HEXHAM—THE NORTH TYNE—BORDER-LAND AND ITS SUGGESTIONS—HAWICK—TEVIOTDALE—BIRTH-PLACE OF LEYDEN—MELROSE AND DRYBURGH ABBEYS—ABBOTSFORD: SIR WALTER SCOTT; HOMAGE TO HIS GENIUS—THE FERRY AND THE OAR-GIRL—NEW FARM STEDDINGS—SCENERY OF THE TWEED VALLEY—EDINBURGH AND ITS CHARACTERISTICS.
On Thursday, Sept. 3rd, I left Newcastle, and proceeded first westward to the old town of Hexham, with the view of taking a more central route into Scotland. Here, too, are the ruins of one of the most ancient of the abbeys. The parish church wears the wrinkles of as many centuries as the oldest in the land. Indeed, the town is full of antiquities of different dates and races,—Roman, Scotch, Saxon, Danish and Norman. They all left the marks of their glaived hands upon it.
From Hexham I faced northward and followed the North Tyne up through a very picturesque and romantic valley, thickly wooded and studded with baronial mansions, parks, castles and residences of gentry, with comfortable farm-houses looking sunny and cheerful on the green hill slopes and on the quiet banks of the river. I saw fields of wheat quite green, looking as if they needed another month’s sun to fit them for harvesting. Lodged in a little village about eight miles from Hexham. The next day walked on to the little hamlet of Fallstones, a distance of about twenty miles. As I ascended the valley, the scene changed rapidly. The river dwindled to a narrow stream. The hills that walled it in on either side grew higher and balder, and the clouds lay cold and dank upon their bleak and sullen brows. The hamlets edged in here and there grew thinner, smaller and shabbier. The road was barred and gated about once in a mile, to keep cattle and sheep from wandering; there being no fences nor hedges running parallel with it. In a word, the premonitory symptoms of a bare border-land thickened at every turn.
Another day brought me into the midst of a wild region, which might be called No-man’s-land; although most of it belongs to the Duke of Northumberland. It is all in the solitary grandeur of heather-haired hills, which tinge, with their purple flush, the huge, black-winged clouds that alight upon them. Only here and there a shepherd’s cottage is to be seen half way up the heights, or sheltering itself in a clump of trees in glen or gorge, like a benighted traveller bivouacking for a night in a desert. Sheep, of the Cheviot breed mostly, are nearly the sole inhabitants and industrials of this mountainous waste. They climb to the highest peaks and bring down the white wealth of their wool to man. It was pleasant to see them like walking mites, flecking the dark brows of the mountains. They made a picture; they made atableau vivantof the same illustration as Landseer’s lamb looking into the grass-covered cannon’s mouth.
This is the Border-land! Here the fiercest antagonisms of hostile nationalities met in deadly conflict. Fire and blood, rapine and wrath blackened and reddened and ravaged for centuries across this bleak territory. Robber-chieftains and knighted free-booters carried on their guerilla raids backward and forward, under the counterfeited banner of patriotism. Scotch and English armies led by kings marched and counter-marched over this sombre boundary. Never before was there one apparently more insoluble as a barrier between two peoples. Never before in Christendom was there one that required a longer space of time to melt. Never before did the fusing of two nationalities encounter more fierce and prolonged opposition. Did ever patriotism pour out a swifter and deeper tide of chivalrous sentiment against merging one in another?—against uniting two thrones and two peoples in one? Did patriotism ever fight bloodier battles to prevent such a union, or cling to local sovereignty with a more desperate hold?
This is the Border-land! Look up the purpled steeps of these heathered hills. The white lambs are looking, with their soft, meek eyes, into the grass-choked mouths of the rusty and dismantled cannon of the war of nationalities between England and Scotland. The deed has been consummated. The valor and patriotism of Wallace and Bruce could not prevent it. The sheep of English and Scotch shepherds feed side by side on these mountain heights, in spite of Stirling and Bannockburn, of Flodden and Falkirk. The Iron Horse, bearing the blended arms of the two realms on his shield, walks over those battle-fields by night and day, treading their memories deeper and deeper in the dust. The lambs are playing in the sun on the boundary line of the two dominions. Does a Scot of to-day love his native land less than the Campbell clansman or clan-chief in Bruce’s time? Not a whit. He carries a heartful of its choicest memories with him into all countries of his sojourning. But there is a larger sentiment that includes all these filial feelings towards his motherland, while it draws additional warmth and strength from them. It is the sentiment of Imperial Nationality; the feeling of a Briton, that does not extinguish nor absorb, nor compete with, the Scot in his heart;—the feeling that he is a political constituent of a mighty nation, whose feet stand upon all the continents of the earth, while it holds the best islands of the sea in its hands;—the feeling with which he saysWewith all the millions of a dominion on which the sun never sets, andOur, when he speaks of its grand and common histories, its hopes, prospects, progress, power and aspirations.
There was a Border-land, dark and bloody, between Saxon England and Celtic Wales. For centuries the red foot-marks of savage conflict scarred and covered its wild waste. Never before did so small a people make so stout, and desperate and protracted struggle for local independence and isolation. Never did one produce a more strong-hearted and blind-eyed patriotism, or patriotism more poets to thrill the listeners to their lays with the intoxicating fanaticism of a national sentiment. On that Border-land the white lambs now lie in the sun. The Welsh sentiment is as strong as ever in the Snowdon shepherd, and he may not speak a dozen words of the English tongue. But the Briton lives in his breast. The feeling of its great meaning surrounds and illumines the inner circles of his local attachment. He may never have seen a map of the Globe, and never have been outside the wall of the Welsh mountains; but he knows, without geography, who and what Queen Victoria is among the earth’s sovereigns, and the length and breadth of her sceptre’s reach and rule around the world.
There was a Border-land between Britain and Ireland, blackened and scarred by more burning antagonisms than those that once divided the larger island. The record of several consecutive centuries is graven deep in it by the brand and bayonet, and by the more incisive teeth-marks of hate. The slumbering antipathies of race and religion even now crop out here and there, over the unfused boundary, in hissing tongues of flame. The Briton and the Celt are still struggling for the precedence in the Irishman’s breast; but it is not a war of extermination. His ardent nature is given to martial memories, and all the battles he boasts of are British battles, in which he or his father played the hero number one. The history of independent Ireland is poor and thin; still he holds it back in his heart, and hesitates to link it with the great annals of the “Saxon” realm, and thus make of both one grand and glorious record, present and future. He cannot yet make up his mind to sayWewith all the other English-speaking millions of the empire, as the Scotsman and Welshman have learned and loved to say it. He cannot as yet sayOurwith them with such a sentiment of joint-interest, when the histories, hopes, expansion and capacities of that empire unroll their vista before him. But the rains and the dews of a milder century are falling upon this Border-land. The lava of spent volcanoes that covered it is taking soil and seed of green vegetation. The white lambs shall yet lie on it in the sun.
What a volume might be filled with the succinctest history of the Border-lands of Christendom! France was intersected with them for centuries. Seemingly they were as implacable and obdurate as any that ever divided the British isle. Local patriotism wrote poetry and shed blood voluminously to prevent the fusion of these old landmarks of pigmy nationalities. It took nearly a thousand years to complete the blending; to make theweand theourof one great consolidated empire the largest political sentiment of the men of Normandy, Burgundy or Navarre. Long and fierce, and seemingly endless was the struggle; but at last, on all those old obstinate boundaries of hostile principalities, the white lambs lay in the sun.
