of sea-bottom laid dry by the ebb formed an admirable school, and Uncle Sandy an excellent teacher, under whom I was not in the least dis» posed to trifle ; and when, long after I learned to detect old- laarine bottoms far out of sight of the sea, — now amid the an OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 63 cient forest-covered Silurians of central England, and anon opening to the light on some hill-side f./iiong the Mountain Limestones of oui own country, — I have 'felt how very much I owed to his instructions. His facts wanted a vocabulary adequately fitted to represent them ; but though they " lacked a commodity of good names," they were all founded on careful observation, and possessed that first element of respectability, — perfect originality. They were all acquired by himself I owed more, however, to the babit of observation which he assisted me in forming, than even to his facts themselves ; and yet some of these were of high value. He has shown me, for instance, that an immense granitic boulder in the neighborhood of the town, known for ages as the Clach Malloch, or Cursed Stone, stands so exactly in the line of low water, that the larger stream-tides of March and September lay dry its inner side, but never its outer one ; — round the outer side there are always from two to four inches of water ; and such had been the case for at least a hundred years before, in his father's and grandfather's days, • — evidence enough of itself, I have heard him say, that the rel- ative levels of sea and land were not altering ; though during the lapsed century the waves had so largely encroached on the low flat shores, that elderly men of his acquaintance, long since passed away, had actually held the plough when young where they had held the rudder when old. He used, too, to point out to me the effect of certain winds upon the tides. A strong hasty gale from the east, if coincident with a spring- tide, sent up the waves high upon the beach, and cut away whole roods of the soil ; but the gales that usually kept the larger tides from falling during ebb were prolonged gales from the west. A series of these, even when not very high, left not nnfrequently from one t© two feet w^ater round the Clach Mal- loch, during stream-tides, that would otherwise have laid its bott im bare ; a proof, he used to say, that the German Ocean, from its want of breadth, could not I e heaped up against our coasts +0 the same extent, by the vio.ence of a very powerful 64 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; east wind, as the Atlantic by the force of a comparatively mod erate westerly one. It is not improbable that the philosophy of the Drift Curren*, and of the apparently re-actionary Gulf Stream, may be embodied in this simple remark. The woods on the lower slopes of the hill, when there was no access to the zones uncovered by the ebb, furnished me with employment of another kind. I learned to look with in* terest on the workings of certain insects, and to understand some of at least their simpler instincts. The large Diadem Spider, which spins so strong a web, that, in pressing my way through the furze thickets, I could hear its white silken cords crack as they yielded before me, and which I found skilled, like an ancient magician, in the strange art of rendering itself in- visible in the clearest light, was an especial favorite ; though its great size, and the wild stories I had read about the bite of its cogener the tarantula, made me cultivate- its acquaintance somewhat at a distance. Often, however, have I stood beside its large web, when the creature occupied its place in the centre, and, touching it with a withered grass stalk, I have seen it sullenly swing on the lines " with its hands," and then shake them with a motion so rapid, that, — like Carathis, the mother of the Caliph Vathek, who, when her hour of doom came, " glanced oif in a rapid whirl, which rendered her invis- ible," — the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes together. Nothing appeals more powerfully to the youth- ful fancy than those coats, rings, and amulets of eastern lore, that conferred on their possessors the gift of invisibil- ity ; and I deemed it a great matter to have discovered for myself, in living nature, a creature actually possessed of an amulet of this kind, that, when danger threatened, could rush mto invisibility. I learned, too, to take an especial interest in what, though they belong to a different family, are known as the Water Spiders ; and have watched them speeding by fits and starts, like skaters on ice, across the surface of some woodland spring or streamlet, — fearless walkers on the water, that, with true faith in the integrity of the implanted instinct OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOK. 6? never made a shipwreck in the eddy or sank in the pool. It is to these little creatures that Wordsworth refers in one of his sonnets on sleep : — " O sleep, thou art to me A fly that up and down himself doth shove Upon a fretful rivulet; now above^ Now on the water, vexed with mockery." As shown, however, to the poet himself on one ocvasion, some what to his discomfort, by assuredly no mean authority, — Mr James Wilson, — the " vexed" " fly," though one of the hemip. terous insects, never uses its wings, and so never gets " above^ the water. Among my other favorites were the splendid dra gon-flies, the crimson-speckled Burnet moths, and the small azure butterflies, that, when fluttering among delicate hair- bells and crimson-tipped daisies, used to suggest to me, long ere I became acquainted with the pretty figure of Moore,* or even ere the figure had been produced, the idea of flowers that had taken to flying. The wild honey bees, too, in their several species, had peculiar charms for me. There were the bufl"- colored carders, that erected over their honey-jars domes of moss ; the lapidary red-tipped bees, that built amid the re- cesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone-walls, and were so invincibly brave in defending their homesteads, that they never gave up the quarrel till they died ; and, above all, *the yellow-zoned humble bees, that lodged deep in the ground along the dry sides of grassy banks, and were usually wealthier in honey than any of their cogeners, and existed in larger com munities. But the herd-boys of the parish, and the foxes of its woods and brakes, shared in my interest in the wild honey bees, and, in the pursuit of something else than knowledge, were ruthless robbers of their nests. I often observed, that the fox, with all his reputed shrewdness, is not particularly know- * "The beautiful blue damsel fly, That fluttered round the jessamine stems, Like winged flowers or flying gems." Paradisic vnd xhk PiRi. ♦)6 MT SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ing on the subject of bees. He makes as dead a set on a wasp's nest as on that of the carder or humble bee, and gets, I doubt not, heartily stung for his pains ; for though, as shown by the marks of his teeth, left on fragments of the paper combs scattered about, he attempts eating the young wasps in the chiysalis state, the undevoured remains seem to argue that he is but little pleased with them as food. There were occasions, however, in which even the herd-boys met with only disap- pointment in their bee-hunting excursions , and in one notable instance, the result of the adventure used to be spoken of in school and elsewhere, under our breath and in secret, as some- thing very horrible. A party of boys had stormed a humble bees' nest on the side of the old chapel-brae, and, digging in- wards along the narrow winding earth passage, they at length came to a grinning human skull, and saw the bees issuing thick from out a round hole at its base, — the foramen magnum. The wise little workers had actually formed their nest within the hollow of the head, once occupied by the busy brain ; and their spoilers, more scrupulous than Samson of old, who seems to have enjoyed the meat brought forth out of the eater, and the sweetness extracted from the strong, left in very great consternation their honey all to themselves. One of my discoveries of this early period would have been deemed a not unimportant one by the geologist. Among the woods of the hill, a short half-mile from the town, there is a morass of comparatively small extent, but considerable depth, which had been laid open by the bursting of a waterspout on the uplands, and in which the dark peaty chasm remained un- closed, though the event had happened ere my birth, until I had become old and curious enough thoroughly to explore it. It was a black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in depth. The Dogs around waved thick with silvery willows of small size ; but, sticking out from the black sides of the ravine itself, and m some instances stretched across it from side to side, lay the decayed remains of huge giants of the vegetable world, that had floui ished and died long ages ere, in at least our northern part of the island, the course of history had begun. There wero OR, THE STORY OF ^iY EDUCATION. 67 oaks of enormous girth, into whose coal-black substance one could dig as easily with a pickaxe as one digs into a bank of clay ; and at least one noble elm, which ran across the little stream that trickled, rather than flowed, along the bottom of the hollow, and which was in such a state of keeping, that I have scooped out of its trunk, with the unassisted hand, a way for the water. I have found in the ravine — which 1 learned very much to like as a scene of exploration, though I never failed to quit it sadly bemired — handfuls of hazel- nuts, of the ordinary size, but black as jet, with the cups of acorns, and with twigs of birch that still retained almost un* changed tlieir silvery outer crust of bark, but whose ligneous interior existed as a mere pulp. I have even laid open, in layers of a sort of unctuous clay, resembHng fuller's earth, leaves of oak, birch, and hazel, that had fluttered in the wind thousands of years before ; and there was one happy day in which I succeeded in digging from out the very bottom of the excavation a huge fragment of an extraordinary-looking deer's horn. It was a broad, massive, strange-looking piece of bone, evidently old-fashioned in its type ; and so I brought it home in triumph to Uncle James, as the antiquary of the fam- ily, assured that he could tell me all about it. Uncle James paused in the middle of his work ; and, taking the horn in his hand, surveyed it leisurely on every side. " That is the horn, boy," he at length said, " of no deer that now lives in this coun- try. We have the red deer, and the fallow deer, and the roe ; and none of them have horns at all like that. I never saw an elk ; but I am pretty sure this broad, plank-like horn can be none other than the horn of an elk." My uncle set aside liia work ; and, taking the horn in his hand, went out to the shop of a cabinetmaker in the neighborhood, where there used to work from five to six journeymen. They all gathered round him to examine it, and agreed in the decision that it was an entirely different sort of horn from any borne by the existing deer of Scotland, and that his surmise regarding it was prob- ably just. And, apparently to enhance the marvel, a neigh- bor, who was lounging in the shop at the time, remarked, in 38 Mr SCHOOLS and schoolmasters; a tone of sober grav'ty, that it had lain in the Moss of the Willows '•' for perhaps half a century." There was positive anger in the tone of my uncle's reply. " Haifa century, Sir ! !" he exclaimed ; " was the elk a native of Scotland half a cen- tury ago ? There is no notice of the elk, Sir, in British his- tory. That horn must have lain in the Moss of the Willows for thousands of years ! " Ah ha, James, ah ha," ejaculated the neighbor, with a sceptical shake of the head ; but as neither he nor any one else dared meet my uncle on historical ground, the controversy took end with the ejaculation. I soon added to the horn of the elk that of a roe, and part of that of a red deer, found in the same ravine; and the neigh- bors, impressed by Uncle James's view, used to bring strangers to look at them. At length, unhappily, a relation settled in the south, who had shown me kindness, took a fancy to them ; and, smit by the charms of a gorgeous paint-box which he had just sent me, I made them over to him entire. They found their w^ay to London, and w^ere ultimately lodged in the col- lection of some obscure virtuoso, whose locality or name I have been unable to trace. The Cromarty Sutors have their two lines of caves, — an an- cient line hollowed by the waves many centuries ago, when the sea stood in relation to the land, from fifteen to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does now ; and a modern line, which the surf is still engaged in scooping out. Many of the older caves are lined with stalactites, deposited by springs that, filtering through the cracks and fissures of the gneiss, find lime enough in their passage to acquire what is known as a petrify- inff, though, in reality, only an encrusting quality. And these stalactites, under the name of " white stones made by the water,'' formed of old — as in that Cave of Slains specially men tioncd by Buchanan and the Chroniclers, and in those caverns of the Peak so quaintly described by Cotton — one of the grand marvels of the place. Almost all the old gazetteers sufficient- ly copious in their details to mention Cromarty at all, refer to its " Dropping ^ave" as a marvellous marble-producing cav- em ; and this *• Di opping Cave" is but one of many that look OR, THE STOllY OF MY EDUCATIOJST. dd out upon the sea from the precipices of the southern Sutor, ui whose dark recesses the drops ever tinkle, and the stony ceil- ings ever grow. The wonder could not have been deemed a great or very rare one by a man like the late Sir George Mac- kenzie of Coul, w^ell known from his travels in Iceland, and his experiments on the inflammability of the diamond ; but it so happened, that Sir George, curious to see what sort of stones to which the old gazetteers referred, made application to the minister of the parish for a set of specimens ; and the minister Btraightway deputed the commission, which he believed to be not a difficult one, to one of his poorer parishoners, an old nailer, as a means of putting a few shillings in his way. It so happened, however, that the nailer had lost his wife by a sad accident, only a few weeks before ; and the story went abroad that the poor woman was, as the townspeople expressed it, " coming back." She had been very suddenly hurried out of the world. When going down the quay, after nightfall one evening, with a parcel of clean linen for a sailor, her relative, she had missed footing on the pier edge, and, half-brained, half-drowned, had been found in the morning, stone dead, at the bottom of the harbor. And now, as if pressed by some unsettled business, she used to be seen, it was said, hovering after nightfall about her old dwelling, or saun- tering along the neighboring street ; nay, there were occa- sions, according to the general report, in which she had even exchanged words with some of the neighbors, little to their satisfaction. The words, however, seemed in every instance to have wonderfully little to do with the affairs of another world. I remember seeing the wife of a neighbor rush intc my mo her's one evening about this time, speechless with tei ror, and declare, after an awful pause, during which she had lair, half fainting in a chair, that she had just seen Christy. She had been engaged, as the night was falling, but ere dark- cess had quite set in, in piling up a load of brushwood foi fuel outside her door, when up started the spectre on the other side of the heap, attired in the ordinary work-day garb of the 70 Mr SCHOOLS AND SO HOOL]\l ASTERS ; deceased, and, in a light and hurried tone, asked, as Qiristj' might have done ere the fatal accident, for a share of the brushwood. " Give me some of that hag^'' said the ghost ; *' you have plenty, — I have none." It was not known whether or no the nailer had seen the apparition ; but it was pretty certain he believed in it ; and as the " Dropping Cave" is both dark and solitary, and had forty years ago a bad name to boot, —for the mermaid had been observed disporting in front of it even at mid-day, and lights seen and screams heard from it at nights, — it must have been a rather formidable place to a mar^ living in the momentary expectation of a visit from a dead wife. So far as could be ascertained, — for the nailer himself was rather close in the matter, — he had not entered the cave at all. He seemed, judging from the marks of scrap- ing left along the sides for about two or three feet from the narrow opening, to have taken his stand outside, where the light was good, and the way of retreat clear, and to have r^ked outwards to him, as far as he could reach, all that stuck to the walls, including ropy slime and mouldy damp, but not one particle of stalactite. Jt was of course seen that his specimens would not suit Sir George ; and the minister, in the extremity of the case, applied to my uncles, though with some little un- willingness, as it was known that no remuneration for their trouble could be offered to them. My uncles were, however, delighted with the commission, — it was all for the benefit of science; and, providing themselves with torches and a hammer, they set out for the caves. And I, of course, accompanied them, — a very happy boy, — armed, like themselves, with ham- mer and torch, and prepared devoutedly to labor in behalf of science and Sir George. I had never before seen the caves by torch-light ; and thougl what I now witnessed did not quite come up to what I had read regarding the Grotto of Antiparos, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably both strange and fine. Tho celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior — as is not unfre quently the case with the Qelebrated — to a cave almost en OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 71 tirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little furthei to the east ; and yet even it had its mterest. It widened, as one entered, into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp and the shade ; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave, how- ever, we found to be of much greater extent, and of more va- ried character. It is one of three caves of the old coast line, known as the Doocot or Pigeon Caves, which open upon a piece of rocky beach, overhung by a rudely semicircular range of gloomy precipices. The points of the semicircle project on either side into deep water, — into at least water so much deeper than the fall of ordinary neaps, that it is only during the ebb of stream tides that the place is accessible by land ; and in each of these bold promontories, — the terminal horns of the cres- cent, — there is a cave of the present coast-line, deeply hollow- ed, in w^hich the »ea stands from ten to twelve feet in depth when the tide is at full, and in which the surf thunders, when gales blow hard from the stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave in the western promon- tory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of the " Puir Wife's Meal Kist," has its roof drilled by two small perfora- tions, — the largest of them not a great deal wider than the blow-hole of a porpoise, — that open externally among the cliffs above ; and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore like green moving walls, there are cer- tain times of the tide in which they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within that it rushes upwards through the openings, roaring in its escape as if ten whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in two white jets of vapor, distinctly visible, to the height of fi om sixty to eighty feet. If there be critics who have deemed it one of the extravagancies of Goethe that he should have given life and motion, as in his famous v/itch-scene in " Faust," to the llartz crags, they would do well to visit this bold head- 72 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; land during some winter tempest from the east, and fmd his description perfectly sober and true: — ■ ♦* See the giant crags, oh ho ! How they snort and how they blow." Within, at the bottom of the crescent, and where the tide never reaches when at the fullest, we found the large pigeon 'save which we had come to explore, hollowed for about a hun- Ired and fifty feet in the line of a fault. There runs across the opening the broken remains of a wall erected by some monopolizing proprietor of the neighboring lands, with the mtention of appropriating to himself the pigeons of the cav< ern ; but his day, even at this time, had been long gone by, and the wall had sunk into a ruin. As we advanced, the cave caught the echoes of our footsteps, and a flock of pigeons, startled from their nests, came whizzing out, almost brushing us with their wings. The damp floor sounded hollow to our tread ; we saw the green mossy sides, which close in the un- certain light, more than twenty feet overhead, furrowed by ridges of stalactites, that became whiter and purer as they re- tired from the vegetable influences ; and marked that the last plant which appeared as we wended our way inward was a minute green moss, about half an inch in length, which slant- ed outwards on the prominences of the sides, and overlay myr- iads of similar sprigs of moss, long before converted into stone, but which, faithful in death to the ruling law of their lives, still pointed, like the others, to the free air and the light. And then, in the deeper recesses of the cave, where the floor becomes covered with uneven sheets of stalagmite, and where long spear -like icicles and drapery-like foldings, pure as the marble of the sculptor, descend from above, or hung pendent over the sides, we found in abundance magnificent specimens for Sir George. The entire expedition was one of wondrous interest ; and I returned next day to school, big with descrip- tion and narrative, to excite, by truths more marvellous than fiction, the curiosity of my class-fellows. I had previously introduced them to the marvels of the hill j OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 73 and during our Saturday half-holidays, some of them had ac- companied me in my excursions to it. But it had failed, some- how, to catch their fancy. It was too solitary, and too far from home, and as a scene of amusement, not at all equal to the town-links, where they could play at " shinty," and " French and English," almost within hail of their parents' homesteads. The very tract along its flat, mossy summit, over vyhich, according to tradition, Wallace had once driven before im in headlong rout a strong body of English, and whio was actually mottled with sepulchral tumuli, still visible amid the heath, failed in any marked degree to engage them ; and though they liked well enough to hear about the caves, they seemed to have no very great desire to see them. There was, however, one little fellow, who sat at the Latin form, — the member of a class lower and brighter than the heavy one^ though it was not particularly bright neither, — who differed in this respect from all the others. Though he was my junior by about a twelvemonth, and shorter by about half a head, he was a diligent boy in even the Grammar School, in which boys were so rarely diligent, and, for his years, a thoroughly sen- sible one, without a grain of the dreamer in his composition. I succeeded, however, notwithstanding his sobriety, in infect- ing him thoroughly with my peculiar tastes, and learned to love him very much, partly because he doubled my amuse- ments by sharing in them, and partly, I dare say, — on the prin- ciple on which Mahomet preferred his old wife to his young one, — because " he believed in me." Devoted to him as Ca- liban in the Tempest to his friend Trinculo, — "I showed him the best springs, I plucked him berries, And 1 with my long nails did dig him pig-nuts." His curiosity on this occasion was largely excited by my de scription of the Doocot Cave ; and, setting out one morning to explore its wonders, armed with John Feddes's hammer, in the benefits of which my friend was permitted liberally to share, wx failed, for that day at least, in finding our way back. It was on a pleasant spring morning that, with my little 74 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES ; curious friend beside me, I stood on the beach opposite the eastern promontory, that, with its stern granitic wall, bars ao cess for ten days out of every fourteen to the w^onders of tho Doocot; and saw it stretc ing provokingly out into the green water. It was hard to be disappointed and the cave so near. The tide was low neap, and if we wanted a passage dry-shod, it behoved us to wait for at least a week ; but neither of U8 understood the philosophy of neap-tides at the period. I wa^ quite sure I had got round at low water with my uncles not f great many da\^s before, and we both inferred, tliat if we but succeeded in getting round now, it would be quite a pleasure to wait among the caves inside until such time as the fall of the tide should lay bare a passage for our return. A narrow and broken shelf runs along the promontory, on which, by the assistance of the naked toe and the toe-nail, it is just possible to creep. We succeeded in scrambling up to it ; and then, crawling outwards on all fours, — the precipice, as we proceed- ed, beetling more and more formidable from above, and the water becoming greener and deeper below, — we reached the outer point of the promontory ; and then doubling the cape on a still narrowing margin, — the water, by a reverse process, becoming shallower and less green as we advanced inwards, — we found the ledge terminating just where, after clearing the sea, it overhung the gravelly beach at an elevation of nearly ten feet. Adown we both dropped, proud of our success ; up splashed the rattling gravel as we fell ; and for at least the whole coming week — though we were unaware of the extent of our good luck at the time — the marvels of the Doocot Cave might be regarded as solely and exclusively our own. For one short seven days, — to borrow emphasis from the phraseology of Carlyle, — " they were our own, and no other man's." The first few hours were hours of sheer enjoyment. Tlie larger cave proved a mine of marvels and we found a great deal additional to wonder at on the slopes beneath the preci- pices, and along the piece of rocky sea-beach in front. We succeeded in discovering for ourselves, in creeping, dwarf bushes, that told of the blighting influence of the sea-spray ; OR, THE STORT OF MY EDUCATION. 75 the j^ale-yellow honeysuckle, that we had never seen before, save in gardens and shrubberies ; and on a deeply shaded slope that leaned against one of the steeper precipices, we detected the sweet-scented woodruff of the flower -plot and parterre, with its pretty verticillate leaves, that become the more odor- iferous the more they are crushed, and its white delicate flow- ers. There, too, immediately in the opening of the deeper cave, where a small stream came pattering in detached drops from the over-beeiling precipice above, like the first drops of a heavy thunder-shower, we found the hot, bitter scurvy grass, with its minute cruciform flowers, which the great Captain Cook had used in his voyages ; above all, there were the caves -wiih. their pigeons, — white, variegated, and blue, — and their mysterious and gloomy depths, in which plants hardened into stone, and water became marble. In a short time we had brok- en off with our hammer whole pocketfuls of stalactites and petrified moss. There were little pools at the side of the cave, where we could see the work of congelation going on, as at the commencement of an October frost, when the cold north wind ruflles, and but barely rufiles, the surface of some mountain lochan or sluggish moorland stream, and shows the newly- formed needles of ice projecting mole-like from the shores into the water. So rapid was the course of deposition, that there were cases in which the sides of the hollows seemed growing almost in proportion as the water rose in them ; the springs, lipping over, deposited their minute crystals on the edges ; and the reservoirs deepened and became more capacious as their mounds were built up by this curious masonry. The long telescopic prospect of the sparkling sea, as viewed from ibo mner extremity of the cavern, w^hile all around was dark as midnight, — the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen for a mo- ment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sunshine, — the black heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of spray, and then, turning downwards, displayed its glossy back and vast angular fin, — even the pigeons, as they shot whizzing by, one moment scarce visible in the gloom, the next radioiit in the light, — all acquired a new interest, from the pe^ 76 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS cuTjarity f the setting in which we saw them. They fonnecl a series of sun-gilt vignettes, framed in jet ; and it was long ere we tired of seeing and admiring in them much of the strange and the beautiful. It did seem rather ominous, how ever, and perhaps somewhat supernatural to boot, that abou an hour afternoon, the tide, while there was yet a full fathom of v/ater beneath the brow of the promontory, ceased to fall, and then, after a quarter of an hour's space, began actually to creep upwards on the beach. But just hoping that there might be some mistake in the matter, which 1;he evening tide would scarce fail to rectify, we continued to amuse ourselves, and to hope on. Hour after hour passed, lengthening as the shadows lengthened, and yet the tide still rose. The sun had sunk be- hind the precipices, and all was gloom along their bases, and double gloom in their caves ; but their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose higher and higher, chased by the shadows ; and then, after lingering for a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and the whole became sombre and gray. The sea-gull sprang upwards from where he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in his deep-sea stack ; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf high on the precipice ; the pig- eons came whizzing downwards from the uplands and the opposite land, and disappeared amid the gloom of their caves ; every creature that had wings made use of them in speeding homewards ; but neither my companion nor myself had any ; and there was no possibility of getting home without them. We made desperate efforts to scale the precipices, and on two several occasions succeeded in reaching mid-way shelves among the crags, where the sparrowhawk and the raven build ; but though we had climbed well enough to render our return a matter of bare possibility^ there was no possibility whatever of getting farther up ; the cliff's had never been scaled before, and they were not destined to be scaled now. And so, as the twilight deepened, and the precarious footing became every moment more doubtful and precarious still, we had just to OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 77 give up in despair. "Wouldn't care for myself," said the poor little fellow, my companion, bursting into tears, " if it were not for my mother ; but what will my mother say f " Wouldn't care neither," said I, with a heavy heart ; " but it's just back water, and we'll get out at twall." We retreated together into one of the shallower and drier caves, and, clear- ing a little spot of its rough stones, and then groping along the rocks for the dry grass that in the spring season hangs from them in withered tufts, we formed for ourselves a most uncom fortable bed, and lay down in one another's arms. For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising dark and stormy in the sea-mouth : they had flared porten- tously in the setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre thundrous brown, and from sombre brown to doleful black. And we could now at least hear what they portended, though we could no longer see. The rising wind began to howl mournfully amid the cliffs, and the sea, hitherto so si- lent, to beat heavily against the shore, and to boom, like dis- tress-guns, from the recesses of the two deep-sea caves. We could hear, too, the beating rain, now heavier, now lighter, as the gusts swelled or sank ; and the intermittent patter of the streamlet over the deeper cave, now driving against the preci pices, now descending heavily on the stones. My companion had only the real evils of the case to deal with, and so, the hardness of our bed and the coldness of the night considered, he slept tolerably well ; but I was unlucky enough to have evils greatly worse than the real ones to annoy me. The corpse of a drowned seaman had been found on the beach ibout a month previous, some forty yaids from where we lay. The hands and feet, miserably contracted, and corru- gated into deep folds at every joint, yet swollen to twice their proper size, had been bleached as white as pieces of alumed sheep-skin ; and where the head should have been, there ex isted or ly a sad m.ass of rubbish. I had examined the body as young people are apt to do, a great deal too curiously for my peace j and, though I had never done the poor nameles? 78 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; seaman any harm, T could not have suffered more from him during that melancholy night, had I been his murderer. Sleeping or waking, he was continually before me. Every time I dropped into a doze, he would come stalking up tha beach from the spot where he had lain, with his stiff white fin- gers, that stuck out like eagles' toes, and his pale, broken pulp of a liead, and attempt striking me ; and then I would awaken with a start, cling to my companion, and remember that the drowned sailor had lain festering among the identical bunches of sea-\^eed that still rotted on the beach not a stone-cast away. The near neighborhood of a score of living bandits would have inspired less horror than the recollection of that one dead seaman. Towards midnight the sky cleared and the wind fell, and the moon, in her last quarter, rose red as a mass of heated iron out of the sea. We crept down, in the uncertain light, over the rough slippery crags, to ascertain whether the tide had not fallen sufficiently far to yield us a passage ; but we found the waves chafing among the rocks just where the tide-line had rested twelve hours before, and a full fathom of sea enclasping the base of the promontory. A glimmering idea of the real nature of our situation at length crossed my mind. It was not imprisonment for a tide to which we had consigned ourselves ; it was imprisonment for a week. There was little comfort in the thought, arising, as it did, amid the chills and terrors of a dreary midnight ; and I looked wistfully on the sea as our only path of escape. There was a vessel crossing the wake of the moon at the time, scarce half a mile from the shore ; and, assisted by my companion, I began to shout at the top of my lungs, in the hope of being heard by the sailors. We saw her dim bulk falling slowly athwart the red glittering belt of light that had rendered her visible, and then disappearing in the murky blackness ; and just as we lost sight of her forever, we could hear an indistinct sound mingling with the dash of the waves, — the shout, in reply, of the startled helmsman. The vessel, as we afterwards learned, was a large stone-lighter, deeply laden, and unfurnished with a boat ; nor were her crew OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 79 at all sure that it would have been safe to attend to the mid- night voice from amid the rocks, even had they the means of communication with the shore. We waited on and on, how- ever, now shouting by turns, and now shouting together ; but there was no second reply ; and at length, losing hope, we groped our way back to our comfortless bed, just as the tide had again turned on the beach, and the waves began to roll up\N ards higher and higher at every dash As the moon rose and brightened, the dead seaman became less troublesome ; and I had succeeded in dropping as soundly asleep as my companion, when we were both aroused by a loud shout. We started up, and again crept downwards among the crags to the shore ; and as we reached the sea, the shout was repeated. It was that of at least a dozen harsh voices united. There was a brief pause, followed by another shout ; and then two boats, strongly manned, shot round the western promontory, and the men, resting on their oars, turned towards the rock, and shouted yet again. The whole town had been alarmed by the intelligence that two little boys had straggled away in the morning to the rocks of the southern Sutor, and had not found their way back. The precipices had been a scene of frightful accidents from time immemorial, and it was at once inferred that one other sad accident had been added to the number. True, there were cases remembered of people having been tide-bound in the Doocot Caves, and not much the worse in consequence ; but as the caves were inaccessible during neaps, we could not, it was said, possibly be in them* and the sole remaining ground of hope was, that, as had hap- pened once before, only one of the two had been killed, and that the survivor was lingering among the rocks, afraid to come home. And in this belief, when the moon rose and the surf fell, the two boats had been fitted out. It was late in the morn ing ere we reached Cromarty, but a crowd on the beach await ed our arrival ; and there were anxious-looking lights glancing in the windows, thick and manifold ; nay, such was the inter- est elicited, that some enormously bad verse, in which th(* tvriter described the incident a few days after, became popular 60 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS^ enough to be handed about in manuscript, and read at tea- parties by the elite of the town. Poor old Miss Bond, who kept thv5 town boarding-school, got the piece nicely dressed up, somewhat upon the principle on which Macpherson translated Ossian ; and at her first school-examination — proud and happy day foi the author ! — it was recited with vast applause, by one of her prettiest young ladies, before the assembled taste and fiishi* d of Cromarty OK. THE STORY OF MT EDUCATION. 8l CHAPTER V. "The wise SI ook their white aged heads o'er me, and sad, Of such materials wretched men were made." B/ROX. Teie report went abroad about this time, not without some foundation, that Miss Bond purposed patronizing me. The copy of my verses which had fallen into her hands — a genuine holograph — bore atop a magnificent view of the Doocot, in which horrid crags of burnt umber were perforated by yawn- ing caverns of Indian-ink, and crested by a dense pine forest of sap-green ; while vast waves, blue on the one side and green on the other, and bearing blotches of white lead atop, rolled frightfully beneath. And Miss Bond had concluded, it was said, that such a genius as that evinced by the sketch and the " poem " for those sister arts of painting and poesy in which she herself excelled, should not be left to waste itself uncared for in the desert wilderness. She had published, shortly be- fore, a work, in two slim volumes, entitled; " Letters of a Vil- lage Governess," — a curious kind of medley, little amenable to the ordinary rules, but a genial book, notwithstanding, with nore heart than head about it; and not a few of the incidents which it related had the merit of being true. It was an un- lucky merit for poor Miss Bond. She dated her book from Fortrose, where she taught what was designated in the Al- manac as the boarding-schocl of the place, but which, accord- 82 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; mg to Miss Bond's own description, was the school of the " village governess." And as her tales were found to be a kind of mosaics composed of droll bits of fact picked up in the neighborhood, Fortrose soon became considerably too hot for her. She had drawn, under the over-transparent guise of the niggardly Mrs. Flint, the skin-flint wife of a " paper minister," who had ruined at one fell blow her best silk dress, and a dozen of good eggs to boot, by putting the eggs in her pocket when going out to a party, and then stumbling over a stone. A.nd, of course, Mrs. Skinflint and the Rev. Mr. Skinflint, with all their blood-relations, could not be other than greatly grati- fied to find the story furbished up in the printed form, and set in fun. There were other stories as imprudent and as amusing, — of young ladies caught eavesdropping at their neighbors' windows ; and of gentlemen, ill at ease in their families, sitting soaking among vulgar companions in the public nouse ; and so the authoress, shortly after the appearance of her work, ceased to be the village governess of Fortrose, anJ became the village governess of Cromarty. It was on this occasion that I saw, for the first time, with mingled admiration and awe, a human creature, — not dead and gone, and merely a printed name, — that had actually published a book. Poor Miss Bond was a kindly sort of person, fond of children, and niightily beloved by them in turn ; and, though keenly alive to the ludicrous, without a grain of malice in her. I remember how, about this time, when, assisted by some three or four boys more, I had suc- ceeded in building a huge house, full four feet long and three feet high, that contained us all, and a fire, and a great deal of smoke to boot. Miss Bond, the authoress, came, and looked in upon us, first through the little door, and then down througl the chimney, and gave us kind words, and seemed to enjo}' our enjoyment very much ; and how we all deemed her visit one of the greatest events that could possibly have taken pjace She had been intimate with the parents of Sir Walter Scott ; ^rd, on the appearance of Sir Walter's first publication, the • .iilnstrelsey of the Scottish Border," she had taken a fit of OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 83 enthusiasm, and written to him ; and, when ii the cold par- oxysm, and inclined to think she had done something foolish, had received from Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, a character- istically warm-hearted reply. She experienced much kind- ness at his hands ever after ; and when she herself became an author, she dedicated her book to him. He now and then procured boarders for her ; and when, after leaving Cromarty for Edinburgh, she opened a school in the latter place, and got on with but indifferent success. Sir Walter — though struggling with his own difficulties at the time — sent her an enclosure of ten pounds, to scare, as he said in his note, " the wolf from the door." But Miss Bond, like the original of his own Jeanie Deans, was a " proud bodie ;" and the ten pounds were returned, with an intimation to the effect that the wolf had not yet come to the door. Poor lady ! I suspect he came to the door at last. Like many other writers of books, her voyage through life skirted, for the greater part of the way, the bleak lee shore of necessity ; and it cost her not a little skilful steering at times to give the strand a respectable offing. And in her solitary old age, she seemed to have got fairly aground. There was an attempt made by some of her former pupils to raise money enough to purchase for her a small annu ity ; but when the design was in progress, I heard of her death. She illustrated in her life the remark recorded by herself in her " Letters," as made by an humble friend : — " It's no an easy thing, Mem, for a woman to go through the world without a head^^'' i. e., single and unprotected. From some unexplained cause, Miss Bond's patronage never reached me. I am sure the good lady intended giving me lessons in both drawing and composition ; for she had said it, and her heart was a kind one ; but then her time was too much occupied to admit of her devoting an occasional hour to myself alone ; and as for introducing me to her young-lady classes, in my rough garments, ever greatly improved the wrong way by my explorations in the ebb and the peat-moss, and frayed, at times, beyond even my mother's ability of repair, by warping to the tops of great trees, and by my feats as a cragsman,-— 5 84: MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASr EHS ; that would have been a piece of Jack-Cadeism, on which, thep . or now, no village governess could have ventured. And so I was left to get on in verse and picture-making quite in the w ild way, without care or culture. My sclioolfellows liked my stories well enough, — better, at . east on most occasions, than they did the lessons of the mas- ter ; but, beyond the common ground of enjoyment which these extempore compositions furnished to both the " sennachie," and his auditors, our tracts of amusement lay widely apart. I di^* liked, as I have said, the yearly cock-fight — found no pleasure in cat-killing, or in teasing at nights, or on the street, the cross-tempered, half-witted eccentrics of the village, — usually kept aloof from the ordinary play-grounds, and very rarely mingled in the old hereditary games. On the other hand, with the exception of my little friend of the cave, who, even after that disastrous incident, evinced a tendency to trust and follow me as implicitly as before, my schoolmates cared as little for my amusements as I did for theirs ; and, having the majority on their side, they of course voted mine to be the foolish ones. And certainly a run of ill-luck followed me in my sports about this time, that did give some show of reason to their decision. In the course of my book-hunting, I had fallen in with two old-fashioned military treatises, part of the small library of a retired officer, lately deceased, of which the one entitled the '' Military Medley," discussed the whole art of marshalling troops, and contained numerous plans, neatly colored, of bat- talions drawn up in all possible forms, to meet all possible exi- gencies ; while the other, which also abounded in prints, treated of the noble science of fortification according to the systen\ of Vauban. 1 pored over both works with much perseverance ; and, regarding them as admirable toy-books, set myself to con- struct, on a very small scale, some of the toys with which they specially dealt. The sea-shore in the immediate neighbor- hood of the town appeared to my inexperienced eye an excel- lent field for the carrying on of a campaign. The sea-sand I found quite coherent enough, when still moistened by tha waters of the receding tide, to stand up in the form of towers OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 85 and bastions, and long lines of rampart ; and there was one of the commonest of the Tiittorinidas, — Littorina Uttoralis^ that in one of its varieties is of a rich yellow color, and in another of a' bluish-green tint, — which supplied me with soldiers enough to execute all the evolutions figured and described in the " Medley." The warmly-hued yellow shells represented Brit- t>ns in their scarlet, — the more dingy ones, the French in their uniforms of dirty blue ; well-selected specimens of Purpura lapillus^ just tipped on their backs with a speck of paint, blue or red, from my box, made capital dragoons ; while a few dozens of the slender pyramidal shells oi Turritella comraunis formed complete parks of artillery. With such unlimited stores of the materiel of w^ar at my command, I was enabled, more fortunate than Uncle Toby of old, to fight battles and conduct retreats, assault and defend, build up fortifications and then batter them down again, at no expense at all ; and the only drawback on such a vast amount of advantage that I could at first perceive, consisted in the circumstance, that the shore was exceedingly open to observation, and that my new amusements, when surveyed at a little distance, did greatly resemble those of the very young children of the place, who used to repair to the same arenaceous banks and shingle-beds, to bake dirt-pies in the sand, or range lines of shells on little shelves of stone, imitative of the crockery cupboard at home. Not only my school-fellows, but also some of their parents, evidently arrived at the conclusion that the two sets of amuse- ments — mine and those of the little children — w^ere identical ; for the elder folk said, that " in their time, poor Francie had been just such another boy, and every one saw what he had come to ;" while the younger, more energetic in their mani- festations, and more intolerant of folly, have even paused in their games of marbles, or ceased spinning their tops, to hoc* at me from a safe distance. But the campaign went on ; and I solaced myself by reflecting, that neither the big folk nor the little folk could bring a battalion of troops across a bridge of boats in the face of an enemy, or knew that a regular for. tificatioD could be constructed on only a regular polygon. 86 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; I at length discovered, however, that as a sea-shore is always a sloping plane, and the Cromarty beach, in particular, a plane of a rather steep slope, it afforded no proper site for a fortress fitted to stand a protracted siege, seeing that, fortify the plax3e as I might, it could be easily commanded by batteries raised on the highei side. And so, fixing upon a grassy knoll among the woods, in the immediate neighborhood of a scaur of boul- der clay, capped by a thick stratum of sand, as a much better scene of operations, I took possession of the knoll somewhat irregularly ; and carrying to it large quantities of sand from the scaur, converted it into the site of a magnificent strong- hold. First, I erected an ancient castle, consisting of four towers built on a rectangular base, and connected by straight curtains embrasured a-top. I then surrounded the castle by out-works in the modern style, consisting of greatly lower curtains than the ancient ones, flanked by numerous bastions, and bristling with cannon of huge calibre, made of the joint- ed stalks of the hemlock ; while in advance of these I laid down ravelins, horn-works, and tenailles. I was vastly de- lighted with my work ; it would, I was sure, be no easy mat- ter to reduce such a fortress ; but observing an eminence in the immediate neighborhood, which could, I thought, be occu- pied by a rather annoying battery, I was deliberating how I might best take possession of it by a redoubt, when out start- ed from behind a tree, the factor of the property on which I was trespassing, and rated me soundly for spoiling the grass in a manner so wantonly mischievous. Horn-work and half- moon, tower and bastion, proved of no manner of effect in re- pelling an attack of a kind so little anticipated. I did think that the factor, who was not only an intelligent man, but had also seen much service in his day on the town links, as the holder of a commission in the Cromarty volunteers, might have perceivc^d that I was laboring on scientific principles, and sc deem mc worthy of some tolerance on that account ; but I sup pose he did not ; though, to be sure, his scold died out good iiaturedly enough in the end, and I saw him laugh as he turn ^d away. But so it was, that in the extremity of my oioi OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 87 liification, I gave up generalship and bastion-building for the time ; chough, alas, my next amusement must have worn in the eyes of ii\j youthful compeers as suspicious an aspect as either. My friend of the eftve had lent me what I had never seen before, — a fine quar^^.o edition of Anson's Voyages, containing the original prints (my father's copy had only the maps) ; among the others, Mr. Brett's elaborate delineation of that strangest of ^ essels, a proa of the Ladrone Islands. I was much struck by the singularity of the construction of a bark that, while its head and stern were exactly alike, had sides that to- tally differed from eQ.oh other, and that, with the wind upon the beam, outsailed, it was said, all other vessels in the world ; and having the com':nand of the little shop in which my Uncle Sandy made occasional carts and wheelbarrows when unem- ployed abroad, I set myself to construct a miniature proa, on the model given in the print, and succeeded in fabricating a very extraordinary proa indeed. While its lee side was per pendicular as a w^all, its windward one, to which there was an outrigger attached, resembled that of a flat-bottomed boat ; head and stern were exactly alike, so as to fit each for per- forming in turn the part of either ; a movable yard, which supported the sail, had to be shifted towards the end convert- ed into the stern for the time, at each tack ; while the sail it- self — a most uncouth-looking thing — formed a scalene trian- gle. Such was the vessel — some eighteen inches long or so — with which I startled from their propriety the mimic navi- gators of a horse-pond in the neighborhood, — all very master- *ly critics in all sorts of barks and barges known on the Scot- tish coast. According to Campbell, " 'Tw:is a thing beyond Description wretched ; such a wherry, Perhaps, ne'er ventured on a pond, Or crossed a ferry." And well did my fellows appreciate its extreme ludicrousnesa. It was certainly rash to " venture" it on this especial " pond ;'' 88 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; for, greatly to the damage of the rigging, it was fairly pelted off, and I was sent to test elsewhere its sailing qualities, which were, as I ascertained, not very remarkable after all. And thus, after a manner so unworthy, were my essays in strategy and bark-building received by a censorious age, that judged ere it knew. Were I sentimental, which luckily I am not, I might well exclaim, in the very vein of Rousseau, Alas ! it has been ever the misfortune of my life that, save by a fow friends, I have never been understood ! 1 was evidently oat-Francieing Francie ; and the parents of my young friend, who saw that I had acquired considerable in- fluence over him, and were afraid lest I should make another Francie of him^ had become naturally enough desirous to break oif our intimacy, when there occurred an unlucky acci- dent, which served materially to assist them in the design. My friend's flither was the master of a large trading smack, which in war times carried a few twelve-pounders, and was furnished with a small magazine of powder and shot ; and my fdend having secured for himself from the general stock, through the connivance of the ship-boy, an entire cannon car- tridge, containing some two or three pounds of gunpowder, i was, of course, let into the secret, and invited to share in the sport and the spoil. We had a glorious day together in his mother's garden ; never before did such magnificent volcanoes break forth out of mole-hills, or were plots of daisies and vio- lets so ruthlessly scorched and torn by the explosion of deep- laid mines ; and though a few mishaps did happen to over- forward fingers, and to eye-brows that were in the way, our amusements passed off innoculously on the whole, and even- ing saw nearly the half of our precious store unexhausted. It was garnered up by my friend in an unsuspected corner of ths garret in which he slept, and would have been safe, had he lOt been seized, when going to bed, with a yearning desire to survey his treasure by candle-light ; when an unlucky spark from the flame exploded the whole. He was so sadly burnt about the face and eyes as to be blind for several days after ; but, amid smoke and confusion, he gallantly bolted his garret OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 8& door, and, while the inmates of the household, startled by the shock and the noise, came rushing up stairs, sturdily refused to let any of them in. Volumes of gunpowder reek issued from every crack and cranny, and his mother and sisters were pi-odigiously alarmed. At length, however, he capitulated, — terms unknown ; and I next morning heard with horror and dismay of the accident. It had been matter of agreement be- tween us on the previous day, mainly in order to screen the fine fellow of a ship-boy, that I should be regarded as th owner of the powder ; but here was a consequence on which I had not calculated ; and the strong desire to see my poor friend was dashed by the dread of being held responsible by his parents and sisters for the accident. And so, more than a week elapsed ere I could muster up courage enough to visit him. I was coldly received by his mother, and, what vexed me to the heart, coldly received by himself; and suspecting that he had been making an ungenerous use of our late treaty, I took leave in high dudgeon, and came away. My suspi- cions, however, wronged him ; he had stoutly denied, as I af- terwards learned, that I had any share in the powder ; but his friends deeming the opportunity a good one for breaking with me, had compelled him, very unwillingly, and after much re sistance, to give me up. And from this period more than two years elapsed, though our hearts beat quick and high every time we accidentally met, ere we exchanged a single word. On one occasion, however, shortly after the accident, we did exchange letters. I wrote to him from the school-form, when, of course, I ought to have been engaged with my tasks, a stately epistle, in the style of the billets in the " Female Quixc te," which began, I remember, as follows : — " 1 once thought I had a friend whom I could rely upon ; but experience tells me he was only nominal. For, had he been a real friend, no accident could have interfered with, or arbi- trary command annihilated his affection," &c., &c. As 1 was rather an indifferent scribe at the time, one of the lads known as the " copperplate writers" of the class, made for me a fair copy of my lucubration, full of all manner of elegant dashes^ 90 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS, and 'n which the spelling of every word was scrupulously test ed hy the dictionary. And in due course I received a care, fully engrossed note in reply, of which the manual portion was performed by my old companion, but the composition, as he afterwards told me, elaborated by some one else. lie as- sured me he was still my friend, but that there w^as " certain circumstances" which would prevent us from meeting for the future on our old terms. We were, however, destined to meet pretty often in the future, notwithstanding ; and narrow iy missed going to the bottom together many years after, in the Floating Manse, grown infirm in her nether parts at the time, when he was the outed minister of Small Isles, and I editor of the Witness newspaper. I had a maternal aunt long settled in the Highlands of Sutherland, who was so much older than her sister, my moth- er, that when nursing her oldest boy, she had, when on a visit to the low country, assisted also in nursing her. The boy had shot up into a very clever lad, who, having gone to seek his fortune in the south, rose, through the several degrees of clerk- ship in a mercantile firm, to be the head of a commercial house of his own, which, though ultimately unsuccessful, seemed for some four or five years to be in a fair way of thriving. For about three of these, the portion of the profit which fell to my cousin's share did not fall short of fifteen hundred pounds per annum ; aud on visiting his parents in their Highland home in the heyday of his prosperity, after an absence of years, it was found that he had a great many friends in his native district on whom he had not calculated, and of a class that had not been greatly in the habit of visiting his mother's cottage, but who now came to lunch, and dine, and take their wine with him, and who seemed to value and admire him very much. My a mt, who was little accustomed to receive high company, aud found herself, like Martha of old, "cumbered about much serving,'' urgently besought my mother, who was young and active at the time, to visit and assist her ; and, infinitely to my delight, 1 was included in the invitation. The place was not n?uch above thirty miles from Cromarty ; but then it was in OR, IHE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 91 the true Highlands, which I had never before seen, sa\e on the distant horizon ; and, to a boy who had to walk all the way. even thirty miles, in an age when railways were not, and ere even mail gigs had penetrated so far, represented a jour- ney of no inconsiderable distance. My mother, though rather a delicate-looking woman, walked remarkable well ; and early on the evening of the second day, we reached together my aunt's cottage, in the ancient Barony of Gruids. It was a low, long, dingy edifice of turf, four or five rooms in length, but only one in height, that, lying along a gentle acclivity, somewhat resembled at a distance a huge black snail creeping up the bill. As the lower apartment was occupied by my uncle's half-dozen milk-cows, the declination of the floor, con- sequent on the nature of the site, proved of signal importance from the free drainage wh^ch it secured ; the second apart- ment, reckoning upwards, which was of considerable size, formed the sitting-room of the family, and had, in the old Highland style, its fire full in the middle of the floor, without back or sides ; so that, like a bonfire kindled in the open air, all the inmates could sit around it in a wide circle, — the wo- men invariably ranged on the one side, and the men on the other : the apartment beyond was partitioned into small and very dark bed rooms : while, further on still, there was a closet with a little window in it, which was assigned to my mother and me ; and beyond all lay what was emphatically " the room," as it was built of stone, and had both window and chimney, with chairs, and table, and chest of drawers, a large box-bed, and a small but well-filled bookcase. And "the room" was, of course, for the time, my cousin the merchant's apartment, his dormitory at night, and the hospitable refec- tory in which he entertained his friends by day. My aunt's family was one of solid worth. Her husband,-— a compactly-built, stout-limbed, elderly Highlander, rather bO' low the middle size, of grave and somewhat melancholy aspect, but in reality of a temperament rather cheerful than otherwise, — had ])e8n somewhat wild in his young days. He had been a good shot and a skilful angler, and had danced at bridalsi 92 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; and, as was common in the Highlands at the time, at Ijice* wakes ; nay, on one occasion he had succeeded in inducing a new- nade widow to take the floor in a Strathspey, beside her husband's corpse, when every one else had failed to bring her up, by roguishly remarking, in her hearing, that whoever else might have refused to dance at poor Donald's death-wake, he little thought it would have been her. But a great change had passed over him, and he was now a staid, thoughtful, God- fearing man, much respected in the Barony for honest worth and quiet, unobtrusive consistency of character. His wife had been brought, at an early age, under the influence of Donald Roy's ring, and had, like her mother, been the means of introducing the vitalities of religion into her household Th^y had two other sons besides the merchant, — both well- built, robust men, somewhat taller than their father, and of such character, that one of my Cromarty cousins, in making out his way, by dint of frequent and sedulous inquiry, to their dwelling, found the general verdict of the district embodied in the very bad English of a poor old woman, who, after doing her best to direct him, certified her knowledge of the house- hold by remarking, " It's a goot mistress ; — it's a goot maister ; — it's a goot, goot two lads.^' The elder of the two brothers superintended, and partly wrought, his father's little farm ; for the father himself found employment enough in acting as a sort of humble factor for the proprietor of the Barony, who lived at a distance, and had no dwelling upon the land. The younger was a mason and slater, and was usually employed, in the working seasons, at a distance ; but in winter, and on this occasion, for a few weeks during the visit of his brother the merchant, he resided with his father. Both were men of marked individuality of character. The elder, Hugh, was an mgenious, self-taught mechanic, who used, in the long wintci evenings, to fashion a number of curious little articles by the fireside, — among the rest. Highland snuff-mulls, with which he supplied all his friends ; and he was at this time engaged in building for his father a Highland barn, and, to vary the work, tabricating for hm: a Highland plough. The younger, George, ^'•■" OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 93 ivho had wrought for a few years at his trade in the south of Scotland, wao* a great reader, wrote very tolerable prose, and verse which, .f not poetry, to which he made no pretensions, was at least quaintly-turned rhyme. He had, besides, a com- petent knowledge of geometry, and was skilled in architec- tural drawing; and — strange accomplishment for a Celt — he was an adept in the noble science of self-defence. But George Dever sought out quarrels ; and such was his amount of bone and muscle, and such the expression of manly resolution stamped on his countenance, that they never came in his way unsought. At the close of the day, when the members of the house hold had assembled in a wide circle round the fire, my uncle " took the Book," and I witnessed, for the first time, family worship conducted in Gaelic. There was, I found, an interest- ing peculiarity in one portion of the services which he con- ducted. He was, as I have said, an elderly man, and hkd worshipped in his family ere Dr. Stewart's Gaelic Translation of the Scriptures had been introduced into the country ; and as he possessed in those days only the English Bible, while his domestics understood only Gaelic, he had to acquire the art, not uncommon in Sutherland at the time, of translating the English chapter for them, as he read, into their native tongue ; and this he had learned to do with such ready fluency, that no one could have guessed it to be other than a Gaelic work from which he was reading. Nor had the introduction of Dr. Stewart's Translation rendered the practice obsolete in his household. His Gaelic was Sutherlandshire Gaelic, whereas that of Dr. Stewart was Argyleshire Gaelic. His family un- derstood his rendering better, in consequence, than that of the Doctor; and so he continued to translate from his English Bible ad aperturam libri, many years after the Gaelic edition lad been spread over the country. The concluding evening prayer was one of great solemnity and unction. I was un- acquainted with the language in which it was couched ; but it was impossible to avoid being struck, notwithstanding, with Hs wrestling earnestness and fervor. The man who poured 94 MY SCHOOLS it fortJi evidently believed there was an unseen ear open 13 it and an all-seeing presence in the place, before whom every se- cret thought lay exposed. The entire scene was a deeply im- pressive one ; and when I saw, in witnessing the celebration of High Mass in a Popish cathedral many years after, the altai suddenly enveloped in a dim and picturesque obscurity, amid which the curling smoke of the incense ascended, and heard the musically-modulated prayer sounding in the distance from within the screen, my thoughts reverted to the rude Highland cottage, where, amid solemnities not theatric, the red umbry light of the fire fell with uncertain glimmer upon dark walls, and bare black rafters, and kneeling forms, and a pale ex- panse of dense smoke, that, filling the upper portion of the roof, overhung the floor like a ceiling, and there arose amid the gloom the sounds of prayer truly God-directed, and poured out from the depths of the heart ; and I felt that the stoled priest of the cathedral was merely an artist, though a skilful one, but that in the " priest and father " of the cottage there were the truth and reality from which the artist drew. No bolt was drawn across the outer door as we retired for the night. The philosophic Blot, when employed with his experiments on the seconds pendulum, resided for several months in one of the smaller Shetland islands ; and, fresh from the troubles oi' Erance, — ^his imagination bearing about with it, if I may so speak, the stains of the guillotine, — the state of trustful secu- rity in which he found the simple inhabitants filled him with astonishment. " Here, during the twenty -five years in which Europe has been devouring herself," he exclaimed, " the door of the house I inhabit has remained open day and night." The interior of Sutherland was at the time of my visit in a simi- lar condition. The door of my uncle's cottage, unfurnished with lock or bar, opened, like that of the hermit in the ballad, with a latch ; but, unlike that of the hermit, it was not be- cause there were no stores within to demand the care of the master, but because at that comparatively recent period the crime of theft was unknown in the district. I rose early next morning, when the dew was yet heavy on OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 95 grass and lichen, curious to explore a locality so new to me. The tJ'act, though a primary one, forms one of the tamer gneiss distriv-'ts of Scotland ; and I found the nearer hills compara- tively low and confluent, and the broad valley in which lay my uncle's cottage, flat, open, and unpromising. Still there were a few points to engage me ; and the more I attracted myself to them, the more did their interest grow. The western slopes of the valley are mottled by grassy tomhans, — the mo raines of some ancient glacier, around and over which ther rose, at this period, a low widely-spreading wood of birch, hazel, and mountain ash, — of hazel, with its nuts fast filling at the time, and of mountain ash, with its berries glowing bright in orange and scarlet. In looking adown the hollow, a group of the green tomhans might be seen relieved against the blue hills of Koss ; in looking upwards, a solitary.birch-cover- ed hillock of a similar origin, but larger proportions, stood strongly out against the calm waters of Loch Shin and the pur- ple peaks of the distant Ben-Hope. In the bottom of the valley, close beside my uncle's cottage, I marked several low swellings of the rock beneath, rising above the general level ; and, ranged ilong these, there w^re groupes of what seemed to be huge Doulder stones, save that they w^ere less rounded and w^ater- worn than ordinary boulders, and were, what groupes of boul- ders rarely are, all of one quality. And on examination I as- certained that some of their number, which stood up like broken obelisks, tall, and comparatively narrow of base, and all hoary with moss and lichen, w^ere actually still connected with the mass of rock below. They were the wasted upper portions of vast dikes and veins of a gray, large-grained sienite, that traverse the fundamental gneiss of the valley, and which [ found veined, in turn, by threads and seams of a white quartz, abounding in drusy cavities, thickly lined along theif sides with sprig crystals. Never had I seen such lovely crys- tals on the shores of Cromarty, or anywhere else. They were clear and transparent as the purest spring w^ater, furnished each with six sides, and sharpened atop into six facets. Bor- rowing one of Cousin George's hammers, I soon filled a little 96 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; box with these gems, which even my mother and aunt were content to admire, as what of old used, they said, to be called Bristol diamonds, and set in silver brooches and sleeve-buttons. Further, within less than a hundred yards of the cottage, 1 found a lively little stream, brown, but clear as a cairngorm of the purest water, and abounding, as I soon ascertained, in trout, lively and little like itself, and gaily speckled with jcarlet. It winded through a flat, dank meadow, never dis- urbed by the plough ; for it had been a burying-ground of old, and flat undressed stone*3 lay thick amid the rank grass. And in the lower corner, where the old turf-wall had sunk into an inconspicuous mound, there stood a mighty tree, all solitary, for its fellows had long before disappeared, and so hollow hearted in its corrupt old age, that, though it still threw out every season a mighty expanse of foliage, I was able to creep into a little chamber in its trunk, from which I could look out through circular openings where boughs once had been, and listen, when a sudden shower came sweeping down the glen, to the pattering of the rain-drops amid the leaves. The valley of the Gruids was perhaps not one of the finest or most beau- tiful of Highland valleys, but it was a very admirable place after all ; and amid its woods, and its rocks, and its tomhans, and at the side of its little trouting stream, the weeks passed delightfully away. My cousin William, the merchant, had, as I have said, many guests ; but they were all too grand to take any notice of me. There was, however, one delightful man, who was said to know a great deal about rocks and stones, that, having heard of my fine large crystals, desired to see both them and the boy who had found them ; and I was admitted to hear him talk about granites, and marbles, and metallic veins, and the gems that lie hid among the mountains in nooks and cran iiies. I am afraid I would not now deem him a very accom plished mineralogist: I remember enough of his conversation to conclude that he knew but little, and that little not very correctly ; but not before Werner or Hutton could I have bowed down wHh a profound reverence. He spoke of the OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION-. 97 marbles of Assynt, — of the petrifactions of Ilelrasdale and Brora, — of shells and plants embedded m solid rocks, and of forest trees converted into stone ; and my ears drank in knowl- edge eagerly, as those of the Queen of Sheba of old when she listened to Solomon. But all too soon did the conversation change. My cousin was mighty in Gaelic etymology, and so was the mineralogist ; and while my cousin held that the name of the Barony of Gruids was derived from the great hollow tree, the mineralogist was quite as certain that it was derived from its sienite, or, as he termed it, its granite^ which re- sembled, he remarked, from the whiteness of its feldspar, a piece of curd. Oruids^ said the one, means the place of the great tree ; Gruids^ said the other, means the place of the cur- dled stone. I do not remember how they settled the contro- versy ; but it terminated, by an easy transition, in a discussion respecting the authenticity of Ossian, — a subject on which they w^ere both perfectly agreed. There could exist no manner of doubt regarding the fact that the poems given to the world by Macpherson had been sung in the Highlands by Ossian, the son of Fingal, more than fourteen hundred years before. My cousin was a devoted member of the Highland Society ; and the Highland Society, in these days, was very much engaged in ascertaining the right cut of the philabeg, and in determin- ing the chronology and true seqr ence of events in the Ossianic age. Happiness perfect and entire is. it is said, not to be enjoyed m this sublunary state ; and even in the Gruids, where there was so much to be seen, heard, and found out, and where I was separated by more than thirty miles from my Latin, — for I had brought none of it from home with me,— this same Ossianic controversy rose like a Highland fog on my horizon, to chill and darken my hours of enjoyment. My cousin possessed O'verything that had been written on the subject, including a considerable amount of manuscript of his own composition ; and as Uncle James had inspired him with the belief that 1 could master anything to which in good earnest I set my mind, he had determined that it should be no fault of his if I did 98 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; not become mighty in the controversy regarding the authen* ticity of Ossian. This was awful. I h'ked Blair's Disserta- tion well enough, nor did I greatly quarrel with that of Karnes ; and as for Sir Walter's critique in the Edhiburgh^ on the opposite side, I thought it not only thoroughly sensible^ but, as it furnished me with arguments against the others, deeply interesting to boot. But th^re succeeded a vast )cean of dissertation, emitted by Highland gentlemen anc their friends, as the dragon in the Apocalypse emitted tht great flood which the earth swallowed up ; and, when once fairly embarked upon it I could see no shore and find no bot- tom. And so at length, though very unwillingly, — for my cousin was very kind, — I fairly mutinied and struck work, iust as he had began to propose that, after mastering the au- thenticity controversy, I should set myself to acquire Gaelic, in order that I might be able to read Ossian in the original. My cousin was not well pleased ; but I did not choose to ag- gravate the case by giving expression to the suspicion which, instead of lessening, has rather grown upon me since, that as I possessed an English copy of the poems, I had read the true Ossian in Ihe original already. With Cousin George, how- ever, who, though strong on the authenticity side, liked a joke rather better than he did Ossian, I was more free ; and to him I ventured to designate . his brother's fine Gaelic copy of the poems, with a superb head of the ancient bard affixed, as " The Poems of Ossian in Gaelic, translated from the orig- inal English by their author." George looked grim, and called me infidel, and then laughed, and said he would tell his brother. But he didn't ; and as I really liked the poems, especially " Temora^^ and some of the smaller pieces, and could read them with more real pleasure than the greater part of the Highlanders who believed in them, I did not wholly lose cred: with my cousin the merchant. He even promised to present me with a finely-bound edition of the " Elegant Extracts," in three bulky octavo volumes, whenever I should have gained my first prize at College ; but I unluckily failed to qualify myself for the gift ; and my copy of the " Extracts*' I had to OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIO]^. 99 ourclase^for myself ten years after, at a book-stall, when working in the neighborhood of Edinburgh as a journeyman mason. It is not every day one meets with so genuine a Highlander as my cousin the merchant ; and, though he failed to inspire me with all his own Ossianic faith and zeal, there were some of the little old Celtic practices which he resuscitated />ro tempore in his flither's household, that I learned to like very much. He restored the genuine Highland breakfast ; and, after hours spent in busy exploration outside, I found I could as thorough- ly admire the groaning table, with its cheese, and its trout, and its cold meat, as even the immortal Lexicographer himself. Some of the dishes, too, which he received were at least curi- ous. There was a supply of gradden-meal prepared, — i. e. grain dried in a pot over the fire, and then coarsely ground in a handmill, — which made cakes that, when they had hunger for their sauce, could be eaten ; and on more than one occa- sion I shared in a not unpalatable sort of blood-pudding, en- riched with butter, and well seasoned with pepper and salt, the main ingredient of which #as derived, through a judicious use of the lancet, from the 7/eld cattle of the farm. The prac- tice w^as an ancient, and by no means unphilosophical one. In summer and early autumn there is plenty of grass in the High- lands ; but, of old at least, there used to be very little grain in it before the beginning of October and as the cattle could, in consequence, provide themselves with a competent supply of blood from the grass, when their masters, who could not eat grass, and had little else that they could eat, were able to ac- quire very little, it was opportunely discovered that by making a division in this way of the all-essential fluid, accumulated as a common stock, the circumstances of the cattle and their owners could be in some degree equalized. With these pecu i.iarly Highland dishes there mingled others not less genuine, — now and then a salmon from the river, and a haunch of eenison from the hill-side, — which I relished better still ; and if all Highlanders live but as well in the present day as I did IOC during my stay with my aunt and cousins, they would be rather unreasonable were they greatly to complain. There were some of the other Highland restorations effected by my cousiil that pleased me much. He occasionally gather^ ed at night around the central Ha' fire a circle of the elderly men of the neighborhood, to repeat long-derived narratives of the old clan feuds of the district, and wild Fingalian legends ; and though, of course, ignorant of the language in which the stories were conveyed, by taking my seat beside Cousin George, and getting him to translate for me in an under tone, as the narratives w^ent on, I contrived to carry away with me at least as much of the clan stories and the legends as I ever after found use for. The clan stories were waxing at the time rather dim and uncertain in Sutherland. The county, through the influence of its good Earls and its godly Lords Reay, had been early converted to Protestantism ; and its people had in consequence ceased to take liberties v/ith the throats and cattle of their neighbors, about a hundred years earlier than in any other part of the Scotch Highlands. And as for the Fin- galian legends, they were, I foMid, very wild legends indeed. Some of them immortalized wonderfid hunters, w^ho had ex- cited the love of Fingal's lady, and whom her angry and jeab ous husband had sent out to hunt monstrous wild boars with poisonous bristles on their backs, — secure in this way of get- ting rid of them. And some of them embalmed the misdeeds of spiritless diminutive Fions, not very much above fifteen feet in height, who, unlike their more active companions, could not leap across the Cromarty or Dornoch Friths on their spears, and who, as was natural, were despised by the women of the tribe very much. The pieces of fine sentiment and brilliant description discovered by Macpherson seemed never to have fi:^und their way into this northern district. But, told in fluent Gaelic, in the great " Ha','' the wild legends served every ne cessary purpose equally well. The " Ha' " in the autumn nights, as the days shortened and the frosts set in, was a geniaJ placii ; and so attached was my cousin to its distinctive pria- CE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATlOlsf. ' ' '^101 ' ciple. — the fire in the midst, — as handed down from the " da^^a of other years," that in the plan of a new two-storied house for his father, which he had procured from a J^ondon archi tect, one of the nethor rooms was actually designed in the cir- cular form ; and a hearth like a millstone, placed in the centre, represented the place of the fa-e. But there was, as I re- marked to Cousin George, no corresponding central hole in the room above, through which to let up the smoke ; and 1 ques tioned whether a nicely-plastered apartment, round as a band box, with a fire in the middle, like the sun in the centre of an Orrery, would have been quite lil<:e anything ever seen in the Highlands before. The plan, however, was not destined to encounter criticism, or give trouble in the execution of it. On Sabbaths my cousin and his two brothers attended the parish church, attired in the fall Highland dress ; and three handsome, well-formed men they were ; but my aunt, though mayhap not quite without the mother's pride, did not greatly relish the exhibition ; and oftener than once I heard her say so to her sister my mother ; though she, smitten by the gallant appearance of her nephews, seemed inclined rather to take the opposite side. My uncle, on the other hand, said nothing either for or against the display. He had been a keen High lander in his younger days ; and when the inhibition against wearing tartan and the philabeg had been virtually removed, in consideration of the achievements of the " hardy and daunt less men" who, according to Chatham, conquered for England " in every quarter of the globe," he had celebrated the event in a merry-making, at which the dance was kept up from night till morning ; but though he retained, I suspect, hi a old partialities, he was now a sobered man ; and when I ven- tured to ask him, on one occasion, why he too did not get o Sunday kilt, which, by the way, he would " have set,^'' notwith- standing his years, as well as any of his sons, he merely re- plied with a quiet " No, no ; there's no fool like an old fool.' 102 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEfiS } CHAPTEK VI **When they sawe the darksome nicht, They sat them downe aud cryed." Babes in the Wood. 1 SPENT the holidays of two other autumns in this delightful Highland valley. On the second, as on the first occasion, I had accompanied my mother, specially invited ; but the third journey w as an unsanctioned undertaking of my own and a Cromarty cousin, my contemporary, to whom, as he had never travelled the way, I had to act as protector and guide. I reached my aunt's cottage without mishap or adventure of any kind ; but found, that during the twelvemonth that had just elapsed, great change had taken place in the circumstances of the household. My cousin George who had married in the interim, had gone to reside in a cottage of his own ; and I soon ascertained that my cousin William, who had been for several months resident with his father, had not nearly so many visit(TS as before ; nor did presents of salmon and haunches of veni- son come at all so often the way. Immediately after the final iiscomfiture of Napoleon, an extensive course of speculation n which he had ventured to engage had turned out so ill, that, nstead of making him a fortune, as at first seemed probable, t had landed him in the Gazette ; and he was now tiding over he difficulties of a time of settlement, six hundred miles from be scene of disaster, in the hope of being soon enabled to be- gin the world anew. He bore his losses with quiet magna- nimity ; and I learned to know and like him better during his period of eclipse than in the previous time, when summer friends had fluttered around him by scores. He was a gener- ous, warm-hearted man, who felt, with the force of an im- planted instinct not vouchsafed to all, that it is more blessed to give than to receive ; and it was doubtless a wise provision of nature, and worthy, in this point of view, the special atten- tion of moralists and philosophers, that his old associates, the 'rand gentlemen, did not now often come his way ; seeing that his inability any longer to give would have cost him, in the circumstances, great pain. I was much with my cousin George in his new dwelling It was one of the most delightful of Highland cottages, and George was happy in it, far above the average lot of humanity, with his young wife. He had dared, in opposition to the gen- eral voice of the district, to build it half-way up the slope of a beautiful Tomhan, that, waving with birch from base to summit, rose regular as a pyramid from the bottom of the val- ley, and commanded a wide view of Loch Shin on the one hand, with the moors and mountains that lie beyond ; and overlooked, on the other, with all the richer portions of the Barony of Gruids, the church and picturesque hamlet of Lairg. Half-hidden by the graceful birchen trees that sprang up thick around, with their silvery boles and light foliage, it was rather a nest than a house ; and George, emancipated, by his reading, and his residence for a time in the south, from at least the wilder beliefs of the locality, failed to suifer, as had been predicted, for his temerity ; as the " good people," who, much to their credit, had made choice of the place for themselves long before, never, to his knowledge, paid him a visit. He had brought his share of the family library with nim ; and it was a large share. He had mathematical instru ments, too, and a color-box, and the tools of his profession, in especial, large hammers fitted to break great stones ; and i was generously made free of them all, — bcoks, instruments color-box, and hammers. His cottage, too, commanded, frora 104 MY' SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; its situation, a delightful vaiiet} of most interesting objects It had all the advantages of my unc le's domicile, and a great many more. The nearer shores of Loch Shin were scarce half a mile away ; and there was a low long promontory which shot out into the lake, that was covered at that time by an ancient wood of doddered time-worn trees, and bore amid its outer solitudes, where the waters circled round its terminal apex, one of those towers of hoary eld, memorials, mayhap, of the primeval stone- period in our island, to which 'the circular erections of Glenelg and Dornadilla belong. It was formed of undressed stones of vast size, uncemented by mortar ; and through the thick walls ran winding passages, — the only covered portions of the build- ing, for the inner area had never been furnished with a roof, — ■ in which, when a sudden shower descended, the loiterer amid the ruins could find shelter. It was a fascinating place to a curious boy. Some of the old trees had become mere whitened skeletons, that stretched forth their blasted arms to the sky, and had so slight a hold of the soil, that I have overthrown them with a delightful crash, by merely running against them ; the heath rose thick beneath, and it was a source of fearful joy to know that it harbored snakes full three feet long; and though the loch itself is by no means one of our finer High- land lochs, it furnished, to at least my eye at this time, a de- lightful prospect in still October mornings, when the light gos- samer went sailing about in white filmy threads, and birch and hazel, glorified by decay, served to embroider with gold the brown hill-sides which, standing up on either hand in their long vista of more than twenty miles, form the barriers of the lake ; and when the sun, still struggling with a blue diluted haze, ell delicately on the smooth surface, or twinkled for a moment m the silvery coats of the little trout, as they sprang a few inches into the air, and then broke the water into a series of concentric rings in their descent. When I last passed the way, both the old wood and the old tower were gone ; and for the latter, which, though much a ruin, might have survived Tor ages, I found only a lorg extent of dry-stone dike, and OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 105 the wide ring formed by the old foundatic n-stones> which had proved too massive to be removed. A greatly more entire erection of the same age and style, known of old as Dunalis- cag, — which stood on the Ross-shire side of the Dornoch Prith, and within whose walls, forming, as it did, a sort of half-way stage, I used, on these Sutherlandshire journeys, to eat my piece of cake with a double relish, — I found, on last passing the way, similarly represented. Its gray venerable walls, and dark winding passages of many steps, — even the huge pear-shaped linte^ which had stretched over its little door, and which, according to tradition, a great Fingalian lady had once thrown across the Dornoch Frith from off the pomt of her spindle, — had all disappeared, and I saw instead, only a dry-stone wall. The men of the present generation do certain- ly live in a most enlightened age, — an age in which every trace of the barbarism of our early ancestors is fast disappearing ; and were we but more zealous in immortalizing the pu'blio benefactors who efface such dark memorials of the past as the tower of Dunaliscag and the promontory of Loch Shin, it would be, doubtless, an encouragement to others to speed us yet further on in the march of improvement. It seems scarce fair that the enlightened destroyers of Arthur s Oven, or of the bas-relief known as Robin of Redesdale, or of the Town-cross of Edinburgh, should enjoy all the celebrity attendant on such acts, w^hile the equally deserving iconoclasts of Dunaliscag and the tower of Loch Shin should be suffered to die without their fame. I remember spending one singularly delightful morning with Cousin George beside the ancient tower. He pointed out to me, amid the heath, several plants to which the old High landers used to attach occult virtues, — plants that disenchant ed bewitched cattle, not by their administration as medicines to the sick animals, but by bringing them in contact, as charms, with the injured milk ; and plants which were used as phil- ters either for procuring love or exciting hatred. It was, he showed me, the root of a species of orchis that was employed In making the philters. While most of the radical fibres of 106 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; the plant retain the ordinary cylindrical form, two of their number are usually found developed into starchy tubercles ; but, belonging apparently to different seasons, one of the two is of a dark color, and of such gravity that it sinks in water ; while the other is light-colored, and floats. And a powder made of the light-colored tubercle formed the main ingre- dient, said my cousin, in the love philter ; while a powder made of the dark-colored one excited, it was held, only an- tipatliy and dislike. And then George would speculate on the origin of a belief which could, as h ' said, neither be sug gest^d by reason nor tested by experience. Living, however, among a people with whom beliefs of this kind were still vital and influential, he did not wholly escape their influence ; and I saw him in one instance administer to an ailing cow a little live trout, simply because the traditions of the district assured him that a trout swallowed alive by the creature was the ody specific in the case. Some of his Highland stories were \ery curious. He communicated to me, for example, beside the broken tower, a tradition illustrative of the Celtic theory of dreaming, of which I have since often thought. Two young men had been spending the early portion of a warm summer day in exactly such a scene as that in which he communicated ' the anecdote. There v.^a6 an ancient ruin beside them, sepa- rated, however, from the mossy bank on which they sat, by a slender runnel, across which there lay, immediately over a miniature cascade, a few withered grass stalks. Overcome by the heat of the day, one of the young men fell asleep ; his companion watched drowsily beside him ; when all at once the watcher was aroused to attention by seeing a little indistinct form, scarce larger than a humble-bee, issue from the mouth of the sleeping man, and, leaping upon the moss, move down wards to the runnel, which it crossed along the withered gras: stalks, and then disappeared amid the interstices of the ruin. Alarmed b} what he saw, the watcher hastily shook his com- panion by the shoulder, and awoke him ; though, with all his haste, the little cloud-like creature, still more rapid in its move- ments, issued from the interstice into which it had gone, and, OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 107 flying across the runnel, instead of creeping along the grass stalks and over the sward, as before, it re-entered the mouth of the sleeper, just as he was in the act of awakening. " What is the matter with you ?" said the watcher, greatly alarmed. " What ails you "?" " Nothing ails me," replied the other ; " but you have robbed me of a most delightful dream. I dreamed I was walking through a fine, rich country, and came at length to the shores of a noble river ; and, just where th cl^ ar water went thundering down a precipice, there was bridge all of silver, which I crossed ; and then, entering a noble palace on the opposite side, I saw great heaps of gold and jewels ; and I was just going to load myself with treas- ure, when you rudely awoke me, and I lost all." I know not what the asserters of the clairvoyant faculty may think of the story ; but I rather believe I have occasionally seen them make use of anecdotes that did not rest on evidence a great deal more solid than the Highland legend, and that illustrated not much more clearly the philosophy of the phenomena with which they profess to deal. Of all my cousins. Cousin George was the one whose pur- suits most nearly resembled my own, and in w^hose society I most delighted to share. He did sometimes borrow a day from his work, even after his marriage ; but then, according to the poet, it was "The love he bore to science was in fault." The borrowed day was always spent in transferring to papci some architectural design, or inwx)rking out some mathemat- ical problem, or in rendering some piece of Gaelic verse into English, or some piece of English prose into Gaelic ; and as he was a steady, careful man, the appropriated day was never seriously missed. The winter, too, was all his own, for in those northern districts, masons are never employed from a little after Hallow-day, till the second, or even third month of spring, — a circumstance which I carefully noted at this tinie in its bearing on the amusements of my cousin, and which afterwards weighed not a little with me when I came to make 108 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; choice of a profession for myself. And George's winters vfc/a always ingeniously spent. He had a great command of Gaelic and a very tolerable command of English ; and so a transla- tion of Bunyan's " Visions of Heaven and Hell," which he pu])lished several years subsequent to this period, was not only well received by his country folk of Sutherland and Ross, but was said by competent judges to be really a not inadequate rendering of the meaning and spirit of the noble old tinker of Elstow. I of course could be no authority respecting the merits of a translation, the language of which I did not under- stand ; but living much amid the literature of a time when almost every volume, whether the Virgil of a Dryden or the Meditations of a Hervey, was heralded by its sets of compli- mentary verses, and having a deep interest in whatever Cousiri George undertook and performed, I addressed to him in the old style, a few introductory stanzas, which, to indulge me in the inexpressible luxury of seeing myself in print for the first time, he benevolently threw into type. They survive to re- mind me that my cousin's belief in Ossian did exert some little influence over my phraseology when I addressed myself to him, and that, with the rashness natural to immature yc»iith, { had at this time the temerity to term myself " poet.' Ves, oft I've said, as oft I've seen The men who dwell its hills among, That INlorven's land iias ever been A land of valor, worth, and song. But Ignorance, of darkness dire, Has o'er that land a mantle spread ; And all untun'd and rude the lyre That sounds beneath its gloomy shade. With muse of calm, nntiring wing, O, be it thine, my friend, to show The Celtic swain how Saxons sing Of Hell's dire gloom and Heaven's glow So shall the meed of fame be thine, The glistening bay-wreath green and gay ; Thy poet, too, though weak his line, Shall frame for thee th' .'pproving lay. OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 109 Longing for some profession in which his proper work would give exercise to the faculties which he most delighted to cul- tivate, my cousin resolved on becoming candidate for a Gaelic Society school, — a poor enough sort of office then, as now ; but which, by investing a little money in cattle, by tilling a little croft, and by now and then emitting from the press a Gaelic translation, might, he thought, be rendered sufficiently remunerative to supply the very moderate wants of himself and his little family. And so he set out for Edinburgh, amply furnished with testimonials that meant more in his case than testimonials usually mean, to stand an examination before a Committee of the Gaelic School Society. Unluckily for his success, however, instead of bringing with him his ordinary Sabbath-day suit of dark brown and blue, (the kilt had been assumed for but a few weeks, to please his brother William,) he had provided himself with a suit of tartan, as at once cheap and respectable, and appeared before the Committee, — if not in the garb, in at least the many-colored hues of his clan, — a robust, manly Highlander, apparently as well suited to enact the part of color-serjeant to the Forty-Second, as to teach children their letters. A grave member of the Society, at that time high in repute for sanctity of character, but who afterwards becoming righteous overmuch, was loosened from his charge, and straightway, spurning the ground, rose into an Irvingite angel, came at once to the conclusion that no such type of man, encased in clan-tartan, could possibly have the root of the matter in him ; and so he determined that Cousin George should be cast in the examination. But then, as it could not be alleged with any decency that my cousin was inadmissible on the score of his having too much tartan, it was agreed that he should be declared inadmissible on the score of his having too little Gaelic. And, of course, at this resul* the examinators arrived ; and George, ultimately to his advan tage, w^as cast accordingly. I still remember the astonish ment evinced by a worthy catechist of the north, — himself a Gaelic teacher, — on being told how my cousin had fared. '' George Munro not allowed to pass," he said, " for want of 110 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS: right Gaelic ! Why, he has more right Gaelic to his own self than all the Society's teachers in this corner of Scotland put together. They are the curiousest people, some of these good gentlemen of the Edinburgh Committees, that I ever heard of, they're just like our country lawyers." It would, however, be far from fair to regard this transaction, which took place, 1 ir.ay mention, so late as the year 1829, as a specimen of the actings of either civic societies or country lawyers. George's ehief examinator on the occasion was the minister of the Gaelic chapel of the place, at that time one of the Society's Committee for the year ; and, not being a remarkably scru- ])ulous man, he seems to have stretched a point or two, in com- pliance with the pious wishes and occult judgment of the Society's Secretary. But the anecdote is not without its lesson. "When devout Walter Taits set themselves ingeniously to ma- noeuvre with the purest of intentions, and for what they deem the best of purposes, — when, founding their real grounds of objection on one set of appearances, they found their ostensi- ble grounds of objection on another and entirely different set — they are always exposed to the signal danger of — getting indevout Duncan M'Caigs to assist them. Only two years from the period of my cousin's examination before the Soci- ety, his reverend examinator received at the bar of the High Court of Justiciary, in the character of a thief convicted of eleven several acts of stealing, sentence of transportation for fourteen years. I had several interesting excursions with my cousin William, We found ourselves one evening — on our way home from a mineral spring which he had discovered among the hills — in a little lonely valley, which opened transversely into that of the Gruids, and which, though its sides were mottled with green furrow-marked patches, had not at the time its single human habitation. At the upper end, however, there stood the ruins of a narrow two-storied house, with one of its gables still entire from foundation-stone to the shattered chimney-tops, but with the other gable, and the larger part of the front wall, laid prostrate along the sward. My cousin, OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. IH after bidding me remark the completeness of the solitude, and that the eye could not command from the site of the ruin a single spot where man had ever dwelt, told me that it had been the scene of the strict seclusion, amounting almost to imprisonment, about eighty years before, of a lady of high birth, over whom, in early youth, there had settled a sad cloud of infamy. She had borne a child to one of the menials of her father's house, which, with the assistance of her paramour, she had murdered ; and being too high for the law^ to reach ii these northern parts, at a time when the hereditary jurisdic- tion still existed entire, and her father w^as the sole magistrate, possessed of the power of life and death in the district, she was sent by her family to wear out life in this lonely retreat, in which she remained secluded from the world for more than half a century. * And then, long after the abolition of the local jurisdictions, and when her father and brother, with the entire generation that knew of her crime, had passed away, she was permitted to take up her abode in one of the sea-port towns of the north, where she was still remembered at this time as a crazy old lady, invariably silent and sullen, that used to be seen in the twilight flitting about the more retired lanes and closes, like an unhappy ghost. The story, as told me in that solitary valley, just as the sun was sinking over the hill be- yond, powerfully impressed my fancy. Crabbe would have delighted to tell it ; and I now relate it, as it lies fast wedged in my memory, mainly for the peculiar light which it casts on the times of the hereditary jurisdictions. It forms an example of one of the judicial banishments of an age that used, in ordinary cases, to save itself all sorts of trouble of the kind, by hanging its victims. I may add, that I saw a good deal of the neighborhood at this time in the company of my cousin, and gleaned, from my visits to shieling and cottage, most of my conceptions of the state of the Northern Highlands, ere the clearance system had depopulated the interior of the country, and precipitated its poverty-stricken population upon the coasts. There w^as, however, one of my excursions with Cousin W ill iam, that turned out rather unfortunately. The river Shin 112 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; has its bold salmon-leap, which even yet, after several mm. dred pounds worth of gunpowder have been expended in slop- ing its angle of ascent, to facilitate the passage of the fish, is a fine picturesque object, but which at this time, when it pre- sented all its original abruptness, was a finer object still. Though distant about three miles from my uncle's cottage, w^e could distinctly hear its roarings from beside his door, when October nights wxre frosty and still ; and as we had been told many strange stories regarding it, — stories about bold fishers who had threaded their dangerous w^ay between the over- hanging rock and the water, and who, striking outwards, had speared salmon through the foam of the cataract as they leaped, — stories, too, of skilful sportsmen, who, taking their stand in the thick wood beyond, had shot the rising animals, as one shoots a bird flying, — both my Cromarty cousin and my self were extremely desirous to visit the scene of such feats anc marvels ; and Cousin William obligingly agreed to act as our guide and instructor by the way. He did look some- what askance at our naked feet ; and we heard him remark, in an under tone, to his mother, that when he and his brothers were boys, she never suffered them to visit her Cromarty relar tions unshod ; but neither Cousin Walter nor myself had the magnanimity to say, that our mothers had also taken care to see us shod ; but that, deeming it lighter and cooler to w^alk barefoot, the good women had no sooner turned their backs than we both agreed to fling our shoes into a corner, and set out on our journey w^ithout them. The walk to the salmon- leap was a thoroughly delightful one. We passed through the woc^'^ al Achanie, famous for their nuts ; startled, as we went, a herd of roe-deer ; and found the leap itself far exceed- ing all anticipation. The Shin becomes savagely wild in its lower reaches. Rugged precipices of gneiss, with scattered bushes fast anchored in the crevices, overhang the stream, which boils in many a dark pool, and foams over many a steep rapid; and immediately beneath, where it threw itself head- long, at this time, over the leap, — for it now^ merely rushes in snow adown a steep slope, — there was a cauldron, so awfully OB, THE SI 3RY OF MY EDUCATION-. Il5 dark and profound, that, according to the accounts of the dis trict, it had no bottom ; and so vexed was it by a frightfuj whirlpool, that no one ever fliirly caught in its eddies had suc- ceeded, it was said, in regaining the shore. We saw, as we stood amidst the scraggy trees of an overhanging wood, the sal- mon leaping up by scores, most of them, however, to fall back again into the pool, — for only a very few stray fish that at- tempted the cataract at its edges seemed to succeed in forcing their upward w^ay; we saw, too, on a shelf of the precipitous but wooded bank, the rude hut, formed of undressed logs, where a solitary watcher used to take his stand, to protect them from the spear and fowling-piece of the poacher, and which, in stormy nights, when the cry of the kelpie mingled with the roar of the flood, must have been a sublime lodge in the wilderness, in which a poet might have delighted to dwell. I was excited by the scene ; and, when heedlessly leaping from a tall lichened stone into the long heath below, my right foot came so heavily in contact with a sharp-edged fragment of rock concealed in the moss, that I almost screamed aloud with pain. I, however, suppressed the shriek, and, sitting dowm and set- ting my teeth close, bore the pang, until it gradually moder ated, and my foot, to the ankle, seeined as if almost divested of feeling. In our return, I halted as I w^alked, and lagged considerably behind my companions ; and during the whole evening the injured foot seemed as if dead, save that it glowed V' ith an intense heat. I was, however, at ease enough to write a sublime piece of blank verse on the cataract ; and, proud of my production, I attempted reading it to Cousin William. But William had taken lessons in recitation under the great Mr. Thelwall, politician and elocutionist ; and deeming it prop- er to set me right in all the words which I mispronounced,— three out of every four at least, and not unfrequently the fourth word also, — the reading of the piece proved greatly stiffer and Blower work than the writing of it ; and, somewhat to my mor- tification, my cousin declined giving me any definite judgment on its merits, even when I had done. He insisted, however, on the sigiiai" advantages of reading well. He had an ac 114 qiiaintance, he said, a poet, who had taken lessons under Mr Thelwall, and who, though his verses, when he published, nnet with no great success, was so indebted to his admirable elocu^ tion, as to be invariably successful when he read them to hia friends. Next morning my injured foot was stiff and sore ; and, after a few days of suffering, it suppurated and discharged great quantities of blood and matter. It was, however, fast getting well again, when, tired of inaction, and stirred up by my cousin Walter, who wearied sadly of the Highlands, I set out with him, contrary to all advice, on my homeward journey, and, for the first six or eight miles, got on tolerably well. My cousin, a stout, active lad, carried the bag of Highland luxu- ries — cheese, and butter, and a full peck of nuts — with which we had been laden by my aunt ; and, by w^ay of'^indemnity for taking both my share of the burden and his own, he demand • ed of me some of my long extempore stories, which, shortly after leaving my aunt's cottage, I accordingly began. My stories, when I had Cousin Walter for my companion, were usually co-extensive with the journey to be performed : they became ten, fifteen, or twenty miles long, agreeably to the measure of the road, and the determination of the mile-stones ; and what was at present required was a story of about thirty miles in length, whose one end would touch the Barony of Gruids, and the other the Cromarty Ferry. At the end, how- ever, of the first six or eight miles, my story broke suddenly down, and my foot, after becoming very painful, began to bleed. The day, too, had grown raw and unpleasant, and after twelve o'clock there came on a thick wetting drizzle. 