My Schools and Schoolmasters Part 10

The masons at Niddry House were paid fortnightly, on a Sat.u.r.day night.

Wages were high--we received two pounds eight s.h.i.+llings for our two weeks' work; but scarce half-a-dozen in the squad could claim at settlement the full tale, as the Monday and Tuesday after pay-night were usually blank days, devoted by two-thirds of the whole to drinking and debauchery. Not often have wages been more sadly mis-spent than by my poor work-fellows at Niddry, during this period of abundant and largely-remunerated employment. On receiving their money, they set straightway off to Edinburgh, in parties of threes and fours; and until the evening of the following Monday or Tuesday I saw no more of them.

They would then come dropping in, pale, dirty, disconsolate-looking--almost always in the reactionary state of unhappiness which succeeds intoxication--(they themselves used to term it "_the horrors_")--and with their nervous system so shaken, that rarely until a day or two after did they recover their ordinary working ability. Narratives of their adventures, however, would then begin to circulate through the squad--adventures commonly of the "Tom and Jerry"

type; and always, the more extravagant they were, the more was the admiration which they excited. On one occasion, I remember (for it was much spoken about as a manifestation of high spirit) that three of them, hiring a coach, drove out on the Sunday to visit Roslin and Hawthornden, and in this way spent their six pounds so much in the style of gentlemen, that they were able to get back to the mallet without a farthing on the evening of Monday. And, as they were at work on Tuesday in consequence, they succeeded, as they said, in saving the wages of a day usually lost, just by doing the thing so genteelly. Edinburgh had in those times a not very efficient police, and, in some of its less reputable localities, must have been dangerous. Burke found its West Port a fitting scene for his horrid trade a good many years after; and from the stories of some of our bolder spirits, which, though mayhap exaggerated, had evidently their nucleus of truth, there was not a little of the violent and the lawless perpetrated in its viler haunts during the years of the speculation mania. Four of our masons found, one Sat.u.r.day evening, a country lad bound hand and foot on the floor of a dark inner room in one of the dens of the High Street; and such was the state of exhaustion to which he was reduced, mainly through the compression of an old ap.r.o.n wrapped tightly round his face, that though they set him loose, it was some time ere he could muster strength enough to crawl away. He had been robbed by a bevy of women whom he had been foolish enough to treat; and on threatening to call in the watchman, they had fallen upon a way of keeping him quiet, which, save for the interference of my wild fellow-workmen, would soon have rendered him permanently so. And such was but one of many stories of the kind.

There was of course a considerable diversity of talent and acquirement among my more reckless a.s.sociates at the work; and it was curious enough to mark their very various views regarding what const.i.tuted spirit or the want of it. One weak lad used to tell us about a singularly spirited brother apprentice of his, who not only drank, kept loose company, and played all sorts of very mischievous practical jokes, but even occasionally stole, out of warehouses; which was of course a very dauntless thing, seeing that it brought him within wind of the gallows; whereas another of our wild workmen--a man of sense and intelligence--not unfrequently cut short the narratives of the weaker brother, by characterizing his spirited apprentice as a mean, graceless scamp, who, had he got his deservings, would have been hung like a dog.

I found that the intelligence which results from a fair school education, sharpened by a subsequent taste for reading, very much heightened in certain items the standard by which my comrades regulated their conduct. Mere intelligence formed no guard amongst them against intemperance or licentiousness; but it did form a not ineffectual protection against what are peculiarly the mean vices--such as theft, and the grosser and more creeping forms of untruthfulness and dishonesty. Of course, exceptional cases occur in all grades of society: there have been accomplished ladies of wealth and rank who have indulged in a propensity for stealing out of drapers' shops; and gentlemen of birth and education who could not be trusted in a library or a bookseller's back-room; and what sometimes occurs in the higher walks must be occasionally exemplified in the lower also; but, judging from what I have seen, I must hold it as a general rule, that a good intellectual education is a not inefficient protection against the meaner felonies, though not in any degree against the "pleasant vices."

The only adequate protection against both, equally, is the sort of education which my friend John Wilson the labourer exemplified--a kind of education not often acquired in schools, and not much more frequently possessed by schoolmasters than by any other cla.s.s of professional men.

The most remarkable man in our party was a young fellow of three-and-twenty--at least as much a blackguard as any of his companions, but possessed of great strength of character and intellect, and, with all his wildness, marked by very n.o.ble traits. He was a strongly and not inelegantly formed man, of about six feet--dark-complexioned, and of a sullen cast of countenance, which, however, though he could, I doubt not, become quite as formidable as he looked, concealed in his ordinary moods much placidity of temper, and a rich vein of humour. Charles ---- was the recognised hero of the squad; but he differed considerably from the men who admired him most. Burns tells us that he "often courted the acquaintance of the part of mankind commonly known by the ordinary phrase of _blackguards_;" and that, "though disgraced by follies, nay, sometimes stained with guilt, he had yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the n.o.blest virtues--magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friends.h.i.+p, and even modesty." I cannot say with the poet that I ever courted the acquaintance of blackguards; but though the labouring man may select his friends, he cannot choose his work-fellows; and so I have not unfrequently _come in contact_ with blackguards, and have had opportunities of pretty thoroughly knowing them. And my experience of the cla.s.s has been very much the reverse of that of Burns. I have usually found their virtues of a merely theatric cast, and their vices real; much a.s.sumed generosity in some instances, but a callousness of feeling, and meanness of spirit, lying concealed beneath. In this poor fellow, however, I certainly did find a sample of the n.o.bler variety of the genus. Poor Charles did too decidedly belong to it. He it was that projected the Sunday party to Roslin; and he it was that, pressing his way into the recesses of a disreputable house in the High Street, found the fast-bound wight choking in an ap.r.o.n, and, unloosing the cords, let him go. No man of the party squandered his gains more recklessly than Charles, or had looser notions regarding the legitimacy of the uses to which he too often applied them. And yet, notwithstanding, he was a generous-hearted fellow; and, under the influence of religious principle, would, like Burns himself, have made a very n.o.ble man.