There are Border-lands now in the south and east of Europe foaming and seething with the same antagonisms of race and language; and Christendom is tremulous with their emotion. It is the same old struggle over again; and yet ninety-nine in a hundred of intelligent and reading people, with the history of British and French Border-lands before them, seem to think that a new and strange thing has happened under the sun. Full that proportion of our English-speaking race, in both hemispheres, closing the volume of its own annals, have made up their minds to the belief that these Border-lands between German and Magyar, Teuton and Latin, Russ and Pole, bristle with antagonisms the like of which never were subdued, and never ought to be subdued by human means or motives. To them, naturally, the half century of this hissing and seething, insurrection and repression, is longer than the five hundred years and more it took to fuse into one the nationalities of England and Wales. What a point of space is a century midway between the ninth and nineteenth! Few are long-sighted enough in historic vision to touch that point with a cambric needle. It may seem unfeeling to say it or think it; still it is as true as the plainest history of the last millenium. There is a patriotism that looks at the future through a gimlet hole, and sees in it but a single star. That patriotism is a natural, and most popular sentiment. It was strong in the Welshman’s breast a thousand years ago, and in the Scotsman’s half that distance back in the past. But it is a patriotism that has its day and its rule; then both its eyes are opened, and it looks upon the firmament of the future broadside on, and sees a constellation where it once saw and half worshipped a solitary star. Better to be the part of a great WHOLE than the whole of a littlenothing.
These continental Border-lands may see the face of their future history in the mirror of England’s annals. They are quaking now with the impetuous emotions of local nationality. They are blackened and scarred in the contest for the Welsh and Scotch independence of centuries agone. But over those boundary wastes the grass shall yet grow soft, fair and green, and there, too, the white lambs shall lie in the sun.
My walk lay over the most inhospitable and unpeopled section I ever saw. Calling at a station on the railway that passes through it, I was told by the master that the nearest church or chapel was sixteen miles in one direction, and over twenty in another. It is doubtful if so large a churchless space could be found in Iowa or even Kansas. I was glad to reach Hawick, a good, solid town but a little way inside of the Scottish border, where I spent the sabbath and the following Monday. This was a rallying and sallying point in the old Border Wars, and was inundated two or three times by the flux and reflux of this conflict, having been burnt twice, and put under the ordeal of other calamities brought upon it when free-booting was both the business, occupation and pastime of knighted chieftains and their clansmen. It is now a thrifty, manufacturing town, lying in the trough of the sea, or of the lofty hills that resemble waves hardened to earth in their crests. Just opposite the Temperance Inn in which I had my quarters, was the Tower Hotel, once a palatial mansion of the Buccleuchs. There the Duchess of Monmouth used to hold her drawing-rooms in an apartment which many a New England journeyman mechanic would hardly think ample and comfortable enough for his parlor. There is a curious conical mound in the town, called the Moat-hill, which looks like a great, green carbuncle. It is thought by some to be a Druidical monument, but is quite involved in a mystery which no one has satisfactorily solved. It is strange that no persistent and successful effort has been made to let day-light through it. Some workmen a long time ago undertook to perforate it, but were frightened away by a thunder-storm, which they seemed to take as a reproof and threatened punishment for their profanity. The great business of Hawick is the manufacture of a woollen fabric calledTweeds. It came to this name in a singular way. The clerk of the factory made out an invoice of the first lot to a London house under the name ofTwilledgoods. The London man read itTweeds, instead of Twilled, and ever since they have gone by that title. As Sir Walter Scott was at that time making the name “Tweed” illustrious, the mistake was a very lucrative one to the manufacturers of the article. Here, too, in this border town commences the chain of birthplaces of eminent men, who have honored Scotland with their lives and history. Here was born James Wilson, once the editor ofThe Economist, who worked his way up, through intermediate positions of public honor and trust, to that of Finance Minister for India, and died at the meridian of his manhood in that country of dearly-bought distinctions.
On Tuesday, Sept. 8th, I commenced my walk northward from this threshold town of Scotland. Followed down the Teviot to Denholm, the birth-place of the celebrated poet and linguist, Dr. John Leyden, another victim who offered himself a sacrifice to the costly honors and emoluments of East Indian official life. One great thought fired his soul in all the perils and privations of that deadly climate. It was to ascend one niche higher in knowledge of oriental tongues than Sir William Jones. He labored to this end with a desperate assiduity that perhaps was never surpassed or even equalled. He died hugging the conviction that he had attained it. This little village was his birthplace. Here he wrote his first rhymes, and wooed and won the first inspirations of the muse. His heart, as its last pulses grew weaker and slower, in that far-off heathen land, took on its child-thoughts again and its child-memories; and his last words were about this little, rural hamlet where he was born. A beautiful monument has been erected to his memory in the centre of the large common around which the village is built. On each of the four sides of the monument there is a tribute to his name and worth; one from Sir Walter Scott, and one taken from his own poems, entitled “Scenes of my Infancy,” a touching appeal to his old friends and neighbors to hold him in kind remembrance.
All this section is as fertile as it can be in the sceneries and historical associations favorable for inspiring a strong-hearted love of country, and for the development of the poetry of romantic patriotism. It was pleasant to emerge from the dark, cold, barren border-land, from the uncivilized mountains, standing sullen in the wild, shaggychevelureof nature, and to walk again between towering hills dressed in the best toilet of human industry, crowned with golden wheatfields, and zoned with broad girdles of the greenest vegetation. It is when these contrasts are suddenly and closely brought within the same vista that one sees and feels how the Creator has honored the labor of human hands, and lifted it up into partnership with His omnipotences in chronicling the consecutive centuries of the earth in illuminated capitals of this joint handwriting. It is a grand and impressive sight—one of those dark-browed hills of the Border-land, bearded to its rock-ridged forehead with such bush-bristles and haired with matted heather. In nature it is what a painted Indian squaw in her blanket, eagle feathers and moccasins, is in the world of humanity. We look upon both with a species of admiration, as contrasts with objects whose worth is measured by the comparison. The Empress Eugenie and the Princess of Wales, and wives and sisters lovelier still to the circles of humble life, look more beautiful and graceful when the eye turns to them from a glance at the best-looking squaw of the North American wilds. And so looked the well-dressed hills on each side of the Teviot, compared with the uncultured and stunted mountains among which I had so recently walked.
Ascending from Teviotdale, I passed the Earl of Minto’s seat, a large and modern-looking mansion, surrounded with beautiful grounds and noble trees, and commanding a grand and picturesque view of valley and mountain from an excellent point of observation. As soon as I lost sight of Teviotdale another grand vista of golden and purpled hills and rich valleys burst upon my sight as suddenly as theatrical sceneries are shifted on the stage. Dined in a little, rural, unpoetical village bearing the name of Lilliesleaf. Resuming my walk, I soon came in sight of the grand valley of the Tweed, a great basin of natural beauty, holding, as it were, Scotland’s “apples of gold in pictures of silver.” Every step commanded some new feature of interest. Here on the left arose to the still, blue bosom of the sky the three great Eildon Hills, with their heads crowned with heather as with an emerald diadem. The sun is low, and the far-off village in the valley shows dimly between the daylight and darkness. There is the shadow of a broken edifice, broken but grand, that arises out of the midst of the low houses. A little farther on, arches, and the stone vein-work of glassless windows, and ivy-netted towers come out more distinctly. I recognise them at the next furlong. They stand thus in pictures hung up in the parlors of thousands of common homes in America, Australia and India. They are the ruins of Melrose Abbey. Here is the original of the picture. I see it at last, as thousands of Americans have seen it before. In history and association it is to them the Westminster Abbey of Scotland, but in ruin. It looks natural, though not at first glance what one expected. The familiar engraving does not give us the real flesh and blood of the antiquity, or the complexion of the stone; but it does not exaggerate the exquisite symmetries and artistic genius of the structure. These truly inspire one with wonder. They are all that pen and pencil have described them. The great window, which is the most salient feature in the common picture, is a magnificent piece of work in stone, twenty-four feet in height and sixteen in breadth. It is all in the elm-tree order of architecture. The old monks belonged to that school, and they wrought out branches, leaves and leaf-veins, and framed the lacework of their chisels with colored glass most exquisitely.
