Deceived by this transparency, I have plunged oftener than once over head and ears, when bathing among the rocks, in pools where I had confidently expected to find footing. From a rock that rose abrupt as a wall from the low-water level of stream tides to a little above the line of flood, I occasionally amused myself, when the evenings were calm, in practising the Indian method of diving—that in which the diver carries a weight with him, to facilitate his sinking, and keep him steadilyat the bottom. I used to select an oblong-shaped stone, of sixteen or eighteen pounds' weight, but thin enough to be easily held in one hand; and after grasping it fast, and quitting the rock edge, I would in a second or two find myself on the grey pebble-strewed ooze beneath, some twelve or fifteen feet from the surface, where I found I could steadily remain, picking up any small objects I chanced to select, until, breath failing, I quitted my hold of the stone. And then two or three seconds more were always sufficient to bring me to the surface again. There are many descriptions, in the works of the poets, of submarine scenery, but it is always scenery such as may be seen by an eye looking down into the water—not by an eye enveloped in it—and very different from that with which I now became acquainted. I found that in these hasty trips to the bottom I could distinguish masses and colours, but that I always failed to determine outlines. The minuter objects—pebbles, shells, and the smaller bunches of sea-weed—always assumed the circular form; the larger, such as detached rocks, and patches of sand, appeared as if described by irregular curves. The dingy gneiss rock rose behind and over me like a dark cloud, thickly dotted with minute circular spots of soiled white—the aspect assumed, as seen through the water, by the numerous specimens of univalve shells (Purpura lapillusandPatella vulgata) with which it was speckled; beneath, the irregular floor seemed covered by a carpet that somewhat resembled in the pattern a piece of marbled paper, save that the circular or oval patches of which it was composed, and which had as their nuclei, stones, rocks, shell-fish, bunches of fuci, and fronds of laminaria, were greatly larger. There spread around a misty groundwork of green intensely deep along its horizon, but comparatively light overhead, in its middle sky, which had always its prodigy—wonderful circlets of light, that went widening outwards, and with whose delicate green there mingled occasional flashes of pale crimson. Such was the striking thoughsomewhat meagre scenery of a sea-bottom in Gairloch, as seen by a human eye submerged in from two to three fathoms of water.
There still continued to linger in this primitive district, at the time, several curious arts and implements, that had long become obsolete in most other parts of the Highlands, and of which the remains, if found in England or the Low country, would have been regarded by the antiquary as belonging to very remote periods. During the previous winter I had read a little work descriptive of an ancient ship, supposed to be Danish, which had been dug out of the silt of an English river, and which, among other marks of antiquity, exhibited seams caulked with moss—a peculiarity which had set at fault, it was said, the modern ship-carpenter, in the chronology of his art, as he was unaware that there had ever been a time when moss was used for such a purpose. On visiting, however, a boat-yard at Gairloch, I found the Highland builder engaged in laying a layer of dried moss, steeped in tar, along one of his seams, and learned that such had been the practice of boat-carpenters in that locality from time immemorial. I have said that the little old Highlander of the solitary shieling, whom we met on first commencing our quarrying labours beside his hut, was engaged in stripping with a pocket-knife long slender filaments from off a piece of moss-fir. He was employed in preparing these ligneous fibres for the manufacture of a primitive kind of cordage, in large use among the fishermen, and which possessed a strength and flexibility that could scarce have been expected from materials of such venerable age and rigidity as the roots and trunks of ancient trees, that had been locked up in the peat-mosses of the district for mayhap a thousand years. Like the ordinary cordage of the rope-maker, it consisted of three strands, and was employed for haulsers, the cork-bauks of herring-nets, and the lacing of sails. Most of the sails themselves were made, not of canvas, but of a woollen stuff, the thread of which,greatly harder and stouter than that of common plaid, had been spun on the distaff and spindle. As hemp and flax must have been as rare commodities of old in the western Highlands, and the Hebrides generally, as they both were thirty years ago in Gairloch, whereas moss-fir must have been abundant, and sheep, however coarse their fleeces, common enough, it seems not improbable that the old Highland fleets that fought in the "Battle of the Bloody Bay," or that, in troublous times, when Donald quarrelled with the king, ravaged the coasts of Arran and Ayrshire, may been equipped with similar sails and cordage. Scott describes the fleet of the "Lord of the Isles," in the days of the Bruce, as consisting of "proud galleys," "streamered with silk and tricked with gold." I suspect he would have approved himself a truer antiquary, though mayhap worse poet, had he described it as composed of very rude carvels, caulked with moss, furnished with sails of dun-coloured woollen stuff still redolent of the oil, and rigged out with brown cordage formed of the twisted fibres of moss-fir. The distaff and spindle was still, as I have said, in extensive use in the district. In a scattered village in the neighbourhood of our barrack, in which all the adult females were ceaselessly engaged in the manufacture of yarn, there was not a single spinning-wheel. Nor, though all its cottages had their little pieces of tillage, did it boast its horse or plough. The cottars turned up the soil with the old Highland implement, thecass-chron; and the necessary manure was carried to the fields in spring, and the produce brought home in autumn, on the backs of the women, in square wicker-work panniers, with slip-bottoms. How these poor Highland women did toil! I have paused amid my labours under the hot sun, to watch them as they passed, bending under their load of peat or manure, and at the same time twirling the spindle as they crept along, and drawing out the never-ending thread from the distaff stuck in their girdles. Their appearance in most cases betrayed their life of hardship. I scarce saw aGairloch woman of the humbler class turned of thirty, who was not thin, sallow, and prematurely old. The men, their husbands and brothers, were by no means worn out with hard work. I have seen them, time after time, sunning themselves on a mossy bank, when the females were thus engaged; and used, with my brother-workmen—who were themselves Celts, but of the industrious, hardworking type—to feel sufficiently indignant at the lazy fellows. But the arrangement which gave them rest, and their wives and sisters hard labour, seemed to be as much the offspring of a remote age as the woollen sails and the moss-fir cordage. Several other ancient practices and implements had at this time just disappeared from the district. A good meal-mill of the modern construction had superseded, not a generation before, several small mills with horizontal water-wheels, of that rude antique type which first supplanted the still more ancient handmill. These horizontal mills still exist, however—at least they did so only two years ago—in the gneiss region of Assynt. The antiquary sometimes forgets that, tested by his special rules for determining periods, several ages may be found contemporary in contiguous districts of the same country. I am old enough to have seen the handmill at work in the north of Scotland; and the traveller into the Highlands of western Sutherland might have witnessed the horizontal mill in action only two years ago. But to the remains of either, if dug out of the mosses or sand-hills of the southern counties, we would assign an antiquity of centuries. In the same way, the unglazed earthen pipkin, fashioned by the hand without the assistance of the potter's wheel, is held to belong to the "bronze and stone periods" of the antiquary; and yet my friend of the Doocot Cave, when minister of Small Isles, found the remains of one of these pipkins in the famous charnel cave of Eigg, which belonged to an age not earlier than that of Mary, and more probably pertained to that of her son James; and I have since learned, that in the southern portionsof the Long Island, this same hand-moulded pottery of the bronze period has been fashioned for domestic use during the early part of the present century. A chapter devoted to these lingering, or only recently departed, arts of the primitive ages, would be a curious one; but I fear the time for writing it is now well-nigh past. My few facts on the subject may serve to show that, even as late as the year 1823, some three days' journey into the Highlands might be regarded as analogous in some respects to a journey into the past of some three or four centuries. But even since that comparatively recent period the Highlands have greatly changed.