In gradually forming my acquaintance with him, I was at first struck by the circ.u.mstance that he never joined in the clumsy ridicule with which I used to be a.s.sailed by the other workmen. When left, too, on one occasion, in consequence of a tacit combination against me, to roll up a large stone to the sort of block-bench, or _siege_, as it is technically termed, on which the ma.s.s had to be hewn, and as I was slowly succeeding in doing, through dint of very violent effort, what some two or three men usually united to do, Charles stepped out to a.s.sist me; and the combination at once broke down. Unlike the others, too, who, while they never scrupled to take odds against me, seemed sufficiently chary of coming in contact with me singly, he learned to seek me out in our intervals of labour, and to converse on subjects upon which we felt a common interest. He was not only an excellent operative mechanic, but possessed also of considerable architectural skill; and in this special province we found an interchange of idea not unprofitable. He had a turn, too, for reading, though he was by no means extensively read; and liked to converse about books. Nor, though the faculty had been but little cultivated, was he devoid of an eye for the curious in nature. On directing his attention, one morning, to a well-marked impression of lepidodendron, which delicately fretted with its lozenge-shaped network one of the planes of the stone before me, he began to describe, with a minuteness of observation not common among working men, certain strange forms which had attracted his notice when employed among the grey flagstones of Forfars.h.i.+re. I long after recognised in his description that strange crustacean of the Middle Old Red Sandstone of Scotland, the _Pterygotus_--an organism which was wholly unknown at this time to geologists, and which is but partially known still; and I saw in 1838, on the publication, in its first edition, of the "Elements" of Sir Charles Lyell, what he meant to indicate, by a rude sketch which he drew on the stone before us, and which, to the base of a semi-ellipsis, somewhat resembling a horse-shoe, united an angular prolongation not very unlike the iron stem of a pointing trowel drawn from the handle. He had evidently seen, long ere it had been detected by the scientific eye, that strange ichthyolite of the Old Red system, the _Cephalaspis_. His story, though he used to tell it with great humour, and no little dramatic effect, was in reality a very sad one. He had quarrelled, when quite a lad, with one of his fellow-workmen, and was unfortunate enough, in the pugilistic encounter which followed, to break his jawbone, and otherwise so severely to injure him, that for some time his recovery seemed doubtful. Flying, pursued by the officers of the law, he was, after a few days' hiding, apprehended, lodged in jail, tried at the High Court of Justiciary, and ultimately sentenced to three months'

imprisonment. And these three months he had to spend--for such was the wretched arrangement of the time--in the worst society in the world. In sketching, as he sometimes did, for the general amus.e.m.e.nt, the characters of the various prisoners with whom he had a.s.sociated--from the sneaking pick-pocket and the murderous ruffian, to the simple Highland smuggler, who had converted his grain into whisky, with scarce intelligence enough to see that there was aught morally wrong in the transaction--he sought only to be as graphic and humorous as he could, and always with complete success. But there attached to his narratives an unintentional moral; and I cannot yet call them up without feeling indignant at that detestable practice of promiscuous imprisonment which so long obtained in our country, and which had the effect of converting its jails into such complete criminal-manufacturing inst.i.tutions, that, had the honest men of the community risen and dealt by them as the Lord-George-Gordon mob dealt with Newgate, I hardly think they would have been acting out of character. Poor Charles had a n.o.bility in his nature which saved him from being contaminated by what was worst in his meaner a.s.sociates; but he was none the better for his imprisonment, and he quitted jail, of course, a marked man; and his after career was, I fear, all the more reckless in consequence of the stain imparted at this time to his character. He was as decidedly a leader among his brother workmen as I myself had been, when sowing my wild oats, among my schoolfellows; but society in its settled state, and in a country such as ours, allows no such scope to the man as it does to the boy; and so his leaders.h.i.+p, dangerous both to himself and his a.s.sociates, had chiefly as the scene of its trophies the grosser and more lawless haunts of vice and dissipation. His course through life was a sad, and, I fear, a brief one. When that sudden crash in the commercial world took place, in which the speculation mania of 1824-25 terminated, he was, with thousands more, thrown out of employment; and, having saved not a farthing of his earnings, he was compelled, under the pressure of actual want, to enlist as a soldier into one of the regiments of the line, bound for one of the intertropical colonies. And there, as his old comrades lost all trace of him, he too probably fell a victim, in an insalubrious climate, to old habits and new rum.

Finding me incorrigible, I was at length left by my brother operatives to be as peculiar as I pleased; and the working portion of the autumnal months pa.s.sed off pleasantly enough in hewing great stones under the branching foliage of the elm and chestnut trees of Niddry Park. From the circ.u.mstance, however, that the stones were so great, the previous trial had been an embarra.s.sing one; and, though too proud to confess that I cared aught about the matter, I was now glad enough that it was fairly over. Our modern Temperance Societies--inst.i.tutions which at this time had not begun to exist--have done much to s.h.i.+eld sober working men from combinations of the trying character to which, in the generation well-nigh pa.s.sed away, they were too often exposed. There are few working parties which have not now their groups of enthusiastic Teetotallers, that always band together against the drinkers, and mutually a.s.sist and keep one another in countenance: and a breakwater is thus formed in the middle of the stream, to protect from that grinding oppression of the poor by the poor, which, let popular agitators declaim on the other side as they may, is at once more trying and more general than the oppression which they experience from the great and wealthy.

According to the striking figure of the wise old king, "it is like a sweeping rain, which leaveth no food." Fanaticism in itself is not a good thing; nor are there many quiet people who do not dislike enthusiasm; and the members of new sects, whether they be religious sects or no, are almost always enthusiasts, and in some degree fanatical. A man can scarce become a vegetarian even without also becoming in some measure intolerant of the still large and not very disreputable cla.s.s that eat beef with their greens, and herrings with their potatoes; and the drinkers of water do say rather strong things of the men who, had they been guests at the marriage in Cana of Galilee, would have seen no great harm in partaking in moderation of the wine.

There is a somewhat intolerant fanaticism among the Teetotallers, just as there is fanaticism amongst most other new sects; and yet, recognising it simply as strength, and knowing what it has to contend with, I am much disposed to tolerate it, whether _it_ tolerate me or no.

Human nature, with all its defects, is a wiser thing than the mere common sense of the creatures whose nature it is; and we find in it special provisions, as in the instincts of the humbler animals, for overmastering the special difficulties with which it is its destiny to contend. And the sort of fanaticism to which I refer seems to be one of those provisions. A few Teetotallers of the average calibre and strength, who take their stand against the majority in a party of wild dissipated mechanics, would require a considerable amount of vigorous fanaticism to make good their position; nor do I see in ordinary men, as society at present exists, aught at once sufficiently potent in its nature, and sufficiently general in its existence, to take its place and do its work. It seems to subsist in the present imperfect state as a wise provision, though, like other wise provisions, such as the horns of the bull or the sting of the bee, it is misdirected at times, and does harm.