1 limped on silently in the rear, leavmg at every few paces a blotch of blood upon the road, until, in the parish of Edderton, v\'e both remembered that there w^as a short cut through the hills, which t^vo of our older cousins had taken during the previous year, when on a similar journey ; and as Walter deemed himself equal to anything which his elder cousins could perform, and as I was exceedingly desirous to get home as soon as possible, and by the shortest way, we both struck 115 up the hill-side, and soon found ourselves in a dreary waste, without trace of human habitation. Walter, however, pushed on bravely and in the right direc- tion : and, though my head was now becoming light, and my sight dim, I succeeded in struggling after him, until, just as the night was falling, we reached a heathy ridge which com- mands the northern sea-board of the Cromarty Frith, and saw the cultivated country and the sands of Nigg lying only a few miles below. The sands are dangerous at certain hours of the tide, and accidents frequently happen in the fords ; but then there could, we thought, be no fear of us ; for though Walter could not swim, I could ; and as I was to lead the way, he of course would be safe, by simply avoiding the places where I lost footing. The night fell rather thick than dark, for there was a moon overhead, though it could not be seen through the cloud ; but though Walter steered well, the down- ward way was exceedingly rough and broken, and we had wandered from the path. I retain a faint but painful recollec- tion of a scraggy moor, and of dark patches of planting, through which I had to grope onwards, stumbling as I went ; and then that I began to feel as if I were merely dreaming, and that the dream was a very horrible one, from which I could not awaken. And finally, on reaching a little cleared spot on the edge of the cultivated country, I dropped down as sudden- ly as if struck by a bullet, and, after an ineffectual attempt to rise, fell fast asleep. Walter was much frightened ; but he succeeded in carrying me to a little rick of dried grass which stood up in the middle of the clearing ; and after covering me well up with the grass, he laid himself down beside me Anxiety, however, kept him awake ; and he was frightened^ as he lay, to hear the sounds of psalm-singing, in the old Gae- lic style coming apparently from a neighboring clump of ^ ood. Walter believed in the fairies ; and, though psalmody was not one of the reputed accomplishments of the " good people" in the low country, he did not know but that in the Highlands the case might be different. Some considerable time after the singing had ceased, there was a slow, heavy step 116 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEHS ; heard approaching the rick ; an exclamation in Gaelic follow ed ; and then a ro igh, hard hand grasped Walter by the nak- ed heel. He started up, and found himself confronted by an old, gray-headed man, the inmate of a cottage which, hidden in the neighboring clump, had escaped his notice. The old man, in the belief that we were gipsies, was at first disposed to be angry at the liberty we had taken with his hay- rick ; but Walter's simple story mollified him at once, and he expressed deep regret that " poor boys, who had met with an ac- cident," should have laid them down in such a night, under the open sky, and a house so near. " It was putting disgrace," he said, " on a Christian land." I was assisted into his cottage, whose only other inmate, an aged woman, the old Highlander's wife, received us with great kindness and sympathy ; and on Walter's declaring our names and lineage, the hospitable re- grets and regards of both host and hostess waxed stronger and louder still. They knew our maternal grandfather and grand- mother, and remembered old Donald Roy ; and when my cousin named my father, there was a strongly expressed burst of sorrow and commiseration, that the son of a man whom they had seen so " well to do in the world" should be in circum- stances so deplorably destitute. I was too ill to take much note of what passed. I only remember, that of the food which they placed before me I could partake of only a few spoonfuls of milk ; and that the old woman, as she washed my feet, fell a crying over me. I was, however, so greatly recruited by a night's rest in their best bed, as to be fit in the morning to be removed, in the old man's rung-cart, to the house of a relation in the parish of Nigg, from which, after a second day's rest, I was conveyed in another cart to the Cromarty Ferry. And thus terminated the last of my boyish visits to the Highlands. Both my grandfather and grandmother had come of long- lived races, and death did not often knock at the family door. But the time when the latter " should cross the river," though she w^as some six or eight years younger than her husband, ciime first ; and so, according to Bunyan, she " called for her children, and told them that her hour had come." She was OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 117 a quiet, retiring woman, and thougli intimately a^jquainted with her Bible, not in the least fitted to make a female Pro- fessor of Theology : she could live her religion better than talk it ; but she now earnestly recommended to her family the great interests once more ; and, as its various members gathered round her bed, she besought one of her daughters to read to her, in their hearing, that eighth chapter of the Romans, which declares that there is " now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit." She repeated, in a sinking voice, the concluding verses, — " For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor an- gels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." And, resting in confidence on the hope which the passage so powerfully expresses, she slept her last sleep, in simple trust that all would be well with her in the morning of the general awakening. I retain her wedding ring, the gift of Donald Roy. It is a sorely wasted fragment worn through on one of the sides, for she had toiled long and hard in her household, and the breach in the circlet, with its. general thinness, testify to the fact ; but its gold is still bright and pure ; and, though not much of a relic-monger, I would hesitate to exchange it for the Holy Coat of Treves, or for wagon-loads of the wood of the " true cross." My grandmother's term of life had exceeded by several twelvemonths the full threescore and ten ; but when, only a few years after. Death next visited the circle, it was on its youngest members that his hand was laid. A deadly fever swept over the place, and my two sisters, — the one in her tenth, the other in her twelfth year, — sank under it within a few days of each other. Jean, the elder, who resided with mj? nicies, was a pretty little girl, of fine intellect, and a great reader ; Catherine, the younger, was lively and affectionate, and a general favorite ; and their loss plunged the family in deep gloom. My uncles made little show of grief, but they fell strongly : my mother for weeks and months wept for hex 118 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; children like Rachel of old, and refused to be comforted, be cause they were not ; but my grandfather, now in his eighty fifth year, seemed to be rendered wholly bankrupt in heart by their loss. As is perhaps not uncommon in such cases, his warmer affections strode across the generation of gi own-up men and women, — his sons and daughters, — and luxuriated among the children of their descendants. The boys, his grand- sons, were too wild for him ; but the two little girls — gentle and affectionate— had seized on his whole heart ; and now that they were gone, it seemed as if he had nothing in the world left to care for. He had been, up till this time, notwithstand- ing his great age, a hale and active man. In 1803, when France threatened invasion, he was, though on the verge of seventy, one of the first men of the place to apply for arms as a vol- unteer ; but he now drooped and gradually sank, and longed for the rest of the grave. " It is God's will," I heard him say about this time to a neighbor who congratulated him on his long term of life and unbroken health, — " It is God's will, but not my desire." And in rather more than a twelvemonth after the death of my sisters, he was seized by almost his only illness, — for, for nearly seventy years he had not been con- fined to bed for a single day, — and was carried off in less than a week. During the last few days, the fever under which he sank mounted to his brain ; and he talked in unbroken nar- rative of the events of his past life. He began with his ear- liest recollections ; described the battle of Culloden as he had witnessed it from the Hill of Cromarty, and the appearance of Duke William and the royal army as seen during a subse- quent visit to Inverness ; ran over the after events of his. career, — his marriage, his interviews with Donald Roy, his business transactions with neighboring proprietors, long dead at the time ; and finally, after reaching, in his oral history, his term of middle life, he struck off into another tract, and began lay inw down, with singular coherency, the statements of doctrine in a theological work of the old school, which he had been re- cently perusing. And finally, his mind clearing as his end approached, he died in good hope. It is not uninteresting to OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 119 100 If back on two such generations of Scotchmen as those tc which my uncles and my grandfather belonged. The}- differed very considerably in some respects. My grandfather, with r«ost >f his contemporaries of the same class, had a good deal of the Tory in his composition. He stood by George III. in the early policy of his reign, and by his adviser Lord Bute ; reprobated Wilkes and Junius ; and gravely questioned wheth* er Washington and his coadjutors, the American Republicans were other than bold rebels. My uncles, on the contrary, were staunch Whigs, who looked upon Washington as perhaps the best and greatest man of modern times, — stood firm by the policy of Fox, as opposed to that of Pitt, — and held that the war with France, which immediately succeeded the First Rev olution, was, however thoroughly it changed its character afterwards, one of unjustifiable aggression. But however greatly my uncles and grandfather may have differed on these points, they were equally honest men. The rising generation can perhaps form no very adequate conception of the? number and singular interest of the links which serve to connect the recollections of a man who has seen his fiftieth birth-day, with what to them must appear a remote past. I have seen at least two men who fought at Cul- loden, — one on the side of the King, the other on that of the Prince, — and, with these, not a few who witnessed the battle from a distance. I have conversed with an aged woman that had conversed, in turn, with an aged man who had attained to mature manhood when the persecutions of Charles and James were at their height, and remembered the general re- gret excited by the death of Renwick. My eldest maternal aunt — the mother of Cousin George — remembered old John Feddes, — turned of ninety at the time ; and John's buccaneer- ing expedition could not have dated later than the year 1GS7, I have known many who remembered the abolition of the hered- itary jurisdictions ; and have listened to stories of executions which took place on the gallows-hills of burghs and sherifi^ doms, and of witch-burnings perpetrated on tow n Links and baronial Laws. And I have felt a strange interest in these 120 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS^ glimpses of a past so unlike the present, when thus pieser tea to the mind as personal reminiscences, or as well-attested tradi* tions, removed from the original witnesses by but a single stage. All, for instance, which I have yet read of witch-burnings has failed to impress me so strongly as the recollections of an old lady who in 1722 was carried in her nurse's arms, — for she was almost an infant at the time, — to witness a witch-execution in the neighborhood of Dernoch, — the last w^hich took place in kotland. The lady well remembered the awe-struck yet ex- cited crowd th*" lighting of the fire, and the miserable appear- ance of the poor fatuous creature whom it was kindled to con- sume, and who seemed to be so little aware of her situation, that she held out her thin shrivelled hands to warm them at the blaze. But w^hat most impressed the narrator, — for it must have been a frightful incident in a sad spectacle, — was the circumstance that, when the charred remains of the vic- tim were sputtering and boiling amid the intense heat of the flames, a cross gust of wind suddenly blew the smoke athwart the spectators, and she felt in her attendant's arms as if in danger of being suffocated by the horrible stench. I have heard described, too, by a man whose father had witnessed the scene, an execution which took place, after a brief and inade- quate trial, on the burgh-gallows of Tain. The supposed cul- prit, a Strathcarron Highlander, had been found lurking about the place, noting, as was supposed, where the burghers kept their cattle, and was hung as a spy ; but they all, after the execution, came to deem him innocent, from the circumstance that, when his dead body was dangling in the wind, a white pigeon had come flying the way, and, as it passed over, hall- encircled the gibbet. One of the tw^o Culloden soldiers whom I remember was an old forester, who lived in a picturesque cottage among the woods of the Cromarty Hill ; and in his last illness, my uncles, whom I had always leave to accompany, used not unfrequent- ly to visit him. He had lived at the time his full century, and -i. few months more ; and I still vividly remember the large gaunt face that used to stare from the bed as they entered, £lnd OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 121 tin nuge, horny hand. He had been settled in life, previous to the year 1745, as the head gardener of a northern proprietor, and little dreamed of being engaged in war ; but the rebellion broke out ; and as his master, a staunch Whig, had volunteered to serve in behalf of his principles in the royal army, his gar- dener, a " mighty man of his hands," went with him. As his memory for the later events of his life was gone at this time, its preceding forty years seemed a blank, from which not a single recollection could be drawn ; but well did he remem- ber the battle, and more vividly still, the succeeding atrocities of the troops of Cumberland. He had accompanied the army, after its victory at Culloden, to the camp at Fort-Augustus, and there witnessed scenes of cruelty and spoliation of which the recollection, after the lapse of seventy years, and in his ex- treme old age, had still power enough to set his Scotch blood aboil. While scores of cottages were flaming in the distance, and blood not unfrequcntly hissing on the embers, the men and women of the army used to be engaged in racing in sacks, or upon Highland ponies ; and when the ponies were in request, the women, who must have sat for their portraits in Hogarth's " March to Finchley," took their seats astride like the men. Gold circulated and liquor flowed in abundance; in a few weeks there were about twenty thousand head of cattle brought in by marauding parties of the soldiery from the crushed and impoverished Highlanders ; and groupes of drovers from York shire and the south of Scotland, — coarse vulgar men, — used to come every day to share in the spoil, by making purchases at greatly less than half-price. My grandfather's recollections of Culloden were merely those of an observant boy of fourteen, who had witnessed the battle from a distance. The day, he has told me, was drizzly and thick ; and on reaching the brow of the Hill of Cromarty where he found many of his townsfolk already assembled, he could scarce see the opposite land. But the fog gradually cleared away ; first one hill-top came into view, and then an- other ; till at length the long range of coast, from the open- ing of the great Caledonian valley to the promontory of Burgh- 122 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; head, was dimly visible through the haze. A little after noon there suddenly rose a round white cloud from the Moor of Culloden. and then a second round white cloud beside it. And then the two clouds mingled together, and went rolling slantways on the wind towards the west ; and he could hear the rattle of the smaller fire-arms mingling with the roar of the artillery. And then, in what seemed an exceedingly brief space of time, the cloud dissipated and disappeared, the boom of the greatei guns ceased, and a sharp intermittent patter of musketry passed on towards Inverness. But the battle was presented to the imagination, in these old personal narratives, hi many a diverse form. I have been told by an ancient woman, who, on the day of the fight, was engaged in tending some sheep on a solitary common near Munlochy, separated from the Moor of Culloden by the Frith, and screened by a lofty hill, that she sat listening in terror to the boom of the cannon ; but that she was even still more scared by the con- tinuous howling of her dog, who sat upright on his haunches all the time the firing lasted, with his neck stretched out to- wards the battle, and " looking as if he saw a spirit.'' Such are some of the recollections which link the memories of a man who has lived his half-century to those of the preceding age, and which serve to remind him how one generation of men after another break and disappear on the shores of the eternal world, as wave after wave breaks in foam upon the beach, when storms a 'e rising, and the ground-swell sets in beavilj from *ihe sea. OK. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 123 CHAPTER VII. ** Whoso elfln prowess scaled the orchard vi all.'* hooKfts. Some of the wealthier tradesmen of the town, dissatisfied <^ith the small progress which their boys were making under the parish schoolmaster, clubbed together and got a schoolmaster of their own ; but, though a rather clever young man, he proved an unsteady one, and regular in his irregularities, got diurnally drunk, on receiving the instalments of his salary at term-days, as long as his money lasted. Getting rid of him, they pro- cured another, — a licentiate of the Church, — who for some time promised well. He seemed steady and thoughtful, and withal a painstaking teacher; but coming in contact with some zealous Baptists, they succeeded in conjuring up such a cloud of doubt around him regarding the propriety of infant baptism, that both his bodily and mental health became affect- ed by his perplexities, and he had to resign his charge. And then, after a pause, during which the boys enjoyed a delight- fully long vacation, they got yet a third schoolmaster, also a licentiate, and a person of a high, if not very consistent relig- ious profession, who was always getting into pecuniary diffi- culties, and always courting, though with but little success, wealthy ladies who, according to the poet, had ''acres of charms." To the subscription school I was transferred, at the instance of Uncle James, who remained quite sure, notwith- 124 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEilS ; standing the experience of the past, that I was destined to be a scholar. And, invariably fortunate in my opportunities of amnsenrient, the transference took place only a few weeks ere the better schoolmaster, losing health and heart in a labyrinth of perplexity, resigned his charge. I had little muie than time enough to look about me on the new forms, and to re- new, on a firmer foundation than ever, my friendship with my old associate of the cave, — who had been for the two previou.-^ years an inmate of the subscription school, and was now less under maternal control than before, — when on came the long vacation ; and for four iiappy months I had nothing to do. My amusements had undergone very little change: I was even fonder of the shores and woods than ever, and bet'ier ac- quainted with the rocks and caves. A very considerable change, however, had taken place in the amusements of the school-fellows my contemporaries, who were now from two to three years older than when I had been associated with them in the parish school. Hy-spy had lost its charms ; nor was there much of its old interest for them in French and Eng- lish ; whereas my rock excursions they came to regard as very interesting indeed. With the exception of my friend of the cave, they cared little about rocks or stones ; but they all liked brambles, and sloes, and craws-apples^ tolerably well, and took great delight in assisting me to kindle fires in the caverns of the old coast line, at which we used to broil shell- fish and crabs, taken among the crags and boulders of the ebb below, and roast potatoes, transferred from the fields of the hill above. There was one cave, an especial favorite with us, in which our fires used to blaze day after day for weeks to- gether. It is deeply hollowed in the base of a steep ivy- mantled precipice of granitic gneiss, a full hundred feet in height ; and bears on its smoothed sides and roof, and along its uneven bottom, — fretted into pot-like cavities, with large round pebbles in them, — unequivocal evidence that the ex- cavating agent to which it owed its existence had been the wild surf of this exposed shore. But for more than two thou- simd years wave nad never reached it : the last general eleva- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION 125 tion of the land had raised it beyond the reach of the highest stream-tides ; and when my gang and I took possession of its twilight reo.esses, its stony sides were crusted with mosses and liverworts ; and a crop of pale, attenuated, sickly-looking weeds, on which the sun had never looked in his strength, sprang thickly up over its floor. In the remote past it had been used as a sort of garner and thrashing-place by a farmer of the parish, named Marcus, who had succeeded in rearing crops of oere and o^ts on two sloping plots at the foot of the cliffs in Its immediate neighborhood ; and it was known, from this circumstance, to my uncles and the older inhabitants of the town, as Marcus' Cave. My companions, however, had been chiefly drawn to it by a much more recent association. A poor Highland pensioner, — a sorely dilapidated relic of the I'Vench- American War, who had fought under General Wolfe in his day, — had taken a great fancy to the cave, and would fain have made it his home. He was ill at ease in his flimily ; — his wife was a termagant, and his daughter disreputable ; and, dv-^sirous to quit their society altogether, and live as a her mit among the rocks, he had made application to the gentle- man who tenanted the farm above, to be permitted to fit up the cave for himself as a dwelling. So bad was his English, however, that the gentleman failed to understand him ; and his request was, as he believed, rejected, while it was in reaUty only not understood. Among the younger folk, the cave came to be known, from the incident, as " Rory Shingles' Cave ;" and my companions were delighted to believe that they were living in it as Rory would have lived had his petition been granted. In the wild half-savage life which we led, we did contrive to provide for ourselves remarkably well. The rocky shores supplied us with limpets, periwinkles, and crabs, and now and then a lump-fish ; the rugged slopes under the pre- cipices, with hips, sloes, and brambles ; the broken fragments of wreck along the beach, and the wood above, furnished abun- dance of fuel ; and as there were fields not half a mile away, I fear the more solid part of our diet consisted often of potatoes which we had not planted, and of peas and beans which we 126 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; had not sown. One of our number contrived to bring away a pot unobserved from his home ; another succeeded in provid- ing us with a pitcher ; there was a good spring not two hun- dred yards from the cave mouth, which supplied us with water ; and, thus possessed of not merely all that nature requires, but of a good deal more, we contrived to fare sumptuously every day. It has been often remarked, that civilized man, when placed in circumstances at all favorable, soon learns to as. sume the savage. I shall not say that my companions or my- self were particularly civilized in our previous state ; but no- thing could be more certain, than that during our long vaca- tion we became very happy, and tolerably perfect savages. The class which we attended was of a kind not opened in any of our accredited schools, and it might be difficult to procure even testimonials in its behalf, easily procurable as these usually are ; and yet, there were some of its lessons which might be conned with some little advantage, by one desirous of cultivating the noble sentiment of self-reliance, or the all- important habit of self-help. At the time, however, they appeared quite pointless enough ; and the moral, as in the case of the continental apologue of Reynard the Fox, seemed al- ways omitted. Our parties in these excursions used at times to swell out tO' ten or twelve, — ^at times to contract to two or three ; but what they gained in quantity they always lost in quality, and became mischievious with the addition of every new member, in greatly more than the arithmetical ratio. When most in • nocent they consisted of only a brace of members, — a warm- hearted, intelligent boy from the south of Scotland, who board- ed with two elderly ladies of the place, and attended the sub- scription school ; and the acknowledged leader of the band, who, belonging to the permanent irreduciable staff of the es. tablishment, was never off duty. We used to be very happy, and not altogether irrational, in these little skeleton parties. My new friend was a gentle, tasteful boy, fond of poetry, and a writer of soft, simple verses in the old-fashioned pastoral vein, which he never showed to any one save myself; and we OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 127 leariied to love one another all the more, from the circum- stance that I was of a somewhat bold, self-relying tempera ment, and he of a clinging, timid one. Two of the stanzas of a little pastoral, which he addressed to me about a twelve- month after this time, when permanently quitting the north country for Edinburgh, still remain fixed in my memory ; and I must submit them to the reader, both as adequately repre- sentative of the many others, their fellows, w^hich have been lost, and of that juvenile poetry in general which " is written," according to Sir Walter Scott, " rather from the recollection of what has pleased the author in others, than what has been suggested by his own imagination." " To you my poor sheep, I resign My colly, my crook, and my horn : To leave you, indeed, I repine, But I must away with the morn. New scenes shall evolve on my sight, The world and its follies be new ; But, ah ! can such scenes of delight Ere arise, as 1 witnessed with you?'* Timid as he naturally was, he soon learned to abide in my company terrors which most of my bolder companions shrank from encountering. I was fond of lingering in the caves until long after nightfall, especially in those seasons when the moon at fuul, or but a few days in her wane, rose out of the sea as the evening wore on, to light up the wild precipices of that solitary shore, and to render practicable our ascending path to the Hill above. And Finlay was almost the only one of my band who dared to encounter with me the terrors of the dark- ness. Our fire has often startled the benighted boatman as he came rowing round some rocky promontory, and saw the red glare streaming seaward from the cavern mouth, and partially lighting up the angry tumbling of the surf beyond ; and ex- cise-cutters have oflener than once altered their track in middle Frith, and come bearing towards the coast, to determine whether the wild rocks of Marcus were not becoming a haunt of smugglers. Immediately beyond the granite gneiss of the Hill there is 128 MY SCHOOLS AND ^SCHOOLMASTERS ; a subaqueous deposit of the Lias formation, never yet ex« plored by geolog-ist, because never yet laid bare by :he ebb ; though every heavier storm from the sea tells of its existence, by tossing ashore fragments of its dark bituminous shale. 1 soon ascertained that the shale is so largely charged with in- flammable matter as to burn with a strong flame, as if steeped in tar or oil, and that I could repeat with it the common ex- periment of producing gas by means of a tobacco-pipe luted with clay. And, having read in Shakspeare of a fuel termed " sea coal," and unaware at the time that the poet merely meant coal brought to London by sea, I inferred that the in- flammable shale cast up from the depths of the Frith by the waves could not be other than the veritable " sea-coal" which figured in the reminiscences of Dame Quickly ; and so, as- sisted by Finlay, who shared in the interest which I felt in the substance, as at once classical and an original discovery, I used to collect it in large quantities, and convert it into smoky and troubled fires, that ever filled our cavern with a horrible stench, and scented all the shores. Though unaware of the fiict at the time, it owed its inflammability, not to vegetable, but to ani- mal substance ; the tar which used to boil in it to the heat, like resin in a faggot of moss-fir, was as strange a mixture as ever yet bubbled in witches' cauldron, — blood of pterodactyl e and grease of ichthyosaur, — eye of belemnite and hood of nau- tilis ; and we learned to delight in its very smell, all oppress- ive as that was, as something wild, strange, and inexplicable. Once or twice I seemed on the eve of a discovery ; in splitting the masses, I occasionally saw what appeared to be fragments of shells embedded in its substance ; and at least once I laid open a mysterious-looking scroll or volute, existing on the dark surface as a cream-colored film ; but though these oij^anisma aised a temporary wonder, it was not until a later period that I learned to comprehend the'r true import, as the half-effaced but still decipherable charact ^rs of a marvellous record of the gray, dream-encircled past. With tne docile Finley as my companion, and left to work oat my own will unchallenged, I was rarely or never mischie- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 12& / vous. On the occasions, how ever, in which my band swelled out to ten or a dozen, I often experienced the ordinary evils of leadership, as known in all gangs and parties, civil and eccle- siastical ; and was sometinaes led, in consequence, to engage in enterprises which my better judgment condemned. I fain wish that among the other " Confessions" with w^hich our literature is charged, we had the bona fide "Confessions of a Leader," with examples of the cases in which, though he seems to over- bear, he is in reality overborne, and ac^^ually follows, though he appears to lead. Honest Sir William Wallace, though seven feet high, and a hero, was at once candid and humbJe enough to confess to the canons of Hexham, that, his " sol diers being evil-disposed men," whom he could neither "jus- tify nor punish," he was able to protect women and Church- men only so long as they " abided in his sight." And, of course, other leaders, less tall and less heroic, must not unfre- quently find themselves, had they but Wallace'tj; magnanimity to confess the fact, in circumstances much akin to those of Wallace. When bee-masters get hold of queen bees, the^ are able, by controlling the movements of these natural leaders of hives, to control the movements of the hives themselves ; and not unfrequently in Churches and States do there exist inconspicuous bee-masters, who, by influencing or controlling the leader-bees, in reality influence and control the move- ments of the entire body, politic or ecclesiastical, over which these natural monarchs seem to preside. But truce with apol- ogy. Partly in the character of a leader, — partly being my self led, — I succeeded about this time in getting one of my larger parties into a tolerably serious scrape. We passed every day, on our way to the cave, a fine large orchard, attached to the manor-house of the Cromarty estate ; and in ascending an adjacent hill over which our path lay, and which commands a bird's-eye view of the trim-kept walks and veil-laden trees, there used not unfrequently to arise wild speculations among us regarding the possibility and propriety of getting a supply of the fruit, to serve as desserts to our meals of shell-fish and potatoes. Weeks elapsed, however, and autumn was drawing 180 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; on to its close, ere we could quite make up our minds regard- ing the adventure, when at length I agreed to lead ; and, after arranging the plan of the expedition, we broke into the or- chard under the cloud of night, and carried away with us whole pocketfuls of apples. They were all intolerably bad, — sour, hard, baking-apples ; for we had delayed the enterprise until the better fruit had been pulled ; but though they set our teeth on edge, and we flung most of them into the sea, we had " snatched," in the foray, what Gray well terms " a fear- ful joy," and had some thought of repeating it, merely for the sake of the excitement induced and the risk encountered, when out came the astounding fact, that one of our number had " peached," and, in the character of king's evidence, betrayed his companions. The factor of the Cromarty property had an orphan nephew, who formed at times a member of our gang, and who had taken a willing part in the orchard foray. He had also en- gaged, however, in a second enterprise of a similar kind wholly on his own account, of which we knew nothing. An out- nouse pertaining to the dwelling in which he lodged, though itself situated outside the orchard, was attached to another house inside the walls, which was employed by the gardener as a store-place for his apples ; and finding an unsuspected crevice in the partition which divided the two buildings, some- what resembling that through which Pyramus and Thisbe made love of old in the city of Babylon, our comrade, straight- way availing himself of so fair an opening, fell a-courting the gardener's apples. Sharpening the end of a long stick, he began harpooning, through the hole, the apple heap below ; and though the hole was greatly too small for admitting the finer and larger specimens, and they, in consequence, fell back disengaged from the harpoon, in the attempt to land them, h( succeeded in getting a good many of the smaller ones. Old John Clark the gardener, — far advanced in life at the time, and seeing too imperfectly to discover the crevice which open- ed high amid the obscurity of the loft, — was in a perfect maze regarding the evil influence that was destroying his apples. OR, THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 131 The harpooned individuals lay scattered over the floor Ly scores ; but the agent that had dispersed and perforated them remained for weeks together an inscrutable mystery to John. At length, however, there came a luckless morning, in which mr quondam companion lost hold, when busy at work, of the pointed stick ; and when John next entered his store-house, the guilty harpoon lay stretched across the harpooned apples. The discovery was followed up ; the culprit detected ; and, on being closeted with his uncle the factor, he communicated no only the details of his own special adventure, but the particu lars of ours also. And early next day there was a message sent us by a safe and secret messenger, to the effect that we would be all put in prison in the course of the week. We were terribly frightened ; so much so, that the strong point of our position — the double-dyed guilt of the factor's nephew — failed to occur to any of us ; and we looked for only instant incarceration. I still remember the intense feeling of shame I used to experience every time I crossed my mother's door for th<^. street, — the agonizing, all-engrossing belief that every one was looking at and pointing me out,-^and the ter- ror, when in my uncles', — akin to that of the culprit who hears from his box the footsteps of the returning jury, — that, having learned of my offence, they were preparing to denounce me as a disgrace to an honest family, on which, in the memory of man, no stain had rested before. The discipline was emi- nently wholesome, and I never forgot it. It did seem some- what strange, however, that no one appeared to know any- thing about our misdemeanor : the factor kept our secret re- markably well ; but we inferred he was doing so in order to pounce upon us all the more effectually ; and, holding a hasty council in the cave, we resolved that, quitting our homes fur a few weeks, we should live among the rocks till the storm that seemed rising should have blown by. Marcus' Cave was too accessible and too well known ; but my knowledge of the locality enabled me to recommend to my lads two other caves in which I thought we might be safe. The one opened in a thicket of furze, some forty feet above 7 132 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; the shore ; and, though large enough within to contain from fifteen to twenty men, it presented outside much the appear- ance of a fox-earth, and was not known to haif-a-dozen people in the country. It was, however, damp and dark ; and we found that we could not venture on lighting a fire in it with out danger of suffocation. It was pronounced excellent, how ever, as a temporary place of concealment, were the search foi as to become ve.-j' hot. The other cavern was wide and open ; out it was a wild, ghostly-looking place, scarcely once vi-sited from one twelvemonth's end to another ; its floor was green with mould, and its ridgy walls and roof bristled over with slim pale stalactites, which looked like the pointed tags that roughen a dead dress. It was certain, too, that it was haunt- ed. Marks of a cloven foot might be seen freshly impressed on its floor, which had been produced either by a stray goat, or by something worse; and the few boys to whom its existence and character were known used to speak of it under their breath as '' the Devil's Cave." My lads did at first look round them, as we entered, with an awe-struck and disconsolate expression ; but falling busily to work among the cliffs, we collected large quantities of withered grass and fern for bed- ding, and, selecting the drier and less exposed portions of the floor, soon piled up for ourselves a row of little lairs, formed in a sort of halfway style between that of the wild beast and the gipsy, on which it would have been possible enough to sleep. We selected, too, a place for our fire, gathered a little heap of fuel, and secreted in a recess, for ready use, our Mar- cus' Cave pot and pitcher, and the lethal weapons of the gang, w^hich consisted of an old bayonet so corroded with rust tliat it somewhat resembled a three-edged saw, and an old iiorseman's pistol tied fast to the stock by cobbler's ends, and with lock and ramrod awanting. Evening surprised us in the middle of our preparations; and as the shadows fell dark and thick, my lads began to look most uncomfortably around them. At length they fairly struck work ; there was no use, they said, for being in the Devil's Cave so late, — no use, indeed, foi being in ^t at all, until we were made sure the factor did ac- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 133 tually intend to imprison us ; and, after delivering themselves to this effect, they fairly bolted, leaving Finlay and myself to bring up the rear at our leisure. My well-laid plan was, in short, found unworkable, from the inferior quality of my ma- terials. I returned home with a heavy heart, somewhat grieved that I had not confided my scheme to only Finlay, who could, 1 ascertained, do braver things, with all his timidity, than the bcldfT boys, our occasional associates. And yet, when, in passing homewards through the dark lonely woods of the IliJl, I bethought me of the still deeper solitude and gloom of the haunted cave far below, and thought further, that at that very moment the mysterious being with the cloven feet might be traversing its silent floor, I felt my blood run cold, and at once leaped to the conclusion that, save for the disgrace, a cave with an evil spirit in it could be not a great deal better than a prison. Of the prison, however, we heard no more ; though I never forgot the grim but precious lesson read me by the factor's threat ; and from that time till the present, — save now and then, by inadvertently admitting into my news- paper a paragraph written in too terse a style by some good man in the provinces, against some very bad man his neigh- bor, — I have not been fairly within wind of the law. I would, however, seriously advise such of my young friends as may cast a curious eye over these pages, to avoid taking any such lesson as mine at first-hand. One half-hour of the mental anguish which I at this time experienced, when I thought of my mother and uncles, and the infamy of a prison, would have vastly more than counterbalanced all that could have been enjoyed from banqueting on apples, even had they been those of the Hesperides or of Eden, instead of being, what they were in this case, green masses of harsh acid, alike for- midable to teeth and stomach. I must add, in justice to my friend of the Doocot Cave, that, though an occasional visitor at Marcus, he had prudently avoided getting into this scrape. Our long vacation came at length to an end, by the ap pointment of a teacher to the subscription school ; but the ar- ransement was not the most profitable possible for the pupils. 184 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; It was an ominous circumstance, that we learned in a fe^v days to designate the new master by a nickname, and that the namo stuck, — a misfortune which almost never befalls the truly su- perior man. He had, however, a certain dash of cleverness about him; and observing that I was of potent influence among my school-fellows, he set himself to determine the grounds on which my authority rested. Copy and arithmetic books In schools in which there was liberty used in those an- cient times to be charged with curious revelations. In the parish school, for instance, which excelled, as I have said, every other school in the world in its knowledge of barks and jcarvels, it was not uncommon to find a book which, when opened at the right end, presented only copy-lines or arithmetical questions, that when opened at the wrong one, presented only ships and boats. And there were cases on record in which, on the grand annual examination-day that heralded the vacation, the worthy parish minister, by beginning to turn over the leaves of some exhibited book at the reverse end, found him- self engaged, when expecting only the questions of Cocker, or the ship-lines of Butterworth, amid whole fleets of smacks, frigates, and brigantines. My new master, professionally ac- quainted with this secret property of arithmetic and copy- books, laid hold of mine, and, bringing them to his desk, found them charged with very extraordinary revelations in- deed. The blank spaces were occupied with deplorably scrab- bled couplets and stanzas, blent with occasional remarks in rude prose, that dealt chiefly with natural phenomena. One note, for instance, which the master took the trouble of de- ciphering, referred to the supposed /ac^, familiar as a matter of sensation to boys located on the sea-coast, that during the bathing season the water is warmer in windy days, when the wavBs break high, than during dead calms ; and accounted for it (I fear, not very philosophically) on the hypothesis that tho *' waves, by slapping against each other, engender heat, as heat may be engendered by clapping the hands." The master read on, evidently with much difficulty, and apparently with sjousiderable scepticism : he inferred that I had been borrow- OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIGIT. 135 ing, not inventing ; though where such prose and such verse could have been borrowed, and, in especial, such grammar and such spelling, even cleverer men than he might w^ell have despaired of ever finding out. And in order to test my pow- ers, he proposed furnishing me wnth a theme on which to write. " Let us see," he said, " let us see : the dancing-school ball comes on here next week ; — ^bring me a poem on the Jancitig-school ball." The subject did not promise a great deal ; but, setting myself to w^ork in the evening, I produced half-a-dozen stanzas on the ball, which were received as good^ in evidence that I actually could rhyme ; and for some weeks after I was rather a favorite with the new master. I had, however, ere now become a wild insubordinate boy, and the only school in which I could properly be taught was that world-wide school which awaited me, in which Toil and Hardship are the severe but noble teachers, I got into sad scrapes. Quarrelling, on one occasion, with a boy of my own standing, we exchanged blows across the form ; and when called up for trial and punishment, the fault was found to at- tach so equally to both sides, that the same number ofpalmies, well laid on, were awarded to each. I bore mine, however, like a North American Indian, whereas my antagonist began to how 1 and cry ; and I could not resist the temptation of say- ing to him, in a whisper that unluckily reached the ear of the master, " Ye big blubbering blockhead, take that for a drub- bing from me." I had of course to receive a few palmies ad- ditional for the speech ; but then, " who oared for that f The master, however, " cared " considerably more for the offence than I did for the punishment. And in a subsequent quarrel with another boy, — a stout and somewhat desperate mulatto, — I got into a worse scrape still, of which he thought still worse. The mulatto, in his battles, which were many, had a trick, when in danger of being over-matched, of drawing his knife ; and in our afiair — the necessities of the fight seeming to require it — he drew his knife upon me. To his horror and astonishment, however, instead of running off*, I immediately drew mine, and, quick as lightning, stabbed him in the thigh. 186 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; He roared out in fright and pain, and, though more alarmed than hurt, never after drew knife upon a combatant. But the value of the lesson which I gave w^as, like most other very valuable things, inadequately appreciated ; and it merely procured for me the character of being a dangerous boy. I had certainly reached a dangerous stage ; but it was mainly myself that was in jeopardy. There is a transition time in which the strength and independence of the latent man begin to mingle with the \ wilfulness and indiscretion of the mere boy, which is more perilous than any other, and in which many more dow^nward careers of recklessness and folly begin, that end in wreck and ruin, than in all the other years of life which intervene be- tween childhood and old age. The growing lad should be wisely and tenderly dealt with at this critical stage. The se- verity that would fain compel the implicit submission yielded at an earlier period, would probably succeed, if his character was a strong one, in ensuring but his ruin. It is at this tran- sition stage that boys run off to sea from their parents and masters, or, when tall enough, enlist in the army for soldiers. The strictly orthodox parent, if more severe than wise, suc- ceeds occasionally in driving, during this crisis, his son into Popery, or infidelity ; and the sternly moral one, in landing his in utter profligacy. But, leniently and judiciously dealt w^ith, the dangerous period passes ; in a few years at most, — in some instances in even a few months, — the sobriety inci- dental to a further development of character ensues, and the wild boy settles down into a rational young man. It so chanced, however, that in what proved the closing scene in my term of school attendance, I was rather unfor- tunate than guilty. The class to which I now belonged read \ an English lesson every afternoon, and had its rounds of j spelling; and in these last I acquitted myself but ill ; partly \ from the circumstance that I spelt only indiflerently, but still more from the further circumstance, that, retaining strongly iixod in my memorj the broad Scotch pronunciation acquired at the dames' school I had to carry on in my mind the double process of at onoe spelling the required word, and of trans OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 131 lating the oK sounds of the letters of which it was composed into the modern ones. Nor had I been taught to break the words into syllables ; and so, when required one evening to spell the word " awfully'' with much deliberation, — for I had to translate, as I went on, the letters a-w and w, — I ^pelt it word for w^ord, without break or pause, as a-w-f-u-1. '^ No," said the master; "a-w, a^^, f-u-1, az^i^Z; spell again." This seemed preposterous spelling. It w^as sticking in an a, as thought, into the middle of the word, where, I was sure, no had a right to be ; and so I spelt it as at first. The master recompensed my supposed contumacy with a sharp cut athwart the ears with his taws ; and again demanding the spelling of the word, I yet again spelt it as at first. But on receiving a second cut, I refused to spell it any more ; and, determined on overcoming my obstinacy, he laid hold of me, and attempted throwing me down. • As wrestling had, however, been one of our favorite Marcus' Cave exercises, and as few lads of my inches wrestled better than I, the master, though a tall and tolerably robust fellow, found the feat considerably more difficult than he could have supposed. We swayed from side to side of the school-room, now^ backw^ards, now forwards, and for a full minute it seemed to be rather a moot point on w^hich side the victory w^as to incline. At length, however, I was tripped over a form ; and as the master had to deal with me, not as master usually deals W'ith pupil, but as one combatant deals with another, whom he has to beat into submission, I was mauled in a way that filled me with aches and bruises for a full month thereafter. I greatly fear that, had I met the fellow on a lonely road five years subsequent to our encounter, wnen I had become strong enough to raise breast-hign the " great lifting stone of the Dropping Cave," he would have caught as sound a thrashing as he ever gave to little boy or girl in his life ; but all I could do at this time was to take down my cap from off the pin, when the aflfair had ended, and maich straight out of school. And thus terminated my school education. Before night I had avenged myself, in a copy of satiric verses, entitled " The Pedagogue," w^hich — as they had J.38 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTLES ; some little cleverness in them, regarded as the work of a boj and as the known eccentricities of their subject gave me large scope — occasioned a good deal of merriment in the place ; and of the verses a fair copy, written out by Finlay, was transmitted through the Post-Office to the pedagogue himself. But the only notice he ever took of them was incidentally, in a short speech made to the copyist a few days after. " I sin, Sir," he said. — " I see you still associate with that fellow Miller ; perhaps he will make you a poet !" " I had thought, Sir," said Finlay, very quietly, in reply, " that poets were born, — not made." As a specimen of the rhyme of this period, and as in some degree a set-off against my drubbing, which remains till this day an unsettled score, I submit my pasquinade to the reader. THE PEDAGOGUE. With solemn mien and pious air, S — k — r attends each call of grace ; Loud eloquence bedecks his prayer, And formal sanctity his face. All good ; but turn the other side, And see the smirking beau displayed ; The pompous strut, exalted air, And all that marks the fop, is thore. In character we seldom see Traits so diverse meet and agree : Can the affected mincing trip, Exalted brow, and pride-pressed lip, In strange incongruous union meet, With all that stamps the hypocrite ? We see they do : but let us scan Those secret springs which move the man. Though now he wields the knotty birch, His better hope lies in the Church : For this the sable robe he wears, For this in pious guise appears. But then, the weak will cannot hide Th' inherent vanity and pride ; And thus he acts the coxcomb's part, As dearer to his poor vain heart : Nature's born fop ! a saint by art 11 OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION?". 139 But, hold, he wears no fopling's dress ; Each seam, each thread the eye can trace. His garb all o'er ; — the t.ye, though true, Time-blanch 'd, displays a fainter hue: Dress forms the fbpling's better part;— Reconcile this and prove your art. '* Chill penury represses pride ;" — A maxim by the wise denied ; For 'tis alone tame plodding souls, Whose spirits bend when it controls,- Whose lives run on in one dull same, Plain honesty their highest aim. With him it merely can repress — Tailor o'er-cowed — the pomp of dress; His spirit, unrepressed, can soar High as e'er folly rose before; Can fly pale study, leam'd debate, And ape proud fashion's idle state ; Yet fails in that engaging grace That lights the practis'd courtier's face. His weak affecled air we mark, And, smiling, view the would-be spark ; Complete in every act and feature, — An ill-bred, silly, awkward creature. My school-days fairly over, a life of toil frowned full in front of me ; but never yet was there half-grown lad less? willing to take up the man and lay down the boy. My set of companions was fast breaking up ; — my friend of the Doocot Cave was on the eve of proceeding to an academy in a neigh, boring town ; Finlay had received a call from the south, tc finish his education in a seminary on the banks of the Tweed ; one Marcus' Cave lad was preparing to go to sea ; another to learn a trade ; a third to enter a shop : the time of dis- persal was too evidently at hand ; and, taking counsel one day together, we resolved on constructing something — we at first knew not what — that might serve as a monument to re- call to us in after years the memory of our early pastimes and enjoyments. The common school-book story of the Persian shepherd, who, when raised by his sovereign to high place in Ihe empire, derived his chief pleasure from contemplating, in a secret apartment the pipe, crook, and rude habiliments of 140 his happier days, suggeb.ed to me that we also should have our secret apartment, in which to store up, for future contem- plation, our bayonet and pistol, pot and pitcher ; and I rec- ommended that we should set ourselves to dig a subterranean chamber for that purpose among the woods of the hill, accessi- ble, like the mysterious vaults of our story-books, by a trap door. The proposal was favorably received ; and, selecting a solitary spot among the trees as a proper site, and procur- ing spade and mattock, we began to dig. Soon passing through the thin crust of vegetable mould, we found the red boulder clay beneath exceedingly stiff and hard ; but day after day saw us perseveringly at work ; and we suc- ceeded in digging a huge square pit, about six feet in length and breadth, and fully seven feet deep. Fixing four upright posts in the corners, we lined our apartment with slender spars nailed closely together ; and we had prepared for giving it a massive roof of beams formed of fallen trees, and strong enough to bear a layer of earth and turf from a foot to a foot and a half in depth, with a little opening for the trap-door ; when we found, one morning, on pressing onwards to the scene of our labors, that we were doggedly tracked by a horde of boys considerably more numerous than our own party. Their curiosity had been excited, like that of the Princess Nekayah in Rasselas, by the tools which we carried, and by " seeing that we had directed our walk every day to the same point ;" and in vain, by running and doubling, by scolding and remon- strating, did we now attempt shaking them off. I saw that, were we to provoke a general melee^ we could scarce expect to come off victors ; but deeming myself fully a match for their stoutest boy, I stepped cut and challenged him to come forward and fight me. He hesitated, looked foolish, and re- fused, but said, he would readily fight with any of my party except myself I immediately named my friend of the Doocot Cave, who leaped out with a bound to meet him ; but the boy, as I had anticipated, refused to fight him also ; and, observing the proper effect produced, I ordered my lads to march for- ward ; and from an upper slope of the hill we had the satisfac- OK, THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 143 tion of seeing that our pursuers, after lingering for a little while on the spot on which \>e had. left them, turned homewards, fairly cowed, and pursued us no more. But, alas ! on reach- ing our secret chamber, we ascertained, by marks all too un equivocal, that it was to be secret no longer. Some rude hand had torn down the wooden lining, and cut two of the posts half through with a hatchet ; and on returning disconsolately to thp. town, we ascertained that Johnstone, the forester, had just been there before us, declaring that some atrociously wicked persons — for whose apprehension a proclamation was to be instantly issued — had contrived a diabolical trap, which he had just discovered, for maiming the cattle of the gentle- man, his employer, who farmed the Hill. Johnstone was an old Forty -Second man, who had follow^ed Wellington over the larger part of the Peninsula ; but though he had witnessed the storming and sack of St. Sebastian, and a great many other bad things, nothing had he ever seen on the Peninsula, or anywhere else, he said, half so mischievous as the cattle-trap. We, of course, kept our own secret ; and as we all returned under the cloud of night, and with heavy hearts filled up our excavation level with the soil, the threatened proclamation was never is- sued. Johnstone, however, who had been watching my mo tions for a considerable time before, and whom, as he was a formidable fellow, very unlike any of the other foresters, I had been sedulously watchi'ng in turn, — had no hesitation in declar- ing that I, and I only, could be the designer of the cattle-trap. I had acquainted myself in books, he said, with the mode of entrapping by pitfalls wild beasts in the forests abroad ; and my trap for the Colonel's cattle was, he was certain, a result of my book-acquired knowledge. I was one day lounging in front of my mother's dwelling, when up came Johnstone to address me. As the evidenvje regarding the excavation had totally broken down, I was aware of no special offence at the time that could have secur- ed for me such a piece of attention, and inferred that the old soldier was laboring under some mistake ; but Johnstone's address soon evinced that he was not in the least mistaken. 142 MY SCHOOLS A^^D SCHOOLMASTERS; He wished to be acquainted with me, he said. " It was all noi .sense for us to be bothering one another, when we had no cause of quarrel." He used occasionally to eke out his pen- sion, and his scanty allowance as forester, by catching a basket of fish for himself from off the rocks of the Hill ; and he had just discovered a projecting rock at the foot of a tall precipice, which would prove, he w^as sure, one of the best fishing plat- forms in the Frith. But then, in the existing state, it was wholly inaccessible. He was, however, of opinion that it was possible to lay it open by carrying a path adown the shelving face of the precipice. He had seen Wellington address him- self to quite as desperate-looking matters in the Peninsula ; and were I but to assist him, he was sure, he said, we could construct between us the necessary path. The undertaking was one wholly according to my own heart ; and next morn- ing Johnstone and I were hard at work on the giddy brow of the precipice. It was topped by a thick bed of boulder clay, itself — such was the steepness of the slope — almost a pre- lipice ; but a series of deeply-cut steps led us easily adown the bed of clay ; and then a sloping shelf, which, with much labor, we deepened and flattened, conducted us not unsafely some five-and-twenty or thirty feet along the face of the precipice proper. A second series of steps, painfulfy scooped out of the living rock, and which passed within a few yards of a range of herons' nests perched on a hitherto inaccessible plat- form, brought us down some five-and-twenty or thirty feet more ; but then we arrived at a sheer descent of about twenty feet, at which Johnstone looked rather blank, though, on my suggesting a ladder, he took heart again, and cutting two slim taper trees in the wood above, we flung them over the preci- pice into the sea ; and then fishing them up with a world of toil and trouble, we squared and bore them upwards, and, cut ting tenons for them in the hard gneiss, we placed them against the rock front, and nailed over them a line of steps. The precipice beneath sloped easily on to the fishing rock, and so a few steps more completed our path. 1 never saw a man more delighted than Johnstone. As being lighter and more active OR, THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 113 than he, — for, though not greatly advanced in life, he was con. siderably debilitated by severe wounds, — I had to take some of the more perilous parts of the work on myself. I had cut the tenons for the ladder with a rope round my waist, and had recovered the trees flung into the sea by some adroit swim- ming ; and the old soldier became thoroughly impressed with the conviction that my proper sphere was the army. I was already five feet three, he said ; in little more than a twelve- month I should be five feet seven ; and were I then but to en- list, and to keep from the " drop drink," — a thing which he never could do, — 1 would, he was certain, rise to be a serjeant. In brief, such were the terms on which Johnstone and I learn ed to live ever after, that, had I constructed a score of traps for the ColoQcl's cattle, I believe he would have winked at them all. Poor fellow ! he got into difficulties a good many years after, and, on the accession of the Whigs to power, mortgaged his pension, and emigrated to Canada. Deeming the terms hard, however, as he well might, he first wrote a letter to his old commander, the Duke of Wellington, — I hold- ing the pen for him, — in which, in the hope that their strin- gency might be relaxed in his behalf, he stated both his ser- vices and his case. And promptly did the Duke reply, in an essentially kind holograph epistle, in which, after stating that he had no influence at the time with the Ministers of the Crown, and no means of getting a relaxation of their terms in behalf of any one, he " earnestly recommended William Johnstone, first^ not to seek a provision for himself in Cana- da, unless he were able-bodied, and fit to provide for himself in circumstances of extreme hardship ; and, second^ on no ac- count to sell or mortgage his pension." But the advice was not taken ; — Johnstone did emigrate to Canada, and did mort* gage his pension ; and I fear — though I failed to trace his al* ter-history — that he suflTered in consequence. 1'44 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEBa CHAPTER yili. " Now, surely, thought I, there's enou* To fill life's dusty way ; And who will miss a poet's feet, Or wonder where he stray ! So to the woods and wastes I'll go, And I will build an ozier bower; And sweetly there to mo shall flow The meditative hour." Hknry Kirke White, FiNLAY was away ; my friend of the Doocot Cave was away ; my other companions were all scattered abroad ; my mother, after a long widowhood of more than eleven years, had enter- ed into a second marriage ; and I found myself standing face to face with a life of labor and restraint. The prospect ap- peared dreary in the extreme. The necessity of ever toiling from morning to night, and from one week's end to another, and all for a little coarse food and homely raipient, seemed to be a dire one ; and fain would I have avoided it. But there was no escape, and so I determined on being a mason. I re- membered my Cousin'^George's long winter holidays, and ho'w delightfully he employed them ; and, by making choice of Cousin George's profession, I trusted to find, like him, largo compensation, in the amusements of one half the year, for the toils of the other half Labor shall not wield over me, I said, a rod entirely black, but a rod like one of Jacob's peeled wands, chequered white and black alternately. 145 I, however, did look, even at this time, notwithstanding the antecedents of a sadly mis-spent boyhood, to something higher .han mere amusement ; and, daring to believe that literature, and, mayhap, natural science, were, after all, my proper voca- tions, I resolved that much of n y leisure time should be given to careful observation, and the study of our best English au 'hors. Both my uncles, especially James, were sorely vexed by my determination to be a mason ; they had expected to see 's\Q rising in some one of the learned professions ; yet here was * going to be a mere operative mechanic, like one of them- selves ! I spent with them a serious hour, in which they urged that, instead of entering as a mason's apprentice, 1 .should devote myself anew to my education. Though the labor of their hands formed their only wealth, they would as- sist me, they said, in getting through college ; nay, if I pre- ferred it, I might meanwhile come and live with them ; all they asked in return of me was, that I should give myself as sedu lously to my lessons as, in the event of my becoming a mason, I would have to give myself to my trade. I demurred. The lads of my acquaintance who were preparing for college had an eye, I said, to some profession ; they were qualifying them- selves to be lawyers, or medical men, or, in much larger part, were studying for the Church ; whereas I had no wish and no peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor ; and as for the Church, that was too serious a direction to look in for one's bread, unless one could honestly regard one's self as called to the Church's proper work ; and I could not. There, said my uncles, you are perfectly right : better be a poor mason, — bet- ter be anything honest, however humble, — than an uncalled minister. How very strong the hold taken of the mind in some cases by hereditary convictions of which the ordinar} conduct shows little apparent trace ! I had for the last few years been a wild boy, — not without my share of respect for Donald Roy's religion, but possessed of none of Donald's se- riousness ; and yet here was his belief in this special matter lying so strongly entrenched in the recesses of my mind, that no consideration whatever could have induced me to outrage 146 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; It by obtruding my unworthiness on the Church. Though, mayhap, overstrained in many of its older forms, I fain wish the conviction, in at least some of its better modifications, were more general now. It might be well for all the Protest- ant Churches practically to hold, with Uncl^^s Jim^^s and Sandy, that true ministers cannot be manufactured Out of ordinary men — men ordinary in talent and character — in a given num- ber of years, and then passed by the imposition of hands into the sacred office ; but that, on the contrary, ministers, when real, are all special creations of the grace of God. I may add, that in a belief of this kind, deeply implanted in the. pop- ular mind of Scotland, the strength of our recent Church con- troversy mainly lay. Slowly and unwillingly my uncles at length consented that I should make trial of a life of manual labor. The husband of one of my maternal aunts was a mason, who, contracting for jobs on a small scale, usually kept an apprentice or two, and employ- ed a few journeymen. With him I agreed to serve for the term of three years ; and, getting a suit of strong moleskin clothes, and a pair of heavy hob-nailed shoes, I waited only for the breaking up of the winter frosts, to begin w^ork in the Cro- marty quarries, — jobbing masters in the north of Scotland us- ually combining the profession Of the quarrier with that of the mason. In the beautiful poetic fragment from which I have chosen my motto, poor Kirk White fondly indulges in the dream of a hermit life, — quiet, meditative, solitary, spent far away in deep woods, or amid wide-spread w^astes, where the very sounds that arose would be but the faint echoes of a lone- liness in which man was not, — a " voice of the desert, never dumb." The dream is that of a certain brief period of life be- tween boyhood and comparatively mature youth ; and we find more traces of it in the poetry of Kirke White than in that of almost any other poet ; simply because he wrote at the age in which it is natural to indulge in it, and because, being less an imitator and more an original than most juvenile poets, he gave it as a portion of the internal experience from which he drew But it is a dream not restricted to young poets ; the OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 147 ignorant, half-grown lad, who learns for the first time " about the great rich gentleman who advertises for a hermit," and wishers that he had but the necessary qualifications of beard to offer nimself as a candidate, indulges in it also ; and I, too, in this transition stage, cherished it with all the strength of a passion. It seems to spring out of a latent timidity in the yet undeveloped mind, that shrinks from grappling with the stern realities of life, amid the crowd and press of a busy world, and o'ershaded by the formidable competition of men already practised in the struggle. I have still before me the picture of the " lodge in some vast wilderness," to which I could have faui retired, to lead all alone a life quieter, but quite as wild, as my Marcus' Cave one ; and the snugness and comfort of the humble interior of my hermitage, during some boisterous night of winter, when the gusty wind would be howling around the roof, and the rain beating on the casement, but when in the calm within, the cheerful flame would roar in the chimney, and glance bright on raftei and wall, still impress me as if the recollection was in reality that of a scene witnessed, not of a mere vision conjured up by the fancy. But it was all the idle dream of a truant lad, w^ho would fain now, as on former oc- casions, have avoided going to school, — that best and noblest of all schools, save the Christian one, in which honest Labor is the teacher, — in which the ability of being useful is impart- ed, and the spirit of independence communicated, and the hab- it of persevering effort acquired ; and which is more moral than the schools in which only philosophy is taught, and great- ly more happy than the schools which profess to teach only the art of enjoyment. Noble, upright, self-relying Toil ! Who that knows thy solid worth and value would be ashamed of thy hard hands, and thy soiled vestments, and thy obscure tasks, — thy humble cottage, and hard couch, and homely fare ! Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast ; and this fallen world would be as certainly a moral as a natural wil- derness. But I little t*hought of the excellence of thy character And of thy teachings, whei^ , with a heavy heart, I set out abo'Jt 148 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; this time, on a morning of early spring, to take my first lessot from thee in a sandstone quarry. I have elsewhere recorded the history of my few first dyys of toil ; but it is possible for two histories of the same period and ind v^idual to be at once true to fact, and unlike each other in the s:5enes which they describe and the events which they record. The quarry in which I commenced my life of iaboi was, as I have said, a sandstone one, and exhibited in the sec tion of the furze-covered bank which it presented, a bar of deep-red stone beneath, and a bar of pale-red clay above. Both deposits belonged to formations equally known at the time to the geologist. The deep-red stone formed part of an upper member of the Lower Old Red Sandstone ; the pale- red clay, which was much roughened by rounded pebbles, and much cracked and fissured by the recent frosts, w^as a bed of the boulder clay. Save for the wholesome restraint that con- fined me for day after day to the spot, I would perhaps have paid little attention to either. Mineralogy in its first rudi- ments had early awakened my curiosity, just as it never fails to awaken, with its gems, and its metals, and its hard glitter- ing rocks, of which tools may be made, the curiosity of infant tribes and nations. But in unsightly masses of mechanical origin, whether sandstone or clay, I could take no interest ; just as infant societies take no interest in such masses, and so fail to know anything of geology ; and it was not until I had learned to detect among the ancient sandstone strata of this quarry exactly the same phenomena as those which I used to witness in my walks with Uncle Sandy in the ebb, that I was fairly excited to examine and inquire. It w^as the necessity which made me a quarrier that taught me to be a geologist. Further, I soon found that there was much to be enjoyed in a life of labor. A taste for the beauties of natural scenery is of itself a never-failing spring of delight ; and there was scarce a day in which I wrought in the open air, during this period, m which I did not experience its soothing and exhilarating in^ fluence. Well has it been said by the poet Keats, that " a thing of beauty is a joy forever." I owed much to the upper 149 reaches of Cromarty Frith, as seen, when we sat down tc our mid -day meal, from the gorge of the quarry, with their numerous rippling currents, that in the calm resembled stream lets winding through a meadow, and their distant gray pro- montories tipped with villages that brightened in the sunshine ; while, pale in the background, the mighty hills, still streaked with snow, rose high over bay and promontory, and gave dig- nty and power to the scene. Still, however, with all my enjoyments, I had to suffer some of the evils of excessive toil. Though now seventeen, I Avas still seven inches short of my ultimate stature ; and my frame^ cast more at the time in the mould of my mother than in that, of the robust sailor, whose " back," according to the descrip- tion of one of his comrades, " no one had ever put to the ground," was slim and loosely knit ; and I used to suffer much from wandering pains in the joints, and an oppressive feeling about the chest, as if crushed by some great weight. I be- came subject, too, to frequent fits of extreme depression of spirits, which took almost the form of a walking sleep, — re suits, I believe, of excessive fatigue,— ^and during which my ab sence of mind was so extreme, that I lacked the ability of protecting myself against accident, in cases the most simple and ordinary. Besides other injuries, I lost at different times during the first few months of my apprenticeship, when in these fits of partial somnambulism, no fewer than seven of my finger-nails. But as 1 gathered strength, my spirits became more equable ; and not until many years^ after, when my health failed for a time under over-exertion of another kind, had I any renewed experience of the fits of walliing sleep. ]\Iy master, an elderly man at the time, — for, as he used not unfrequently to tell his apprentices, he had been born on the same day and year as George the Fourth, and so we could celebrate, if we pleased, both holidays together, — ^^was a per- son of ploading, persevering industry, who wrought rather longei hours than was quite agreeable to one who wished to have some time to himself ; but he was, in the main, a good master. As a builder, he made conscience of every stone he 150 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; laid. It was remarked in the place, that the walls built b;y Uncle David never bulged or fell ; and no apprentice or jour- neyman of his was permitted, on any plea, to make " slight work." Though by no means a bold or daring man, he was, from sheer abstraction, when engrossed in his employment, more thoroughly insensible to personal danger than almosi any other individual I ever knew. On one occasion, when an overloaded boat, in which he was carrying stones from the quarry to the neighboring town, was overtaken by a series of rippling seas, and suddenly sank, leaving him standing on onr of the thwarts submerged to the throat, he merely said to hi{. partner, on seeing his favorite snuff-mull go floating past " Od, Andro man, just rax out your han' and tak in my snufF box." On another, when a huge mass of the boulder cla^ came toppling down upon us in the quarry with such momen tum, that it bent a massive iron lever like a bow, and crushed into minute fragments a strong wheelbarrow, Uncle David; who, older and less active than any of the others, had been entangled in the formidable debris, relieved all our minds by remarking, as we rushed back, expecting to find him crushed as flat as a botanical preparation, " Od, I draid, Andro man, we have lost our good barrow." He was at first of opinion that I would do him little credit as a workman ; in my ab- sent fits I was well-nigh as impervious to instruction as he him- self was insensible to danger ; and I labored under the further disadvantage of knowing a little, as an amateur, of both hew- ing and building, from the circumstance, that when the under- takings of my schoolboy days involved, as they sometimes did, the erection of a house, I used always to be selected as the mason of the party. And all that I had learned on these oc- casions I had now to unlearn. In the course of a few months, however, I did unlearn it all ; and then, acquiring in less than a fortnight a very considerable mastery over the mallet, — for mine was one of the not very unfrequent cases in which the mechanical knack seems, after many an abortive attempt, to be fraught up at once, — I astonished Uncle David one morn- ing by setting myself to compete with him, and by hewing OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 151 nearly two feet c f pavement for his one. And on this occa sion my aunt, his wife, who had been no stranger to his pre- vious complaints, was informed that her " stupid nephew" was to turn out " a grand workman after all." A life of toil has, however, its peculiar temptations. When overwrought.^ and in my depressed moods, I learned to regard the ardent spirits of the dram-shop as high luxuries ; they gave lightness and energy to both body and mind, and substi- tuted for a state of dulness and gloom, one of exhilaration and enjoyment. Usquebhae was simply happiness doled out by the glass, and sold by the gill. The drinking usages of the profession in which I labored were at this time many ; w^hen a foundation was laid, the workmen were treated to drink ; they were treated to drink when the walls were levelled for laying the joists ; they were treated to drink when the build- ing was finished ; they were treated to drink when an appren- tice joined the squad ; treated to drink when his " apron was washed ;" treated to drink when his " time was out ;" and oc- casionally they learned to treat one another to drink. In lay- ing down the foundation-stone of one of the larger houses built this year by Uncle David and his partner, the workmen had a royal " founding-pint," and two whole glasses of the whiskey came to my share. A full-grown man would not have deemed a gill of usquebhae an overdose, but it was consider- ably too much for me ; and when the party broke up, and 1 got home to my books, I found, as I opened the pages of a favor it/3 author, the letters dancing before my eyes, and that [ could no longer master the sense. I have the volume at pres- ent before me, — a small edition of the Essays of Bacon, a good deal worn at the corners by the friction of the pocket ; for of Bacon I never tired. The condition into which I had brought myself was, I felt, one of degradation. I had sunk, Dy my own act, for the time, to a lower level of intelligence than that on which it was my privilege to be placed ; and though the state could have been no very favorable one fox forming a resolution, I in that hour determined that I should never again sacrifice my capacity for intellectual enjovr-^ent tc 152 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; a drinking usage ; and, with God's help, I was enabled to hold by the determination. Though never a strict abstainer, I have wrought as an operative mason for whole twelvemonths together, in which I did not consume half-a-dozen glasses of ardent spirits, or partake of half-a-dozen draughts of ferment- ed liquor. But I do see, in looking back on this my first year of labor, a dangerous point, at which, in the attempt to escape from the sense of depression and fatigue, the craving appetite of the confirmed tippler might have been formed. The ordinary, long-wrought quarries of my native town have been opened in the old coast-line along the southern shores of the Cromarty Frith, and they contain no organisms. The beds occasionally display their water-rippled surfaces, and oc- casionally their areas of ancient desiccation, in which the poly- gonal partings still remain as when they had cracked in the drying, untold ages before. But the rock contains neither fish nor shell ; and the mere mechanical processes of which it gave evidence, though they served to raise strange questions in my mind, failed to interest me so deeply as the wonderful organ- isms of other creations would have done. We soon quitted these quarries, however, as they proved more than usually dif- ficult in the working at this time, for a quarry situated on the northern shore of the Moray Frith, which had been recently opened in an inferior member of the Lower Old Red Sand- stone, and which, as I subsequently ascertained, does in some of its beds contain fossils. It was, however, not to the quarry itself that my first-found organisms belonged. There lies in the Frith beyond, an outlier of the Lias, which, like the Mar- cus' Cave one referred to in a preceding chapter, strews the beach with its fragments after every storm from the sea ; and n a nodular mass of blueish-gray limestone derived from thi? ubaqueous bed I laid open my first-found ammonite. It wa? a beautiful specimen, graceful in its curves as those of the Ionic volute, and greatly more delicate in its sculpturing ; and its bright cream-colored tint, dimly burnished by the pris- matic hues of the original pearl, contrasted exquisitely with the dark gray )f the matrix which enclosed it. I broke open many OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 153 a similar nodule during our stay at this delightful quarry and there were few of them in which I did not detect some or- jranism of the ancient world, — scales of fishes, groupes of shells, ^ bits of decayed wood, and fragments of fern. At the dinner hour I used to show my new-found specimens to the work- men ; but though they always took the trouble of looking at them, and wondered at times how the shells and plants had " got into the stone," they seemed to regard them as a sort of atural toys, which a mere lad might amuse himself in look ng after, but which were rather below the notice of grown-up people like themselves. One workman, however, informed me, that things of a kind I had not yet found, — genuine thun- derbolts, — which in his flither's times were much sought after for the cure of bewitched cattle, — were to be found in tolerable abundance on a reach of the beach about two miles further to the west ; and as, on quitting the quarry for the piece of work on which we were to be next engaged, Uncle David gave us all a half-holiday, I made use of it in visiting the tract of shore indicated by the workman. And there, leaning against the granite gneiss and hornblend slate of the Hill of Eathie, I found a Liasic deposit, amazingly rich in its organisms, — not buried under the waves, as at Marcus' shore, or as opposite our new quarry, but at one part underlying a little grass-cover ed plain, and at another exposed for several hundred yards to- gether along the shore. Never yet did embryo-geologist break ground on a more promising field ; and memorable in my ex- istence was this first of the many happy evenings that I have spent in exploring it. The Hill of Eathie, like the Cromarty Sutors, belongs, as I have already had occasion to mention, to what De Beaumont ^ould term the Ben Nevis system of hills, — that latest of oui Icottish mountain systems which, running from south- west to north-east, in the line of the great Caledonian valley, and in that of the valleys of the Nairn, Findhorn.and Spey, uptilted in its course, when it arose, the Oolites of Sutherland, and the Lias of Cromarty and Ross. The deposit which the Hill of Eathie distuiLed is exclusively a Liasic one. The upturned 154 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; base of the formation rests immediately against the Hill ; arid we may trace the edges of the various overlaying beds for seve - ral hundred feet outwards, until, apparently near the top of the deposit, we lose them in the sea. The various beds — all save the lowest, which consists of a blue adhesive clay — are composed of a dark shale, consisting of easily-separable laminae, thin as sheets of pasteboard ; and they are curiously divided from each other by bands of fossiliferous limestone of but from one to two feet thick. These Liasic beds, with their separating bands, are a sort of boarded books ; for as a series of volume? reclining against a granite pedestal in the geological library of nature, I used to find pleasure in regarding them. The lime- stone bands, elaborately marbled with lignite, icthyolite, and shell, form the stiff boarding ; the pasteboard-like laminae be- tween, — tens and hundreds of thousands in number in even the slimmer volumes, — compose the closely-written leaves. I say closely written ; for never yet did signs or characters lie closer on page or scroll than do the organisms of the Lias on the surface of these leaf-like laminae. I can scarce hope to communicate to the reader, after the lapse of so many years, an adequate idea of the feeling of wonder which the marvels of this deposit excited in my mind, wholly new as they were to me at the time. Even the fairy lore of my first-formed library, — that of the birchen box, — had impressed me less. The general tone of the coloring of these written leaves, though dimmed by the action of untold centuries, is still very striking. The ground is invariably of a deep natural gray, verging on black ; while the flattened organisms, which present about the same degree of relief as one sees in the figures of an embossed card, contrast with it in tints that vary from opaque to silvery white, and from pale yellow to an utnbry or chestnut brown. Groups of ammonites appear as if drawn in white chalk ; clusters of a minute undescribed bivalve are still plated with thin films of the silvery nacre ; the mytilaceae usually bear a warm tint of yellowish brown, and must have been brilliant shells in their day ; gryphites and oysters are always of a dark gray, and plagiostoma) ordinarily of a blueish or neutral tint. On some OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 155 of the leaves curious pieces of incident seem recorded. We see fleets of minute terebratulse, that appear to have been covered up by some sudden deposit from above, when riding at their anchors ; and whole argosies of ammonites, that seem to have been wrecked at once by some untoward accident, and sent crushed and dead to the bottom. Assemblages of bright black plates, that shine like pieces of Japan work, with numerous pa- rallelogram mical scales bristling with nail-like points, indicate where some armed fish of the old ganoid order lay down and died ; and groupes of belemnites, that lie like heaps of boarding pikes thrown carelessly on a vessel's deck on the surrender of the crew, tell where sculls of cuttle-fishes of the ancient type had ceased to trouble the waters. I need scarce add, that these spear-like belemnites formed the supposed thunderbolts of the deposit. Lying athwart some of the pages thus strangely in- scribed, we occasionally find, like the dark hawthorn leaf in Bewick's well-known vignette, slim-shaped leaves colored in deep umber ; and branches of extinct pines, and fragments of strangely fashioned ferns, form their more ordinary garnishing. Page after page, for tens and hundreds of feet together, repeat the same wonderful story. The great Alexandrian library, with its tomes of ancient literature, the accumulation of long ages, was but a meagre collection, — not less puny in bulk than recent in date, — compared with this marvellous library of the Scotch Lias. Who, after once spending even a few hours in such a school, could avoid being a geologist? I had formerly found miich pleasure among rocks and in caves ; but it was the wonders of the Eathie Lias that first gave direction and aim to my curi- osity. From being a mere child, that had sought amusement ill looking over the pictures of the stony volume of nature, I henceforth became a sober student, desirous of reading and knowing it as a book. The extreme beauty, however, of the Liasic fossils made me pass over at this time, as of little in- terest, a discovery which, if duly followed up, would have prob- ably landed me in full in the midst of the Old Red Sandstone icbth}'olites fully ten years ere I learned to know them. In 8 156 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; forming a temporary harbor, at which we boated the stones we had been quarrying, I struck my pick into a slaty sand- stone bed, thickly mottled in the layers by carbonaceous mark- higs. They consisted, I saw, of thin rectilinear stems or leaves, much broken, and in a bad state of keeping, that at once sug. gested to me layers of comminuted Zostera marina^ such as I had often seen on the Cromarty beach thrown up from the sub-marine meadows of the Frith beyond. But then, with nagnificent ammonites and belemnites, and large well-marked ignites, to be had in abundance at Eathie just for the laying open and the picking up, how could I think of giving myself to disinter what seemed to be mere broken fragments oi Zos- tera ? Within, however, a few feet of these carbonaceous markings there occurred one of those platforms of violent death for which the Old Red Sandstone is so remarkable, — a platform strewed over with fossil remains of the first-born ga- noids of creation, many of which still bore in their contorted outlines evidence of sudden dissolution and the dying pang. During the winter of this year, — for winter at length came, and, my labors over, three happy months were all my own, — I had an opportunity of seeing, deep in a wild Highland glen, the remains of one of our old Scotch forests of the na- tive pine. My cousin George, finding his pretty Highland cottage on the birch-covered Tomhan situated too far from his ordinary scenes of employment, had removed to Cromarty ; and when his work had this year come to a close for the sea- son, he made use of his first leisure in visiting his father-in- law, an aged shepherd who resided in the upper recesses cf Sirathcarron. He had invited me to accompany him ; and cf the invitation I gladly availed myself We struck across the tract of wild hills which intervenes between the Cromarty and Dornoch Friths, a few miles to the west of the village of In- vergordon ; and, after spending several hours in toiling across dreary moors, unopened at the time oy any public road, we took our noon-day refreshmcTit in an uninhabited valley, among broken cottage-walls, with a few fuiTOwed patches stretching out around us, green amid the waste One of the bpst siiyordsr OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 157 men in Ross had once lived there ; but both he and his race had been lost to Scotland in consequence of the compelled emi- gration so common in the Highlands during the last two ages ; and Cousin George came strongly out against the lairds. The chill winter night had fallen on the dark hills and alder-skirted river of Strathcarron, as, turning from off the road that winds along the Kyle of Dornoch, we entered its bleak gorge ; and as the shepherd's dwelling lay high up the valley, where the lofty sides approach so near, and rise so abruptly, that for tho whole winter quarter the sun never falls on the stream below, we had still some ten or twelve miles of broken road before us. The moon, in her first quarter, hung on the edge of the hills, dimly revealing their rough outline ; while in a recess of the stream, far beneath, we could see the torch of some adventur- ous fisher, now gleaming red on rock and water, now suddenly disappearing, eclipsed by the overhanging brushwood. It was late ere we reached the shepherd's cottage, — a dark-raftered, dimly-lighted erection of turf and stone. The weather for several weeks before had been rainy and close, and the flocks of the inmate had been thinned by the common scourge of the sheep-farmer at such seasons on damp, boggy farms. The beams were laden with skins besmeared with blood, that dangled overhead to catch the conservative influences of the smoke ; and on a rude plank-table below, there rose two tall pyramids of braxy-mutton, heaped up each on a corn-riddle. The shepherd, — a Highlander of large proportions, but hard, and thin, and worn by the cares and toils of at least sixty winters, — sat moodily beside the fire. The state of his flocks was not cheering ; and, besides, he had seen a vision of late^ De said, that filled his mind with strange forebodings. He Had gone out after nightfall on the previous evening, to a dank bellow, in which many of his flock had died. The rain had ceased a few hours before, and a smart frost had set in, that (illed the whole valley with a wreath of silvery vapor, dimly lighted by the thin fragment of a moon that appeared as if resting on the hill-top. The wreath stretched out its gray folds beneath hiii, — for he had climbed half-way up the acclivity, 158 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; —-when suddenly the figure of a man, formed as of ^leated metal, — the figure of what seemed to be a brazen man brought to a red heat in a furnace, — sprang up out of the darkness ; and, after stalking over the surface of the fog for a few brief sec- onds, during which, however, it had traversed the greater part of the valley, it as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanscent trail of flame behind it. There could be little doubt that the old shepherd had merely seen one of those shooting lights that in mountain districts so frequently startle the night traveller; but the apparition now filled his whole mind, as one vouch- safed from the spiritual world, and of strange and frightful portent ; — " A meteor of the night of distant years, That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld, Musing at midnight upon prophecies." I spent the greater part of the following day with my cousin in the forest of Corrybhalgan, and saw two large herds of red deer on the hills. The forest was but a shred of its former self; but the venerable trees still rose thick and tall in some of the more inaccessible hollows ; and it was interesting to mark, where they encroached furthest on the open waste, how thoroughly they lost the ordinary character of the Scotch fir, and how, sending out from their short gnarled boles immense branches, some two or three feet over the soil, they somewhat resembled, in their squat, dense proportions, and rounded con- tours, gigantic bee-hives. It was of itself worth while under- taking a journey to the Highlands, to witness these last re- mains of that arboreous condition of our country to which the youngest of our geological formations, the Peat Mosses, bear such significant witness ; and which still, largely existing as the condition of the northern countries of continental Europe, " remains to attest," as Humboldt well remarks, " more than even the records of history, the youthfulness of our civiliza- tion." I revisited at this time, before returning home, the Barony of Gruids; but winter had not improved it: its humble features, divested of their summer complexion, had a» OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 159 Bumcd an express 3n of blank wretchedness ; and hundreds of its people, appalled at the time by a summons of ejection looked quite as depressed and miserable as its scenery. Finlay and my friend of the Doocot Cave were no longer within reach ; but during this winter I was much in the com- pany of a young man about five years my senior, who was of the true stuff of which friends are made, and to whom I became much attached. I had formed some acquaintance with him about five years before, on his coming to the place from the neighboring parish of Nigg, to be apprenticed to a house- painter, who lived a few doors from my mother's. But there was at first too great a disparity between us for friendship : he was a tall lad, and I a wild boy ; and, though occasionally ad- mitted into his sanctum, — a damp little room in at outhouse in which he slept, and in his leisure hours made water-color drawings and verses, — it was but as an occasional visitor, who, having a rude taste for literature and the fine arts, was just worthy of being encouraged in this way. My year of toil had, however, wrought wonders for me : it had converted me into a sober young man ; and William Ross now seemed to iind scarce less pleasure in my company than I did in his. P(/or William ! his name must be wholly unfamiliar to the reader ; and yet he had that in him which ought to have made it a known one. He was a lad of genius, — drew truthfully, had a nice sense of the beautiful, and possessed the true poetic fac ulty ; but he lacked health and spirits, and was naturally of a melancholy temperament, and diffident of himself. He was at this time a thin, pale lad, fair-haired, with a clear waxen complexion, flat chest, and stooping figure; and though he lasted considerably longer than could have been anticipated from his appearance, in seven years after he was in his grave. He was unfortunate in his parents : his mother, though of a ♦levout family of the old Scottish type, was an aberrant speci- men; — she had fallen in early youth, and had subsequently married an ignorant, half-imbecile laborer, with whom she passed a life of poverty and unhappiness ; and of this unprom- ising marr'age William was the eldest child. It was cer- 160 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; tainly no from either parent he derived his genius. His ma ternal grandmother and aunt were, however, excellent Chris- tian women, of superior intelligence, who suppoited them- selves by keeping a girls' school in the parish ; and William, who had been brought at an early age to live with them, and was naturally a gentle-spirited, docile boy, had the advantage, in consequence, of having that most important lesson of any education, — the lesson of a good example at home, — set well before him. His boyhood had been that of the poet : he had loved to indulge in his day-dreams in the solitude of a deep wood beside his grandmother's cottage ; and had learned to write verses and draw landscapes in a rural locality in which no one had ever written verses or drawn landscapes before. And finally, as, in the north of Scotland, in those primitive times, the nearest approach to an artist was a house-painter, William was despatched to Cromarty, when he had grown tall enough for the work, to cultivate his natural taste for the fine arts, in papering rooms and lobbies, and in painting railings and wheel-barrows. There are, I believe, a few instances on rec- ord of house-painters rising to be artists : the history of the late Mr. William Bonnar, of the Royal Academy of Edinburgh, furnishes one of these ; but the fact that the cases are not more numerous serves, I fear, to show how much oftener a turn for drawing is a merely imitative, than an original, self- derived faculty. Almost all the apprentices of our neighbor the house-painter had their turn for drawing, decided enough to influence their choice of a profession ; and what was so re- peatedly the case in Cromarty must, I should think, Ijave been the case in many similar places ; but of how few of these em- bryo limners have the works appeared in even a provincial €xhibition-room ! At the time my intimacy with William became most close, both his grandmother and aunt were dead, and he was strug- gling with great difficulty through the last }ear of his appren- ticeship. As his master supplied him with but for>d and lodg- ing, his linen was becoming scant, and his Sabbath suit shabby ; and he was looking forward to the time when he should be at OR, THE STORV QF MY EDUCATION. 16l liberty to work for himself, with all the anxiety of the voyager wh : fears that his meagre stock of provisions and water may wholly fail him ere he reaches port. I of course could not as- sist him. I was an apprentice, like himself, and had not the command of a sixpence ; nor, had the case been otherwise, would he in all probability have consented to accept of my help ; but he lacked spirits as much as money, and in that par- ticular my society did him good. We used to beat over all manner of subjects together, especially poetry and the fine arts : and though we often differed, our differences served only to knit us the more. He, for instance, deemed the " Min- strel" of Beattie the most perfect of English poems ; but though he liked Dryden's " Virgil " well enough, he could find no poetry whatever in the " Absalom and Ahithophel" of Dry den ; whereas I liked both the " Minstrel " and the "Ahithophel," and, indeed, could hardly say, unlike as they were in com- plexion and character, which of the two I read oftenest or ad- mired most. Again, among the prose writers, Addison was his especial favorite, and Swift he detested ; whereas I liked Addison and Swift almost equally well, and passed without sense of incongruity, from the Vision of Mirza, or the paper on Westminster Abbey, to the true account of the death of Partridge, or the Tale of a Tub. If, however, he could wonder at the latitudinarian laxity of ray taste, there was at least one special departraent in which I could marvel quite as much at the incomprehensible breadth of his. Nature had given me. in despite of the phrenologists, who find music indicated by two large protuberances on the corners of my forehead, a de- plorably defective ear. My Uncle Sandy, who was profoundly skilled in psalmody, had done his best to make a singer of me ; but he was at length content to stop short, after a world of effort, when he had, as he thought, brought me to distinguish St. George's from any other psalm- tune. On the introduction, however, of a second tune into the parish church that repeated the line at the end of the stanza, even this poor fragment of ab/.ity deserted me; and to this day, — though I rather like the strains of the bagpipe in general, and have no objection to 162 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERM • dnimb in particular, — doubts do occasionally come across nm whether there be in reality any such thing as tune. My friend William Ross was, on the contrary, a born musician. When a little boy, he had constructed for himself a fife and clarionet of young shoots of elder, on which he succeeded in discoursing sweet music ; and, addressing himself at another and later period to both the principles and practices of the science, he became one of the best flute-players in the district. Notwithstanding my dulness of ear, I do cherish a pleasing recollection of the sweet sounds that used to issue from his little room in the outhouse, every milder evening as I ap- prcfached, and of the soothed and tranquil state in which I ever found him on these occasions, as I entered. I could not understand his music, but I saw that, mentally at least, though, I fear, not physically, — for the respiratory organs were weak, — it did him great good. There was, however, one special province in which our tastes thoroughly harmonized. We were b^th of us, if not alike favored, at least equally devoted, lovers of the wild and beau- tiful in nature ; and many a moon-light walk did we take to- gether this winter among the woods and rocks of the Hill. It was once said of Thomson, by one who was himself not at all morbidly poetic in his feelings, that " he could not have viewed two candles burning but with a poetical eye." It might at least be said of my friend, that he never saw a piece of fine or striking scenery without being deeply moved by it. As for the mere candles, if placed on a deal-dresser or shop-counter, they might have failed to touch him ; but if burning in some lyke-wake beside the dead, or in some vaulted crypt or lonely rock-cave, he also could not have looked other than poet- ically on them. I have seen him awed into deep solemnity, in our walks, by the rising moon, as it peered down upon us over the hill, red and broad, and cloud-encircled, through the interstices of some clump of dark firs ; and have observed him become suddenly silent, as, emerging from the moonlight woods, we looked into a rugged dell, and saw far beneath, the slim rippling streamlet gleaming in the light, like a narro\» OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION-. 16B strip of the aurora borealis shot athwart a dark sky, when the steep rough sides of the ravine, on either hand, were enveloped in gloom. My friend's opportunities of general reading had not been equal to my own, but he was acquainted with at least one class of books of which I knew scarce anything ; — he had carefully studied Hogarth's " Analysis of Beauty," Fresnoy's "Art of Painting," " Gessner's Letters," the " Lectures of Sir Joshua Reynolds," and several other works of a similar khid ; and in all the questions of criticism that related to external form, the effects of light and shade, and the influences of the meteoric media, I found him a high authority. He had a fine eye for detecting the peculiar features which gave individuality and character to a landscape, — those features, as he used to say, which the artist or poet should seize and render promi- nent, while, at the same time, lest they should be lost as in a mob, he softened down the others ; and, recognizing him as a master in this department of characteristic selection, I delight- ed to learn in his school, — by far the best of its kind I ever attended. I was able, however, in part to repay him, by in- troducing him to many an interesting spot among the rocks, or to retired dells and hollow^s in the woods, which, from his sedentary habits, he would scarce ever have discovered for himself I taught him, too, to light fires after nightfill in the caves, that we might watch the effects of the strong lights and deep shadows in scenes so wild ; and I still vividly remember the delight he experienced, when, after kindling up in the day- time a strong blaze at the mouth of the Doocot Cave, which filled the recess within with smoke, we forced our way inwards through the cloud, to mark the appearance of the sea and the opposite land seen through a medium so dense, and saw, on turning round, the landscape strangely enwrapped " in the dun hues of earthquake and eclipse." We have visited, after night- fall, the glades of the surrounding w^oods together, to listen to the night breeze, as it swept sullenly along the pine-tops ; and, after striking a light in the old burial vault of a solitary church- yard, we have watched the ray falling on the fissured walls and ropy damp and mould ; or, on setting on fire a few withered 16^ MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; leaves, have seen the smoke curling slowly upwards, through a square opening in the roof, into the dark sky. Willianrs mind was not of the scientific cast. He had, however, acquired ?ome knowledge of the mathematics, and some skill both in architecture and in the anatomy of the human skeleton and muscles ; while of perspective he perhaps knew well-nigh as much as was known at the time. I remember he preferred the Treatise on this art, of Ferguson the astronomer and me- chanician, to any other ; and used to say that the twenty years spent by the philosopher as a painter were fully redeemed, though they had produced no good pictures, by his little work on Perspective alone. My friend had ere this time given up the writing of verses, very much because he had learned to know what verses ought to be, and failed to satisfy himself with his own ; and ere his death, I saw^ him resign in success- ion his flute and penci?, and yield up all the hopes he had once cherished of being known. But his weak health affected his spirits, and prostrated the energies of a mind originally rather delicate than strong. OR. THE STORY OF MY EICCATIOK. 