After some six or eight weeks of warm sunny days and lovely evenings, there came on a dreary tract of rainy weather, with strong westerly gales; and for three months together, while there was scarce a day that had not its shower, some days had half-a-dozen. Gairloch occupies, as I have said, exactly the focus of that great curve of annual rain which, impinging on our western shores from the Atlantic, extends from the north of Assynt to the south of Mull, and exhibits on the rain-gauge an average of thirty-five yearly inches—an average very considerably above the medium quantity that falls in any other part of Great Britain, save a small tract at the Land's End, included in a southern curve of equal fall. The rain-fall of this year, however, must have stood very considerably above even this high average; and the corn crops of the poor Highlanders soon began to testify to the fact. There had been a larger than ordinary promise during the fine weather; but in the danker hollows the lodged oats and barley now lay rotting on the ground, or, on the more exposed heights, stood up, shorn of the ears, as mere naked spikes of straw. The potatoes, too, had become soft and watery, and must have formed but indifferent food to the poor Highlanders, condemned, even in better seasons, to feed upon them during the greater part of the year, and now thrown upon them almost exclusively by the failure ofthe corn crop. The cottars of the neighbouring village were on other accounts in more than usually depressed circumstances at the time. Each family paid to the laird for its patch of corn-land, and the pasturage of a wide upland moor, on which each kept three cows a-piece, a small yearly rent of three pounds. The males were all fishermen as well as crofters; and, small as the rent was, they derived their only means of paying it from the sea—chiefly, indeed, from the herring fishery—which, everywhere an uncertain and precarious source of supply, is more so here than in most other places on the north-western coasts of Scotland. And as for three years together the herring fishing had failed in the Loch, they had been unable, term after term, to meet with the laird, and were now three years in arrears. Fortunately for them, he was a humane, sensible man, comfortable enough in his circumstances to have, what Highland proprietors often have not, the complete command of his own affairs; but they all felt that their cattle were their own only by sufferance, and so long as he forbore urging his claims against them; and they entertained but little hope of ultimate extrication. I saw among these poor men much of that indolence of which the country has heard not a little; and could not doubt, from the peculiar aspects in which it presented itself, that it was, as I have said, a long-derived hereditary indolence, in which their fathers and grandfathers had indulged for centuries. But there was certainly little in their circumstances to lead to the formation of new habits of industry. Even a previously industrious people, were they to be located within the great north-western curve of thirty-five inch rain, to raise corn and potatoes for the autumnal storms to blast, and to fish in the laird's behalf herrings that year after year refused to come to be caught, would, I suspect, in a short time get nearly as indolent as themselves. And certainly, judging from the contrast which my brother-workmen presented to these Highlanders of the west coast, the indolence which we saw, and for whichmy comrades had no tolerance whatever, could scarce be described as inherently Celtic. I myself was the only genuine Lowlander of our party. John Fraser, who, though turned of sixty, would have laid or hewn stone for stone with the most diligent Saxon mason in Britain or elsewhere, was a true Celt of the Scandinavian-Gaelic variety; and all our other masons—Macdonalds, M'Leods, and Mackays, hard-working men, who were content to toil from season to season, and all day long—were true Celts also. But they had been bred on the eastern border of the Highlands, in a sandstone district, where they had the opportunity of acquiring a trade, and of securing in the working season regular well-remunerated employment; and so they had developed into industrious, skilled mechanics, of at least the ordinary efficiency. There are other things much more deeply in fault as producing causes of the indolence of the west-coast Highlander than his Celtic blood.
On finishing the dwelling-house upon which we had been engaged, nearly one-half the workmen quitted the squad for the low country, and the remainder removed to the neighbourhood of the inn at which we had spent our first night, or rather morning, in the place, to build a kitchen and store-room for the inn-keeper. Among the others, we lost the society of Click-Clack, who had been a continual source of amusement and annoyance to us in the barrack all the season long. We soon found that he was regarded by the Highlanders in our neighbourhood with feelings of the intensest horror and dread: they had learned somehow that he used to be seen in the low country flitting suspiciously at nights about churchyards, and was suspected of being a resurrectionist; and not one of the ghouls or vampires of eastern story could have been more feared or hated in the regions which they were believed to infest, than a resurrectionist in the Western Highlands. Click-Clack had certainly a trick of wandering about at nights; and not unfrequently did he bring, on his return from some nocturnal ramble, dead bodieswith him into the barrack; but they were invariably the dead bodies of cod, gurnard, and hake. I know not where his fishing-bank lay, or what bait he employed; but I observed that almost all the fish which he caught were ready dried and salted. Old John Fraser was not without suspicion that there were occasional interferences on the part of the carter with the integrity of our meal-barrel; and I have seen the old man smoothing the surface of the meal just before quitting the barrack for his work, and inscribing upon it with his knife-point the important moral injunction, "Thou shalt not steal," in such a way as to render it impossible to break the commandment within the precincts of the barrel, without, at the same time, effacing some of its characters. And these once effaced, Click-Clack, as he was no writer himself, and had no assistant or confidant, could not have re-inscribed. Ere quitting us for the low country, I bargained with him that he should carry my blanket in his cart to Conon-side, and gave him a shilling and a dram in advance, as pay for the service. He carried it, however, no further than the next inn, where, pledging it for a second shilling and second dram, he left me to relieve it as I passed. Poor Click-Clack, though one of the cleverest of his class, was decidedly half-witted; and I may remark, as at least curious, that though I have known idiocy in its unmixed state united to great honesty, and capable of disinterested attachment, I never yet knew one of the half-witted caste who was not selfish and a rogue.
We were unlucky in our barracks this season. Ere completing our first piece of work, we had to quit the hay-barn, our earliest dwelling, to make way for the proprietor's hay, and to shelter in a cow-house, where, as the place had no chimney, we were nearly suffocated by smoke; and we now found the innkeeper, our new employer, speculating, like the magistrates in Joe Miller, on the practicability of lodging us in a building, the materials of which were to be used in erecting the one which we were engaged to build. We did our best to solve theproblem, by hanging up at the end of the doomed hovel—which had been a salt-store in its day, and was in damp weather ever sweating salt-water—a hanging partition of mats, that somewhat resembled the curtain of a barn-theatre; and, making our beds within, we began pulling down piecemeal, as the materials were required, that part of the erection which lay outside. We had very nearly unhoused ourselves ere our work was finished; and the chill blasts of October, especially when they blew in at the open end of our dwelling, rendered it as uncomfortable as a shallow cave in an exposed rock-front. My boyish experiences, however, among the rocks of Cromarty, constituted no bad preparation for such a life, and I roughed it out at least as well as any of my comrades. The day had so contracted, that night always fell upon our unfinished labours, and I had no evening walks; but there was a delightful gneiss island, of about thirty acres in extent, and nearly two miles away, to which I used to be occasionally despatched to quarry lintels and corner stones, and where work had all the charms of play; and the quiet Sabbaths were all my own. So long as the laird and his family were at the mansion-house of Flowerdale—at least four months of every year—there was an English service in the parish church; but I had come to the place this season before the laird, and now remained in it after he had gone away, and there was no English service for me. And so I usually spent my Sabbaths all alone in the noble Flowerdale woods, now bright under their dark hillsides, in the autumnal tints, and remarkable for the great height and bulk of their ash trees, and of a few detached firs, that spoke, in their venerable massiveness, of former centuries. The clear, calm mornings, when the gossamer went sailing in long grey films along the retired glades of the wood, and the straggling sunlight fell on the crimson and orange mushroom, as it sprang up amid the dank grass, and under thickly-leaved boughs of scarlet and gold, I deemed peculiarly delightful. For one who had neither home nor church, the autumnal woods formed bymuch a preferable Sabbath haunt to a shallow cave, dropping brine, unprovided with chair or table, and whose only furniture consisted of two rude bedsteads of undressed slabs, that bore atop two blankets a-piece, and a heap of straw. Sabbath-walking in parties, and especially in the neighbourhood of our large towns, is always a frivolous, and often a very bad thing; but lonely Sabbath-walks in a rural district—walks such as the poet Graham describes—are not necessarily bad; and the Sabbatarians who urge that in all cases, men, when not in church on the Sabbath, ought to be in their dwellings, must know very little indeed of the "huts where poor men lie." In the mason's barrack, or the farm-servant's bothy, it is often impossible to enjoy the quiet of the Sabbath: the circumstances necessary to its enjoyment must be sought in the open air, amid the recesses of some thick wood, or along the banks of some unfrequented river, or on the brown wastes of some solitary moor.
