LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBR CALIFORNIA lifers « 1M\ - LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBR CALIFORNIA VXD ^S LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBR IIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ^^S^" ojr^o ^sggg^ LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFOR IIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFOR IVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 1^ LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFOR CALIFORNIA CALIFORNIA 0)1 Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2008 with funding from Microsoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/autobiographymysOOmillrich CA P m 166 a w 1861 C A L rLn (86f GAL iKtfi mm^mM, ) i i AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY. MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; OR, THE STORY OP MY EDUCATION. Br HUGH MILLER AUTHOR OF "THE OLD RED SANDSTONE." "FOOTPRINTS OF THE CREATOR," "FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND AND ITS PEOPLE," ETC. ' Love had he found in huts where poor men lie 5 His daily teachers had been woods and rills, — The silence that is in the starry sky, — The sleep that is among the lonely hills." Wordsworth. BOSTO N : O OULD A N D LINCOLN, 5 9 WASHINGTON STREET. NEW YORK: SHELDON AND COMPANY. CINCINNATI: GEO. S. BLANCH ARD. I860. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1854, by GOULD 4 * f.NCOLN, Id the Clerk's Office of the District oourt of the District of Massachusetts. TO THE EBADEK It is now nearly a hundred years since Goldsmith remarked, in his little educational treatise, that " few subjects have been more frequently written upon than the education of youth." And during the century which has well nigh elapsed since he said so, there have been so many more additional works given to the world on this fertile topic, that their number has been at least doubled. Almost all the men who ever taught a few pupils, with a great many more whf the eathic lias. — An important discovery not followed up.— Journey into the lighlands,— the old shepherd's vision.— Forest of native Scotch pine.— A new •cquaiutance.— Moonlit exhibitions of natural scenery 144 CHAPTER IX. I oon Side.— A midnight hour.— Gillie-Christ.— Spectral appearance in the Jmrchyard.— The poor maniac— Origin of the soul.— Traditionary stories.— highland character.— The maniac's quarrel with her husband.— Something pe- culiarly unwholesome in the society of a strong-minded maniac— Her anec- dotes of a brother.— A specimen of barrack-life.— A new school.— Professional ♦iharacteristics.— Bothy life of the North-country masons CONTENTS CHAPTER X. PAOI fnttvesting objects around Conon Side.— The poetic mood. — The accomplishment of verse distinct from the poetic faculty.— Stanzas. — Unio Jllargaritifcrus, and the formation of pearls. — Bathing in the haunted pools of Conon. — Superstition has her figures as certainly as poesy. — The ruined chapel in the woods. — A dark rivulet and its trout. — Curious property of Flounders. — Libellula. — Different stages of the animal creation.— Human contrivances anticipated in both animal and vegetable nature.— Jock, the story-teller of the barracks. — The faculty for extemporary fabrication a peculiarity of a rude society. — Musings. — Verses to the Conon 186 CHAPTER XI. The young painter's home.— Symbolism of ancient Celtic sculpture.—" Poor lame Danie."— Barrack-life again.— The conglomerate deposits of Conon.— Goblin of Craighouse. — Highlanders of the border districts inferior to those of the in- terior. — Superstition natural to a state of failing health. — Disastrous effects of the large farm system on the people of the agricultural districts. — Study of the old Scotch poets. — Alleged superiority of the old Greek and Roman writers accounted for 210 CHAPTER XII. Disastrous consequences to the mechanic of being an inferior workman.— My friend of the Doocot Cave. — A perilous adventure. — Ludicrous expedient to fix a boundary-stone.— Click Clack, the Carter.— Unique features of the metamor- phic system.— Recession of the shore of Loch Maree.— Music on the waters. — Island Maree.— Comforts of a barrack.— Home of a Highlander.— " Without Gaelic in Gairloch." — Effect of a potato famine. — Disparity among people of contiguous districts due to a mixture of races. — Discrepancy in the appearance of the sex3s on ihe west coast of Scotland.— Gaelic Thinking in Scripture Eng- lish 035 CONTE NTS. XI CHAPTER XIII. PAOI A terra incognita.— Contentment sometimes rather a vice than a virtue.— A ge- nius.— A grave difference between porridge with, and porridge without milk. — Relative powers of fairies and ice to walk off with great stones. — Flora of Gairloch. — Law of increase in the animal and vegetable world,— the same ap- plies to man. — View of the western islands. — Differences between Ihe produc- tions of the eastern and western coasts of Scotland.— Submarine scenery.— Primitive arts of uncultivated districts. — Gloomy prospects of the cotters, — their Celtic blood not the only cause of their indolence.— A resurrectionist.— Sabbaths in Flowerdale.— Poverty of the Highlanders 257 CHAPTER XIV. A sad Accident.— Belief in a particular Providence natural to the mind.— The last eagle of Cromarty Hill.— The ancient records of geology confirmed by the present extinction of animal species on the globe.— Resolve to seek my fortune among the stone-cutters of Edinburgh.— Scenery of the Frith of Forth.— Distant view of the Scottish capital. — An unfortunate patrimony. — Edinburgh a city of the past and present.—" A Highlander newly come to Scotland."— A culti- vated and fenced country less beloved by a people than a wild, open one.— The carboniferous system.— Visions of science.— Serfdom in the coal districts.— Collier women of Niddry. — The democratic watchword "Liberty and Equality" faulty in its phlosophy.— Moral degradation in the environs of Edinburgh.— My lodging 284 CHAPTER XV. Disaffection toward religious establishments among the working-men of Scotland. —My fellow-lodgers.— Irreligion among the masons.— Family worship estab- lished in our cottage. — Habits of dissipation among the masons.— The province of intelligence in reforming the morals.— The nobler virtues unknown to black- guards.— Charles the hero of our party.— Evil effect of the practice of promis- cuous imprisonment.— Intolerance of new sects.— Strike among the masons.— Scene in a public house.— Human nature a difficult problem. — Evils of strikes. — The self-conceit of the young a wise provision. — " Old Alie, the witch," and " Davie, the apprentice."— A city playhouse 3W Xll CONTENTS CHAPTER XVI. PAG« A great fire in Edinburgh.— Special visitations of heaven difficult to be deter- mined. — Dr. M'Crie. — My reading and Rambles. — Noz Ambrosiana. — We un- derstand an author the better for knowing how he looks. — Quit Edinburgh for Cromarty.— Superstition of sailors.— Stanzas written at sea.— Reflections on the condition of the lower classes,— causes of their degradation on the increase. — Renewed acquaintance with my friend at Doocot.— Man had no responsible predecessor on earth.— Intellectual superiority of the scholar over the work- ing-man not so great as has been supposed 333 CHAPTER XVII. My religious impressions,— Powerlessness of mere speculative theology.— Con- vinced that the "Word made flesh" is the central object of the Christian sys- tem, — importance of this belief. — Adaptation of the scheme of redemption to the heart o/ man,— practical power of this principle.— Teachings of geology on the doctrine of the union of two natures in Christ.— Failing health.— Stanzas. — Convalescence . — Sketches of a gipsy party 357 CHAPTER XVIII. A new branch of employment. — Observations on the floras of KirkmichaBl, — their bearing on the development hypothesis — Annus, the idiot of Nigg. — Jock Gordon, the imbecile of Cromarty, — their rivalship, and its issue. — An original theory of the mind. — The ministers of Cromarty.— Meeting with Mr. Stewart,— our subsequent intimacy.— His manner of preaching J78 CHAPTER XIX. get out to seek employment at Inverness.— Interview with the parish minister.— The sort of patronage which letters of introduction procure. — Planning to get employment. — Both verse and old English fail me.— A jilted bridegroom. — The Guars of Inverness. — Criticism on the magistrates. — Determine to publish a volume of poems.— Death of my uncle James, and of my friend William Ross. 393 CONTENTS. Xlll CHAPTER XX. PAGE Preface to my volume of verse.— Write for the Courier on the herring fishery,— extracts. — Reception of my verses by the critics. — A near criticism.— A severe attack from an itinerant elocutionist, — the lecturer barely escapes a. drubbing. —A generous critique from Edinburgh.— My circle of friends become consider- ably enlarged. — Interview with Dr. Baird. — Other literary enterprises. — The error of forsaking an honest calling.— An interesting group of literary ladies. — Jeu iTesprit on a young naval officer 4 16 CHAPTER XXI. Land wastes of Culbiu. — Peculiarities of the sub-aerial formation. — Great age of the globe,— the Scriptures do not fix its antiquity.— Tremendous storm on the Hill of Cromarty,— extraordinary character of the scene.— Origin of Scottish mosses. — Molusca of the Shandwick lias. — Dissection of a loligo. — The oolitic and lias deposits.— 3rganism of the second age of vertebrate existence 437 CHAPTER XXII The Baptist cause at Cromarty. — Opposition to the Catholic Relief Bill.— Trouble in the parish, — a dire ecclesiastical dispute. — Approach of the cholera — Our Barrier Sanitaire measure. — The virtues of the smoke of sulphur and chloride tested,— fumigation of the Inverness politicians. — Ravages of the pestilence. — A time of peace favorable to the growth of opinion.— The Revolution in France, — reception of the news by the crew of a French lugger. — Effects of the Reform Bill on the politics of Cromarty.— Beginning and ending of my municipal career 4-Vl CHAPTER XXIII. Evenings with the ladies.— A pretty young lady and "the Cromarty poet."— A lovely apparition.— The propriety of conversing privately with an operative mason.— A dream maiden displaced by a real one.— Thoughts of a home in the XIV CONTENTS. PA.OB backwoods of America. — The business of the newspaper editor not always au independent one. — A special providence,— employed as accountant of the Branch Bark. The ill-condition of the laboring classes often overdrawn.— Voy- age to Edinburgh, — object of the journey. — My stay at Linlithgow.— Organisms of the mountain limestone. — Return to Cromarty. — Comparative educational advantages of the mechanic and the clerk.— Reception of my traditional vol- ume. — The bank proves an admirable school, suited to cultivate a shrewd com- mon sense. — My bridal excursion. — Cathedral of Elgin.— Return to Cromarty. — Stanzas 475 CHAPTER XXIV. Contributions to the " Border Tales."— The reward of" pains-taking research."— Robert Chambers and his journal. — Ichthyolitic deposits of the old red sand- stone, — these have no representative among recent fishes.— Mr. DinkePa alleged restoration of the Cephalasprans disproved.— Cheiracanthus and Cheirolepsis. —Evening excursions to Moray Frith.— Triumph of the Liberals over Presby- terial bigotry.— An ability of efficient squabbling proved to be a very market- able one.— Memoir of William Forsyth.— A sad bereavement.— Stanzas 499 CHAPTER XXV. The voluntary controversy.— My uncles become Seceders.— Sympathy with the establishment. — Critical position of the Church, — it is defended in a letter to Lord Brougham,— great success of the pamphlet.— Story of the "Deserted Church." — Become editor of the Witness, — a non-intrusion paper. — Oratory of Dr. Chalmers,— great orators imperfectly represented in their written speeches. — Anecdotes of Dr. Chalmers. — Brief history of a friend.— Quit Cromarty. — Suc- cess of the Witness. — Reflections on the past d I? MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; OR. THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. CHAPTER I. " Ye gentlemen of England Who live at home at ease, O, little do you think upon The dangers of the seas." Old Soi Rather more than eighty years ago, a stout little boy, in his sixth or seventh year, was despatched from an old-fashioned farm-house in the upper part of the parish of Cromarty, to drown a litter of puppies in an adjacent pond. The commis- sion seemed to be not in the least congenial. He sat down beside the pool, and began to cry over his charge ; and finally, after wasting some time in a paroxysm of indecision and sor- row, instead of committing the puppies to the water, he tucked them up in his little kilt, and set out by a blind pathway which went winding through the stunted heath of the dreary Maolbuoy Common, in a direction opposite to that of the farm house, — his home for the two previous twelvemonths. After some doubtful wandering on the waste, he succeeded in reach- ing, before nightfall, the neighbouring seaport town, and pre- sented himself laden with his charge, at his mother's door. 2 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; The poor woman, — a sailor's widow, in very humble circum- stances, — raised her hands in astonishment : " O, my unlucky boy," she exclaimed, " what's this ? — what brings you here V "The little doggies, mither," said the boy ; "I couldna drown the little doggies ; and I took them to you." What after- wards befell the " little doggies," I know not ; but trivial as the incident may seem, it exercised a marked influence on the circumstances and destiny of at least two generations of crea- tures higher in the scale than themselves. The boy, as he /"stubbornly refused to return to the farm-house, had to be sent on shipboard, agreeably to his wish, as a cabin-boy ; and the writer of these chapters was born, in consequence, a sailor's son, and was rendered, as early as his fifth year, mainly de- pendent for his support on the sedulously plied but indiffer- ently remunerated labors of his only surviving parent at the time, a sailor's widow. The little boy of the farm-house was descended from a long line of seafaring men, — skilful and adventurous sailors, — - some of whom had coasted along the Scottish shores as early as the times of Sir Andrew Wood and the " bold Bartons," and mayhap helped to man that " verrie monstrous schippe the Great Michael," that " cumbered all Scotland to get her to sea," They had taken as naturally to the water as the New- foundland dog or the duckling. That waste of life which is always so great in the naval profession had been more than usually so in the generation just passed away. Of the boy's two uncles, one had sailed around the world with Anson, and assisted in burning Paita, and in boarding the Manilla gal- leon ; but on reaching the English coast he mysteriously dis- appeared, and was never more heard of. The other uncle, a remarkably handsome and powerful man, — or, to borrow the homely but not inexpressive language in which I have heard him described, " as pretty a fellow as ever stepped in shoe- leather," — perished at sea in a storm ; and several years after, the boy's father, when entering the Frith of Cromarty, was struck overboard, during a sudden gust, by the boom of his vessel, and, apparently stunned by the blow, never rose again. Shortly after, in the hope of securing her son from what seemed to be the hereditary fate, his mother had committed the boy to the charge of a sister, married to a farmer of the parish, and now the mistress of the farm-house of Ardavell ; but the family death was not to be so avoided ; and the ar- rangement terminated, as has been seen, in the transaction beside the pond. In course of time the sailor boy, despite of hardship and rough usage, grew up into a singularly robust and active man ; not above the middle size. — for his height never exceeded five feet eight inches, — but broad-shouldered, deep-chested, strong-limbed, and so compact of bone and muscle, that in a ship of the line, in which he afterwards sailed, there was not, among five hundred able-bodied seamen, a man who could lift so great a weight, or grapple with him on equal terms. His education had been but indifferently cared for at home ; he had, however, been taught to read by a female cousin, a niece of his mother's, who, like her too, was both the daughter and the widow of a sailor ; and for his cousin's only child, a girl somewhat younger than himself, he had contracted a boyish affection, which in a stronger form continued to retain possess- ion of him after he grew up. In the leisure thrown on his hands in long Indian and Chinese voyages, he learned to write ; and profited so much by the instruction of a comrade, an in- telligent and warm-hearted though reckless Irishman, that he became skilful enough to keep a log-book, and to take a reckoning with the necessary correctness, — accomplishments far from common at the time among ordinary sailors. He formed, too, a taste for reading. The recollection of his cousin's daughter may have influenced him, but he commenced life with a determination to rise in it, — made his first money by storing up instead of drinking his grog, — and, as was com- mon in those times, drove a little trade with the natives of foreign parts, in articles of curiosity and vcrtu, for which, I sus- pect, the custom-house dues were not always paid. With all his Scotch prudence, however, and with much kindliness of heart and placidity of temper, there was some wild blood in his 4 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; veins, derived, mayhap, from one or two buccaneering ances tors, that, when excited beyond the endurance point, became sufficiently formidable ; and which, on at least one occasion, interfered very considerably with his plans and prospects. On a protracted and tedious voyage in a large East India- man, he had, with the rest of the crew, been subjected to harsh usage by a stern, capricious captain ; but, secure of re- lief on reaching port, he had borne uncomplainingly with it all. His comrade and quondam teacher the Irishman was, however, less patient ; and for remonstrating with the tyrant, as one of a deputation of the seamen, in what was deemed a mutinous spirit, he was laid hold of, and was in the course of being bound down to the deck under a tropical sun, when his quieter comrade, with his blood now heated to the boiling point, stepped aft, and with apparent calmness re-stated the grievance. The captain drew a loaded pistol from his belt ; the sailor struck up his hand ; and, as the bullet whistled through the rigging above, he grappled with him, and dis- armed him in a trice. The crew rose, and in a few minutes the ship was all their own. But having failed to calculate on such a result, they knew not what to do with their charge ; and, acting under the advice of their new leader, who felt to the full the embarrassing nature of the position, they were con- tent simply to demand the redress of their grievances as their terms of surrender ; when, untowardly for their claims, a ship of war hove in sight, much in want of men, and, bearing down on the Indiaman, the mutiny was at once suppressed, and the leading mutineers sent aboard the armed vessel, accompanied by a grave charge, and the worst possible of characters. Lucki- ly for them, however, and especially luckily for the Irishman and his friend, the war-ship was so weakened by scurvy, at that time the untamed pest of the navy, that scarce two dozen of her crew could do duty aloft. A fierce tropical tempest, too, which broke out not long after, pleaded powerfully in their favor ; and the affair terminated in the ultimate pro- motion of the Irishman to the office of ship-schoolmaster, and of his Scotch comrade to the captaincy of the foretop. My narrative abides with the latter. He remained for seve- ral years aboard men-of-war, and, though not much in love with the service, did his duty in both storm and battle. He served in the action off the Dogger-Bank, — one of the last naval engagements fought ere the manoeuvre of breaking the line gave to British valor its due superiority, by rendering all our great sea-battles decisive; and a comrade who sail- ed in the same vessel, and from whom, when a boy, I have re- ceived kindness for my father's sake, has told me that, their ship being but indifferently manned at the time, and the ex- traordinary personal strength and activity of his friend well known, he had a station assigned him at his gun against two of the crew, and that during the action he actually outwrought them both. At length, however, the enemy drifted to leeward to refit ; and when set to repair the gashed and severed rig- ging, such was his state of exhaustion, in consequence of the previous overstrain on every nerve and muscle, that he had scarce vigor enough left to raise the marlinspike employed in the work to the level of his face. Suddenly, when in this condition, a signal passed along the line, that the Dutch fleet, already refitted, was bearing down to renew the engagement. A thrill like that of an electric shock passed through the frame of the exhausted sailor ; his fatigue at once left him ; and, vig- orous and strong as when the action first began, he found himself able, as before, to run out against his two comrades the one side of a four-and-twenty pounder. The instance is a curious one of the influence of that " spirit" which, accord- ing to the Wise King, enables a man to " sustain his infir- mity." It may be well not to inquire too curiously regarding the mode in which this effective sailor quitted the navy. The country had borrowed his services without consulting his will ; and he, I suspect, reclaimed them on his own behalf without first asking leave. I have been told by my mother that he found the navy very intolerable ; the mutiny at the Nore had not yet meliorated the service to the common sailor. Among other hardships, he had been oftener than once under not only 6 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; very harsh, but also very incompetent officers ; and on one occasion, after toiling on the fore-yard in a violent night-squall, with some of the best seamen aboard, in fruitless attempts to furl up the sail, he had to descend, cap in hand, at the risk of a flogging, and humbly implore the boy-lieutenant in charge that he should order the vessel's head to be laid in a certain direction. Luckily for him, the advice was taken by the young gentlemen, and in a few minutes the sail was furled. He left his ship one fine morning, attired in his best, and hav- ing on his head a three-cornered hat, with tufts of lace at the corners, which I well remember, from the circumstance that it had long after to perform an important part in certain boy- ish masquerades at Christmas and the New Year ; and as he had taken effective precautions for being reported missing in the evening, he got clear off. Of some of the after-events of his life, I retain such mere fragmentary recollections, dissociated from date and locality, as might be most readily seized on by the imagination of a child. At one time, when engaged in one of his Indian voy- ages, he was stationed during the night, accompanied by but a single comrade, in a small open boat, near one of the minor mouths of the Ganges ; and he had just fallen asleep on the beams, when he was suddenly awakened by a violent motion, as if his skiff were capsizing. Starting up, he saw in the im- perfect light, a huge tiger, that had swam, apparently, from the neighboring jungle, in the act of boarding the boat. So much was he taken aback, that though a loaded musket lay beside him, it was one of the loose beams, or foot-spars, used as ful- crums for the feet in rowing, that he laid hold of as a weapon ; but such was the blow he dealt to the paws of the creature, as they rested on the gunwale, that it dropped off with a tremen dous snarl, and he saw it no more. On another occasion, Ik was one of three men sent with despatches to some Indian port in a boat, which, oversetting in the open sea in a squall, left them for the greater part of three days only its upturned bot- tom for their resting-place. And so thickly, during that time, did the sharks congregate around them, that though a keg of OR, THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 7 rum. part of the boat's stores, floated for the first two days within a few yards of them, and they had neither meat nor drink, none of them, though they all swam well, dared attempt regaining it. They were at length relieved by a Spanish vessel, and treated with such kindness, that the subject of my narrative used ever after to speak well of the Spaniards, as a generous people, destined ultimately to rise. He was at one time so reduced by scurvy, in a vessel half of whose crew had been carried off by the disease, that, though still able to do duty on the tops, the pressure of his finger left for several seconds a dent in his thigh, as if the muscular flesh had become of the consistency of dough. At another time, when over- taken in a small vessel by a protracted tempest, in which " for many days neither sun nor moon appeared," he continued to retain his hold of the helm for twelve hours after every other man aboard was utterly prostrated and down, and succeeded, in consequence, in weathering the storm for them all. And after his death, a nephew of my mother's, a young man who had served his apprenticeship under him, was treated with great kindness on the Spanish Main, for his sake, by a West Indian captain, whose ship and crew he had saved, as the captain told the lad, by boarding them in a storm, at immi- nent risk to himself, and working their vessel into port, when, in circumstances of similar exhaustion, they were drifting full upon an iron-bound shore. Many of my other recollections of this manly sailor are equally fragmentary in their character ; but there is a distinct bit of picture in them all, that strongly impressed the boyish fancy. When not much turned of thirty, the sailor returned to nis native town, with money enough, hardly earned and carefully kept, to buy a fine, large sloop, with which he engaged in the coasting trade ; and shortly after he married his cousin's daugh- ter. He found his cousin, who had supported herself in her widowhood by teaching school, residing in a clingy, old fashioned house, three rooms in length, but with the windows of its second story half-buried in the eaves, that had been J eft her by their mutual grandfather, old John Feddes, one of 8 the last of the buccaneers. It had been built, I have every reason to believe, with Spanish gold ; not, however, with a great deal of it, for, notwithstanding its six rooms, it was a rather humble erection, and had now fallen greatly into dis- repair. It was fitted up, however, with some of the sailor's money, and after his marriage, became his home — a home rendered all the happier by the presence of his cousin, now rising in years, and who, during her long widowhood, had sought and found consolations amid her troubles and priva- tions, where it was surest to be found. She was a meek- spirited, sincerely pious woman, and the sailor during his more distant voyages — for he sometimes traded with ports of the Baltic on the one hand, and with those of Ireland and the south of England on the other — had the comfort of knowing that his wife, who had fallen into a state of health chronically delicate, was sedulously tended and cared for by a devoted mother. The happiness which he would have otherwise en- joyed was, however, marred in some degree by his wife's great delicacy of constitution, and ultimately blighted by two unhappy accidents. He had not lost the nature which had been evinced at an early age beside the pond : for a man who had often looked death in the face, he had remained nicely tender of human life, and had often hazarded his own in preserving that of others ; and when accompanied, on one occasion, by his wife and her mother to his vessel, just previous to sailing, he had unfortu- nately to exert himself in her presence, in behalf of one of his seamen, in a way that gave her constitution a shock from whieh it never recovered. A clear, frosty, moonlight evening had. set in ; the pier-head was glistening with new-formed ice, and one of the sailors, when engaged in casting over a haulser which he had just loosed, missed footing on the treacherous margin, and fell into the sea. The master knew his man could not swim ; a powerful seaward tide sweeps past the place with the first hours of ebb ; there was not a moment to be Jost ; and, hastily throwing off his heavy great-coat, he plunged after him, and in an instant the strong current swept them both ort of sight. He succeeded, however, in laying hold of the half-drowned man, and striking with him from out the peril- ous tide-way into an eddy, with a Herculean effort he regained the quay. On reaching it, however, his wife lay insensible in the arms of her mother ; and as she was at the time in the de- licate condition incidental to married women, the natural con- sequence followed, and she never recovered the shock, but lin- gered for more than a twelvemonth, the mere shadow of hei former self; when a second event, as untoward as the first, too violently shook the fast-ebbing sands, and precipitated her dis- solution. A prolonged tempest from the stormy north-east, had swept the Moray Frith of its shipping, and congregated the storm- bound vessels by scores in the noble harbor of Cromarty, when the wind chopped suddenly round, and they all set out to sea, the sloop of the master among the rest. The other vessels kept the open Frith ; but the master, thoroughly ac- quainted with its navigation, and in the belief that the change of wind was but temporary, went on hugging the land on the weather side, till, as he had anticipated, the breeze set full into the old quarter, and increased into a gale. And then, when all the rest of the fleet had no other choice left them than just to scud back again, he struck out into the Frith in a long tack, and, doubling Kinnaird's Head and the dreaded Buchan Ness, succeeded in making good his voyage south. Next morning, the wind-bound vessels were crowding the harbor of refuge as before, and only his sloop was missing. The first war of the French Revolution had broken out at the time ; it was known there were several French privateers hovering on the coast, and the report went abroad that the missing sloop had been captured by the French. There was a weather-brained tailor in the neighborhood, who used to do very odd tilings, especially, it was said, when the moon was at the full, and whom the w r riter remembers from the circumstance that he fabricated for him his first jacket, and that, though he suc- ceeded in sewing on one sleeve to the hole at the shoulder, where it 3ught to be, he committed the slight mistake of sew- 10 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ing on the other sleeve to one of the pocket holes. Poor An drew Fern had heard that his townsman's sloop had been cap- tured by a privateer, and fidgety with impatience till he had communicated the intelligence