Class JEiliAM- Bonk_^ ..<; THE HILLS OF HOME Lkyi.Lii'V LuUU iTi-VLKSCM THE HILLS OF HOME BY L. MACLEAN WATT WITH THE PENTLAND ESSAYS OF ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER THE MANSE: A PASTORAL AND THE PENTLAND RISING TWELVE ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOUR BY ROBERT HOPE, A.R.S.A. NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1914 '^R^^^ Tut-nbull &f Spears, Printers, Edinburgh, Great Britain LIST OF CONTENTS THE HILLS OF HOME CHAPTER ONE page \S CHAPTER TWO . 29 CHAPTER THREE 41 CHAPTER FOUR . 49 CHAPTER FIVE . 59 CHAPTER SIX . 87 CHAPTER SEVEN lOI CHAPTER EIGHT 115 CHAPTER NINE . 133 PENTLAND ESSAYS I. A PASTORAL .... 147 II. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER 167 III. THE MANSE .... 185 IV. THE PENTLAND RISING 203 I. THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT 207 II. THE BEGINNING . 215 III. THE MARCH OF THE REBELS 223 IV. RULLION GREEN 235 V. A RECORD OF BLOOD 24s LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Frotn pictures by ROBERT HOPE, A.R.S.A. Robert Louis Stevenson . . frontispiece SwANSTON Cottage .... pa^c i6 "When years have come it casts a more endearing light upon the past." SwANSTON Village— Spring ... 32 " Each new impression only deepens the sense of nationality and the desire of native places." From above Swanston Cottage ... 64 "The sea-beholding city in the plain." Winter on the Pentlands .... 96 "A bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings of the wind along the moors." Thatched Cottage — Swanston Village . 128 "I think I owe my taste for that hill busi- ness rather to the art and interest of John Tod." John Tod 152 " Had been all his days faithful to that curlew-scattering, sheep-collecting life." The Garden— Swanston Cottage . . 168 "In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic." LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Manse . . ... page 184 "A certain water-door, embosomed in shrubbery." CoLiNTON — Old Mill 200 "The river is there dammed back for the service of the old flour-mill." RuLLiON Green 216 "On the summit of the bare heathery spur of the Pentlands." The Pentlands, near Rullion Green . 248 "In sooth that scene was fair." NOTE The Three Essays, "Pastoral," "An Old Scotch Gardener," and "The Manse," contained in this volume, are reprinted by arrangement with Messrs Chatto & Windus, Ltd. THE HILLS OF HOME THE HILLS OF HOME BY L. MACLEAN WATT CHAPTER ONE IT IS A THING WHICH CAN- not be understood by the dwellers in fertile plains — how hearts should ever learn to cling with love to the remembrance of frowning mountains, bare grey crags, and stormy headlands beaten about by the wind, and the rain, and the tumbling surf of the sea. Yet, that the thought of these does possess and domin- ate the lives of certain peoples with an abiding passion is testified alikeby history and by literature. All mountain folks have been patriots, because the mountains have been, in every age, the haven, the fortress, and bulwark of liberty. The very ruggedness of a land was an asset of its national independence. Hence the love men bear for their Father- land is naturally intensified in those last re- treats of most precious human interests. Indeed, battle for anything enhances its 15 THE HILLS OF HOME value in the eyes of those whohave to strug- gle for the possession of it. This undoubt- edly very largely explains thetenderpride which the Swiss and the Scots feel fortheir native mountains. The ranks of invading enemies have been rolled back down their slopes like spent waves. They vindicated their right to them in the blood of their race. "Scotia, my dear, my native soil" — that expresses the personal possession-right of a man to the land of his birth and upbring- ing, the prime result of his grapple for lib- erty. Retention, in spite of assault and violence, made each glen and hill, each hamlet and graveyard, very deeply prec- ious. Yet, up to modern times, the hills were largelyset about with fear and awe. In fact, in medieval and later Scotland a ridge, a ravine or a rushing stream was the border- limit of the possession of a clan, to cross which was to venture upon opposition, wrangle, and the risk of death. The advent i6 THE HILLS OF HOME ofpeacefuldays,and the passing of ancient habits of language and life awoke, devel- oped, and deepened the spirit of romance. The genius and patriotism of Sir Walter Scott especially gave voice and meaning to this. Fading things were clothed with the glamour which dying gives to them, and men began to move lovingly amongst the glens.anddreambesidemeanderingburns. The crumblincr ruin on the crag- became a centre of poetic thought; the selfishness, oppression, cruelty, murder, and lust which had disgraced it being forgotten. Scotland can, from the very variety of her configuration and character, very freely meet the patriotic wants of all her varied people; for her landscape ranges from plain to crag, from silent moor to sobbing sea, fromdesolateupland to sunny harvest-field and placid lake. It is Fatherland! And that is a spell which has quickened tears even in strong men's hearts. I have known a handful of white sand, from the shore of a 17 B THE HILLS OF HOME Highland loch four thousand miles away, treasured through three generations, from the morninglongagowhen the exiles turn- ed to take a final look at the lone waters that they loved. Years ago, an old High- lander, speaking to me, expressed in epi- gram this secret of Scotland and the Scot- tish nature, when he told me that what clasped his long life in a sweet complete- ness were his faith in God, and his being still in the place where he had been born. Religion and patriotism are undoubtedly the cords that bind us as a people. The nation that has within it thelove ofcountry and the love of God has the indomitable note of true and lasting life. This set at the back of all our strife the key of abiding victory. Men of our race were content to toil in windy fields, fighting, baffled often, onreluctanthillsides,coaxingcorn-patches out of rugged moors, because they loved their land, and because they believed that Godremembershonestlabour and rewards i8 THE HILLS OF HOME the Struggle of true hearts. This is the fact behind that remembrance of native land which haunts the exile from the fields of home. He may forget. Softly as the silting sand that blows in from the desert, the dust of the years may settle between his heart and the home afar. But, ere he lies down to die, some voice, like the sound of a bell borne through the dark to a ship at sea, some verse of an oldsong his mother sang, will wake memory from her sleep. He will see again the old land of home — he will hear again the cry of the wind among the crags, and the voices of his own people call- ing to him, Come home to your own folks before you die! For a man cannot escape his race. A man cannot hush the call of the blood though he heaphimself around with comfortSjthough he win whatever the world can give him, though he bar the door ofhis heart against the dreams that visit him. Old memories draw the curtain. He sees aeain grey peaks against the sky, the scattered 19 THE HILLS OF HOME hamlet clinging above the shingly bay; and the salt spray of Hebridean seas is blown among his hair. There never was a true manyetbutfelt this to be true,remem- bering his lost youth, down behind the years. Now, through almost all the thoughts and words of Robert Louis Stevenson these truths run like an undertone. The story of his country's struggle for freedom and for faith impressed his heart deeply. Cosmopolitan though he became,he loved most of all the city of his birth, and though he loved all high places, yet most deeply spoke to him the environing hills of his childhood, "the hills of home," the wind among the trees on their lonely slopes, the voice of running waters in their wood- lands, the song of blackbirds and the rapture of the larks. The Pentland Hills, so accessible from the Edinburgh pavements, yet intimately known to comparatively fewof her citizens, 20 THE HILLS OF HOME appealed to Stevenson by their quiet, by their pensive dignity, by their historic and poetic associations, by their influence on the Hves of those whose acquaintance he made when he went to live beneath the shadow of Kirk Yetton, by the variety in the sunshine and cloud of their day-time, and by the spell of the thought of their loneliness in the night, vocal with the ghostly cry of restless wind and falling water. These feelings he expressed most charmingly in the verses, the second of which appeared in the dedication of his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: Bells upon the city are ringing in the night; High above the gardens are the houses full of light; On the heathy Pentlands is the curlew flying free; And the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie. We cannae break the bonds that God decreed to bind, Still we'll be the children of the heather and the wind; Far away from home, O, it's still for you and me That the broom is blowing bonnie in the north countrie! 21 THE HILLS OF HOME At the foot of the craggy face of Kirk Yetton shelters the little village of Swan- ston, a clachan "in the woody fold of a green hill," with some thatched cottages near by. Beside the burn, encircled by sweet trees, is Swanston Cottage, for ever associated with the remembrance of the delicate youth whose creative genius has written his name amongst the Scottish immortals, and at the same time has given him a grip on the affections of the world. The view from Kirk Yetton was very precious to him; and somewhere in the hollow of those hills Allan Ramsay set the ideal scene of his Gentle Shepherd, though more than one site has contended for the honour of being the poet's Habbies Howe. The vicinity of Carlops makes the strong- est claim, and thepoet's genius has created and coloured the geography of the neigh- bourhood, scattering it with "Patie's Hill" and "Patie's Mill," "Peggy's Lea" and "Jenny's Brae," &c. 22 THE HILLS OF HOME These Pentland **hills of home," so dear to Stevenson, are thus the real source of that interest in the lonely places and the lives remote in pastoral glens of Scotland which reached its climax in Sir Walter Scott, and through him became an integral part of Scottish thought. The pastoral landscape appealed to Ramsay. He did not incorporate in his picture anything of the sublime majesty of frowning precipice and misty corrie. His time was not yet ready for the appreciation of such things. But it had — almost without knowing it till Ramsay made it feel how wearisome it had become — grown tired of the garden convention which had come down as a bit of the poetic stage scenery from the older poets; and men, especially the jaded town folks, were glad to be led out into the green glades and sunny moorlands so near, yet for so long remote from their acquaintance. Besides giving an impetus to the literary expression of the charm of 23 THE HILLS OF HOME "the hills of home," Ramsay's work, in moving David Allan, in 1788, to depict the scenes of The Gentle Shepherd, awak- ened an art interest in native landscapes. Montgomerie, in the sixteenth century, had noted the charm of banks and braes, with the multitudinous life of undisturbed places; and very striking had been his pioneer view of wild Nature, especially in the rocky scaur, the rushing cascade, and the singing stream. But his was a picture of loneliness — Nature in solitude, except for the poet's responsive heart: As I mused mine alane, I saw ane river rin Out oure ane craggy rock of stane, Syne lighted in ane lin. With tumbling and rumbling Among the rockis round, Bewailing and falling Into that pit profound. To hear thae startling stremis clear, Methought it music to the ear. In Ramsay,however,thegentlermoods 24 THE HILLS OF HOME of the Pentlands, the purling stream sing- ing its song of Nature's childhood, the waterfall, the greensward, the folds of sheep, are viewed as the setting of innoc- ent pastoral life, and as things to be lov- ingly brought into intimate friendliest touch with human loves and aspirations of every-day existence and labour, the ele- ments and ingredients of primary poesy. He sees these things with a clean eye. Gae farer up the burn to Habbie's How, Where a' the sweets of spring and summer grow; Between twa birks, out o'er a little lin, The water fa's and makes a singin' din; A pool breast-deep beneath as clear as glass, Kisses with easy whirls the bord'ring grass. This was, of course, the fullest possible extent of acquaintance with such scenes that thedebonair townsman couldachieve. He was too corpulent, besides, to win ac- cess into the wilder solitudes, amid the mist-haunted grimnesses of frowning mountain recesses. 25 THE HILLS OF HOME Burns truly touched the characteristics of Ramsay's limitations when he wrote — In gowany glens thy burnie strays Where bonnie lasses bleach their claes; Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes Wi' hawthorns grey, Where blackbirds join the shepherd lays At close o' day. The influence of the Pentlands in liter- ature is therefore a recordable fact. There are other interests besides Ram- say's. The little village of Wester How- gate, in touch with the range, has an affec- tionate place in human memory through the exquisitely written tale, by Doctor John Brown, of Rab and His Friends. E very year, too, the anniversary of Rullion Green is celebrated by an open-air ser- vice, where thousands of people meet in huge conventicle. The old names them- selves have still an appeal within them. Windy Gowl, Cauldstane Slap — their very sound has an eerie sough. The hills are intersected by droveroads, 26 THE HILLS OF HOME nowlongsince forsaken by the great flocks of sheep creeping onwards to the Southern markets. Many an adventure occurred up- on these in the old droving days; robbery and murder sometimes invaded the quiet places. Gypsies, shepherds, and lonely men have had their adventures, unrecord- ed, deep in the quiet heart of those green hills. Judgment Day will see some strange uprisings there. It was natural, therefore, that this youth with the literary hunger in his heart, with eye and ear keenly open to the beauties of Nature and the experiences of men, should find much to interest and enthral him in such an environment. The natural exit for his thought in this connection was the Essay, and he used that form of utter- ance as a medium of word painting and portraiture, whereby the landscape of his childhood and hisyoungmanhood became re-peopled with the old minister, the old gardener, and the old shepherd, and with 27 THE HILLS OF HOME memories of the persecuted hill-folk, marching through the mist and the driv- ing hail to death for the faith of their fathers. CHAPTER TWO THE MODERN ESSAY, as a form of composition, sprang out of the Charact- er Sketch. The Character Sketch was too objective to meet the desire of expressing personal opinions, and it did not provide for desultory comment on af- fairs in general. Men in the sixteenth cen- tury were entering into thehabit of jotting down their opinions. A habit of keeping Common-place Books, wherein a man's thoughts became methodically arranged, led to the customof thinking on paper;and these things werecirculatedamongfriends. The name Essay was taken from Mon- taigne to cover the product. That word sufficiently expressed what the thing was meant for, namely, an informal attempt to- wards the utterance of thought. Itwas con- sidered tobe an avenue of personal opinion. In its pages the thinker spoke in the first person. It was even the convention to look 29 THE HILLS OF HOME Upon them as having been put together for the author's private use. Lord Bacon, by the pubHcation ofhisBssaj's in 1 597, estab- lished a model, for the English essayist, which has not been transcended. The Es- say remained for a while as a vehicle of worldly wisdom — a select gathering of notes and maxims; and gradually worked its way into recognition as an established branch of literature. Bacon set the mark of its style as an instrument of concise phrase and refined and polished thought, which he uses as the envelope of quotations and illustrations drawn from his own wide and varied reading in the Scriptures, in the classics, in Machiavelli and Montaigne; while all science, as known in his time, is utilized to elucidate his views on life. He looked upon his Bssaysin the light of their title, namely, as things which were not meant to be anything else but the passing expression of opinions, the spontaneous utterance of his own beliefs and thoughts. 30 THE HILLS OF HOME The Essay method was applied by Fell- tham, "a kind of Bacon in holy orders," to religious topics. Its utility was widely re- cognized, and it became an established medium of literary expression, evoking in modern times the most interesting utter- ance ofmen's most intimatethought. From its nature,therefore, it admitted of asmuch variety in utterance and point of view as there was human character behind the making of it. It may "perhaps be styled the sonnet of prose writing. . . Brevity be- ing its mark, it may be a vehicle of gentle humour, clean and polished wit, tabloided thought, and pregnant suggestion."* Sir Thomas Browne, Dryden, and Cowley used it with a masterly power. It was the genius of Addison and Steele, however, that, in The Spectator, fixed the Essay as a popular English literary form. A vast impetus was given to its cultivation, and Johnson's Rambler and Idler, along with * Literature and Life, by L. Mac Lean Watt. 31 THE HILLS OF HOME Goldsmith's Bee and Citizen of the World, bridged the gulf between the opalesques of Addison and Steele and the poignant humanity of Elia. Alexander Smith, the almost forgotten author oi A Life Di^ama, presented, in his Dreamthorp, his thoughts upon literature and life, in the form of care- fully polished and refined essay, using it as a vehicle of passing emotional impres- sions of humanity, manners, and emotions, characters and customs. In the hands of Macaulay, Arnold, and Carlyle it became a mediumof criticism, expressingtheauth- or's views on the principles of Art, and Literature, in fact almost the pamphlet of a reviewer. Of modern men none have come nearer to the earlier masterpieces in the art of the Essay than Robert Louis Stevenson. His essays were extremely personal, and, in this respect, indeed, excelled their kind, while they displayed intimate acquaint- ance with all that had gone before in the 32 THE HILLS OF HOME hands of the master-craftsmen. He knows the dialect of his trade, yet his own accent and his own point of view lift him above the imputationof plagiarism and imitation. His methods of work followed his ideals of writing. Agood thing has to grow slow- ly. It cannot be pushed, "Do you imagine," he says, in protest, to a kindly correspondent, "that I could write an essay a month, or promise an essay even every three months? . . . The essays must fall from me, essay by essay, as they ripen." They were to be the full fruitage of his soul, not the trivial expres- sion of a passing moment. Yet Stevenson's notion of what an essay was, expressed in his own words, did not rise quite so high as that, but as being contributions towards "a friendlier and more thoughtful wayoflooking about one. . . . You know my own description of my- self as a person with a poetic character and no poetic talent: just as my prose 33 c THE HILLS OF HOME muse has all the ways of a poetic one, and I must take my Essays as they come to me." His psychological insight, unique in its depths of piercing and passionate vision, was an early possession of his own. As when, a mere child, he said to his mother, "Mamma, I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?" His sympathy, too, could speak with a touch that arrested the breath in one's throat, as when he tells how, in one of his nights of early ill-health, his mother lifted him up out of bed, and showed him two or three windows still lit- up in Queen Street, "where also, we told each other, there might be sick little boys and their nurses, waiting, like us, for the morning." He was deeply fond of history. Brave episodes of life and struggle appealed to the imaginative side of his nature. Especi- ally was he moved by the history of his country, in the dark days of the persecu- 34 THE HILLS OF HOME tion of the Presbyterian faith, that form of faith so suitable to "the hills of home," an amalgam of sternness and love, like the environing landscapes which were the theatre of its manifestations. Neverthe- less, he was catholic in the truest sense. His love for Edinburgh, and the combin- ation of meadow, woodland, and mountain in which it is set, was pathetically faithful and abiding, although she behaved to him like a step-mother. The same contradic- tions which appeared in most things that appealed to him, appeared also in this love of his for the ecclesiastical history of his country; for the sunshine of his nature, in combination with the Bohemianism of his character, made him revolt, at certain seasons, against hard dogmas in its creed. Besides, he would really have found the way to heaven wearisome walking contin- ually with the saints. The variety of the road in the other direction, with the com- pany therein, sometimes appealed to him 35 THE HILLS OF HOME with a freshness and a tang quite his own. His extreme impatience of convention led him, of course, to be greatly mis- understood, perhaps most of all by his own father, whose conventional ortho- doxy he declared to be something like a belief that "this life was a shambling sort of omnibus which was taking him to his hotel." To himself, the clockwork world seemed so ridiculous! It was a weariness "to see people skipping all round us, with their eyes sealed up with indifference, knowing nothing of the earth, or man, or woman, going automatically to offices, and they are happy or unhappy out of a sense of duty, I suppose, surely at least from no sense of happiness or unhappiness, unless perhaps they have a tooth that twinges. Is it not like a bad dream? Why don't they stamp their foot upon the ground and awake?" One can trace the seeking of his soul after some kind of spiritual rest, and find- 36 THE HILLS OF HOME ing it, not in dogmatic utterances, but in general conclusions. Sometimes one sus- pects that he is gropingafter faith to oblige his father, and to make the old man forget the bitter arguments they have shared on the subject. Still, one must feel him to be honest when he says: "Strange as it may seem to you, every- thing has been, in one way or the other, bringing me a little nearer to what I think you would like me to be. 