^liM THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES GIFT OF FREDERIC THOMAS BLANCHARD :TET=Ea 1, doth think duly, ■urncd mind hook itrife, your Return this hook to me ijuite clean, And receive tlie thanks of A. D. KEAN. N. B. — Commence with tlie title page, and read every word to the end of the hook that you may do tlie author justice. Please keep a Cover on this I Book while using it. - - ■- A.D. K. Boudht Price $ AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. MY Schools and Schoolmasters ; OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. BY HUGH MILLER, AUTHOR OF "the OLD RED SANDSTONE," "FOOTPRINTS OF THB CREATOR," " 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 hUls." Wordsworth. NINETEENTH THOUSAND. NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER AND BROTHERS, S30 Broadway. 1882. Entered according to Act of Congress, in tlie year 1854, by GOULD AND LINCOLN, In the Clerk's oflSce of the District Court of the District of Massachosetta. 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 whlic.— Aij lntero«tin'.( excursion.— .\ «ad story in a solitary valley.— The salmon leaj — A lodge In the wilderness. — A sublime p^em ^really lt SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS. MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. CHAPTER I. " Ye gentlemen of Ensland Who live at home at ease, O, little do you think upon The dangers of tlie 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. 2 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; The poor woman, — a sailor's widow, in very humble circura stances, — raised her hands in astonishment : " O, my unlucky boy," she exclaimed, " what's this ? — what brings you here 1" *' The little doggies, mither," tSi.i the boy ; " I couldna drown the little doggies ; and I took them to you." What after- wards befell the " little doggies," I know not ; but trivial as the incident may seem, it exercised a marked influence on che circumstances 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 indiflTcr- ently remunerated labors of his only surviving parent at the time, a sailor's Avidow. 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 awaJ^ 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 reniarkaUly handsome and jwwerful man, — or, to borrow the homely but not inexpressive language in which I have heard him descril)ed, " as pretty a fellow as ever stepped in shoe- leather," — perished at sea in a storm ; and several years after, the hoy's father, when entering the Frith of Cromarty, was struck overl)oard, during a sudden gust, by the boom of his vessel, and, apparently stunned by the blow, never rose again. OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 3 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 former of the parish, and now the mistress of the farm-house of Ardavell ; but the family death was not to be so avoided ; and the 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 warm-hearted though reckless Irishman, that he became skilful enough to keep a log-book, and to take a reckoning with the necessary correctness, — accomplishments far from common at the time among ordinary sailors. He formed, too, a taste for reading. The recollection of his cousin's daughter may have influenced him, but he commenced life with a determination to rise in it, — made his first money by storing up instead of drinking his grog, — and, as was com- mon in those times, drove a little trade with the natives of foi'eign 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 wliat 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, j)leaded powerfully in their fiivor ; and the ailhir terminated in the ultimate pro- motion of the Iriishman to the office of ship-schoolmaister, and pf his Scotch comrjide to the captaincy of the foretop. OR, 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, w hen a boy, I have re- ceived kindness for my fixther'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 hearing 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 tw^o 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 X)untry 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 al}ack, that though a loaded musket lay beside Aim, it was one of the loose beams, or foot-spars, used as ful- erums for the feet in rowing, that he laid hold of as a weapon ; hut 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, ht was one of three men sent with despatches to some hidian 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 tlu'ir rosting-phice. And so f liirkly, during that tiino, did Uie sharlts congregate around them, that ihougii a keg of OR, THE STORY OP 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 nis 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 windows of its second story half-buried in the eaves, that had been left her by their mutual grandfather, old John Feddes, one cf 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 privl^ tions, where it was surest to be found. She was a meek- spirited, sincerely pious woman, and the sailor during his more distant voyages — for he sometimes traded with ports of the Baltic on the one hand, and with those of Ireland and the south of England on the other — had the comfort of knowing that his wife, who had fallen into a state of health chronically delicate, was sedulously tended and cared for by a devoted mother. The happiness which he would have otherwise 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 otlen 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 tiis 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 tliat 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 he lost; and, hastily throwing off his heavy great-ooat, he plunged after him, and in an instant ihe strong (Minrcnt swept them both OR, THE STORY 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 Buehan 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 hovering on the coast, and the report went abroad that the missing sloop had been captured by the French. There was a weather-brained tailor in the 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 ho 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 ^ught to be, he committed the slight mistake of sew IC MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ing on the other sleeve to one of the pock«;t holes. Toot 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 ye ping suddenly into the east, both vessels loosed from their moorings, and, as a rather gloomy day was passing into «\ still gloomier night, they bore out to sea. The breeze soon freshened into a gale ; the gale swelled into a hurricane, accompanied by a thick snow-storm ; and when, early next morning, the smack opened the Frith, she was staggering un ier her storm-jib, and a main-sail reefed to the 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." Tlie 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 shorcwards between the Sntors, and to send up its white foam liigh against tho 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 Bloop or her crew. There was grief in the master's dwelling, -grief in no degree the less poignant from the circumstaiico OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 18 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, absorl^ed in silent, stupefying sorrow, when a heavy foot was heard pacing along the now silent street. It passed, and anon returned ; ceased for a moment nearly op. posit e the window ; then approached the door, where there y?as 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 tali, powerful seaman, but apparently in a state of utter exhaustion, staggered, rather than walked in, and flung himself into a chair, " Jack," exclaimed the old woman, seizing him convulsively by both his hands, " where'.