165 CHAPTER IX ** others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate ; and reasoned high Of Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute. And found no end in wandering mazes lost." Milton. Spiiin 5 came on, and brought with it its round of labor,— « quarryii g, building, and stone-cutting ; but labor had noTV no terrors for me : I wrought hard during the hours allotted tc toil, and was content ; and read, wrote, or walked, during the flours that were properly my own, and was happy. Early in May, however, we had finished all the work for which my master had previously contracted ; and as trade was usually dull at the time, he could procure no further contracts, and the squad was thrown out of employment. I rushed to the woods and rocks, and got on with my lessons in geology and natural science ; but my master, who had no lessons to learn, wearied sadly of doing nothing ; and at length, very unwill *ngly, — for he had enacted the part of the employer, thougl m a small scale, for a full quarter of a century, — he set him self to procure w^ork as a journeyman. He had another ap prentice at the time ; and he, availing himself of the oppoi tunity which the old man's inability of employing him ;\ir nished, quitted his service, and commenced work on his own behalf, — a step to which, though the position of a journey Ib'ft MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS: man's apprentice seemed rather an anomalous one, I could not see my way. And so, as work turned up for both master and apprentice at a place about twenty miles distant from Cromarty, I set out with him, to make trial, for the first time, of the sort of life that is spent in bothies and barracks. Our work was to consist, I was informed, of building and hewing at an extensive farm-steading on the banks of the river Conon, \shUh one of the wealthier proprietors of the district was get- ting built for himself, not on contract, but by the old mode of employing operatives on days' wages ; and my master was to be permitted to rate as a full journeyman, though now considerably in his decline as a workman, on condition that the services of his apprentice should be rated so much lower than their actual value as to render master and man regarded as one lot, — a fair bargain to the employer, and somewhat more. The arrangement was not quite a flattering one for me ; but I acquiesced in it without remark, and set out with my master for Conon-side. The evening sun was gleaming delightfully, as we neared the scene of our labors, on the broad reaches of the Conon, and lighting up the fine woods and noble hills beyond. It would, 1 know, be happiness to toil for some ten hours or so per day in so sweet a district, and then to find the evening all my own ; but on reaching the work, we were told that we would require to set out in the morning for a place about four miles farther to the west, where there were a few workmen engaged in building a jointure-house for the lady of a Ross-shire proprietor lately dead, and which lay off the river in a rather unpromising direction. And so, a little after sunrise, we had to take the road with our tools slung across our backs, awd before six o'clock we reached the rising jointure-house, and set to work, The country around was somewhat bare and dreary, — a scene of bogs and moors, overlooked by a range of tame heathy hills ; but in our immediate neighborhood there was a picturesque little scene, — rather a vignette than a picture, — that in some degree redeemed ithe general deformity. Two ineal-mill<3 — the one small and old, the other larger and more OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 167 modern — were placed beside each other, on ground so un- equal, that, seen in front, the smaller seemed perched on the top of the larger ; a group of tall graceful larches rose imme- diate^ beside the lower building, and hung their slim branches over the huge wheel ; while a few aged ash-trees that encircled the mill-pond, which, in sending its waters down the hill, sup- plied both wheels in succession, sprang up immediately beside the upper erection, and shot their branches over its roof. On closing our labors for the evening, we repaired to the old mansion-house, about half a mile away, in which the dowager lady for whom we wrought still continued to reside, and where we expected to be accommodated, like the other workmen, with beds for the night. We had not been expected, how- ever, and there were no beds provided for us ; but as the Highland carpenter who had engaged to execute the wood- work of the new building had an entire bed to himself, we were told we might, if we pleased, lie three a-bed with him. But though the carpenter was, I dare say, a most respectable man, and a thorough Celt, I had observed during the day that he was miserably affected by a certain skin disease, which, as it was more prevalent in the past of Highland history than even at this time, must have rendered his ances- tors of old very formidable, even without their broadswords ; and so I determined on no account to sleep with him. I gave my master fair warning, by telling him what I had seen ; but Uncle David, always insensible to danger, conducted himself on the occasion as in the sinking boat or under the falling bank, and so went to bed with the carpenter ; while I, steal' ing out, got into the upper story of an outhouse ; and, fling- ing myself down in my clothes on the floor, on a heap of straw, was soon fast asleep. I was, however, not much ac- customed at the time to so rough a bed ; every time I turned me in my lair, the strong, stiff* straw rustled against my face ; and about midnight I awoke. I rose to a little window which opened upon a dreary moor, and commanded a view, in the distance, of a ruinous chapel and solitary burying-ground, famous in the traditions of the 16S MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; district as the chapel and burying-ground of Gillie-christ. Dr. Johnson relates, in his " Journey," that when eating, on one occasion, his dinner in Skye to the music of the bagpipe, he was informed by a gentleman, " that in s^ me remote time, the Macdonalds of Glengarry having been injured or offended by the inhabitants of Culloden, and resolving to have justice, or vengeance, they came to Culloden on a Sunday, when, finding their enemies at worship, they shut them up in the church, which they set on fire ; and this, said he, is the tune that the piper played while they were burning." Culloden, however, was not ^be scene of the atrocity ; it was the Mackenzies of Ord that their fellow-Christians and brother-Churchmen, the Macdonalds of Glengary succeeded in converting into ani- mal charcoal, when the poor people were engaged, like good Catholics, in attending mass ; and in this old chapel of Gillie- Christ was the experiment performed. The Macdonalds, after setting fire to the building, held fast the doors until the last of the Mackenzies of Ord had perished in the flames ; and then, pursued by the Mackenzies of Brahan, they fled into their own country, to glory every after in the greatness of the feat. The evening was calm and still, but dark for the season, for it was now near mid-summer ; and every object had disappeared in the gloomv, save the outlines of a ridge of low hills that rose beyond the moor ; but I could determine where the chapel and churchyard lay ; and great was my astonishment to see a light flickering amid the grave-stones and the ruins. At one time seen, at another hid, like the revolving lantern of a light- house, it seemed to be passing round and round the building ; and, as I listened, I could hear distinctly w^hat appeared to be a continuous screaming of most unearthly sound, proceeding from evidently the same spot as the twinkle of the light. What could be the meaning of such an apparition, with such accompaniments, — the time of its appearance midnight, the p'ace a solitary burying-ground ? I was in the Highlands ; was there truth, after all, in the many floating Highland stories of spectral dead-lights and wild supernatural sounds, seen and heard by nights in lonely places of sepulture, when some sud' OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 169 der. death was near '? I did feel my blood run somewhat cold — ft,r I had not yet passed the credulous time of life,— and had som^-^- thoughts of stealing down to my master's bed-side, to be within reach of the human voice ; when I saw the light quittin^^^ the churchyard and coming downward across th<^ moor ii\ a straight line, though tossed about in the dead calm, ia man}? a wave and flourish : and further, I could ascertain, chat whixl I had deemed a persistent screaming was in reality ;^ continuous singing, carried on at the pitch of a powerful th«^ugh somewhat cracked voice, hi a moment after, one of the iiervant girls of the mansion-house came rushing out half- dxes,^^v>d to the door of an outer building in which the work- n?en iwd a farm-servant lay, and summoned them immediate- ly tD r*i>e. Mad Bell had again broke out, she said, and would set tbeniv on fire a second time. The ?i\en rose, and, as they appeared at the door, I joined them ; but on striking out a few yards into the moor, we found the maniac already in the custody of two men, who had seized and were dragging her towards her cottage, a miserable hovel, about half a mile away. She never once spoke to us, but continued singing, though in a lower and more subdued tone of voice than before, a Gaelic song. We reached her hut, and, making use of her own light, we entered. A chain of considerable length, attached by a stopple to one of the Highland couples of the erection, showed that her neighbors had been compelled on former occasions to abridge her liberty ; and one of the men, in now making use of it, so wound it round her person as to bind her down, instead of giving her the scope of the apartment, to the damp uneven floor. A very '-^amp and uneven floor it was. There were crevices in the roof above, which gave free access to the elements ; and the tui f walls, perilously bulged by the leakage in several places, were green with mould. One of the masons and I simulta neously interfered. It would never do, we said, to pin down a huD.an creature in that way, to the damp earth. Why not give her what the length of the chain permitted, — the full rarge of the room ] If we did that, replied the man, she would 170 MY SCHOOLS be sure to set herself free before morning, and we would just have to rise and bind her again. But we resolved, we i ejoined, whatever might happen, that she should not be tied down in that way to the filthy floor ; and ultimately we succeeded in carrying our point. The song ceased for a moment ; the maniac turned round, presenting full to the light the strongly- marked, energetic features of a woman of about fifty -five ; and surveying us with a keen scrutinizing glance, altogether uu like that of the idiot, she emphatically repeated the sacred text, " Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." She then began singing, in a low, mournful tone, an old Scotch ballad ; and, as we left the cottage, we could hear her voice gradually heightening as we retired, until it had at length at- tained to its former pitch and wildness of tone. Before daybreak the maniac succeeded in setting herself free ; but the paroxysm of the fit had meanwhile passed over ; and when she visited me next morning at the place where I was hewing, — a little apart from the other workmen, who were all engaged in building on the walls, — save for the strongly- marked features I would scarcely have recognized her. She was neatly dressed, though her gown was neither fine nor new ; her clean white cap was nicely arranged ; and her air seemed rather that of the respectable tradesman's wife or daughter, than of the ordinary country woman. For some little time she stood beside me without speaking, and then somewhat abrupt- ly asked, — " What makes you work as a mason ?" I made some commonplace reply ; but it failed to satisfy her. " All your fellows are real masons," she said ; " but you are merely in the disguise of a mason ; and I have come to consult you about the deep matters of the soul." The matters she had come to inquire regarding were really very deep indeed ; she Jiad, I found, carefully read Flavel's " Treatise on the Soul of Man," — a volume which, fortunately for my credit, I also had perused ; and we were soon deep together in the rather bad metaphysics promulgated on the subject by the Schoolmen, and republislied by the divine. It seemed clear, she said, that everj human soul was created, — not transmitted, — created^ OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOK. 171 mayhap, at the time when it began to be ; but if so, how or on what principle, did it come under the influence of the Fall 1 I merely remarked, in reply, that she was of course acquaint- ed with the views of the old theologians, — such as Flavel, — men who really knew as much about such things as could be known, and perhaps a little more ; was she not satisfied with them 1 Not dissatisfied, she said ; but she wanted more light. Could a soul not derived from our first parents be rendered vile simply by being put into a body derived from them ? One of the passages in Flavel, on* this special point, had luckily struck me, from its odd obscurity of expression, and I was able to quote it in nearly the original words. You know, I remark ed, that a great authority on the question " declined confident- iy to affirm that the moral infection came by way of physical agency, as a rusty scabbard infects and defiles a bright sword when sheathed therein ; it might be," he thought, " by way of natural concomitancy, as Estius will have it ; or, to speak as Dr. Reynolds doth, by way of ineffable resultancy and emana tion." As this was perfectly unintelligible, it seemed to sat- isfy my new friend. I added, however, that, like herself, I was waiting for more light on the difficulty, and might set my- self to it in right earnest, when I found it fully demonstrated that the Creator could not, or did not make man equally the descendant in soul as in body of the original progenitors of the race. I believed, with the great Mr. Locke, that he could do it ; nor was 1 aware he had anywhere said that what he could do in the matter he had not done. Such was the first of many strange conversations with the maniac, who, with all her sad brokenness of mind, was one of the most intellectual women I ever knew. Humble as were the circumstances in which I found her, her brother, who was at this time about tvvo years dead, had been one of the best-known ministers of the Scottish Church in the Northern Highlands. To quote fron> an iffectionate notice by the editor of a Jttle volume of his sermons, published a few years ago, — the Rev. Mr. Mackenzie of North Leith, — he " was a profound divine, an eloquent preacher, a deeply-experienced Christian, and, withal, a classi- 172 MY Schools and schoolmasters; ca] scnolar, a popular poet, a man of original genius, and eml nently a man of prayer." And his poor sister Isabel, though grieviously vexed at times by a dire insanity, seemed to have received from nature powers mayhap not inferior to his. We wero not always engaged with the old divines; Isabel's tenacious memory w^as stored with the traditions of the dis- trict ; and many an anecdote could she tell of old chieftains, forgotten on the lands which had once been their own, and of Highland poets, whose songs had been sung for the last time The story of the " Raid of GilUe-christ" has been repeatedly hi print since I fa\st heard it from her ; it forms the basis ol the late Sir Thomas Dick Lauder's powerful tale of " Allen with the Red Jacket ;" and I have seen it in its more ordinary traditionary dress, in the columns of the Inverness Courier^ But at this time it was new to me ; and on no occasion could it have lost less by the narrator. She was herself a Macken- zie ; and her eyes flashed a wdld fire w^hen she spoke of the barbarous and brutal Macdonalds, and of the measured march and unfaltering notes of their piper outside the burning cha- pel, when her perishing ancestors were shrieking in their agony within. She was acquainted also with the resembling story of that Cave of Eigg, in which a body of the Macdonalds them- selves, consisting of men, women, and children, — the entirs population of the island, — had been suffocated wholesale b^' the Macleods of Skye ; and I have heard from her more gooa sense on the subject of the Highland character, " ere the gos pel changed it," as illustrated by these passages in their his* tory, than from some Highlanders sane enough on other mat fcers, but carried away by a too indiscriminating respect for tht- wild courage and half-instinctive fidelity of the old race. The incient Highlanders were bold, faithful dogs, she has said, ready to die for their masters, and prepared to do, at their bid Jing, like other dogs, the most cruel and wicked actions ; and AS dogs often were they treated ; nay, even still, after religion had made them men (as if condemned to suffer for the sins of their parents), they were frequently treated as dogs. Tho pious martyrs of the south had contended in God's behalf ; OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 173 whereas the poor Highlanders of the north had contended but in behalf of their chiefs ; and so, while God had been kind to the descendants of His servants, the chiefs had been very un- kind to the descendants of theirs. From excellent sense, how- ever, in these our conversations, my new companion used often to wander into deplorable insanity. Her midnight visits to the old chapel of Gillie-christ wxre raade, she saidj in Older that she might consult her father in her difficulties; and the good man, though often silent for nights together^ rarely failed to soothe and counsel her from the depths of his quiet grave, on every occasion when her unhappiness be- came extreme. It was acting on his advice, however, that sho had set fire to a door that had for a time excluded her from the burying-ground, and burnt it down. She had been mar- ried in early life ; and I have rarely heard anything wilder or more fegenious than the account she gave of a quarrel with her husband, that terminated in their separation. After living happily with him for several years, she all at once, she said, became most miserable, and everything in their household went on ill. But though her husband seemed to have no true conception of the cause of their new-born misery, she had. He used, from motives of economy, to keep a pig, which, when converted into bacon, was always useful in the family ; and an occasional ham of the animal now and then found its way to her brother's manse, as a sort of friendly ac- knowledgment of the many good things received from him. One wTctched pig, however, — a little black thing, only a few v/eeks old, — which her husband had purchased at a fair, was, she soon discovered, possessed by an evil spirit, that had a strange power of quitting the animal to do mischief in her dwelling, and an ability of not only rendering her extremely unhappy, but at times even of getting into her husband. The husband himself, poor blinded man ! could see nothing of all this ; nor would he believe lier^ who could and did see it ; nor yet could she convince him that it was decidedly his duty to get rid of the pig. She was not satisfied that she herself had Q, clear right to kill the creature: it was undoubtedly her hus- 174 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; band's property, not hers ; but could she only succeed iii plachig it in circumstances in which it might be free either to kill itself or not, and were it, in these circumstances, to de- stroy itself, she was sure all the better divines would acquit her of aught approaching to moral guilt in the transaction ; and the relieved household would be free from both the evil spirit and the little pig. The mill-pond was situated imme- diately beside her dwelling ; its steep sides, which were walled with stone, were unscaleable by at least little pigs ; and among the aged ashes which sprung up immediately at its edge, there was one that shot out a huge bough, like a bent arm, dire(;tly over it, far beyond the stonework, so that the boys of the neigh- borhood used to take their seat on it, and fish for little trout that sometimes found their way into the pond. On the pro- jecting branch one day, when her husband's back was turned, and there was no one to see or interfere, she placed the pig. It stood for awhile : there was no doubt, therefore, it could stand ; but, unw^illing to stand any longer, it sprawled, — slip- ped, — fell, — dropped into the water, in short, — and ultimate- ly, as it could not make its way up the bank, was drowned. And thus ended the pig. It would seem, however, as if the evil spirit had got into her husband instead, — ^so extreme was his indignation at the transaction. He would accept of neither apology nor explanation ; and unable, of course, to live any longer under the same roof with a man so unreasonable, she took the opportunity, when he was quitting that part of the country for employment at a distance, to remain behind in her old cottage, — the same in which she at that time resided. Such was the maniac's account of her quarrel with her hus- band ; and, w^hen listening to men chopping little familiar logic on one of the profoundest mysteries of Revelation, — a mystery which, once received as an article of faith, serves to unlock many a difficulty, but which is itself wholly irreducible by the naman intellect, — I have been sometimes involuntarily led to think of her ingenious but not very sound argumenta- tion on the fall of the pig. It is dangerous to attempt ex- plaining, in the theological province, what in reality cannot be CR, THE STOKY OF MY EDUCAITC 5r. 175 explavaod. Some weak abortion of the human reason is al- ways ii:iil»stituted, in the attempt, for some profound mystery in the moral government of God ; and men ill grounded in the faith are led to confound the palpable abortion with the inscrutable laystery, and are injured in consequence. I succeeded in getting a bed in the mansion-house, without, like Marsyas of old, perilling my skin ; and though there was but little of interest in the immediate neighborhood, and not much to be enjoyed withm doors, — for I could procure neither books nor congenial companionship, — with the assistance of my pencil and sketch-book I got over my leisure hours toler- ably well. My new friend Isabel would have given me as much of her conversation as I liked ; for there was many a point on which she had to consult me, and many a mystery to state, and secret to communicate ; but, though always interest- ed in her company, I was also always pained, and invariably quitted her, after each lengthened tete-a-tete^ in a state of low spirits, which I found it difficult to shake off. There seems to be something peculiarly unwholesome in the society of a strong- minded maniac ; and so I contrived as much as possible — not a little, at times, to her mortification — to avoid her. For hours together^ however, I have seen her perfectly sane ; and on these occasions she used to speak much about her brother, for whom she tiitertained a high veneration, and gave me many anecdotes regaiding him, not uninteresting in themselves, which she told remarkably well. Some of these my memory still re- tains. " There were two classes of men," she has said, " for whom he had a special regard, — Christian men of consistent character ; and men who, though they made no profession of religion, were honest in their dealings, and of kindly disposi \ionf And with people of this latter kind he used to have a great deal of kindly intercourse, cheerful enough at times, — for he could both make a joke and take one, — but which usu ally did his friends good in the end. So long as my fathei and mother lived, he used to travel across the country oiice every year to pay them a visit; and he was accompanied, on ore of these journeys, by one of this less religious Jass of his 176 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; parishioners, who had, however, a great regard for h m, and whom he liked, in turn, for his blunt honesty and obliging dis- position. They had baited for some time at a house in thft outer skirts of my brother's parish, where there was. a (hi 1(1 to baptize, and where, I fear, Donald must have got an extra dram ; for he was very argumentative all the evening after ; and finding he could not agree with my brother on any one subject, he suffered him to shoot a-head for a few hundred yards, and did not again come up with him, until, in passing through a thick clump of natural wood, he found him standing, lost in thought, before a singularly-shaped tree. Donald liad never seen such a strange looking tree in all his days before. The lowxr part of it was twisted in and out, and backwards and forwards, like an ill-made cork-screw ; while the higher shot straight upwards, direct as a line, and its taper top seem- ed like a finger pointing at the sky. ' Come, tell me, Donald, said my brother, ' what you think this tree is like V ' Indeed I kenna, Mr. Lachlan,' replied Donald ; ' but if you let me tak' that straight bit aff the tap o't, it will be gey an' like the worm o' a whisky still.' ' But I cannot want the straight bit,' said my brother ; ' the very pith and point of my comparison lies in the straight bit. One of the old fathers would perhaps have said, Donald, that the tree resembled the course of the Christian. His early progress has turns and twists in it, just like the lower part of that tree ; one temptation draws him to the left, — another to the right : his upward course is a crooked one ; but it is an upw^ard course for all that ; for he has, like the tree, the principle of sky-directed growth within him : the disturbing influences weaken as grace strengthens and appetite and passion decay ; and so the early part of his career is not more like the warped and twisted trunk of that tree, than his latter years resemble its taper top. He shoots off* heavenward in a straight line.' " Such is a specimen of the anecdotes of this poor woman. I saw her once afterwards, though for only a short time ; when she told me that, though people could not understand us, there was meaning in both her thoughts and in mine ; a id some years subsequently, W'hen I was engaged 177 as a journeyman mason in the south of Scotland, she walked twenty miles to pay my mother a visit, and staid witli her for several days. Her death was a melancholy one. When fording the river Conon in one of her wilder moods, she was swept away by the stream and drowned, and her body cast upon the bank a day or two after. Our work finished at this place, my master and I returned to Conon-side on a Saturday evening, where we found twenty- four workmen crow^ded in a rustic corn-kiln, oj)en from gable to gable, and not above thirty feet in length. A row of rude beds, formed of undressed slabs, ran along the sides ; and against one of the gables there blazed a line of fires, with what are known as masons' setting-irons stuck into the stone-work behind, fjr suspending over them the pots used in cooking the food of the squad. The scene, as we entered, was one of wild confusion. A few of the soberer workmen were engaged in " baking and firing" oaten cakes, and a few more occupied, with equal sobriety, in cooking their evening porridge ; but i-n front of the building there was a wild party of apprentices, who were riotously endeavoring to prevent a Highland shepherd from driving his flock past them, by shaking their aprons at the affrighted animals ; and a party equally bent on amuse- ment inside were joining with burlesque vehemence in a song which one of the men, justly proud of his musical talents, had just struck up. Suddenly the song ceased, and with wild up- roar a bevy of some eight or ten workmen burst out into the green in full pursuit of a squat little fellow, who had, they said, insulted the singer. The cry rose wild and high, '* A ramming ! a ramming !" The little fellow w^as seized and thrown down ; and five men — one holding his head, and one stationed at each arm and leg — proceeded to execute on hi« body the stern behests of barrack-law. He was poised like an ancient battering-ram, and driven endlong against the wall of the kiln, — that important part of his person coming in violent contact with the masonry, " where," according to Butler, " a kick hurts honor" very much. After the third blow, how- ever, he was released, and the interrupted song went ou as 178 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; before. I was astonished, and somewhat dismayed, by this spe cimen of barrack-life ; but, getting quietly inside the building, I succeeded in cooking for my uncle and myself some porridge over one of the unoccupied fires, and then stole off, as early as I could, to my lair in a solitary hay-loft, — for there was no room for us in the barrack ; where, by the judicious use of a little sulphur and mercury, I succeeded in freeing my master from the effects of the strange bed-fellowship which our re- cent misery had laade, and of preserving myself from infec tion. The following Sabbath was a day of quiet rest ; and 1 commenced the labors of the week, disposed to think that my lot, though rather a rough one, was not altogether unendura- ble ; and that, even were it worse than it was, it would be at once wise and manly, seeing that winter would certainly come, cheerfully to acquiesce in and bear up under it. I had, in truth, entered a school altogether new, — at times, as I have just shown, a singularly noisy and uproarious one, for it was a school without master or monitor ; but its occa- sional lessons were, notwithstanding, eminently worthy of be- ing scanned. All know that there exists such a thing as pro- fessional character. On some men, indeed, nature imprints so strongly the stamp of individuality, that the feebler stamp of circumstance and position fails to impress them. Such cases, however, must always be regarded as exceptional. On the average masses of mankind, the special employments which they pursue, or the kinds of business which they transact, have the effect of moulding them into distinct classes, each of which bears an artificially induced character peculiarly its own. Clergymen, as such, differ from merchants and soldiers, and all three from lawyers and physicians. Each of these profess- icns has long borne in our literature, and in common opinion a character so clearly appreciable by the public generally, that when truthfully reproduced in some new work of fiction, or exemplified by some transaction in real life, it is at once recog- nized as marked by the genuine class-traits and peculiarities. But these professional characteristics descend much lower in tlie scale than is usually supposed. There is scarce a trade or OR, THE STORY OF MY jfiDUCATION. 179 department of manual labor that does not induce its own set of peculiarities, — peculiarities which, though less within the range of the observation of men in the habit of recording what they remark, are not less real than those of the man of physio or of law\ The barber is as unlike the weaver, and the tailor as unlike b »th, as the farmer is unlike the soldier, or as either farmer or soldier is unlike the merchant, lawyer or minister. And it is only on the same sort of principle that all men, when seen from the top of a lofty tower, whether they be tall or short, seem of the same stature, that these differences escape the notice of men in the higher w^alks. Between the workmen that pass sedentary lives within doors, such as weavers and tailors, and those who labor in the open air, such as masons and ploughmen, there exists a grand gen- eric difference. Sedentary mechanics are usually less con- tented than laborious ones ; and as they almost always work in parties, and as their comparatively light, though often long and wearily-plied employments do not so much strain their respiratory organs but that they can keep up an interchange of idea when at their toils, they are generally much better able to state their grievances, and much more fluent in speculating ^n their causes. They develop more freely than the labor- V3US out-of-door workers of the country, and present, as a class, 9, more intelligent aspect. On the other hand, when the open- air worker does so overcome his difficulties as to get fairly- developed, he is usually of a fresher and more vigorous type ihan the sedentary one. Burns, Hogg, Allan Cunningham, are i;he literary representatives of the order ; and it will be found that they stand considerably in advance of the Thoms, Bloom- fields, and Tannahills that represent the sedentary workmen. The silent, solitary, hard-toiled men, if nature has put no better stuff in them than that of which stump-orators and Chartist lecturers are made, remain silent, repressed by their circum- stances ; but if of a higher grade, and if they once do get their mouths fairly opened, they speak with power, and bear with them into our literature the freshness of the green earth and the freedom of the open sky. 180 MY SCHOOLS AND oCHOOLMASTEHS * Tlie specific peculiarities induced by particular professiora are not less marked than the generic ones. How different, for instance, the character of the sedentary tailor, as such, from that of the equally sedentary barber ! Two imperfectly-taught young lads, of not more than the average intellect, are appren- ticed, the one to the hair-dresser, the other to the fashionable clothes-maker, of a large village. The barber has to entertain his familiar round of customers, when operating upon their heads and beards. He must have no controversies with them ; — that might be disagreeable, and might affect his command of the scissors or razor : but he is expected to communicate to them all he knows of the gossip of the place ; and as each customer supplies him with a little, he of course comes to know more than anybody else. And as his light and easy work lays no stress upon his respiration, in course of time he learns to be a fast and fluent talker, with a great appetite for news, but little given to dispute. He acquires, too, if his round of customers be good, a courteous manner ; and if they be in large proportion Conservatives, he becomes, in all prob- ability, a Conservative, too. The young tailor goes through an entirely different process. He learns to regard dress as the most important of all earthly things, — becomes knowing in cuts and fashions, — is taught to appreciate, in a way no other individual can, the aspect of a button, or the pattern of a vest ; and as his work is cleanly, and does not soil his clothes, and as he can get them more cheaply, and more perfectly in the fashion than other mechanics, the chances are ten to one that he turns out a beau. He becomes great in that which he regards as of all things greatest, — dress. A young tailor may be known by the cut of his coat and the merits of his panta- loons, among all other workmen ; and as even fine clothes are not enough of themselves, it is necessary that he should also have fme manners ; and not having such advantages of seeing polite society as his neighbor the barber, his gentlemanly manners are always less fine than grotesque. Hence more ridicule of tailors among working men than of any other class of mechanic?. And such — if nature has sent them from hei OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 181 hand ordinary men, — for the extraordinary rise abovt? all the modifying influences of profession — are the processes through which tailors and hair-dressers put on their distinctive charac- ters as such. A village smith hears well nigh as much gossip as a village barber ; but he develops into an entirely different sort of man. He is not bound to please his customers by his talk ; nor does his profession leave his breath free enough to talk fluently or much ; and so he listens in grim and swarthy independence, — strikes his iron while it is hot, — and when, after thrusting it into the fire, he bends himself to the bellows, he drops, in rude phrase, a brief judicial remark, and again falls sturdily to work. Again, the shoemaker may be deemed, in the merely mechanical character of his profession, near of kin to the tailor. But such is not the case. He has to work amid paste, wax, oil, and blacking, and contracts a smell of leather. He cannot keep himself particularly clean ; and, although a nicely-finished shoe be all well enough in its way, there is not much about it on which conceit can build. No man can set up as a beau on the strength of a prettily-shaped shoe ; and so a beau the shoemaker is not, but, on the con- trary, a careless, manly fellow, who, when not overmuch devoted to Saint Monday, gains, usually, in his course through life, a considerable amount of sense. Shoemakers are often in large proportions intelligent men ; and Bloomfield, the poet, GiflTord, the critic and satirist, and Carey, the mission- ary, must certainly be regarded as thoroughly respectable contributions from the profession, to the worlds of poetry, criticism and religion. The professional character of the mason varies a good deal in the several provinces of Scotland, according to the ^ arious circumstances in which he is placed. He is in general a blunt manly, taciturn fellow, who, without much of the Radical or (Chartist about him, especially if wages be good and employ- ment abundant, rarely touches his hat to a gentleman. His employment is less purely mechanical than many others : he is not like a man carelessly engaged in pointing needles or Cishioning pin-heads. On the contrary, every stone he lays or 182 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEIiS hews demands the exercise of a certain amount of judgment for itself; and so he cannot wholly suffer his mind to fall asleep over his work. When engaged, too, in erecting somo fine building, he always experiences a degree of interest in marking the effect of the design developing itself piecemeal, and growing up under his hands ; and so he rarely wearies of what he is doing. Further, his profession has this advantage, that it educates his sense of sight. Accustomed to ascertain the Btraightness of lines at a glance, and to cast his eye along plane walls, or the mouldings of entablatures or architraves, in order to determine the rectitude of the masonry, he acquires a sort of mathematical precision in determining the true bearings and position of objects, and is usually found, when admitted into a rifle-club, to equal, without previous practice, its second-rate shots. He only falls short of its first-rate ones, because unin- itiated by the experience of his profession in the mystery of the parabolic curve, he fails, in taking aim, to make the propei allowance for it. The mason is almost always a silent man ; the strain on his respiration is too great, when he is actively employed, to leave the necessary freedom to the organs of speech ; and so at least the provincial builder or stone-cutter rarely or never becomes a democratic orator. I have met with exceptional cases in the larger towns ; but they were the result of individual idiosyncrasies, developed in clubs and taverns, and were not professional. It is, however, with the character of our north-countrj masons that I have at present chiefly to do. Living in small villages, or in cottages in the country, they can very rarely procure employment in the neighborhood of their dwellings and so they are usually content to regard these as simply theii homes for the winter and earlier spring months, when the}' have nothing to do, and to remove for work to other parts of the country, where bridges, or harbors, or farm-steadings, are in the course of building, — to be subjected there to the influ ences of what is known as the barrack, or rather bothy life. These barracks or bothies are almost always of the most miser* ble description, I have lived in hovels that were invariably OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOIT. 183 flooded in wet weather by the overflowings of the neighboring swamps, and through whose roofs I could tell the hour at night, by marking fron'. my bed the stars that were passing over the openings along the ridge : I have resided in other dwellings of iither higher pretensions, in which I have been awakened during every heavier night-shower, by the rain drops splash ing upon my face where I lay a-bed. I remember that Uncle James, in urging me not to become a mason, told me that a neighboring laird, when asked why he left a crazy old build ing standing beside a group of neat modern ofiices, informed the querist that it was not altogether through bad taste the hovel was spared, but from the circumstance that he found it of great convenience every time his speculatitDns brought a drove of pigs or a squad of masons the way. And my after experience showed me that the story might not be in the least, apocryphal, and that masons had reason at times for not touching their hats to gentlemen. In these barracks the food is of the plainest and coarsest description : oatmeal forms its staple, with milk, when milk can be had, which is not always ; and as the men have to cook by turns, with only half an hour or so given them in which to light a fire, and prepare the meal for a dozen or twenty asso- ciates, the cooking is invariably an exceedingly rough and sim- ple affair. I have known mason-parties engaged in the central Highlands in building bridges, not unfrequently reduced, by a tract of wet weather, that soaked their only fuel the turf, and rendered it incombustible, to the extremity of eating their oatmeal raw, and merely moistened by a little water, scooped by the hand from a neighboring brook. I have oftener than once seen our own supply of salt fail us ; and after relief had been af- forded by a Highland smuggler — for there was much smuggling Ml salt in those days, ere the repeal of the duties — I have heard i complaint from a young fellow regarding the hardness of our fere, at once checked by a comrade's asking him whether he was lot an ungrateful dog to grumble in that way, seeing that, after living on fresh poultices for a week^ we had actually that morn 184 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; iiig got porridge with salt in it. One marked efiect of tho ainiual change which the north-country mason had to undergo, from a life of domestic comfort to a life of hardship in the bothy, if he has not passed middle life, is a great apparent increase in his animal spirits. At home he is in all probability a quiet, rather dull-looking personage, not much given to laugh or joke ; whereas in the bothy, if the squad be a large one, he becomes wild and a humorist, — laughs much, and becomes in genious in playing off pranks on his fellows. As in all othei communities, there are certain laws recognized in the barrack, as useful for controlling at least its younger members the ap prentices ; but in the general tone of merriment, even these lose their character, and ceasing to be a terror to evil-doers, become in the execution mere occasions of mirth. I never in all my experience, saw a serious punishment inflicted. Shortly after our arrival at Conon-side, my master chancing to remark that he had not wrought as a journeyman for twenty-five years before, was voted a " ramming," for taking, as was said, such high ground with his brother workmen ; but, though sentence was immediately executed, they dealt gently with the old man, w^ho had good sense enough to acquiesce in the whole as a joke. And yet, amid all this wild merriment and license, there was not a workman who did not regret the comforts of his quiet home, and long for the happiness which was, he felt, to be enjoyed only there. It has been long known that gaiety is not solid enjoyment ; but that the gaiety should indicate little else than the want of solid enjoyment, is a circumstance not always suspected. My experience of barrack-life has enabled me to receive without hesitation what has been said of the occasional merriment of slaves in America and elsewhere, and fully to credit the often-repeated statement that the abject serfs of despotic Governments laugh more than the subjects of a free country. Poor fellows ! If the British people were as unhappy as slaves or serfs, they would, I dare say, learn in time to be quite as merry. There are, however, two circumstances that «.^Tve to prevent the bothy life of the north-country mason OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 185 from essentially injuring his character in the way it filmost never fails to injure that of the farm-servant. As he has to calculate on being part of every winter, and almost every spring, unemployed, he is compelled to practise a self-denying economy the effect of which, when not carried to the extreme of a miserly narrowness, is always good ; and Hi?llow-day re- turns him every season to the humanizing iiii^nc^Jices of his bone 186 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; CHAPTER X. "The mnse, nae poet ever fand her, Till by himsel' he learned to wander Adowu some trottin' burn's meander, An' no think lang: O, sweet to muse, and pensive ponder A heart-feit sang I" Burns. There arc delightful walks in the immediate neighLorhood of Conon-side; and as the workmen — engaged, as I have said, on day's wages — immediately ceased working as the hour of six arrived, I had, during the summer months, from three to four hours to myself every evening, in which to enjoy them. The great hollow occupied by the waters of the Cromarty Frith divides into two valleys at its upper end, just where the sea ceases to flow. There is the valley of the Peffer, and the valley of the Conon ; and a tract of broken hills lies between, formed by the great conglomerate base of the Old Red Sys- tem. The conglomerate, always a picturesque deposit, termi- nates some four or five miles higher up the valley, in a range of rough precipices, as bold and abrupt, though they front the Ulterior of the country, as if they formed the terminal barrier of some exposed sea-coast. A few straggling pines crest their summits ; and the noble woods of Brahan Castle, the ancient seat of the Earls of Seaforth, sweep downwards from their base OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 187 to the margin of the Conon. On our own side of the river, the more immature but fresh and thickly-clustered woods of Conon House rose along the banks ; and I was delighted to find among them a ruinous chapel and ancient bury ing-ground, occupying, in a profoundly solitary corner, a little green hiU lock, once an island of the river, but now left dry by the grad- ual wear of the channel, and the consequent fall of the water to a lower level. A few broken walls rose on the highest peak of the eminence; the slope was occupied by the little mossy hillocks and sorely-lichened tombstones that mark the ancient grave-yard; and among the tombs immediately beside the ruin there stood a rustic dial, with its iron gnomon worn to an oxydized film, and green with weather-stains and moss. And around this little lonely yard sprang the young wood, thick as a hedge, but just open enough towards the west to admit, in slant lines along the tombstones and the ruins, the red level light of the setting sun. I greatly enjoyed these evening w^alks. From Conon-side as a centre, a radius of six miles commands many objects of interest; — Strathpeffer, w^ith its mineral springs, — Castle Leod, with its ancient trees, among the rest, one of the largest Span- ish chestnuts in Scotland, — Knockferrel, with its vitrified fort, — the old tower of Fairburn, — the old though somewhat modernized tower of Kinkell, — the Brahan policies, with the old Castle of the Seaforths, — the old Castle'of Kilcoy, — and the Druidic circles of the moor of Red-castle. In succession I visited them all, with many a sweet scene besides ; but \ found that my four hours, when the visit involved, as it some- times did, twelve miles walking, left me little enough time to examine and enjoy. A half-holiday every week would be a mighty boon to the working man who has acquired a taste for the quiet pleasures of intellect, and either cultivates an affec- tion for natural objects, or, according to the antiquary, " lovea to look upon what is old." My recollections of this rich tract of country, with its woods, and towers, and noble river, seem as if bathed in the red light of gorgeous sunsets. Its iineven 188 plain ol Old Bed Sandstone leans, at a few miles distance, against dark Highland hills of schistose gneiss, that, at the line where they join on to the green Lowlands, are low and tame, but sweep upwards into an alpine region, where the old Scandinavian Flora of the country, — that Flora which alone flourished in the times of its boulder clay, — still maintains its place against the Germanic invaders which cover the lower grounds, as the Celt of old used to maintain exactly the same ground against the Saxon. And at the top of a swelling moor just beneath where the hills rise rugged and black, stands the pale tall tower of Fairburn, that, seen in the gloamin', as J have often seen it, seems a ghastly spectre of the past, looking from out its solitude at the changes of the present. The free- booter, its founder, had at first built it, for the greater security, without a door, and used to climb into it through the window of an upper story by a ladder. But now unbroken peace brooded over its shattered ivy -bound walls, and ploughed fields were creeping up year by year along the moory slope on which it stood, until at length all became green, and the dark heath disappeared. There is a poetic age in the life of most indi- viduals, as certainly as in the history of most nations ; and a very happy age it is. I had now fully entered on it ; and en- joyed, in my lonely walks along the Conon, a happiness ample enough to compensate for many a long hour of toil, and many a privation. I have quoted, as the motto of this chapter, an exquisite verse from Burns. There is scarce another stanza in the wide round of British literature that so faithfully de- scribes the mood which, regularly as the evening came, and after I had buried myself in the thick woods, or reached some bosky recess of the river bank, used to come stealing over me, and in which I have felt my heart and intellect as thoroughly •.n Keeping with the scene and hour as the still woodland pool beside me, whose surface reflected in the calm every tree and rock that rose around it, and every hue of the heavens above. And yet the mood, though a sweet, was also, as the poet ex- Di esses it, a pensive one : it was steeped in the happy melan* - OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIO:^'. 189 choly sung so truthfully by an elder bard, who also mudt nave entered deeply into the feelhig. " When I goe musing all alone, Thinking of divers things Ibreknowne, — When 1 builde castles in the air, Voide of sorrow and voide of care, Pleasing myself with phantasms sweet, — Methinks the lime runs very fleet ; All my joyes to this are follie ;— None soe sweet as melauchoUie. When to myself I sit and smile, With pleasing thoughts ihe time beguile, By a brook side or wood soe green. Unheard, unsought for, and unseen, A thousand pleasures doe me blesse, And crowne my soul with happiness ; All my joyes to this are foUle ; — None soe sweet as melanchoUie." When I remember how my happiness was enhanced by every little bird that burst out into sudden song among the trees, and then as suddenly became silent, or by every bright- scaled fish that went darting through the topaz-colored depths of the water, or rose for a moment over its calm surface, — how the blue sheets of hyacinths that carpeted the openings in the wood delighted me, and every golden-tinted cloud that gleam- ed over the setting sun, and threw its bright flush on the river, seemed to inform the heart of a heaven beyond, — I marvel, in looking over the scraps of verse produced at the time, to find how little of the sentiment in which I so luxuriated, or of the nature which I so enjoyed, found their way into them. But what Wordsworth well terms " the accomplishment of verse," given to but few, is as distinct from the poetic faculty vouch- safed to many, as the ability of relishing exquisite music is di 5tinct from the power of producing it. Nay, there are cases n which the " faculty" may be very high, and yet the " ac complishment" comparatively low, or altogether awanting. J have been told by the late Dr. Chalmers, whose Astronomical Discourses form one of the finest philosophical poems in any language, that he never succeeded in achieving a readable 190 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; stanza ; and Dr. Thomas Brown, whose metaphysics glow with poetry, might, though he produced whole volumes of verse, have said nearly the same thing of himself But, like the Metaphysician, who would scarce have published his verses unless he had thought them good ones, my rhymes pleased me at this period, and for some time after, wonderfully well : they came to be so associated in my mind with the scenery amid which they were composed, and the mood which it rarely fail- ed of inducing, that, though they neither breathed the mood nor reflected the scenery, they always suggested both ; on the principle, I suppose, that a pewter spoon, bearing the London stamp, suggested to a crew of poor weather-beaten sailors in one of the islands of the Pacific, their far-distant home and its enjoyments. One of the pieces suggested at this time I shall, however, venture on submitting to the reader. The few simple thoughts which it embodies arose in the solitary churchyard among the woods, beside the aged lichen-encrusted dial-stone. ON SEEING A SUN-DIAL IN A CHURCHYARD. Gray dial-stone, I fain would know What motive placed thee here, W^here darkly opes the frequent grave, And rests the frequent bier ; Ah ! bootless creeps the dusky shade, Slow o'er thy figured plain ; When mortal life has passed away, Time counts his hours in vain. As sweep the clouds o'er ocean's breast, When shrieks the wintry wind, So doubtful thoughts, gray dial-stone, Come sweeping o'er my mind. I think of what could place thee here, Of those beneath thee laid ; And ponder if thou Aver't not raised In mockery o'er the dead. Nay, man, when on life's stage they fret, May mock his fellow-men ; In sooth, their soberest freaks afford Rare food for mockery then. OB. THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 191 But ah ! when passed their brief sojourn. When Heaven's dread doom is said, — Beats there the luiman heart could pour Light mockeries o'er the di ad ? The fiend unblest, who still to harm Directs his felon power, May ope the book of grace to him Whose day of grace is o'er ; But never sure could mortal man, Whate'er his age or clime. Thus raise, in mockery o'er the dead. The stone that measures time. Gray dial-stone, I fain would know What motive placed theo here, Where sadness heaves the frequent sigh; And drops the frequent tear. Like thy carved plain, gray dial-stone, Grief's weary mourners be ; Dark sorrow metes out lime to them, — Dark shade marks time on thee. I know it now : wer't thou not plac'd To catch the eye of him To whom, through glistening tears, earth's fnwOm Worthless appear, and dim? We think of time when time has fled. The friend our tears deplore ; The God whom pride-swollen hearts deny, Grief-humbled hearts adore. Gray 'stone, o'er thee the lazy night Passes untold away ; Nor were it thine at noon to teach, If failed the solar ray. In death's dark night, gray dial-stone, Cease all the works of men ; In life, if Heaven withhold its aid, Bootless these works and vain. Gray dial-stone while yet thy shade Points out those hours are mine, — While yet at early morn 1 rise. And rest at day's decline, — Would that the Sun that formed thinfl^ His bright rays beamed on me, That I, wise for the final day. Might measure time, like thee I 192 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; These were happy evenings, — all the more happy from the circumstance that I was still in heart arid appetite a boy, and could relish as much as ever, when their season came on, the wild raspberries of the Conon Woods, — a very abundant fruit in that part of the country, — and climb as lightly as ever, to strip the guean-trees of their wild cherries. When the ri^ er was low, I used to wade into its fords, in quest of its pearl muscles i^Unio Margaritiferus) ; and, though not very suc- cessful in my pearl-fishing, it was at least something to see how thickly the individuals of this greatest of British fresh- water molluscs lay scattered among the pebbles of the fords, or to mark them slowly creeping along the bottom, — when, in consequence of prolonged droughts, the current had so mod- erated that they were in no danger of being swept away, — each on its large white foot, with its valves elevated over its back, like the carpace of some tall tortoise. I found occasion at this time to conclude, that the Unio of our r"ver fords se- cretes pearls so much more frequently than the (Jnionidce and Anadonta of our still pools and lakes, not from any specific peculiarity Ui tne constitution of the creature, but from the effects of the habitat which it is its nature to choose. It re- ceives in the fords and shallows of a rapid river many a rough blow from sticks and pebbles, carried down in times of flood, and occasionally from the feet of the men and animals that cross the stream during droughts ; and the blows induce the morbid secretions of which pearls are the result. There seems to exist no inherent cause why Anodon Cygnea^ with its beau- tiful silvery nacre, — as bright often, and always more delicate, than that of Unio Margaritiferus^ — should not be equally pro- ductive of pearls ; but, secure from violence in its still pools and lakes, and unexposed to the circumstances that provoke abnormal secretions, it does not produce a single pearl for every hundred that are ripened into value and beauty by the exposed current-tossed Unionidce of our rapid mountain rivers. Would that hardship and suffering bore always in a creatu.-e of a greatly higher family similar results, and that the hard buffets dea' \ him by fortune in the rough stream of life could OR, THE STORY OF M.\ EDUCATION. 193 be transmuted, by some blessed internal predisposition of his nature, into pearls of great price ! It formed one of my standing enjoyments at this time to bathe, as the sun was sinking behind the woods, in the deeper pools of the Conon, — a pleasure which, like all the more Ex- citing pleasures of youth, bordered on terror. Like that of the poet, when he " wantoned with the breakers," and the " fresh- ning sea made them a terror," " 'twas a pleasing fear." But t was not current nor freshening eddy that rendered it such ; J had acquired, long before, a complete mastery over all my motions in the water, and, setting out from the shores of the Bay of Cromarty, have swam round vessels in the roadstead, when, among the many boys of a seaport town, not more than one or two would venture to accompany me ; but the poetic age is ever a credulous one, ay certainly in individuals as in na- tions ; the old fears of the supernatural may be modified and ethereal ized, but they continue to influence it ; and at this period the Conon still took its place among the haunted streams of Scotland. There was not a river in the Highlands that used, ere the erection of the stately bridge in our neigh- borhood, to sport more wantonly with human life, — an evi- dence, the ethnographer might perhaps say, of its purely Cel- tic origin ; and as Superstition has her figures as certainly as Poesy, the perils of a wild mountain-born stream, flowing be- tween thinly-inhabited banks, w^ere personified in the beliefs of the people by a frightful goblin, that took a malignant de- light in luring into its pools, or overpowering in its fords, the benighted traveller. Its goblin, the " water-wraith," used to appear as a tall woman dressed in green, but distinguished chiefly by her withered, meagre countenance, ever distorted by a malignant scowl. I knew all the various fords — always dangerous ones — where of old she used to start, it was said, out of the river, before the terrified traveller, to point at him, as in derision, with her skinny finger, or to beckon him iii- vitingly on ; and I w^as shown the very tree to which a poor Highlander had clung, when, in crossing the river by nignt, he was seized by th^ goblin, and from which, despite of hia 194 MY SCHOOLS AND SCIIOOLMASTEHS ; utmost exertions, though assisted by a young lad, his compan- ion, he was dragged into the middle of the current, where he perished. And when, in swimming at sunset over some dark pool, where the eye failed to mark, or the foot to sound the distant bottom, the twig of some sunken bush or tree has struck against me as I passed, I have felt, with sudden start, as if touched by the cold, bloodless fingers of the goblin. The old chapel among the woods formed the scene, says tra- dition, of an incident similar to that which Sir Walter Scott relates in his '* Heart of Mid-Lothian," when borrowing, as the motto of the chapter in which he describes the prepara- tions for the execution of Porteus, from an author rarely quoted, — Kelpie. ** The hour's come," so runs the extract, *' but not the man ; " — nearly the same words which the same author employs in his '*Guy Mannering," in the cave scene between Meg Merrilies and Dirk Hatterick. '* There is a tradition," he adds, in the accompanying note, " that while a little stream was swollen into a torrent by recent showers, the discontented voice of the water- spirit was heard to pro- nounce these words. At the same moment, a man urged on by his fate, or, in Scottish language, fay, arrived at a gallop, and prepared to cross the water. No remonstrance from the bystanders w^as of power to stop him ; he plunged into the stream, and perished." So far, Sir Walter, The Eoss-shire story is fuller, and somewhat diiTerent in its details. On a field in the near neighborhood of the chapel, now laid out into the gardens of Conon House, there was a party of High- landers engaged in an autumnal day at noon, some two or three centuries ago, in cutting down their corn, when the? boding voice of the wraith was heard rising from the Conon beneath, — " The hour's come, but not the man." Immediate- ly after, a courier on horseback was seen spurring down the hill in hot haste, making directly for what is known as a " fause ford," that lies across the stream, just opposite the old building, in the form of a rippling bar, which, indicating ap- parently, though very falsely, little depth of water, is flanked by a deep black pool above and below. The Highlanders OR THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 195 spiang forward to warn him of his clanger, and keep him back ; but he was unoelieving and in haste, and rode express, he said, on business that would brook no delay ; and as for the " fause ford," if it could not be ridden, it could be swam ; and, whether bv riding or swimming, he was resolved on getting across. Determined, however, in saving him in his own de- spite, the Highlanders forced him from his horse, and, thrust- ing him into the little chapel, locked him in ; and then, throw- ing open the door when the fatal hour had passed, they called hhn that he might now pursue his journey. But there was no reply, no one came forth ; and on going in, they found him lying cold and stiff, with his face buried in the water of a small stone font. He had fallen, apparently, in a fit, athwart the wall ; and his predestined hour having come, he was suf- focated by the few pints of water in the projecting font. At this time the stone font of the tradition — a rude trough, little more than a foot in diameter either way- — was still to be seen among the ruins ; and, like the veritable cannon in the Castle of Udolpho, beside which, according to Annette, the ghost used to take its stand, it imparted by its solid reality a degree of authenticity to the story in this part of the country, whi^;h, if unfurnished with a " local habitation," as in Sir Walter's note, it would have wanted. Such was one of the many stories of the Conon with which I became acquainted at a time when the beliefs they exemplified were by no means quite dead, and of which I could think as tolerably serious realities, when lying a-bed all alone at midnight, the solitary inmate of a dreary barrack, listening to the roar of the Conon. Besides the long evenings, we had an hour to breakfast, and another to dinner. Much of the breakfast hour was spent in cooking our food ; but as a bit of oaten cake and a draught of milk usually served us for the mid-day meal, the greater part of the hour assigned to it was available for the purpose of rest or air usement. And when the day was fine, I used to spend it by the side "^f a mossy stream, within a few minutes walk of the work-shed, or in a neighboring planting, beside a little irregular 1 :)chan, fringed round with flags and rushes. Th^ 196 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; mossy stream, black in its deeper pools, as if it were a rivulet of tar, contained a good many trout, which had acquired a hue nearly as deep as its own, and formed the very negroes of their race. They were usually of small size, — for the stream itself was small ; and, though little countries sometimes produce great men, little streams rarely produce great fish. But on one oc- casion, towards the close of autumn, when a party of the younger workmen set themselves, in a frolic, to sweep it with torch and spear, they succeeded in capturing, in a dark alder- o'ershaded pool, a monstrous individual, nearly three feet in length, and proportionately bulky, with a snout bent over the lower jaw at its symphysis, like the beak of a hawk, and as deeply tinged (though with more of brown in its complexion) as the blackest coal-fish I ever saw. It must have been a bull-trout, a visitor from the neighboring river ; but we all concluded at the time, from the extreme dinginess of its coat, that it had lived for years in its dark pool, a hermit apart from its fellows. I am not now, however, altogether certain that the inference was a sound one. Some fishes, like some men, have a wonderful ability of assuming the colors that best suit their interests for the time. I have been unable to determine whether the trout was one of these conformists ; but it used to strike me at this period as at least curious, that the fishes in even the lower reaches of the dark little rivulet should diflfer so entirely in hue from those of the greatly clearer Conon, into which its peaty waters fall, and whose scaly denizens are of silvery brightness. No fish seems to possess a more complete power over its dingy coat than a very abundant one in the estuary of the Conon, — the common flounder. Standing o the bank, I have startled these creatures from oflT the patch of Dottom on which they lay, — visible to only a very sharp eye, — by pitching a small pebble right over them. Was the patch a pale one, — for a minute or so they carried its pale color along with them into some darker tract, where they remained dis- tinctly visible fi-om the contrast, until, gradually acquiring the aeoper hue, they again became inconspicuous. But if startled back to the same pale patch from which they had set out, 1 OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 197 nave then seen then visible for a minute or so, from their over-dark tint, until, gradually losing it in turn, they paled down, as at first, to the color of the lighter ground. An old Highlander, whose suit of tartan conformed to the general hue of the heather, was invisible at a little distance, when travers- h'lg a moor, but came full into view in crossing a green field or meadow ; the suit given by nature to the flounder, tinted ap parentlj on the same principle of concealment, exhibits a de gree of adaptation to its varying circumstances, which the tartan wanted. And it is certainly curious enough to find, in one of our commonest fishes, a property which used to be re^ garded as one of the standing marvels of the zoology of those remote countries of which the chameleon is a native. The pond in the piece of planting, though as unsightly a little patch of water as might be, was, I found, a greatly richer study than the dark rivulet. Mean and small as it was, — not larger in area inside its fringe of rushes than a fiishionable drawing-room, — its natural history would have formed an in- teresting volume ; and many a half hour have I spent beside it in the heat of the day, watching its numerous inhabitants, — insect, reptilian, and verniiferous. There were two — apparent- ly three — different species of libellula that used to come and deposit their eggs in it, — one of the two, that large kind »)f dragon-fly (£Jshna grandis), scarce smaller than one's middle- finger, — which is so beautifully colored black and yellow, as if adorned by the same taste one sees displayed in the chariots and liveries of the fashionable world. The other fly was a greatly more slender and smaller species or genus, rather Agrion ; and it seemed two, not one, from the circumstance, that about one-half the individuals were beautifully varie- gated black and sky-blue, the other half black and bright crimson. But the peculiarity was merely a sexual one ; as if in illustration of those fine analogies with which all nature is charged, the sexes put on the complimeniory colorb. and are mutually fascinating, not by resembling, but by corre- sponding \o, each other. I learned in time to distinguish the disagreeal le lookhiglarvce of these flies, both larger and smaller. 198 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; with their six hairy legs, and their grotesque formidable vizors, and found that they were the very pirates of the water, as the iplendid insects into which they were ultimately developed A^ere the very tyrants of the lower air. It was strange to see >he beautiful winged creature that sprang out of the pupae flito which the repulsive looking pirate had been transformed, launch forth into its new element, changed in everything save is nature, but still unchanged in that, and rendering itself as formidable to the moth and the butterfly as it had been before vO the newt and the tadpole. There is, I dare say, an analogy nere also. It is in the first stages of our own species, as certain- ly as in that of the dragon-fly, that the character is fixed. Further, I used to experience much interest in watching the progress of the frog, in its earlier stages from the egg to the fish ; then from the fish to the reptile-fish, with its fringed tail, and ventral and pectoral limbs ; and, last of all, from the reptile-fish to the complete reptile. I had not yet learned — nor was it anywhere known at the time — that the history of the individual frog, through these successive transformations, is a history in small of the animal creation itself in its earlier stages, — that in order of time the egg-like mollusc had taken precedence of the fish, and the fish of the reptile ; and that an intermediate order of creatures had once abounded, in which, as in the half developed frog, the natures of both fish and rep- tile were united. But, though unacquainted with this strange analogy, the transformations were of themselves wonderful enough to fiL for a time my whole mind. I remember being struck one afternoon, after spending my customary spare half hour beside the pond, and marking the peculiar style of color- ing in the yellow and black libellulidce in the common wasp, and in a yellow and black species of ichneumon fly, to detect in some half-dozen gentlemen's carriages that were standing opposite our work-shed, — for the good old knight of Conon House had a dinner party that evening, — exactly the same style of ornamental coloring. The greater number of the vehicles were yellow and black, — just as these were the pre- v'ailing colors among the wasps and libellulidos ; but there OR, THE SrORY OF MY EDUCATION. 199 was a slight admixture of other colors among them too : there was at least one that was black and green, or black and blue, I forget which ; and another black and brown. And so it was among the insects also : the same sort of taste, both in color and the arrangements of color, and even in the propor- tions of the various colors, seemed to have regulated the style of ornament manifested in the carriages of the dinner party, and of the insect visitors of the pond. Further, 1 thought I could detect a considerable degree of resemblance in form between a chariot and an insect. There was a great abdominal body, separated by a narrow isthmus from a thoracic coach-box, where the directing power w as stationed ; while the wheels, poles, springs, and general framework on which the vehicle rested, corresponded to the wings, limbs, and antennae of the insect. There was at least sufficient resem- blance of form to justify resemblance of color ; and here was the actual resemblance of color which the resemblance of form justified. I remember that, in musing over the coinci dence, I learned to suspect, for the first time, that it might be no mere coincidence after all ; and that the fact embodied in the remarkable text which informs us that the Creator made man in his own image, might in reality lie at its foundation as the proper solution. Man, spurred by his necessities, has discovered for himself mechanical contrivances, which he has afterwards found anticipated as contrivances of the Divine Mind, in some organism, animal or vegetable. In the same way, his sense of beauty in form of color originates some pleas- uig combination of lines or tints ; and he then discovers that t7 also has been anticipated. He gets his chariot tastefully painted black and yellow, and lo ! the wasp that settles on it? wheel, or the dragon-fly that darts over it, he finds painted in exactly the same style. His neighbor, indulging in a differ, ent taste, gets his vehicle painted black and blue, and lo! some lesser libellula or ichneumon fly comes whizzing }»ast, to justify his style of ornament also, but at the same time to show that it, too, had existed ages before. The evenings gradually closed in as the season waned, — at 200 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; first abridging, and at length wholly interdicting, mj evening walks ; and having no other place to w^hich to retire, save the dark, gousty hay-loft, into which a light was never adnnitted, I had to seek the shelter of the barrack, and succeeded usually in finding a seat within at least sight of the fire. The place was greatly over-crowded ; and, as in all over-large companies, it had commonly its four or five groupes of talkers, each group furnished with a topic of its own. The elderly men spoke about the state of the markets, and speculated, in especial, on the price of oatmeal ; the apprentices talked about lasses ; w^hile knots of intermediate age discussed occasionally both markets and lasses too, or spoke of old companions, their pe- culiarities and history, or expatiated on the adventures of former work seasons, and the character of the neighboring lairds. Politics proper I never heard. During the whole season a newspaper never once entered the barrack door. At times a song or a story secured the attention of the whole bar- rack ; and there was in especial one story-teller whose powers of commanding attention were very great. He was a middle- aged Highlander, not very skilful as a workman, and but in- differently provided with English ; and as there usually at- taches a nickname to persons in the hunnbler w^alks that are marked by any eccentricity of character, he was better known among his brother workmen as Jock Mo-ghoal, i. e. John my Darling, than by his proper name. Of all Jock Mo-ghoal's stories Jock Mo-ghoal was himself the hero ; and certainly most wonderful was the invention of the man. As recorded in hib narratives, his life was one long epic poem, filled with strange and startling adventure, and furnished with an extra- ordinary machinery of the wild and supernatural ; and though dl knew that Jock made imagination supply, in his histories he place of memory, not even Ulysses or ^Eneas, — men who^ unless very much indebted to their poets, must have been of a similar turn, — could have attracted more notice at the courts of Alcinous or Dido, than Jock in the barrack. The Avork- men used, on the mornings after his greater narratives, to look ■)ne another full in the face, and ask, with a smile rather in- OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUoATIOX. 201 cipient than fully manifest, whether " J .^ck was na perfectly wonderfu' last nicht ?" He had several times visited the south of Scotland, as one of a band of Highland reapers, for employment in his proper profession very often failed poor Jock; and these journeys formed the grand occasions of his adventures. One of his nar- ratives commenced, I remember, with a frightful midnight scene in a solitary churchyard. Jock had lost his way in the darkness ; and, after stumbling among burial-mounds, and tombstones, he had toppled into an open grave, which was of a depth so profound, that for some time he failed to escape from it, and merely pulled down upon himself, in his attempts to climb its loose sides, musty skulls and great thigh-bones, and pieces of decayed coffins. At length, however, he did succeed in getting out, just as a party of unscrupulous resur- rectionists were in the act of entering the burying-ground ; and they, naturally enough preferring an undecayed subject that had the life in it to preserve it fresh, to dead corpses the worse for the keeping, gave him chase ; and it was with the extrem- est difficulty that, after scudding over wild moors and through dark woods, he at length escaped them by derning himself in a fox-earth. The season of autumnal labor over, he visited Edinburgh on his way north ; and was passing along the High Street, when, seeing a Highland girl on the opposite side with whom he was intimate, and whom he afterwards married, he strode across to address her, and a chariot coming w^hirling along the street at the time at full speed, he was struck by the pole and knocked down. The blow had taken him full on the chest ; but though the bone seemed injured, and the integuments became frightfully swollen and livid, he was able to get up ; and, on asking to be shown the way to a surgeon's shop, his acquaintance the girl b'rought him to an under- ground room in one of the narrow lanes off the street, which, save for the light of a great fire, would have been pitch-dark at mid-day, and in which he found a little wrinkled old woman, as yellow as the smoke that filled the apartment, "Choose," said the hag, as she looked at the injured' part, 202 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; " one of two things, — a cure slow but sure, or sudden but im perfect. Or shall I put back the hurt altogether till you get home ?" " That, that." said Jock ; " if I were ance home 1 could bear it well enouch." The hag began to pass her hand over the injured part, and to mutter under her breath some potent charm ; and as she muttered and manipulated, the swelling gradually subsided, and the livid tints blanched, till at length nought remained to tell of the recent accident save a pale spot in the middle of the breast, surrounded by a thread- like circle of blue. And now, she said, you are well for three weeks ; but be prepared for the fourth. Jock prosecuted his northward journey, and encountered the usual amount of ad- venture by the way. He was attacked by robbers, but, as- sistance coming up, he succeeded in beating them off. He lost his way in a thick mist, but found shelter, after many hours' wandering far among the hills, in a deserted shepherd's shielin'. He was nearly buried in a sudden snow-storm that broke out by night, but, getting into the middle of a cooped-up flock of sheep, they kept him warm and comfortable amid th^ vast drift-wreaths, till the light of morning enabled him to prose- cute his journey. At length he reached home, and was prose- cuting his ordinary avocations, when the third week came to a close ; and he was on a lonely moor at the very hour he had meet with the accident on the High Street, when he suddenly heard the distant rattle of a chariot, though not a shadow of the vehicle was to be seen ; the sounds came bearing down upon him, heightening as they approached, and, when at the loudest, a violent blow on the breast prostrated him on the moor. The stroke of the High Street " had come back," just as the wise woman had said it would, though with accom- paniments that Jock had not anticipated. It was with diili culty he reached his cottage that evening ; and there elapsei fully six weeks ere he was able to quit it again. Such, in its outlines, was one of the marvellous narratives of Jock Mo- ghoal. He belonged to a curious class, known by specimen, in, I suppose, almost every locality, especially in the more prim- ;tive"ones, — for the smart ridicule common in the artificial OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 203 States of society greatly stunt their growth ; and in our litera- ture, — as represented by the Bobadils, Young Wildings, Caleb Balderstons, and Baron Munchausens, — they hold a prominent place. The class is to be found of very general development among the vagabond tribes. I have listened to wonderful personal narratives that had not a word of truth in them " from gipsies brown in summer glades that bask," as I took my seat beside their fire, in a wild rock-cave in the neigh- noi'hood of Rosemarkie, or at a later period in the cave of !N[arcus ; and in getting into conversation with individuals of the more thoroughly lapsed classes of our large towns, I have found that a faculty of extemporary fabrication was almost the only one which I could calculate on finding among them in a state of vigorous activity. . That in some cases the propen- sity should be found co-existing with superior calibre and ac- quirement, and with even a sense of honor by no means very obtuse, must be regarded as one of the strange anomalies which so often surprise and perplex the student of human character. As a misdirected toe-nail, injured by pressure, sometimes turns round, and, re-entering the flesh, vexes it mto a sore, it would seem as if that noble inventive faculty to which we owe the parable and the epic poem, was liable, when constrained by self-love, to similar misdirections ; and certainly, when turned inwards upon its possessor, the moral character festers or grows callous around it. There was no one in the barrack with whom I cared much to converse, or who, in turn, cared much to converse with me ; and so I learned, on the occasion when the company got dull and broke up into groupes, to retire to the hay -loft where I slept, and pass there whole hours seated on my chest. The loi't was a vast apartment, some fifty or sixty feet in length, with its naked rafters raised little more than a man's height over the floor ; but in the starlit nights, when the openings in the wall assumed the character of square patches of darkness- visible stamped upon utter darkness, it looked quite as well as any other unlighted place that could not be seen ; and in nights brightened by the moon, the pale oeams, which found 10 204 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS', access at openings and crevices, rendered its wide ai ea qult^^ picturesque enough for ghosts to walk in. But I never saw any ; and the only sounds I heard were those made by the horses in the stable below, champing and snorting c . er their food. They were, I doubt not, happy enough in their dark stalls, because they were horses, and had plenty to eat ; and I was at times quite happy enough in the dark loft above, be cause I was a man, and could think and imagine. It is, I ])e lieve, Addison who remarks, that if all the thoughts which pass through n an's minds were to be made public, the great difference which seems to exist between the thinking of the wise and of the unwise would be a good deal reduced ; seeing that it is a difference which does not consist in their not bar- ing the same weak thoughts in common, but merely in the prudence through which the wise suppress their foolish ones. I" still possess notes of the cogitations of these solitary even- nings, ample enough to show that they were extraordinary combinations of the false and the true ; but I at the same time nold them sufficiently in memory to remember, that I scarce, if at all, distinguished between what was false and true in them at the time. The literature of almost every people has a corresponding early stage, in which fresh thinking is mingled with little conceits, and in which the taste is usually false, but the feeling true. Let me present my younger readers, from my notes, with the variously compounded cogitations of one of these quiet evenings. What formed so long ago one of my exercises may now form one of theirs, if they but set themselves to separate tlie 3olid from the unsolid thinking contained in my abstract •I stood last Slimmer on the summit of Tor-Achilty [a pyramidal hill abcut sii tniles from Conon side], and occupied, when there, the cenlietf a wide circle, about flHy miles in diameter. I can still call up its rough-edged sea of hills, with the deaf blue firmament arching over, and the slant rays of the setting sun gleaming athwart. Yes, over that circular field, fifty miles across, the firmament closed all around at the borizon: as a watch glass closes round the dial-plate of the watch. Sky and earth OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 205 lewTTicJ co-extensive ; and yet how incalculably vast their difference of area' Thousands of systems ^eemed but commensurate to the eye with a small dia trict of eaith fifiy miles each way. But capacious as the human imagination has been deemed, can it conceive of an area of wi.ler field ? Mine can- not. My mind cannot take in more at a glance, if I may so speak, than ia taken in by the eye. I cannot conceive of a wider area than that which the sight commands from the summit ol a lofty eminence. I can pass in im« agination through many such areas. I can add field to field ad ivfmitum ; and thus conceive of infinite space, by conceiving of a space which can be Uifiuitely added to ; but all of space that I can take in at one process is an area commensurate with that embraced at • glance by the eye. How, then, Dave I my conception of the earth as a whole, — of the solar system as a whole, — nay, of many systems as a whole? Just as 1 have my conceptions of a school- globe or of an Orrery, — by diminution. It is through the diminution induced by distance that the sidereal heavens only co-extend, as seen from the top of Tor Achilty, with a portion of the counties of Ross and Inverness. The apparent area Is the same, but the coloring is ditferent. Our ideas of greatness, then, are much less dependent on actual area than on what painters term aerial perspective. The dimness of distance and the diminution of parts are essential to right con- ceptions of great magnitude. " Of the various figures presented to me here, I seize strong hold of but one. I brood over the picture of the soLir system conjured up. I conceive of the satellites as light shallops that continually sail round heavier vessels, and consider how much more of space they must traverse than the orbs to which they are attached. The entire system is presented to me as an Orrery of the apparent size of the area of landscape seen from the hill-top ; but dimness and darkness prevent the diminution from communicating that ap- pearance of litileness to the whole which would attach to it were it, like an actual Orrery, sharply defined and clear. As the picture rises before me, the entire system seems to possess, what I suspect it wants, its atmosphere like that of the earth, which reflects the light of the sun in the different degrees of excessive brightness,— noon-tide splendor, the fainter shades of even- ing, and gray twilight obscurity. This veil of light is thickest towards the centre of the fystem ; for when the glance rests on its edges, the suns of other systems may be seen peeping through. I see Mercury sparkling to the 8un, with its oceans of molten glass and its fountains of liquid gold. I see the ice mountains of Saturn, hoar through the twilight. I behold the earth rolling upon itself, from darkness to light, and from light to darkness. I see the clouds of winter seitling over one part of it, with the nether mantle of snow shining through them ; I see in another a brown, dusky waste of Sana lighted up by the glow of summer. One ocean appears smooth as a mir- ror,— another is black with tempest. I see the pyramid of shade which eato of the planets casts from its darkened side into the space behind ; and I per- ceive the stars twinkling through each opening, as through the angular doors of a pavilion. ♦* Such is the scene seen at right angles with the plane in which Ihr pkifel* 206 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS more ; but what would be its aspect if T saw it in the iine 3f the planel What would be its appearance if I saw it edgewise? There arises in my mind one of lhos«; uncertainties which so frequently convince me that 1 am igno- rant. I cannot com|)lete my picture, for 1 do not know whether all the phai' ets move in one plane. Flow determine the point? A ray of light breaks in. Huzza ! I have found it. If the courses of the planets as seen in the heavens form parallel lines, then must thfy all move in one plane; and via versd. But hold! That would be as seen from the sun, — if the plantits ciiild Is seen from the sun. The earth is but one of their own number, and from it the point (^f view must be disadvantageous. The diuri.al motion must pe^ plex. But no. The apparent motion of the heavens need not disturb the ob- 'uervalion. Let the course of the planets through the fixed stars be maiiieu, and though, from the peculiarity of the point of observation, their motion maj at one time seem more rapid, and at another more slow, yet if their plane bd, as a workman would say, out of twisty their lines will seem parallel. Still in eome doubt, however: I long for a glance at an Orrery, to determine the point; and then I remember that Ferguson, an untaught man like myself, had made more Orreries than any one else, and that mechanical contrivances of the kind were the natural recourse of a man unskilled in the higher geometry. But it would be better to be a mathematician than skilful in contriving Orreries. A man of the Newtonian cast of mind, and accomplished in the Newtonian learning, cculd solve the problem where I sat, without an Orrery. " From the thing contemplated, I pass to the consideration of the mind that contemplates. O ! that wonderful Newton, respecting whom the French- man inquired whether he ^e and slept like other men. 1 consider ho>^ one mind excels another ; nay, how one m;in excels a thousand ; and, by way of illustration, I bethink me of the mode of valuing diamonds. A single diamond that weighs fifty carats is deemed more valuable than two thousand diamonds each of which only weighs one. My illustration refers exclusively to the native powers ; but may it not, I ask, bear also on the acquisition of knowledge ? Every new idea added to the stock already collected is a carat added to the diamond ; for it is not only valuable to itself, but it also increases the value of all the others, by giving to each of them a new link of association *'The thought links itself on to another, mayhap less sound: — Do not the minds of men of exalted genius, such as Homer, Milton, Shakspeare, seem to partake of some of the qualities of infinitude ? Add a great many bricks together, and they form a pyramid as huge as the peak of Tenerifie. Add all the common minds together that the world ever produced, and the mind of a Shakspeare towers over the whole, in all the grandeur of unappr^ach able infinity. That which is infinite admits of neither increase nor diminu tion. Is it not so with genius of a certain altitude? Homer, Milton, Shaka feare, were perhaps men of equal powers. Homer was, it is said, a beg gar ; Shakspeare an illiterate wool-comber ; Milton skilled in all human learn- inc. B\it they have all risen to an equal height. Learning has added no- thiiig to the illimitable genius of the one ; nor has the want of it detracted OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOJiT. 20\ from th» infinite powevs of the others. Bm it is time that I go and prepara 6upp«;r." I visited the policies of Conon House a full quarter of a cen tury after this time, — walked round the kiln, once our barrack, — scaled the outside stone-stair of the hay-loft, to stand for half a minute on the spot where I used to spend whole hours seated on my chest, so long before ; and then enjoyed a quiet stroll among the woods of the Conon. The river was big in flood : it was exactly such a river Conon as I had lost sight of in the winter of 1821, and eddied past dark and heavy, sweep- mg over bulwark and bank. The low-stemmed alders that rose on islet and mound seemed shorn of half their trunks in the tide ; here and there an elastic branch bent to the current, and rose and bent again ; and now a tuft of withered heath came floating down, and now a soiled wreath of foam. How vividly the past rose up before me ! — boyish day-dreams, for- gotten for twenty years, — the fossils of an early formation of mind, produced at a period when the atmosphere of feeling was warmer than now, and the immaturities of the mental kingdom grew rank and large, like the ancient cryptogamia^ and bore no specific resemblance to the productions of a riper time. The season I had passed in the neighborhood so long before, — the first I had anywhere spent among strangers, — be- longed to an age when home is not a country, nor a province even, but simply a little spot of earth, inhabited by friends and relatives ; and the verses, long forgotten, in which my joy had found vent when en the eve of returning to that home, came chiming as freshly into my memory as if scarce a month had passed since I had composed them beside the Conon. Here they ar(^., with all the green juvenility of the home-sickness still about them, — a true petrifaction of an extinct feeling : TO THE CONON. Conon, fair flowed thy mountain stream, Througli blossomed heath and ripening Hold, When, shrunk by summer's fervid beam, Thy peaceful waves I first beheld. 208 MY SCHOOLS AND SCH00LMASTF.P5 : Calmly they swept thy winding shore, When harvest's mirthful feast was nigh, — When, breeze-borne, with thy hoarser roar Came niing ing sweei the reapers' cry. But now I mark thy angry wave Rush headlong to the stormy sea ; Wildly the blasts of winter rave, Sad rusiling through the leafless tree. Loose on its sj-ray the alder leaf Hangs wavering, trembling, sear and browD? And dark thy eddies whirl beneath. And white thy foam comes floating down. Thy banks with withered shrubs are spread; Thy tields confess stern winter's reign ; And gleams yon thorn with berries red, Like banner on a ravaged plain. Hark ! ceaseless groans the leafless wood ; Hark ! ceaseless roars thy stream below ; Beu-Vaichard's peaks are dark with cloud; Ben-Weavis' crest is white with snow. And yet, though red thy stream comes down,— Though bleak th' encircling hills appear, — Tliough field be bare, and forest brown, And winter rule the waning year, — Uumov'd 1 see each charm decay, Unmourn'd the sweets of autumn die; And fading flower and leafless spray Court all in vain the thoughtful sigh. Not that dull grief delights to see Vex'd Nature wear a kindred gloom ; Not that she smiled in vain lo me. When gaily prank'd in summer's bloom. Nay, rpuch I lov'd, at even tide. Through Brahan's lonely woods to stray To mark thy peaceful billows glide, And watch the sun's declining ray. But yet, though roll'd thy billows fair As ere roll'd those of classic stream, — Though green thy woods, now dark aud baf«^ Bask'tl beauteous in the weslern beam; To mark a scene that childhood loved, The anxious eye was turn'd in vain ; Nor could 1 find the friend approv'd, That shar'd my joy or sooth'd my pain. OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 20b Now winter re gns : these hills no more Shall sternly bound my anxious view ; Soon, bent my course to Cronia's shore, Shall I yon winding path pursue. Fairer thnn kcrc gay summer's glow To me there wintry storms shall seem : Then blow, ye bitter breezes, blow, And lash the Conon's mouutuia streasi i 210 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLSIASTEHS ; :!HAPTER XL ** Th 3 boiindinjr pulse, the languid limb, The chungina; spirit's rise and fall, — We know that these were felt by him, For these are felt by all." MONTGOMKRY. The apprenticeship of my friend William Eoss had expired during the working season of this year, when I was engaged at Conon-side ; and he was now living in his mother's cottage in the parish of Nigg, on the Ross-shire side of the Cromarty Frith. And so, with the sea between us, we could no longer meet every evening as before, or take long night-walks among the woods. I crossed the Frith, however, and spent one happy day in his society, in a little, low-roofed domicile, with a furze- roughened ravine on the one side, and a dark fir-wood on the other ; and which, though picturesque and interesting as a cottage, must, I fear, have been a very uncomfortable home. His father, whom I had not before seen, was sitting beside the fire as I entered. In all except expression he was wonderfully like my friend ; and yet he was one of the most vapid men 1 evei knew, — a man literally without an idea, and almost witli- out a recollection or a fact. And my friend's mother, though she showed a certain kindliness of disposition which her hus- band wanted, was loquacious and weak. Had my quondam acquaintance, the vigorous-minded maniac of Ord, seen Wil- liam and his parents, she would have triumphantly referred to OR, THE STORY CF MY EDUCATI02T. 211 them in evidence that Flavel and the Schoolmen were wnolly in the right in holding that souls are not " derived through parental traduction." My friend had much to show me : he had made an inter- esting series of water-color sketches of the old castles of the neighborhood, and a very elaborate set of drawings of what are known as the Rui.ic obelisks of Ross : he had made some first attempts, too, in oil-painting : but though his drawing was, as usual, correct, there was a deadness and want of transparency about his coloring, which characterized all his after attempts in the same department, and which was, I sus- pect, the result of some such deficiency in his perceptions of the harmonies of color as tiiat which, in another department of sense, made me so insensible to the harmonies of sound. His drawings of the obelisks were of singular interest. Not only have the thirty years which have since elapsed exerted their dilapidating eflfect on all the originals from which he drew, but one of the number — the most entire of the group at that time — has been since almost wholly destroyed ; and so, what he was then able to do there can be no such opportunity of doing again. Further, his representations of the sculptured orna- ments, instead of being (what those of artists too often are) mere picturesque approximations, were true in every curve and line. He told me he had spent a fortnight in tracing out the involved mathematical figures — curves, circles, and right lines, — on which the intricate fretwork of one of the obelisks was formed, and in making separate drawings of each compart- ment, before commencing his draught of the entire stone. And, looking with the eye of a stone-cutter at his preliminary sketches, from the iirst meagre lines that formed the ground- work of some involved and difficult knot, to the elaborate knot itself, I saw that, with such a series of drawings before me, 1 myself could learn to cut Runic obelisks, in all the integrity of the complex ancient style, in less than a fortnight. My friend had formed some striking and original views regarding the theology represented by symbol on these ancient stones, — at that time regarded as Runic, but now held to be rather of 212 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES ; Celtic origin. In the centre of each obelisk, on the more m portant and strongly relieved side, there always occurs a large cross, rather of the Greek than of the Roman type, and usually elaborately wrought into a fretwork, composed of myriads of snakes, raised in some of the compartments over half-spheres resenibling apples. In one of the Ross-shire obelisks, — that of Shadwick in the parish of Nigg, — the cross is entirely com- p.»sed of these apple-like, snake-covered protuberances ; and it was the belief of my friend, that the original idea of the whole, and, indeed, the fundamental idea of this school of sculpture, was exactly that so emphatically laid down by ]\Iil- ton in the opening argument of his poem, — man's fall symbol- ized by the serpents and the apples, and the great sign of his restoration, by the cross. But in order to indicate that to the Divine Man, the Restorer, the cross itself was a consequence of the Fall, even it was covered over with symbols of the event, and, in one curious specimen, built up of them. It was the snakes and apples that had reared, i. e. rendered impera- tive, the cross. My friend further remarked, that from this main idea a sort of fretwork had originated, which seemed more modern in some of its specimens than the elaborately- carved snakes and strongly-relieved apples, but in which the twistings of the one and the circular outlines of the others might be distinctly traced ; and that it seemed ultimately to have passed from a symbol into a mere ornament ; as, in earlier instances, hieroglyphic pictures had passed into mere ar- bitrary signs or characters. I know not what may be thought of the theory of William Ross; but when, in visiting, sever- al years ago, the ancient ruins of lona, I marked, on the more ancient crosses, the snakes and apparent aj)ples, and then saw how the same combination of figures appeared as mere orna- mental fretwork on some of the later tombs, I regarded it aa more probably the right one than any of the others I have yet seen broached on this subject. I dined with my friend this day on potatoes and salt, flanked by a jug of water; nor were the potatoes by any means very good ones ; but they /brmed the only article of food in the household at the tima OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 213 \ He had now dined and breakfasted upon them, he said, for Kseveral weeks together; but though not very strengthening they kept in the spark of life ; and he had saved up money enough to carry him to the south of Scotland in the spring, where he trusted to find employment. A poor friendless lad oi genius, diluting his thin consumptive blood on bad pota toes and water, and at the same time anticipating the laborji of our antiquarian societies by his elaborate and truthful drawings of an interesting class of national antiquities, must DC regarded as a' melancholy object of contemplation ; but such hapless geniuses there are in every age in which art is cultivated and literature has its admirers ; and shrinkingly modest and retiring in their natures, the world rarely finds them out in time. I found employment enough for my leisure during this win- ter in my books and walks, and in my Uncle James's work- shop ; which, now that Uncle James had no longer to lecture me about my Latin, and my carelessness as a scholar in general, was a very pleasant place, where a great deal of sound remark and excellent information were always to be had. There was another dwelling in the neighborhood in which I sometimes spent a not unpleasant hour. It was a damp underground room, inhabited by a poor old woman who had come to the town from a country parish in the previous year, bringing with her a miserably deformed lad, her son, who, though now turned of twenty, more resembled, save in his head and face, a boy of ten, and who was so helpless a cripple, that he could not move, from ofi" his seat. -' Poor lame Danie," as he was termed, was, notwithstanding the hard measure dealt him by nature, an even-tempered, kindly-dispositioned lad, and was, in conse quence, a great favorite with the young people in the neigh borhood, especially with the humbly taught young w^omen,. who — regarding him simply as an intelligence, coupled with sympathies, that could write letters — used to find him employ- ment, which he liked not a little, as a sort of amanuensis and adviser-general in their aflTairs of the heart. Richardson tells that he learned to write his Pamela by the practice he ao 2l4 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; quired in writing love-letters, when a very young lad, for half a score love-sick females, who trusted and employed him, " Poor Danie," though he bore on a skeleton body, wholly unfurnished with muscle, a brain of the average size and ac- tivity, was not born to be a novelist ; but he had the necessa- ry materials in abundance ; and, though secret enough to all his other acquaintance, I, who cared not a great deal about the matter, might, I found, have as many of his experien(^es as I pleased. I enjoyed among my companions the reputa- tirn of being what they termed "close-minded;" and Danie, satisfied, in some sort, that I, deserved the character, seemed CO find it a relief to roll over upon my shoulders the great weight of confidence which, rather liberally, as would seem, for his comfort, had been laid upon his own. It is recorded of himself by Burns, that he "felt as much pleasure in being in the secret of half the loves of the parish of Tarbolton, as ever did statesman in knowing the intrigues of half the Courts of Europe." And, writing to Dr. Moore, he adds that it was " with difficulty " his pen was " restrained from giving him a couple of paragraphs on the love-adventures of his com- peers, the humble inmates of the farm-house and cottage." I, on the other hand, bore my confidence soberly enough, and kept them safe and very close, — regarding myself as merely a sort of back-yard of mind, in which Danie might store up at pleasure the precious commodities entrusted to his charge, which, from want of stowage, it cumbered him to keep, but which were his property, not mine. And though, I dare say, I could still fill more than " a couple of paragraphs " with the love-afiairs of townswomen, some of whose daughters were courted and married ten years ago, I feel no inclination what- ever, after having kept their secrets so long, to begin blabbing them now. Danie kept a draft-board, and used to take a pride in beating all his neighbors ; but in a short time he taught me — too palpably to his chagrin — to beat himself; and finding the game a rather engrossing one besides, and not caring to look on the woe-begone expression that used to cloud the meek pale face of my poor acquaintance, every OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION-. 215 •jime lie found his men swept off the board or cooped up into a corner, I gave i p drafts, the only game of the kind of which I ever knew anything, and in the course of a few years succeeded in unlearning pretty completely all the moves. It appeared wonderful that the processes essential to life could have been carried on in so miserable a piece of frame-work as the person of poor Danie : it w^as simply a human skeleton bent double, and covered ,with a sallow skin. But they were not carried on in it long. About eighteen months after the first commencement of our acquaintance, when I was many miles away, he was seized by a sudden illness, and died in a few hours. I have seen, in even our better W3rks of fiction, less interesting characters portrayed than poor, gentle-spirited Danie, the love-depository of the young dames of the village ; and I learned a thing or two in his school. It was not until after several weeks of the working season had passed, that my master's great repugnance to doing nothing overcame his almost equally great repugnance again to seek work as a journeyman. At length, however, a life of inac- tivity became wholly intolerable to him ; and, applying to his former employer, he was engaged on the previous terms,— full wages for himself, and a very small allowance for his ap- prentice, who was now, however, recognized as the readier and more skilful stone-cutter of the two. In cutting mouldings of the more difficult kinds, I had sometimes to take the old man under charge, and give him lessons in the art, from which, however, he had become rather too rigid in both mind and body greatly to profit. We both returned to Con on-side, where there was a tall dome of hewn rock to be erected over the main archway of the steading at which we had been eii« gaged during the previous year ; and as few of the workmen had yet assembled on the spot, we succeeded in establishing ourselves as inmates of the barrack, leaving the hay-loft, with its inferior accommodation, to the later-comers. We con structed for ourselves a bed-frame of rough slabs, and filled it M^ith hay ; placed our chests in front of it ; and, as the rati^ mustered by thousands in the place, suspended our sack of 216 MV SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; oatmeal by a rope, from one of the naked rafters, U ratbei more than a man's height over the floor. And, having both pot and pitcher, our household economy was complete. Though resolved not to forego my evening walks, I had determined to conform also to every practice of the barrack ; and as the workmen drafted from various parts of the country, gradually increased around us, and the place became crowded, I soor. 