My Schools and Schoolmasters Part 9

CHAPTER XIV.

"Edina! Scotia's darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and towers!"--BURNS.

There had occurred a sad accident among the Cromarty rocks this season, when I was labouring in Gairloch, which, from the circ.u.mstance that it had nearly taken place in my own person about five years before, a good deal impressed me on my return. A few hundred yards from the very bad road which I had a.s.sisted old Johnstone of the Forty-Second in constructing, there is a tall inaccessible precipice of ferruginous gneiss, that from time immemorial down to this period had furnished a secure nestling-place to a pair of ravens--the only birds of their species that frequented the rocks of the Hill. Year after year, regularly as the breeding season came round, the ravens used to make their appearance, and enter on possession of their hereditary home: they had done so for a hundred years, to a certainty--some said, for a much longer time; and as there existed a tradition in the place that the nest had once been robbed of its young birds by a bold climber, I paid it a visit one morning, in order to determine whether I could not rob it too.

There was no getting up to it from below: the precipice, more inaccessible for about a hundred feet from its base than a castle wall, overhung the sh.o.r.e; but it seemed not impracticable from above; and, coming gradually down upon it, availing myself, as I crept along, of every little protuberance and hollow, I at length stood within six or eight feet of the young birds. From that point, however, a smooth shelf, without projection or cavity, descended at an angle of about forty to the nest, and terminated abruptly, without ledge or margin, in the overhanging precipice. Have I not, I asked, crept along a roof of even a steeper slope than that of the shelf? Why not, in like manner, creep along it to the nest, where there is firm footing? I had actually stretched out my naked foot to take the first step, when I observed, as the sun suddenly broke out from behind a cloud, that the light glistened on the smooth surface. It was incrusted over by a thin layer of chlorite, slippery as the mixture of soap and grease that the s.h.i.+p-carpenter spreads over his slips on the morning of a launch. I at once saw there was an element of danger in the way, on which I had at first failed to calculate; and so, relinquis.h.i.+ng the attempt as hopeless, I returned by the path I had come, and thought no more of robbing the raven's nest. It was, however, again attempted this season, but with tragic results, by a young lad from Sutherland, named Mackay, who had previously approved his skill as a cragsman in his native county, and several times secured the reward given by an Agricultural Society for the destruction of young birds of prey. As the incident was related to me, he had approached the nest by the path which I had selected; he had paused where I had paused, and even for a longer time; and then, venturing forward, he no sooner committed himself to the treacherous chlorite, than, losing footing as if on a steep sheet of ice, he shot right over the precipice. Falling sheer for the first fifty feet or so without touching the rock, he was then turned full round by a protuberance against which he had glanced, and, descending for the lower half of the way head foremost, and das.h.i.+ng with tremendous force among the smooth sea-stones below, his brains were scattered over an area of from ten to twelve square yards in extent. His only companion--an ignorant Irish lad--had to gather up the fragments of his head in a napkin.

I now felt that, save for the gleam of the sun on the glistening chlorite--seen not a moment too soon--I should probably have been subst.i.tuted as the victim for poor Mackay, and that he, warned by my fate, would in all likelihood have escaped. And though I knew it might be asked, Why the interposition of a Providence to save _you_, when he was left to perish? I _did_ feel that I did not owe my escape merely to my acquaintance with chlorite and its properties. For the full development of the moral instincts of our nature, one may lead a life by much too quiet and too secure: a sprinkling in one's lot of sudden perils and hair-breadth escapes is, I am convinced, more wholesome, if positive superst.i.tion be avoided, than a total absence of danger. For my own part, though I have, I trust, ever believed in the doctrine of a particular Providence, it has been always some narrow escape that has given me my best evidences of the vitality and strength of the belief within. It has ever been the touch of danger that has rendered it emotional. A few years after this time, when stooping forward to examine an opening fissure in a rock front, at which I was engaged in quarrying, a stone, detached from above by a sudden gust of wind, brushed so closely past my head as to beat down the projecting front of my bonnet, and then dented into a deep hollow the sward at my feet. There was nothing that was not perfectly natural in the occurrence; but the gush of acknowledgment that burst spontaneously from my heart would have set at nought the scepticism which should have held that there was no Providence in it. On another occasion, I paused for some time, when examining a cave of the old-coast line, directly under its low-browed roof of Old Red conglomerate, as little aware of the presence of danger as if I had been standing under the dome of St. Paul's; but when I next pa.s.sed the way, the roof had fallen, and a ma.s.s, huge enough to have given me at once death and burial, c.u.mbered the spot which I had occupied. On yet another occasion, I clambered a few yards down a precipice, to examine some crab-apple trees, which, springing from a turret-like projection of the rock, far from gardens and nurseries, had every mark of being indigenous; and then, climbing up among the branches, I shook them in a manner that must have exerted no small leverage power on the outjet beneath, to possess myself of some of the fruit, as the native apples of Scotland. On my descent, I marked, without much thinking of the matter, an apparently recent crack running between the outjet and the body of the precipice. I found, however, cause enough to think of it on my return, scarce a month after; for then both outjet and trees lay broken and fractured on the beach more than a hundred feet below. With such momentum had even the slimmer twigs been dashed against the sea-pebbles, that they stuck out from under more than a hundred tons of fallen rock, divested of the bark on their under sides, as if peeled by the hand. And what I felt on all these occasions was, I believe, not more in accordance with the nature of man as an instinct of the moral faculty, than in agreement with that provision of the Divine Government under which a sparrow falleth not without permission. There perhaps never was a time in which the doctrine of a particular Providence was more questioned and doubted than in the present; and yet the scepticism which obtains regarding it seems to be very much a scepticism of effort, conjured up by toiling intellects, in a quiet age, and among the easy cla.s.ses; while the belief which, partially and for the time, it overshadows, lies safely entrenched all the while amid the fastnesses of the unalterable nature of man. When danger comes to touch it, it will spring up in its old proportions; nay, so indigenous is it to the human heart, that if it will not take its _cultivated_ form as a belief in Providence, it will to a certainty take to it its _wild_ form as a belief in Fate or Destiny. Of a doctrine so fundamentally important that there can be no religion without it, G.o.d himself seems to have taken care when he moulded the human heart.