'Tis a strange world, indeed, but there is a manifest God for those who care to look for Him." At the same moment his postscript ex- plains his position. The perverse pixie ac- knowledges his fault: "While I am writing gravely, let me say one word more. I have taken a step to- wards more intimate relations with you. But don't expect too much of me. Try to take me as I am. This is a rare moment, and I have profited by it; but take it as a rare moment. Usually I hate to speak of n THE HILLS OF HOME what I really feel, to that extent that when I find myself cornered, I have a tendency to say the reverse." He is beginning to see the fundamental earnestness of life, and he feels convinced that every man should leave a Bible be- hind him if he is unable to leave a jest book. "I feel fit to leave nothing but my benediction." He left it truly in his words that so often are like still music, in his look over the shadow-threshold of the Unseen, in some of his verse, haunting in its pathetic truth, and fruited melody, in the strength which out of his frequent weakness makes forthe upliftingof strong- er men, down, sometimes, on their faces, in sorrow or in failure, or in fruitless ques- tionings in the sawdust ring of the circus we call life. It is, indeed, much to talk with one who has gone through the campaign, lain strick- en in the trenches with bleeding wounds, and heard the onward-moving feet of the 38 THE HILLS OF HOME crowd passing above and around him. The load that irks our own shoulders; and the ache in our own hearts are uplifted and assuaged when we know how weaker and sadder men learned to endure, and to triumph and be strong. CHAPTER THREE THERE WAS SOME- thing brave in his writing, worthy of thf: h'ghthouse building stock to which he belonged. His grandfather had not fitted up the Bell-Rock lighthouse for nought. Hh father's moodishness gave colour to his child's feelings, and there was much in the memories of the Manse, in which some of his childhood was spent, beside the Water of Leith at Colinton, where his grandfather, old Doctor Balfour, so long ministered. Men might have chosen to-day another site, certainly not in the flat be- tween the parish graveyard and the river; but they could never have selected a more romantic or more poetic stance. Out of the bedroom windows the belfry, the home of white-winged pigeons, may be seen, under the shadow of which the fathers of the hamlet sleep; the dust of poor men and women creeping in close to the shelter of 41 THE HILLS OF HOME the great ones of the parish. The grave- yard of a place like that becomes the real "Who's Who" of the men who gave of their means, andthe men who gaveof their labour for the up-building of a community for God within sound of the running river singing seaward through the trees — a riv- er of mills, all speaking of honest industry, beating and pulsing with honest thought. The village has become now a place of villas, where the dry lungs of city folk may expand under the clean breath of the hills. In Stevenson's day it was a dreamy ham- let — the churchyard a veritable Garden of Sleep; while the long grasses, daisy- starred, were a fringe like a benediction between the faces of the dead and the star- ing eye of the world's day. The Manse plane is a dreamy hollow still. Under its windows the river flows, now fretted into passion music byboulders that obstruct its passage to the sea, now floating through soul-moving silences of great deep shad- 42 THE HILLS OF HOME owy pools. There are messages from the mountains in it for the children of the plains. To the imaginative boy the high bank of cliff and scaur, up which climb the wind-stirred trees, was as the border of the skies, yet with the imaginative tincture ofa world beyond touching its lofty margin of greenery. H is heart went back long pil- grimages out of manhood to that place of running waters, with whose song once mingled the evening psalm of the Coven- anters in the snow-covered kirkyard, on their last bivouac before death for the grimand stern faith that was drawingthem on to lonely Rullion Green. It must have seemed, and especially to a heart touched by the emotions of the ancient religion of the Hebrew shot through with the grey sunshine of Scottish skies, adwelling-place of God, in which The sparrow findeth out An house wherein to rest, The swallow also for herself Hath purchased a nest,— 43 THE HILLS OF HOME the flash of sunshine on the wings of doves being almost the token of angeHc pres- ences. That old place, secluded and remote, yet spoke of wide-world pilgrimages to him in whose heart was the call of the mystic flautist that plays always to the children of our race the captivating call, "Over the hills and far away!" For there were lines of communication from it to the ends of the world; and the heavy-footed post-carrier, in his coarse and common satchel, bore to and fro messages with strange foreign names. One finds this reflected as in a magic plate in his Essay on the Manse, wherein he passes a loving hand across the mirror of remembrance, his touch reviving pic- tures that are fading, and pictures that have been forgotten quite, love bringing to light a type of Scottish clergyman no longer moving now through Assemblies of the Church. There scarce can be to-day 44 THE HILLS OF HOME the kind of study like that wherein the old man sat. The library of a parson of to- day is different, with a wide world's dif- ferences, from that which was marshalled on the old man's shelves. Even the kindly grace, the dignity which was the peculiar property of a courtierofthe King of Kings, has given place to the preciseness of men of affairs, who have to run their parishes like business establishments. The day of quiet dreams is past for most Scottish manses. Shoe-leather, stair climbing, fin- ance, the face-to-face-ness of intimate ac- quaintance with social problems of the poor and the unclean, are in the forefront of the methods of the ecclesiastic of to-day. Parochial religion is as practical a thing as life and fire insurance. Not, of course, that it has lost the inspiring necessity of divine grace laid upon it from the begin- ning; but much of the simple sweetness of its externals has for ever passed away. Nevertheless, the old place between the 45 THE HILLS OF HOME running waters and the Garden of Sleep, which is as a deep still pool on this side of eternity, remains practically the same; and, to the heart of R. L. Stevenson, it al- ways remained as a holy nook of memory, whither recurred his soul's bestdreamings. Looking through the past, he loved to trace the residuum of inheritance which he had received into his own heart from the old minister — "a love of talk, a love of teaching, a love of nuts and port and porter." " I would rise," said he, "from the dead, to preach!" Though he could not tabulate all he felt, the presence of ancient influences "in the very knot and centre of his present life and experience" made him as though he kept step with the stride of the past; and the mixed blood of border fighter, of Jacobite smuggler, of deep-sea sailor, and of brave hearts that struggled in the salt foam to fix up guiding lights for mariners,gave a measure to the pulse-beat of his own, 46 THE HILLS OF HOME There is a great deal to be reckoned with in the rock from which we are hewn. It is difficuh to get one's feet clear of the entanglements of race which cling about our early years, and the stories of what men of our blood have done, whispered above us when we were little more than out of our cradles. The Scottish heart especially lingers among such things. They are the very last to be shaken off from its remembrance. The power of an- cestor-remembering is thehistory-making power in the Scottish folk-legend. It had a special appeal to the mind of Stevenson. The Essay on the Manse is full of it. The old place was to him a house of ghosts. The stairs creaked under steps that had a haunting familiarity in their footfall. Indeed, his heart was haunted, and the windows of it crowded with faces tantaliz- ingly reminiscent of family portraits hung in dusty rooms. CHAPTER FOUR THE INFLUENCE OF his ancestry, and the serious- mindedness of his parents very naturally turned his thought towards the entrancement of the Covenant. As the result of his reading on the matter of the religious persecutions in Scotland his Pent land Rising, A Page of History, 1666, was written, and was pub- lished anonymously as a small green pamphlet, issued by Andrew Elliot, Edin- burgh. H is imagination was deeply stirred by the sufferings of his countrymen, by their indomitable courage and fearless- ness in the face of death. He always loved the peasantry, and, with thatgenialinstinct of genius, was drawn by sympathy and admiration to the cause of the common people. His heart must have been moved to read of his namesake, John Stevenson of Cumreggan, one of the survivors of 49 £> THE HILLS OF HOME Pentland, who wrote A Rare Soul- strengthening Cordial, and who, like all men that have passed through a soul- crisis, instinctively touched true style, as when he said, "Many a night have I lain with pleasure in the churchyard of Old Dailly, and made a grave my pillow." Wodrow, whose page was a pleasure to Stevenson, and yet also a weariness, with its footnotes, proclamations, and Acts of Parliament, recorded the shooting of another Stevenson, who was in a small company surprised at prayer in Minnigaff by the notorious Colonel James Douglas, Lieutenant Livingstone, and Cornet Douglas. There was much inthe Pentland episode to stir the imagination and catch the fancy. The Covenanters, goaded to a corporate protest, seven hundred people, roused at Dairy, marched on towards Edinburgh, under Wallace of Achans, an old cam- paigner of the Civil Wars, who had been 50 THE HILLS OF HOME Lieutenant-Colonel of the Foot Guards, and who, by constant drill and discipline, did his best upon the way to stiffen his peasant forces for the fight which he felt certain would be thrown across their path. A terrible storm lashed them as they moved over the wild country round Cumnock, but Wallace defied the storm, though it winnowed his ranks of some who were not weather-proof. Strong and resolute, however, he allowed nothing to hinder his march; and sheltered his rabble in St Bride's of Douglas, among the tombs of notable men of war. At Lanark they were one thousand strong, half of them mounted on rough farm horses. They pushed on by Bathgate, "through pitiable broken moores," not daring to lie down lest they should perish in the sleet, pressing forward, tied together lest they might fall out of the ranks in thedarkness andstorm. In Colinton churchyard, which lay cover- ed with frosted snow, they made their biv- 51 THE HILLS OF HOME ouac. Disturbed by the Edinburgh Fen- cibles, they took to the Pentlands, lofty and austere in the November morning, swinging round by Dreghorn Castle, Woodhouselee, and Inaliston Bridoe to Rullion Green, an ancient market stance on the south-east base of Turnhouse Hill, familiar to the drovers of the South, where many a ragged "rullion" had been gath- ered to the cattle trysts. Dalyell came on from Currie by the drove road between Capelaw and Bellshill, past Saint Cather- ine's Chapel, now hid beneath the Edin- burgh water reservoir. The experienced eye of Wallace selected this for his des- perate stand. A natural trench cut the old drove road, and overhead was the Turn- house Hill, fifteen hundred feet high. West and south the green slopes rolled to the foot of Carnethy, while on the north the ground dropped three hundred feet in half a mile, towards the Castlelaw Hill, where the Glencorse burn "dreams 52 THE HILLS OF HOME and pours in cunning wimples in that glen." The army of the Covenant had in it only sixty muskets, forty brace of pistols, and twenty pounds of loose powder, while Dalyell's three thousand were well-armed disciplined troops. A contemporary ballad scornfully recounts how "Some had halbards; some had durks; Some had crooked swords like Turks; Some had slings, and some had flails Knit with eel and oxen tails; Some had spears and some had pikes; Some had spades which delvyt dykes; Some had guns with rusty ratches; Some had firey peats for matches; Some had bows but wanted arrows; Some had pistols without marrows; Some the coulter of a plough; Some had scyths men and horse to hough; And some with a Lochaber axe Resolved to give Dalyell his paiks." A fight like that which ensued was fraught with imaginative power. It kindl- ed imagination even in the rough men who, havingpassed through this struggle, 53 THE HILLS OF HOME wrote their ill-spelled letters about their experience. Drummond, for example, writ- ing to Rothes, described the skirmish in a thumb-nail sketch. "They mixed," he says, "like chess-men in a bag." Rude though their weapons were, the hearts of the peasantry were pathetically staunch, and their scythes mounted on poles were terrible against the charges of the horse- men. There were figures among them that would stand out from the most prosaic page, sure to catch Stevenson's eye — men like Captain Paton of Meadowhead — whose trenchant blade, notched with its dour battle work, may still be seen — a veteran who had fought in comradeship with Dalyell himself in the German wars, and who had gone through Kilsyth, Phil- iphaugh and Worcester. He and Dalyell knew each other's fighting weight. As Paton cut down trooper after trooper sent to kill him, he grimly cried, ' ' Go home and 54 THE HILLS OF HOME tell your master I cannot come to sup with him to-night!" How Joab, the captain of David's host, would have loved a man like that! What a vindictive psalm he might have written. A great mass of the defeated peasantry- were captured and driven like cattle, to be penned like beasts in Greyfriars church- yard, in Edinburgh, while many found their last long bivouac on the green side of the Pentlands, where they had fought their final fight. "Next day," we are told, "the godly women of Edinburgh went out and buried in shrouds the dead who lay stricken on the bloody sward of Rullion Green." Stevenson was caught, very naturally, by the thought of those men who had left the farm and the plough, and, with the very implements of their labour, scythes and flails, went out to die for their faith. The quiet hills seemed to speak to him of their stern resolve. His soul had grown 55 THE HILLS OF HOME Up in the environment of a strongly Pres- byterian house; and the romantic chivalry of his nature responded to the self-forget- fulness of the brave peasantry and landed gentry who had felt their patriotism bound up thus with their religion. Stevenson, much to the joy of his father, toiled on this episode, but he made it into a story, a method which did not meet with the ap- proval of the domestic censor. He there- fore wrote the small green-covered pam- phlet; which, however, was soon after- wards bought in, as far as possible, by his father. The simple suffering devotion of the Covenanters clung to his sympathy. The graves of the martyrs, scattered every- where in quiet moors, in lonely places where they fell, gripped his fancy. When- ever he writes about them, his writing gains power by the spiritual transcript of the gaunt simplicity of the subject. Noth- ing needs to be added to lines like these: 56 THE HILLS OF HOME "We went up the stream a little further to where two Covenanters lie buried in an oakwood." The picture of an emotion stands therein clear and perfect. The appeal of the persecuted remnant held sway over him to the end; and it was far away from home, that home which he was never to behold again, that he wrote to S. R. Crockett the three touching ver- ses, instinct with pity for the outcast folk: Blows the wind to-day, and the sun and the rain are flying. Blows the wind on the moors to-day and now, Where about the graves of the martyrs the whaups are crying, My heart remembers how! Grey recumbent tombs of the dead in desert places, Standing stones on the vacant wine-red moor. Hills of sheep, and the homes of the silent vanished races. And winds, austere and pure: Be it granted me to behold you again in dying. Hills of home! and to hear again the call; Hear about the graves of the martyrs the peewees crying, And hear no more at all. 57 THE HILLS OF HOME It would be interesting to know how much of this was actually inspired by the lonely places which were the scenes of the struggles of the faithful, and which were the enfolding receptacle of their graves. The fact and its envelope made their ap- peal, often, together, to Stevenson's sens- itive mind. Undoubtedly the solitude which was the arena of the conflict and the sacrifice of those simple courageous bands deepened the piteousness of their story, emphasizing their bitter outcasting. The grey wilderness became vibrant, for him, with their appeal for the recognition of the stern and terrible justice of their cause. CHAPTER FIVE THE SCOTTISH MIND is indomitably moulded by the mountain, the desert and the sea, the three great influ- ences which make for deep things in the heart. It is manifest that that trinity ap- pealed immeasurably to Stevenson. Yet love of Nature, and the recognition of the appeal of Scottish landscape to the soul, came late in the day; in fact, it is the characteristic of the modern spirit of Scot- tish Literature. One need not be astonish- ed at that, if one remembers, alongside of it, the remarkable fact that, though we are a maritime race, it is only in modern times that even an anthology of sea poems could be compiled in our literature, which one would expect really to be full of sea-tangle and driftwood; while such a thingis impos- sible in connection with woodland and for- est verse. Montgomerie, Scott and Hume, it istrue.inthe sixteenth century sawbeau- 59 THE HILLS OF HOME ty in Nature; but not until Drummond of Hawthornden does that feeling find utter- ance in Scottish poetry again, and he pass- ed it on as a growing thing to Allan Ram- say. There was love of country,undoubted- ly,which sprang from the keenly awakened feeling for natural liberty; but the passion for the hills, the field and the stream, the communion with the spirit of the moun- tains, and the deep romantic love of lone- ly places, was essentially modern. A man loved the spot that gave him birth, the glen that sheltered him, or the town within whose walls his people had found protec- tion, the streets and lanes in whichhe play- ed with his earliest comrades;but,down till the eighteenth century, to thegeneral mass of the poets and the great body of the people, the vast wild lonely places were looked upon with something like terror, when not with absolute repulsion. Burt, in his letters from the North, spoke of the hills as grisly and ugly, and "especially so 60 THE HILLS OF HOME when the heather was in bloom! "The man whose genius changed all that, clothing even the ragged caterans with the colours of romance, was Sir Walter Scott, who, by accentuating the charm of native scenery, wrote the deeper on the patriotic heart of the people the love of native land. Never- theless, Drummond was unique in histime in discerning and expressing in his verse the still beauty of a lofty mountain cover- ed with snow, an exquisite feature of a Scottish landscape, to which, perhaps, he had been educated through his travels a- broad, when he had beheld the splendid colouring of the snow-crowned Alps. In this he was a pioneer. Robert Louis Stevenson was, in these respects, a worthy son of his race; and, while he was a true child of Edinburgh, lovingitsplainstones with a filial affection, yet, the glamour of the hills, and especially of those which were near his native city, held him overmasteringly. When, there- 6i THE HILLS OF HOME fore, in 1867, his parents took a lease of Swanston Cottage, at the foot of Kirk Yet- ton, and he spent his time between Edin- burgh and Swanston, the influences and associations of green hill and grey rock, of misty peak and quiet and still places, took a large part in the moulding of his thought and of the form of its expression. Very early the love of Nature and of lonely places had possessed him, and led him away out of beaten tracks of conduct and of duty. He loved to play truant from school, and from the matter-of-fact dis- cipline of lessons. The voice of Spring especially would call to his willing heart — "Come with me over the hill so free, Where the winds are blowing, And the streams are flowing On to the shining sea." He was always for "Over the hills and far away," at the very first impulse. The strain of Nature sang to him the Song of the Open Road, and his heart leapt to its measure. 62 THE HILLS OF HOME It was a suitable education, indeed, for a child like him. His truant hours were charged with inspiration. Indeed, the best school for such a spirit was the free field, and Nature was his best professor. The air of open places got into the breath of his vocabulary, and gave a spacious dignity of its own to his style. And yet, along with the spontaneity which is the grace of genius he brought into the creation of that style which was the expression of himself, the grace of industry. The acquisition of the art of writing was with him a work of piety and of labour. Without his wanderings over Kirk Yetton, Allermuir, Cauldstane Slap and the rest, his mind would have missed the free stride of its utterance. The very names appealed to him; and he pass- ed on their glamour togenerations of read- ers. Nor would he have been brought in contact with the mind and character of men like John Tod the Herd, and Robert Young the Gardener. 