We had completed all our work ere Hallowday, and, after a journey of nearly three days, I found myself once more at home, with the leisure of the long happy winter before me. I still look lack on the experiences of this year with a feeling of interest. I had seen in my boyhood, in the interior of Sutherland, the Highlanders living in that condition of comparative comfort which they enjoyed from shortly after the suppression of the rebellion of 1745, and the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions, till the beginning of the present century, and in some localities for ten or twelve years later. And here again I saw them in a condition—the effect mainly of the introduction of the extensive sheep-farm system into the interior of the country—which has since become general over almost the entire Highlands, and of which the result may be seen in the annual famines. The population, formerly spread pretty equally over the country, now exists as a miserable selvedge, stretched along its shores, dependent in most cases on precarious fisheries, that prove remunerative for a year or two, and disastrous for mayhap half-a-dozen; andable barely to subsist when most successful, a failure in the potato crop, or in the expected return of the herring shoals, at once reduces them to starvation. The grand difference between the circumstances of the people of the Highlands in the better time and the worse may be summed up in the one important vocable—capital. The Highlander was never wealthy: the inhabitants of a wild mountainous district, formed of the primary rocks, never are. But he possessed, on the average, his six, or eight, or ten head of cattle, and his small flock of sheep; and when, as sometimes happened in the high-lying districts, the corn-crop turned out a failure, the sale of a few cattle or sheep more than served to clear scores with the landlord, and enabled him to purchase his winter and spring supply of meal in the Lowlands. He was thus a capitalist, and possessed the capitalist's peculiar advantage of not "living from hand to mouth," but on an accumulated fund, which always stood between him and absolute want, though not between him and positive hardship, and which enabled him to rest, during a year of scarcity, on his own resources, instead of throwing himself on the charity of his Lowland neighbours. Nay, in what were emphatically termed "the dear years" of the beginning of the present and latter half of the past century, the humble people of the Lowlands, especially our Lowland mechanics and labourers, suffered more than the crofters andsmallfarmers of the Highlands, and this mainly from the circumstance, that as the failure of the crops which induced the scarcity was a corn failure, not a failure of grass and pasture, the humbler Highlanders had sheep and cattle, which continued to supply them with food and raiment; while the humbler Lowlanders, depending on corn almost exclusively, and accustomed to deal with the draper for their articles of clothing, were reduced by the high price of provisions to great straits. There took place, however, about the beginning of the century, a mighty change, coincident with, and, to a certain extent, an effect of, the wars of the first French Revolution.The price of provisions rose in England and the Lowlands, and with the price of provisions, the rent of land. The Highland proprietor naturally enough set himself to determine how his rental also was to be increased; and, as a consequence of the conclusion at which he arrived, the sheep-farm and clearance system began. Many thousand Highlanders, ejected from their snug holdings, employed their little capital in emigrating to Canada and the States; and there, in most cases, the little capital increased, and a rude plenty continues to be enjoyed by their descendants. Many thousands more, however, fell down upon the coasts of the country, and, on moss-covered moors or bare promontories, ill suited to repay the labours of the agriculturist, commenced a sort of amphibious life as crofters and fishermen. And, located on an ungenial soil, and prosecuting with but indifferent skill a precarious trade, their little capital dribbled out of their hands, and they became the poorest of men. Meanwhile, in some parts of the Highlands and Islands a busy commerce sprang up, which employed—much to the profit of the landlords—many thousands of the inhabitants. The kelp manufacture rendered inhospitable islets and tracts of bleak rocky shore, rich in sea-weed, of as much value to the proprietors as the best land in Scotland; and, under the impetus given by full employment, and, if not ample, at least remunerative pay, population increased. Suddenly, however, Free Trade, in its first approaches, destroyed the trade in kelp; and then the discovery of a cheap mode of manufacturing soda out of common salt secured its ruin beyond the power of legislation to retrieve. Both the people and landlords experienced in the kelp districts the evils which a ruined commerce always leaves behind it. Old Highland families disappeared from amid the aristocracy and landowners of Scotland; and the population of extensive islands and sea-boards of the country, from being no more than adequate, suddenly became oppressively redundant. It required, however, another drop to make the full cup runover. The potatoes had become, as I have shown, the staple food of the Highlander; and when, in 1846, the potato-blight came on, the people, most of them previously stripped of their little capitals, and divested of their employment, were deprived of their food, and ruined at a blow. The same stroke which did little more than slightly impinge on the comforts of the people of the Lowlands, utterly prostrated the Highlanders; and ever since, the sufferings of famine have become chronic along the bleak shores and rugged islands of at least the north-western portion of our country. Nor is it perhaps the worst part of the evil that takes the form of clamorous want: so heavily have the famines borne on a class which were not absolutely the poor when they came on, that they are absolutely the poor now;—they have dissipated the last remains of capital possessed by thepeopleof the Highlands.
FOOTNOTES:[4]Appended to their joint paper on the "Deposits contained between the Scottish Primary Rocks and Oolitic Series," and interesting, as the first published geological map of Scotland to the north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde.[5]There are only two of these exclusively west-coast shells,—Trochus umbilicatusandPecten niveus. As neither of them has yet been detected in any Tertiary formation, they are in all probability shells of comparatively recent origin, that came into existence in some western centre of creation; whereas specimens ofTrochus magusandNassa reticulata, which occasionally occur on the eastern coasts of the kingdom, I have also found in a Pleistocene deposit. Thus the more widely-spread shells seem to be also the shells of more ancient standing.
[4]Appended to their joint paper on the "Deposits contained between the Scottish Primary Rocks and Oolitic Series," and interesting, as the first published geological map of Scotland to the north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde.
[4]Appended to their joint paper on the "Deposits contained between the Scottish Primary Rocks and Oolitic Series," and interesting, as the first published geological map of Scotland to the north of the Firths of Forth and Clyde.
[5]There are only two of these exclusively west-coast shells,—Trochus umbilicatusandPecten niveus. As neither of them has yet been detected in any Tertiary formation, they are in all probability shells of comparatively recent origin, that came into existence in some western centre of creation; whereas specimens ofTrochus magusandNassa reticulata, which occasionally occur on the eastern coasts of the kingdom, I have also found in a Pleistocene deposit. Thus the more widely-spread shells seem to be also the shells of more ancient standing.
