On the 22d November, when Mr Erman began his slide northwards, traffic had not yet given the road that wavy configuration so uncomfortable to the bilious traveller. The post from Tobolsk to Beresov had made but one journey on the winter-track, and the sledges glided rapidly and smoothly on the almost virgin snow-way. Beyond Tugalova, a village 140 miles from Tobolsk, they travelled on the frozen Irtuish, and frequently passed the self-acting machinery used for the winter fishing. This consists of a strong pole in an inclined position, with its lower extremity frozen fast in the ice. "At the upper end of this pole was a continuation made of switches, which, bending down, reached to the surface of the ice; at that point was a hole through which was let down the hook and line. The upper part of the apparatus is seen bent down more or less according as the bait is still untouched, or as a fish pulling at it has freed a check put to the elasticity of the rod, and is thus, in consequence of its own efforts, drawn nearer to the surface of the water." The ingenuity of this contrivance would avail little, however, were not means found of rousing the sleepy sturgeon from their winter slumbers. They lie in muddy hollows in the bed of the river, quite motionless, and clustered together for the sake of warmth. To awaken them, hard balls of clay, heated in the fire, are thrown from time to time into the water, below the line. Driven from their resting-place, they swim up stream, according to their custom, and come upon the bait. This mode of fishing is very productive. Fishing, of one kind or other, is the principal occupation of the Ostyaks, in the heart of whose country, after three or four days' journey, Mr Erman found himself. The rivers abound with excellent fish—eels, especially, being very abundant, but not much eaten, although their skins are in great request as window-panes. These are rubbed with fat, to make them more transparent, but there are small roundish swellings in the skin which refract and confound the rays of light. A better substitute for glass is a flake of ice, used by the Sosnovian Ostyaks, a tribe further north. The flakes are about a foot thick, and are propped from without by a pole, whose lower end bears obliquely against the ground. The fire, kept burning in the hut, thaws the inner surface of the ice, rendering it smooth as a mirror. A whiter and brighter light penetrates through these windows than through the fish-skins, which the Sosnovians use for boots, and even for clothes. Strong and air-tight, and well rubbed with fat, they are almost as warm as fur, and better against the wet.
The commencement of a fishing season or expedition is celebrated by the Ostyaks with all manner of queer saturnalia. Although nominally Christians, and accustomed to attend church once a-year, they are very heathenish in some of their rites and ceremonies, and make a strange jumble of their old superstitions and their new faith. The priests do not invariably set them a goodexample. "Our Russian informant complained bitterly of the priest in his neighbourhood, who came into the village on holidays so drunk, that the congregation assembled to no purpose." With such pastors, no wonder if the sheep cleave to some of their ancient usages. Those who are departing on an expedition, slaughter a tame animal, and smear their faces with its blood, accompanying the sacrifice with a carousal. In one village Mr Erman found the huts remarkably empty, and was told that the men had just gone a-fishing, and that their wives were drinking brandy in the kabak or public-house. The sale of spirits in Siberia, as in all the Russian dominions, is a government monopoly, and brandy is only to be had in certain houses, to whose keepers the privilege is farmed. In a small dark room, scarcely ten paces wide, Mr Erman found ten or twelve Ostyak dames clustered round the bottle, and benevolently drunk. His account of their maudlin state is amusingly grave and sentimental. "A number of short corpulent figures, with black sparkling eyes, could be just seen, moving and mingling together, in the narrow space. They all talked with animation, and with remarkably delicate voices, which now gave expression only to soft and joyous emotions. They embraced, one after the other, the Yamschik, who entered with us; and their soft voices, now almost whining, seemed attuned, not so much to words of old acquaintance, as to the endearments of young and growing love." The ladies having emptied their purses without quenching their thirst, the good-natured German, who observed that "the pleasure of drinking had but just risen to its highest pitch," opened them a credit with the kabak-keeper. "They now took especial pains to show themselves deserving of the European treat, by good Christian observance. Devout Russians are in the habit of neutralising the Satanic operation of spirituous liquors by a rapid movement of the right hand, intended to describe the cross, or by a softly-ejaculated prayer, or merely by blowing the breath upon the glass. But the good-humoured Ostyaks, novices in Christian prayer as in drinking, made the sign of the cross to such an extent, so slowly and with such deep bowing of the body, as would be required by the church only on the most solemn occasions."
Although much engrossed by fishing, the Ostyaks do not neglect the chase. Their thick woods abound in the better kinds of fur animals, and the annual tribute of two sable skins, payable by each family to the Russian government, is not very difficult to obtain. It is seldom found necessary to pay an equivalent in other skins. Although quite the beginning of winter, Mr Erman's host, in an Ostyak village, showed him a fine sable skin, which he kept in a strong box, like a treasure, concealed in a corner of his dwelling. Its value was diminished by a yellowish tinge, ascribed to the animal's having lived in a wood where there was too much light. Besides sable and squirrel, the reindeer, the fox, the glutton, and the elk, are objects of chase. Mr Erman tried to get at the fact of the enmity said to exist between the two latter animals. The reply to his inquiries was the old story current in Europe—how the glutton leaps from a branch on the elk's neck, and keeps his seat till the death of his steed. No one, however, had seen any thing of the kind: it was matter of tradition, handed down from their dead fathers. The ermine is taken in traps. The fox is in great variety, the most esteemed being the crossed stone fox, whose colour is partly a grayish yellow, partly white, so distributed that the grayish parts unite prettily to form a cross, one bar of which extends along the back, whilst the other stretches obliquely down the middle ribs to the belly. The fur of this animal is greatly prized by the Russian clergy, for whom pelisses, covered with natural crosses, are made from it. The latitude of the town of Beresov is the headquarters of the Siberian beaver, hunted not for the fur but for the precious castoreum or beaver-stone, to which such great medical virtues are ascribed. Attempts have been made in Germany to obtain from the beavers of that country a product which might replace that of Siberia; but all in vain. The fine quality is only to be had in the far north, where, as MrErman fancifully observes, nature scatters animal perfumes in place of fragrant flowers. "The Kosaks and Russian traders have exalted the beaver-stone into a panacea.... To the sentence, 'God arose, and our enemies were scattered,' the Siberians add, very characteristically, the apocryphal interpolation, 'and we are free from headache.' To ensure this most desirable condition, every one has recourse, at home or on his travels, and with the firmest faith, to two medicines, and only two, viz., beaver-stone, or beaver-efflux, as it is here called, and sal-ammoniac." From the strength of the castoreum, the Siberians infer that other parts of the animal must possess peculiar virtues. Gouty swellings are said to subside rapidly when rubbed with the fat, and the beaver's teeth are popularly believed to cure toothach.
The beaver is the only fur animal in these latitudes that does not change its colour in the course of the year. This is probably owing to the circumstance, that in winter it dwells wholly in the water, thus enjoying a comparatively equable temperature. In the river Obi, at Beresov, the water does not usually freeze below the depth of four feet eight inches, and the beaver always has two entrances to his dwelling, one high on the bank above the stream, the other below the freezing limit. The architectural and wood-cutting habits of the animal are the same here as in America; but two assertions, new to Mr Erman, were made respecting it by the Beresov hunters. He was assured that "among beavers, as with bees and men, there are distinctions of ranks; each chief keeping a number of labourers, the toils of which he oversees and directs without taking part in them; and, again, it was stated that the contents of the castoreum bags depend on the moon." It was impossible to verify the veracity of these two statements. As regards the moon's influence, however, there is ground for a suspicion that its advantages are rather felt by the hunter, than essential to the virtues of the drug. Full moon is maintained, both by Ostyaks and Russians, to be the propitious time.
The most northern tribe of Ostyaks, who dwell between the rivers Obi and Yenisei, surpass their southern neighbours in venatorial skill, as they, in their turn, are surpassed by the Samoyedes, who live in the northernmost regions of Siberia. The men of the Yenisei kill wolves, which, on account of their long soft hair, are reckoned greatly superior to the forest and steppe wolves of middle Siberia. They are also famed for their dexterity in killing and capturing reindeer. "Tying leathern cords between the tops of the antlers of their tame deer, they turn the animals loose, one by one, in the neighbourhood of a wild herd: these do not fail to attack the strangers, and their antlers becoming entangled in the cords during the contest, they are held fast by the tame deer till the men arrive. These Ostyaks know also how to plant spring-bows, which send the arrow against the animal's breast." But the Samoyedes, besides these ordinary artifices, have other and ingenious ways, peculiar to themselves, of ensnaring and slaying the brute creation, by putting themselves as much as possible on an equality with the animals pursued, going on all-fours, and imitating them in voice and clothing. The Polar bear is a common victim to their cunning devices, and even to their open attacks; for their intimate acquaintance with the formidable beast makes them regard him as an easy prey. "The Samoyedes assert that the white bear far exceeds the black bear in ferocity and strength, whilst fully equal to it in cunning; yet, owing to his unwieldiness, they encounter it without fear, and always reckon on victory as certain. A man will often go singly against a Polar bear, eight feet long, without any other weapon than his knife, which he fastens to the end of a pole. In spring and autumn these animals are found upon the ice, near the hole, whence the seals come forth to breathe. There the bear covers himself up with snow, facing the hole, and with one paw stretched into the water." The Samoyede seal-hunters imitate the bears, and when the seal walks out upon the ice, they shove a board over the hole and capture the phoca. Concerningthe bear the Ostyaks entertain peculiar notions, viewing it with a sort of superstitious respect. "A member of the court of justice told me that, in suits between Russians and Ostyaks, it is still the custom here (at Beresov) to bring, into court the head of a bear, and that this animal, which is supposed to be omniscient, is there appealed to as a witness by the Ostyaks. In swearing, they make the gesture of eating, and call upon the bear to devour them in like manner if they do not tell the truth." Some similar reverence for Bruin exists, we believe, amongst certain North American tribes.