Melrose Abbey was the eldest daughter, I believe, of Rievaulx Abbey, in Yorkshire, which has already been noticed; a year or two older in its foundation than Fountain Abbey, in Studley Park. The fecundity with which these ecclesiastical buildings multiplied and replenished England and Scotland is a marvel, considering the age in which they were erected and the small population and the poverty of the country. But something on this aspect of the subject hereafter. Here lie the ashes of Scottish kings, abbots and knights whose names figured conspicuously in the history of public and private wars which cover such a space of the country’s life as an independent nation. The Douglas family especially with several of its branches found a resting-place for their dust within these walls. Built and rebuilt, burnt and reburnt, mutilated, dismembered, consecrated and desecrated, make up the history of this celebrated edifice, and that of its like, from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s. It is a slight but a very appreciable mitigation of these destructive acts that it was ruinedartistically; just as some enthusiastic castle and abbey-painter would have suggested.
Although I spent the night at Melrose, it was a dark and cloudy one, so that I could not see the abbey by moonlight—a view so much prized and celebrated. The next day I literally walked from morning till evening among the tombstones of antiquity and monuments of Scotch history invested with an interest which will never wane. In the first place, I went down the Tweed a few miles and crossed it in a ferry-boat to see Dryburgh Abbey. Here, embowered among the trees in a silver curve of the river, stands this grand monument of one of the most remarkable ages of the world. Within an hour’s walk from Melrose, and four or five years only after the completion of that edifice, the foundations of this were laid. It is astonishing. We will not dwell upon it now, but make a separate chapter on it when I have seen most of the other ruins of the kind in the kingdom. The French are given to the habit of festooning the monuments and graves of their relatives and friends withimmortelles. Nature has hung one of hers to Dryburgh Abbey. It is a yew-tree opposite the door by which you enter the ruins. The year-rings of its trunk register all the centuries that the stones of the oldest wall have stood imbedded one upon the other. The tree is still green, putting forth its leaf in its season. But there is animmortellehung to these dark, crumbling walls that shall outlive the greenest trees now growing on earth. Here, in a little vaulted chapel, or rather a deep niche in the wall, lie the remains of Sir Walter Scott, his wife and the brilliant Lockhart. How many thousands of all lands where the English language is spoken will come and stand here in mute and pensive communion before the iron gate of this family tomb and look through the bars upon this group of simply-lettered stones!
From Dryburgh I walked back to Melrose on the east side of the Tweed. Lost the footpath, and for two hours clambered up and down the precipitous cliffs that rise high and abrupt from the river. In many places the zig-zag path was cut into the rock, hardly a foot in breadth, overhanging a precipice which a person of weak nerves could hardly face with composure. At last got out of these dark fastnesses and ascended a range of lofty hills where I found a good carriage road. This elevation commanded the most magnificent view that I ever saw in Scotland, excepting, perhaps, the one from Stirling Castle only for the feature which the Forth supplies. It was truly beautiful beyond description, and it would be useless for me to attempt one.
After dinner in Melrose, I resumed my walk northward and came suddenly upon Abbotsford. Indeed, I should have missed it, had I not noticed a wooden gate open on the roadside, with some directions upon it for those wishing to visit the house. As it stands low down towards the river, and as all the space above it to the road is covered with trees and shrubbery, it is entirely hidden from view in that direction. The descent to the house is rather steep and long. And here it is!—Abbotsford! It is the photograph of Sir Walter Scott. It is brim full of him and his histories. No author’s pen ever gave such an individuality to a human home. It is all the coinage of thoughts that have flooded the hemispheres. Pages of living literature built up all these lofty walls, bent these arches, panelled these ceilings, and filled the whole edifice with these mementoes of the men and ages gone. Every one of these hewn stones cost a paragraph; that carved and gilded crest, a column’s length of thinking done on paper. It must be true that pure, unaided literary labor never built before a mansion of this magnitude and filled it with such treasures of art and history. This will forever make it and the pictures of it a monument of peculiar interest. I have said that it is brim full of the author. It is equally full of all he wrote about; full of the interesting topographs of Scotland’s history, back to the twilight ages; full inside and out, and in the very garden and stable walls. The studio of an artist was never fuller of models of human or animal heads, or of counterfeit duplicates of Nature’s handiwork, than Sir Walter’s mansion is of things his pen painted on in the long life of its inspirations. The very porchway that leads into the house is hung with petrified stag-horns, doubtless dug up in Scottish bogs, and illustrating a page of the natural history of the country in some pre-historic century. The halls are panelled with Scotland,—with carvings in oak from the old palace of Dunfermline. Coats of arms of the celebrated Border chieftains are arrayed in line around the walls. The armoury is a miniature arsenal of all arms ever wielded since the time of the Druids. And a history attaches to nearly every one of the weapons. History hangs its webwork everywhere. It is built, high and low, into the face of the outside walls. Quaint, old, carved stones from abbey and castle ruins, arms, devices and inscriptions are all here presented to the eye like the printed page of an open volume. Among the interesting relics are a chair made from the rafters of the house in which Wallace was betrayed, Rob Roy’s pistol, and the key of the old Tolbooth of Edinburgh.
I was conducted through the rooms opened to visitors by a very gentlemanly-looking man, who might be taken for an author himself, from his intellectual appearance and conversation. The library is the largest of all the apartments—fifty feet by sixty. Nor is it too large for the collection of books it contains, which numbers about 20,000 volumes, many of them very rare and valuable. But the soul-centre of the building to me was thestudy, opening into the library. There is the small writing-table, and there is the plain armchair in which he sat by it and worked out those creations of fancy which have excited such interest through the world. That square foot over against this chair, where his paper lay, is the focus, the point of incidence and reflection, of thoughts that pencilled outward, like sun-rays, until their illumination reached the antipodes,—thoughts that brought a pleasant shining to the sun-burnt face of the Australian shepherd as he watched his flock at noon from under the shadow of a stunted tree; thoughts which made a cheery fellowship at night for the Hudson Bay hunter, in his snow-buried cabin on the Saskatchiwine. The books of this little inner library were the body-guard of his genius, chosen to be nearest him in the outsallyings of his imagination. Here is a little conversational closet, with a window in it to let in the leaf-sifted light and air—a small recess large enough for a couple of chairs or so, which he called a “Speak-a-bit.” Here is something so near his personality that it almost startles you like a sudden apparition of himself. It is a glass case containing the clothes he last wore on earth,—the large-buttoned, blue coat, the plaid trousers, the broad-brimmed hat, and heavy, thick-soled shoes which he had on when he came in from his last walk to lay himself down and die.
On signing my name in the register, I was affected at a coincidence which conveyed a tribute of respect to the memory of the great author of striking significance, while it recorded the painful catastrophe which has broken over upon the American Republic. It was a sad sight to me to see the profane and suicidal antagonisms which have rent it in twain brought to the shrine of this great memory and graven upon its sacred tablet as it were with the murdering dagger’s point. New and bad initials! The father and patriot Washington would have wept tears of blood to have read them here,—to have read them anywhere, bearing such deplorable meaning. They were U.S.A. and C.S.A., as it were chasing each other up and down the pages of the visitors’ register. Sad, sad was the sight—sadder, in a certain sense, than the smoke-wreaths of the Tuscarora and Alabama ploughing the broad ocean with their keels. U.S.A. and C.S.A.! What initials for Americans to write, with the precious memories of a common history and a common weal still held to their hearts—to write here or anywhere! What a riving and a ruin do those letters record! Still they brought in their severed hands a common homage-gift to the memory of the Writer of Abbotsford. If they represented the dissolution of a great political fabric, in which they once gloried with equal pride, they meant union here—a oneness indissoluble in admiration for a great genius whose memory can no more be localised to a nation than the interest of his works.