«i my cousin 1 — where's Hugh ?" " The master's safe and well," said Jack ; " but the poor Friendship lies in spales on the bar of Findhorn." " God be praised !" ejaculated the widow " Let the gear go !" I have often heard Jack's story related in Jack's own words, at a period of life when repetition never tires ; but I am not sure that I can do it the necessary justice now. " We left Peterhead," he said, " with about half a cargo of coal ; for we had lightened ship a day or two before ; and the gale 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 were loosening from the quay, a poor young woman, much knocked up, with a child in her arms, had come to the vessel's sido, 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 was 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 another half lost in the darkness. That, I said to myself, must be the soldier's wife and her child ; but how in the name of wonder can the master allow a woman to come on deck in such a night as this, when we ourselves have just enough ado to keep 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 woman had surely better go below.' ' What woman. Jack V said he ; ' our passenger, j'ou may be sure, is nowhere else.' I looked round, mistress, and found he was quite alone, and that the companion-head was hasped down. There came a cold sweat all over me. ' Jack,' said !he 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, inoanwhile, to the 1>oatlacklc and the oars. 1 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 al] over with us now, master,' said I. ' Nay, map.' replied the OB, THE STORY OP 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 -igainst 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 pee 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 fiill 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- vived, 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 tlie west. Master would have crossed the Frith himself this morning to I'clieve your mind, but being less worn out than any of us, he thought it best to remain in charge of the wreck." Such, in effect, was the narrative of Jack Grant the mate. The master, as I have said, had well nigh to {'omnience 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 interjiosed and advanced him tlu^talaiice required. He was assisted, too, b^ B sister in Leith, who was in toK'rably comfortable circura- stances; and so he got a new sloop, which, IIk )ugh not (juile equal in size to the one he had last, was built wholly of oak, everjp OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. li plank and beam of which he had superhitended 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. The master was absent on one of his linger 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 wife. There was a very considerable disparity between their ages, — the master was forty -four, and his wife only eighteen, — but never was there a happier marriage. The young wife was simple, confiding,' and affectionate, and the master of a soft and genial nature, with a large amount of buoyant 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 of the southern shore. His mate had gone away for the night to the opposite side of the bay, to visit his parents, who resided in that neighbor hood ; and the remaining crew consisted of but two seamen, both young and somewhat reckless men, and the ship-boy. Taking the boy with them to keep the ship's boat afloat, and 18 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; wait their return, the two sailors went ashore ancl, setting out tor a distant public-house, remained there drinking till a late hour. There was a bright moon overhead, but the evening was chill and frosty ; and the boy, cold, tired, and half-over- come b} sleep, after waiting on till past midnight, shoved off the boat and, making his way to the vessel, got straightway mto his hammock, and fell asleep. Shortly after, the two men came to the shore, much the worse of liquor ; and, failing to make themselves heard by the boy, they stripped off their clothes, and, chilly as the night was, swam aboard. The mas- ter and his wife had been for hours snug in their bed, when they were awakened by the screams of the boy ; the drunken men were unmercifully bastinading him with a rope's end apiece ; and the master, hastily rising, had to interfere in his behalf, and, with the air of a man who knew that remonstrance in the circumstances would be of little avail, he sent them both off to their hammocks. Scarcely, however, had he again got into bed, when he was a second time aroused by the cries of the boy, uttered on this occasion in the shrill tones of agony and terror ; and, promptly springing up, now followed by his wife, he found the two sailors again belaboring the boy, and that one of them, in his blind fury, had laid hold of a rope-end, armed, as is common on shipboard, with an iron thimble or ring, and that every blow produced a wound. The poor boy was streaming over with blood. The master, in the extremity of his indignation, lost command of himself Rushing in, the two men were in a moment dashed against the deck ; — they seemed powerless in his hands as children ; and had not his wife, although very unfit at the time for mingling in a fray, run in and laid hold of him, — a movement which calmed hiin at once, — it was her serious impression that, unarmed as he was, ne would have killed them hoth upon the spot. There are, I believe, few things more formidable than the unwonted auger of a good-natured man. OR THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. tft 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." LrOWh. 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 sheila 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 ..ave 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 SCHOOLMASTEliS ; 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 wife. There were some little circumstances in his history which nmst 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 steiidfastly regarding me with apparent complacency ; uul 1 was sadly frightened ; and for years after, when passing through the dingy, ill-lighted room, out of which I inferred he had come, 1 used to feel not at all sure that 1 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 when in the ofling, 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 lie 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 delivered over to me, and there breaking up every wheel and horse, and the vehicle itself, into their original bits, until not two of the pieces were led sticking together. Farther, I still remember my disap- pcjiiitment at not finding something curious within at least the horses and the wheels ; and as unquestionably the main en- joyment derival)le from such things is to be had in the break- yiy of Lhem, I bometimes 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. I 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, with his own little one. A ship of war, under the guidance of an unskilful pilot, had run aground on a shallow flat on the opposite side of the 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 hia confidence repaid by seeing her hauled off" into deep water in a single tide. Knowing the nature of the bottom, — a soft arenaceous mud, which, if beat for some time by the foot 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 eflfectual 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 other moiety of the men, tugging hard on kedge and haulser, drew the vessel off* a few feet at a time, till at length, after not a few repetitions of the process, she floated free. Of course, on a harder bottom the 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, thai 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, ere it fell before the first approaches of Free Trade ; and my father, in collecting a supply for the Leith Glass Works, for which he occasionally acted both as agent and shipmaster, used sometimes to spend whole months amid the Hebrides, sailing from station to station, and purchasing here a few tons and there a few hundredweights, until he had completed his cargo. In his last kelp voyage, he had been detained in this way from the close of August 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* lion 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 ex[)cdient 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 OR, THE STORY 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 «wn 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 of contemporary woman, the boy is always a true savage. The old parish school of the place had been nobly situated in a snug comer, 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 fliulty delineation, was surer of being more justly and imsparingly criticised. Further, the town, which drove a great trade in salted pork at the time, had a killiiig-iilace 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 tiie general murmur within ; or to be told by some comrade, returned from his live miiniles' leave of absence, that a hero of a ])ig 