where he thought it would tell most effectively, he called on the master's wife, to ask whether she had not heard that all the wind-bound vessels had got back again save the master's, and to wonder no one had yet told her that if his had not got back, it was simply because it had been taken by the French. The tailor's communication told x more powerfully than he could have anticipated : in less than a week after, the master's wife was dead ; and long ere her husband's return, she was lying in the quiet family burying- place, in which — so heavy were the drafts made by accident and violent death on the family — the remains of none of the male members had been deposited for more than a hundred years. The mother, now left, by the death of her daughter, to a dreary solitude, sought to relieve its tedium, during the ab- sence of her son-in-law when on his frequent voyages, by keep- ing, as she had done ere his return from foreign parts, an hum- ble school. It was attended by two little girls, the children of a distant relation but very dear friend, the wife of a tradesman \of the place — a woman, like herself, of sincere though unpre- tending piety. Their similarity of character in this respect could hardly be traced to their common ancestor. He was the last curate of the neighboring parish of Nigg ; and, though not one of those intolerant Episcopalian ministers that succeed- ed in rendering their church thoroughly hateful to the Scot- tish people — for he was a simple, easy man, of much good na- ture — he was, if tradition speaks true, as little religious as any of them. In one of the earlier replies to that curious work, " Scotch Presbyterian Eloquence Displayed," I find a nonsen- sical passage from one of the curate's sermons, given as a set- off against the Presbyterian nonsense adduced by the other side. " Mr. James M'Kenzie, curate of Nigg in Ross," says the writer, " describing eternity to his parishioners, told them that in that state they would be immortalized, so that nothing could hurt them ; a slash of a broad sword could not hurt you, 11 saith he ; nay, a cannon-ball would play but baff on you." Most of the curate's descendants were staunch Presbyterians, and animated by a greatly stronger spirit than his ; and there were none of them stauncher in their Presbyterianism than the two elderly women who counted kin from him in the fourth degree, and who, on the basis of a common faith, had become attached friends. The little girls were great favorites with the schoolmistress ; and when, as she rose in years, her health began to fail, the elder of the two removed from her mother's house, to live with and take care of her ; and the younger, who was now shooting up into a pretty young woman, used, as before, to pass much of her time with her sister and her old mistress. Meanwhile the shipmaster was thriving. He purchased a site for a house beside that of his buccaneering grandfather, and built for himself and his aged relative a respectable dwell- ing, which cost him about four hundred pounds, and entitled his son, the writer, to exercise the franchise, on the passing, considerably more than thirty years after, of the Reform Bill. The new house was, however, never to be inhabited by its builder ; for, ere it was fully finished, he was overtaken by a sad calamity, that, to a man of less energy and determina- tion, would have been ruin, and in consequence of which he had to content himself with the old house as before, and al- most to begin the world anew. I have now reached a point in my narrative at which, from my connection with the two little girls, — both of whom still live in the somewhat altered character of women far advanced in life, — I can be as minute in its details as I please ; and the details of the misadventure which stripped the shipmaster of the earnings of long years of carefulness and toil, blended as they are with what an old critic might term a curious machinery of the supernatural, seem not unworthy of being given unabridged. Early in November 1797, two vessels — the one a smack in the London and Inverness trade, the other the master's square-rigged sloop — lay wind-bound for a few days on their passage north, in the port of Peterhead. The weather, which 12 had been stormy and unsettled, moderated toward the even- ing of the fifth day of their detention ; and the wind chop- ping suddenly into the east, both vessels loosed from their moorings, and, as a rather gloomy day was passing into * still gloomier night, they bore out to sea. The breeze soon freshened into a gale ; the gale swelled into a hurricane, accompanied by a thick snow-storm ; and when, early next morning, the smack opened the Frith, she was staggering un ler her storm-jib, and a main-sail reefed to the cross. What ver wind may blow, there is always shelter within the Su tors; and she was soon riding at anchor within the road- stead ; but she had entered the bay alone ; and when day broke, and for a brief, interval the driving snow-rack cleared up toward the east, no second sail appeared in the offing. " Poor Miller !" exclaimed the master of the smack ; " if he does not enter the Frith ere an hour, he will never enter it at all. Good sound vessel, and better sailor never stepped be- tween stem and stern ; but last night has, I fear, been too much for him. He should have been here long ere now." The hour passed ; the day itself wore heavily away in gloom and tempest ; and as not only the master, but also all the crew of the sloop, were natives of the place, groupes of the town's folks might be seen, so long as the daylight lasted, looking out into the storm from the salient points of the old coast-line that, rising immediately behind the houses, commands the Frith. But the sloop came not, and before they had retired to their homes, a second night had fallen, dark and tempestuous us the first. Ere morning the weather moderated ; a keen frost bound up the wind in its icy fetters ; and during the following day, though a heavy swell continued to roll shorewards between the Sutors, and to send up its white foam high against the cliffs, the surface of the sea had become glassy and smooth. But the day wore on and evening again fell ; and even the . most sanguine relinquished all hope of ever again seeing the sloop or her crew. There was grief in the master's dwelling, ■ — grief in no degree the less poignant from the circumstance 13 that it was the tearless, uncomplaining grief of rigid old age. Her two youthful friends and their mother watched with the widow, now, as it seemed, left alone in the world. The town- clock had struck the hour of midnight, and still she remained as if fixed to her seat, absorbed in silent, stupefying sorrow, when a heavy foot was heard pacing along the now silent street. It passed, and anon returned ; ceased for a moment nearly op. posit e the window ; then approached the door, where there vis a second pause ; and then there succeeded a faltering knock, that struck on the very hearts of the inmates within. One of the girls sprang up, and on undoing the bolt, shrieked out, as the door fell open, " O, mistress, here is Jack Grant the mate !" Jack, a tall, powerful seaman, but apparently in a state of utter exhaustion, staggered, rather than walked in, and flung himself into a chair. " Jack," exclaimed the old woman, seizing him convulsively by both his hands, " where's my cousin ? — where's Hugh ?" " The master's safe and well," said Jack ; " but the poor Friendship lies in spales on the bar of Findhorn." " God be praised !" ejaculated the widow. " Let the gear go !" I have often heard Jack's story related in Jack's own words, at a period of life when repetition never tires ; but I am not sure that I can do it the necessary justice now. " We left, Peterhead," he said, "with about half a cargo of coal ; for we had lightened ship a day or two before ; and the gale freshen- ed as the night came on. We made all tight, however ; and though the snow-drift was so blinding in the thick of the show- er that I could scarce see my hand before me, and though it soon began to blow great guns, we had given the land a good offing, and the hurricane blew the right way. Just as we were loosening from the quay, a poor young woman, much knocked up, with a child in her arms, had come to the vessel's side, and begged hard of the master to take her aboard. She was a soldier's wife, and was travelling to join her husband at Fort- George ; but she was already worn out and penniless, she said ; and now, as a snow-storm threatened to block up the roads, she could neither stay where she was nor pursue her journey. 14 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; Her infant, too, — she was sure, if she tried to force her way through the hills, it would perish in the snow. The master, though unwilling to cumber us with a passenger in such weath- er, was induced, out of pity for the poor destitute creature, to take her aboard. And she was now, with her child, all alone, below in the cabin. I was stationed a-head on the out- look beside the foresail horse ; the night had grown pitch dark ; and the lamp in the binnacle threw just light enough through the gray of the shower to show me the master at the helm. He looked more anxious, I thought, than I had almost ever seen him before, though I have been with him, mistress, in very bad weather; and all at once I saw he had got company, and strange company too, for such a night ; there was a woman moving round him, with a child in her arms. I could see her as distinctly as I ever saw anything, — now on the one side, now on the other, — at one time full in the light, at another half lost in the darkness. That, I said to myself, must be the soldier's wife and her child ; but how in the name of wonder can the master allow a woman to come on deck in such a night as this, when we ourselves have just enough ado to keep foot- ing ! He takes no notice of her neither, but keeps looking on, quite in his wont, at the binnacle. ' Master,' I said, step- ping up to him, ' the woman had surely better go below.' ' What woman, Jack V said he ; ' our passenger, you may be sure, is nowhere else.' I looked round, mistress, and found he was quite alone, and that the companion-head was hasped down. There came a cold sweat all over me. ' Jack,' said Ihe master, ' the night is getting worse, and the roll of the waves heightening every moment. I'm convinced, too, our cargo is shifting. As the last sea struck us, I could hear the coals rattle below ; and see how stiffly we heel to the larboard. Say nothing, however, to the men, but have all your wits about you ; and look, meanwhile, to the boat-tackle and the oars. I have seen a boat live in as bad a night as this.' As he spoke, a blue light from above glimmered on the deck. We looked up, and saw a dead-fire sticking to the cross-trees. ' It's all over with us now, master,' said I. ' Nay, man,' replied the 15 master, ii his easy, humorous way, which I always like well enough except in bad weather, and then I see his humor is served out like his extra grog, to keep up hearts that have cause enough to get low, — ' Nay, man,' he said, ' we can't af- ford to let your grandmother board us to-night. If you will ensure me against the shifting coal, I'll be your guarantee against the dead-light. Why, it's as much a natural appear- ance man, as a flash of lightning. Away to your berth, and keep up a good heart ; we can't be far from Covesea now, where, when once past the Skerries, the swell will take off ; and then, in two short hours, we may be snug within the Su- tors.' I had scarcely reached my berth a-head, mistress, when a heavy sea struck us on the starboard quarter, almost throw- ing us on our beam-ends. I could hear the rushing of the coals below, as they settled on the larboard side ; and though the master set us full before the wind, and gave instant orders to lighten every stitch of sail, — and it was but little sail we had at the time to lighten, — still the vessel did not rise, but lay un- manageable as a log, with her gunwale in the water. On we drifted, however, along the south coast, with little expectation save that every other sea would send us to the bottom ; until, in the first gray of the morning, we found ourselves among the breakers of the terrible bar of Findhorn. And shortly after, the poor Friendship took the ground right on the edge of the quicksands, for she would neither stay nor wear ; and as she beat hard against the bottom, the surf came rolling over half- mast high. " Just as we struck," continued Jack, " the master made a desperate effort to get into the cabin. The vessel couldn't miss, we saw, to break up and fill ; and though there was little hope of any of us ever setting foot ashore, he wished to give the poor woman below a chance with the rest. All of us but himself, mistress, had got up into the shrouds, and so could £-ee round us a bit ; and he had just laid his hand on the companion hasp to undo the door, when I saw a tremendous sea coming rolling towards us like a moving wall, and shouted on him to hold fast. lie sprang to the weather back-stay, 16 and laid hold. The sea came tumbling on, and, breaking full twenty feet over his head, buried him for a minute's space in the foam. We thought we should never see him more ; but when it cleared away, there was he still, with his iron gripe on the stay, though the fearful wave had water-logged the Friendship from bow to stern, and swept her companion-head as cleanly off by the deck as if it had been cut with a saw. No human aid could avail the poor woman and her baby. Master could hear the terrible choaking noise of her dying agony right under his feet, with but a two-inch plank between ; and the sounds have haunted him ever since. But even had he suc- ceeded in getting her on deck, she could not possibly have sur- vived, mistress. For five long hours we clung to the rigging, with the seas riding over us all the time like wild horses ; and though we could see, through the snow drift and the spray, crowds on the shore, and boats lying thick beside the pier, none dared venture out to assist us, till near the close of the day, when the wind fell with the falling tide, and we were brought ashore, more dead than alive, by a volunteer crew from the harbor. The unlucky Friendship began to break up under us ere mid-day, and we saw the corpse of the drowned woman, with the dead infant still in its arms, come floating out through a hole in the side. But the surf soon tore mother and child asunder, and we lost sight of them as they drifted away to the west. Master would have crossed the Frith himself this morning to relieve your mind, but being less worn out than any of us, he thought it best to remain in charge of the wreck." Such, in effect, was the narrative of Jack Grant the mate. The master, as I have said, had well nigh to commence the world anew, and was on the eve of selling his new house at a disadvantage, in order to make up the sum necessary for pro- viding himself with a new vessel, when a friend interposed and advanced him the balance required. He was assisted, too, bv a sister in Leith, who was in tolerably comfortable circum- stances ; and so he got a new sloop, which, though not quite equal in size to the one he had last, was built wholly of oak, every 17 plank and beam of which he had superintended in the laying down, and a prime sailer to boot ; and so, though he had to satisfy himself with the accommodation of the old domicile, with its little rooms and its small windows, and to let the other house to a tenant, he began to thrive again as before. Mean- while his aged cousin was gradually sinking. The master was absent on one of his longer voyages, and she too truly felt that she could not survive till his return. She called to her bed- side her two young friends, the sisters, who had been unwea- ried in their attentions to her, and poured out her blessing on them ; first on the elder, and then on the younger. " But as for you, Harriet," she added, addressing the latter, — " there waits for you one of the best blessings of this world also, — the blessing of a good husband ; you will be a gainer in the end, even in this life, through your kindness to the poor childless widow." The prophesy was a true one ; the old woman had shrewdly marked where the eyes of her cousin had been fall- ing of late ; and in about a twelvmonth after her death, her young friend and pupil had become the master's wife. There was a very considerable disparity between their ages, — the master was forty -four, and his wife only eighteen, — but never was there a happier marriage. The young wife was simple, confiding, and affectionate, and the master of a soft and genial nature, with a large amount of buoyant humor about him, and so equable in temper, that, during six years of wedded life, his wife never saw him angry but once. I have heard her speak of the exceptional instance, however, as too terrible to be readily forgotten. She had accompanied him on ship-board, during their first year of married life, to the upper parts of the Cromarty Frith, where his sloop was taking in a cargo of grain, and lay quietly embayed within two hundred yards cf the southern shore. His mate had gone away for the night to the opposite side of the bay, to visit his parents, who resided in that neighbor- hood ; and the remaining crew consisted of but two seamen, both young and somewhat reckless men, and the ship-boy. Taking the boy with them to keep the ship's boat afloat, and 18 wait their return, the two sailors went ashore and ; setting out. for a distant public-house, remained there drinking till a late hour. There was a bright moon overhead, but the evening was chill and frosty ; and the boy, cold, tired, and half-over- come b} sleep, after w r aiting on till past midnight, shoved off the boat and, making his way to the vessel, got straightway into his hammock, and fell asleep. Shortly after, the two men came to the shore, much the worse of liquor ; and, failing to make themselves heard by the boy, they stripped off their clothes, and, chilly as the night was, swam aboard. The mas- ter and his wife had been for hours snug in their bed, when they were awakened by the screams of the boy ; the drunken men were unmercifully bastinading him with a rope's end apiece ; and the master, hastily rising, had to interfere in his behalf, and, with the air of a man w r ho knew that remonstrance in the circumstances would be of little avail, he sent them both off to their hammocks. Scarcely, however, had he again got into bed, when he was a second time aroused by the cries of the boy, uttered on this occasion in the shrill tones of agony and terror ; and, promptly springing up, now followed by his wife, he found the two sailors again belaboring the boy, and that one of them, in his blind fury, had laid hold of a rope-end, armed, as is common on shipboard, with an iron thimble or ring, and that every blow produced a wound. The poor boy was streaming over w r ith blood. The master, in the extremity of his indignation, lost command of himself. Rushing in, the two men were in a moment dashed against the deck ; — they seemed powerless in his hands as children ; and had not his wife, although very unfit at the time for mingling in a fray, run in and laid hold of him, — a movement which calmed him at once, — it was her serious impression that, unarmed as he was, ne w r ould have killed them both upon the spot. There are, I believe, few things more formidable than the unwonted anger of a good-natured man. OR THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 19 CHAPTER II. "Three stormy nights and stormy days We tossed upon the raging main; And long we strove our bark to save, But all our striving was in vain." Lowe. I was born, the first child of this marriage, on the 10th day of October, 1802, in the low, long house built by my great- grandfather, the buccaneer. My memory awoke early. I have recollections which date several months ere the completion of my third year ; but, like those of the golden age of the world, they are chiefly of a mythologic character. I remember, for instance, getting out unobserved one day to my father's little garden, and seeing there a minute duckling covered with soft yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red color. I know not what prodigy of the vegetable kingdom produced the little duckling ; but the plant with the shells must, I think, have been a scarlet runner, and the shells themselves the papilionaceous blossoms. I have a distinct -ecollection, too — but it belongs to a later period — of seeing ny ancestor, old John Feddes, the buccaneer, though he must. ( .iave been dead at the time considerably more than half a cen- tury. I had learned to take an interest in his story, as pre- served and told in the antique dwelling which lie had built more than a hundred years before. To forget a love disap- 20 pointment, he had set out early in life for the Spanish Main, where, after giving and receiving some hard blows, he suc- ceeded in filling a little bag with dollars and doubloons ; and then coming home, he found his old sweetheart a widow, and so much inclined to listen to reason, that she ultimately be- came his wife. There were some little circumstances in his history which must have laid hold of my imagination ; for I used over and over to demand its repetition ; and one of my first attempts at a work of art was to scribble his initials with my fingers, in red paint, on the house-door. One day, when playing all alone at the stair-foot, — for the inmates of the house had gone out, — something extraordinary caught my eye on the landing-place above ; and looking up, there stood John Feddes, — for I somehow instinctively divined that it was none other than he, — in the form of a large, tall, very old man, attired in a light-blue great-coat. He seemed to be steadfastly regarding me with apparent complacency ; but I was sadly frightened ; and for years after, when passing through the dingy, ill-lighted room, out of which I inferred he had come, I used to feel not at all sure that I might not tilt against old John in the dark. I retain a vivid recollection of the joy which used to light up the household on my father's arrival ; and how I learned to distinguish for myself his sloop when in the offing, by the two slim stripes of white that ran along her sides, and her two square topsails. 1 have my golden memories, too, of splendid toys that he used to bring home with him, — among the rest, of a magnificent four-wheeled wagon of painted tin, drawn by four wooden horses and a string ; and of getting it into a quiet corner, immediately on its being delivered over to me, and there breaking up every wheel and horse, and the vehicle itself, into their original bits, until not two of the pieces were left sticking together. Farther, I still remember my disap- pointment at not finding something curious within at least the horses and the wheels ; and as unquestionably the main en- joyment derivable from such things is to be had in the break- ing of them, I sometimes wonder that our ingenious toymen OR, THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 21 do not fell upon the way of at once extending their trade, and adding to its philosophy, by putting some of their most bril- liant things where nature puts the nut-kernel, — inside. I shall advert to but one other recollection of this period. I have a dream-like memory of a busy time, when men with gold lace on their breasts, and at least one gentleman with golden epaulets on his shoulders, used to call at my father's house, and fill my newly-acquired pockets with coppers ; and how they wanted, it is said, to bring my father along with thern, to help them to sail their great vessel ; but he preferred re- maining, it was added, with his own little one. A ship of war, under the guidance of an unskilful pilot, had run aground on a shallow flat on the opposite side of the Frith, known as the Inches ; and as the flood of a stream-tide was at its height at the time, and straightway began to fall off, it was found, after lightening her of her guns and the greater part of her stores, that she still stuck fast. My father, whose sloop hau been pressed into the service, and was loaded to the gun- wale with the ordnance, had betrayed an unexpected knowl- edge of the points of a large war vessel ; and the command- er, entering into conversation with him, was so impressed by his skill, that he placed his ship under his charge, and had his confidence repaid by seeing her hauled off into deep water in a single tide. Knowing the nature of the bottom, — a soft arenaceous mud, which, if beat for some time by the foot of hand, resolved itself into a sort of quicksand, half sludge, half water, which, when covered by a competent depth of sea, could offer no effectual resistance to a ship's keel, — the master had set half the crew to run in a body from side to side, till, by the motion generated in this way, the portion of the bank mmediately beneath was beaten soft ; and then the other moiety of the men. tugging hard on kedge and haulser, drew the vessel off a few feet at a time, till at length, after not a few repetitions of the process, she floated free. Of course, on a harder bottom the experiment would not have availed ; but so struck was the commander by its efficacy and originality, and by the extent of the master's professional resources, that 22 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; he strongly recommended him to part with his sloop, and en- ter the navy, where he thought he had influence enough, he said, to get him placed in a proper position. But as the mas- ter's previous experience of the service had been of a very disagreeable kind, and as his position, as at once master and owner of the vessel he sailed, was at least an independent one, he declined acting on the advice. Such are some of my earlier recollections. But there waa a time of sterner memories at hand. The kelp trade had no yet attained to the importance which it afterwards acquired, ere it fell before the first approaches of Free Trade ; and my father, in collecting a supply for the Leith Glass Works, for which he occasionally acted both as agent and shipmaster, used sometimes to spend whole months amid the Hebrides, sailing from station to station, and purchasing here a few tons and there a few hundredweights, until he had completed his cargo. In his last kelp voyage, he had been detained in this way from the close of August to the end of October ; and at length, deeply laden, he had threaded his way round Cape Wrath, and through the Pentland and across the Moray Friths, when a severe gale compelled him to seek shelter in the har- bor of Peterhead. From that port, on the 9th of Novem- ber, 1807, he wrote my mother the last letter she ever re- ceived from him ; for on the day after he sailed from it, there arose a terrible tempest, in which many seamen perished, and he and his crew were never more heard of. His sloop was last seen by a brother townsman and shipmaster, who, ere the storm came on, had been fortunate enough to secure an asylum for his bark in an English harbor on an exposed por- tion of the coast. Vessel after vessel had been coming ashore during the da} 7 ; and the beach was strewed with wrecks and dead bodies ; but he had marked his townsman's sloop in the offing from mid-day till near evening, exhausting every nauti- cal shift and expedient to keep aloof from the shore ; and at length, as the night was falling, the skill and perseverance exerted seemed successful ; for, clearing a formidable head- land that had lain on the lee for hours, and was mottled with 23 broken ships and drowned men, the sloop was seen stretching out in a long tack into the open sea. " Miller's seamanship has saved him once more !" said Matheson, the Cromarty skip- per, as, quitting his place of outlook, he returned to his cabin ; but the night fell tempestuous and wild, and no vestige of the hapless sloop was ever after seen. It was supposed that, heavi- ly laden, and laboring in a mountainous sea, she must have started a plank and foundered. And thus perished — to bor- row from the simple eulogium of one of his seafaring friends whom I heard long after condoling w T ith my mother — " one of the best sailors that ever sailed the Moray Frith." The fatal tempest, as it had prevailed chiefly on the eastern coasts of England and the south of Scotland, was represented in the north by but a few bleak, sullen days, in which, with little wind, a heavy ground-swell came rolling in coastwards from the east, and sent up its surf high against the precipices of the Northern Sutor. There were no forebodings in the mas- ter's dwelling ; for his Peterhead letter — a brief but hopeful missive — had been just received ; and my mother was sitting, on the evening after, beside the household fire, plying the cheerful needle, when the house-door, which had been left un- fastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side to shut it. What follows must simply be regarded as the recollection, though a very vivid one, of a boy who had completed his fifth year only a month before. Day had not wholly disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a gray haze spread a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at 'ue open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female ; they bore a livid and sodden appearance ; and directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I was fearfully startled, and ran shriek- ing to my mother, telling what I had seen ; and the house- girl, whom she next sent to shut the door, apparently affected 24: MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; by my terror, also returned frightened, and said that she too had seen the woman's hand ; which, however, did not seem to he the case. And finally, my mother going to the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the ex- tremeness of my terror and the minuteness of my description. I communicate the story as it lies fixed in my memory, with- out attempting to explain it. The supposed apparition may have been merely a momentary affection of the eye, of the na- ure described by Sir Walter Scott in his " Demonology," and Sir David Brewster in his " Natural Magic." But if so, the affection was one of which I experienced no after-return ; and its coincidence, in the case, with the probable time of my fa- ther's death, seems at least curious. There followed a dreary season, on which I still look back in memory, as on a prospect which, sunshiny and sparkling for a time, has become suddenly enveloped in cloud and storm. I remember my mother's long fits of weeping, and the general gloom of the widowed household ; and how, after she had sent my two little sisters to bed, — for such had been the increase of the family, — and her hands were set free for the evening, she used to sit up late at night, engaged as a seamstress, in making pieces of dress for such of the neighbors as chose to employ her. My father's new house lay untenanted at the time ; and though his sloop had been partially insured, the broker with whom he dealt was, it would seem, on the verge of insolvency, and having raised