The raven no longer builds among the rocks of the Hill of Cromarty; and I saw many years ago its last pair of eagles. This last n.o.ble bird was a not unfrequent visitor of the Sutors early in the present century. I still remember scaring it from its perch on the southern side of the hill, as day was drawing to a close, when the tall precipices amid which it had lodged lay deep in the shade; and vividly recollect how picturesquely it used to catch the red gleam of evening on its plumage of warm brown, as, sailing outwards over the calm sea many hundred feet below, it emerged from under the shadow of the cliffs into the suns.h.i.+ne.

Uncle James once shot a very large eagle beneath one of the loftiest precipices of the southern Sutor; and, swimming out through the surf to recover its body--for it had dropped dead into the sea--he kept its skin for many years as a trophy.[6] But eagles are now no longer to lie seen or shot on the Sutors or their neighbourhood. The badger, too--one of perhaps the oldest inhabitants of the country, for it seems to have been contemporary with the extinct elephants and hyaenas of the Pleistocene periods--has become greatly less common on their steep sides than in the days of my boyhood; and both the fox and otter are less frequently seen.

It is not uninteresting to mark with the eye of the geologist, how palpably in the course of a single lifetime--still nearly twenty years short of the term fixed by the Psalmist--these wild animals have been posting on in Scotland to that extinction which overtook, within its precincts, during the human period, the bear, the beaver, and the wolf, and of which the past history of the globe, as inscribed on its rocks, furnishes so strong a record.

Winter pa.s.sed in the usual pursuits; and I commenced the working season of a new year by a.s.sisting my old master to inclose with a stone wall a little bit of ground, which he had bought on speculation, but had failed in getting feued out for buildings. My services, however, were gratuitous--given merely to eke out the rather indifferent bargain that the old man had been able to drive in his own behalf for my labours as an apprentice; and when our job was finished, it became necessary that I should look out for employment of a more profitable character. There was not much doing in the north; but work promised to be abundant in the great towns of the south: the disastrous building mania of 1824-25 had just begun, and, after some little hesitation, I resolved on trying whether I could not make my way as a mechanic among the stone-cutters of Edinburgh perhaps the most skilful in their profession in the world. I was, besides, desirous to get rid of a little property in Leith, which had cost the family great annoyance, and not a little money, but from which, so long as the nominal proprietor was a minor, we could not shake ourselves loose. It was a house on the Coal-hill, or rather the self-contained ground-floor of a house, which had fallen to my father through the death of a relative, so immediately before his own death that he had not entered upon possession. It was burdened with legacies to the amount of nearly two hundred pounds; but then the yearly rent amounted to twenty-four pounds; and my mother, acting on the advice of friends, and deeming the investment a good one, had no sooner recovered the insurance-money of my father's vessel from the underwriter, than she handed the greater part of it to the legatees, and took possession of the property in my behalf. Alas! never was there a more unfortunate inheritance or worse investment. It had been let as a public-house and tap-room, and had been the scene of a somewhat rough, and, I daresay, not very respectable, but yet profitable trade; but no sooner had it become mine than, in consequence of some alterations in the harbour, the greater part of the s.h.i.+pping that used to lie at the Coal-hill removed to a lower reach; the tap-room business suddenly fell off; and the rent sank, during the course of one twelvemonth, from twenty-four to twelve pounds. And then in its sear and wintry state, the unhappy house came to be inhabited by a series of miserable tenants, who, though they sanguinely engaged to pay the twelve pounds, never paid them. I still remember the brief, curt letters from our agent, the late Mr. Veitch, town-clerk of Leith, that never failed to fill my mother with terror and dismay, and very much resembled, in at least the narrative parts, jottings by the poet Crabbe, for some projected poem on the profligate poor. Two of our tenants made moonlight flittings just on the eve of the term; and though the little furniture which they left behind them was duly rouped at the cross, such was the inevitable expense of the transaction, that none of the proceeds of the sale reached Cromarty. The house was next inhabited by a stout female, who kept a certain description of lady-lodgers; and for the first half-year she paid the rent most conscientiously; but the authorities interfering, there was another house found for her and her ladies in the neighbourhood of the Calton, and the rent of the second half-year remained unpaid. And as the house lost, in consequence of her occupation, the modic.u.m of character which it had previously retained, it lay for five years wholly untenanted, save by a mischievous spirit--the ghost, it was said, of a murdered gentleman, whose throat had been cut in an inner apartment by the ladies, and his body flung by night into the deep mud of the harbour. The ghost was, however, at length detected by the police, couching in the form of one of the ladies themselves, on a lair of straw in the corner of one of the rooms, and exorcised into Bridewell; and then the house came to be inhabited by a tenant who had both the will and the ability to pay. One year's rent, however, had to be expended in repairs; and ere the next year pa.s.sed, the heritors of the parish were rated for the erection of the magnificent parish church of North Leith, then in course of building, with its tall and graceful spire and cla.s.sic portico; and as we had no one to state our case, our house was rated, not according to its reduced, but according to its original value. And so the entire rental of the second year, with several pounds additional which I had to subtract from my hard-earned savings as a mason, were appropriated in behalf of the ecclesiastical Establishment of the country, by the builders of the church and spire. I had attained my majority when lodging in the fragment of a salt storehouse in Gairloch; and, competent in the eye of the law to dispose of the house on the Coal-hill, I now hoped to find, if not a purchaser, at least some one foolish enough to take it off my hands for nothing. I have since heard and read a good deal about the atrocious landlords of the poorer and less reputable sort of houses in our large towns, and have seen it a.s.serted that, being a bad and selfish kind of people, they ought to be rigorously dealt with. And so, I daresay, they ought; but at the same time I cannot forget, that I myself was one of these atrocious landlords from my fifth till nearly my twenty-second year, and that I could not possibly help it, and was very sorry for it.

On the fourth day after losing sight of the Hill of Cromarty, the Leith smack in which I sailed was slowly threading her way, in a morning of light airs and huge broken fog-wreaths, through the lower tracts of the Firth of Forth. The islands and distant land looked dim and grey through the haze, like objects in an unfinished drawing; and at times some vast low-browed cloud from the sea applied the sponge as it rolled past, and blotted out half a county at a time; but the sun occasionally broke forth in partial glimpses of great beauty, and brought out into bold relief little bits of the landscape--now a town, and now an islet, and anon the blue summit of a hill. A sunlit wreath rose from around the abrupt and rugged Ba.s.s as we pa.s.sed; and my heart leaped within me as I saw, for the first time, that stern Patmos of the devout and brave of another age looming dark and high through the diluted mist, and enveloped for a moment, as the cloud parted, in an amber-tinted glory.