'bund myself engaged in the rolicking barrack-life of the north •,ountry mason. The rats were somewhat troublesome. A comrade who slept in the bed immediately beside ours had one of his ears bitten through one night as he lay asleep, and remarked that he supposed it would be his weasand they would attack next time ; and on rising one morning, I found that the four brightly plated jack-buttons to which my braces had been fastened, had been fairly cut from off my trousers, and carried away, to form, I doubt not, a portion of some miser hoard in the wall. But even the rats themselves be- came a source of amusement to us, and imparted to our rude domicile, in some little degree, the dignity of danger. It was not likely that they would succeed in eating us all up, as they had done wicked Bishop Hatto, of old ; but it was at least something that they had begun to try. The dwellers in the hay -loft had not been admitted in the previous season to the full privileges of the barrack, nor had they been required to share in all its toils and duties. They nad to provide their quota of wood for the fire, and of water for general household purposes ; but they had not to take their turn of cooking and baking for the entire mess, but were per- mitted, as convenience served, to cook and bake for them- selves. And so, till now, I had made cakes and porridge, with at times an occasional mess of brose o^ brochan, for only my master and myself, — a happy arrangement, which, I dare soy , saved me a few ra7nmings ; seeing that, in at least my earlier efforts, I had been rather unlucky as a cook, and not ^ery fortunate as a baker. My experience in the Cromarty ca'^es had rendered me skilful in both boiling and roasting potatoes, and in preparing shell-fish for the table, whether OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATI0:N-. 217 molluscous or crustacean, according to the most approved methods ; but the exigencies of our wild life had never brought me fairly in contact with the ceralia ; and I had now to spoil a meal or two, in each instance, ere my porridge became pal- atable, or my cakes crisp, or my brose free and knotty, or my hrochan sufficiently smooth and void of knots. My master, poor man, did grumble a little at first ; but there was a gene- ral disposition in the barrack to take part rather with his ap pi entice than with himself; and after finding that the cases were to be given against him, he ceased making complaints. My porridge w^as at times, I must confess, very like leaven ; but then, it was a standing recipe in the barrack, that the cook should continue stirring the mess and adding meal, until, from its first wild ebullitions in full boil, it became silent over the fire ; and so I could show that I had made my porridge like leaven, quite according to rule. And as for my hrochan. I suc- ceeded in proving that I had actually failed to satisfy, though I had made two kinds of it at once in the same pot. I pre- ferred this viand when of a thicker consistency than usual, whereas my master liked it thin enough to be drunk out of the bowl ; but as it was I who had the making of it, I used more instead of less meal than ordinary, and unluckily, in my first experiment, mixed up the meal in a very small bowd. It became a dense dough-like mass ; and on emptying it into the pot, instead of incorporating with the boiling water, it sank in a solid cake to the bottom. In vain I stirred, and manipu- lated, and kept up the fire. The stubborn mass refused to separate or dilute, and at length burnt brown against the bo1> tom of the pot, — a hue which the gruel-like fluid which float- ed over also assumed ; and at length, in utter despair of se- curing aught approaching to an average consistency for the vfhole, and hearing my master's foot at the door, I took the pot from off the fire, and dished up for supper a portion of the thinner mixture which it contained, and which, in at least coloi and consistency, not a little resembled chocolate. The poor man ladled the stuff in utter dismay. " Od. laddie," he said. " what ca' ye this % Ca' ve this hrochan ^" " Ony thing 218 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ye like master," I replied ; *' but there are two kinds in the pot, and it will go hard if none of them please you." I then dished him a piece of the cake, somewhat resembling in size and consistency a small brow^n dumpling, which he of course found wholly unedible. and became angry. But this bad earth of ours " is filled," according to Cowper, " wnth wrong and outrage;" and the barrack laughed and took part with the de- faulter. Experience, however, that does so much for all, did a little for me. I at length became a tolerably fair plain cook, and a not very bad baker ; and now, when the exigencies re- quired that I should take my full share in the duties of the barrack, I was found adequate to their proper fulfilment. ] made cakes and porridge of fully the average excellence ; and my brose and brochan enjoyed at least the negative happiness of escaping animadversion and comment. Some of the inmates, however, who were exceedingly nico in their eating, were great connoisseurs in porridge ; and it was no easy matter to please them. There existed unsettled differences — the results of a diversity of tastes— regarding the time that should be given to the boiling of the mess, respect- ing the proportion of salt that should be allotted to each indi- vidual, and as to whether the process of " mealing," as it was termed, should be a slow or a hasty one ; and, of course, as in all controversies of all kinds, the more the matters in dis- pute were discussed, the more did they grow in importance. Occasionally the disputants had their porridge made at the same time in the same pot ; there were, in especial, two of tho workmen who differed upon the degree-of-salt question, whoso bickers were supplied from the same general preparation ; and as these had usually opposite complaints to urge against the cook'ng, their objections served so completely to neutralize each other, that they in no degree told against the cook. One morning the cook, — a wag and a favorite, — in making por* ridge for both the controversialists, made it so exceedingly fresh as to be but little removed from a poultice ; and, filling with the preparation in this state the bicker of the salt-loving fi.:)iinoisseur, he then took a handful of salt, and mixing it with OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATI0:N-. 219 the portion which remained in the pot, poured into the bicker of the fresh-man, porridge very much akin to a pickle. Both entered the barrack sharply set for breakfast, and sat down each to his meal ; and both at the first spoonful dropped their spoons. " A ramming to the cook !' cried the one, — " he has given me porridge without salt !" " A ramming to the cook !" roared out the oth^r, — " he has given me porridge like brine !" " You see lads," said the cook, stepping out into the middle of the floor, with the air of a much-injured orator, — " you see, lads, what matters have come to at last ; there is the very pot in which I made in one mess the porridge in both their bickers. I don't think we should bear this any longer ; we have all had our turn of it, though mine happens to be the worst ; and I now move that these two fellows be rammed." No sooner said than done. There was a terrible struggling, and a burning sense of injustice ; but no single man in the barrack was match for half-a-dozen of the others. The disputants, too, instead of making common cause together, were prepared to assist in ramming each the other ; and so rammed they both were. And at length, when the details of the stratagem came out, the cook — by escaping for half an hour into the neighboring wood, and concealing himself there, like some political exile under ban of the Government — succeeded in escaping the merited punishment. The cause of justice was never, I found, in greater danger in our little community, than when a culprit succeeded in get- ting the laughers on his side. I have said that I became a not very bad baker. Still less and less sorely, as I improved in this useful art, did my cakes try the failing teeth of my master, until at length they became crisp and nice ; and he began to find that my new accomplishment was working se- rious effects upon the contents of his meal-chest. With a keenly whet appetite, and in vigorous health, I was eating a great deal of bread ; and, after a good deal of grumbling, ho at length laid it down as law that I should restrict myself for the future to two cakes per week. I at once agreed ; but the general barrack, to whose ears some of my master's remon* 220 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES ; strances had found their way, was dissatisfied ; and it wculd probably have overturied in conclave our agreement, and punished the old man, my master, for the niggardly stringency of his terms, had I not craved,- by way of special favor, to be permitted to give them a week's trial. One evening early in the week, when the old man had gone out, I mixed up the better part of a peck of meal in a pot, and, placing two of the larger chests together in the same plane, kneaded it out into an enormous cake, at least equal in area to an ordinary- sized Newcastle grindstone. I then cut it up into about twerty pieces, and, forming a vast semicircle of stones round the fire, raised the pieces to the heat in a continuous row, some five or six feet in length. I had ample and ready assistance vouch- safed me in the " firing," — half the barrack were engaged in the work, — when my master entered, and, after scanning our employment in utter astonishment, — now glancing at the ring of meal which still remained on the united chests, to testify to the huge proportions of the disparted bannock, — and now at the cones, squares, rhombs, and trapeziums of cake that har- dened to the heat in front of the fire, he abruptly asked, — " What's this, laddie 1 — are ye baking for a wadding f " Jv st baking one of the two cakes, master," T replied ; •' I don't think we'll need the other one before Saturday night." A roar of laughter from every corner of the barrack precluded reply ; and in the laughter, after an embarrassed pause, the poor man had the good sense to join. And during the rest of the season I baked as often and as much as I pleased. It is, I believe. Goldsmith who remarks, that '' wit generally suc- ceeds more from being happily addressed, than from its na- tive poignancy," and that " a jest calculated to spread at a gaming table, may be received with perfect indifference should it happen to drop in a mackerel-boat." On Goldsmith's prin- ciple, the joke of what was termed, from the well-known fairy tale, " the big bannock wi' the Malison," could have perhaps succeeded in only a masons' barrack ; but never there at least oould joke have been more successful. As I had not y^-t ascertained that the Old Red Sandstone OR, THE STORY OF MY liDUCATION. 221 of I he north of Scotland is richly fossiliferous, Con on side and its neighborhood furnished me with no very favorable field for geological exploration. It enabled me, however, to extend my acquaintance with the great conglomerate base of the sys- tem, which forms here, as I have already said, a sort of minia- ture Highlands, extending between the valleys of the Conon and the Peffer, and which, — remarkable for its picturesque cliffs, abrupt eminences, and narrow steep-sided dells, — bear n itir centre a pretty wood-skirted loch, into which the old Celtic prophet Kenneth Ore, when, like Prospero. he relin- quished his art, buried " deep beyond plummet sound" the magic stone in which he was wont to see both the distant and the future. Immediately over the pleasure-grounds of Brahan, the rock forms exactly such cliffs as the landscape gardener would make, if he could, — cliffs with their rude prominent pebbles breaking the light over every square foot of surface, and furnishing footing, by their innumerable projections, to many a green tuft of moss, and many a sweet little flower ; while far below, among the deep woods, there stand up enor- mous fragments of the same rock, that must have rolled down in some remote age from the precipices above, and which, mossy and hoar, and many of them ivy -bound, resemble arti- ficial ruins, — obnoxious, however, to none of the disparaging associations which the make-believe ruin is sure always to awaken. It was inexpressibly pleasant to spend a quiet even- ing hour among these wild cliffs, and imagine a time when the far distant sea beat against their b^ses ; but though their en- closed pebbles evidently owed their rounded form to the attri- tion of water, the imagination seemed paralyzed when it at- tempted calling up a still earlier time, when these solid rocks existed but as loose sand and pebbles, tossed by waves or scat- tered by currents ; and when, for hundreds and thousands of square miles, the wild tract around existed as an ancient ocean, skirted by unknown lands. I had not yet collected enough of geologic fact to enable me to grapple with the difficulties of a restoration of the more ancient time. There was a later period, also represented in the immediate neighborhood by i\ 222 thick de])osit of stratified sand, of which I knew as little as of the conglomerate. We dug into it, in founding a thrashing-mill, for about ten feet, hut came to no bottom ; and I could see that it formed the subsoil of the valley all around the policies of Conon- side, and underlay most of its fields and woods. It was "white and pure, as if it had been washed by the sea only a few weeks previous ; but in vain did I search its beds and layers for a frag^ ment of shell by which to determine its age. I can now, how- e^er, entertain little doubt that it belonged to the boulder-clay period of submergence, and that the fauna with which it was associated bore the ordinary sub-arctic character. When this stratified sand was deposited, the waves must have broken against the conglomerate precipices of Brahan, and the sea have occupied, as friths and sounds, the deep Highland valleys of the interior. And on such of the hills of the country as had their heads above water at the time, that interesting but some- what meagre Alpine Flora must have flourished, which we now find restricted to our higher mountain summits. Once every six wrecks I was permitted to visit Cromarty, and pass a Sabbath there ; but as my master usually accom- panied me, and as the way proved sufficiently long and weary to press upon his failing strength and stifiening limbs, w^e had to restrict ourselves to the beaten road, and saw but little. On, however, one occasion this season, I journeyed alone, and spent so happy a day in finding my homeward road along blind paths, — that ran now along the rocky shores of the Cro- marty Frith in its upper reaches, now through brown, lonely moors, mottled with Danish encampments, and now beside quiet, tomb-besprinkled burying-grounds,and the broken walls of deserted churches, — that its memory still lives freshly in my mind, as one of the happiest of my life. I passed whole hours among the ruins of Craighouse, — a gray fantastic rag of a castle, consisting of four heavily-arched stories of time-eaten stone, piled over each other, and still bearing atop its stone roof and its ornate turrets and bartizans, — **A ghastly prison, that eternally Haiigs 's blind visage out to the lone ?ea." OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOiN. 22b it was said in these days to be haunted by its goblin, — a mis- erable-looking, gray-headed, gray-bearded, little old man, that might occasionally be seen late in the evening, or early in the morning, peering out through some arrow-slit or shot-hole at the chance passenger. I remember getting the whole hiiitory of the goblin this day from a sun-burnt herd-boy, whom I found tending his cattle under the shadow of the old castle- walJ. I began by asking him whose apparition he thought it was that could continue to haunt a building, the very name of whose last inhabitant had been long since forgotten. " 0, the^/re saying,'''' was the reply, " it's the spirit of the man that was killed on the foundation-stone, just after it was laid, and then built intil the wa' by the masons, that he might keep the castle by coming back again ; and they're saying that a' the verra auld houses in the kintra had murderit men builded intil them in that way, and that they have a' o' them their bogle." I recognized in the boy's account of the matter an old and widely-spread tradition, which, whatever may have been its original basis of truth, seems to have so far influenced the buccaneers of the 17th century, as to have become a reality in their hands. " If time," says Sir Walter Scott, " did not per- mit the buccaneers to lavish away their plunder in their usual debaucheries, they were wont to hi ie it, with many supersti- tious solemnities, in the desert islands and keys which they frequented, and where much treasure, whose lawless owners perished without reclaiming it, is still supposed to be concealed. The most cruel of mankind are often the most superstitious ; and those pirates are said to have had recourse to a hoi-rid ritual, in order to secure an unearthly guardian to their treas- ures. They killed a negro or Spaniard, and buried him with the treasure, believing that his spirit would haunt the spot. and terrify away all intruders." There is a figurative j)ecu!i arity in the language in which Joshua denounced the man who should dare rebuild Jericho, that seems to point at some an- cient pagan rite of this kind. Nor does it seem improbiible that a practice which existed in times so little remote as tliose of the buccaneera may have first begun in the dark and crue] 224 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ages of human saci fice. " Cursed be tLe man before tht Lord," said Joshua, '-that riseth up and buildeth this city of Jericho : he shall lay the foundatior: thereof in his first-born^ and in his youngest son shall he set vp the gates of itP The large-farm system had been already introduced into the part of the country in which I at this time resided, on the richer and more level lands; but many a Gaelic-speaking cot- ter and small tenant still lived on the neighboring moors and Jiill-sides. Though Highland in their surnames and language, they bore a character considerably different from that of the simpler Highlanders of the interior of Sutherland, or of ^i class I had shortly afterwards an opportunity of studying — the High- landers of the western coast of Ross-shire. Doors were not left unbarred at night in the neighborhood ; and there were wretch- ed hovels among the moors, very zealously watched and guard- ed indeed. There was much illicit distillation and smuggling at this time among the Gaelic-speaking people of the district; and it told upon their character with the usual deteriorating effect. Many of the Highlanders, too, had \yrought as labor- ers at the Caledonian Canal, where they had come in contact with south-country workmen, and had brought back with them a confident, loquacious smartness, that, based on a ground- work of ignorance, which it rendered active and obtrusive, had a bizarre and disagreeable effect, and formed but an indifierent substitute for the diffident and taciturn simplicity which it had supplanted. But I have ever found the people of those border districts of the Highlands which join on to the low country, oi that inhabit districts much traversed by tourists, of a com- paratively inferior cast : the finer qualities of the Highland character seem easily injured : the hospitality, the simplicity, the unsuspecting honesty disappear; and we find, instead, a people rapacious, suspicious, and unscrupulous, considerably beneath the Lowland average. In all the unopened districts of the remote Highlands into which I have penetrated, I have found the people strongly engage my sympathies and affec- tions, — much more strongly than in any part c f the Lowlands ; whereas, on the contrary, in the deter icrat^id districts I have OR, THE STORY OJ^" MY EDUCATION. 225 hoen sensible of an involuntary revulsion of feeling, when in contact with the altered race of which, among the low-coun- try Scotch or the English, I have had no experience. I re- member being impressed, in reading, many years ago, one of Miss Terrier's novels, with the truth of a stroke that brought out very practically the ready susceptibility of injury mani- fested by the Celtic character. Some visitors of condition from the Highlands are represented as seeking out, in one of our larger towns of the south, a simple Highland lad, \\ho had quitted a remote northern district only a few months bo- fore ; and when they find him, it is as a prisoner in Bridewell. Towards the end of September, my master, who had wholly failed in overcoming his repugnance to labor as a mere jour neyman, succeeded in procuring a piece of work by contract, in a locality about fourteen miles nearer our home than Co- non-side, and I accompanied him to assist in its completion. Our employment in our new scene of labor was of the most disagreeable kind. Burns, who must have had a tolerably ex- tensive experience of the evils of hard work, specifies in his " Twa Dogs" three kinds of labor in especial that give poor *' cot-folk" " fash enough." "Trowth, CjBsar, whiles they're fash'd enough ; A cottar howkin in a sheugh, W^i' dirty stanes biggin a dyke. Baring a quaary, and sic like." All very disagreeable employments, as I also can testify ; and our work here unfortunately combined the whole three. We were engaged in rebuilding one of those old-fashioned walls of gentlemen's pleasure-grounds known as " ha Aas," that line the sides of deep ditches, and raise their tops to but the level of the sward ; and as the ditch in this special instance was a wet one, and as we had to clear it of the old fallen materials, and to dig it out for our new line of foundation, while at the same time we had to furnish ourselves with additional materials from a neighboring quarry, we had at once the '* baring of the parry," the "howkin in the sheugh," and the 'biggin of 226 the dyke wi' dirty stanes," to " fash" us. The last-named em ployment is by far the most painful and trying. In most kindy of severe labor the skin thickens, and the hand hardens, through a natural provision, to suit the requirements of the task im- posed, and yield the necessary protection to the integuments below ; but the " dirty stanes" of the dyke-builder, when wet as well as dirty, try the reproductive powers of the cuticle too severely, and wear it off, so that under the rough friction the quick is laid bare. On this occasion, and on at least one other, when engaged in building in a wet season in the West- ern Highlands, 1 had all my fingers oozing blood at once ; and those who think that in such circumstances labor protracted throughout a long day can be other than torture, would do well to try. How these poor hands of mine burnt and beat At night at this time, as if an unhappy heart had been station- ed in every finger ! and what cold chills used to run, sudden as electric shocks, through the feverish frame ! My general health, too, had become far from strong. As 1 had been almost entirely engaged in hewing for the two pre- vious seasons, the dust of the stone, inhaled at every breath, had exerted the usual weakening effects on the lungs, — those effects under which the life of the stone cutter is restricted to about forty five years ; but it was only now, when working day after day with wet feet in a water-logged ditch, that I be- gan to be sensibly informed, by a dull, depressing pain in the chest, and a blood-stained, mucoidal substance, expectorated with difficulty, that I had already caught harm from my em- ployment, and that my term of life might fall far short of the average one. I resolved, however, as the last year of my ap- prenticeship was fast drawing to its close, to complete, at all hazards, my engagement with my master. It had been mere ly a verbal agreement, and I might have broken it withou* blame, when, unable to furnish me with work in his character as a master-mason, he had to transfer my labor to another ; but I had determined not to break it, all the more doggedly from the circumstance that my Uncle James, in a moment of irritation, had said at its commencement, that he feared 1 OB, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION 227 would no more persist in being a mason than I had done in being a scholar ; and so I wrought perseveringly on ; and slowly and painfully, rood after rood, the wall grew up under our* hands. My poor master, who suffered even more from chopped hands and bleeding fingers than I did, was cross and fretful, and sometimes sought relief in finding fault with his apprentice; but, sobered by my forebodings of an early death, I used to make no reply ; and the hasty, ill-tempered express- ions in which he gave vent virtually to but his sense of pain and discomfort, were almost always follow^ed by some concilia- tory remark. Superstition takes a strong hold of the mind in circumstances such as those in which I was at this time placed. One day, when on the top of a tall building, part of which we were throwing down to supply us with materials for our work, I raised up a broad slab of red micaceous sandstone, thin as a roofing slate, and exceedingly fragile, and, holding it out at arm's length, dropped it over the w^all. I had been worse than usual all that morning, and much depressed ; and, ere the slab parted from my hand, I said, — looking forward to but a few months of life, — I shall break up like that sandstone slab, and perish as little known. But the sandstone slab did not break up ; a sudden breeze blew it aslant as it fell ; it cleared the rough heap of stones below, where I had antici- pated it would have been shivered to fragments ; and, light- ing on its edge, stuck upright like a miniature obelisk, in the soft green sward beyond. None of the Philosophies or the Logics would have sanctioned the inference which I immedi- ately drew ; but that curious chapter in the history of human belief which treats of signs and omens abounds in such postu- lates and such conclusions. I at once inferred that recovery awaited me ; 1 was " to live and not die ;'* and felt lighter, during the few weeks I afterwards toiled at this place, under the cheering influence of the conviction. The tenant of the farm on w^hich our work was situated, and who had been both a great distiller and considerable farmer in his da} , had become bankrupt shortly before, and was on the eve of quitting the place, a broken man. And his fjrlorn cir- 1 228 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES cumstances seemed stamped on almost every field and tat- house of his farm. The stone fences were ruinous ; the hedges gapped by the almost untended cattle ; a considerable sprink ling of corn-ears lay rotting on the lea ; and here and there an entire sheaf, that had fallen from the " leading-cart" at tho close of harvest, might be seen still lying among the stubble fastened to the earth by the germination of its grains. Some of the outhouses were miserable beyond description. There was a square of modern offices, in which the cattle and horses of the farm — appropriated by the landlord, at the time, under the law of hypothec — were tolerably well lodged ; but the hovel in which three of the farm-servants lived, and in which, for want of a better, my master and I had to cook and sleep, was one of the most miserable tumble-down erections I ever saw inhabited. It had formed part of an ancient set of offices that had been condemned about fourteen years before ; but the proprietor of the place becoming insolvent, it had been spared, in lack of a better, to accommodate the servants who wrought on the farm ; and it had now become not only a comfortless, but also a very unsafe dwelling. It would have formed no bad subject, with its bulging walls and gapped roof, that show^ed the bare ribs through the breaches, for the pencil of my friend William Ross ; but the cow or horse that had no better shelter than that which it afforded, could not be re- garded as other than indifferently lodged. Every heaviei shower found its way through the roof in torrents : I could even tell the hour of the night by the stars which passed over the long opening that ran along the ridge from gable to gable ; and in stormy evenings I have paused at every ruder blast, iu the expectation of hearing the rafters crack and give way over my head. The distiller had introduced upon his farm, on a small scale, what has since been extensively known as the bothy system ; and this hovel was the bothy. There were, as I have said, but three farm-servants who lived in it at the time, — young, unmarried lads, extremely ignorant, and of gay, reckless dispositions, whose care for their master's interests might be read in the germinating sheaves that lay upon *iis OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 229 fields, and who usually sp )ke of him, when out of his hear- ing?, as " the old sinner." He too evidently cared nothing for them, and they detested him ; and regarded the ruin which had overtaken him, and which their own recklessness and in- differency to his welfare must have at least assisted to secure, with open satisfaction. " It was a'e comfort anyhow," they said, " that the blastit old sinner, after a' his near-goingness wi' them, was now but a dyvour bankrupt." Bad enough, certainly ; and yet natural enough, and, in a sense, proper ei.ough, too. The Christian divine would have urged these men to return their master good for evil. Cobbett, on the contrary, would have advised them to go out at nights a rick- burning. The better advice will to a certainty not be taken by ninety-nine out of every hundred of our bothy-men ; for it is one of the grand evils of the system, that it removes its victims beyond the ennobling influences of religion ; and, on the other hand, at least this much may be said for the worse counsel, that the system costs the country every year the price of a (Treat many corn-ricks. The thr'ie lads lived chiefly on brose, as the viand at all edible into which their oatmeal could be most readily convert- ed ; and never baked or made for themselves a dish of porridge or gruel, apparently to avoid trouble, and that they might be as little as possible in the hated bothy. I always lost sight of thera in the evening ; but towards midnight their talk frequently awoke me as they were going to bed ; and I heard them tell of incidents that had befallen them at the neighborhig farm-houses, or refer to blackguard bits of scandal which they had picked up. Sometimes a fourth voice mingled in the dialogue. It was that of a reckless poacher, who used to come in, always long after nightfall, and fling himself down on a lair of straw in a corner of the bothy ; and usually ere day broke he was up and away. The grand enjoyment of the three farm-lads, — the enjoyment which seemed to counter- balance, with its concentrated delights, the comfortless monoo- ony of weeks, — was a rustic ball, Avhich took place once every month, and sometimes of^ener, at a public-house in a nei^b- 280 M Y SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS , boring village, and at which they used to meet some of the farm-lasses of the locality, and dance and drink whisky till morning. I know not how their money stood such frequent carousals ; but they were, I saw, bare of every necessary ar- ticle of clothing, especially of underclothing and linen ; and 1 learned from their occasional talk about justice-of-peace sum- monses, that the previous term-day had left in the hands of their shoemakers and drapers unsettled bills. But such mat. ters were taken very lightly : the three lads, if not happy, were at least merry ; and the monthly ball, for which they sacri- ficed so much, furnished not only its hours of pleasure while it lasted, but also a wreck's talking in anticipation ere it came, and another week's talking over its various incidents after it had passed. And such was my experience of the bothy sys- tem in its first beginnings. It has since so greatly increased, that there are now single counties in Scotland in which there are from five to eight hundred farm-servants exposed to its deteriorating influences ; and the rustic population bids fair in those districts fully to rival that of our large towns in profli- gacy, and greatly to outrival them in coarseness. Were I a statesman I would, I think, be bold enough to try the eflScacy of a tax on bothies. It is long since Goldsmith wrote regard- ing a state of society in which " wealth accumulates and men decay," and since Burns looked with his accustomed sagacity on that change for the worse in the character of our rural people which the large farm-system has introduced. " A fertile improved country is West Lothian," we find the latter poet remarking, in one of his journals : " but the more elegance and luxury among the farmers I always observe in equal pro- portion the rudeness and stupidity of the peasantry. This remark I have made all over the Lothians, Merse, Roxburglu (fee ; and for this, among other reasons, I think that a man of omantic taste — 'a man of feeling' — will be better pleased with the poverty but intelligent minds of the pa-isantry of Ayrshire (peasantry they all are below the Justice of Peace), than the opulence of a club of Merse farmers, when he at the same time tonsiders the Yandalisri of their plough-folks." The dete- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 231 riorating effect of the large-farm system, remarked by the poet, is inevitable. It is impossible that the modern farm-servant, in his comparatively irresponsible situation, and with his fixed wages of meagre amount, can be rendered as thoughtful and provident a person as the small farmer of the last age, who, thrown on his own resources, had to cultivate his fields and drive his bargains with his Martinmas and Whitsunday settle- ment with the landlord full before him ; and who often sue* ceeded in saving money and in giving a classical education to some promising son or nephew, which enabled the young man to rise to a higher sphere of life. Farm-servants, as a class, must be lower in the scale than the old tenant-farmers, who wrought their little farms with their own hands ; but it is pos- sible to elevate them far above the degraded level of a bothy ; and unless means be taken to check the spread of the ruinous process of brut e-making which the system involves, the Scottish people will sink, to a certainty, in the agricultural districts, from being one of the most provident, intelligent and moral in Europe, to be one of the most licentious, reckless and ignorant. Candle-light is a luxury in which no one ever thinks of in- dulging in a barrack ; and in a barrack such as ours at this time, riddled with gaps and breaches, and filled with all man- ner of cold draughts, it was not every night in which a candle would have burnt. And as our fuel, which consisted of sorely decayed wood, — the roofing of a dilapidated outhouse which we were pulling down, — formed but a dull fire, it was with difficulty I could read by its light. By spreading out my book, however, within a foot or so of the embers, I was en- abled, though sometimes at the expense of a headache, to pros- ecute a new tract of reading which had just opened to me, and in which, for a time, I found much amusement. There vras a vagabond pedlar who travelled at this time the northern counties, widely known as Jack from Dover, but whose true name was Alexander Knox, and who used to affirm that he was of the same family as the great Reformer. The pedlar himself was, however, no reformer. Once every six weeks or two months, he go madly drunk and not only " perished the 232 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; pack,'' as he used to say, but sometimes got into prison to boot There were, however, some kind relations in the south, who always set him up again ; and Jack from Dover, after a fort- night of misery, used to appear with the ordinary bulk of merchandize at his back, and continue thriving until he again got drunk. He had a turn for buying and reading curious books, which, after mastering their contents, he always sold again ; and he learned to bring them, when of a kind which m one else would purchase, to my mother, and recommend them as suitable for me. Poor Jack was always conscientious in his recommendations. I know not how he contrived to take the exact measure of my tastes in the matter, but suitable for me they invariably were ; and as his price rarely exceeded a shil ling per volume, and sometimes fell below a sixpence, my mother always purchased, when she could, upon his judgment. I owed to his discrimination my first copy of " Bacon's Wis- dom of the Ancients," '- done into English by Sir Arthur Gorges," and a book to which I had long after occasion to refer in my geological writings, — Maillet's " Telliamed," — one of the earlier treatises on the development hypothesis ; and he had now procured for me a selection, in one volume, of the Poems of Gawin Douglas and Will Dunbar, and another col- lection in a larger volume, of " Ancient Scottish Poems," from the MS. of George Bannatyne. I had been previously almost wholly unacquainted with the elder Scottish poets. My Uncle James had introduced me, at a very early age, to Burns and Ramsay, and I had found out Fergusson and Tannahill for myself; but that school of Scottish literature which flourished between the reigns of David the Second and James the Sixth had remained to me, until now, well-nigh a terra incognita ; and I found no little pleasure in exploring the antique recesses which it opened up. Shortly after, I read Ramsay's *' Ever- green," the " King's Quair," and the true " Actes and Deidis of ye illuster and vailyeand campioun Shyr Wilham Wallace," not modernized, as in my first copy, but in the tongue in which they had been recited of old by Henry the Minstrel : I had previously gloated O" er Barbour's Bruce ; and thus my ao OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 2^.6 quaintance with the old Scots poets, if not very profound, be came at least so respectable, that not until many years after did I meet with an mdividual who knew them equally well. The strange picturesque allegories of Douglas, and the terse sense and racy humor of Dunbar, delighted me much. As 1 had to con my way slowly amid the difficulties of a language whii h was no longer that spoken by my country folk, I felt as if I were creating the sense which I found : it came gradually out like some fossil jf the rock, from which I had laboriously to chip away the enveloping matrix ; and in hanging admir- ingly over it, I thought I perceived how it was that some of my old schoolfellows, who were prosecuting their education at college, were always insisting on the great superiority of the old Greek and Roman writers over the writers of our own coun- try. I could not give them credit for much critical discern- ment : they were indifferent enough, some of them, to both verse and prose, and hardly knew in what poetry consisted ; and yet I believed them to be true to their perceptions when they insisted on what they termed the high excellence of the ancients. With my old schoolfellows, I now said, the process of perusal, when reading an English work of classical standing, is so sudden, compared with the slowness with which they imagine or understand, that they slide over the surface of their author's numbers, or of his periods, without acquiring a due sense of what lies beneath ; whereas, in perusing the works of a Greek or Latin author, they have just to do what I am doing in deciphering the " Palice of Honour," or the " Goldin Terge," — they have to proceed slowly, and to render the language of their author into the language of their own thinking. And so, losing scarce any of his meaning in consequence, and not re- flecting on the process through which they have entered into it they contrast the little which they gain from a hurried peru- sal of a good English book, with the much which they gain from the very leisurely perusal of a good Latin or Greek one ; and term the little the poverty of modern writers, and the much the fertility of the ancients. Such was my theory, and it was at least not an uncharitable one to my acquaintance. I waa 234 MY SCHOOLS AND however, arrested in the middle of my studies by a day cf soaking rain, which so saturated with moisture the decayed spongy wood, our fuel, that, though I succeeded in making with some difficulty such fires of it as sufficed to cook our victuals, it defied my skill to make one by which I could read. At length, however, this dreary season of labor — ^by far the gloomiest I ever spent — came to a close, and I returned with my master to Cromarty about Martinmas, — our heavy job of wcrk completed, and my term of apprenticeship at a close. Oa. TDE STOKY OF MY EDtJCATION. 835 CHAPTER XII. **rar let me wander down thy craggy shore, AVith rocks and trees bestrewn, dark Loch Maree." Small. The restorative powers of a constitution which at this time it took much hard usage to injure, came vigorously into opera- tion on my removal from the wet ditch and the ruinous hovel ; and ere the close of winter I had got once more into my ordi- nary state of robust health. I read, wrote, drew, correspond- ed with my friend William Ross (who had removed to Edin- burgh), re-examined the Eathie Lias, and re -explored the Eathie Burn, — a noble Old Red Sandstone ravine, remarkable for the wild picturesqueness of its cliffs and the beauty of its cataracts. I spent, too, many an evening in Uncle James's workshop, on better terms with both my uncles than almost ever before, — a consequence, in part, of the sober complexion which, as the seasons passed, my mind was gradually assum- ing, and, in part, of the manner in which I had completed my engagement with my master. "Act always," said Uncle James, " as you have done in this matter. In all your deal- ings, give your neighbor the cast of the hauk^ — ' good meas- ure heaped up and running over,' — and you will not lose by it in the end." I certainly did not lose by faithfully serving out my term of apprenticeship. It is not uninstructive to ob- serve how strangely the public are led at times to attach para 23(5 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEj^^f : mount importance to what is in reality only subordinaiel} ira portant, and to pass over the really paramount without thought or notice. The destiny in life of the skilled mechanic is much more influenced, for instance, by his second education — that of his apprenticeship — than by his first — that of the school ; and yet it is to the education at the school that the importance is generally regarded as attaching, and we never hear of the other. The careless, incompetent scholar has many opportu nities of recovering himself; the careless, incompetent appren- tice, who either fails to serve out his regular time, or who, though he fulfils his tonn, is discharged an inferior workman, has very few ; and farther, nothing can be more certain than that inferiority as a workman bears much more disastrously on the condition of the mechanic than inferiority as a scholar. Unable to maintain his place among brother journeymen, or to render himself worthy of the average wages of his craft, the ill-taught mechanic falls out of regular employment, subsists precariously for a time on occasional jobs, and either, forming idle habits, becomes a vagabond trampe7\ or, getting into the toils of some rapacious task -master, becomes an enslaved sweater. For one workman injured by neglect of his school education, there are scores ruined by neglect of their appren- ticeship-education. Three-fourths of the distress of the coun- try's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of the unhappy class who have to compete with machinery), and nine-tenthg of their vagabondism, will be found restricted to inferior work- men, who, like Hogarth's '^ careless apprentice," neglected tho opportunities of their second term of education. The sagacious painter had a truer insight into the matter than most of oui modern educationists. My friend of the Doocot Cave had been serving a short ap- prenticeship to a grocer in London during the latter years in which I had been working out mine as a stone-mason in the north country ; and I now learned that he had just returned to his native place, with the intention of setting up in busi- •less for himself. To those who move in the upper walks, the superi rity in status of the village shop-keeper over the jour OR, THE STORY OF MY EDE CATION'. 237 neyman mason may not be very perceptible ; but, surveyed from the lower levels of society, it is quite considerable enough to be seen ; even Gulliver could determine that the Emperor of Lilliput was taller by almost the breadth of a nail than any of his Court; and, though extremely desirous of renewing my acquaintanceship with my old friend, I was sensible enough of his advantage over me in point of position, to feel that the ne- cessary advances should be made on his part, not on mine. I, however, threw myself in his way, though after a manner so fastidiously proud and jealous, that even yet, every time the recollection crosses me, it provokes me to a smile. On learn- ing that he was engaged at the quay in superintending the landing of some goods, for, I suppose, his future shop, I assum ed the leathern apron, which I had thrown aside for the winter at Marthimas, and stalked past him in my v/orking dress, — a veritable operative mason,— eyeing him steadfastly as I passed. He looked at me for a moment ; and then, without sign of re- cognition, turned indifferently away. I failed taking into ac- count that he had never seen me girt with a leathern apron be- fore, — that, since we had last parted, I had grown more than half a foot, — and that a young man of nearly five feet eleven inches, with an incipient whisker palpably visible on his check, might be a different-looking sort of person from a smooth- chinned strippling of little more than five feet three. And certainly my friend, as I learned from him nearly three years after, failed on this occasion to recognize me. But believing that he did, and that he did not choose to reckon among his friends a humble working man, I returned to my home very sad, and, I am afraid, not a little angry ; and, locking up the supposed slight in my breast, as if of too delicate a nature to be communicated to any one, for more than two years from this time I did not again cross his path. I was now my own master, and commenced work as a jour- neyman inbehalf of one of my m.aternal aunts, — the aunt who had gone so many years before to live with her aged relative, the cousin of my father, and the mother of his first wife. Aunt Jerny had resided for many years after this time with 238 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHiX)LMASTERS ; an aged widow lady, who had lived apart in quiet gentility on very small means ; and, now that she was dead, ray aunt saw her vocation gone, and wished that she too could live apart, a life of humble independency, supporting herself by her spin- ning-wheel, and by now and then knitting a stocking. She feared, however, to encounter the formidable drain on her means of a half-yearly room-rent ; and, as there was a little bit of ground at the head of the strip of garden left me by my father, which bordered on a road that, communicating between town and country, bore, as is common in the north of Scotland, the French name of the Pays^ it occurred to me that I might try my hand, as a skilled mechanic, in erecting upon it a cot- tage for Aunt Jenny. , Masons have, of course, more in their power in the way of house-building than any other class of mechanics. It was necessary, however, that there should be money provided for the purchase of wood for the roof, and for the carting of the necessary stones and mortar ; and I had none. But Aunt Jenny had saved a few pounds, and a very few proved sufficient ; and so I built a cottage in the Pays^ of a single room and a closet, as my first job, which, if not very elegant, or of large accommodation, came fully up to Aunt Jenny's ideas of comfort, and which, for at least a quarter of a century, has served her as a home. It was completed before Whitsunday, and I then deliberated on setting myself to seek after employment of a more remunerative kind, with just a little of the feeling to which we owe one of the best known elegiac poems in the language, — the "Man was made to Mourn" of Burns. " There is nothing that gives me a more mortifying picture of human life," said the poet, " than a man seeking work." The required work, however, came direct in my way without solicitation, and exactly at the proper time. I was engaged to assist in hewing a Gothic gateway among the woods of my old haunt, Conon-side ; and was then de- spatched, when the work was on the eve of being finished, to provide materials for building a house on the western coast of Ross-shire. My new master had found me engaged in the previous season, amid the wild turmoil of the barrack, in OE, THE STORi^ OF MY EDITCATIOK 239 Studying practical geometry, and had glanced approving'iy over a series of architectural drawings, which I had just complet- ■^d ; and he now sought me out in consequence, and placed me in charge of a small party which he despatched in advance of his other workmen, and which I was instructed to increase, by empl ^ying a laborer or two on arriving at the scene of our future eniployment. We were to be accompanied by a carter from a neighbor ing town ; and on the morning fixed for the comraencemen of our journey, his cart and horse were early at Conon-side to carry across the country the tools required at our new job ; but of himself we saw no trace, and about ten o'clock we set off without him. Ascertaining, however, when about two miles on our way, that we had left behind us a lever useful in the setting of large stones, I bade my companion wait for me at the village of Contin, where we expected meeting the carter ; and, returning for the tool, 1 quitted the high road on finding it, and, to save time, and avoid a detour of about three miles, struck across the country direct on the village. My way was, however, a very rough one ; and in coming upon the Conon, which it was necessary I should ford, — for, by avoiding the detour, I had missed the bridge, — I found it tolerably heavy in flood. Save for the iron lever which I carried, I would have selected, as my point of crossing, one of the still, deep pools, as much safer to a vigorous swimmer than any of the apparent fords, with their powerful currents, whirling eddies, and rough bottoms. But though the heroes of antiquity — men such as Julius Caesar and Horatius Coccles — could swim across rivers and seas in heavy armor, the specific gravity of the human subject in these latter ages of the world forbids such feats ; and concluding that I had net levity enough in my framework to float across the lever, I selected, with some hes- itation, one of the better-looking fords, and, with my trous- ers dangling from the iron-beam on my shoulder, entered the river. Such was the arrowy swiftness of the current, how- ever, that the water had scarce reached my middle when it began to hollow out the stones and gravel from under my feet, 2-10 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLM.^STERS ; and to bear me down per force in a slanting directi; n Tliere was a foaming rapid just at hand ; and immediately beyond, a deep, dark pool, in which the chafed current whirled around, as if exhausting the wrath aroused by its recent treatment among rocks and stones, ere recovering its ordinary temper ; and had I lost footing, or been carried a little further down, I know not how it might have fared with me in the wild foam hig descent that lay betweei the ford and the pool. Curious* ly enough, however, the one idea which, in the excitement of the moment, filled my mind, was an intensely ludicrous one. I would, of course, lose not only the lever in the torrent, but my trousers also ; and how was I ever to get home without them ? Where, in the name of wonder, would I get a kilt to borrow 1 I have oftener than once experienced this strange sensation of the ludicrous in circumstances with which a dif- ferent feeling would have harmonized better. Byron repre- sents it as rising in extreme grief: it is, however, I suspect, greatly more common in extreme danger ; and all the in- stances which the poet himself gives in his note, — Sir Thomas More on the scaffold, Anne Boleyn in the Tower, and those victims of the French Revolution " with whom it became a fashion to leave some mot as a legacy," — were all jokers rather in circumstances of desperate and hopeless peril than of sorrow. It is, however, in danger, as certainly as in grief, a joyless sort of mirth. "That playfulness of sorrow ne'er beguiles ; It smiles in bitterness ; but still it smiles, And sometimes with the wisest and the best, Till even the scaffold echoes with their jest." Tlie feeling, however, though an inharmoniously toned, is not a weakening one. I laughed in the stream, but I did not yield to it ; and, making a violent effort, when just on the edge of the rapid, I got into stiller water, and succeeded in making my way to the opposite bank, drenched to the arm-pits. It was in nearly the same reach of the Conon that my poor ^iend the maniac of Ord lost her life a few years after. I found my companion in charge of the cart with our tools. OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 241 baiting at an inn a little beyond Contin ; but there was no sign of the carter ; and we were informed by the innkeeper, to whom he was well known, that we might have to wait for him all day, and perhaps not see him at night. Click-Clack, — • a name expressive of the carter's fluency as a talker, by which he was oftener designated than by the one in the parish register, — ^might no doubt have purposed in the morning joining us at an early b >ur, but that was when he was sober ; and what his intention might be now, said the innkeeper, when in all proba- bility jje was drunk, no living man could say. This was rather startling intelligence to men who had a long journey through a rough country before them ; and my comrade — a lad a year or two older than myself, but still an apprentice — added to my dismay by telling me he had been sure from the first there was something wrong with Click-Clack, and that his master had secured his services, not from choice, but simply because, hav- ing thoughtlessly become surety for him at a sale for the price of a horse, and being left to pay for the animal, he had now em- ployed him, in the hope of getting himself reimbursed. I re- solved, however, on waiting for the carter until the last moment after which it would be impossible for us to reach our ultimate stage without perilously encroaching on the night ; and, taking it for granted that he would not very soon join us, I set out for a neighboring hill, which commands an extensive view, to take note of the main features of a district with which I had formed, during the two previous years, not a few interesting associa- tions, and to dry my wetted clothes in the breeze and the sun. The old Tower of Fairburn formed one of the most striking objects in the prospect ; and the eye expatiated beyond from where the gneiss region begins, on a tract of broken hill and brown moor, uncheered by a single green field or human d\^ elling. There are traditions that, in the'r very peculiarity, and remoteness from the tract of ordinary invention, give evidence of their truth ; and I now called up a tradition, which I owed to my friend the maniac, respecting the manner in wh' ?h the Mackenzies of Fairburn and the Chisholms of Strath- 242 MY SCH30LS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; glass had divided this barren tract between them. It had lain^ from the first settlement of the country, an unappropriated waste, and neither proprietor could tell where his own lands terminated, or those of his neighbor began ; but finding that the want of a proper line of demarcation led to quarrels be- tween their herdsmen when baiting in their summer shillings with their cattle, they agreed to have the tract divided. The age of land-surveyors had not yet come ; but, selecting two old women of seventy-five, they sent them out at the same hour, tc meet among the hills, the one from Fairburn Tower, tl^ other from Erchless Castle, after first binding themselves to accept their place of meeting as the point at which to set up the bound- ary-stone of the two properties. The women, attended by a bevy of competent witnesses, journeyed as if for life and death; but the Fairburn woman, who was the laird's foster-mother, either more zealous or more active than the Chisholm one, travelled nearly two miles for her one ; and when they c^ame in sight of each other in the waste, it was far from the fields of Fairburn, and comparatively at no great distance from those of the Chisholm. It is not easy knowing why they should have regarded one another in the light of enemies ; but at a mile's distance, their flagging pace quickened into a run, and, meeting at a narrow rivulet, they would fain have fought ; but lacking, in their utter exhaustion, strength for fighting and breath for scolding, they could only seat themselves on the opposite banks, and girn at one another across the stream. George Cruikshank has had at times worse subjects for his pencil, r is, I believe, Landor, in one of his " imaginary conversations," who makes a Highland laird inform Adam Smith that, desirous to ascertain, in some sort of conceivable degree, the size of his property, he had placed a line of pipers around it, each at such a distance from his nearest neighbor that he could barely catch the sound of his bag-pipe ; and that fron\ the number of pipers required he was able to form an approximate estimate of the extent of his estate. And Qere, in a Highlani traditit n, genuine at least as such, are w<> OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 243 introduced to an expedient of the kind scarce less ludicrous or inadequate than that which Landor must, in one of his humor- our moods, have merely imagined. I returned to the inn at the hour from which, as I have said, it would be possible for us, and not more than possible, to complete our day's journey ; and finding, as I had anticipated, no trace of Click-Clack, we set off without him. Our way led us through long moory straths, with here and there a blue lake and birch w^ood, and here and there a group of dingy cottages and of irregular fields ; but the general scenery was that of the prevailing schistose gneiss of the Scotch Highlands, in which rounded confluent hills stand up over long withdraw- ing valleys, and imposing rather from its bare and lonely expansiveness, than from aught bold or striking in its features. The district had been opened up only a few seasons previous by the Parliamentary road over w^hich w^e travelled, and was at the time little known to the tourist ; and the thirty years which have since passed, have in some respects considerably changed it, as they have done the Highlands generally. Most of the cottages, when I last journeyed the way, were repre- sented by but broken ruins, and the fields by mossy patches that remained green amid the waste. I marked at one spot an extraordinary group of oak trees, in the last stage of decay, which would have attracted notice from their great bulk and size in even the forests of England. The largest of the group lay rotting upon the ground, — a black, doddered shell, fully six feet in diameter, but hollow as a tar-barrel ; while the others, some four or five in number, stood up around it, totally di- vested of all their larger boughs, but green with leaves, that, from the minuteness of the twigs on which they grew, wrap- ped them around like close-fitting mantles. Their period of " tree-ship " — to borrow a phrase from Cowper — must have extended far into the obscure past of Highland history, — to a time, I doubt not, when not a few of the adjacent peat-mosses still lived as forests, and when some of the neighboring clans — Erasers, Bissets, and Chisholms — ^had, at least under the, ex- 244 MY SCHOOLS AND SGHOOLMASTEKS ; isting names (French and Saxon in their derivation), not yet begun to be. Ere we reached the solitary inn of Auchen- nasheen, — a true Highland clachan of the ancient type, — the night had fallen dark and stormy for a night in June ; and a gray mist which had been descending for hours along the hills, — blotting offtheir brown summits bit by bit, as an artist might his pencilled hills with a piece of India rubber, but which, methodical in its encroachments, had preserved in its advances a perfect horizontality of line, — had broken into a heavy, con- tinuous rain. As, however, the fair weather had lasted us till we were within a mile of our journey's end, we were only partially wet on our arrival, and soon succeeded in drying ourselves in front of a noble turf fire. My comrade would fain have solaced himself, after our weary journey, with something nice. He held that a Highland inn should be able to furnish at least a bit of mutton-ham or a cut of dried salmon, and ordered a few slices, first of ham, and then of salmon ; but his orders served merely to perplex the landlord and his wife, whose stores seemed to consist of only oatmeal and whisky ; and, coming down in his expectations and demands, and intimating that he was very hungry, and that anything edible would do, we heard the landlady inform, with evident satisfaction, a red- armed wench, dressed in blue plaiding, that " the lads would take porridge." The porridge was accordingly prepared ; and when engaged in discussing this familiar viand, a little before midnight, — for we had arrived late, — a tall Highlander enter- ed the inn, dropping like a mill-wheel. He was charged, he said, with messages to the landlord, and to two mason lads in »;he inn, fr jm a forlorn carter with whom he had travelled About twenty miles, but who, knocked up by the " drap drink" and a pair of bad shoes, had been compelled to shelter for the night in a cottage about seven miles short of Auchen-nasheen. Tiie carter's message to the landlord w^as simply to the effect that, the two mason lads having stolen his horse and cart, he instructed him to detain his property for him, until he himself should come up in the morning. As for his message to the OR, THE STORr OF MY EDUCATION. 245 lads said the Highlander, " it was no meikle worth gaun o'er again ; but if we liked to buckle on a' the Gaelic curses to a' the English ones, it would be something like that." We were awakened next niorning by a tremendous hubbub in the adjoining apartmeiit. It is Click-Clack, the carter, said my comrade ; O, what shall we do ? We leaped up ; and getiing into our clothes m doubly-quick time, set ourselves to reconnoitre through the crannies of a deal partition, and sawtho carter standing in the middle of the next room, storming furi- ously, and the landlord, a smooth-spoken, little old man, striv ing hard to conciliate him. Click-Clack was a rough-looking fellow, turned of forty, of about five feet ten, with a black, un- shaven beard, like a shoe-brush, stuck under his nose, which was red as a coal, and attired in a sadly-breached suit of Aber- deen-gray, topped by a brimless hat, that had been borrowed, apparently, from some obliging scare-crow. I measured him in person and expression ; and, deeming myself his match, even unassisted by my comrade, on whose discretion I could calculate with more certainty than on his valor, I entered the apartment, and taxed him with gross dereliction of duty. He had left us to drive his horse and cart for a whole day, and had broken, for the sake of his wretched indulgence in the pub- lic-house, his engagement with our master ; and I would report him to a certainty. The carter turned upon me with the fierce- ness of a wild beast ; but, first catching his eye, as I would that of a maniac, I set my face very near his, and he calmed down in a moment. He could not help being late, he said : he had reached the inn at Contin not an hour after we had left it ; and it was really very hard to have to travel a long day's journey in such bad shoes. We accepted his apology ; and, ordering the landlord to bring in half a mutchkin of whisky, the storm blew by. The morning, like the previous night, had been thick and rainy ; but it gradually cleared up as the day rose ; and after breakfast we set out together along a broken footj)ath, never before traversed by horse and cart. We passed a solitary lake, on whose shores the only human dwelling was a dark turf shieling, at which, however, Click-Clack ascer- 246 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEIIS ; tained there was whisky to be sold; and then entered np.m 9 tract of scenery wholly different in its composition and chai acter from that through which our journey had previously lain» There runs along the west coast of Scotland, from the island of Rum to the immediate neighborhood of Cape Wrath, a formation laid down by Macculloch, in his Geological Map of the Kingdom, as Old Red Sandstone, but which underlies for mations deemed primary, — two of these of quartz rock, and a third of that unfossiliferous limestone in which the huge Cave of Smoo is hollowed, and to which the Assynt marbles belong. The system, which, taken as a whole, — quartz-rock, lime, and sandstone, — corresponds bed for bed with the Lower Old Red of the east coast, and is probably of a highly metamorphic ex- ample of that great deposit, exhibits its fullest development in Assynt, where all its four component beds are present. In the tract on which we now entered, it presents only two of these, — the lower quartz-rock, and the underlying red sand- stone ; but wherever any of its members appear, they present unique features, — marks of enormous denudation, and a bold style of landscape altogether its own ; and in now entering upon it for the first time, I was much impressed by its extra- ordinary character. Loch Maree, one of the wildest of our Highland lakes, — and at this time scarce at all known to the tourist, — owes to it all that is peculiar in its appearance, — its tall pyramidal quartz mountains, that rise at one stride, steep, and well nigh as naked as the old Pyramids, from nearly the level of the sea, to heights on which at midsummer the snows of winter gleam white in streaks and patches, and a picturesque sandstone tract of .precipitous hills, which flanks its western shore, and bore at this period the remains of one of the old pine forests. A continuous wall of gneiss mountains, that runs along the eastern side of the lake, sinks sheer into its brown depths, save at one point, where a level tract, half-encircled by precipices, is occupied by fields and copsewood, and bears in the midst a white mansion-house ; the blue expanse of the lake greatly broadens in its lower reaches ; and a group of par- tially submerged hillocks, that resemble the forest-covered onea OR, IHE STORY 01' MY EDUCATION. 247 on its western shores, but are of lower altitude, rise over its waters, and form a miniature archipelago, gray with lichened Btone, and bosky with birch and hazel. Finding at the head of the loch that no horse and cart had ever forced their way along its sides, we had to hire a boat for the transport of at least cart and baggage ; and when the boatmen were getting ready for the voyage, which was, with the characteristic dila- tor! ness of the district, a work of hours, we baited at the clachan of Kinlochewe^ — a humble Highland inn, like that in which we had passed the night. The name — that of an old farm which stretches out along the head or upper end of Loch Maree — has a remarkable etymology : it means simply the head of Loch Ewe^ — the salt-water loch into which the waters of Loch Maree empty themselves by a river little more than a mile in length, and whose present head is some sixteen or twenty miles distant from the farm which bears its name. Ere that last elevation of the land, however, to whici our country owes the level marginal strip that stretches between the pres- ent coast-line and the ancient one, the sea must have found its way to the old farm. Loch Maree (Mary's Loch), a name evidently of mediaeval origin, would then have existed as a prolongation of the marine Loch Ewe, and Kinlochewe would have actually been what the compound words signify, — the head of Loch Ewe. There seems to be reason for holding that, ere the latest elevation of the land took place in our island, it had received its first human inhabitants, — rude savages, who employed tools and weapons of stone, and fashioned canoes out of single logs of wood. Are we to accept etymologies such as the instanced one — and there are several such in the Highlands — as good, in evidence that these aboriginal savages were of the Celtic race, and that Gaelic was spoken in Scut- land at a time when its strips of grassy links, and the ^iles of many of its seaport towns, such as Leith, Greenock, ^\\\< selburgh, and Cromarty, existed as oozy sea-beaches, covered twice every day by the waters of the ocean ? It was a delightful evening, — still, breathless, clear, — ^as we swept slowly across the broad breast of Loch Maree ,• and t\\» 248 MT SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; red light of the sinking sun fell on many a sweet wild recess^ amid the labyri; ith of islands purple with heath, and overhung by the birch and mountain-ash ; or slanted along the broken glades of the ancient forest ; or lighted up into a blush the pale stony faces of the tall pyramidal hills. A boat bearing a wedding party was crossing the lake to the white house on the opposite side, and a piper, stationed in the bows, was dis- coursing sweet music, that, softened by distance, and caught up by the echoes of the rocks, resembled no strain I had ever heard from the bagpipe before. Even the boatmen rested on their oars, and I had just enough of Gaelic to know that they were remarking how very beautiful it was. " I wish," said my comrade, " you understood those men : they have a great many curious stories about, the loch, that I am sure you would like. See you that large island ? It is Island-Maree. There is, they tell me, an old burying-ground on it, in which th? Danes used to bury long ages ago, and whose ancient tomb stones no man can read. And yon other island beside it is famouS as the place in which the good people meet every year to make submission to their queen. There is, they say, a little loch in the island, and another little island in the loch ; and it is under a tree on that inner island that the queen sits and gathers kain for the Evil-One. They tell me that, for certain, the fairies have not left this part of the country yet." We landed, a little after sunset, at the point from which our road led across the hills to the sea-side, but found that the carter had not yet come up ; and at length, despairing of his appear- ance, and unable to carry off his cart and the baggage with us, as we had succeeded in bringing off cart, horse, and baggage on the previous day, we were preparing to take up our night's lodging under the shelter of an overhanging crag, when wo heard him coming soliloo-iizing through the wood, in a man ner worthy of his name, as if he were not one, but twenty cart ers. " What a perfect shame of a country !" he exclaimed,— "perfect shame! Road for a horse, forsooth! — more like a turnpike stair. And not a feed of corn for the poor beast ; ind Lot a public house atween this and Kinlochewe; and not OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 24:9 a drop of whisk^^ ; perfect, perfect shame of a country !" On his coming up in apparently very bad humor, we found him disposed to transfer the shame of the country to our shoulders. What sort of people were we, he asked, to travel in such a land without whisky ! Whisky, however, there was none to produce ; there was no whisky nearer, we told him, than the public house at the sea-side, where we proposed spending the night ; and, of course, the sooner we got there the better. And after assisting hin* to harness his horse, we set off in the dark- ening twilight, amid the hills. Rough gray rocks, and little blue lochans, edged with flags, and mottled in their season with water-lilies, glimmered dim and uncertain in the imper- fect light as we passed ; but ere we reached the inn of Flower- dale in Gairloch, every object stood out clear, though cold, in the increscent light of morning ; and a few light streaks of cloud, poised in the east over the unrisen sun, were gradually exchanging their gleam of pale bronze for a deep flush of mingled blood and Are. After the refreshment of a few hours' sleep and a tolerable breakfast, we set out for the scene of our labors, which lay on the sea-shore, about two miles further to the north and west ; and were shown an outhouse, — one of a square of dilapidated offices, — which we might fit up, we v/ere told, for our barrack. The building had been originally what is known on the north- western coast of Scotland, with its ever-weeping climate, as a hay-barn ; but it was now merely a roof-covered tank of greeu stagnant water, about three-quarters of a foot in depth, which nad oozed through the walls from an over-gorged pond in the adjacent court, that in a tract of recent ruins had overflowed its banks, and not yet subsided. Our hew house did look ex- ceedingly like a beaver-dam, with this disadvantageous differ- ence, that no expedient of diving could bring us to better •chambers on the other side of the wall. My comrade, setting nimself to sound the abyss with his stick, sung out in sailoi Btyle, " three feet water in the hold ;" Cliclt-Clack broke into a rage. That a dwelling for human creatures!" he said. ** If I w^as to put my horse intil't, poor beast ! the very hoo6 250 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; would rot off him in less than a week. Are we eels or pad docks, that we are sent to live in a lochf Marking, however a narrow portion of the ridge which dammed up the waters of the neighboring pool, whence our domicile derived its sup- ply, J set myself to cut it across, and had soon the satisfaction of seeing the general surface lowered fully a foot, and the floor of our future dwelling laid bare. Click-Clack, gathering courage as he saw the w^aters ebbing away, seized a shovel, and soon showed us the value of his many years' practice in the labors of the stable ; and then, despatching him for a few cart-loads of a dry shell-sand from the shore, which I had marked by the way as suitable for mixing with our lime, we had soon for our tank of green water a fine white floor. " Man wants but little here below," especially in a mason's barrack. There were two square openings in the apartment, neither of them furnished with frame or glass ; but the one w^e filled up with stone, and an old unglazed frame, w^hich, with the as- sistance of a base and border of turf, I succeeded in fitting into the other, gave at least an air of respectability to the place, Boulder stones, capped with pieces of mossy turf, served us for seats ; and we had soon a comfortable peat fire blazing against the gable ; but we were still sadly in want of a bed : the fundamental damp of the floor was, we saw, fast gaining on the sand ; and it would be neither comfortable nor safe to spread our dried grass and blankets over it. My com- rade went out to see whether the place did not furnish mate- rials enough of any kind to make a bedstead, and soon return- ed in triumph, dragging after him a pair of harrows which he placed side by side in a snug corner beside the fire, with of course the teeth downwards. A good Catholic prepared to win heaven for himself by a judicious use of sharp points might have preferred having them turned the other way ; bu my comrade was an enlightened Protestant ; and besides, like Goldsmith's sailor, he loved to lie soft. ' The second piece of luck was mine. I found lying unclaimed in the yard, an old barn-door, which a recent gale had blown from off its hinges ; and by placing it above the harrows, and driving a row of OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATtON. 251 stako.s around it into the floor, to keep the outer sleeper from rolling off, — for the wall served to secure the position of the inner one, — we succeeded in constructing, by our joint efforts, a luxurious bed. There was but one serious drawback on its comforts : the roof overhead was bad, and there was an obsti- nate drop that used, during every shower which fell in the season of sleep, to make a dead set at my face, and try me at times with the water-torture of the old story, mayhap half a dozen times in the course of a single night. Our barrack fairly fitted up, I set out with my comrade, whose knowledge of Gaelic enabled him to act as my inter- preter, to a neighboring group of cottages, to secure a laborer for the work of the morrow. The evening was now beginning to darken ; but there was still light enough to show me that the littl-e fields I passed through on my way resembled very much those of Lilliput, as described by Gulliver. They were, however, though equally small, greatly more irregular, and had peculiarities, too, altogether their own. The land had orig- inally been stony ; and as it showed, according to the High- land phrase, its " bare bones through its skin," — ^large bosses of the rock beneath coming here and there to the surface, — the Highlanders had gathered the stones in great pyramida'_ heaps on the bare bosses ; and so very numerous were these in some of the fields, that they looked as if some malignant sor- cerer had, in the time of harvest, converted all their shocks into stone. On approaching the cottage of our future laborer, I was attracted by a door of very peculiar construction that Jay against the wall. It had been brought from the ancient pine forest on the western bank of Loch Maree, and was formed of the roots of trees so curiously interlaced by nature, that when cut out of the soil, which it had covered over like a piece of I et'work, it remained firmly together, and now formed a clo( t which the mere imitator of the rustic might in vain attemf)t iv rival. We entered the cottage, and plunging downwards two feet or so, found ourselves upon the dunghill >f the establisli- ment, which in this part of the country usually occupied at the time an ante-chamber which corresponded to that occupied by 12 252 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; the cattle a few years earlier, in the midland districts of Suth erland. Groping in this foul outer chamber through a stifling atmosphere of smoke, we came to an inner door raised to the level of the soil outside, through which a red umbery gleam escaped into the darkness ; and, climbing into the inner apart- ment, we found ourselves in the presence of the inmates of the mansion. The fire, as in the cottage of my Sutheiland. shire relative, was placed in the middle of the floor ; the mas- jer of the mansion, a red haired, strongly-built Highlander, )f the middle size and age, with his son, a boy of twelve, sat on the one side ; his wife, who, though not much turned of thirty, had the haggard, drooping cheeks, hollow eyes, and yale, sallow complexion of old age, sat on the other. We broke our business to the Highlander through my companion, — for, save a few words caught up at school by the boy, there was no English in the household, — and found them disposed to entertain it favorably. A large pot of potatoes hung sus- pended over the fire, under a dense ceiling of smoke ; and he hospitably invited us to wait supper, which, as our dinner had consisted of but a piece of dry oaten-cake, we willingly did. As the conversation went on, I became conscious that it turn- ed upon myself, and that I was an object of profound commis- eration to the inmates of the cottage. " What," I inquired of my companion, " are these kind people pitying me so very much for V '' For your want of Gaelic, to be sure. How can a man get on in the world that wants Gaelic?" " But do not they themselves," I asked, " want English ?" " O yes," he said, " but what does that signify 1 What is the use of English in Gairloch 1" The potatoes, with a little ground salt, and much unbroken hunger as sauce, ate remarkably well. Our host regretted that he had no fish to oflfer us ; bul a tract of rough weather had kept him from sea, and he had just exhausted his previous supply ; and as for bread, he had used up the last of his grain crop a little after Christmas, and had been living, with his family, on potatoes, with fish when be could get them, ever since. Thirty years have now passed since I shared in the High- 253 lander's evening meal, and during the first twenty of these, the use of the potatoe— unknown in the Highlands a century before — greatly increased. I have been told by my maternal grandfather, that about the year 1740, when he was a boy of about eight or nine years of age, the head gardener at Balna* gown Castle used, in his occasional visits to Cromarty, to bring him in his pocket, as great rarities, some three or four potatoes; and that it was not until some fifteen or twenty years after this time that he saw potatoes reared in fields in any part of the Northern Highlands. But, once fairly employed as food, every season saw a greater breadth of them laid down. In the North-Western Highlands, in especial, the use of these roots increased from the year 1801 to the year 1846 nearly a hun- dredfold, and came at length to form, as in Ireland, not merely the staple, but in some localities, almost the only food of the people ; and when destroyed by disease in the latter year, famine immediately ensued in both Ireland and the Highlands. A writer in the Witness, whose letter had the effect of bring- ing that respectable paper under the eye of Mr. P\nich, repre- sented the Irish famine as a direct judgment on the Maynooth Endowment ; while another writer, a member of the Peace Association, — whose letter did not find its way into the Wit- ness, though it reached the editor, — challenged the decision on the ground that the Scotch Highlanders, who were greatly op- posed to Maynooth, suffered from the infliction nearly as much as the Irish themselves, and that the offence punished must have been surely some one of which both Highlanders and Irish had been guilty in common. He, however, had found out, he said, what the crime visited actually w as. B* ^th the Irish and Highland famines were judgments upon the people for thtvr great homicidal efficiency as soldiers in the wars of the empire, an efficiency which, as he truly remarked, was almost equally characteristic of both nations. For my own part, I have been unable hitherto to see the steps which conduct to such pro- found conclusions ; and am content simply to hold, that the superintending Providence who communicated to man a cal- sulating, forseeing nature, does occasionally get angry with 2^4 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS him, and inflict judgments upon him, when, inste;id of exer- cising his faculties, he sinks to a level lower than his own^ and becomes content, like some of the inferior animals, to live on a single root. There are two periods favorable to observation, — an eaily and a late one. A fresh eye detects external traits and pecu- liarities among a people, seen for the first time, which disap- Dear as they become familiar ; but it is not until after repeat- ed opportunities of study, and a prolonged acquaintanceship, that internal characteristics and conditions begin to be rightly known. During the first fortnight of my residence in this remote district, I was more impressed than at a later stage by certain peculiarities of manner and appearance in the inhabit- ants. Dr. Johnson remarked that he found fewer very tall or very short men among the people of the Hebrides, than in England : I was now struck by a similar mediocrity of size among the Highlanders of Western Ross; five-sixths of the grown men seemed to average between five feet seven and five feet nine inches in height, and either tall or short men I found comparatively rare. The Highlanders of the eastern coast were, on the contrary, at that period, mayhap still, very vari- ous of stature, — some of them exceedingly diminutive, others of great bulk and height ; and, as might be seen in the con- gregations of the parish churches removed by but a few miles, there were marked differences in this respect between the people of contiguous districts, — certain tracts of plain or valley producing larger races than others. I was inclined to believe at the time that the middle-sized Highlanders of the west coast were a less mixed race than the unequally-sized Higli- landers of the east : I at least found corresponding inequalities among the higher-born Highland families, that, as shown by their genealogies, blended the Norman and Saxon with the Celtic blood ; and as the unequally-sized Highland race bor- dered on that Scandinavian one which fringes the greater part of the eastern coast of Scotland, I inferred that there had been a similar blending of blood among them, I have since seen in Gustav Kombst's Ethnographic Map of the British fslandSj OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIO]^. 255 the difference, which I at this time but inferred, inaicated by a different shade of color, and a different name. The High- landers of the east coast Kombst terms " Scandinavian-Gaelic ;" those of the west, " Gaelic-Scandinavian-Gaelic," — names in- dicative, of course, of the proportions in which he holds that they possess the Celtic blood. Disparity of bulk and size appears to be one of the consequences of a mixture of races ; nor does the induced inequality seem restricted to the phys- ical framework. Minds of large calibre, and possessed of tlia kingly faculty, come first into view, in our history, among the fused tribes, just as of old it was the mixed marriages that first produced the giants. The difference in size which I re- marked in particular districts of the Scandinavian Gaelic re- gion, separated, in some instances, by but a ridge of hills or an expanse of moor, must have been a result of the old clan divisions, and is said to have marked the clans themselves very strongly. Some of them were of a greatly more ro- bust, and some of a slimmer type, than others. 1 was struck by another peculiarity in the west coast High- landers. I found the men in general greatly better-looking than the women, and that in middle life they bore their years much more lightly. The females seemed old and haggard at a period when the males were still comparatively fresh and robust. I am not sure whether the remark may not in some degree apply to Highlanders generally. The " rugged form " and " harsher features," which, according to Sir Walter, " mark the mountain band," accord worse with the female than with the male countenance and figure. But I at least found this discrepancy in the appearance of the sexes greatly more marked on the west than on the eastern coast ; and saw only too much reason to conclude, that it was owing in great part to the disproportionably large share of crushing labor laid, in tlie district, in accordance with the practice of a barbarous lim(^, on the weaker frame of the female. There is, however, a stylo of female loveliness occasionally though rarely exem- plified in the Highlands, which far transcends the Saxon or Scandinavian type. It is manifested usually in extreme youth, 256 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; . — at least betw een the fourteenth and eighteenth year ; and its effect we find happily indicated by Wordsworth, — who seems to have met with a characteristic specimen, — in his lines to a Highland girl. He describes her as possessing as her " dower," " a very shower of beauty." Further, however, he describes her as very young. "Twice seven consenting years had shed Their utmost bounty on her head." f was, besides, struck at this time by finding, that while al- most all the young lads under twenty, with whom I came in contact, had at least a smattering of English, I found only a single Highlander turned of forty with whom I could exchange a word. The exceptional Highlander was, however, a curi- osity in his way. He seemed to have a natural turn for ac- quiring languages, and had derived his English, not from con- versation, but, in the midst of a Gaelic-speaking people, from the study of the Scriptures in our common English version. His application of Bible language to ordinary subjects told at times with rather ludicrous effect. Upon enquiring of him, on one occasion, regarding a young man whom he wished tc employ as an extra laborer, he described him in exactly the words in which David is described in the chapter that records the combat with Goliath, as " but a youth, and ruddy, and of a fair countenance ;" and on asking where he thought we could get a few loads of water-rolled pebbles for causewaying a floor, he directed us to the bed of a neighboring rivulet, where we might " choose us," he said, " smooth stones out of tho brook." He spoke with great deliberation, translating evi« deiitly his Gaelic-thinking, as he went on, into Scriptural Eiigl'sh. (»S. THE STORY OF MY EDTrCATIOW 2W CHAPTER XIII. " A man of glee, With hair of glittering gray, As blytlie a man as you could see On a spring holiday." Wordsworth There existed at this time no geological map of Scotland. Macculloch's did not appear until about six or seven years after (in 1829 or in 1830), and Sedgwick and Murchison's in- teresting sketch of the northern formations* not until at least five years after (1828). And so, on setting out on the morn- ing after that of my arrival, to provide stones for our future erection, I found myself in a terra incognita^ new to the quar- rier, and unknown to the geologist. Most of the stratified primary rocks make but indifferent building materials ; and in the immediate neighborhood of our work I could find only one of the worst of the class, — the schistose gneiss. On consulting, however, the scenery of the district, I marked that at a certain [)oint both shores of the open sea-loch on whose margin we were situated, suddenly changed their character. The abrupt • Appended to their joint paper on the " Deposits contained between the Scottish Primary Rdclcs and Oolitic Series," and interesting, as the first published geological map of Scotland <,o the north of the Friths of Forth and Clyde. 256 Ml? Sw'^HOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEllS : rugged hills of gneiss that, viewed from an eminence, re« sembled a tumbling sea, suddenly sank into low brown pro montories, unbroken by ravines, and whose eminences were mer(i flat swellings ; and in the hope of finding some change of formation coincident with the change of scenery, I set out with my comrade for the nearest point at w^hich the broken outline passed into the rectilinear or merely undulatory one. But though I did expect a change, it was not w^ithout some degree of surprise that, immediately after passing the point of junction, I found myself in a district of red sandstone. It was a hard, compact, dark-colored stone, but dressed readily to pick and hammer, and made excellent corner-stones and ashlar ; and it would have furnished us with even hewn work for our building, had not our employer, unacquainted, like every one else at the time, with the mineral capabilities of the locality, brought his hewing stone in a sloop, at no small expense, through the Caledonian Canal, from one of the quar- ries of Moray, — a circuitous voyage of more than two hun dred miles. Immediately beside where we opened our quarry, there was a little solitary shieling : it was well-nigh such an edifice as I used to erect when a boy, — some eight or ten feet in length, and of so humble an altitude, that, when standing erect in the midst, I could lay my hand on the roof-tree. A heath-bed occupied one of the corners ; a few gray embers were smoul- dering in the middle of the floor ; a pot lay beside them, ready for use, half-filled with cockles and razor-fish, the spoils of the morning ebb ; and a cog of milk occupied a small shelf that projected from the gable above. Such were the contents of *jhe shieling. Its only inmate, a lively little old man, sat oat- side, at once tending a few cows grouped on the moor, and employed in stripping with a pocket-knife, long slender fila^ inents from off" a piece of moss fir ; and as he wrought and watched, he crooned a Gaelic song not very musically, may- hap, but, like the happy song of the humble bee, there was perfect content in every tone. He had a great many curious questions to ask in his native Gaelic, of my comrade, regard* OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 25? in^ our employment and our employer ; and when satisfied, he began, I perceived, like the Highlander of the previous evening, to express very profound commiseration for me. *'Ia that man also pitying me f I asked. " O yes, very much," was the reply : " he does not at all see how you are to live in Gairloch without Gaelic." I was reminded by the shieling and its happy inmate, of one of my father's experiences, as communicated to me by Uncle James. In the course of a protracted kelp voyage among the Hebrides, he had landed in his boat, before entering one of the sounds of the Long Island, to procure a pilot, but found in the fisherman's cottage on which he had directed his course, only the fisherman's wife, — a young creature of not more than eighteen, — engaged in nursing her child and singing a Gaelic song, in tones expressive of a light heart, till the rocks rang again. A heath bed, a pot of baked clay, of native manufacture, fashioned by the hand, and a heap of fish newdy caught, seemed to constitute the only wealth of the cottage ; but its mistress w^as, notwithstanding, one of the happiest of women ; and deeply did she commiserate th^ poor sailors, and earnestly wish for the return of her husband, that he might assist them in their perplexity. The husband at length appeared. " O," he asked, " after the first greeting, " have ye any salt f " Plenty," said the master ; " and you, I see, from your supply of fresh fish, want it very much ; but come, pilot us through the sound, and you shall have as much salt as you require." And so the vessel got^ a pilot and the fisherman got salt ; but never did my father forget the light- hearted song of the happy mistress of that poor Highland cot- tage. It was one of the palpable characteristics of our Scottish Highlanders, for at least the first thirty years of the century, that the} were contented enough, as a people, to find more to pity than to envy in the condition of their neighbors ; and i remember that at this time, and for years after, I used to deem the trait a good one. I have now, however, my doubts on the subject, and am not quite sure whether a content so general as to be national may not, in certain circumstances, be rather a vice thvVn a virtue. It is certainly no virtue when it has the 260 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; effect of arresting either individuals or peoples in their course of development ; and is perilously allied to great suffering, when the men who exemplify it are so thoroughly happy amid the mediocrities of the present, that they fail to make provis- ion for the contingencies of the future. We were joined in about a fortnight by the other workmen from the low country, and I resigned my temporary charge (save that I still retained the time-book in my master's be- half) into the hands of an ancient mason, remarkable over the north of Scotland for his skill as an operative, and who, though he was now turned of sixty, was still able to build and hew considerably more than the youngest and most active man in the squad. He was at this time the only survivor of three brothers, all masons, and all not merely first-class workmen, but of a class to which, at least to the north of the Grampians, only they themselves belonged, and very considerably in advance of the first. And on the removal of the second of the three brothers to the south of Scotland, it was found that, amid the stone-cutters of Glasgow, David Eraser held relatively the same place that he had done among those of the north. I have been told by Mr. Kenneth Matheson, — a gentleman well known as a master-builder in the west of Scotland, — that in erecting some hanging stairs of polished stone, ornamented in front and at the outer edge by the common fillet and torus, his or- dinary workmen used to complete for him their one step apiece per day, and David Fraser his three steps, finished equally well. It is easily conceivable how, in the higher works of art, one man should excel a thousand, — nay, how he should have nei- ther competitor when living, nor successor w^hen dead. The English gentleman who, after the death of Canova, asked a surviving brother of the sculptor whether he proposed carry- ing on Canova's business^ found that he had achieved in the query an unintentional joke. But in the commoner avocations there appear no such differences between man and man ; and It may seem strange how, in ordinary stone-cutting, one man could thus perform the work of three. My acquaintance with old John Fraser showed me how very much the ability de* OR; THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOK. 26l pend^d on a natural faculty. John's strength had nevei been above the average of that of Scotchmen, and it was now consid- erably reduced ; nor did his mallet deal more or .eavier blows than that of the common workman. He had, however, an ex- traordinary power of conceiving of the finished piece of work, as lying within the rude stone from which it was his business to disinter it ; and while ordinary stone-cutters had to repeat and re-repeat their lines and draughts, and had in this way virtually to give to their work several surfaces in detail ero hey reached the true one, old John cut upon the true figure at once, and made one surface serve for all. In building, too, he exercised a similar power : he hammer-dressed his stones with fewer strokes than other workmen, and in fitting the in- terspaces between stones already laid, always picked from out the heap at his feet the stone that exactly fitted the place ; while other operatives busied themselves in picking up stones that were too small or too large ; or, if they set themselves to reduce the too large ones, reduced them too little or too much, and had to fit and fit again. Whether building or hew- ing, John never seemed in a hurry. He has been seen, when far advanced in life, working very leisurely, as became his years, on the one side of a wall, and two stout young fellows building against him on the other side, — toiling, apparently, twice harder than he, but the old man always contriving to keep a little ahead of them both. David Fraser I never saw ; but as a hewer he was said con siderably to excel even his brother John. On hearing that it had been remarked among a party of Edinburgh masons, that, though regarded as the first of Glasgow stone-cutters, he would find in the eastern capital at least his equals, he attired himself most uncouthly in a long-tailed coat of tartan, and, looking to the life the untamed, untaught, conceited little Celt, he presented himself one Monday morning, armed with a letter of introduction from a Glasgow builder, before the foreman of an Edinburgh squad of masons engaged upon one of the finei buildings at that time in the course of erection. The letter specified neither his qualifications nor his name : U 262 had beev^ written merely to secure for him the necessary em* ployment, and the necessary employment it did secure. The better workmen of the party were engaged, on his arrival, in hewing columns, each of which was deemed sufficient work for a week ; and David was asked, somew^hat incredulously, by the foreman, " if he could hew V " O yes, he thoy,ght he coidd hesv." " Could he hew columns such as these V " O yes, he thought he could hew columns such as these." A mass of stone, in which a possible column lay hid, was accordingly placed before David, not under cover of the shed, which was already occupied by workmen, but, agreeably to David's own request, directly in front of it, where he might be seen by all, and where he straightway commenced a most extraordinary course of antics. Buttoning his long tartan coat fast around him, he would first look along the stone from the one end, anon from the other, and then examine it in front and rear ; or, quitting it altogether for the time, he would take up his stand beside the other workmen, and, after looking at them with' great attention, return and give it a few taps with the mallet, in a style evidently imitative of theirs, but monstrously a caricature. The shed all that day resounded with roars of laughter ; and the only thoroughly grave man on the ground was he who occasioned the mirth of all the others. Next morning David again buttoned his coat ; but he got on much better this day than the former : he was less awkward and less idle, though not less observant than before ; and he succeeded ere evening in tracing, in workman-like fashion, a few draughts along the future column. He was evidently greatly improv- ing. On the morning of Wednesday he threw off his coat ; and it was seen that, though by no means in a hurry, he was seriously at work. There were no more jokes or laughter; and it was whispered in the evening that the strange Highlander had made astonishing progress during the day. By^the middle of Thursday heJiad made up for his two days' trifling, and was abreast of ihe othei w^orkmen ; before night he was far ahead of them ; and ere the evening of Friday, when they had still tt full day's w^ork on each of their columns, David's was com* OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 265 pleted 111 a style that defied criticism ; and, his tartan coat again buttoned around him, he sat resting himself beside it. The foreman went out, and greeted him. " Well," he said, " you have beaten us all : you certainly canhe-w !" " Yes," said David ; " I thought 1 could hew columns. Did the othei men take much more than a week to learn?" " Come, come, David Fraser^''^ replied the foreman ; " we all guess who you are : you have had your joke out ; and now, I suppose, we must give you your week's wages, and let you away." "Yes,' said David ; " work waits for me in Glasgow ; but I just thought it might be w^ell to know how you hewed on this east side of the country." John Fraser was a shrewd, sarcastic old man, much liked, however, by his brother workmen ; though his severe sayings —which, never accompanied by any ill nature, were always tol- erated in the barrack — did both himself and them occasional harm when repeated outside. To men who have to live for months together on oatmeal and salt, the difference between porridge with and porridge without milk is a very grave dif- ference indeed, both in point of salutariness and comfort ; and I had succeeded in securing, on the ordinary terms, ere the arrival of John, what was termed a set of skimmed milk from the wife of the gentleman at whose dwelling-house we were engaged in working. The skimmed milk was, however, by no means good ; it was thin, blue, and sour ; and we received it without complaint only because we knew that, according to the poet, it was " better just than want aye," and that there was no other dairy in that part of the country. But old John was less prudent ; and, taking the dairy-maid to task in his quiet ironical style, he began by expressing wonder and regret that a grand lady like her mistress should be unable to distin- guish the difference between milk and wine. The maid iii dignantly denied the fact in toto : her mistress, she said, did know the difference. Oh no, replied John ; w4ne always gets better the longer it is kept, and milk always the worse ; but your mistress, not knowing the difference, keeps her milk very 'ong, in order to make it better, and makes it so very bad in 264 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; consequence, that there are some days we can scarce eat it ni ,ill. The dairy-maid bridled up, and, communicating the re- mark to her mistress, we were told next morning that we might go for our milk to the next dairy, if we pleased, but that we would get none from her. And so, for four months thereafter, we had to do penance for the joke, on that not very luxurious viand " dry porridge." The pleasures of the table had occu pied but small space amid the \ ery scanty enjoyments of our Darrack even before, and they were now so considerably re- duced, that I could have almost wished at meal-times that — • like the inhabitants of the moon, as described by Baron Mun- chausen — I could* open up a port-hole in my side, and lay in at once provisions enough for a fortnight ; but the infliction told considerably more on our constitutions than on our appe- tites ; and we all became subject to small but very painful boils in the muscular parts o^ the body, — a species of disease which seems to be scarce less certainly attendant on the ex- clusive use of oatmeal, than sea-scurvy on the exclusive use of salt meat. Old John, however, though in a certain sense ^he author of our calamity, escaped all censure, while a dou ble portion fell to the share of the gentleman's wife. I never met a man possessed of a more thoroughly mathe* matical head than this ancient mason. I know not that he ever saw a copy of Euclid ; but the principles of the work seemed to lie as self-evident truths in his mind. In the abil- ity, too, of drawing shrewd inferences from natural pheno- mena, old John Fraser excelled all the other untaught men 1 ever knew. Until my acquaintance with him commenced, 1 had been accustomed to hear the removal of what was widely known in the north of Scotland as " the travelled stone of Petty," attributed to supernatural agency. An enormous boub der had been carried in the night-time, by the fairies, it was said; from its resting-place on the sea-beach, into the middle of a little bay, — a journey of several hundred feet ; but old John, though he had not been on the spot at the time, at once inferred that it had been carried, not by the fairies, but by a thick cake of ice, considerable enough, when firmly clasped OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 265 round it, to float it away. He had seei), he told me, stones of very considerable size floated ofl'by ice on the shore opposite his cottage, in the upper reaches of tlie Cromarty Frith : ice^ was an agent that sometimes " walked off with great stones ;'' whereas he had no evidence whatever that the fairies Jiad any powers that way ; and so he accepted the agent .vhich he knew, as the true one in the removal of the travelled stone, and not tlie hypothetical agents, of which he knew nothing. Such was the natural philosophy of old John ; and in this special in- stance geologic science has since fully confirmed his decision. He was chiefly a favorite among us, however, from his even and cheerful temper, and his ability of telling humorous sto- ries, that used to set the barrack in a roar, and in which he never spared himself, if the exhibition of a weakness or absurd- ity gave but point to the fun. His narrative of a visit to Inver- ness, which he had made when an apprentice lad, to see a sheep-steal er hung, and his description of the terrors of a night- journey back, in which he fancied he saw men waiving in the wind on almost every tree, till, on reaching his solitary bar- rack, he was utterly prostrated by the apparition of his own great-coat suspended from a pin, has oftener than once con vulsed us with laughter. But John's humorous confessions, based as they always were on a strong good sense, that always saw the early folly in its most ludicrous aspect, never lowered him in our eyes. Of his wonderful skill as a workman, much was incommunicable ; but it was at least something to know the principles on which he directed the operations of what a phrenologist would perhaps term his extraordinary faculties oiform and size ; and so I recognize old John as one of not the least useful nor able of my many teachers. Some of his professional lessons were of a kind which the south and east country mason would be the better for knowing. ' In that rainy district of Scotland of which we at this time occupied the cen tral tract, rubble walls built in the ordinary style leak like the bad roofs of other parts of the country ; and mansion-houses constructed within its precincts by qualified workmen from Edinburgh and Glasgow hpve been found to admit the watei 266 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; in such torrents as to be uninhabitable, until their more c% posed walls had been slated over like their roofs. Old John, however, always succeeded in building water-tight walls. T>e parting from the ordinary rule of the builder elsewhere, and which on the east coast of Scotland he himself always respect' ed, he slightly elevated the under beds of his stones, instead of laying them, as usual, on the dead level ; while along the edges of their upper beds he struck off a small rude champer " and by these simple contrivances, the rain, though driven witl violence against his work, coursed in streams along its face, without entering into the interior and soaking through. For about six weeks we had magnificent weather, — clear sunny skies and calm seas ; and I greatly enjoyed my even- ing rambles amid the hills, or along the sea-shore. I was struck, in these walks, by the amazing abundance of the wild flowers which covered the natural meadows and lower hill- slopes, — an abundance, as I have since remarked, equally char- acteristic of both the northern and western islands of Scot- land. The lower slopes of Gairloch, of western Sutherland, of Orkney, and of the northern Hebrides generally, — though for the purposes of the agriculturist, vegetation languishes, and wheat is never reared, — are by many degrees richer in wild flowers than the fat loamy meadows of England. They resemble gaudy pieces of carpeting, as abundant in petals as in leaves. Little of the rare is to be detected in these meadows, save, perhaps, that in those of western Sutherland a few Alpine plants may be found at a greatly lower level than elsewhere in Britain ; but the vast profusion of blossoms borne by species common to almost every other part of the kingdom, imparts to them an apparently novel character. We may detect, lam inclined to think, in this singular floral profusion, the opera^ tion of a law not less influential in the animal than in the vegetable w^orld, which, when hardship presses upon the life of the individual shrub or quadruped, so as to threaten its vitality, renders it fruitful in behalf of its species. I have seen the principle strikingly exemplified in the common tobacco plant, when reared in a northern country in the open air. OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 267 Year after year it continued to degenerate, and to exhibit a smaller leaf and shorter stem, until the successors of what in the first year of trial had been vigorous plants, of some three to four feet in height, had in the sixth or eighth become mere weeds of scarce as many inches. But while the as yet unde generate plant had merely borne atop a few florets, which pro duced a small quantity of exceedingly minute seeds, the stunted weed, its descendant, was so thickly covered over in its season with its pale yellow bells, as to present the appearance of a nosegay ; and the seeds produced were not only bulkier in the mass, but also individually of much greater size. The tobacco had grown productive in proportion as it had degenerated. In the common scurvy-grass, too, — remarkable, with some other plants, for taking its place among both the productions of our Alpine heights and of our sea-shores, — it will be found that, in proportion as its habitat proves ungenial, and its leaves and stems become dwarfish and thin, its little white cruciform flowers increase, till, in localities where it barely exists, as if on the edge of extinction, we find the entire plant forming a dense bundle of seed-vessels, each charged to the full with seed. And in the gay meadow*s of Gairloch and Orkney, crowded with a vegetation that approaches its northern limit of production, we detect what seems to be the same principle chronically operative ; and hence, it would seem, their extra- ordinary gaiety. Their richly blossoming plants are the poor productive Irish of the vegetable world; for Doubleday seems to be quite in the right in holding, that the law extends to not only the inferior animals, but to our own species also. The lean, ill-fed sow and rabbit rear, it has been long known, a greatly more numerous progeny than the same animals w hen well cared for and fat ; and every horse and cattle breeder knows that to over-feed his animals proves a sure mode of rendering them sterile. The sheep, if tolerably well pastured, brings forth only a single lamb at a birth ; but if half-starved and lean, the chances are that it may bring forth two or three. And so it is also wit) the greatly higher human race. Place fhem in cir-'umstance of degradation and hardship so extreme 268 MY SCI OOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; as almost to threaten their existence as individuals, and they increase, as if in behalf of the species, with a rapidity without precedent in circumstances of greater comfort. The aristo- cratic families of a country are continually running out ; and it requires frequent creations to keep up the House of Lords , whereas our poorer people seem increasing in more than the arithmetical ratio. In Syke, though fully two-thirds of the population emigrated early in the latter half of the last cen tury, a single generation had scarce passed ere the gap was completely filled ; and miserable Ireland, as it existed ere the famine, would have been of itself sufficient, had the human family no other breeding-place, to people in a few ages the world. Here, too, in close neighborhood with the flower- covered meadows, were there miserable cottages that were swarming with children, — cottages in which, for nearly the half of every twelvemonth, the cereals were unknown as food, and whose over-toiled female inmates did all the domestic work, and more than half the work of the little fields outside. How exquisitely the sun sets in a clear, calm, summer even- ing over the blue Hebrides ! Within less than a mile of our barrack there rose a tall hill, whose bold summit commanded all the Western Isles, from Sleat in Skye, to the Butt of the Lewis. To the south lay the trap islands ; to the north and west, the gneiss ones. They formed, however, seen from this hill, one great group, which, just as the sun had sunk, and sea and sky were so equally bathed in gold as to exhibit on the horizon no dividing line, seemed in their transparent purple,— darker or lighter according to the distance, — a group of lovely clouds, that, though moveless in the calm, the first light breeze might sweep away. Even the flat promontories of sandstone which, like outstretched arms, enclosed the outer reaches of the foreground, — promontories edged with low red cliflTs, and covered with brown heath, — used to borrow at these tirr^s, froni the soft yellow beam, a beauty not their own. Arnid the inequalities of the gneiss region within, — a region more broken and precipitous, but of humbler altitude, than the great gneiss trsct of the midland Highlands, — the chequered light OB - THE STOBY OF MY EDUCATION. 