objections to paying the money, it was long ere any part of it cauld be realized. And so, with all my mother's industry, the household would have fared but ill had it not been for the assistance lent her by her two brothers, in- dustrious, hard-working men, who lived with their aged parents and an unmarried sister, about a bow-shot away, and now not only advanced her money as she needed it, but also took her second child, the elder of my two sisters, a docile little girl of three years, to live with them. I remember I used to go wan- dering disconsolately about the harbor at this season, to ex- amine the vessels which had come in during the night ; and that I oftener than once set my mother a crying by asking her 25 why the shipmasters who, when my father was alive, used to stroke my head, and slip halfpence into my pockets, never now took any notice of me, or gave me anything 1 She well knew that the shipmasters — not an ungenerous class of men — had simply failed to recognize their old comrade's child ; but the question was only too suggestive, notwithstanding, of both her own loss and mine. I used, too, to climb, day after day, a grassy protuberance of the old coast-line immediately behind my mother's house, that commands a wide reach of the Mo- ray Frith, and to look wistfully out, long after every one else had ceased to hope, for the sloop with the two stripes of white and the two square topsails. But months and years passed by, and the white stripes and the square topsails I never saw. The antecedents of my father's life impressed me more powerfully during my boyhood than at least aught I acquired at school ; and I have submitted them to the reader at consid- erable length, as not only curious in themselves, but as form- ing a first chapter in the story of my education. And the fol- lowing stanzas, written at a time when, in opening manhood, I was sowing my wild oats in verse, may at least serve to show that they continued to stand out in bold relief on my memo- ry, even after I had grown up. "Round Albyn's western shores, a lonely skiff Is coasting slow ; — the adverse winds detain ; # And now she rounds secure the dreaded cliff,* Whose horrid ridge beats back the northern main; And now the whirling Pentland roars in vain Her stern beneath, for favoring breezes rise ; The green isles fade, whitens the watery plain, O'er the vexed waves with meteor speed she flies, Till Moray's distant hills o'er the blue waves arise. Who guides that vessel's wanderings o'er the wavo? A patient, hardy man, of thoughtful brow ; Serene and warm of heart, and wisely brave, And sagely skill'd, when burly breezes blow, To press through angry waves the adventurous prow. * Cape Wrath. / 26 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS Age hath not quell'd his strength, nor quench'd desire Of generous deed, nor chill'd his bosom's glow ; Yet to a better world his hopes aspire. Ah ! this must sure be thee ! All hail my honored Sire ! Alas ! thy latest voyage draws near a close, For Death broods voiceless in the darkening sky; Subsides the breeze ; th' untroubled waves repose ; The scene is peaceful all. Can Death be nigh, When thus, mute and unarmed, his vassals lie ? Mark ye that cloud ! There toils the imprisoned gale ; E'en now it comes, with voice uplifted high; Resound the shores, harsh screams the rending sail, And roars th' amazed wave, and bursts the thunder peal Three days the tempest raged ; on Scotia's shore Wreck piled on wreck, and corse o'er corse was thrown; Her rugged cliffs were red with clotted gore ; Her dark caves echoed back the expiring moan ; And luckless maidens mourned their lovers gone ; And friendless orphans cried in vain for bread ; And widow'd mothers wandered forth alone ; — Restore, O wave, they cried, — restore our dead ! And then the breast they bar'd, and beat the unshelter'd head. Of thee, my Sire, what mortal tongue can tell ! No friendly bay thy shattered bark received; Ev'n when thy dust repos'd in ocean cell, Strange baseless tales of hope thy friends deceived ; Which oft they doubted sad, or gay believed. At length, when deeper, darker waxed the gloom, .Hopeless they grieved, but 'twas in vain they grieved : If God be truth, 'tis sure no voice of doom, That bids the accepted soul its robes of joy assume." I had been sent, previous to my father's death, to a dame's school, where I was taught to pronounce my letters to such effect in the old Scottish mode, that still, when I attempt spell- ing a word aloud, which is not often, — for I find the process a very perilous one, — the acts and ee's, and uhs and vaus, letum upon me, and I have to translate them with no little hesita tion, as I go along, into the more modish sounds. A knowl- edge of the letters themselves I had already acquired by study- ing the sign-posts of the place, — rare works of art, that ex- cited my utmost admiration, with jugs, and glasses, and bottles, 27 and ships, and loaves of bread upon them, all of which could, as the artists had intended, be actually recognized. During my sixth year I spelt my way, under the dame, through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then entered upon her highest form, as a member of the Bible class ; but all the while the process of acquiring learn- ing had been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended ; when at once my mind awoke U the meaning of the most delightful of all narratives, — th story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made be- fore ! I actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books ; and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a corner on the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph ; nor did one perusal serve ; — the other Scripture stories followed, — in especial, the story of Samson and the Philis- tines, of David and Goliah, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha ; and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, too, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works. Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with several others of resembling character. Those intolerable nuisances the useful-knowledge books had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars, on the educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting influence on the opening in- tellect of the " youthhood ;" and so, from my rudimental nooks, — books that made themselves truly such by their thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind, — I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice chil- dren's books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admi 28 rably for l'.ttle folk, especially in the Odyssey ; a copy of which, — in the only true translation extant, — for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be, — I found in the house of a neighbor. Next came the Iliad ; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lintot, With what power, and at how early an age, true genius im presses ! I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages ; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next succeeded in discovering for my- self a child's book, of not less interest than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a magnifi- cent old edition of the " Pilgrim's Progress," printed on coarse whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous wood-cuts, each of which occupied an entire page, that, on principles of economy, bore letter-press on the other side. And such de- lightful prints as they were ! It must have been some such volume that sat for its portrait to Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as "Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts, Strange and uncouth ; dire faces, figures dire, Sharp-knee'd, sharp-elbow'd, and lean ancled too, With long and ghasily shanks, — forms which, once seen, Could never be forgotten." In process of time I had devoured, besides these genial works, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the "judgment chapter" in Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the adventures of Philip Quarll, with a good nany other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. t was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir, Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's Voyages, all the volumes were now absent save the first ; and a very tantalizing romance, in four volumes, — Mrs. RatclifFs 29 " Mysteries of Udolpho," — was represented by only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained some rare books, ■ — among the rest, a curious little volume, entitled " The Mir- acles of Nature and Art," to which we find Dr. Johnson re- ferring, in one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day, and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge, between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of the " Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Re- ligion," — a work interesting from the circumstance that — though it bore another name on its title-page — it had been translated from the French for a few guineas by poor Gold- smith, in his days of obscure literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellencies of his style. The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an English sailor who had spent the best years of his life as a slave in Mo- rocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff controversy, — Flavel's Works, and Henry's Commentary, and Hutchinson on the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelations, with the title page away, and blind Jame- son's volume on the Hierarchy, with first editions of Naphtali, the Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind Let Loose. But with these solid authors I did not venture to grapple until long after this time. Of the works of fact and incident which it contained, those of the voyages were my especial favorites. I perused with avidity the voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods Rogers ; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and hunt wild beasts and fight battles. I have already made mention of my two maternal uncles ; and referred, at least incidentally, to their mother, as the friend and relative of my father's aged cousins, and, like her, a great- grand-child of the last curate of Nigg. The curate's youngest 30 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; daughter had been courted and married by a somewhat wild young farmer, of the clan Ross, but who was known, like the celebrated Highland outlaw, from the color of his hair, as Roy, or the red. Donald Roy was the best club-player in the district ; and as King James's " Book of Sports'' was not deem- ed a very bad book in the semi-Celtic parish of Nigg, the games in which Donald took part were usually played on the Sabbath. About the time of the Revolution, however, he was laid hold of by strong religious convictions, heralded, say the traditions of the district, by events that approximated in cha- racter to the supernatural ; and Donald became the subject of a mighty change. There is a phase of the religious character, which in the South of Scotland belongs to the first two ages of Presbytery, but which disappeared ere its third establishment under William of Nassau, that we find strikingly exemplified in the Welches, Pedens, and Cargills of the times of the perse- cution, and in which a sort of wild machinery of the supernatu- ral was added to the commoner aspects of a living Christianity. The men in whom it w r as exhibited were seers of visions and dreamers of dreams ; and, standing on the very verge of the natural world, they looked far into the world of spirits, and had at times their strange glimpses of the distant and the fu- ture. To the north of the Grampians, as if born out of due season, these seers pertain to a later age. They flourished chiefly in the early part of the last century ; for it is a not un- instructive fact, that in the religious history of Scotland, the eighteenth century of the Highland and semi-Highland dis- tricts of the north corresponds in many of its traits to the seven- teenth century of the Saxon-peopled districts of the south ; and Donald Roy was one of the most notable of the class. The anecdotes regarding him which still float among the old recol- lections of Ross-shire, if transferred to Peden or Welch, would be found entirely in character with the strange stories that inlay the biographies of these devoted men, and live so enduringly in the memory of the Scottish people. Living, too, in an age in which, like the Covenanters of a former century, the High- lander still retained his weapons, and knew how to use them, 31 Donald had, like the Patons, Hackstons, and Bal fours of the south, his dash of the warlike spirit ; and after assisting his minister, previous to the rebellion of 1745, in what was known as the great religious revival of Nigg, he had to assist him, shortly after, in pursuing a band of armed Caterans, that, de- scending from the hills, swept the parish of its cattle. And coming up with the outlaws in the gorges of a wild Highland glen, no man of his party was more active in the fray that fol- owed than old Donald, or exerted himself to better effect in re-capturing the cattle. I need scarce add, that he was an at- tached member of the Church of Scotland. But he was not destined to die in her communion. Donald's minister, John Balfour of Nigg, — a man whose memory is still honored in the north, died in middle life, and an unpopular presentee was obtruded on the people. The policy of Robertson prevailed at the time ; Gillespie had been deposed only four years previous, for refusing to assist in the disputed settlement of Inverkeithing ; and four of the Nigg Presbytery, overawed by the stringency of the precedent, re- paired to the parish church to conduct the settlement of the obnoxious licentiate, and introduce him to the parishoners. They found, however, only an empty building ; and, notwith- standing the ominous absence of the people, they were pro- ceeding in shame and sorrow with their work, when a solitary and venerable man, far advanced in life, appeared before them, and, solemnly protesting against the utter mockery of such a proceeding, impressively declared, " that if they settled a man to the walls of that kirk, the blood of the parish of Nigg would be required at their hands." Both Dr. Hetherington and Dr. Merle D'Aubigne record the event ; but neither of these ac- complished historians seem to have been aware of the pecu- Jiar emphasis which a scene that would have been striking in any circumstances derived from the character of the protester, — old Donald Roy. The Presbytery, appalled, stopt short in the middle of its work ; nor was it resumed till an after day, when, at the command of the Moderate majority of the Church, — a command not unaccompanied by significant reference to 32 the fate of Gillespie, — the forced settlement was consummated. Donald, who carried the entire parish with him, continued to cling by the National Church for nearly ten years after, much befriended by one of the most eminent and influential divines of the north, — Fraser of Alness, — the author of a volume on Sanctification, still regarded as a standard work by Scottish theologians. But as neither the people nor their leader ever entered on any occasion the parish church, or heard the ob- noxious presentee, the Presbytery at length refused to tolerate the irregularity by extending to them, as before, the ordinary Church privileges ; and so they were lost to the Establish- ment, and became Seceders. And in the communion of that portion of the Secession known as the Burghers, Donald died several years after, at a patriarchal old age. Among his other descendants, he had three grand-daughters, who were left orphans at an early age by the death of both their parents, and whom the old man, on their bereavement, had brought to his dwelling to live with him. They had small portions apiece, derived from his son-in-law, their father, which did not grow smaller under the care of Donald ; and as each of the three was married in succession out of his family, he added to all his other kindnesses the gift of a gold ring. They had been brought up under his eye sound in the faith ; and Donald's ring had, in each case, a mystic meaning ; — they were to regard it, he told them, as the wedding ring of their other Husband, the Head of the Church, and to be faithful spouses to Him in their several households. Nor did the injunction, nor the significant symbol with w r hich it was accompanied, prove idle in the end. They all brought the savor of sincere piety into their families. The grand-daughter, with whom the writer was more directly connected, had been married to an honest and industrious but somewhat gay young trades- man, but she proved, under God, the means of his conversion • and their children, of whom eight grew up to be men and women, were reared in decent frugality, and the exercise of honest principles carefully instilled. Her husband's family had, like that of my paternal ancestors, been a seafaring one. 33 His father, after serving on shipboard, had passed the latter part of his life as one of the armed boatmen that, during the last century, guarded the coasts in behalf of the revenue ; and his only brother, the boatman's son, an adventurous young sailor, had engaged in Admiral Vernon's unfortunate expedi- tion, and left his bones under the walls of Carthagena ; but he himself pursued the peaceful occupation of a shoemaker, and in carrying on his trade, usually employed a few journeymen, and kept a few apprentices. In course of time, the elder daughters of the family married and got households of their own ; but the two sons, my uncles, remained under the roof of their parents, and at the time when my father perished they were both in middle life ; and, deeming themselves called on to take his place in the work of instruction and discipline. 1 owed to them much more of my real education than to any of the teachers whose schools I afterwards attended. They both bore a marked individuality of character, and were much the reverse of common-place or vulgar men. My elder uncle, James, added to a clear head and much native sagacity, a singularly retentive memory, and great thirst of information. He was a harness-maker, and wrought for the farmers of an extensive district of country ; and as he never engaged either journeymen or apprentice, but executed all his work with his own hands, his hours of labor, save that he indulged in a brief pause as the twilight came on, and took a mile's walk or so, were usually protracted from six o'clock in the morning till ten at night. Such incessant occupa- tion, of course, left him little time for reading ; but he often found some one to read beside him during the day ; and in the winter evenings, his portable bench used to be brought from his shop at the other end of the dwelling, into the family sitting-room, and placed beside the circle round the hearth, where his brother Alexander, my younger uncle, whose occu- pation left his evenings free, would read aloud from some inter esting volume for the general benefit, — placing himself al ways at the opposite side of the bench, so as to share in the light of the worker. Occasionally the family circle would be 34 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; widened by the accession of from two to three intelligent neighbors, who would drop in to listen ; and then the book, after a space, would be laid aside, in order that its contents might be discussed in conversation. In the summer months, Uncle James always spent some time in the country, in look- ing after and keeping in repair the harness of the farmers for whom he wrought ; and during his journeys and twilight walks on these occasions, there was not an old castle, or hill-fort, or ancient encampment, or antique ecclesiastical edifice, within twenty miles of the town, which he had not visited and ex amined over and over again. He was a keen, local antiquary ; knew a good deal about the architectural styles of the various ages, at a time when these subjects were little studied or known, and possessed more traditionary lore, picked up chiefly in his country journeys, than any man I ever knew. What he once heard he never forgot ; and the knowledge which he had acquired he could communicate pleasingly and succinctly, in a style which, had he been a writer of books, instead of merely a reader of them, would have had the merit of being clear and terse, and more laden with meaning than words. From his reputation for sagacity, his advice used to be much sought after by the neighbors in every little difficulty that, came their way ; and the counsel given was always shrewd and honest. I never knew a man more entirely just in his deal- ings than Uncle James, or who regarded every species of mean- ness with a more thorough contempt. I soon learned to bring my story-books to his workshop, and became, in a small way, one of his readers — greatly more, however, as may be suppos- ed, on my own account than his. My books were not yet of the kind which he would have chosen for himself; but he took an interest in my interest ; and his explanations of all the han words saved me the trouble of turning over a dictionary. An when tired of reading, I never failed to find rare delight in his anecdotes and old-world stories, many of which were not to be found in books, and all of which, without apparent effort on his own part, he could render singularly amusing. Of these narratives, the larger part died with him ; but a portion of 35 them I succeeded in preserving in a little traditionary work published a few years after his death. I was much a favorite with Uncle James — even more, I am disposed to think, on rny father's account, than on that of his sister, my mother. My father and he had been close friends for years ; and in the vigorous and energetic sailor, he had found his beau ideal of a man. My Uncle Alexander was of a different cast from his brother b« th in intellect and temperament ; but he was characterized by the same strict integrity ; and his religious feelings, though quiet and unobtrusive, were perhaps more deep. James was somewhat of a humorist, and fond of a good joke. Alexan- der was grave and serious ; and never, save on one solitary occasion, did I know him even attempt a jest. On hearing an intelligent but somewhat eccentric neighbor observe that " all flesh is grass," in a strictly physical sense, seeing that all the flesh of the herbiverous animals is elaborated from vege- tation, and all the flesh of the carnivorous animals from that of the herbiverous ones, Uncle Sandy remarked that, knowing, as he did, the pisciverous habits of the Cromarty folk, he should surely make an exception in his generalization, by ad- mitting that in at least one village, " all flesh is fish." My uncle had acquired the trade of the cartwright, and was em- ployed in a workshop at Glasgow at the time the first war of the French Revolution broke out ; when, moved by some such spirit as possessed his uncle — the victim of Admiral Vernon's unlucky expedition — or of old Donald Roy, when he buckled himself to his Highland broadsword, and set out in pursuit of the Caterans — he entered the navy. And during the event- ful period which intervened between the commencement of the war and the peace of 1802, there was little either suffered or achieved by his countrymen in which he had not a share. He sailed with Nelson ; witnessed the mutiny at the Nore ; fought under Admiral Duncan at Camperdown, and under Sir John Borlase Warren off Loch S willy ; assisted in capturing the Generoux and Guillaum Tell, two French ships of the line; was one of the seamen who, in the Egyptian expedition, were 3 36 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; drafted out of Lord Keith's fleet to supply the lack of artillery men in the army of Sir Ralph Abercromby ; had a share in the dangers and glory of the landing in Egypt ; and fought in the battle of the 13th March, and in that which deprived our country of one of her most popular generals. He served, too, at the siege of Alexandria. And then, as he succeeded in pro- curing his discharge during the short peace of 1802, he re- turned home with a small sum of hardly-earned prize money, heartily sick of war and bloodshed. I was asked, not long ago, by one of his few surviving comrades, whether my uncle had ever told me that their gun was the first landed in Egypt, and the first dragged up the sand-bank immediately over the beach, and how hot it grew under their hands, as, with a rapid- ity unsurpassed, along the line they poured out in thick suc- cession its iron discharges upon the enemy. I had to reply- in the negative. All my uncle's narratives were narratives of what he had seen — not of what he had done; and, when perusing, late in life, one of his favorite works — " Dr. Keith's Signs of the Times" — he came to the chapter in which that excellent writer describes the time of hot naval warfare which immediately followed the breaking out of war, as the period in which the second vial was poured out on the sea, and in which the waters " became as the blood of a dead man, so that every living soul died in the sea," I saw him bend his head in rever- ence as he remarked, " Prophecy, I find, gives to all our glories but a single verse, and it is a verse of judgment." Uncle Sandy, however, did not urge the peace principles which he had acquired amid scenes of death and carnage, into any extravagant consequences; and on the breaking out, in 1803, of the second war of the Revolution, when Napoleon threatened invasion from Brest to Boulogne, he at once shouldered his musket as a volunteer. He had not his brother's fluency of speech ; but his narratives of what he had seen were singu- larly truthful and graphic ; and his descriptions of foreign plants and animals, and of the aspect of the distant regions which he had visited, had all the careful minuteness of those of a Dampier. He had a decided turn for natural history. OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 37 My collection contains a murex, not unfrequent in the Medi- terranean, which he found time enough to transfer, during the heat of the landing in Egypt, from the beach to his pock- et; and the first ammonite I ever saw was a specimen, which I still retain, that he brought home with him from one of the liasic deposits of England. Early on the Sabbath evenings I used regularly to attend at my uncles' with two of my maternal cousins, boys of about my own age, and latterly with my two sisters, to be cate- chised, first on the Shorter Catechism, and then on the Moth- er's Catechism of Willison. On Willison my uncles always cross-examined us, to make sure that we understood the short and simple questions ; but, apparently regarding the questions of the Shorter Catechism as seed sown for a future day, they were content with having them well fixed in our memories. There was a Sabbath class taught in the parish church at the time by one of the elders ; but Sabbath schools my uncles regarded as merely compensatory institutions, highly credit- able to the teachers, but very discreditable indeed to the pa- rents and relatives of the taught; and so they of course never thought of sending us there. Later in the evening, after a short twilight walk, for w^hich the sedentary occupation of my Uncle James formed an apology, but in which my Uncle Alex- ander always shared, and which usually led them into solitary woods, or along an unfrequented sea-shore, some of the old divines were read ; and I used to take my place in the circle, though, I am afraid, not to very much advantage. I occasion- ally caught a fact, or had my attention arrested for a moment by a simile or metaphor ; but the trains of close argument, ur_d the passages of dreary " application," were always lost. 83 MY SCHOOLS A.NI) SCHOOLMASTEBS CHAPTER III ** At Wallace name what Scottish blood But boils up in a spring-tide flood ! Oft have our fearless fathers strode By Wallace side, Still pressing onward, red wat shod, Or glorious died." Burns. / I first became thoroughly a Scot some time in my tenth year ; and the consciousness of country has remained tolerably strong within me ever since. My Uncle James had procured for me from a neighbor the loan of a common stall-edition of Blind Harry's " Wallace," as modernized by Hamilton ; but after reading the first chapter, — a piece of dull genealogy, broken into very rude rhyme, — I tossed the volume aside as uninter- esting ; and only resumed it at the request of my uncle, who urged that, simply for his amusement and gratification, I should read some three or four chapters more. Accordingly, the three or four chapters more I did read ; — I read " how Wallace kill- ed young Selbie the Constable's son ;" " how Wallace fished in Irvine Water ;" and " how Wallace killed the Churl with his own staff in Ayr ;" and then Uncle James told me, in the quiet way in which he used to make a joke tell, that the book seemed to be rather a rough sort of production, filled with accounts of quarrels and bloodshed, and that I might read no more of it unless I felt inclined. But I now did feel inclined very strongly, and read on with increasing astonishment and OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 39 delight. I was intoxicated with the fiery narratives of the blind minstrel, — with his fierce breathings of hot, intolerant patriotism, and his stories of astonishing prowess ; and, glory- ing in being a Scot, and the countryman of Wallace and the Graham, I longed for a war with the Southron, that the wrongs and sufferings of these noble heroes might yet be avenged. All I had previously heard and read of the marvels of foreign parts, or the glories of modern battles, seemed tame and com- monplace compared with the incidents in the life of Wallace and I never after vexed my mother by wishing myself big enough to be a sailor. My Uncle Sandy, who had some taste for the refinements of poetry, would fain have led me on from the exploits of Wallace to the " Life of the Bruce," which, in the form of a not very vigorous imitation of Dry den's " Vir- gil," by one Harvey, was bound up in the same volume, and which my uncle deemed the better-written life of the two. And so far as the mere amenities of style were concerned, he was, I dare say, right. But I could not agree with him. Harvey was by much too fine and too learned for me ; and it was not until some years after, when I was fortunate enough to pick up one of the later editions of Barbour's " Bruce," that the Hero-King of Scotland assumed his right place in my mind beside its Hero-Guardian. There are stages of develop- ment in the immature youth of individuals, that seem to cor- respond with stages of development in the immature youth of nations ; and the recollections of this early time enable me, in some measure, to understand how it was that, for hundreds of years, Blind Harry's " Wallace," with its rude and naked narrative, and its exaggerated incident, should have been, ac- cording to Lord Hailes, the Bible of the Scotch people. I quitted the dame's