[5]There are only two of these exclusively west-coast shells,—Trochus umbilicatusandPecten niveus. As neither of them has yet been detected in any Tertiary formation, they are in all probability shells of comparatively recent origin, that came into existence in some western centre of creation; whereas specimens ofTrochus magusandNassa reticulata, which occasionally occur on the eastern coasts of the kingdom, I have also found in a Pleistocene deposit. Thus the more widely-spread shells seem to be also the shells of more ancient standing.
"Edina! Scotia's darling seat!All hail thy palaces and towers!"—Burns.
"Edina! Scotia's darling seat!All hail thy palaces and towers!"—Burns.
"Edina! Scotia's darling seat!All hail thy palaces and towers!"—Burns.
"Edina! Scotia's darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and towers!"—Burns.
There had occurred a sad accident among the Cromarty rocks this season, when I was labouring in Gairloch, which, from the circumstance that it had nearly taken place in my own person about five years before, a good deal impressed me on my return. A few hundred yards from the very bad road which I had assisted old Johnstone of the Forty-Second in constructing, there is a tall inaccessible precipice of ferruginous gneiss, that from time immemorial down to this period had furnished a secure nestling-place to a pair of ravens—the only birds of their species that frequented the rocks of the Hill. Year after year, regularly as the breeding season came round, the ravens used to make their appearance, and enter on possession of their hereditary home: they had done so for a hundred years, to a certainty—some said, for a much longer time; and as there existed a tradition in the place that the nest had once been robbed of its young birds by a bold climber, I paid it a visit one morning, in order to determine whether I could not rob it too. There was no getting up to it from below: the precipice, more inaccessible for about a hundred feet from its base than a castle wall, overhung the shore; but it seemed not impracticable from above; and, coming gradually down upon it, availing myself, as I crept along, of every little protuberance and hollow, I at length stood within six or eight feet of the young birds. From that point, however, a smooth shelf, without projectionor cavity, descended at an angle of about forty to the nest, and terminated abruptly, without ledge or margin, in the overhanging precipice. Have I not, I asked, crept along a roof of even a steeper slope than that of the shelf? Why not, in like manner, creep along it to the nest, where there is firm footing? I had actually stretched out my naked foot to take the first step, when I observed, as the sun suddenly broke out from behind a cloud, that the light glistened on the smooth surface. It was incrusted over by a thin layer of chlorite, slippery as the mixture of soap and grease that the ship-carpenter spreads over his slips on the morning of a launch. I at once saw there was an element of danger in the way, on which I had at first failed to calculate; and so, relinquishing the attempt as hopeless, I returned by the path I had come, and thought no more of robbing the raven's nest. It was, however, again attempted this season, but with tragic results, by a young lad from Sutherland, named Mackay, who had previously approved his skill as a cragsman in his native county, and several times secured the reward given by an Agricultural Society for the destruction of young birds of prey. As the incident was related to me, he had approached the nest by the path which I had selected; he had paused where I had paused, and even for a longer time; and then, venturing forward, he no sooner committed himself to the treacherous chlorite, than, losing footing as if on a steep sheet of ice, he shot right over the precipice. Falling sheer for the first fifty feet or so without touching the rock, he was then turned full round by a protuberance against which he had glanced, and, descending for the lower half of the way head foremost, and dashing with tremendous force among the smooth sea-stones below, his brains were scattered over an area of from ten to twelve square yards in extent. His only companion—an ignorant Irish lad—had to gather up the fragments of his head in a napkin.
I now felt that, save for the gleam of the sun on theglistening chlorite—seen not a moment too soon—I should probably have been substituted as the victim for poor Mackay, and that he, warned by my fate, would in all likelihood have escaped. And though I knew it might be asked, Why the interposition of a Providence to saveyou, when he was left to perish? Ididfeel that I did not owe my escape merely to my acquaintance with chlorite and its properties. For the full development of the moral instincts of our nature, one may lead a life by much too quiet and too secure: a sprinkling in one's lot of sudden perils and hair-breadth escapes is, I am convinced, more wholesome, if positive superstition be avoided, than a total absence of danger. For my own part, though I have, I trust, ever believed in the doctrine of a particular Providence, it has been always some narrow escape that has given me my best evidences of the vitality and strength of the belief within. It has ever been the touch of danger that has rendered it emotional. A few years after this time, when stooping forward to examine an opening fissure in a rock front, at which I was engaged in quarrying, a stone, detached from above by a sudden gust of wind, brushed so closely past my head as to beat down the projecting front of my bonnet, and then dented into a deep hollow the sward at my feet. There was nothing that was not perfectly natural in the occurrence; but the gush of acknowledgment that burst spontaneously from my heart would have set at nought the scepticism which should have held that there was no Providence in it. On another occasion, I paused for some time, when examining a cave of the old-coast line, directly under its low-browed roof of Old Red conglomerate, as little aware of the presence of danger as if I had been standing under the dome of St. Paul's; but when I next passed the way, the roof had fallen, and a mass, huge enough to have given me at once death and burial, cumbered the spot which I had occupied. On yet another occasion, I clambered a few yards down a precipice, to examine some crab-apple trees, which, springing froma turret-like projection of the rock, far from gardens and nurseries, had every mark of being indigenous; and then, climbing up among the branches, I shook them in a manner that must have exerted no small leverage power on the outjet beneath, to possess myself of some of the fruit, as the native apples of Scotland. On my descent, I marked, without much thinking of the matter, an apparently recent crack running between the outjet and the body of the precipice. I found, however, cause enough to think of it on my return, scarce a month after; for then both outjet and trees lay broken and fractured on the beach more than a hundred feet below. With such momentum had even the slimmer twigs been dashed against the sea-pebbles, that they stuck out from under more than a hundred tons of fallen rock, divested of the bark on their under sides, as if peeled by the hand. And what I felt on all these occasions was, I believe, not more in accordance with the nature of man as an instinct of the moral faculty, than in agreement with that provision of the Divine Government under which a sparrow falleth not without permission. There perhaps never was a time in which the doctrine of a particular Providence was more questioned and doubted than in the present; and yet the scepticism which obtains regarding it seems to be very much a scepticism of effort, conjured up by toiling intellects, in a quiet age, and among the easy classes; while the belief which, partially and for the time, it overshadows, lies safely entrenched all the while amid the fastnesses of the unalterable nature of man. When danger comes to touch it, it will spring up in its old proportions; nay, so indigenous is it to the human heart, that if it will not take itscultivatedform as a belief in Providence, it will to a certainty take to it itswildform as a belief in Fate or Destiny. Of a doctrine so fundamentally important that there can be no religion without it, God himself seems to have taken care when he moulded the human heart.
The raven no longer builds among the rocks of the Hill ofCromarty; and I saw many years ago its last pair of eagles. This last noble bird was a not unfrequent visitor of the Sutors early in the present century. I still remember scaring it from its perch on the southern side of the hill, as day was drawing to a close, when the tall precipices amid which it had lodged lay deep in the shade; and vividly recollect how picturesquely it used to catch the red gleam of evening on its plumage of warm brown, as, sailing outwards over the calm sea many hundred feet below, it emerged from under the shadow of the cliffs into the sunshine. Uncle James once shot a very large eagle beneath one of the loftiest precipices of the southern Sutor; and, swimming out through the surf to recover its body—for it had dropped dead into the sea—he kept its skin for many years as a trophy.[6]But eagles are now no longer to lie seen or shot on the Sutors or their neighbourhood. The badger, too—one of perhaps the oldest inhabitants of the country, for it seems to have been contemporary with the extinct elephants and hyænas of the Pleistocene periods—has become greatly less common on their steep sides than in the days of my boyhood; and both the fox and otter are less frequently seen. It is not uninteresting to mark with the eye of the geologist, how palpably in the course of a single lifetime—still nearly twenty years short of the term fixed by the Psalmist—these wild animals have been posting on in Scotland to thatextinction which overtook, within its precincts, during the human period, the bear, the beaver, and the wolf, and of which the past history of the globe, as inscribed on its rocks, furnishes so strong a record.