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 li.nid in its mouth, and almost smashed his thumb. We learned, loo, to know, from our signal opportunities of observation, not only 1 good deal about ]>ig anatomy, — especially ai>ont 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-bo;its during the fishing season passed our win dows on their homeward way to the harbor ; and, from their depth in the water, we became skilful enough to predicate the number of crans aboard of each with wonderful judgment and correctness. In days of good general fishings, too, when the curing-yards proved too small to accommodate the 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 which all were initiated, and in which all became in some degree accomplished, in the grammar school of Cromarty ! The building in which w^e 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 every boat owed a long-derived perquisite of twenty peats to the grammar school, and as payment was at times foolishly refused, the party of boys commissioned by the master to 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 sehool 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. Tliere 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 Beeing — blockheads that they were ! — that the very admission established in full the rectitude of our claim, and gave to us, amid our dire perils and faithful contendings, the 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 |»arty fdling their ])ockets with stones, and ranging tluimselves 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 purchasei's of the peats. "VVe then, after due warning given, opened fire upon the boatmen ; and, when the pebbles were h<)p|)ing about them like hailstones, the boys below commonly suecei-tled in se- curing, under cover of the fire, the desired boathook or oar. And such were the ordinary circumstances and details of this OR, THE STORY OF IVHT EDUCATION. 4h 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 the same sessions as the late Dr. Mearns, and in mathematics and the languages had disputed the prize with the Doctor ; but he had failed to get on equally well in the world ; and now, in middle life, though a licentiate of the Church, he had settled down to be what he subsequently remained, — the teacher of a parish school. There were usually a few grown-up lads under his tuition, — careful sailors, that had 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, ov the other hand, the pupils who wished to do nothing, — a description of individuals that comprised fully two-thirds of all the younger ones, — were not required to do much more than they wished ; and parents and guardians were loud in their complaints that he was no suitable 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, 1 44 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS, almost always substituted a synonym in the place of it. Aui no, as UnoJe James had arrived, on data of his own, at a simi 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 aa 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 us 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 lis much looked af^er ; and I soon learned to bring books of ainusenioiit to the school with me, which, amid the Babel confusion of the place I contrived to read undetected. Some of them, save in tht language in which they were written, were almost identical witli the books jiroper to the j)lace. 1 remember perusing }>y stealtti in this way, Dryden's " Virgil," and the " Ovid" of r)-"yden and his friends ; Mhile Ovid's own " Ovid," and Vir OH, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 46 gil's own " Virgil-" lay beside me, sealed up in the fine old tongue, which 1 was thus throwing away my only chance of acquiring. One morning, having the master's English rendering of the day's task well fixed in my memory, and no book of 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 ill 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. Ratclifie'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 houi 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 unfrequenfcly 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 fruits. The master had a tolerably correct notion of what was 46 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; 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 uj)on 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 Speciator, — " 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 l)y two holidays and a half, during wliich the boys occupied them selves in collecting and bringing up their cocks. And such ilways was the array of fighting birds mustered on the occa- OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 47 sion, 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 the 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 with horror from both processes ; and if I drew near at all, it was only when some animal, scraped and cleaned, and suspended from the beam, was in the course of being laid open by tha 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 AISTD SCHOOLMASTERS' annual cock-fight my uncles must have contributed. The were loud in their denunciation of the enormity ; and on ou occasion, when a neighljor 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 nothinj wrong in it, I saw their habitual respect for the old divine give way, for at least a moment. Uncle Sandy hesitatci mder apparent excitement; but quick and fiery as light ing, Uncle James came to his rescue. " Yes, excelleni 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 The]j 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 lie 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, delighlfiil old chests and cupboards, filled with tattered and dusty volumes. The moiety of my father's lilirary which remained to me consisted of about sixty several works ; my uncles possessed about a hundred and fifty more ; and there was a literary cabinetnuiker m the neighborhood, who had once actually composed a poem of thirty lines on the Hill of OR, 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 worlvshop of the cabinetmaker, and was some- times privileged to hear him repeat his poem. There was not much admiration of poets or poetry in the place ; and my praise, though that of a very young critic, had always the double merit of being both ample and sincere. I knew the verv rocks and trees which his description embraced — had oeard 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 sheriffdom on its crest, nothing could be more definite than the grave reference, in his opening line, to "The verdant rising of the Onlluw-biW." And so I thought a very great deal of his poem, and what I thought I said ; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There was another mechanic in the 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 Flavel ; 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 ftdl freedom of the press." But of all my occasional benefactors in this way, by far the greatest was poor old Francic, the retired clerk and supercargo. Francie was 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 Jeast the theory of business ; and when articled in eai'ly life to a Cromarty merchant and shopkeeper, it was with tolerably fair prospects of getting on in the world. He had, however h certa'Q infirmity of brain which rendered both talent and 50 MT 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 he saw his master or a customer approaching, bolt back again The thing was not deemed seemly ; but Francie, when spoken to on the subject, could speak as sensibly as any young person of his years. He needed relaxation, he used to say, though he never suffered it to interfere with his proper business ; and where was 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 at the office ; and little else could be learned respecting him, than that at early dawn he had been seen setting out for the woods, provided with staff' and knapsack. He returned in about a week, worn out and half-starved. He had not been so successful as lie had anticijiated, 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 lie 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 unexplori-d country ; and as his friend^; and superiors at St. John's had just laden a vessel with fish for the taLan market during Lent, Francie was despatch OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 51 ed with her as supercargo, to look