school at the end of the first tweUe- month, after mastering that grand acquirement of my life, — > the art of holding converse with books ; and was transferred straightforth to the grammar school of the parish, at which there attended at the time about a hundred and twenty boys, with a class of about thirty individuals more, much looked down upon by the others, and not deemed greatly worth the 40 counting seeing that it consisted of only lassies. And here, too, the early individual development seems nicely correspond- ent with an early national one. In his depreciatory estimate of contemporary woman, the boy is always a true savage. The old parish school of the place had been nobly situated in a snug corner, between the parish churchyard and a thick wood ; and from the interesting centre which it formed, the boys, when tired of making dragon-horses of the erect head-stones, or of leaping along the flat-laid memorials, from end to end of the graveyard, " without touching grass," could repair to the tall- er trees, and rise in the world by climbing among them. As, however, they used to encroach, on these latter occasions, upon the laird's pleasure-grounds, the school had been removed ere my time to the sea-shore ; where, though there were neither tombstones nor trees, there were some balancing advantages, of a kind which, perhaps, only boys of the old school could have adequately appreciated. As the school-windows fronted the opening of the Frith, not a vessel could enter the harbor that we did not see ; and, improving through our opportuni- ties, there was perhaps no educational institution in the king- dom in which all sorts of barks and carvels, from the fishing yawl to the frigate, could be more correctly drawn on the slate, or where any defect in bulk or rigging, in some faulty delineation, was surer of being more justly and unsparingly criticised. Further, the town, which drove a great trade in salted pork at the time, had a killing-place not thirty yards from the school-door, where from eighty to a hundred pigs used sometimes to die for the general good in a single day ; and it was a great matter to hear, at occasional intervals, the roar of death outside rising high over the general murmur within ; or to be told by some comrade, returned from his five minutes' leave of absence, that a hero of a pig had taken three blows of the hatchet ere it fell, and that even after its subjection to the sticking process, it had got hold of Jock Keddie's hand in its mouth, and almost smashed his thumb. We learned, too, to know, from our signal opportunities of observation, not only a good deal about pig anatomy, — especially about the detached 41 edible parts of the animal, such as the spleen and the pancreas, and at least one other very palatable viscus besides, — but be came knowing also about the take and the curing of herrings. All the herring-boats during the fishing season passed our win- dows on their homeward way to the harbor ; and, from their depth in the water, we became skilful enough to predicate the number of crans aboard of each with wonderful judgment and correctness. In days of good general fishings, too, when the curing-yards proved too small to accommodate the quantities brought ashore, the fish used to be laid in glittering heaps op- posite the school-house door ; and an exciting scene, that com- bined the bustle of the workshop with the confusion of the crowded fair, would straightway spring up within twenty yards of the farms at which we sat, greatly to our enjoyment, and, of course, not a little to our instruction. We could see, sim- ply by peering over book or slate, the curers going about rous- ing their fish with salt, to counteract the effects of the dog-day sun ; bevies of young women employed as gutters, and hor- ridly incarnadined with blood and viscera, squatting around the heaps, knife in hand, and plying with busy fingers their well-paid labors, at the rate of a sixpence per hour ; relays of heavily-laden fish-wives bringing ever and anon fresh heaps of herrings in their creels ; and outside of all, the coopers hammering as if for life and death, — now tightening hoops, and now slackening them, and anon caulking with bullrush the leaky seems. It is not every grammar school in which such lessons are taught as those, in which all were initiated, and in which all became in some degree accomplished, in the grammar school of Cromarty ! The building in which we met was a low, long, straw- thatched cottage, open from gable to gable, with a mud floor below, and an unlathed roof above ; and stretching along the naked rafters, which, when the master chanced to be absent for a few minutes, gave noble exercise in climbing, there used frequently to lie a helm, or oar, or boat-hook, or even a foresail, — the spoil of some hapless peat-boat from the opposite side of the Frith. The Highland boatmen of Ross had carried on 42 a trade « peats for ages with the Saxons of the town ; and as every boat owed a long-derived perquisite of twenty peats to the grammar school, and as payment was at times foolishly refused, the party of boys commissioned by the master to ex- act it almost always succeeded, either by force or stratagem, in securing and bringing along with them, in behalf of the insti- tution, some spar, or sail, or piece of rigging, which, until re- deemed by special treaty, and the payment of the peats, was stowed up over the rafters. These peat-exhibitions, which were intensely popular in the school, gave noble exercise tc the faculties. It was always a great matter to see, just as the school met, some observant boy appear, cap in hand, before the master, and intimate the fact of an arrival at the shore, by the simple words, " Peat-boat, Sir." The master would then proceed to name a party, more or less numerous, according to the exigency : but it seemed to be matter of pretty correct cal- culation that, in the cases in which the peat claim was dis- puted, it required about twenty boys to bring home the twenty peats, or, lacking these, the compensatory sail or spar. There were certain ill-conditioned boatmen who almost always re- sisted, and who delighted to tell us — invariably, too, in very bad English — that our perquisite was properly the hangman's perquisite, made over to us because we were like him ; not seeing — blockheads that they were ! — that the very admission established in full the rectitude of our claim, and gave to us, amid our dire perils and faithful contendings, the strengthen- ing consciousness of a just quarrel. In dealing with these re- cusants, we used ordinarily to divide our forces into two bodies, the larger portion of the party filling their pockets with stones, and ranging themselves on some point of vantage, such as the pier-head ; and the smaller stealing down as near the boat as possible, and mixing themselves up with the purchasers of the peats. We then, after due warning given, opened fire upon the boatmen ; and, when the pebbles were hopping about them like hailstones, the boys below commonly succeeded in se- curing, under cover of the fire, the desired boathook or oar. And such were the ordinary circumstances and details of this OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 43 piece of Spartan education ; of which a townsman has told me he was strongly reminded when boarding, on one occasion, under cover of a well-sustained discharge of musketry, the vessel of an enemy that had been stranded on the shores of Berbice. The parish schoolmaster was a scholar and an honest man, and if a boy really wished to learn, he certainly could teach him. He had attended the classes at Aberdeen duiing the same sessions as the late Dr. Mearns, and in mathematics and the languages had disputed the prize with the Doctor ; but he had failed to get on equally well in the world ; and now, in middle life, though a licentiate of the Church, he had settled down to be what he subsequently remained, — the teacher of a parish school. There were usually a few grown-up lads under his tuition, — careful sailors, that had staid ashore during the winter quarter to study navigation as a science, — or tall fel lows happy in the patronage of the great, who, in the hope of being made excisemen, had come to school to be initiated in the mysteries of gauging, — or grown young men, who, on second thoughts, and somewhat late in the day, had recog nized the Church as their proper vocation ; and these used to speak of the master's acquirements and teaching ability in the very highest terms. He himself, too, could appeal to the fact that no teacher in the north had ever sent more students to college, and that his better scholars almost always got on well in life. But then, or? the other hand, the pupils who wished to do nothing, — a description of individuals that comprised fully two-thirds of all the younger ones, — were not required to do much more than they wished ; and parents and guardians were loud in their complaints that he was no suitable school- master for them ; though the boys themselves usually thought him quite suitable enough. He was in the habit of advising the parents or relations of those he deemed his clever lads, to give them a classical edu- cation ; and meeting one day with Uncle James, he urged that I should be put on Latin. I was a great reader, he said ; and he found that when I missed a word in my English tasks, 1 i4 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS , almost always substituted a synonym in the place of it. An> so, as Uncle James had arrived, on data of his own, at a simi lar conclusion. I was transferred from the English to the Latin form, and, with four other boys, fairly entered on the " Rudi- ments." I labored with tolerable diligence for a day or two ; but there was no one to tell me what the rules meant, or whether they really meant anything ; and when I got on as far as penna, a pen, and saw how the changes were rung on one poor word, that did not seem to be of more importance in the old language than in the modern one, I began miser ably to flag, and to long for my English reading, with its nice amusing stories, and its picture-like descriptions. The Rudiments was by far the dullest book I had ever seen. It embodied no thought that I could perceive, — it certainly con- tained no narrative, — it was a perfect contrast to not only the " Life and Adventures of Sir William Wallace," but to even the Voyages of Cook and Anson. None of my class-fel- lows were by any means bright ; — they had been all set on Latin without advice of the master; and yet, when he learn- ed, which he soon did, to distinguish and call us up to our tasks by the name of the " heavy class," I was, in most in- stances, to be found at its nether end. Shortly after, however, when we got a little farther on, it was seen that I had a de- cided turn for translation. The master, good simple man that he was, always read to us in English, as the school met, the piece of Latin given us as our task for the day ; and as my memory was strong enough to carry away the whole transla- tion in its order, I used to give him back in the evening, word for word, his own rendering, which satisfied him on most oc- casions tolerably well. There were none of us much looked after ; and I soon learned to bring books of amusement to the sehool with me, which, amid the Babel confusion of the place, I contrived to read undetected. Some of them, save in the language in which they were written, were almost identical with the books proper to the place. I remember perusing by stealth in this way, Dryden's " Virgil," and the " Ovid" of Dryden and his friends ; \t bile Ovid's own " Ovid," and Vir OR, TflE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 45 gil's own " Virgil," lay beside me, sealed up in the fine old tongue, which I was thus throwing away my only chance of acquiring. One morning, having the master's English rendering of the day's task well fixed in my memory, and no book of amuse- ment to read, I began gossiping with my nearest class-fellow, a very tall boy, who ultimately shot up into a lad of six feet four, and who on most occasions sat beside me, as lowest in the form save one. I told him about the tall Wallace and his exploits ; and so effectually succeeded in awakening his curios ity, that I had to communicate to him, from beginning to end, every adventure recorded by the blind minstrel. My story- telling vocation once fairly ascertained, there was, I found, no stopping in my course. I had to tell all the stories I had ever heard or read ; — all my father's adventures, so far as I knew them, and all my Uncle Sandy's, — with the story of Gulliver, and Philip Quarll,and Robinson Crusoe, — of Sinbad,and Ulys- ses, and Mrs. Ratcliffe's heroine Emily, with, of course, the love-passages left out ; and at length, after weeks and months of narrative, I found my available stock of acquired fact and fiction fairly exhausted. The demand on the part of my class- fellows was, however, as great and urgent as ever ; and, set- ting myself, in the extremity of the case, to try my ability of original production, I began to dole out to them by the hour and the diet, long extempore biographies, which proved won- derfully popular and successful. My heroes were usually war- riors like Wallace, and voyagers like Gulliver, and dwellers in desolate islands like Robinson Crusoe ; and they had not unfrequently to seek shelter in huge deserted castles, abound- ing in trap-doors and secret passages, like that of Udolpho. And finally, after much destruction of giants and wild beasts, and frightful encounters with magicians and savages, they al- most invariably succeeded in disentombing hidden treasures to an enormous amount, or in laying open gold mines, and then passed a luxurious old age, like that of Sinbad the Sailor, at peace with all mankind, in the midst of confectionary and fruits. The master had a tolerably correct notion of what was 46 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; going on in the " heavy class ;" — the stretched-out necks, and the heads clustered together, always told their own special story when I was engaged in telling mine ; but, without hating the child, he spared the rod, and simply did what he some- times allowed himself to do, — bestowed a nickname upon me. I was the Sennachie, he said ; and as the Sennachie I might have been known so long as I remained under his charge, had it not been that, priding himself upon his Gaelic, he used to bestow upon the word the full Celtic pronunciation, which, ; agreeing but ill with the Teutonic mouths of my school-fel lows, militated against its use ; and so the name failed to take. With all my carelessness, I continued to be a sort of favorite with the master ; and, when at the general English lesson, he used to address to me little quiet speeches, vouchsafed to no other pupil, indicative of a certain literary ground common to us, on which the others had not entered. " That, Sir," he has said, after the class had just perused, in the school collection, a Tatler, or Spectator, — " That, Sir, is a good paper ; — it's an Addison ;" or, " That's one of Steele's, Sir ;" and on finding in my copy-book on one occasion, a page filled with rhymes, which I had headed " Poem on Care," he brought it to his desk, and, after reading it carefully over, called me up, and with his closed penknife, which served as a pointer, in the one hand, and the copy-book brought down to the level of my eyes in the other, began his criticism. " That's bad grammar, Sir," he said, resting the knife-handle on one of the lines ; "and here's an ill-spelt word ; and there's another ; and you have not at all attended to the punctuation ; — but the general sense of the piece is good, — very good, indeed, Sir." And then he added, with a grim smile, " Care, Sir, is, I dare say, as you re- mark, a very bad thing ; but you may safely bestow a littl more of it on your spelling and your grammar." The school, like almost all the other grammar-schools of the period in Scotland, had its yearly cock-fight, preceded by two holidays and a half, during which the boys occupied them- selves in collecting and bringing up their cocks. And such always was the array of fighting birds mustered on the occa- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 47 sion, that the day of the festival, from morning till night, used to be spent in fighting out the battle. For weeks after it had passed, the school-floor would continue to retain its deeply- stained blotches of blood, and the boys would be full of ex- citing narratives regarding the glories of gallant birds, who had continued to fight until both their eyes had been picked out, or who, in the moment of victory, had dropped dead in the middle of the cock-pit. The yearly fight was the relic of a barbarous age ; and, in at least one of its provisions, there seemed evi- dence that it was that of an intolerant age also ; every pupil at school, without exception, had his name entered on the subscription-list as a cock-fighter, and was obliged to pay the master at the rate of twopence per head, ostensibly for leave to bring his birds to the pit ; but, amid the growing humani- ties of a better time, though the twopence continued to be ex- acted, it was no longer imperative to bring the birds ; and, availing myself of the liberty, I never brought any. Nor, save for a few minutes, on two several occasions, did I ever attend the fight. Had the combat been one among the boys them- selves, I would readily enough have done my part, by meeting with any opponent of my years and standing ; but I could not bear to look at the bleeding birds. And so I continued to pay my yearly sixpence, as a holder of three cocks, — the lowest sum deemed in any degree genteel, — but remained simply a fictitious or paper cock-fighter, and contributed in no degree to the success of the head-stock or leader, to whose party, in the general division of the school, it was my lot to fall. Neither, I must add, did I learn to take an interest in the sacrificial orgies of the adjoining slaughter-house. A few of the chosen schoolboys were permitted by the killers to exer- cise at times the privilege of knocking down a pig, and even, on rare occasions, to essay the sticking ; but I turned with horror from both processes ; and if I drew near at all, it was only when some animal, scraped and cleaned, and suspended from the beam, was in the course of being laid open by the butcher's knife, that I might mark the forms of the viscera, and the positions which they occupied. To my dislike of the 48 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS' annual cock-fight my uncles must have contributed. They were loud in their denunciation of the enormity ; and on one occasion, when a neighbor was unlucky enough to remark, in extenuation, that the practice had been handed down to us by pious and excellent men, who seemed to see nothing wrong in it, I saw their habitual respect for the old divines give way, for at least a moment. Uncle Sandy hesitated mder apparent excitement; but quick and fiery as light- ing, Uncle James came to his rescue. "Yes, excellent ncn !" said my uncle, " but the excellent men of a rude and barbarous age ; and, in some parts of their character, tinged by its barbarity. For the cock-fight which these excellent men have bequeathed to us they ought to have been sent to Bridewell for a week, and fed upon bread and water." Uncle James was, no doubt, over hasty, and felt so a minute after ; but the practice of fixing the foundation of ethics on a They themselves did it, much after the manner in which the Schoolmen fixed the foundations of their nonsensical philo- sophy on a " He himself said it," is a practice which, though not yet exploded in even very pure Churches, is always pro- voking, and not quite free from peril to the worthies, whether dead or alive, in whose precedents the moral right is made to rest. In the class of minds represented among the people by that of Uncle James, for instance, it would be much easier to bring down even the old divines, than to bring up cock-fight- ing. ^ My native town had possessed, for at least an age or two previous to that of my boyhood, its moiety of intelligent, book- consulting mechanics and tradesfolk ; and as my acquaintance gradually extended among their representatives and descend- ants,. I was permitted to rummage, in the pursuit of knowl- edge, delightful old chests and cupboards, filled with tattered and dusty volumes. The moiety of my father's library which remained to me consisted of about sixty several works ; my uncles possessed about a hundred and fifty more ; and there was a literary cabinetmaker in the neighborhood, who had once actually composed a poem of thirty lines on the Hill of 49 Cromarty, whose collection of books, chiefly poetical, amount- ed to from about eighty to a hundred. I used to be often at nights in the workshop of the cabinetmaker, and was some- times privileged to hear him repeat his poem. There was not much admiration of poets or poetry in the place ; and my praise, though that of a very young critic, had always the double merit of being both ample and sincere. I knew the very rocks and trees which his description embraced — had heard the birds to which he referred, and seen the flowers; and as the hill had been of old a frequent scene of execu- tions, and had borne the gallows of the sheriffdom on its crest, nothing could be more definite than the grave reference, in his opening line, to "The verdant rising of the Galloic-h'itt." And so I thought a very great deal of his poem, and what I thought I said ; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There was another mechanic in the neighborhood, — a house-carpenter, who, though not a poet, was deeply read in books of all kinds, from the plays of Farquhar to the ser- mons of Flavel ; and as both his father and grandfather, — the latter, by the way, a Porteous-mob man, and the former a per- sonal friend of poor Fergusson, the poet, — had also been read- ers and collectors of books, he possessed a whole pressful of tattered, hard-working volumes, some of them very curious ones ; and to me he liberally extended, what literary men always value, " the full freedom of the press." But of all my occasional benefactors in this way, by far the greatest was poor old Francie, the retired clerk and supercargo. Francie was naturally a man of fair talent and active curios ity. Nor was he by any means deficient in acquirement. He wrote and figured well, and knew a good deal about a least the theory of business; and when articled in early life to a Cromarty merchant and shopkeeper, it was with tolerably fair prospects of getting on in the world. He had, however, a certain infirmity of brain which rendered both talent and 50 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; acquirement of but little avail, and that began to manifest itself very early. While yet an apprentice, on ascertaining that the way was clear, he used, though grown a tall lad, to bolt out from behind the counter into the middle of a green directly opposite, and there, joining in the sports of some group of youngsters, which the place rarely wanted, he would play out half a game at marbles, or honey -pots, or hy-spy, and when he saw his master or a customer approaching, bolt back again The thing was not deemed seemly ; but Francie, when spoken to on the subject, could speak as sensibly as any young person of his years. He needed relaxation, he used to say, though he never suffered it to interfere with his proper business ; and where was safer relaxation to be found than among innocent children 1 This, of course, was eminently rational and virtu- ous. And so, when his term of apprenticeship had expired, Francie was despatched, not without hope of success, to New- foundland, — where he had relations extensively engaged in the fishing trade, — to serve as one of their clerks. He was found to be a competent clerk ; but unluckily there was but little known of the interior of the island at the time, and some of the places most distant from St. John's, such as the Bay and River of Exploits, bore tempting names ; and so, after Francie had made many inquiries of the older inhabitants regarding what was to be seen amid the scraggy brushwood and broken rocks of the inner country, a morning came in which he was reported missing at the office ; and little else could be learned respecting him, than that at early dawn he had been seen setting out for the woods, provided with staff and knapsack. He returned in about a week, worn out and half-starved. He had not been so successful as he had anticipated, he said, in pro- viding himself by the way with food, and so he had to turn back ere he could reach the point on which he had previously determined ; but he was sure he would be happier in his next journey. It was palpably unsafe to suffer him to remain ex- posed to the temptation of an unexplored country ; and as his friends and superiors at St. John's had just laden a vessel with fish for the tal.'an market during Lent, Francie was despatch* OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 61 ed with her as supercargo, to look after the sales, in a land of which every footbreaclth had been familiar to men for thou- sands of years, and in which it was supposed he would have no inducement to wander. Francie, however, had read much about Italy ; and finding, on landing at Leghorn, that he was within a short distance of Pisa, he left ship and cargo to take care of themselves, and set out on foot to see the famous hang- ing tower, and the great marble cathedral. And tower and cathedral he did see : but it was meanwhile found that he was not quite suited for a supercargo, and he had shortly after to return to Scotland, where his friends succeeded in establishing him in the capacity of clerk and overseer upon a small prop- erty in Forfarshire, which w r as farmed by the proprietor on what was then the newly-introduced modern system. He was acquainted, however, with the classical description of Glammis Castle, in the letters of the poet Gray ; and after visiting the castle, he set out to examine the ancient encampment at Ar- doch, — the Lxndum of the Romans. Finally, all hopes of getting him settled at a distance being given up by his friends, he had to fall back upon Cromarty, where he was yet once more appointed to a clerkship. The establishment with which he was now connected was a large hempen manufactory ; and it was his chief employment to register the quantities of hemp given out to the spinners, and the number of hanks of yarn into which they had converted it, when given in. He soon, however, began to take long walks ; and the old women, with their yarn, would be often found accumulated, ere his return, by tens and dozens at the office-door. At length, after taking a very long walk indeed, for it stretched from near the open- ing to the head of the Cromarty Frith, a distance of about twenty miles, and included in its survey the antique tower of Kinkell and the old Castle of Craighouse, he was relieved from the duties of his clerkship, and left to pursue his researches undisturbed, on a small annuity, the gift of his friends. He was considerably advanced in life ere I knew him, profoundly grave, and very taciturn, and, though he never discussed poli- tics, a mighty reader of the newspapers. " Oh T this is ter- 62 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; rible," I have heard him exclaim, when on one occasion a snow storm had blocked up both the coast and the Highland roads for a week together, and arrested the northward course of the ma Is, — " It is terrible to be left in utter ignorance of the public business of the country !" Francie, whom every one called Mr. , to his face, and always Francie when his back was turned, chiefly because h was known that he was punctilious on the point, and did not like the more familiar term, used in the winter evenings to be a regular member of the circle that met beside my Uncle James's work-table. And, chiefly through the influence, in the first instance, of my uncles, I was permitted to visit him in his own room, — a privilege enjoyed by scarce any one else, — and even invited to borrow his books. His room — a dark and mel- ancholy chamber, gray with dust — always contained a number of curious but not very rare things, which he had picked up in his walks, — prettily colored fungi, — vegetable monstrosi- ties of the commoner kind, such as " fause craws' nests," and flattened twigs of pine, — and with these, as the representatives of another department of natural science, fragments of semi- transparent quartz or of glittering feldspar, and sheets of mica a little above the ordinary size. But the charm of the apart- ment lay in its books. Francie was a book-fancier, and lacked only the necessary wealth to be in the possession of a very pretty collection. As it was, he had some curious vol- umes ; among others, a first-edition copy of the " Nineteen Years' Travels of William Lithgow," with an ancient wood- cut, representing the said William in the background, with his head brushing the skies, and, far in front, two of the tombs which covered the heroes of Ilium, barely tall enough to reach half-way to his knee, and of the length, in proportion to the size of the traveller, of ordinary octavo volumes. He had black-letter books, too, on astrology, and on the planetary properties of vegetables ; and an ancient book on medicine, that recommended as a cure for the toothache a bit of the jaw of a suicide, well triturated ; and, as an infallible remedy for the falling- sickness, an ounce or two of the brains of a young man, 53 carefully dried over the fire. Better, however, than these, for at least my purposes, he had a tolerably complete collection of the British essayists, from Addison to Mackenzie, with the " Essays " and " Citizen of the World " of Goldsmith ; several interesting works of travels and voyages, translated from the French ; and translations from the German, of Lavater, Zim- merman, and Klopstock. He had a good many v">f the minor poets too ; and I was enabled to cultivate, mainly from his collection, a tolerably adequate acquaintance with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne. Poor Francie was at bottom a kindly and honest man ; but the more intimately one knew him, the more did the weakness and brokenness of his intellect appear. His mind was a labyrinth without a clue, in whose recesses there lay stored up a vast amount of book-knowl- edge, that could never be found when wanted, and was of no sort of use to himself or any one else. I got sufficiently into his confidence to be informed, under the seal of strict secrecy, that he contemplated producing a great literary work, whose special character he had not quite determined, but which was to be begun a few years hence. And when death found him, at an age which did not fall short of the allotted three score and ten, the great unknown work was still an undefined idea, and had still to be begun. There were several other branches of my education going on at this time, outside the pale of the school, in which, though I succeeded in amusing myself, I was no trifler. The