Winter passed in the usual pursuits; and I commenced the working season of a new year by assisting my old master to inclose with a stone wall a little bit of ground, which he had bought on speculation, but had failed in getting feued out for buildings. My services, however, were gratuitous—given merely to eke out the rather indifferent bargain that the old man had been able to drive in his own behalf for my labours as an apprentice; and when our job was finished, it became necessary that I should look out for employment of a more profitable character. There was not much doing in the north; but work promised to be abundant in the great towns of the south: the disastrous building mania of 1824-25 had just begun, and, after some little hesitation, I resolved on trying whether I could not make my way as a mechanic among the stone-cutters of Edinburgh perhaps the most skilful in their profession in the world. I was, besides, desirous to get rid of a little property in Leith, which had cost the family great annoyance, and not a little money, but from which, so long as the nominal proprietor was a minor, we could not shake ourselves loose. It was a house on the Coal-hill, or rather the self-contained ground-floor of a house, which had fallen to my father through the death of a relative, so immediately before his own death that he had not entered upon possession. It was burdened with legacies to the amount of nearly two hundred pounds; but then the yearly rent amounted to twenty-four pounds; and my mother, acting on the advice of friends, and deeming the investment a good one, had no sooner recovered the insurance-money of my father's vessel from the underwriter, than she handed the greater part of it to the legatees, and took possession of the property in my behalf. Alas! never was there a more unfortunate inheritanceor worse investment. It had been let as a public-house and tap-room, and had been the scene of a somewhat rough, and, I daresay, not very respectable, but yet profitable trade; but no sooner had it become mine than, in consequence of some alterations in the harbour, the greater part of the shipping that used to lie at the Coal-hill removed to a lower reach; the tap-room business suddenly fell off; and the rent sank, during the course of one twelvemonth, from twenty-four to twelve pounds. And then in its sear and wintry state, the unhappy house came to be inhabited by a series of miserable tenants, who, though they sanguinely engaged to pay the twelve pounds, never paid them. I still remember the brief, curt letters from our agent, the late Mr. Veitch, town-clerk of Leith, that never failed to fill my mother with terror and dismay, and very much resembled, in at least the narrative parts, jottings by the poet Crabbe, for some projected poem on the profligate poor. Two of our tenants made moonlight flittings just on the eve of the term; and though the little furniture which they left behind them was duly rouped at the cross, such was the inevitable expense of the transaction, that none of the proceeds of the sale reached Cromarty. The house was next inhabited by a stout female, who kept a certain description of lady-lodgers; and for the first half-year she paid the rent most conscientiously; but the authorities interfering, there was another house found for her and her ladies in the neighbourhood of the Calton, and the rent of the second half-year remained unpaid. And as the house lost, in consequence of her occupation, the modicum of character which it had previously retained, it lay for five years wholly untenanted, save by a mischievous spirit—the ghost, it was said, of a murdered gentleman, whose throat had been cut in an inner apartment by the ladies, and his body flung by night into the deep mud of the harbour. The ghost was, however, at length detected by the police, couching in the form of one of the ladies themselves, on a lair of straw in the corner of one of the rooms,and exorcised into Bridewell; and then the house came to be inhabited by a tenant who had both the will and the ability to pay. One year's rent, however, had to be expended in repairs; and ere the next year passed, the heritors of the parish were rated for the erection of the magnificent parish church of North Leith, then in course of building, with its tall and graceful spire and classic portico; and as we had no one to state our case, our house was rated, not according to its reduced, but according to its original value. And so the entire rental of the second year, with several pounds additional which I had to subtract from my hard-earned savings as a mason, were appropriated in behalf of the ecclesiastical Establishment of the country, by the builders of the church and spire. I had attained my majority when lodging in the fragment of a salt storehouse in Gairloch; and, competent in the eye of the law to dispose of the house on the Coal-hill, I now hoped to find, if not a purchaser, at least some one foolish enough to take it off my hands for nothing. I have since heard and read a good deal about the atrocious landlords of the poorer and less reputable sort of houses in our large towns, and have seen it asserted that, being a bad and selfish kind of people, they ought to be rigorously dealt with. And so, I daresay, they ought; but at the same time I cannot forget, that I myself was one of these atrocious landlords from my fifth till nearly my twenty-second year, and that I could not possibly help it, and was very sorry for it.
On the fourth day after losing sight of the Hill of Cromarty, the Leith smack in which I sailed was slowly threading her way, in a morning of light airs and huge broken fog-wreaths, through the lower tracts of the Firth of Forth. The islands and distant land looked dim and grey through the haze, like objects in an unfinished drawing; and at times some vast low-browed cloud from the sea applied the sponge as it rolled past, and blotted out half a county at a time; but the sunoccasionally broke forth in partial glimpses of great beauty, and brought out into bold relief little bits of the landscape—now a town, and now an islet, and anon the blue summit of a hill. A sunlit wreath rose from around the abrupt and rugged Bass as we passed; and my heart leaped within me as I saw, for the first time, that stern Patmos of the devout and brave of another age looming dark and high through the diluted mist, and enveloped for a moment, as the cloud parted, in an amber-tinted glory. There had been a little Presbyterian oasis of old in the neighbourhood of Cromarty, which, in the midst of the Highland andModerateindifferency that characterized the greater part of the north of Scotland during the seventeenth century, had furnished the Bass with not a few of its most devoted victims. Mackilligen of Alness, Hogg of Kiltearn, and the Rosses of Tain and Kincardine, had been incarcerated in its dungeons; and, when labouring in the Cromarty quarries in early spring, I used to know that it was time to gather up my tools for the evening, when I saw the sun resting over the high-lying farm which formed the patrimony of another of its better-known victims—young Fraser of Brea. And so I looked with a double interest on the bold sea-girt rock, and the sun-gilt cloud that rose over its scared forehead, like that still brighter halo which glorifies it in the memories of the Scottish people. Many a long-cherished association drew my thoughts to Edinburgh. I was acquainted with Ramsay, and Fergusson, and the "Humphrey Clinker" of Smollett, and had read a description of the place in the "Marmion" and the earlier novels of Scott; and I was not yet too old to feel as if I were approaching a great magical city—like some of those in the "Arabian Nights"—that was even more intensely poetical than Nature itself. I did somewhat chide the tantalizing mist, that, like a capricious showman, now raised one corner of its curtain, and anon another, and showed me the place at once very indistinctly, and only by bits at a time; and yet I know not that I could in reality have seen it to greateradvantage, or after a mode more in harmony with my previous conceptions. The water in the harbour was too low, during the first hour or two after our arrival, to float our vessel, and we remained tacking in the roadstead, watching for the signal from the pier-head which was to intimate to us when the tide had risen high enough for our admission; and so I had sufficient time given me to con over the features of the scene, as presented in detail. At one time a flat reach of the New Town came full into view, along which, in the general dimness, the multitudinous chimneys stood up like stacks of corn in a field newly reaped; at another, the Castle loomed out dark in the cloud; then, as if suspended over the earth, the rugged summit of Arthur's Seat came strongly out, while its base still remained invisible in the wreath; and anon I caught a glimpse of the distant Pentlands, enveloped by a clear blue sky, and lighted up by the sun. Leith, with its thicket of masts, and its tall round Tower, lay deep in shade in the foreground—a cold, dingy, ragged town, but so strongly relieved against the pale smoky grey of the background, that it seemed another little city of Zoar, entire in front of the burning. And such was the strangely picturesque countenance with which I was favoured by the Scottish capital, when forming my earliest acquaintance with it, twenty-nine years ago.