American names, both of the North and South, may be found on almost every page of the register. I wrote mine next to that of a gentleman from Worcester, Mass., my old place of residence, who only left an hour before my arrival. Abbotsford and Stratford-upon-Avon are points to which our countrymen converge in their travels in this country; and you will find more of their signatures in the registry of these two haloed homesteads of genius than anywhere else in Europe.
The valley of the Tweed in this section is all an artist would delight in as a surrounding of such histories. The hills are lofty, declining into gorges or dells at different angles with the river, which they wall in precipitously with their wooded sides in many places. They are mostly cultivated to the top, and now in harvest many of them were crowned with stooked sheaves of wheat, each looking in the distance like Nature with her golden curls done up in paper, dressing for the harvest-home of the season. Some of them wore belts and gores of turnip foliage of differentnuancesof green luxuriance, combining with every conceivable shade and alternation of vegetable coloring. Indeed, as already intimated, the view from the eminence almost overhanging the little sequestered peninsula on which Old Melrose stood twelve centuries ago, is indescribably beautiful, and well worth a long journey to see, disconnected from its historical associations. The Eildon Hills towering up heather-crowned to the height of over 1,300 feet above the level of the sea right out of the sheen of barley fields, as from a sea of silver, form one of the salient features of this glorious landscape. This is an interesting peculiarity of Scotch scenery;—civilization sapping the barbarism of the wilderness; wheat-fieldsmordantbiting in upon peaty moorlands, or climbing to the tops of cold, bald mountains, shearing off their thorny locks of heather and covering them with the well-dressedchevelureof yellow grain. Where the farmer’s horse cannot climb with the plough, or the little sheep cannot graze to advantage, human hands plant the Scotch larch or fir, just as a tenant-gardener would set out cabbage-plants in odd corners of his little holding which he could have no other use for.
Abbotsferry is just above Abbotsford, and is crossed in a small row-boat. The river here is of considerable width and quite rapid. The boat was kept on the other side; so I hallooed to a man engaged in thatching a rick of oats to come and ferry me over. Without descending from the ladder, he called to some one in the cottage, when, to my surprise, a well-dressed young woman, in rather flowing dress, red jacket, and with her hair tastefully done up in a neta-la-mode, made her appearance. Descending to the river, she folded up her gown, and, settling herself to the oars, “pushed her light shallop from the shore” with the grace of The Lady of the Lake. In a few minutes she ran the prow upon the pebbled beach at my feet, and I took my seat at the other end of the boat. She did it all so naturally, and without any other flush upon her pleasant face than that of the exercise of rowing, that I felt quite easy myself and checked the expression of regret I was on the point of uttering for putting her to such service. A few questions convinced me it was her regular employment, especially when her father was busy. I could not help asking her if she had ever read “The Lady of the Lake,” but found that neither that romance nor any other had ever invested her river experience with any sensibility except of a cheerful duty. She was going to do the whole for a penny, her usual charge, but I declined to take back any change for the piece of silver I gave to her, intimating that I regarded it cheap at that to be rowed over a river by such hands.
Almost opposite to Abbotsford I passed one of the best farming establishments I had seen in Scotland. I was particularly struck with a feature which will hereafter distinguish the steddings or farm buildings in Great Britain. Steam has already accomplished many changes, and among others one that could hardly have been anticipated when it was first applied to common uses. It has virtually turned the threshing-floor out of doors. Grain growing has become completely out-of-door work, from seeding to sending to market. The day of building two-story barns for storing and threshing wheat, barley and oats is over, I am persuaded, in this country. A quadrangle of slate-roofed cow-sheds, for housing horses and cattle, will displace the old-fashioned barns, each with its rood of roof. This I saw on crossing the Tweed was quite new, and may serve as a model of the housing that will come into vogue rapidly. One familiar with New England in the “old meeting-house” time would call this establishment a hollow square of horse-sheds, without a break or crevice at the angles.
I reached Galashiels about 5 p.m., and stopped an hour for tea. This is a vigorous and thrifty town, that makes a profitable and useful business of the manufacture of tweeds, tartans and shawls. It is situated on the banks of the Gala, a little, rapid, shallow river that joins the Tweed about a mile below. After tea I resumed my walk, but owing to the confused direction of the landlady, took the wrong side of the river, and diverged westward toward Peebles. I had made three miles or more in this direction before I found out my mistake, so was obliged to return to Galashiels, where I concluded to spend the night, after another involuntary excursion more unsatisfactory than my walk around Sheffield, inasmuch as I had to travel over the same road twice for the whole distance. Thus the three mistakes thus far made have cost me twenty miles of extra footing. The next morning I set out in good season, determined to reach Edinburgh, if possible, by night.
Followed the Gala Water, as it is called here, just as if it were a placid lake or land-locked bay, though it is a tortuous and swift-running stream. The scenery was still picturesque, in some places very grand and romantic. There was one great amphitheatre just before reaching the village of Stow which was peculiarly interesting. It was a great bowl full of earth’s glory up to the very rim. The circular wall was embossed with the best patterns and colors of vegetation. The hills of everytournureshowed each in a fir setting, looking, with their sloping fields of grain, like inverted goblets of gold vined with emerald leafwork. In the valley a reaping machine was at work with its peculiar chatter and clatter, and men and women were following in its wake, gathering up and binding the grain as it fell and clearing the way for the next round. Up and down these hills frequently runs a stripe of Scotch firs or larches a few rods wide; here and there they resemble those geometrical figures often seen in gardens and pleasure grounds. The sun peeping out of the clouds, and flooding these features with a sudden, transient river of light, gives them a glow and glory that would delight the artist. After a long walk through such scenery, I reached, late in the evening,Auld Reekie, a favorite home-name which the modern Athenians love to give to Edinburgh. Being anxious to push on and complete my journey as soon as practicable, I only remained in the celebrated Scotch metropolis one night, taking staff early next morning, and holding northward towards the Highlands.
Edinburgh has made its mark upon the world and its place among the great centres of the world’s civilization. On the whole, no city in Great Britain, or in Christendom, has ever attained to such well-developed, I will not say angular, but salient individuality. This is deep-featured and ineffaceable. It is, not was. Edinburgh has reared great men prolifically and supplied the world with them, and kept always a good number back for itself to give a shaping to others the world needed. Its prestige is great in the production of such intellects. But it keeps up with the times. It is faithful to its antecedents, and appreciates them at their full value and obligation. It does not lie a-bed until noon because it has got its name up for educating brilliant minds. Its grand old University holds its own among the wranglers of learning. Its High School is proportionately as high as ever, notwithstanding the rapid growth of others of the same purpose. Its pulpit boasts of its old mind-power and moral stature. Its Theology stands iron-cabled, grand and solid as an iceberg in the sea of modern speculation, unsoftened under the patter of the heterodox sentimentalities of human philanthropy. It is growing more and more a City of Palaces. And the palaces are all built for housing the poorest of the poor, the weakest of the weak and the vilest of the vile. These hospitals are the Holyroods of Edinburgh II. They honor it with a renown better than the royal palace of the latter name ever won.
I said Edinburgh the Second. That is correct. There are two towns, the Old and the New; the last about half a century’s age. But the oldest will be the youngest fifty years hence. The hand of a “higher civilization,” with its spirit-level, pick, plane and trowel, is upon it with the grip of a Samson. That hand will tone down its great distinctive individualities and give it the modernuniformityof design, face and feature. All these tall houses, built skyward layer upon layer or flat upon flat, until they show half a dozen stories on one street, and twice that number on the other, are doomed, and they will be done for, one by one in its turn. They probably came in with Queen Mary, and they will go out under the blue-eyed Alexandra. They will be supplanted by the most improved architecture of modern taste and utilitarianism. Edinburgh will be Anglicised and put in the fashionable costume of a progressive age; in the same swallow-tailed coat, figured vest and stovepipe hat worn by London, Liverpool and Manchester. It will not be allowed to wear tweed pantaloons except for one circumstance;—that it is now building its best houses of stone instead of brick.