shores of Cromarty are strewed over with water-rolled fragments of the primary rocks, derived chiefly from the west during the ages of the boulder clay; and I soon learned to take a deep inter- est in sauntering over the various pebble-beds when shaken up by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their nu- merous components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary ; and as, according to Cowper, " the growth of what is excellent is slow," it was not until long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of representing the various species of simple rocks by certain numerals, and the compound ones by the numerals representative of each separate component, 54 ranged, as in vulgar fractions, along a medial line, with the figures representative of the prevailing materials of the mass above, and those representative of the materials in less pro- portions below. Though, however, wholly deficient in the signs proper to represent what I knew, I soon acquired a consider- able quickness of eye in distinguishing the various kinds of rock, and tolerably definite conceptions of the generic character of the porphyries, granites, gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, and mica-schists, which everywhere strewed the beach. In the rocks of mechanical origin I was at the time much less inter- ested ; but in individual, as in general history, mineralogy almost always precedes geology. I was fortunate enough to discover, one happy morning, among the lumber and debris of old John Feddes dark room, an antique-fashioned hammer, which had belonged, my mother told me, to old John himself more than a hundred years before. It was an uncouth sort of implement, w r ith a handle of strong black oak, and a short, compact head, square on the one face and oblong on the other. And though it dealt rather an obtuse blow, the temper was excellent, and the haft firmly set ; and I went about with it, breaking into all manner of stones, with great perseverance and success. I found, in a large-grained granite, a few sheets of beautiful black mica, that when split exceedingly thin, and pasted between slips of mica of the ordinary kind, made ad- mirably-colored eye-glasses, that converted the landscapes around into richly-toned drawings in sepia ; and numerous crystals of garnet embedded in mica-schist, that were, I was sure, identical with the stones set in a little gold brooch, the property of my mother. To this last surmise, however, some of the neighbors to whom I showed my prize demurred. The stones in my mother's brooch were precious stones, they said ; whereas what I had found, w r as merely a " stone upon the shore." My friend the cabinetmaker w T ent so far as to say that the specimen was but a mass of plum-pudding stone, and Its dark-colored enclosures simply the currants ; but then, on the other hand, Uncle Sandy took my view of the matter : the stone was not plum-pudding stone, he said : he had often OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 55 seen plum-pudding stone in England, had knew it to be a sort of rough conglomerate of various components ; whereas my stone was composed of a finely-grained silvery substance, and the crystals which it contained were, he was sure, gems like those in the brooch, and, so far as he could judge, real gar- nets. This was a great decision ; and, much encouraged in consequence, I soon ascertained that garnets are by no means rare among the pebbles of the Cromarty shore. Nay, so mix. ed up are they with its sands even, — a consequence of the abundance of the mineral among the primary rocks of Ross. — that after a heavy surf has beaten the exposed beach of the neighboring hill, there may be found on it patches of commi- nuted garnet, from one to three square yards in extent, that resemble, at a little distance, pieces of crimson carpeting, and nearer at hand sheets of crimson bead-work, and of which al- most every point and particle is a gem. From some unex- plained circumstance, connected apparently with the specific gravity of the substance, it separates in this style from the general mass, on coasts much beaten by the waves ; but the garnets of these curious pavements, though so exceedingly abundant, are in every instance exceedingly minute. I never detected in them a fragment greatly larger than a pin-head ; but it was always with much delight that I used to fling my- self down on the shore beside some newly-discovered patch, and bethink me, as I passed my fingers along the larger grains, of the heaps of gems in Aladdin's cavern, or of Sinbad's val- ley of diamonds. The Hill of Cromarty formed at this time at once my true school and favorite play-ground ; and if my master did wink at times harder than master ought, when I was playing truant among its woods or on its shores, it was, I believe, whether he thought so or no, all for the best. My Uncle Sandy had, as 1 Have already said, been bred a cartwright ; but finding, on his return, after his seven years' service aboard man-of-war, that the place had cartwrights enough for all the employment, he applied himself to the humble but not unremunerative pro- fession of a sawyer, and used often \o pitch his saw-pit, in the 56 MT SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; more genial seasons of the year, among the woods of the hill. I remember, he never failed setting it down in some pretty spot, sheltered from the prevailing winds under the lee of some fern-covered rising ground, or some bosky thicket, and always in the near neighborhood of a spring ; and it used to be one of my most delightful exercises to find out for myself among the thick woods, in some holiday journey of explora- tion, the place of a newly-formed pit. With the saw-pit as my base-line of operations, and secure always of a share in Uncle Sandy's dinner, I used to make excursions of discovery on every side, — now among the thicker tracks of wood, which bore among the town-boys, from the twilight gloom that ever rested in their recesses, the name of" the dungeons ;" and anon to the precipitous sea-shore, with its wild cliffs and caverns. The Hill of Cromarty is one of a chain belonging to the great Ben Nevis line of elevation ; and, though it occurs in a sand- stone district, is itself a huge primary mass, upheaved of old from the abyss, and composed chiefly of granitic gneiss and a red splintery hornstone. It contains also numerous veins and beds of hornblend-rock and chlorite-schist, and of a peculiar- looking granite, of which the quartz is white as milk, and the feldspar red as blood. When still wet by the receding tide, these veins and beds seem as if highly polished, and present a beautiful aspect ; and it was always with great delight that I used to pick my way among them, hammer in hand, and fill my pockets with specimens. There was one locality which I in especial loved. No path runs the way. On the one side an abrupt iron-tinged pro- montory, so remarkable for its human-like profile, that it seems part of a half-buried sphynx, protrudes into the deep green water. On the other, — less prominent, for even at full tide the traveller can wind between its base and the sea, — there rises a shattered and ruinous precipice, seamed with blood-red ironstone, that retains on its surface the bright metallic gleam, and amid wh;se piles of loose and fractured rock one may still detect fragments of stalactite. The stalactite is all that remains of a spacious cavern, which once hollowed the precipice, but OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 57 which, more than a hundred years before, had tumbled down during a thunder-storm, when filled with a flock of sheep, and penned up the poor creatures forever. The space between these headlands forms an irregular crescent of great height, covered with wood a-top, and amid whose lichened crags, and on whose steep slopes, the hawthorn, and bramble, and A'ild- rasp, and rock-strawberry, take root, with many a scraggy shrub and sweet wild flower besides ; while along its base lie huge blocks of green hornblend, on a rude pavement of granitic gneiss, traversed at one point, for many rods, by a broad vein of milk-white quartz. The quartz vein formed my central point of attraction in this wild paradise. The white stone, thickly traversed by threads of purple and red, is a beautiful though unworkable rock ; and I soon ascertained that it is flanked by a vein of feldspar broader than itself, of a brick-red tint, and the red stone flanked, in turn, by a drab- colored vein of the same mineral, in which there occurs in great abundance masses of a homogeneous mica, — mica not existing in lamina, but, if I may use the term, as a sort of mi- caceous felt. It would almost seem as if some gigantic exper- imenter of the old world had set himself to separate into their simple mineral components the granitic rocks of the hill, and that the three parallel veins were the results of his labor. Such, however, was not the sort of idea which they at this time suggested to me. I had read in Sir Walter Raleigh's voyage to Guinea, the poetic description of that upper country in which the knight's exploration of the river Corale terminated, and where, amid lovely prospects of rich valleys, and wooded hills, and winding waters, almost every rock bore on its surface the yellow gleam of gold. True, according to the voyager, the precious metal was itself absent. But Sir Walter, on after- wards showing " some of the stones to a Spaniard of the Ca- raccas, was told by him they were el madre del ora, that is, the mother of gold, and that the mine itself was farther in the ground." And though the quartz vein of the Cromarty Hill contained no metal more precious than iron, and but little even of that, it was, I felt sure the " mother' of something 58 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; very fine. As for silver, I was pretty certain I had found the " mother" of it, if not indeed the precious metal itself, in a cherty boulder, inclosing numerous cubes of rich galena ; and occasional masses of iron pyrites gave, as I thought, large promise of gold. But though sometimes asked, in humble irony, by the farm servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed along the Cromarty beach, whether I was " getting siller in the stanes," I was so unlucky as never to be able to answer their question in the affirmative. OR. THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 59 CHAPTER IV w Strange marble stones, here larger and there less, And of full various forms, which still increase In height and bulk by a continual drop, Which upon each distilling from the top, And falling still exactly on the crown, There break themselves to mists, which, trickling down, Crust into stone, and (but with leisure) swell The sides, and still advance the miracle." Charles Cotton. It is low water in the Frith of Cromarty during stream tides, between six and seven o'clock in the evening ; and my Uncle Sandy, in returning from his work at the close of the day, used not unfrequently, when, according to the phrase of the place, " there was a tide in the water," to strike down the hill- side, and spend a quiet hour in the ebb. I delighted to accom- pany him on these occasions. There are Professors of Natu- ral History that know less of living nature than was known by Uncle Sandy ; and I deemed it no small matter to have all the various productions of the sea with which he was acquaint- ed pointed out to me in these walks, and to be put in possess- ion of his many curious anecdotes regarding them. lie was a skilful crab and lobster fisher, and knew every hole and crannie, along several miles of rocky shore, in which the creatures were accustomed to shelter, with not a few of their own peculiarities of character. Contrary to the view taken by some of our naturalists, such as Agassiz, who held 4 60 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; that the crab — a genus comparatively recent in its appearance in creation — is less embryotic in its character, and higher in its standing, than the more ancient lobster, my uncle regarded the lobster as a more intelligent animal than the crab. The hole in which the lobster lodges has almost always two open ing-s, he has said, through one of which it sometimes contrives to escape when the other is stormed by the fisher ; whereas the crab is usually content, like the " rat devoid of soul," with a lole of only one opening ; and, besides, gets so angry in most ♦ases with his assailant, as to become more bent on assault than escape, and so loses himself through sheer loss of temper. And yet the crab has, he used to add, some points of intelli- gence about him too. "When, as sometimes happened, he got hold, in his dark narrow recess in the rock, of some luckless digit, my uncle showed me how that after the first tremendous squeeze he began always to experiment upon what he had got, by alternately slackening and straitening his grasp, as if to as- certain whether it had life in it, or was merely a piece of dead matter ; and that the only way to escape him, on these trying occasions, was to let the finger lie passively between his nip- pers, as if it were a bit of stick or tangle ; when, apparently deeming it such, he would be sure to let it go ; whereas, on the least attempt to withdraw it, he would at once straiten his gripe, and not again relax it for mayhap half an hour. In dealing with the lobster, on the other hand, the fisher had to beware that he did not depend too much on the hold he had got of the creature, if it was merely a hold of one of the great claws. For a moment it would remain passive in his grasp ; he would then be sensible of a slight tremor in the captured limb, and mayhap hear a slight crackle ; and, presto, the cap tive would straightway be off like a dart through the deep- water hole, and only the limb remain in the fisher's hand. My uncle has, however, told me, that lobsters do not always lose their limbs with the necessary judgment. They throw them off when suddenly frightened, without first waiting to consider whether the sacrifice of a pair of legs is the best mode of ob- viating the danger. On firing a musket immediately over a 61 lobster just captured, he has seen it throw off both its great claws in the sudden extremity of its terror, just as a panic- struck soldier sometimes throws away his weapons. Such, in kind, were the anecdotes of Uncle Sandy. He instructed me, to>, how to find, amid thickets of laminaria and fuci, the nest of the lump-fish, and taught me to look well in its immediate neighborhood for the male and female fish, especially for the male ; and showed me further, that the hard-shelled spawn of this creature may, when well washed, be eaten raw, and forms at least as palatable a viand in that state as the imported ca- viare of Russia and the Caspian. There were instances in which the common crow acted as a sort of jackall to us in our lump-fish explorations. We would see him busied at the side of some fuci-covered pool, screaming and cawing as if engaged in combating an enemy ; and, on going up to the place, we used to find the lump-fish he had killed fresh and entire, but divested of the eyes, which we found, as a matter of course, the assailant, in order to make sure of victory, had taken the precaution of picking out at an early stage of the contest. Nor was it with merely the edible that we busied ourselves on these journeys. The brilliant metallic plumage of the sea- mouse (Aphrodita), steeped as in the dyes of the rainbow, ex- cited our admiration time after time; and still higher wonder used to be awakened by a much rarer annelid, brown, and slender as a piece of rope-yarn, and from thirty to forty feet in length, which no one save my uncle had ever found along the Cromarty shores, and which, when broken in two, as some- times happened in the measuring, divided its vitality so equally between the pieces, that each was fitted, we could not doubt, though unable to repeat in the case the experiment of Spal- lanzani to set up as an independent existence, and carry on business for itself. The annelids, too, that form for them selves tubular dwellings built up of large grains of sand (am phitrites), always excited our interest. Two hand-shaped tufts of golden-hued setos, — furnished, however, with greatly more than the typical number of fingers, — rise from the shoulders 62 my schools of these creatures, and must, I suspect, be used as hands in the process of building ; at least the hands of the most practised builder could not set stones with nicer skill than is exhibited by these worms in the setting of the grains which compose their cylindrical dwellings,— dwellings that, from their form and structure, seem suited to remind the antiquary of the round towers of Ireland, and, from the style of their masonry, of old Cyclopean walls. Even the mason-wasps and bees are greatly inferior workmen to these mason amphitrites. I was introduced also, in our ebb excursions, to the cuttle-fish and the sea-hare, and shown how the one, when pursued by an enemy, dis- charges a cloud of ink to conceal its retreat, and that the other darkens the water around it with a lovely purple pigment, which my uncle was pretty sure would make a rich dye, like that extracted of old by the Tyrians from a whelk which he had often seen on the beach near Alexandria. I learned, too, to cultivate an acquaintance with some two or three species of doris, that carry their arboraceous, tree-like lungs on their backs, as Macduff's soldiers carried the boughs of Birnam wood to the Hill of Dunsinane ; and I soon acquired a sort of affection for certain shells, which bore, as I supposed, a more exotic aspect than their neighbors. Among these were, Tro- chus Zizyphinus, with its flame-like markings of crimson, on a ground of paley -brown ; Patella pellucida, with its lustrous rays of vivid blue on its dark epidermis, that resemble the sparks of a firework breaking against a cloud ; and above all, Cyprcea Uuropea, a not rare shell farther to the north, but so little abundant in the Frith of Cromarty, as to render the live animal, when once or twice in a season I used to find it creep- ing on the laminaria at the extreme outer edge of the tide- line, with its wide orange mantle flowing liberally around it somewhat of a prize. In short, the tract of sea-bottom laid dry by the ebb formed an admirable school, and Uncle Sandy an excellent teacher, under whom I was not in the least dis- posed to trifle ; and when, long after I learned to detect old- marine bottoms far out of sight of the sea, — now amid the an- 63 cient forest-covered Silurians of central England, and anon opening to the light on some hill-side among the Mountain Limestones of oui own country, — I have felt how very much I owed to his instructions. His facts wanted a vocabulary adequately fitted to represent them ; but though they " lacked a commodity of good names," they were all founded on careful observation, and possessed that first element of respectability, — perfect originality. They were all acquired by himself. I owed more, however, to the habit of observation which he assisted me in forming, than even to his facts themselves ; and yet some of these were of high value. He has shown me, for instance, that an immense granitic boulder in the neighborhood of the town, known for ages as the Clach Malloch, or Cursed Stone, stands so exactly in the line of low water, that the larger stream-tides of March and September lay dry its inner side, but never its outer one ; — round the outer side there are always from tw r o to four inches of water ; and such had been the case for at least a hundred years before, in his father's and grandfather's days, — evidence enough of itself, I have heard him say, that the rel- ative levels of sea and land were not altering ; though during the lapsed century the waves had so largely encroached on the low flat shores, that elderly men of his acquaintance, long since passed away, had actually held the plough when young where they had held the rudder when old. He used, too, to point out to me the effect of certain winds upon the tides. A strong hasty gale from the east, if coincident w T ith a spring- tide, sent up the waves high upon the beach, and cut away whole roods of the soil ; but the gales that usually kept the larger tides from falling during ebb were prolonged gales from the west. A series of these, even when not very high, left not nnfrequently from one to two feet water round the Clach Mal- loch, during stream-tides, that would otherwise have laid its bott mi bare ; a proof, he used to say, that the German Ocean, from its want of breadth, could not te heaped up against our coasts *o the same extent, by the vio' ence of a very powerful 64 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; east wind, as the Atlantic by the force of a comparatively mod erate westerly one. It is not improbable that the philosophy of the Drift Curren*, and of the apparently reactionary Gulf Stream, may be embodied in this simple remark. The woods on the lower slopes of the hill, when there was no access to the zones uncovered by the ebb, furnished me with employment of another kind. I learned to look with in- terest on the workings of certain insects, and to understand some of at least their simpler instincts. The large Diadem Spider, which spins so strong a web, that, in pressing my way through the furze thickets, I could hear its white silken cords crack as they yielded before me, and which I found skilled, like an ancient magician, in the strange art of rendering itself in- visible in the clearest light, was an especial favorite ; though its great size, and the wild stories I had read about the bite of its cogener the tarantula, made me cultivate its acquaintance somewhat at a distance. Often, however, have I stood beside its large web, when the creature occupied its place in the centre, and, touching it with a withered grass stalk, I have seen it sullenly swing on the lines " with its hands," and then shake them with a motion so rapid, that, — like Carathis, the mother of the Caliph Vathek, who, when her hour of doom came, " glanced off in a rapid whirl, which rendered her invis- ible," — the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes together. Nothing appeals more powerfully to the youth- ful fancy than those coats, rings, and amulets of eastern lore, that conferred on their possessors the gift of invisibil- ity ; and I deemed it a great matter to have discovered for myself, in living nature, a creature actually possessed of an amulet of this kind, that, when danger threatened, could rush into invisibility. I learned, too, to take an especial interest in what, though they belong to a different family, are known as the Water Sliders ; and have watched them speeding by fits and starts, like skaters on ice, across the surface of some woodland spring or streamlet, — fearless walkers on the water, that, with true faith in the integrity of the implanted instinct OK, THE STOIiY OF MY EDUCATION. Gh never made a shipwreck in the eddy or sank in the pool. It is to these little creatures that Wordsworth refers in one of his sonnets on sleep : — "O sleep, thou art to me A fly that up and down himself doth shove Upon a fretful rivulet; now above, Now on the water, vexed with mockery." As shown, however, to the poet himself on one ocvdsion, some what to his discomfort, by assuredly no mean authority, — Mr James Wilson, — the " vexed" " fly," though one of the hemip- terous insects, never uses its wings, and so never gets " above 1 the water. Among my other favorites were the splendid dra gon-flies, the crimson-speckled Burnet moths, and the small azure butterflies, that, when fluttering among delicate hair- bells and crimson-tipped daisies, used to suggest to me, long ere I became acquainted with the pretty figure of Moore,* or even ere the figure had been produced, the idea of flowers that had taken to flying. The wild honey bees, too, in their several species, had peculiar charms for me. There were the buft- colored carders, that erected over their honey-jars domes of moss ; the lapidary red-tipped bees, that built amid the re- cesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone-walls, and were so invincibly brave in defending their homesteads, that they never gave up the quarrel till they died ; and, above all, the yellow-zoned humble bees, that lodged deep in the ground along the dry sides of grassy banks, and were usually wealthier in honey than any of their cogeners, and existed in larger com munities. But the herd-boys of the parish, and the foxes of its woods and brakes, shared in my interest in the wild honey bees, and, in the pursuit of something else than knowledge, were ruthless robbers of their nests. I often observed, that the fox, with all his reputed shrewdness, is not particularly know- ; The beautiful blue damsel fly, That fluttered round ihe jessamine stems, Like winged (lowers or flying gems." Paradise and riiK Pi m. 66 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEKS ; ing on the subject of bees. He makes as dead a set on a wasp's nest as on that of the carder or humble bee, and gets, I doubt not, heartily stung for his pains ; for though, as shown by the marks of his teeth, ]eft on fragments of the paper combs scattered about, he attempts eating the young wasps in the chrysalis state, the undevoured remains seem to argue that he is but little pleased with them as food. There were occasions, however, in which even the herd-boys met with only disap- pointment in their bee-hunting excursions , and in one notable instance, the result of the adventure used to be spoken of in school and elsewhere, under our breath and in secret, as some- thing very horrible. A party of boys had stormed a humble bees' nest on the side of the old chapel-brae, and, digging in- wards along the narrow winding earth passage, they at length came to a grinning human skull, and saw the bees issuing thick from out a round hole at its base, — the foramen magnum. The wise little workers had actually formed their nest within the hollow of the head, once occupied by the busy brain ; and their spoilers, more scrupulous than Samson of old, who seems to have enjoyed the meat brought forth out of the eater, and the sweetness extracted from the strong, left in very great consternation their honey all to themselves. One of my discoveries of this early period would have been deemed a not unimportant one by the geologist. Among the woods of the hill, a short half-mile from the town, there is a morass of comparatively small extent, but considerable depth, which had been laid open by the bursting of a waterspout on the uplands, and in which the dark peaty chasm remained un- closed, though the event had happened ere my birth, until I had become old and curious enough thoroughly to explore it. It was a black miry ravine, some ten or twelve feet in depth. The Dogs around waved thick with silvery willows of small size : but, sticking out from the black sides of the ravine itself, and in some instances stretched across it from side to side, lay the decayed remains of huge giants of the vegetable world, that had flourished and died long ages ere, in at least our northern part of the island, the course of history had begun. There were OR, THE STORY OP MY EDUCATION. 