Winter came on, and our weekly wages were lowered immediately after Hallow-day, from twenty-four to fifteen s.h.i.+llings per week. This was deemed too large a reduction; and, reckoning by the weekly hours during which, on the average, we were still able to work--forty-two, as nearly as I could calculate, instead of sixty--it _was_ too great a reduction by about one s.h.i.+lling and ninepence. I would, however, in the circ.u.mstances, have taken particular care not to strike work for an advance. I knew that three-fourths of the masons about town--quite as improvident as the masons of our own party--could not live on their resources for a fortnight, and had no general fund to sustain them; and further, that many of the master-builders were not very urgently desirous to press on their work throughout the winter. And so, when, on coming to the work-shed on the Monday morning after the close of our first fortnight on the reduced scale, I found my comrades gathered in front of it in a group, and learned that there was a grand strike all over the district, I received the intelligence with as little of the enthusiasm of the "independent a.s.sociated mechanic" as possibly may be.

"You are in the right in your claims," I said to Charles; "but you have taken a bad time for urging them, and will be beaten to a certainty. The masters are much better prepared for a strike than you are. How, may I ask, are you yourself provided with the sinews of war?" "Very ill indeed," said Charles, scratching his head: "if the masters don't give in before Sat.u.r.day, it's all up with me; but never mind; let us have one day's fun: there's to be a grand meeting at Bruntsfield Links; let us go in as a deputation from the country masons, and make a speech about our rights and duties; and then, if we see matters going very far wrong, we can just step back again, and begin work to-morrow." "Bravely resolved,"

I said: "I shall go with you by all means, and take notes of your speech." We marched into town, about sixteen in number; and, on joining the crowd already a.s.sembled on the Links, were recognised, by the deep red hue of our clothes and ap.r.o.ns, which differed considerably from that borne by workers in the paler Edinburgh stone, as a reinforcement from a distance, and were received with loud cheers. Charles, however, did not make his speech: the meeting, which was about eight hundred strong, seemed fully in the possession of a few crack orators, who spoke with a fluency to which he could make no pretensions; and so he replied to the various calls from among his comrades, of "Cha, Cha," by a.s.suring them that he could not catch the eye of the gentleman in the chair. The meeting had, of course, neither chair nor chairman; and after a good deal of idle speech-making, which seemed to satisfy the speakers themselves remarkably well, but which at least some of their auditory regarded as nonsense, we found that the only motion on which we could harmoniously agree was a motion for an adjournment. And so we adjourned till the evening, fixing as our place of meeting one of the humbler halls of the city.

My comrades proposed that we should pa.s.s the time until the hour of meeting in a public-house; and, desirous of securing a glimpse of the sort of enjoyment for which they sacrificed so much, I accompanied them.

Pa.s.sing not a few more inviting-looking places, we entered a low tavern in the upper part of the Canongate, kept in an old half-ruinous building, which has since disappeared. We pa.s.sed on through a narrow pa.s.sage to a low-roofed room in the centre of the erection, into which the light of day never penetrated, and in which the gas was burning dimly in a close sluggish atmosphere, rendered still more stifling by tobacco-smoke, and a strong smell of ardent spirits. In the middle of the crazy floor there was a trap-door which lay open at the time; and a wild combination of sounds, in which the yelping of a dog, and a few gruff voices that seemed cheering him on, were most noticeable, rose from the apartment below. It was customary at this time for dram-shops to keep badgers housed in long narrow boxes, and for working men to keep dogs; and it was part of the ordinary sport of such places to set the dogs to unhouse the badgers. The wild sport which Scott describes in his "Guy Mannering," as pursued by Dandy Dinmont and his a.s.sociates among the Cheviots, was extensively practised twenty-nine years ago amid the dingier haunts of the High Street and the Canongate. Our party, like most others, had its dog--a repulsive-looking brute, with an earth-directed eye, as if he carried about with him an evil conscience; and my companions were desirous of getting his earthing ability tested upon the badger of the establishment; but on summoning the tavern-keeper, we were told that the party below had got the start of us: their dog was as we might hear, "just drawing the badger; and before our dog could be permitted to draw him, the poor brute would require to get an hour's rest." I need scarce say that the hour was spent in hard drinking in that stagnant atmosphere; and we then all descended through the trap-door, by means of a ladder, into a bare-walled dungeon, dark and damp, and where the pestiferous air smelt like that of a burial vault. The scene which followed was exceedingly repulsive and brutal--nearly as much so as some of the scenes furnished by those otter hunts in which the aristocracy of the country delight occasionally to indulge. Amid shouts and yells, the badger, with the blood of his recent conflict still fresh upon him, was again drawn to the box mouth; and the party returning satisfied to the apartment above, again betook themselves to hard drinking. In a short time the liquor began to tell, not first, as might be supposed, on our younger men, who were mostly tall, vigorous fellows, in the first flush of their full strength, but on a few of the middle-aged workmen, whose const.i.tutions seemed undermined by a previous course of dissipation and debauchery.

The conversation became very loud, very involved, and, though highly seasoned with emphatic oaths, very insipid; and leaving with Cha--who seemed somewhat uneasy that my eye should be upon their meeting in its hour of weakness--money enough to clear off my share of the reckoning, I stole out to the King's Park, and pa.s.sed an hour to better purpose among the trap rocks than I could possibly have spent it beside the trap-door.

Of that tavern party, I am not aware that a single individual save the writer is now living: its very dog did not live out half his days. His owner was alarmed one morning, shortly after this time, by the intelligence that a dozen of sheep had been worried during the night on a neighbouring farm, and that a dog very like his had been seen prowling about the fold; but in order to determine the point, he would be visited, it was added, in the course of the day, by the shepherd and a law-officer. The dog meanwhile, however, conscious of guilt--for dogs do seem to have consciences in such matters--was nowhere to be found, though, after the lapse of nearly a week, he again appeared at the work; and his master, slipping a rope round his neck, brought him to a deserted coal-pit half-filled with water, that opened in an adjacent field, and, flinging him in, left the authorities no clue by which to establish his ident.i.ty with the robber and a.s.sa.s.sin of the fold.

I had now quite enough of the strike; and, instead of attending the evening meeting, pa.s.sed the night with my friend William Ross. Curious to know, however, whether my absence had been observed by my brother workmen, I asked Cha, when we next met, "what he thought of _our_ meeting?" "Gude-sake!" he replied, "let that flee stick to the wa'! We got upon the _skuff_ after you left us, and grew deaf to time, and so not one of us has seen the meeting yet." I learned, however, that, though somewhat reduced in numbers, it had been very spirited and energetic, and had resolved on nailing the colours to the mast; but in a few mornings subsequent, several of the squads returned to work on their master's terms, and all broke down in about a week after. Contrary to what I should have expected from my previous knowledge of him, I found that my friend William Ross took a warm interest in strikes and combinations, and was much surprised at the apathy which I manifested on this occasion; nay, that he himself, as he told me, actually officiated as clerk for a combined society of house-painters, and entertained sanguine hopes regarding the happy influence which the principle of union was yet to exercise on the status and comfort of the working man.