But there are physical features that will always distinguish Edinburgh from all other cities of the world and which no architectural changes can ever obliterate or deface. There are Arthur’s Seat, Salisbury Crags, the Calton Hill, and the Castle Height, and there they will stand forever—the grandest surroundings and garniture of Nature ever given to any capital or centre of the earth’s populations.
LOCH LEVEN-ITS ISLANDCASTLE—STRATHS—PERTH—SALMON-BREEDING—THOUGHTS ON FISH-FARMING—DUNKELD—BLAIR ATHOLL—DUCAL TREE-PLANTER—STRATHSPEY AND ITS SCENERY—THE ROADS—SCOTCH CATTLE AND SHEEP—NIGHT IN A WAYSIDE COTTAGE—ARRIVAL AT INVERNESS.
On Friday, Sept. 11th, I left for the north the morning after my arrival in Edinburgh, hoping to finish my long walk before the rainy season commenced. My old friend and host accompanied me across the Forth, by the Granton Ferry, and walked with me for some distance on the other side; then bidding me God-speed, he returned to the city. The weather was fine, and the farmers were very busy at work. A vast quantity of grain, especially of oats, was cut and ready for carting; but little of it had been ricked in consequence of frequent showers. I noticed that they used a different snath for their scythes here from that common in England. It is in two parts, like the handles of a plough, joining a foot or two above the blade. One is shorter than the other, each having a thole. It is a singular contrivance, but seems to be preferred here to the old English pole. I have never seen yet an American scythe-snath in England or Scotland, although so much of our implemental machinery has been introduced. American manure-forks and hay-forks, axes and augurs you will now find exposed for sale in nearly every considerable town, but one of our beautifully mounted scythes would be a great novelty here.
The scenery varies, but retains the peculiarly Scotch features. Hills which we should call mountains are frequently planted with trees as far up as the soil will lie upon the precipitous sides. On passing one of great height, bald at the top, but bearded to the eyebrows with fir and larch, I asked an elderly man, a blacksmith, standing in his shop-door, if they were a natural growth. He said that he and his two boys planted them all about forty-eight years ago. They were now worth, on an average, twelve English shillings, or about three dollars a-piece.
I lodged in Kinross, a pleasant-faced, quiet and comfortable little town, done up with historical associations of special interest. Here is Loch Leven, serene and placid, like a mirror framed with wooded hills, looking at their faces in it. It is a beautiful sheet of water, taking the history out of it. But putting that in and around it, you see a picture before you that you will remember. Here is more of Mary the Unfortunate. You see reflected in the silver sheen of the lake that face which looks at you with its soft appeal for sympathy in all the galleries of Christendom. Out there, on that little islet, green and low, stands the black castle in which they prisoned her. There they made her trembling, indignant fingers write herself “a queen without a crown.” Southward there, where amateurs now fish for trout, young Douglas rowed her ashore with muffled oars so softly that they stirred no ripple at the bow. The keys of the castle they threw into the lake to bar pursuit, lay in the mud for nearly three centuries, when they were found by a lad of the village, and presented to the Earl of Morton, a representative of the Douglas family.
The next day I walked on to Perth, passing through a very interesting section, which nature and history have enriched with landscapes and manscapes manifold. It is truly a romantic region for both these qualities, with delightful views in sudden and frequent alternation. Glens deep, winding and dark, with steep mountain walls folding their tree-hands over the road; lofty hills in full Scotch uniform, in tartan heather and yellow grain plaided in various figures; chippering streams, now hidden, now coming to the light, in white flashing foam in a rocky glade of the dell; straths or savannas, like great prairie gardens, threaded by meandering rivers and studded with wheat in sheaves, shocks and ricks, seen over long reaches of unreapt harvests; villages, hamlets, white cottages nestling in the niches and green gorges of the mountains,—and all these sceneries set in romantic histories dating back to the Danes and their doings in Scotland, make up a prevista for the eye and a revista for the mind that keep both in exhilarating occupation every rod of the distance from Kinross to Perth.
The roadviaGlenfarg would be a luxury of the first enjoyment to any tourist with an eye to the wild, romantic and picturesque. Debouching from this long, winding, tree-arched dell, you come out upon Strathearn, or the bottom-land of the river Earn, which joins the Tay a few miles below. The term strath is peculiarly a Scottish designation which many American readers may not have fully comprehended, although it is so blended with the history and romance of this country. It is not a valley proper, as we use that term; as the Valley of the Mississippi or the Valley of the Connecticut. If the word were admissible, it might be called most descriptively the land-bay of a river, at a certain distance between its source and mouth, such for instance as the German Flats on the Mohawk, or the Oxbow on the Connecticut, at Wethersfield, in Vermont, or the great onion-growing flat on the same river at Wethersfield in Connecticut. These straths are numerous in Scotland, and constitute the great productive centres of the mountain sections. They are generally cultivated to the highest perfection of agricultural science and economy and are devoted mostly to grain. As they are always walled in by bald-headed mountains and lofty hills, cropped as high as man and horse can climb with a plough and planted with firs and larches beyond, they show beautifully to the eye, and constitute, with these surroundings, the peculiar charm of Scotch scenery. The term is always prefixed to the name of the river, as Strathearn, Strathspey, etc.
I noticed on this day’s walk the same singular habit that struck me in the north part of Yorkshire; that is, of cutting inward upon the standing grain. Several persons, frequently women and boys, follow the mowers, and pick up the swath and bind it into sheaves, using no rake at all in the process. So pertinaciously they seem to adhere to this remarkable and awkward custom, that I saw two mowers walk down a hill, a distance of full a hundred rods, with their scythes under their arms, in order to begin a new swath in the same way; four or five men and women running after them full tilt to bind the grain as it fell! Here was a loss of at least five minutes each to half a dozen hands, amounting to half an hour to a single man at the end of each swath or work. Supposing the mowers made twenty in ten hours from bottom to top of the field, here is the loss of one whole day for one man, or one sixth of the whole aggregate time applied to the harvesting of the crop, given to the mere running down that hill of six pairs of legs for no earthly purpose but to cut inward instead of outward, as we do. The grain-ricks in Scotland are nearly all round and quite small. Every one of them is rounded up at the top and fitted with a Mandarin-looking hat of straw, which sheds the rain well. A good-sized farm-house is flanked with quite a village of these little round stacks, looking like a comfortable colony of large, yellow tea-caddies in the distance.
Reached Perth a little after dark, having made a walk of nearly twenty miles after 11 a.m. Here I remained over the Sabbath, and greatly enjoyed both its rest and the devotional exercises in some of the churches of the city.
The Fair City of Perth is truly most beautifully situated at the head of navigation on the Tay, as Stirling is on the Forth. It has no mountainous eminence in its midst, castle-crowned, like Stirling, from which to look off upon such a scene as the latter commands. But Nature has erected grand and lofty observatories near by in the Moncrieffe and Kinnoull Hills, from which a splendid prospect is unrolled to the eye. There is some historical or legendary authority for the idea that the Romans contemplated this view from Moncrieffe Hill; and, as the German army, returning homeward from France, shouted with wild enthusiasm, at its first sight,Der Rhein! Der Rhein! so these soldiers of the Cæsars shouted at the view of the Tay and the Corse of Gowrie,Ecce Tiber! Ecce Compus Martius! There was more patriotism than parity in the comparison. The Italian river is a Rhine in history, but a mere Goose Creek within its actual banks compared with the Tay. In history, Perth has its full share of “love and murder,” rhyme and romance, sieges, battering and burning, royals and rebels. In the practical life of to-day, it is a progressive, thriving town, busy, intelligent, respected and honorable. The two natural features which would attract, perhaps, the most special attention of the traveller are the two Inches, North and South, divided by the city. This is a peculiar Scotch term which an untravelled American will hardly understand. It has no relation to measurement of any kind; but signifies what we should call a low, level green or common in or adjoining a town. The Inches of Perth are, to my eye, the finest in Scotland, each having about a mile and a half in circumference, and making delightful and healthy playgrounds and promenades for the whole population.