The draught-dogs, so faithful and useful to the northern Siberians, often receive but scurvy treatment at their masters' hands. The Ostyaks, who are honesty personified, and who laugh at the common European precautions of locking up valuables and bolting doors, cannot endure the predatory propensities of their canine allies, and fly into a passion whenever an unlucky dog sneaks into their dwelling in search of warmth or food. The poor brute is immediately a mark for the blows and kicks of every body present, the storm of abuse being justified by the cunning and greediness of its object, who, if allowed to abide in the house, would soon reduce its inmates to short commons. There is some excuse for the dogs' voracity, however; for, according to Mr Erman's account, they are considerably more than half-starved, and are rarely admitted to the fire to be fed, save when they return weary and distressed from a long journey. Severe as is the cold in those regions, protection from it is not essential to the existence, or even to the health of these hardy dogs. They sleep outside the houses, in holes which they thaw in the snow by their own warmth. At Obdorsk, where there are no pastures, and consequently no horses, four hundred dogs are kept by sixty inhabitants, and each of them is estimated to draw five poods' (two hundred pounds) weight in the loaded sledge. About eight o'clock in the evening these four hundred brutes set up a hideous howling, by way of claiming their daily meal, consisting invariably of fish, which, for them as well as for their owners' consumption, is first dried in the sun and then pounded, bones and all. Except this evening concert, a bark or a cry is rarely uttered by these dogs, unless at first starting when yoked to the sledge, or on coming across a reindeer team upon the road. Hydrophobia would be a terrible scourge in this dog-district, but the disease is fortunately unknown there. Steller has stated the same thing of the dogs of Kamschatka, and Mr Erman concludes that the malady is a result of the European system of living in towns. And as the Siberian dogs are so very moderately fed, he infers that excess, not want, generates the morbid habit. We are inclined to attribute more importance to the quality than to the quantity of the food. A fish diet may be more conducive to a wholesome state of the animals' blood than the masses of horse-flesh, paunch, and other rank and unclean offal commonly given to dogs in Europe, and especially in England, where the carnivorous addictions of the bipeds induce a belief in the propriety of unlimited flesh-feeding for quadrupeds.
The large annual importation of exiles, the system of conscription, and the advantages offered to public officers volunteering for Siberian service, are the most important and efficacious measures by which Russia proceeds gradually but steadily with the colonisation and civilisation of her Asiatic dominions. The conscripts are sometimes drawn, not only from Tobolsk, but from the remotest parts of Siberia, and the term of military service being twenty-eight years, it is probable that only a small proportion return to their native villages. Those who do are looked up to as oracles by their countrymen. They are objects of pride to their families and of respect to every body else; the place of honour is theirs by right, and they are addressed by the title of Master Soldier.[7]The ferryof the Irtuish, by Tobolsk, whose passage is considered the symbol of political death to the numerous exiles who each year cross it—bestows a step of rank on all public servants offering themselves for duty in Siberia Proper. The passion for rank, stronger in Russia than in any other country, drives hosts of officers across this important boundary; but as they are not obliged to remain more than three years, most of them return home at the end of that time. Far nearer to St Petersburg than the Asiatic frontier, civilisation is still at a very low ebb amongst the aboriginal tribes. Close to Nijni Novgorod, and within a very short distance of Moscow, the prevailing population consists of Cheremisses and Chuvashes, two tribes many of whose customs are nearly as barbarous as their names. These people are shy and timid, very slow in acquiring industrious habits, and addicted to sundry practices stamping them as semi-savages. In some places they cling to paganism, and offer up horned beasts, fruit, and vegetables to their various deities. The Chuvash ladies wear a sort of bustle of sheet copper, hanging from the girdle backwards over the hips, and having appended to it all manner of metal ornaments, making a perpetual clatter in walking. But these tribes are the pink of refinement by comparison with those in the northern portion of the Muscovite empire,—with the Ostyaks, who eat out of the same trough with their dogs, or with the Samoyedes who tear with their teeth, and swallow with infinite relish, huge lumps of raw and reeking flesh. The women of the latter people wear, as their favourite decoration, (certainly no inappropriate one) a glutton's tail, hanging down the back of their pelisse. Their hair is plaited in tails, to which all manner of lumber, brass and iron rings, and rusty musket-locks, are attached. Mr Erman's account of "Life in theChum" (the skin tent of the Samoyedes) is quaint and graphic.
"The reindeer calf, which we had got on the way, was killed and cut up in front of the tent a few minutes, after our arrival. The men now brought the bleeding flesh into the tent, and began devouring it immediately, quite raw, with the heartiest appetite. The old man was satisfied with sucking the brain from the head, whilst each of our younger comrades gnawed away at a limb of the animal, even to the bone. They laughed at the amazement which my good-humoured Esthonian attendant expressed at their blood-stained faces; and when he gave them to understand, through the interpreter, that they were no better than wolves, they seemed quite unprepared for such reproof; replying gravely, that they were at the same time no worse than the wolves, since they shared honestly with them, and left the bones and some scraps of flesh merely for their sake." In this same tent there was a little monster of a boy named Peina, whom one reads of with a sort of shudder, and with a strong suspicion that the creature was notcanny. Mr Erman himself seems to write of him with peculiar reserve, stating facts, but evidently unwilling to give an opinion as to the exact nature of the beast. Peina, who had first-rate masticators, got his share of the raw meat, which did not prevent his drawing on his mother's lacteal resources, and thumping her brutally till she honoured the draft, or handed him the pot-ladle, with which he supped scalding porridge to his great internal contentment. The travellers' bread, although frozen hard and not easy eating for adult jaws, disappeared by wholesale within those of Peina. At night the anomalous urchin was laid naked in a canoe-shaped basket, and covered up so thickly with furs that his cries seemed to come from the depths of the earth. In the morning his mother took him from his bed and set him up, still naked, before the fire to warm himself. Sugar, when first presented to him, he called snow, and threw away, but when once he had tasted the dainty, his demands for it were unceasing and peremptory. Taking into consideration the uncomfortable and uncleanly peculiarities of the Samoyedes, both young and old, we cannot feel surprised that Mr Erman's interpreter conceived an intense dislike to their society, and so managed matters that one morning,whilst the man of science was busy measuring a base-line to ascertain the heights of some mountains, his Samoyede companions suddenly disappeared with their tent and their reindeer, leaving him with three ill-equipped sledges and a few Ostyak attendants, and with no choice but to make the best of his way back to Obdorsk, whence he soon afterwards returned to Tobolsk. There he passed his Christmas, and then resumed his journey; but this time in a southerly direction. After having penetrated to sixty-seven degrees north, the region of eternal frost, he struck southwards to the latitude of the Land's End, making a dip into China, which furnishes some of the best chapters in his book.
Irkutsk, the last town of importance north of the Chinese frontier, consists of nineteen hundred houses, fifty being of brick, and the remainder of wood, and is probably the cheapest place in the civilised world as regards articles of food. We say "civilised," because, although situate in a barbarous region, and possessing a population of a very motley character, the town has much that is European in its aspect and usages. It possesses an exchange, government factories, where newly-arrived convicts are employed, a school of medicine, a gymnasium, and a handsome parade-ground. In the market, formed of wooden booths, the stores of food were enormous. Beef cost about a halfpenny a pound; of flour one penny would purchase nearly eight and a half pounds; partridges and heathfowl were sold at five farthings a-piece. But we are in haste to get amongst the Celestials. First comes a gallop across More Baikal, a large lake just beyond Irkutsk, on which the Russian government maintains an armed flotilla. This gallop is a fine bit of helter-skelter, over ice brilliant as glass. "There was no snow upon the ice, so that its surface shone like a polished mirror in the moonlight. The horses that were put under our sledges in Kadilnaya had to be held on each side till the very moment of starting, when they broke at once into full gallop, which they kept up till we landed on the further shore. We completed seven German miles in two hours and a quarter, undoubtedly the most extraordinary as well as the most speedy stage upon any route in Russia." Thence, onwards to the frontier line. "We followed the crowd that pressed forward towards a narrow door in the front of a long wooden building. This admitted us into the inner quadrangle of a Russian warehouse. A corresponding door, at the opposite side of this court, opens just upon a wooden barricade, which constitutes the barrier of China. In this there is a wide portal, ornamented with pillars, and displaying the Russian eagle above it, along with the cipher of the reigning emperor, Nicholas the First, by whom it was erected." On passing through this gate, the change is immediate and striking,—from Russian sobriety of aspect and hue to the gaudy finery of China. Maimachen, the name of the Chinese town visited by Mr Erman, has a very masquerading air to a European eye. The walls on either side of the streets do not look like house walls, the roofs being flat and invisible from the street. "Indeed, they are nearly altogether concealed by the gay-coloured paper lanterns and flags, with inscriptions on them, hung out on both sides of the way. Cords, with similar scrolls and lanterns, are likewise stretched from roof to roof across the street. These dazzling decorations stand out in glaring contrast with the dull yellow of the ground and walls. In the open crossings of the streets, which intersect each other at right angles, stood enormous chafing-dishes of cast-iron, like basins, upon a slender pedestal four feet in height. The benches by which they were surrounded were occupied by tea-drinkers, who sat smoking from the little pipes they carry at their girdles, whilst their kettles boiled at the common fire." Mr Erman had the good fortune to be on the frontier at the period of the Chinese festival of the White Moon, which is in fact the celebration of the new-year, and he had the still greater luck to be invited to share in it at Maimachen. He found the town in its gayest costume. The expenditure of flags and lanterns was prodigious. The scrolls usually contained the names of the families before whose houses they were hung out,coupled with words of auspicious import, as gladness, riches, wisdom, &c. There was a great firing of crackers and rockets, partly to celebrate the day, but chiefly in honour of the guests. Before dinner the latter were diverted by a theatrical representation. Maimachen boasts a regular company of actors, and upon this great occasion they did their best. Their orchestra was of a rather violent description, consisting of "wooden drums, shaped like casks, brass cymbals, and plates of the same metal, or gongs, held by a string and beaten with knockers, and wooden truncheons, of different sizes, which they used as castanets." There were no actresses; but the deficiency was not to be detected, the younger and more delicate men personating women to the life by the aid of wigs and long tresses of black hair, but especially by curls pressed flat upon the forehead. Masks were not used, but paint was in abundance; in some cases with a view to represent spectacles, mustachios, &c.; in others to conceal the human features, or give them a monstrous aspect. "One face was covered with coloured rays, issuing from the mouth. The same actor had also a feather on his head—in Chinese comedy the conventional mark of a ghost or apparition. Another wore a golden helmet, which constituted him a warrior. Several kept beating themselves incessantly on the hip with a cane, and by so doing intimated that they were on horseback." The play itself was more like a game of romps than any regular dramatic representation. Little was said; but, on the other hand, there was a deal of dancing, drumming, and running about. Mr Erman could make neither head nor tail of the proceedings. By way of experiment, however, he made some tender gestures to one of the pseudo-ladies, who acknowledged them in the most amiable manner, and after that the horsemen without horses paid him much attention, pointing with their sticks to his spectacles, and trying to touch them as they passed. All this greatly diverted the Mongol audience, evidently delighted to see a real counterpart to the painted spectacles of some of the actors.