There had been a little Presbyterian oasis of old in the neighbourhood of Cromarty, which, in the midst of the Highland and _Moderate_ indifferency that characterized the greater part of the north of Scotland during the seventeenth century, had furnished the Ba.s.s with not a few of its most devoted victims. Mackilligen of Alness, Hogg of Kiltearn, and the Rosses of Tain and Kincardine, had been incarcerated in its dungeons; and, when labouring in the Cromarty quarries in early spring, I used to know that it was time to gather up my tools for the evening, when I saw the sun resting over the high-lying farm which formed the patrimony of another of its better-known victims--young Fraser of Brea. And so I looked with a double interest on the bold sea-girt rock, and the sun-gilt cloud that rose over its scared forehead, like that still brighter halo which glorifies it in the memories of the Scottish people. Many a long-cherished a.s.sociation drew my thoughts to Edinburgh. I was acquainted with Ramsay, and Fergusson, and the "Humphrey Clinker" of Smollett, and had read a description of the place in the "Marmion" and the earlier novels of Scott; and I was not yet too old to feel as if I were approaching a great magical city--like some of those in the "Arabian Nights"--that was even more intensely poetical than Nature itself. I did somewhat chide the tantalizing mist, that, like a capricious showman, now raised one corner of its curtain, and anon another, and showed me the place at once very indistinctly, and only by bits at a time; and yet I know not that I could in reality have seen it to greater advantage, or after a mode more in harmony with my previous conceptions. The water in the harbour was too low, during the first hour or two after our arrival, to float our vessel, and we remained tacking in the roadstead, watching for the signal from the pier-head which was to intimate to us when the tide had risen high enough for our admission; and so I had sufficient time given me to con over the features of the scene, as presented in detail. At one time a flat reach of the New Town came full into view, along which, in the general dimness, the mult.i.tudinous chimneys stood up like stacks of corn in a field newly reaped; at another, the Castle loomed out dark in the cloud; then, as if suspended over the earth, the rugged summit of Arthur's Seat came strongly out, while its base still remained invisible in the wreath; and anon I caught a glimpse of the distant Pentlands, enveloped by a clear blue sky, and lighted up by the sun. Leith, with its thicket of masts, and its tall round Tower, lay deep in shade in the foreground--a cold, dingy, ragged town, but so strongly relieved against the pale smoky grey of the background, that it seemed another little city of Zoar, entire in front of the burning. And such was the strangely picturesque countenance with which I was favoured by the Scottish capital, when forming my earliest acquaintance with it, twenty-nine years ago.

It was evening ere I reached it. The fog of the early part of the day had rolled off, and every object stood out in clear light and shade under a bright suns.h.i.+ny sky. The workmen of the place--their labours just closed for the day--were pa.s.sing in groups along the streets to their respective homes; but I was too much engaged in looking at the buildings and shops to look very discriminately at them; and it was not without some surprise that I found myself suddenly laid hold of by one of their number, a slim lad, in pale moleskin a good deal bespattered with paint. My friend William Ross stood before me; and his welcome on the occasion was a very hearty one. I had previously taken a hasty survey of my unlucky house in Leith, accompanied by a sharp, keen-looking, one-handed man of middle age, who kept the key, and acted, under the town-clerk, as general manager; and who, as I afterwards ascertained, was the immortal Peter M'Craw. But I had seen nothing suited to put me greatly in conceit with my patrimony. It formed the lowermost floor of an old black building, four stories in height, flanked by a damp narrow court along one of its sides, and that turned to the street its sharp-peaked, many-windowed gable. The lower windows were covered up by dilapidated, weather-bleached shutters; in the upper, the comparatively fresh appearance of the rags that stuffed up holes where panes ought to have been, and a few very pale-coloured petticoats and very dark-coloured s.h.i.+rts fluttering in the wind, gave evident signs of habitation. It cost my conductor's one hand an arduous wrench to lay open the lock of the outer door, in front of which he had first to dislodge a very dingy female, attired in an earth-coloured gown, that seemed as if starched with ashes; and as the rusty hinges creaked, and the door fell against the wall, we became sensible of a damp, unwholesome smell, like the breath of a charnel-house, which issued from the interior. The place had been shut up for nearly two years; and so foul had the stagnant atmosphere become, that the candle which we brought with us to explore burned dim and yellow like a miner's lamp.

The floors, broken up in fifty different places, were littered with rotten straw; and in one of the corners there lay a damp heap, gathered up like the lair of some wild beast, on which some one seemed to have slept, mayhap months before. The part.i.tions were crazed and tottering; the walls blackened with smoke; broad patches of plaster had fallen from the ceilings, or still dangled from them, suspended by single hairs; and the bars of the grates, crusted with rust, had become red as foxtails.

Mr. M'Craw nodded his head over the gathered heap of straw. "Ah," he said--"got in again, I see! The shutters must be looked to." "I daresay," I remarked, looking disconsolately around me, "you don't find it very easy to get tenants for houses of this kind." "_Very_ easy!"

said Mr. M'Craw, with somewhat of a Highland tw.a.n.g, and, as I thought, with also a good deal of Highland _hauteur_--as was of course quite natural in so shrewd and extensive a house-agent, when dealing with the owner of a domicile that would not let, and who made foolish remarks--"No, nor easy at all, or it would not be locked up in this way: but if we took off the shutters you would soon get tenants enough." "Oh, I suppose so; and I daresay it is as difficult to sell as to let such houses." "Ay, and more," said Mr. M'Craw: "it's all sellers, and no buyers, when we get this low." "But do you not think," I perseveringly asked, "that some kind, charitable person might be found in the neighbourhood disposed to take it off my hands as a free gift! It's terrible to be married for life to a baggage of a house like this, and made liable, like other husbands, for all its debts. Is there no way of getting a divorce?" "Don't know," he emphatically replied, with somewhat of a nasal snort; and so we parted; and I saw or heard no more of Peter M'Craw until many years after, when I found him celebrated in the well-known song by poor Gilfillan.[7] And in the society of my friend I soon forgot my miserable house, and all the liabilities which it entailed.