269 and shade lay, as the sun declmed, in strongly-contrasted patches, that betrayed the abrupt inequalities of the ground, and bore, when all around was warm, tinted and bright, a hue of cold neutral gray ; while innmediately over and beyond thi? rough sombre base there rose two noble pyramids of red sand- stone, about two thousand feet in height, that used to flare tc the setting sun in bright crimson, and whose nearly horizontal strata, deeply scored along the lines, like courses of ashlar in an ancient wall, added to the mural effect communicated by their bare fronts and steep rectilinear outlines. These tall pyramids form the terminal members, towards the south, of an extraordinary group of sandstone hills, of denudation unique in the British islands, to which I have already referred, and which extends from the northern boundary of Assynt to neai Applecross. But though I formed at this time my first ac- quaintance with the group, it was not until many years after that I had an opportunity of determining the relations of their component beds to each other, and to the fundamental rocks of the country. At times my walks were directed along the sea-shore. Nat- iiralists well know how much the western coasts of Scotland differ in their productions from its eastern ones ; but it was a difference wholly new to me at this time; and though my limited knowledge enabled me to detect it in but compar- atively few particulars, I found it no uninteresting task to trace it for myself in even these few. I was first attracted by one of the larger sea-weeds, Himanthalia /orm,-^with its cup-shaped disc and long thong-like receptacles, — which I found verv abundant on the rocks here, but which I had never seen in the upper reaches of the Moray Frith, and which is by no means very common on any portion of the east coast. From the sea weeds I passed to the shells, among which I detected not only a difference in the proportions in which tne various species occurred, but also species that were new to me, — such as a shell, not rare in Gairloch, Nassa reticulata, but rarely if ever seen in the Moray or Cromarty Friths ; and three other shelU which I saw here for the first time, Trochus umhilicatn% 270 MY SCHOOLS ANL SCHOOLMASTERS ; TrocJius tnagus^ and Pecten niveus.^ I found, too, that tlh common edible oyster, osfrea edulis, which on the east coast lies always in comparatively deep water, is sometimes found in the Gairloch, as, for instance, in the little bay' opposite Flowerdale, in beds laid bare by the ebb of stream-tides. It is always interesting to come unexpectedly either upon a new species oi a striking peculiarity in an old one ; and I deemed it a curious and suggestive fact, that there should be British shells still restricted to our western shores, and that have not yet made their way into the German Ocean, along the coasts of either extremity of the island. Are we to infer that they are shells of more recent origin than the widely-diffused ones ? or are they merely feebler in their reproductive powers ? and is the German Ocean, as some of our geologists hold, a com- paratively modern sea, into which only the hardier mollusca of rapid increase have yet made their way ? Furthei:, I found that the true fishes differ considerably in the group on the opposite sides of the island. The haddock and whiting are greatly more common on the east coast : the hake and horse mackerel very much more abundant on the west. Even where the species are the same on both sides, the varieties are differ- ent. The herring of the west coast is a short, thick, richly- flavored fish, greatly superior to the large lean variety so abundant on the east ; whereas the west-coast cod are large- headed, thin-bodied, pale-colored fishes, inferior, even in their best season, to the darker-colored, small-headed variety of the east. In no respect do the two coasts differ more, at least to the north of the Grampians, than in the transparency of the water. The bottom is rarely seen on the east coast at a depth • There are only two of these exclusively west-coast shells, — Trochus umhiUtO' tnis aud Pecten iiivcus. As neither of them has yet been detected in any Ter- ♦Jary formation, they are in all probability shells of comparatively recent origin^ that cam 5 into existence in some western centre of creation ; whereas spect* mens of Trochus maffus and J^as^^a reticulata, which occasionally occur on th6 eastern coasts of the kingdom, I have also found in a Pleistocene deposit. Thuat •Jie more widely-spread shells seem to be also the eholls of more ancient stanci 271 ol more than twenty feut, and not often at more than twelve ; whereas on the west I have seen it very distinctly, during a tract of dry weather, at a depth of sixty or seventy feet. The handles of the spears used in Gairloch in spearing flat fish and the common edible crab {^Cancer Pagurus)^ are sometimes five- and-twenty leet in length, — a length which might in vain be given to spear-handles upon the east coast, seeing that there, at such a depth of water, flat fish or crab was never yet seen from the surface. Deceived by this transparency, I have plunged oflener than once over head and ears, when bathing among the rocks, in pools where I had confidently expected to find footing. From a rock that rose abrupt as a wall from the low-water level of stream -tides to a little above the line of flood, I occasionally amused myself, when the evenings were calm, in practising the Indian method of diving, — that in which the diver carries a weight with him, to facilitate his sinking, and keep him stead- ily at the bottom. I used to select an oblong-shaped stone, of sixteen or eighteen pounds weight, but thin enough to be easily held in one hand ; and after grasping it fist, and quit ting the rock edge, I would in a second or two find myself on the gray pebble-strewed ooze beneath, some twelve or fifteen feet from the surface, where I found I could steadily remain, picking up any small objects I chanced to select, until, breath failing, I quitted my hold of the stone. And then two or three seconds more were always suflficient to bring me *o the surface again. There are many descriptions, in the works of the poets, of submarine scenery, but it is always scenery such as may be seen by an eye looking down into the water, — not by an eye enveloped in it, — and very different from that with which I now became acquainted. I found that in these hasty trips to the bottom I could distinguish masses and colors, but that I always failed to determine outlines. The minuter ob- jects—pebbles, shells, and the smaller bunches of sea-weed — always assumed the circular form ; the larger, such as detach- ed rocks and patches of sand, appeared as if described by ir regular curves. The dingy gneiss rock rose behind and over 272 MY SCIIJOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS: me like a lark cloud, thickly dotted with minute circular spots of soiled white, — the aspect assumed, as seen through the water, b}' the numerous specimens of univalve shells {^Purpu- ra lapilli s and Patella vulgata) with which it was speckled ; beneath, the irregular floor seemed covered by a carpet that somewhat resembled in the pattern a piece of marbled paj)er, save that the circular or oval patches of which it was (com- posed, and which had as their nuclei, stones, rocks, shell-fish, bunches of fuci, and fronds of laminaria, were greatly larger. TLTiere spread around a misty groundwork of green, intensely deep along its horizon, but comparatively light overhead, in its middle sky, which had always its prodigy, — wonderful cir- clets of light, that went widening outwards, and with whose delicate green there mingled occasional flashes of pale crim- son. Such was the striking though somewhat meagre scenery of a sea-bottom in Gairloch, as seen by a human eye sub- merged in from two to three fathoms of water. There still continued to linger in this primitive district, at the time, several curious arts and implements, that had long become obsolete in most other parts of the Highlands, and of which the remains, if found in England or the Low country, would have been regarded by the antiquary as belonging to very remote periods. During the previous winter I had read a little w^ork descriptive of an ancient ship, supposed to be Danish, which had been dug out of the silt of an English river, and which, among other marks of antiquity, exhibited seams caulked with moss, — a peculiarity which had set at fault, it was said, the modern ship-carpenter, in the chronology of his art, as he was unaware there had ever been a time when moss was used for such a purpose. On visiting, however, a boat- yard at Gairloch, J found the Highland builder engaged in laying a layer of dried moss, steeped in tar, along one of his seams, and learned that such had been the practice of boat- carpenters in that locality from time immemorial. J have said that the little old Highlander of the solitary shieling, whom V met on first commencing our quarrying labors be- side his hut, was engaged in stripping with a pocket-knife OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATI0:N". 273 tong slender filaments from off a piece of moss-fir. He wag employed in preparing these ligneous fibres for the manufac- ture of a primitive kind of cordage, in large use among the fishermen, and which possessed a strength and flexibility that could scarce have been expected from materials of such vener- able age and rigidity as the roots and trunks of ancient trees, that had been locked up in the peat-mosses of the district for ma J hap a thousand years. Like the ordinary cordage of the rope-maker, it consisted of three strands, and was employed for haulsers, the cork-bauks of herring nets, and the lacing of sails. Most of the sails themselves were made, not of canvass, but of a woollen stuff, the thread of which, greatly harder and stouter than that of common plaic had been spun on the dis- taff and spindle. As hemp and flax must have been as rare commodities of old in the western Highlands, and the He- brides generally, as they both were thirty years ago in Gair- loch, whereas moss-fir must have been abundant, and sheep, however coarse their fleeces, common enough, it seems not improbable that the old - Highland fleets that fought in the " Battle of the Bloody Bay," or that, in troublous times, when Donald quarrelled with the king, ravaged the coasts of Arran and Ayrshire, may have been equipped with similar sails and cordage. Scott describes the fleet of the " Lord of the Isles," in the days of the Bruce, as consisting of " proud galleys," "streamered with silk and tricked with gold." I suspect he would have approved himself a truer antiquary, though, may- hap, worse poet, had he described it as composed of very rude carvels, caulked with moss, furnished with sails of dun-color- ed woollen stuff still redolent of the oil, and rigged out with brown cordage formed of the twisted fibres of moss-fir. The distaff and spindle was still, as I have said, in extensive use in the district. In a scattered village in the ;.eighborhood of our barrack, in which all the adult females were ceaselessly en- gaged in the manufacture of yarn, there was not a single spin- ning- wheel. Nor, though all its cottages had their little pieces of tillage, did it boast its horse or plow. The cottars turned up the soil with the old Highland implement, the cass chrom. 274 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; and the necessary manure was carried to the fields in spring and the produce brought home in autumn, on the ^acks of the women, in square wicker-work panniers, with slip-bottoms. How these poor Highland women did toil ! I have paused amid my labors under the hot sun, to watch them as they passed, bending under their load of peat or manure, and at the same time twirling the spindle as they crept along, and drawing out the never-ending thread from the distaff stuck in their girdles. Their appearance in most cases betrayed their e of hardship. I scarce saw a Gairloch woman of the imbler class turned of thirty, who was not thin, sallow, and prematurely old. The men, their husbands and brothers, were by no means worn out with hard work. I have seen them, time after time, sunning themselves on a mossy bank, when the females were thus engaged ; and used, with my brother- workmen, — who were themselves Celts, 'but of the industrious, hardworking type, — to feel sufficiently indignant at the lazy fellows. But the arrangement which gave them rest, and their wives and sisters hard labor, seemed to be as much the offspring of a remote age as the woollen sails arid the moss-fir cordage. Several other ancient practices and implements had at this time just disappeared from the district. A good meal- mill of the modern construction had superseded, not a genera- tion before, several small mills with horizontal water-wheels, of that rude antique type which first supplanted the still more ancient handmill. These horizontal mills still exist, however, — at least they did so only two years ago, — in the gneiss re- gion of Assynt. The antiquary sometimes forgets that, tested Dy his special rules for determining periods, several ages may be foimd contemporary in contiguous districts of the same country. I am old enough to have seen the handmill at work in the north of Scotland ; and the traveller into the High lands of western Sutherland might have witnessed the hori- zontal mill in action only two years ago. But to the remains of either, if dug out of the mosses or sand-hills of the southern counties, we would assign an antiquity of centuries, hi the same way, the unglazed earthen pipkin, fashioned by the hand OHj THE STOliY OF MY EDUCATION. 275 mtlioiit the assistance of the potter's wheel, is held to belong •:o the '• broi io and stone periods" of the antiquary ; and yet m/ friend o/ ibe Doocot Cove, when minister of Small Isles, found the renu ins of one of these pipkins in the famous char- nel cave of Ligg, which belonged to an age not earlier than that of Mary, and more probably pertained to that of her son James ; and I have since learned that in the southern portions f f the Long Island, this same hand-moulded pottery of the bronze period has been fashioned for domestic use during the early part of the present century. A chapter devoted to these lingering, or onlj^ recently departed, arts of the primitive ages, would be a curious one ; but I fear the time for writing it is now well-nigh past. My few facts on the subject may serve to show that, even as late as the year 1823, some three days' journey into the Highlands might be regarded as analagous in some respects to a journey into the past of some three or four centuries. But even since that comparatively recent period the highlands have greatly changed. After some six or eight weeks of warm sunny days and lovely evenings, there came on a dreary tract of rainy weather, with strong westerly gales ; and for three months together, while there was scarce a day that had not its shower, some days had half-a-dozen. Gairloch occupies, as I have said, exactly the focus of that great curve of annual ruin wliich, impinging on our western shores from the Atlantic, extends from, the north of Assynt to the south of Mull^ and exhil)its on the rain-gauge an average of thirty-five yearly inches, — an ave/age very considerably above the medium quantity that falL m any other part of Great Britain, save a small tract at the Land's End, included in a southern curve of equal fill. The rain-fall of this year, however, must have stood very con- siderably above even this high average ; and the corn crops of the poor Highlanders soon began to testify to the fact. There had been a larger than ordinary promise during the fine weather ; but in the darker hollows the lodged oats and bar- ley now lay rotting on the ground, or^ on the more exposed heights, stood up, shorn of the ears, as mere naked spikes of 13 276 MY scnooLS and schoolmasters; straw. The potatoes, to ), had become soft and watery, aux must have formed but indifferent food to the poor Highlanders ; condemned even in better seasons to feed upon them during tli'^ greater part of the year, and now thrown upon them al- iv )st exclusively by the failure of the corn crop. The cot- tars of the neighboring village were on other accounts in more than usually depressed circumstances at the time. Each family paid to the laird for its patch of corn-land, and the pasturage of a wide upland moor, on which each kept three cows a-piece, a small yearly rent of three pounds. The males were all fishermen as well as crofters ; and, small as the rent was, they derived their only means of paying it from the sea, — chiefly, indeed, from the herring-fishery, — which, ever^' where an uncertain and precarious source of supply, is more so here than in most other places on the north-western coasts of Scot- land. And as for three years together the herring-fishing had failed in the Loch, they had been unable, term after term, to meet with the laird, and were now three years in arrears. For- tunately for them, he was a humane, sensible man, comfortable enough in his circumstances to have, what Highland proprietors oflen have not, the complete command of his own afHurs ; but they all felt that their cattle were their own only by sufferance, and so long as he forbore urging his claim against them ; and they entertained but little hope of ultimate extrication. I saw among these poor men much of that indolence of which the country has heard not a little; and could not doubt, from the peculiar aspects in which it presented itself, that it was, as 1 liave said, a long-derived hereditary indolence, in which tlieir fal hers and grandfathers had indulged fo'- centuries. But there was certainly little in their circumstances to lead to the forma- tion of new habits of industry. Even a previously industriou:i oeople, were they to be located with! i the great north-western curve of thir ty -five inch rain, to raise corn and potatoes for the autumnal storms to blast, and to fish in the laird's behalf her- rings that year after year refused to come to be caught, would, [ suspect, in a short time get nearly as indolent as themselves. And certainly, judging from the contrast which my brother OR, THE STOliY OF MY EDUCATION. 277 workmen presented to these Highlanders of the west coast, the mdolence which we saw, and for which my comrades had no tolerance whatever, could scarce be described as inherently Celtic. I myself was the only genuine Lowlander of our party. John Eraser, who, though now turned of sixty, would have laid or hewn stone for stone with the most diligent Saxon mason in Britain or elsev/here, was a true Celt of the Scandina- rian-Gaelic variety ; and all our other masons, — Macdonalds, M'Leods, and Mackays, hard-working men, who were con- tent to toil from season to season, and all day long, — were true CXts also. But they had been bred on the eastern border of the Highlands, in a sandstone district, where they had the op- portunity of acquiring a trade, and of securing in the working season regular well-remunerated employment ; and so they had developed into industrious, skilled mechanics, of at least the ordinary efficiency. There are other things much more deeply in fault as producing causes of the indolence of the west-coast Highlander than his Celtic blood. On finishing the dwelling-house upon which we had been engaged, nearly one half the workmen quitted the squad for the low country, and the remainder removed to the neighbor- hood of the inn at which we had spent our first night, or rather morning, in the place, to build a kitchen and store-room for the inn-keeper. Among the others, we lost the society of Click-Clack, who had been a continual source of amusement and annoyance to us in the barrack all the season long. We soon found that he was regarded by the Highlanders in our neighborhood with feelings of the intensest horror and dread : they had learned somehow that he used to be seen in the low country flitting suspiciously at nights about churchyards, and was suspected of being a resurrectionist ; and not one of the ghouls or vampires of eastern story could have been more feared or hated in the regions which they were believed to infest, than a resurrectionist in the Western Highlands. Click-Clack had certainly a trick of wandering about at nights ; and not unfrequently did he bring, on his return from some noctur- nal ramble, dead bodies with him into the barrack j but they 278 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; were invariably the dead bodies of cod, gurnard, and hake, know not where his fishing-bank lay, or what bait he employ- ed ; but I observed that almost all the fish which he caught were ready dried and salted. Old John Eraser was not with- out suspicion that there were occasional interferences on the part of the carter with the integrity of our meal-barrel ; and I have seen the old man smoothing the surface of the meal, just before quitting the barrack for his work, and inscribing upon it with his knife-point the important moral injunction, *' Thou shalt not steal," in such a way as to render it impos^ sible to break the commandment within the precincts of the barrel, w^ithout at the same time effacing some of its charac- ters. And these once effaced, Click-Clack, as he was no writer himself, and had no assistant or confidant, could not have re-inscribed. Ere quitting us for the low country, I bar- gained with him that he should carry my blanket in his cart to Conon-side, and gave him a shilling and a dram in advance, as pay for the service. He carried it, however, no farther than the next inn, where, pledging it for a second shilling and a second dram, he left me to relieve it as I passed. Poor Click- Clack, though one of the cleverest of his class, was decidedly half-witted; and I may rer^rk, as at least curious, that though I have known idiotcy in its unmixed state united to great honesty, and capable of disinterested attachment, I never yet knew one of the half-witted cast who was not selfish and a rogue. We were unlucky in our barracks this season. Ere com- pleting our first piece of work, we had to quit the hay -barn, our earliest dwelling, to make way for the proprietor's hay, and to shelter in a cow-house, where, as the place had no chimney, we were nearly suffocated by smoke ; and we now found the inn-keeper, our new employer, speculating, like the magistrates in Joe Mill^^, on the practicability of lodging us in a building the materials of which were to be used in erecting the one which we were engaged to build. We did our best to solve the problem, by hanging up at the end of the doomed hovel, —which had been a salt-store in its day, and was in damp OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 279 weather ever s^^ eating salt-water, — a hanging partition of mats, that somewhat resembled the curtain of a barn-theatre ; and, making our beds within, we began pulling down piecemeal, as the materials were required, that part of the erection which lay outside. We had very nearly unhoused ourselves ere our work was finished ; and the chill blasts of October, especially when they blew in at the open end of our dwelling, rendered it as uncomfortable as a shallow cave in an exposed rock-front. My boyish experiences, however, among the rocks of Cromarty, constituted no bad preparation for such a life, and I roughed it out at least as well as any of my comrades. The day had so contracted, that night always fell upon our unfinished lar bors, and I had no evening walks ; but there was a delight- ful gneiss island, of about thirty acres in extent, and nearly two miles away, to which I used to be occasionally despatched to quarry lintels and corner stones, and where work had all the charms of play ; and the quiet Sabbaths were all my own. So long as the laird and his family were at the mansion-house at Flowerdale, — at least four months of every year, — there was an English service in the parish church ; but I had come to the place this season before the laird, and now remained in it after he had gone away, and there was no English service for me. And so I usually spent my Sabbaths all alone in the noble Flowerdale woods, now bright, under their dark hill- sides, in the autumnal tints, and remarkable for the great height and bulk of their ash trees, and of a few detached firs, that spoke, in their venerable massiveness, of former centuries. The clear, calm mornings, when the gossamer went sailing in long gray films along the retired glades of the wood, and the straggling sunlight fell on the crimson and orange mushroom, as it sprang up amid the dank grass, and under thi jkly-leaved bougns of scarlet and gold, I deemed peculiarly delightful. For one who had neither home nor church, the autunmal ^v^ocds formed by much a preferable Sabbath haunt to a shal- low cave, dropping brine, unprovided with chair or table, and v\hose only furniture consisted of two rude bedsteads of un •Iressed slab? that bore atop two blankets a-piece and a heap 280 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; of straw. Sabbath-walking in parties, and especially in the neighborhood of our large towns, is always a frivolous, and often a very bad thing ; but lonely Sabbath- v/alks in a rural district, — walks such as the poet Grahame describes, — are not necessarily bad ; and the Sabbatarians who urge that in all cases, men, when not in church on the Sabbath, ought to be in their dwellings, must know very little indeed of the "huts where poor men lie." In the mr'son's barrack, or the faim- servant's bothy, it is often impossible to enjoy the quiet of the Sabbath : the circumstances necessary to its enjoyment must be sought in the open air, amid the recesses of some thick wood, or along the banks of some unfrequented river, jv on the brown wastes of some solitary moor. We had completed all our work ere Hallowday, and, after a journey of nearly three days, I found myself once more at home, with the leisure of the long happy winter before me. 1 still look back on the experiences of this year with a feeling of interest. I had seen in my boyhood, in the interior of Sutherland, the Highlanders living in that condition of com- parative comfort which they enjoyed from shortly after the suppression of the rebellion of 1745, and the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions, till the beginning of the present cen- tury, and in some localities for ten or twelve years later. And here again 1 saw them in a condition — the effect mainly of the introduction of the extensive sheep-farm system into the in- terior of the country — which has since become general over almost the entire Highlands, and of which the result may be seen in the annual famines. The population, formerly spread pretty equally over the country, now exists as a miserable selvage, stretched along its shores, dependent in most cases on precarious fisheries, that prove remunerative for a year or two, and disastrous for mayhap half-a-dozen. And, able barely to subsist when most successful, a failure of the potato crop, or in the expected return of the herring shoals, at once red\ices them to starvation. The grand difference between the circum- stances of the people of the Highlands in the better time and the worse, may be summed up in the one important vocable, OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 281 — capital. The Highlander was never wealthy : tht. inhabit ants of a wild mountainous district, formed of the primary rocks, never are. But he possessed on the average his six, or eight, or ten head of cattle, and his small flock of sheep ; and when, as sometimes happened in the high-lying districts, the corn-crop turned out a failure, the sale of a few cattle or sheep more than served to clear scores with the landlord, and enabled him to pui chase his winter and spring supply of meal in the Lowlands. He w^as thus a capitalist, and possessed the capi- talist's peculiar advantage of not "living from hand to mouth," but on an accumulated fund, which always stood between him and absolute want, though not between him and positive hard- ship, and which enabled him to rest, during a year of scarcity, on his own resources, instead of throwing himself on the charity of his Lowland neighbors. Nay, in what were emphatically termed " the dear years" of the beginning of the present and latter half of the past century, the humble people of the Low lands, especially our Lowland mechanics and laborers, suf- fered more than the crofters and small flirmers of the High- lands, and this mainly from the circumstance, that as tho failure of the crops which induced the scarcity was a corn failure, not a failure of grass and pasture, the humbler High- landers had sheep and cattle, which continued to supply them with food and raiment ; while the humbler Lowlanders, de- pending on corn almost exclusively, and accustomed to deal with the draper for their articles of clothing, were reduced by the high price of provisions to great straits. There took place, however, about the beginning of the century, a mighty change, coincident with, and, to a certain extent, an effect of, the wars of the first French Revolution. The price of provisions rose in England and the Lowlands, and, w^ith the price of provis- ions, the rent of land. The Llighland proprietor naturally enough set himself to determine how his rental also was to be increased ; and, as a consequence of the conclusion at which he arrived, the sheep-farm and clearance-system began. Many thousand Highlanders, ejected from their snug holdings, em- ployed their little capital in emigrating to Canada and the 282 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; States ; and there, in most cases, the little capital increased, and a rude plenty continues to be enjoyed by their descendants. Many thousands more, however, fell down upon the coasts of the country, and, on moss-covered moors or bare promontories, ill-suited to repay the labors of the agriculturist, commenced a sort of amphibious life as crofters and fishermen. And, lo- cated on an ungenial soil, and prosecuting with but indifferent skill a precarious trade, their little capital dribbled out of their hands, and they became the poorest of men. Meanwhile, in some parts of the Highlands and Islands, a busy commerce sprang up, w^hich employed — much to the profit of the land- lords — many thousands of the inhabitants. The kelp manu facture rendered inhospitable islets and tracts of bleak rocky shore, rich in sea-weed, of as much value to the proprietors as the best land in Scotland ; and under the impetus given by full employment, and, if not ample, at least remunerative pay, population increased. Suddenly, however. Free Trade, in its first approaches, destroyed the trade in kelp ; and then the dis- covery of a cheap mode of manufacturing soda out of common salt secured its ruin beyond the powder of legislation to retrieve. Both the people and landlords experienced in the kelp dis- tricts the evils which a ruined commerce alway leaves behind it. Old Highland families disappeared from amid the aristoc- racy and landowners of Scotland ; and the population of ex- tensive islands and sea-boards of the country, from being no more than adequate, suddenly became oppressively redundant. It required, however, another drop to make the full cup run over. The potatoes had become, as I have shown, the staple food of the Highlander; and when, in 1846, the potato blight came on, the people, most of them previously stripped of their little capitals, and divested of their employment, were deprived of their food, and ruined at a blow. The same stroke which did little more than slightly impinge on the comforts of the people of the Lowlands, utterly prostrated the Highlanders ; and ever since, the sufferings of famine have become chronic along the bleak shores and rugged islands of at least the north- western portion of our country. Nor is it perhaps the worst OR, THE STOKY OF MY EDUCATION. i^^."^ part of the evil that takes the form of clamorous want : so heavily have the famines born on a class which were not ab- solutely the poor when they came on, that they are absolutely the poor now ; — they have dissipated the last remains of capi- tal possessed ^y Xha people of the Highlands, 2^4 MY SCHOOLS ANT) SCHOOLMASTERS' CHAPTEE XIV. "Edina! Scotia's darling seat! All hail thy palaces and towers !" Burns. There had occurred a sad accident among the Cromarty rocks this season, when I was laboring in Gairloch, which, from the circumstance that it had nearly taken place in my own person about five years before, a good deal impressed me on my return. A few hundred yards from the very bad road which I had assisted old Johnstone of the Forty-Second in constructing, there is a tall inaccessible precipice of ferruginous gneiss, that from time immemorial down to this period had furnished a secure nestling-place to a pair of ravens, — the only birds of their species that frequented the rocks of the Hill. Year after year, regularly as the breeding season came round., the ravens used to make their appearance, and enter on pos- session of their hereditary home : they had done so for a hun- dred years to a certainty, — some said, for a much longer time ; and as there existed a tradition in the place that the nest had once been robbed of its young birds by a bold climber, I paid it a visit one morning, in order to determine whether I could not rob it too. There was no getting up to it from below : the precipice, more inaccessible for about a hundred feet from its base than a castle- wall, overhung the shore ; but it seemed QOt impracticable from above; and, coming gradually down OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 2£5 upon it, availing myself, as- T crept along, of every little protii berance and hollow, 1 at length stood within six or eight feet of the young birds. From that point, however, a smooth shelf, without projection or cavity, descended at an angle of about forty, to the nest, and terminated abruptly, without ledge or margin, in the overhanging precipice. Have I not, I asked, crept along a roof of even a steeper slope than that of the shelf? Why not, in like manner, creep along it to the nest, where there is firm footing I I had actually stretched out my naked foot to take the first step, when I observed, as the sun suddenly broke out from behind a cloud, that the light glisten- ed on the smooth surface. It was encrusted over by a thin layer of chlorite, slippery as the mixture of soap and grease that the ship-carpenter spreads over his slips on the morning of a launch. I at once saw there was an element of danger in the way on which I had at first failed to calculate ; and so, relinquishing the attempt as hopeless, I returned by the path 1 had come, and thought no more of robbing the raven's nest. It was, however, again attempted this season, but with tragic result, by a young lad from Sutherland named Mackay, who had previously approved his skill as a cragsman in his native county, and several times secured the reward given by an Agricultural Society for the destruction of young birds of prey. As the incident was related to me, he had approached the nest by the path which I had selected : he had paused where I had paused, and even for a longer time; and then, venturing forward, he no sooner committed himself to the treacherous chlorite, than, losing footing as if on a steep sheet of ice, he shot right over the precipice. Falling sheer for the first fifty feet or so without touching the rock, he w^as then turned full round by a protuberance against which he had glanced, and descending for the lower half of the way head foremost and dashing with tremendous force among the sraoo'l. sea-stones below, his brains were scattered over an area of from ten to twelve square yards in extent. His only com- panion — an ignorant Irislr lad — ^had to gather up the fragwenU of his head in a napkin. 286 MY SCJfOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; I now felt that, save for the gleam of the sun on the glisten ing chlorite, — seen not a moment too soon, — I would probably have been substituted as the victim for poor Mackay, and thai he, warned by my fate, w^ould. in all likelihood, have escaped. And though I knew it might be asked, Why the interposition of a Providence to save you^ when he was left to perish '? 1 did feel that I did not owe my escape merely to my acquaint- anoe with chlorite and its properties. For the fall develoj>- ment of the moral instincts of our nature, one may lead a life by much too quiet and too secure: a sprinkling in one's lot of sudden perils and hair-breadth escapes is, I am convinced, more wholesome, if positive superstition be avoided, than a total absence of danger. For my own part, though I have, I trust, ever believed in the doctrine of a particular Providence, it has been always some narrow escape that has given me my best evidences of the vitality and strength of the belief within. It has been ever the touch of danger that has rendered it strongly emotional. A few years after this time, when stoop- ing forward to examine an opening fissure in a rock front, at w^hich I was engaged in quarrying, a stone, detached from above by a sudden gust of wind, brushed so closely past my head as to beat down the projecting front of my bonnet, and then dented into a deep hollow the sward at my feet. There w^as nothing that was not perfectly natural in the occurrence ; but the gush of acknowledgment that burst spontaneously from my heart would have set at nought the scepticism which would have held that there was no Providence in it. On another occasion, I paused for some time when examining a cave of the old-coast line, directly under its low-browed roof of Old Red conglomerate, as little aware of the presence of danger as if I had been standing under the dome of St. Paul's ; but when 1 next passed the way, the roof had fallen, and a mass, huge enough to have given me at once death and burial, cumbered the spot which I had occupied. On yet another occasion, I clambered a few yards down a precipice, to examine some crab- apple trees, which, springing from a turret-like projeo tion of the rock, far from gardens or nurseries, had everj OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 287 r/iark of being indigene us; and then, climbing up among the branches, I shook them in a manner that must have exerted no small leverage power on the outjet beneath, to possess myself of some of the fruit, as the native apples of Scotland, On mj descent I marked, without much thinking of the mat- ter, an apparent y recent crack running between the outjet and the body of the precipice. I found, however, cause enough to think of it on my return, scarce a month after ; for then b(»th outjet and trees lay broken and fractured on the beach more than a hundred feet below. With such momentum had even tke slimmer twigs been dashed against the sea-pebbles, that uhey stuck out from under more than a hundred tons of fallen rock, divested of the bark on their under sides, as if peeled by the hand. And what I felt on all these occasions was, I be- lieve, not more in accordance with the nature of man as an in- stinct of the moral faculty, than in agreement with that pro vis- ion of the Divine Government under which a sparrow falletli not without permission. There perhaps never was a time in which the doctrine of a particular Providence was more ques- tioned and doubted than in the present ; and yet the scepticism which obtains regarding it seems to be very much a scepticism of effort, conjured up by toiling intellects, in a quiet age, and among the easy classes ; while the belief which, partially and for the time, it overshadows, lies safely entrenched all the while amid the fastnesses of the unalterable nature of man. When danger comes to touch it, it will spring up in its old proportions ; nay, so indigenous is it to the human heart, that if it will not take its cultivated form as a belief in Providence, it will to a certainty take to it its wild form as a belief in Fate or Destiny. Of a doctrine so fundamentally important that there can be no religion without it, God himself seems to have taken care when He moulded the human heart. The raven no longer builds among the rocks of the Hill of Cromarty, and I saw many years ago its last pair of eagles. This last noble bird was a not unfrequent visitor of the Sutors early in the present century. I still remember scaring it from 288 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; its perch on the southern side of the hill, as day was dravNing (o a close, when the tall precipices amid which it had lodged lay deep in the shade ; and how picturesquely it used to catch the red gleam of evening on its plumage of warm brown, as, sai^ng outwards over the calm sea, many hundred feet below, it emerged from under the shadow of the cliffs into the sunshine. Uncle James once shot a very large eagle beneath one of the loftiest precipices of the southern Sutor ; and, swim- ming out through the surf to recover its body, — for it had drop- ped dead into the sea, — he kept its skin for many years as a trophy.* But eagles are now no longer to be seen or shot on the Sutors or their neighborhood. The badger, too, — one of perhaps the oldest inhabitants of the country, for its seems to have been contemporary with the extinct elephants and hyaiuas of the Pleistocene periods, — has become greatly less common on their steeps sides than in the days of my boyhood ; and both the fox and otter are less frequently seen. It is not uninterest- ing to mark with the eye of the geologist, how palpably in the course of a single lifetime, — still nearly twenty years short of the term fixed by the Psalmist, — these wild animals have been posting on in Scotland to that extinction which overtook, within its precincts, during the human period, the bear, the beaver, and the wolf, and of which the past history • Uncle James would scarce have sanctioned, had he been consulted in the matter, the use to which the carcase of his dead eagle was applied. There lived in the place an eccentric, half-witted old woman, who, for the small sum of one half-penny, used to fall a dancing on the street to amuse children, and who rejoiced in the euphonious though somewhat obscure appellation of "Dribble Drone." Some young fellows, on seeing the eagle divested of its skin, and looking remarkably clean and well-condi- tioned, suggested that it should be sent to "Dribble;" and, accordingly in the cha^ acter of "a great goose, the gift of a gentleman," it was landed at the door. The gift was thankfully accepted. Dribble's cottage proved odoriferous at dinner-time for the several following days ; and when asked, after a week had gone by, how she had relished the great goose which the gentleman had sent, she replied, that it waa " Unco sweet, but O ! teuch, tench." For years after, the reply continued to be pro- verbial in the place" and many a piece of over-hard stock fish, and over-fresh steak, used to be characterized as, ''Like Dribble Drone's eagle, unco swfet, but 01 teucti, teuch," OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION-. 2S9 of tin globe, as inscribed on its rocks, furnishes so strange a record Winter passed in the usual pursuits ; and I commenced the working season of a new year by assisting my old master to inclose with a stone wall a little bit of ground, which he had bought on speculation, but had failed in getting feued out for buildings. My services, however, were gratuitous, — given merely to eke out the rather indifferent bargain that the old man had been able to drive in his ov/n behalf, for my labors as an apprentice ; and when our job was finished, it became necessary that I should look out for employment of a more remunerative character. There was not much doing in the north ; but work promised to be abundant in the great towns ^ of the south : the disastrous building mania of 1824-25 had just begun ; and, after some little hesitation, I resolved on trying whether I could not make my way as a mechanic among the stone-cutters of Edinburgh, — perhaps the most skilful in their profession in the world. I was, besides, desirous to get rid of a little property in Leith, which had cost the family; great annoyance, and not a little money, but from which, so long as the nominal proprietor was a minor, we could not shake ourselves loose. It was a house on the Coal-hill, or rather the self-contained ground-floor of a house, which had fallen to my father by the death of a relative, so immediately before his own death that he had not entered upon possession. It was burdened with legacies to the amount of nearly two hundred pounds ; but then the yearly rent amounted to twenty- four pounds ; and my mother, acting on the advice of friends, and deeming the investment a good one, had no sooner re- covered the insurance-money of my father's vessel from the underwriter, than she handed the greater part of it to the leg- atees, and took possession of the property in my behalf. Alas ! never was there a more unfortunate inheritance or worse in vestment. It had been let as a public-house and tap-room; and had been the scene of a somewhat rough, and, T dare say. uot very respectable, but vp.t nrofitable trade ; but no sooiif f 290 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; had it become mine, than, in consequence of some alteration* in the harbor, the greater part of the shipping that used to lie at the Coal-hill removed to a lower reach : the tap-room business suddenly fell off, and the rent sank, during the course of one twelvemonth, from twenty -four to twelve pounds. And then, in its sere ard wintry state, the unhappy house came to be inhabited by a s^eries of miserable tenants, who, though they sanguinely engaged to pay the twelve pounds, never paid them. I still remember the brief, curt letters from our agent, the late Mr. Veitch, town-clerk of Leith, that never failed to fill my mother with terror and dismay, and very much resem- bled, in at least the narrative parts, jottings by the poet Crabbe , for some projected poem on the profligate poor. Two of our tenants made moonlight flittings just on the eve of the term ; and though the little furniture which they left behind them was duly rouped at the cross, such was the inevitable expense of the transaction, that none of the proceeds of the sale reached Cromarty. The house was next inhabited by a stout female, who kept a certain description of lady -lodgers ; and for the first half-year she paid the rent most conscientiously ; but the authorities interfering, there was another house found for her and her ladies in the neighborhood of the Calton, and the rent of the second half-year remained unpaid. And as the house lost, in consequence of her occupation, the modicum of char- acter which it had previously retained, it lay for five years wholly untenanted, save by a mischievous spirit, — the ghost it was said, of a murdered gentleman, whose throat had bee* cut in an inner apartment by the ladies, and his body flung b} night into the deep mud of the harbor. The ghost was, how ever, at length detected by the police, couching, in the form of one of the ladies themselves, on a lair of straw in the cornei of one of the rooms, and exorcised into Bridewell ; and then the house came to be inhabited by a tenant who had both the will and the ability to pay. One year's rent, however, had to be expended in repairs ; and ere the next year passed, the heritor* of the parish were rated for the erection of the magnificent parish church of North Leith, with its tall OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOIST. 291 aid graceful spire, then in course of building; and as we had no one to state our case, our house was rated, not accord- ing to its reduced, but according to its original value. And so the entire rental of the second year, with several pounds additional which I had to subtract from my hard-earned sav- ings as a mason, were appropriated in behalf of the ecclesiastical Establishment of the country, by the builders of the church and spire. I had attained my majority when lodging in the fragment of a salt store-house in Gairloch ; and, competent in the eye of the law to dispose of the house on the Coal-hill, I now hoped to find, if not a purchaser, at least some one foolish enough to take it off my hands for nothing. I have since heard and read a good deal about the atrocious landlords of the poorer and less reputable sort of houses in our large towns, and have seen it asserted that, being a bad and selfish kind of people, they ought to be rigorously dealt with. And so, I dare say, they ought ; but at the same time I cannot forget, that I myself was one of these atrocious landlords from my fifth till nearly my twenty-second year, and that I could not possibly help it, and was very sorry for it. On the fourth day after losing sight of the Hill of Cromarty, the Leith smack in which I sailed w^as slowly threading her way, in a morning of light airs and huge broken fog-wreaths, through the lower tracts of the Frith of Forth. The islands and distant land looked dim and gray through the haze, like objects in an unfinished drawing ; and at times some vast low- browed cloud from the sea applied the sponge as it rolled past, and blotted out half a county at a time ; but the sun occa- sionally broke forth in partial glimpses of great beauty, and brought out in bold relief little bits of the landscape, — now a town, and now an islet, and anon the blue summit of a hill. A sunlit wreath rose from around the abrupt and rugged Bass as we passed ; and my heart leaped within me as I saw, for the first time, that stern Patm.os of the devout and brave of another age looming dark and high through the diluted mist, and enveloped for a moment, as the cloud parted, in an am- ber ""inted glory. There had been a little Presbyterian oasis 292 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEHS; of old in the neighborhood of Cromarty, which, hi the midst of the Highlands and Moderate indifferency that charaeterize.s * The act for manumitting our Scotch colliers was passed in the year 1775, forly- aine years prior lo the date of my acquaintance with the class at Niddry. But though it was only such colliers of the village as were in their fiftieth year wlien I knew them (with, Of course, all the older ones), who had been born slaves, even its men of thirty had actually, though not nominally, come into the world in a stale < f bondage, in consequence of certain penalties att:iched to the emancipating act, of which the poor ignorant workers under 'ground were both too improvident and loo little ingenious to keep clear. Tliey were set free, however, by a second act passed in J799. The language of both these acts, regarded as British ones of the latter half of the last century, and as bearing reference to British subjects living within the limits of the island, strikes with stariling effect. " Whereas," says the preamble of the older act— that of 1775— "by the statute law of Scotland, as explained by the judges of the courts of law there, many colliers, and coal-bearers, and sailers, are in a state of .s/aucri/or Z»owd«^r^, bound to the collieries or salt-works where they wDrk for lifc^ transferable with the collieries avd salt-works ; and whereas the emancipat- ing," &c. &c. A passage in the preamble of the act of 1799 is scarce less strikinc; • It declares that, notwithstanding the former act, "many colliers and coal-bearers Ktill continue in a state of bondage"^"* in Scotland. The history of our Scotch collitrs v'>uld be found a curious and instructive one. Their slavery seems not to ha\e been derived from the ancient times of general s rfship, but to have originated \x\ com pt- rati vely modern acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in decisions of the Court of Sessions,— acts of a Parliament in which the poor ignorant subterranean men of the country were, of course, wholly unrepresented, and in decisions of a Court ir which no "^geut of theirs ever j^ade appearance in their behalf. 306 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASrERS ; given, which, based on extensive statistical tables, exhilit by darker and lighter shadings the moral and intellectual character of the people in the various districts of the coun- tries which they represent. In one map, for instance, repre- sentative of the state of education in France, while certain well-taught provinces arc represented by a bright tint, as if enjoying the light, there are others, in which great ignorance obtains, that exhibit a deep shade of blackness, as if a cloud rested over them ; and the general aspect of the whole is that of a landscape seen from a hill-top in a day of dappled light and shadow. There are certain minuter shadings, however, by which certain curious facts might be strikingly represented to the eye in this manner, for which statistical tables furnish no adequate basis, but which men who have seen a good deal of the people of a country might be able to give in a manner at least approximately correct. In a shaded map representative of the intelligence of Scotland, I would be disposed — sinking the lapsed classes, or representing them merely by a few such dark spots as mottle the sun — to represent the large towns as centres of focal brightness ; but each of these focal centres I would encircle with a halo of darkness considerably deeper in shade than the medium spaces beyond. I found that in the tenebrious halo of the Scottish capital there existed, indepen- dently of the ignorance of the poor colliers, three distinct ele- ments. A considerable proportion of the villagers were farm- servants in the decline of life, who, unable any longer to pro- cure, as in their days of unbroken strength, regular engage ments from the farmers of the district, supported themselves as occasional laborers. And they, of course, were characterized by the ignorance of their class. Another portion of the people were carters, — employed mainly, in these times, ere the rail- ways began, in supplying the Edinburgh coal-market, and in di'iving building materials into the city from the various quar- ries. And carters as a class, like all who live much in the society of horses, are invariably ignorant and un intellectual. A third, but greatly smaller portion than either of the other two, con- listed of mechanics; but it was only mechanics of an inferior OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 807 order, that remained outside the city to work for carters ana laborers : the better skilled, and, as to a certain extent the terms are convertible, the more intelligent mechanics, found employment and a home in Edinburgh. The cottage in which 1 lodged was inhabited by an old farm-servant, — a tall, large bodied, small-headed man, who, in his journey through life, seemed to have picked up scarce an idea; and his wife, a woman turned of sixty, though a fine enough body in the main, and a careful manager, was not more intellectual. They had but a single apartment in their humble dwelling, fenced off by a little bit of partition from the outer door; and I could fain have wished that they had two ; but there was no choice of lodgings in the village, and I had just to content myself, as the working man always must in such circumstances, with the shelter I could get. My bed was situated in the one end of the room, and my landlady's and her husband's in the other, with the passage by which we entered between ; but decent old Peggy Russel had been accustomed to such arrangements all her life long, and seemed never once to think of the matter ; and — as she had reached that period of life at which women of the humbler class assume the characteristics of the other sex, somewhat, I suppose, on the principle on which very ancient female birds put on male plumage — I in a short time ceased to think of it also. It is not the less true, however, that the pur poses of decency demand that much should be done, especially in the southern and midland districts of Scotland, for tba dwellings of the poor. SOa MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS' CHAPTER XT. **See Inebriety, her wand she waves, And lo! her pale, and lo! her purple slaves." Crabbi. I WAS joi-/:jd in the course of a few weeks, in Peggy Russel's one-roomed cottage, by another lodger, — lodgers of the hum- bler class usually consociating together in pairs. My new companion had lived for some time, ere my arrival at Niddry, hi a neighboring domicile, which, as he was what was termed a " quiet living man," and as the inmates were turbulent and unsteady, he had, after bearing a good deal, been compelled to quit. Like our foreman, he was a strict Seceder, in full communion with his Church. Though merely a common la- borer, with not more than half the wages of our skilled work- men, I had observed, ere our acquaintance began, that no mason in the squad was more comfortably attired on week- days than he, or wore a better suit on Sunday ; and so 1 nart set him down, from the circumstance, as a decent man. I now found that, like my uncle Sandy, he was a great reader of good books, — an admirer even of the same old authors,- — deeply read, like him, in Durham and Rutherford, — and en- tcrtaining, too, a high respect for Baxter, Boston, old John Brown, and the Erskines. In one respect, however, he dif- fered from both my uncles : he had begun to question the excellence of religious Establishments ; nay, to hold that the country might be none the worse were its ecclesiastical eD ORj THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 809 dowments taken away, — a view which our foreman a.so en- tertained ; whereas both Uncles Sandy and James were as little averse as the old divines themselves to a Sta^e-paid ministry, and desiderated only that it should be a good one. There were two other Seceders engaged as masons at the work, — more of the polerhical and less of the devout type than the foreman or my new comrade the laborer ; and they also used occasionally to speak, not merely of the doubtful usefulness, but as they were stronger in their language than their more self-denying and more consistent co-religionists — of the posi- tive worthlessness, of Establishments. The Voluntary con- troversy did not break out until about nine years after this time, when the Reform Bill gave vent to many a pent-up opinion and humor among that class to which it extended the franchise ; but the materials of the war were evidently already accumulating among the intelligent Dissenters of Scotland ; and from what I now saw, its after appearance in a some- what formidable aspect failed to take me by surprise. I must in justice add, that all the religion of our party was to be found among its Seceders. Our other workmen were really wild fellows, most of w^hom never entered a church. A d(v cided reaction had already commenced within the Establish- ment, on the cold, elegant, unpopular Moderatism of the pre- vious period, — that Moderatism which had been so adequately represented in the Scottish capital by the theology of Blair and the ecclesiastical policy of Robertson ; but it was chiefly among the middle and upper classes that the re-action had begun ; and scarce any portion of the humbler people, lost to the Church during the course of the two preceding genera- tions, had yet been recovered. And so the working men of Edinburgh and its neighborhood, at this time, were in large part either non-religious, or included w^ithin the Independent or Secession pale. John Wilson — for such was the name of my new comrade — was a truly good man, — devout, conscientious, friendly, — not highly intellectual, but a person of plain good sense, and by ao means devoid of general information. There was another 810 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; laborer at the work, an unhappy little man, with whom i have often seen John engaged in mixing mortar, or carrying materials to the builders, but never without being struck by the contrast which they presented in character and appearance. John was a plain, somewhat rustic-looking personage; and an injury which he had received from gunpowder in a quarry, t hat had destroyed the sight of one of his eyes, and consider- ably dimmed that of the other, had, of course, not served t< improve his looks ; but he always wore a cheerful, contented air ; and, with all hia homeliness, was a person pleasant to the sight. His companion was a really handsome man,— -- gray-haired, silvery-whiskered, with an aristocratic cast of countenance, that would have done no discredit to a royal drawing-room, and an erect though somewhat petit figure, cast in a mould that,if set off more to advantage, would have been recognized as elegant. But John Lindsay — for so he was called — bore ahvays the stamp of misery on his striking features. There lay between the poor little man and the Crawford peerage only a narrow chasm, represented by a miss- ing marriage certificate ; but he w^as never able to bridge the gulf across ; and he had to toil on in unhappiness, in conse- quence, as a mason's laborer. I have heard the call resound- ing from the walls twenty times a-day, — " John, Yearl Cra- furd, bring us anither hod o' lime." I found religion occupying a much humbler place among these workmen of the south of Scotland than that which I had used to see assigned to it in the north. In my native district and the neighboring counties it still spoke with authority ; and a man who stood up in its behalf in any society, unless very foolish or very inconsistent, always succeeded in silencing opposition, and making good its claims. Here, however, the irreligious asserted their power as the majority, and carried matters with a high hand ; and religion itself, existing as but dissent, not as an establishment, had to content itself with bare toleration. Eemonstrance, or even advice, was not permitted. " Johnnie, boy," I have heard one of the rougher mechanics say, half in jest, half in earnest, to my companion, "if you set mi, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 811 ^mnself to convert me, I'll brak your face ;" and I have known another of them' remark, with a patronizing air, that "kirks were nae very bad things, after a' ;" that he " aye liked to be in a kirlv', for the sake of decency, once a twelvemonth ;" and that, as L^i "hadna been kirked for the last ten months, he was just only waiting for a rainy Sabbath to lay in his stock o' divinity lor the year." Our new lodger, aware how little any interference with the religious concerns of others was tolerated ii the place, seemed unable for some time to muster up resolution enough to broach in the family his favorite subject. He retired every night, before going to bed, to his :loset/ —the blue vault, with all its stars, — often the only closet of the devout lodger in a south-country cottage ; but I saw that ewrh evening, ere he went out, he used to look uneasily at the landlord and me, as if there lay some weight on his mmd regarding us, of which he was afraid to rid himself, and which yet rendered him very uncomfortable. " Well, John," I asked one evening, speaking direct, to his evident embar- rassment; "what is itl" John looked at old William the landlord, and then at me. " Did we not think it right," he said^ " that there should be evening worship in the family 1" Old William had not idea enough for conversation : he either signified acquiescence in whatever was said that pleased him, by an ever-recurring ay, ay, ay ; or he grumbled out his dissent m a few explosive sounds, that conveyed his meaning rather in their character as tones than as vocables. But there now mingled with the ordinary explosions the distinct enunciation, given with, for him, unwonted emphasis, that he " wasna for thot^^ I struck in, however, on the other side, and appealed to Peggy. " I was sure," I said, '- that Mrs. Russel would see th«t propriety of John's proposal." And Mrs. Russel, as most women would have done in the circumstances, unless, indeed, very bad ones, did see the propriety of it ; and from that evening forward the cottage had its family worship. John's prayers were always very earnest and excellent, but sometimes just a little too long ; and old William, who, I fear, did not g/eatly profit by them, used not unfrequently to fall asleep on 312 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASIERS , his knees. But though he sometimes stole t( his bed wheic John chanced to be a little later in taking the book than usual, and got into a profound slumber ere the prayer began, he de- ferred to the majoi ty, and gave us no active opposition. He was not a vicious man : his intellect had slept through life, and he had as little religion as an old horse or dog ; but he was quiet and honest, and, to the measure of his failing ability, I faithful worker in his humble employments. His religious raining, like that of his brother villagers, seemed to have been sadly neglected. Had he gone to the parish church on Sun- day, he would have heard a respectable moral essay read from the pulpit, and would, of course, have slept under it ; but William, like most of his neighbors, preferred sleeping out the day at home, and never did go to the church ; and as cer- tainly as he went not to the teacher of religion, the teacher of religion never came to him. During the ten months which I spent in the neighborhood of Niddry Mill, I saw neither minister nor missionary. But if the village furnished no ad- vantageous ground on which to fight the battle of religious Establishments, — seeing that the Establishment was of no manner of use there, — it furnished ground quite as unsuitable for the class of Voluntaries who hold that the supply of relig- ious instruction should, as in the case of all other commodi- ties, be regulated by the demand. Demand and supply were admirably well balanced in the village of Niddry : there was no religious instruction, and no wish or desire for it. The masons at Niddry House were paid fortnightly, on a Saturday night. Wages were high, — we received two pounds eight shillings for our two weeks' work; but scarce half-a-dozen in the squad could claim at settlement the full tale, as the Monday and Tuesday after pay-night were usually blanK days, devoted by two-thirds of the whole to drinking and debauchery. Not often has wages been more sadly misspent than by my poor work-fellows at Niddry, during this period of abundant and largely-remunerated employment. On receiving their money, they set straightway off for Edinburgh, in parties of threes and fours ; and until the evening of the following Mon OR, THE STOnr OF MY EDUCATIOIS'. 313 day or Tuesday I saw no more of them. They would then come dropping in, pale, dirty, disconsolate-looking, — almost al- ways in the re-actionary state of unhappiness which succeeds intoxication — (they themselves used to term it " the horrors'') — and with their nervous system so shaken, that rarely until a day or two after did they recover their ordinary working ability. Narratives of their adventures, however, would then begin to circulate through the squad, — adventures commonly of the " Tom and Jerry" type ; and always, the more extrav- agant they were, the more was the admiration which they ex- cited. On one occasion, I remember (for it was much spoken about as a manifestation of high spirit) that three of them, hiring a coach, drove out on the Sunday to visit Roslm and Hawthornden, and in this way spent their six pounds so much in the style of gentlemen, that they were able to get back to the mallet without a farthing on the evening of Monday. And as they were at work on Tuesday in consequence, they succeeded, as they said, in saving the wages of a day usually lost, just by doing the thing so genteely. Edinburgh had in those times a not very efficient police, and, in some of its less reputable localities, must have been dangerous. , Burke found its West Port a fitting scene for his horrid trade a good many years after ; and from the stories of some of our bolder spirits, which, though mayhap exaggerated, had evidently their nu- cleus of truth, there was not a little of the violent and the law- less perpetrated in its viler haunts during the years of the spec- ulation mania. Four of our masons found, one Saturday even- ing, a country lad bound hand and foot on the floor of a dark inner room in one of the dens of the High Street ; and such was the state of exhaustion to which he was reduced, mainly through the compression of an old apron wrapped tightly round his face, that though they set nim loose, it was some time ere he could muster strength enough to crawl away. He had been robbed by a bevy of women whom he had beei; foolish enough to treat; and on threatening to call in the watchman, they had fallen upon a way of keeping him quiet, which, save for the interference of my wild fellow- workmen* 814 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; would soon have rendered him permanently so. And such was but one of many stories of the kind. There was of course a considerable diversity of talent and acquirement among my more reckless associates at the work ; and it was curious enough to mark their very various viewa regarding what constituted spirit or the want of it. One weak lad used to tell us abou^ a singularly spirited brother apprentice of his, who not onl} drank, kept loose company and played all sorts of very mischievous practical jokes, but even occasionally stole out of warehouses ; which was of course a very dauntless thing, seeing that it brought him with- in wind of the gallows ; whereas another of our wild work- men, — a man of sense and intelligence, — not unfrequently cut short the narratives of the weaker brother, by characterizing his spirited apprentice as a mean, graceless scamp, who, had he got his deservings, would have been hung like a dog. I found that the intelligence which results from a fair school education, sharpened by a subsequent taste for reading, very much heightened in certain items the standard by which my comrades regulated their conduct. Mere intelligence formed no guard amongst them against intemperance or licentious- ness ; but it did form a not ineffectual protection against what are peculiarly the mean vices, — such as theft, and the grosser and more creeping forms of untruthfulness and dishonesty. Of course, exceptional cases occur in all grades of society : there have been accomplished ladies of wealth and rank who have indulged in a propensity for stealing out of drapers' shops, and gentlemen of birth and education who could not be trusted in a library or a bookseller's back-room ; and what sometimes occurs in the higher walks must be occasionally exemplified in the lower also; but, judging from what I have seen, I must hold it as a general rule, that a good intellectual educa. tion is a not inefficient protection against the meaner felonies, though not in any degree against the " pleasant vices." The only adeqiiate protection against both equally is the soi«t of education which my friend John Wilson the laborer exem- plified, —a kind of education not often acquired in schools, OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 815 fr id not much more frequently possessed by schoolmasters than by any other class of professional men. The most remarkable man in our party was a young fellow of three-and-twenty, — at least as much a blackguard as any of his companions, but possessed of great strength of character and intellect, and, with all his wildness, marked by ver}^ noble traits. He was a strongly and not inelegantly formed man, of about six feet, — dark complexioned, and of a sullen cast of countenance, which, however, though he could, I doubt not, become quite as formidable as he looked, concealed in his ordinary moods much placidity of temper, and a rich vein of humor. Charles was the recognized hero of the squad ; but he differed considerably from the men who admired him most. Burns tells us that he " often courted the acquaint- ance of the part of mankind commonly known by the ordi- nary phrase of blackguards ;" and that, " though disgraced by follies, nay, sometimes stained with guilt, he had yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest vir- tues, — magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even modesty." I cannot say with the poet that I ever court- ed the acquaintance of blackguards; but though the labor- ing man may select his friends, he cannot choose his work- fellows ; and so I have not unfrequently co7ne iti contact with blackguards, and have had opportunities of pretty thoroughly knowing them. And my experience of the class has been very miich the reverse of that of Burns. I have usually found their virtues of a merely theatric cast, and their vices real ; much assumed generosity in some instances, but a callous- ness of feeling, and meanness of spirit, lying concealed beneath. \n this poor fellow, however, I certainly did find a sample of the noble variety of the genus. Poor Charles did too de- cidedly belong to it. He it was that projected the Sunday party to Roslin ; and he it was that, pressing his way into the recesses of a disreputable house in the High Street, found the fast-bound wight choaking in an apron, and, unloosing the cords, let him go. No man of the party squandered his gains' more recklessly than Charles, or had looser no 316 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; tions regarding the egitimacy of the uses to which he too often applied them. And yet, notwithstanding, he was a generous-hearted fellow; and, under the influence of religious principle, would, like Burns himself, have made a very noble man. In gradually forming my acquaintance with him, I was at first struck b} the circumstance that he never joined in the clumsy ridicule with which I used to be assailed by the othei workmen. When left, too, on one occasion, in consequence of a tacit combination against me, to roll up a large stone to the sort of block-bench, or siege^ as it is technically termed, on which the mass had to be hewn, and as I was slowly succeed- ing in doing, through dint of very violent effort, what some two or three men usually united to do, Charles stepped out to assist me ; and the combination at once broke down. Unlike the others, too, who, while they never scrupled to take odds against me, seemed sufficiently chary of coming in contact with me singly, he learned to seek me out in our intervals of labor, and to converse on subjects upon which we felt a common in- terest. He was not only an excellent operative mechanic, but possessed also of considerable architectural skill ; and in this special province we found an interchange of idea not unprofit- able. He had a turn, too, for reading, though he was by no means extensively read ; and liked to converse about books. Nor^ though the faculty had been but little cultivated, was he devoid of an eye for the curious in nature. On directing his attention, one morning, to a well-marked impression of lepi- dodendron, which delicately fretted with its lozenge-shaped net-work one of the planes of the stone before me, he began to describe, with a minuteness of observation not common a'liong working men, certain strange forms which had attract- cd his notice when employed among the gray flagstones of Forfarshire. I long after recognized in his description that strange crustacean of the Middle Old Red Sandstone of Scot- land, the Pteryyotus, — an organism which was wholly un- known at this time to geologists, and which is but partially -cnown still; and I saw in 1838, on the publication, in it« OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 81? i^rsf edition, of the " Elements" of Sir Charles Lyell, what he meant to indicate, by a rude sketch which he drew on the stone before us, and which, to the base of a semi-ellipsis, some- what resembling a horse-shoe, united an angular prolongation not very unlike the iron stem of a pointing trowel drawn from the handle. He had evidently seen, long ere it had been de- tected by the scientific eye, that strange ichthyolite of the Old Red system, the Cephalaspis. His story, though he used to tell it with great humor, and no little dramatic effect, was in reality a very sad one. He had quarrelled, when quite a lad, with one of his fellow-workmen, and was unfortunate enough, in the pugilistic encounter which followed, to break his jaw. bone, and otherwise so severely to injure him, that for some time his recovery seemed doubtful. Flying, pursued by the officers of the law, he was, after a few days' hiding, appre- hended, lodged in jail, tried at the High Court of Judiciary, and ultimately sentenced to three months' imprisonment. And these three months he had to spend — for such was the wretch- ed arrangement of the time — in the worst society in the world.' In sketching, as he sometimes did, for the general amusement, the characters of the various prisoners with whom he had as- sociated, — from the*sneaking pick-pocket and the murderous ruffian, to the simple Highland smuggler, who had converted his grain into whisky, with scarce intelligence enough to see that there was aught morally wrong in the transaction, — he sought only to be as graphic and humorous as he could, and always with complete success. But there attached to his narratives an unintentional moral ; and I cannot yet call them up with, out feeling indignant at that detestable practice of promiscuouis imprisonment which so long obtained in our country, and w^hich had the effect of converting its jails into such complete criminal- manufacturing institutions, that, had the honest men of the community risen and dealt by them as the Lord-George-Gor- don mob dealt with Newgate, I hardly think they would have been acting out of character. Poor Charles had a nobility in his nature which saved him from being contaminated by what was worst in his meaner associates ; but he was none the bet 318 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ter for his imprisonment, and he quitted jail, of course, a marked man ; and his after career was, I fear, all the more reckless in consequence of the stain imparted at this time to his character. He was as decidedly a leader among his brothel workmen as I myself had been, when sowing my wild oats, (imong my school -fellows ; but society in its settled state, and m a country such as ours, allows no such scope to the man as it does to the boy ; and so his leadership, dangerous both to iimself and his associates, had chiefly as the scene of its trophies rtie grosser and more lawless haunts of vice and dissipation. His course through life was a sad, and, I fear, a brief one. When the sudden crt.sh in the commercial world took place, n which the speculation mania of 1824-25 terminated, he vas, with thousands more, thrown out of employment ; and, saving saved not a farthing of his earnings, he was compelled, ♦nder the pressure of actual want, to enlist as a soldier into ' ne of the regiments of the line, bound for one of the inter- \ f opical colonies. And there, as his old comrades lost ail 1 'ace of him, he too probably fell a victim, in an insalubrious Climate, to old habits and new rum. Finding me incorrigible, I was at length left by my brother operatives to be as peculiar as I pleased ; and the working portion of the autumnal months passed off pleasantly enough in hewing great stones under the branching foliage of the elm ar.d chestnut trees of Niddry Park. From the circumstance, however, that the stones were so great, the previous trial had beon an embarrassing one ; and, though too proud to confess that I cared aught about the matter, I was now glad enough that it was fairly over. Our modern Temperance Societies- institutions which at this time had not begun to exist — have done much to shield sober working men from combinations cf the trying character to which, in the generation well-nigh passed away, they were too often exposed. There are few working parties which have not now their groupes of enthu- siastic Teetotallers, that always band together against the drinkers, and mutually assist and keep one another in coun- tenance ; and a breakwater is thus formed in the middle of OE^ THI? STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 819 the stream, tc protect from that grinding oppression of the poor by the poor, which, let popular agitators disclaim on the other side as they may, is at once more trying and more gene- ral than the oppression which they experience from the great and wealthy. According to the striking figure of the wise old king, " it is like a sw^eeping rain, which leaveth no food,*" Fanaticism in itself is not a good thing ; nor are there many quiet people who do not dislike enthusiasm ; and the mem- bers of new sects, whether they be religious sects or no, are almost always enthusiasts, and in some degree fanatical. A man can scarce become a vegetarian even without also be- coming in some measure intolerant of the still large and not very disreputable class that eat beef with their greens, and herrings with their potatoes ; and the drinkers of water do say rather strong things of the men who, had they been guests at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, would have seen no great harm in partaking in moderation of the wine. There is a somewhat intolerant fanaticism among the Teetotallers, just as there is fanaticism among most other new sects ; and yet, re- cognizing it simply as strength, and knowing what it has to con- tend with, I am much disposed to tolerate it, whether it tolerate me or no. Human nature, with all its defects, is a wiser thing than the mere common sense of the creatures whose naiure it is ; and we find in it special provisions, as in the in- stincts of the humbler animals, for overmastering the special difficulties with which it is its destiny to contend. And the sort of fanaticism to which I refer seems to be one cf those provisions. A few Teetotallers of the average calibre and strength, who take their stand against the majority in a party of wild dissipated mechanics, would require a considerable amount of vigorous fanaticism to make good their position ; nor do I see in ordinary men, as society at present exists, aught at once sufficiently potent in its nature, and sufficiently general in its existence, to take its place and do its w^ork. It seems to subsist in the present imperfect -otate as a wise provi* si on, though, like o^her wise provisions, such as the horns of 820 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; the bull or the sthig of the bee, it is misdirected at times, and does harm. Winter came on, and our weekly wages A^ere lowered im- mediately after Hallow-day, from twenty-four to fifteen shil- lings per week. This was deemed too large a reduction ; and, reckoning by the weekly hours during which, on the average, we were still able to work, — forty-two, as nearly as 1 could calculate, instead of sixty, — it was too great a reduction by about one shilling and ninepence. I would, however, in the circumstances, have taken particular care not to strike work for an advance. I knew that three-fourths of the masons about town — quite as improvident as the masons of our own party — could not live on their resources for a fortnight, and had no general fund to sustain them ; and further, that many of the master-builders were not very urgently desirous to press on their work throughout the M'inter. And so, when, on coming to the work-shed on the Monday morning after the close of our first fortnight on the reduced scale, I found my comrades gathered in front of it in a group, and learned that there was a grand strike all over the district, I received the intelligence with as little of the enthusiasm of the " indepen- dent associated mechanic" as possibly may be. " You are in the right in your claims," I said to Charles ; " but you have taken a bad time for urging them, and will be beaten to a cer- tainty. The masters are much better prepared for a strike than you are. How, may I ask, are you yourself provided with the sinews of war V " Very ill indeed," said Charles, scratch- ing his head : " if the masters don't give in before Saturday^ it's all up with me ; but never mind ; let us have one day's fim : there's to be a grand meeting at Bruntsfield Links ; let us go in as a deputation from the country masons, and make a speech about our rights and duties ; and then, if we see mat- ters going very far wrong, we can just step back again, and begin work to-morrow." " Bravely resolved," 1 said : " 1 shall go with you by all means, and take notes of your speech." We marched in to town, about sixteen in number ; OR, THE STOKY OF MY EDUCATION. 321 and, on joining the crowd already assembled on the Links, were recognized by the deep red hue of our clothes and aprons, which differed considerably from that borne by workers in the paler Edinburgh stone, as a reinforcement from a distance, and were received with loud cheers. Charles, however, did not make his speech : the meeting, which was about eight hun- dred strong, seemed fully in the possession of a few crack orators, who spoke with a fluency to which he could make no pretensions ; and so he replied to the various calls from among his comrades, of " Cha, Cha," by assuring them that he could not catch the eye of the gentleman in the chair. The meet- ing had, of course, neither chair nor chairman ; and after a good deal of idle speech-making, which seemed to satisfy the speakers themselves remarkably well, but which at least some of their auditory regarded as nonsense, w^e found that the only motion on which we could harmoniously agree was a motion for an adjournment. And so we adjourned till the evening, fixing as our place of meeting one of the humbler halls of the city. My comrades proposed that we should pass the time until the hour of meeting in a public-house ; aad, desirous of se- curing a glimpse of the sort of enjoyment for which they sacri- ficed so much, I accompanied them. Passing not a few more inviting-looking places, we entered a low tavern in the upper part of the Canongate, kept in an old half-ruinous building, which has since disappeared. We passed on through a nar- row passage to a low-roofed room in the centre of the erection, into which the light of day never penetrated, and in which the gas was burning dimly in a close sluggish atmosphere, ren- dered still more stifling by tobacco-smoke, and a strong smell )f ardent spirits. In the middle of the crazy floor there was a trap-door which lay open at the time ; and a wild combina- tion of sounds, in which the yelping of a dog, and a few gruff voices that seemed cheering him on, were most noticeable, rose from the apartment below. It was customary at this time for dram-shops to keep badgers housed in long narrow boxes, and for working men to keep do^J^s ; and it was part of the ordi* 322 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; nary sport of such places to set the dogs to unhouse the badgers. The wild sport which Scott describes in his " Guy Mannering," as pursued by Dandy Dinmont and his associates among the Cheviots, was extensively practised twenty nine years ago amid the dingier haunts of the High Street and Canongate. Our party, like most others, had its dog, — a repulsive-looking brute, with an earth-directed eye, as if he carried about with him an evil conscience ; and my companions were desirous of getting his earthing ability tested upon the badger of the establishment ; but on summoning the bar-keeper, we were told that the party below had got the start of us : their dog was, as w^e might hear, "just drawing the badger ; and before our dog could bo permitted to draw him, the poor brute w^ould require to get an hour's rest." 1 need scarce say, that the hour was spent in hard drinking in that stagnant atmosphere ; and we then all descended through the trap-door, by means of a ladder, into a bare-walled dungeon, dark and damp, and where the pestifer- ous air smelt like that of a burial vault. The scene which followed was exceedingly repulsive and brutal, — nearly as much so as some of the scenes furnished by those otter hunts in which the aristocracy of the country delight occasionally to in- dulge. Amid shouts and yells, the badger, with the blood of his recent conflict still fresh upon him, was again draw^n to the box mouth ; and the party returning satisfied to the apartment above, again betook themselves to hard drinking. In a short time the liquor began to tell, not first, as might be supposed, on our younger men, who were mostly tall, vigorous fellow^s, in the first flush of their full strength, but on a few^ of the middle-aged workmen, whose constitutions seemed undermin- ed by a previous course of dissipation and debauchery. The conversation became very loud, very involved, and, though highly seasoned with emphatic oaths, very insipid ; and leav ing with Cha, — w^ho seemed somewhat uneasy that my eye should be upon their meeting in its hour of weakness, — money enough to clear off" my share of the reckoning, I stole out to the King's Park, and passed an hour to better purpose among tlie trap rocks than I could possibly have spent it beside OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 823 the trap-door. Of that tavern party I am not aware that a single individual save the writer is now living : its very dog did not live out half his days. His owner was alarmed one morning, shortly after this time, by the intelligence that a dozen of sheep had been worried during the night on a neigh- boring farm, and that a dog very like his had been seen prowling about the fold ; but in order to determine the point, he would be visited, it w^as added, in the course of the day^ by the shepherd and a law-officer. The dog meanwhile, how ever, conscious of guilt, — for dogs do seem to have consciences in such matters, — was nowhere to be found, though, after the lapse of nearly a week, he again appeared at the work ; and his master, slipping a rope round his neck, brought him to a deserted coal-pit half filled with water, that opened in an ad- jacent field, and, flinging him in, left the authorities no clue by which to establish his identity with the robber and assassin of the fold. I had now quite enough of the strike ; and, instead of at- tending the evening meeting, passed the night with my friend William Ross. Curious to know, however, whether my ab- sence had been observed by my brother w^orkmen, I asked Cha, when we next met, " what he thought of our meeting f " Gudesake !" he replied, " let that flee stick to the wa' ! We got upon the skuff after you left us, and grew deaf to time, and so not one of us has seen the meeting yet." I learned, however, that though somewhat reduced in numbers, it had been very spirited and energetic, and had resolved on nailing the colors to the mast ; but in a few mornings subsequent, several of the squads returned to work on their master's terms, and all broke down in about a week after. Contrary to what I would have expected from my previous knowledge of him, I f<3und that my friend William Ross took a warm interest in strikes and combinations, and was much surprised at the apathy which I manifested on this occasion ; nay, that he himself, as he told me, actually officiated as clerk for a combined society of house-painters, and entertained sanguine hopes regarding the happy influence which the principla of union was yet to 15 824 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; exercise on the status and comfort of the working man. There are no problems more difficult than those which speculative men sometimes attempt solving, when they set themselves to predict how certain given characters would act in certain given circumstances. In what spirit, it has been asked, would So- crates have listened to the address of Paul on Mars Hill, had ne lived a few ages later ? and what sort of a statesman would Robert Burns have made? I cannot answer either question ; but this I know, that from my intimate acquaintance with the retiring, unobtrusive character of my friend in early life, I should have predicted that he would have taken no interest whatever in strikes or combinations ; and I was now surprised to find the case otherwise. And he, on the other hand, equal ly intimate with my comparatively wild boyhood, and my in fluence among my school-fellows, would have predicted that I should have taken a very warm interest in such combinations, mayhap as a ringleader ; at all events, as an energetic, influen tial member ; and he was now not a little astonished to see me iieeping aloof from them, as things of no account or value. I believe, however, we were both acting in character. Lacking my obstinacy, he had in some degree yielded, on first coming to the capital, to the tyranny of his brother workmen ; and, becoming one of themselves, and identifying his interests with theirs, his talents and acquirements had recommended him to an office of trust among them ; whereas I, stubbornly battling, like Harry of the Wynd, " for my own hand," would not stir a finger in assertion of the alleged rights of fellows who had no respect for the rights which were indisputably mine. I may here mention, that this first year of the building mania was also the first, in the present century, of those great strikes Siinong workmen, of which the public has since heard and seen so much. Up till this time, combination among operatives for the purpose of raising the rate of wages had been a crime punishable by law ; and though several combinations and trado unions did exist, open strikes, which would have been a too palpable manifestation of them to be tolerat ed, could scarce be said ever to take place. I saw enough at the period to con- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 325 vmce me, that though the right of combinaticm, abstractly considered, is just and proper, the strikes which would re- sult from it as consequences would be productive of much evil and little good ; and in an argument with my friend Wil- liam on the subject, I ventured to assure him that his houses- painters' union would never benefit the operative house painters as a class, and urged him to give up his clerkship. " There is a want," I said, " of true leadership among our operatives in Miese combinations. It is the wilder spirits that dictate the conditions ; and, pitching their demands high, they begin usually by enforcing acquiescence in them on the quieter and more moderate among their companions. They are tyrants to their fellows ere they come into collision with their masters, and have thus an enemy in the camp, not unwilling to take advantage of their seasons of weakness, and prepared to re- joice, though secretly mayhap, in their defeat and reverses. And further, their discomfiture will be always quite certain enough when seasons of depression come, from the circum- stance that, fixing their terms in prosperous times, they will fix them with reference rather to their present power of en- forcing them, than to that medium line of fair and equal ad- justment on which a conscientious man could plant his foot and make a firm stand. Men such as you, able and ready to work in behalf of these combinations, will of course get the work to do, but you will have little or no power given you in their direction : the direction will be apparently in the hands of a few fluent gabbers ; and yet even they will not be the actual directors, — they will be but the exponents and voices of the general mediocre sentiment and inferior sense of the mass as a whole, and acceptable only so long as they give utterance to that ; and so, ultimately, exceedingly little will be won in this way for working men. It is well that they should be al- lowed to combine, seeing that combination is permitted to those who employ them ; but until the majority of our work- ing men of the south become very different from what they now are, — greatly wiser and greatly better,— -there will be more lost ^han ga'ned by their combinations. According to 826 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; the circumstances of the time and season, the current Mill be at one period running in their favor against the masters, and at another in favor of the masters against them : there will be a continual ebb and flow, like that of the sea, but no gen- eral advance ; and the sooner that the like of you and I get out of the rough conflict and jostle of the tideway, and set our selves to labor apart on our own internal resources, it will be all the better for us." William, however, did not give up his clerkship ; and I dare say the sort of treatment which I had received at the hands of my fellow-workmen made me express my self rather strongly on the subject ; but the actual history of the numerous strikes and combinations which have taken place during the quarter of a century and more which has since intervened, is of a kind not in the least suited to modify my views. There is a want of judicious leadership among our working men ; and such of the autobiographies of the class as are able and interesting enough to obtain a hearing for their authors show, I am inclined to think, how this takes place. Combination is first brought to bear among them against the men, their fellows, who have vigor enough of in- tellect to think and act for themselves ; and such always is the character of the born leader : their true leaders are almost always forced into the opposition ; and thus separating be- tween themselves and the men fitted by nature to render them formidable, they fall under the direction of mere chatterers and stump orators, which is in reality no direction at all. The author of the " Working Man's Way in the World," — evi- dently a very superior man, — had, he tells us, to quit at one time his employment, overborne by the senseless ridicule of his brother workmen. Somerville states in his Autobiography, that, botli as a laboring man and a soldier, it was from the hands of his comrades that, — save in one memorable instance, — he had experienced all the tyranny and oppression of which he had been the victim. Nay, Benjamin Franklin himself was deemed a much more ordinary man in the printing-house in Bartholomew Close, where he was teased and laughed at as the Water -American, than in the House of Representatives, OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 827 the Ho} dl Societ} , or the court of France. The great Printer, though recognized by accomplished politicians as a profoun(f statesman, and by tnen of solid science as " the most rational of the philosophers," was regarded by his poor brother com- positors as merely an odd fellow, who did not conform to their drinking usages, and w^hom it was therefore fair to teaze and annoy as a contemner of the sacrament of the chapel.^ The life of my friend was, how 3ver, pitched on a better itiid higher tone than that of most of his brother unionists. It \^■a intellectual and moral, and its happier hours were its hours of quiet self-improvement, when, throwing himself on the re- sources within, he forgot for the time the unions and combina^ tions that entailed upon him much troublesome occupation, but never did him any service. I regretted, however, to find that a distrust of his own powers was still growing upon him, and narrowing his circle of enjoyment. On asking him whether he still amused himself with his flute, he turned, after replying with a brief " Oh no," to a comrade with whom he had lived for years, and quietly said to him, by way of ex- plaining the question, " Robert, I suppose you don't know I was once a grand flute-player !" And sure enough Robert did not know. He had given up, too, his water-color drawing, in which his taste was decidedly fine ; and even in oils, with which he still occasionally engaged himself, instead of casting himself full on nature, as at an earlier period, he had become a copyist of the late Rev. Mr. Thomson of Duddingstone, at * The kind of club into which the compositors of a prinling-house always form themselves has from lime immemorial been termed a chapel; and the petty tricks by which Franklin was annoyed were said to be played him by the chapel ghost. " My employer desiring," he says, "after some weeks, to have mc in the composing-room, I left the pressmen. A new bien venu for drink, be'ng Ave shillings, was demanded ol me by the compositors. I thought it an imposition, as I had paid one to the pres» men. The master thought so too, and forbade my paying it. I stood out two or three weeks, was accordingly considered as an excommunicate^ and had S) many little pieces of private malice practiced on me by mixing my sorts, transposing and breaking my Clatter, &c., &c., if ever 1 stepped out of the room, and all ascribed to the chapel ghost^ which, they said, ever haunted those not regularly admitted, thai, notwithstand* hig my maste."'8 protea 'on, fomid myself obliged to comply and pay the tnoney.