The play over, Mr Erman and the other guests, preceded by the uproarious orchestra, marched off to dinner at the house of the sarguchei or chief officer of Maimachen. This gentleman, a tall, thin person of stern countenance, dressed in gray velvet, had a white button on the crown of his black felt hat, indicating his rank, and a chalcedony ring, an inch wide, upon his right-hand thumb, this being a mark of official dignity. "His nails," says our traveller, "did not extend above half an inch beyond the tips of his fingers, his personal vanity being in this respect subdued, as might be expected in a man of sober mind and mature years." The man of short nails and sober mind was exceeding hospitable, welcomed his guests in a soft and sonorous voice, and sat down with them to dinner at tables covered with scarlet cloth. The regale that followed might have caused a Europeanchefto pale his ineffectual fires from sheer envy. It began, oddly enough, with fruits, sweetmeats, and tea. These discussed, a piece of fine paper, for a napkin, and a pair of ivory chopsticks, were laid before each guest, and the tables, which were six feet wide, were covered over thickly with small porcelain plates full of all manner of complicated edibles. Fat abounded in the dressing, to neutralise which weak vinegar was used. The first series of saucers duly honoured, a second was brought in and put on the top of its predecessor. Others followed, and as the previous stratum was never removed, there soon arose upon the table a lofty pile of gastronomical curiosities. Pipes andchowsen, a Chinese spirit distilled from rice, concluded the feast, as the strangers thought;—but they were vastly mistaken. The soup course had still to come, and that was followed by an infusion of cabbage-leaves, drawn out of an urn by a cock, and drunk steaming hot. How a dinner commencing with preserved apricots, and concluding with cabbage water, agreed with German stomachs, Mr Erman does not inform us. After managing to taste upwards of a hundred dishes, he went to visit the temple of Fo, whose court was guarded by two clay lions painted green, whilst at his shrine were deposited, on account of the festive season, a prodigious heap ofdelicacies. Whole sheep without the skin, plucked chickens, pheasants, and guinea-fowls, in their natural positions, and glistening with fat, lay in hillocks at the feet of half-a-dozen grotesque and indecent idols. On a long table, a wall of offerings was built up, consisting of dressed meat and cakes of every kind, the whole surrounded with an elaborate lattice-work of white dough, five or six feet high, the openings of which were filled with dried fruits and confectionary of the finest kind. Perfumed candles burned before the disgusting idols, and brass discs hung from the ceiling, and were struck with clappers when any bearing offerings approached.
The contents of the shops at Maimachen gave Mr Erman a very high opinion of Chinese skill and ingenuity. He saw scientific instruments of great merit, very clever clockwork, paintings drawn and finished with the greatest care, (although highly objectionable by the indelicacy of their subjects,) porcelain, sculpture, bowls, vases, and figures of various kinds of stone. "There were large spherical bowls, and oval vases, of chalcedony and agate, and reliefs cut in cornelians, nephrit, and other coloured stones. Of the latter kind, the most common are flowers, the several parts of which are formed of various and tastefully selected stones, and then cemented with mastic on a foundation of stone. For many of these articles, highly elaborate, and at the same time quite useless, the merchants of Maimachen asked four thousand tea-bricks, (a standard of currency,) or about two thousand five hundred Russian dollars. In this we saw a proof of luxury and profuse expenditure amongst the Chinese. Many other branches of industry indicated enervation and effeminacy of manners:" musk, for instance, and other perfumes, enclosed in little bags, and considered indispensable appendages to a young man's dress. A curious plaything, considered equally essential, is composed of two polished balls, about an inch in diameter, which the men always carry with them. "These are taken in the right hand, at idle times, and rolled and rubbed one over the other with the fingers; the noise they make amuses, and perhaps there is something agreeable also in the feel of them. Here, in Maimachen, I saw some of these balls made of glass, striped green and white, and, hollow, containing within them a little lump of clay, which rattled with every motion." The musk and perfumes, however abundantly used, are all insufficient to counteract a very peculiar and unpleasant smell attributed by Mr Erman to the Chinese. He first perceived it at the theatre, and took it to arise from an inordinate addiction to leeks on the part of actors and audience, whose breath and clothes were infected with the disagreeable odour of that bulb. But he was subsequently induced to regard it as a national taint, a Chinese exhalation, not to be overcome by any amount of artificial perfume, and whose cause is matter of inquiry for the chemist. Doubtless the Chinese would get rid of it, were it possible so to do, for the care they bestow on personal beauty and elegance is very great. Another striking defect in the inhabitants of Maimachen is to be found in their black and decayed teeth. The cause of this Mr Erman suspects to be the solution of copper, produced by the empyreumatic oil of tobacco in the bronze mouth-pieces of their pipes.
At a post-house upon his road back to Irkutsk, Mr Erman and his party were met by a deputation from no less a personage than the Khamba Lama, the high-priest of the Buraets, a Mongolian tribe closely allied in language and customs to the natives of the northern provinces of China. The embassy consisted of four lamas or priests attired in scarlet robes and bright yellow hats. They brought an invitation to a grand festival, which was readily accepted,—and a very remarkable business it proved to be. The discordant theatrical music at Maimachen was a mere trifle compared to the monstrous noise made by the Buraet kettle-drums, so large that they were dragged upon four wheels, and by copper trumpets ten feet long, borne by one man and blown by another. "The grave prelude of the wind instruments was like a roaring hurricane, and the chorus of brass gongs, drums, &c., resembled the crash of a falling mountain." Inthis place we find some curious and interesting details respecting the Buddhist religion and priesthood, after which Mr Erman returns to Irkutsk, and resumes his journey eastward, through the valley of the Lena, to the land of the Tunguzes and Yakuts. The chief town of the latter people, Yakutsk, is two degrees to the south of Beresov, which Mr Erman had visited on his way to Obdorsk; but, nevertheless, the cold is far more severe at the former place, where frozen earth is found near the surface all the year round, and the same condition of the ground continues to the depth of six hundred feet. "The inhabitants of the Swiss Alps would not unjustly think themselves lost if they were compelled to live at the height of ten thousand feet, or two thousand three hundred feet above the hospital of the great St Bernard, and there to support and clothe themselves by keeping cattle, and with the productions of the surrounding mountains; yet they would then, and not until they arrived at that height, be settled on ground having the same temperature which I found here amongst the Yakuts, who are rich in cattle. It would seem, therefore, as if that succeeded in Siberia which was impossible in Europe, if we did not take into account that the same constant temperature of the ground may be made up at different places of very different elements." Notwithstanding the severity of their climate and resistance of their frozen soil, the Yakuts are a prosperous people, having attained a considerable degree of civilisation, and amongst whom crime is rare, although the influence of Russian example and contact daily renders it less so. There is much interest in Mr Erman's account of them, and of the wandering Tunguzses, the last tribe with whom he consorted before his arrival at Okhotsk. Here his reception was not very flattering. "We were looked at with much curiosity from all the house-doors on the way, for the devout elders of the place had been filled with anxious forebodings by the accounts of the arrival of a foreigner. They signed themselves with the cross whenever he was mentioned. And I learned to-day that they had fears of war, conscription, and other calamities." Nor was their alarm abated by learning that "the heathen foreigner wore snow-shades (spectacles) even in thick weather, and that he carried a dog in the sledge with him. Thus the return to civilised man was marked in the first instance by the encounter of intolerant superstition, and it was necessary to forget the nobler traits of the wilderness before we could become reconciled to the Russians of Okhotsk." At which place Mr Erman's narrative ceases. We await with interest its promised continuation—an account of his adventures in Kamschatka, California, and the Pacific.
Lays of the Deer Forest, with Sketches of Olden and Modern Deer Hunting, &c. &c.ByJohn SobieskiandCharles Edward Stuart. 2 vols., post 8vo. William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh and London.
We would that, like stout Lord Percy of yore, it were in our power at this present moment to chronicle a vow that we should forthwith take our pastime for three summer days on the pleasant hills of Scotland. Alas for us, that we are doomed, from divers causes, to absent ourselves from felicity awhile, and, amidst the heat and noise of London, listen with intense disgust to the brutal bayings of the Chartists! This very night, we hear, the ignoble hunt is to be up in Bishop Bonner's fields. Crowds of dirty, unshaven, squalid ruffians, who have not the strength to use the pike, but the will to employ the knife of the assassin—fellows whom even Cobden would be chary to recognise as hisquondamsupporters, defenders, and dupes—not unmingled with foreign propagandists, whom even France, in the fury of her revolutionary tornado, repudiates—are thronging to the place of rendezvous, where, doubtless, their souls will be worthily regaled by the ravings of some rascally vendors of sedition, blasphemy, and treason. Then will ensue the usual scene which for nights has disgraced the metropolis. Some unfortunate tradesman, whose curiosity has been stronger than his prudence, will be fixed upon as a "special" or a spy—the cowards, presuming upon their numbers, and the apparent absence of all executive power, will attempt a deliberate murder—the police will sally from their hiding-place to the rescue—there will be a storm of brickbats, a determined charge with the baton, a shop or two will be gutted, some score of craniums cracked, and to-morrow morning the greasy patriots, at the bar of Bow Street, will read their recantation, and, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, protest their loyalty to the Queen. Such are the pastimes of merry England in the month of June, and such the results of that enlightened policy which yields every thing to popular clamour, adopts the most fatal delusions as distinct principles of right, and then shrinks, trembling and aghast, from the inevitable result of their development!
We do not want—in this article, at least—to be political, and we vow that we took up our pen three minutes ago in a spirit of perfect good-will and harmony towards all manner of men. But the hoarse bawling of these cannibals has somewhat ruffled our temper, dispelled for the moment our dreams of the mountains, and forced us back to the sterner realities of popular tumult and the truncheon. If this sort of thing lasts, we shall indubitably emigrate. Assassination, as recommended by the modern Hamilcar, is by no manner of means to our taste. Our opinion coincides with that of the gracious Captain of Knockdunder, and, were we promoted to a judicial function, "the chiel they ca' the Fustler" should ere long fustle in a tow. Neither are we at all disposed to fraternise with the milder Cuffey—a fellow, by the way, who is not without some redeeming scintillations of humour. We have no wish to be introduced to him even at a mesmeric soiree; and, acting upon the principle of Jacquey, we shall pray heaven to decrease our acquaintance, and put the Tweed as speedily as possible between ourselves and the partisans of O'Connor. We hope the Lord Provost, though discomfited in his Police Bill, has been looking after the tranquillity of the Calton. If not, we must move further north, and finally locate ourselves somewhere in the vicinity of Dalnacardoch. The deuce is in it, if the revolutionary mania has penetrated to that sequestred region! No son of the mountains has ever yet given in his adhesion to the Charter—treason hath not stained the tartan, and no republican pins have ever been exposed beneath the checkered margin of the kilt. There is loyalty at least in the land which was traversed by Montrose and Dundee;and without the slightest fear that any of the numerous points of that interesting but incomprehensible public document, which Mr Joseph Hume proposes to condense, shall be unduly obtruded on our notice, we shall at once exchange our London dwelling for the more pleasant bothy of the hills.