after the sales, m a land of which every footbreadth had been familiar to men for thou- sands of years, and in which it was supposed he would have no inducement to wander. Francie, however, had read much about Italy ; and finding, on landing at Leghorn, that he was within a short distance of Pisa, he left ship and cargo to take care of themselves, and set out on foot to see the famous 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 Forfiirshire, 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 KinkcU and the old Castle of Craighouse, he was relieved froni the duties of his clerkship, and left to pursue his researches undisturbed, on a small annuity, the gift of his friends. He was considerably advanced in life ere I knew him, profoundly grave, and very taciturn, and, though he never discussed poli- tics, a mighty reader of the newspapers. " Oh ' this is ter- 52 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS: rible," I have heard him exclaim, when on one occasion >» snow storm had blocked up both the coast and the Highland roads for a week together, and arrested the northward course of the mals, — "It is terrible to be left in utter ignorance of the public business of the country !" Francie, whom every one called Mr. , to his face, and always Francie when his back was turned, chiefly because i. 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 perniitted 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 rejjresentatives 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, f;ir in front, two of the tombs which covered the heroes of Ilium, barely tall enough to roach halfway to his knee, and of the length, in projjortion to the size of the traveller, of ordinary octavo volumes. lie had black-letter books, too, on astrology, and on the i)]anetary properties of vegetables ; and an ancient hook on medicine, that recorainendcd as a cure for the toothache a bit of llie jaw of a suicide, well triturated ; and, as an inlJillihle remedy for the falling-sickness, an ounce or two of the brains of a young man. OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 53 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 \">f the minor poets too ; and I was enabled to cultivate, mainty 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 v/anted, 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, w^hose 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 west during the ages of the boulder clay ; and I soon learned to take a deep inter- est in sauntering over the v^arious 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 what is excellent IS slow," it was not until long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of representing the various species of simple rocks by certain numerals, and the compound onea by the numerals representative of each separate component 54 Mr SCHOOLS and schoolmasters; ranged, as in vulgar fiactions, along a medial 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 detieient 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 ai'ound 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 what I had found, was merely a " stone upon thf; shore." My friend the cabinetmaker went so far as to say that the specimen was but a mass of plum-pudding stiiue, 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 OR, THE STOKY OF MV EDUCATION. 55 Been 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 Have already said, been bred a cartwright ; but finding, on his 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- fession of a sawyer, and used often \o pitch his saw-pit, in the 66 MY SCHOOLS 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 £19 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 hornbl end-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 aln-upt iron-tinged pro- montory, so remarkable for its human-like profile, that it seema part of a half-buried sphyLX, protrudes into the deep greca water. On the other, — less prominent, for even at full tide .,he traveller can wind between its base and the sea, — there rises a shattered and ruinous precipice, soiimed with bloodrcd ironstone, that retains on its surface the briglit inelaliic gleam, and amid whi-se piles of loose and fractured rock one may still detect fragments of stalactite. The stalactite is all that remains of a spar^ii:u8 cavern, Thich once hollowed the precipice, but OR, THE STORY OF MT EDUCATION. 57 which, more than a hundred years before, had tumbled down during a thunder-storm, when filled with a flock of sheep, and penned up the poor creatures 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 basxj 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 oocurs 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, avid 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- Awards showing " some of the stones to a Spaniard of the Ca- raccas, was told by him they were el madre del ora, that is, the mother of gold, and that the mine itself was farther in the ground." And though the quartz vein of the Cromarty Tlill 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 AOT) SCHOOLMASTERS; rery 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 Ci'omarty 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. OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 59 CHAPTER IV. "Strange marble stones, here larger and there leas, 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, Tliere break themselves to mists, which, trickling down, Crust into stone, and (but with leisure) swell The sides, and still advance the miracle." Charles Cottox. 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- ion 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, such as Agassiz, who held 4 (JO MY SCHOOLS AND 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 most >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 hinx too. When, as sometimes happened, he got hold, in his dark narrow recess in the rock, of some luckless iigit, my uncle showed me how that after the first tremendous equeeze he began always to experiment upon what ho had got, by alternately slackening and straitening his grasp, as if to as- certain whether it had life in it, or was merely a piece of dead matter; and that the only way to escape him, on these trying occasions, was to let the finger lie passively between his nip- pers, as if it were a bit of stick or tangle ; when, apparently deeming it such, he would be sui*e to let it go ; whereas, on the least attempt to withdraw it, he would at once straiten hia gripe, and not again relax it for mayhap half an liour. In 'dealing with the lobster, on the other hand, the fisher had to beware that he did not depend too much on the hold he had got of the creature, if it was merely a hold of one of the great claws. For a moment it would remain passive in his grasp ; he would then be sensible of a slight tremor in the captured limb, and mayliap hear a slight crackle; and, presto^ the cap tive would straightway be oif like a dart tiwough 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 )ir when suddenly frightened, without first waiting to consider whether tlu; sacrifieii of a pair of legs is the best mode of ob- viating the danger. On firing a mu^ket immediately over a OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 61 lobster just captured, he has seen it throw oft' 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 nie, to), how to find, amid thickets of laminaria and fuei, the nest of the lump-fish, and taught me to look well in its immediate ueighborh )od 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 engagejl 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 wondei 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 c^ise 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 sctaj, — furnished, however, with greatly more than the typical number of fingers, — rise from the shoulders 62 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; of these creatures, and must, I suspect, be used as hands in thi 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 am2:)hitrites. 