67 oaks of enormous girth, into whose coal-black substance one could dig as easily with a pickaxe as one digs into a bank of clay; and at least one noble elm, which ran across the little stream that trickled, rather than flowed, along the bottom of the hollow, and which was in such a state of keeping, that I have scooped out of its trunk, with the unassisted hand, a way for the water. I have found in the ravine — which I learned very much to like as a scene of exploration, though I never failed to quit it sadly bemired — handfuls of hazel- nuts, of the ordinary size, but black as jet, with the cups of acorns, and with twigs of birch that still retained almost un- changed their silvery outer crust of bark, but whose ligneous interior existed as a mere pulp. I have even laid open, in layers of a sort of unctuous clay, resembling fuller's earth, leaves of oak, birch, and hazel, that had fluttered in the wind thousands of years before ; and there was one happy day in which I succeeded in digging from out the very bottom of the excavation a huge fragment of an extraordinary-looking' deer's horn. It was a broad, massive, strange-looking piece of bone, evidently old-fashioned in its type ; and so I brought it home in triumph to Uncle James, as the antiquary of the fam- ily, assured that he could tell me all about it. Uncle James paused in the middle of his work ; and, taking the horn in his hand, surveyed it leisurely on every side. " That is the horn, boy," he at length said, " of no deer that now lives in this coun- try. We have the red deer, and the fallow deer, and the roe ; and none of them have horns at all like that. I never saw an elk ; but I am pretty sure this broad, plank-like horn can he none other than the horn of an elk." My uncle set aside his work; and, taking the horn in his hand, went out to the shop of a cabinetmaker in the neighborhood, where there used to work from five to six journeymen. They all gathered round him to examine it, and agreed in the decision that it was an entirely different sort of horn from any borne by tin' existing deer of Scotland, and that his surmise regarding it was prob- ably just. And, apparently to enhance tin; marvel, a neigh- bor, who was lounging in the shop at the time, remarked, in 68 a tone of sober grav'ty, that it had lain in the Moss of the Willows " for perhaps half a century." There was positive anger in the tone of my uncle's reply. " Haifa century, Sir ! !" he exclaimed ; " was the elk a native of Scotland half a cen- tury ago ? There is no notice of the elk, Sir, in British his- tory. That horn must have lain in the Moss of the Willows for thousands of years ! " Ah ha, James, ah ha," ejaculated the neighbor, with a sceptical shake of the head ; but as neither he nor any one else dared meet my uncle on historical ground, the controversy took end with the ejaculation. I soon added to the horn of the elk that of a roe, and part of that of a red deer, found in the same ravine ; and the neigh- bors, impressed by Uncle James's view, used to bring strangers to look at them. At length, unhappily, a relation settled in the south, who had shown me kindness, took a fancy to them ; and, smit by the charms of a gorgeous paint-box which he had just sent me, I made them over to him entire. They found their way to London, and were ultimately lodged in the col- lection of some obscure virtuoso, whose locality or name I have been unable to trace. The Cromarty Sutors have their two lines of caves, — an an- cient line hollowed by the waves many centuries ago, when the sea stood in relation to the land, from fifteen to thirty feet higher along our shores than it does now ; and a modern line, which the surf is still engaged in scooping out. Many of the older caves are lined with stalactites, deposited by springs that, filtering through the cracks and fissures of the gneiss, find lime enough in their passage to acquire what is known as a petrify- ing, though, in reality, only an encrusting quality. And these stalactites, under the name of " white stones made by the water," formed of old — as in that Cave of Slains specially men tioned by Buchanan and the Chroniclers, and in those caverns of the Peak so quaintly described by Cotton — one of the grand marvels of the place. Almost all the old gazetteers sufficient- ly copious in their details to mention Cromarty at all, refer to its " Dropping ^ave" as a marvellous marble-producing cav- ern ; and this " Di :>pping Cave" is but one of many that look OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 69 out upon the sea from the precipices of the southern Sutor, in whose dark recesses the drops ever tinkle, and the stony ceil- ings ever grow. The wonder could not have been deemed a great or very rare one by a man like the late Sir George Mac- kenzie of Coul, well known from his travels in Iceland, and his experiments on the inflammability of the diamond ; but it so happened, that Sir George, curious to see what sort of stones to which the old gazetteers referred, made application to the minister of the parish for a set of specimens ; and the minister straightway deputed the commission, which he believed to be not a difficult one, to one of his poorer parishoners, an old nailer, as a means of putting a few shillings in his way. It so happened, however, that the nailer had lost his wife by a sad accident, only a few weeks before ; and the story went abroad that the poor woman was, as the townspeople expressed it, "coming back." She had been very suddenly hurried out of the world. When going down the quay, after nightfall one evening, with a parcel of clean linen for a sailor, her relative, she had missed footing on the pier edge, and, half-brained, half-drowned, had been found in the morning, stone dead, at the bottom of the harbor. And now, as if pressed by some unsettled business, she used to be seen, it was said, hovering after nightfall about her old dwelling, or saun- tering along the neighboring street ; nay, there were occa- sions, according to the general report, in which she had even exchanged words with some of the neighbors, little to their satisfaction. The words, however, seemed in every instance to have wonderfully little to do with the affairs of another world. I remember seeing the wife of a neighbor rush into my mother's one evening about this time, speechless with tci ror, and declare, after an awful pause, during which she had lain half fainting in a chair, that she had just seen Christy. She had been engaged, as the night was falling, but ere dark- ness had quite set in, in piling up a load of brushwood for fuel outside her door, when up started the spectre on the other side of the heap, attired in the ordinary work-day garb of the 70 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; deceased, and, in a light and hurried tone, asked, as Christy might have done ere. the fatal accident, for a share of the brushwood. " Give me some of that hag" said the ghost ; " you have plenty, — I have none." It was not known whether or no the nailer had seen the apparition ; but it was pretty certain he believed in it ; and as the " Dropping Cave" is both dark and solitary, and had forty years ago a bad name to boot, — for the mermaid had been observed disporting in front of it even at mid-day, and lights seen and screams heard from it at nights, — it must have been a rather formidable place to a iiiuii living in the momentary expectation of a visit from a dead wife. So far as could be ascertained, — for the nailer himself was rather close in the matter, — he had not entered the cave at all. He seemed, judging from the marks of scrap- ing left along the sides for about two or three feet from the narrow opening, to have taken his stand outside, where the light was good, and the way of retreat clear, and to have raked outwards to him, as far as he could reach, all that stuck to the walls, including ropy slime and mouldy damp, but not one particle of stalactite. It was of course seen that his specimens would not suit Sir George ; and the minister, in the extremity of the case, applied to my uncles, though with some little un- willingness, as it was known that no remuneration for their trouble could be offered to them. My uncles were, however, delighted with the commission, — it was all for the benefit of science; and, providing themselves with torches and a hammer, they set out for the caves. And I, of course, accompanied them, — a very happy boy, — armed, like themselves, with ham- mer and torch, and prepared devoutedly to labor in behalf of science and Sir George. I had never before seen the caves by torch-light ; and thougl what I now witnessed did not quite come up to what I had read regarding the Grotto of Antiparos, or even the wonders of the Peak, it was unquestionably both strange and fine. The celebrated Dropping Cave proved inferior — as is not unfre quently the case with the celebrated — to a cave almost en- 71 tirely unknown, which opened among the rocks a little further to the east ; and yet even it had its interest. It widened, as one entered, into a twilight chamber, green with velvety mosses, that love the damp and the shade ; and terminated in a range of crystalline wells, fed by the perpetual dropping, and hollowed in what seemed an altar-piece of the deposited marble. And above, and along the sides, there depended many a draped fold, and hung many a translucent icicle. The other cave, how- ever, we found to be of much greater extent, and of more va- ried character. It is one of three caves of the old coast line, known as the Doocot or Pigeon Caves, which open upon a piece of rocky beach, overhung by a rudely semicircular range of gloomy precipices. The points of the semicircle project on either side into deep water, — into at least water so much deeper than the fall of ordinary neaps, that it is only during the ebb of stream tides that the place is accessible by land ; and in each of these bold promontories, — the terminal horns of the cres- cent, — there is a cave of the present coast-line, deeply hollow- ed, in which the sea stands from ten to twelve feet in depth when the tide is at full, and in which the surf thunders, when gales blow hard from the stormy north-east, with the roar of whole parks of artillery. The cave in the western promon- tory, which bears among the townsfolk the name of the " Puir "Wife's Meal Kist,' 1 has its roof drilled by two small perfora- tions, — the largest of them not a great deal wider than the blow-hole of a porpoise, — that open externally among the cliffs above ; and when, during storms from the sea, the huge waves come rolling ashore like green moving walls, there are cer- tain times of the tide in which they shut up the mouth of the cave, and so compress the air within that it rushes upwards through the openings, roaring in its escape as if ten whales were blowing at once, and rises from amid the crags overhead in two white jets of vapor, distinctly visible, to the height of from sixty to eighty feet. If there be critics who have deemed it one of the extravagancies of Goethe that he should have given life and motion, as in his famous witch-scene in " Faust," to the 1 lartz crags, they would do well to visit this bold head- 72 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; land during some winter tempest from the east, and find his description perfectly sober and true: — "See the giant craers, oh ho! How they snort and how they blow." Within, at the bottom of the crescent, and where the tide never reaches when at the fullest, we found the large pigeon ^ave which we had come to explore, hollowed for about a hun- Ired and fifty feet in the line of a fault. There runs across the opening the broken remains of a wall erected by some monopolizing proprietor of the neighboring lands, with the intention of appropriating to himself the pigeons of the cav- ern ; but his day, even at this time, had been long gone by, and the wall had sunk into a ruin. As we advanced, the cave caught the echoes of our footsteps, and a flock of pigeons, startled from their nests, came whizzing out, almost brushing us with their wings. The damp floor sounded hollow to our tread ; we saw the green mossy sides, which close in the un- certain light, more than twenty feet overhead, furrowed by ridges of stalactites, that became whiter and purer as they re- tired from the vegetable influences ; and marked that the last plant which appeared as we wended our way inward was a minute green moss, about half an inch in length, which slant- ed outwards on the prominences of the sides, and overlay myr- iads of similar sprigs of moss, long before converted into stone, but which, faithful in death to the ruling law of their lives, still pointed, like the others, to the free air and the light. And then, in the deeper recesses of the cave, where the floor becomes covered with uneven sheets of stalagmite, and where long spear-like icicles and drapery-like foldings, pure as the marble of the sculptor, descend from above, or hung pendent over the sides, we found in abundance magnificent specimens for Sir George. The entire expedition was one of wondrous interest ; and I returned next day to school, big with descrip- tion and narrative, to excite, by truths more marvellous than fiction, the curiosity of my class-fellows. I had previously introduced them to the marvels of the hill ; 73 and during our Saturday half-holidays, some of them had ac- companied me in my excursions to it. But it had failed, some- how, to catch their fancy. It was too solitary, and too far from home, and as a scene of amusement, not at all equal to the town-links, where they could play at " shinty," and " French and English," almost within hail of their parents' homesteads. The very tract along its flat, mossy summit, over A^hich, according to tradition, Wallace had once driven before im in headlong rout a strong body of English, and whic was actually mottled with sepulchral tumuli, still visible amid the heath, failed in any marked degree to engage them ; and though they liked well enough to hear about the caves, they seemed to have no very great desire to see them. There was, however, one little fellow, who sat at the Latin form, — the member of a class lower and brighter than the heavy one, though it was not particularly bright neither, — who differed in this respect from all the others. Though he was my junior by about a twelvemonth, and shorter by about half a head, he was a diligent boy in even the Grammar School, in which boys were so rarely diligent, and, for his years, a thoroughly sen- sible one, without a grain of the dreamer in his composition. I succeeded, however, notwithstanding his sobriety, in infect- ing him thoroughly with my peculiar tastes, and learned to love him very much, partly because he doubled my amuse- ments by sharing in them, and partly, I dare say, — on the prin- ciple on which Mahomet preferred his old wife to his young one, — because " he believed in me." Devoted to him as Ca- liban in the Tempest to his friend Trinculo, — "I showed him the best springs, I plucked him berries, And I with my long nails did dig him pig-nuts." His curiosity on this occasion was largely excited by my de scription of the Doocot Cave ; and, setting out one morning to explore its wonders, armed with John Feddes's hammer, in the benefits of which my friend was permitted liberally to share, we failed, for that day at least, in finding our way back. It was on a pleasant spring morning that, with my little 74 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; curious friend beside me, I stood on the beach opposite the eastern promontory, that, with its stern granitic wall, bars ac- cess for ten days out of every fourteen to the wonders of fl?3 Doocot ; and saw it stretching provokingly out into the green water. It was hard to be disappointed and the cave so near. The tide was low neap, and if we wanted a passage dry-shod, it behoved us to wait for at least a week ; but neither of us understood the philosophy of neap-tides at the period. I was- quite sure I had got round at low water with my uncles not e great many days before, and we both inferred, that if we but succeeded in getting round now, it would be quite a pleasure to wait among the caves inside until such time as the fall of the tide should lay bare a passage for our return. A narrow and broken shelf runs along the promontory, on which, by the assistance of the naked toe and the toe-nail, it is just possible to creep. We succeeded in scrambling up to it ; and then, crawling outwards on all fours, — the precipice, as we proceed- ed, beetling more and more formidable from above, and the water becoming greener and deeper below, — we reached the outer point of the promontory ; and then doubling the cape on a still narrowing margin, — the water, by a rej-'erse process, becoming shallower and less green as we advanced inwards, — we found the ledge terminating just where, after clearing the sea, it overhung the gravelly beach at an elevation of nearly ten feet. Adown we both dropped, proud of our success ; up splashed the rattling gravel as we fell ; and for at least the whole coming week — though we were unaware of the extent of our good luck at the time — the marvels of the Doocot Cave might be regarded as solely and exclusively our own. For one short seven days, — to borrow emphasis from the phraseology of Carlyle, — " they were our own, and no other man's." The first few hours were hours of sheer enjoyment. The larger cave proved a mine of marvels and we found a great deal additional to wonder at on the slopes beneath the preci- pices, and along the piece of rocky sea-beach in front. We succeeded in discovering for ourselves, in creeping, dwarf bushes, that told of the blighting influence of the sea-spray ; OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 75 the pale-yellow honeysuckle, that we had never seen before, save in gardens and shrubberies ; and on a deeply shaded slope that leaned against one of the steeper precipices, we detected the sweet-scented woodruff 1 of the flower -plot and parterre, with its pretty verticillate leaves, that become the more odor- iferous the more they are crushed, and its white delicate flow- ers. There, too, immediately in the opening of the deeper cave, where a small stream came pattering in detached drops from the over-beeiling precipice above, like the first drops of a heavy thunder-shower, we found the hot, bitter scurvy grass, with its minute cruciform flowers, which the great Captain Cook had used in his voyages ; above all, there were the caves with their pigeons, — white, variegated, and blue, — and their mysterious and gloomy depths, in which plants hardened into stone, and water became marble. In a short time we had brok- en off with our hammer whole pocketfuls of stalactites and petrified moss. There were little pools at the side of the cave, where we could see the work of congelation going on, as at the commencement of an October frost, when the cold north wind ruffles, and but barely ruffles, the surface of some mountain lochan or sluggish moorland stream, and shows the newly- formed needles of ice projecting mole-like from the shores into the water. So rapid was the course of deposition, that .there were cases in which the sides of the hollows seemed growing almost in proportion as the water rose in them ; the springs, lipping over, deposited their minute crystals on the edges ; and the reservoirs deepened and became more capacious as their mounds were built up by this curious masonry. The long telescopic prospect of the sparkling sea, as viewed from the inner extremity of the cavern, while all around was dark as midnight, — the sudden gleam of the sea-gull, seen for a mo- ment from the recess, as it flitted past in the sunshine, — the black heaving bulk of the grampus, as it threw up its slender jets of spray, and then, turning downwards, displayed its glossy back and vast angular fin, — even the pigeons, as they shot whizzing by, one moment scarce visible in the gloom, the next radia»it in the light, — all acquired a new interest, from the pe- 76 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; culiarity ;f the setting in which we saw them. They formed a series of sun-gilt vignettes, framed in jet ; and it was long ere we tired of seeing and admiring in them much of the strange and the beautiful. It did seem rather ominous, how- ever, and perhaps somewhat supernatural to boot, that abou an hour after noon, the tide, while there was yet a full fathom of water beneath the brow of the promontory, ceased to fall, and then, after a quarter of an hour's space, began actually to creep upwards on the beach. But just hoping that there might be some mistake in the matter, which "he evening tide would scarce fail to rectify, we continued to amuse ourselves, and to hope on. Hour after hour passed, lengthening as the shadows lengthened, and yet the tide still rose. The sun had sunk be- hind the precipices, and all was gloom along their bases, and double gloom in their caves ; but their rugged brows still caught the red glare of evening. The flush rose higher and higher, chased by the shadows ; and then, after lingering for a moment on their crests of honeysuckle and juniper, passed away, and the whole became sombre and gray. The sea-gull sprang upwards from where he had floated on the ripple, and hied him slowly away to his lodge in his deep-sea stack ; the dusky cormorant flitted past, with heavier and more frequent stroke, to his whitened shelf high on the precipice ; the pig- eons came whizzing downwards from the uplands and the opposite land, and disappeared amid the gloom of their caves ; every creature that had wings made use of them in speeding homewards ; but neither my companion nor myself had any ; and there was no possibility of getting home without them. We made desperate efforts to scale the precipices, and on two several occasions succeeded in reaching mid-way shelves among the crags, where the sparrowhawk and the raven build ; but though we had climbed well enough to render our return a matter of bare possibility , there was no possibility whatever of getting farther up ; the cliffs had never been scaled before, and they were not destined to be scaled now. And so, as the twilight deepened, and the precarious footing became every moment more doubtful and precarious still, we had just to 77 give up in despair. "Wouldn't care for myself," said the poor little fellow, my companion, bursting into tears, " if it were not for my mother ; but what will my mother say V " Wouldn't care neither," said I, with a heavy heart ; " but it's just back water, and we'll get out at twall." We retreated together into one of the shallower and drier caves, and, clear- ing a little spot of its rough stones, and then groping along the rocks for the dry grass that in the spring season hangs from them in withered tufts, we formed for ourselves a most uncom fortable bed, and lay down in one another's arms. For the last few hours mountainous piles of clouds had been rising dark and stormy in the sea-mouth : they had flared porten- tously in the setting sun, and had worn, with the decline of evening, almost every meteoric tint of anger, from fiery red to a sombre thundrous brown, and from sombre brown to doleful black. And we could now at least hear what they portended, though we could no longer see. The rising wind began to howl mournfully amid the cliffs, and the sea, hitherto so si- lent, to beat heavily against the shore, and to boom, like dis- tress-guns, from the recesses of the two deep-sea caves. We could hear, too, the beating rain, now heavier, now lighter, as the gusts swelled or sank ; and the intermittent patter of the streamlet over the deeper cave, now driving against the preci pices, now descending heavily on the stones. My companion had only the real evils of the case to deal with, and so, the hardness of our bed and the coldness of the night considered, he slept tolerably well ; but I was unlucky enough to have evils greatly worse than the real ones to annoy me. The corpse of a drowned seaman had been found on the beach about a month previous, some forty yaids from where we lay. The hands and feet, miserably contracted, and corru- gated into deep folds at every joint, yet swollen to twice their proper size, had been bleached as white as pieces of alumed sheep-skin ; and where the head should have been, there ex- isted or ly a sad mass of rubbish. I had examined the body, as young people are apt to do, a great deal too curiously for my peace; and, though I had never done the poor nameless 78 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; seaman any harm, I could not have suffered more from him during that melancholy night, had I been his murderer. Sleeping or waking, he was continually before me. Every time I dropped into a doze, he would come stalking up the beach from the spot where he had lain, with his stiff white fin- gers, that stuck out like eagles' toes, and his pale, broken pulp of a head, and attempt striking me ; and then I would awaken with a start, cling to my companion, and remember that the drowned sailor had lain festering among the identical bunches of sea-weed that still rotted on the beach not a stone-cast away. The near neighborhood of a score of living bandits would have inspired less horror than the recollection of that one dead seaman. Towards midnight the sky cleared and .the wind fell, and the moon, in her last quarter, rose red as a mass of heated iron out of the sea. We crept down, in the uncertain light, over the rough slippery crags, to ascertain whether the tide had not fallen sufficiently far to yield us a passage ; but we found the waves chafing among the rocks just where the tide-line had rested twelve hours before, and a full fathom of sea enclasping the base of the promontory. A glimmering idea of the real nature of our situation at length crossed my mind. It was not imprisonment for a tide to which we had consigned ourselves ; it was imprisonment for a week. There was little comfort in the thought, arising, as it did, amid the chills and terrors of a dreary midnight ; and I looked wistfully on the sea as our only path of escape. There was a vessel crossing the wake of the moon at the time, scarce half a mile from the shore ; and, assisted by my companion, I began to shout at the top of my lungs, in the hope of being heard by the sailors. We saw her dim bulk falling slowly athwart the red glittering belt of light that had rendered her visible, and then disappearing in the murky blackness ; and just as we lost sight of her forever, we could hear an indistinct sound mingling with the dash of the waves, — the shout, in reply, of the startled helmsman. The vessel, as we afterwards learned, was a large stone-lighter, deeply laden, and unfurnished with a boat ; nor were her crew 79 at all sure that it would have been safe to attend to the mid- night voice from amid the rocks, even had they the means of communication with the shore. We waited on and on, how- ever, now shouting by turns, and now shouting together ; but there was no second reply ; and at length, losing hope, we groped our way back to our comfortless bed, just as the tide had again turned on the beach, and the waves began to roll up\A ards higher and higher at every dash. * As the moon rose and brightened, the dead seaman became less troublesome ; and I had succeeded in dropping as soundly asleep as my companion, when we were both aroused by a loud shout. We started up, and again crept downwards among the crags to the shore ; and as we reached the sea, the shout was repeated. It was that of at least a dozen harsh voices united. There was a brief pause, followed by another shout ; and then two boats, strongly manned, shot round the western promontory, and the men, resting on their oars, turned towards the rock, and shouted yet again. The whole town had been alarmed by the intelligence that two little boys had straggled away in the morning to the rocks of the southern Sutor, and had not found their way back. The precipices had been a scene of frightful accidents from time immemorial, and it was at once inferred that one other sad accident had been added to the number. True, there were cases remembered of people having been tide-bound in the Doocot Caves, and not much the worse in consequence ; but as the caves were inaccessible during neaps, we could not, it was said, possibly be in them; and the sole remaining ground of hope was, that, as had hap- pened once before, only one of the two had been killed, and that the survivor was lingering among the rocks, afraid to come home. And in this belief, when the moon rose and the surf fell, the two boats had been fitted out. It was late in the morn- ing ere we reached Cromarty, but a crowd on the beach await ed our arrival ; and there were anxious-looking lights glancing in the windows, thick and manifold ; nay, such was the inter- x est elicited, that some enormously bad verse, in which the writer described the incident a few days after, became popular 80 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; enough to be handed about in manuscript, and read at tea- parties by the elite of the town. Poor old Miss Bond, who kept the town boarding-school, got the piece nicely dressed up, somewhat upon the principle on which Macpherson translated Ossian ; and at her first school-examination — proud and happy day for the author ! — it was recited with vast applause, by one of her prettiest young ladies, before the assembled taste and fashi- a of Cromartv OB, THE STOEY OF MY EDUCATION. 81 CHAPTER 7. "The wise Sl.ook their white aged heads o'er me, and &a.d, Of such materials wretched men were made." Byron. The report went abroad about this time, not without some foundation, that Miss Bond purposed patronizing me. The copy of my verses which had fallen into her hands — a genuine holograph — bore atop a magnificent view of the Doocot, in which horrid crags of burnt umber were perforated by yawn- ing caverns of Indian-ink, and crested by a dense pine forest of sap-green ; while vast waves, blue on the one side and green on the other, and bearing blotches of white lead atop, rolled frightfully beneath. And Miss Bond had concluded, it was said, that such a genius as that evinced by the sketch and the "poem" for those sister arts of painting and poesy in which she herself excelled, should not be left to waste itself uneared for in the desert wilderness. She had published, shortly lie- fore, a work, in two slim volumes, entitled, " Letters of a Vil- lage Governess," — a curious kind of medley, little amenable to the ordinary rules, but a genial book, notwithstanding, with nore heart than head about it ; and not a few of the incidents which it related had the merit of being true. It was an un- lucky merit for poor Miss Bond. She dated her book from Fortrose, where she taught what was designated in the Al- manac as the boarding-schot 1 of the place, but which, accord- S2 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; ing to Miss Bond's own description, was the school of the " village governess." And as her tales were found to be a kind of mosaics composed of droll bits of fact picked up in the neighborhood, Fortrose soon became considerably too hot for her. She had drawn, under the over-transparent guise of the niggardly Mrs. Flint, the skin-flint wife of a " paper minister," who had ruined at one fell blow her best silk dress, and a dozen of good eggs to boot, by putting the eggs in her pocket when going out to a party, and then stumbling over a stone. And, of course, Mrs. Skinflint and the Rev. Mr. Skinflint, with all their blood-relations, could not be other than greatly grati- fied to find the story furbished up in the printed form, and set in fun. There were other stories as imprudent and as amusing, — of young ladies caught eavesdropping at their neighbors' windows ; and of gentlemen, ill at ease in their families, sitting soaking among vulgar companions in the public house ; and so the authoress, shortly after the appearance of her work, ceased to be the village governess of Fortrose, anc 7 became the village governess of Cromarty. It was on this occasion that I saw, for the first time, with mingled admiration and awe, a human creature, — not dead and gone, and merely a printed name, — that had actually published a book. Poor Miss Bond was a kindly sort of person, fond of children, and mightily beloved by them in turn ; and, though keenly alive to the ludicrous, without a grain of malice in her. I remember how, about this time, when, assisted by some three or four boys more, I had suc- ceeded in building a huge house, full four feet long and three feet high, that contained us all, and a fire, and a great deal of smoke to boot, Miss Bond, the authoress, came, and looked in upon us, first through the little door, and then down through the chimney, and gave us kind words, and seemed to enjov our enjoyment very much ; and how we all deemed her visit one of the greatest events that could possibly have taken place. She had been intimate with the parents of Sir Walter Scott ; and, on the appearance of Sir Walter's first publication, the '' Minstrelsey of the Scottish Border," she had taken a fit of OK, THE STOKY OF MY EDUCATION. 