“The night drave on wi’ sangs and clatter.”
“The night drave on wi’ sangs and clatter.”
“The night drave on wi’ sangs and clatter.”
“The night drave on wi’ sangs and clatter.”
One merry story suggested another, till the potent spirit of the bowl covered some all over with slumber “as with a cloak,” laid others prostrate beneath the table, and to the maudlin eyes of the unconquered survivors presented every object as if of the dual number. The bustle and hurry of preparation in the kitchen had died away, orders for an additional supply of liquor were more tardily executed, and the kitchen-maid came in half undressed, holding a short gown together at the breast, rubbing her eyes, and staggering under the influence of a stolen nap at the fireside, from which she had been hastily and reluctantly roused. Cleekum, M‘Harrigle, M‘Glashan, and myself were the only individuals who had any pretentions to sobriety. The landlord had prudently retired to rest an hour before. Silence reigned in the whole house, except in one apartment, and silence would have put down her velvet footstep there also, but for the occasional roars of M‘Harrigle, who bellowed as if he had been holding conversational communion with his own nowt; and the engine-without-oil sort of noise that M‘Glashan made as he twanged, sputtered, and grunted his native tongue to M‘Harrigle, who was turning round to the piper every now and then, crying “D——n your Gaelic, you’ve spewed enough o’t the night; put a bung in your throat, you beast!”
A few flies that buzzed and murmured round the room were the only joyous and sleepless creatures that seemed disposed to prolong the revelry. The cold toddy having lost its delicious relish, produced loathing, and its former exhilarating effluvia was now sickening to the nose. The candle-wick stood in the middle of the flickering flame like a long nail with a large round head, and sending the light in fitful flashes against the walls. The cock had sounded his clarion, the morning seamed the openings of the window-shutters with lines of light, and the ploughman, roused to labour, went whistling past the door. I opened the window-shutter. A glare of light rushed in and condensed the flame of our little luminary into a single bud of pale light, whose sickliness seemed to evince a kindred sympathy with the disorderly remains of the night’s revelry, and with the stupified senses and exhausted bodies of the revellers themselves.
I looked out of the window. All was silent, save the far-off whistle of the ploughman who had passed, and the continual roar of the cataract; and all was motionless, except the blue feathery smoke which puffed from a single-chimney, and floated down the glen in a long wavering stream. How chill and piercing the morning air feels to the nervous and debilitated reveller, and how reproachfully does the light of another day steal in upon the unseemly disorder of his privacy! Almost every man feels himself to be somewhat of a blackguard who is thus surprised.
Going home drunk in a summer morning! What a beast! Feebleness of knees, that would gladly lie down by the wayside,—headache, that makes the brain a mere puddle of dirty recollections, and dismal anticipations,—dimness of eyes, that makes every visible object caricaturish and monstrous,—filthiness of apparel enough to shame a very scavenger,—and a heart sick almost to the commission offelo de se. Zig-zag, thump, thump, down again, howling, swearing, praying. It is a libel on the brute creation to call it beastliness. Brutes do no such thing. And the morning, how fresh, clear, green, and glittering! Hang that fellow,—going to work, I imagine. What on earth roused him at such an unseasonable hour? To be a spy upon me, I suppose. Who are you, sir?—A poor man, please your honour, sir.—A poor man! go and be hanged then.—These birds yelping from that thicket are more unmusical than hurdy-gurdy, marrowbone and cleaver. I wish each of them had a pipe-stopple in its windpipe. I never heard such abominable discord. The whole world is astir. Who told them I was going home at this time in the morning? Who is that singing the “Flower o’ Dunblane” at the other side of the hedge? A milkmaid—“and the milkmaid singeth blithe.” Ah, John Milton, thy notions of rural felicity were formed in a closet. You may have a peep of her through this “slap.” Rural innocence!—a mere humbug,—a dirty, tawdry, pudding-legged, blowsy-faced, sun-burnt drab. What a thing for a shepherdess in a pastoral! Confound these road trustees; they have been drawing the road through a bore, and have made it ten times its common length, and a hundred times narrower than its common breadth. Horribly rough; no man can walk steadily on it. Have the blockheads not heard of M‘Adam? In the words of the Lawrencekirk album epigrammatist,—
“The people here ought to be hanged,Unless they mend their ways.”
“The people here ought to be hanged,Unless they mend their ways.”
“The people here ought to be hanged,Unless they mend their ways.”
“The people here ought to be hanged,
Unless they mend their ways.”
Hast thou, gentle reader, ever gone home drunk in a summer morning, when thy shame, that is day-light, was rising in the east? Sulky—a question not to be answered. So much for thy credit, for there be in this sinful and wicked world men who boast of such things. I am glad thou art not one of them. Neither do I boast of such doings; for, gentle reader, I went to bed. My bedroom was one of M‘Gowan’s garret-rooms. Cleekum and M‘Harrigle, who lived at some distance, thought proper to retire to rest before visiting their own firesides; and M‘Glashan, being a sort of vagrant musician, who had no legal domicile in any particular place, had always a bed assigned him in M‘Gowan’s when he visited the village.
Stretched in bed after a day’s travelling and a night’s carousing—exquisite pleasure! It is worth a man’s while to travel thirty or forty miles to enjoy such a blessed luxury. After a few yawnings, pokings out and drawings up of the legs, the whole body begins to feel a genial glow of heat, and he is worse than an infidel who in such a pleasurable mood does not feel disposed to bless his Maker. Everything being properly arranged, the curtains carefully drawn around, the night-cap pulled down over the ears and folded upward on the brow, the pillow shifted, shuffled, and nicely adjusted to the head, the clothes pulled and lugged about, till there is not a single air-hole left to pinch the body, the downy bed itself, by sundry tossings and turnings, converted into an exact mould for the particular part of the body that has sunk into it, then does the joyous spirit sing to itself inwardly, with the mute melody of gratitude,—“I’m wearin’ awa, Jean!”—Blackwood’s Magazine, 1826.