I was as entirely unacquainted with great towns at this time as the shepherd in Virgil; and, excited by what I saw, I sadly tasked my friend's peripatetic abilities, and, I fear, his patience also, in taking an admiring survey of all the more characteristic streets, and then in setting out for the top of Arthur's Seat--from which, this evening, I watched the sun set behind the distant Lomonds--that I might acquaint myself with the features of the surrounding country, and the effect of the city as a whole. And amid much confused and imperfect recollection of picturesque groups of ancient buildings, and magnificent a.s.semblages of elegant modern ones, I carried away with me two vividly distinct ideas--first results, as a painter might perhaps say, of a "fresh eye," which no after survey has served to freshen or intensify. I felt that I had seen, not one, but two cities--a city of the past and a city of the present--set down side by side, as if for purposes of comparison, with a picturesque valley drawn like a deep score between them, to mark off the line of division. And such in reality seems to be the grand peculiarity of the Scottish capital--its distinguis.h.i.+ng trait among the cities of the empire; though, of course, during the twenty-nine years that have elapsed since I first saw it, the more ancient of its two cities--greatly modernized in many parts--has become less uniformly and consistently antique in its aspect. Regarded simply as matters of taste, I have found little to admire in the improvements that have so materially changed its aspect. Of its older portions I used never to tire: I found I could walk among them as purely for the pleasure which accrued, as among the wild and picturesque of nature itself; whereas one visit to the elegant streets and ample squares of the new city always proved sufficient to satisfy; and I certainly never felt the desire to return to any of them to saunter in quest of pleasure along the smooth, well-kept pavements. I of course except Princes Street. There the two cities stand ranged side by side, as if for comparison; and the eye falls on the features of a natural scenery that would of itself be singularly pleasing even were both the cities away.

Next day I waited on the town-clerk, Mr. Veitch, to see whether he could not suggest to me some way in which I might shake myself loose from my unfortunate property on the Coal-hill. He received me civilly--told me that the property was not quite so desperate an investment as I seemed to think it, as at least the site, in which I had an interest with the other proprietors, was worth something, and as the little courtyard was exclusively my own; and that he thought he could get the whole disposed of for me, if I was prepared to accept of a small price. And I was of course, as I told him, prepared to accept of a very small one. Further, on learning that I was a stone-cutter, and unemployed, he kindly introduced me to one of his friends, a master-builder, by whom I was engaged to work at a manor-house a few miles to the south of Edinburgh.

And procuring "lodgings" in a small cottage of but a single apartment, near the village of Niddry Mill, I commenced my labours as a hewer under the shade of the Niddry woods.

There was a party of sixteen masons employed at Niddry, besides apprentices and labourers. They were accomplished stone-cutters--skilful, especially in the cutting of mouldings, far above the average of the masons of the north country; and it was with some little solicitude that I set myself to labour beside them on mullions, and transoms, and labels--for our work was in the old English style--a style in which I had no previous practice. I was diligent, however, and kept old John Fraser's principle in view (though, as Nature had been less liberal in imparting the necessary faculties, I could not cut so directly as he used to do on the required planes and curves inclosed in the stones); and I had the satisfaction of finding, when pay-night came round, that the foreman, who had frequently stood beside me during the week to observe my modes of working, and the progress which I made, estimated my services at the same rate as he did those of the others. I was by and by intrusted, too, like the best of them, with all the more difficult kinds of work required in the erection, and was at one time engaged for six weeks together in fas.h.i.+oning long, slim, deeply-moulded mullions, not one of which broke in my hands, though the stone on which I wrought was brittle and gritty, and but indifferently suited for the nicer purposes of the architect. I soon found, however, that most of my brother workmen regarded me with undisguised hostility and dislike, and would have been better pleased had I, as they seemed to expect, from the northern locality in which I had been reared, broken down in the trial. I was, they said, "a Highlander newly come to Scotland," and, if not chased northwards again, would carry home with me half the money of the country. Some of the builders used to criticize very unfairly the workmans.h.i.+p of the stones which I hewed: they could not lay them, they said; and the hewers sometimes refused to a.s.sist me in carrying in or in turning the weightier blocks on which I wrought.

The foreman, however, a worthy, pious man, a member of a Secession congregation, stood my friend and encouraged me to persevere. "Do not,"

he has said, "suffer yourself to be driven from the work, and they will soon tire out, and leave you to pursue your own course. I know exactly the nature of your offence: you do not drink with them or treat them; but they will soon cease to expect that you should; and when once they find that you are not to be coerced or driven off, they will let you alone." As, however, from the abundance of employment--a consequence of the Building mania--the men were masters and more at the time, the foreman could not take my part openly in opposition to them; but I was grateful for his kindness, and felt too thoroughly indignant at the mean fellows who could take such odds against an inoffensive stranger, to be much in danger of yielding to the combination. It is only a weak man whom the wind deprives of his cloak: a man of the average strength is more in danger of losing it when a.s.sailed by the genial beams of a too kindly sun.