83 enthusiasm, and written to him ; and, when ir. the cold par- oxysm, and inclined to think she had done something foolish, had received from Sir Walter, then Mr. Scott, a character- istically warm-hearted reply. She experienced much kind- ness at his hands ever after ; and when she herself became an author, she dedicated her book to him. He now and then procured boarders for her ; and when, after leaving Cromarty for Edinburgh, she opened a school in the latter place, and got on with but indifferent success, Sir Walter — though struggling with his own difficulties at the time — sent her an enclosure of ten pounds, to scare, as he said in his note, " the wolf from the door." But Miss Bond, like the original of his own Jeanie Deans, was a " proud bodie ;" and the ten pounds were returned, with an intimation to the effect that the wolf had not yet come to the door. Poor lady ! I suspect he came to the door at last. Like many other writers of books, her voyage through life skirted, for the greater part of the way, the bleak lee shore of necessity ; and it cost her not a little skilful steering at times to give the strand a respectable offing. And in her solitary old age, she seemed to have got fairly aground. There was an attempt made by some of her former pupils to raise money enough to purchase for her a small annu- ity ; but when the design was in progress, I heard of her death. She illustrated in her life the remark recorded by herself in her " Letters," as made by an humble friend : — " It's no an easy thing, Mem, for a woman to go through the world without a head, 1 '' i. e., single and unprotected. From some unexplained cause, Miss Bond's patronage never reached me. I am sure the good lady intended giving me lessons in both drawing and composition ; for she had said it, and her heart was a kind one ; but then her time was too much occupied to admit of her devoting an occasional hour to myself alone; and as for introducing me to her young-lady classes, in my rough garments, ever greatly improved the wrong way by my explorations in the ebb and the peat-moss, and frayed, at times, beyond even my mother's ability of repair, by warping to the tops of great trees, and by my feats as a cragsman, — 5 84 that would have been a piece of Jack-Cadeism, on which, then or now, no village governess could have ventured. And so I was left to get on in verse and picture-making quite in the wild way, without care or culture. My schoolfellows liked my stories well enough, — better, at . east on most occasions, than they did the lessons of the mas- ter ; but, beyond the common ground of enjoyment which these extempore compositions furnished to both the " sennachic," and his auditors, our tracts of amusement lay widely apart. I dis- liked, as I have said, the yearly cock-fight — found no pleasure in cat-killing, or in teasing at nights, or on the street, the cross-tempered, half-witted eccentrics of the village, — usually kept aloof from the ordinary play-grounds, and very rarely mingled in the old hereditary games. On the other hand, with the exception of my little friend of the cave, who, even after that disastrous incident, evinced a tendency to trust and follow me as implicitly as before, my schoolmates cared as little for my amusements as I did for theirs ; and, having the majority on their side, they of course voted mine to be the foolish ones. And certainly a run of ill-luck followed me in my sports about this time, that did give some show of reason to their decision. In the course of my book-hunting, I had fallen in with two old-fashioned military treatises, part of the small library of a retired officer, lately deceased, of which the one entitled the " Military Medley," discussed the whole art of marshalling troops, and contained numerous plans, neatly colored, of bat- talions drawn up in all possible forms, to meet all possible exi- gencies ; while the other, which also abounded in prints, treated of the noble science of fortification according to the system of Vauban. I pored over both works with much perseverance ; and, regarding them as admirable toy-books, set myself to con- struct, on a very small scale, some of the toys with which they specially dealt. The sea-shore in the immediate neighbor- hood of the town appeared to my inexperienced eye an excel- lent field for the carrying on of a campaign. The sea-sand I found quite coherent enough, when still moistened by the waters of the receding tide, to stand up in the form of towers 85 and bastions, and long lines of rampart ; and there was one of the commonest of the Littorinidce, — Littorina UlloraUs, that in one of its varieties is of a rich yellow color, and in another of a bluish-green tint, — which supplied me with soldiers enough to execute all the evolutions figured and described in the " Medley." The warmly-hued yellow shells represented Brit- ons in their scarlet, — the more dingy ones, the French in their uniforms of dirty blue ; well-selected specimens of Purpura lapillus, just tipped on their backs with a speck of paint, blue or red, from my box, made capital dragoons ; while a few dozens of the slender pyramidal shells of Turritella communis formed complete parks of artillery. With such unlimited stores of the materiel of war at my command, I was enabled, more fortunate than Uncle Toby of old, to fight battles and conduct retreats, assault and defend, build up fortifications and then batter them down again, at no expense at all ; and the only drawback on such a vast amount of advantage that I could at first perceive, consisted in the circumstance, that the shore was exceedingly open to observation, and that my new amusements, when surveyed at a little distance, did greatly resemble those of the very young children of the place, who used to repair to the same arenaceous banks and shingle-beds, to bake dirt-pies in the sand, or range lines of shells on little shelves of stone, imitative of the crockery cupboard at home. Not only my school-fellows, but also some of their parents, evidently arrived at the conclusion that the two sets of amuse- ments — mine and those of the little children — were identical ; for the elder folk said, that " in their time, poor Francie had been just such another boy, and every one saw what he had come to ;" while the younger, more energetic in their mani- festations, and more intolerant of folly, have even paused in their games of marbles, or ceased spinning their tops, to hoo* at me from a safe distance. But the campaign went on ; and I solaced myself by reflecting, that neither the big folk nor the little folk could bring a battalion of troops across a bridge of boats in the face of an enemy, or knew that a regular for- tificat'on could be constructed on only a regular polygon. 86 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES J I at length discovered, however, that as a sea-shore is always a sloping plane, and the Cromarty beach, in particular, a plane of a rather steep slope, it afforded no proper site for a fortress fitted to stand a protracted siege, seeing that, fortify the place as I might, it could be easily commanded by batteries raised on the higher side. And so, fixing upon a grassy knoll among the woods, in the immediate neighborhood of a scaur of boul- der clay, capped by a thick stratum of sand, as a much better scene of operations, I took possession of the knoll somewhat irregularly ; and carrying to it large quantities of sand from the scaur, converted it into the site of a magnificent strong- hold. First, I erected an ancient castle, consisting of four towers built on a rectangular base, and connected by straight curtains embrasured a-top. I then surrounded the castle by out-works in the modern style, consisting of greatly lower curtains than the ancient ones, flanked by numerous bastions, and bristling with cannon of huge calibre, made of the joint- ed stalks of the hemlock ; while in advance of these I laid down ravelins, horn-works, and tenailles. I was vastly de- lighted with my work ; it would, I was sure, be no easy mat- ter to reduce such a fortress ; but observing an eminence in the immediate neighborhood, which could, I thought, be occu- pied by a rather annoying battery, I was deliberating how I might best take possession of it by a redoubt, when out start- ed from behind a tree, the factor of the property on which I was trespassing, and rated me soundly for spoiling the grass in a manner so wantonly mischievous. Horn-work and half- moon, tower and bastion, proved of no manner of effect in re- pelling an attack of a kind so little anticipated. I did think that the factor, who was not only an intelligent man, but had also seen much service in his day on the town links, as the holder of a commission in the Cromarty volunteers, might have perceived that I was laboring on scientific principles, and so deem me worthy of some tolerance on that account ; but I sup- pose he did not; though, to be sure, his scold died out good- naturedly enough in the end, and I saw him laugh as he turn- ed away. But so it was, that in the extremity of my mor- 87 tincation, I gave up generalship and bastion-building for the time ; though, alas, my next amusement must have worn in the eyes of my youthful compeers as suspicious an aspect as either. My friend of the cave had lent me what I had never seen before, — a fine quarto edition of Anson's Voyages, containing the original prints (my father's copy had only the maps) ; among the others, Mr. Brett's elaborate delineation of that strangest of vessels, a proa of the Ladrone Islands. I was much struck by the singularity of the construction of a bark that, while its head and stern were exactly alike, had sides that to- tally differed from each other, and that, with the wind upon the beam, outsailed, it was said, all other Vessels in the world ; and having the command of the little shop in which my Uncle Sandy made occasional carts and wheelbarrows when unem- ployed abroad, I set myself to construct a miniature proa, on the model given in the print, and succeeded in fabricating a very extraordinary proa indeed. While its lee side was per- pendicular as a wall, its windward one, to which there was an outrigger attached, resembled that of a flat-bottomed boat ; head and stern were exactly alike, so as to fit each for per- forming in turn the part of either ; a movable yard, which supported the sail, had to be shifted towards the end convert- ed into the stern for the time, at each tack ; while the sail it- self—a most uncouth-looking thing — formed a scalene trian- gle. Such was the vessel — some eighteen inches long or so — with which I startled from their propriety the mimic navi- gators of a horse-pond in the neighborhood, — all very master- ly critics in all sorts of barks and barges known on the Scot- tish coast. According to Campbell, " 'Twas a thing beyond Description wretched ; such a wherry. Perhaps, near ventured on a pond, Or crossed a ferry." And well did my fellows appreciate its extreme ludicrousness. It was certainly rash to " venture" it on this especial " pond ;" 88 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; for, greatly to the damage of the rigging, it was fairly pelted off, and I was sent to test elsewhere its sailing qualities, which were, as I ascertained, not very remarkable after all. And thus, after a manner so unworthy, were my essays in strategy and bark-building received by a censorious age, that judged ere it knew. Were I sentimental, which luckily I am not, I might well exclaim, in the very vein of Rousseau, Alas ! it has been ever the misfortune of my life that, save by a few friends, I have never been understood ! I was evidently out-Francieing Francie ; and the parents of my young friend, who saw that I had acquired considerable in- fluence over him, and were afraid lest I should make another Francie of him, had become naturally enough desirous to break off our intimacy, when there occurred an unlucky acci- dent, which served materially to assist them in the design. My friend's father was the master of a large trading smack, which in war times carried a few twelve-pounders, and was furnished with a small magazine of powder and shot ; and my friend having secured for himself from the general stock, through the connivance of the ship-boy, an entire cannon car- tridge, containing some two or three pounds of gunpowder, I was, of course, let into the secret, and invited to share in the sport and the spoil. We had a glorious day together in his mother's garden ; never before did such magnificent volcanoes break forth out of mole-hills, or were plots of daisies and vio- lets so ruthlessly scorched and torn by the explosion of deep- laid mines ; and though a few mishaps did happen to over- forward fingers, and to eye-brows that were in the way, our amusements passed off innoculously on the whole, and even- ing saw nearly the half of our precious store unexhausted. It was garnered up by my friend in an unsuspected corner of the garret in which he slept, and would have been safe, had he iOt been seized, when going to bed, with a yearning desire to survey his treasure by candle-light ; when an unlucky spark from the flame exploded the whole. He was so sadly burnt about the face and eyes as to be blind for several days after ; but, amid smoke and confusion, he gallantly bolted his garret- 89 door, and, while the inmates of the household, startled by the shock and the noise, came rushing up stairs, sturdily refused to let any of them in. Volumes of gunpowder reek issued from every crack and cranny, and his mother and sisters were prodigiously alarmed. At length, however, he capitulated, — terms unknown ; and I next morning heard with horror and dismay of the accident. It had been matter of agreement be- tween us on the previous day, mainly in order to screen the fine fellow of a ship-boy, that I should be regarded as th owner of the powder ; but here was a consequence on which I had not calculated ; and the strong desire to see my poor friend was dashed by the dread of being held responsible by his parents and sisters for the accident. And so, more than a week elapsed ere I could muster up courage enough to visit him. I was coldly received by his mother, and, what vexed me to the heart, coldly received by himself; and suspecting that he had been making an ungenerous use of our late treaty, I took leave in high dudgeon, and came away. My suspi- cions, however, wronged him ; he had stoutly denied, as I af- terwards learned, that I had any share in the powder ; but his friends deeming the opportunity a good one for breaking with me, had compelled hirn, very unwillingly, and after much re- sistance, to give me up. And from this period more than two years elapsed, though our hearts beat quick and high every time we accidentally met, ere we exchanged a single word. On one occasion, however, shortly after the accident, we did exchange letters. I wrote to him from the school-form, when, of course, I ought to have been engaged with my tasks, a stately epistle, in the style of the billets in the " Female Quixote," which began, I remember, as follows : — " I once thought I had a friend whom I could rely upon ; but experience tells me he was only nominal. For, had he been a real friend, no accident could have interfered with, or arbi- trary command annihilated his affection," &c, &c. As I was rather an indifferent scribe at the time, one of the lads known as the " copperplate writers" of the class, made for me a fair copy of my lucubration, full of all manner of elegant dashes, 90 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS J and n which the spelling of every word was scrupulously test- ed by the dictionary. And in due course I received a care- fully engrossed note in reply, of which the manual portion was performed by my old companion, but the composition, as he afterwards told me, elaborated by some one else. He as- sured me he was still my friend, but that there was " certain circumstances" which would prevent us from meeting for the future on our old terms. We were, however, destined to meet pretty often in the future, notwithstanding ; and narrow- ly missed going to the bottom together many years after, in the Floating Manse, grown infirm in her nether parts at the time, when he was the outed minister of Small Isles, and 1 editor of the Witness newspaper. I had a maternal aunt long settled in the Highlands of Sutherland, who was so much older than her sister, my moth- er, that when nursing her oldest boy, she had, when on a visit to the low country, assisted also in nursing her. The boy had shot up into a very clever lad, who, having gone to seek his fortune in the south, rose, through the several degrees of clerk- ship in a mercantile firm, to be the head of a commercial house of his own, which, though ultimately unsuccessful, seemed for some four or five years to be in a fair way of thriving. For about three of these, the portion of the profit which fell to my cousin's share did not fall short of fifteen hundred pounds per annum ; aud on visiting his parents in their Highland home in the heyday of his prosperity, after an absence of years, it was found that he had a great many friends in his native district on whom he had not calculated, and of a class that had not been greatly in the habit of visiting his mother's cottage, but who now came to lunch, and dine, and take their wine with him, and who seemed to value and admire him very much. My a int, who was little accustomed to receive high company, and found herself, like Martha of old, "cumbered about much serving,''' urgently besought my mother, who was young and active at the time, to visit and assist her ; and, infinitely to my delight, 1 was included in the invitation. The place was not much above thirty miles from Cromarty ; but then it was in OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 91 the true Highlands, which I had never before seen, save on the distant horizon ; and, to a boy who had to walk all the way. even thirty miles, in an age when railways were not, and ere even mail gigs had penetrated so far, represented a jour- ney of no inconsiderable distance. My mother, though rather a delicate-looking woman, walked remarkable well ; and early on the evening of the second day, we reached together my aunt's cottage, in the ancient Barony of Gruids. It was a low, long, dingy edifice of turf, four or five rooms in length, but only one in height, that, lying along a gentle acclivity, somewhat resembled at a distance a huge black snail creeping up the bill. As the lower apartment was occupied by my uncle's half-dozen milk-cows, the declination of the floor, con- sequent on the nature of the site, proved of signal importance, from the free drainage which it secured ; the second apart- ment, reckoning upwards, which w r as of considerable size, formed the sitting-room of the family, and had, in the old Highland style, its fire full in the middle of the floor, without back or sides ; so that, like a bonfire kindled in the open air, all the inmates could sit around it in a w r ide circle, — the wo- men invariably ranged on the one side, and the men on the other ; the apartment beyond was partitioned into small and very dark bed rooms : while, further on still, there was a closet with a little window in it, which was assigned to my mother and me; and beyond all lay what was emphatically "the room," as it was built of stone, and had both window and chimney, with chairs, and table, and chest of drawers, a large box-bed, and a small but well-filled bookcase. And "the room" was, of course, for the time, my cousin the merchant's apartment, his dormitory at night, and the hospitable refec- tory in which he entertained his friends by day. My aunt's family was one of solid worth. Her husband, — a compactly-built, stout-limbed, elderly Highlander, rather be- low the middle size, of grave and somewhat melancholy aspect, but in reality of a temperament rather cheerful than otherwise, — had been somewhat wild in his young days. He had been a good shot and a skilful angler, and had danced at bridals, 92 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; and, as was common in the Highlands at the time, at lyke- wakes ; nay, on one occasion he had succeeded in inducing a new-made widow to take the floor in a Strathspey, beside her husband's corpse, when every one else had foiled to bring her up, by roguishly remarking, in her hearing, that whoever else might have refused to dance at poor Donald's death-wake, he little thought it would have been her. But a great change had passed over him, and he was now a staid, thoughtful, God- fearing man, much respected in the Barony for honest worth and quiet, unobtrusive consistency of character. His wife had been brought, at an early age, under the influence of Donald Roy's ring, and had, like her mother, been the means of introducing the vitalities of religion into her household They had two other sons besides the merchant, — both well- built, robust men, somewhat taller than their father, and of such character, that one of my Cromarty cousins, in making out his way, by dint of frequent and sedulous inquiry, to their dwelling, found the general verdict of the district embodied in the very bad English of a poor old woman, who, after doing her best to direct him, certified her knowledge of the house- hold by remarking, " It's a goot mistress ; — it's a goot maister ; — it's a goot, goot two lads." The elder of the two brothers superintended, and partly wrought, his father's little farm ; for the father himself found employment enough in acting as a sort of humble factor for the proprietor of the Barony, who lived at a distance, and had no dwelling upon the land. The younger was a mason and slater, and was usually employed, in the working seasons, at a distance ; but in winter, and on this occasion, for a few weeks during the visit of his brother the merchant, he resided with his father. Both were men of marked individuality of character. The elder, Hugh, was an ingenious, self-taught mechanic, who used, in the long white* evenings, to fashion a number of curious little articles by the fireside, — among the rest, Highland snuff-mulls, with which he supplied all his friends ; and he was at this time engaged in building for his father a Highland barn, and, to vary the work, tibricating for him a Highland plough. The younger, George, 93 who had wrought for a few years at his trade in the south of Scotland, war/ a great reader, wrote very tolerable prose, and verse which, f not poetry, to which he made no pretensions, was at least quaintly-turned rhyme. He had, besides, a com- petent knowledge of geometry, and w r as skilled in architec- tural drawing ; and — strange accomplishment for a Celt — he was an aelept in the noble science of self-defence. But George never sought out quarrels ; and such was his amount of bone and muscle, and such the expression of manly resolution stamped on his countenance, that they never came in his way unsought. At the close of the day, when the members of the house- hold had assembled in a w r ide circle round the fire, my uncle " took the Book," and I witnessed, for the first time, family worship conducted in Gaelic. There was, I found, an interest- ing peculiarity in one portion of the services which he con- ducted. He was, as I have said, an elderly man, and had worshipped in his family ere Dr. Stewart's Gaelic Translation of the Scriptures had been introduced into the country ; and as he possessed in those days only the English Bible, while his domestics understood only Gaelic, he had to acquire the art, not uncommon in Sutherland at the time, of translating the English chapter for them, as he read, into their native tongue ; and this he had learned to do with such ready fluency, that no one could have guessed it to be other than a Gaelic work from which he was reading. Nor had the introduction of Dr. Stewart's Translation rendered the practice obsolete in his household. His Gaelic w T as Sutherlandshire Gaelic, w r hereas that of Dr. Stewart was Argyleshire Gaelic. His family un- derstood his rendering better, in consequence, than that of the Doctor; and so he continued to translate from his English Bible ad aiierturwm libri, many years after the Gaelic edition lad been spread over the country. The concluding evening prayer was one of great solemnity and unction. I was un- acquainted with the language in which it was couched; but it was impossible to avoid being struck, notwithstanding, with ; ts wrestling earnestness and fervor. The man who poured 94 it fortn evidently believed there was an unseen ear open tj> it, and an all-seeing presence in the place, before whom every se- cret thought lay exposed. The entire scene was a deeply im- pressive one ; and when I saw, in witnessing the celebration of High Mass in a Popish cathedral many years after, the altai suddenly enveloped in a dim and picturesque obscurity, amid which the curling smoke of the incense ascended, and heard the musically-modulated prayer sounding in the distance from . within the screen, my thoughts reverted to the rude Highland \ cottage, where, amid solemnities not theatric, the red umbry light of the fire fell with uncertain glimmer upon dark walls, and bare black rafters, and kneeling forms, and a pale ex- panse of dense smoke, that, filling the upper portion of the roof, overhung the floor like a ceiling, and there arose amid the gloom the sounds of prayer truly God-directed, and poured out from the depths of the heart ; and I felt that the stoled priest of the cathedral was merely an artist, though a skilful one, but that in the " priest and father " of the cottage there were the truth and reality from which the artist drew. No bolt was drawn across the outer door as we retired for the night. The philosophic Biot, when employed with his experiments on the seconds pendulum, resided for several months in one of the smaller Shetland islands ; and, fresh from the troubles of France, — his imagination bearing about with it, if I may so speak, the stains of the guillotine, — the state of trustful secu- rity in which he found the simple inhabitants filled him with astonishment. " Here, during the twenty-five years in which Europe has been devouring herself," he exclaimed, " the door of the house I inhabit has remained open day and night." The interior of Sutherland was at the time of my visit in a simi- lar condition. The door of my uncle's cottage, unfurnished with lock or bar, opened, like that of the hermit in the ballad, with a latch ; but, unlike that of the hermit, it was not be- cause there were no stores within to demand the care of the master, but because at that comparatively recent period the crime of theft was unknown in the district. I rose early next morning, when the dew w r as yet heavy on 95 grass and lichen, curious to explore a locality so new to me. The tract, though a primary one, forms one of the tamer gneiss districts of Scotland ; and I found the nearer hills compara- tively low and confluent, and the broad valley in which lay my uncle's cottage, flat, open, and unpromising. Still there were a few points to engage me ; and the more I attracted myself to them, the more did their interest grow. The western slopes of the valley are mottled by grassy tomhans, — the mo raines of some ancient glacier, around and over which theie rose, at this period, a low widely-spreading wood of birch, hazel, and mountain ash, — of hazel, with its nuts fast filling at the time, and of mountain ash, with its berries glowing bright in orange and scarlet. In looking adown the hollow, a group of the green tomhans might be seen relieved against the blue hills of Ross ; in looking upwards, a solitary birch-cover- ed hillock of a similar origin, but larger proportions, stood strongly out against the calm waters of Loch Shin and the pur- ple peaks of the distant Ben-Hope. In the bottom of the valley, close beside my uncle's cottage, I marked several low swellings of the rock beneath, rising above the general level ; and, ranged along these, there were groupes of what seemed to be huge Doulder stones, save that they were less rounded and water- worn than ordinary boulders, and were, what groupes of boul- ders rarely are, all of one quality. And on examination I as- certained that some of their number, which stood up like broken obelisks, tall, and comparatively narrow of base, and all hoary with moss and lichen, were actually still connected with the mass of rock below. They were the wasted upper portions of vast dikes and veins of a gray, large-grained sienite, that traverse the fundamental gneiss of the valley, and which I found veined, in turn, by threads and seams of a white quartz, abounding in drusy cavities, thickly lined along their sides with sprig crystals. Never had I seen such lovely crys- tals on the shores of Cromarty, or anywhere else. They were clear and transparent as the purest spring water, furnished each with six sides, and sharpened atop into six facets. Bor- rowing one of Cousin George's hammers, I soon filled a little 96 box with these gems, which even my mother and aunt ^ere content to admire, as what of old used, they said, to be called Bristol diamonds, and set in silver brooches and sleeve-buttons. Further, within less than a hundred yards of the cottage, ] found a lively little stream, brown, but clear as a cairngorm of the purest water, and abounding, as I soon ascertained, in trout, lively and little like itself, and gaily speckled with jcarlet. It winded through a flat, dank meadow, never dis- urbed by the plough ; for it had been a buryipg-ground of old, and flat undressed stones lay thick amid the rank grass. And in the lower corner, where the old turf-wall had sunk into an inconspicuous mound, there stood a mighty tree, all solitary, for its fellows had long before disappeared, and so hollow hearted in its corrupt old age, that, though it still threw out every season a mighty expanse of foliage, I was able to creep into a little chamber in its trunk, from which I could look out through circular openings where boughs once had been, and listen, when a sudden shower came sweeping down the glen, to the pattering of the rain-drops amid the leaves. The valley of the Gruids was perhaps not one of the finest or most beau- tiful of Highland valleys, but it was a very admirable place after all ; and amid its woods, and its rocks, and its tomhans, and at the side of its little trouting stream, the weeks passed delightfully away. My cousin William, the merchant, had, as I have said, many guests ; but they were all too grand to take any notice of me. There was, however, one delightful man, who was said to know a great deal about rocks and stones, that, having heard of my fine large crystals, desired to see both them and the boy who had found them ; and I was admitted to hear him talk about granites, and marbles, and metallic veins, and the gems that lie hid among the mountains in nooks and cran nies. I am afraid I would not now deem him a very accom- plished mineralogist : I remember enough of his conversation to conclude that he knew but little, and that little not very correctly ; but not before Werner or Hutt( in could I have bowed down with a profound reverence. He spoke of the OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 97 marbles of Assynt, — of the petrifactions of Helmsdale and Brora, — of shells and plants embedded in solid rocks, and of forest trees converted into stone ; and my ears drank in knowl- edge eagerly, as those of the Queen of Sheba of old when she listened to Solomon. But all too soon did the conversation change. My cousin was mighty in Gaelic etymology, and so was the mineralogist ; and while my cousin held that the name of the Barony of Gruids was derived from the great hollow tree, the mineralogist was quite as certain that it was derived from its sienite, or, as he termed it, its granite, which re- sembled, he remarked, from the whiteness of its feldspar, a piece of curd. Gruids, said the one, means the place of the great tree ; Gruids, said the other, means the place of the cur- dled stone. I do not remember how they settled the contro- versy ; but it terminated, by an easy transition, in a discussion respecting the authenticity of Ossian, — a subject on which they were both perfectly agreed. There could exist no manner of doubt regarding the fact that the poems given to the world by Macpherson had been sung in the Highlands by Ossian, the son of Fingal, more than fourteen hundred years before. My cousin was a devoted member of the Highland Society ; and the Highland Society, in these days, was very much engaged in ascertaining the right cut of the philabeg, and in determin- ing the chronology and true sequence of events in the Ossianic age. Happiness perfect and entire is, it is said, not to be enjoyed in this sublunary state ; and even in the Gruids, where there was so much to be seen, heard, and found out, and where I was separated by more than thirty miles from my