^ 828 that time in the full blow 3f his artistic reputation; nor could I see that he copied him well. I urged and remonstrated, but to no effect. " Ah, Miller," he has said, " what matters it how I amuse myself? You have stamina in you, and will force your way; but I want strength: the world will never hear of me." Tliat overweening conceit which seems as natural to the young man as a playful disposition to the kitten, or a soft and timid one to the puppy, often assumes a ridicu- lous, and oftener still an unamiable, aspect. x\nd yet, though it originates many very foolish things, it seems to be in itself, liiie the fanaticism of the Teetotaller, a wise provision, which, were it not made by nature, would leave most minds without spring enough to effect, with the required energy, the move- ments necessary to launch them fairly into busy or studious life. The sobered man of mature age v/ho has learned pretty correctly to take the measure of himself, has usually acquired both habits and knowledge that assist him in urging his on- ward way, and the moving force of necessity always presses him onward from behind ; but the exhilarating conviction of being born to superior parts, and to do something astonish- ingly clever, seems necessary to the young man ; and when I see it manifesting itself, if not very foolishly or very offen- sively, I usually think of my poor friend William Ross, who was unfortunate enough wholly to want it; and extend to it a pretty ample toleration. Ultimately my friend gave up paint- ing, and restricted himself to the ornamental parts of his pro- fession, of which he became very much a master. In finish-. ing a ceiling in oils, upon which he had represented in bold relief some of the ornately sculptured foliage of the architect, the gentleman for whom he wrought (the son-in-law of a dis- tinguished artist, and himself an amateur), called on his wife to admire the truthful and delicate shading of their hause- painter. It was astonishing, he said, and perhaps somewhat humiliating, to see the mere mechanic trenching so decidedly on the province of the artist. Poor William Ross, however, was no mere mechanic ; and even artists might have regarded his encroachments on their proper domain with more of com OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 829 placency than humiliation. One of the last pieces of work upon which he was engaged was a gorgeously painted ceiling in the palace of some Irish bishop, which he had been sent all the way from Glasgow to finish. Every society, however homely, has its picturesque points, nor did even that of the rather commonplace hamlet in which r resided at this time wholly want them. There was a de- caying cottage a few doors away, that had for its inmat(i a cross-tempered old crone, who strove hard to set up as a witch, but broke down from sheer want of the necessary capital. She had been one of the underground workers of Niddry in her time ; and, being as little intelligent as most of the other collier-women of the neighborhood, she had not the necessary witch-lore to adapt her pretensions to the ca- pacity of belief which obtained in the district. And so the general estimate formed regarding her was that to which our landlady occasionally gave expression. " Donnart auld bodie," Peggy used to say ; " though she threaps hersel' a witch, she's nae mair witch than I am ; she's only just trying, in her feck- less auld age, to make folk stand in her reverence." Old Alie w^as, however, a curiosity in her way, — quite malignant enough to be a real witch, and fitted, if, with a few more advantages of acquirement, she had been antedated an age or two, to be- come as hopeful a candidate for a tar-barrel as most of her class. Her next door neighbor w^as also an old woman, and well-nigh as poor as the crone ; but she was an easy-tempered, genial sort of person, who wished harm to no one ; and the expression of content that dwelt on her round fresh face, which, after the wear of more than seventy winters, still re- tained its modicum of color, contrasted strongly with the fierce wTctchediiess that gleamed from the sharp and sallow features of the witch. It was evident that the two old women, though placed externally in almost the same circumstances, had essentially a very different lot assigned to them, and en joyed existence in a very unequal degree. The placid old woman kept a solitary lodger, — " Davie the apprentice," — a wayward, eccentric lad, Jiuch about my own age, though •*■• 830 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; but the second " year of his time," who used to fret even hef temper, and who, after making trial of I know not how many- other professions, now began to find that his genius did not lie to the mallet. Davie was stage-mad ; but for the stage nature seemed to have fitted him rather indifferently : she had given him a squat ungainly figure, an inexpressive face, a voice that in its intonations somewhat resembled the grating of a carpenter's saw, and, withal, no very nice conception of either comic or serious character ; but he could recite in the *' big bow-wow style," and think and dream of only plays and play-actors. To Davie the world and its concerns seemed unworthy of a moment's care, and the stage appeared the only great reality. He was engaged, when I first made his ao quaintance, in writing a play, with which he had already filled a whole quire of foolscap, without, however, having quite en tered upon the plot ; and he read to me some of the scenes in tones of such energy, that the whole village heard. Though written in the kind of verse which Dr. Young believed to be the language of angels, his play was sad stuff; and when he paused for my approbation, I ventured to suggest an alteration in one of the speeches. " There, Sir," said Davie, in the vein of Cambyses, " take the pen ; let me see. Sir, how you would turn it." I accordingly took the pen, and re-wrote the speech. " Hum," said Davie, as he ran his eye along the lines, " that, Sir, is mere poetry. What, think you, could the great Kean make of feeble stuff like that ? Let me tell you. Sir, you have no notion whatever of stage effect." I, of course, at once ac- quiesced ; and Davie, mollified by my submission, read to me yet another scene. Cha. however, of whom he stood a good deal in awe, used to tease him not a little about his play. I have heard him inquire sedulously about the develop .nent of the story and the management of the characters, and whether he was writing the several parts with a due eye to the capar bilities of the leading actors of the day ; and Davie, not quite 5ure, apparently, whether Cha was in joke or earnest, was asually on these occasions very chary of reply. Davie, had he but the means of secui'ng access, would have OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 831 walked in every night to the city to attend the playhouse ; and it quite astonished him, he used to say, that I, who really knew something of the drama, and had four shillings a-day, did not nightly devote at least one of the four to purchase per- fect happiness and a seat in the shilling gallery. On some two, or at most three occasions, I did attend the playhouse, accompanied by Cha and a few of the other workmen ; but though I had been greatly delighted, when a boy, by the act- ing of a company of strollers that had visited Cromarty, and converted the Council House Hall into a theatre, the greatly better acting of the Edinburgh company failed to satisfy me now. The few plays, however, which I saw enacted chanced to be of a rather mediocre character, and gave no scope for the exhibition of nice histrionic talent ; nor were any of the great actors of the south on the Edinburgh boards at the time. The stage scenery, too, though quite fine enough of its kind, had, I found, altogether a different effect upon me from the one which it had been elaborated to produce. In perusing our fine old dramas, it was the truth of nature that the vividly- drawn scenes and figures, and the happily portrayed charac- ters, always suggested ; whereas the painted canvas, and the respectable but yet too palpable acting, served but to unre- alize what I saw, and to remind me that I was merely in a theatre. Farther, I deemed it too large a price to devote a whole evening to see some play acted which, mayhap, as a^ composition I would not have deemed worth the reading ; and so the temptation of play-going failed to tempt me ; and lat- terly, when my comrades set out for the playhouse, I staid at home. Whatever the nature of the process through which they liave gone, a considerable proportion of the more intel- ligent mechanics of the present generation seem to have landed in conclusions similar to the one at which I at this time ar- rived. At least, for every dozen of the class that frequented the theatre thirty years ago, there is scarce one that frequents it now. I have said that the scenery of the stage made no i^ery favorable impression upon me. Some parts of it must, hov ever, have made a considerably stronger one than I could 882 MY SCHOOLJr AND SCHOOLMASTERS; have supposed at the time. Fourteen years after, when the whole seemed to have passed out of memory, I was lynig ill of small-pox, which, though a good deal modified apparently by the vaccination of a long anterior period, was accompanied by such a degree of fever, that for two days together one delirious image continued to succeed another in the troubled sensorium, as scene succeeds scene in the box of an itinerant showman. As is not uncommon, hovrever, in such cases, though ill enough to be haunted by the images, I was yet well enough to know tha. they were idle unrealities, the mere effects of indisposi- tion ; and even sufficiently collected to take an interest in watching them as they arose, and in striving to determine whether they were linked together by the ordinary associative ties. I found, however, that they were wholly independent of each other. Curious to know whether the will exerted any power over them, I set myself to try whether I could not con- jure up a death's head as one of the series ; but what rose instead was a cheerful parlor fire, bearing atop a tea-kettle ; and as the picture faded and then vanished, it was succeeded by a gorgeous cataract, in which the white foam, at first strongly relieved against the dark rock over which it fell, soon exhibited a deep tinge of sulphurous blue, and then came dashing down in one frigiitful sheet of blood. The great sin- gularity of the vision served to freshen recollection, and I de- tected in the strange cataract every line and tint of the water- fall in the incantation scene in " Der Freischutz" which I had witnessed in the Theatre Royal of Edinburgh, with certainly no very particular interest, so long before. There are, I suspect, provinces in the philosophy of mind into which the metaphy- sicians have not yet entered. Of that accessible storehouse in which the memories of past events lie arranged and taped up, they appear to know a good deal ; but of a mysterious cabinet of daguerreotype pictures, of which, though fast locked up on ordinary occasions, disease sometimes flings the door ajar, they wsem to knov nothing. OR THE STOKY OF MY EDUCATION. 383 CHAPTER XVI. •* Let not this weak, unknowing hand, Presume thy bolta to throw." Pope. The gi'eat fires of the Parliament Close and the High Street were events of this winter. A countryman, who had left town when the old spire of the Tron Church was blazing like a torch, and the large group of buildings nearly opposite the Cross still enveloped in flame from ground-floor to roof-tree, passed our work-shed, a little after two o'clock, and, telling us what he had seen, remarked that, if the conflagration went on as it was doing, we v/ould have, as our next season's employ- ment, the Old Town of Edinburgh to rebuild. And as the evening closed over our labors, we went in to town in a body, to see the fires that promised to do so much for us. The spire had burnt out, and we could but catch between us and the darkened sky, the square abrupt outline of the masonry atop that had supported the wooden broach, whence, only a few hours before, Fergusson's bell had descended in a molten shower. The flames, too, in the upper group of buildings were restricted to the lower stories, and flared fitfuily on the tall forms and bright swords of the dragoons, drawn from the neighboring barracks, as they rode up and down the middle space ; or gleamed athwart the street on groupes of wretched- looking women and ruffian men, who seemed scanning with S34 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS, greedy eyes the still unremoved heapu of household goods rescued from the burning tenements. The first figure that caught my eye was a singularly ludicrous one. Removed from the burning mass by but the thickness of a wall, there was a barber's shop brilliantly lighted with gas, the uncur- tained window of which permitted the spectators outside to see whatever was going on in the interior. The barber was as busily at work as if he was a hundred miles from the scene of danger, though the engines at the time were playing against the outside of his gable wall ; and the immediate sub- ject under his hands, as my eye rested upon him, was an im- mensely fat old fellow, on whose round bald forehead and ruddy cheeks the perspiration, occasioned by the oven-like heat of the place, was standing out in huge drops, and whose vast mouth, widely opened to accommodate the man of the razor, gave to his countenance such an expression as I have sometimes seen in grotesque Gothic heads of that age of art in which the ecclesiastical architect began to make sport of his religion. The next object that presented itself was, how- ever, of a more sobering description. A poor working man, laden with his favorite piece of furniture, a glass-fronted press or cupboard, which he had succeeded in rescuing from his burning dwelling, was emerging from one of the lanes, fol- lowed by his wife, when, striking his foot against some ob- stacle in the way, or staggering from the too great weight of his load, he tottered against a projecting corner, and the glazed door was driven in with a crash. There was hopeless misery in the wailing cry of his wife, — " Oh, ruin, ruin ! — it's lost too !" Nor was his own despairing response less sad : — "Aye, aye, puir lassie, its a' at an end noo." Curious as it may seera, the wild excitement of the scene had at first rather exhilarated than depressed my spirits ; but the incident of the glass cup- board served to awaken the proper feeling ; and as I came more in contact with the misery of the catastrophe, and marked the groups of shivering houseless creatures that watched beside the broken fragments of their stufi* I saw what a dire calamity a great fire really is. Nearly two hun OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 885 dred families were already at this time east homeless into the streets. Shortly before quitting the scene of the conflagration for the country, I passed along a common stair, which led from the Parliament Close towards the Cowgate, through a tall old domicile, eleven storeys in height, and I afterwards remem- bered that the passage was occupied by a smouldering oppress- ive vapor, which, from the direction of the wind, could scarce have been derived from the adjacent conflagration, though at the time, without thinking much of the circum- stance, I concluded it might have come creeping westwards on some low cross current along the narrow lanes. In less than an hour after, that lofty tenement was wrapped in flames, from the ground storey to more than a hundred feet over its tallest chimneys, and about sixty additional families, its ten- ants, were cast into the streets with the others. My friend William Ross afterwards assured me, that never had he wit- nessed anything equal in grandeur to this last of the confla- grations. Directly over the sea of fire below, the low-browed clouds above seemed as if charged with a sea of blood, that lightened and darkened by fits as the flames rose and fell ; and far and wide, tower and spire, and tall house-top, glared out against a background of darkness, as if they had been brought to a red heat by some great subterranean, earth-born fire, that was fast rising to wrap the entire city in destruction. The old church of St. Giles, he said, with the fantastic masonry of its pale gray tower, bathed in crimson, and that of its dark rude walls suffused in a bronzed umber, and with the red light gleaming inwards through its huge mullioned windows, and flickering on its stone roof, formed one of the most pictur esque objects he had ever seen.* * The extreme picturesqueness of these fires,— in part a consequence of the groat •leight and peculiar architecture of the buildings which they destroyed,— caught tho nice eye of Sir Walter Scott. " I can conceive," we find him saying, in one of his letters of the period, "no sight more grand or terrible than to see these lofty build- ings on fire from top to bottom, vomiting out flames, like a volcano, from ever) aperture, and finally crashing down, one after another, into ai abyss of fire, which 336 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; 1 sometimes heard old Dr. Colquhoun of Leith pi^ach, There were fewer authors among the clergy in those days than now ; and I felt a special mterest in a living divine who had written so good a book, that my Uncle Sandy — no mean judge in such matters — had assigned to it a place in his little theo- logical library, among the writings of the great divines of other ages. The old man's preaching days, ere the winter of 1824 were well nigh done : he could scarce make himself heard ovei naif the area of his large, hulking chapel, which was, how- ever, always less than half filled ; but, though the feeble tones teasingly strained the ear, I liked to listen to his quaintly-at- tired but usually very solid theology ; and found, as I thought, more matter in his discourses than in those of men who spoke louder and in a flashier style. The worthy man, however, did me a mischief at this time. There had been a great Musical Festival held m Edinburgh about three weeks previous to the conflagration, at which oratorios were performed in the ordi- nary pagan style, in which amateurs play at devotion, without even professing to feel it ; and the Doctor, in his first sermon after the great fires, gave serious expression to the conviction, that they were judgments sent upon Edinburgh, to avenge the profanity of its Musical Festival. Edinburgh had sinned, he said, and Edinburgh was now punished ; and it was according to the Divine economy, he added, that judgments administered exactly after the manner of the infliction which we had just witnessed should fall upon cities and kingdoms. I liked the reasoning very ill. I knew only two ways in which God's judgments could be determined to be really such, — either through direct revelation from God himself, or in those casea in which they take place so much in accordance with His fixed laws, and in such relation to the oflence or crime visited oscmblcd nothing but hell ; for there were vaults of wine and spirits which sent up huge jets of flames whenever they were called into activity by the fall of thcs« massive fragments. Bstv/een the corner of the Parliament Square and the Trm Churcl , all is destroyed excepting some new buildings at the lower extremity." OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 837 in tiem by punishment, that man, simply by the exercise of his rational faculties, and reasoning from cause to effect, as ia his nature, can determine them for himself. And the great Edinburgh fires had come under neither category. God did not reveal that he had punished the tradesmen and mechanics of the High Street for the musical sins of the lawyers and land- owners of Abercrombie Place and Charlotte Square ; nor could any natural relation be established between the oratorios in th Parliament House or the concerts in the Theatre Royal, and the conflagrations opposite the Cross or at the top of the Tron Church steeple. All that could be proven in the case were the facts of the festival and of the fires ; and the farther fact, that, so far as could be ascertained, there was no visi- ble connection between them, and that it was not the people who had joined in the one that had suffered from the others. And the Doctor's argument seemed to be the perilously loose one, that as God had sometimes of old visited cities and na- tions with judgments which had no apparent connection with the sins punished, and which could not be recognized as judg- ments had not He himself told that such they were, the Edin- burgh fires, of which he had told nothing, might be properly regarded — seeing that they had in the same way no connec- tion with the oratorios, and had wrought no mischief to the people who had patronized the oratorios — as special judg- ments on the oratorios. The good old Papist had said, " 1 believe because it is impossible." What the Doctor in this instance seemed to say was, " I believe because it is not in the least likely." If, I argued. Dr. Colquhoun's own house and library had been burnt, he would no doubt very properly have deemed the infliction a great trial to himself; but on what principal could he have further held that it was not only a trial to himself, but also a judgment on his neighbor ? If we must not believe that the falling of the tower of Siloam was a special visitation on the sins of the poor men whom it crushed, now, or on what grounds, are we to believe that it was a spe cial visitation on the sins of the men whom it did not in the least injure ? I fear I remembered Dr. Colquhoun's remarks 338 MY SCHOOLS ANl) SCHOOLMASTEES ; on the fire better than aught else I ever heard from him ; nay, I must add, that nothing had I ever found in the writings of the sceptics that had a worse effect on my mind ; and 1 „ow mention the circumstance to show how sober in applications of the kind, in an age like the present, a theologian should be. It was some time ere I forgot the ill savor of that dead fly 3 and it was to beliefs of a serious and very important class that it served for a time to impart its own doubtful character. But from the minister whose chapel I oftenest attended, I was little in danger of having my beliefs unsettled by reason- ings of this stumbling cast. " Be sure," said both my uncles, as I was quitting Cromarty for the south, — " be sure you go and hear Dr. M'Crie." And so Dr. M'Crie I did go and hear ; and not once or twice, but often. The biographer of Knox, — to employ the language in which Wordsworth de- scribes the humble hero of the " Excursion," — " Was a man Whom no one could have passed without remark." And on first attending his church, I found that I had unwit- tingly seen him before, and that without remark I had not passed him. I had extended one of my usual evening walks, shortly after commencing work at Niddry, in the direction of the southern suburb of Edinburgh, and was sauntering through one of the green lanes of Liberton, when I met a gentleman whose appearance at once struck me. He was a singularly erect, spare, tall man, and bore about him an air which, neither wholly clerical nor wholly military, seemed to be a curious compound of both. The countenance was pale, and the expression, as I thought, somewhat melancholy ; but an air of sedate power sat so palpably on every feature, that I stood arrested as he passed, and for half a minute or so re« mained looking after him. He wore, over a suit of black, a brown great-coat, with the neck a good deal whitened by pow- der, and the rim of the hat behind, which was slightly turned up, bore a similar stain. " There is mark about that old- fashioned man," I said to myself: " who or what can he be?" OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 839 Curiously enough, the apparent combination of the military and the clerical in his gait and air suggested to me Sir Richard Steele's story, in the Tattler," of the old officer who, acting in the double capacity of major and chaplain to his regiment, challenged a young man for blasphemy, and, after disarming, would not take him to mercy until he had first begged pardon of God upon his knees on the duelling-ground, for the irrev- erence with which he had treated His name. My curiosity regarding the stranger gentleman was soon gratified. Next Saturday I attended the Doctor's chapel, and saw the tall, spare, clerico-military looking man in the pulpit. I have a good deal of faith in the military air, when, in the character of a natural trait, I find it strongly marking men who never served in the army. I have not yet seen it borne by a civilian who had not in him at least the elements of the soldier ; nor can I doubt that, had Dr. M'Crie been a Scotch covenanter of the times of Charles II., the insurgents at Bothwell would have had what they sadly wanted, — a general. The shrewd sense of his discourses had great charms for me ; and, though not a flashy, nor, in the ordinary sense of the term, even an eloquent preacher, there were none of the other Edinburgh clergy his contemporaries to whom 1 found I could listen with greater profit or satisfaction. A simple incident which oc- curred during my first morning attendance at his chapel, strongly impressed me with a sense of his sagacity. There was a great deal of coughing in the place, the eflfect of a recent change of weather ; and the Doctor, whose voice was not a strong one, and who seemed somewhat annoyed by the ruthless inter- ruptions, stopping suddenly short in the middle of his argument, made a dead pause. When people are taken greatly by sur- prise, they cease to cough, — a circumstance on which he had evidently calculated. Every eye w^as now turned towards him, and for a full minute so dead was the silence, that one might have heard a pin drop. " I see, my friends," said the Doctor, resuming speech, with a suppressed smile, — " I see you can be all quiet enougl when I am quiet." There was not a little genuine strategy in the rebuke ; and as cough lies a good dea] S40 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS: more under the influence of the will than most coughers sup. pose, such was its effect, that during the rest of the day there was not a tithe of the previous coughing. The one-roomed cottage which I shared with its three other inmates, did not present all the possible conveniences for stud 7 ; but it had a little table in a corner, at which I contrived to write a good deal ; and my book-shelf already exhibited from twenty to thirty volumes, picked up on Saturday evenings at the book-stalls of the city, and which were all accessions to my little library. I, besides, got a few volumes to read from my friend William Ross, and a few more through my v ork, fellow Cha; and so my rate of acquirement in book-knowl- ledge, if not equal to that of some former years, at least con- siderably exceeded what it had been in the previous season, which I had spent in the Highlands, and during which I had perused only three volumes, — one of the three a slim volume of slim poems, by a lady, and the other, the rather curious than edifying work, " Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed." The cheap literature had not yet been called into existence ; and, without in the least undervaluing its advantages, it was, J dare say, better, on the whole, as a mental exercise, and greatly better in the provision which it made for the future, that I should have to urge my way through the works of our best writers in prose and verse, — works which always made an impression on the memory, — than that I should have been engaged, instead, in picking up odds and ends of information from loose essays, the hasty productions of men too little vigorous, or too little at leisure, to impress upon their writings the stamp of their own individuality. In quiet moonlight nights I found it exceedingly pleasant to saunter all alone through the Niddry woods. Moonlight gives to even leafless groves the charms of fall foliage, and conceals tameness of outline in a landscape. I found it singularly agreeable, too, to listen, from a solitude so profound as that which a short walk secured to me, to the distant bells of the city ringing out, a? the clock struck eight, the old curfew peal ; and to mark, from under the 'nterlacing boughs of a long-arched vista, the inter- OR, THE STORY OF SIY EDUCATIOK. 641 mittent glnain of the Inclikeith light now brightening and now fading, as the Ian thorn revolved. In short, the winter passed not unpleasantly away : I had now nothing to annoy me in the work-shed ; and my only serious care arose from my unlucky house in Leith, for which I found myself summoned one morn> ing by an officer-looking man, to pay nearly three pounds, — the last instalment which I ow^ed, I w^as told, as one of the heritors of the place, for its fine new church. I must confess I was wicked enough to wish, on this occasion, that the prop- erty on the Coal-hill had been included in the judgment on the Musical Festival. But shortly after, not less to my as- tonishment than delight, I was informed by Mr. Veitch that he had at length found a purchaser for my house ; and, after getting myself served heir to my father before the court of the Canongate, and paying a larger arrear of feu-duty to that venerable corporation, in which I had to recognize my feudal superior, I got myself as surely dissevered from the Coal-hill as paper and parchment could do it, and pocketed, in virtue of the transaction, a balance of about fifty pounds. As nearly as I could calculate on what the property had cost us, from first to last, the composition which it paid was one of about five shillings in the pound. And such was the concluding passage in the history of a legacy which threatened for a time to be the ruin of the flxmily. When I last passed along the Coal-hill, I saw my umquhile house existing as a bit of dingy wall, a single storey in height, and perforated by three narrow old-fashioned doors, jealously boarded up, and apparently, as in the days when it was mine, of no manner of use in the w^orld. I trust, however, it is no longer the positive mischief to its proprietor that it was to me. The busy season had now fairly commenced : wages were fast mounting up to the level of the former year, w^hich they ultimately overtopped ; and employment had become very abundant. I found, however, that it might be well for me to return home for a few months. The dust of the stone which I had been hewing for the last two years had begun to affect my lungs, as they had been aflfected in the last autumn of my ap 312 prenticeshij , but much more severely; and I was too palpably sinking in flesh and strength to render it safe for me to en- counter the consequences of another season of hard work as q stone-cutter. From the stage of the malady at which I had already arrived, poor workmen, unable to do what I did, throw themselves loose from their employment, and sink in six or eight months into the grave, — some at an earlier, some at a later period of life; but so general is the affection, that few of our Edinburgh stone-cutters pass their fortieth year unscathed, and not one out of every fifty of their number ever reaches his forty-fifth. I accordingly engaged my passage for the north in an Inverness sloop, and took leave of my few friends, — of the excellent foreman of the Niddry squad, and of Cha and John Wilson, with both of whom, notwithstanding their oppo- site characters, I had become very intimate. Among the rest, too, I took leave of a paternal cousin settled in Leith, the wife of a genial-hearted sailor, master of a now wholly obsolete type of vessel, one of the old Leith and London smacks, with a huge . single mast, massive and tall as that of a frigate, and a main- sail of a quarter of an acre. I had received much kindness from my cousin, who, besides her relationship to my father, had been a contemporary and early friend of my mother's ; and my welcome from the master her husband — one of the best-natured men I ever knew-^used always to be one of the heartiest. And afler parting from Cousin Marshall, 1 mustered up resolution enough to call on yet another cousin. Cousin William, the eldest son of my Sutherlandshire aunt had been for some years settled in Edinburgh, first as an upper clerk and manager, — for, after his failure as a merchant, he had to begin the world anew ; and now, in the speculation year, h^ had succeeded in establishing a business for himself, which bore about it a hopeful and promising air so long as the over-genial season lasted, but fell, with many a more deeply- rooted establishment, in the tempest which followed. On quitting the north, I had been charged with a letter for him by his father, which I knew, however, to be wholly recom inendatory (^f myself, and so I had failed to deliver it. Cousin OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION-. 843 Wniiani, likt. Uncle James, had fully expected that wa« to make my way m life in some one of the learned professions ; and as his position — though, as the result unfortunately showed, a not very secure one — was considerably in advance of mine, I kept aloof from him, in the character of a poor re- lation, who was quite as proud as he was poor, and in the be- lief that his new friends, of w^hom, I understood, he had now well nigh as many as before, would hold that the cousinship of a mere working man did him little credit. He had learned from home, however, that I was in Edinburgh, and had made not a few ineffectual attempts to find me out, of which I had heard ; and now, on forming my resolution to return to the north, I waited upon him at his rooms in Ambrose's Lodgings, ■ — at that time possessed of a sort of classical interest, as the famous Blackwood Club, w^ith Christopher North at its head, used to meet in the hotel immediately below. Cousin Wil liam had a warm heart, and received me with great kindness, though I had, of course, to submit to the scold which I de- served ; and as some young friends were to look in upon him in the evening/ he said, I had to do, what I w^ould fain have avoided, perform penance, by waiting, on his express invita- tion, to meet with them. They were, I ascertained, chiefly students of medicine and divinity, in attendance at the classes of the University, and not at all the formidable sort of persons I had feared to meet ; and finding nothing very unattainable in their conversation, and as Cousin William made a dead set on me " to bring me out," I at length ventured to mingle in it, and found my reading stand me in some stead. There was a meeting, we were told, that evening, in the apartment below, of the Blackwood Club. The night I spent with my coushi was, if our information was correct, and the Nodes not a mere myth, one of the famous Nodes Amhrosiance ; and fain would I have seen, for but a moment, from some quiet corner, the men whose names fame had blown so widely ; but I have ever been unlucky in the curiosity — though I have always strongly entertained it — which has the personal appearance of cele brated men for its object. I had ere now several times lin 34^ MY gered in Castle Street of a Saturday evening, opposite Ue hous« of Sir Walter Scott, in the hope of catching a glimpse of that great writer and genial man, but had never been successful. I could fain, too, have seen Hogg (who at the time occasionally visited Edinburgh) ; with Jeffrey ; old Dugald Stewart, who still lived ; Belta, and Professor Wilson ; but I quitted the place without seeing any of them ; and ere I again returned to the capital, ten years after ,^ death had been busy in the high places, and the greatest of their number was no longer to be seen. In short. Dr. M'Crie was the only man whose name promises to live, of whose personal appearance I was able to carry away with me at this time a distinct image. Addi son makes his Spectator remark, rather in joke than earnest, that " a reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure till he knows whether the waiter of it be a black or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor, with other particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the right understanding of an author." I am inclined to say nearly as much, witliout being in the least in joke. 1 think I understand an author all the better for knowing e^- actly how he looked. I would have to regard the massive vehemence of the style of Chalmers as considerably less char- acteristic of the man, had it been dissociated from the broad chest and mighty structure of bone ; and the warlike spirit which breathes, in a subdued but still very palpable form, in the historical writings of the elder M'Crie, strikes me as sin- gularly in harmony with the military air of this Presbyteriaii minister of the type of Knox and Melville. Howxver theo logians may settle the meaning of the text, it is one of the grand lessons of his writings, that such of the Churches of the Reformation as did not " take the sword, perished by the word." I was accompanied to the vessel .by my friend William Ross, from whom I, alas ! parted for the last time ; and, when step- ping aboard. Cousin William, whom I had scarce expected to see, but who had snatched an hour from business, and walked down all the way to Leith to bid me farewell, came forward OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 845 to grasp me by the hand. 1 am not much disposed to quarrel with the pride of the working man, when, according to John- son and Chalmers, it is a defensive, not an aggressive pride ; but it does at times lead him to be somewhat less than just to the better feelings of the men who occupy places in the scale a little higher than his own. Cousin William from whom J had kept so jealously aloof, had a heart of the finest water His after course was rough and unprosperous. After the gen- eral crash of 1825-26, he struggled on in London for some six or eight years, in circumstances of great difficulty ; and then, receiving some subordinate appointment in connection with the Stipendiary Magistracy of the West Indies, he sailed for Jamaica, where — considerably turned of fifty at the time — ^he soon fell a victim to the climate. In my voyage north, I spent about half as many days on sea, betw^een Leith Roads and the Souters of Cromarty, as the Cunard steamers now spend in crossing the Atlantic. I had taken a cabin passage, not caring to subject my weakened lungs to the exposure of a steerage one ; but during the seven days of thick, foggy mornings, clear moonlight nights, and almost unbroken calms, both night and morning, in which we tided our slow way north, I was much in the forecastle with the men, seeing how sailors lived, and ascertaining what they were thinking about, and how. We had rare narratives at nights,— "Wonderful stories of battle and wreck. That were told by the men of the watch." Some of the crew had been voyagers in their time to distant parts of the world ; and though no existence can be mo^e mo- notonous than the every -day life of the seaman, the profession has always its bits of striking incident, that, when strung together, impart to it an air of interest which its ordinary do- tails sadly want, and which lures but to disappoint the young lads of a romantic cast who are led to make choice of it in 'ts presumed character as a continued series of stirring events and exciting adventures. W^hat, however, struck me as cu 846 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; rious in the narratives of my companions, was the large mix ture of the supernatural which they almost always exhibited. The story of Jack Grant the mate, given in an early chapter, may be regarded as not inadequately representative of the sailor stories which were told on deck and forecastle, along at least the northern coasts of Scotland, nearly thirty years later, Tliat life of peril which casts the seaman much at the mercy of every rough gale and lee-shore, and in which his calcula- tions regarding ultimate results must be always very doubtful, has a strong tendency to render him superstitious. He is more removed, too, than the landsman of his education and stand- ing, from the influence of general opinion, and the mayhap over-sceptical teaching of the Press ; and, as a consequence of their position and circumstances, I found, at this period, seamen of the generation to which I myself belonged as firm believers in wraiths, ghosts, and death-warnings, as the land- ward contemporaries of my grandfather had been sixty years before. A series of well-written nautical tales had appeared shortly previous to this time in one of the metropolitan month lies, — the London Magazine^ if I rightly remember ; and was now interested to find in one of the sailors' stories, the original of decidedly the best of their number, — " The Doomed Man." The author of the series, — a Mr. Hamilton, it w^as said, who afterwards became an Irvingite teacher, and grew too scru pulous to exercise in fiction a very pleasing pen, though he continued to employ, as a portrait-painter, a rather indifferent pencil, — had evidently sought such opportunities of listening to sailors' stories as those on w^hich I had at this time thrust myself. Very curious materials for fiction may be found in this way by the litterateur. It must be held that Sir Walter Scott was no incompetent judge of the capabilities, for th( purposes of the novelist, of a piece of narrative ; and yet wt find him saying of the story told by a common sailor to his friend William Clerk, w^hich he records in the " Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft," that "the tale, properly managed, might have made the fortune of a romancer." At times by day, — ^for the sailors' stories were stories of the OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 347 night, — I found interesting companionship in the society of a young student of divinity, one of the passengers, who, though a lad of part*? and acquirements, did not deem it beneath him to converse on literary subjects with a working man in pale moleskin, and with whom I did not again meet until many years after, when we were both actively engaged in prosecute ing the same quarrel, — he as one of the majority of the Pres- bytery of Aiichterarder, and I as editor of the leading ne\rs- paper of the Non-Intrusion party. Perhaps the respected Free (Jliurch minister of North Leith may be still able to call to memory, — not, of course, the subjects, but the /ac^, of our dis- cussions on literature and the belles lettres at this time ; and that, on asking me one morning whether I had not been, ac- cording to Burns, " crooning to mysel', " when on deck during the previous evening, what seemed from the cadence to be verse, I ventured to submit to him, as my night's w^ork, a few descriptive stanzas. And, as forming in some sort a memorial of our voyage, and in order that my friendly critic may be enabled, after the lapse of considerably more thau a quait.^.r of a century, to review his judgment respecting them, 1 1 ow submit thern to the reader : — STANZAS WRITTEN AT SEA. Jcy of the poet's soul, I court thy aid ; Arouuvi our vessel heaves the midnight wave ; The cheerless moon sinks in the western sky ; Reigns breezeless silence ! — in her ocean cave The mermaid rests, while her fond lover nigh, Marks the pale star-beams as they fall from high. Gilding with tremulous light her couch of sleep Why smile incred'lous ? the rapt Muse's eye Through earth's dark caves, o'er heaven's fair plains, can sweep Can range each hidden cell, where toils the unfathom'd deep On ocean's craggy floor, beneath the shade Of bushy rock-weed, tangled, dusk, and brown, She sees the wreck of founder'd vessel laid, In slimy silence, many a fathom down From where the star-beam trembles ; o'er it ihr 868 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; tiful scene *y which surrounds my native town, and which 1 loved all tue more from the consciousness that my eyes might so soon close upon it forever. " It is a pleasant thing to be- hold the sun." Among my manuscripts, — useless scraps of paper, to which, however, in their character as fossils of the past epochs of my life, I cannot help attaching an interest not at all in themselves, — I find the mood represented by only a few almost infantile verses, addressed to a docile little girl of five years, my eldest sister by my mother's second marriage, and my frequent companion, during my illness, in my short walks. TO JEANIE. Sister Jeanie, haste, we'll go To where the white-starr'd gowans grow, Wi' the puddock-flower o' gowden hue, The snaw-drap white and the bonny vi'let blue. Sister Jeanie, haste, weMl go To where the blossoin'd lilacs grow, — To where the pine-tree, dark an' high, Is pointing its tap at the cludless sky. Jeanie, mony a merry lay Is sung in the young-leav'd woods to-day; Flits on light wing the dragon-fiee, An* hums on the flowrie the big red-bee. Down the burnie wirks its way Aneath the bending birken spray, An' wimples roun' the green moss stane, An' mourns, I kenna why, wi' a ceaseless mane Jeanie, come ; thy days o' play Wi' autumn tide shall pass away ; Sune shall these scenes, in darkness cast. Be ravaged wild by the wild winter blast. Though to thee a spring shall rise, An' scenes as fair ^alute thine eyes; An' though, through many a cludless day, My winsome Jean shall be heartsome and gay He wha grasps thy little hand Nae langer at thy side shall stand, Nor o'er the flower-besprinkled brae Lead thee the lown'est an' the bonniest way. OR, THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 369 Dost thou see yon yard sae green, Spreckl'd wi' many a mossy stane? A few short weeks o' pain shall fly, An' asleep in that bed shall thy puir brither lieit Then thy mither's tears awhile May chide thy joy an' damp thy soile; But sune ilk grief shall we.ir awa' Anrt I'll be forgotten by ane an' by a\ Dlnna think the thought is sad ; Life vex'd me aft, but this mak's glad : Whan cauld my heart and clos'd my ee', Bonny shall the dreams o' ray slumbers be. At length, however, my constitution threw off the malady ; though — as I still occasionally feel — the organ affected never quite regained its former vigor ; and I began to experience the quiet but exquisite enjoyment of the convalescent. After long and depressing illnesses, youth itself appears to return with re- turning health ; and it seems to be one of the compensating pro- visions, that while men of robust constitution and rigid or- ganization get gradually old in their spirits and obtuse in their feelings, the class that have to endure being many times sick have the solace of being also many times young. The reduced and weakened frame becomes as susceptible of the emotional as in tender and delicate youth. I know not that I ever spent three happier months than the autumnal months of this year, when gradually picking up flesh and strength amid my old haunts, the woods and caves. My friend had left me early in July for Aberdeen, where he had gone to prosecute his studies under the eye of a tutor, one Mr. Dun- can, whom he described to me in his letters as perhaps the most deeply learned man he had ever seen. " You may ask him a common question," said my friend, " without getting an answer, — for he has considerably more than the average ab- sontness of the great scholar about him ; but if you inquire of him the state of any one controversy ever agitated in the Church or the world, he will give it you at once, with, if you please, all the arguments on both sides." The trait struck me at the time as one of some mark ; and I thought of it many 870 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; years after, when fame had blown the name of my friend's tutor pretty widely as Dr. Duncan, Hebrew Professor in our Free Church College, and one of the most profoundly learned of Orientalists. Though separated, however, from my friend, [ found a quiet pleasure in follow^ing up, in my solitary walks, the views which his conversations had suggested ; and in a copy of verses, the production of this time, which, with all their poverty and stiffness, please me as true, and as repre- sentative of the convalescent feeling, I find direct reference to the beliefs which he had laliored to instil. My verses are written in a sort of metre which, in the hands of Collins, be^ came flexible, and exquisitely poetic, and which in those of Kirke White is at least pleasing, but of which we find poor enough specimens in the " Anthologies" of Southey, and which perhaps no one so limited in his metrical vocabulary, and so defective in his musical ear, as the writer of these chapters, should ever have attempted. SOLACE. No star of golden Influence hailed the birth Of him who, all unknown and lonely, pours, As fails the light of eve, His pensive, artless song ; Yea, those who mark out honor, ease, wealth, fame. As man's sole joys, shall find no joy in him ; Yet of far nobler kind His silent pleasures prove. For not unmarked by him the ways of men ; Nor yet to him the ample page unknown, Where, trac'd by Nature's hand, Is many a pleasing line. O ! when the world's dull children bend the knee, Meanly obsequious, to some mortal god, It yields no vulgar joy Alone to stand aloof ; Or when they jostle on wealth's crowded road, And swells the tumult on the breeze, 'tis sweet, Thoughtful, at length reclined, To list the wrathful hum. What though the weakly gay affect to scorn The loitering dreamer of life's darkest shade, Stingless the jeer, whose voice Ck>me3 from the erroneous path. OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCAlTO^f. 87l Bcorner, of all thy toils the end cieclarel If pleasure, pleasure comes uncall'd to cheer The haunts of him who spends His hours in quiet thought. And happier he who can repress desire, Than they who seldom mourn a thwarted wish : The vassals they of fate, — The unbending conqueror he. And thou, blest Muse, though rudely strung thy lyre^ Its tones can guile the dark "nd lonesome day,— Can smooth the wrinkled brow, And dry the sorrowing tear. "Tiine many a bliss, — O, many a solace thine! Uy thee upheld, the soul asserts her throne, The chastened passions sleep, And dove-eyed Peace prevails. And thou, fair Hope ! when other comforts fail, — When night's thick mists descend,— thy beacon flactoa, Till grow the dark clouds round With beams of promised bliss. Thou failest not, when, mute the soothing lyre^ Lives thy unfading solace: sweet to raise Thy eye, O quiet Hope, And greet a friend in heaven ! — A friend, a brother, one whose awful throne In holy fear heaven's mightiest sons approach Man's heart to feel for man, — To save him God's great power ! Oonqueror of death, joy of the accepted soul, O, woiiders raise no doubt when told of thee I Thy way past finding out. Thy love, can tongue declare ? Chet-ed by thy smile, Peace dwells amid the storm ; Held by thy hand, the floods assail in vain ; With grief is blent a joy, And beams the vault of death. Passing, m one of my walks this autumn, the cave in whica ! used to ?ipend in boyhood so many happy hours with Finlay, ) found in smoking, as of old, with a huge fire, and occupied hy a wilder and more careless party than even my truant Bclioolfellows. It has been discovered and appropriated by a band of gipsies, who, attracted by the soot-stains on its roof and sides, and concluding that it had been inhabited by the gijysies of other days, had, without consulting factor or landlord, 17 872 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES , at once entered upon possession, as the proper successors of its former occupants. They were a savage party, with a good deal of the true gipsy blood in them, but not without mixture of a broken-down classof apparently British descent; and one of their women was purely Irish. From what I had previously heard about gipsies, I was not prepared for a mixture of this kind ; but I found it pretty general, and ascertained that at least one of the ways in which it had taken place was exem- plified by the case of the one Irish woman. Her gipsy hus- band had served as a soldier, and had married her when in the army. I have been always exceedingly curious to see man in his rude elements, — to study him as the savage, whether among the degraded classes of our own country, or, as exhibited in the writings of travellers and vOyagers, in his aboriginal state ; and I now did not hesitate to visit the gipsies, and to spend not unfrequently an hour or two in their company. They at first seemed jealous of me as a spy ; but finding nie inoffensive, and that I did not bewray counsel, they came at length to re cognize me as the " quiet, sickly lad," and to chatter as freely in my presence as in that of the other pitchers with ears, which they used to fabricate out of tin by the dozen and the score, and the manufacture of which, with the making of horn spoons, formed the main branch of business carried on in tne cave. I saw in these visits curious glimpses of gipsy life. I could trust only to what I actually witnessed : what was told me could on no occasion be believed ; for never were there lies more gross and monstrous than those of the gipsies ; but even the lying formed of itself a peculiar trait. 1 have never heard lying elsewhere that set all probability so utterly at defiance, — a consequence, in part, of their recklessly venturing, like un- skilful authors, to expatiate in walks of invention over which their experience did not extend. On one occasion an old gipsy woman, after pronouncing my malady consumption, prescribed for me as an infallible remedy, raw parsley minced small and made up into balls with fresh butter ; but seeing, I suppose, from my manner, that I lacked the necessary belief in her specific^ she went on to say, that she had derived her knowledge of such OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 873 matters from her mother, one of the most " skeely women that ever lived.'' Her mother, she said, had once healed a lord's son of a grievous hurt in half a minute, after all the English doctors had shown they could do nothing for him. His eye had been struck out of its socket by a blow, and hung half^ way down his cheek ; and though the doctors could of course return it to its place, it refused to stick, always falling out again. Her mother, however, at once understood the case ; and. making a little slit at the back of the young man's neck, she got hold of the end of a sinew, and pulling in the dislodged orb at a tug, she made all tight by running a knot on the con- trolling ligament, and so kept the eye in its place. And, save that the young lord continued to squint a little, he was well at once. The peculiar anatomy on which this invention was framed must have, of course, resembled that of a wax-doll with winking eyes ; but it did well enough for the woman ; and, having no character for truth to maintain, she did not hesitate to build on it. On asking her whether she ever attended church, she at once replied, "O yes, at one time very often. I am the daughter of a minister, — a natural daughter, you know : my father was the most powerful preacher in all the south, and I always went to hear him." In about an hour after, however, forgetting her extemporary sally, and the rev- erend character with which she had invested her sire, she spoke of him, in another equally palpable invention, as the greatest " king of the gipsies" that the gipsies ever had. Even the children had caught this habit of monstrous mendacity. There was one of the boys of the band, considerably under twelve, who could extemporize lying narratives by the hour, and seemed always delighted to get a listener ; and a little girl, younger still, who " lisped m fiction for th^i fiction came." Tliere were two things that used to strike me as peculiar among these gipsies, — a Hindu type of head, small of size, but with a considerable fulness of forehead, especially along the medial line, in the region, as the phrenologist would perhaps say, of individvality and comparison ; and a singular posture assumed by che ^Iderly females of the tribe in squatting before their 874 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; fires, in which the elbow rested on the knees brought close to gether, he chin on the palms, and the entire ligure (some- what resembling in attitude a Mexican mummy) assumed an outlandish appearance, that reminded me of some of the more grotesque sculptures of Egypt and Hindustan. The peculiar type of head was derived, I doubt not, from an ancestry originally different from that of the settled races of the coun- try ; nor is it impossible that the peculiar position, — unl'ke any I have ever seen Scottish females assume, — was also of ' foreign origin. I have witnessed scenes among these gipsies, of which the author of the " Jolly Beggars" might have made rare use, but which formed a sort of materials that I lacked the special abili- ty rightly to employ. It was reported on one occasion that a marriage ceremony and wedding were to take place in the cave, and I sauntered the way, in the hope of ascertaining how its inmates contrived to do for themselves what of course no clergyman could venture to do for them, — seeing that, of the parties to be united, the bridegroom might have already as many wives living as " Peter Bell," and the bride as many hus- bands. A gipsy marriage had taken place a few years pre- vious in a cave near Rosemarkie. An old male gipsy, pos- sessed of the rare accomplishment of reading, had half-read, half-spelled the English marriage-service to the young couple, and the ceremony was deemed complete at its close. And I now expected to witness something similar. In an opening in the wood above, I encountered two very drunk gipsies, and saw the first fruits of the coming merriment. One of the two was an uncouth-looking monster, sallow-skinned, flat-faced, round- shouldered, long and thinly limbed, at least six feet two inches in height, and, from his strange misproportions, he might have passed for seven feet any day, were it not that his trousers, made for a much shorter man, and rising to the middle of his calfless legs, gave him much the appearance of a big boy walk- ing on stilts. The boys of the place called him " Giant Grimbo ;" while his companion, a tight dapper little fellow, who always showed off a compact, well-rounded leg in cordu OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 875 roy inexpressibles, they had learned to distinguish as ^^ Biliy Breeches." The giant, who carried a bag-pipe, had broken down ere I came up with them ; and now, sitting on the grassy he was droning out in fitful blasts a diabolical music, to which Billy Breeches was dancing ; but, just as I passed, Billy also gave way, after wasting an infinity of exertion in keeping erect ; And, falling over the prostrate musician, I could hear the bag groaning out its soul as he pressed against it, in a lengthened melancholious squeal. I found the cave bearing an aspect of more than ordinary picturesqueness. It had its two fires, and its double portion of smoke, that went rolling out in the calm like an inverted river ; for it clung close to the roof, as if by a reversed gravitation, and turned its foaming surface lown- wards. At the one fire an old gipsy woman was engaged in baking oaten cakes ; and a great pot, that dispensed through the cave the savory odor of unlucky poultry cut short in the middle of their days, and of hapless hares destroyed without the game license, depended over the other. An ass, the com- mon property of the tribe, stood meditating in the fore-ground ; two urchins, of about from ten to twelve years a-piece,— wretchedly supplied in the article of clothing, — for the one, provided with only a pair of tattered trousers, was naked from the waist upwards, and the other, furnished with only a dilap- idated jacket, was naked from the waist downwards, — were engaged in picking up fuel for the fire, still further in front ; a few of the ordinary inmates of the place lounged under cover of the smoke, apparently in a mood not in the least busy ; and on a couch of dried fern sat evidently the central figure of the group, a young, sparkling-eyed brunette, more than ordinarily marked by the Hindu peculiarities of head and feature, and attended by a savage-looking fellow of about twenty, dark as B mulatto, and with a profusion of long flexible hair, black as jet, hanging down to his eyes, and clustering about his clieeks and neck. These were, I ascertained, the bride and bride- groom. The bride was engaged in sewing a cap, — the bride- groom in watching the progress of the work. I observed that the party, whc were less communicative than usual, seemed to 876 Ml SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; regard me in the light of an intruder. An elderly tinker, Lie father of the bride, gray as a leafless thorn in winter, but still stalwart and strong, sat admiring a bit of spelter of about a pound weight. It was gold, he said, or, as he pronownced the word, " guild," which had been found in an old cairn, and was of immense value, " for it was peer guild, and that was the best o' guild ;" but if I pleased, he w:'ild sell it to me, a very great bargain. I was engaged with some difficulty in de- clining the offer, when we were interrupted by the sounds of the bag-pipe. Giant Grimbo and Billy Breeches had suc- ceeded in regaining their feet, and were seen staggering towards the cave. " Where's the whisky, Billy f inquired the proprietor of the gold, addressing himself to the man of the small clothes. " Whisky !" said Billy, " ask Grimbo." " Where's the whisky, Grimbo 1" reiterated the tinker. " Whisky !" replied Grimbo, " Whisky !" and yet again, after a pause and a hiccup, " Whisky !" " Ye confounded blacks !" said the tinker, springing to his feet with an agility wonderful for an age so advanced as his, " Have you drank it all ? But take that, Grimbo, he added, planting a blow full on the side of the giant's head, which prostrated his vast length along the floor of the cave. " And take that, Billy," he iterated, deal- ing such another blow^ to the shorter man, which sent him right athwart his prostrate comrade. And then, turning to me she remarked with perfect coolness, " That, master, I call smart hitting." " Honest lad," whispered one of the women immediately after, " it will be a reugh time wi' us here the nicht : you had just better be stepping your ways." I had already begun to think so without prompting ; and so, taking my leave of the gipsies, I failed being, as I had proposed, one if the witnesses of the wedding. There is a sort of grotesque humor in scenes of the kind described, that has charms for artists and authors of a particu- lar class, — some of them men of broad sympathies and great genius ; and hence, through their representations, literary and pictorial, the ludicrous point of view has come to be the con- ventional and ordinary one. And yet it is a sad enough nier OB. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". S77 rimeiit, after all, that has for its subject a degradation so ex. tremc, I never knew a gipsy that seemed to possess a moral sense, — a degree of Pariahism which has been reached by only one other class in the country, and that a small one, — the do- scendants of degraded females in our large towns. An educa tion in Scotland, however secular in its character, always casts a certain amount of enlightenment on the conscience ; a home, however humble, whose inmates win their bread by honest in- dustry, has a similar effect ; but in the peculiar walks in which for generations there has been no education of any kind, or in which bread has been the wages of infamy, the moral sense seems so wholly obliterated, that there appears to survive nothing in the mind to which the missionary or the moralist can appeal. It seems scarce possible for a man to know even a very little of these classes, without learning, in consequence, to respect honest labor, and even secular knowledge, as at least the second-best things, in their moral bearing and in- fluence that can exist among a people. S78 UY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; CHAPTER XVIII For such is the flaw or the depth of the plan In the make of that wonderful creature eallM mao, No two virtues, whatever relation they claim, Nor even two diflerent shades of the same, Though like as was ever twin-brother to brother. Possessing the one shall imply you've the other." Burns During my period of convalescence, I amused myself in liewing for my uncles, from an original design, an ornate dial- stone ; and the dial-stone still exists, to show that my skill as a stone-cutter rose somewhat above the average of the pro- fession in those parts of the country in which it ranks highest, Gradually as I recovered health and strength, little jobs camo dropping in. I executed sculptured tablets in a style not common in the north of Scotland ; introduced into the church- yards of the locality a better type of tombstone than had ob- tained in them before, save, mayhap, at a very early period ; distanced all my competitors in the art of inscription-cutting ; and at length found that, without exposing my weakened lungs to the rough tear and wear to which the ordinary stone- cutter must subject himself, I could live. I deemed it an advantage, too, rather than the reverse, that my new branch of employment brought me not unfrequently for a few days into country districts sufficiently distant from home to present me with ne\y fields of observation, and to open up new tracts of OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 879 inquiry. Sometimes I spent half a. week in a farm-house in the neighborhood of some country churchyard, — sometimes 1 lodged in a village, — oftener than once I sheltered beside some gentleman's seat, where the august shadow of lairdship lay heavy on society ; and in this way I came to see and know a good deal of the Scottish people, in their many-colored aspects. of which otherwise I might have remained ignorant. At times, too, on some dusty cottage shelf I succeeded in picking up a rare book, or, what was not less welcome, got a curious tradition from the cottager ; or there lay within the reach of an evening walk some interesting piece of antiquity, or some rock-section, which I found it profitable to visit. A solitary burying-ground, too, situated, as country burying-grounds usually are, in some pleasant spot, and surrounded by its groupes of ancient trees, formed a much more delightful scene of labor than a dusty work-shed, or some open area in a bus} town ; and altogether I found my new mode of life a quie . and happy one. Nor, with all its tranquillity, was it a sort of life in which the intellect was in any great danger of falling asleep. There was scarce a locality in which new game might not be started, that, in the running down, kept the faculties in full play. Let me exemplify by describing the courses of inquiry, physical and metaphysical, which opened up to me when spending a few days, first in the burying-ground of Kirk michael, and next in the churchyard of Nigg. I have elsewhere somewhat fancifully described the ruinous chapel and solitary grave-yard of Kirkmichael as lying on the sweep of a gentle declivity, within a few yards of a flat sea beach, so little exposed to the winds, that it would seem ab if " ocean muffled its waves in approaching this field of the dead." And so the two vegetations, — that of the land and of the sea, — undisturbed by the surf, which on opener coasts pre- vents the growth of either along the upper littoral line, where the waves beat heaviest, here meet and mingle, each encroach- ing for a little way on the province of the other. And at meal-times, and when returning homewards in the evening along the shore ^t furnished me with amusement enough to 680 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES ^ mark the chjiracter of the several plants of both floias that thus meet and cross each other, and the appearances which the}' assume when inhabiting each the other's province. On the side of the land, beds of thrift, with its gay flowers the sea- pinks, occupied green prominent cushions, that stood up like little islets amid the flowing sea, and were covered over by salt water during stream-tides to the depth of from eighteen inches to two feet. With these there occasionally mingled spikes of the sea-lavender ; and now and then, though more rarely, a sea-aster^ that might be seen raising above the calm surface its composite flowers, with their bright yellow stamina! pods, and their pale purple petals. Far beyond, however even the cushions of thrift, I could trace the fleshy, jointed stems of the glass- wort, rising out of the mud, but becoming diminutive and branchless as I followed them dowmw^ards, till, at depths where they must have been frequently swum over by the young coal-fish and the flounder, they appeared as mere fleshy spikes, scarce an inch in height, and then ceased. On the side of the sea it was the various fucoids that rose highest along the beach : the serrated 'fucus barely met the salt-wort; but the bladder-bearing fucus [fucus nodosus) mingled its brown fronds not unfrequently with the crimson flowers of the thrift, and the vesicular fucus [fucus vesiculosus) rose higher still, to enter into strange companionship with the sea-side plaintains and the common scurvy-grass. Green en- teromorpha of two species — ^. compressa and E. intestinalis — I also found abundant along the edges of the thrift-beds ; and it struck me as curious at the time, that while most of the land-plants which had thus descended beyond the sea- level were of the high dicotyledonous division, the sea-weeds with which they mingled their leaves and seed-vessels were low in their standing, — fuci and ^enteromorpha, — plants at least not higher than their kindred cryptogamia, the lichens ani mosses of the land. Far beyond, in the outer reaches of the bay., where land-plants never approached, there were meadows of a sub-marine vegetation, of (for the sea) a compar- atively )>igh character. Their numerous plants {zostera una OR THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 38i riiia) had true roots, and true leaves, and true flowers j and their spikes ripened amid the salt waters towards the close of autumn, round white seeds, that, like many of the seeds of the land, had their sugar and starch. But these plants kept far aloof, in their green depths, from their cogeners the mono- cotyledons of the terrestrial flora. It was merely the k w Fucacece and Confervece of the sea that I found meeting and mixing with the descending dicotyledons of the land. I felt a good deal of interest in marking, about this time, how certain belts of marine vegetation occurred on a vast boulder situated in the neighborhood of Cromarty, on the extreme line of the ebb of spring-tides. I detected the various species ranged in zones, just as on lofty hills the botanist finds his agricultural, moorland, and alpine zones rising in succession the one over the other. At the base of the huge mass, at a level to which the tide rarely falls, the characteristic vegetable is the rough- stemmed tangle, — Laminaria digitata. In the zone imme- diately above the lowest, the prevailing vegetable is the smooth-stemmed tangle, — Laminaria saccharina. Higher still there occurs a zone of the serrated fucus, — F. serratus, — blent with another familiar fucus,— i^. nodosus. Then comes a yet higher zone of Fucus vesiculosus ; and higher still, a few scattered tufts of Fucus canaliculatus ; and then, as on lofty mountains that rise above the line of perpetual snow, vegeta- tion ceases, and the boulder presents a round bald head, that rises over the surface after the first few hours of ebb have passed. But far beyond its base, where the sea never falls, green meadows of zostera flourish in the depths of the water, where they unfold their colorless flowers, unfurnished with petals, and ripen their farinaceous seeds, that, wherever they rise to the surface, seem very susceptible of frost. I ha^re s(^en the shores strewed with a line of green zostera^ with its spikes charged with seed, after a smart October frost, that had been coincident with the ebb of a low spring-tide, had nipt its rectilinear fronds and flexible stems. But what, it may be asked, was the bearing of all this :>b. servatM">n ? I by no means saw its ent're bearing at the time: 382 I simply observed and recorded, because I found it pleasant to observe and record. And yet one of the wild dreams of Maillet in his Telliamed had given a certain degree of unity, and a certain definite direction, to my gleanings of fact on the subject, which they would not have otherwise possessed. It was held by this fanciful writer, that the vegetation of the land had been derived originally from that of the ocean. " In a word," we find him saying, " do not herbs, plants, roots, grain, and all of this kind that the earth produces and nour- ishes, come from the sea 1 Is it not at least natural to think so, since we are certain that all our habitable lands came originally from the sea ? Besides, in small islands far from the Conti nent, which have appeared a few ages ago at most, and where it is manifest that never any men had been, we find shrubs, herbs, and roots. Now, you must be forced to own that either those productions owed their origin to the sea, or to a new creation^ which is absurd^ And then Maillet goes on to show, after a manner which — now that algseology has become a science — must be regarded as at least curious, that the plants of the sea, though not so well developed as those of the land, are really very much of the same nature. " The fishermen of Marseilles find daily," he says, " in their nets, and among their fish, plants of a hundred kinds, with their fruits still upon them ; and though these fruits are not so large nor so well nourished as those of our earth, yet their species is in no other respects du- bious. There they find clusters of white and black grapes, peach trees, pear trees, prune trees, apple trees, and all sorts of flowers." Such was the sort of wild fable invented in a tract of natural science in which I found it of interest to acquaint myself with the truth. I have since seen the extraordinary vision of Maillet revived, first by Ok en, and then by the author of the " Vestiges of Creation ;" and when, in grappling with some of the views and statements of the latter writer, I set myself to write the chapter of my little work which deals with this spe- cial hypothesis, I found that I had in some sort studied in the school in which the education necessary to its production was most thoroughly to be acquired. Had the ingenious author OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION-. 88[| of the " Vestiges" taken lessons for but a short time at the same form, he would scarce have thought of reviving in these latter ages the dream of Oken and Maillet. A knowl edge of the facts would to a certainty have protected him against the reproduction of the hypothesis. The lesson at Nigg was of a more curious kind, though, mayhap, less certainly conclusive in its bearings. The house of the proprietor of Nigg bordered on the burying-ground. I was engaged in cutting an inscription on the tombstone of his wife, recently dead ; and a poor idiot, who found his living in the kitchen, and to whom the deceased had shown kindness, used to come every day to the churchyard, to sit beside me, and jabber in broken expressions his grief I was struck with the extremeness of his idiotcy : he manifested even more than the ordinary inability of his class to deal with figures, for he could scarce tell whether nature had furnished him with one head or with two ; and no power of education could have taught him to count his fingers. He was equally defective, too, in the mechanical. Angus could not be got into trousers ; and the contrivance of the button remained' a mystery which he was never able to comprehend. And so he wore a large blue gown, like that of a beadsman, which slipped over his head, and was bound by a belt round his middle, with a stout woollen shirt underneath. But, though unacquainted with the mystery of the button, there were mysteries of another kind with which he seemed to have a most perfect acquaintance : Angus — always a faithful attendant at church — was a great critic in sermons ; nor was it every preacher that s»atisfied him ; and such was his imitative turn, that he himself could preach by the hour, in the manner — so far at least as voice and ges- ture went — of all the popular ministers of the district. There was, however, rather a paucity of idea in his discourses : in his more energetic passages, when he struck the book and stamped with his foot, he usually iterated, in sonorous Gaelic, "-" The wicked, the wicked, O wretches the wicked '" while a passage of a less depreciatory character served him for set- ting oft' his middle tones and his pathos. But that for which 884 his character was chiefly remarkable was an instincti /e, fox like cunning, that seemed to lie at its very basis, — a cunning which co-existed, however, with perfect honr-sty, and a de- voted attachment to his patron the proprietor. The town of Cromarty had its poor imbecile man of quite a different stamp. Jock Gordon had been, it was said, " like other people" till his fourteenth year, when a severe attack of illness left him bankrupt in both mind and body. He rose rom his bed lame of a foot and hand, his one side shrunken and nerveless, the one lobe of his brain apparently inopera- tive, and with less than half his former energy and intellect; not at all an idiot, however, though somewhat more helpless, — the poor mutilated fragment of a reasoning man. Among his other failings, he stuttered lamentably. He became an in- mate of the kitchen of Cromarty House ; and learned to run, or, I should rather say, to limp^ errands — for he had risen from the fever that ruined him to run no more — with great fidelity and success. He was fond of church-going, of read- ing good little books, and, notwithstanding his sad stutter, of singing. During the day, he might be heard, as he hobbled along the streets on business, " singing in into himself l^'' as the children used to say, in a low unvaried undertone, somewhat resembling the humming of a bee ; but when night fell, the whole town heard him. He was no patronizer of modern poets or composers. " There was a ship, and a ship of fame," and " Death and the Fair Lady," were his especial favorites ; and he could repeat the " Gosport Tragedy," and the " Babeb in the Wood," from beginning to end. Sometimes he stutter- ed in the notes, and then they lengthened on and on into a never-ending quaver that our first-rate singers might have en. vied. Sometimes there was a sudden break ; — Jock had been consulting the pocket in which he stored his bread ; — but no sooner was his mouth half-cleared, than he began again. In middle-life, however, a great calamity overtook Jock. His patron, the occupant of Cromarty House, quitted the country for France ; Jock was left without occupation or aliment ; and the streets heard no more of his songs. He grew lank OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOIT. 885 and thin, and stuttered and limped more painfully than oe- fore, and was in the last stage of privation and distress ; when a benevolent proprietor of Nigg, who resided half the year in a town-house in Cromarty, took pity upon him, and introduced him to his kitchen. And in a few days Jock was singing and limping errands with as much energy as ever. But the time at length came when his new benefactor had to ^uit his house in town, for his seat in the country ; and it Dehoved Jock to take temporary leave of Cromarty and fol low him. And then the poor imbecile man of the town kitchen had, of course, to measure himself against his for- midable rival, the vigorous idiot of the country one. On Jock's advent at Nigg, — which had taken place a few weeks previous to my engagement in the burying-ground of the parish, — the character of Angus seemed to dilate in energy and power. He repaired to the churchyard with spade and pick axe, and began digging a grave. It was a grave, he said, for wicked Jock Gordon ; and Jock, whether he thought it or no, had come to Nigg, he added, only to be buried. Jock, however, was not to be dislodged so ; and Angus, professing sudden friendship for him, gave expression to the magnani- mous resolution, that he would not only tolerate Jock, but also be very kind to him, and show him the place where he kept all his money. He had lots of money, he said, which he had hidden in a dike ; but he would show the place to Jock Gor- don, — to poor cripple Jock Gordon : he would show him the very hole, and Jock would get it all. And so he brought Jock to the hole, — a cavity in a turf-wall in the neighboring wood. — and, taking care that his own vray of retreat was clear he bade him insinuate his hand. No sooner had he done so, however, than there issued forth from between his fingers a cloud of wasps, of the variety so abundant in the north (>oun try. that build their nests in earthy banks and old mole hills ; aiid poor Jock, ill fitted for retreat in any sudden emergency, was stung within an inch of his life. Angus returned in high glee, preaching about " wicked Jock Gordon, whom the very wasps wouldn't let alone ;" but though he pretended no further 386 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES ; friendship for a few days after, he again drew to him in ap- parent kindness ; and on the following Saturday, on Jock be- ing despatched to a neighboring smithy with a sheep's head to singe, Angus volunteered his services to show him the way. Angus went trotting before ; Jock came limping behind : the fields w^ere open and bare ; the dwellings few and far be tween ; and after having passed, in about an hour's walking, lialf-a-dozen little hamlets, Jock began to marvel exceedingly that there should be no sign of the smith's shop. " Poor fool- ish Jock Gordon !" ejaculated Angus, quickening his trot into a canter : " what does he know about carrying sheep's heads to the smithy ? Jock labored hard to keep up with his guide ; quavering and semi-quavering, as his breath served, — for Jock always began to sing, when in solitary places, after nightfall, as a protection against ghosts. At length the day- light died entirely away, and he could only learn from Angus that the smithy was farther off than ever ; and, to add to his trouble and perplexity, the roughness of the ground showed him that they were wandering from the road. First they went toiling athwart what seemed an endless range of fields, sep- arated from one another by deep ditches and fences of stone; then they crossed over a dreary moor, bristling with furze and sloe-thorn ; then over a waste of bogs and quagmires : then across a tract of newly-ploughed land ; and then they en- tered a second wood. At length, after a miserable night's wandering, day broke upon the two forlorn satyrs ; and Jock found himself in a strange country, with a long narrow lake in front, and a wood behind. He had wandered after his guide into the remote parish of Tarbet. Tarbet abounded at that time in little muddy lakes, edged with water-flags and reeds, and swarming with frogs and eels ; and it was one of the largest and deepest of these that now lay before Jock and his guide. Angus tucked up his blue gown, as if to wade across. Jock would have as soon thought of fording the German Ocean. " O, wicked Jock Gordon !" ex* claimed the fool, when he saw him hesitate ; " the Colonel's waiting, poor man, for his head, and Jock will no' take it to OR, THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATIOitT. 887 the smithy." He stepped into the water. Jock followed in sheer desperation ; arid, after clearing the belt of reeds, Loth sank to the middle in the mingled water and mud. Angus had at length accomplished the object of his journey. Extri- cating himself in a moment, — for he was lithe and active, — he snatched the sheep's head and trotters from Jock, and, leaping ashore, left the poor man sticking fast. It was church-time ere he reached, on his way back, the old Abbey of Fearn, still employed as a Protestant place of worship ; and as the sight of the gathering people awakened his church-going propensity, he went in. He was in high spirits, — seemed, by the mouths he made, very much to admire the sermon, — and paraded the sheep's head and trotters through the passages and gallery a score of times at least, like a monk of the order of St. Francis exhibiting the relics of some favorite saint. In the evening he found his way home, but learned, to his grief and astonish- ment, that " wicked Jock Gordon" had got there shortly be- fore him in a cart. The poor man had remained sticking in the mud for three long hours after Angus had left him, until at length the very frogs began to cultivate his acquaintance, as they had done that of King Log of old ; and in the mud he would have been sticking still, had he not been extricated by a former of Fearn, who, in coming to church, had taken the lake in his way. He left Nigg, however, for Cromarty on the following day, convinced that he was no match for his rival^ and dubious how the next adventure might terminate. Such was the story which I found current in Nigg, when working in its churchyard, with the hero of the adventure often beside me. It led me to take special note of his class, and to collect facts respecting it, on which I erected a sort of semi- metaphysical theory of human character, which, though it would not now be regarded as by any means a novel one, I had thought out for myself, and which possessed for me, in consequence, the charm of originality. In these poor creatures, I Ihu? argued, we find, amid much general dilapidation ana brokenness of mind, certain instincts and peculiarities remain- ins? entire. Here, in Angus, for instance, there is that instinct 888 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ive cunning which some of the lower animals, such as the f^ possess, existing in a wonderful degree of perfection. Pope himself, who "could not drink tea without a stratagem," could scarce have possessed a larger share of it. And yet how distinct must not this sort of ingenuity be from the mechanical ingenuity ! Angus cannot fix a button in its hole. I even see him baffled by a tall snuff-box, with a small quantity of snuff at its bottom, that lies beyond the reach ol his finger. He has not ingenuity enough to lay it on its side or to empty its snuff on his palm ; but stretches and evei stretches towards it the unavailing digit, and then gets angry to find it elude his touch. There are other idiots, however, who have none of Angus's cunning, in whom this mechanical ability is decidedly developed. Many of the cretins of the Alps are said to be remarkable for their skill as artisans ; and it is told of a Scotch idiot, who lived in a cottage on the Maol- buie Common in the upper part of the Black Isle, and in whom a similar mechanical ability existed, abstracted from ability of almost every other kind, that, among other things, he fabricated, out of a piece of rude metal, a large sacking needle. Angus is attached to his patron, and mourns for the deceased lady ; but he seems to have little general regard for the species, — simply courting for the time those from whom he expects snuff. A Cromarty idiot, on the contrary, is obliging and kindly to all, and bears a peculiar love to children ; and though more ap imbecile in some respects than even Angus, he has a turn for dress, and can attire himself very neatly. In this last respect, however, the Cro narty fool was excelled by an idiot of the last age, known to the children of many a village and hamlet as Fool Charloch, who used to go wandering about the coun- try, adorned somewhat in the style of an Indian chief, with half a peacock's tail stuck in his cap. Yet another idiot, a fierce and dangerous creature, seemed as invariably malignant in his dispositions as the Cromarty one is benevolent, and died in a prison, to which he had been committed for killing a poor half-witted associate. Yet another idiot of the north of Scot- land had a strange turn for the supernatural. He was a mut OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 889 terer of cliarms, and a watcher of omens, and possessed it was said, the second sight. I collected not a few other facts of a similar kind, and thus reasoned regarding them : — These idiots are imperfect men, from whose minds certain faculties have been effaced, and other faculties left to exhibit themselves all the more prominently from the circumstance of their standing so much alone. They resemble men who have lost their hands, but retain their feet, or who have lost their sight or smell, but retain their taste or hearing. But as the limbs and the senses, if they did not exist as separate parts of the frame, could not be separately lost, so in the mind i1>- self, or in at least the organization through which the mind manifests itself, there must also be separate parts, or they would not be thus found isolated by Nature in her mutilated and abortive specimens. Those metaphysicians who deal by the mind as if it were simply a general power existing in states, must be scarce less in error than if they were to regard the senses as merely a general power existing in states, instead of recognizing them as distinct, independent powers, so various often in their degree of development, that, from the full perfection of any one of them, the perfection, or even the existence, of any of the others cannot be predicated. If, for instance, it were, — as some metaphysicians hold, — the same general warmth of emotive power that glows in benevolence and burns in resent- ment, the fierce, dangerous idiot that killed his companion, and the kindly-dispositioned Cromarty one who takes home pailfuls of water to the poor old women of the place, and parts with his own toys to its children, would, instead of thus ex hibiting the opposite poles of character, at least so far resemble one another, that the vindictive fool would at times be kindly and obliging, and the benevolent one at times violent and re- sentful. But such is not the case : the one is never madly savage, — the other never genial and kind ; and so it seems legitimate to infer, that it is not a general power or energy that acts through them in different states, but two particular powers or energies, as unlike in their natures, and as capable of acting apart, as seeing and hearing. Even powers which seem to 890 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; have so much in common, that the same words are sometimet made use of in reference to both, may be as distinct as smelling and tasting. We speak of the cunning workman, and we speak of the cunning man ; and refer to a certain faculty of contrivance manifested in dealing with characters and affairs on the part of the one, and in dealing with certain modifications of matter on the part of the other ; but so entirely different are the two facul- ties, and, further, so little dependent arc they, in at least their first elements, on intellect, that we may find the cunning which manifests itself in affairs, existing, as in Angus, totally dissoci- ated from mechanical skill; and, on the other hand, the cunning of the artisan, existing, as in the idiot of the Maolbuie, totally dissociated from that of the diplomatist. In short, regarding idiots as persons of fragmentary mind, in whom certain primary mental elements may be found standing out in a state of great entireness, and all the more striking in their relief from the isolation, I came to view them as hits of analysis^ if I may so express myself, made to my hand by Nature, and from the study of which I could conceive of the structure of minds of a more complete, and therefore more complex, character. As children learn the alphabet from cards, each of which contains only a letter or two a-piece, printed large, I held at this time, and, with a few modifications, hold still, that those primary sentiments and propensities which form the basis of character may be found separately stamped in the same way on the comparatively blank minds of the imbecile; and that the student of mental philosophy might learn from them what may be regarded as the alphabet of his science, much more truthfully than from those metaphysicians who represent mind as a pcv/er not manifested in contemporaneous and separable facultieSj but as existing in consecutive states. Cromarty had been fortunate in its parish ministers. From the death of its last curate, shortly after the Revolution, and the consequent return of its old " outed minister," who had resigned his living for conscience' sake twenty-eight years bo- fore, and new came to spend his evening of life with his people, it had enjoyed the services of a series of devout and popular OR, TEfE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 891 men ; and so the amse of the Establishment was particular!}^ strong in both town and parish. At the beginning of the present century, Cromarty had not its single Dissenter ; and though a ^ew of what were known as " Haldane's people"' might b*-, found in it, some eight or ten years later they failed m effecting a lodgment, and ultimately quitted it for a neigh- boring town. Almost all the Dissent that has arisen in Scot- land since the Reformation has been an effect of Moderatism and forced settlements ; and as the place had known neither, ts people continued to harbor within the Church of their fathers, nor wished to change. A vacancy had occurred in the incumbency, during my sojourn in the south, through the death of the incumbent, the respected minister of my child- hood and youth ; and I found, on my return, a new face in the pulpit. It was that of a remarkable man, — the late Mr. Stewart of Cromarty, — one of at once the most original thinkers and profound theologians I ever knew ; though he has, alas ! left as little mark of his exquisite talent behind him, as those sweet singers of former ages, the memory of whose enchanting notes has died, save as a doubtful echo, with the generation that heard them. I sat, with few interruptions, for sixteen years under his ministry ; and for nearly twelve of these enjoyed his confidence and friendship. I never could press myself on the notice of superior men, however desirous of forming their acquaintance ; and have, in consequence, missed opportunities innumerable of coming in friendly contact with persons whom it would be at once a pleas- ure and an honor to know. And so, for the first two years, or rather more, I was content to listen with profound attention, to the pulpit addresses of my new minister, and to appear as a catechumen, when my turn came, at his diets of catechising. He had been struck, however, as he afterwards told me, by my sustained attention when at church ; and, on making ir quiry regarding me among his friends, he was informed that I was a great reader, and, it was believed, a writer of verse. And com ing unwittingly out upon him one day as he was passing, wheu quitting my work-place for the street, he addi essed me. " Wei], liid " he said, *• it is your dinner hour ; I hear I have a poe> 892 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; among my people?" "I doubt it much," I replied. "Well,'' he rejoined, " one may fall short of being a poet, and yet gain by exercising one's tastes and talents in the poetic walk. The accomplishment of verse is at least not a vulgar one." The conversation went on as we passed together along the street ; and he stood for a time opposite the manse door. " I am forming," he said, "a small library for our Sabbath-school scholars and teachers : most of the books are simple enough little things ; but it contains a few works of the intellectual class. Call upon me this evening, that we may look over them, and you may perhaps find among them some volumes you would wish to read." I accordingly waited upon him in the evening ; and we had a long conversation together. He was, I saw, curiously sounding me, and taking my measure in all directions ; or, as he himself afterwards used to express it in his characteristio way, he was like a traveller who, having come unexpectedly on a dark pool in a ford, was dipping down his staff, to ascertain the depth of the w^ater and the nature of the bottom. He inquired regarding my reading, and found that in the belles lettres, especially in English literature, it was about as extensive as his own. He next inquired respecting my acquaintance with the metaphysicians. " Had I read Eeid?" "Yes." "Brown?" "Yes." "- HumeP "Yes." " Ah ! ha ! Hume ! ! By the way, has he not something very ingenious about miracles ? Do you remember his argument ?" I stated the argument. " Ah, very ingenious, — most ingenious. And how would you answer that V I said, " I thought I could give an abstract of the reply of Campbell," and sketched in outline the reverend Doctor's argument. " And do you deem that satisfactory V said the minister. " No, not at all," I replied, " No ! no ! ! tha£s not satisfactory." " But perfectly satisfactory," I rejoined, " that such is the general partiality for the better side, that the worse argument has been received as perfectly adequate for the last sixty years." The minister s face gleamed with the broad fun that entered so largely into his composition, and the conversation shifted into other chan* nels. From that night f()rward I enjoyed perhaps more of his coi> oil, THE SIORY OF Mr EDUCATION. 393 fioeiice and conversation than any other man in his parish. Many an hour did he spend beside me in the churchyard, and many a quiet tea did I enjoy in the manse ; and I learned to know how much solid worth and true wisdom lay under the somewhat eccentric exterior of a man who sacrificed scarce anything to the conventionalities. This, with the exceptio^i of Chalmers, sublimest of Scottish preachers, — for, little as he was known, I will challenge for him that place, — was a genial man, who, for the sake of a joke, would sacrifice anything save prin- ciple ; but, though marvellously careless of maintaining intact the " gloss of the clerical enamel," never was there sincerity more genuine than his, or a more thorough honesty. Content to be in the right, he never thought of simulating it, and sacrificed even less than he ought to appearances. I may mention, that on coming to Edinburgh, I found the peculiar taste formed under the administration of Mr. Stev^art most thoroughly grati- fied under those of Dr. Guthrie ; and that in looking round the congregation, I saw, with pleasure rather than surprise, that all Mr. Stewart's people resident in Edinburgh had come to the same conclusion ; for there — sitting in the Doctor's pews — they all were. Certainly in fertility of illusti ation, in soul'Stirring evangelistic doctrine, and in a genial basis of rich numor, the resemblance between the deceased and the living minister seems complete ; but genius is always unique ; and while in breadth of popular power. Dr. Guthrie stands alone among living preachers, I have never either heard or read argument in the analogical field that m ingenuity or origin, ality equalled that of Mr. Stewart. That in which he specially excelled all the men I ever knew, was the power of detecting and establishing occult resem- blances. He seemed able to read oflT, as if by intuition, — not by snatches and fragments, but as a consecutive whole, — that old revelation of type and symbol which God first gave to man ; and when privileged to listen to him, I have been constrained to n^cognize, in the evident integrity of the reading, and the profound and consistent theological system which the pictorial rfccoid conveyed, a demonstration of the divinity of its origin, 894 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; not less powerful and convincing than the demonstrations of the other and more familiar departments of the Christian evi- dences. Compared with other theologians in this province, I have felt under his ministry as if, when admitted to the com- pany of some party of modern savans employed in decypher- ing a hieroglyphic-covered obelisk of the desert, and here suc- cessful in discovering the meaning of an insulated sign, and there of a detached symbol, we had been suddenly joined by some sage of the olden time, to whom the mysterious inscrip- tion was but a piece of common language written in a familiar alphabet, and who could read off fluently, and as a whole, what the others could but darkly guess at in detached and broker parts. To this singular power of tracing analogies there wa^ added in Mr. Stewart an ability of originating the most vivid illustrations. In some instances a s'jdden stroke produced a figure that at once illuminated the subject-matter of his dis- course, like the light of a Ian thorn flashed hastily upon a paint- ed wall ; in others he dwelt upon an illustrative picture, finish- ing it with stroke after stroke, until it filled the whole imagin- ation, and sank deep into the memory. I remember hearing him preach, on one occasion, on the return of the Jews as a people to Him whom they had rejected, and the effect which their sudden conversion could not fail to have on the unbe- lieving and Gentile world. Suddenly his language, from its high level of eloquent simplicity, became that of metaphor. " When Joseph," he said, " shall reveal himself to his breth- ren, the whole house of Pharaoh shall hear the weeping. ^^ On another occasion I heard him dwell on that vast profundity, characteristic of the scriptural revelation of God, which ever deepens and broadens the longer and more thoroughly it is ex- plored, until at length the student — struck at first by its ex pansiveness, but conceiving of it as if it were a mere measurei expansiveness — finds that it partakes of the unlimited infinity of the Divine nature itself. Naturally and simply, as if grow- ing out of the subject, like a berry-covered mistletoe out of the massy trunk of an oak, there sprung up one of his more length- tned ir.ustrations. A child bred up in the interior of the OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 895 country has been brought for the first time to the sea-shore, and carried out into the middle of one of the noble friths that indent so deeply our line of coast. And, on his return, he de^ scribes to his father, with all a child's eagerness, the wonderful expansiveness of the ocean which he had seen. He went out, ho. tells him, far amid the great waves and the rushing tides, until at length the hills seemed diminished into mere hiim- mocKS, and the wide land itself appeared along the waters but as a slim strip of blue. And then, when in mid-sea, the sailors heaved the lead ; and it w^ent down, and down, and down, — and the long line slipped swiftly away, coil after coil, till, ere the plummet rested on the ooze below, all was well nigh ex- pended. And was it not the great sea, asks the boy, that was so vastly broad, and so profoundly deep ? Ah ! my child, ex- claims the father, you have not seen aught of its greatness : you have sailed over merely one of its little arms. Had it been out into the wide ocean that the seamen had carried you, " you would have seen no shore, and you would have found no bottom." In one rare quality of the orator, Mr. Stewart stood alone among his contemporaries. Pope refers to a strange power of creating love and admiration by "just touching the brink of all we hate."" And Burke, in some of his nobler pas- sages, happily exemplifies the thing. He intensified the effect of his burning eloquence by the employment of figures so homely, — ^nay, almost so repulsive, — that the man of lower powers who ventured on their use would find them effective in but lowering his subject, and ruining his cause. I need but refer, in illustration, to the well-known figure of the disem- bowelled bird, which occurs in the indignant denial that the character of the revolutionary French in aught resembled that of the English. " We have not," says the orator, " been draw*n and trussed, in order that we may be filled, like stuffed birds in a museum, with chaff, and rags, and paltry blurred shreds of paper about the rights of man." Into this perilous but sin- gularly effective department, closed against even superior men, Mr Stewart could enter safely and at will. One of the last sermors I heard him preach, — a discourse of singular power, 18 396 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; — was on the " Sin Offering" of the Jewish economy, as mi- nutely described in Leviticus. He drew a picture of tho slaughtered animal, foul with dust and blood, and steaming, in its impurity, to the sun, as it awaited the consuming fire amid the uncleanness of ashes outside the camp^ — its throat gashed across, — its entrails laid open ; a vile and horrid thing, which no one could see without experiencing emotions of disgust, nor touch without contracting defilement. The description ppeared too painfully vivid, — its introduction too little in ac cordance with the rules of a just taste. But the master in this difficult walk knew what he was doing. And that, he said, pointing to the strongly-colored picture he had just completed, — " And THAT IS SIN." By one stroke the intended effect was produced, and the rising disgust and horror transferred from the revolting material image to the great moral evil. How could such a man pass from earth, and leave no trace behind him ? Mainly, I believe, from two several causes. As the minister of an attached provincial congregation, a sense of duty, and the promptings of a highly-intellectual nature, to w^hich exertion was enjoyment, led him to study much and deeply ; and he poured forth viva voce his full-volumed and ever-sparkling tide of eloquent idea, as freely and richly as the nightingale, unconscious of a listener, pours forth her mel- ody in the shade. But, strangely diffident of his own powers, he could not be made to believe that what so much impressed and delighted the privileged few who surrounded him, was equally suited to impress and delight the intellectual many outside ; or that he was fitted to speak through the press in tones which would compel the attention, not merely of the religious, but also of the literary world. Further, practising but little the art of elaborate composition, and master of a spoken style more effect- ive for the purposes of the pulpit than almost any written one, save that of Chalmers, he failed, in all his attemps in writing, to satisfy a fastidious taste, which he had suffered greatly to outgrow his ability of production. And so he failed to leave any adequate mark behind him. I find that for my stock of theological idea, not directly derived from Scripture, I stand OB, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 897 mure indebted to two Scotch theologians than to all other men of their profession and class. The one of these was Thomas Chalmers, — the other, Alexander Stewart : the one a name known wherever the English language is spoken; while of the other it is only remembered, and by com- paratively a few, that the impression did exist at the time of Lis death, that "A mighty spirit was eclipsed,— a power Had ;>as9ed from day to darkness, to whose hour (Xli^ t CO likeness was bequeatbed,— uo i 898 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; CHAPTER XIX. ** See yonder poor o'er-laborM wight, So abject, mean, and vile, Who begs a brother of the earth To give him leave to toil ; And see his lordy fellow-worm The poor petition spurn." Burns. Work failed me about the end of June 1828 ; a^d, acting on the advice of a friend who believed that my style of cutting in- scriptions could not fail to secure for me a good many little jobs in the churchyard of Inverness, I visited that place, and inserted a brief advertisement in one of the newspapers, so- liciting employment. I ventured to characterize my style of engraving as neat and correct ; laying especial emphasis on the correctness, as a quality not very common among the stone- cutters of the north. It was not a Scotch, but an English mason, who, when engaged, at the instance of a bereaved widower, in recording on his wife's tombstone that a " virtuous woman is a crown to her husband," corrupted the text, in his simplicity, by substituting " 5s." for the " crown.^^ But even Scotch masons do make odd enough mistakes at times, espe- cially in the provinces ; and I felt it would be something gain- ed could I but get an opportunity of showing the Inverness public that I had at least English enough to avoid the com- moner errors. My verses, thought I, are at least tolerably cor- rect : could I not get some one or two copies introduced into OR, THE STORT OF MY EDUCATION. 399 the poet's corner of the Inverness Courier or Journal^ and thus show that I have literature enough to be trusted with the cut- ting of an opitath on a gravestone 1 I had a letter of intro- duction from a friend in Cromarty to one of the ministers of the place, himself an author, and a person of influence with the proprietors of the Courier ; and, calculating on some amount of literary sympathy from a person accustomed to court the public through the medium of the press, I thought I might just venture on stating the case to him. I first, however wrote a brief address, in octo-syllabic quatrains, to the rivci which flows through the town, and gives to it its name ; — a composition which has, I find, more of the advertisement in it than is quite seemly, but which would have perhaps expressed less confidence had it been written less under the influence of a shrinking timidity, that tried to re-assure itself by words of comfort and encouragement. I was informed that the minister's hour for receiving vis- itors of the humbler class was between eleven and twelve at noon ; and, with the letter of introduction and my copy of verses in my pocket, I called at the manse, and was shown into a little narrow ante-room, furnished with two seats of deal that ran along the opposite walls. I found the place oo« cupied by some six or seven individuals, — more than half that number old withered women, in very shabby habiliments, who, as I soon learned from a conversation which they kept up in a grave under-tone, about weekly allowances, and the partialities of the session, were paupers. The others were young men, 'who had apparently serious requests to prefer anent marriage and baptism ; for I saw that one of them was ever and anon draw- ing from his breast-pocket a tattered copy of the Shorter Cate- chism, and running over the questions ; and 1 overheard an other asking his neighbor, " Who drew up the contract lines for him ?" and " Where he had got the whisky T The min- ister entered; and as he passed into the inner room, we all rose. He s-tood for a moment in the doorway, and, beckoning on one of the young men, — he of the Catechism, — they went in togetner, and the door closed. They remain closeted to- 400 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; gethor for about twenty minutes or half an hour, and then the young man went out ; and another young man, — he who had procured the contract lines and the whisky, — took his place. The interview in this second case, however, was much shorter than the first ; and a very few minutes served to despatch the business of the third young man ; and then the minister, com- ing to the doorway, looked first at the old women and then at me, as if mentally determining our respective claims to prl ority ; and mine at length prevailing, — I know not on what occult principle, — I was beckoned in. I presented my letter of introduction, which was graciously read ; and though the nature of the business did strike me as ludicrously out of keeping with the place, and it did cost me some little trouble to suppress at one time a burst of laughter, that would, of course, have been prodigiously improper in the circumstances, I detailed to him in a few words my little plan, and handed him my copy of verses. He read them aloud with slow de- liberation. ODE TO THE NESS. Child of the lake!* whose silvery gleam Cheers the rough desert, dark and lone, — A brown, deep, sullen, restless stream, With ceaseless speed thou hurriest on. And yet thy banks with flowers are gay ; The sun laughs on thy ample breast ; And o'er thy tides the zephyrs play. Though nought be thine of quiet rest Stream of the lake! to him who strays, Lonely, thy winding marge along. Not fraught with lore of other days, And yet not all unblest in song, — To him thou tell'st of busy men. Who madly waste their present day, Pursuing hopes, baseless as vain. While life, untasted, glides away. Loch Nesft OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 401 Stream of the lake! why hasten on? A boisterous ocean spreads before, Where dash dark tides, and wild winds nrioan, And foam-wreaths skirt a cheerless shore. Nor bending flowers, nor waving fields, * Nor aught of rest is there for thee ; But rest to thee no pleasure yields; Then haste and join the stormy sea I Stream of the lake ! of bloody men. Who thirst the guilty fight to try,'- Who seek for joy in mortal pain, Music in misery's thrilling cry, — Thou tell'st : peace yields no joy to them, Nor harmle-^s Pleasure's golden smile; Of evil deed the cheerless fame Is all the meed that crowns their toil. Not such would prove, — if Pleasure shone, — Stream of the deep and peaceful lake ! His course, whom Hardship urges on, Through cheerless waste and thorny brake. For, ah ! each pleasing scene he loves, And peace is all his heart's desire; And, ah ! of scenes where Pleasure roves, And Peace, could gentle minstrel tire? Stream of the lake ! for thee await The tempests of an angry main ; A brighter hope, a happier fate. He boasts, whose present course is pain. Yes, ev'n for him may death prepare A home of pleasure, peace, and love ; rhus blessed by hope, little his care, Though rough his present course may prove. The minister paused as he concluded, and looked puzzled " Pretty well, I dare say," he said ; " but I do not now read poetry. You, however, use a word that is not English, — ' Thy winding marge along.' Marge ! — what is marge V " You will find it in Johnson," I said. " Ah, but we must not ase all the words we find in Johnson." " But the poets make frequent use of it." " What poets ?" '' Spenser." " Too old, — too old : no authority now," said the minister. " But the Wartons also use it.'' '"'' I don't know the Wartons. '' " It accurs also,'' I iterated, ** in one of the m<7st finished sonnets 402 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; of Henry Kirke White." "What sonnet?" "That to the river Trent. 