I threw myself, as usual, for the compensatory pleasures, on my evening walks, but found the enclosed state of the district, and the fence of a rigorously-administered trespa.s.s-law, serious drawbacks; and ceased to wonder that a thoroughly cultivated country is, in most instances, so much less beloved by its people than a wild and open one. Rights of proprietors.h.i.+p may exist equally in both; but there is an important sense in which the open country belongs to the proprietors and to the people too. All that the heart and the intellect can derive from it may be alike free to peasant and aristocrat; whereas the cultivated and strictly fenced country belongs usually, in every sense, to only the proprietor; and as it is a much simpler and more obvious matter to love one's country as a scene of hills, and streams, and green fields, amid which Nature has often been enjoyed, than as a definite locality, in which certain laws and const.i.tutional privileges exist, it is rather to be regretted than wondered at that there should be often less true patriotism in a country of just inst.i.tutions and equal laws, whose soil has been so exclusively appropriated as to leave only the dusty high-roads to its people, than in wild open countries, in which the popular mind and affections are left free to embrace the soil, but whose inst.i.tutions are partial and defective. Were our beloved Monarch to regard such of the gentlemen of her court as taboo their Glen Tilts, and shut up the pa.s.ses of the Grampians, as a sort of disloyal Destructives of a peculiar type, who make it their vocation to divest her people of their patriotism, and who virtually teach them that a country no longer theirs is not worth the fighting for, it might be very safely concluded that she was but manifesting, in one other direction, the strong good sense which has ever distinguished her. Though shut out, however, from the neighbouring fields and policies, the Niddry woods were open to me; and I have enjoyed many an agreeable saunter along a broad planted belt, with a gra.s.sy path in the midst, that forms their southern boundary, and through whose long vista I could see the sun sink over the picturesque ruins of Craigmillar Castle. A few peculiarities in the natural history of the district showed me, that the two degrees of lat.i.tude which lay between me and the former scenes of my studies were not without their influence on both the animal and vegetable kingdoms. The group of land-sh.e.l.ls was different, in at least its proportions; and one well-marked mollusc--the large tortoise-sh.e.l.l helix (_helix aspersa_), very abundant in this neighbourhood--I had never seen in the north at all. I formed, too, my first acquaintance in this woody, bush-skirted walk, with the hedgehog in its wild state--an animal which does not occur to the north of the Moray Firth. I saw, besides, though the summer was of but the average warmth, the oak ripening its acorns--a rare occurrence among the Cromarty woods, where, in at least nine out of every ten seasons, the fruit merely forms and then drops off. But my researches this season lay rather among fossils than among recent plants and animals. I was now for the first time located on the Carboniferous System: the stone at which I wrought was intercalated among the working coal-seams, and abounded in well-marked impressions of the more robust vegetables of the period--stigmaria, sigillaria, calamites, and lepidodendra; and as they greatly excited my curiosity I spent many an evening hour in the quarry in which they occurred, in tracing their forms in the rock; or, extending my walks to the neighbouring coal pits, I laid open with my hammer, in quest of organisms, the blocks of shale or stratified clay raised from beneath by the miner. There existed at the time none of those popular digests of geological science which are now so common; and so I had to grope my way without guide or a.s.sistant, and wholly unfurnished with a vocabulary. At length, however, by dint of patient labour, I came to form not very erroneous, though of course inadequate, conceptions of the ancient Coal Measure Flora: it was impossible to doubt that its numerous ferns were really such; and though I at first failed to trace the supposed a.n.a.logies of its lepidodendra and calamites, it was at least evident that they were the bole-like stems of great plants, that had stood erect like trees. A certain amount of fact, too, once acquired, enabled me to a.s.similate to the ma.s.s little s.n.a.t.c.hes of information, derived from chance paragraphs and occasional articles in magazines and reviews, that, save for my previous acquaintance with the organisms to which they referred, would have told me nothing. And so the vegetation of the Coal Measures began gradually to form within my mind's eye, where all had been blank before, as I had seen the spires and columns of Edinburgh forming amid the fog, on the morning of my arrival.

I found, however, one of the earliest dreams of my youth curiously mingling with my restorations, or rather forming their groundwork. I had read Gulliver at the proper age; and my imagination had become filled with the little men and women, and retained strong hold of at least one scene laid in the country of the very tall men--that in which the traveller, after wandering amid gra.s.s that rose twenty feet over his head, lost himself in a vast thicket of barley forty feet high. I became the owner, in fancy, of a colony of Liliputians, that manned my eighteen-inch canoe, or tilled my ap.r.o.n-breadth of a garden; and, coupling with the men of Liliput the scene in Brobdignag, I had often set myself to imagine, when playing truant on the green slopes of the Hill, or among the swamps of the "Willows," how some of the vignette-like scenes by which I was surrounded would have appeared to creatures so minute. I have imagined them threading their way through dark forests of bracken forty feet high--or admiring on the hill-side some enormous club-moss that stretched out its green hairy arms for whole roods--or arrested at the edge of some dangerous mora.s.s, by hedges of gigantic horse-tail, that bore a-top, high over the bog, their many-windowed, club-like cones, and at every point shot forth their green verticillate leaves, huge as coach-wheels divested of the rim. And while I thus dreamed for my Liliputian companions, I became for the time a Liliputian myself, examined the minute in Nature as if through a magnifying-gla.s.s, roamed in fancy under ferns that had shot up into trees, and saw the dark club-like heads of the equisetaceae stand up over the spiky branches, some six yards or so above head. And now, strange to tell, I found I had just to fall back on my old juvenile imaginings, and to form my first approximate conceptions of the forests of the Coal Measures, by learning to look at our ferns, club-mosses, and equisetaceae, with the eye of some wandering traveller of Liliput lost amid their entanglements. When sauntering at sunset along the edge of a wood-embosomed stream that ran through the grounds, and beside which the horse-tail rose thick and rank in the danker hollows, and the bracken shot out its fronds from the drier banks, I had to sink in fancy as of old into a manikin of a few inches, and to see intertropical jungles in the tangled gra.s.ses and thickly-interlaced equisetaceae, and tall trees in the brake and the lady-fern. But many a wanting feature had to be supplied, and many an existing one altered. Amid forests of arboraceous ferns, and of horse-tails tall as the masts of pinnaces, there stood up gigantic club-mosses, thicker than the body of a man, and from sixty to eighty feet in height, that mingled their foliage with strange monsters of the vegetable world, of types no longer recognisable among the existing forms--sculptured ullodendra, bearing rectilinear stripes of sessile cones along their sides--and ornately tatooed sigillaria, fluted like columns, and with vertical rows of leaves bristling over their stems and larger branches. Such were some of the dreams in which I began at this period for the first time to indulge; nor have they, like the other dreams of youth, pa.s.sed away. The aged poet has not unfrequently to complain, that as he rises in years, his "visions float less palpably before him." Those, on the contrary, which science conjures up, grow in distinctness, as, in the process of slow acquirement, form after form is evoked from out the obscurity of the past, and one restoration added to another.