There are no problems more difficult than those which speculative men sometimes attempt solving, when they set themselves to predict how certain given characters would act in certain given circ.u.mstances. In what spirit, it has been asked, would Socrates have listened to the address of Paul on Mars Hill, had he lived a few ages later? and what sort of a statesman would Robert Burns have made? I cannot answer either question; but this I know, that from my intimate acquaintance with the retiring, un.o.btrusive character of my friend in early life, I should have predicted that he would have taken no interest whatever in strikes or combinations; and I was now surprised to find the case otherwise. And he, on the other hand, equally intimate with my comparatively wild boyhood, and my influence among my schoolfellows, would have predicted that I should have taken a very warm interest in such combinations, mayhap as a ringleader; at all events, as an energetic, influential member; and he was now not a little astonished to see me keeping aloof from them, as things of no account or value. I believe, however, we were both acting in character. Lacking my obstinacy, he had in some degree yielded, on first coming to the capital, to the tyranny of his brother workmen; and, becoming one of themselves, and identifying his interest with theirs, his talents and acquirements had recommended him to an office of trust among them; whereas I, stubbornly battling, like Harry of the Wynd, "for my own hand," would not stir a finger in a.s.sertion of the alleged rights of fellows who had no respect for the rights which were indisputably mine.

I may here mention, that this first year of the building mania was also the first, in the present century, of those great _strikes_ among workmen, of which the public has since heard and seen so much. Up till this time, combination among operatives for the purpose of raising the rate of wages had been a crime punishable by law; and though several combinations and trade unions did exist, open strikes, which would have been a too palpable manifestation of them to be tolerated, could scarce be said ever to take place. I saw enough at the period to convince me, that though the _right_ of combination, abstractly considered, is just and proper, the strikes which would result from it as consequences would be productive of much evil, and little good; and in an argument with my friend William on the subject, I ventured to a.s.sure him that his house-painter's union would never benefit the operative house-painters as a cla.s.s, and urged him to give up his clerks.h.i.+p. "There is a want," I said, "of true leaders.h.i.+p among our operatives in these combinations. It is the wilder spirits that dictate the conditions; and, pitching their demands high, they begin usually by enforcing acquiescence in them on the quieter and more moderate among their companions. They are tyrants to their fellows ere they come into collision with their masters, and have thus an enemy in the camp, not unwilling to take advantage of their seasons of weakness, and prepared to rejoice, though secretly mayhap, in their defeats and reverses. And further, their discomfiture will be always quite certain enough when seasons of depression come, from the circ.u.mstance that, fixing their terms in prosperous times, they will fix them with reference rather to their present power of enforcing them, than to that medium line of fair and equal adjustment on which a conscientious man could plant his foot and make a firm stand. Men such as you, able and ready to work in behalf of these combinations, will of course get the work to do, but you will have little or no power given you in their direction: the direction will be apparently in the hands of a few fluent _gabbers_; and yet even they will not be the actual directors--they will be but the exponents and voices of the general mediocre sentiment and inferior sense of the ma.s.s as a whole, and acceptable only so long as they give utterance to that; and so, ultimately, exceedingly little will be won in this way for working men.

It is well that they should be allowed to combine, seeing that combination is permitted to those who employ them; but until the majority of our working men of the south become very different from what they now are--greatly wiser and greatly better--there will be more lost than gained by their combinations. According to the circ.u.mstances of the time and season, the current will be at one period running in their favour against the masters, and at another in favour of the masters against them: there will be a continual ebb and flow, like that of the sea, but no general advance; and the sooner that the like of you and I get out of the rough conflict and jostle of the tideway, and set ourselves to labour apart on our own internal resources, it will be all the better for us." William, however, did not give up his clerks.h.i.+p; and I daresay the sort of treatment which I had received at the hands of my fellow-workmen made me express myself rather strongly on the subject; but the actual history of the numerous strikes and combinations which have taken place during the quarter of a century and more which has since intervened, is of a kind not in the least suited to modify my views. There _is_ a want of judicious leaders.h.i.+p among our working men; and such of the autobiographies of the cla.s.s as are able and interesting enough to obtain a hearing of their authors show, I am inclined to think, how this takes place. Combination is first brought to bear among them against the men, their fellows, who have vigour enough of intellect to think and act for themselves; and such always is the character of the born leader: these true leaders are almost always forced into the opposition; and thus separating between themselves and the men fitted by nature to render them formidable, they fall under the direction of mere chatterers and stump orators, which is in reality no direction at all.

The author of the "Working Man's Way in the World"--evidently a very superior man--had, he tells us, to quit at one time his employment, overborne by the senseless ridicule of his brother workmen. Somerville states in his Autobiography, that, both as a labouring man and a soldier, it was from the hands of his comrades that--save in one memorable instance--he had experienced all the tyranny and oppression of which he had been the victim. Nay, Benjamin Franklin himself was deemed a much more ordinary man in the printing-house in Bartholomew Close, where he was teased and laughed at as the _Water-American_, than in the House of Representatives, the Royal Society, or the Court of France.

The great Printer, though recognised by accomplished politicians as a profound statesman, and by men of solid science as "the most rational of the philosophers," was regarded by his poor brother compositors as merely an odd fellow, who did not conform to their drinking usages, and whom it was therefore fair to tease and annoy as a contemner of the _sacrament_ of the _chapel_.[9]

The life of my friend was, however, pitched on a better and higher tone than that of most of his brother unionists. It was intellectual and moral, and its happier hours were its hours of quiet self-improvement, when, throwing himself on the resources within, he forgot for the time the unions and combinations that entailed upon him much troublesome occupation, but never did him any service. I regretted, however, to find that a distrust of his own powers was still growing upon him, and narrowing his circle of enjoyment. On asking him whether he still amused himself with his flute, he turned, after replying with a brief "O no!"