On Monday, Sept. 14th, I took staff and set out for another week-stage of my walk, or from Perth to Inverness. Crossed the Tay and proceeded northward up the east side of that fertile river. Fertile may sound at first a singular qualification for a broad, rapid stream running down out of the mountains and widening into a bay or firth at its mouth. But it may be applied in the best sense of production to the Tay; and not only that, but other terms known to practical agriculture. Up to the present moment, no river in the world has been cultivated with more science and success. None has been sown so thickly with seed-vitalities or produced more valuable crops of aquatic life. Here salmon are hatched by hand and folded and herded with a shepherd’s care. Here pisciculture, or, to use a far better and more euphonious word, fish-farming, is carried to the highest perfection in Great Britain. It is a tillage that must hereafter take its place with agriculture as a great and honored industry. If the cold, bald-headed mountains, the wild, stony reaches of poverty-stricken regions, moor, morass, steppe and prairie are made the pasturage of sheep innumerable, the thousands of rivers in both hemispheres will not be suffered to run to waste through another century. The utilitarian genius of the present age will turn them into pasturage worth more per acre than the value of the richest land on their banks. Just think of the pasturage of the Tay. It rents for £14,000 a year; and those who hire it must make it produce at least £50,000, or $240,000 annually. Let us assume that the whole length of this salmon-pasturage is fifty miles, and its average width one-eighth of a mile. Then the whole distance would contain the space of 4,000 square acres, and the annual rent for fishing would amount to over £3 13s. per acre. This would make every fish-bearing acre of the river worth £100, calculated on the land basis of interest or rent.
Having heard of the Stormontfields’ Ponds for breeding salmon, I had a great desire to see them. They are situated on the Tay, a few miles above Perth, and are well worthy of the inspection and admiration of the scientific as well as the utilitarian world. The process is as simple as it is successful and valuable. A race or canal, filled with a clear, mountain stream, and constructed many years ago to supply motive power to a corn-mill, runs parallel with the river, at the distance from it of about twenty rods. At right angles with this stream, there are twenty-five wooden boxes side by side, about fifty feet in length, placed on a slight decline. These boxes or troughs, each about two feet wide and one foot deep, are divided into partitions by cross-boards, which do not reach, within a few inches, the top of the siding, so that the water shall make a continuous surface the whole length of the trough. Each trough is filled with round river stones or pebbles washed clean, on which the spawn is laid. The water is let out of the mill-race upon these troughs through a wire-cloth filter, covering them about two inches deep above the stones. At the bottom, a lateral channel or race, running at right angles to the troughs, conducts the waste water in a rapid, bubbling stream down into the feeding-pond, which covers the space of about one-fifth of an acre, close to the river, with which it is connected by a narrow race gated also with a wire-cloth, to prevent the little living mites from being carried off before their time.
This may serve to give the reader some approximate idea of the construction of the fish-fold. The next process is the stocking it with the breeding ewes of the sea and river. The female salmon is caught in the spawning season with a net, and the ova are expressed from her by passing the hand gently down the body, when she is again put into the river to go on her way. The manager told me that they generally reckoned upon a thousand eggs to a pound of the salmon caught. Thus fourteen good-sized fish would stock the twenty-five troughs. When hatched, the little things run down into the race-way, which carries them into the feeding-pond. Here they are fed twice daily, with five pounds of beef’s liver pulverised. They remain in this water-yard from April to autumn, when the gate is raised and they are let out into the river. And it is a very singular and interesting fact that those only go which have got their sea-coats on them, or have reached the “smolt” character. The smaller fry remain in the pond until, as it has been said in higher circles of society, their beards are grown, or, in their case, until their scales are grown, to fit them for the rough and tumble of salt-water life.
The growth of the little bull-headed mites, after being turned into the river-pasture, is wonderful—more rapid than that of lambs of the Southdown breed. The keeper had marked some of them, on letting them out, by clipping the dorsal fin. On being caught six or eight months afterward, they weighed from five to seven pounds against half a pound each when sent forth to take care of themselves. The proprietors of the fisheries defray the expense of this breeding establishment, being taxed only twopence in the pound of their rental. This, of course, they get back with large interest and profit from the tenant-farmers of the river. As a proof of the enhanced production of the Tay fisheries under this cultivation the fact will suffice, that they now rent for £14,000 a year against £11,000 under the old system.
Salmon-breeding is doubtless destined to rank with sheep-culture and cattle-culture in the future. The remotest colonies of Great Britain are moving in the matter with vigor and almost enthusiasm. Vessels have been constructed on purpose to convey this fair and mottled stock of British rivers to those of Australia and New Zealand. In France, fish-farming has become a large and lucrative occupation. I hope our own countrymen, who plume themselves on going ahead in utilitarian enterprises, will show the world what they can do in this. Surely our New England men, who claim to lead in American industries and ingenuities, will not suffer half a million acres of river-pasturage to run to waste for another half century, when it would fold and feed millions of salmon. Once they herded in the Connecticut in such multitudes that a special stipulation was inserted in the indentures of apprentices in the vicinity of the river, that they should not be obliged to eat salmon more than a certain number of times in a week. Now, if a salmon is caught between the mouth and source of the river, it is blazoned forth in the newspapers as a very extraordinary and unnatural event. There is no earthly reason why the Connecticut should not breed and supply as great a number of these excellent and beautiful fish as the Tay. Its waters are equally pure and quiet as those of the Scotch river. Every acre of the Connecticut, from the northernmost bridge that spans it in Vermont to its debouchment at Saybrook, might be made productive of as great a value as any onion-garden acre at Wethersfield.
The salmon-shepherd at Stormontfields, having fully explained the labors and duties of his charge, rowed me across the Tay, and I continued my walk highly gratified in having seen one of the new industries which this age is adding to the different cultures provided for the sustentation and comfort of human life. The whole way to Dunkeld was full of interest, nature and history making every mile a scene to delight the eye and exhilarate the mind. The first considerable village I passed through was Stanley, which gives the name to that old family of British peers known in history by the battle-cry of a badly-pressed sovereign, “On, Stanley, on!” Murthley Castle, the seat of Sir William Stewart, and the beautiful grounds which front and surround it, will excite the admiration of the traveller and pay him well for a moment’s pause to peruse its illuminated pages opened to his view. The baronet is regarded as an eccentric man, perhaps chiefly because he has built a splendid Roman Catholic chapel quite near to his mansion and supports a priest of that order mostly for his own spiritual good. Near Dunkeld, Birnam Hill lifts its round, dark, bushy head to the height of over 1,500 feet, grand and grim, as if it wore the bonnet of Macbeth and hid his dagger beneath its tartan cloak of firs. “Birnam Wood,” which Shakespeare’s genius has made one of the immortals among earthly localities, was the setting of that hill in his day, and perhaps centuries before it. Crossing the Tay by a magnificent bridge, you are in the famous old city and capital of ancient Caledonia, Dunkeld. Here centre some of the richest rivulets of Scotch history, ecclesiastical and military, of church and state, cowl and crown. Walled in here, on the upper waters of the Tay, by dark and heavily-wooded mountains, it was just the place for the earliest monks to select as the site of one of their cloistered communities. The two best saints ever produced by these islands, St. Columba and St. Cuthbert, are said to have been connected with the religious foundations of this little sequestered city. The old cathedral, having been knocked about like other Roman Catholic edifices in the sledge-hammer crusades of the Reformation, wasruinedvery picturesquely, as a tourist, with one of Murray’s red-book guides in his hand, would be likely to say. But the choir was rebuilt and fitted up for worship by the late Duke of Atholl at the expense of about £5,000.