There were at this time several collier villages in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, which have since disappeared. They were situated on what were called the "edge-coals"--those steep seams of the Mid-Lothian Coal Basin which, lying low in the system, have got a more vertical tilt against the trap eminences of the south and west than the upper seams in the middle of the field, and which, as they could not be followed in their abrupt descent beyond a certain depth, are now regarded, for at least the practical purposes of the miner, and until the value of coal shall have risen considerably, as wrought out. One of these villages, whose foundations can no longer be traced, occurred in the immediate vicinity of Niddry Mill. It was a wretched a.s.semblage of dingy, low-roofed, tile-covered hovels, each of which perfectly resembled all the others, and was inhabited by a rude and ignorant race of men, that still bore about them the soil and stain of recent slavery. Curious as the fact may seem, all the older men of that village, though situated little more than four miles from Edinburgh, had been born slaves. Nay, eighteen years later (in 1842), when Parliament issued a commission to inquire into the nature and results of female labour in the coal-pits of Scotland, there was a collier still living that had never been twenty miles from the Scottish capital, who could state to the Commissioners that both his father and grandfather had been slaves--that he himself had been born a slave--and that he had wrought for years in a pit in the neighbourhood of Musselburgh ere the colliers got their freedom. Father and grandfather had been paris.h.i.+oners of the late Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk. They were cotemporary with Chatham and Cowper, and Burke and Fox; and at a time when Granville Sharpe could have stepped forward and effectually protected the runaway negro who had taken refuge from the tyranny of his master in a British port, no man could have protected _them_ from the Inveresk laird, their proprietor, had they dared to exercise the right, common to all Britons besides, of removing to some other locality, or of making choice of some other employment. Strange enough, surely, that so entire a fragment of the barbarous past should have been thus dovetailed into the age not yet wholly pa.s.sed away! I regard it as one of the more singular circ.u.mstances of my life, that I should have conversed with Scotchmen who had been born slaves. The collier women of this village--poor over-toiled creatures, who carried up all the coal from underground on their backs, by a long turnpike stair inserted in one of the shafts--continued to bear more of the marks of serfdom still about them than even the men. How these poor women did labour, and how thoroughly, even at this time, were they characterized by the slave nature! It has been estimated by a man who knew them well--Mr. Robert Bald--that one of their ordinary day's work was equal to the carrying of a hundredweight from the level of the sea to the top of Ben Lomond. They were marked by a peculiar type of mouth, by which I learned to distinguish them from all the other females of the country.

It was wide, open, thick-lipped, projecting equally above and below, and exactly resembled that which we find in the prints given of savages in their lowest and most degraded state, in such narratives of our modern voyagers as, for instance, the "Narrative of Captain Fitzroy's Second Voyage of the Beagle." During, however, the lapse of the last twenty years this type of mouth seems to have disappeared in Scotland. It was accompanied by traits of almost infantile weakness. I have seen these collier women crying like children, when toiling under their load along the upper rounds of the wooden stair that traversed the shaft; and then returning, scarce a minute after, with the empty creel, singing with glee. The collier houses were chiefly remarkable for being all alike, outside and in; all were equally dingy, dirty, naked, and uncomfortable.

I first learned to suspect, in this rude village, that the democratic watchword, "Liberty and Equality," is somewhat faulty in its philosophy.

Slavery and Equality would be nearer the mark. Wherever there is liberty, the original differences between man and man begin to manifest themselves in their external circ.u.mstances, and the equality straightway ceases. It is through slavery that equality, among at least the ma.s.ses, is to be fully attained.[8]

I found but little intelligence in the neighbourhood, among even the villagers and country people, that stood on a higher platform than the colliers. The fact may be variously accounted for; but so it is, that though there is almost always more than the average amount of knowledge and acquirement amongst the mechanics of large towns, the little hamlets and villages by which they are surrounded are usually inhabited by a cla.s.s considerably below the average. In M. Quetelet's interesting "Treatise on Man," we find a series of maps given, which, based on extensive statistical tables, exhibit by darker and lighter shadings the moral and intellectual character of the people in the various districts of the countries which they represent. In one map, for instance, representative of the state of education in France, while certain well-taught provinces are represented by a bright tint, as if enjoying the light, there are others, in which great ignorance obtains, that exhibit a deep shade of blackness, as if a cloud rested over them; and the general aspect of the whole is that of a landscape seen from a hill-top in a day of dappled light and shadow. There are certain minuter shadings, however, by which certain curious facts might be strikingly represented to the eye in this manner, for which statistical tables furnish no adequate basis, but which men who have seen a good deal of the people of a country might be able to give in a manner at least approximately correct. In a shaded map representative of the intelligence of Scotland, I would be disposed--sinking the lapsed cla.s.ses, or representing them merely by a few such dark spots as mottle the sun--to represent the large towns as centres of focal brightness; but each of these focal centres I would encircle with a halo of darkness considerably deeper in shade than the medium s.p.a.ces beyond. I found that in the tenebrious halo of the Scottish capital there existed, independently of the ignorance of the poor colliers, three distinct elements. A considerable proportion of the villagers were farm-servants in the decline of life, who, unable any longer to procure, as in their days of unbroken strength, regular engagements from the farmers of the district, supported themselves as occasional labourers. And they, of course, were characterized by the ignorance of their cla.s.s. Another portion of the people were carters--employed mainly, in these times, ere the railways began, in supplying the Edinburgh coal-market, and in driving building materials into the city from the various quarries. And carters as a cla.s.s, like all who live much in the society of horses, are invariably ignorant and unintellectual. A third, but greatly smaller portion than either of the other two, consisted of mechanics; but it was only mechanics of an inferior order, that remained outside the city to work for carters and labourers: the better skilled, and, as to a certain extent the terms are convertible, the more intelligent mechanics found employment and a home in Edinburgh. The cottage in which I lodged was inhabited by an old farm-servant--a tall, large-bodied, small-headed man, who, in his journey through life, seemed to have picked up scarce an idea; and his wife, a woman turned of sixty, though a fine enough _body_ in the main, and a careful manager, was not more intellectual.

They had but a single apartment in their humble dwelling, fenced off by a little bit of part.i.tion from the outer door--and I could fain have wished that they had two--but there was no choice of lodgings in the village, and I had just to content myself, as the working man always must in such circ.u.mstances, with the shelter I could get. My bed was situated in the one end of the room, and my landlady's and her husband's in the other, with the pa.s.sage by which we entered between; but decent old Peggy Russel had been accustomed to such arrangements all her life long, and seemed never once to think of the matter; and--as she had reached that period of life at which women of the humbler cla.s.s a.s.sume the characteristics of the other s.e.x, somewhat, I suppose, on the principle on which very ancient female birds put on male plumage--I in a short time ceased to think of it also. It is not the less true, however, that the purposes of decency demand that much should be done, especially in the southern and midland districts of Scotland, for the dwellings of the poor.

FOOTNOTES:

[6] Uncle James would scarce have sanctioned, had he been consulted in the matter, the use to which the carcase of his dead eagle was applied.