to a comrade with whom he had lived for years, and quietly said to him, by way of explaining the question, "Robert, I suppose you don't know I was once a grand flute-player!" And sure enough Robert did not know. He had given up, too, his water-colour drawing, in which his taste was decidedly fine; and even in oils, with which he still occasionally engaged himself, instead of casting himself full on nature, as at an earlier period, he had become a copyist of the late Rev. Mr. Thomson of Duddingstone, at that time in the full blow of his artistic reputation; nor could I see that he copied him well. I urged and remonstrated, but to no effect. "Ah, Miller," he has said, "what matters it how I amuse myself? You have stamina in you, and will force your way; but I want strength: the world will never hear of me." That overweening conceit which seems but natural to the young man as a playful disposition to the kitten, or a soft and timid one to the puppy, often a.s.sumes a ridiculous, and oftener still an unamiable, aspect. And yet, though it originates many very foolish things, it seems to be in itself, like the fanaticism of the Teetotaller, a wise provision, which, were it not made by nature, would leave most minds without spring enough to effect, with the required energy, the movements necessary to launch them fairly into busy or studious life. The sobered man of mature age who has learned pretty correctly to take the measure of himself, has usually acquired both habits and knowledge that a.s.sist him in urging his onward way, and the moving force of necessity always presses him onward from behind; but the exhilarating conviction of being born to superior parts, and to do something astonis.h.i.+ngly clever, seems necessary to the young man; and when I see it manifesting itself, if not very foolishly or very offensively, I usually think of my poor friend William Ross, who was unfortunate enough wholly to want it; and extend to it a pretty ample toleration. Ultimately my friend gave up painting, and restricted himself to the ornamental parts of his profession, of which he became very much a master. In finis.h.i.+ng a ceiling in oils, upon which he had represented in bold relief some of the ornately sculptured foliage of the architect, the gentleman for whom he wrought (the son-in-law of a distinguished artist, and himself an amateur), called on his wife to admire the truthful and delicate shading of their house-painter. It was astonis.h.i.+ng, he said, and perhaps somewhat humiliating, to see the mere mechanic trenching so decidedly on the province of the artist. Poor William Ross, however, was no mere mechanic; and even artists might have regarded his encroachments on their proper domain with more of complacency than humiliation. One of the last pieces of work upon which he was engaged was a gorgeously painted ceiling in the palace of some Irish bishop, which he had been sent all the way from Glasgow to finish.

Every society, however homely, has its picturesque points, nor did even that of the rather commonplace hamlet in which I resided at this time wholly want them. There was a decaying cottage a few doors away, that had for its inmate a cross-tempered old crone, who strove hard to set up as a witch, but broke down from sheer want of the necessary capital. She had been one of the underground workers of Niddry in her time; and, being as little intelligent as most of the other collier-women of the neighbourhood, she had not the necessary witch-lore to adapt her pretensions to the capacity of belief which obtained in the district.

And so the general estimate formed regarding her was that to which our landlady occasionally gave expression. "Donnart auld bodie," Peggy used to say; "though she threaps hersel' a witch, she's nae mair witch than I am: she's only just trying, in her f.e.c.kless auld age, to make folk stand in her reverence." Old Alie was, however, a curiosity in her way--quite malignant enough to be a real witch, and fitted, if with a few more advantages of acquirement, she had been antedated an age or two, to become as hopeful a candidate for a tar-barrel as most of her cla.s.s. Her next-door neighbour was also an old woman, and well-nigh as poor as the crone; but she was an easy-tempered genial sort of person, who wished harm to no one; and the expression of content that dwelt on her round fresh face, which, after the wear of more than seventy winters, still retained its modic.u.m of colour, contrasted strongly with the fierce wretchedness that gleamed from the sharp and sallow features of the witch. It was evident that the two old women, though placed externally in almost the same circ.u.mstances, had essentially a very different lot a.s.signed to them, and enjoyed existence in a very unequal degree. The placid old woman kept a solitary lodger--"Davie the apprentice"--a wayward, eccentric lad, much about my own age, though in but the second "year of his time," who used to fret even her temper, and who, after making trial of I know not how many other professions, now began to find that his genius did not lie to the mallet. Davie was stage-mad; but for the stage nature seemed to have fitted him rather indifferently: she had given him a squat ungainly figure, an inexpressive face, a voice that in its intonations somewhat resembled the grating of a carpenter's saw; and, withal, no very nice conception of either comic or serious character; but he could recite in the "big bow-wow style," and think and dream of only plays and play-actors. To Davie the world and its concerns seemed unworthy of a moment's care, and the stage appeared the only great reality. He was engaged, when I first made his acquaintance, in writing a play, with which he had already filled a whole quire of foolscap, without, however, having quite entered upon the plot; and he read to me some of the scenes in tones of such energy that the whole village heard. Though written in the kind of verse which Dr. Young believed to be the language of angels, his play was sad stuff; and when he paused for my approbation, I ventured to suggest an alteration in one of the speeches. "There, Sir," said Davie, in the vein of Cambyses, "take the pen; let me see, Sir, how _you_ would turn it." I accordingly took the pen, and re-wrote the speech. "Hum," said Davie, as he ran his eye along the lines, "that, Sir, is mere poetry. What, think you, could the great Kean make of feeble stuff like that? Let me tell you, Sir, you have no notion whatever of stage effect." I, of course, at once acquiesced; and Davie, mollified by my submission, read to me yet another scene. Cha, however, of whom he stood a good deal in awe, used to tease him not a little about his play. I have heard him inquire sedulously about the development of the story and the management of the characters, and whether he was writing the several parts with a due eye to the capabilities of the leading actors of the day; and Davie, not quite sure, apparently, whether Cha was in joke or earnest, was usually on these occasions very chary of reply.

Davie, had he but the means of securing access, would have walked in every night to the city to attend the playhouse; and it quite astonished him, he used to say, that I, who really knew something of the drama, and had four s.h.i.+llings a day, did not nightly at least devote one of the four to purchase perfect happiness and a seat in the s.h.i.+lling gallery.