63 THE HILLS OF HOME His college days were not remarkable for that close attendance on lectures and assiduous devotion to note-taking which usually mark out a student for the respect of his Professors. His contemporaries did not, indeed, gauge his qualities as a whole. Some fell short altogether. I have actually heard one who was with him in the Specu- lative Society say that some of them never really listened to any paper he wrote; and, far more clearly than his appearances in a discussion, recalled theoccasionon which he turned up driving a cab, which, because he was late, he had boldly seized on the stance, leaving the open-mouthed vocifer- ous cabman helplessly gazing after him. I do not know the name of the friend who was brave enough to drive the cab back, and leave it among the ruins of Jehu's voc- abulary. His was surely the bolder half of the adventure. While the sound of the sea, and the glamour of the hills everywhere appealed 64 THE HILLS OF HOME to his Scottish heart, men appealed to him also, through the same mental chan- nel. Knox, "strong, salient, and worthy," Scoto-Hebraic, religio-political prophet and pioneer of so much that is great in his native land, especially in educational or- ganization; Hume and Burns, with Scott, " the ever delightful man sane, courage- ous, admirable," as he designated him, these were shadows that spoke to him strongly out of the past. It is interesting to see how Nature im- pressed him through channels of native in- fluence, wherein religion, like a ghost, nev- er far away from the heels of any Scots- man, coloured his view; as when he wrote from Wick of the storm he beheld there, in which the spray rose eighty feet above the new pier. "I stood a long while on the cope watching the sea below me. . . . I hear its dull monotonous roar at this moment below the shrieking of the wind, and there came ever recurring to my mind 65 E THE HILLS OF HOME the verse I am so fond of — 'But yet the Lord that is on high Is more of might by far Than noise of many waters is Or great sea billows are.' " Edinburgh, of course, spoke to him with power equal, perhaps, to that of the hills. That fair city — about which every- thing that is good has been said, fre- quently so badly because no words can express the charm, material and spiritual, of the grey Scottish capital, with the peak of Arthur's Seat looking down the alleys, watching the crowded houses; with the cry of the bugles at the castle; and the power of that poem in stone-and-lime up on the moss-grown rock, the throne of kings of old — held his heart until the end. Its appeal is, of course, unique, with its view of the Forth, and the H ighland hills, from its very streets. "After all," he writes, "new countries, sun, music, and all the rest, can never take 66 THE HILLS OF HOME down our gusty, rainy, smoky, grim old city out of the first place that it has been making for itself in the bottom of my soul, by all pleasant and hard things that have befallen me for these past twenty years or so. My heart is buried there — say, in Advocate's Close!" And once more he writes — "Hearkening I heard again In my precipitous city, beaten bells Winnow the keen sea wind." He had the memorizing eye of the art- ist, which carries away in one glance all that it sees, and which appeals, as though with visual music, to the heart. One sees that, in his letter to Crockett, where he speaks of Glencorse Kirk— the quiet cruciform structure which figures in Weir of Hermiston. "Do you know where the road crosses the burn under Glencorse Church? Go there, and say a prayer for me: moriturus salutat. See that it's a sunny day; I would like it to be a Sunday, 67 THE HILLS OF HOME but that's not possible in the premises; and stand on the right-hand bank just where the road goes down into the water, and shut your eyes, and if I don't appear to you! well, it can't be helped, and will be extremely funny." On his return from the South of Europe in 1874 he went to live at Swanston. The shadowof the Pentlands,and the sunshine drifting along their slopes, again moved about his life. In May the sleet was on the hills, for Swanston sits six hundred feet above the sea. He reclined there, quaff- ing the caller air. The high wintry wind' the grey sky, the clamour of blackbirds, "the bleating of sheep being shorn in a field near the garden," the gold coming out upon the whins, the great trailing flight of crows "passing continually be- tween the wintry leaden sky and the wintry cold-looking hills," these made up the environing picture of his soul's life at Swanston. Here he worked, and worked 68 THE HILLS OF HOME hard, striving ever after Literature, the purest, truest utterance of the best things and thoughts — seeking, beyond Journal- ism, the finer essences, the higher em- bodiment of the essential soul. Here he developed a gospel — thoughhis body was decrepit he seeks for cheer, and finds it by crowding hypochondria out of his lifewith the work whereby he fills it. "Nothing, indeed, but work all day long, except a short walk alone on the cold hills, and meals, and a couple of pipes with my father in the evening." His walks among the hills uplifted and solemnized his outlook, bringing him into contact with the heart of Nature, and with the striking, deeply sober originality of the grave men who herded sheep in lone- ly places, companioning with Thought — men whose brooding isolation kept their souls apart from overcrowding talk, until that uniqueness of view and expression which the world calls Originality, with 69 THE HILLS OF HOME quaintness frequent beneath its cloak, grew up within their hearts and moved upon their lips. S wanston was for him a place of miscell- aneous reading, working, and thinking. The Trial of Joan of Arc, Paston Letters, Basin the French historian, Boswe/l, Pil- grims Progress, and the book of wild, tu- multuous, gusty Nature, were his library there. And his fancy peopled its environ- ment with the crowd of its creations. S wan- ston Cottao^e fiqures i n St/vesas the home of Flora and her aunt Miss Gilchrist. When the French prisoner escapes from Edin- burgh Castle it is to S wanston that he flees for shelter. The drovers Simms and Cand- lish, who are to lead St Ives across the bord- ers, are pretty much John Tod the Swans- tonherdmade intotwins;and theyleadhim over the Pentlands to the great North road. So also in PFeir of Hermiston, though the geography is not exact, yet the places and descriptions are true to the " hills of home. ' 70 THE HILLS OF HOME The silence of the glens conferred upon him the wide-open observant eye and the responsive heart. He forgot the limitat- ions of the Edinburgh plainstones; he saw the mystery of the little worlds within the world of Nature.One can trace that through his letters. You can see him watch the plover, nervously flapping the attention of the wanderer away from his nest; or, in a brown muse, hepokes disaster into the big busy community of ants. He hears and sees what oftenis hid from the mere towns- man, the child of cities, enslaved to exist- ence in cramping streets. These things were enriching the essayist's vision, deep- ening his humanity, widening out his sym- pathy, giving him the secret of that uni- versal love without which, as the Scripture hath it, all earthly eloquence and human gifts are vain. He becomes as personal in his individual touch as Montaigne. He argues with his conscience over having been rude to one of the servants — he an- 71 THE HILLS OF HOME alyses his very worry over the apologiz- ing. Hewas stirredbythe activity of Nature, the sound of Nature's unrest. The garden at Swanston had its share of this kind of thing, when the wind blew straight out of the hills, laden with the breath of the whins. He says: "The trees were all in a tempest, and roared like a heavy surf; the paths all strewn with fallen apple-blossom and leaves, I got a quiet seat behind a yew and went away into a meditation. I was very happy after my own fashion, and whenever there came a blink of sunshine, or a bird whistled higher than usual, or a little pow- der of white apple-blossom came over the hedge and settled about me in the grass, I had the gladdest little flutter at my heart, and stretched myself for very voluptuous- ness." In the restfulness of the garden-house he was sometimes driven in upon himself; andquestions ofTo-morrow,andthe furth- 72 THE HILLS OF HOME er future veiled in the mystery of Beyond, combined with the wind-symphonies and the picture-makingspellof the mists, made hisdays only swift enough in their passing. He had thoughts, too, on topics that had perplexed him, which arguments with his father had not sweetened. Yet Time, not argument, was clarifying them. "This God may not be cruel when all is done; He may relent and be good to us a la fin des fins. Think of how He tempers our afflictions to us, of how tenderly He mixes in bright joys with the grey web of trouble and care that we call our life." He was extremely sensitive to the Pa- thetic Fallacy. "It maybe that two clods together, two flowers together, two grown trees together touching each other deliciously with their spread leaves, it may be that these dumb things have their own priceless sympath- ies, surer and more untroubled than ours." The influence of the lonely and remote n THE HILLS OF HOME environment played on his heart and feel- ings as on a most variedly sensitive in- strument. Sometimes he hated the noisy breezes. "In my hell," said he, "it would always blow a gale." In one of his most in- teresting letters he says: ' ' The day was warm enough, but it blew a whole gale of wind;and the noise and the purposeless rude violence of it somehow irritated and depressed me. There was good news, however, though the anxiety must still be long. O peace, peace, whither are you fled and where have you carried my old quiet humour? I am so bitter and disquiet, and speak even spitefully to people. And somehow, though I promise myselfamendmentjday after day finds me equally rough and sour to those about me. But this would pass with good health and good weather; and at bottom I am not unhappy; the soil is still good although it bears thorns; and the time will come a- gain for flowers." 74 THE HILLS OF HOME Although his soul feels driven, buffeted and beaten by the wind that roars among the trees, though he knows that the hill- top is sheeted likea ghost in grey rain, and the valleysarefilled with mist, yet his heart is sheltered in warmth and quiet, the gar- den is fair and all its sweetness lying in the dim love-light of the veiled moon, and the lingering glamour of dying day; and he knows there is beauty still in the lovely world he lives in. But the knowledge has sorrow clinging to the skirt of its gladness. There is a shadow familiar to him in the sweetness of the scene. The questionings and lingerings about the door of the grave, so characteristic of Scottish Calvinism, are not necessarily morbid things, but just like going round about an old friend's house, trying the latch, and peeping in occasionally at the window. AtSwanston he was often ill and weary, but it was the anvil-hammering time, the 75 THE HILLS OF HOME crushing of thought into imperishable form in the laminated life. He was very sensitive to all sound. 'I have been made miserable," he wrote, "by Chopin's Marche Funebre. Reading those things which I like aloud when I am fancifully excited is the keenest artistic pleasure I know." This he inherited from his mother, who would sometimes be moved to tears even by an anthem in the church. Again, he writes under emotion: "The drums and fifes up in the castle were sounding the call through the dark. " These very frequendy went through his soul. Every aspect of Edinburgh spoke to him — the silence that sometimes holds the city as well as the sound that fills it. "The gardens below my windows are steeped in diffused sunlight, and every tree seems standing on tip-toe, strained and silent as though to get its head above its neighbours and listen. . . I wish I could make you feel the hush that is over every- 76 THE HILLS OF HOME thing, only made the more perfect by rare interruptions and the rich placid light and the still autumnal foliage." The summer days at Swanston enriched his heart's experience of communion with Nature; while in winter the swift glance, like a swallow's flight, across the Forth, from the back windows of Heriot Row, caught vision of the hills of Fife, beyond the shining Firth which "bridled the wild Hielan'man" in the days of old. Swanston gave him also word pictures which stand out clear and perfect in a line or two. "How the rain falls! The mist is quite low on the hill." He frequently felt his inertness as a re- proach;as though he were but "something for the winds to blow over, and the sun to glimpse on and go off again, as it might be a tree or a gravestone." At the same time he had a silver lining to his cloud, for almost in the same breath he says: "Here lam back again in my oldhumour n THE HILLS OF HOME of a sunny equanimity; to see the world fleet about me; and the days chase each other like sun patches, and the nights like cloud shadows, on a windy day; content to see them go, and no wise reluctant for the cool evening, with its dew, and stars, and fading stain of tragic red." Sometimes his love of country, obliter- ated by the mists of suffering and pain which he had endured as if at hard hands, broke through like a sunburst from behind the darkness. **I have been a Scotchman," said he, "all my life and denied my native land." Yet, again, he could laugh at it: "Here I am in my native land, being gently blown and hailed upon, and creep- ing closer and closer to the fire." The pathos of his struggle against the anx- ieties of life often peeps its head through the golden clouds. Although by 1887 he was worth about ^4000 a year, his income in 1880 was only ^^"109, but he declared 78 THE HILLS OF HOME himself ready to face the world on ;^200. He feels, as a test of success of his labour, "If you can interest a person for an hour and a half you have not been idle." He loves the balm a story gives in sick weari- ness. "We want incident, interest, action: to the devil with your philosophy. When we are well again, and have an easy mind, we shall peruse your important work. . . . So I, when I am ready to go beside myself, stick my head into a story-book, as the ostrich with her bush." His optimism had, however, many a struggle with pessimism, which was his chamber-companion also. "I am not well at all," he writes. "But hope to be better. . . . To-morrow I may be carrying topgal- lant sails again. But just at present I am scraping along with a jurymast and a kind of amateur rudder." There was more truth than perhaps he thought in his humoresque sketch of his tomb, with its motto — 79 THE HILLS OF HOME "ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON born 1850, of a family of engineers, died .... 'Nitor aquis.' Home is the sailor, home from sea. And the hunter home from the hill. You, who pass this grave, put aside hatred ; love kindness; be all services remembered in your heart, and all offences pardoned." He was bravely content to suffer. He is a wounded soldier in the campaign of life. Yet he begs that he have not to suffer more than he can bear. "For that makes a man mad." At the same time he prays, "Never to sink up to my eyes in comfort, and grow dead in virtues and respect- ability." He sees the ennobling discipline of life's trials. He says: " I am a bad man by nature, I suppose; but I cannot be good without sufferinga little." Hediscerns,also, plainly, through that window of pain, what is the end of life — "The pleasurable death of 80 THE HILLS OF HOME self: a thing not to be attained because it is a thing belonging to heaven." He had the universal sympathy of the truest genius. As when he saw the little feathered world invaded by the terror of a hawk, and noted the songless thrill of fear that filled the garden. "I did not know be- fore, "he says, "that the voice of birds could be so tragically expressive. . . . Really, they almost frightened me; I could hear mothers and w-ives in terror for those who were dear to them." His frequent bitterness of utterance and discontent was not by any means his natural mood. He was not given to con- centration upon his own self. With that poetic altruism which made Burns, in the heart of storm and winter, think of the suffering creatures, he writes: "It is a fine strong night, full of wind; the trees are all crying out in the darkness; funny to think of the birds asleep outside, on the tossing branches, the little bright 8i F THE HILLS OF HOME eyes closed, the brave wings folded, the little hearts that beat so hard and thick (so much harder and thicker than ever human heart) all stilled and quieted in deep slumber, in the midst of this noise and turmoil. Why, it will be as much as I can do to sleep in here in my walled room; so loud and jolly the wind sounds through the open window."Ashelistens, the night's unrest gets into his being. He sees the far- stretching world, of unknown and untra- versed spaces, the roads that wind away behind the hills, "the sleeping towns and sleeping farm-houses and cottages," the low places down beside the surf-beaten shores, and his fancy fares a-foot past them all, with Slumber following, red-eyed, behind him. In that same letter his wayward mood finds expression. It is the spirit of the essayist, tired with the struggle. The impulse to begin life at the very start of a fresh furrow, out under the clear 82 THE HILLS OF HOME azure coolness of the night, away from the fret and fever that have made his efforts such distress, and to go on, without turn- ing or returning, "until somewhere by a road-side or in some clean inn, clean death opened his arms to me and took me to his quiet heart for ever." It would be like fall- ing into that deep Sleep which tired hu- manity longs for, like a ripe thing, carrying the full heart of a chastened experience with him over the shadow-limit into the Land of Dawn. He has been friends with Death. H e has felt the grass and the daises growing out of his grave. He can laugh in the grim cold shadows, a ghost not fear- some, but familiar and friendly, with greet- ings for life, or its questionings, not a tear- ful good-bye. He was evidently, for the time, in that territory so familiar to him — "the desert of Cough, and by the ghoul-haunted wood- land of Fever." It gradually, in his separation, across the 83 THE HILLS OF HOME sea, became impossible for him to think of ever returning to his native land. The "Hills of Home" were to be always Hills of Dream.Tohave made the venture were to play with certain death, were to beguilty of something like an act of suicide. He schooled his heart to the deprivation; and wrote to Crockett, from Samoa: "I shall never take that walk by the Fish- er's Tryst and Glencorse. I shall never see Auld Reekie. I shall never set my foot a- gain upon the heather. Here I am until I die, and here will I be buried. The word is out,and thedoomwritten.Or, if I do come, it will be a voyage to a further goal." Crockett's words of dedication to him of The Stickit Minister had moved him very deeply to remembrance. He wrote from the depths of his being when he said: "It's a wrench not to be planted in Scot- land — that I can never deny — if I could onlybeburiedinthe hills,under the heath- er, and a table tombstone like the martyrs, 84 THE HILLS OF HOME where the vvhaups and plovers are crying! . . . Singular that I should fulfil the Scots destiny throughout, and live a voluntary exile, and have my head filled with the blessed beastly place all the time!" In this respect he hit, in his Master of Ballantrae, upon the contradiction that is within the love of a Scotsman for home, where he makes a character say that he has been guilty of two errors, in that he ever left his native city, and that he ever returned to it! CHAPTER SIX A"CLACHAN" LIKE Swanstonwascertaintohave its "character." And Steven- son's note-taking soul was just as certain to single him out. He found in Robert Young the old gardener a sub- ject worthy of his pen. Whether or no it be that in the inmost nature of our fellow countrymen there is a strong spice of original sin, making us sus- pect a truly lineal descent from the prim- ary delver, who leaned upon his spade in Eden's riggs looking around vainly for conversational diversion, until he sinned, and,beingflung out to perspire a wage, be- came father of all who plant cabbages, and progenitor of Flower Shows, so that Adam is still a common and favourite name in many Scottish families, and the laws of heredity make all head-gardeners Scots- men, one thing is certain, that the Scottish man who digs and plants seems always to 87 THE HILLS OF HOME Speak out of a long, ancient, and very inti- mate acquaintance with the beginnings of things. His soul, with roots of early know- ledge clinging to it, and much rudimentary clay, seems to have been turned out of pot after pot through multitudinous seasons and varieties of soil carrying each experi- ence with it. These characteristics make almost any gardener, like a minister's man, a deeply in- teresting subject of study. Stevenson was, however, wrong in thinking that Robert Young,the gardener at Swanston, was pro- bably the last. The type survives. The oc- cupation seems to produce the character. The agricultural farmer is generally more full of life-thoughts than the man whose days are devoted to "beasts." The growingof green things, thesowing, plant- ing, reaping, and in-gatheringof food-stuffs for earth's living creatures make for seas- ons of quiet reflective thought. While they are growing in the fields imagination has 88 THE HILLS OF HOME its times of brooding and enrichment. It has, besides, uniqueopportunities of look- ing in the eye of Nature and interpreting what is hid in Nature's heart. Especially is the man of plants a man of parts. He is also a man of ruminating tendencies. Indeed, every Scotsman has a reminiscent mind. The past is always close as his shadow behind him. Seen through the grey mist of a Scottish mem- ory, it is apt to become transfigured and transformed. Little things, mean enough to the eye of the ordinary Saxon soul, be- come ennobled. The casual word the Marquis dropped becomes lengthened in- to an intimate conversation; the wage of fifty years since, a princely income com- pared with the pittance which secures the serviceofto-day'sexperience. The forcing- frame becomes a vinery at least, and the garden of to-day a wretched thing of squalid plots, alongside of the great de- mesne which once the old Adam of cab- 89 THE HILLS OF HOME bages and calceolaries graced with his presence, and ruled as King of Spades. The Scottish workman, the more he loves his master, loves the more to impressupon him his own condescension in giving his valuable labour to him, and to show some- times, by a gesture pregnant with mean- ing beyond words, how well within the grip of his own hand is the problem of his present sphere. He may show this by the long list of gardening implements which he details as being necessary for the prop- er working of his field of labour, which has Art behind it, and which if his master purchase he will be apt to find lying un- used in the stick-shed ere a month go by. Further, his quiet hours among growing things become woven together into a kind of fragrant loneliness, begetting an array of solitary thoughts set in families, maxims of life with the smack of proverbial litera- ture about them, and deeds clothed in the characteristics of dignified personality. 