It was evening ere I reached it. The fog of the early part of the day had rolled off, and every object stood out in clear light and shade under a bright sunshiny sky. The workmen of the place—their labours just closed for the day—were passing in groups along the streets to their respective homes; but I was too much engaged in looking at the buildings and shops to look very discriminately at them; and it was not without some surprise that I found myself suddenly laid hold of by one of their number, a slim lad, in pale moleskin a good deal bespattered with paint. My friend William Ross stood before me; and his welcome on the occasion was a very hearty one. I hadpreviously taken a hasty survey of my unlucky house in Leith, accompanied by a sharp, keen-looking, one-handed man of middle age, who kept the key, and acted, under the town-clerk, as general manager; and who, as I afterwards ascertained, was the immortal Peter M'Craw. But I had seen nothing suited to put me greatly in conceit with my patrimony. It formed the lowermost floor of an old black building, four stories in height, flanked by a damp narrow court along one of its sides, and that turned to the street its sharp-peaked, many-windowed gable. The lower windows were covered up by dilapidated, weather-bleached shutters; in the upper, the comparatively fresh appearance of the rags that stuffed up holes where panes ought to have been, and a few very pale-coloured petticoats and very dark-coloured shirts fluttering in the wind, gave evident signs of habitation. It cost my conductor's one hand an arduous wrench to lay open the lock of the outer door, in front of which he had first to dislodge a very dingy female, attired in an earth-coloured gown, that seemed as if starched with ashes; and as the rusty hinges creaked, and the door fell against the wall, we became sensible of a damp, unwholesome smell, like the breath of a charnel-house, which issued from the interior. The place had been shut up for nearly two years; and so foul had the stagnant atmosphere become, that the candle which we brought with us to explore burned dim and yellow like a miner's lamp. The floors, broken up in fifty different places, were littered with rotten straw; and in one of the corners there lay a damp heap, gathered up like the lair of some wild beast, on which some one seemed to have slept, mayhap months before. The partitions were crazed and tottering; the walls blackened with smoke; broad patches of plaster had fallen from the ceilings, or still dangled from them, suspended by single hairs; and the bars of the grates, crusted with rust, had become red as foxtails. Mr. M'Craw nodded his head over the gathered heap of straw. "Ah," he said—"got in again, I see! The shuttersmust be looked to." "I daresay," I remarked, looking disconsolately around me, "you don't find it very easy to get tenants for houses of this kind." "Veryeasy!" said Mr. M'Craw, with somewhat of a Highland twang, and, as I thought, with also a good deal of Highlandhauteur—as was of course quite natural in so shrewd and extensive a house-agent, when dealing with the owner of a domicile that would not let, and who made foolish remarks—"No, nor easy at all, or it would not be locked up in this way: but if we took off the shutters you would soon get tenants enough." "Oh, I suppose so; and I daresay it is as difficult to sell as to let such houses." "Ay, and more," said Mr. M'Craw: "it's all sellers, and no buyers, when we get this low." "But do you not think," I perseveringly asked, "that some kind, charitable person might be found in the neighbourhood disposed to take it off my hands as a free gift! It's terrible to be married for life to a baggage of a house like this, and made liable, like other husbands, for all its debts. Is there no way of getting a divorce?" "Don't know," he emphatically replied, with somewhat of a nasal snort; and so we parted; and I saw or heard no more of Peter M'Craw until many years after, when I found him celebrated in the well-known song by poor Gilfillan.[7]And in the society of my friendI soon forgot my miserable house, and all the liabilities which it entailed.
I was as entirely unacquainted with great towns at this time as the shepherd in Virgil; and, excited by what I saw, I sadly tasked my friend's peripatetic abilities, and, I fear, his patience also, in taking an admiring survey of all the more characteristic streets, and then in setting out for the top of Arthur's Seat—from which, this evening, I watched the sun set behindthe distant Lomonds—that I might acquaint myself with the features of the surrounding country, and the effect of the city as a whole. And amid much confused and imperfect recollection of picturesque groups of ancient buildings, and magnificent assemblages of elegant modern ones, I carried away with me two vividly distinct ideas—first results, as a painter might perhaps say, of a "fresh eye," which no after survey has served to freshen or intensify. I felt that I had seen, not one, but two cities—a city of the past and a city of the present—set down side by side, as if for purposes of comparison, with a picturesque valley drawn like a deep score between them, to mark off the line of division. And such in reality seems to be the grand peculiarity of the Scottish capital—its distinguishing trait among the cities of the empire; though, of course, during the twenty-nine years that have elapsed since I first saw it, the more ancient of its two cities—greatly modernized in many parts—has become less uniformly and consistently antique in its aspect. Regarded simply as matters of taste, I have found little to admire in the improvements that have so materially changed its aspect. Of its older portions I used never to tire: I found I could walk among them as purely for the pleasure which accrued, as among the wild and picturesque of nature itself; whereas one visit to the elegant streets and ample squares of the new city always proved sufficient to satisfy; and I certainly never felt the desire to return to any of them to saunter in quest of pleasure along the smooth, well-kept pavements. I of course except Princes Street. There the two cities stand ranged side by side, as if for comparison; and the eye falls on the features of a natural scenery that would of itself be singularly pleasing even were both the cities away. Next day I waited on the town-clerk, Mr. Veitch, to see whether he could not suggest to me some way in which I might shake myself loose from my unfortunate property on the Coal-hill. He received me civilly—told me that the property was not quite so desperate aninvestment as I seemed to think it, as at least the site, in which I had an interest with the other proprietors, was worth something, and as the little courtyard was exclusively my own; and that he thought he could get the whole disposed of for me, if I was prepared to accept of a small price. And I was of course, as I told him, prepared to accept of a very small one. Further, on learning that I was a stone-cutter, and unemployed, he kindly introduced me to one of his friends, a master-builder, by whom I was engaged to work at a manor-house a few miles to the south of Edinburgh. And procuring "lodgings" in a small cottage of but a single apartment, near the village of Niddry Mill, I commenced my labours as a hewer under the shade of the Niddry woods.