On some two, or at most three occasions, I did attend the playhouse, accompanied by Cha and a few of the other workmen; but though I had been greatly delighted, when a boy, by the acting of a company of strollers that had visited Cromarty, and converted the Council House Hall into a theatre, the greatly better acting of the Edinburgh company failed to satisfy me now. The few plays, however, which I saw enacted chanced to be of a rather mediocre character, and gave no scope for the exhibition of nice histrionic talent; nor were any of the great actors of the south on the Edinburgh boards at the time. The stage scenery, too, though quite fine enough of its kind, had, I found, altogether a different effect upon me from the one which it had been elaborated to produce. In perusing our fine old dramas, it was the truth of nature that the vividly-drawn scenes and figures, and the happily-portrayed characters, always suggested; whereas the painted canvas, and the respectable but yet too palpable acting, served but to unrealize what I saw, and to remind me that I was merely in a theatre. Further, I deemed it too large a price to devote a whole evening to see some play acted which, mayhap, as a composition I would not have deemed worth the reading; and so the temptation of play-going failed to tempt me; and latterly, when my comrades set out for the playhouse, I stayed at home. Whatever the nature of the process through which they have gone, a considerable proportion of the more intelligent mechanics of the present generation seem to have landed in conclusions similar to the one at which I at this time arrived. At least, for every dozen of the cla.s.s that frequented the theatre thirty years ago, there is scarce one that frequents it now. I have said that the scenery of the stage made no very favourable impression upon me. Some parts of it must, however, have made a considerably stronger one than I could have supposed at the time.

Fourteen years after, when the whole seemed to have pa.s.sed out of memory, I was lying ill of small-pox, which, though a good deal modified apparently by the vaccination of a long anterior period, was accompanied by such a degree of fever, that for two days together one delirious image continued to succeed another in the troubled sensorium, as scene succeeds scene in the box of an itinerant showman. As is not uncommon, however, in such cases, though ill enough to be haunted by the images, I was yet well enough to know that they were idle unrealities, the mere effects of indisposition; and even sufficiently collected to take an interest in watching them as they arose, and in striving to determine whether they were linked together by the ordinary a.s.sociative ties. I found, however, that they were wholly independent of each other. Curious to know whether the will exerted any power over them, I set myself to try whether I could not conjure up a death's-head as one of the series; but what rose instead was a cheerful parlour fire, bearing a-top a tea-kettle, and as the picture faded and then vanished, it was succeeded by a gorgeous cataract, in which the white foam, at first strongly relieved against the dark rock over which it fell, soon exhibited a deep tinge of sulphurous blue, and then came das.h.i.+ng down in one frightful sheet of blood. The great singularity of the vision served to freshen recollection, and I detected in the strange cataract every line and tint of the water-fall in the incantation scene in "Der Freischutz" which I had witnessed in the Theatre Royal of Edinburgh, with certainly no very particular interest, so long before. There are, I suspect, provinces in the philosophy of mind into which the metaphysicians have not yet entered. Of that accessible storehouse in which the memories of past events lie arranged and taped up, they appear to know a good deal; but of a mysterious cabinet of daguerrotype pictures, of which, though fast locked up on ordinary occasions, disease sometimes flings the door ajar, they seem to know nothing.

FOOTNOTE:

[9] The kind of club into which the compositors of a printing-house always form themselves has from time immemorial been termed a _chapel_; and the petty tricks by which Franklin was annoyed were said to be played him by the chapel ghost. "My employer desiring," he says, "after some weeks, to have me in the composing room, I left the pressmen. A new _bien-venu_ for drink, being five s.h.i.+llings, was demanded of me by the compositors. I thought it an imposition, as I had paid one to the pressmen. The master thought so too, and forbade my paying it. I stood out two or three weeks, was accordingly considered as an _excommunicate_, and had so many little pieces of private malice practised on me by mixing my sorts, transposing and breaking my matter, &c. &c., if ever I stepped out of the room, and all ascribed to the _chapel ghost_, which, they said, ever haunted those not regularly admitted, that, notwithstanding my master's protection, I found myself obliged to comply and pay the money."

CHAPTER XVI.

"Let not this weak, unknowing hand, Presume thy bolts to throw."--POPE.

The great fires of the Parliament Close and the High Street were events of this winter. A countryman, who had left town when the old spire of the Tron Church was blazing like a torch, and the large group of buildings nearly opposite the Cross still enveloped in flame from ground-floor to roof-tree, pa.s.sed our work-shed, a little after two o'clock, and, telling us what he had seen, remarked that, if the conflagration went on as it was doing, we would have, as our next season's employment, the Old Town of Edinburgh to rebuild. And as the evening closed over our labours, we went in to town in a body, to see the fires that promised to do so much for us. The spire had burnt out, and we could but catch between us and the darkened sky, the square abrupt outline of the masonry a-top that had supported the wooden broach, whence, only a few hours before, Fergusson's bell had descended in a molten shower. The flames, too, in the upper group of buildings, were restricted to the lower stories, and flared fitfully on the tall forms and bright swords of the dragoons, drawn from the neighbouring barracks, as they rode up and down the middle s.p.a.ce, or gleamed athwart the street on groups of wretched-looking women and ruffian men, who seemed scanning with greedy eyes the still unremoved heaps of household goods rescued from the burning tenements. The first figure that caught my eye was a singularly ludicrous one. Removed from the burning ma.s.s but by the thickness of a wall, there was a barber's shop brilliantly lighted with gas, the uncurtained window of which permitted the spectators outside to see whatever was going on in the interior. The barber was as busily at work as if he were a hundred miles from the scene of danger, though the engines at the time were playing against the outside of his gable wall; and the immediate subject under his hands, as my eye rested upon him, was an immensely fat old fellow, on whose round bald forehead and ruddy cheeks the perspiration, occasioned by the oven-like heat of the place, was standing out in huge drops, and whose vast mouth, widely opened to accommodate the man of the razor, gave to his countenance such an expression as I have sometimes seen in grotesque Gothic heads of that age of art in which the ecclesiastical architect began to make sport of his religion. The next object that presented itself was, however, of a more sobering description. A poor working man, laden with his favourite piece of furniture, a gla.s.s-fronted press or cupboard, which he had succeeded in rescuing from his burning dwelling, was emerging from one of the lanes, followed by his wife, when, striking his foot against some obstacle in the way, or staggering from the too great weight of his load, he tottered against a projecting corner, and the glazed door was driven in with a crash. There was hopeless misery in the wailing cry of his wife--"Oh, ruin, ruin!--_it's_ lost too!" Nor was his own despairing response less sad:--"Ay, ay, puir la.s.sie, its a' at an end noo." Curious as it may seem, the wild excitement of the scene had at first rather exhilarated than depressed my spirits; but the incident of the gla.s.s cupboard served to awaken the proper feeling; and as I came more into contact with the misery of the catastrophe, and marked the groups of s.h.i.+vering houseless creatures that watched beside the broken fragments of their stuff, I saw what a dire calamity a great fire really is. Nearly two hundred families were already at this time cast homeless into the streets. Shortly before quitting the scene of the conflagration for the country, I pa.s.sed along a common stair, which led from the Parliament Close towards the Cowgate, through a tall old domicile, eleven stories in height, and I afterwards remembered that the pa.s.sage was occupied by a smouldering oppressive vapour, which, from the direction of the wind, could scarce have been derived from the adjacent conflagration, though at the time, without thinking much of the circ.u.mstance, I concluded it might have come creeping westwards on some low cross current along the narrow lanes. In less than an hour after that lofty tenement was wrapt in flames, from the ground story to more than a hundred feet over its tallest chimneys, and about sixty additional families, its tenants, were cast into the streets with the others. My friend William Ross afterwards a.s.sured me, that never had he witnessed anything equal in grandeur to this last of the conflagrations.