Of this duke I must say a few words, for he has left the greenest monument to his memory that a man ever planted over his grave. He did something more and better than roofing the choir of a ruined cathedral. He roofed a hundred hills and valleys with a larch-and-fir work that will make them as glorious and beautiful as Lebanon forever. One of the most illustrious and eloquent of the Iroquois aristocracy was a chief called Corn-planter. This Duke of Atholl should be named and known for evermore as the great Tree-planter of Christendom. We have already dwelt upon the benefaction that such a man leaves to coming generations. This Scotch nobleman virtually founded a new order of knighthood far more useful and honorable than the Order of the Garter. To talk ofgarters!—why, he not only put the cold, ragged shivering hills of Scotland into garters, but into stockings waist high, and doublets and bonnets and shoes of beautifully green and thick fir-plaid. He planted 11,000 square acres with the larch alone; and thousands of these acres stood up edgewise against mountains and hills so steep that the planters must have spaded the holes with ropes around their waists to keep them from falling down the precipice. It is stated that he had twenty-seven millions of the larch alone planted on his mountainous estates, besides several millions of other trees. Now, it is doubtful if the whole region thus dibbled with this tree-crop yielded an average rental of one English shilling per acre as a pasturage for sheep. On passing through miles and miles of this magnificent wood-grain and taking an estimate of its value, I put it at 10s., or $2 40c. per tree. Of the twenty-seven millions of larches thus planted, ten must be worth that sum; making alone, without counting the rest, £5,000,000, or $24,000,000. It is quite probable that the larches, firs and other trees now covering the Atholl estates, would sell for £10,000,000 if brought to the hammer. But he was not only the greatest arboriculturist in the world, but the founder of tree-farming as a productive industry as well as a decorative art. Already it has transformed the Highlands of Scotland and trebled their value, as well as clothed them with a new and beautiful scenery. What we call the Scotch larch was not originally a native of that country. Close to the cathedral in Dunkeld stand the two patriarchs of the family, first introduced into Scotland from Switzerland in 1737.
Having remained the best part of two days in Dunkeld, I held on northward, through heavily-shaded and winding glen and valley to Blair Atholl. For the whole distance of twenty miles the country is quite Alpine, wild and grand, with mountains larched or firred to the utmost reach and tenure of soil for roots; deep, dark gorges pouring down into the narrowing river their foamy, dashing streams; mansions planted here and there on sloping lawns showing sunnily through groves and parks; now a hamlet of cottages set in the side of a lofty hill, now a larger village opening suddenly upon you at the turning of the turnpike road. I reached Blair Atholl at about dark, and lodged at the largest hotel I slept in between London and John O’Groat’s. It is virtually the tourist’s inn; for this is the centre of some of the most interesting and striking sceneries and localities in Scotland. Glens, waterfalls, stream, torrent, mountain and valley, with their romantic histories, make this a very attractive region to thousands of summer travellers from England and other countries. The railway from Perth to Inverness via Dunkeld and Blair Atholl, has just opened up this secluded Scotch Switzerland to multitudes who never would have seen it without the help of the Iron Horse. A month previous, this point had been the most distant in Scotland from steam-routes of transportation and travel. Now southern sportsmen were hiring up “the shooting” for many miles on both sides of the line, making the hills and glens echo with their fusillades. Blair Castle, the duke’s mansion, is a very ordinary building in appearance, looking from the public road like a large four-story factory painted white, with small, old-fashioned windows. He himself was lying in a very painful and precarious condition, with a cancer in the throat, from which it was the general impression that he never would recover. The day preceding, the Queen had visited him, whileen routefor Balmoral, having gone sixty miles out of her way to comfort him with such an expression of her sympathy.
The next day I reached the northern boundary of the Duke of Atholl’s estates, having walked for full forty miles continuously through it. Passed over a very bleak, treeless, barren waste of mountain and moorland, most of it too rocky or soilless for even heather. The dashing, flashing, little Garry, which I had followed for a day or two, thinned and narrowed down to a noisy brook as I ascended towards its source. For a long distance the country was exceedingly wild and desolate. Terrible must be the condition of a man benighted therein, especially in winter. There were standing beacons all along the road for miles, to indicate the track when it was buried in drifting snow. These were painted posts, about six or eight feet high, planted on the rocky, river side of the road, at a few rods interval, to guide the traveller and keep him from dashing over the concealed precipices. About the middle of the afternoon I reached the summit of the two watersheds, where a horse’s hoof might so dam a balancing stream as to send it southward into the Tay or northward into the Moray Firth. Soon a rivulet welled out in the latter direction with a decided current. It was the Spey. A few miles brought me suddenly into a little, glorious world of beauty. The change of theatrical sceneries could hardly have produced a more sudden and striking contrast than this presented to the wild, cold, dark waste through which I had been travelling for a day. It was Strathspey; and I doubt if there is another view in Scotland, of the same dimensions, to equal it. It was indescribably grand and beautiful, if you could blend the meaning of these two commonly-coupled adjectives into one qualification, as you can blend two colors on the easel. To get the full enjoyment of the scene at one draught, you should enter it first from the south, after having travelled for twenty miles without seeing a sheaf of wheat or patch of vegetation tilled by the hand of man. I know nothing in America to compare it with or to help the American reader to an approximate idea of it. Imagine a land-lake, apparently shut in completely by a circular wall of mountains of every stature, the tallest looking over the shoulders of the lower hills, like grand giants standing in steel helmets and green doublets and gilded corselets, to see the soft and quiet beauty of the valley sleeping under their watch and ward. As the sun-bursts from the strath-skies above darted out of their shifting cloud-walls and flashed a flush of light upon the solemn brows of these majestic apostles of nature one by one, they stood haloed, like the favored saints in Scripture in the overflow of the Transfiguration. It was just the kind of day to make the scene glorious indescribably. The clouds and sky were in the happiest disposition for the brilliant plays and pictures of light and shade, and dissolving views of fascinating splendor succeeded and surpassed each other at a minute’s interval. Now, the great land-lake, on whose bosom floated in the sunlight a thousand islands oat-and-barley-gilded, and rimmed with the green and purple verdure of the turnip and rutabaga, was all set a-glow by a luminous flood from the opening clouds above. The next moment they closed this disparted seam in their drapery, and opened a side one upon the still, grave faces of the surrounding mountains; and, for a few minutes, the smile went round from one to the other, and the great centurions of the hills looked happy and almost human in the gleam. Then shade’s turn came in the play, and it played its part as perfectly as light. It put in the touch of the old Italian masters, giving an everchanging background to all the sublime pictures of the panorama.
I was not alone in the enjoyment of this scenery. For the first time in this Walk I had a companion for a day. A clergyman from near Edinburgh joined me at Kingussie, with whom I shared the luxury of one of the most splendid views to be found in Scotland. Indeed, few minds are so constituted as to prefer to see such natural pictures alone. After a day’s walk among these sceneries, we came to the small village of Aviemore in the dusk of the evening. Here we found that the only inn had been closed and turned into a private residence, and that it was doubtful if a bed could be had for love or money in the place. The railway through it to Inverness had just been opened, and the navvies seemed still to constitute the largest portion of the population. Neither of us had eaten any dinner, and we were hungry as well as tired. Seeing a little, low cottage near the railroad, with the sign of something for the public good over the door, we went to it, and found that it had two rooms, one a kind of rough, stone-floored shed, the other an apartment full ten feet square, with two beds in it, which occupied half the entire space. But, small as it was, the good man and woman made the most of it in the way of entertainment, getting up a tea occasionally for persons stopping over in the village at a meal-time, also selling small articles of grocery to the laborers. Everything was brought from a distance, even their bread, bacon and butter. Their stock of these fundamentals was exhausted, so that they could not give us anything with our tea until the arrival of the train from the north, which we all watched with common interest. In the course of half an hour it came, and soon our cabin-landlord brought in a large basket full of the simplest necessaries of life, which we were quite prepared to enjoy as its best luxuries. Soon a wood fire blazed for us in the double-bedded parlor, and the unpainted deal table was spread in the fire-light with a repast we relished with a pleasant appreciation.