There was a party of sixteen masons employed at Niddry, besides apprentices and labourers. They were accomplished stone-cutters—skilful, especially in the cutting of mouldings, far above the average of the masons of the north country; and it was with some little solicitude that I set myself to labour beside them on mullions, and transoms, and labels—for our work was in the old English style—a style in which I had no previous practice. I was diligent, however, and kept old John Fraser's principle in view (though, as Nature had been less liberal in imparting the necessary faculties, I could not cut so directly as he used to do on the required planes and curves inclosed in the stones); and I had the satisfaction of finding, when pay-night came round, that the foreman, who had frequently stood beside me during the week to observe my modes of working, and the progress which I made, estimated my services at the same rate as he did those of the others. I was by and by intrusted, too, like the best of them, with all the more difficult kinds of work required in the erection, and was at one time engaged for six weeks together in fashioning long, slim, deeply-moulded mullions, not one of which broke in my hands, though the stone on which I wrought was brittle and gritty, and but indifferently suitedfor the nicer purposes of the architect. I soon found, however, that most of my brother workmen regarded me with undisguised hostility and dislike, and would have been better pleased had I, as they seemed to expect, from the northern locality in which I had been reared, broken down in the trial. I was, they said, "a Highlander newly come to Scotland," and, if not chased northwards again, would carry home with me half the money of the country. Some of the builders used to criticize very unfairly the workmanship of the stones which I hewed: they could not lay them, they said; and the hewers sometimes refused to assist me in carrying in or in turning the weightier blocks on which I wrought. The foreman, however, a worthy, pious man, a member of a Secession congregation, stood my friend and encouraged me to persevere. "Do not," he has said, "suffer yourself to be driven from the work, and they will soon tire out, and leave you to pursue your own course. I know exactly the nature of your offence: you do not drink with them or treat them; but they will soon cease to expect that you should; and when once they find that you are not to be coerced or driven off, they will let you alone." As, however, from the abundance of employment—a consequence of the Building mania—the men were masters and more at the time, the foreman could not take my part openly in opposition to them; but I was grateful for his kindness, and felt too thoroughly indignant at the mean fellows who could take such odds against an inoffensive stranger, to be much in danger of yielding to the combination. It is only a weak man whom the wind deprives of his cloak: a man of the average strength is more in danger of losing it when assailed by the genial beams of a too kindly sun.
I threw myself, as usual, for the compensatory pleasures, on my evening walks, but found the enclosed state of the district, and the fence of a rigorously-administered trespass-law, serious drawbacks; and ceased to wonder that a thoroughly cultivated country is, in most instances, so much less beloved by its people thana wild and open one. Rights of proprietorship may exist equally in both; but there is an important sense in which the open country belongs to the proprietors and to the people too. All that the heart and the intellect can derive from it may be alike free to peasant and aristocrat; whereas the cultivated and strictly fenced country belongs usually, in every sense, to only the proprietor; and as it is a much simpler and more obvious matter to love one's country as a scene of hills, and streams, and green fields, amid which Nature has often been enjoyed, than as a definite locality, in which certain laws and constitutional privileges exist, it is rather to be regretted than wondered at that there should be often less true patriotism in a country of just institutions and equal laws, whose soil has been so exclusively appropriated as to leave only the dusty high-roads to its people, than in wild open countries, in which the popular mind and affections are left free to embrace the soil, but whose institutions are partial and defective. Were our beloved Monarch to regard such of the gentlemen of her court as taboo their Glen Tilts, and shut up the passes of the Grampians, as a sort of disloyal Destructives of a peculiar type, who make it their vocation to divest her people of their patriotism, and who virtually teach them that a country no longer theirs is not worth the fighting for, it might be very safely concluded that she was but manifesting, in one other direction, the strong good sense which has ever distinguished her. Though shut out, however, from the neighbouring fields and policies, the Niddry woods were open to me; and I have enjoyed many an agreeable saunter along a broad planted belt, with a grassy path in the midst, that forms their southern boundary, and through whose long vista I could see the sun sink over the picturesque ruins of Craigmillar Castle. A few peculiarities in the natural history of the district showed me, that the two degrees of latitude which lay between me and the former scenes of my studies were not without their influence on both the animal and vegetablekingdoms. The group of land-shells was different, in at least its proportions; and one well-marked mollusc—the large tortoise-shell helix (helix aspersa), very abundant in this neighbourhood—I had never seen in the north at all. I formed, too, my first acquaintance in this woody, bush-skirted walk, with the hedgehog in its wild state—an animal which does not occur to the north of the Moray Firth. I saw, besides, though the summer was of but the average warmth, the oak ripening its acorns—a rare occurrence among the Cromarty woods, where, in at least nine out of every ten seasons, the fruit merely forms and then drops off. But my researches this season lay rather among fossils than among recent plants and animals. I was now for the first time located on the Carboniferous System: the stone at which I wrought was intercalated among the working coal-seams, and abounded in well-marked impressions of the more robust vegetables of the period—stigmaria, sigillaria, calamites, and lepidodendra; and as they greatly excited my curiosity I spent many an evening hour in the quarry in which they occurred, in tracing their forms in the rock; or, extending my walks to the neighbouring coal pits, I laid open with my hammer, in quest of organisms, the blocks of shale or stratified clay raised from beneath by the miner. There existed at the time none of those popular digests of geological science which are now so common; and so I had to grope my way without guide or assistant, and wholly unfurnished with a vocabulary. At length, however, by dint of patient labour, I came to form not very erroneous, though of course inadequate, conceptions of the ancient Coal Measure Flora: it was impossible to doubt that its numerous ferns were really such; and though I at first failed to trace the supposed analogies of its lepidodendra and calamites, it was at least evident that they were the bole-like stems of great plants, that had stood erect like trees. A certain amount of fact, too, once acquired, enabled me to assimilate to the mass little snatches of information, derived from chance paragraphsand occasional articles in magazines and reviews, that, save for my previous acquaintance with the organisms to which they referred, would have told me nothing. And so the vegetation of the Coal Measures began gradually to form within my mind's eye, where all had been blank before, as I had seen the spires and columns of Edinburgh forming amid the fog, on the morning of my arrival.
I found, however, one of the earliest dreams of my youth curiously mingling with my restorations, or rather forming their groundwork. I had read Gulliver at the proper age; and my imagination had become filled with the little men and women, and retained strong hold of at least one scene laid in the country of the very tall men—that in which the traveller, after wandering amid grass that rose twenty feet over his head, lost himself in a vast thicket of barley forty feet high. I became the owner, in fancy, of a colony of Liliputians, that manned my eighteen-inch canoe, or tilled my apron-breadth of a garden; and, coupling with the men of Liliput the scene in Brobdignag, I had often set myself to imagine, when playing truant on the green slopes of the Hill, or among the swamps of the "Willows," how some of the vignette-like scenes by which I was surrounded would have appeared to creatures so minute. I have imagined them threading their way through dark forests of bracken forty feet high—or admiring on the hill-side some enormous club-moss that stretched out its green hairy arms for whole roods—or arrested at the edge of some dangerous morass, by hedges of gigantic horse-tail, that bore a-top, high over the bog, their many-windowed, club-like cones, and at every point shot forth their green verticillate leaves, huge as coach-wheels divested of the rim. And while I thus dreamed for my Liliputian companions, I became for the time a Liliputian myself, examined the minute in Nature as if through a magnifying-glass, roamed in fancy under ferns that had shot up into trees, and saw the dark club-like heads of the equisetaceæ stand upover the spiky branches, some six yards or so above head. And now, strange to tell, I found I had just to fall back on my old juvenile imaginings, and to form my first approximate conceptions of the forests of the Coal Measures, by learning to look at our ferns, club-mosses, and equisetaceæ, with the eye of some wandering traveller of Liliput lost amid their entanglements. When sauntering at sunset along the edge of a wood-embosomed stream that ran through the grounds, and beside which the horse-tail rose thick and rank in the danker hollows, and the bracken shot out its fronds from the drier banks, I had to sink in fancy as of old into a manikin of a few inches, and to see intertropical jungles in the tangled grasses and thickly-interlaced equisetaceæ, and tall trees in the brake and the lady-fern. But many a wanting feature had to be supplied, and many an existing one altered. Amid forests of arboraceous ferns, and of horse-tails tall as the masts of pinnaces, there stood up gigantic club-mosses, thicker than the body of a man, and from sixty to eighty feet in height, that mingled their foliage with strange monsters of the vegetable world, of types no longer recognisable among the existing forms—sculptured ullodendra, bearing rectilinear stripes of sessile cones along their sides—and ornately tatooed sigillaria, fluted like columns, and with vertical rows of leaves bristling over their stems and larger branches. Such were some of the dreams in which I began at this period for the first time to indulge; nor have they, like the other dreams of youth, passed away. The aged poet has not unfrequently to complain, that as he rises in years, his "visions float less palpably before him." Those, on the contrary, which science conjures up, grow in distinctness, as, in the process of slow acquirement, form after form is evoked from out the obscurity of the past, and one restoration added to another.