Directly over the sea of fire below, the low-browed clouds above seemed as if charged with a sea of blood, that lightened and darkened by fits as the flames rose and fell; and far and wide, tower and spire, and tall house-top, glared out against a background of darkness, as if they had been brought to a red heat by some great subterranean, earth-born fire, that was fast rising to wrap the entire city in destruction. The old church of St. Giles, he said, with the fantastic masonry of its pale grey tower, bathed in crimson, and that of its dark rude walls suffused in a bronzed umber, and with the red light gleaming inwards through its huge mullioned windows, and flickering on its stone roof, formed one of the most picturesque objects he had ever seen.[10]

I sometimes heard old Dr. Colquhoun of Leith preach. There were fewer authors among the clergy in those days than now; and I felt a special interest in a living divine who had written so good a book, that my uncle Sandy--no mean judge in such matters--had a.s.signed to it a place in his little theological library, among the writings of the great divines of other ages. The old man's preaching days, ere the winter of 1824, were well-nigh done: he could scarce make himself heard over half the area of his large, hulking chapel, which was, however, always less than half filled; but, though the feeble tones teasingly strained the ear, I liked to listen to his quaintly attired but usually very solid theology, and found, as I thought, more matter in his discourses than in those of men who spoke louder and in a flas.h.i.+er style. The worthy man, however, did me a mischief at this time. There had been a great Musical Festival held in Edinburgh about three weeks previous to the conflagration, at which oratorios were performed in the ordinary pagan style, in which amateurs play at devotion, without even professing to feel it; and the Doctor, in his first sermon after the great fires, gave serious expression to the conviction, that they were judgments sent upon Edinburgh, to avenge the profanity of its Musical Festival. Edinburgh had sinned, he said, and Edinburgh was now punished; and it was according to the Divine economy, he added, that judgments administered exactly after the manner of the infliction which we had just witnessed should fall upon cities and kingdoms. I liked the reasoning very ill. I knew only two ways in which G.o.d's judgments could be determined to be really such--either through direct revelation from G.o.d himself, or in those cases in which they take place so much in accordance with His fixed laws, and in such relation to the offence or crime visited in them by punishment, that man, simply by the exercise of his rational faculties, and reasoning from cause to effect, as is his nature, can determine them for himself. And the great Edinburgh fires had come under neither category. G.o.d did not reveal that He had punished the tradesmen and mechanics of the High Street for the musical sins of the lawyers and landowners of Abercromby Place and Charlotte Square; nor could any natural relation be established between the oratorios in the Parliament House or the concerts in the Theatre Royal, and the conflagrations opposite the Cross or at the top of the Tron Church steeple. All that could be proven in the case were the facts of the festival and of the fires; and the further fact, that, so far as could be ascertained, there was no visible connexion between them, and that it was not the people who had joined in the one that had suffered from the others. And the Doctor's argument seemed to be the perilous loose one, that as G.o.d had sometimes of old visited cities and nations with judgments which had no apparent connexion with the sins punished, and which could not be recognised as judgments had not He himself told that such they were, the Edinburgh fires, of which He had told nothing, might be properly regarded--seeing that they had in the same way no connexion with the oratorios, and had wrought no mischief to the people who had patronized the oratorios--as special judgments on the oratorios. The good old Papist had said, "I believe because it is impossible." What the Doctor in this instance seemed to say was, "I believe because it is not in the least likely." If, I argued, Dr. Colquhoun's own house and library had been burnt, he would no doubt very properly have deemed the infliction a great trial to himself; but on what principle could he have further held that it was not only a trial to himself, but also a judgment on his neighbour? If we must not believe that the falling of the tower of Siloam was a special visitation on the sins of the poor men whom it crushed, how, or on what grounds, are we to believe that it was a special visitation on the sins of the men whom it did not in the least injure? I fear I remembered Dr. Colquhoun's remarks on the fire better than aught else I ever heard from him; nay, I must add, that nothing had I ever found in the writings of the sceptics that had a worse effect on my mind; and I now mention the circ.u.mstance to show how sober in applications of the kind, in an age like the present, a theologian should be. It was some time ere I forgot the ill savour of that dead fly; and it was to beliefs of a serious and very important cla.s.s that it served for a time to impart its own doubtful character.

But from the minister whose chapel I oftenest attended, I was little in danger of having my beliefs unsettled by reasonings of this stumbling cast. "Be sure," said both my uncles, as I was quitting Cromarty for the south, "be sure you go and hear Dr. M'Crie." And so Dr. M'Crie I did go and hear; and not once or twice, but often. The biographer of Knox--to employ the language in which Wordsworth describes the humble hero of the "Excursion"--

"was a man Whom no one could have pa.s.sed without remark."

And on first attending his church, I found that I had unwittingly seen him before, and that without remark I had _not_ pa.s.sed him. I had extended one of my usual evening walks, shortly after commencing work at Niddry, in the direction of the southern suburb of Edinburgh, and was sauntering through one of the green lanes of Liberton, when I met a gentleman whose appearance at once struck me. He was a singularly erect, spare, tall man, and bore about him an air which, neither wholly clerical nor wholly military, seemed to be a curious compound of both.