'Once more, O Trent! along thy pebbly marge^ A pensive invalid, reduced and [)ale, From the close sick room newly set at large, Woos to his woe-worn cheek the pleasant gale.* It is, in short, one of the common English words of the poetic vocabulary." Could a man in quest of patronage, and actual- ly at the time soliciting a favor, possibly contrive to say any- thing more imprudent? And this, too, to a gentleman so much accustomed to be deferred to when he took up his ground on the Standards, as sometimes to forget, through the sheer force of habit, that he was not a standard himself! He colored to the eyes ; and his condescending humility, which seemed, I thought, rather too great for the occasion, and was of a kind which my friend Mr. Stewart never used to exhibit, appeared somewhat ruffled. I have no acquaintance, he said, with the editor of the Courier : we take opposite sides in very important questions ; and I cannot recommend your verses to him ; but call on Mr. ; he is one of the proprietors ; and, with my compliments, state your case to him : he will be perhaps able to assist you. Meanwhile, I wish you all suc- cess. The minister hurried me out, and one of the withered old women was called in. " This," I said to myself, as I step- ped into the street, " is the sort of patronage which letters of introduction procure for one. I don't think I'll seek any more of it." Meeting on the street, however, with two Cromarty friends, one of whom was just going to call on the gentleman named by the minister, he induced me to accompany him. The other said, as he took his separate way, that, having come to visit an old townsman settled in Inverness, a man of some in- fluence in the burgh, he would state my case to him ; and he was sure he would exert himself to procure me employment. I have already referred to the remark of Burns. It is record- ed by his brother Gilbert, that the poet used often to say, ** That h« could n9t well conceive a more mortifying picture OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 405 of liuman life, than a man seeking work ;" and that the ex- quisite Dirge, * Man was made to Mourn," owes its existencb to the sentiment. The feeling is certainly a very depressing one ; and as on most other occasions work rather sought me than I the work, I experienced more of it at this time than at any other period of my life. I, of course, could hardly ex- pect that people should die off and require epitaphs merely to accommodate me. That demand of employment as a right in all cases and circumstances, which the more extreme " claims- of-labor men" do not scruple to urge, is the result of a sort of indignant re-action on this feeling, — a feeling which be- came poetry in Burns and nonsense in the Communists ; but which I experienced neither as nonsense nor poetry, but sim- ply as a depressing conviction that I was one man too many in the world. The gentleman on whom I now called with my friend was a person both of business habits and literary tastes ; but I saw that my poetic scheme rather damaged me in his estimation. The English verse produced at this time in the far north was of a kind ill fitted for the literary market, and usually published, or rather printed, — for published it never was, — by that teasing subscription scheme which so often robs men of good money, and gives them bad books in exchange ; and he seemed to set me down as one of the annoy- ing semi -beggar class; — rather a mistake, I should hope. He, however, obligingly introduced me to a gentleman of literature and science, the secretary of a society of the place, antiquarian and scientific in its character, termed the " Northern Institu- tion," and the honorary conservator of its museum, — an in- teresting miscellaneous collection, which I had previously seen, and in connection with which I had formed my only other scheme of getting into employment. I wrote that old Eng.ish hand which has been revived of late by the general rage for the medisevai, but which at that time was one of the lost arts, with much neatness ; and could produce imitations of the illuminated manuscripts that pre- ceded our printed books, which even an antiquary would have pronounced respectable. And, addressing the members of the 404: MY SCHOOLS Als'D SCHOOLMASTERS; Northen .nstitution on the character and tendency of theii pursuits, in a somewhat lengthy piece of verse, written in what I at least intended to be the manner of Dry den, as exemplified in his middle-style poems, such as the Religio Laici^ I en- grossed it in the old hand, and now called on the Secretary to request that he w^onld present it at the first meeting of the So- ciety, which was to hold, I understood, in a few days. The Secretary was busy at his desk ; but he received me politely, spoke approvingly of my work as an imitation of the old manuscript, and obligingly charged himself with its delivery at the meeting ; and so we parted for the time, not in the least aware that there was a science which dealt with characters greatly more ancient than those of the old manuscripts, and laden with profounder meanings, in which we both took a deep interest, and regarding which we could have exchanged facts and ideas with mutual pleasure and profit. The Secre- tary of the Northern Institution at this time was Mr. George Anderson, the well-known geologist, and joint author with his brother of the admirable " Guide-Book to the Highlands," which bears their name. I never heard how my address fared. It would, of course, have been tabled, — looked at, I suppose, for a few seconds by a member or two, — and then set aside ; and it is probably still in the archives of the Insti- tution, awaiting the light of future ages, when its simulated antiquity shall have become real. It was not written in a character to be read, nor, I fear, very readable in any charac- ter ; and so the members of the Institution must have remained ignorant of all the wisdom I had found in their pursuits, anti- quarian and ethnological. The following forms an averag* specimen of the production : — " 'Tis yours to trace Each deep-fixed trait that marks the human race ; -And as the Egyptian priests, with mystery fraught, B) signs, not words, of Sphynx and Horus taught, So, 'mid your stores, by things, not books, ye scan The powers and history of the mind of man. Yon chequered wall displays the arms of war Of times remote and nations distant far : OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 405 Alas! the club and brand but serve to sh( w Kow wide extends the reign of wrong and woe. Yes! all that man has framed his image bears; And much of hate, and much of pride, appears. " Pleasant it is each diverse step to scan, By which the savage first assumes the man ; To mark what feelings sway his softening breast, Or what strong passion triumphs o'er the rest. Narrow of heart, or free, or brave, or base, Ev'n in the infant we the man may trace ; And from the rude ungainly sires may know Each striking trait the polished sons shall show Dependent on what moods assume the reign, Science shall smile, or spread her stores in vain: As coward fears or generous passions sway. Shall freedom reign, or heartless slaves obey. " Not unto chance must aught of power be given,— A country's genius is the gift of Heaven. What warms the poet's lays with generous fire, To which no toil can reach, no art aspire ? Who taught the sage, with deepest wisdom fraught, While scarce one pupil grasps the ponderous though Nay, wherefore ask ? — as Heaven the mind bestows, A Napier calculates and a Tliomson glows Now turn to where, beneath the city wall, The sun's fierce rays in unbroke splendor faJl: Vacant and weak there sits the idiot boy. Of pain scarce conscious, scarce alive to joy ; A thousand busy sounds around him roar ; Trade wields the tool, and Commerce plies the oar ; But, all unheeding of the restless scene. Of toil he nothing knows, and nought of gain: The thoughts of common minds were strange to him, Ev'n as to such a Napier's thoughts would seem. Thus, as in men, in peopled states, we find Unequal powers, and varied tones of mind ; Timid or dauntless, high of thought or low, O'erwhelm'd with phlegm, or fraught with fire thcf fi^OI And as the sculptor's art is better shown In Parian marble than in porous stone, Wreaths fresh or sear'd repay refinement's toil, As genius owns or dulness stamps the soil. Where isles of coral stud the southern main. And painted kings and cinctur'd warrioiB reign. Nations there are who native worth possess, — Whom every art shall court, each science bless; And tribes there are, heavy of heart and slow- On whom no coming age a change shall know." 4:06 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; There was, I suspect, a waste of effort in all this planning ; but some men seem destined to do things clumsily and ill, at many times the expense which serves to secure success to the more adroit. I despatched my Ode to the newspaper, accom- panied by a letter of explanation ; but it fared as ill as my Address to the Institution ; and a single line in italics in the next number intimated that it was not to appear. And thus both my schemes were, as they ought to be, knocked on the head. I have not schemed any since. Strategy is, I fear, not my forte ; and it is idle to attempt doing in spite of nature what one has not been born to do well. Besides, I began to 6e seriously dissatisfied with myself: there seemed to be no- thing absolutely wrong in a man who wanted honest employ- ment taking this way of showing he was capable of it ; but I felt the spirit within rise against it ; and so I resolved to ask no more favors of any one, even should poets' corners re- main shut against me forever, or however little Institutions, literary or scientific, might favor me with their notice. I strode along the streets, half an inch taller on the strength of the resolution ; and straightway, as if to reward me for my magnanimity, an offer of employment came my way unsolic- ited. I was addressed by a recruiting serjeant of a High- land regiment, who asked me if I did not belong to the Aird ? " No, not to the Aird ; to Cromarty," I replied. " Ah. to Cromarty, — very fine place! But would you not better bid adieu to Cromarty, and come along with me ? We have a capital grenadier company ; and in our regiment a stout steady man is always sure to get on." I thanked him, but declined his invitation ; and, with an apology on his part, which was not in thfc least needed or expected, we parted. Though verse and old English failed me, the simple state- ment made by my Cromarty friend to my townsman located in Inverness, that I was a good workman, and wanted work, procured me at once the cutting of an inscription, and two little jobs in Cromarty besides, which I was to execute on my return home. The Inverness job was soon completed ; but I had the n*^ar prospect of another ; and as the little bit of the public that came my way approved of my cutting, I trusted OKj THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 407 employment would flow in apace. I lodged with a worthy old widow, conscientious and devout, and ever doing her hum- ble work consciously in the eye of the Great Taskmaster, — • one of a class of persons not at all so numerous in the world as might be desirable, but sufficiently common to render it rather a marvel that some of our modern masters of fiction should never have chanced — judging from their writings — to come in contact with any of them. She had an only son. a working cabinetmaker, who used occasionally to annoy her by his silly jokes at serious things, and who was courting at this time a sweetheart who had five hundred pounds in the bank, — an immensely large sum to a man in his circumstances. He had urged his suit with such apparent success, that the marriage-day was fixed and at hand, and the house which he had engaged as his future residence fully furnished. And it was his prospective brother-in-law who was to be my new employer, so soon as the wedding should leave him leisure enough to furnish epitaphs for two tombstones recently placed in the family burying-ground. The wedding-day arrived; and, to be out of the way of the bustle and the pageant, I re- tired to the house of a neighbor, a carpenter, whom I had obliged by a few lessons in practical geometry and architec- tural drawing. The carpenter was at the wedding ; and, with the whole house to myself, I was engaged in writing, when up flew the door, and in rushed my pupil the carpenter. " What has happened ?" I asked. " Happened !" said the carpenter, — " Happened ! ! The bride's away with another man ! ! The bi'idegroom has taken to his bed, and raves like a madman ; and his poor old mother — good honest woman — is crying like a child. Do come, and see what can be done." I accompa- nied him to my landlady's, where I found the bridegroom in a paroxysm of mingled grief and rage, congratulating himself on his escape, and bemoaning his unhappy disappointment, by turns. He lay athwart the bed, which he told me in the morn- ing he had quitted for the last time ; but as I entered, he half rose, and, seizing on a pair of new shoes which had been prepared for the bride, and lay on a table beside him, he 408 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; hurled them against the wall, first the one and then the (diuT until they came rebounding hack across the room ; and then, with an exclamation that need not be repeated, he dashed himself down again. I did my best to comfort his poor mother, who seemed to feel very keenly the slight done to her son, and to anticipate with dread the scandal and gossip of which it would render her humble household the subject. She seemed sensible, however, that he had made an escape, and at once icquiesced in my suggestion, that all that should now be done would be to get every expense her son had been at in his prep- arations for housekeeping and the wedding, transferred to the shoulders of the other party. And such an arrangement could, I thought, be easily effected through the bride's brother, who seemed to be a reasonable man, and who would be aware also that a suit at law could be instituted in the case against his sister ; though in any such suit I held it might be best for both parties not to engage. And at the old woman's request, I set out with the carpenter to wait on the bride's brother, in order to see whether he was not prepared for some such arrangement as I suggested, and, besides, able to furnish us with some ex- planation of the extraordinary step taken by the bride. We were overtaken, as we passed along the street, by a person who was, he said, in search of us, and who now re- quested us to accompany him ; and, threading our way, undei his guidance, through a few narrow lanes that traverse the as- semblage of houses on the west bank of the Ness, we stopped at the door of an obscure alehouse. This, said our conductor, we have found to be the retreat of the bride. He ushered us into a room occupied by some eight or ten persons, drawn up on the opposite sides, with a blank space between. On the one side sat the bride, a high-colored, buxom young girl, se- rene and erect as Britannia on the halfpennies, and guarded by two stout fellows, masons or slaters apparently, iu theii working dresses. They looked hard at the carpenter and me as we entered, of course regarding us as the assailants against whom they would have to maintain their prize. On the other side sat a group of the bride's relatives, — among the rest hei OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 409 brother, — silent, and all apparently very much grieved ; while in the space between them there stumped up and down a lame, sallow-complexioned oddity, in shabby black, who seemed to be making a set oration, to which no one replied, about the sacred claims of love, and the cruelty of interfering with the affections of young people. Neither the carpenter nor myself felt any inclination to debate with the orator, or fight with the guards, or yet to interfere with the affections of the young lady ; and so, calling out the brother into another room, and expressing our regret at what had happened, we stated our ease, and found him, as we had expected, very reasonable. We could not, however, treat for the absent bridegroom, nor could he engage for his sister ; and so we had to part without coming to any agreement. There were points about the case which at first I could not understand. My jilted acquaintance the cabinetmaker had not only enjoyed the countenance of all his mistress's relatives, but he had been also as well re ceived by herself as lovers usually are : she had written him kind letters, and accepted of his presents ; and then, just as her friends were sitting down to the marriage-breakflist, she had eloped with another man. The other man, however, — a handsome fellow, but great scamp, — had a prior claim to her regards : he had been the lover of her choice, though detested by her brother and all her friends, who were sufficiently well acquainted with his character to know that he would land her in ruin ; and during his absence in the country, where he was working as a slater, they had lent their influence and counte- nance to my acquaintance the cabinetmaker, in order to get her married to a comparatively safe man, out of the slater'^ reach. And, not very strong of will, she had acquiesced in the arrangement. On the eve of the marriage, however, the slater had come into town ; and, exchanging clothes with an ao- quaintance, a Highland soldier, he had walked unsuspected opposite her door, until, finding an opportunity of conversing with her on the morning of the wedding-day, he had repre- sented her new lover as a silly, ill-shaped fellow, who had just head enough \o be mercenary, and himself as one of the mosV ilO MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; devoted and disconsolate of lovers. And, his soft tongue and fine leg gaining the day, she had left the marriage guests to enjoy their tea and toast without her, and set off with him to the change-house. Ultimately the affair ended ill for all parties. I lost my job, for I saw no more of the bride's brother ; the wrong-headed cabinetmaker, contrary to the ad vice of his mother and her lodger, entered into a lawsuit, in which he got small damages and much vexation ; and tht slater and his mistress broke out into such a course of dissi pation after becoming man and wife, that they and the five hundred pounds came to an end almost together. Shortly after, my landlady and her son quitted the country for the United States. So favorably had the poor woman impressed me as one of the truly excellent, that I took a journey from Cromarty to Inverness — a distance of nineteen miles — to bid her farewell ; but I found, on my arrival, her house shut up, and learned that she had left the place for some sailing port on the west coast two days before. She was a humble washer- woman ; but I am convinced that in the other world, which she must have entered long ere now, she ranks considerably higher. I waited on in Inverness, in the hope that, according to Burns, " my brothers of the earth would give me leave to toil ;" but the hope was a vain one, as I succeeded in procuring no second job. There was no lack, however, of the sort of em- ployment which I could cut out for myself; but the remunera- tion — only now in the process of being realized, and that very slowly — had to be deferred to a distant day. I had to give more than twelve years credit to the pursuits that engaged me ; and as my capital was small, it was rather a trying matter tc be " kept so long out of my wages." There is a wonderful group of what are now termed osars, in the immediate neigh- borhood of Inverness, — a group to which the Queen of Scottish Tomhans, the picturesque Tomnahuirich, belongs, and to the ex- amination of which I devoted several days. But I learned only to state the difficulty which they form, not to solve it ; and now that Agassiz had promulgated his glacial theory, and that traces ORj THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 411 of the great ice agencies have been detected all over Scotland, the mystery of the osars remains a mystery still. I succeed- ed, however, in determining at this time, that they belong to ft later period than the boulder clay, which I found underlying the great gravel formation of which they form a part, in a sec- tion near Loch Ness that had been laid open shortly before, in excavating for the great Caledonian Canal. And as all, or almost all, the shells of the boulder clay are of species that still live, we may infer that the mysterious osars were formed not very long ere the introduction upon our planet of the in quisitive little creature that has been puzzling himself — hith- erto at least with no satisfactory result — in attempting to ac- count for their origin. I examined, too, with some care, the old-coast line, so well developed in this neighborhood as to form one of the features of its striking scenery, and which must be regarded as the geological memorial and representative of those latter ages of the world in which the human epoch im- pinged on the old Pre-Adamite periods. The magistrates of the place were engaged at the time in doing their duty, like sensible men, as they were, in what I could not help thinking a somewhat barbarous instance. The neat, well-proportioned, fery uninteresting jail-spire of the burgh, about which, in its integrity, no one cares anything, had been shaken by an earth- quake, which took place in the year 1816, into one of the great- est curiosities in the kingdom. The earthquake, which, for a Scotch one, had been unprecedentedly severe, especially in the line of the great Caledonian Valley, had, by a strange vorticose motion, twisted round the spire, so that, at the transverse line of displacement, the panes and corners of the octagonal broach which its top formed, overshot their proper positions fully seven inches. The corners were carried into nearly the middle of the panes, as if some gigantic hand, in attempting to twirl round the building by the spire, as one twirls round a spin- ning-top by the stalk or bole, had, from some failure in the cohere icy of the masonry, succeeded in turning round only the part of which he had laid hold. Sir Charles Lyell figures, ir his " Principles," similar shifts in the stones of two obelisks 412 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; in a Calabrian convent, and subjoins the ingenious suggestion on the subject of Messrs. Darwin and Mallet. And here was there a Scotch example of the same sort of ingenious pheno- mena, not less curious than the Calabrian one and certainly unique in its character as Scotch, which, though the injured building had already stood twelve years in its displaced con- dition, and might stand for as many more as the hanging tcwer of Piba, the magistrates were laboriously effacing at the f jtpense of the burgh. They were completely successful, t(/0 ; And the jail-spire was duly restored to its state of original in- significance, as a fifth-rate piece of ornamental masonry. But how very absurd, save, mayhap, here and there to a geolo- gist, must not these remarks appear ! But my criticisms on the magistracy, however foolish, were silent criticisms, and did harm to no one. About the time, however, in which I was indulging in them, I imprudently ex- posed myself, by one of those impulsive acts of which men re- pent at their leisure, to criticisms not silent, and of a kind that occasionally do harm. I had been piqued by the rejection of my verses on the Ness. True, I had no high opinion of their merit, — deeming them little more than equal to the average verses of provincial prints; but then I had intimated my scheme of getting them printed to a few Cromarty friends, and was now weak enough to be annoyed at the thought that my towns folk would regard me as an incompetent blockhead, who could not write rhymes good enough for a new^spaper. And so I rashly determined on appealing to the public in a small vol ume. Had I known as much as in an after-period about newspaper affairs, and the mode in which copies of verses are often dealt with by editors and their assistants, — fatigued with nonsense, and at once hopeless of finding grain in the enor^ mous heaps of chaff submitted to them, and too much occu- pied tc seek for it. even should they believe in its occurrence in the form of single seeds sparsely scattered, — 1 would have thought less of the matter. As the case was, howe^^er, I hasti \y collected from among my piles of manuscripts soine fifteen ^r t\wen^y pieces in verse, wrHten chiefly during the preceding ORj THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 413 six years, and put them into the hands of the printer of the Inverness Courier. It would have been a greatly wiser act, as I soon came to see, had I put them into the fire instead ; but my choice of a printing office secured to me at least one ad- vantage, — it brought me acquainted with one of the ablest and most accomplished of Scottish editors, — the gentleman who now owns and still conducts the Courier ; and, besides, having once crossed the Rubicon, I felt all my native obstinacy stirred up to make good a position for myself, despite of failure and reverses on the further side. It is an advantage in some cases to be committed. The clear large type of the Courier office did, however, show me many a blemish in my verse that had escaped me before, and broke off associations which — curious- ly linked with the manuscripts — had given to the stanzas and passages which they contained charms of tone and color not their own. I began to find, too, that my humble accomplish- ment of verse was too narrow to contain my thinking ; — the thinking ability had been growing, but not the ability of po- etic expression; nay, much of the thinking seemed to be of a kind not suited for poetic purposes at all ;— and though it was of course far better that I should come to know this in time, than that, like some, even superior men, I should persist in wasting, in inefficient verse, the hours in which vigorous prose might be produced, it was at least quite mortifying enough to make the discovery with half a volume of metre committed to type, and in the hands of the printer. Resolving, however, that my humble name should not appear in the title page, I went on with my volume. My new friend the editor kindly inserted, from time to time, copies of its verses in the columns of his paper, and strove to excite some degree of interest and expectation regarding it ; but my recent discovery had thor- oughly sobered me, and I awaited the publication of my vol- ume not much elated by the honor done me, and as little san- guine respecting its ultimate success as well might be. And ere I quitted Inverness, a sad bereavement, which greatly nar- rowed the circle of my best-loved friends, threw very much into the back-ground all my thoughts regarding it. 414: MY SCHOOLS .iND SCHOOLMASTERS; On quitting Cromarty, I had left my uncle James laborini^ under an attack of rheumatic fever ; but though he had just entered his grand climacteric, he was still a vigorous and ac- tive man, and I could not doubt that he had strength of con- stitution enough to throw it off. He had failed to rally, how ever : and after reti rning one evening from a long exploratory- walk, I found in my lodgings a note awaiting me, intimating his death. The blow fell with stunning effect. Ever since the death of my father, my two uncles had faithfully occupied his place ; and James, of a franker and less reserved temper than Alexander, and more tolerant of my boyish follies, had, though I sincerely loved the other, laid stronger hold of my affections. He was of a genial disposition, too, that always re- mained sanguine in the cast of its hopes and anticipations ; and he had unwittingly flattered my vanity by taking me pretty much at my own estimate, — overweeningly high, of course, like that of almost all young men, but mayhap necessary, in the character of a force, to make headway in the face of obstruc- tion and difficulty. Uncle James, like Le Balafre in the novel, would have " ventured his nephew against the wight Wallace." I immediately set out for Cromarty ; and, curious as it may seem, found grief so companionable, that the four hours which I spent by the way seemed hardly equal to one. I retained, however, only a confused recollection of my journey, remem- bering little more than that, w^hen passing at midnight along the dreary Maollbuie, I saw the moon in her wane, rising red and lightless out of the distant sea ; and that, lying, as it were, prostrate on the horizon, she reminded me of some o'er match ed wrestler thro wn helplessly on the ground. On reaching home, I found my mother, late as the hour was, Btill up, and engaged in making a dead-dress for the body. ^* There is a letter from the south, with a black seal, awaiting you," she said ; " I fear you have also lost your friend Wil- liam Ross." I opened the letter, and found her surmise too well founded. It was a farewell letter, written in feeble char- acters, but in no feeble spirit ; and a brief postscript, added by a ^mrade, intimated the death of the writer. "This/' OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. *J6 wrote the dying man, with a hand fast forgetting its cunning, " is, to all human probability, my last letter ; but the thought gives me little trouble ; for my hope of salvation is in the blood of Jesus. Farewell, my sincerest friend !" There is a provision through which nature sets limits to both physical and mental suffering. A man partially stunned by a violent blow is sometimes conscious that it is followed by other blows, rather from seeing than from feeling them : his capacity of suffering has been exhausted by the first ; and the others that fall upon him, though they may injure, fail to pain. And so also it is with strokes that fall on the affections. In other cir- cumstances I would have grieved for the death of my friend, but my mind was already occupied to the full by the death of ny uncle; and though I saw the new stroke, several days elapsed ere / could feel it. My friend, after half a lifetime of decline, had sunk suddenly. A comrade who lived with him — a stout, florid lad — had been seized by the same insidious malady as his own, about a twelvemonth before ; and, pre- viously unacquainted with sickness, in him the progress of the disease had been rapid, and his sufferings were so great, that he was incapacitated for work several months before his death. But my poor friend, though sinking at the time, wrought for both : he was able to prosecute his employments, — which, ac- cording to Bacon, " required rather the finger than the arm," — in even the latter stages of his complaint ; and after support- ing and tending his dying comrade till he sank, he himself suddenly broke down and died. And thus perished, unknown and in the prime of his days, a man of sterling principle and fine genius. I found employment enough for the few weeks which still remained of the working season of this year, in hewing a tombstone for my Uncle James, on which I inscrib- ed an epitaph of a few lines, that had the merit of being true. It characterized the deceased — " James Wright" — as " an hon- est, warm-hearted man, who had the happiness of living with- out reproach, and of iying without fear." 416 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEBS : CHAPTER XX. ** This while my notion's ta'en a sklent, To try my fate in guid black prent ; But still the mair I'm that way bent, Something cries, Hoolie ! I red you, honest man, tak' tent ; Ye'U shaw your folly." Burns Mr vol ime of verse passed but slowly through the press ; and as I had begun to look rather ruefully forward to its appearance, there was no anxiety evinced on my part to urge it on. At length, however, all the pieces were thrown into type ; and I followed them up by a tail-piece in prose, formed somewhat on the model of the preface of Pope, — for I was a great admirer at the time of the English written by the " wits of the reign of Queen Anne," — in which I gave serious expression to the suspicion that, as a writer of verse, I had mistaken my vocation. ** It is more than possible," I said, " that I have completely failed in poetry. It may appear that, while grasping at originality of description and se'jiiraent and striving to attain propriety of expression, I have only been depicting com- mon images, and embodying obvious thoughts, and this," too, in inelegant lan- guage. Yet even in this case, though d'sappoinled, I shall not be without ray Bources of comfort. The pleasure which I enjoy in composing verses is quite Inlependeut of other men's opinions of them ; and I expect to feel as happy as ever in this amusement, even though assured that others could find no pleas- ure in reading what I had found so much in writing. It is no small solace to •eflect, that the fab^e of the dog and shadow cannot apply to me, since my pre- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOI!^. 417 diiection for poetry has not prevented me from acquiring the skill of at least th« common mechanic. I am not more ignorant of masonry and architecture than many professors of these arts who never measured a stanza. Ttiere is also some satisfaction in reflecting that, unlike some would-be satirists, I have not assail- ed private character, and ;hat though men may deride me as an unskilful poet, they cannot justly detest me as a bad or ill-natured man. Nay, I shall possibly have the pleasure of repaying those who may be merry at my expense, in their own coin. An ill-conditioned critic is always a more pitiable sort of person than an unsuccessful versifier; and the desire of showing one's own discernment at the expense of one's neighbor, a greatly worse thing than the simple wish, however divorced from the ability, of aflx)rding him harmless pleasure. Further, it would think, not be difficult to show that my mistake in supposing myself to be a poet is not a whit more ridiculous, and infinitely less mischievous, than many of those into which myiiads of my fellow-men are falling every day. I have «een the vicious attempting to teach morals, and the weak to unfold mysteries. t have seen men set up for freethinkers who were born not to think at all. To cone'ude, there will surely be cause for self-gratulation in reflecting that, by be- coming an author, 1 have only lost a few pounds, not gained the reputation of being % mean fellow, who had teased all his acquaintance until they had sub- scribed lor a worthless book; and that the severest remark of the severesk critic can only be, * a certain anonymous rhymer is no poet.' " As, notwithstanding the blank in the title page, the au- thorship of my volume would be known in Cromarty and its neighborhood, I set myself to see whether I could not, meanwhile, prepare for the press something better suited to make an impression in my favor. In tossing the bar or throwing the stone, the competitor who begins with a rather indifferent cast is never very unfavorably judged if he immediately mend it by giving a better ; and I resolv- ed on mending my cast, if I could, by writing for the In- verness Courier — which w^as now open to me, through the Kindness of the editor — a series of carefully prepared let- ters on some popular subject. In the days of Goldsmith, the herring-fishing employed, as he tells us In one of his essays, "all Grub Street." In the north of Scotland this fishery was a popular theme little more than twenty years ago. The welfare of whole communities depended in no slight degree on its success : it formed the basis of mary a calculation, and the subject of many an investment; and it was all the more suitable for mv Durpose from the circum- 418 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; stance that there was no Grub Street in that part of ttm world 10 employ itself about. It was, in at least all its better aspects, a fresh subject; and I deemed myself more thoroughly acquainted with it than at least most of the men who were skilful enough, as litterateurs^ to communi- cate their knowledge in writing. I knew the peculiarities of fishermen as a class, and the effects of this special branch of their profession on their character : I had seen them pursuing their employments amid the sublime of na. ture, and had occasionally taken a share in their work ; and, further, I was acquainted with not a few antique traditions of the fishermen of other ages, in which, as in the narra- tives of most seafaring men, there mingled with a certain amount of real incident, curious snatches of the supernatu ral. In short, the subject was one on which, as I knew a good deal regarding it that was not generally known, I was in some degree qualified to write; and so I occupied my leisure in casting my facts respecting it into a series of let- ters, of which the first appeared in the Courier a fortnight after my volume of verse was laid on the tables of the north- country booksellers. I had first gone out to sea to assist in catching herrings about ten years before ; and I now described, in one of my letters, as truthfully as I could, those features of the scene to which I had been introduced on that occasion, which had struck me as novel and peculiar. And what had been strange to me proved equally so, I found, to the readers of the Courier. My letters attracted attention, and were republished in my behalf by the proprietors of the paper, " in consequence," said my friend the editor, in a note which he kindly attached to the pamphlet which they formed " of the interest they had excited in the northern counties.' Their modicum of success, lowly as was their subject, com pared with that of some of my more ambitious verses, taught me my proper course. Let it be my business, I said, to know what is not generally known ; — let me qual- ify myself to stand as an interpreter between nature and the OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 419 public : while I strive to narrate as pleasingly, and describe as vividly, as I can, let truth, not fiction, be my walk ; and if I succeed in uniting the novel to the true, in prov- inces of more general interest than the very humble one in which I have now partially succeeded, I shall succeed also in establishing myself in a position which, if not lofty, will yield me at least more solid footing than that to which I might attain as a mere litterateur^ who, mayhap, pleased for a little, but added nothing to the general fund. The resolution was, I think, a good one; — would that it had been better kept! The following extracts may serve to show that, humble as my new subject may be deemed, it gave considerable scope for description of a kind not often associated with herrings, even when they employed all Grub Street : — ** Aa the nigbt gradually darkened, the sky assumed a dead and leaden hue ; the sea, roughened by the rising breeze, retlecled its deeper hues with an intensity ap- proaching to black, and seemed a dark uneven pavement, that absorbed every ray of the remaining light. A calm silvery patch, some fifteen or twenty yards in extent, came moving slowly through the black. It seemed merely a patch of water coated with oil ; but, obedient to some other moving power than that of either tide or wind, it sailed aslant our line of buoys, a stone-cast from our bows, — lengthened Itself along the line to thrice its former extent, — paused as if for a moment, — and then three of the buoys, after erecting themselves on their nar- rower base, with a sudden jerk, slowly sank. 'One— two — three buoys!' ex- daimed one of the fishermen, reckoning them as they disappeared ; — there are ten barrels for us secure.' A few moments were sulTered to elapse; and then, unfix- ing the haulser from the stem, and bringing it aft to the stern, we commenced hauling. The nets approached the gunwale. The first three appeared, from the phosphoric light of the water, as if bursting into flames of a pale green color. Here and there a herring glittered bright in the meshes, or went darting awaj through the pitchy darkness, visible for a moment by its own light. The fourth net was brighter than any of the others, and glittered through the waves while il was yet several fathoms away; the pale green seemed as if mingled with broker meets of snow, that — flickering amid the mass of light— appear ed, with every tug (riven by the fishermen, to shift, dissipate, and again form ; and there streamed from it into the surrounding gloom myriads of green rays, an instant seen and then iost,— the retreating fish that had avoided the meshes, but had lingered, until dis- turbed, beside their eiitaniiled companions. It contained a considerable body of lierrings. As we raised them over the gunwale, they felt warm to the hand, for in the middle of a large shoal f^ven the temperature of the water is raised,— a fact well iLDown to every herring fisherman; and in shaking them out of the mesheti 19 4:20 MY SCHOOLS AND SOHOOLMASTEKS ; Ihe ear became sensible of a shrill, chirping sound, like that of ne monao, bat much fainter, — a ceaseless cheep, cheep, cheep, occasioned apparently— for no Inw fish is furnished with organs of sound — by a sudden e3ca~>e ''"or^ the air-bladder. The shoal, a small one, had spread over only three of the nets,— the three whose buoys had so suddenly disappeared ; and most of the others had but their more sprinkling of fish, some dozen or two in a net ; but so thickly had they lain in ihe foitunate three, that the entire haul consisted of rather more than twelve barrels. »Ve started up about midnight, and saw an open sea, as before; but the seen;; ha I considerably changed since we had lain down. The breeze had died into a calna ; Jhe heavens, no longer dark and gray, were glowing with stars; and the sea, froia the smoothness of the surface, appeared a second sky, as bright and starry as the other; with this ditference, however, that all its stars seemed to be comets: the gh'ghtly tremulous motion of the surface elongated the reflected images, and gave to each its tail. There was no visible line of division at the horizon. Where the h'Us rose high along the coast, and appeared as if doubled by their undulating strip of shadow, what might be deemed a dense bank of cloud lay sleeping in the heav- ens, just where the upper and nether firmaments met; but its presence rendered the illusion none the less complete: the outline of the boat lay dark around us, Jke the fragment of some broken planet suspended in middle space, far from the earth and every star; and all around we saw extended the complete sphere, — un- hidden above from Orion to the Pole, and visible beneath from the Tole to Orion. Certainly ^ub]ime scenery possesses in itself no virtue potent enough to develop the faculties, or the mind of the fisherman would not have so long lain asleep. There is no profession whose recollections should rise into purer poetry than his; but if the mirror bear not its previous amalgam of taste and genius, what does r. matter though the scene which sheds up« sory than those which associate— as if they existed in the relation of cause and effect —some piece of striking scenery with some sudden development of the intellect oi imagination. The eyes open, and there is an external beauty seen ; but it is not Ui* external beauty that has opened the eyes. "11 was still a dead calm,— calm to blackness; when, in about an hour aflei sunrise, what seemed like fitful airs began to |)lay on the surface, imparting to it, In irregular i)atches, a tint of gray. First one patch would form, then a sec4)nd )eside it, then a third, and then for miles around, the surface, el*e so silvery, woulJ ieem frosted over with gray : the apparent breeze appeared as if propaf keeping, but black and brittle as coal. Beneath this layer of soil lay a thin deposit of the stratified gravel of what *s now known as the later glacial period, — the age ofo^ats and ^0 MY SCHOLS AND moraines ; and beneath all — for the underlying Old Red Sand- Btone of the district is not exposed amid the level wastes of Culbin — rested the boulder clay, the memorial of a time of submergence, when Scotland sat low in the sea as a wintry archipelago of islands, brushed by frequent icebergs, and when sub-arctic molluscs lived in her sounds and bays. A section of a few feet in vertical extent presented me with four distinct periods. There was, first, the period of the sand-flood, repre- sented by the bar of pale sand ; then, secondly, the period of cultivation and human occupancy, represented by the dark plough-furrowed belt of hardened soil ; thirdly, there was the gravel ; and, fourthly, the clay. And that shallow section ex- hausted the historic ages, and more ; for the double band of gravel and clay belonged palpably to the geologic ages, ere man had appeared on our planet. There had been found in the locality, only a few years previous to this time, a considerable number of stone arrow-heads, — some of them only partially finished, and some of them marred in the making, as if some fletcher of the stone-age had carried on his work on the spot ; and all these memorials of a time long anterior to the first beginnings of history in the island were restricted to the stratum of hardened mould. I carried on my researches in this — what I may term the chronological — direction, in connection with the old-coast line, which, as I have already said, is finely developed in the neighborhood of Cromarty on both sides of the Frith, and represented along the precipices of the Sutors by its line of deep caves, into which the sea never now enters. And it, too, pressed upon me the fact of the amazing antiquity of the globe. I found that the caves hollowed by the surf, when the sea had stood from fifteen to five-and-twenty feet above its present level, or, as I should perhaps rather say, when the land had stood that much lower, were deeper, on the average, by about one-third, than those caves of the present coast-line that are still in the course of being hollowed by the waves. And yet the waves have been breaking against the present coast- line during the whole of the historic period. The ancient OK, THE STOliY DF MY EDUCATION. 441 wall of Antoninus, which stretched between the Eriths of Forth and Clyde, was built at its terminations with reference to the existing levels ; and ere Coesar landed in Britain, St. Michael's Mount was connected with the mainland, as now, by a narrow neck of beach laid bare by the ebb, across which, according to Diodorus Siculus, the Cornish miners used to drive, at low water, their carts laden with tin. If the sea has stood for two thousand six hundred years against the present coast-line^ ■ — and no geologist w^ould fix his estimate of the term lower, — then must it have stood against the old line, ere it could have excavated caves one-third deeper than the modern ones, three thousand nine hundred years. And both sums united more than exhaust the Hebrew chronology. Yet what a mere beginning of geologic history does not the epoch of the old- coast line form ! It is but a starting point from the recent pe- riod. Not a single shell seems to have become extinct during the last six thousand years. The organisms which I found deeply imbedded in the soil beneath the old-coast line were exactly those which still live in our seas ; and I have been since told by Mr. Smith of Jordanhill, one of our highest authorities on the subject, that he detected only three shells of the period with which he was not familiar as existing forms, and that he subsequently met with all three, in his dredging expeditions, still alive. The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us : they do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond. Dr. Chalmers had taught, more than a quarter of a century previous to this time, that the Scriptures do not fix the antiquity of the earth. " If they fix anything," he said, '' it is only the antiquity of the human species." The Doctor, though not practically a geologist at the time, had shrewdly weighed both the evidence adduced and the scientific character of the men who adduced it, and arrived at a conclusion, in consequence, which may now. be safely regarded as the final one. I, on the other hand, who knew comparatively little about the standing of the geologists, or the weight which ought to attach to their testimony, based 442 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; my findings regarding the vast antiquity of the earth on ex Bctly the data on which they had founded theirs ; and the more my acquaintance with the geologic deposits has since extend- ed, the firmer have my convictions on the subject become, and the more pressing and inevitable have I felt the ever-growing demand for longer and yet longer periods for their format'ion. As certainly as the sun is the centre of our system, must our earth have revolved around it for millions of years. An American theologian, the author of a little book entitled the ''Epoch of Creation," in doing me the honor of referring to my convictions on this subject, states, that I " betray indubi- table tokens of being spell-bound to the extent of infatuation, by the foregone conclusion of" my " theory concerning the high antiquity of the earth, and the succession of animal and vege- table creations." He adds further, in an eloquent sentence, a page and a half long, that had I first studied and credited my Bible, I would have failed to believe in successive creations and the geologic chronology. I trust, however, I may say I did first study and believe my Bible. But such is the structure of the human mind, that, save when blinded by passion or warped by prejudice, it must yield an involuntary consent to the force of evidence ; and I can now no more refuse believing, in op- position to respectable theologians such as Mr. Granvtlle Penn, Professor Moses Stuart, and Mr. Eliezar Lord, that the earth is of an antiquity incalculably vast, than I can refuse believing, in opposition to still more respectable theologians, such as St. Augustine, Lactantius, and Turretin, that it has antipodes, and moves round the sun. And further, of this, men such as the Messrs. Penn, Stuart, and Lord may rest assured, that w^hat I believe in this matter now, all theologians, even the weakest, will be content to believe fifty years hence. Sometimes a chance incident taught me an interesting geo logical lesson. At the close of the year 1830, a tremendous hurricane from the south and west, unequalled in the north of Scotland, from at least the time of the great hurricane of Christmas ISOG, blew down in a single hour four thousand full- grown trees on the Hill of Cromarty. The vast gaps and ave- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 443 nues which it opened in the wood above could be seen from the town ; and no sooner had it began to take off than I set out for the scene of its ravages. I had previously witnessed, from a sheltered hollow of the old-coast line, the extraordinary ap- pearance of the sea. It would seem as if the very violence of the wind had kept down the waves. It brushed off their tops as they were rising, and swept along the spray in one dense cloud, white as driving snow, that rose high into the air as i receded from the shore, and blotted out along the horizon the line between sky and water. As I approached the wood, I met two poor little girls of from eight to ten years, coming running and crying along the road in a paroxysm of constei*-- nation ; but, gathering heart on seeing me, they stood to tell that when the storm was in its worst, they were in the midst of the falling trees. Setting out for the Hill on the first rising of the wind, in the expectation of a rich harvest of withered boughs, they had reached one of its most exposed ridges just as the gale had attained to its extreme height, and the trees began to crash down around them. Their little tear- bestained countenances still continued to show how extreme the agony of their terror had been. They would run, they said, for a few paces in one direction, until some huge pine would come roaring down, and block up their path ; when, turning with a shriek, they would run for a few paces in another ; and then, terrified by a similar interruption, again strike off in a third. At length, after passing nearly an hour in the ex- tremest peril, and in at least all the fear which the circum- stances justified, they succeeded in making their way unhurt to the outer skirts of the wood. Bewick would have found in the incident the subject of a vignette that would have told its own story. In getting into the thick of the trees, I was struck by the extraordinary character of the scene presented. In some places, greatly more than half their number lay stretched upon the ground. On the more exposed prominences of the Hill, scarce a tree was left standing for acres together : they covered the slopes, tree stretched over tree, like tiles on a roof, with here aud there some shattered trunk whose k>p had been blown ofl, 20 i44 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS : and carried by the hurricane some fifteen or twenty yard away, leaning in sad ruin over its fallen comrades. Wha^ however, formed the most striking, because less expected, part* (»f the scene, were the tall walls of turf that stood up every- where among the fallen trees, like the ruins of dismantled cot- tages. The granitic gneiss of the Hill is covered by a thick do- posil of the red boulder clay of the district, and the clay, in tuiii, hy a thin layer of vegetable mould, interlaced in every direction by the tree roots, which, arrested in their downward progress by the stiff clay, are restricted to the upper layer. And, save where here and there I found some tree snapped across in the midst, or divested of its top, all the others had yielded at ^;ho line between the boulder clay and the soil, and had torn up, as they fell, vast walls of the felted turf, from fifteen to t;wenty feet in length, by from ten to twelve feet in height. There were quite enough of these walls standing up among the pros- trate trees, to have formed a score of the eastern Saltan's ruined villages ; and they imparted to the scene one of its strangest features. I have mentioned in an early chapter that the Hill had its dense thickets, which, from the gloom that brooded in I heir recesses even at mid-day, were known to the boys of the neighboring town as the " dungeons." They had now fared, however, in this terrible overturn, like dungeons elsewhere in times of revolution, and were all swept away ; and piles of pros- irate trees — in some instances ten or twelve in a single heap — marked where they had stood. In several localities, where ihey fell over swampy hollows, or w^here deep-seated springs t ame gushing to the light, I found the water partially danimed up, and saw that, were they to be left to cumber the ground a^ the debris of forests destroyed by hurricanes in the earlier ages of Scottish history would certainly have been left, the deep shade and the moisture could not have failed to induce a total change in the vegetation. I marked, too, the fallen trees all lying one way, in the direction of the wind ; and the thought at once struck me, that in this recent scene of devastation I had the ori s}n of full one half of our Scottish mosses exemplified. Some jf the mosses of the south date from the times of Rcunan hi OB, THE BTOnr OF MY EDUCATION. 446 Vasion. Their lower tiers of trunk bear the mark of the Ro- man axe, and, in some instances, the sorely wasted axe itself — a narrow, oblong tool, somewhat resembling that of the American backwoodsman — has been found sticking in the bur- ied stump. Some of our other mosses are of still more mod- ern origin : there exist Scottish mosses that seem to have been formed when Robert the Bruce felled the woods and wasted ♦^^he country of John of Lorn. But of the others, not a few have palpably owed their origin to violent hurricanes, such as Ihe one which on this occasion ravaged the Hill of Cromarty. The trees which form their lower stratum are broken across, or torn up by the roots, and their trunks all lie one way. Much of the interest of a science such as geology must consist in the ability of making dead deposits represent living scenes ; and from this hurricane I was enabled to conceive, pictorially, if I may so express myself, of the origin of those comparatively recent deposits of Scotland which, formed almost exclusively of vegetable matter, contain, with rude works of art, and oc- casional remains of the early human inhabitants of the coun- try, skeletons of the wolf, the bear, and the beaver, with horns of the hos primigenius and bos longifrons^ and of a gigando variety of red deer, unequalled in size by animals of the same species in these later ages. Occasionally I was enabled to vivify in this way even tho ancient deposits of the Lias, with their vast abundance of cephalopodous mollusca, — belemnites, ammonites, and nautili. My friend of the Cave had become parish schoolmaster of Nigg ; and his hospitable dwelling furnished me with an ex- cellent centre for exploring the geology of the parish, especial- ly its Liasic deposits at Shandwick, with their huge gryphitejj and their numerous belemnites, of at least two species, com- paratively rare at Eathie, — the belemnite abreviatus and be iemnite elongatus. I had learned that these curious shells once- formed part of the internal framework of a mollusc moie nearly akin to the cuttle-fishes of the present day than aught else that now exists ; and the cuttle-fishes — not rare in at least one of their species {loUgo vulgare) in the Frith of Cromartv 446 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ■ — I embraced every opportunity of examining. I have seen from eighteen to twenty individuals of this species enclosed at once in the inner chamber of one of our salmon wears. The greater number of these shoals I have ordinarily found dead, and tinged with various shades of green, blue, and yellow, — for it is one of the characteristics of the creature to assume, when passing into a state of decomposition, a succession of brilliant colors ; but I have seen from six to eight individuals of their number still alive in a little pool beside the nets, and still retaining their original pink tint, freckled with red. And these, I have observed, as my shadow tell across their little patch of water, darting from side to side in panic terror within the narrow confines, emitting ink at almost every dart, until the whole pool had become a deep solution of sepia. Some of my most interesting recollections of the cuttle-fish are as- sociated, however, with the capture and dissection of a single specimen. The creature, in swimming, darts through the w^ater much in the manner that a boy slides down an ice-crusted declivity, feet foremost ; — the lower or nether extremities go first, and the head behind ; it follows its tail, instead of be- ing followed by it ; and this curious peculiarity in its mode of progression, though, of course, on the whole, the mode best adapted to its conformation and instincts, sometimes proves fatal to it in calm weather, when not a ripple breaks upon the pebbles, to warn that the shore is near. An enemy appears ; the creature ejects its cloud of ink, like a sharp shooter discharging his rifle ere he retreats ; and then, darting away, tail foremost, under cover of the cloud, it grounds it- self high upon the beach, and perishes there. I was walking, one very calm day, along the Cromarty shore, a little to the west of the town, when I heard a peculiar sound, — a squelch. if I may employ such a w^ord, — and saw that a large loligo, fully a foot and a half in length, had thrown itself high and dry upon the beach. I laid hold of it by its sheath or sack ; and the loligo, in turn, laid hold of the pebbles, appan ntly to render its abduction as difficult as possible, just as I have Been a boy, when borne off against his will by a stronger than OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION*. 447 himself, grasping fast to door-posts and furniture. The pebbles were hard and smooth, but the creature raised them very readi- ly with its suckers. I subjected one of my hands to its grasp, and it seized fast hold ; but though the suckers were still em. ployed, it made use of them on a different principle. Around the circular rim of each there is a fringe of minute thorns, hooked somewhat like those of the wild rose. In clinging to the hard polished pebbles, these were overlapped by a fleshy membrane, much in the manner that the cushions of a cat' paw overlap its claws when the animal is in a state of tran quillity ; and by means of the projecting membrane, the hol- low interior was rendered air-tight, and the vacuum complet- ed : but in dealing with the hand — a soft substance — the thorns were laid bare, like the claws of the cat when stretched out in anger, and at least a thousand minute prickles were fixed in the skin at once. They failed to penetrate it, for they were short, and individually not strong ; but, acting together by hundreds, they took at least a very firm hold. What follows may be deemed barbarous ; but the men who gulp down at a sitting half a-hundred live oysters to gratify their taste, may surely forgive me the destruction of a single mollusc to gratify my curiosity ! I cut open the sack of the creature with a sharp penknife, and laid bare the viscera. What a sight for Harvey, when prosecuting, in the earlier stages, his grand discovery of the circulation ! There^ in the centre, was the yellow muscular heart, propelling into the tran- sparent, tubular arteries, the yellow blood. Beat — beat — beat : — I could see the whole as in a glass model ; and all I lacked were powers of vision nice enough to enable me to detect the fluid passing through the minuter arterial branches, and then returning by the veins to the two other hearts of the creature ; for, strange to say, it is furnished with three. There in the midst I saw the yellow heart, and, lying altogether detached from it, two other deep-colored hearts at the sides. I cut a little deeper. There was the gizzard-like stomach, filled with fragments of minute mussel and crab shells ; and there, ir*5erted in the spongy, conical, yellowish-colored liver, and 448 MY SCHOOLS ANr SCHOOLMASTERS; somewhat resembling in form a Florence flask, was the ink-bag distended, with its deep dark sepia, — the identical pigment sold under that name in our color-shops, and so extensively used in landscape drawing by the limner. I then dissected and laid open the circular or ring-like brain that surrounds the crea- ture's parrot-like beak, as if its thinking part had no other vocation than simply to take care of the mouth and its perti- nents, — almost the sole employment, however, of not a few brains of a considerably higher order. I next laid open the huge eyes. They were curious organs, more simple in their structure than those of the true fishes, but admirably adapted, I doubt not, for the purpose of seeing. A camera obscura may be described as consisting of two parts, — a lens in front and a darkened chamber behind ; but in the eyes of fishes, as in the brute and human eye, we find a third part added : there is a lens in the middle, a darkened chamber behind, and a lighted chamber, or rather vestibule, in front. Now, this lighted vestibule — the cornea — is wanting in the eye of the cuttle-fish. The lens is placed in front, and the darkened chamber behind. The construction of the organ is that of a common camera obscura. I found something worthy of re- mark, too, in the peculiar style in which the chamber is dark- ened. In the higher animals it may be described as a cham- ber hung with black velvet, — the 'pigmentum nigrum which covers it is of the deepest black ; but in the cuttle-fish it is a chamber hung with velvet, not of a black, but of a dark pur- ple hue, — the 'pigmentum nigrum is of a purplish red color. There is something interesting in marking this first departure from an invariable condition of eyes of the more perfect struc- ture, and in then tracing the peculiarity downwards through almost every shade of color, to the emerald-like eye-specks of the pecten, and the still more rudimentary red eye-specks of (he star-fish. After examining the eyes, I next laid open, in all its length, from the neck to the point of the sack, the dorsal bone of the creature, — its internal shell, I should ra!;her say, for bone it has none. The form of the shell in this species is (hat of a feather, equally developed in the w^eb on both sides. UR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 449 It gives rigniity to the body, and furnishes the muscles with a fulcruni ; and we find it composed, like all other shells, of a mixture of animal matter and carbonate of lime. Such was the lesson taught me in a single walk ; and I have recorded it at some length. The subject of it, the loligo, has been described by some o^* our most distinguished naturalists, such as Kirby in his Bridgewater Treatise, as " one of the most wonderful works of the Creator ;" and the reader will perhaps remenibei liow fraught with importance to natural science an incideu similar to the one related proved in the life of the youthful Cuvier. It was when passing his twenty-second year on the sea- coast, near Fiquainville, that this greatest of modern naturalists was led, by finding a cuttle-fish stranded on the beach, which he afterwards dissected, to study the anatomy and character of the molliisca. To me, however, the lesson served merely to vivify the dead deposits of the Oolitic system, as represented by the Lias of Cromarty and Ross. The middle and later ages of the great secondary division were peculiarly ages of the Ce- phalopodous molluscs : their belemnites, ammonites, nautili, baculites, hamites, turrilites, and scaphites, belonged to the great natural class — singularly rich in its extinct orders and genera, though comparatively poor in its existing ones — which we find represented by the cuttle-fish ; and when engaged in disinterring the remains of the earlier-born members of the family — ammonites, belemnites, and nautili — from amid the shades of Eathie or the mud stones of Shandwick, the incident of the loligo has enabled me to conceive of them, not as mere dead remains, but as the living inhabitants of primaeval seas, stirred by the diurnal tides, and lighted up by the sun. "When pursuing my researches amid the deposits of the Lias, I was conducted to an interesting discovery. There are two great systems of hills in the north of Scotland, — an older and a newer, — that bisect each other like the furrows of a field that had first been ploughed across and then diagonally. The dia gonal furrows, as the last drawn, are still very entire. The great Caledonian Valley, open from sea to sea, is the most remark- able ol* these; but the parallel valleys of the Nairn, of thf 450 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; Findhorn, and of the Spey, are all well-defined furrows ; no? are the mountain ridges which separate them less definitely ranged in continuous lines. The ridges and furrows of the earlier ploughing are, on the contrary, as might be anticipated, broken and interrupted : the eflfacing plough has passed over them ; and yet there are certain localities in which we find the fragments of this earlier system sufficiently entire to form one of the main features of the landscape. In passing through the upper reaches of the Moray Frith, and along the Caledo- nian Valley, the cross furrows may be seen branching off to the west, and existing as the valleys of Loch Fleet, of the Dornoch Frith, of the Frith of Cromarty, of the Bay of Munlochy, of the Frith of Beauly, and, as we enter the Highlands proper, as Glen Urquhart, Glen Morrison, Glen Garry, Loch Arkaig, and Loch Eil. The diagonal system, — represented toy the great valley itself, and known as the system of Ben Nevis and the Ord of Caithness in our own country, and, according to De Beaumont, as that of Mount Pilate and Cote d'Or on the Con- tinent, — was upheaved after the close of the Oolitic ages. It was not until at least the period of the Weald that its "hills had been formed and its mountains brought forth ;" and in the line of the Moray Frith the Lias and Oolite lie uptilted, at steep angles, against the sides of its long ranges of precipice. It is not so easy determining the age of the older system. No for- mation occurs in the North of Scotland between the Lias and the Old Red Sandstone ; the vast Carboniferous, Permian, and Triasic deposits are represented by a wide gap ; and all *^hat can be said regarding the older hills is, that they disturbed and bore up with them the Old Red Sandstone ; but that as there lay at their basis, at the time of their upheaval, no more modern rock to be disturbed, it seems impossible definitely to fi i their era. Neither does there appear among their estuaries or valleys any trace of the Oolitic deposits. Existing, in all probability, during even the times of the Lias, as the sub- aerial framework of Oolitic Scotland, — as the framework on which the Oolitic vegetables grew, — ^no deposit of the system could of course have taken place over them. I had not yet. OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 461 however. fi:>rmed any very definite ideas regarding the two sys- tems, or ascertained that they belonged apparently to a different time; and, finding the Lias upheaved against the steeper sides of the Moray Frith, — one of the huge furrows of the more modern system, — I repeatedly sought to find it uptilted also against the shores of the Cromarty Frith, — one of the furrows of the greatly more ancient one. I had, however, prosecuted the search in a somewhat desultory manner ; and as a pause of a few days took place in my professional labors in the au- tumn of 1830, between the completing of one piece of work and the commencement of another, I resolved on devoting the time to a thorough survey of the Cromarty Frith, in the hope of detecting the Lias. I began my search at the granitic gneiss of the Hill, and, proceeding westwards, passed in succession, in the ascending order, over the uptilted beds of the lower Old Red Sandstone, from the Great Conglomerate base of the system, till I reached the middle member of the deposit, which consists, in this locality, of alternate beds of limestone, sand- stone, and stratified clay, and which we find represented in Caithness by the extensively developed flag-stones. And then, the rock disappearing, I passed over a pebbly beach mottled with boulders ; and in a little bay, not half a mile distant from the town, I again found the rock laid bare. I had long before observed that the rock rose to the surface in this little bay ; I had even employed, when a boy, pieces of its stratified clay as slate-pencil ; but I had yet failed mi- nutely to examine it. I was now, however, struck by its re* semblance, in all save color, to the Lias. The strata lay at a low angle : they were composed of an argillaceous shale, and abounded in limestone nodules ; and, save that both shale and nodules bore, instead of the deep liasic gray, an olivaceous tint ; I might have almost supposed I had fallen on a continuation of some of the Eathie beds. I laid open d nodule with a blow of the hammer, and my heart leaped up when I saw that it enclosed an organism. A lark, ill de- fined, bituminous mass occupied the centre ; but I could dis- tinguish what seemed to be spines and small ichthyic bones 152 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; projecting from its edges ; and when I subjected them to th^ scrutiny of the glass, unlike those mere chance resemblances which sometimes deceive for a moment the eye, the more dis- tinct and unequivocal did their forms become. I laid open a second nodule. It contained a group of glittering rhomboidal scales, with a few cerebral plates, and a jaw bristling with teeth. A third nodule also supplied its organism, in a well- defined ichthyolite, covered with minute, finely-striated scales, and furnished with a sharp spine in the anterior edge of every fin. I eagerly wrought on, and disinterred, in the course of a single tide, specimens enough to cover a museum table ; and it was w^ith intense delight that, as the ripple of the advancing tide was rising against the pebbles, and covering up the ich thyolitic beds, I carried them to the higher slopes of the beach, and, seated on a boulder, began carefully to examine them in detail, with a common botanist's microscope. But not a plate, spine, or scale could I detect among their organisms, identical with the ichthyic remains of the Lias. I had got amid the remains of an entirely different and incalculably more ancient creation. My new-found organisms represented, not the first, but merely the second age of vertebrate existence on our planet ; but as the remains of the earlier age exist as the mere detached teeth and spines of placoids, which, though they give full evidence of the existence of the fishes to which they be- long, throw scarce any light on their structure, it is from the ganoids of the second age that the palseontologist can with certainty know under what peculiarities of form, and associ- ated with varieties of mechanism, vertebral life existed in the earlier ages of the world. In my new-found deposit, — to which I soon added, however, within the limits of the parish, some six or eight deposits more, all charged with the same ichthyic remains, — I found had work enough before me fo: the patient study of years ox. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 4^5 CHAPTER XXII. '* They lay aside their private cares, To mend the Kirk and State affairs ; They'll talk o' patronage and priests, Wi' kindling fury in their breasts ; Or tell what new taxation 's comin', An' ferlle at the folk in /,071'ore." Burns. "We had, as I have already stated, no Dissenters in the parish of Cromarty. What were known as the Haldane's People had tried to effect a lodgment among us in the town, but without success : in the course of several years they failed to acquire more than six or eight members ; and these were not of the more solid people, but marked as an eccentric class, fond of argument, and possessed by a rage for the novel and the ex- treme. The leading teachers of the party were a retired Eng- lish merchant and an ex-blacksmith, who, quitting the forge in middle life, had pursued the ordinary studies to no very great effect, and become a preacher. And both were, I believe, ood men, but by no means prudent missionaries. They said very strong things against the Church of Scotland, in a place i^^here the Church of Scotland was much respected ; and i\ was observed, that while they did not do a great deal to con- vert the irreligious to Christianity, they were exceedingly zealous in their endeavors to make the religi:us Baptists. Much to my annoyance in my } ounger days, they used to 4d4 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEltS: waylay Uncle Sandy on his return from the Hill, on eveningg when I had gone to get some lesson from him regarding sand- worms, or razor-fish, or the sea-hare, and engage him in long controversies about infant baptism and Church Establishments. The matters which they discussed were greatly too high for me, nor was I by any means an attentive listener ; but I picked up enough to know that Uncle Sandy, though a man of slow speech, held stiffly to the Establishment scheme of Knox, and the defence of Presby terianism ; and it did not requii e any particularly nice perceptive powers to observe that both his antagonists and himself used at times to get pretty warm, and to talk tolerably loud, — louder, at least, than was at all neces- sary in the quiet evening woods. I remember, too, that in urging him to quit the National Church for theirs, they usually employed language borrowed from the Revelations ; and that, calling his Church Babylon, they bade him come out of her, thtit he might not be a partaker of her plagues. Uncle Sand;; had seen too much of the world, and read and heard too mur a or* controversy, to be out of measure shocked by the phrase , but with a decent farmer of the parish the hard words of the pro- selytizers did them a mischief. The retired merchanr had irged him to quit the Establishment ; and the farmer had re- plied by asking, in his simplicity, whether he thought he ought to leave his Church to sink in that way ? "Yes," exclaimed the merchant with great emphasis ; "leave her to sink to her place, — the lowest hell !" This was terrible : the decent farmer open- ed huge eyes at hearing what he deemed a bold blasphemy. The Church of w^hich the Baptist spoke was, in Cromarty at least, the Church of the outed Mr. Hugh Anderson, who gave up his all in the time of the persecution, for conscience' sake; it was the Church of Mr. Gordon, whose ministry had been sc signally countenanced during the period of the great revival ; i was the Church of devout Mr. Munro, and of worthy Mr. Smith, and of many a godly elder and God-fearing member who had held by Christ the Head ; and yet here was it denouncea as a Church whose true place was hell. The farmer turned away^ sick of the controversy ; and the imprudent speech of the re- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 455 tired merchant flew lik( wildfire over the paiish. *' Surely,'* says Bacon, " princes have need, in tender matters and tick- lish times, to beware what they say, especially in those short speeches which fly about like darts, and are thought to be shot out of their secret intentions." Princes are, however, rot the only men who would do well to be aware of short speeches. Th<^. short speech of the merchant ruined the Baptist cause in Ci"omarty ; and the two missionaries might, on its delivery have just done, if they but knew the position to which it re^- duced them, what they were content to do a few years after, — pack up their movables and quit the place. Having for years no antagonists to contend with outside the pale of the Establishment, it was of course na'iural that we should find opponents within. But during the incumbency of Mr. Smith, — the minister of the parish for the first one-and- twenty years of my life, — even these were wanting ; and we passed a very quiet time, undisturbed by controversy of any kind, political or ecclesiastical. Nor were the first few years of Mr. Stewart's incumbency less quiet. The Catholic Relief Bill was a pebble cast into the pool, but a very minute one ; and the ripple which it raised caused scarce any agitation. Mr. Stewart did not see his way clearly through all the di^ Acuities of the measure : but, influenced in part by some of his brethren in the neighborhood, he at length made up his mind to petition against it ; and to his petition, praying that no concessions should be made to the Papists, greatly more than nineteen-twentieths of the male parishioners aflixed their names. The few individuals who kept aloof were chiefly lads of an extra liberal turn, devoid, like most extreme poli- ticians, of the ordinary ecclesiastical sympathies of their countryfolk ; and as I cultivated no acquaintance with them, and was more ecclesiastical than political in my leanings, I had the satisfaction of finding myself standing, in oppo- sition to all my friends, on the Catholic Relief measure, in a respectable minority of one. Even Uncle Sandy, after some little demur, and an explosion against the Irish Estab- lishment, set off* and signed the petition. I failed, howevei, 456 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; to see that I was in the wrong. With the two great facts of the Irish Union and the Irish Church before me, I could not petition against Koman Catholic emancipation. I felt, too, that were I myself a Roman Catholic, I would listen to no Pro- testant argument until what I held to be justice had first been done me. I would have at once inferred that a religion asso« ciated with what I deemed injustice was a false, not a true, re igion; and, on the strength of the inference, would have re- jected it without farther inquiry ; and could I fail to believe that what I myself would have done in the circumstances, many Roman Catholics were actually doing 1 And believing I could defend my position, which was certainly not an obtru- sive one, and was at times assailed in conversation by my friends, in a way that showed, as I thought, they did not un- derstand it, I sat down and wrote an elaborate letter on the subject, addressed to the editor of the Inverness Courier ; in which, as I afterwards found, I was happy enough to anticipate in some points the line taken up, in his famous emancipation speech, by a man whom I had early learned to recognize as the greatest and wisest of Scottish ministers, — the late Dr. Chalmers. On glancing over my letter, however, and then looking round me on the good men among my townsfolk, — including my uncle and my minister, — with whom it would have the effect of placing me in more decided antagonism than any mere refusal to sign their petition, I resolved, in- stead of dropping it into the post-office, to drop it into the fire, which I accordingly did ; and so the matter took end ; and what I had to say in my own defence, and in that of emancipation, was in consequence never said. This, however, was but the mere shadow of a controversy : it was merely a possible controversy, strangled in the birth. But some three years after, the parish was agitated by a dire ecclesiastical dispute, which set us altogether by the ears. The place had not only its parish church, but also its Gaelic chapel, which, though on the ordinary foundation of a chapel of ease, was endowed, and under the patronage of the crown. It had been built about sixty years previous, by OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 457 a benevolent proprietor of the lands of Cromarty, — '• George Ross, the Scotch Agent," — whom Junius ironically described as the " trusted friend and worthy confidant of Lord Mans fi'^ld ;" and who, whatever the satirist may have thought of either, was in reality a man w^orthy the friendship of the accom- plished and philosophic lawyer. Cromarty, originally a Low- land settlement, had had from the Reformation down till the atter quarter of the last century no Gaelic place of worship. On the breaking up of the feudal system, however, the High- landers began to drop into the place in quest of employment ; and George Ross, affected by their uncared-for religious con- dition, built for them, at his own expense, a chapel, and had influence enough to get an endowment for its minister from the Government. Government retained the patronage in its own hands ; and as the Highlanders consisted of but laborers and flirm-servants, and the w^orkers in a hempen manufactory, and had no manner of influence, their wishes were not always consulted in the choice of a minister. About the time of Mr. Stewart's appointment, through the late Sir Robert Peel who had courteously yielded to the wishes of the English con- gregation, the Gaelic people had got a minister presented to them whom they would scarcely have chosen for themselves, but who had, notwithstanding, popular parts about him. Though not of high talent, he was frank and genial, and vis- ited often, and conversed much ; and at length the Highland- ers came to regard him as the very beau ideal of a minister. He and Mr. Stewart belonged to the antagonist parties in the Church. Mr. Stewart took his place in the old Presbyterian section, under Chalmers and Thomson ; while the Gaelic min- ister held by Drs. Inglis and Cook ; and so thoroughly were their respective congregations influenced by their views, that at the Disruption in 1843, while considerably more than nine- tenths of tHe English-speaking parishioners clos(\d their con* aection with the State, and became Free Churchmen, at least an equal proportion of the chapel Highlanders clung to the Establishment. Curiously enough, however, there arose a con troversy W.tween the congregations at this time, in which eacb 458 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; seemed^ in relation to the general question at issue, to tak* the part proper to the othei'. I do not think the English congregation were in any de- gree jealous of the Gaelic one. The English contained the elite of the place, — all its men of property and influence, from its merchants and heritors, down to the humblest of the class that afterwards became its ten-pound franchise-holders ; where- as the Gaelic people were, as I have said, simply poor labor ^ ers and weavers ; and if the sense of superiority did at time? show itself on the more potent side, it was only among the lowlier people of the English congregation. When, on one occasion, a stranger fell asleep in the middle of one of Mr, Stewart's best sermons, and snored louder than was seemly, an individual beside him was heard muttering, in a low whis- per, that the man ought to be sent up to " the Gaelidl'' for he was not fit to be among them ; and there might be a few other similar manifestations ; but the parties were not on a sufficiently equal level to enact the part of those rival congre- gations that are forever bemoaning the shortcomings each of the other, and that in their days of fasting and humiliation have the sins of their neighbors at least as strongly before them as their own. But if the English congregation were not jealous of the Gaelic one, the Gaelic one, as was perhaps natu- ral in their circumstances, wxre, I am afraid, jealous of the English : they were poor people, they used sometimes to say, but their souls were as precious as those of richer folk, and they were surely as well entitled to have their just rights as the English people, ^ — axioms which, I believe, no one in the other congregation disputed, or even canvassed at all. We were all, however, roused one morning to consider the case, by learning that on the previous day the minister of the Gaelic chapel had petitioned the Presbytery of the district, either to be assign- ed a parish within the bounds of the parish of Cromarty, or to have the charge erected into a collegiate one, and his half of it, of course, rendered' co-ordinate with Mr. Stewart's. Tlie English people were at once very angry and very much alarmed. A 5 the two ccngregations were scattered all over OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 459 the same piece of territory, it would'be impossible to cut it jp into two parishes, without separating between a portion of Mr. Stew^art's people and their minister, and making them the parishioners of a man whom they had not yet learned to like ; and, on the other hand, by erecting the charge into a collegiate one, the minister whom they had not yet learned to like would acquire as real a jurisdiction over them as that possessed by the minister of their choice. Or — as the case was somewhat quaintly stated by one of themselves — by the one alternativ "the Gaelic man would become whole minister to the half of them, and, by the other, half minister to the whole of them." And so they determined on making a vigorous resistance. Mr. Stewart himself, too, liked the move of his neighbor the Gae- lic minister exceedingly ill. He was not desirous, he said, to have a colleague thrust upon him in his charge, to keep him right on Moderate principles, — a benefit for which he had not bargained when he accepted the presentation ; nor yet, as the other alternative, did he wish to see his living child, the parish, divided into two, and the half of it given to the strange claimant that was not its parent. There was another account, too, on which he disliked the movement : the two great parties in the Church were equally represented at the time in the Presbytery ; they had their three members apiece ; and he, of course, saw that the introduction of the Gaelic minister into it would have the effect of casting the balance in favor of Moderatism. And so, as both minister and people were equally in earnest, counter petitions were soon got up, praying the Presbytery, as a first step in the process, that copies of the Gaelic minister's docu- ment should be served upon them. The Presbytery decided, in terms of their prayer, that copies should be served ; and the Gaelic minister, on the somewhat extreme ground that the people had no right to appear in the business at all, appealed to the General Assembly. And so the people had next to pe- tition that venerable court in behalf of what they deemed their imperilled rights ; wh'le the Gaelic congregation, under the full impression that their overbearing English neighbors weie ti'eati;ig them " as if th(^.y had no souls," got up a counter pe 4:60 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; tition virtually to the effect that the parish might be eitner cut ii- two, and the half of it given to their minister, or that he might be at least made second minister to every man in it. The minister, however, finding at the General Assembly that the ecclesiastical party on whose support he had relied were opposed in toto to the erecting of chapels of ease into regular charges, and that the peculiarities of the case were such as to cut off all chance of his being supported by their opponents, fell from his appeal, and the case was never called in Court. Some of our Cromarty fisher-folk, who were staunch on the English side, though they could not quite see the merits, liad rather a different version of the business. " The Gaelic man had no sooner entered the Kirk o' the General Assembly," they said, " than the maister of the Assembly rose, and, speaking very rough, said, ' Ye contrarious rascal, what tak's you here ? What are ye aye troubling that decent lad Mr. Stewart for ? I'm sure he's no meddlin' wi' you ! Get about your business, ye contrarious rascal !' " I took an active part in this controversy ; wrote petitions and statements for my brother parishioners, with paragraphs for the local newspapers, and a long letter for the Caledonian Mer- cury^ in reply to a tissue of misrepresentation which appear- ed in that print, from the pen of one of the Gaelic minister's legal agents ; and, finally, I replied to a pamphlet by the same hand, which, though miserable as a piece of writing, — for it resembled no other composition ever produced, save, mayhap, a very badly-written law paper, — contained statements which I deemed it necessary to meet. And such were my first at- tempts in the rough field of ecclesiastical controversy, — a field into which inclination would never have led me, but which tas certainly lain very much in my way, and in which I have spent many a laborious hour. My first pieces were rather stiffly written, somewhat on the perilous model of Junius ; but as il was hardly possible to write so ill as my opponent, I could ap- peal to even his friends whether it was quite right in him to call me illiterate and untaught, in prose so much worse than mj own. Chiefly by getting the laughers now and then on OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 461 my side, I succeeded in making him angry ; and he replied to my jokes by calling names, — a phrase, by the way, which, for- getting his Watts' Hymns, and failing to consult his Johnson, he characterized as not English. I was, he said, a " shallow, pretending ninny ;" an " impudent illiterate lad ;" " a fanatic," and a " frantic person ;" the " low underling of a faction," and " Peter the Hermit ;" and finally, as the sum total of the whole, he assured me that I stood in his " estimation as the most ignoble and despised in the whole range of the human species." This was frightful ! but I not only outlived it all, but learned, I fear, after in this way first tasting blood, to experience a rather too keen delight in the anger of an antagonist. I may add, that when, some two or three years after the period of this contro- versy, the General Assembly admitted what were known as the Parliamentary ministers, and the ministers of chapels of ease, to a seat in the church courts, neither my townsmen nor my- self saw aught to challenge in the arrangement. It contained none of the elements which had provoked our hostility in the Cromarty chapel case : it did not make over the people of one minister to the charge of another, whom they would never have chosen for themselves ; but, without encroaching on pop- ular rights, equalized, on the Presbyterian scheme, the stand- ing of ministers and the claims of congregations. The next matter which engaged my townsfolK was a con- siderably more serious one. When, in 1831, cholera first threatened the shores of Britain, the Bay of Cromarty was appointed by Government one of the quarantine ports ; and we became familiar with the sight, at first deemed sufli ciently startling, of fleets of vessels lying in the upper road- stead, with the yellow flag waving from their mast-tops. The disease, however, failed to find its way ashore ; and when, in the summer of the following year, it was introduced into the north of Scotland, it went stalking around the town and parish for several months, without visiting either. It greatly more than decimated the villages of Portmahomak and Inver, and visited the parishes of Nigg and Urquhart, with the towns of Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall, and Rosemarkie ; and, ii 462 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; fine, the quarantine seaport town that seemed at first to be most in danger appeared latterly to be almost the only place of any size in the locality exempted from its ravages. It approached, however, alarmingly near. The opening of the Cromarty Frith is little more than a mile across ; a glass of the ordinary powxr enables one to count every pane in the windows of the dwellings that mottle its northern shore, and to distinguish their inhab- itants ; and yet among these dwellings cholera was raging ; and we could see, in at least one instance, a dead body borne forth by two persons on a hand-barrow, and buried in a neigh boring sand-bank. Stories, too, of the sad fate of individuals with whom the townsfolk were acquainted, and who had resid- ed in well-known localities, told among them with powerful effect. Such was the general panic in the infected places, that the bodies of the dead were no longer carried to the church- yard, but huddled up in solitary holes and corners ; and the pic- tures suggested to the fancy, of familiar faces lying uncoffined in the ground beside some lonely wood, or in some dark morass or heathy moor, were fraught to many with a terror stronger than that of death. We knew that the corpse of a young robust fisherman, who used occasionally to act as one of the Cromarty ferrymen, and with whose appearance, in consequence, every one was familiar, lay festering in a sand-bank ; that the iron frame of a brawny blacksmith was decomposing in a mossy hole beside a thorn -bush ; that half of the inhabitants of the little fish- ing village of Inver were strewn in shallow furrows along the arid waste which surrounded their dwellings ; that houses di- vested of their tenants, and become foul dens of contagion, had been set on fire and burnt to the ground ; and that around the infected fishing-hamlets of Hilton and Balintore the country people had drawn a sort of barrier sanitaire, and cooped up within the limits of their respective villages the wretched in- habitants. And in the general consternation, — a consteina^ tion much more extreme than that evinced when the disease actually visited the place, — it was asked by the townsfolk whether thej/ ought not, so long as the place remained unin- spected, to draw a similar cordon round themselves. A pubr\o OK, THE STORY OF Ml EDUCATION. 463 meeting was accordingly held, to deliberate on the best means of shutting themselves in ; and at the meeting almost all the adult male inhabitants attended, with the exception of the gen tlemen in the commission of the peace, and the town officials, who, though quite prepared to wink hard at our irregularities, failed to see that, on any grounds tenable in the eye of the law, they themselves could take a share in them. Our meeting at first threatened to be stormy. The extra Liberals, who, in the previous ecclesiastical struggle, had taken )art to a man with the Gaelic people, as they did, in the sub- sequent church controversy, with the Court of Session, began by an attack on the town Justices. We might all see now, said a Liberal writer lad who addressed us, how little these people were our friends. Now when the place was threaten- ed by the pestilence, they would do nothing for us ; they would not even so much as countenance our meeting ; w^e saw there was not one of them present : in short, they cared no- thing at all about us, or whether we died or lived. But he and his friends would stand by us to the last ; nay, while the magistrates were evidently afraid, with all their wealth, to move in the matter, terrified, no doubt, by the prosecutions for damages which might be instituted against them were they to stop the highways, and turn back travellers, he himself, though far from rich, would be our security against all legal processes whatever. This, of course, was very noble ; all the more noble from the circumstance that the speaker could not, as the Gazette informed us, meet his own actual liabilities at the time, and yet was fully prepared, notwithstanding, to meet with all our possible ones. Up started, however, almost ere he had done speaking, a friend of the Justices, and made so angry a speech in their defence, that the meeting threatened to fall into two parties, and explode in a squabble. I rose in the extrem- ity, and, though unhappily no orator, addressed my towns- folk in a few homely sentences. Cholera, I reminded them, was too evidently of neither party ; and the magistrates were, I was sure, nearly as much frightened as we were. But they Really r(]uld do nothing for us. In matters of life and death. 464 MY SCH001.S AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; however, when laws and magistrates fliiled to protect quiet people, the people were justified in asserting the natural right to protect themselves ; ai-d, whatever laws and lawyers might urge to the contrary, that right was now ours. In a neighbor- ing county, the inhabitants of certain infected villages were fairly shut up amid their dwellings by the countryfolk around, who could themselves show a clean bill of health ; and we, if in the circumstances of these villagers, would very possibly be treated after the same manner. And what remained to us in our actual circumstances was just to anticipate the process of being ourselves bottled in, by bottling the country out. The town, situated on a promontory, and approachable at only a few points, could easily be guarded ; and, instead of squabbling about the merits of Justices of the Peace, — very likely some- what Conservative in their leanings, — or of spirited Reformers who would like very well to be Justices of the Peace too, and would doubtless make very excellent ones, I thought it would be far better for us immediately to form ourselves into a De- fence Association, and proceed to regulate our watches and set our guards. My short speech was remarkably well received. There was a poor man immediately beside me, who was in great dread of cholera, and who actually proved one of its first victims in the place, — for in little more than a week after, he was in his grave, — who backed me by an especially vigorous Hear, hear ! — and the answering Hear, hears, of the meeting bore down all reply. We accordingly at once formed our De- fence Association ; and ere midnight our rounds and stations were marked out, and the watches set. All power passed at once out of the hands of the magistrates ; but the worthy men themselves said very little about it ; and we had the satisfac- tion of knowing that their families — especially their wives and laughters — were very friendly indeed both to the Association and the temporary suspension of the law, and that, on both their own account and ours, they wished us all manner of success. We kept guard for several days. All vagabonds and tramp- ers were turned back without remorse ; but there was a re- spectable class of travellers from whom there was less danger OR, THE STORY W MY EDUCATION". 465 to be apprehended ; and with these we found it somewtit <: dit- %ult to deal. I would have admitted them at once ; hut the majority of the Association demurred ; — to do that would be, fvccording to Corporal Trim, to " set one man greatly o^'er the head of another ;" and it was ultimately agreed that, instead of at once admitting them, they would be first brought into a wooden building fitted up for the purpose, and thoroughly fur-xj. gated with sulphur and chloride of lime. I know not with whos the expedient first orig^^nated : it was said to have been sugg<^s< d by some medical man who knew a great deal about cholera And though, for my own part, I could not see how the demon oi the disease was to be expelled by the steam of a little sulphui and chloride, as the evil spirit in Tobit was expelled by the smoke of the fish's liver, it seemed to satisfy the Association wonderfully well ; and a stranger well smoked came to be re- garded as safe. There was a day at hand which promised an unusual amount of smoking. The agitation of the Reform Bill had commenced ; — a great court of appeal was on that day to hold at Cromarty ; and it was known that both a Whig and Tory party from Inverness, in which cholera was raging at the time, would to a certainty attend it. What, it was asked, were we to do with the politicians, — the formidable bankers, factors, and lawyers who would form, we knew, the Inverness cavalcade ? Individually, the question seemed to be asked under a sort of foreboding terror that calculated consequences ; but when the Association came to ask it collectively, and to answer it in a body, it was in a bold tone, that set fear at de- 85nce. And so it was resolved nem, con. that the Inverness politicians should be smoked like the others. My turn to mount guard had come round on the previous night at twelve ">'clock ; but I had calculated on being off the station ere the Inverness people came up. Unluckily, however, instead of oeing appointed a simple sentry, I was made officer for the night. It was the duty assigned me to walk round the sev- eral posts, and see that the various sentinels were keeping a smart lookout, which I did very faithfully ; but when the term i>f my watch had expired I found no relieving officer coming 4G6 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; up to take tny place. The prudent man appointed on the oc- casion was, I feared, tiding over the coming difficulty in some quiet corner ; but I continued my rounds, maugre the suspi- cion, in the hope of his appearance. And as I approached one of our most important stations, — that on the great high- way which connects the town of Cromarty with Kestock Ferry, there was the Whig portion of the Inverness cavalcade just coming up. The newly-appointed sentinel stood aside •0 let his officer deal with the Whig gentlemen, as, of course, best became both their quality and his official standing. 