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 ■\^'helk which he had often seen on the beach near Alexandria. I learned, too, to cultivate an acquaintance with some two or three species of doris, that carry their arboraceous, tree-like lungs on their backs, as Macduff's soldiers carried the boughs of Birnam wood to the Hill of Dunsinane ; and I soon acquired a sort of affection for certain shells, which bore, as I supposed, a more exotic aspect than their neighbors. Among these were, Tro- chus Zizyphinus^ with its flame-like marlciugs of crimson, on a ground of paley -brown ; Patella pelluckla, 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, Cijprcca Europea, a not rare shell flirther to the north, but so littk- abundant in the Frith of Cromarty, as to render the live animal, when once or twice in a season I used to find it cree.i> ing on the laminaria at the extreme outer edge of the tide- line, with its wide orange mantle flowing ]il)erally around it somewhat of a prize, hi short, the tract of sea-bottom laid dry by the ebb fbrnu^d an admirable school, and Uncle Sandy an excellent teacher, under whom 1 was not in the least dis. posed to trifle ; and when, long after I learned to detect old. narine bottoms far out of sight of the sea, — now ajuid 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 i.mong 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 habit 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 j)lough when young where they had held the rudder when old. He used, too, to point out to me the eftect 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 laiger tides from falling during ebb were prolonged gales from the west. A series of these, even when not very high, left not unfrequently from one to two feet water round the Clach 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 ^o the same extent, by the vio ence of a very powerful 64 IVIY SCHOOLS A^B 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 waa 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 ci'cature 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 oil' in a rapid whirl, which rendered her invis- ible," — the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes together. Nothing a{)peals 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 foi myself, in living nature, a creature actually possessed of an amulet of this kind, that, when danger threatened, could rush mto invisibility. I h-arncd, too, to take an especial interest in what, though they belong to a ditfen'nt family, are known as the Water Spiders ; and have watched iheni speeding by llts and starts, like skaters on ice, across the surface of some Woodland spring or streamlet, — fearless walkers on the water, that, with true fixith in the integrity of the implanted instinct OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 6Jr 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, Ihou art to me A fly that up and down liiinselldoth 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 buff- 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 geraa," PA.RADI8B IND niuPsRl. H6 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 w^asps in the chrysalis state, the undevoured remains seem to argue that he is but little pleased with them as food. There were occasions, however, in which even the herd-boys met with only 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 fo7-a7nen magnum. The wise little workers ha& 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 unimjiortant one by the geologist. Among the woods of the hill, a short lialf-mile fi-om 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 Iliad become old and curious enough thoroughly to ex}ilore it. It was a black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in dejtlh. The ijogs around waved thick with silvery willows of small size; but, sticking out from the black sides of the ravine itself, and in some instances stretched across it from side to side, lay the decayed remains of huge giants of the vegetable world, that had flourished and died long nges ere, in at least our northern i)art of the island, the course of history had begun. There wero OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 67 oaks of pnormous gii'th, 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 trickhnl, rather than flowed, along the bottom of the hollow, and vvliich 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 (juit 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 their srilvery outer crust of bark, but whose ligneous interior existed as a mere pulp. I have even laid open, in layers of a sort of unctuous clay, resembling fuller's earth, leaves of oak, birch, and hazel, that had fluttered in the wind thousands of years before ; and there was one happy day in which I succeeded in digging from out the very bottom of the excavation a huge fragment of an extraordinary-looking deer's horn. It was a broad, massive, strange-looking piece of bone, evidently old-fiishioned in its type ; and so I bi'ought it home in triumph to Uncle James, as the antiquary of the fam- ily, assured that he could tell me all al)out 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 woi'k from five to six journeymen. They all gathered round him to examine it, and agreed in the decision that it was an entii'ely different sort of horn from any borne by the existing deer of Scothind, and that his surmise regard.ng 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 88 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL MASTEES ; a tone of sober gravity, that it had lain in the Moss of th« 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- tur}- ago ? There is no notice of the elk, Sir, in British his- tory. That horn must have lain in the IMoss 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 way to London, and were 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 man}"^ 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 tliat, filtering througl'. the cracks and fissures of the gneiss, find lime enough in tlieir passage to acquire what is known as & petrify- ing, though, in reality, only an encrusting quality. And these stalactites, under the name of " white stones made by the watrr," formed of old — as in that Cave of Slains specially men tinned by liuchaiian and the Chroniclers, and in those caverns ol the Peak so quaintly descrilied by Cotton — tmeof the grand marvels of the place. Almost all the old gazetteers sufiicicnt- ly copious in tlnir details to mention Cromarty at all, refer f/O its " Dro[)ping /ave" as a marvellous marble-prodticing cav- ern ; and this - Di ^pping Cave" is but t)ne of many that look OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 69 r)ut upon the sea from the precipices of the southern Sutor, in 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, well known from his travels in Iceland, and his experiments on the inflammability of the diamond ; but it so happened, that Sir George, curious to see 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 intt ray mo hers 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 for 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 SCHOOLMASTERS; deceased, and, in a light and hurried tone, asked, as Christy might have done ere the fatal accident, for a share of the brushwood. " Give me some of that Aa^," said the ghost ; " yon 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 raked outwards to him, as far as he could reach, all that stuck to the walls, including ropy slime and mouldy damp, but not one particle of stalactite. It was of course seen that his specimens would not suit Sir George ; and the minister, in the extremity of the case, applied to my uncles, though with some little un- williuirness, 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 n.'ganling the Grotto of AMti|)aros, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably both strange and fuie. The celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior — as is not uut're quently the case with the celebrated — to a cave almost en OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATIOlf. 