There lived in the place an eccentric, half-witted old woman, who, for the small sum of one halfpenny, used to fall a-dancing on the street to amuse children, and rejoiced in the euphonious though somewhat obscure appellation of "Dribble Drone." Some young fellows, on seeing the eagle divested of its skin, and looking remarkably clean and well-conditioned, suggested that it should be sent to "Dribble;" and, accordingly, in the character of a "great goose, the gift of a gentleman," it was landed at her door. The gift was thankfully accepted. Dribble's cottage proved odoriferous at dinner-time for the several following days; and when asked, after a week had gone by, how she had relished the great goose which the gentleman had seat, she replied, that it was "Unco sweet, but oh! teuch, teuch!" For years after, the reply continued to be proverbial in the place: and many a piece of over-hard stock-fish, and over-fresh steak, used to be characterized as, "Like Dribble Drone's eagle, unco sweet, but oh! teuch, teuch!"

[7] Well known as Gilfillan's song is among ourselves, it is much less so to the south of the Border, and I present it to my English readers, as a worthy representative, in these latter days, of those ludicrous songs of our country in the olden time which are so admirably suited to show, notwithstanding the gibe of Goldsmith,

"That a Scot may have humour, I almost said wit."

THE TAX-GATHERER.

Oh! do you ken Peter, the taxman an' writer?

Ye're well aff wha ken naething 'bout him ava; They ca' him Inspector, or Poor's Rate Collector-- My faith! he's weel kent in Leith, Peter M'Craw!

He ca's and he comes again--haws, and he hums again-- He's only ae hand, but it's as good as twa; He pu's't out and raxes, an' draws in the taxes, An' pouches the siller--shame! Peter M'Craw!

He'll be at your door by daylight on a Monday, On Tyesday ye're favoured again wi' a ca'; E'en a slee look he gied me at kirk the last Sunday, Whilk meant--"_Mind the preachin' an' Peter M'Craw._"

He glowrs at my auld door as if he had made it; He keeks through the keyhole when I am awa'; He'll syne read the auld stane, that tells a' wha read it, To "_Blisse G.o.d for a' giftes_,"[*]--but Peter M'Craw!

His sma' papers neatly are 'ranged a' completely, That yours, for a wonder, 's the first on the raw!

There's nae jinkin' Peter, nae antelope's fleeter; Nae _cuttin_' acquaintance wi' Peter M'Craw!

'Twas just Friday e'enin', Auld Reekie I'd been in, I'd gatten a s.h.i.+llin'--I maybe gat twa; I thought to be happy wi' friends ower a drappie, When wha suld come papin--but Peter M'Craw?

There's houp o' a s.h.i.+p though she's sair pressed wi' dangere, An' roun' her frail timmers the angry winds blaw; I've aften gat kindness unlocked for frae strangers, But wha need houp kindness frae Peter M'Craw?

I've kent a man pardoned when just at the gallows-- I've kent a chiel honest whase trade was the law!

I've kent fortune's smile even fa' on gude fallows; But I ne'er kent exception wi' Peter M'Craw!

Our toun, yince sae cheerie, is dowie an' eerie; Our s.h.i.+ppies hae left us, our trade is awa'; There's nae fair maids strayin', nae wee bairnies playin; Ye've muckle to answer for, Peter M'Craw!

But what gude o' greevin' as lang's we are leevin'?

My banes I'll soon lay within yon kirk-yard wa'; There nae care shall press me, nae taxes distress me, For there I'll be free frae thee--Peter M'Craw!

[*]A devout legend, common in the seventeenth century above the entrance of houses.

[8] The act for manumitting our Scotch colliers was pa.s.sed in the year 1775, forty-nine years prior to the date of my acquaintance with the cla.s.s at Niddry. But though it was only such colliers of the village as were in their fiftieth year when I knew them (with, of course, all the older ones), who had been born slaves, even its men of thirty had actually, though not nominally, come into the world in a state of bondage, in consequence of certain penalties attached to the emanc.i.p.ating act, of which the poor ignorant workers under ground were both too improvident and too little ingenious to keep clear. They were set free, however, by a second act pa.s.sed in 1799. The language of both these acts, regarded as British ones of the latter half of the last century, and as bearing reference to British subjects living within the limits of the island, strikes with startling effect. "Whereas," says the preamble of the older act--that of 1775--"by the statute law of Scotland, as explained by the judges of the courts of law there, many colliers, and coal-bearers, and salters, are in a state of _slavery or bondage_, bound to the collieries or salt-works where they work _for life, transferable with the collieries and salt-works_; and whereas the emanc.i.p.ating," &c. &c. A pa.s.sage in the preamble of the act of 1799 is scarce less striking: it declares that, notwithstanding the former act, "many colliers and coal-bearers _still continue in a state of bondage_"

in Scotland. The history of our Scotch colliers will be found a curious and instructive one. Their slavery seems not to have been derived from the ancient tunes of general serfs.h.i.+p, but to have originated in comparatively modern acts of the Scottish Parliament, and in decisions of the Court of Session--in acts of a Parliament in which the poor ignorant subterranean men of the country were, of course, wholly unrepresented, and in decisions of a Court in which no agent of theirs ever made appearance in their behalf.

CHAPTER XV.

"See Inebriety, her wand she waves, And lo! her pale and lo! her purple slaves."--CRABBE.