90 THE HILLS OF HOME Originality seems to spring from the soil. No soul passes its time in close con- tact with fields, furrows, and forests, with- out acquiring its peculiar tang in thought, deed, andexpression. Poachers, fishermen, and shepherds all have it. But gardeners exhale it. It was, therefore, a very precious ex- perience that Stevenson had through his association in the garden at Swanston with old Robert Young. And it is well that his distemper portrait of the old man was not allowed to lie forgotten in the pages of the College Magazine, which, after four public appearances, died a quiet death from defective circulation. One can see the veteran moving about among his flower-plots, under the quiet hills, and hear his gentle brag of the great days in Eden, before the fall into the meaner con- descensions of his later toils. His appropriation of what he worked amongst is peculiar to his class, who in- 91 THE HILLS OF HOME variably identify themselves with whatso- ever they take in hand. I have known a beadle, who, having assured himself, tried hard to assure the ministerthat the people had been turning out better on Sundays since he began to ring the bell and carry up the books; while I have also heard as common every-day statements from the lips of the "second man in the parish," re- miniscences of "the last time we baptised a child here," or "the last marriage at which we officiated." The mind of a Scottish gardener of the old school becomes the sheltering-place of innumerable quaint notions, which seem to walk out and in, as if from stage doors, at the most unexpected moments, with the mostunanticipated remarks. I well remem- ber one such who admired the sententious semi-theological phraseology of the min- ister's man. The latter functionary was an authority on bees, and if at any time in the parish, during the swooning summer, a 92 THE HILLS OF HOME crowd was seen gazing open-mouthed into a tree, a passer-by would be justified in concluding that it was the church-officer securing a swarm. "Do you know, "asked the old gardener of me, one day as I met him with the forester — "Do you know what I think, sometimes, when Tammas goes up into the pulpit wi' the books, and gives the Bible a clap on the sma' o' the back, and takes a look round the Kirk? Well," he said, perfectly gravely, and with honest intention, "I aye think a short discourse on bees would be very acceptable!" Old Robert Young of Swanston, who despised with infinite pity the latter-day love of gewgaws, and tried to curb the tendency by developing troops of cauli- flowers and cabbages across the flower- beds, was of the true Scottish stamp. Two hundred years before his own day, he would have been tramping in the army of theCovenant.or discussing when the con- 93 THE HILLS OF HOME venticle was over, knotty points of Scrip- ture and questionable interpretations of abstruse dogma; for his life, and the life of his kind, was nourished on daily scraps that had dropped as if from tables of stone, out of the Hebrew Scriptures. His dreams were doubtless filled with shadows, of date probably not much later, as a general rule, than the Mosaic Dis- pensation; and yet he would have his own views on the crossing of Greenland, which would be as clear as those which he held about the crossing of the Red Sea, regard- ing which he probably knew just as much. He would have his own opinion also, of the character and conduct of the patri- archs, and would be apt to despise Adam forlosing a good situation over a deprav- ed taste in apples. His Scotchness would come out like a stone-crop of contradic- toriness, which, breaking through the close-trimmed lawn of his suavity, just served the purpose of preventing the de- 94 THE HILLS OF HOME velopment of false conceit in those with whom he held converse. We can under- stand the old man being proud of his age, yet shaking a deprecating head over his three-score years and ten, remember- ing how they were "few and evil"; while, at the same time, he would resent deeply the application of the adjective "auld" to himself. Each day draws a picture of its passing, over his heart, his work bending him to its own shape; the earth he serves and feeds drawing him nearer to her bosom, as a mother draws a reluctant child close to her in the descending shad- ows, till with a quiet surprise at theliberty, and astonished at the careless forgetful- ness of Providence, he is blinded, and gagged, and carried off by death, the con- queror of kings and gardeners,tothe green places far beyond the limit of this world of changing seasons and Flower-Shows. Yet ever, insome reproduction of his kind, one feels as though he had really come 95 THE HILLS OF HOME through a resurrection; for, so long as Scotland lives, the old Scotch gardener can never die. It was, therefore, the de- piction of a deathless type that Stevenson gives us on his clever page, a type that still goes on, pottering among greenhous- es and cabbages, under the shadow of the Hills of Home. Alongside of his picture of the gardener stands that of the other native character, John Tod, the shepherd of the Pentlands. The Nature love of the early world brought down, todwell amongstthe sheep- cotes and pastoral glens, the gods who loved to sit by shepherds' fires, and share the rude repasts in huts where poor men lay. I wonder how they would have fared in intercourse with some of our Scottish herds, sun-burned and wind-tanned, and hoarse with shouting to their dogs! They live in a world of their own. Knowledge, strong, big, and solitary, fearless with the fearlessness as of a deity's, and as confid- 96 o = s Si.,. THE HILLS OF HOME ent of infallibleness, springs up within the heart of such a man; for, where there is none to contend against his will, and where a man is literally lord of the creatures, is it a wonder that he will shout his opinions in the face of constable and parson, and ban upon the hillside, unhesitatingly, a contumacious world? The man of sheep is Nature's general. From his knoll he takes in at one glance the arrangement of a whole campaign, sending out his four- legged scouts andwise lieutenants, to turn the flanks of scattered droves and bands of scared and scampering sheep. He has a code of his own, too — a whistle, a wave of the hand, a yelp, or aword out of a vocabul- ary which no philologer can ever run to earth, in its remote sources away among nomad pastoralities. His commands toler- ate no contradiction, and are above all question; and woe to the canine intellig- ence which flickers, even for a second, out of the line of perfect understanding. He is 97 G THE HILLS OF HOME apt to think meanly, you may be sure, of the other pastor in the parish who does his shouting only on one day in the week when the John Tods of the parish are silent; and does it, too, not on the hillside, but in the fold; flinging out his commands not to sheep-dogs but to the flock direct, just as much to their confusion and bewild- erment as would ensue were the same method applied by John Tod himself! I can hear him saying, with a snort, on a wind-swept grassy headland in the hills, "What wonder though his flock scatter with such a herding, when the pastor him- self is sheep-dog and shepherd, and there isn't a well-trained collie among them." The town man laughs to see the big hodden-clad son of the hills stupefied a- mong swift cars and motor bicycles, not able to find hisway, without multitudinous bumpings, along broad crowded pave- ments. Yet let him loose in the trackless wild, in the teeth of snow and hail that THE HILLS OF HOME obliterate all things — see him in the swamp, or on the face of a swooning cliff, after a lamb that has wandered, or a sheep that has been lost, and you see the noblest bit of fearlessness and indefatigable assid- uity indomitable, thatyour mortal eyes will ever look upon this side of the stars. He fears no human face; no title and no rank have consideration from him alongside of the interests of his flock. No mother's passion for her child, no love of patriot for his fatherland, ever could eclipse the strenuous devotion to solitary duty, the blazing tempestuous courage of the shep- herd, child of the glens among the "Hills of Home." J CHAPTER SEVEN IT IS REMARKABLE THAT he who knew so much of human character did not, in his work, make that use which might have been ex- pected of the complex nature of woman- hood. It is true that this, and even more, has been said so often, that it has been accepted without question that Stevenson could not draw women at all. That he was himself conscious of this, we can see from his letter to Marcel Schwob where hesays: " Vous nedetesteiz pas alorsmes bonnes femmes? Moi, je les deteste. I have never pleased myself with any women of mine save two character parts, one of only a few lines — the Countess of Rosen, and Madame Desprez in the Treasure of Franc hardy Nevertheless, it is also true that one has only to read his letters to see how he could interest women in him — a proof that he was not without the power of being inter- lOI THE HILLS OF HOME ested in them. Further, I think it is quite plain that he was not seized by the master passion until late in his career, when he met the woman who possessed him to the end. Besides, he wrote many of his stories forthestory'ssake,studyingcertainactions of men, who were impulse-driven byother motives and purposes than those of sex. They are the adventures of men banished and driven from home, not in consequence of contact with feminine intrigue, but by the greed of gold, by outre passion, and by the love of adventure. Yet when pro- bably impelled to do so by the fact of grumbling criticism, he does bring in the feminine legend, I do not think that any fair-minded critic could say that he fails. Besides, sex problems are not absolutely necessary in romance. Although the tend- er passion has made for more romantic situation than anything else in the world, yet there have been other impulses which have affected the relations of individuals I02 THE HILLS OF HOME and communities sufficiently to create positions of intense emotional interest. The conflict of a heart against itself, of a soul against its destiny, are all sufficiently moving and absorbing to fill a canvas. Stevenson's mental interests were in re- ality,atheart, historical and psychological. He concentrates in Kidnapped upon the mystery of the Appin murder rather than on the slow fire of David Balfour's love. It is not, in fact, primarily a love story at all, but a study of the character of Alan Breck the Highlander in contrast to David Balfour the slow-witted Lowlander. So with the majority of his tales. His women were perhaps mostly in his story as pivots, or in order that they might do something for the men that are in it. This was quite natural, from the position of women in a typical Scottish household, and from the semi-Hebraic Biblical point of view of old Thomas Stevenson the novelist's father. The women of his youth who had a sense THE HILLS OF HOME of enfranchisement were apt to be looked upon as eccentrics by the staid standards of Edinburgh society. It was still the day of the indoors woman. Models for Mrs Weir of Hermiston were not difficult to find — the peevish textifier, confined to her sofa, a kind of drawing-room martyr with a "tidy" on her. The fact is, that, for the purposes of Stevenson's story, the women had just to be as he made them. I am not sure that his own estimate in his letter to Schwob in regard to Countess Rosen is correct, for it is as difficult for a man to make a fair estimate of the off- spring of his mind as of that of his body. Each reader is free to choose his own heroine to fall in love with. Stevenson had to depict the women he knew as he saw them, not as we do. His women were women of whim. Their angels do tweak the ear of their purpose sometimes. In Weir of Hermiston, however, that masterly torso, bearing about its lines the 104 THE HILLS OF HOME marks and imprint of great art, and in- sight, the two Kirsties stand out limned clearly and possessingly. It is the fashion to concentrate praise on Kirstie the elder, but the picture of her niece is one of the masterpieces of literary portraiture of a girl's soul. It would be interesting to know a truer picture, with a deeper inner know- ledge of feminine human nature than it shows. One cannot, at the same time, for- get the tragedy of the midnight scene of the heart-wrung passionateness of the elder Kirstie's pleading. It is also the vogue to scorn Stevenson's picture of Catriona, calling her "a boy dressed in girl's clothes." This cry, re- peated by the multitude that so readily take their opinions fromanybody'sprinted page, has been attempted to be met by the supposition that those critics have never been in love. It is, however, far clearer that they do not understand the character of a Highland woman. Catriona is not a 105 THE HILLS OF HOME mere dairy- maid, but a personality instinct with the feelings of a Highland lady. Her fidelity, her patience, her devotion, the constancy of her affection, win the heart even of the reader who may have pre- possessions against her, as gently and as surely as in real life she would have done. Nor is the feminine naive gravity of Miss Barbara Grant in the samestoryacreation in fustian and sawdust, but feminine to her finger-tips, and true to her class. Olalla too — what a thing of passion she is! While, as for a simple Scottish girl — what a glimpse is that of "the nameless lass "who helps Alan Breck and David Balfour to get across the Forth, in their flight. In a touch or two she seizes our visual imagin- ation and vanishes. One can hearthe flutter of her skirts as she escapes from our presence. His highest reach in his womenkind was undoubtedly Kirstie Elliot, senior, the true Scottish muirland woman, with a 1 06 THE HILLS OF HOME lash-snap in the whip of her words. Kirstie theyounger is also a truedaughter of the Hills of Home, so different from her aunt — quite evidently a careful study of genuine womanhood. Of course she has no depth in her — she is only a sunny pool rip- pled by any passing breath, shadowed by the wind of any passing bird. If in any way Robert Louis Stevenson failed or seemed to fail in his depiction of womanhood, it was not from want of knowledge of the sex, for he was passion- ate, and he knew passionate secrets. Speaking, in his letters, of the Elgin Marbles, he says, "If one could love a woman like that once, see her once grow pale with passion, and once wring your lips out upon hers, would it not be a small thing to die." It is so difficult in ordinary life to fathom the sunsmit, shadow-chased per- sonality of woman, so ready for leal self- abnegation, so prompt to do and dare for 107 THE HILLS OF HOME sweet love's sake, yet so often in the grip of fickle whim and passing mood, that only a great artist can catch and fix the lines of a true portrait; sometimes, indeed, the greatest artist only by suggestion settles the eluding sylphlike personality upon the canvas of imagination. Yet it cannot be denied that such feminine characters as Stevenson has touched and quickened have not been unknown to many through whose lives they have sent their lasting influence; and it must just be taken for granted that their kind have passed by the grumblers. His verse, especiallyhis Scottish verse, is not his greatest creation. He would not himself have claimed it to be so. His models are rather obvious. From what he himself says he felt very much the influence of hapless Robert Fer- gusson. Sometimes, indeed, he thought he was a reincarnation of that poet. It was natural that the fate of that young Edin- io8 THE HILLS OF HOME burgh man, whose health and reason were shattered by Bohemian dissipations, should have appealed very powerfully to Stevenson who moved through a Bo- hemian world also. Superlative though the poems of Burns be, it is undeniable that his chequered career intensely deep- ened Stevenson's interest in his life. Stevenson's verse utterance follows in all details the Scottish traditions. He does not, in fact, make in them a new contrib- ution to the stock, although his personal voice and view are present. What is known as the Habbie Simson stave, a form called by Allan Ramsay the "stand- ard Habbie," and which was especially used in Scottish poetry for epistolary verse, was for the most part his medium of expression. This measure itself had a history of its own. It was troubadour in origin, and from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century was in use in England. In the eleventh century Count William of 109 THE HILLS OF HOME Poitiers wrote in it. From courtly singers it passed out, however, to be a favourite measure of singers in courts and alleys, and after a most varied history it became, after 1640, the model of Scottish verse, until Burns made it practically the metri- cal uniform of his muse. This was the verse used by Stevenson in A Lowde7i Sabbath Morn, in which he laughs, not a sardonic laugh, but a genial sympathetic appreciation of the humours of the relig- ious habits of his native land and fellow- countrymen. \viA Lowden Sabbath Morn he employs the same arts of the master- craftsman, with choice of vocalic effect and picturesque presentment of fact and character, as in his Essays. The clinkum-clank o' Sabbath bells Noo to the hoastin' rookery swells, Noo faintin' laigh in shady dells. Sounds far and near, An' through the simmer kintry tells Its tale o' cheer. True to the life is the picture of the ham- IIO THE HILLS OF HOME let gathering for worship in the church- yard, where The prentit stanes that mark the deid, Wi' lengthened lip, the sarious read; Syne wag a moraleesin' heid, An' then and there Their hirplin' practice an' their creed Try hard to square. Inside the sacred building the minister expounds to the drowsing parish, redolent of peppermint and southernwood, the sins of others, and especially the fau'ts o' ither kirks, An' shaws the best o' them No muckle better than mere Turks, When a's confessed o' them. Bethankit! what a bonny creed! What mair would ony Christian need? — The braw words rumm'le ower his heid, Nor steer the sleeper; And in their restin' graves, the deid Sleep aye the deeper. In somewhat more of the spirit of Satire he looks through the eye of a Scotsman returned from abroad with the hunger for the old doctrines of his youth, after the III THE HILLS OF HOME spiritual unsettlement of the landsthrough which he has been wandering. He lays a finger on the weaknesses of his people. Scots folks have always been fond of their own way in religious forms of worship. Each individual likes to have his own kind of faith. When an Englishman quarrels with another Englishman he sulks or com- mits a breach of the peace, but when a Scotsman has a quarrel he goes off and founds a sect. No matter on how slight a ground the quarrel occurs, say, from the use of a harmonium to the singing of a hymn, or the taking up of a collection, he will always find plenty to follow him, till there be enough to have amongst them another schism, or two. Stevenson hits this off with a twinkling eye, and his tongue in his cheek, while he also touches lightly on the queer combination of spirituality and spirituosity which was once the note of Scottish faith. Despite the innovations of hymn books I 12 THE HILLS OF HOME and the gesturing manners of the new precentor, the returned emigrant foundhis old satisfaction from thegeneral sweeping condemnation of everything and every- body which formed the staple of the prea- cher's word. I owned, wi' gratitude and wonder. He was a pleisure to sit under. His Scottish poems give clear impres- sions of Nature, religion, and life in his native land. For example, how Horatian is the spirit of this picture. Frae nirly, nippin', Eas' Ian' breeze, Frae Norlan' snaw, an' haar o' seas, Weel happit in your gairden trees, A bonny bit, Atween the muckle Pentland's knees. Secure ye sit Frae the high hills the curlew ca's; The sheep gang baaing by the wa's; Or whiles a clan o' roosty craws Cangle thegether; The wild bees seek the gairden raws, Weariet wi' heather. Or in the gloamin' douce an' gray The sweet-throat mavis tunes her lay; 113 H THE HILLS OF HOME The herd comes linkin* doun the brae; An' by degrees The muckle siller mune maks way Amang the trees. The last verse especially is a beautiful reminiscence of the ** Hills of Home." CHAPTER EIGHT WHERE DID HE GET the charm of his writing, with its incisive phrase, its necromantic glamour, its vistas of stillness and charm, with episodes that hush the heart as though we get in that moment a glimpse into the bacchanal- haunted glades, where Dionysus leads the king, in the palinode of Euripides? The man himself did not know. When he tries to tell us, he attempts what is be- yond the reach of his own real knowledge. He looked back on the nearest stepping- stones whichonlyhad led him over thelast brookhehad crossed in his pilgrimage;but he forgot the heart-seeking voice of the bugles in the dark, up on the magic Castle- rock, encrusted with memories of the old struggles of the makers of Edinburgh, the haunting shadows of the midnight streets, the lone peaks that had looked at him through the grey mist, the running waters 115 THE HILLS OF HOME in the hills that had broken in upon him in the wakeful intervals of his sleeping, the cry of the winds on the grey crags of Kirk Yet- ton, the honeysuckle and the rose-leaves tost at his feet over the dyke of the garden at Swanston. Ay, and the shadows of the fathers of his race, who had struo^orled in border foray and in conflicts with the sea. Stevenson was, and still is, largely and widely misunderstood by certain stupid people of whom and of whose kind there are always plenty in the world ready to take an author absolutely literally at his word; and so, reading Stevenson's state- ments as to the books and authors that in- fluenced him in the reminiscences of his wide reading, are prematurely ready to ac- cept him as having been, for the mostpart, as he puts it, "the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Mon- taigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann." What he meant by using that phrase is eas- ii6 THE HILLS OF HOME ily understood by every reflective reader, and especially by every man who writes, and knows his business. He was sharpen- ing his sword. Every artist has to begin, in a sense, as a copyist, in order to learn the use of his tools. No man becomes a master by hitting out in the dark. We can perceive and appreciate the "sedulous ape" business, for example, in such a thing as his analysis of the contra- dictories in man, where there is proof that the shadows of Bacon and Pascal stood each at the writer's shoulder while he wrote: "What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated dust, lift- ing alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing, feeding, growing, bring- ing forth small copies of himself; grown upon with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his face; a thing to set children screaming! — and yet, look- ed at nearlier, known as his fellows knows 117 THE HILLS OF HOME him, how surprising are his attributes!" And so forth, in similar strain. That he owed something also to Jean- Jacques Rousseau is manifest, from the following, taken at random from the Con- fessions'. "There is something in walking that stirs and quickens my ideas; I can hardly think when I remain in one place; my body must be on the move to set my mind agoing. The sight of the country, the suc- cession of agreeable views, the open air, the big appetite, the good health I win by walking, the freedom of the Inn, the ab- sence of everything that makes me feel my dependence, everything that reminds me of my situation, all this loosensmysoul, gives me a greater audacity to think, throws me, so to speak, into the immens- ity of beings, to combine them, to choose them, to appropriate them at my will, with- out fear or constraint. I dispose of all Nat- ure like a master." ii8 THE HILLS OF HOME Or again, take this: "I lay down voluptuously on the ledge of a sort of recess or false door let into the wall of a terrace. ... A nightingale was just overhead, and I went to sleep to its song; my slumbers were sweet, my awak- ening was still more so. It was broad day- light; my eyes, on opening, saw the water, the verdure, a wonderful landscape. I got up and shook myself; I felt hungry; I wended my way gaily to the town, re- solved to spend two pieces of six blanks, that I still had left, in a good breakfast." One might almost feel as though Stev- enson's voice were here speaking, as though his genius had made response to the French influence of old treaty connec- tions with the Southern land and its sunny champaigns, verdant, and gay with laugh- ter and with songs of nightingales and happy wayfarers. In fact, words were his comrades. He carried in his pockets one book to read in, 119 THE HILLS OF HOME and another to write in, writing not for publication, but as a child would learn to walk, by exercise of its limbs. Sometimes, thus, he would catch a thought worth keeping, as one might hap upon an escap- ing angel. His experience was indeed just the same as that of any imaginative boy with the lure of Literature before him. In his correspondence he once declared that he had moulded his style on theweird pages of Patrick Walker, the grim cove- nanting pedlar. I am certain this meant little more, however, than just that the "far ben" glimpses of the recesses of the human soul with which Walker's pages abound had given hush to his own fancies, and made them stand a-tip-toe often, with finger on their lips. He was, indeed, so sensitively responsive to directness and strength of utterance that he was apt to feel that he owed everything to the last vivid thing he read; and, doubtless, for a time the ripple of the last stone that fell in- 120 THE HILLS OF HOME to the pool of his consciousness kept mov- ing slowly onward to the shore. Almost fromhis earliest he was,ashesaid,astudent of methods of expression; also, he read everything, everywhere, anyhow. One can easily trace also the vivid in- fluence of Walt Whitman — the astonish- ing naked man of modern literature. Besides, what is originality, but the individual's own interpretation of what, after all, must be, at this time of day, the great universal common-places of life and thought? The more widely a wise and clever man reads, the more he will interpret his read- ing by the varied and ever-varying library of Humanity. In the wide world he finds his true commentary. The heart of man is his whetstone. Stevenson did not really need other men's mirrors. He needed no second-hand inspiration. He had skylights of his own. He did not require to pay ferrymen's fees; 121 THE HILLS OF HOME he could be his own steersman, sailing the wide seas of imagination. He knew the secrets of life and death intimately — they haunt a Bohemian world. The man who lives in Bohemia is apt neither to take death so seriously as that grim visitant expects, nor even mirth so lightly as men look for. So Stevenson is a man earnest — inevitably so.seeingashe does, howsevere is the heart of things; and yet he smiles, for he has the magician's gift,and can work a transformation scene. He can afford quiet laughter to illumine his stage, though, at the same time, making one feel, knowing what one does know, that he is sometimes playing jigs to keep up our hearts during the acting of the tragedy. He was, in fact, an instinctive rebel against conventions, both of joy and sorrow. He was a born actor, for he was "of imagination all com- pact." Now, each man can breathe his own feeling even into another man's notes, so 122 THE HILLS OF HOME long as he play on his own fiddle. I U-trained and ill-tempered critics, with narrow out- look and vague experience of life and liter- ature, are prone to confuse issues in such a matter. It is true, for example, that the mystery story may appeal to the creative imagination sufficiently to beget another of its own kind. One would expect, in the nature of things, that this should be so. But it does not at all follow that Edgar Allan Poe is the father of Stevenson. He himself declared in writing Treasure Is- land that he was to write a pirate story "in the old way." But, just as with a singer using a set form of notes, he gives it, even in an exercise, the turn of his own voice. After all, the possible situations of diffic- ulty in human experience have their limit- ations;and it is, indeed, amazing that such variety can be built up out of a vocabulary which, even at its widest, has its restric- tions. The craze for crude comparisons in 123 THE HILLS OF HOME present-day criticism is often only a mode of cheap clap-trap. Nothing was cheaper for example, than to call Stevenson the modern Scott, the modern Burns, the Scot- tish Addison or Steele. Scott and Burns are the crest of their wave. They are alone. They maygive,bythe ictus of their genius, impetus to otherminds,butthe'rlion-skins are not transferable, any more than their personalities. Besides, the fact that a man wri tes about i^'/yzWr.