71 tirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little further to the east ; and yet even it had its interest. It widened, as one entered, into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp and the shade ; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave, 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 j)lace 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 which the oea 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 tun whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in two white jets of vapor, distinctly visible, to the height of ft 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 witch-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 find his desci'Iption perfectly sober and true: — " See the giant craes, ah ho ! How they snort aud 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 t>- tish coast. According to Campbell, (( 'n 'Twas a thing beyond Uescription wretched; such a wherry, Perhaps, iio'cr ventured on a pond, Or crossed a ferry." And well did my fellows appreciate its extreme ludicrousness. It was certainly rash to " venture" it on this especial " pond j' 88 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; for, greatly to the damage of the rigging, it was fairly pelted oft', 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 1 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 few friends, I have never been understood ! I was evidently out-Francieing Francie ; and the parents of my young friend, who saw that I had acquired considerable in- fluence over him, and were afraid lest I should make another Francie of him, had become naturally enough desirous to break off" our intimacy, when there occurred an unlucky acci- dent, which served materially to assist them in the design. My friend's father was the master of a large trading smack, which in war times carried a few twelve-pounders, and was furnished with a small magazine of powder and shot ; and my friend having secured for himself from the general stock, through the connivance of the ship-boy, an entire cannon car- tridge, containing some two or three pounds of gunpowder, 1 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" iiinoculously 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 the 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 sjjark from the flame fX|>loded the whole. He was so sadly ])urnt 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. 89 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 Quixo 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 bee« a real friend, no accident could have interfered with, or arbi- trary command annihilated his affection," &c., &c. As I was rather an indiflereut 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, aa he afterwards told me, elaborated by some one else. He as- sured me he was still my friend, but that there was " 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 ly 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 1 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 tall short of fifteen hundred pounds per annum ; aud on visiting his parents in their nighiand 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 hal)it of visiting his mother's cottage, but who now came to lunch, and dine, and take their wine with hiin, and who seemed to value and admire him very much. My a nit, who was little accustomed to receive high company, and found lierself, like Martha of old, "cumbered about much serving,' urgently Insought my mother, who was young and active at the time, to visit and assist her; and, infuiitely to my delight, 1 was included in the invitation. The place was not iDUcli above thirty miles from Cromarty ; but tb<^n it was in OR, THE STORY OP MY EDUCATION. 91 the true Highlands, which ! 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 rathci 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 which 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 oji still, there was a closet with a little window in it, Avhich 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, tor the time, my cousin the merchant's apartment, his dormitory at night, and the hospitable refeo 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 be- low the middle size, of grave and somewhat melancholy aspect, but in reality of a temperament rather cheerful than otherwise, had been somewhat wild in his young days. He had been a good shot and a skilful angler, and had danced at bridala 92 MT SCHOOLS AJSTD SCHOOLMASTERS; and, as was common in the Highlands at the time, at lyke- 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 They had two other sons besides the merchant, — both well- built, robust men, somewhat taller than their fither, 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 maistcr ; — it's a goot, goot two lads." The elder of the two brothers superintended, and partly wrought, his fa*^her'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 ou this occasion, for a few weeks during the visit of his brother the merchant, he resided with his father. Both were men of marked individuality of character. The elder, Hugh, was an ingenious, self-taught nicchanie, who used, in the long wintci evenings, to fiisliion a number of curious little artieles by the 6reside, — among the rest. Highland snuff'-niuUs, with which he supplied all his friends; and he was at this time engaged in building fur his father a Highland barn, and, to vary the work, Ikbricating for hin. a Highland plough. The younger, George, OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 93 who had wrought for a few vears at. his trade in the south of Scotland, was 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 — ha was an adept in the noble science of self-defence. But George never sought out quarrels ; and such was his amount of bone and muscle, and such the expression of manly resolution stamped on his countenance, that they never came in his way unsought. At the close of the day, when the members of the 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- mg peculiarity in one portion of the services which he con- ducted. He was, as I have said, an elderly man, and had worshipped in his family ere Dr. Stewart's Gaelic Translation of the Scriptures had been introduced into the 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 Hbri, 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 im- acquainted with the language in which it was couched ; but it was impossible to avoid being struck, notwithstanding, with 'ts wrestlmg earnestness and fervor. The man who poured 94 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; it fortn evidently believed there was an unseen ear open to itj 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 Biot, when employed with his experiments on the seconds pcnduhmi, resided for several months in one of the smaller Shetland islands; and, fresh from the troubles of France, — his imagination bearing about with it, if I may so speak, the stains of the guillotine, — the state of trustful 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 inhal)it has remained open day and night." The interior of Sutherland was at the time of my visit in a oimi- lar condition. The door of my uncle's cottage, unfurnished with lock or l)ar, opened, like that of the hermit in the ballad, with a latch; l»ut, unlike that of the hermit, it was not bo- 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. 1 rose early next morning, when the dew was yet heavy on OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 96 grass and lichen, curious to explore a locality so ne\^ to me. The ti-act, though a primary one, forms one of the tamer gneiss districts 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 Ross ; 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 were less rounded and water- 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, were 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 their 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 water, furnished each with six sides, and sharpened atop into six facets. Bor- rowing one of Gsusin 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 tailed Bristol diamonds, and set in silvei" 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 XJarlet. 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 stones lay thick amid the rank grass. And in the lower corner, where the old turf-wall had sunk into an inconspicuous mound, there stood a mighty tree, all solitary, for its fellows had long before disappeared, and so hollow hearted in its corrupt old age, that, though it still threw out every season a mighty expanse of foliage, I was able to creep into a little chamber in its trunk, from which I could look out through circular openings Avhere 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 groat deal al)Out rocks and stones, that, having heard of my fine large crystals, desired to see both tliem 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 craii nics. I am afraid I would not now deem him a very acooni. pli.shcd mineral agist: 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 w'th a profound reverence. He spoke of the OE, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION". 