The countenance was pale, and the expression, as I thought, somewhat melancholy; but an air of sedate power sat so palpably on every feature, that I stood arrested as he pa.s.sed, and for half a minute or so remained looking after him. He wore, over a suit of black, a brown great-coat, with the neck a good deal whitened by powder, and the rim of the hat behind, which was slightly turned up, bore a similar stain. "There is mark about that old-fas.h.i.+oned man," I said to myself: "who or what can he be?" Curiously enough, the apparent combination of the military and the clerical in his gait and air suggested to me Sir Richard Steele's story, in the "Tattler," of the old officer who, acting in the double capacity of major and chaplain to his regiment, challenged a young man for blasphemy, and after disarming, would not take him to mercy until he had first begged pardon of G.o.d upon his knees on the duelling ground, for the irreverence with which he had treated His name. My curiosity regarding the stranger gentleman was soon gratified. Next Sabbath I attended the Doctor's chapel, and saw the tall, spare, clerico-military looking man in the pulpit. I have a good deal of faith in the military air, when, in the character of a natural trait, I find it strongly marking men who never served in the army. I have not yet seen it borne by a civilian who had not in him at least the elements of the soldier; nor can I doubt that, had Dr. M'Crie been a Scotch covenanter of the times of Charles II, the insurgents at Bothwell would have had what they sadly wanted--a general. The shrewd sense of his discourses had great charms for me; and, though not a flashy, nor, in the ordinary sense of the term, even an eloquent preacher, there were none of the other Edinburgh clergy his contemporaries to whom I found I could listen with greater profit or satisfaction. A simple incident which occurred during my first morning attendance at his chapel, strongly impressed me with a sense of his sagacity. There was a great deal of coughing in the place, the effect of a recent change of weather; and the Doctor, whose voice was not a strong one, and who seemed somewhat annoyed by the ruthless interruptions, stopping suddenly short in the middle of his argument, made a dead pause. When people are taken greatly by surprise, they cease to cough--a circ.u.mstance on which he had evidently calculated. Every eye was now turned towards him, and for a full minute so dead was the silence, that one might have heard a pin drop. "I see, my friends," said the Doctor, resuming speech, with a suppressed smile--"I see you can be all quiet enough when I am quiet." There was not a little genuine strategy in the rebuke; and as cough lies a good deal more under the influence of the will than most coughers suppose, such was its effect, that during the rest of the day there was not a t.i.the of the previous coughing.

The one-roomed cottage which I shared with its three other inmates, did not present all the possible conveniences for study; but it had a little table in a corner, at which I contrived to write a good deal; and my book-shelf already exhibited from twenty to thirty volumes, picked up on Sat.u.r.day evenings at the book-stalls of the city, and which were all accessions to my little library. I, besides, got a few volumes to read from my friend William Ross, and a few more through my work-fellow Cha; and so my rate of acquirement in book-knowledge, if not equal to that of some former years, at least considerably exceeded what it had been in the previous season, which I had spent in the Highlands, and during which I had perused only three volumes--one of the three a slim volume of slim poems, by a lady, and the other, that rather curious than edifying work, "Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed." The cheap literature had not yet been called into existence; and, without in the least undervaluing its advantages, it was, I daresay, better on the whole as a mental exercise, and greatly better in the provision which it made for the future, that I should have to urge my way through the works of our best writers in prose and verse--works which always made an impression on the memory--than that I should have been engaged instead in picking up odds and ends of information from loose essays, the hasty productions of men too little vigorous, or too little at leisure, to impress upon their writings the stamp of their own individuality. In quiet moonlight nights I found it exceedingly pleasant to saunter all alone through the Niddry woods. Moonlight gives to even leafless groves the charms of full foliage, and conceals tameness of outline in a landscape. I found it singularly agreeable, too, to listen, from a solitude so profound as that which a short walk secured to me, to the distant bells of the city ringing out, as the clock struck eight, the old curfew peal; and to mark, from under the interlacing boughs of a long-arched vista, the intermittent gleam of the Inchkeith light now brightening and now fading, as the lanthorn revolved. In short, the winter pa.s.sed not unpleasantly away: I had now nothing to annoy me in the work-shed; and my only serious care arose from my unlucky house in Leith, for which I found myself summoned one morning, by an officer-looking man, to pay nearly three pounds--the last instalment which I owed, I was told, as one of the heritors of the place, for its fine new church. I must confess I was wicked enough to wish on this occasion that the property on the Coal-hill had been included in the judgment on the Musical Festival. But shortly after, not less to my astonishment than delight, I was informed by Mr. Veitch that he had at length found a purchaser for my house; and, after getting myself served heir to my father before the Court of the Canongate, and paying a large arrear of feu-duty to that venerable corporation, in which I had to recognise my feudal superior, I got myself as surely dissevered from the Coal-hill as paper and parchment could do it, and pocketed, in virtue of the transaction, a balance of about fifty pounds. As nearly as I could calculate on what the property had cost us, from first to last, the _composition_ which it paid was one of about five s.h.i.+llings in the pound. And such was the concluding pa.s.sage in the history of a legacy which threatened for a time to be the ruin of the family. When I last pa.s.sed along the Coal-hill, I saw my umquhile house existing as a bit of dingy wall, a single storey in height, and perforated by three narrow old-fas.h.i.+oned doors, jealously boarded up, and apparently, as in the days when it was mine, of no manner of use in the world. I trust, however, it is no longer the positive mischief to its proprietor that it was to me.

The busy season had now fairly commenced: wages were fast mounting up to the level of the former year, which they ultimately overtopped; and employment had become very abundant. I found, however, that it might be well for me to return home for a few months. The dust of the stone which I had been hewing for the last two years had begun to affect my lungs, as they had been affected in the last autumn of my apprentices.h.i.+p, but much more severely; and I was too palpably sinking in flesh and strength to render it safe for me to encounter the consequences of another season of hard work as a stone-cutter. From the stage of the malady at which I had already arrived, poor workmen, unable to do what I did, throw themselves loose from their employment, and sink in six or eight months into the grave--some at an earlier, some at a later period of life; but so general is the affection, that few of our Edinburgh stone-cutters pa.s.s their fortieth year unscathed, and not one out of every fifty of their number ever reaches his forty-fifth year. I accordingly engaged my pa.s.sage for the north in an Inverness sloop, and took leave of my few friends--of the excellent foreman of the Niddry squad, and of Cha and John Wilson, with both of whom, notwithstanding their opposite characters, I had become very intimate. Among the rest, too, I took leave of a paternal cousin settled in Leith, the wife of a genial-hearted sailor, master of a now wholly obsolete type of vessel, one of the old Leith and London smacks, with a huge single mast, ma.s.sive and tall as that of a frigate, and a mainsail of a quarter of an acre. I had received much kindness from my cousin, who, besides her relations.h.i.+p to my father, had been a contemporary and early friend of my mother's; and my welcome from the master her husband--one of the best-natured men I ever knew--used always to be one of the heartiest. And after parting from Cousin Marshall, I mustered up resolution enough to call on yet another cousin.

Cousin William, the eldest son of my Sutherlands.h.i.+re aunt, had been for some years settled in Edinburgh, first as an upper clerk and manager--for, after his failure as a merchant he had to begin the world anew; and now, in the speculation year, he had succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng a business for himself, which bore about it a hopeful and promising air so long as the over-genial season lasted, but fell,