As for a companion, we shall seek none better—for we could not find one—than this last publication of the Stuarts. And here, once for all, let us draw a line of distinction betwixt the poetry and the prose of these very remarkable brothers. We have not the remotest intention of sitting in judgment on the "Lays," or of testing the poetical merits of John Sobieski and Charles Edward, either by the canons of Longinus, or by that superior code of literary laws which Maga has promulgated to the world. The poems, which occupy exclusively the first of these volumes, are, with one exception, fugitive in their nature, and appear to have been penned rather from occasional impulse, than from any deliberate intention of publication. Accordingly, we find that most of them relate to topics personal to the authors themselves—and with these we do not meddle. In others, there are flashes of the deep national spirit which still survives—though our rulers do not seem to mark it—in Scotland: indignation at the neglect with which too many of our national institutions have been treated, and mournful lamentings over the misfortunes of a former age. But the impulse which leads to the composition of poetry does not always imply its accomplishment. Poetry, as an art in which excellence can only be obtained by a combination of the simple and the sublime, requires a study far more intense and serious than the mere critic is apt to allow. In a former Number we devoted an article to an exposition of those principles, which are absolutely invariable in their application, and which must be thoroughly understood, if they are not intuitive to the poet; and, being in no mood for repetition, we shall simply say that we adhere to our recorded doctrines. The Stuarts, it must be confessed, are more successful with the rifle than the lyre. We would far rather meet them in the garb of the forester, than in the more fantastic fashion of the minstrel: be theirs the lot of Ryno the hunter, not the darkened destiny of the bard.
Do, therefore, what you please with the first volume—pack it up in your portmanteau, or place it on the shelf beside Chambers' History and the collections of good old Bishop Forbes. But if you profess to be a deer-stalker—though we fear your profession to be false—or if you are but an aspiring neophyte, and hankerer after that proud position—or if you merely bound your aspirations towards the compassing of the death of a roebuck—or if simply you have a keen and a kindly eye for nature, and are a lover of the sylvan solitudes—in one or other, or all of these characters, we pray you to deal more leisurely with the other tone, which is the Hunter's Vade-Mecum, the best guide ever yet published to the haunts of the antlered monarch.
We are fond of Mr Scrope, and we have an excessive partiality for St John. Two finer fellows never shouldered a rifle; and our conscience does not accuse us of having used too superlative, in epithet in their praise. This was the more creditable on our part, because we knew them both to be Southrons; and while freely admitting the sportsman-like qualities of the one, and the strong picturesque style and spirit of the other, we felt a slight, passing, but pardonable pang of jealousy, that they should have stepped in, and pre-occupied the native field. Where, thought we, are our Scottish deer-stalkers? Can the lads not handle a pen as well as touch a trigger? Will none of them, who have been trained to the hills since they were striplings, stand forth for the honour of Albyn, and try a match with these fustian-coated circumventers of the stag? By the shade of Domhnull Mac-Fhionnlaidlhnan Dan, we blush for the literary reputation of our country, and almost wish that we were young enough ourselves to take the hill against the invading Sassenach! At length—and we are delighted to see it—the reproach has been swept away. Two stalwart champions of the forest have risen in the persons of the Stuarts—theyhave encountered the Englishmen with their own weapons, and, in our opinion, beaten them hollow.
Mr Scrope had the merit of producing the earliest work in which deer-stalking was treated as a distinct and peculiar branch of the art venatory. We speak of it now from recollection; for our copy, somewhat frayed and worn by the fingers of ambitious sportsmen, is in the snug corner of a library some hundred miles to the northward. But we remember well the Waltonian character of the book—the professional style in which the elder practitioner enforced his precepts upon the dawning intellect of his companion; and the adventures, neither few nor feeble, which were depicted in the heart of the Atholl forest. Taken as the production of an English sportsman, Mr Scrope's book is highly creditable: considered as the manual of a deer-stalker, it is at the best indifferent. Nor, indeed, could it well be otherwise. Not until middle age, if we are informed rightly, did Mr Scrope first send a ball into the ample shoulder of a hart: his young blood never beat tumultuously in his veins at the sight of the mighty creature rolling over upon the heather, and its antlers buried in the moss. His boyish enthusiasm, we fear, was expended upon game of less mark and likelihood—partridges, perchance, as they whirred from the turnips, or possibly he was "entered" with the hare. Wordsworth's maxim, that the boy is the father of the man, is peculiarly applicable in sporting matters. Upon the character of the country in which the latent spirit of the hunter is earliest developed, depends, in a great degree, his future success, and certainly his accomplishment as an Orion. The young squire, who has been brought up in the faith of Sykes, who never stirs abroad without a keeper, and who is accustomed to see his delicate pointers execute their manœuvres with almost mathematical precision on the flat stubbles of Norfolk, labours under a huge disadvantage in the higher branches of his science, compared with the Highland boy who has received his education on the hill. What though the single barrel of the latter be a clumsy implement indeed in competition with the Purdie which decorates the shoulder of the former—though the hound that sometimes attends him, though oftener he is alone, never slept a single night in a kennel, and is the ruggedest specimen of his kind—still he is in the enjoyment of advantages incomparably superior for the development of all his faculties, and the sharpening of every sense. The triumph of the sportsman does not lie so much in the killing as in the finding of his game. Were it otherwise, the pigeon-slayer of Battersea or the Red-house would have just claims to the honours of Sir Tristram, and the annihilator of poultry to rank with the Nimrods of the world. Our young friend the Squire shoots well—that is to say, he can kill with reasonable precision: but, after all, what is he save an instrument? Take Ponto away from him, tie up Juno, send a bullet through the brain of Basta, and a pretty beggarly account you will have of it in the evening when we come to the emptying of the bags! Or lead him down to the sea-shore, and show him a whaup, which in the English tongue is denominated a curlew; request him to use all his possible skill to compass possession of the bird; but do not set your heart on having it, else, as sure as fate, you are doomed to disappointment. Whaup is quite alive to his own interests, and by no means unsuspicious of the Saxon, who advances straight towards him with a hypocritical air of unconcern. Had the Highland lad been there, what a difference! He would have dropped like a stone behind that rock, wriggled like a serpent over the sand, kept the bird between himself and the sea, taken advantage of every inequality in the ground, discerned from the attitude of his quarry whether its suspicions were aroused or not, and in ten minutes a pluff of white smoke and a report would have announced its extermination. As it is, the curlew remains apparently unconcerned until the Lord of the Manor has reduced the intermediate distance to a hundred and twenty yards, and then, with a shrill whistle, takes flight along the margin of the tide. Or set him to stalk a blackcock, perched high of an Autumn morning on a dyke. How clumsily he sets about it! how miserableis his stoop! how wretchedly he calculates his distance! That wide-awake hat, which, for the sake of symmetry, he has been pleased to surmount with a feather, is as conspicuous to the country for miles round, and of course to the blackcock, as was the white plume of Murat in the field of battle, and as potent to effect a clearance, of which we presently have ocular demonstration.
We contend, therefore, that it is extremely difficult for the man, be he ever so addicted to field-sports, who has been educated in a cultivated country, to disembarrass himself of the artificial habits which he is tolerably sure to acquire. His trolling may be excellent—indeed, English gentlemen are, generally speaking, first-rate shots—but he will be deficient in the science of the naturalist, and in that singular acuteness of perception which can hardly be gained save by an early intimacy with nature, on the mountain, the moor, or in the glen. No subsequent education or experience can make up for the normal deficiency, least of all in the pursuit of an animal so wary, so instinctive, and so peculiar in its habits as the deer. Of course we do not mean to deny that there is much which may be learned. What a pointer is to partridges, some wary and experienced forester may often be made to the deer; and if you put yourself under his tuition, and scrupulously obey his orders, you may very possibly succeed in attaining the object of your desires. Nor indeed can you do better, up to a certain point, notwithstanding the strictures of the Stuarts, who are, we think, unnecessarily wroth at the system which would call in the aid of any supplementary assistance. We hope no gentleman who has rented a forest for the ensuing season will be deterred from following the feet of a Highland Gamaliel on account of any ridicule which may be attached to the fact of his having been "taken up" to a deer. If he should rashly attempt stalking at his own hand, without any preliminary instruction, we should be sorry to found our hopes of dinner on the chance of his acquisition of a haunch.
"When advancing upon deer [say our authors]—except in strange ground—the forester, or any other attendant, should be left behind a stone, or in some covert, before the stalker commences his approach; not from any recognition of the false reproach made against the guides by Mr Scrope, but because there is no occasion for an assistant, and the action of one has more celerity, independence, and security from discovery, than when a greater number are in motion. The charge made by the author of 'The Art of Deer-stalking,' that the forester is often in the way, and sometimes obstructs the shot, is not true, unless in instances of inexperienced and awkward individuals, who are not to be found among that class of foresters of whom the guest of theAtholl Forestproposes his remarks. With a MacKenzie, or a MacDonald, a Catanach, and a MacHardie, the asserted inconvenience must proceed from the ignorance or maladroitness of the gray worm which crawls at his back, and who often does not know what he is doing, or where he is going, with his ideaségaréon his sensitive knees and varnished Purdie, unconscious of what he ought to do and nervous for what he ought not, flurried with eagerness and disgusted with his posture, and who, never seeing a deer except once in the year, is led up to him like a 'blind burraid,' by one whose language he scarcely understands. In general, therefore, the embarrassments of the 'creep' are those of the superior, who is frequently so ignorant, unpractised, and dependent upon the guidance of the forester, that to be 'taken up to the deer' has become the modern forest phrase for the approach of the sportsman. This contemptible term, and its contemptible practice, has only been introduced within the last quarter century, since the prevalence of stalking gentlemen utterly unacquainted with the ground and pursuit of deer. Of old, the 'Seàlgair uasal nam bèann' was initiated to the hill when yet but a 'biorach' of a stalker; and when he became a matured hill-man, he should no more have suffered himself to be—'taken upto his deer' by an attendant, than a Melton fox-hunter to be trained after the hounds by a whipper-in with a leading rein.—What should have been the sentiments of the old chiefs and Uaislean of the last century—the Dukes of Atholl and Gordon—Glengarrie—John Aberardar—Iain dubh Bhail-a-Chroäin—to hear a deer-hunter speak of being 'taken up to his deer!'—Certainly that he was a noble 'amadan' or 'gille-crùbach,' who had not the faculties or the limbs to act for himself.—But this is only one of the many instances for which the hills of Gael may mourn with the mountains of Gilboa—'Quomodo ceciderunt robusti!'"