I was joined in the course of a few weeks, in Peggy Russel's one-roomed cottage, by another lodger--lodgers of the humbler cla.s.s usually consociating together in pairs. My new companion had lived for some time, ere my arrival at Niddry, in a neighbouring domicile, which, as he was what was termed a "quiet-living man," and as the inmates were turbulent and unsteady, he had, after bearing a good deal, been compelled to quit. Like our foreman, he was a strict Seceder, in full communion with his Church. Though merely a common labourer, with not more than half the wages of our skilled workmen, I had observed, ere our acquaintance began, that no mason in the squad was more comfortably attired on week-days than he, or wore a better suit on Sunday; and so I had set him down, from the circ.u.mstance, as a decent man. I now found that, like my uncle Sandy, he was a great reader of good books--an admirer even of the same old authors--deeply read like him, in Durham and Rutherford--and entertaining, too, a high respect for Baxter, Boston, old John Brown, and the Erskines. In one respect, however, he differed from both my uncles: he had begun to question the excellence of religious Establishments; nay, to hold that the country might be none the worse were its ecclesiastical endowments taken away--a view which our foreman also entertained; whereas both Uncles Sandy and James were as little averse as the old divines themselves to a State-paid ministry, and desiderated only that it should be a good one. There were two other Seceders engaged as masons at the work--more of the polemical and less of the devout type than the foreman or my new comrade the labourer; and they also used occasionally to speak, not merely of the doubtful usefulness, but--as they were stronger in their language than their more self-denying and more consistent co-religionists--of the positive worthlessness of Establishments. The Voluntary controversy did not break out until about nine years after this time, when the Reform Bill gave vent to many a pent-up opinion and humour among that cla.s.s to which it extended the franchise; but the materials of the war were evidently already acc.u.mulating among the intelligent Dissenters of Scotland; and from what I now saw, its first appearance in a somewhat formidable aspect failed to take me by surprise. I must in justice add, that all the religion of our party was to be found among its Seceders. Our other workmen were really wild fellows, most of whom never entered a church. A decided reaction had already commenced within the Establishment, on the cold, elegant, unpopular Moderatism of the previous period--that Moderatism which had been so adequately represented in the Scottish capital by the theology of Blair and the ecclesiastical policy of Robertson; but it was chiefly among the middle and upper cla.s.ses that the reaction had begun; and scarce any portion of the humbler people, lost to the Church during the course of the two preceding generations, had yet been recovered. And so the working men of Edinburgh and its neighbourhood, at this time, were in large part either non-religious, or included within the Independent or Secession pale.

John Wilson--for such was the name of my new comrade--was a truly good man--devout, conscientious, friendly--not highly intellectual, but a person of plain good sense, and by no means devoid of general information. There was another labourer at the work, an unhappy little man, with whom I have often seen John engaged in mixing mortar, or carrying materials to the builders, but never without being struck by the contrast which they presented in character and appearance. John was a plain, somewhat rustic-looking personage; and an injury which he had received from gunpowder in a quarry, that had destroyed the sight of one of his eyes, and considerably dimmed that of the other, had, of course, not served to improve his looks; but he always wore a cheerful, contented air; and, with all his homeliness, was a person pleasant to the sight. His companion was a really handsome man--grey-haired, silvery-whiskered, with an aristocratic cast of countenance, that would have done no discredit to a royal drawing-room, and an erect though somewhat pet.i.t figure, cast in a mould that, if set off more to advantage, would have been recognised as elegant. But John Lindsay--for so he was called--bore always the stamp of misery on his striking features. There lay between the poor little man and the Crawford peerage only a narrow chasm, represented by a missing marriage certificate; but he was never able to bridge the gulf across; and he had to toil on in unhappiness, in consequence, as a mason's labourer. I have heard the call resounding from the walls twenty times a day--"John, Yearl Crafurd, bring us anither hod o' lime."

I found religion occupying a much humbler place among these workmen of the south of Scotland than that which I had used to see a.s.signed to it in the north. In my native district and the neighbouring counties, it still spoke with authority; and a man who stood up in its behalf in any society, unless very foolish or very inconsistent, always succeeded in silencing opposition, and making good its claims. Here, however, the irreligious a.s.serted their power as the majority, and carried matters with a high hand; and religion itself, existing as but _dissent_, not as an _establishment_, had to content itself with bare toleration.

Remonstrance, or even advice, was not permitted. "Johnnie, boy," I have heard one of the rougher mechanics say, half in jest, half in earnest, to my companion, "if you set yourself to convert me, I'll brak your face;" and I have known another of them remark, with a patronizing air, that "kirks werena very bad things, after a';" that he "aye liked to be in a kirk, for the sake of decency, once a twelvemonth;" and that, as he "hadna been kirked for the last ten months, he was just only waiting for a rainy Sabbath, to lay in his stock o' divinity for the year." Our new lodger, aware how little any interference with the religious concerns of others was tolerated in the place, seemed unable for some time to muster up resolution enough to broach in the family his favourite subject. He retired every night, before going to bed, to his closet--the blue vault, with all its stars--often the only closet of the devout lodger in a south-country cottage; but I saw that each evening, ere he went out, he used to look uneasily at the landlord and me, as if there lay some weight on his mind regarding us, of which he was afraid to rid himself, and which yet rendered him very uncomfortable. "Well, John," I asked one evening, speaking direct, to his evident embarra.s.sment; "what is it?"

John looked at old William the landlord, and then at me. "Did we not think it right," he said, "that there should be evening wors.h.i.+p in the family?" Old William had not idea enough for conversation: he either signified acquiescence in whatever was said that pleased him, by an ever-recurring ay, ay, ay; or he grumbled out his dissent in a few explosive sounds, that conveyed his meaning rather in their character as tones than as vocables. But there now mingled with the ordinary explosions the distinct enunciation, given with, for him, unwonted emphasis, that he "wasna for _that_." I struck in, however, on the other side, and appealed to Peggy. "I was sure," I said, "that Mrs. Russel would see the propriety of John's proposal." And Mrs. Russel, as most women would have done in the circ.u.mstances, unless, indeed, very bad ones, did see the propriety of it; and from that evening forward the cottage had its family wors.h.i.+p. John's prayers were always very earnest and excellent, but sometimes just a little too long; and old William, who, I fear, did not greatly profit by them, used not unfrequently to fall asleep on his knees. But though he sometimes stole to his bed when John chanced to be a little later in taking the book than usual, and got into a profound slumber ere the prayer began, he deferred to the majority, and gave us no active opposition. He was not a vicious man: his intellect had slept through life, and he had as little religion as an old horse or dog; but he was quiet and honest, and, to the measure of his failing ability, a faithful worker in his humble employments. His religious training, like that of his brother villagers, seemed to have been sadly neglected. Had he gone to the parish church on Sunday, he would have heard a respectable moral essay read from the pulpit, and would, of course, have slept under it; but William, like most of his neighbours, preferred sleeping out the day at home, and never did go to the church; and as certainly as he went not to the teacher of religion, the teacher of religion never came to him. During the ten months which I spent in the neighbourhood of Niddry Mill, I saw neither minister nor missionary. But if the village furnished no advantageous ground on which to fight the battle of religious Establishments--seeing that the Establishment was of no manner of use there--it furnished ground quite as unsuitable for the cla.s.s of Voluntaries who hold that the supply of religious instruction should, as in the case of all other commodities, be regulated by the demand. Demand and supply were admirably well balanced in the village of Niddry: there was no religious instruction, and no wish or desire for it.