1 would rather have been- elsewhere ; but I at once brought the procession to a stand. A man of high spirit and influence, — a banker, and very much a Whig, — at once addressed me w^ith a stern — " By what authority, Sir V By the authority, I re- plied, of five hundred able-bodied men in the neighboring town, associated for the protection of themselves and their families. " Protection against what V " Protection against the pestilence ; — you come from an infected place." " Do you know what you are doing. Sir V said the banker, fiercely. " Yes, — doing what the law cannot do for us, but what we have determined to do for ourselves." The banker grew pale with anger ; and he was afterwards heard to say, that had he a pistol at the time, he would have shot upon the spot the man w^ho stopped him ; but not having a pistol, he could not shoot me ; and so I sent him and his party away under an escort, to be smoked. And as they were somewhat obstreperous by the way, and knocked the hat of one of their guards over his nose they got, in the fumigating process, as I was sorry to learn, double portion of the sulphur and the chloride ; and came into court, to contend with the Tories, gasping for breath. I was aware I had acted on this occasion a very foolish part ; I ough* to a certainty to have run away on the approach of the Inver ness cavalcade ; but the running away would have involved, ac- cording to Rochester, an amount of moral courage w^hich I did not possess. I fear, too, I must admit, that the rough tones of the banker's address stirred up what had long lain quietly anough in my veins, — some of the wild buccaneering blood o/ OB, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 467 Tolm Feddes and the old seafaring Millers ; and so I weakly- remained at my post, and did what the Association deemed my duty. I trust the banker did not recognize me, and that now, after the lapse of more than twenty years, he will be in- clined to extend to me his forgiveness. I take this late op- portunity of humbly begging his pardon, and of assuring him, that at the very time I brought him to bay I was heartily at one with him in his politics. But then my townsfolk, being much frightened, were perfectly impartial in smoking Whigs and Tories all alike ; and I could bethink me of no eligible mode of exempting my friends from a process of fumigation which was, I dare say, very unpleasant, and in whose virtues my faith was assuredly not strong. When engaged, however, in keeping up our cordon with ap- parent success, cholera entered the place in a way in which it was impossible we could have calculated. A Cromarty fish erman had died of the disease at Wick rather more than a month previous, and all the clothes which had been in con- tact with the body were burnt by the Wick authorities in the open air. He had, however, a brother on the spot, who had stealthily appropriated some of the better pieces of dress ; and these he brought home with him in a chest ; though such was the dread with which he regarded them, that for more than four weeks he suffered the chest to lie beside him unopened. At length, in an evil hour, the pieces of dress were taken out, and, like the " goodly Babylonish garment" which wrought the destruction of Achan and the discomfiture of the camp, they led, in the first instance, to the death of the poor impru- dent fisherman, and to that of not a few of his townsfolk im mediately after. He himself was seized by cholera on the fi)l lowing day ; in less than two days more he was dead and bu- ried ; and the disease went creeping about the streets and lanes for weeks after, — here striking down a strong man in the full vigoi of middle life, — there shortening, apparently by but a few months, the span of some worn-out creature, already on the verge of the grave. The visitation had its wildly picturesque accompaniments. Pitch and tar were kept burnu ^ during the 21 468 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS, night in the openings of the infected lanes ; ai^d the unsteady light flickered with ghastly effect on house and wall, and the flitting figures of the watchers. By day, the frequer t coffins, borne to the grave by but a few bearers, and the frequent smoke that rose outside the place from fires kindled to con sume the clothes of the infected, had their sad and startling offect ; a migration, too, of a considerable portion of the fisher population to the caves of the hill, hi which they continued t3 reside till the disease left the place, formed a striking ao companiment of the visitation ; and yet, curiously enough, as the danger seemed to increase, the consternation lessened, and there was much less fear among the people when the disease was actually ravaging the place, than when it was merely stalking within sight around it. We soon became familiar, too, with its direst horrors, and even learned to regard them as comparatively ordinary and commonplace. I had read, about two years before, the passage in Southey's" Colloquies'^ m which Sir Thomas More is made to remark, that modern Englishmen have no guarantee whatever, in these latter times, that their shores shall not be visited, as of old, by devastating plagues. " As touching the pestilence," says Sir Thomas (or rather the [joet in his name), " you fancy yourselves secure because the [)lague has not appeared among you for the last hundred and (ifty years, — a portion of time which, long as it may seem, com- pared with the brief term of mortal existence, is as nothing in I he physical history of the globe. The importation of that scourge is as possible now as it was in former times ; and were it once imported, do you suppose it would rage with less vio- lence among the crowded population of your metropolis than it lid before the fire? What," he adds, "if the sweating sick iiess, emphatically called the English disease, were to show it- self again? Can any cause be assigned why it is not as likfly to break out in the nineteenth century as in the fifteenth V And, striking as the passage is, I remembered perusing it with that incredulous feeling, natural to men in a quiet time, which leads them to draw so broad a linebetv/een the experience of history, if of a comparatively remote age, or jf a distant olace, OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 469 and their own personal experience. In the loose sense cf the sophist, it was contrary to my experience that Britain should become the seat of any such fatal and widely-devastating dis- ease as used to ravage it of old. And yet, now that I saw as terrible and unwonted an infliction as either the plague or the sweating sickness decimating our towns and villages, and tlie terrible scenes described by De Foe and Patrick Walker fully rivalled, the feeling with which I came to regard it was not one of strangeness, but of familiarity. When thus unsuccessfully employed in keeping watch and ward against our insidious enemy, the Reform Bill for Scot- land passed the House of Lords, and became the law of the land. I had watched with interest the growth of the popular element in the country, — ^had seen it gradually strengthening from the despotic times of Liverpool and Castlereagh, through the middle period of Canning and Goderich, down till even Wellington and Peel, men of iron as they were, had to yield to the pressure from without, and to repeal first the Test and Cor- poration Acts, and next to carry, against their own convictions, their great Roman Catholic Emancipation measure. The people, during a season of undisturbed peace, favorable to the growth of opinion, were becoming more decidedly a power in the country than they had ever been before ; and, of course, as one of the people, and in the belief, too, that the influence of the many would be less selfishly exerted than that of the few, 1 was pleased that it should be so, and looked forward to bettei days. For myself personally, I expected nothing. I had early come to see that toil, physical or intellectual, was tp be my portion throughout life, and that through no possi- ble improvement in the government of the country could I be exempted from laboring for my bread. From State pat- ronage I never expected anything, and I have received from it about as much as I expected. was employed in laboring pretty hard for my bread one fine evening in the summer of 1830, — engaged in hewing, with bare breast and arms, in the neighborhood of the harbor of Cromarty, a large tombstone, which, on the following day, was 470 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTER!!?, to be carried across the ferry to a churchyard on the opposite side of the Frith. A group of French fishermen, who had gathered round me, were looking curiously at my mode of working, and, as I thought, somewhat curiously at myself, as if speculating on the physical powers of a man with whom there was at least a possibility of their having one day to deal They formed part of the crew of one of \hoke powerfully manned French luggers which visit our northern coasts every year, ostensibly with the design of prosecuting the herrin^» fishery, but which, supported mainly by large Government bounties, and in but small part by their fishing speculations are in reality kept up by the State as a means of rearing sailon for the French navy. Their lugger — an uncouth-looking ves sel, representative rather of the navigation of three centuries ago than of that of the present day — lay stranded in the har bor beside us ; and, their work over for the day, they seemed as quiet and silent as the calm evening whose stillness they were enjoying, when the letter-carrier of the place came up to where I was working, and handed me, all damp from tht' press, a copy of the Inverness Courier^ which I owed to tht kindness of its editor. I was at once attracted by the heading in capitals, of his leading article, — " Revolution in France- Flight of Charles X." — and pointed it out to the Frenchmen None of them understood English ; but they could here am there catch the meaning of the more important words, and, ex claiming " Revolution en France ! ! — Fuite de Charles X, ! P — they clustered roAnd it in a state of the extremest excite ment, gabbling faster and louder than thrice as many English men could have done in any circumstances. At length, how ever, their resolution seemed taken ; curiously enough, theii lugger bore the name of " Charles X, ;" and one of them, lay ing hold of a large lump of chalk, repaired to the vessel's stern, and, by covering over the white-lead letters with the chalk, effaced the royal name. Charles was virtually declared by the little bit of France that sailed in the lugger to be no longer king ; and the incident struck me, trivial as it may seem, as significantly illustrative of the extreme slightuess of OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 471 that hold which the rulers of modern France possess on the affections of their people. I returned to my home as the even- ing darkened, more moved by this unexpected revolution than by any other political event of my time, — brim-full of hope for the cause of freedom all over the civilized world, and, in especial — misled by a sort of analogical experience— sanguine in my expectations for France. It had had, like our own coun- try^ its first stormy revolution, in which its monarch had lost his nead ; and then its Cromwell, and then its Restoration and its easy, luxurious king, who, like Charles II., had died in possession of the throne, and who had been succeeded by a weak bigot brother, the very counterpart of James II. And now, after a comparatively orderly revolution like that of 1688, the bigot had been dethroned, and the head of another branch of the royal family had been called in to enact the part of William III. The historical parallel seemed complete ; and could I doubt that what would next follow would be a long period of progressive improvement, in which the French peo- ple would come to enjoy, as entirely as those of Britain, a well-regulated freedom, under which revolutions would be unnecessary, mayhap impossible 1 Was it not evident, too, that the success of the French in their noble struggle would immediately act with beneficial effect on the popular cause in our own country and everywhere else, and greatly quicken the progress of reform. And so I continued to w^atch with interest the course of the Eeform Bill, and was delighted to see it, after a passage sin- gularly stormy and precarious, at length safely moored in port. In some of the measures, too, to which it subsequently led, I greatly delighted, especially in the emancipation of our negro slaves in the colonies. Nor could I join many of my person- al friends in their denunciation of that appropriation meas- ure, as it was termed, — also an effect of the altered constitu- ency, — which suppressed the Irish bishopricks. As I ventured to tell my minister, who took the other side, — if a Protestant Church failed, after enjoying for three hundred years the bene- fits of a large endowment, and every advantage of position which 4:72 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS, the statute-book could confer, to erect herself into the Church of the many, it was high time to commence dealing with her in her true character, — as the Church of the few. At home^ however, within the narrow precincts of my native town, there were effects of the measure which, though comparatively trifl- ing, I liked considerably worse than the suppression of tha bishopricks. It broke up the townsfolk into two portions, — the one consisting of elderly or middle-aged men, who had been in the CDmmission of the peace ere the passing of the bill, and who now, as it erected the town into a parliamentary burgh, became our magistrates, in virtue of the support of a majority of the voters ; and a younger and weaker, but clever and very active party, few of whom were yet in the commis- sion of the peace, and who, after standing unsuccessfully for the magistracy, became the leaders of a patriotic opposition, which succeeded in rendering the seat of justice a rather un- easy one in Cromarty. The younger men were staunch Lib- erals, but great Moderates, — the elder, sound Evangelicals, but decidedly Conservative in their leanings ; and as I held ec- clesiastically by the one party, and secularly by the other, I found my position, on the whole, a rather anomalous one. Both parties got involved in lawsuits. When the Whig Mem bers of Parliament for the county and burgh came the way, they might be seen going about the streets arm-in-arm with the young Whigs, which was, of course, a signal honor ; and during the heat of a contested election, young Whiggism, to show itself grateful, succeeded in running off with a Conserva- tive voter, whom it had caught in his cups, and got itself in- volved in a lawsuit in consequence, which cost it several hun- dred pounds. The Conservatives, on the other hand, also got entangled in an expensive lawsuit. The town had its annual fair, at which from fifty to a hundred children used to buy gin- gcrbread, and which had held for many years at the eastern end of the town links. Through, however, some unexplained piece Df strategy on the part of the young Liberals, a market-day came round, on which the gingerbread women took their stand on a green a little above the harbor ; and, of course, where the gla 473 gerbread was, there the children were gathered together ; ana the magistrates, astonished, visited the spot in order to ascep tain, if possible, the philosophy of the change. They found the ground occupied by a talkative pedlar, who stood up strong- ly for the young Liberals and the new site ; and the magis- trates straightway demanded the production of his license. The pedlar had none. And so he was apprehended, and sum- marily tried, o i a charge of contravening the statute 54 Geo. III. cap. 71 ; and, being found guilty of hawking without a license, he was committed to prison. The pedlar, backed, il was understood, by the young Liberals, raised an action for wrongous imprisonment ; and, on the ground that the day on which he had sold his goods was a fair or market-day, on which anybody might sell anything, the magistrates were cast in damages. I liked the lawsuits very ill, and held that the young Liberals would have been more wisely employed in making money by their shops and professions, — secure that the coveted honors would ultimately get into the wake of the good bank-accounts, — than that they should be engaged either in scattering their own means in courts of law, or in imping- ing on the means of their neighbors. And ultimately I found my proper political position as a supporter in all ecclesiasti- cal and municipal matters of my Conservative townsmen, and a supporter in almost all the national ones of the Whigs, whom, however, I always liked better, and deemed more vir- tuous, when they were out of office than when they were in. On one occasion, I even became political enough to stand for a councillorship. My friends, chiefly through the death of elderly voters and the rise of younger men, few of whom were Conservative, felt themselves getting weak in the place ; and, fearing that they could not otherwise secure a majority at the Council board, they urged me to stand for one of the vacancies, which I accordingly did, and carried my election by a swim- ming majority. And in duly attending the first meeting of Council, I heard an eloquent speech from a gentleman in the opposition, directed against the individuals who, as he finely expressed it, '' were wielding the destinies of his native town j" 474 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; and saw, as the only serious piece of business before the meet- ing, the Councillors clubbing pennies apiece, in order to de- fray, in the utter lack of town funds, the expense of a nine- penny postage. And then, with, I fear, a very inadequate sense of the responsibilities of my new office, I stayed away from the Council board, and did nothing whatever in its be- half, with astonishing perseverance and success, for three years together. And thus began and terminated my muni- cipal career, — a career which, I must confess, failed to secure for me the thanks of my constituency ; and then, on the other hand, I am not aware that the worthy people ever seriously complained. There was absolutely nothing to do in the coun- cil ship ; and, unlike some of my brother office-bearers, the requisite nothing I did, quietly and considerately, and very much at my leisure, without any unnecessary display of stump oratory, or of anything else. OB. THE STOET OF MY EDUCATION. 475 CHAPTER XXIII " DayG passed ; an' now my patient steps That maiden's walks attend ; My vows had reach'd that maiden's ear, Aye, an' she ca'd me friend. An' I was bless'd, as bless'd can be ; The fond, daft dreamer Hope Ne'er dream'd o' happier days than mine, Or joys o' ampler scope." Hknrison's Sano. I USED, as I have said, to have occasional visitors when work iiig in the churchyard. My minister has stood beside me foi hours together, discussing every sort of subject, from the mis- deeds of the Moderate divines, — whom he liked all the worse for being brethren of his own cloth, — to the views of Isaac Taylor on the corruptions of Christianity or the possibilities of the future state. Strangers, too, occasionally came the way, desirous of being introduced to the natural curiosities of the district, more especially to its geology ; and I remember first meeting in the churchyard, in this way, the late Sir Thomas Dick Lauder ; and of having the opportunity afforded me of questioning, mallet in hand, the present distinguished Pro fessor of Humanity in the Edinburgh University,* respecting • Professor Pillans. 476 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS I the nature of the cohesive agent in the non-calcareo\is saiid stone which I was engaged in hewing. I had sometimes a different, but not less irtercsting, class of visitors. The town had its small but very choice circle of accomplished intellec- tual ladies, who, earlier in the century, would have been per- haps described as members of the blue-stocking sisterhood ; but the advancing intelligence of the age had rendered the plirase obsolete : and they simply took their place as well- informed, sensible w^omen, whose acquaintance with the best authors was regarded as in no degree disqualifying them from their proper duties as wives or daughters. And my circle of acquaintarxe included the entire class. I used to meet them at delightful tea-parties, and sometimes borrowed a day from my work to conduct them through the picturesque burn of Eathie, or the wild scenes of the Cromarty Hill, or to introduce them to the fossiliferous deposits of the Lias or the Old Red Sandstone. And not unfrequently their evening walks used to terminate where I WTought, in the old chapel of St. Regulus, or in the parish burying -ground, beside a sweet wooded dell known as the " Ladies' Walk ;" and my labors for the day closed in what I always very much relish ed, — a conversation on the last good book, or on some ne\i organism, recently disinterred, of the Secondary or Palaeozoic period. I had been hewing, about this time, in the upper part of my uncle's garden, and had just closed my work for the evening, when I was visited by one of my lady friends, accompanied by a stranger lady, who had come to see a curious old dial-stone which I had dug out of the earth long before, when a boy, and which had originally belonged to the ancient Castle-garden of Cromarty. I was standing with them beside the dial, which 1 had placed in my uncle*s garden, and remarking, that as it ex- hibited in its structure no little mathematical skill, it had prob- ably been cut under the eye of the eccentric but accomplished Sir Thomas Urquhart ; when a third lady, greatly younger than the others, and whom I had never seen before, came nurried- ly tripping down the garden-walk, and, addressing the other OB, THE STORY OF MY EDUCAIIOJS'. 471 two, apparently quitt in a flurry, — " O come, cc me away," she said, " I have been seeking you ever so long." " Is this you, L V was the staid reply : "Why, what now? — you have run yourself out of breath." The young lady was, I saw, very pretty ; and, though in her nineteenth year at the time, her light and somew hat petite figure, and the waxen clearness of her complexion, which resembled rather that of a fair child than of a grown woman, made her look from three to foui years younger. And as if in some degree still a child, hei two lady friends seemed to regard her. She stayed with them scarce a minute ere she tripped off again; nor did I observe that she favored me with a single glance. But what else could be expected by an ungainly, dust-besprinkled mechanic in his shirt-sleeves, and with a leathern apron before him 1 Nor did the mechanic expect aught else ; and when informed long after, by one whose testimony was conclusive on the point, that he had been pointed out to the young lady by some such distinguished name as "the Cromarty poet," and that she had come up to her friends somewhat in a flurry, simply that she might have a nearer look of him, he received the in- telligence somewhat with surprise. All the first interviews in all the novels I ever read are of a more romantic and less homely cast than the special interview just related ; but 1 know not a more curious one. Only a few evenings after, I met the same young lady, hi circumstances of which the writer of a tale might have made a little more. I was sauntering, just as the sun was sinking, along one of my favorite walks on the Hill, — a tre(i-skirted glade, — now looking out through the openings on the ever- fresh beauties of the Cromarty Frith, wdth its promontories, ind bays, and long lines of winding shore, and anon mark Jig how redly the slant light fell through intersticial gapsi on pale lichened trunks and huge boughs, in the deeper re- cesses of the wood, — when I found myself unexpectedly in the presence of the young lady of the previous evening. She was Siiuntering through the wood as leisurely as myself, — now and then dipping into a rather bulky volume which she carried, i78 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; that had not in the least the look of a novel, and which, as I subsequently ascertained, was an elaborate essay on Cau- sation. We, of course, passed each other on our several ways without sign of recognition. Quickening her pace, however, she was soon out of sight ; and I just thought, on one or two occasions afterwards, of the apparition that had been pre- sented as she passed, as much in keeping with the adjuncts, —the picturesque forest and the gorgeous sunset. It would not be easy, I thought, were the large book but away, to fur- aish a very lovely scene with a more suitable figure. Short- ly after, I began to meet the young lady at the charming tea- parties of the place. Her father, a worthy man, who, from unfortunate speculations in business, had met with severe losses, was at this time several years dead ; and his widow had come to reside in Cromarty, on a somewhat limited income, derived from property of her own. Liberally assisted, how- ever, by relations in England, she had been enabled to send her daughter to Edinburgh, where the young lady received all the advantages which a first-rate education could confer. By some lucky chance, she was boarded, with a few other ladies, all in early womanhood, in the family of Mr. George Thom- son, the well-known correspondent of Burns ; and passed under his roof some of her happiest years. Mr. Thomson, — himself an enthusiast in art, — strove to inoculate the youthful Inmates of his house with the same fervor, and to develope whatever seeds of taste or genius might be found in them ; and, characterized till the close of a life extended far beyond the ordinary term, by the fine chivalrous manners of the thorough gentleman of the old school, his influence over his young friends was very great, and his endeavors, in at least some of the instances, very successful. In none, however, was he more so than in the case of the young lady of my narra^ tive. From Edinburgh she was sent to reside with the friends in England to whose kindness she had been so largely indebt ed; and with them she might have permanently remained, to enjoy the advantages of superior position. She was at an age, however, which rarely occupies itself in adjusting the balancft OB, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOiN". 479 of temporal advantage; and her only brother having been ad mitted through the interest of her friends, as a pupil into (^hrist'i? Hospital, she preferred returning to her widowed mother, left solitary in consequence, though with the prospect of being obliged to add to her resources by taking a few of the children of the town as day-pupils. Her claim to take her place in the intellectual circle of the burgh was soon recognized. I found that, misled by the extreme youthfulness of her appearance, and a marked juvenility of manner, I had greatly mistaken the young lady. That she should be accomplished in the ordinary sense of the term, — that she should draw, play, and sing well, — would be what I should have expected ; but as I was not prepared to find that, mere girl as she seemed, she should have a decided turn, not for the light- er, but for the severer walks of literature, and should have al- ready acquired the ability of giving expression to her thoughts in a style formed on the best English models, and not in the least like that of a young lady. The original shyness wore away, and we became great friends. I was nearly ten years her senior, and had read a great many more books than she , and, finding me a sort of dictionary of fact, ready of access, and with explanatory not6s attached, that became long or short just as she pleased to draw them out by her queries, she had, in the course of her amateur studies, frequent occa- sion to consult me. There were, she saw, several ladies of her acquaintance, who used occasionally to converse with me in the churchyard ; but in order to make assurance doubly sure respecting the perfect propriety of such a proceeding on her part, she took the laudable precaution of stating the case to her mother's landlord, a thoroughly sensible man, one of the magistrates of the burgh, and an elder of the kirk ; and he at once certified that there was no lady of the place whc might not converse, without remark, as often and as long as she pleased, with me. And so, fully justified, both by the example of her friends — all very judicious women, some of them only 9 CHAPTEE XXIV. ** Life is a drama of a few brief acts ; The actors shift, the scene is often changed Pauses and revoUitions intervene, The mind is set to many a varied tune, And jars and plays in harmony by turns." Alexander Betuumx TuoruH my wife continued, after our marriage, to teach a few pupils, the united earnings of the household did not much exceed a hundred pounds per annum, — not quite so large a sum as I had used to think it a few years before ; and so I set myself to try whether I could not turn my leisure hours to some account, by writing for the periodicals. My old in- ability of pressing for work continued to be as embarrassing as ever, and, save for a chance engagement of no very promising kind, which presented itself to me unsolicited about this time, I might have failed in procuring the employment which I sought. An ingenious self-taught mechanic, — the late Mr. John Mackay Wilson of Berwick-on-Tweed, — after making good his upward w^ay from his original place at the composi- tor's frame, to the editorship of a provincial paper, started, ii the beginning of 1835, a weekly periodical, consisting of " Bor der Tales," which, as he possessed the story-telling ability, met with considerable success. He did not live, however, to complete the first yearly volume ; the forty-ninth weekly num- ber intimated his death ; but as the publication had been a BOO MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS , not ur profitable one. the publisher resoived on carrying it on ; and it was stated in a brief notice, which embodied a few par- ticulars of Mr. Wilson's biography, that, his materials being un- exhausted, "tales yet untold lay in reserve, to keep alive his memory.'* And in the name of Wilson the publication w^as kept up for, I believe, five years. It reckoned among its con- tributers the two Bethunes, John and Alexander, and the late Professor Gillespie of St. Andrew's, with several other writers, none of whom seem to have been indebted to any original mat- ter collected by its first editor ; and I, who, at the publisher's request, wrote for it, during the first year of my marriage, tales enough to fill an ordinary volume, had certainly to provide all my materials for myself. The whole brought me about twenty- five pounds, — a considerable addition to the previous hundred and odds of the household, but, for the work done, as inadequate a remuneration as ever poor writer got in the days of Grub Street. My tales, however, though an English critic did me the honor of selecting one of them as the best in the monthly part in which it appeared, were not in the highest order ; it took a great deal of writing to earn the three guineas, which were the stipulated wages for filling a weekly number ; and though poor Wilson may have been a fine enough fellow in his way, one had no great encouragement to do one's very best, in order to " keep alive his memory." In all such matters, according to Sir Walter Scott and the old proverb, " every herring should hang by its own head." I can show, however, that at least one of my contributions did gain Wilson some little credit. In the perilous attempt to bring out, in the dramatic form, the characters of two of ( ur national poets, — Burns and Fergusson, — I wrote for the " Tales" a series of " Recollections," drawn ostensibly from the memory of one who had been personally acquainted with them both, but in reality based on my own conceptions of the men, as exhibited in their lives and writings. And in an elaborate life of Fergusson, lately published, I find a bor- rowed extract from my contribution, and an approving ret- erence to the whole, coupled with a piece of information en- OR, THE STORY OF MY ElUCATION. 60i tirely new to me. " These Recollections," says the biographer, " are truly interesting and touching, and were the result of various communications made to Mr. Wilson, whose pains- taking researches I have had frequent occasion to verify in the course of my owi ." Alas, no ! Poor Wilson was more than a twelvemonth in his grave ere the idea of producing these " Recollections" first struck the writer, — a person to whom no communications on the subject were ever made by any one, and who, unassisted save by one of the biographies of the poet, — that in Chambers' " Lives of Illustrious Scotsmen," — wrote full two hundred miles from the scene of his sad and brief career. The same individual who, in Mr. Wil- son's behalf, is so complimentary to my " pains-taking re- search," is, I find, very severe on one of Fergusson's previous biographers, — the scholarly Dr. Irving, author of the Life of Buchanan, and the lives of the older Scottish Poets, — a gentleman who, whatever his estimate of the poor poet may have been, would have spared no labor in elucidating the various incidents which composed his history. The man of research is roughly treated, and a compliment awarded to the diligence of the man of none. But it is always thus with Fame. *' Some she disgraced, and some with honors crown'd ; Unlike successes equal merits found : So her blind sister, fickle Fortune, reigns, And, undiscerning, scatters crowns and chains." In the memoir of John Bethune by his brother Alexandei, the reader is told that he was much depressed and disap- pointed, about a twelvemonth or so previous to his decease, by the rejection of several of his stories in succession, which were returned to him, " with an editor's sentence of death passed upon them." I know not whether it was by the edi- joy of the " Tales of the Borders" that sentence in the case was passed ; but I know he sentenced some of mine, w^hich were, I dare say, not very good, though well nigh equal, I thought, to most of his own. Instead, however, of yielding to de- pression, like poor Bethune, I simply resolved to write fo» 502 MY SCHOOLS AND SC '^OOj^MA^TERS ; hiiii no more ; anc straightway raade an offer of my (?ervicea to Mr. Robert Chambers, by whom they were accepted ; and during the two following years I occasionally contributed to his Journal^ on greatly more liberal terms than those on which I had labored for the other periodical, and with my name attached to my several articles. I must be permitted to avail myself of the present opportunity of acknowledging the kind- ness of Mr. Chambers. There is perhaps no other writer of the present day who has done so much to encourage strug gling talent as this gentleman. I have for many years ob- served, that publications, however obscure, in which he finds aught really praiseworthy, are secure always of getting, in his widely-circulated periodical, a kind approving word, — that his criticisms invariably bear the stamp of a benevolent natur which experiences more of pleasure in the recognition of merit than in the detection of defect, — that his kindness does not stop with these cheering notices, for he finds time, in the course of a very busy life, to write many a note of encourage- ment and advice to obscure men in whom he recognizes a spirit superior to their condition, — and that the compositions of writers of this meritorious class, when submitted to him editorially, rarely fail, if really suitable for his journal, to find a place in it, or to be remunerated on a scale that invariably bears reference to the value of the communications, — not to the circumstances of their authors. I can scarce speak of my contributions to the periodicals at this time as forming any part of my education. I acquired, in their composition, a somewhat readier command of the pen than before ; but they, of course, tendered rather to the dissipation of previous stories than to the accumulation of new ones : nor did they give exercise to those higher faculties of mind which 1 deemed it most my interest to cultivate. My real education at \k\fi time was that in which I was gradually becoming initiated behind the bank-counter, as my experience of the business of the district extended ; and that in which I contrived to pick up In my leisure evenings along the shores. A rich ichthyolitic leposit of the Old Red Sandstone lies, as 1 have already said, 505 within less than half a mile of the town of Cromarty : and when fatigued with my calculations in the bank, I used to find it delightful relaxation to lay open its fish by scores, and to study their peculiarities as exhibited in their various states of keeping, until I at length became able to determine their several genera and species from even the minutest fragments. The number of ichthyolites which that deposit of itself furnished, — a patch little more than forty yards square, — seemed altogether astonishing : it supplied me with specimens at almost every visit, for ten years together ; nor, though, after I left Cromarty for Edinburgh, it was often explored by geologic tourists, and by a few cultivators of science in the place, was it wholly exhausted for ten years more. The ganoids of the second age of vertebrate existence must have congregated as thickly upon that spot in the times of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, as herrings ever do now, in their season, on the best fishing-banks of Caithness or the Moray Frith. I was for some time greatly puzzled in my attempts to restore these ancient fishes, by the peculiari- ties of their organization. It was in vain I examined every species of fish caught by the fishermen of the place, from the dog-fish and the skate, to the herring and the mackerel. I could find in our recent fishes no such scales of enamelled bone as those which had covered the Dipteria7is and the Celacanths ; and no such plate-encased animals as the various species of Coccosteus or Pterichthys, On the other hand, with the ex- ception of a double line of vertebral processes in the Coccos- teus, I could find in the ancient fishes no internal skeleton : they had apparently worn all their bones outside, where the ciustaceans wear their shells, and were furnished inside with but frameworks of perishable cartilage. It seemed somewhat strange, too, that the geologists who occasionally came my way, — some of them men of eminence,— seemed to know even less about my Old Red fishes and their peculiarities of structure, than T did myself. I had represented the various species of the deposit simply by numerals, which not a few of the speci- mens of my collection still retain on their faded labels ; and waited on until some one should come the way learned enough 504 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOODMASTERS ; to substitute for my provisional figures, words by which to designate them ; but the necessary learning seemed wanting, and I at length came to find that I had got into a terra incog- nita in the geological field, the greater portion of whose or- ganisms were still unconnected with human language. Tliey had no representative among the vocables. I formed my first imperfect acquaintance with the recent i^anoidal fishes in 1836, from a perusal of the late Dr. Rib Dert's paper on the deposit of Burdiehouse, which I owed to the kindness of Mr. George Anderson. Dr. Hibbert, in illus- trating the fishes of the Coal Measures, figured and briefly described the Lepidosteus of the American rivers as a still surviving fish of the early type ; but his description of the animal, though supplemented shortly after by that of Dr. Buckland in the Bridgewater Treatise, carried me but a little way. I saw that two of the Old Red genera, — Osteolejjsis and Diplopterus^ — resembled the American fish externally. It will be seen that the first-mentioned of these ancient ichthyolites bears a name compounded, though, in the reverse order, of ex actly the same words. But while I found the skeleton of the Lepidosteus described as remarkably hard and solid, I could detect in the Osteopolissind its kindred genus no trace of internal skeleton at all. The Cephalaspean genera, too, — Coccosteus and Pterichthys^ — greatly puzzled me : I could find no living ana logues for them ; and so, in my often-repeated attempts at res toration, I had to build them up plate by plate, as a child sets up its dissected map or picture bit by bit, — every new speci- men that turned up furnishing a key for some part previously unknown, — until at length, after many an abortive effort, the creatures rose up before me in their strange, unwonted pro- portions, as they had lived, untold ages before, in the prim eeval seas. The extraordinary form of Pterichthys filled me with astonishment ; and, with its arched carpace and flat plas- tron restored before me, I leaped to the conclusion, that as the recent Lepidosteus, with its ancient representdtives of the Old Red Sandstone, were sauroid fishes, — strange connecting links oetween fishes and alligators, — so the Pterichthys was a Chelo- OR, THE STOKY OF MY EDUCATION 505 nian fish, — a connecting link between the fish and the tortoise. A gurnard, — insinuated so far through the shell of a small tor- toise as to suffer its head to protrude from the anterior open- ing, furnished with oar-like paddles instead of pectoral fins, and with its caudal fin clipped to a point, — would, I found, form no inadequate representative of this strangest of fishes* And when, some years after, I had the pleasure of introducing *t to the notice of Agassiz, I found that, with all his world- wide experience of its class, it was as much an object of won- der to him as it had been to myself. " It is impossible," we find him saying, in his great work, " to see aught more bi- zarre in all creation than the Pterichihyan genus : the same astonishment that Cuvier felt in examining the Plesiosaurus, I myself experienced, when Mr. H. Miller, the first discoverer of these fossils, showed me the specimens which he had de- tected in the Old Red Sandstone of Cromarty." And there were peculiarities about the Coccosteus that scarce less excited my wonder than the general from of the Pterichthys^ and which, when I first ventured to describe them, were regarded by the higher authorities in Palaeontology as mere blunders on the part of the observer. I have, however, since succeeded in demonstrating that, if blunders at all, — which I greatly doubt, for Nature makes very few, — it was Nature herself that was in error, not the observer. In this strange Coccostean genus, Nature did place a group of opposing teeth in each ramus of the lower jaw, just in the line of the svmphysis, — an ar- rangement unique, so far as it is yet know^n, in the vertebrate division of creation, and which must have rendered the mouth of these creatures an extraordinary combination of the horizontal mouth proper to the vertebrata, and of the vertical mouth proper to the crustaceans. It was favorable to the integrity of my work of restoration, that the press was not waiting for me, and that when portions of the creatures on which ^ wrought were wanting, or plates turned up whose places I was unable to determine, I could la} aside my self-imposed task for the time, and only resume it when some new-found specimen sup- ph'ed me with the materials requisite for carrying it on. And 506 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; SO the restorations which I completed in 1840, and published in 1841, were found, by our highest authorities in 1848, after they had been set aside for nearly six years, to be essentially the true ones after all. I see, however, that one of the most fanciful and monstrous of all the interim restorations of Ptet' khthys given to the world, — that made by Mr. Joseph Dinkel in 1844 for \hQ late Dr. Mantell, and published in the " Medab of Creation," has been reproduced in the recent illustrated edi- tion of the " Vestiges of Creation." But the ingenious authoi of that work would scarce act prudently were he to stake the soundness of his hypothesis on the integrity of the restora- tion. For my own part, I consent, if it can be shown that the Pterichthys which once lived and moved on this ancient globe of ours ever either rose or sank into the Pterichthys of Mr. Dinkel, freely and fully to confess, not only the possi- bility, but also the actuality of the transmutation of both species and genera. I am first, however, prepared to demon- strate, before any competent jury of Palaeontologists in the world, that not a single plate or scale of Mr. Dinkel's restora- tion represents those of the fish which he professed to restore ; that the same judgment applies equally to his restoration of Coccosteus ; and that, instead of reproducing in his figures the true forms of ancient Cephalaspeans, he has merely given, in- stead, the likeness of things that never were " in the heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth." The place in the geologic scale, as certainly as the forms and characters, of these ancient fishes had to be determined. Mr. George Anderson had informed me, as early as 1834, that some of them were identical with the ichthyolites of the Gamrie de- posit; but then the place of the Gamrie deposit was still to fix. It had been recently referred to the same geological hori- zon as the Carboniferous Limestone, and was regarded as lying unconformable to the Old Red Sandstone of the district in which it occurs ; but, wholly dissatisfied with the evidence ad- duced, I continued my search, and, though the process was % slow one, saw the position of the Cromar y beds gradually OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCAlIOiT. 507 appioximating towards determination. It was not, however, until the autumn of 1837 that I got them fairly fixed down to the Old Red Sandstone, and not until the winter of 1839 that I was able conclusively to demonstrate their place in the base of the system, little more than a hundred feet, and in one part not more than eighty feet, above the upper strata of the Great Conglomerate. I had often wished, during my ex- plorations, to be able to extend my field of observation into the neighboring counties, in order to determine whether could not possess myself, at a distance, of the evidence which, for a time at least, I failed to find at home ; but my daily engagements in the bank fixed me down to Cromarty and its neighborhood ; and I found myself somewhat in the cir- cumstances of a tolerably lively beetle stuck on a pin, that, though able, with a little exertion, to spin round its centre, is yet wholly unable to quit it. I acquired, however, at the close of 1837, in the late Dr. John Malcolmson of Madras, a noble auxiliary, who could expatiate freely over the regions virtually barred against me. He had been led to visit Cro- marty by a brief description of its geology, rather picturesque than scientific, which had appeared in my legendary volume ; and after I had introduced him to its ichthyolitic beds on both sides of the Hill and at Eathie, and acquainted him with their character and organisms, he set himself to trace out the resembling deposits of the neighboring shires of BanflT, Moray, and Nairn. And in little more than a fortnight he had detect- ed the ichthyolites in numerous localities all over an Old Red Sandstone tract, which extends from the pn^nary districts of Banff* to near the field of Culloden. The Old Red Sandstone of the north, hitherto deemed so poor in fossils, he found, — with the Cromarty deposits as his key, — teeming with organic re- mains. In the spring of 1838, Dr. Malcolmson visited Eng- land and the Continent, and introduced some of my Cepha- iaspean fossils to the notice of Agassiz, and some of the evi- dence which I had laid before him regarding their place in the scale, t3 Mr. (now Sir Roderick) Murchison. And I had *fhe honor, in consequence, of corresponding with both these 508 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; distinguished men ; and the satisfaction of knowing, that by both, the fruit of my labois was deemed important. I ob serve that Humboldt, in his " Cosmos," specially refers to the judgment of Agassiz on the extraordinary character of the new zoological link with which I had furnished him ; and I find Murchison, in his great work on the Silurian System, pub- lished in 1839, laying no little emphases on the stratigraphi- cal fact. After referring to the previously formed opinion thai the Gamrie depoj^^t, with its ichthyolites, was 7iot an Old Red one, he goes on to say, — " On the other hand, I have recently been informed by Dr. Malcolmson,thatMr. Miller of Cromarty (who has made some highly interesting discoveries near that place) pointed out to him nodules, resembling those of Gam- rie, and containing similar fishes, in highly-inclined strata, which are interpolated in, and completely subordinate to, the great mass of old Red Sandstone of Ross and Cromarty. This important observation will, I trust, be soon communicated to the Geological Society, for it strengthens the inference of M. Agassiz respecting the epoch during which the C heir acanthus and Cheirolepis lived." All this will, I am afraid, appear tolerably weak to the reader, and somewhat more than toler- ably tedious. Let him remember, however, that the only merit to which I lay claim in the case is that of patient re- search, — a merit in which whoever wills may rival or surpass me ; and that this humble faculty of patience, when rightly directed, may lead to more extraordinary developments of idea than even genius itself. What I had been slowly de- ciphering were the ideas of God as developed in the mechan- ism and framework of his creatures, during the second age of vertebrate existence ; and one portion of my inquiries deter- mined the date of these ideas, and another their character. Many of the best sections of the Sutors and the adjacent hills, wdth their associated deposits, cannot be examined with- out boat ; and so I purchased for a few pounds a light little yawl, furnished with mast and sail, and that rowed four oars, to enable me to carry out my explorations. It made me free of the Cromarty and Moray Friths for some six or eig)»t milea OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 509 from the town, and afTorded me many a pleasant evening's excursion to the deep-sea caves and skerries, and the pic- tures({ue surf- wasted stacks of the granitic wall of rock whioh runs in the Ben Nevis line of elevation, from Shad wick on the east to the Scarfs Crag on the west. 1 know not a richei tract for the geologist. Independently of the interest that at- taches to its sorely-contorted granitic gneiss, — which seems, as Murchison shrewdly remarks, to have been protruded througli the sedimentary deposits in a solid state, as a fractured bono is sometimes protruded though the integuments, — there occurs along the range three several deposits of the Old Red Ichthyo- lites, and three several deposits of the Lias, besides the sub- aqueous ones, with two insulated skerries, which I am inclined to regard as outliers of the Oolite. These last occur in the form of half-tide rocKs, very dangerous to the mariner, which lie a full half-mile from the shore, and can be visited with safety only at low- water during dead calms, when no ground-swell comes rolling in from the sea. I have set out as early as two o'clock in a fine summer morning for these skerries, and, after spending several hours upon them, have been seated at the bank desk before ten ; but these were mornings of very hard work. It was the long Saturday afternoons that were my fa- vorite seasons of exploration ; and when the weather was fine, my wife would often accompany me in these excursions; and we not unfrequently anchored our skiff in some rocky bay, or over some fishing bank, and, provided with rods and lines, caught, ere our return, a basket of rock-cod or coal-fish for supper, that always seemed to eat better than the fish supplied us in the mar ket. These were happy holidays. Shelley predicates of a day of exquisite beauty, that it would continue to " live like joy in memory." I do retain recollections of these evenings spent in my little skifi^ — recollections mingled with a well remembered imagery of blue seas and purple hills, and a sun lit town in tlie distance, and tall wood-crested precipices nearer at hand, which flung lengthening shadows across shors and sea, — that not merely represent enjoyments which have been, but that In certain moods of the nind, take the form of enjoyment stilL 510 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS , They are favored spots in the chequered prospect of the past, on which the sunshine of memory falls more brightly than on most of the others. When thus employed, there broke out very unexpectedly, a second war with the Liberal Moderates of the town, in which, unwillingly rather than otherwise, I had ultimately to engage. The Sacrament of the Supper is celebrated in most of the parish churches of the north of Scotland only once a year ; and, as many of the congregations worship at that time in the open air, the summer and autumn seasons are usually selected foi the " occasion," as best fitted for open-air meetings. As, how- ever, the celebration is preceded and followed by week-day preachings, and as on one of these week-days — the Thursday preceding the Sacramental Sabbath — no work is done, Kirk« Sessions usually avoid fixing their sacrament in a busy time, such as the time of harvest in the rural districts, or of the her- ring-fishing in the seaport towns ; and as the parish of Cromarty has both its rural population and its fishing one, the Kirk-Ses- sion of the place have to avoid both periods. And so the early part of July, ere the herring-fishing or the harvest comes on, is the time usually fixed upon for the Cromarty Sacrament. In this year, however (1838), it so chanced that the day appointed for the Queen's coronation proved coincident with the Sacra- mental Thursday, and the Liberal Moderate party urged upon the Session that the preparations for the Sacrament should give way to the rejoicings for the Coronation. We had not been much accustomed to rejoicings of the kind in the north since the good old times when respectable Tory gentlemen used to show them selves drunk in public on the King's birth-day, in order to de- monstrate their loyalty : the coronation days of both George IV. and William IV. had passed ofi* as quietly as Sabbaths ; and the Session, holding that it might be quite as well for people to pray for their young Queen at church, and then quietly drink lier health when they got home, as to grow glorious in her behalf m taverns and tap-rooms, refused to alter their day. Believing that, though essentially in the right, they were yet politically in ■-he wrong, a^d that a plausible case might be made out against OKj THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 5H them by the newspaper pre^s, I waited on my minister, and urged him to ^ive way to the liberals, and have his preparatiim- day changed fi om Thursday to Friday. He seemed quite will- ing enough to act on the suggestion ; nay, he had made a simi- lar one, he told me, to his Session ; but the devout eldership, strong in the precedents of centuries, had declined to subordinate the religious services of the Kirk to the wassail and merriment sanctioned by the State. And so they determined on keeping their day of sacramental preparation on the Thursday, as their fathers had done. Meanwhile, the Liberals held what was very properly termed a public meeting, seeing that, though the pub- lie had failed to attend it, the public had been quite at liberty to do so, nay, had even been specially invited ; and there appear- ed in the provincial newspapers a long report of its proceedings, including five speeches, — all written by a legal gentleman, — in which it was designated a meeting of the inhabitants of the town and parish of Cromarty. The resolutions were, of course, of the most enthusiastically loyal character. There was not a member of the meeting who was not prepared to spend upon himself the last drop of his bottle of port in her majesty's behalf. Thursday came, — the Thursday of the Sacrament and of the coronation ; and, with ninety-nine hundredths of the church- going population of my townsfolk, I went to church as usual. The parochial resolutioners, amounting in all to ten, were, I can honestly avouch, scarce at all missed in a congregation of near ly as many hundreds. About mid-day, however, we could hear the muffled report of their carronades ; and, shortly after the service was over, and we had returned to our homes, there passed through the streets a forlorn little group of indi viduals, that looked exceedingly like a press-gang, but was in reality intended for a procession. Though joined by a pro- prietor from a neighboring parish, a lawyer from a neigh boring burgh, a small coast-guard party, with its command ing officer, and two half-pay Episcopalian officers beside, the number who walked, including boys, did not exceed twenty five personal; and of these, as I have said, only ten were parishioners The processionists had a noble dinner ui th 512 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS', head inn of the place, — merrier than even dinners of celel ra^ tion usually are, as it was, of course, loyalty and public spirit to ignore the special claim upon the day asserted by the Church ; and the darkening evening saw a splendid bonfire blazing from the brae-head. And the Liberal newspapers south and north taking part with the processionists, in many aparagraph and short leader, representing their frolic, — for such it was, and a very foolish one, — as a splendid triumph of the [>cople of Cromarty over Presby terial bigotry and clerical domi- iiati Dn. Nay, so bad did the case of my minister and his Ses- sion appear, thus placed in opposition to at once the people and the Queen, that the papers on the other side failed to take it up. A well-written letter on the subject by my wife, which fairly stated the facts, was refused admission into even the ecclesiastico-Conservative journal, specially patronized, at the time, by the Scottish Church ; and my minister's friends and brethren in the south could do little else than marvel at what Lhey deemed his wondrous imprudence. I had anticipated, from the first, that his position was to be a bad one ; but I ill liked to see him with his back to the wall. And though I had determined, on the rejection of my counsel, to take no part in the quarrel, I now resolved to try whether I could not render it evident that he was really not at issue with his people, but with merely a very incon- siderable clique among them, who had never liked him ; and that it was much a joke to describe him as disaffected to his sovereign, simply because he had held his preparation ser- vices on the day of her coronation. In order to make good my first point, I took the unpardonable liberty of giving the names in full, in a letter which appeared in our northern news- ■)apers, of every individual who walked in the procession, and represented themselves as the people ; and challenged the ad- dition of even a single name to a list ludicrously brief And in making good the second, I fairly succeeded, as there were not a few conical circumstances in the transaction, in getting the laughers on my side. The clique was amazingly angry, and wrote n">t very bright letters, which appeared as advertise- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 513 ments in the n ^wspapers, and paid duty to make evident the fact. There was a shallow and very ignorant young shoemaker in the place, named Chaucer, a native of the south of Scotland, who represented himself as the grandson of the old poet of the days of Edward III., and wrote particularly wretched doggrel to make good his claim. And, having a quarrel with the Kirk-Session, in a certain delicate department, he had joined the pioces- eionists, and celebrated their achievements in a ballad entirely worthy of them. And it was peihaps the severest cut of all, that the recognized leader of the band pronounced Chau- cer the younger a greatly better poet than me. There were representations, too, made to my superiors in the banking department at Edinburgh, which procured me a reprimand, though a gentle one ; but my superior in Cromarty, — Mr. Ross, — as wise and good a man as any in the direction, and thoroughly acquainted with the merits of the case, was wholly on my side. I am afraid the reader may deem all this very foolish, and hold that I would have been better employed among the rocks, in determining the true relations of their various beds, and the character of their organisms, than in bickering in a petty village quarrel, and making myself ene- mies. And yet, man being what he is, I fear an ability of efficient squabbling is a greatly more marketable one than any ability whatever of extending the boundaries of natural science. At least so it was, that while my geological researches did nothing for me at this time, my letter in the procession con- troversy procured for me the offer of a newspaper editorship. But though, in a pecuniary point of view, I would have con- siderably bettered my circumstances by closing with it, I found I could not do so without assuming the character of the special pleader, and giving myself to the advocacy of views and prin- ciples which I really did not hold ; and so I at once declined the office, as one for which I did not deem myself s^uited, and could not in conscience undertake. 1 found about this time more congenial employment, though, of course, it occupied only my leisure hours, in writing the memoir of a townsman, — the late Mr. Williai i Forsyth of Cro 514 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; marty, — at the request of his relation and son-in-law, my friend Mr. Isaac Fcrsyth of Elgin. William Forsyth had been a grown man ere the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions ; and, from the massiveness and excellence of his character, and his high standing as a merchant, in a part of the country in which mer- chants at the time were few, he had succeeded, within the pre- cincts of the town, to not a little of the power of the hereditary Sheriff of the district ; and after acting for more than half a century as a laborious Justice of the Peace, and succeeding in making up more quarrels than most country lawyers have an opportunity of fomenting, — for the age was a rude and com bative one, and the merchant ever a peace-maker, — he lived long enough to see Liberty-and-Equality Clubs and Processions, and died about the close of the first war of the first French Rev- olution. It was an important half-century in Scotland — though it exhibits but a narrow, inconspicuous front in the his- tory of the country — that intervened between the times of the hereditary jurisdictions and the Liberty-and-Equality Clubs. It was specially the period during which popular opinion be- gan to assume its potency, and in which the Scotland of the past merged, in consequence, into the very dissimilar Scotland of the present. And I derived much pleasure in tracing some of the more striking features of this transition age in the bi- ography of Mr. Forsyth. My little work was printed, but not published, and distributed by Mr. Forsyth of Elgin among the friends of the family, as perhaps a better and more adequate memorial of a worthy and able man than could be placed over his grave. It was on the occasion of the death of his last- surviving child, — the late Mrs. M'Kenzie of Cromarty, a lady from whom I had received much kindness, and under whose hospitable roof I had the opportunity afforded me of meeting not a few superior men, — that my memoir was undertaken ; and I regarded it as a fitting tribute to a worthy family just passed away, at once deserving of being remembered for its own sake, and to which I owed a debt of gratitude. In the spring of 1839, a sad bereavement darkened my household, and for a time left me little heart to pursue my on, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 515 wonted amusements, literary or scientific. • We had been visit ed, ten months after our marriage, by a little girl, whose preS' ence had added not a little to our happiness : home became more emphatically such from the presence of the child, that in a few months had learned so well to know its mother, and in a few more to take its stand in the nurse's arms, at an upper window that commanded the street, and to recognize and make signs to its father as he approached the house. Its few little words, too, had a Ascinating interest to our ears ; — our own names, lisped in a language of its own, every time we approach- ed ; and the simple Scotch vocable " awa, awa," which it knew how to employ in sicch plaintive tones as we retired, and that used to come back upon us in recollection, like an echo from the grave, when, its hrief visit over, it had left us forever, and its fair face and silken hair lay in darkness amid the clods of the church-yard. In how short a time had it laid hold of our affections ! Two brief years before, and we knew it not ; and now it seemed as if the void which it left in our hearts the whole world could not fill. We buried it beside the old chape] of St. Reiiuius. with the deep ricn words all around, save where an opening in front commands the distant land and the blue sea ; and where the daisies, which had learned to love, mottle, star-like, the mossy mounds ; and where birds, whosQ songs its ear had become skilful enough to distinguish, pour their notes over its little grave. The following simple but truthful stanzas, which I found among its mother's papers, seem to have been written in this place, — sw^eetest of burying- grounds, — a few weeks after its burial, when a chill and back- ward spring, that had scowled upon its lingering illness, broke out at once into genial summer : — Thou'rt *' awa, awa," from thy mother's side, And " awa, awa," from thy father's knee ; Thou'rt " awa" from our blessing, our care, our caressing^ But " awa" from our hearts thou'lt never be. All things, dear child, that were wont to pleaao ;hea Are round thee here in beauty bright, — There's music rare in the cloudless air. And the earth is teeming with living delighL 23 516 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; Thou'rt " awa, awa," from the bursting spring tims Tho' o'er thy head its green boughs wav« • The lambs are leaving their little footprinU Upon the turf of thy new-made grave. And art thou " awa," and " awa" forever That little face,— that tender frame,— That voice which first, in sweetest accenla» Call'd me the mother's thrilling namtj,- That head of nature's finest moulding,— Those eyes, the deep night ether's biwl. Where sensibility its shadows Of ever-changing meaning threw 1 Thy sweetness, patience under suflfering, All promis'd us an opening day Most fair, and told that to subdue thee Would need but love's most gentle sway. Ah me I Uwas here I thought to lead thee, And tell thee what are life and death, And -aise thy serious thouirh*'s first wakiur lo tii.n who holds our every breaih. And does my selfish heart then grudge tbet» That angels are thy teachers now,— That glory from thy &iviour's presence Kindles the crown upon thy brow ? O^ no I to me earth must be loneli^, Wanting thy voice, thy hand, thy \on ' Yet dost thou dawn a star of promiM» Mild beacon to the world abOT'O. OB. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 517 CHAPTER XXV. ** AU for the Church, and a little lesa for the State " Bklhavkm I HAD taken no very deep interest m the Voluntary contro rersy. There was, I thought, a good deal of overstatement and exaggeration on both sides. On the one hand the Volun taries failed to convince me that a State endowment for eccle- siastical purposes is in itself in any degree a bad thing. I had direct experience to the contrary. I had evidence the most unequivocal that in various parts of the country it was a very excellent thing indeed. It had been a very excellent thing, for instance, in the parish of Cromarty, ever since the Eevolution, down to the death of Mr. Smith, — in reality, a valuable patrimony of the people there ; for it had supplied the parish, free of cost, with a series of popular and excellent miii isters, whom otherwise the parishioners would have had to pay for themselves. And it had now given us my friend Mr. Stewart, one of the ablest and honestest ministers in Scotland or elsewhere, whether Established or Dissenting. And these facts, which were but specimens of a numerous class, had a tan- gibility and solidity about them which influenced me more than all the theoretic reasonings pressed on my attention about the mischief done to the Church by the over-kindness of Con- stantine, or the corrupting effects of State favor. But then 1 u«)uid as little agree with some of my friends on the endowment 6iO MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; side, that the Establishment, even in Scotland, was everywhere of value, as with some of the Voluntaries that it was nowhere of any. I had resided for months together in various parts of the country, where it would have mattered not a farthing to any one save the minister and his family, though the Estab- lishment had been struck down at a blow. Eeligion and morals would have no more suffered by the annihilation of the minister's stipend, than by the suppression of the pension of sc»me retired supervisor or superannuated officer of customs* Nor could I forget, that the only religion, or appearance of re- ligion, that existed in parties of workmen among which I had Deen employed (as in the south of Scotland, for instance), was to be found among their Dissenters, — most of them, at the time, asserters of the Voluntary principle. If the other work- men were reckoned, statistically at least, adherents of the Es- tablishment, it was not because they either benefited by it oi cared for it, but only somewhat in the way that, according to the popular English belief, persons born at sea are held to be long to the parishof Stepney. Further, I did not in the least like the sort of company into which the Voluntary controversy had introduced the good men on both sides : it gave a common cause to the Voluntary and the Infidel, and drew them cordially together ; and, on the other hand, placed side by side, on terms portentously friendly, the pious asserter of endowments and the irreligious old Tory. There was religion on both sides of the controversy, but a religious controversy it was not. The position of my grandmother's family, including, of course. Uncles James and Sandy, was a sort of midway one between the Secession and the Establishment. My grand- mother had quitted the family of Donald Roy long ere he had been compelled, very unwillingly, to leave the Church; and as no forced settlements had taken place in the parish into which she had removed, and as its ministers had been all men of the right stamp, she had done what Donald himself had been so desirous to do, — remained an attached member of the Establishment. One of her sisters had, however, mar- -ied in Nigg ; and she and her husband, following Donald OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 519 into the ranks of the Secession, had reared one of their boys to the ministry, who became, in course of time, the respected minister of the congregation which his great-grandfather had founded. And, as the contemporary and first cousin of my uncles, the minister used to call upon them every time he came to town ; and my Uncle James, in turn (Uncle Sandy very rarely went to the country), never missed, when in Nigg or its neighborhood, to repay his visits. There was thus a good deal of intercourse kept up between the families, no without effect. Most of the books of modern theology which my uncles read were Secession books, recommended by their cousin ; and the religious magazines for which they subscribed was a Secession magazine. The latter bore, I remember, the name of the "Christian Magazine, or Evangelical Repository." It was not one of the brightest of periodicals, but a sound and solid one, with, as my uncles held, a good deal of the old unction about it ; and there was, in especial, one of the con- tributors whose papers they used to pick out as of peculiar ex- cellence, and not unfrequently read a second time. They bore the somewhat Greek-looking signature of Leumas^ as if the writer had been a brother or cousin-german of some of the old Christians to whom Paul used to notify kind regards and good wishes at the end of his epistles ; but it was soon discovered that Leumas was merely the proper name Samuel reversed, though who the special Samuel was who turned his signature to the right about, placing the wrong end foremost, and wrote with all the concise weight and gravity of the old divines, my uncles never knew. They had both passed away ere, in perus- ing the " Second Gallery of Literary Portraits," I found my- self introduced to worthy old Leumas^ also a denizen of the unseen world at the time, as the father of the writer of that brilliant work, — the Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee. This kind of writing had, of course, its proper effect on my uncles, sind, through them, on the family : it kept up our respect for the Secession. The Established Church, too, was in those days a tolerably faulty institution. My uncles took an interest in missions ; and the Church had none : nay, its deliberate de- 520 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; liision against them, — that of 1796, — remained still unreversed. It had had, b* jides, its forced settlements in our immediate neighborhood ; and Moderatism, wise and politic in its gen eration, had perpetrated them by the hands of some of the better ministers of the d strict, who had learned to do what ihey themselves believed to be very wicked things w^hen theii' Church bade them, — a sort of professional license which my uncles could not in the least understand. In short, the Seces- sion better pleased them, in the main, than the Establishment, though to the Establishment they continued to adhere, and failed to see on what Seceder principle their old friends were becoming Voluntaries. On the breaking out of the controversy, [ remembered all this ; and, when told by good men of the Established Church that well nigh all the vital religion of the country was on our side, and that it had left the Vol- untary Seceders, though the good men themselves honestly believed what they said, I could not. Further, the heads of a conversation which I had overheard in my cousin the Seceder minister's house, when I was a very young boy, — and to which it could have been little suspected that I was listen- ing, for 1 was playing at the time on the floor, — ^had taken a strong hold of my memory, and often returned upon me at this period. My cousin and some of his elders were mourn- ing — very sincerely , I cannot doubt — over the decay of religion among them : they were falling far short, they said, of the at- tainments of their fathers ; there were no Donald Roys among them now; and yet they felt it to be a satisfaction, though a r,ad one, that the little religion which there was in the district seemed to be all among themselves. And now, here was there exactly the same sort of conviction, equally strong, on the other side. But with all that liberally-expressed charity which forms one of the distinctive features of the present time, and is in reality one of its best things, there is still a vast amount .)f appreciation of this partial kind. Friends are seen in the (christian aspect ; opponents in the polemic one : and it is too often forgottei that the friends have a polemic aspect to their opponents, and the opponents a Christian aspect to their friends DB, THS STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 521 And not only in the present, but at all former periods, the case seems to have been the same. I am sometimes half dis- posed to think, that either the Prophet Elijah, or the seven thousand honest men who had not bowed the knee to Baal, mu5,t have been dissenters. Had the Prophet been entirely at one in his views with the seven thousand, it is not easy to conceive how he could have been wholly ignorant of their ex- istence. With all these latitudinarian convictions, however, I was thoroughly an Establishment man. The revenues of the Scot- tish Church I regarded, as I have said, as the patrimony of the Scottish people ; and 1 looked forward to a time when that un- warrantable appropriation of them, through w^hich the aristoc- racy had sought to extend its influence, but which had served only greatly to reduce its power in the country, would come to an end. What I specially wanted, in short, was, not the confiscation of the people's patrimony, but simply its restoration from the Moderates and the lairds. And in the enactment of the Veto law I saw the process of restoration fairly begun. I would have much preferred seeing a good broad anti-patronage agita- tion raised on the part of the Church. As shrewdly shown at the time by the late Dr. M'Crie, such a course would have been at once wiser and safer. But for such an agitation even the Church's better ministers were not in the least prepared. From 1712 to 1784, — a period of seventy-two years, — the General Assembly had yearly raised its voice against the enactment of the patronage law of Queen Anne, as an unconstitutional encroachment on those privileges of the Church and those rights of the Scottish people which the Treaty of Union had been framed to secure. But the half century which had passed, since, through the act of a Moderate majority, the protest had been dropped, had produced the natural effect. By much the greater part of even the better ministers of the Church had been admitted into their offices through the law of patronage ; and, naturally grateful to the patrons who had befriended them, they hesitated to make open war on tne powers that had beer exerted m their own behal£ Accord* 522 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ing to Solomon, the "gift" had to a certain extent " de- stroye 1 the heart ;" and so they were preparea to take up merely a half-way position, which their predecessors, the old popular divines, would have liked exceedingly ill. I could not avoid seeing that, fixed in a sort of overtopped hollow, if I may so speak, between the claims of patronage on the one hand and the rights of the people on the other, it was a most perilous position, singularly open to misconception and misrepresentation on both sides ; and as it virtually strip- ped the patrons of half their power, and extended to the people only half their rights, I was not a little afraid that the patrons might be greatly more indignant than the people grateful, and that the Church might, in consequence, find her- self exposed to the wrath of very potent enemies, and backed by the support of only lukewarm friends. But, however per- ilous and difficult as a post of occupation, it was, I could not avoid believing, a position conscientiously taken up ; nor could I doubt that its grounds were strictly constitutional. The Church, in a case of disputed settlement, might, I be- lieved, have to forfeit the temporalities, if her decision differed from that of the law courts, but only the temporalities con- nected with the case at issue ; and these I deemed worth risk- ing in the popular behalf, seeing that they might be regarded as already lost to the country in every case in which a parish .was assigned to a minister whom the parishioners refused to hear. It rejoiced me, too, to see the revival of the old spirit in the Church ; and so I looked with an interest on the earlier stages of her struggle with the law courts, greatly more in- tense than that with which any mere political contest had ever inspired me. I saw with great anxiety decision after de- cision go against her ; first that of the Court of Session iu March 1838, and next that of the House of Lords in May 1839 ; and then with the original Auchterarder case of collision I saw that of Lethendy and Marnoch mixed up ; and, as one entanglement succeeded another, confusion becoming w^orse confounded. It was only when the Church's hour of peril came that 1 learn -^d to know how much I really valued her, and how OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOIT. 523 strong and iiimerous the associations were that bound her to my affections. I had experienced at least the average amount of interest in political measures whose tendency and principles I deemed good in the main, — such as the Reform Bill, the Cath- olic Emancipation Act, and the Emancipation of the Negroes ; but they had never cost me an hour's sleep. Now, however, 1 felt more deeply ; and for at least one night, after reading the speech of Lord Brougham, and the decision of the House of Lords in the Auchterarder case, I slept none. In truth, the position of the Church at this time seemed critical in the extreme. Offended by the usage which she had received at the hands of the Whigs, in her claims for endowments to her new chapels, and startled by their general treatment of the Irish Establishment, and the suppression of the ten bishopricks, she had thrown her influence into the Tory scale, and had done much to produce that re-action against the Liberal party in Scotland which took place during the Ministry of Lord Melbourne. In the representation of at least one county in which she was all-potent, — Ross-shire, — she had succeeded in substituting a Tory for a Whig ; and there were few districts in the kingdom in which she had not very considerably increased the votes on the Tory, or, as it was term ed. Conservative side. The people, however, though they might, and did, become quite indifferent enough to the Whigs, could not follow her into the Tory ranks. They stood aloof, — very suspicious, not without reason, of her new political friends, — • no admirers of the newspapers which she patronized, and not in the least able to perceive the nature of the interest which she had begun to take in supernumerary bishops and the Irish Establishment. And now, when once more in a position worthy of her old character, and when her Tory friends, — con- verted at once into the bitterest and most ungenerous of ene- mies, — were turning upon her to rend her, she had at once to encounter the hostility of the Whigs and the indifferency of the people. Further, with but one, or at most two exceptions, all the newspapers which she had patronized declared against her, and were throughout the struggle the bitterest and most 524 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; abusive of her opponents. The Voluntaries, too, joined with redoubled vehemence in the cry raised to drown her voice and misinterpret and misrepresent her claims. The general cur- rent of opinion ran strongly against her. My minister, warmly interested in the success of the Non-Intrusion principle, has told me, that for many months I was the only man in his parish that seemed thoroughly to sympathize with him ; and I have no doubt that the late Dr. George Cook was perfectly correct and truthful when he about this time remarked, in one of his public addresses, that he could scarce enter an inn or a stage-coach, without finding respectable men inveighing against the utter folly of the Non-Intrusionists, and the worse than madness of the Church Courts. Could I do nothing for my Church in her hour of peril ? There was, I believed, no other institution in the country half so valuable, or in which the people had so large a stake. The Church was of right theirs, — a patrimony won for them by the blood of their fathers, during the struggles and suffer- ings of more than a hundred years ; and now that her better ministers were trying, at least partially, to rescue that patri- mony for them from the hands of an aristocracy who, as a body at least, had no spiritual interest in the Church, — belong- ing, as most of its members did, to a different communion, — they were in danger of being put down, unbacked by the popu- lar support which in such a cause they deserved. Could I not do something to bring up the people to their assistance 1 I tossed wakefully throughout a long night, in which I formed my plan of taking up the purely popular side of the question ; and in the morning I sat down to state my views to the people, in the form of a letter addressed to Lord Brougham. I devoted to my new employment every moment not imperatively de- manded by my duties in the bank office, and, in about a week af- ter, was able to despatch the manuscript of my pamphlet to the respected manager of the Commercial Bank, — Mr. Robert Paul, — a gentleman from whom I had received much kindness when ir Edinburgh, and who, in the great ecclesiastical struggle, took decided part with the Church. Mr. Paul brought it to OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 52£ his ministi r, the Rev. Mr. Candlish of St. George's (n^ n Dr. Candlish), who, recognizing its popular character, urged its im- mediate publication ; and the manuscript was accordingly put intc the hand of Mr. Johnstone, the well-known Church book- seller. Dr. Candlish had been one of a party of ministers and elders of the Evangelical majority who had met in Edinburgh shortly before, to take measures for the establishment of a newspaper. All the Edinburgh press, with the exception <^f one newspaper, had declared against the ecclesiastical party : and even that one rather received articles and paragraphs in their behalf through the friendship of the proprietor, than was itself on their side. There had been a larger infusion of Whiggism among the Edinburgh Churchmen than in any other part of the kingdom. They had seen very much, in consequence, that the line taken by the Conservative portion of their friends, in addressing the people through the press, had not been an efficient one; — their friends had set themselves to make the people both good Conservatives and good Church- men, and of course had never got over the first point, and never would ; and what they now purposed was, to establish a paper that, without supporting any of the old parties in the State, would be as Liberal in its politics as in its Churchman- ship. But there was a preliminary point which they also could not get over. All the ready-made editors of the king- dom, if I may so speak, had declared against them ; and for want of an editor, their meeting had succeeded in originating, not the intended newspaper, but merely a formal recognition, in a few resolutions, of its desirableness and importance. On reading my pamphlet in manuscript, however. Dr. Candlish at once concluded that the desired want was to be supplied Dy its writer. Here, he said, is the editor we have been look, mg for. Meanwhile, my little work issued from the press, and was successful. It ran rapidly through four editions of a thou- sand copies each, — the number, as I subsequently ascertained. of a popular non-intrusion pamphlet that would fairly sell — aud was read pretty extensively by men who were not Non- Iiitrusionists. Among these there were several members c»f 526 MY SJHO^LS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; the Ministry of the time, including the late Lord Melboame, who at first regarded it, as I have been informed, as the com- position, under the popular form and a nommede guerre^ of some of the Non-Intrusion leaders in Edinburgh ; and by the late Mr O'Connell, who had no such suspicions, and who, though he lacked sympathy, as he said, with the ecclesiastical views which it advocated, enjoyed what he termed its *' racy Eng- lish," and the position in w^hich it placed the Noble Lord to whom it was addressed. It was favorably noticed, too, by Mr. Gladstone, in his elaborate work on Church Principles ; and was, in short, both in the extent of its circulation, and the circles into which it found its way, a very successful pamphlet. So filled was my mind with our ecclesiastical controversy, that w^hile yet unacquainted with the fate of my first brochure, I was busily engaged with a second. A remarkable cause of intrusion had occurred in the district rather more than twenty years before; and after closing my week's labors in the bank, I set out for the house of a friend in a neighboring parish on a Saturday evening, that I might attend the deserted church on the following Sabbath, and glean from actual observation the materials of a truthful description, which would, I trusted, tell in the controversy. And as the case was one of those in which truth proves stranger than fiction, what I had to de- scribe was really very curious ; and my description received an extensive circulation. I insert the passage entire, as prop- erly a part of my story, "There were associations of a peculiarly high character connected with thl8 northern p:irish. For more than a thousand years it had formed part of the patrimony of a truly noble family, celebrated by Philip Doddridge for i(s great moral worth, and by Sir Walter Scott for its high military genius ; and through -whoso miiuence the light of the Reformation had been introduced into this re- mote corner, at a period when the neighboring districts were enveloped in the original darkness. In a later age it had been honored by the flues and proscnp. lions of Charles II. ; and its minister,— one of tljo?e men of God whose names Btill live in the memory of the country, and whose biography occupies no small space in the recorded history of her ' worthies,'— had rendered him>elf so ob- noxious to the tyranny and irreligion of the time, that he was ejected fnjm his soarge rao"« than a year before any of the other non-conforming clergymen of tba OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 527 C?hurch.* I approached the parish from the east. The day was varm and pleasant; the scenery through which I passed some of the finest in Scotiand. The mountains rose on the right, in huge Titanic masses, tliat seemed to soften their purple and blue in the clear sunshine, to the delicate tone of the deep Bky beyond; and I could see the yet unwasted snows of winter glittering, in little detached masses, along their summits. The hills of the midd'e region were feathered with wood ; a forest of mingled oaks and larches, which still blended the tender softness of spring with the full foliage of summer, swept down tc the path ; the wide undulating plain below was laid out into fields, mottled with cottages, and waving with the yet unshot corn ; and a noble arm of the sea winded along the lower edge for nearly twenty miles, losing Itself to the west, among blue hills and jutting headlands, and opening io tho east to the main ocean, through a magnificent gateway of rock. But th€ little groups which I encountered at every turning of the path, as they jour- neyed with all the sober, well-marked decency of a Scottish Sabbath morn Ing, towards the church of a neighboring parish, interested me more than even the scenery. The clan which inhabited this part of the country had jorne a well-marked character in Scottish story. Buchanan had described it as one of the most fearless and warlike in the north. It served under tho Bruce of Bannockburn. It was the first to rise in arms to protect Queen Mary, on her visit to Inverness, from the intended violence of Huntly. It fought the battles of Protestantism in Germany, under Gustavus Adolphus. It corvered the retreat of tho English at Fontenoy ; and presented an un unbroken front to the enemy, after all the other allied troops had quitted the field. And it was the descendants of those very men who were now pass- ing me on the road. The rugged, robust form, half bone, half mnscle,— the springy firmness of the tread, — tlie grave, manly countenance, — all gave indication that the original characteristics survived in their full strength; and it was a strength that in-pired confidence, not fenr. There were gray-haired, patriarchal-looking men among the groupes, whose very air seemed impressed by a sense of the duties of the day; nor was there aught that did not agree with the object of the journey, in the appearance of even the youngest and least thoughtful. '*As I proceeded, I came up with a few people who were travelling in a contrary direction. A Secession meeting-house has lately sprung up in the parish, and these formed part of the congregation. A path, nearly obscured by grass and weeds, leads from the main road to the parish church. It was with difficulty I could trace it, and there were none to direct me, for I was now walking alone. The parish burying-ground, thickly sprinkled with graves and tombstones, surrounds the church. It is a quiet, solitary spot, of great beauty, lying beside the sea-shore; and as service had not yet commenced, I ^-hiled away half an hour in sauntering among the stones, and decipheriug the inscriptions. I could trace in the rude monuments of this retired little spot, a •Thomas Hog of Kiltearn. See *'Scot* Worthies;" or the cheap-pubii«iU(>« rolumes of the Free Churcli for 1846. 528 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; brief but inlere<;tins: history of the district. The older tablets, gray and shfiggy witfc the mosses and lichens of three centuries, bear, in their uncouth semblancei of the unwieldy battle-axe and double-handed sword of ancient warfare, the mt«t and appropriate symbols of the earlier time. But the more modern testify to the introduction of a humanizing influence. They speak of a life after death, in the "holy texts" described by the poet; or certify in a quiet humility of Btyle which almost vouches for their truth, that the sleepers below were *' honeU juen of blameless character, and who feared God." There is one tombstone, however, more remarkable than all the others. It lies beside the church-door, ud testifies, in an antique description, that it covers the remains of the "oreai an.of.God.and.faithful.ministkr.of.Jesus.Christ.," who hud endnred persecu ion for the truth in the dark days of Charles and his brother. He had out- lived the tyranny of the Stuarts; and though worn by years and sufferings, had returned to his parish on the Revolution, to end his course as it hac' begun. He saw, ere his death, the law of patronage abolished, and the popula- right virtually secured ; and fearing lest his people might be led to abuse th< important privilege conferred upon them, and calculating aright on the abiding influence of his own character among them, he gave charge on his death-bed to dig his grave in the threshold of the church, that they might regard him af a sentinel placed at the door, and that his tombstone might speak to them af they passed out and in. The inscription, which, after the lapse of nearly r century and a half, is still perfectly legible, concludes with the following rv markable words :— " THIS.srONK.SHALL.BJCAR.WITNESS.AGAlNST.THE.PARI8JllONEE»i OF.KlLTEARN.lF.THEY.BRINO. ANK. UNGODLY. MINISTER.IN.HKRE." Could the imagliJ? tion of a poet have originated a more striking conception in connection v dU a clmrch deserted by all its better people, and whose minister fattens oii hia hire, useless and contented? "I entered the church, for the clergyman had just gone in. The/e wora from eight to ten persons scattered over the pews below, and se-ea in tUe galleries above; and these, as ll\ere were no more ^ Peter darks'' re *• Mich id Tods'** in the paiish, composed the entire congregation. I wrapp^i mysctf up \n my plaid, and sat down ; and the service went on in the usud . cour^ ; but it sounded in my ears like a miserable mockery. The precent >r sung almost alone ; and ere the clergyman had reached the middle of his fiisrouiei, which he read in an unim passioned, monotonous tone, nearly one lialf hSs skeleton congregation had fallen asleep ; and the drowsy, listless expression of the others showed that, for every good purpose, they might have been at»l>-p too. And Sabbath after Sabbath has this unfortunate man gone the samo t rosonra round. »nd with exactly the same effect for the last twenty-three y'jj'f;— at no time regarded by the better clergymen of the district as really t'i<;ir brother,— on no occasion recognized by the parish as virtually its ministtr;— with a dreary vacancy and a lew indifferent hearts inside his church, and lao stone of the * Peter Clark and Michael Tod were the only individuaj" who, in a popu- lation of three thousand souls, attached their signatures to he\ call of the ob- noxious fresentee, Mr. Yomig, in the famous Auchterarder ■ ua. OR, IHE STORY OE MY EDUCATION". 529 Covenanter at the door. Against whom does the inscription testify ? for the people have escaped. Against the patron, the intruder, and the law of Bolin^ broke,— th 3 Dr. Robertsons of the last age, and the Dr. Cooks of the present. It 18 well to learn from this hapless parish the exact sense in which, in a lifferent state of matters, the Rev. Mr. Young would have been constituted minister of Auchterarder. It is well, too, to learn, that there may be vacan- 4es in the Church where no blank appears in the Almanac." On my return home from this journey, early on the follow- big Monday, I found a letter from Edinburgh awaiting me, requesting me to meet there with the leading Non-Intni- sionists. And so, after describing, in the given extract, the scene which I had just witnessed, and completing my second pamphlet, I set out for Edinburgh, and saw for the first time men with whose names I had been familiar during the course of the Voluntary and NonJntrusion controversies. And enter- ing into their plans, though with no little shrinking of heart, lest I should be found unequal to the demands of a twice-a- week paper, that would have to stand, in Ishmael's position, against almost the whole newspaper press of the kingdom, I agreed to undertake the editorship of their projected newspaper, the Witness, Save for the intense interest with which I regard- ed the struggle, and the stake possessed in it, as I believed, by the Scottish people, no consideration whatever would have in- duced me to take a step so fraught, as I thought at the time, with peril and discomfort. For full twenty years I had never been engaged in a quarrel on my own account: all my quarrels, either directly or indirectly, were ecclesiastical ones ; — I had fought for my minister, or for my brother parishioners : and fain now would I have lived at peace with all men : but the editor- ship of a Non-Intrusion newspaper involved, as a portion of its duties, war with all the world. I held, besides, — not aware how very much the spur of necessity quickens production, — that its twice-a-week demands would fully occupy all my time, and that I would have to resign, in consequence, my favorite pur- suit, — ^geology. I had once hoped, too, — though of late years the hope had been becoming faint, — to leave some little mark behind me in the literature of my country ; but the last re mains of the pxp-^ctation had now to be resigned. The newa 680 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; paper editor writes in sand when the flood is coming in. If he but succeed in influencing opinion for the present, he must be content to be forgotten in the future. But believing the cause to be a good one, I prepared for a life of strife, toil, and com- parative obscurity. In counting the cost, I very considerably exaggerated it ; but I trust I may say that, in all honesty, and with no sinister aim, or prospect of worldly advantage, I did count it, and fairly undertook to make the full sacrifice whid the cause demanded. It was arranged that our new paper should start with the new twelvemonth (1840) ; and I meanwhile returned to Cro- marty, to fulfil my engagements with the bank till the close of its financial year, which in the Commercial Bank oflices takes place at the end of autumn. Shortly after my return Dr. Chalmers visited the place on the last of his Church Ex- tension journeys ; and I heard, for the first time, the most impressive of modern orators address a public meeting, and had a curious illustration of the power which his ^'deep mouth'''* could communicate to passages little suited, one might suppose, to call forth the vehemency of his eloquence. Li illustrating one of his points, he quoted from my " Me- moir of William Forsyth" a brief anecdote, set in descrip. tion of a kind which most men would have read quietly enough, but which, coming from him, seemed instinct with the Homeric vigor and force. The extraordinary impress- iveness which he communicated to the passage served to show me, better than aught else, how imperfectly great orators may be represented by their written speeches. Ad- mij'able as the published sermons and addresses of Dr. Chalmers are, they impart no adequate idea of that wonder- ful power and impressiveness in which he excelled all other British preachers.* I had been introduced to the Doctor in Edinburgh a few ♦ The following is the passage which was honored on this occasion by Chalmers, and which told, in hi 3 hands, with all the effect of the most power- ful acting:— ^^ Saunders Macivoi the mate of the ^Elizabeth,' was a grav« OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 631 weeks before ; but on this occasion I saw rather more of him. He examined with curious interest my collection of geological specimens, which already contained not a few valuable fossils that could be seen nowhere else ; and I had the pleasure of spending the greater part of a day in visiting in his company, by boat, some of the more striking scenes of the Cromarty Sutors. I had long looked up to Chalmers as, on the whole, the man of largest mind which the Church of Scotland had ever produced ; not more intense or practical than Knox, but broader of faculty ; nor yet fitted by nature or accomplish and somewhat hard-favored man, powerful in bone and muscle, even after ho had considerably turned his sixtieth year, and much respected for his intlexi« ble integrity and the depth of his religious feelings. Both the mate and his de- vout wife were especial favorites with Mr. Porteous of Kilmuir,— a minister of the same class as the Pedens, Reiiwicks, and Cargils of a former age; and on one occasion when the sacrament was dispensed in his parish, and Saunders was absent on one of his Continental voyages, Mrs. Macivor was an inmate of the manse. A tremendous storm burst out in the night-time, and the poor woman lay awake, listening in utter terror to the fearful roarings of the wind, as it howled in the chimneys, and shook the casements and the doors. At length, when she could lie still no longer, she arose, and crept along the passage to the door of the minister's chamber. *0, Mr. Porteous,' she said, *Mr. Porteous, do ye no hear that?— and poor Saunders on his way back frae Holland ! O, rise, rise, and ask the strong help o' your Master!' The minister accordingly rose and entered his closet. The ' Elizabeth' at this critical moment was driving onwards through spray and darkness, along the northern shores of the Moray Frith. The fearful skerries of Shandwick, where so many gallant vessels have perished, were closes at hand ; and the increasing roll of the sea showed ths gradual shallowing of the water. Macivor and his old townsman Robert Hog- Back stood together at the binnacle. An immense wave came ro'.ling behind, and they had but barely time to clutch to the nearest hold, when it broke over them half-mast high, sweeping spars, bulwarks, cordage, all before it, in Its course. It passed, but the vessel rose not. Her deck remained buried m a sheet of foam, and she seemed settling down by the heaa. There was & frightful pause. First, however, the bowsprit and the butts of the windlass, began tc emerge,— next the forecastle, — the vessel seemed as if shaking her- self from the load ; and then the whole deck appeared, as she- went tiltiiig over the next wave. 'There are still more mercies in store for us,' sail Mac- ivor, addressing his companion; 'she floats still.' 'O, Saunders, Saunders I' ex- claimed Robert, 'there was surely some God's soul at work for ua, >r sh« would never have cowed yon.'" 5S2 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ment to make himself a mo^e enduring name in literature than Robertson, but greatl} nobler in sentiment, and of a larger grasp of general intellect. With any of our other Scottish ministers it might be invidious to compare him ; seeing that some of the ablest of them are, like Henderson, little more than mere historic portraits drawn by their con- temporaries, but whose true intellectual measure cannot, fiom the lack of the necessary materials on which to form a judgment, be now taken anew ; and that many of the others employed fine faculties in work, liter iry and minis- terial, which, though important in its consequences, was scarce less ephemeral in its character than even the labors of the newspaper editor. The mind of Chalmers w^as emphati- cally a many-sided one. Few men ever came into friendly contact with him, who did not find in it, if they had really anything good in them, moral or intellectual, a side that suited themselves ; and I had been long struck by that union which his intellect exhibited of a comprehensive philosophy with a true poetic faculty, very exquisite in quality, though dissociated from what Wordsworth terms the " accomplishment of verse." 1 had not a little pleasure in contemplating him on this occa- sion as the jpoet Chalmers. The day was calm and clear ; but there was a considerable swell rolling in from the German Ocean, on which our little vessel rose and fell, and which sent the surf high against the rocks. The sunshine played amid the broken crags atop, and amid the foliage of an overhanging wood ; or caught, half-way down, some projecting tuft of ivy ; but the faces of the steeper precipices were brown in the shade ; and where the waves roared in deep caves beneath, all was dark and chill. There were several members of the party who attempted engaging the Doctor in conversation ; but he was in no conversational mood. It would seem as if the words addressed to his ear failed at first to catch his attention, and that, with a painful courtesy, he had to gather up their mean- ing from the remaining echoes, and to reply to them doubt- fully and monosyllabically, at the least possible expense of xnind. His fare wore, meanwhile, an air of dreamy enjoy OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 533 ment He was busy, evidently, among the crags and boskj hollow*, and would have enjoyed himself more had he been alone. In the middle of one noble precipice, that reared its tall pine-crested brow more than a hundred yards overhead, there was a bush-covered shelf of considerable size, but wholly inaccessible ; for the rock dropped sheer into it from above, and then sank perpendicularly from its outer edge to the beach below ; and the insulated shelf, in its green unapproachable sol- itude, had evidently caught his eye. It was the scene, I said, — taking the direction of his eye as the antecedent for the zV, — it was the scene, says tradition, of a sad tragedy during the times of the persecution of Charles. A renegade chaplain, rather weak than wicked, threw himself, in a state of wild de- spair, over the precipice above ; and his body, intercepted in ita fall by that shelf, lay unburied among thebushes for years after, until it had bleached into a dry and whitened skeleton. Even as late as the last age, the shelf continued to retain the name of the " Chaplain's Lair." I found that my communication, chiming in with his train of cogitation at the time, caught both his ear and mind ; and his reply, though brief was expressive of the gratification which its snatch of incident had conveyed. As our skiff sped on a few oar-lengths more, we disturbed a flock of sea-gulls, that had been sporting in the sunshine over a shoal of sillochs ; and a few of them winged their way to a jutting crag that rose immediately beside the shelf. I saw Chalmers' eye gleam as it followed them. " Would you not like. Sir," he said, addressing himself to my minister, who sat beside him, — ••' Would you not like to be a sea-gull ? I think I would. Sea-gulls are free of the three elements, — earth, air, and w^ater. These birds were sailing but half a minute since without boat, at once angling and dining, and now they are already rusticating in the Chaplain's Lair. I think I could enjoy being a sea-gull." I saw the Doctor once afterwards in a similar mood. When on a visit to him in Burntisland, in the following year, I marked, on approaching the sh ^re by boat, a solitary figure stationed on the sward- crested trap-rock which juts into the sea immediately below th» 534 MY SCHOOLS ANP SCHOOLMASTERS; town ; and after the time spent in landing and walking round to the spot, there was the solitary figure still, standing motionless as when first seen. It was Chalmers, — the same expression of dreamy enjoyment impressed on his features as I had w^it- nessed in the little skiflf, and with his eyes turned on the sea and the opposite land. It was a lovely morning. A faint breeze had just begun to wrinkle in detached belts and patches the mirror-like blackness of the previous calm, in which the broad Frith had lain sleeping since day-break ; and the sun light danced on the new-raised wavelets ; while a thin long wreath of blue mist, which seemed coiling its tail like a snake round the distant Inchkeith, was slowly raising the folds of its dragon-like neck and head from oflT the Scottish capital, dim in the distance, and unveiling fortalice, and tower, and spire, and the noble curtain of blue hills behind. And there was Chalmers, evidently enjoying the exquisiteness of the scene, as only by the true poet scenery can be enjoyed. Those striking metaphors which so abound in his writings, and which so often, without apparent eflbrt, lay the material world before the reader, show how thoroughly he must have drunk in the beauties of nature ; the images retained in his mind became, like words to the ordinary man, the signs by which he thought, and, as such, formed an important element in the power of his thii^ing. I have seen his Astronomical Discourses dis- paragingly dealt with by a slim and meagre critic, as if they had been but the chapters of a mere treatise on astronomy^ - — a thing which, of course, any ordinary man could write. — maj^hap even the critic himself The Astronomical Discour- ses, on the other hand, no one could have written save Chalmers. Nominally a series of sermons, they in reality represent, and in the present century form perhaps the only worthy repre- sentatives of, that school of philosophic poetry to which, in an- cient literature, the work of Lucretius belonged, and of which, in the literature of our own country, the " Seasons" of Thomson, and Akenside's " Pleasures of the Imagination," furnish ade- quate examples. He would, I suspect, be no discriminating critic who would deal with "-ihe " Seasons" as if they formed OB, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 5S^ merely the journal of a, naturalist, or by the poem of Aken- side as if it were simply a metaphysical treatise. The autumn of this year brought me an unexpected but very welcome visitor, in my old Marcus' Cave friend Finlay ; and when I visited all my former haunts, to take leave of them ere I quitted the place for the scene of my future labors, I had him to accompany me. Though for many years a planter n Jamaica, his affections were still warm, and his literary tastes unchanged. He was a writer, as of old, of sweet simple verses, and as sedulous a reader as ever; and, had time permit- ted, we found we could have kindled fires together in the caves^ as we had done more than twenty years before, and have ranged the shores for shell-fish and crabs. He had had, however, in passing through life, his full share of its cares and sorrows. A young lady to whom he had been engaged in early youth had perished at sea, and he had remained single for her sake. He had to struggle, too, in his business relations, with the em- barrassments incident to a sinking colony ; and though a West Indian climate was beginning to tell on his constitution, his circumstances, though tolerably easy, were not such as to per- mit his permanent residence in Scotland. He retured in the following year to Jamaica ; and I saw, some time after, in a Kingston paper, an intimation of his election to the Colonial House of Representatives, and the outline of a well-toned sensible address to his constituents, in which he urged that the sole hope of the colony lay in the education and mental ele- vation of its negro population to the standard of the people at home. I have been informed that the latter part of his life was, like that of many of the Jamaica planters in their altered circumstances, pretty much a struggle; and his health at length breaking down, in a climate little favorable to Europeans, he died about three years ago, with the exception of my friend )f the Doocot Cave, now Free Church minister of Nigg, the last of my Marcus' Cave companions. Their remains lie acat- tcred over half the globe. I closed my connection with the bank at the termination of its fmarir-^al year ; ga^e a few weeks very sedulously to ge 536 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; olo^y, during which I was fortunate enough to find specimena on which Agassiz has founded two of his fossil species ; got, at parting, an elegant breakfast-service of plate from a kind and numerous circle of friends, of all shades of politics and both sides of the Church ; and was entertained at a public din- ner, at which I at-tempted a speech, that got on but indifferently, though it looked quite well enough in my friend Mr. Carruthers^ report, and which was, I suppose, in some sort apologized for by the fiddlers, who struck up at its close, " A man's a man for a' that." It was, I felt, not the least gratifying part of the entertainment, that old Uncle Sandy was present, and that liis health was cordially drunk by the company, in the recognized character of my best and earliest friend. And then, taking leave of my mother and uncle, of my respected minister, and my honored superior in the bank, Mr. Ross, I set out for Edinburgh, and in a few days after was seated at the edi- torial desk, — a point at which, for the present, the story of my education must terminate. I wrote for my paper during the first twelvemonth, a series of geological chapters, which were fortunate enough to attract the notice of the geologists of the British Association, assembled that year at Glasgow, and which, in the collected form, compose my little work on thf Old Red Sandstone. The paper itself rose rapidly in circula- tion, till it ultimately attained to its place among what are known as our first-class Scottish newspapers ; and of its sub- scribers, perhaps a more considerable proportion of the whole are men who have received a university education, than can be reckoned by any other Scotch journal of the same number of readers. And during the course of the first three years, my employers doubled my salary. I am sensible, however, that these are but small achievements. In looking back upon my youth, I see, methinks,a wild fruit tree, rich in leaf and blossom ; and it is mortifying enough to mark how very few of the blos- soms have set, and how diminutive and imperfectly formed the fruit is into which even the productive few have been developed. A right use of the opportunities of instruction afforded me in ;3arly youth would have made me a scholar ere my twenty OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 537-551 fifth year, and have saved to me at least ten of the best years of life, — years which were spent in obscure and humble occupa- tions. But while my story must serve to show the evils which result from truant carelessness in boyhood, and that what was sport to the young lad may assume the form of serious mis- fortune to the man, it may also serve to show, that much may be done by after diligence, to retrieve an early error of this kind, — that life itself is a school, and Nature always a, fresh study, — and that the man who keeps his eyes and his mind open will always find fitting, though, it may be, hard scbool- inasters, to speed him on in his life-long education. ^'B 30267 5'i.?n97 UNIVERSITY OF CAUFORNIA LIBRARY w»tf a ra i< i ^ ;>tmtfw>»«:M • ^ * 5p:Ss«W«JESl«a«