"When advancing upon deer [say our authors]—except in strange ground—the forester, or any other attendant, should be left behind a stone, or in some covert, before the stalker commences his approach; not from any recognition of the false reproach made against the guides by Mr Scrope, but because there is no occasion for an assistant, and the action of one has more celerity, independence, and security from discovery, than when a greater number are in motion. The charge made by the author of 'The Art of Deer-stalking,' that the forester is often in the way, and sometimes obstructs the shot, is not true, unless in instances of inexperienced and awkward individuals, who are not to be found among that class of foresters of whom the guest of theAtholl Forestproposes his remarks. With a MacKenzie, or a MacDonald, a Catanach, and a MacHardie, the asserted inconvenience must proceed from the ignorance or maladroitness of the gray worm which crawls at his back, and who often does not know what he is doing, or where he is going, with his ideaségaréon his sensitive knees and varnished Purdie, unconscious of what he ought to do and nervous for what he ought not, flurried with eagerness and disgusted with his posture, and who, never seeing a deer except once in the year, is led up to him like a 'blind burraid,' by one whose language he scarcely understands. In general, therefore, the embarrassments of the 'creep' are those of the superior, who is frequently so ignorant, unpractised, and dependent upon the guidance of the forester, that to be 'taken up to the deer' has become the modern forest phrase for the approach of the sportsman. This contemptible term, and its contemptible practice, has only been introduced within the last quarter century, since the prevalence of stalking gentlemen utterly unacquainted with the ground and pursuit of deer. Of old, the 'Seàlgair uasal nam bèann' was initiated to the hill when yet but a 'biorach' of a stalker; and when he became a matured hill-man, he should no more have suffered himself to be—'taken upto his deer' by an attendant, than a Melton fox-hunter to be trained after the hounds by a whipper-in with a leading rein.—What should have been the sentiments of the old chiefs and Uaislean of the last century—the Dukes of Atholl and Gordon—Glengarrie—John Aberardar—Iain dubh Bhail-a-Chroäin—to hear a deer-hunter speak of being 'taken up to his deer!'—Certainly that he was a noble 'amadan' or 'gille-crùbach,' who had not the faculties or the limbs to act for himself.—But this is only one of the many instances for which the hills of Gael may mourn with the mountains of Gilboa—'Quomodo ceciderunt robusti!'"
Far are we from insinuating that Mr Scrope is at all liable to the remarks contained in the foregoing extract. On the contrary, we hold him to be a man of vigorous mind and acute eye, and any thing but a contemptible foe to the stags, after the measure of his own experience. If he is deficient at all, it is in the poetry and higher mysteries of the art, which hardly would be expected from a stranger, whose initiation was necessarily late. Waverley, though a respectable shot, and a man of literary taste, would, we apprehend, have described the driving and disposition of the tainchel less effectively, and certainly far less truly, than Fergus M'Ivor; so great a difference is there betwixt the craft of the master and his pupil. Let Mr Scrope, therefore, rest content with the laurels he has won, and the trophies he has taken from the forest. Not unforgotten is his name in Atholl, nor unloved. Let him be a guide to the Southren, but he must not dream of rivalling the Stuarts in woodcraft, or Stoddart in the science of piscation.
Of Mr St John's "Wild Sports of the Highlands," we have already spoken in terms of unqualified praise. A more delightful volume was never adapted for the pocket of the sportsman: a more truthful or observant work has seldom issued from the pen of the naturalist. His sketches and pictures of deer-stalking we allow to be as perfect in their way as the compositions of Landseer; and having said so much, we shall not make any further call upon that gentleman's blushes. Still, even his experience is limited, and his knowledge imperfect. He has given us a brilliant account of his own exploits upon the hill, but he has not lived long enough in the wilder haunts of the deer accurately to understand their habits. Not so our authors, who for years have been denizens of the mountains, speaking the tongue of the Gael, wearing the native garb, and following the chase with an ardour and enthusiasm unparalleled in these degenerate days.
Gentlemen who complain of the inferior accommodation afforded by some of the more distant hostelries of Scotland—who are shocked at the absence of warming-pans, and tremulously nervous about your sanatory condition, when subjected to the enormity of damp sheets—how would you like to spend a few nights on the misty hill-side, or even in the hut of the hunters? We shall take you if you please to the latter spot, merely premising that, in order to reach it, we must cross the Findhorn, now roaring down in spate. A terrible stream is that Findhorn, as Mr St John well knows; but we question whether he ever ventured to ford it on the rise, as was done by one of the Stuarts. For the information of distant friends, we beg to put our imprimatur to the following description of this furious Highland flood, which rolled between the residence of the hunters and their favourite ground.
"That stream, however, which was so calm, and bright, and sunny, when the otters floated down its current in a still summer's morning, was a fierce and terrible enemy in its anger; and, for a great part of the year, the dread of its uncertainty and danger was a formidable cause for the preservation of that profound solitude of the forest which so long made it the sanctuary of deer, roe, and every kind of wild game. The rapidity with which the river comes down, the impassable height to which it rises in an incredibly short time, its incertitude and fury, would render it an object of care to bold forders and boatmen; but with the peasants of the 'laich,' unaccustomed, like the Highlanders, to wrestle with a mountain torrent, and, excepting in rare instances, unable to swim or manage a coble, it inspires a dread, almost amounting to awe, and none except ourselves ventured to keep a boat above the fishing-station of Slui. Pent within a channel of rocks from fifty to a hundred and eighty feet in height, the rise of the water is rapidly exaggerated by the incapability of diffusion; and the length of its course sometimes concealing beyond the horizon the storms by which it is swelled at its source, its floods then descend with unexpected violence. Frequently when, excepting a low wreath upon Beann-Drineachain, the sun is shining in a cloudless sky, and the water scarce ripples over the glittering ford, a deep hollow sound—a dull approaching roar may be heard in the gorges of the river; and almost before the wading fisherman can gain the shore, a bank of water, loaded with trees, and rocks, and wreck, will come down three—four—five feet abreast—sweeping all before itin a thunder of foam and ruin. In ordinary cases, after two days of rain, the stream will rise twenty or thirty feet—ithasrisen nearly ten fathoms in its rocky gulf; and once upon this occasion it mounted fifteen feet in a quarter of an hour. When the dawn broke, it appeared sweeping through the trees, which the evening before hung fifty feet above its brink—a black roaring tempest loaded with ruins and debris, from which were seen to rise at times the white skeletons of trees peeled of their bark, beams and couples of houses—a cart—a door—a cradle, hurrying and tilting through the foam and spray, like the scattered 'floatsome' of a wreck."It may be judged how far it was convenient in winter to hunt a forest separated by such a boundary, of which the nearest certain passage was by a bridge two miles to the west, with frequently the view of hunting three miles to the east. Often we have gone out in a clear sapphire morning, when there was scarce a ripple on the pools, and the water on the ford was not over our 'glunachan,' and when we returned at evening, and approached through the dark veil of pines which descended to the river, have heard a roar as if the world was rolling together down the black trough before us, and as we came out on the bank, found a furious tempest of water, tumbling, and plunging, and leaping, over stock and rock twenty feet upon the clatach, where we had left it whimpering among the pebbles in the morning; while, in the far, deep, birch-embowered channel, where the stream was then so still and placid that you could only guess its course by the bright glistening eye which here and there blinked between the trees and stones,—now it came yelling, and skirling, and clamouring down the rocks and falls, as if all the air was full of gibbering, babbling, laughing demons, who were muttering, and yammering, and prophesying, and hooting, at what you were going to do, if you attempted to cross."
"That stream, however, which was so calm, and bright, and sunny, when the otters floated down its current in a still summer's morning, was a fierce and terrible enemy in its anger; and, for a great part of the year, the dread of its uncertainty and danger was a formidable cause for the preservation of that profound solitude of the forest which so long made it the sanctuary of deer, roe, and every kind of wild game. The rapidity with which the river comes down, the impassable height to which it rises in an incredibly short time, its incertitude and fury, would render it an object of care to bold forders and boatmen; but with the peasants of the 'laich,' unaccustomed, like the Highlanders, to wrestle with a mountain torrent, and, excepting in rare instances, unable to swim or manage a coble, it inspires a dread, almost amounting to awe, and none except ourselves ventured to keep a boat above the fishing-station of Slui. Pent within a channel of rocks from fifty to a hundred and eighty feet in height, the rise of the water is rapidly exaggerated by the incapability of diffusion; and the length of its course sometimes concealing beyond the horizon the storms by which it is swelled at its source, its floods then descend with unexpected violence. Frequently when, excepting a low wreath upon Beann-Drineachain, the sun is shining in a cloudless sky, and the water scarce ripples over the glittering ford, a deep hollow sound—a dull approaching roar may be heard in the gorges of the river; and almost before the wading fisherman can gain the shore, a bank of water, loaded with trees, and rocks, and wreck, will come down three—four—five feet abreast—sweeping all before itin a thunder of foam and ruin. In ordinary cases, after two days of rain, the stream will rise twenty or thirty feet—ithasrisen nearly ten fathoms in its rocky gulf; and once upon this occasion it mounted fifteen feet in a quarter of an hour. When the dawn broke, it appeared sweeping through the trees, which the evening before hung fifty feet above its brink—a black roaring tempest loaded with ruins and debris, from which were seen to rise at times the white skeletons of trees peeled of their bark, beams and couples of houses—a cart—a door—a cradle, hurrying and tilting through the foam and spray, like the scattered 'floatsome' of a wreck.
"It may be judged how far it was convenient in winter to hunt a forest separated by such a boundary, of which the nearest certain passage was by a bridge two miles to the west, with frequently the view of hunting three miles to the east. Often we have gone out in a clear sapphire morning, when there was scarce a ripple on the pools, and the water on the ford was not over our 'glunachan,' and when we returned at evening, and approached through the dark veil of pines which descended to the river, have heard a roar as if the world was rolling together down the black trough before us, and as we came out on the bank, found a furious tempest of water, tumbling, and plunging, and leaping, over stock and rock twenty feet upon the clatach, where we had left it whimpering among the pebbles in the morning; while, in the far, deep, birch-embowered channel, where the stream was then so still and placid that you could only guess its course by the bright glistening eye which here and there blinked between the trees and stones,—now it came yelling, and skirling, and clamouring down the rocks and falls, as if all the air was full of gibbering, babbling, laughing demons, who were muttering, and yammering, and prophesying, and hooting, at what you were going to do, if you attempted to cross."
We pray you at your leisure to read on, and you will presently see what peril our authors underwent at the fearful fords of the Findhorn. Once or twice in our life we have been in similar jeopardy, and we can testify with unction to the singular sensations which beset a man in the midst of a roaring river, when the rapids are shooting away below, and the boulder-stones rolling beneath his feet. We pass over some perilous instances of adventure, which at length became so frequent as to lead to the construction of the hut.