^or the Jacobites does not justify a comparison with Hamlet or Waverley. The true comparison by a true critic is the comparison of a man with his own previous work, which may be his best or his worst. All the same, of course, no man living or writing in the world of im- aginative creation can help being splashed a little with some spray from theperennial fountains of Montaigne, Pepys, Scott, Balzac, Dumas, and the rest. For those who believe in portents, such can be found in Stevenson's record. The 124 THE HILLS OF HOME legend of a laughter-chased shadow as a remote Celtic progenitor was his. We hear its echo often. Even in his earliest child- hood he was brought in a remarkable and dangerous way into contact with the Bo- hemian world, through the habits of his first nurse. She was unfortunately much addicted to alcohol, and was discovered in a public-house very drunk, while the tiny Robert Louis, tied up like a parcel, lay on a shelf behind the bar. A portrait of the young adventurer among the pewters would be a striking frontispiece! Another proved as perilous an experiment; and then "Cummy," Alison Cunningham, was secured, a precious and inestimable poss- ession. Her tales ofweirdry, her ballad lore, and, above all, her rich Scottish vocabul- ary, had very probably much more to do with the moulding of his world of praise than he was aware of. I believe, in fact, that it cannot be doubted that he owed for style, thought, and matter to "Cummy" 125 THE HILLS OF HOME his old nurse, who must have fed hisyoung imagination with many a draught drawn from the deep well of her remembrance, far more than his fancied indebtedness to Hazlitt and the rest. The relationship be- tween her and him was one of intense love. Her kindness and devotion to him must have been deep as that of a mother. What he wrote to her he meant, when he said: "Donot suppose that I shall everforget those long, bitter nights, when I coughed and coughed andwas so unhappy,and you were so patient and loving with a poor,sick child. Indeed, Cummy, I wish I might be- come a man worth talkingof, if it were only that you should not have thrown away your pains." His imagination had a very weird side to it, which might partly be traced to the influence of thisdeardelightful old woman. "Do you know," he writes of one of his tales, "thisstoryof mine is horrible; I only work at it by fits and starts, because I feel 126 THE HILLS OF HOME as If Itwere a sort of crime against human- ity — it is so cruel." Of course it cannot be denied that, at the back of the Scottish genius, right up against the humour of the race, there is a chord that vibrates to the sardonic grim key-note of Tophet. From the earhest time Literature had him on her leash. It was with a sorely dis- appointed heart that his father saw his son turn away resolutely from the profession of engineering, which was the tradition of their family. He made a struggle to obey his father's will in this respect, playing at engineering at Anstruther and at Wick, by day giving some kind of attention to his father's work, but by night, in the silence of his room, touching what to him was real life, modulatingandmouldinghis thoughts, and trying to master the art of expressing them. He loved the outdoor life, and so per- haps it was not only to oblige his father that he entered into engineering, with a 127 THE HILLS OF HOME hearty dislike for it. It was not unprofit- able for his future, for it gave him a living experience among men and ships, with a romantic acquaintance with quays, and harbours, and the mystery of the sea, which stood him in good stead, and was extremely creative in relation to his later work. In a large degree, also, it suited his Bohemian tastes and love for composite companionships. The hard recognition that engineering was impossible as a profession for him having been faced, he read, or was sup- posed to read, for the Scottish Bar. Be- hind all things, however, the shadow of Literature, with a star upon its brow, still beckoned him to follow. His Bohemian companionships, the mis- cellaneous friendships and acquaintances which he loved to make, especially among the common people, were strongly creat- ive influences in his life and thought. He is, indeed, essentially, and very largely 128 V 1 m ^. THE HILLS OF HOME through this, the voice of the Scottish mind, as it looks on the stern and "paw- kie" side of things, almost in the same glance. The Scottish peasant lends him- self very much to such opportunities of friendship and intimacy with his super- iors, and one can see how both they and Stevenson would enjoy the occasion. A glimpse of that kind of thing emerges in one of his letters to Mrs Sitwell. He tells howa shower of raindrove him for shelter into a tumble-down steading, where he fell into conversation with "a labourer cleaning a byre." In any other country he would have fought shy of com- munion with a man of that class, but re- membering that he was in Scotland he plunged into a discussion upon Education and Politics. The clear mother-wit of the Scottish peasant quickened the mind of the man of culture, by its clear-visioned perception of what had perplexed him in the state of the peasant people of Suffolk. 129 I THE HILLS OF HOME And, further, he gave the literary student of men and manners an encouraging up- lift, when he declared that he could not understand how any man who had a defi- nite aim in life could be daunted or cast down. " They that havehadaguidschoolin' and do nae mair, whatever they do, they have done; but him that has aye something a- yont need never be weary.' ... I think the sentiment will keep, even through a change of words, something of the heart- some ring of encouragement that it had for me; and that from a man cleaning a byre! You see what John Knox and his schools have done." One can easily see this lean man of genius loving to talk even to "a labourer cleaning a byre," while outside the rain patters, making the dust lift up as it hits the earth with a "ping," and the roar of the mill-lade punctuates the conversation. It creates a strong epithetic picture. 130 THE HILLS OF HOME That same letter has a touch of the Stevenson of the most intimate essays, especially in regard to the power, which was his own, of making even sound al- most visible. For example: " We lay together a long time on the beach; the sea just babbled among the stones; and at one time we heard the hol- low, sturdy beat of the paddles of an un- seen steamer somewhere round the cape." It makes the stillness of a library vibrate. One catches also a real touch of theborn essayist in his letter to Baxter of October 1872, which is, in reality, a discourse on Fooldom, as concentrated as a pearl. It is so perfect and concise that it must be re- produced in his own words. " That is a happy land, if you like — and not so far away either. Take a fool's advice and let us strive without ceasing to get in- to it. Hark in your ear again: 'they allow PEOPLE TO REASON IN THAT LAND.' I wish I could take you by the hand and lead you 131 THE HILLS OF HOME away into its pleasant boundaries. There is no custom-house on the frontier, and you may take in what books you will. There are no manners and customs; but men and women grow up, like trees in a still, well-walled garden, 'at their own sweet will ' There is no prescribed or cus- tomary folly — no motley, cap, or bauble: out of the well of each one's own innate absurdity he is allowed and encouraged freely to draw and to communicate; and it is a strange thing how this natural fooling comes so nigh to one's better thoughts of wisdom; and stranger still, that all this dis- cord of people speaking in their own natur- al moods and keys, masses itself into a far more perfect harmony than all the dismal, official unison in which they sing in other countries. Parting-singing seems best all the world over." CHAPTER NINE IN MANYTHINGS HE MUST be measured very largely by his heart. Though he laughed at church- es he did not laugh at the principle which was behind them, for he was a child of his race and of his family. And he had not a snigger in his laughter. He had be- sides, a quick conscience. The chimes at midnight might stir one side of it, but the bells of the faith of his fathers as often moved the other and the deeper side. He had also the restless impulse of his race. He had the instinct of action, and more than once he cried out, "Oh that I had been a soldier!" He was, indeed, a man of action, tied by the leg to a sick bed. No matter how the evanescent critics girded at the written thing of this man's soul, which was to abide when they and their gird were gone, he was happy in the possession of the unswervingconfidence of ^33 THE HILLS OF HOME faithful friends, and these also, "namely" people too, who knew well the quality of that inwhich they were trusting. He knew, of course, that confidence to be the most valuable and at the same time the most terrible possession of the human heart; for what if it one day got its eyes opened, also, to the possible truth that what it valued at so high an estimate were really fustian wind-blown, for a brief day's littleness? Their confidence in him, however, proved to be correct. Time has justified it. His charm was intensely personal. Like Burns he possessed an innate distinction of personal grace which found expression in his words. His beauty of eye, and the charm of his face, where expressions and feelings were evanescent and pursuant as the wind- wave over the wheat, marked him out from the common ruck of man. And his written style was the natural embodi- ment of his personality. Stevenson's power of vivid singular ^34 THE HILLS OF HOME flashlight vision was indeed his very own. His whole was apt to consist of a succes- sion of individual scenes, revealed in splendidly forcible pictature. This is, of course, the result of deliberate devotion tohis art, the nurture of his gift, the polish- ing development of his medium. The issue is the unique grace and precision of his workmanship. Light, lambent and pure, plays about his sentences. His words are like flowers and stars. His paragraphs are rich tapestries, to pull a single thread from which would be to damage the fabric. Sometimes his style is as close as that of Thucydides. Besides, his genius is as ver- satile and various as the moods of his nat- ive climate. The novel, the prose-poem, the epistle, the parable.above all the essay, reflecting aspects of Nature and of the soul's lifeand conduct. Hence it is that his charm is such as perennially attracts, with new phases of freshness on each renewal. Yet, while he reveals his heart he does not 135 THE HILLS OF HOME uncover his nakedness. His confidences are clean. He is a gentleman. One thing needs to be clearly said, and firmly declared. He did not pose as an in- valid. He would have liked nothing so little as being set up before even an ad- miring public, wrapt in a blanket, a band- age round his head, and a packet of cough drops, duly labelled, on his lap. Himself said: "To me the medicine botdes on my chimney and the blood on my handker- chief are accidents. They do not colour my view of life, and I should think myself a trifler, and in bad taste, if I introduced the world to these unimportant trifles." He would hate to have his biography a series of bulletins. Notwithstanding his experiences with health, or rather with the want of it, his youth was entirely immortal; his soul could do a back somersault into his child- hood years. Even with the blood-stained handkerchief at his lips he was an optim- 136 THE HILLS OF HOME ist. No man had a cheerier laugh with which to meet his interviews with Death. He never Hked to put Death out of count- enance by making him feel that he was an unwelcome caller. Yet, Death himself must often have felt awkward in the cham- ber of such a man. Tears were near his laughter too. A curious pixie lived in hid- ing-holes of his heart. His soul was an Ariel. His opinion of himself was all the while much more modest than that which was in the scrap-book of the gods. His name is still one for leaded type. There is a sheen of its own about it. He had, in him- self, and in his character, a familiar per- sonal power to interest, to attach, and to charm. He was an attractive inspiration, for he possessed in rare degree what appeals to universal and primitive sources of racial imagination. His genius was by nature fastidious and artistically modelled. His work in general has many master-touches 137 THE HILLS OF HOME of inner revelation. The keys of the soul are touched with master hand in the de- lineation of his characters. His work is truest literature, master-piecesof thought, moulded on the deepest feelings of the universal heart. The world's verdict on his work has modified its early utterances in the direc- tion of extended praise and deepening appreciation. Sir John Millais knew what he was sayingwhen he declared, " Nobody living can see with such an eye as that fellow, and nobody is such a master of his tools." Sometimes he reveals the inner char- acter of a man by a flash upon its integu- ment. Thus, how vividly one can see Markheim, as in a verbal cartoon, with "the haggard lift of his upper lip through which his teeth looked out." Or you find his scorn for the mock religious hypocrite, admirably touched into the concrete, in his picture of Tod Lapraik — "a muckle 138 THE HILLS OF HOME fat white hash of a man like creish, wi' a kind of a holy smile that gar'd me scun- ner." There always was a coterie of know- ledge who were convinced of his true artis- try. Himself knew all the while, too, what he was seeking. He was extremely sensi- tive to phrase. To a friend he says: 'T hope you don't dislike reading bad style like this as much as I do writing it; it hurts me when neither words nor clauses fall into their places, much as it would hurt you to sing when you had a bad cold and your voice deceived you, and missed every other note." He was, as we have seen, only too ready to attribute the source of his excellencies to others, for he was poor, and his soul was like a shallop tumbling in the trough of great dark waves, in which he had fre- quent doubt of himself. "I have given up all hope," he writes, "all fancy rather, of making literature my hold; I see that 139 THE HILLS OF HOME I have not capacity enough." It sounds strange to us to-day! He was blamed and censured for being an egotist; but his egotism had the charm- ing innocence of a child's about it. The world that entered by his eyes flowed through his heart into utterance. There is a Scoto-Frenchness in many of his emo- tions, as when he writes: "The first violet. ... I do not think so small a thing has ever given me such a princely festival of pleasure. I feel as if my heart were a little bunch of violets in my bosom; and my brain is pleasantly intox- icated with the wonderful odour. ... It is like a wind blowing to one out of fairy- land." In fact, this kind of egotism is the ground root of the essayist's labour. The world is going on round about him, big and noisy; but the essayist, instinctively and by right of his egotism, button-holes the world, and leads it into a side place, 140 THE HILLS OF HOME especially to a place, if possible, penetrated by the sound of running water. He says in effect what Stevenson says in fact: "I cannot write in any sense of the word, but I am as happy as can be, and I wish to notify the fact before it passes." He loved the children, and nothing delighted him more than to share in the creation of sport for them. Childlike also was his love of appreciation. It was with- held from him long enough, and when it did come in little preliminary drops into his heart it was received with real grat- itude. He appreciated above everything the approval of common people, for the truest critic, after all, is the common uni- versal man. He liked to receive criticism, but certain criticisms annoyed him, espec- ially when he is "down in health, wealth, and fortune." He begs Henley, "Never, please, delay such confidences any more. If they come quickly they are a help, if they come after long silences they feel 141 THE HILLS OF HOME almost like a taunt." He resistantly wriggles under certain forms of stricture. But he has confidence in thevision and the impulsewhichmaster- fully impel him to write. "I do not care," he says. "There is something in meworth saying, though I cannot find what it is just yet; and, ere I die, if I do not die too fast, I shall write something worth the boards, which with scarce an exception I have not yet done." Yet he had written, A Lodging for the Night, the best picture of sixteenth- century Paris with Frangois Villon in it, that could be done by any man living or dead, with Will d the Mill, and Providence and the Guitar! He was not good at making a mercenary bargain, hence he experienced the trad- itional anxieties of the poverty of authors. He touched cash arrangements gingerly with a shrinking finger. 'T hate myself for being always on business. But I cannot help my fears, 142 THE HILLS OF HOME anxieties about money Now I am fight- ing with both hands a hard battle, and my work, while it will be as good as I can make it, will probablybe worth twopence." How blind is genius always to investment potencies. How hunger hinders the calcul- ation of profits while only provoking the "liberty of prophesying"! And now he needs to ask for nothing. Time is giving him, every passing day, a more abiding reward. Wheresoever he did a day's thinking, writing or suffering, has become a place to be remembered. And no place, except that hill-top where his dust lies sleeping, is more transfused with the remembrance of his spirit than the grey streets of Edinburgh, and the quiet "Hills of Home." THE PENTLAND ESSAYS PENTLAND ESSAY NUMBER ONE PASTORAL PENTLAND ESSAY NUMBER ONE TO LEAVE HOME IN early life is to be stunned and quickened with novel- ties ; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more clearly the central features of the race ; when once youth has flown, each new impression only deepens the sense of na- tionality and the desire of native places. So may some cadet of Royal Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, ashemounted guard about French citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the Scots- Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana 149 THE HIIJ-S OF HOME and Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lin- gers about the lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of Scotland are in- comparable in themselves — or I am only the more Scottish to suppose so — and their sound and colourdwell for everin the mem- ory. How often and willingly do I not look again in fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling in its Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie! I think shame to leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too long if I remember- ed all; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions, that Water of Leithofthe many and well-named mills — Bell's Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn of pleasant mem- ories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that 150 PASTORAL nameless trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed from Hal- kerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, over- hung by a rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then kidnapped in itsinfancy by subterranean pipes fortheser- vice of the sea-beholding city in the plain. From many points in the moss you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its corners without sittingdown,andnotyetbegintobebreath- ed; Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem to the inexpert, in superflu- ity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a buc- ket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river; it would take in an appreci- able time to fill your morning bath; for the most part, besides, it soaks unseen through 151 THE HILLS OF HOME the moss; and yet for the sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a cQvidAn genius loci, I am condemned to Hnger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the nymph (whocannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me. John Tod, when I knew him, was al- ready "the oldest herd on the Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-scattering, sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days, when thedroveroadSjthatnowliegreen and sol- itary through the heather, were thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often mar- ched flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; and by his ac- count it was a rough business not without danger. The drove roads lay apart from habitation; the drovers met in the wilder- ness, asto-daythedeep-sea fishers meet off the banks in the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the one as in the other case rough 152 I OHM TOD PASTORAL habits and first-law were the rule. Crimes were committed, sheep filched, and drov- ers robbed and beaten; most of which of- fences had a moorland burial and were nev- er heard of in the courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once attacked, — by two men after his watch, — and at least once, betrayed by his habitual anger, fell under the danger of the law and was clapped into some rustic prison-house, the doors of which he burst in the night and was no more heard of in thatquarter. When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter places, and he hadno caresbeyondthedull- nessofhisdogs and the inroads of pedestri- ans from town. Butfora manof his propen- sity to wrath these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by snatches, in the grey of the summer morning, and al- ready from far up the hill, he would wake the "toun" with thesoundofhisshoutings; and in the lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced late at night. This wrathful voice 