97 marbles of Assynt, — of the petrifactions of Helmsdale and Brora, — of shells and plants embedded in solid rocks, and of forest trees converted into stone ; and my cars 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. Gruids, 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 were both perfectly agreed. There could exist no manner of doubt regarding the fact that the poems given to the world by Macpherson had been sung in the Highlands by Ossian, the son of Fingal, more than fourteen hundred years before. My cousin was a devoted member of the Highland Society ; and the Highland Society, in these days, was very much engaged in ascertaining the right cut of the philabeg, and in determin- ing the chronology and true seqrence 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 everything that had been written on the subject, including a considerable amount of manuscript of his own composition ; and as Uncle James had inspired him with the belief that I could master anything to which in good earnest I set my mind, he had determined that it should be no fault of his if I did ^98 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES ; not become mighty in the controversy regarding the authen- ticity of Ossian. This was awful. I liked Blair's Disserta- tion well enough, nor did I greatly quarrel with that of Karnes ; and as for Sir Walter's critique in the Edinburgh^ on the opposite side, I thought it not only thoroughly sensible, but, as it furnished me with arguments against the others, deeply interesting to boot. But there succeeded a vast )cean of dissertation, emitted by Highland gentlemen am 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, — 1 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 sA\ English copy of the poems, I had read the true Ossian in the original already. With Cousin George, how- ever, who, though strong on the authenticity side, liked « 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 afiixed, as " The Poems of Ossian in Gaelic, translated from the orig- inal English by their author." George looked grim, and oalled me infidel, and then laughed, and said he would tell his brother. But he didn't; and as 1 really likid the poems, especially " Temora!'' and some of the smaller pieces, and could read them with inore real pleasure than the greater part of the Highlanders who believed in them, I did not wholly losecred: with my cousin the merchant. He even promised to present me with a linely-bound edition of the " Ek-gant Extracts," in throe bulky octavo volumes, whenever I should have gained my first prize at College; but I unluckily failed to qualify myself for the gift ; and ray copy of the " Extracts" I had to OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 99 Durcl aie 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 Ossiianic faitii and zeal, there were some of the little old Celtic practices which he resuscitated />ro tempore in his father'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-mcal 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 was derived, through a judicious use of the lancet, from the yeld cattle of the farm. The prac- tice was 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, iu 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 divis-ion 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 Uarly Highland dishes there mingled others not less genuine, — now and then a salmon fi-om the river, and a haunch of venison from the hill-side, — which I relished better still ; and if all Higlilanders live but as well in the present day as I did IOC MY SCHOOLS AKD SCHOOLMASTERS; during my stay with my aunt and cousins, they would be rather unreasonable were they greatly to complain. There were some of the other Highland restorations effected by my cousin that pleased me much. He occasionall}'^ 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 went 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 with 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 found, very wild legends indeed. Some of them immortalized wonderful hunters, who had ex- cited the love of Fingal's lady, and whom her angry and jeal- ous husband had sent out to hunt monstrous wild boars with poisonous bristles on their backs, — sc(?lire 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 notlcapacross the Cromarty or Dornoch Friths on their spears, and who, as was natural, were despised l)y the women of the tribe very much. The pieces of (ino sentinuMit and brilliant descri[)tion discovered by Macpherson seemed never to have found their way into this northern district. But, told in fluent Gaelic, in the great " Ha'," the wild legends served every ne- cessary purpose equally well. TIk^ " Ha'" in the autumn nights, as the days shortened and ihe frosts set in, was a geniaJ placi3 ; and so attached was my cousin to its distiuctivo priit OK. THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 101 ciple, — the fire in the midst, — as handed down from the " days of other years," that in the plan of a new two-storied house for his father, wliich he had procured from a liondon archi tect, one of the nether rooms was actually designed in the cir- cular form ; and a hearth like a millstone, placed in the centre, represented the place of the fire. 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 like anything ever seen in the Highlands before. The plan, however, was not destined to encounter criticism, or give trouble in the execution of it. On Sabbaths my cousin and his two brothers attended the parish church, attired in the full Highland dress ; and three handsome, well-formed men they were ; but my aunt, though mayhap not quite without the mother's pride, did not greatly relish the exhibition ; and often er 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 m a merry-making, at which the dance was kept up from night till morning ; but though he retained, I suspect, his old partialities, he was now a soldered man ; and when I ven- tured to ask him, on one occasion, why he too did not get a 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 MT SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEfiS : CHAPTER VI "When they tawe the clark>ome nicht, They sal them dowiie and 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 Mas an unsanctioned undertaking of my own and a Cromarty cousin, my contemporary, to whom, as he had never travelled the way, 1 had to act as protector and guide. I reached my aunt's cottage witliout mishap or adventure of any kind; but found, that during the twelvemonth that had just elapsed, great change h.ad 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('rs as before ; nor did presents of salmon and haunches of veni- son come at all so often the way. Immediately after the final iiscomfitin'e of Napoleon, an extensive course of speculation u 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 Oazette ; and he was now tiding over he dinii-ulties of a time of settlemeiil, six hun'lred miles from be scei\e of disaster, in the hope of being soon enabled to be- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 103 gin the world anew. He bore his losses with quiet magna nimity ; and I learned to know and like him better during hi? 