"Such continually and unexpectedly were the ferries of the Findhorn, and many such escapes we had, in daylight and in darkness.—Twice I have been swamped, often nearly upset, and more than once carried off my legs in the fords; and—I say it with humility, and always under the mercy of heaven—that I owed rescue either to actual swimming, or to the confidence inspired by that power when struggling with the strong and terrible enemy."This continual exposure to battle and disappointment, however, became at length too vexatious an abridgment of sport and certainty; and as I would—and often—have made my bed under a fir tree rather than go round by the bridge of Daltullich, I resolved upon another alternative—to build in the forest a 'bothan an t-sealgair,' or 'hunter's hut,' where we might lodge for the night when it was impossible to cross the water."There is a high and beautiful craig at the crook of the river near the 'Little Eas,'—a precipice eighty feet in height, and then like a vast stone helmet crowned with a feathery plume of wood, which nodded over its brow. From its top you might drop a bullet into the pool below, but on the south side there is an accessible woody bank, down which, by planting your heels firmly in the soil and among the roots of the trees, there is a descent to a deep but smooth and sandy ford. Upon the summit of the rock there is, or there was—my blessing upon it!—a thick and beautiful bird-cherry, which hung over the craig, and whose pendant branches, taking root on the edge of the steep, shot up again like the banana, and formed a natural arbour and close trellis along the margin of the precipice. Behind its little gallery, there is a mighty holly, under which the snow rarely lays in winter, or the rain drops in summer. Beneath the shelter of this tree, and within the bank at its foot, I dug a little cell large enough to hold two beds, a bench, a hearth, a table, and a 'kistie.' The sides were lined with deals well caulked with moss, and the roof was constructed in the same manner, but covered with a tarpauling, which, lying in the slope of the surrounding bank, carried off any water which might descend from thaw or rain, and, when the autumn trees shook off their leaves, could not be distinguished from the adjoining bank. Its door was on the brink of the craig, veiled by the thick bird-cherries on the edge of theprecipice; and the entrance to the little path, which ascended from either side upon the brow of the rock, was concealed by a screen of birch and hazel, beneath which the banks were covered with primroses, wood-anemones, and forget-me-not. Bowers of honeysuckle and wild-roses twined among the lower trees; and even in the tall pines above, the rose sometimes climbed to the very top, where all its blossoms, clustering to the sun, hung in white tassels out of the dark-blue foliage. There the thrush and the blackbird sang at morning and evening, and the owl cried at night, and the buck belled upon the Torr.—Blessed, wild, free, joyous dwelling, which we shall never see again!"
"Such continually and unexpectedly were the ferries of the Findhorn, and many such escapes we had, in daylight and in darkness.—Twice I have been swamped, often nearly upset, and more than once carried off my legs in the fords; and—I say it with humility, and always under the mercy of heaven—that I owed rescue either to actual swimming, or to the confidence inspired by that power when struggling with the strong and terrible enemy.
"This continual exposure to battle and disappointment, however, became at length too vexatious an abridgment of sport and certainty; and as I would—and often—have made my bed under a fir tree rather than go round by the bridge of Daltullich, I resolved upon another alternative—to build in the forest a 'bothan an t-sealgair,' or 'hunter's hut,' where we might lodge for the night when it was impossible to cross the water.
"There is a high and beautiful craig at the crook of the river near the 'Little Eas,'—a precipice eighty feet in height, and then like a vast stone helmet crowned with a feathery plume of wood, which nodded over its brow. From its top you might drop a bullet into the pool below, but on the south side there is an accessible woody bank, down which, by planting your heels firmly in the soil and among the roots of the trees, there is a descent to a deep but smooth and sandy ford. Upon the summit of the rock there is, or there was—my blessing upon it!—a thick and beautiful bird-cherry, which hung over the craig, and whose pendant branches, taking root on the edge of the steep, shot up again like the banana, and formed a natural arbour and close trellis along the margin of the precipice. Behind its little gallery, there is a mighty holly, under which the snow rarely lays in winter, or the rain drops in summer. Beneath the shelter of this tree, and within the bank at its foot, I dug a little cell large enough to hold two beds, a bench, a hearth, a table, and a 'kistie.' The sides were lined with deals well caulked with moss, and the roof was constructed in the same manner, but covered with a tarpauling, which, lying in the slope of the surrounding bank, carried off any water which might descend from thaw or rain, and, when the autumn trees shook off their leaves, could not be distinguished from the adjoining bank. Its door was on the brink of the craig, veiled by the thick bird-cherries on the edge of theprecipice; and the entrance to the little path, which ascended from either side upon the brow of the rock, was concealed by a screen of birch and hazel, beneath which the banks were covered with primroses, wood-anemones, and forget-me-not. Bowers of honeysuckle and wild-roses twined among the lower trees; and even in the tall pines above, the rose sometimes climbed to the very top, where all its blossoms, clustering to the sun, hung in white tassels out of the dark-blue foliage. There the thrush and the blackbird sang at morning and evening, and the owl cried at night, and the buck belled upon the Torr.—Blessed, wild, free, joyous dwelling, which we shall never see again!"
A lovely place indeed must that have been in the pleasant days of summer! We do not wonder at the fondness with which the Stuarts speak of that lodge in the wilderness, reared as it was in the midst of the most beautiful and romantic scenery which exists within the compass of the seas of Britain, or, for aught we know, elsewhere. Years have rolled by since we last set foot upon the banks of Findhorn; but never shall we forget the glories of that deep ravine, or the noble woods of Altyre, still possessed by the descendants of the princely Comyns. Did we not expect to be summoned out within half an hour to contribute to the safety of the realm by breaking the head of a Chartist, we should ourselves launch out into description, and try conclusions with Horatio M'Culloch. But, after all, it would be a work of supererogation. Mr St John has already illustrated most charmingly that abode of the faithful; and he will not be displeased to see that, even in painting, he has met with formidable rivals. Rarely, indeed, have we met with any thing so perfect as the following sketch:—
"Near Slui on the Findhorn there is a range of precipices and wooded steeps crowned with pine, and washed by a clear and rippling stream of the river, through which there is an excellent ford, very well known to the roe, for escaping to the woods of Slui when pressed by the hounds. This reach is called the Ledanreich, from a remarkable craig, a sheer naked even wall of sandstone, lying in horizontal strata eighty or ninety feet high: At the eastern extremity of this rock there is a great division, partly separated from the main curtain by a deep woody slope, which dips into the precipice with little more inclination from the perpendicular than to admit of careful footing. In the face of the divided craig, the decomposition of the softer stone between the courses of the strata has wasted it away into narrow galleries, which, passing behind the tall pillars of the pines growing from the rifts and ledges, extend along the face of the precipice, veiled by a deep tapestry of ivy, which spreads over the mighty wall of rock, and hangs from shelf to shelf over the covered ways. Beyond the craigs, the bank of the forest, an abrupt steep, covered with oak and copsewood, slopes down to the river, its brow darkened with a deep-blue cloud of pines, and its descent carpeted with moss, primroses, and pyrolas, here and there hollowed into quaint 'cuachs,' filled with hazels, thorns, and giant pines. Along this woody scarp, and through its thick copse, the roe had made narrow galleries, which communicated with the ivy corridors on the face of the craig, to which there were corresponding ways upon the opposite side. In that fortress of the rock, for shelter from the sun and flies, and seclusion from the stir of the world during the day in the heat of summer, the red-deer and roe made their secret haunt, concealed behind the deep dim veil of leaves, unseen and unsuspected in the cool hollows of the cliff. The prying eye might search the craig from below, and the beaters or the woodmen might whistle, and whoop, and shout above, but nothing appeared or moved except the gray falcon, which rose channering out of the rifts. Above the craig the wooded bank was so abrupt, that to the front view there was no indication of a slope, and any who passed quickly over the brow was immediately out of sight. At each descent beyond the extremities of the whole range of rocks there was a common roe's run and pass, which was supposed to be 'deadly sure' if the deer took the path, since the precipice below was believed to be an infallible barrier against any intermediate escape. Often, however, when pressed upon the terrace above, the deer neither went through the passes nor turned against the beaters, but vanished as if by magic—nobody could tell where; and it was the common opinion of the drivers and fishermen, that, when forced near the river, they threw themselves over the craigs 'for spite,'—a belief often confirmed by old Davie Simpson, who declared that he had often found their bodies beneath the rocks, and in the Cluach, the Clerk's Pool, and the 'Furling Hole.' He did not, however, relate whatwoundsthey had, and the truth was,that those which disappeared at the brow of the Ledanreich dashed down the sudden dip of the bank between the precipices, and, turning through the ivy corridors, went out through the copse galleries upon the other side, and either descended to the water or skirted below the pass, and went back into the forest. Those which were found dead were such as had been mortally wounded at some in-wood pass, and, unable to take, or cross the water, had died on the beach, or been carried down by the river. In the same mysterious passages which gave concealment and escape to the stags and bucks, the does were used to lay with their kids, and from thence at morning and evening they brought them out to pluck the tender grass upon the green banks beyond. Often from the brow above, or from behind the ivy screen, we have watched their 'red garment' stealing through the boughs, followed by their little pair drawing their slender legs daintily through the wet dew, and turning their large velvet ears to catch every passing sound upon the breeze as it brought the hum of the water, or the crow of the distant cock—now trotting before, now lingering behind their dam, now nestling together, now starting off as the gale suddenly rustled the leaves behind them—then listening and re-uniting in a timorous plump, pricking their ears, and bobbing their little black noses in the wind,—then, as the doe dropped on her knees in the moss, and laid her side on the warm spot where the morning sun glanced in through the branches, they gambolled about her, leaping over her back, and running round in little circles, uttering that soft, wild, plaintive cry like the treble note of an accordion, till, weary of their sport, they lay down at her side, and slept while she watched as only a mother can. No marvel it was that they loved that safe and fair retreat, with all its songs and flowers, its plenty and repose. All around was sweet, and beautiful, and abundant, such as the poetical imagination of the painter can rarely compose, andnever, unless like Salvator he has lived in the wilderness with its free denizens. Upon the summit above the craig there was a broad and verdant terrace surrounded by ivied pines and feathering birches, and upon a little green glade in the midst grow two of the most beautiful objects ever produced by art or nature. These were a pair of twin thorns exactly similar in size, age, and form, and standing about three yards from each other: their stems as straight as shafts, and their round and even heads like vast bushes of wild thyme, but each so overgrown with ivy and woodbine, that their slender trunks appeared like fretted columns, over which the thorny foliage served as a trellis to suspend the heavy plumes of the ivy and the golden tassels of the woodbine. Many a 'ladye's bower' we have seen, and many a rich and costly plant reared by the care of man, but none so beautiful as those lonely sisters of the forest, planted by His hand in His great garden, where none beheld but those for whom He made it lovely—the ravens of the rock, the deer who couched under its shade by night, and the birds who sang their matins and their even-song out of its sweet boughs."