There were at this time several collier villages in the neighbourhood of Edinburgh, which have since disappeared. They were situated on what were called the "edge-coals"—those steepseams of the Mid-Lothian Coal Basin which, lying low in the system, have got a more vertical tilt against the trap eminences of the south and west than the upper seams in the middle of the field, and which, as they could not be followed in their abrupt descent beyond a certain depth, are now regarded, for at least the practical purposes of the miner, and until the value of coal shall have risen considerably, as wrought out. One of these villages, whose foundations can no longer be traced, occurred in the immediate vicinity of Niddry Mill. It was a wretched assemblage of dingy, low-roofed, tile-covered hovels, each of which perfectly resembled all the others, and was inhabited by a rude and ignorant race of men, that still bore about them the soil and stain of recent slavery. Curious as the fact may seem, all the older men of that village, though situated little more than four miles from Edinburgh, had been born slaves. Nay, eighteen years later (in 1842), when Parliament issued a commission to inquire into the nature and results of female labour in the coal-pits of Scotland, there was a collier still living that had never been twenty miles from the Scottish capital, who could state to the Commissioners that both his father and grandfather had been slaves—that he himself had been born a slave—and that he had wrought for years in a pit in the neighbourhood of Musselburgh ere the colliers got their freedom. Father and grandfather had been parishioners of the late Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk. They were cotemporary with Chatham and Cowper, and Burke and Fox; and at a time when Granville Sharpe could have stepped forward and effectually protected the runaway negro who had taken refuge from the tyranny of his master in a British port, no man could have protectedthemfrom the Inveresk laird, their proprietor, had they dared to exercise the right, common to all Britons besides, of removing to some other locality, or of making choice of some other employment. Strange enough, surely, that so entire a fragment of the barbarous past should have been thusdovetailed into the age not yet wholly passed away! I regard it as one of the more singular circumstances of my life, that I should have conversed with Scotchmen who had been born slaves. The collier women of this village—poor over-toiled creatures, who carried up all the coal from underground on their backs, by a long turnpike stair inserted in one of the shafts—continued to bear more of the marks of serfdom still about them than even the men. How these poor women did labour, and how thoroughly, even at this time, were they characterized by the slave nature! It has been estimated by a man who knew them well—Mr. Robert Bald—that one of their ordinary day's work was equal to the carrying of a hundredweight from the level of the sea to the top of Ben Lomond. They were marked by a peculiar type of mouth, by which I learned to distinguish them from all the other females of the country. It was wide, open, thick-lipped, projecting equally above and below, and exactly resembled that which we find in the prints given of savages in their lowest and most degraded state, in such narratives of our modern voyagers as, for instance, the "Narrative of Captain Fitzroy's Second Voyage of the Beagle." During, however, the lapse of the last twenty years this type of mouth seems to have disappeared in Scotland. It was accompanied by traits of almost infantile weakness. I have seen these collier women crying like children, when toiling under their load along the upper rounds of the wooden stair that traversed the shaft; and then returning, scarce a minute after, with the empty creel, singing with glee. The collier houses were chiefly remarkable for being all alike, outside and in; all were equally dingy, dirty, naked, and uncomfortable. I first learned to suspect, in this rude village, that the democratic watchword, "Liberty and Equality," is somewhat faulty in its philosophy. Slavery and Equality would be nearer the mark. Wherever there is liberty, the original differences between man and man begin to manifest themselves in theirexternal circumstances, and the equality straightway ceases. It is through slavery that equality, among at least the masses, is to be fully attained.[8]
I found but little intelligence in the neighbourhood, among even the villagers and country people, that stood on a higher platform than the colliers. The fact may be variously accounted for; but so it is, that though there is almost always more than the average amount of knowledge and acquirement amongst the mechanics of large towns, the little hamlets and villages by which they are surrounded are usually inhabited by a class considerably below the average. In M. Quetelet's interesting "Treatise on Man," we find a series of maps given, which, based on extensive statistical tables, exhibit by darker and lighter shadings the moral and intellectual character of the people in the various districts of the countries which they represent. In one map, for instance, representative of the state of education in France, while certain well-taught provinces are represented by a bright tint, as if enjoying the light, there are others, in which great ignorance obtains, that exhibit a deepshade of blackness, as if a cloud rested over them; and the general aspect of the whole is that of a landscape seen from a hill-top in a day of dappled light and shadow. There are certain minuter shadings, however, by which certain curious facts might be strikingly represented to the eye in this manner, for which statistical tables furnish no adequate basis, but which men who have seen a good deal of the people of a country might be able to give in a manner at least approximately correct. In a shaded map representative of the intelligence of Scotland, I would be disposed—sinking the lapsed classes, or representing them merely by a few such dark spots as mottle the sun—to represent the large towns as centres of focal brightness; but each of these focal centres I would encircle with a halo of darkness considerably deeper in shade than the medium spaces beyond. I found that in the tenebrious halo of the Scottish capital there existed, independently of the ignorance of the poor colliers, three distinct elements. A considerable proportion of the villagers were farm-servants in the decline of life, who, unable any longer to procure, as in their days of unbroken strength, regular engagements from the farmers of the district, supported themselves as occasional labourers. And they, of course, were characterized by the ignorance of their class. Another portion of the people were carters—employed mainly, in these times, ere the railways began, in supplying the Edinburgh coal-market, and in driving building materials into the city from the various quarries. And carters as a class, like all who live much in the society of horses, are invariably ignorant and unintellectual. A third, but greatly smaller portion than either of the other two, consisted of mechanics; but it was only mechanics of an inferior order, that remained outside the city to work for carters and labourers: the better skilled, and, as to a certain extent the terms are convertible, the more intelligent mechanics found employment and a home in Edinburgh. The cottage in which I lodged was inhabited by an oldfarm-servant—a tall, large-bodied, small-headed man, who, in his journey through life, seemed to have picked up scarce an idea; and his wife, a woman turned of sixty, though a fine enoughbodyin the main, and a careful manager, was not more intellectual. They had but a single apartment in their humble dwelling, fenced off by a little bit of partition from the outer door—and I could fain have wished that they had two—but there was no choice of lodgings in the village, and I had just to content myself, as the working man always must in such circumstances, with the shelter I could get. My bed was situated in the one end of the room, and my landlady's and her husband's in the other, with the passage by which we entered between; but decent old Peggy Russel had been accustomed to such arrangements all her life long, and seemed never once to think of the matter; and—as she had reached that period of life at which women of the humbler class assume the characteristics of the other sex, somewhat, I suppose, on the principle on which very ancient female birds put on male plumage—I in a short time ceased to think of it also. It is not the less true, however, that the purposes of decency demand that much should be done, especially in the southern and midland districts of Scotland, for the dwellings of the poor.