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 provisio)i 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 oi' 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, b}' his reading, and his residence for a time in the south, from at least the wilder beliefs of the locality, failed to suffer, aa 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 witli tiim ; and it was a large share. He had mathematical instru nients, too, and a color-box, and the tools of his profession , in especial, large hammers fitted to break great stones ; and J was generously made free of them all, — books, instruments color-box, and hammers. His cottage, too, commanded, froin 104 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES ; its situation, a delightful vaiiet} of most interesting objects It had all the advantages of my uncle's domicile, and a great many more. The nearer shores of Loch Shin were scarce half a mile away ; and there was a low long promontory which shot out into the, lake, that was covered at that time by an ancient wood of doddered time-worn trees, and bore amid its outer solitudes, where the waters circled round its terminal apex, one of those towers of hoary eld, memorials, mayhap, of the primeval stone- period in our island, to which the circular erections of Glenelg and Dornadilla belong. It was formed of undressed stones of vast size, uncemented by mortar ; and through the thick walls ran winding passages, — the only covered portions of the 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 cither hand in their long vista of more than twenty miles, form the barriers of the lake ; and when the suu, 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 tlieir descent. When I last passed the way, both the old wood and the old tower were gone ; and for the latter, which, though much a ruin, might have survived for ages, I found only a loig extent of dry-stone dike, and OB, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 105 the wide ring formed by the old foundutic 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 Eoss-shire side of the Dornoch Frith, and within whose walls, forming, as it did, a sort of half-way stage, I used, on these Sutherlandshire journeys, to eat ray 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 Fingaliau 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 public benefactors who efface such dark memorials of the past as the tower of Dunaliscag and the promontory of Loch Shin, it would be, doubtless, an encouragement to others to speed us yet further on in the march of improvement. It seems scarce fair that the enlightened destroyers of Arthur's Oven, or of the bas-relief known as Robin of Redesdale, or of the Town-cross of Edinburgh, should enjoy all the celebrity attendant on such acts, while the equally deserving iconoclasts of Dunaliscag and the tower of Loch Shin should be suffered to die without their fame. I remember spending one singularly delightful morning with Cousin George beside the ancient tower. He pointed out to me, amid the heath, several plants to which the old 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 vn making the philters. While most of the radical fibres of 106 MY SCHOOLS AKD SCHOOLMASTERS; the plant retain the ordinary cylindrical form, two of their number are usually found developed into starchy tubercles ; but, belonging apparently to difterent 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 mail ingre- dient, said my cousin, in the love philter; while a powder made of the dark-colored one excited, it was held, only an- tipathy and dislike. And then George would speculate on the origin of a belief which could, as h' said, neither be sug gested 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 only specific in the case. Some of his Highland stories were very curious. He communicated to me, for example, beside the broken tower, a tradition illustrative of the Celtic theory of dreaming, of which I have since often thought. Two young men had been spending the early portion of a warm summer day in exactly such a scene as that in which he communicated the anecdote. There v.as 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 luimhle-ljee, issue from the mouth of the sleeping man, and, leaj>iiig 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 l>> what he saw, the watcher hastily shook his com- panion by the shoulder, and awoke him ; thougii, with all his haste, the little cloud-like creature, still more rajtid in its move- oieuts, issued from the interstice into which it had gone, and, OK. 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 V 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 elf 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 whose society I most delighted to share. He did sometimes borrow a day from his work, even after his marriage ; but then, according to the poet, it was "The love he bore to science was iu fault." The borrowed day was always spent in transferring to papei some architectural design, or in working out some matheinat- 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 time 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 we^-e 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 published several years subsequent to this period, was not only well received by his country folk of Sutherland and Ross, but was said by competent judges to be really a not inadequate rendering of the meaning and spirit of the noble old tinkei 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 wlicn almost every volume, whether the Virgil of a Dry den or the Meditations of a Hervey, was heralded by its sets of compli- mentary verses, and having a deep interest in whatever Cousin George undertook and performed, I addressed to him in the old style, a few introductory stanzas, which, to indulge me in the inexpressible luxury of seeing myself in print for the first time, he benevolently threw into type. They survive to re- mind me that my cousiin's belief in Ossian did exert some little influence over my phraseology when I addressed myself to him, and that, with the rashness natural to immature youth, I had at this time the temerity to term myself " poet.' Ves, oft I've said, as oft I've seen The men who dwell its hills iimoug, Tliat Morveii's land has ever been A land of valor, worth, and song. But Ignorance, of darkness diro, Has o'er that land a inaiillo spread ; And all untun'd and rude the lyre That sounds beneath its gloomy shade. With niiiso of culm, ntUirinK wing, O, be il tliine, my friend, lo show The tXiltic swain how Saxons sing Of Hell's diro gloom and Ueuvoii's glow So shall the mcod of fame bo thine, The KlisU'iiini,' bay-wroath K^ecn and gay J Thy /Kiri, too, Ihouxh wi'ak his line, Shall frame for thoo th' tpproving 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 fomily. 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, was 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 no MY SCHOOLS AJSTD 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 pe(>ple, some of these good gentlemen of the Edinburgh Committees, that I ever heard of, they're just like our country lawyers." It would, however, be far from fair to regard this transaction, which took place, I may mention, so late as the year 1829, as a specimen of the actings of either civic societies or country lawyers. George's chief examinator on the occasion was the minister of the (raelic chapel of the place, at that time one of the Society's (.)ommittee for the year ; and, not being a remarkably scru- pulous 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 n(^t at the time its single human habitation. At the upper end, however, there stood the ruins of a narrow two-storied liousc, with one of its gables still entire frcm foundation-stone to the shattered chimney -tops, but with the other gable, and the larger part :)f the front wall, laid prostrate along the sward. My cousin. OR, THE STORY OF MT EDUCATION. Ill 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 was the sole magistrate, possessed of the power of life and death in the district, she was sent by her family to wear out life in this lonely retreat, in which she.remained secluded from the world for more than half a centui-y. 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, em the clearance system had depopulated the interior of the country, and precipitated its poverty-stricken population upon the coasts. There wa-;, 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 nun. dred pounds worth of gunpowder have been expended in slop- mg its angle of ascent, to flicilitate 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, we could distinctly hear its roarings from beside his door, when October nights were frosty and still ; and as we had been told many strange stories regarding it, — stories about bold fishers who had threaded their dangerous way between the 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 am 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 rela- 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 walk barefoot, the good women had no sooner turned their backs than we both agreed to fling our shoes into a corner, and set out on our journey without them. The walk to the salmon- leap was a thoroiiglily delightful one. We ])assed through the W()("^ ui Achanic, 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. Ivugged ])reci|)iccs of gneiss, with scattered bushes fast anchored in the crevices, overhang the stream, which Ixiils in many a dark pool, and foams over many a steep rapid ;;iii