"Near Slui on the Findhorn there is a range of precipices and wooded steeps crowned with pine, and washed by a clear and rippling stream of the river, through which there is an excellent ford, very well known to the roe, for escaping to the woods of Slui when pressed by the hounds. This reach is called the Ledanreich, from a remarkable craig, a sheer naked even wall of sandstone, lying in horizontal strata eighty or ninety feet high: At the eastern extremity of this rock there is a great division, partly separated from the main curtain by a deep woody slope, which dips into the precipice with little more inclination from the perpendicular than to admit of careful footing. In the face of the divided craig, the decomposition of the softer stone between the courses of the strata has wasted it away into narrow galleries, which, passing behind the tall pillars of the pines growing from the rifts and ledges, extend along the face of the precipice, veiled by a deep tapestry of ivy, which spreads over the mighty wall of rock, and hangs from shelf to shelf over the covered ways. Beyond the craigs, the bank of the forest, an abrupt steep, covered with oak and copsewood, slopes down to the river, its brow darkened with a deep-blue cloud of pines, and its descent carpeted with moss, primroses, and pyrolas, here and there hollowed into quaint 'cuachs,' filled with hazels, thorns, and giant pines. Along this woody scarp, and through its thick copse, the roe had made narrow galleries, which communicated with the ivy corridors on the face of the craig, to which there were corresponding ways upon the opposite side. In that fortress of the rock, for shelter from the sun and flies, and seclusion from the stir of the world during the day in the heat of summer, the red-deer and roe made their secret haunt, concealed behind the deep dim veil of leaves, unseen and unsuspected in the cool hollows of the cliff. The prying eye might search the craig from below, and the beaters or the woodmen might whistle, and whoop, and shout above, but nothing appeared or moved except the gray falcon, which rose channering out of the rifts. Above the craig the wooded bank was so abrupt, that to the front view there was no indication of a slope, and any who passed quickly over the brow was immediately out of sight. At each descent beyond the extremities of the whole range of rocks there was a common roe's run and pass, which was supposed to be 'deadly sure' if the deer took the path, since the precipice below was believed to be an infallible barrier against any intermediate escape. Often, however, when pressed upon the terrace above, the deer neither went through the passes nor turned against the beaters, but vanished as if by magic—nobody could tell where; and it was the common opinion of the drivers and fishermen, that, when forced near the river, they threw themselves over the craigs 'for spite,'—a belief often confirmed by old Davie Simpson, who declared that he had often found their bodies beneath the rocks, and in the Cluach, the Clerk's Pool, and the 'Furling Hole.' He did not, however, relate whatwoundsthey had, and the truth was,that those which disappeared at the brow of the Ledanreich dashed down the sudden dip of the bank between the precipices, and, turning through the ivy corridors, went out through the copse galleries upon the other side, and either descended to the water or skirted below the pass, and went back into the forest. Those which were found dead were such as had been mortally wounded at some in-wood pass, and, unable to take, or cross the water, had died on the beach, or been carried down by the river. In the same mysterious passages which gave concealment and escape to the stags and bucks, the does were used to lay with their kids, and from thence at morning and evening they brought them out to pluck the tender grass upon the green banks beyond. Often from the brow above, or from behind the ivy screen, we have watched their 'red garment' stealing through the boughs, followed by their little pair drawing their slender legs daintily through the wet dew, and turning their large velvet ears to catch every passing sound upon the breeze as it brought the hum of the water, or the crow of the distant cock—now trotting before, now lingering behind their dam, now nestling together, now starting off as the gale suddenly rustled the leaves behind them—then listening and re-uniting in a timorous plump, pricking their ears, and bobbing their little black noses in the wind,—then, as the doe dropped on her knees in the moss, and laid her side on the warm spot where the morning sun glanced in through the branches, they gambolled about her, leaping over her back, and running round in little circles, uttering that soft, wild, plaintive cry like the treble note of an accordion, till, weary of their sport, they lay down at her side, and slept while she watched as only a mother can. No marvel it was that they loved that safe and fair retreat, with all its songs and flowers, its plenty and repose. All around was sweet, and beautiful, and abundant, such as the poetical imagination of the painter can rarely compose, andnever, unless like Salvator he has lived in the wilderness with its free denizens. Upon the summit above the craig there was a broad and verdant terrace surrounded by ivied pines and feathering birches, and upon a little green glade in the midst grow two of the most beautiful objects ever produced by art or nature. These were a pair of twin thorns exactly similar in size, age, and form, and standing about three yards from each other: their stems as straight as shafts, and their round and even heads like vast bushes of wild thyme, but each so overgrown with ivy and woodbine, that their slender trunks appeared like fretted columns, over which the thorny foliage served as a trellis to suspend the heavy plumes of the ivy and the golden tassels of the woodbine. Many a 'ladye's bower' we have seen, and many a rich and costly plant reared by the care of man, but none so beautiful as those lonely sisters of the forest, planted by His hand in His great garden, where none beheld but those for whom He made it lovely—the ravens of the rock, the deer who couched under its shade by night, and the birds who sang their matins and their even-song out of its sweet boughs."
If we go on quoting at this rate, we shall never reach the hill, and as yet we have not started from the hut. To say the truth, we are in no hurry, and neither, we suspect, upon many occasions were the Stuarts, indomitable huntsmen as they are. What though at night the river swept with the sound of thunder below, making the solid rock vibrate to its deep foundation,—what though the wind swept mightily down the ravine, swaying the trees like saplings, and threatening to tear them away,—what though the windows of heaven were open, and the deluge came down, and the bark of the hill-fox sounded sharp above the roaring of the water and the wood,—yet within that little bothy that rests upon the face of the craig, the wearied huntsmen slept peacefully; and in the morning, says one of them,—"I was awakened as usual by the whistle of the robin in the bird-cherry, and the sharp note of the blue bonnet sharpening his little saw on the top of the holly. I went out to the narrow terre-plain over the craig. The wind was gone, and the sun smiling on the still leaves and dewy grass—the flood torrent of the river dancing and laughing in its light, and the calm bright air breathing with the sweet perfume of the damp plants, and all the freshness and fragrance of the forest wilderness." We back it against the forest of Ardennes!
Every true hunter is humane. What! you say—do you call it humane to persecute the unfortunate stag, the monarch of the wilds, to the death?—to drive rifle-bullets into the target of the harmless roe? to murder otters by the dozen, and to slaughter sealsby the score? Indubitably we do. Let us reason a little upon this. Yesterday, you recollect that you dined upon very juvenile veal, smothered in a mess of dingy vegetable matter which we apprehend to have been sorrel, after the beastly fashion of the Gauls. Posterior to that, you devoured the larger moiety of a duckling. This morning we saw you, with our own eyes, regaling yourself at the club, between the intervals of muffin, with what assuredly were cutlets of lamb. After all this, can you have the face to stand up and defend your own humanity? For how many days had the sun dawned upon that luckless calf, the mangled fragments of which upon your platter rather resembled the rags of a kid-glove, than food meet for the stomach of a Christian? How long had the feeble quackle of Draco been heard round the row of peas near which he unsuspiciously perambulated, little dreaming how much the pods thereof were mixed up with his future destiny? How many races were run upon the meadow by that perished daughter of the sheep? Three infantine lives cut off simply for your sole gormandising! This is but a slight case. Set you down to a rook-pie, and you will engulf a dozen unfortunates before you bury your visage in the pewter. Pay for you at Blackwall, and the whitebait will disappear by the thousand. It is in vain that you attempt to shift the atrocity of your inordinate appetite from your own shoulders to those of the grazier, the butcher, the poulterer, or the fisherman. Cobden, or Joe Hume, or any other of the political economists belonging to the tribe who would starve the workman in order that they may guzzle themselves, will tell you that invariably the demand regulates the supply. You, therefore, are the responsible party: the young have fallen into your Scylla—the immature of days have been swept into the vortex of your Charybdis! Moreover, if you were a sportsman—which you are not—our minds would be grievously troubled for the future safety of the singing-birds. Welford, the friend of Bright, as we all remember, proposed a grand crusade throughout Britain against the feathered tribe; and you are not at all unlikely to join in a general St Bartholomew of the sparrows. Do you venture to retort upon us? Do you think we take life unnecessarily, or that we are base enough to use our weapons until the quarry has reached its prime? No calf or fawn ever fell by the hand of the genuine hunter—no cheeper or pout ever sullied the interior of the sportsman's bag. Not until the better part of his life has been run,—till his muscles are hard as iron, his slot deep, and his branches towering on the beam,—not until he has lived and loved, do we strike down, as if with lightning and painless death, the great hart in the middle of the wilderness. But to all innocent things—to the harmless indwellers of the forest and moor, the true hunter is a guardian and a friend. The strong man is ever brave, and none but the strong can pass to where the herds of the mountain dwell.
One more scene at the Hut, and we shall illustrate this subject further.