153 THE HILLS OF HOME of a man unseen might be said to haunt that quarter of the Pentlands,an audible bogie; and no doubt it added to the fear in which menstoodof Johnatouchofsomethingleg- endary. For my own part, he was at first my enemy, and I , in my character of a ram- bling boy, his natural abhorrence. It was long before I saw him near at hand, know- ing him only by some sudden blast of bel- lowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot amang the sheep." The quietest reces- ses of the hill harboured this ogre; I skulk- ed in my favourite wilderness like a Cam- eronianof the KillingTime, andJohnTod was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my questing dragoons. Little by little we drop- ped into civilities; hishailat sight of me be- gan to have less of the ring of a war-slogan; soon, we never met but he produced his snuff-box,whichwaswithhim,likethe calu- met with the Red Indian, a part of herald- ry of peace; and at length, in the ripeness of time, we grew to be a pair of friends, and ^54 PASTORAL when I livedalonein these parts of the win- ter, it was a settled thing for John to "give me a cry" over the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and for me to overtake him and bear him company. That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and colour- ed; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face;yet with a certain strain and a threat of latent anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fineand harassed with perpetual vigilance. He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard;the words in themselveswere a pleasure and often a surprise to me, so that I often came back from one of our pa- 155 THE HILLS OF HOME trols with new acquisitions; and this voca- bulary he wouldhandleHke a master, stalk- ing a little beforeme, "beard onshoulder," the plaid hanging loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems peculiar to men of his trade. I might count him with the best talkers; only that talking Scotch and talk- ing English seem incomparable acts. He touched on nothingatleast, but headorned it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising. The clans of sheep with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in the yearly killings and purchases, each must be proportionally thinned and ' strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the signsof the weather, the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite stupi- dity of sheep, the exquisite cunningofdogs: 156 PASTORAL all these he could present so humanly, and with so much old experience and living gusto, that weariness was excluded. And in the midst he would suddenly straighten his bowed back, the stick would fly abroad in demonstration, and the sharp thunder of his voice roll out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw at last the use of that great wealth of names for every knowe and howe upon the hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with lowered tails and raised faces, would run up their flags again to the masthead and spread themselves upon the indicated circuit. It used to fill me with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story. But John denied these creatures all intelligence; they were the constant butt of his passion and con- tempt; it wasjust possible to workwith the like of them, he said, — not more than pos- sible. And then he would expand upon the subject of the really good dogs that he had known, and the one really good dog that 157 \ THE HILLS OF HOME he had himself possessed. He had been offered forty pounds for it; but a good col- lie was worth more than that, more than anything, to a "herd"; he did the herd's work for him. "As for the like of them!" he would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of his assistants. Once — I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being born Britannis in montibus, indeed, but alas! inerudito scBculo — once, in the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in Edinburgh, and on the way out, the road being crowd- ed, two were lost. This was a reproach to John, and a slur upon the dog; and both were alive to theirmisfortune. Word came, after some days, that a farmer about Braid had found a pair of sheep;and thitherwent John and the dog to ask for restitution. But the farmer was a hard man and stood upon his rights. "How were they marked?" he asked;and since Johnhad boughtrightand left from many sellers and had no notion 158 PASTORAL ofthemarks — "Very well, "said thefarmer, "then it's only right that I should keep them." — "Well,"said John, "it's a factthat I cannae tell the sheep; but if my dog can, will ye let me have them?" The farmer was honest as well as hard, and besides I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so he had all the sheepupon his farm into one largepark,andturned John's doginto their midst.Thathairyman ofbusiness knewhis errand well; he knew that John and he had bought twosheep and(to their shame)lost them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the Lord knows how, unless by listening) that they were come to Braid for their recovery; and without pause or blun- der singled out, first one and then another, the two waifs. It was that afternoon the forty pounds were offered and refused. And the shepherd and his dog — what do I say? the true shepherd and his man — set off together by Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and "smiled to ither" all the way 159 THE HILLS OF HOME home, with the two recovered ones before them. So far, so good;but intelligence may be abused. The dog, as he is by little man's inferior in mind, is only by little his super- ior in virtue; and John had another collie tale of quite a different complexion. At the foot ofthe moss behind Kirk Yetton(Caer Ketton, wise men say) there is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for wash- ing sheep. John was one day lying under a bush in the scrog, when he was aware of a collie on the far hillside skulking down through the deepest of the heather with obtrusive stealth. He knew the dog; knew him for a clever, rising practitioner from quite a distant farm; one whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw him masterfully steering flocks to market. But whatdid the practitionerso far fromhome.-^andwhythis guilty and secretmanceuvring towards the pool.-* — for it was towards the pool that he was heading. John lay the closer under his bush, andpresently saw thedogcome forth 1 60 PASTORAL Upon the margin, look all about him to see if he were anywhere observed, plunge in and repeatedly wash himselfoverheadand ears, and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike homeward over the hills. That same night word was sent his mas- ter, and the rising practitioner, shaken up from where he lay, all innocence, before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptlyshot; for alas! he was that foulest of criminals under trust,a sheep-eater;and itwas from themaculation of sheep'sblood that he had come so far to cleanse himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton. A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of life, in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a hint of it ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, vocal or written. The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the skill of him that writes, but as much, per- haps, in the inherited experience of him who reads; and when I hear with a partic- i6i L THE HILLS OF HOME ular thrill of things that I have never done or seen, it is one of that innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in past deeds. Thus novels begin to touch not the fine clilettantihMX. the gross mass of mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of manner and still-born nice- ties of motive, and begin to deal with fight- ing, sailoring, adventure, death or child- birth; and thus ancient outdoor crafts and occupations,whether Mr Hardy wields the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift romance into a near neigh- bourhood with epic. These aged things have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much to us, the semi- artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and ab- original taproot of the race. A thousand interests spring up in the process of the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an eccentricity or a lost artwhich was once the fashion of an empire; and those only areperennial mattersthatrouse us to-day, 162 PASTORAL and that roused men in all epochs of the past. There is a certain critic, not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be known to set before the best: a certain low-browed, hairygentleman, atfirst a per- cher in the fork of trees, next (as they re- late) a dweller in caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a plea- sant afternoon, to munch his berries — his wife, that accomplished lady, squatting by hisside:hisname I never heard, butheisof- ten described as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for recognition. Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there runsomeminimsofhisold, wild, tree- top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which wouldhave movedour common ancestor, all must obediently thrill. We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I had one for an ascendant who has largely moulded me. 16:; THE HILLS OF HOME But yet I think I owe my taste for that hill- side business rather to the art and interest of John Tod. He it was that made it live forme,astheartistcanmakeallthingslive. It was through him the simple strategy of massing sheepupon a snowy evening, with its attendant scampering of earnest, shag- gy aides-de-camp, wasanaffairthat I never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to mind: the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable black blotsofsnowshowermovinghereand there like night already come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the snow, abi tter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings of the wind along the moors; and for centre piece to all these fea- tures and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his captain's eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a spasm of bellowingthat seemed to make the evening bleaker. It is thus that I still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a 164 PASTORAL hump of the declivity not far from Halker- side, his staffin airy flourish, his great voice taking hold upon the hillsand echoing ter- ror to the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until thefitshould beover, and, withapinch of snuff, my friend relapse into his easy, even conversation. THJB GARDEN— SWANS ION COITACr. In flowers his. taste was otd-f?5hioncd iiu.l catholiv PENTLAND ESSAY NUMBER TWO AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER PENTLAND ESSAY TWO BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON I THINK I MIGHT ALMOST havesaidthelastrsomewhere, indeed, in the uttermost glens of the Lamm- ermuir or among the south-western hills there may yet linger a decrepid repre- sentative of this bygone good fellowship; but as far as actual experience goes, I have only met onemaninmylifewho might fitly be quoted in the same breath with Andrew Fairservice, — though without his vices. He was a man whose very presence could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to the baldest and most modern flower-pots. There was a dignityabout histall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote who had come through the train- ing of the Covenant, and been nourished in his youth on Walker s Lives and The Hindlet Loose. Now.aslcouldnotbeartoletsuchaman 171 THE HILLS OF HOME pass away with no sketch preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he can the in- firmities of my description. To me, whofind it so difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as di genius loci. It is impossible to separate his spare form and old straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks overgrown with cle- matis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid breadth of champaign that one saw from the north-west corner. The garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each ot- her. When I take him from his right sur- roundings and try to make him appear for me on paper, he looks unreal and phantas- mal ; the best that I can say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me it will be ever impotent. The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old already: he had cer- tainly begun to use his years as a stalking 172 OLD SCOTCH GARDENER horse. Latterly he was beyond all the im- pudenciesof logic, considering a reference to the parish registerworth all the reasons in the world. "/ am old and well stricken in years',' he was wont to say; and I never found any one bold enough to answer the argument. Apart from this vantage that he kept over all who were not yet octogenar- ian, he had some other drawbacks as a gar- dener. He shrank the very place he culti- vated. The dignity and reduced gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry figure. He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger days. He spokeof castlesand parkswith a humbling familiarity. He told of places where un- der-gardeners had trembled at his looks, where there were meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and wildernesses of sad shrubbery in his control, till you could not helpfeelingthatitwascondescensiononhis part to dress your humbler garden plots. Youwere thrown atonce intoan invidious ^11 THE HILLS OF HOME position. You felt that you were profiting by the needs of dignity, and that his poverty and not his will consented to your vulgar rule. Involuntarily you compared yourself with the swineherd that made Alfred watch hiscakes, orsome bloated citizen who may have given hissons and hiscondescension to the fallen Dionysius. Nor were the dis- agreeables purely fanciful and metaphys- ical, for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet. He would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most favoured and fertile section of thegarden with a vegetable that none of us could eat, in supreme contempt for our opinion. If you asked him to send you in one of your own artichokes, ''That I wull, mem,'' he would say, ''with pleas- ure, for it is mair blessed to give than to re- ceive!' Ay, and even when, by extra twist- ing of the screw, we prevailed on him to prefer our commands to his own inclina- 174 OLD SCOTCH GARDENER tion, and he went away, stately and sad, ^roiessmgXhdiV'ourwtdl was kzs pleastire,'' but yet reminding us that he would do it ''withfeelins" — even then, I say, the tri- umphant master felt humbled in his tri- umph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and that the whole scene had been one of those " slights that patient merit of the unworthy takes." In flowers his taste was old-fashioned andcatholic;affecting sunflowers and dah- lias, wallflowers and roses, and holding in supreme aversion whatsoever was fantas- tic, new-fashioned or wild. There was one exception tothis sweeping ban. Foxgloves, though undoubtedly guilty on the last count, he not only spared, but loved; and when the shubbery was being thinned, he stayed his hand and dexterously manipul- ated his bill in order to save every stately stem. Inboyhood,ashetoldmeonce,speak- ing in that tonethatonly actors andtheold- ^75 THE HILLS OF HOME fashioned common folk can use nowadays, his heart grew ''proud'' within him when he came ona burn-course among the braes of Manor that shone purple with their graceful trophies; and not all his apprent- iceship and practice for so many years of precisegardeninghad banished theseboy- ish recollections from his heart. Indeed, he was a man keenlyalive to the beauty of all that was bygone. He abounded in old stor- ies of his boyhood, and kept pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (onaholiday)tovisit one of the fabled great places of the earth where he had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite reminiscences that show- ed real passion for the past, such as might have shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean- Jacques. But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his liking for the fox- gloves, the very truth was that he scorned all flowers together. They were but gar- 176 OLD SCOTCH GARDENER nishings, childish toys, trifling ornaments forladies' chimney-shelves. Itwas towards his cauliflowers andpeas andcabbage that his heart grew warm. H is preference for the more useful growths was such that cab- bages werefoundinvadingthe flower-pots, andanoutpostofsavoyswasoncediscover- ed in the centre of the lawn. Hewould pre- lectover some thriving plant with wonder- ful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on re- miniscence of former and perhaps yet fin- er specimens. Yet even then he did not let the credit leave himself He had, indeed, raised ''finer o' them'; but it seemed that no one else had been favoured with a like success. All other gardeners, in fact, were mere foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount, with perfect sober- nessof voice and visage, howso and so had wondered, and such another could scarce- ly give credit to his eyes. Nor was it with his rivals only that he parted praise and blame. If you remarked how well a plant 177 M THE HILLS OF HOME was looking, he would gravely touch his hat and thank you with solemn unction; all credit in the matter falling to him. If, on the other hand, you called his attention to some back -going vegetable, he would quote Scripture: ''Paul may plant andAp- ollos may water'; all blame being left to Providence, on the score of deficient rain or untimely frosts. There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with his favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the beehive. Their sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet productalso,hadtaken hold of his imaginationand heart, whether by way of memory or no I cannot say, al- though perhaps the bees too were linked tohimbysome recollectionof Manorbraes and his country childhood. Nevertheless, he was too chary of his personal safety or (let me rather say) his personal dignity to mingle in any active office towards them. But hecould stand by whileoneof the con- 178 OLD SCOTCH GARDENER temned rivals did the work for him, and protest that itwas quite safe in spite of his own considerate distance and the cries of the distressed assistant. In regard to bees, hewasrathera man of word than deed, and someof hismoststriking sentenceshad the bees for text. ' ' They are indeed wonderfu creatures, meni^' he said once. " They just mind me d what the Queen of Sheba said to Solomon — and I think she said it wi a sigh, — ' 7^ he half of it hath not deen told un- to me. ' " As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read, like the old Covenanters, of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth wasfullofsacredquotations;itwasthebook that he had studied most and thought up- on most deeply. To many people in his sta- tion the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the only books of any vital literary merit that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on the draff of country newspapers, and the very instructive but not very palatable pa- 179 THE HILLS OF HOME bulum of some cheap educational series. This was Robert's position. All day long he haddreamedof the Hebrew stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the very ex- pressions had become a par t of him ; so that herarely spoke withoutsomeantique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave a raci- ness to the merest trivialities of talk. But the influence of the Bible did not stop here. There was more in Robert than quaint phrase and ready store of reference. He was imbuedwith a spirit of peaceand love: he interposed between man and wife: he threwhimself between the angry, touching his hat the while with all the ceremony of an usher : he protected the birds from every bodybut himself, seeing, I suppose, a great difference between official execution and wanton sport. His mistresstelling him one day to put some ferns into his master's par- ticular corner, and adding, "Though, in- i8o OLD SCOTCH GARDENER deed, Robert, he doesn't deserve them, for he wouldn't help me to gather them," ''Eh menty' replies Robert, '' btit I wouldnae say that, for I think he s just a most deservin gentleman. " Again, two of our friends, who were onintimate terms, andaccustomed to use language to each other, somewhat with - out the bounds of the parliamentary, hap- pened to differ about the position of a seat in he garden. The discussion, as was usual when these two were at it, soon waxed tol- erably insulting on both sides. Every one accustomed to such controversies several timesa day was quietlyenjoying thisprize- fight of somewhat abusive wit — everyone but Robert, to whom the perfectgood faith of the whole quarrel seemed unquestion- able, and who, after having waited till his conscience would suffer him to wait no more, and till he expected every moment that the disputants would fall to blows, cut suddenlyin with tonesof almosttearfulen- treaty: ''Eh, but, gentlemen, I ivadhaenae i8i .jv : ^m ' j! THE HILLS OF HOME mazrwordsado2t^tL^"Onet\\ingwa.snotice- able about Robert'sreligion: itwas neither dogmatic nor sectarian. He never expati- ated (at least, in my hearing) on the doct- rines of his creed, and he never condemn- ed anybody else. I have no doubt that he held all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as considerably out of it; I don't believe hehad any sympathy for Pre- lacy; and the natural feelings of man must have made him a little sore about Free- Churchism; but at least, he never talked about these views, never grew controver- sially noisy, and never openly aspersed the belief or practice of anybody. Now all this is not generally characteristic of Scotch piety; Scotch sects beingchurches militant with a vengeance, and Scotch believers perpetual crusaders the one against the ot- her, and missionaries the one to the other. Perhaps Robert's originally tender heart was what made the difference; or, perhaps, his solitary and pleasant labour among OLD SCOTCH GARDENER fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny creed than those whose work is among the tares of fallen humanity; and the soft influencesof thegarden had enter- ed deep into his spirit, " Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade." But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or telling of his inno- cent and living piety. I had meant to tell of his cottage with the German pipe hung reverently above the fire, and the shell box that he had made for his son, and of which he would say pathetically: ''He was real pleased wi it at first, but I think he s got a kind d tired d it now'' — the son being then a man of about forty. But I will let all these pass. "'Tis more significant: he's dead." The earth, that he had digged so much in his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the flowers that he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new and nearer way. A bird flew about the open 183 liif^i*i^iv •'*-:,; THE HILLS OF HOME grave as if it too wished to honour the ob- sequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in favour of its kind: "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, and yet not one of them falleth to the ground." Yes, he is dead. But the kings did not rise in the place of death to greet him "with taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet the haughty Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker and a servant of God. TFIE MANSH THE MANSE PENTLAND ESSAY NUMBER THREE I HAVE NAMED, AMONG many rivers that make music in my memory, that dirty Water of Leith. Often and often I desire to look upon it again ; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me. It should be at a certain water- door, embowered in shrubbery. The river is there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown obscurity with a glint of gold, and it has but newly been recruited by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly steering to and fro upon the surface. Or so it was when I was young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experi- ence, it must be on many and impossible 189 THE HILLS OF HOME conditions. I must choose, as well as the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale may be exagger- ated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am stand- ing, seem as low as Styx. And I must choose the season also, so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the songs of birds; — and the year of grace, so that when I turn to leave the riverside I may find the old manse and its inhabitants unchanged. It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into provinces by a great hedge of beech, and overlooked by the church and the terrace of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, and af- ter nightfall " spunkies " might be seen to dance at least by children; flower-plots ly- ing warm in sunshine; laurels and the great yew making elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade; the smell of water rising 190 THE MANSE from all round, with an added tang of paper-mills; the sound of water every- where, and the sound of mills — the wheel and the dam singing their alternate strain; the birds on every bush and from every corner of the overhanging woods pealing out their notes until the air throbbed with them; and in the midst of this, the manse. I see it, by the standard of my childish stature, as a great and roomy house. In truth, it was not so large as I supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is difficult to suppose that it was healthful. Yet a large family of stalwart sons and tall daughters were housed and reared, and came to man and womanhood in that nest of little chambers; so that the face of the earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and letters with out- landish stamps became familiar to the local postman, and the walls of the little chambers brightened with the wonders of the East. The dullest could see this was a 191 THE HILLS OF HOME house that had a pair of hands in divers foreign places: a well-beloved house — its image fondly dwelt on by many travellers. Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men. I read him, judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as a man of singular simpli- city of nature; unemotional, and hating the display of what he felt; standing con- tented on the old ways; a lover of his life and innocent habits to the end. We chil- dren admired him: partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for none more than children are concerned for beauty and, above all, for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn light in which we beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers, in the pulpit. But his strictness and dis- tance, the effect, I now fancy, of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind of terror. When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons or let- ters to his scattered family in a dark and 192 THE MANSE cold room with a library of bloodless books — or so they seemed in those days, al- though I have some of them now on my own shelves and like well enough to read them;andtheselonely hours wrapped him in the greater gloom for our imaginations. But the study had a redeeming grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young eyes. I cannot depict (for I have no such passions now) the greed with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to say a psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might reward me with an Indian picture. "Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will He slumber that thee keeps," it ran: a strange conglomerate of the un- pronounceable, a sad model to set in child- hood before one who was himself to be a versifier, and a task in recitation that real- ly merited reward. And I must suppose 193 N THE HILLS OF HOME the old man thought so too, and was either touched or amused by the performance; for he took me in his arms with most unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a Httle kindly sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we were clerk and parson. I was struck by this reception into so tender a surprise that I forgot mydisappointment. And indeed the hope was one of those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design upon reality. Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should strip himself of one of those pictures, love- gifts and reminders of his absent sons; no- thing more unlikely than that he should bestow it upon me. He had no idea of spoil- ing children, leaving all that to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered under the rod in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young. The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key. He had over- walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the 194 THE MANSE end of his many days. He sat by the dining- room fire, with his white hair, pale face and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure; and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine, Dr Gregory's powder. Now that remedy, as the work of a near kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savour of romance for the imagina- tion; but it comes uncouthly to the palate. The old gentleman had taken it with a wry face; and that being accomplished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching a " barley-sugar kiss." But when my aunt, having the canister open in her hands, pro- posed to let me share in the sweets, he in- terfered at once. I had no Gregory; then I should have no barley-sugar kiss: so he decided with a touch of irritation. And just then the phaeton coming opportune- ly to the kitchen door — for such was our unlordly fashion — I was taken for the last time from the presence of my grand- father. 195 THE HILLS OF HOME Now I often wonder what I have inherit- ed from this old minister. I must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching ser- mons, and so am I, though I never heard itmaintainedthateitherof us loved to hear them. He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare also, and am per- suaded I can read him well, though I own I never have been told so. He made em- broidery, designing his own patterns; and in that kindof work I never made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which was as black as the chimney before 1 had done with it. Heloved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better with my grand- father, which seems to me a breach of con- tract. He had chalk-stones in his fingers; 196 THE MANSE and these, in good time, I may possibly in- herit, but I would much rather have inherit- ed his noble presence. Try as I please, I cannot join myself with the reverend doc- tor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write thephrase,he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me,andsits efficient in theveryknot and centre of my being. In his garden, as I played there, I learned the loveof mills — orhad I anancestor a miller? — and a kindness for the neighbourhood of graves, as homely things not without their poetry — orhad I an ancestor sexton? But what of the garden where he played him- self? — forthat, too, was the sceneofmy edu- cation. Some part of me played therein the eighteenth century, andran races underthe green avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, which was still a country place, and sat on the High School benches, and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr Adam. The housewhere I spent my youth was not yet thought upon; but we made 197 THE HILLS OF HOME holiday parties among the cornfields on its site, and ate strawberries and cream near by at a gardener's. All this I had forgotten; onlymygrandfatherrememberedandonce reminded me. I have forgotten, too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our first Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughterof Burns's Dr Smith — "Smith opens out his cauld har- angues." I have forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns at first hand. And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this homunculus or part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other hornunculos or part-men, in the persons of myotheran- cestors. These were of a lower order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly. But as I went to college with Dr Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil man tak- ing down the shutters from his shop beside 198 THE MANSE the Tron; — we may have had a rabbit- hutch or a book-shelf made for us by a cer- tain carpenter in I know not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, upon some holi- day excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a cottage in a flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his shut- tle. And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side; and from the eyes of thelampandoil man one-half of my unborn father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we went by to college. No- thing of all this would cross the mindof the young student, as hepostedupthe Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadul- terated. It would not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural metastasis, tobloom intoa light- house-engineer, should have a grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed; and some portion of that stu- 199 THE HILLS OF HOME dent himself should survive yet a year or two longer in the person of their child. Butourancestraladventuresare beyond even the arithmetic of fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that we can follow backward the careers of our komunculos3ind be reminded of our an- tenatal lives. Our conscious years are buta moment in the history of the elements that build us. Are you a bank-clerk, and do you liveat PeckhamPItwasnotalwaysso.And though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or I was present when there landed at St Andrews a French bar- ber-surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of thegreat Cardinal Beaton;! have shakenaspearin the Debateable Landand shouted thesloganof the Elliots; I waspre- sent when a skipper, plying from Dundee, smuggled J acobites to France after the '15; I was in a West India merchant's office, perhaps nextdoor to Bailie Nicol Jarvie's, and managed the business of a plantation 200 THE MANSE in St Kitt's; I was with my engineer-grand- father (the son-in-law of the lamp and oil man) when he sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise that gave us the /^^V- ^/^ and the Lor dof the Isles; I was with him, too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the Smeaton had drifted from her moorings, and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap sea-water before his tongue could utter audible words; and once more with him when the Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into the tower, then nearly finished, and he sat un- moved reading in his Bible — or affecting to read — till one after another slunk back with confusion of countenance to their en- gineer. Yes, parts of me have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well. And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of ascendants: Picts who rallied 20I THE HILLS OF HOME round Macbeth and the old (and highly preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the legions of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gaz- ers on Chaldaean plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face isthisthat fancy can seepeer- ing through thedisparted branches? What sleeper in green tree-tops, what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree? Probably arboreal in his habits. . . . And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about with me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; tree-top memories, like undevel- oped negatives, lay dormant in his mind; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down; and Probably Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from a monkey) gamboll- ed and chattered in the brain of the old divine. 202 PENTLAND ESSAY NUMBER FOUR THE PENTLAND RISING A PAGE OF HISTORY 1666 PENTLAND ESSAY NUMBER FOUR I THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT THE PENTLAND RISING A PAGE OF HISTORY 1666 PENTLAND ESSAY NUMBER FOUR I THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT TWO HUNDRED YEARS ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory where- of has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deep tragedies which followed it. It is, as it were, the even- ing of the night of persecution — a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but light as the noonday when compared with the mid- night gloom which followed. This fact, of its being the very threshold of persecution, lends it, however, an additional interest. The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were "out of measure in- creased," says Bishop Burnet, "by the new incumbents who were put in the place of the ejected preachers, and were gener- ally very mean and despicable in all re" spects. They were the worst preachers I ever heard; they were ignorant to a re- 211 THE HILLS OF HOME preach; and many of them were openly vicious. They were indeed the dregs and refuseof the northernparts, Thoseof them whoarose abovecontempt or scandal were men of such violent tempers that they were as muchhated as the others were de- spised."* It was little to be wondered at, from this account, that the country-folk refused to go to the parish church, and chose rather to listen to outed ministers in the fields. But this was not tobe allowed, and their persecutors at last fell on the methodofcalling a roll of the parishioners' names every Sabbath, and marking a fine of twenty shillings Scots to the name of each absenter. In this way very large debts were incurred bypersons altogether unable to pay. Besides this, landlords were fined for their tenants' absences, tenants for their landlords, masters for their serv- ants, servants for their masters, even * History of My Own Times^ beginning 1660, by Bishop Gilbert, p. 158. 212 CAUSES OF THE RE\^OLT though in theirattendance they themselves were perfectly regular. And as the cur- ates were allowed to fine with the sanct- ion of any common soldier, it may be im- agined that often the pretexts were neither very sufficient nor well proven. When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes, and household uten- sils were seized upon, or a number of soldiers, proportionate to his wealth, were quartered on the offender. The coarse and drunken privates filled the houses with woe; snatched the bread from the children to feed their dogs; shocked the principles, scorned the scruples, and blasphemed the religion of their humble hosts; and when they had reduced them to destitution, sold the furniture, and burned down the roof- tree which was consecrated to the peas- ants by the name of Home. For all this attention each of these soldiers received from his unwilling landlord a certain sum ofmoneyperday — three shillings sterling, 213 THE HILLS OF HOME according to ''Naphtali" And frequently they were forced to payquartering money for more men than were in reaHty "cess- ed"on them. At that time it was no strange thing to behold a strong man begging for money to pay his fines, and many others who were deep in arrears, or who had attracted attention in some otherway, were forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge from arrest and imprisonment among the wild mosses of the uplands.* One example in particular we may cite: John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was, unfortunately for him- self, a Nonconformist. First he was fined in four hundred pounds Scots, and then through cessing he lost nineteen hundred and ninety-three pounds Scots. He was next obliged to leave his house and flee from place to place, during which wander- ings he lost his horse. His wife and child- ren were turned out of doors, and then his *Wodrow's Church History^ Book II. chap. i. sect. i. 214 CAUSES OF THE REVOLT tenantswere fined till they too were almost ruined. As a final stroke, they drove away all his cattle to Glasgow and sold them.* Surely it was time that something were done to alleviate so much sorrow, to over- throw such tyranny. About this time too there arrived in Gallowaya person calling himself Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people to revolt. He displayed some documents purporting to be from the northern Coven- anters, and stating that they were pre- pared to join in any enterprise commenced by their southern brethren. The leader of the persecutors was Sir James Turner, an officer afterwards degraded for his share in the matter. "He was naturally fierce, but was mad when he was drunk, and that was very often," said Bishop Burnet. "He was a learned man, but had always been in armies, and knew no other rule but to obey orders. He told me he had no regard to any *Cruikshank's Church History^ I75i, 2nd edit.p. 202. 215 THE HILr,S OF HOME law, but acted, as he was commanded, in a military way."* This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed which gave spirit and determination to the oppressed coun- trymen, lit the flame of insubordination, and for the time at least recoiled on those who perpetrated it with redoubled force. * Burnet, p. 348. II THE BEGINNING I love no warres, I loveno jarres, Nor strife's fire. May discord cease, Let's live in peace: This I desire. If it must be Warre we must see (So fates conspire), May we not feel The force of steel: This I desire. T. Jackson, 1651. * Fuller's Historic of the Holy Warre ^ 4th edit. 1651. II THE BEGINNING UPON TUESDAY. Nov- ember 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and three other soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of Dairy and demanded the payment of his fines. On the old man's refusing to pay, they forced a large party of his neighbours to go with them and thresh hiscorn. The field was acertaindistanceout of the clachan, and four persons, disguised as countrymen, who had been out on the moors all night, met this mournful drove of slaves, compelled by the four soldiers to work for the ruin of their friend. How- ever, chilled to the bone by their night on the hills, and worn out by want of food, they proceeded to the village inn to re- fresh themselves. Suddenly some people rushed into the room where they were sit- ting, and told them that the soldiers were about to roast the old man, naked, on his own girdle. This was too much for them to stand, and they repaired immediately 219 THE Hlll,S OF HOME to the scene of this gross outrage, and at first merely requested that the captive should be released. On the refusal of the two soldiers who were in the front room, high words were given and taken on both sides, and the other two rushed forth from an adjoining chamber and made at the countrymen with drawn swords. One of the latter, J ohn M ' Lellan of Barskob, drew a pistol and shot the corporal in the body. The pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it was loaded, to the number of ten at least, entered him, and he was so much disturb- ed that he never appears to have recover- ed, for we find long afterwards a petition to the Privy Council requesting a pension for him. The other soldiers then laid down their arms, the old man was rescued, and the rebellion was commenced.* And now we must turn to Sir James Turner's memoirs of himself; for, strange to say, this extraordinary man was re- *Wodrow, vol. ii. p. 17. 220 THE BEGINNING markably fond of literary composition, and wrote, besides the amusing account of his own adventuresjust mentioned, a large number of essays and short biographies, and a work on war, entitled '' Pallas Ar- maia.'' The following are some of the shorter pieces: "Magick," "Friendship," "Imprisonment," "Anger," "Revenge," "Duells,"" Cruelty," "A Defence of some of the Ceremonies of the English Liturgie — to wit — Bowing at the Name of Jesus, The frequent repetition of the Lord's Pray- er and Good Lord deliver us, Of the Doxo- logie,OfSurplesses,Rotchets,Canonnicall Coats," etc. From what we know of his character we should expect "Anger" and "Cruelty" to be very full and instructive. But what earthly right he had to meddle with ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see. Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information concerning Gray's proceedings, but as it was excess- 221 THE HILLS OF HOME ively indefinite in its character, he paid no attention to it. On the evening of the 14th, Corporal Deanes was brought into Dumfries, who affirmed stoutly that he had been shot while refusing to sign the Covenant — a story rendered singularly unlikely by the after conduct of the rebels. Sir James instantly despatched orders to the cessed soldiers either to cometoDum- fries or meet him on the way to Dairy, and commanded the thirteen or fourteen men in the town with him to come at nine next morning to his lodging for sup- plies. On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries with 50 horse and 150 foot. Nielson of Corsack, and Gray, who commanded, with a considerable troop, entered the town, and surrounded Sir James Turner's lodging. Though it was between eight and nine o'clock, that worthy, being unwell, was still in bed, but rose at once and went to the window. 222 THE BEGINNING Nielson and some others cried, "You may have fair quarter." " I need no quarter," replied Sir James; "nor can I be a prisoner, seeing there is no war declared." On being told, however, that he must either be a prisoner or die, he came down, and went into the street in his night-shirt. Here Grayshowed him- self very desirous of killing him, but he was overruled by Corsack. However, he was taken away a prisoner. Captain Gray mounting him on his own horse, though, as Turner naively remarks, "there was good reason for it, for he mounted himself on a farre better one of mine." A large coffer containing his clothes and money, together with all his papers, were taken away by the rebels. They robbed Master Chalmers, the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of his horse, drank the King's health at the market cross, and then left Dumfries.* * Sir J. Turner's Memoirs^ pp. 148-50. Ill THE MARCH OF THE REBELS 'Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads, At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads; Our right hand stood at Lanark, these we want, Because with them we signed the Covenant." Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton.'