My companion was bound northward by the next train in that direction, and was sure to find good quarters for the night; but as there was not an inn for ten miles on the route I was to travel, and as it was now quite night and the road mostly houseless and lonely, I felt some anxiety about my own lodging. But on inquiry I was very glad to find that one of the two beds in the room was unoccupied and at my disposal. So, having accompanied my fellow-traveller to the station and seen him off with mutual good wishes, I returned to the cottage, and the mistress replenished the fire with a new supply of chips and faggots, and I had two or three hours of rare enjoyment, enhanced by some interesting books I found on a shelf by the window. And this is a fact worthy of note and full of good meaning. You will seldom find a cottage in Scotland, however poor and small, without a shelf of books in it. I retired rather earlier than usual; but before I fell asleep, the two regular lodgers, who occupied the other bed, came in softly, and spoke in a suppressed tone, as if reluctant to awaken me. And here I was much impressed with another fact affiliated with the one I have mentioned—that of praying as well as reading in the Scotch cottage. After a little conversation just above a whisper, the elder of the two—and he not twenty, while the other was apparently only sixteen—first read, with full Scotch accent, one of the hard-rhymed psalms used in the Scotch service. Then, after a short pause, he read with a low, solemn voice a chapter in the Bible. A few minutes of silence succeeded, as if a wordless prayer was going upward upon the still wings of thought, which made no audible beating in their flight. It was very impressive; an incident that I shall ever hold among the most interesting of all I met with on my walk. They were not brothers evidently, but most likely strangers thrown together on the railroad. They doubtless came from different directions, but, from Highlands or Lowlands, they came from Bible-lighted homes, whose “voices of the night” were blended with the breathings of religious life and instruction. Separated from such homes, they had agreed to make this one after the same spiritual pattern, barring the parental presence and teaching.
The next day after breakfast, took leave of my kind cottage hosts, exchanging good wishes for mutual happiness. Went out of the amphitheatre of Strathspey by a gateway into another, surrounded by mountains less lofty and entirely covered with heather. For several miles beyond Carr Bridge I passed over the wildest moorland. The road was marked by posts about ten feet high, painted white within two feet of the top and black above. These are planted about fifteen rods apart, to guide the traveller in the drifting and blinding snows of winter. The road over this cold, desolate waste exceeded anything I ever saw in America, even in the most fashionable suburbs of New York and Boston. It was as smooth and hard as a cement floor. Here on this treeless wild, I met several men at work trimming the edges of the road by a line, with as much precision and care as if they were laying out an aisle in a flower garden. After a walk of about seventeen miles, I reached Freeburn Inn about the middle of the afternoon, and as it began to rain and to threaten bad weather for walking, I concluded to stop there for the night, and found good quarters.
The rain continued in showers, and I feared I should be unable to reach Inverness to spend the Sabbath. There was a cattle fair at the inn, and a considerable number of farmers and dealers came together notwithstanding the weather. Indeed, there were nearly as many men and boys as animals on the ground. A score or more had come in, each leading or driving a single cow or calf. The cattle generally were evidently of the Gaelic origin and antecedents—little, chubby, scraggy creatures, of all colors, but mostly black, with wide-branching horns longer than their fore-legs. Their hair is long and as coarse as a polar seal’s, and they look as if they knew no more of housing against snow, rain and wintry winds, or of a littered bed, than the buffaloes beyond the upper waters of the Missouri. One would be inclined to think they had lived from calf-hood on nothing but heather or gorse, and that the prickly fodder had penetrated through their hides and covered them with a growth midway between hair and bristles. They will not average over 350 lbs. when dressed; still they seem to hold their own among other breeds which have attracted so much attention. This is probably because they can browse out a living where the Durham and Devon would starve.
The sheep in this region are chiefly the old Scotch breed, with curling horns and crocked faces and legs, such as are represented in old pictures. The black seems to be spattered upon them, and looks as if the heather would rub it off. The wool is long and coarse, giving them a goat-like appearance. They seem to predominate over any other breed in this part of Scotland, yet not necessarily nor advantageously. A large sheep farmer from England was staying at the inn, with whom I had much conversation on the subject. He said the Cheviots were equally adapted to the Highlands, and thought they would ultimately supplant the black faces. Although he lived in Northumberland, full two hundred miles to the south, he had rented a large sheep-walk, or mountain farm, in the Western Highlands, and had come to this section to buy or hire another tract. He kept about 4,000 sheep, and intended to introduce the Cheviots upon these Scotch holdings, as their bodies were much heavier and their wool worth nearly double that of the old black-faced breed. Sheep are the principal source of wealth in the whole of the North and West of Scotland. I was told that sometimes a flock of 20,000 is owned by one man. The lands on which they are pastured will not rent above one or two English shillings per acre; and a flock even of 1,000 requires a vast range, as may be indicated by the reply of a Scotch farmer to an English one, on being asked by the latter, “How many sheep do you allow to the acre?” “Ah, mon,” was the answer, “that’s nae the way we count in the Highlands; it’s how monie acres to the sheep.”
At about two p.m., the showers becoming less frequent, I set out with the hope of reaching Inverness before night. The wind was high, the road muddy, ordirty, as the English call that condition; and the rain frequently compelled me to seek shelter in some wayside cottage, or under the fir-trees that were planted in groves at narrow intervals. The walking was heavy and slow in face of the frequent showers, and a strong gale from the north-east; so that I was exceedingly glad to reach an inn within four miles of Inverness, where I promised myself comfortable lodgings for the night. It was a rather large, but comfortless-looking house, evidently concentrating all its entertainment for travellers in the tap-room. After considerable hesitation, the landlady consented to give me bed and board; and directed “the lassie” to make a fire for me in a large and very respectable room on the second floor. I soon began to feel quite at home by its side. My boots had leaked on the way and my feet were very wet and cold; and it was with a pleasant sense of comfort that I changed stockings, and warmed myself at the ruddy grate, while the storm seemed to increase without. After waiting about an hour for tea, I heard the lassie’s heavy footstep on the stairs; a knock—the door opens—now for the tray and the steaming tea-pot, and happy vision of bread, oatcake and Scotchscones! Alas! what a falling-off was there from this delicious expectation! The lassie had brought a severe and peremptory message from the master, who had just returned home. And she delivered it commiseratingly but decidedly. She was to tell me from him that there was nothing in the house to set before me; that the fair the day before had eaten out the whole stock of his provisions; in short, that I was to take my staff and walk on to Inverness. It was in vain that I remonstrated, pleaded and urged wet feet, the darkness, the wind and rain. “It is so,” said the lassie, “and can’t be otherwise.” She tried to encourage me to the journey by shortening the distance by half its actual miles, saying it was only two, when it was full four, and they of the longest kind. So I went out into the night in my wet clothes, and put the best face and foot to the head-wind and rain that I could bring to bear against them. Both were strong, beating and drenching; and it was so dark that I could hardly see the road. In the course of half an hour, I made the lassie’s two miles, and in another, the whole of the actual distance, and found comfortable quarters in one of the temperance inns of Inverness, reaching it between nine and ten at night. Here I spent a quiet Sabbath, which I greatly enjoyed.