"But though our bothie was far from resembling the Peri Paribanon's cell, or the rock-palace where the old kaiser keeps his court in the bowels of the Unterberg—we loved it, not only for its bucks and stags, and all its greenwood cheer, but for the love of nature by which it was surrounded. Beyond its 'vert and venison,' there was a world of life and interest for those who had the eye to mark and the heart to read its book. On every side we had companions; from the passenger which came from Norway, to the little native guest—the robin which roosted in the holly-bush above us. 'Therobin?'—you smile and say. Yes, there was but one. He lived in the bush, as we lived in the bothie, and we were his neighbours too long not to be very well acquainted. His species, as well as all the small tribes, conformable to the minuteness of their range and habits, are very local, and may be found all the year in, or near, the same place; and those who feed them will rarely wait many minutes for their appearance. There were many robins which lived about the bothie, and all were continually in its vicinity, and very tame; but none so gentle and grateful as our little neighbour in the holly. They would, however, enter the hut, sit on the bed or the table, and hop about the floor, and, when I went out, follow me to the brae. They liked very much to see me turn up the soil, which always provided them with a little feast; accordingly,they were never absent at the planting of a shrub or a flower; and when I brought home, in my shooting-bag, a tuft of primroses, pyrolas, or lilies of the valley, they were always in attendance to see them put into the bank. For watching my occupation, they preferred something more elevated than the ground, but not so high as the branches of the trees, which were too far from the earth to give them a clear sight of what I turned up; for their accommodation, therefore, I made little crosses and crotchets, and, when I was planting, set them up beside me, moving them as I proceeded from place to place. Each was immediately occupied by an attentive observer; and, whenever an insect or a worm was discovered, one of the nearest darted down and caught it, even from between my fingers, and disappeared for a few moments under the rock or behind the great holly, to enjoy his success undisturbed. At his disappearance his place was immediately occupied by another, but at the return of the first it was amiably resigned by his successor. The blue-bonnets were almost as numerous as the robins, but they never arrived at the same intimacy and confidence. They never entered the bothie in my presence, and even when I fed them they would not approach as long as I remained outside the door; but as soon as I went in they descended four or five together, chattering and fluttering about the entrance, peeping in at the little window, and stretching their necks as far as they could, to see where I was, and if all was right. Then they would begin their breakfast on what I had left for them, talking a great deal about it, but occasionally ogling the door, in a manner from which I concluded that there was but small esteem or gratitude in their conversation.——Far different was the friendship of our little neighbour in the holly. In the morning he used to come down and perch on the arm of the bird-cherry, which stretched over the precipice before the door, waiting for its opening and the preparation of the breakfast, which he always shared; and when we were seated he would venture over the sill, and gather the crumbs about the table at our feet. Often when the first blood-red streaks of the autumn morning shone like lurid fire through the little window, we were awakened by his sad and solitary whistle, as he sat on his usual branch, his jet-black eye cast towards the door, impatient for our appearance. Many of his little cousins there were in the wood, with whom we were also well acquainted, and between us happened many an incident, which increased our interest and familiarity."I remember a day, one of those deep still blue days so solemn in the forest; the ground was covered with a foot of snow, and all the trees were hanging like gigantic ostrich feathers; but all the world was blue,—the sky was a sleeping mass of those heavy indigo clouds which forebode a 'feeding storm,'—not a tempest, but a fall of snow; for, in Scotland, snow is called 'storm,' however light and still it falls: thus, in tracking the deer, we say he 'has brushed thestormfrom the heather;' and a 'feeding storm' is when the clouds are continually feeding the earth with its velvet pall.—The reflection of those deep-blue clouds cast a delicate tint of the same colour over the whitened world. I was standing with my back against a huge pine—one of the old remnant of the great forest of Moray, which had, no doubt, heard the bell toll for the first Stuart earl.—I counted the rings in a smaller tree which once stood in the same hollow;—I shunned its wreck as I would have avoided a corpse which I could not bury, and always, when I passed near it, averted my face; but one day running to cut off a buck, and just heading him, I dropped on my knee to receive him as he came out from a mass of junipers, and when reloading, I found that I had knelt by the stump of my old friend.—I counted two hundred and sixty-four rings in his wood!—how many earls had he seen?—Well, I was leaning against his elder brother, as I suppose by the size. I had been there for a long time, waiting to hear the dogs bring back a buck from—I don't know now from where.——As I had been through all the swamps, and stripes, and wet hollows on that side of the forest, and waded through two and three feet of snow-wreaths, my kilt and hose, and, as it seemed, my flesh was saturated to the bones with 'snaw-bree,' and I began to beat, first one foot, and then the other, to quicken the blood, which was warm enough in my trunk.—I had scarce commenced this exercise, when I heard a little 'tic!' close to my ear, and the soft low voice of a bird—a sound, neither a whistle nor a chirp, but which I knew very well before I turned and saw the robin, who sat on a dry branch within a yard of my cheek. I guessed what had brought him: he was very cold, his ruffled back humped as round as a ball, and his tail drooping almost perpendicular with his legs, as if it was a little brown peg to lean on, like that on which the travelling Tyrolean merchant rests his pack. He looked at me with his large black eye, then, with a flirt of his tail and a bow with his head, indicated that, if I had no objection, he should like to descend to the place whichI occupied; the object of which he expressed, by turning his head sidelong, and directing one eye into the black earth which my foot had beaten bare in the snow. I immediately drew back a couple of feet, and he instantly dropped into the spot of mould, peeped and picked under every leaf and clod of earth, and, when there was nothing more, hopped up on the guard of my rifle, on which I was leaning, and, turning his head, looked at me with his upper eye.—I again stepped forward, and recommenced my foot-exercise, during which he returned to his branch, examining my progress with some impatience. As soon as my foot was removed, he again dropped into the hollow, and busily collected all the little grubs and chrysales which, though too small for me to see as I stood, I knew abounded beneath the sere leaves and thatch of moss and sticks. In this manner I repeated his supply several times, on one of which, when I was too long, or he too impatient, he dropped from his perch, and hovered over the space in which my foot was at work, and, as I continued, lighted on the point of the other shoe, and remained there, peeping into the hollow, until I withdrew my foot, and then descended to finish his repast. When he was satisfied, he ruffed his feathers, looked up sidelong to me, and, after a shake of satisfaction, resumed his perch close to my head, and, after pruning and oiling his feathers, mounted another branch higher, and opened his little throat with that most sad, sweet, and intermitting warble which gives such a melancholy charm to a still winter's day."
"But though our bothie was far from resembling the Peri Paribanon's cell, or the rock-palace where the old kaiser keeps his court in the bowels of the Unterberg—we loved it, not only for its bucks and stags, and all its greenwood cheer, but for the love of nature by which it was surrounded. Beyond its 'vert and venison,' there was a world of life and interest for those who had the eye to mark and the heart to read its book. On every side we had companions; from the passenger which came from Norway, to the little native guest—the robin which roosted in the holly-bush above us. 'Therobin?'—you smile and say. Yes, there was but one. He lived in the bush, as we lived in the bothie, and we were his neighbours too long not to be very well acquainted. His species, as well as all the small tribes, conformable to the minuteness of their range and habits, are very local, and may be found all the year in, or near, the same place; and those who feed them will rarely wait many minutes for their appearance. There were many robins which lived about the bothie, and all were continually in its vicinity, and very tame; but none so gentle and grateful as our little neighbour in the holly. They would, however, enter the hut, sit on the bed or the table, and hop about the floor, and, when I went out, follow me to the brae. They liked very much to see me turn up the soil, which always provided them with a little feast; accordingly,they were never absent at the planting of a shrub or a flower; and when I brought home, in my shooting-bag, a tuft of primroses, pyrolas, or lilies of the valley, they were always in attendance to see them put into the bank. For watching my occupation, they preferred something more elevated than the ground, but not so high as the branches of the trees, which were too far from the earth to give them a clear sight of what I turned up; for their accommodation, therefore, I made little crosses and crotchets, and, when I was planting, set them up beside me, moving them as I proceeded from place to place. Each was immediately occupied by an attentive observer; and, whenever an insect or a worm was discovered, one of the nearest darted down and caught it, even from between my fingers, and disappeared for a few moments under the rock or behind the great holly, to enjoy his success undisturbed. At his disappearance his place was immediately occupied by another, but at the return of the first it was amiably resigned by his successor. The blue-bonnets were almost as numerous as the robins, but they never arrived at the same intimacy and confidence. They never entered the bothie in my presence, and even when I fed them they would not approach as long as I remained outside the door; but as soon as I went in they descended four or five together, chattering and fluttering about the entrance, peeping in at the little window, and stretching their necks as far as they could, to see where I was, and if all was right. Then they would begin their breakfast on what I had left for them, talking a great deal about it, but occasionally ogling the door, in a manner from which I concluded that there was but small esteem or gratitude in their conversation.——Far different was the friendship of our little neighbour in the holly. In the morning he used to come down and perch on the arm of the bird-cherry, which stretched over the precipice before the door, waiting for its opening and the preparation of the breakfast, which he always shared; and when we were seated he would venture over the sill, and gather the crumbs about the table at our feet. Often when the first blood-red streaks of the autumn morning shone like lurid fire through the little window, we were awakened by his sad and solitary whistle, as he sat on his usual branch, his jet-black eye cast towards the door, impatient for our appearance. Many of his little cousins there were in the wood, with whom we were also well acquainted, and between us happened many an incident, which increased our interest and familiarity.
"I remember a day, one of those deep still blue days so solemn in the forest; the ground was covered with a foot of snow, and all the trees were hanging like gigantic ostrich feathers; but all the world was blue,—the sky was a sleeping mass of those heavy indigo clouds which forebode a 'feeding storm,'—not a tempest, but a fall of snow; for, in Scotland, snow is called 'storm,' however light and still it falls: thus, in tracking the deer, we say he 'has brushed thestormfrom the heather;' and a 'feeding storm' is when the clouds are continually feeding the earth with its velvet pall.—The reflection of those deep-blue clouds cast a delicate tint of the same colour over the whitened world. I was standing with my back against a huge pine—one of the old remnant of the great forest of Moray, which had, no doubt, heard the bell toll for the first Stuart earl.—I counted the rings in a smaller tree which once stood in the same hollow;—I shunned its wreck as I would have avoided a corpse which I could not bury, and always, when I passed near it, averted my face; but one day running to cut off a buck, and just heading him, I dropped on my knee to receive him as he came out from a mass of junipers, and when reloading, I found that I had knelt by the stump of my old friend.—I counted two hundred and sixty-four rings in his wood!—how many earls had he seen?—Well, I was leaning against his elder brother, as I suppose by the size. I had been there for a long time, waiting to hear the dogs bring back a buck from—I don't know now from where.——As I had been through all the swamps, and stripes, and wet hollows on that side of the forest, and waded through two and three feet of snow-wreaths, my kilt and hose, and, as it seemed, my flesh was saturated to the bones with 'snaw-bree,' and I began to beat, first one foot, and then the other, to quicken the blood, which was warm enough in my trunk.—I had scarce commenced this exercise, when I heard a little 'tic!' close to my ear, and the soft low voice of a bird—a sound, neither a whistle nor a chirp, but which I knew very well before I turned and saw the robin, who sat on a dry branch within a yard of my cheek. I guessed what had brought him: he was very cold, his ruffled back humped as round as a ball, and his tail drooping almost perpendicular with his legs, as if it was a little brown peg to lean on, like that on which the travelling Tyrolean merchant rests his pack. He looked at me with his large black eye, then, with a flirt of his tail and a bow with his head, indicated that, if I had no objection, he should like to descend to the place whichI occupied; the object of which he expressed, by turning his head sidelong, and directing one eye into the black earth which my foot had beaten bare in the snow. I immediately drew back a couple of feet, and he instantly dropped into the spot of mould, peeped and picked under every leaf and clod of earth, and, when there was nothing more, hopped up on the guard of my rifle, on which I was leaning, and, turning his head, looked at me with his upper eye.—I again stepped forward, and recommenced my foot-exercise, during which he returned to his branch, examining my progress with some impatience. As soon as my foot was removed, he again dropped into the hollow, and busily collected all the little grubs and chrysales which, though too small for me to see as I stood, I knew abounded beneath the sere leaves and thatch of moss and sticks. In this manner I repeated his supply several times, on one of which, when I was too long, or he too impatient, he dropped from his perch, and hovered over the space in which my foot was at work, and, as I continued, lighted on the point of the other shoe, and remained there, peeping into the hollow, until I withdrew my foot, and then descended to finish his repast. When he was satisfied, he ruffed his feathers, looked up sidelong to me, and, after a shake of satisfaction, resumed his perch close to my head, and, after pruning and oiling his feathers, mounted another branch higher, and opened his little throat with that most sad, sweet, and intermitting warble which gives such a melancholy charm to a still winter's day."