* * A Cloud of Witnesses, p. 376. Ill THE MARCH OF THE REBELS ON FRIDAY THE 16TH, BailielrvineofDumfriescame to the Council at Edinburgh, and gave information concer- ning this ' ' horrid rebelHon. " I n the absence of Rothes, Sharpe presided — much to the wrathofsomemembers;andasheimagined his own safety endangered, his measures were most energetic. Dalzell was ordered away to the West, the guards round the city were doubled, officers and soldiers were forced to take the oath of allegiance, and all lodgers were commanded to give in their names. Sharpe, surrounded with all these guards and precautions, trembled — trembled as he trembled when the aveng- ers of blood drew him from his chariot on Magus Muir, — for he knew how he had sold his trust, how he had betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must their chiefest hatred be directed, against him their direst thunderbolts be forged. But even in his fear the apostate Presbyt- 227 THE HILLS OF HOME erian was unrelenting', unpityingly harsh; he published in his manifesto no promise of pardon, no inducement to submission. Hesaid, " If you submit not you must die," but never added, " If you submit you may live!'* Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way. At Carsphairn they were de- serted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion, neglected to leave be- hind him the coffer containing Sir James's money. Whohe was is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his papers were evid- ently forgeries — that, and his final flight, appears to indicate that he was an agent of the Royalists, for either the King or the Duke of York was heard to say, ' ' That, jf he might have his wish, he would have them all turn rebels and go to arms."t Upon the i8th day of the month they left Carsphairn and marched onwards. * Wodrow, pp. 19, 20. t A Hind Let Loose, p. 123. 2^8 MARCH OF THE REBELS Turner was always lodged by his capt- ors at a good inn, frequently at the best of which their halting-place could boast. Here many visits were paid to him by the ministers and officers of the insurgent force. In his description of these inter- views he displays a veinof satiric severity, admitting any kindness that was done to him withsomequalifying souvenirof form- er harshness, and gloating over any injury, mistake, or folly, which it was his chance to suffer or to hear. He appears, notwith- standing all this, to have been on pretty good terms with his cruel "phanaticks,"as the following extract sufficiently proves: "Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard, and order given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be preached by Mr Welch. Maxwell of Morith, and Major M'Cullough invited me to heare "that phanatick sermon" (for soe they merrilie called it). They said that preaching might prove an effectual meane 229 THE HILLS OF HOME to turne me, which they heartihe wished. I answered to them that I was under guards, and that if they intended to heare that ser- mon, it was probable I might Hkewise, for it was not Hke my guards wold goe to church and leave me alone at my lodgeings. Bot to what they said of my conversion, I said it wold be hard to turne a Turner. Bot because I foundethem in a merrie humour, I said, if I did notcome to heare Mr Welch preach, then they might fine me in fortie shillings Scots, which was double the su- ome of what I had exacted from the phan- atics."* This took place at Ochiltree, on the 2 2 nd day of the month. The following is re- counted by this personage with malicious glee, and certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with wheat, and how ignorant.almost impious, persons were engaged in this movement; never- theless we give it, for we wish to present * Turner, p. 163. 230 MARCH OF THE REBELS with impartiality all the alleged facts to the reader : — "Towards the evening Mr Robinsone and Mr Crukshank gaue me a visite; I called for some ale purposelie to heare one of them blesse it. It fell Mr Robinsone to seeke the blessing, who said one of the most bombastick graces that ever I heard in my life. He summoned God Allmightie very imperiouslie to be their secondarie (for that was his language). 'And if,' said he, 'thou wilt not be our Secondarie, we will not fight for thee at all, for it is not our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt not fight for our cause and thy oune cause, then we are not obliged to fight for it. They say,' said he, 'that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are coming with the King's General against us, bot they shall be noth- ing bot a threshing to us." This grace did more fullie satisfie me of the folly and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench my thirst."* 231 * Turner, p. 198. THE HILLS OF HOME Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or in some con- venient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken the command, would re- view the horse and foot, during which time Turner was sent either into the ale- house or round the shoulder of the hill, to prevent him from seeing the disorders which were likely to arise. He was, at last, on the 25th day of the month, between Douglas and Lanark, permitted to behold their evolutions. "I found their horse did consistof four hundreth andfortie,and the foot of five hundreth and upwards. . . . The horsemen were armed for most part with suord and pistoll, some onlie with suord. The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe), forke, and suord; and some with suords great and long." He admired much the proficiency of their cavalry, and mar- velled how they had attained to it in so short a time.* ♦Turner, p. 167. 232 MARCH OF THE REBELS At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of thisgreat wapinshaw,they were charged — awful picture of depravity ! — with the theft of a silver spoon and a nightgown. Could it be expected that while the whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a rare opport- unity for plunder should be lost by rogues, that among a thousand men, even though fighting for religion, there should not be one Achan in the camp? At Lanark a declaration was drawn up and signed by the chief rebels. In it occurs the follow- ing: "The just sense whereof" — the suffer- ings of the country — "made us choose, rather to betake ourselves to the fields for self-defence, than to stay at home, bur- dened daily with the calamities of others, and tortured with the fears of our own approaching misery."* The whole body, too, swore the Coven- * Wodrow, p. 29. THE HILLS OF HOME ant, to which ceremony the epitaph at the head of this chapter seems to refer. A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to Bathgate, where, on the eveningof Monday the 26th, the wearied army stopped. But at twelve o'clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet, of "Horse! horse!" and "Mount the prisoner!" resounded through the night-shrouded town, and called the peas- ants from their well-earned rest to toil on- wards in their march. The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close, thick, wettingraindescended. Chilled to thebone, worn out with long fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to de- struction. One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the wayside wherein to hide till daybreak. One by one at first, then in gradually increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen, whole troops left the 234 MARCH OF THE REBELS waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the ferocity of the temp- est. To rip^ht and left nought could be de- scried but the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels, seen dimly through the murky night, plodd- ing onwards through the sinking moss. Those who kept together — a miserable few — often halted to rest themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to over- take them. Then onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the darkness — onward to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at Edinburgh. It was calcu- lated that they lost one half of their army on that disastrous night-march. Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles from Edinburgh, where they halted for the last time.* * Turner, Wodrow, and Church History by James Kirkton, an outed minister of the period. IV RULLION GREEN "They cut his hands ere he was dead, And after that struck off his head. His blood under the altar cries For vengeance on Christ's enemies." Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont * * Cloud of Witfiesses, p. 389; Edin. 1765. IV RULLION GREEN LATE ON THE FOURTH night of November, exactly twenty-four days before Rull- ion Green , Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in Haddington, be- held four men, clad like West-country Whigamores, standing round some object on the ground. It was at the two-mile cross, andwithin that distance from their homes. At last, to their horror, they discovered that the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in a blood-stained wind- ing-sheet.* Many thought that this appari- tion was a portent of the deaths connected with the Pentland Rising. On themorningof Wednesday, the 28th of November 1 666, they left Colinton and marched to Rullion Green. There they arrived about sunset. The position was a strong one. On the summit of a bare, heathery spur of the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them lies a narrow *Kirkton, p. 244. THE HILLS OF HOME band of flat marshy ground On the high- est of the two mounds — that nearest the Pentlands,andon the left handofthemain- body — was the greater part of the cavalry, under Major Learmont; on the other Bar- skob and the Galloway gentlemen; and in the centre Colonel Wallace and the weak, half-armed infantry. Their position was further strengthened by the depth of the valley below, and the deep chasm-like course of the Rullion Burn. The sun, going down behind the Pent- lands, cast golden lights and blue shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted ob- liquely into the rich plain before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled trees, and fading gradu- ally into shadow in the distance. To the south, too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge; the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading 240 RULLION GREEN into blue indistinctness in the south, th e wild heath -clad Peeblesshire hills. In sooth, that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was cast over that peace- ful evening scene from the spot where the rebels awaited their defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow lifted his head from the blood-stained heather to strive with darkening eyeballs to behold that landscape, over which, as over his life and his cause, the shadows of night and of gloom were falling and thickening. It was while waiting on this spot that the fear - inspiring cry was raised: "The enemy! Here come the enemy!" Unwilling to believe their own doom — for our insurgents still hoped for success in some negotiations for peace which had been carried on at Colinton — they called out, "They are some other of our own." "They are too blacke" {i.e. numerous), "fie! fie! for ground to draw up on," cried Wallace, fully realising the want of space 241 Q THE HILLS OF HOME for his men, and proving that it was not till after this time that his forces were finally arranged."* First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse sent obliquely across the hill to attack the left wing of the rebels. An equal number of Learmont's men met them, and, after a struggle, drove them back. The course of the Rullion Burn prevented almost all pursuit, andWallace, on perceiving it, dispatched a body of foot to occupy both the burn and some ruined sheep-walls on the farther side. Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the foot of the hill, on the top of which were his foes. He then dis- patched a mingled body of infantry and cavalry to attack Wallace's outpost, but they also were driven back. A third charge produced a still more disastrous effect, for Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his men by a reinforcement. *Kirkton. 242 RULLION GREEN These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant- General's ranks, for sev- eral of his men flung down their arms. Urged by such fatal symptoms, and by the approaching night, he deployed his men, and closed in overwhelming numbers on the centre and rig^ht flank of the insurgent army. In the increasing twilight the burn- ing matches of the firelocks, shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent to the approaching army a picturesque effect, like a huge, many-armed giant breathing flame into the darkness. Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud,"The God of Jac- ob! The God of Jacob!" and prayed with uplifted hands for victory."* But still the Royalist troops closed in. Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to capture him with his own hands. Accordingly he charg- ed forward, presenting his pistols. Paton * Turner. 243 THE HILLS OF HOME fired, but the balls hopped off Dalzell's buff coat and fell into his boot. With the superstition peculiar to his age, the Non- conformist concluded that his adversary was rendered bullet-proof by enchant- ment, and, pulling some small silver coins from his pocket, charged his pistol there- with. Dalzell, seeing this, and supposing, it is likely, that Paton wasputtingin larger balls, hid behind his servant, who was killed.* Meantimetheoutposts were forced, and the army of Wallace was enveloped in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor — tightening, closing, crushing every sem- blance of life from the victim enclosed in his toils. The flanking parties of horse were forced in upon the centre, and though as even Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general flight was the re- sult. But when they fell there was none to * Kirkton. 244 RULLION GREEN sing their coronach or wail the death-wail over them. Those who sacrificed them- selves for the peace, the liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay bleaching in the field of death for long, and when at last they were buried by charity, the peasants dug up their bodies, dese- crated their graves, and cast them once more upon the open heath for the sorry value of their winding-sheets! A RECORD OF BLOOD RULI,ION GREEN INSCRIPTION ON STONE AT RULLION GREEN: Here and near to this Place lyes the Reuerend Mr John Crookshanks and Mr Andrew McCormock Ministersof the Gos- pel, and about Fifty other True Covenanted Presbyterians who were killed in this Place in their own Innocent Self Defence and Defence of the Covenanted Work of Re- formation by Thomas Dalzeel of Bins upon the 28 of November 1666. Rev. 12. 11. Erected Sept. 28, 1738. Back of Stone: A Cloud of Witnesses ly here, Who for Christ's Interest did appear, For to restore true Liberty, O'erturnfed then by tyrany. And by proud Prelats who did Rage Against the Lord's own heritage. They sacrificed were for the laws Of Christ their king, his noble cause. These heroes fought with great renown By falling got the Martyr's crown.* * Kirkton. Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see, This tomb doth show for what some men did die. Monumenty Greyfriars' Churchyard, Edinburgh, 1661-1668.* * Theater of Mortality, p. 10. Edin. 17 13. V A RECORD OF BLOOD MASTER ANDREW Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow, on the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the march of many feet beneath his window. He gazed out.With colours flying,and with musicsounding,Dalzell,victorious,entered Edinburgh. But his banners were dyed in blood,and aband of prisoners were marched within his ranks. The old man knew it all. That martial and triumphant strain was the death-knell of his friends and of their cause, the rust-hued spots upon the flags were the tokens of their courage and their death, and the prisoners were the miser- able remnant spared from death in battle to die upon the scaffold. Poor old man! he had outlived all joy. Had he lived longer he would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe; he would have seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more than midnight darkness over his 251 THE HILLS OF HOME native hills, and have fallen a victim to those bloody persecutions which, later, sent their red memorials to the sea by many a burn. By a merciful Providence all this was spared to him — he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since Rullion Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to his fathers.* WhenSharpefirstheardoftherebellion, he applied to Sir Alexander Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his house. Disliking their occupation, the soldiers gave him an ugly time of it. All the night through they kept up a continuous series of "alarms and incursions," "cries of 'Stand!' 'Give fire!'" etc., which forced the prelate to flee to the Castle in the morning, hoping there to find the rest which was denied him at home.f Now, however, when all danger to himself was past, Sharpe came out in his true colours, and scantwasthe justicelikelyto be shown * Kirkton, p. 247. t Ibid. p. 254. 252 A RECORD OF BLOOD to the foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate was by. The prisoners were lodged in Haddo's Hole, a partof St Giles' Cathedral, where, by the kindness of Bis- hop Wishart, to his credit be it spoken they were amply supplied with food.* Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of quarter which had been given on the field of battle should protect the lives of the miserable men. Sir John Gilmoure, the greatest lawyer, gave no opinion — certainly a suggestive circum- stance — but Lord Lee declared that this would not interfere with their legal trial; "so to bloody executions they went."! To the number of thirty they were condemned and executed; while two of them, Hugh M'Kail, a young minister, and Nielson of Corsack, were tortured with the boots. The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their bodies were dis- membered and distributed to different * Kirkton, p. 247. t Ibid. pp. 247, 248. THE HILLS OF HOME parts of the country; "the heads of Major M'Culloch and the two Gordons, it was resolved,"says Kirkton, "should be pitch- ed on the sfate of Kirkcudbright; the two Hamiltons and Strong's head should be affixed at Hamilton, and Captain Arnot's sett on the Watter Gate at Edinburgh. The armes of all the ten, because they hade with uplifted hands renewed the Cov- enant at Lanark, were sent to thepeopleof that town to expiate that crime, by placing these arms on the top of the prison."* A- mong these was John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, who saved Turner's life at Dumfries; in return for which service Sir James attempted, though without success, to get the poor man reprieved. One of the condemned died of his wounds between the day of condemnation and the day of execution. "None of them," says Kirkton, "would save their life by taking the declar- ation & renouncing the Covenant, though * Kirkton, p. 248. A RECORD OF BLOOD it was offered to them. . . . But never men died in Scotland so much lamented by the people, not only spectators, but those in the country. When Knockbreck and his brotherwereturnedover,theyclaspedeach other in their arms, and so endured the pangs of death. When Humphrey Colqu- houn died, he spoke not like ane ordinary citizen, but like a heavenly minister, relat- inghis comfortable Christian experiences, and called for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded arm, and read John iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of all. But most of all, when Mr M'Kail died, there was such lamentation as was never known in Scotland before; not one dry cheek upon all the street, orinall the numberless wind- ows in the mercate place."* The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and its author: " Hereafter I will not talkwith flesh and blood, nor think on the world's consol- * Kirkton, p. 249. THE HILLS OF HOME ations. Farewell to all my friends, whose company hath been refreshful to me in my pilgrimage. I have done with the light of the sun and the moon; welcome eternal light, eternal life, everlasting love, ever- lasting praise, everlasting glory. Praise to Him that sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb for ever! Bless the Lord, O my soul, that hath pardoned all my iniquities in the blood of His Son, and healed all my dis- eases. Bless Him, O all ye His angels that excel in strength, ye ministers of His that do His pleasure. Bless the Lord, O my soul!"* After having ascended the gallows lad- der he again broke forth in the following words of touching eloquence: "And now I leave off to speak any more to creatures, and begin my intercourse with God, which shall never be broken off. Farewell father and mother, friends and relations! Fare- well the world and all delights! Farewell ^Naphtali, p. 205 ; Glasgow, 1721. 256 A RECORD OF BLOOD meat and drink! Farewell sun, moon, and stars! — Welcome God and Father! Wel- come sweet Jesus Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant! Welcome blessed Spir- it of ofrace and God of all consolation! Welcome glory! Welcome eternal life! Welcome Death!"* At Glasgow, too, where some were ex- ecuted, they caused the soldiers to beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears. Hideous refinement of re- venge! Even the last words which drop from the lips of a dying man, words sure- ly the most sincere and the most unbiassed which mortal mouth can utter, even these were looked upon as poisoned and as poi- sonous. "Drown their last accents," was the cry, "lest they should lead the crowd to take their part, or at the least to mourn their doom!'t But, after all, perhaps it was more merciful than one would think — un- intentionally so, of course; perhaps the * Wodrow, p. 59. t Kirkton, p. 246. 257 R THE HILLS OF HOME Storm of harsh and fiercely jubilant noises, the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of drums, and the hootings and jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the last they heard on earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when the river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached. Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid- Lothian, pursued, captured, plund- ered, and murdered the miserable fugit- ives who fell in their way. One strange story have we of these times of blood and persecution: Kirkton the historian and popular tradition tell us alike of a flame which often would arise from the grave, in a moss near Carnwath, of some of those poor rebels: of how it crept along the ground; of how it covered the house of 2S8 A RECORD OF BLOOD their murderer; and of how it scared him with its lurid glare. Hear Daniel Defoe:* "If the poor people were by these in- supportable violences made desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who can justly reflect on them when they read in the word of God 'That oppression makes a wise man mad'? And therefore were there no other original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising of Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of those times might have justified to all the world, nature having dictated to all people a right of defence when illegally and arbitrarily attacked in a manner not justifiable either by laws of nature, the laws of God, or the laws of the country." Bear this remonstrance of Defoe's in mind, and though it is the fashion of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and * Defoe's History of the Church. THE HILLS OF HOME to contemn, the noble band of Covenant- ers — though the bitter laugh at their old- world religious views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and the chilling silence on their bravery and their determination, are but too rife through all society — be charit- able to what was evil and honest to what was good about the Pentland insurgents, who fought for life and liberty, for country and religion, on the 28th of November 1 666, now just two hundred years ago. Edinburgh, 28/,^ iV«3z/. 1866. "From Covenanters with uplifted hands, From Remonstrators with associate bands, Good Lord, dehver us!" Royalist Rhyme, Kirkton, p. 127.