Latin, — for I had brought none of it from home with me, — this same Ossianic controversy rose like a Highland fog on my horizon, to chill and darken my hours of enjoyment. My cousin possessed everything that had been written on the subject, including a considerable amount of manuscript of his own composition ; and as Uncle James had inspired him with the belief that 1 could master anything to which in good earnest I set my mind, he had determined that it should be no fault of his if 1 did 98 not become mighty in the controversy regarding the authen- ticity of Ossian. This was awful. I liked Blair's Disserta- tion well enough, nor did I greatly quarrel with that of Karnes ; and as for Sir Walter's critique in the Edinburgh, on the opposite side, I thought it not only thoroughly sensible, but, as it furnished me with arguments against the others, deeply interesting to boot. But there succeeded a vast >cean of dissertation, emitted by Highland gentlemen anc fheir friends, as the dragon in the Apocalypse emitted tin great flood which the earth swallowed up ; and, when once fairly embarked upon it I could see no shore and find no bot- tom. And so at length, though very unwillingly, — for my cousin was very kind, — I fairly mutinied and struck work, just as he had began to propose that, after mastering the au- thenticity controversy, I should set myself to acquire Gaelic, in order that I might be able to read Ossian in the original. My cousin was not well pleased ; but I did not choose to ag- gravate the case by giving expression to the suspicion which, instead of lessening, has rather grown upon me since, that as I possessed an English copy of the poems, I had read the true Ossian in the original already. With Cousin George, how- ever, who, though strong on the authenticity side, liked a joke rather better than he did Ossian, I was more free ; and to him I ventured to designate his brother's fine Gaelic copy of the poems, with a superb head of the ancient bard affixed, as " The Poems of Ossian in Gaelic, translated from the orig- inal English by their author." George looked grim, and called me infidel, and then laughed, and said he would tell his brother. But he didn't ; and as I really liked the poems, especially " Temora" and some of the smaller pieces, and could read them with more real pleasure than the greater part of the Highlanders who believed in them, I did not wholly lose credi with my cousin the merchant. He even promised to present me with a finely-bound edition of the " Elegant Extracts," in three bulky octavo volumes, whenever I should have gained my first prize at College ; but I unluckily failed to qualify myself for the gift ; and my copy of the " Extracts" I had to 99 Dure) ase for myself ten years after, at a book-stall, when working in the neighborhood of Edinburgh as a journeyman mason. It is not every day one meets with so genuine a Highlander as my cousin the merchant ; and, though he failed to inspire me with all his own Ossianic faith and zeal, there were some of the little old Celtic practices which he resuscitated pro tempore in his father's household, that I learned to like very much. He restored the genuine Highland breakfast ; and, after hours spent in busy exploration outside, I found I could as thorough- ly admire the groaning table, with its cheese, and its trout, and its cold meat, as even the immortal Lexicographer himself. Some of the dishes, too, which he received were at least curi- ous. There was a supply of gradderi-me&l prepared, — L c. grain dried in a pot over the fire, and then coarsely ground in a handmill, — which made cakes that, when they had hunger for their sauce, could be eaten ; and on more than one occa- sion I shared in a not unpalatable sort of blood-pudding, en- riched with butter, and well seasoned with pepper and salt, the main ingredient of which was derived, through a judicious use of the lancet, from the yeld cattle of the farm. The prac- tice w r as an ancient, and by no means unphilosophical one. In summer and early autumn there is plenty of grass in the High- lands ; but, of old at least, there used to be very little grain in it before the beginning of October and as the cattle could, in consequence, provide themselves with a competent supply of blood from the grass, when their masters, who could not eat crass, and had little else that they could eat, were able to ac- quire very little, it was opportunely discovered that by making a division in this way of the all-essential fluid, accumulated as a common stock, the circumstances of the cattle and their owners could be in some degree equalized. With these pecu l.iarly Highland dishes there mingled others not less genuine, — now and then a salmon from the river, and a haunch of venison from the hill-side, — which I relished better still ; and if all Highlanders live but as well in the present day as I did 100 during my stay with my aunt and cousins, they would be rather unreasonable were they greatly to complain. There were some of the other Highland restorations effected by my cousin that pleased me much. He occasionally gather- ed at night around the central Ha' fire a circle of the elderly men of the neighborhood, to repeat long-derived narratives of the old clan feuds of the district, and wild Fingalian legends ; and though, of course, ignorant of the language in which the stories were conveyed, by taking my seat beside Cousin George, and getting him to translate for me in an under tone, as the narratives went on, I contrived to carry away with me at least as much of the clan stories and the legends as I ever after found use for. The clan stories were waxing at the time rather dim and uncertain in Sutherland. The county, through the influence of its good Earls and its godly Lords Reay, had been early converted to Protestantism ; and its people had in consequence ceased to take liberties with the throats and cattle of their neighbors, about a hundred years earlier than in any other part of the Scotch Highlands. And as for the Fin- galian legends, they were, I found, very wild legends indeed. Some of them immortalized wonderful hunters, who had ex- cited the love of Fingal's lady, and whom her angry and jeal- ous husband had sent out to hunt monstrous wild boars with poisonous bristles on their backs, — secure in this way of get- ting rid of them. And some of them embalmed the misdeeds of spiritless diminutive Fions, not very much above fifteen feet in height, who, unlike their more active companions, could not leap across the Cromarty or Dornoch Friths on their spears, and who, as was natural, were despised by the women of the tribe very much. The pieces of fine sentiment and brilliant description discovered by Macpherson seemed never to have found their way into this northern district. But, told in fluent Gaelic, in the great " Ha'," the wild legends served every ne- cessary purpose equally well. The " Ha' " in the autumn nights, as the days shortened and the frosts set in, was a genial place ; and so attached was my cousin to its distinctive prin- OK, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 10 1 ciple, — the fire in the midst, — as handed down from the " days of other years," that in the plan of a new two-storied house for his father, which he had procured from a London archi- tect, one of the nethor rooms was actually designed in the cir- cular form ; and a hearth like a millstone, placed in the centre, represented the place of the fire. But there was, as I re- marked to Cousin George, no corresponding central hole in the room above, through which to let up the smoke ; and I ques tioned whether a nicely-plastered apartment, round as a band box, with a fire in the middle, like the sun in the centre of an Orrery, would have been quite like anything ever seen in the Highlands before. The plan, however, was not destined to encounter criticism, or give trouble in the execution of it. On Sabbaths my cousin and his two brothers attended the parish church, attired in the full Highland dress ; and three handsome, well-formed men they were ; but my aunt, though mayhap not quite without the mother's pride, did not greatly relish the exhibition ; and oftener than once I heard her say so to her sister my mother ; though she, smitten by the gallant appearance of her nephews, seemed inclined rather to take the opposite side. My uncle, on the other hand, said nothing either for or against the display. He had been a keen High- lander in his younger days ; and when the inhibition against wearing tartan and the philabeg had been virtually removed, in consideration of the achievements of the " hardy and daunt- less men" who, according to Chatham, conquered for England " in every quarter of the globe," he had celebrated the event in a merry-making, at which the dance was kept up from night till morning ; but though he retained, I suspect, his old partialities, he was now a sobered man ; and when I ven- tured to ask him, on one occasion, why he too did not get a Sunday kilt, which, by the way, he would " have set" notwith- standing his years, as well as any of his sons, he merely re- plied with a quiet " No, no ; there's no fool like an old fool." 102 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS ; CHAPTER VI "When they sawe the darksome nicht, They sat them downe and cryed." Babes in the Wood. 1 spent the holidays of two other autumns in this delightful Highland valley. On the second, as on the first occasion, I had accompanied my mother, specially invited ; but the third journey was an unsanctioned undertaking of my own and a Cromarty cousin, my contemporary, to whom, as he had never travelled the way, I had to act as protector and guide. I reached my aunt's cottage without mishap or adventure of any kind ; but found, that during the twelvemonth that had just elapsed, great change had taken place in the circumstances of the household. My cousin George who had married in the interim, had gone to reside in a cottage of his own ; and I soon ascertained that my cousin William, who had been for several months resident with his father, had not nearly so many visitors as before ; nor did presents of salmon and haunches of veni- son come at all so often the way. Immediately after the final discomfiture of Napoleon, an extensive course of speculation n which he had ventured to engage had turned out so ill, that, nstead of making him a fortune, as at first seemed probable, t had landed him in the Gazette ; and he was now tiding over he difficulties of a time of settlement, six hundred miles from he scene of disaster, in the hope of being soon enabled to be- OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 103 gin the world anew. He bore his losses with quiet magna- nimity ; and I learned to know and like him better during his period of eclipse than in the previous time, when summer friends had fluttered around him by scores. He was a gener- ous, warm-hearted man, who felt, with the force of an im- planted instinct not vouchsafed to all, that it is more blessed to give than to receive ; and it was doubtless a wise provision of nature, and worthy, in this point of view, the special atten- ' tion of moralists and philosophers, that his old associates, the *rand gentlemen, did not now often come his way ; seeing that his inability any longer to give would have cost him, in the circumstances, great pain. I was much with my cousin George in his new dwelling. It was one of the most delightful of Highland cottages, and George was happy in it, far above the average lot of humanity, with his young wife. He had dared, in opposition to the gen- eral voice of the district, to build it half-way up the slope of a beautiful Tomhan, that, waving with birch from base to summit, rose regular as a pyramid from the bottom of the val- ley, and commanded a wide view of Loch Shin on the one hand, with the moors and mountains that lie beyond ; and overlooked, on the other, with all the richer portions of the Barony of Gruids, the church and picturesque hamlet of Lairg. Half-hidden by the graceful birchen trees that sprang up thick around, with their silvery boles and light foliage, it was rather a nest than a house ; and George, emancipated, by his reading, and his residence for a time in the south, from at least the wilder beliefs of the locality, failed to suffer, as had been predicted, for his temerity ; as the " good people," who, much to their credit, had made choice of the place for themselves long before, never, to his knowledge, paid him a visit. He had brought his share of the family library with nim ; and it was a large share. He had mathematical instru ments, too, and a color-box, and the tools of his profession; in especial, large hammers fitted to break great stones ; and 1 was generously made free of them all, — bcoks, instruments, color-box, and hammers. His cottage, too, commanded, from 104 its situation, a delightful variety of most interesting objects. It had all the advantages of my uncle's domicile, and a great many more. The nearer shores of Loch Shin were scarce half a mile away ; and there was a low long promontory which shot out into the lake, that was covered at that time by an ancient wood of doddered time-worn trees, and bore amid its outer solitudes, where the waters circled round its terminal apex, one of those towers of hoary eld, memorials, mayhap, of the primeval stone- period in our island, to which the circular erections of Glenelg and Dornadilla belong. It was formed of undressed stones of vast size, uncemented by mortar ; and through the thick walls ran winding passages, — the only covered portions of the build- ing, for the inner area had never been furnished with a roof, — in which, when a sudden shower descended, the loiterer amid the ruins could find shelter. It was a fascinating place to a curious boy. Some of the old trees had become mere whitened skeletons, that stretched forth their blasted arms to the sky, and had so slight a hold of the soil, that I have overthrown them with a delightful crash, by merely running against them ; the heath rose thick beneath, and it was a source of fearful joy to know that it harbored snakes full three feet long; and though the loch itself is by no means one of our finer High- land lochs, it furnished, to at least my eye at this time, a de- lightful prospect in still October mornings, when the light gos- samer went sailing about in white filmy threads, and birch and hazel, glorified by decay, served to embroider with gold the brown hill-sides which, standing up on either hand in their long vista of more than twenty miles, form the barriers of the lake ; and when the sun, still struggling with a blue diluted haze, ell delicately on the smooth surface, or twinkled for a moment >n the silvery coats of the little trout, as they sprang a few inches into the air, and then broke the water into a series of concentric rings in their descent. When I last passed the way, both the old wood and the old tower were gone ; and for the latter, which, though much a ruin, might have survived for ages, I found only a lor.g extent of dry-stone dike, and 105 the wide ring formed by the old foundation-stones, which had proved too massive to be removed. A greatly more entire erection of the same age and style, known of old as Dunalis- cag, — which stood on the Ross-shire side of the Dornoch Frith, and within whose walls, forming, as it did, a sort of half-way stage, I used, on these Sutherlandshire journeys, to eat my piece of cake with a double relish, — I found, on last passing the way, similarly represented. Its gray venerable walls, and dark winding passages of many steps, — even the huge pear-shaped linte 7 , which had stretched over its little door, and which, according to tradition, a great Fingalian lady had once thrown across the Dornoch Frith from off the point of her spindle, — had all disappeared, and I saw instead, only a dry-stone wall. The men of the present generation do certain- ly live in a most enlightened age, — an age in which every trace of the barbarism of our early ancestors is fast disappearing ; and were we but more zealous in immortalizing the public benefactors who efface such dark memorials of the past as the tower of Dunaliscag and the promontory of Loch Shin, it would be, doubtless, an encouragement to others to speed us yet further on in the march of improvement. It seems scarce fair that the enlightened destroyers of Arthur's Oven, or of the bas-relief known as Robin of Redesdale, or of the Town-cross of Edinburgh, should enjoy all the celebrity attendant on such acts, while the equally deserving iconoclasts of Dunaliscag and the tower of Loch Shin should be suffered to die without their fame. I remember spending one singularly delightful morning with Cousin George beside the ancient tower. He pointed out to me, amid the heath, several plants to which the old High landers used to attach occult virtues, — plants that disenchant- ed bewitched cattle, not by their administration as medicines to the sick animals, but by bringing them in contact, as charms, with the injured milk ; and plants which were used as phil- ters either for procuring love or exciting hatred. It was, ho showed me, the root of a species of orchis that was employed in making the philters. While most of the radical litres of 106 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTEES ; the plant retain the ordinary cylindrical form, two of their number are usually found developed into starchy tubercles ; but, belonging apparently to different seasons, one of the two is of a dark color, and of such gravity that it sinks in water ; while the other is light-colored, and floats. And a powder made of the light-colored tubercle formed the main ingre- dient, said my cousin, in the love philter ; while a powder made of the dark-colored one excited, it was held, only an- tipathy and dislike. And then George would speculate on the origin of a belief which could, as h^ said, neither be sug gested by reason nor tested by experience. Living, however, among a people with whom beliefs of this kind were still vital and influential, he did not wholly escape their influence ; and I saw him in one instance administer to an ailing cow a little live trout, simply because the traditions of the district assured him that a trout swallowed alive by the creature was the only specific in the case. Some of his Highland stories were very curious. He communicated to me, for example, beside the broken tower, a tradition illustrative of the Celtic theory of dreaming, of which I have since often thought. Two young men had been spending the early portion of a warm summer day in exactly such a scene as that in which he communicated the anecdote. There was an ancient ruin beside them, sepa- rated, however, from the mossy bank on which they sat, by a slender runnel, across which there lay, immediately over a miniature cascade, a few withered grass stalks. Overcome by the heat of the day, one of the young men fell asleep ; his companion watched drowsily beside him ; when all at once the watcher was aroused to attention by seeing a little indistinct form, scarce larger than a humble-bee, issue from the mouth of the sleeping man, and, leaping upon the moss, move down wards to the runnel, which it crossed along the withered gras; stalks, and then disappeared amid the interstices of the ruin. Alarmed b) what he saw, the watcher hastily shook his com- panion by the shoulder, and awoke him ; though, with all his haste, the little cloud-like creature, still more rapid in its move- ments, issued from the interstice into which it had gone, and, OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 107 flying across the runnel, instead of creeping along the grass stalks and over the sward, as before, it re-entered the mouth of the sleeper, just as he was in the act of awakening. " What is the matter with you ?" said the watcher, greatly alarmed. " What ails you ?" " Nothing ails me," replied the other ; " but you have robbed me of a most delightful dream. I dreamed I was walking through a fine, rich country, and came at length to the shores of a noble river ; and, just where th cl' ar water went thundering down a precipice, there was bridge all of silver, which I crossed ; and then, entering a noble palace on the opposite side, I saw great heaps of gold and jewels; and I was just going to load myself with treas- ure, when you rudely awoke me, and I lost all." I know not what the asserters of the clairvoyant faculty may think of the story ; but I rather believe I have occasionally seen them make use of anecdotes that did not rest on evidence a great deal more solid than the Highland legend, and that illustrated not much more clearly the philosophy of the phenomena with which they profess to deal. Of all my cousins, Cousin George was the one whose pur- suits most nearly resembled my own, and in whose society I most delighted to share. He did sometimes borrow a day from his work, even after his marriage ; but then, according to the poet, it was "The love he bore to science waa iu fault." The borrowed day was always spent in transferring to paper some architectural design, or in working out some mathemat- ical problem, or in rendering some piece of Gaelic verse into English, or some piece of English prose into Gaelic ; and as he was a steady, careful man, the appropriated day was never seriously missed. The winter, too, was all his own, for in those northern districts, masons are never employed from a little after Hallow-day, till the second, or even third month of spring, — a circumstance which I carefully noted at this time in its bearing on the amusements of my cousin, and which afterwards weighed not a little with me when I came to make 103 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; choice of a profession for myself. And George's winters were always ingeniously spent. He had a great command of Gaelic, and a very tolerable command of English; and so a transla- tion of Bunyan's " Visions of Heaven and Hell," which he published several years subsequent to this period, was not only well received by his country folk of Sutherland and Ross, but. was said by competent judges to be really a not inadequate rendering of the meaning and spirit of the noble old tinker of Elstow. I of course could be no authority respecting the merits of a translation, the language of which I did not under- stand ; but living much amid the literature of a time when almost every volume, whether the Virgil of a Dryden or the Meditations of a Hervey, was heralded by its sets of compli- mentary verses, and having a deep interest in whatever Cousin. George undertook and performed, I addressed to him in the old style, a few introductory stanzas, which, to indulge me in the inexpressible luxury of seeing myself in print fur the first time, he benevolently threw into type. They survive to re- mind me that my cousin's belief in Ossian did exert some little influence over my phraseology when I addressed myself to him, and that, with the rashness natural to immature youth, \ had at this time the temerity to term myself " poet.' Yes, oft I've said, as oft I've seen The men who dwell its hills among, That Morven's land has ever been A land of valor, worth, and song. But Ignorance, of darkness dire, Has o'er that land a mantle spread ; And all untun'd and rude the lyre That sounds beneath its gloomy shade. With muse of calm, untiring wing, O, be it thine, my friend, to show The Celtic swain how Saxons sing Of Hell's dire gloom and Heaven's glow! So shall the meed of fame be thine, The glistening bay-wreath green and gay ; Thy poet, too, though weak his line, Shall frame for thee th' approving lay. 0R ; THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. 109 Longing for some profession in which his proper work would give exercise to the faculties which he most delighted to cul- tivate, my cousin resolved on becoming candidate for a Gaelic Society school, — a poor enough sort of office then, as now ; but which, by investing a little money in cattle, by tilling a little croft, and by now and then emitting from the press a Gaelic translation, might, he thought, be rendered sufficiently reinunerative to supply the very moderate wants of himself and his little family. And so he set out for Edinburgh, amply furnished with testimonials that meant more in his case than testimonials usually mean, to stand an examination before a Committee of the Gaelic School Society. Unluckily for his success, however, instead of bringing with him his ordinary Sabbath-day suit of dark brown and blue, (the kilt had been assumed for but a few weeks, to please his brother William,) he had provided himself with a suit of tartan, as at once cheap and respectable, and appeared before the Committee, — if not in the garb, in at least the many-colored hues of his clan, — a robust, manly Highlander, apparently as well suited to enact the part of color-serjeant to the Forty-Second, as to teach children their letters. A grave member of the Society, at that time high in repute for sanctity of character, but who afterwards becoming righteous overmuch, w r as loosened from nis charge, and straightway, spurning the ground, rose into an Irvingite angel, came at once to the conclusion that no such type of man, encased in clan-tartan, could possibly have the root of the matter in him ; and so he determined that Cousin George should be cast in the examination. But then, as it could not be alleged with any decency that my cousin was inadmissible on the score of his having too much tartan, it was agreed that he should be declared inadmissible on the score of his having too little Gaelic. And, of course, at this resul 4 - the examinators arrived ; and George, ultimately to his ad van tage, was cast accordingly. I still remember the astonish ment evinced by a worthy catechist of the north, — himself a Gaelic teacher, — on being told how my cousin had fared. " George Munro not allowed to pass," he said, " for want of 110 MY right Gaelic ! Why, he has more right Gaelic to his own self than all the Society's teachers in this corner of Scotland put together. They are the cvriousest people, some of these good gentlemen of the Edinburgh Committees, that I ever heard of, they're just like our country lawyers." It would, however, be far from fair to regard this transaction, which took place, I may mention, so late as the year 1829, as a specimen of the actings of either civic societies or country lawyers. George's chief examinator on the occasion was the minister of the Gaelic chapel of the place, at that time one of the Society's Committee for the year ; and, not being a remarkably scru- pulous man, he seems to have stretched a point or two, in com- pliance with the pious wishes and occult judgment of the Society's Secretary. But the anecdote is not without its lesson. When devout W alter Taits set themselves ingeniously to ma- noeuvre with the purest of intentions, and for what they deem the best of purposes, — when, founding their real grounds of objection on one set of appearances, they found their ostensi- ble grounds of objection on another and entirely different set — they are always exposed to the signal danger of — getting indevout Duncan M'Caigs to assist them. Only two years from the period of my cousin's examination before the Soci- ety, his reverend examinator received at the bar of the High Court of Justiciary, in the character of a thief convicted of eleven several acts of stealing, sentence of transportation for fourteen years. I had several interesting excursions with my cousin William. We found ourselves one evening — on our way home from a mineral spring which he had discovered among the hills — in a little lonely valley, which opened transversely into that of the Gruids, and which, though its sides were mottled with green furrow-marked patches, had not at the time its single human habitation. At the upper end, however, there stood the ruins of a narrow two-storied house, with one of its gables still entire frcm foundation-stone to the shattered chimney-tops, but with the other gable, and the larger part of the front wall, laid prostrate along the sward. My cousin, OR, THE STORY OF MY EDUCATION. Ill after bidding me remark the completeness of the solitude, and that the eye could not command from the site of the ruin a single spot where man had ever dwelt, told me that it had been the scene of the strict seclusion, amounting almost to imprisonment, about eighty years before, of a lady of high birth, over whom, in early youth, there had settled a sad cloud of infamy. She had borne a child to one of the menials of her father's house, which, with the assistance of her paramour, she had murdered ; and being too high for the law to reach ii these northern parts, at a time when the hereditary jurisdic- tion still existed entire, and her father was the sole magistrate, possessed of the power of life and death in the district, she was sent by her family to wear out life in this lonely retreat, in which she remained secluded from the world for more than half a century. And then, long after the abolition of the local jurisdictions, and when her father and brother, with the entire generation that knew of her crime, had passed away, she was permitted to take up her abode in one of the sea-port towns of the north, where she was still remembered at this time as a crazy old lady, invariably silent and sullen, that used to be seen in the twilight flitting about the more retired lanes and closes, like an unhappy ghost. The story, as told me in that solitary valley, just as the sun was sinking over the hill be- yond, powerfully impressed my fancy. Crabbe would have delighted to tell it ; and I now relate it, as it lies fast wedged in my memory, mainly for the peculiar light which it casts on the times of the hereditary jurisdictions. It forms an example of one of the judicial banishments of an age that used, in ordinary cases, to save itself all sorts of trouble of the kind, by hanging its victims. I may add, that I saw a good deal of the neighborhood at this time in the company of my cousin, and gleaned, from my visits to shieling and cottage, most of my conceptions of the state of the Northern Highlands, ere the clearance system had depopulated the interior of the country, and precipitated its poverty-stricken population upon the coasts. There was, however, one of my excursions with Cousin W ill iam. that turned out rather unfortunately. The river Shin 112 MY SCHOOLS AND SCHOOLMASTERS; has its bold salmon-leap, which even yet, after several hun- dred pounds worth of gunpowder have been expended in slop- ing its angle of ascent, to facilitate the passage of the fish, is a fine picturesque object, but which at this time, when it pre- sented all its original abruptness, was a finer object still. Though distant about three miles from my uncle's cottage, we could distinctly hear its roarings from beside his door, when October nights were frosty and still ; and as we had been told many strange stories regarding it, — stories about bold fishers who had threaded their dangerous way between the over- hanging rock and the water, and who, striking outwards, had speared salmon through the foam of the cataract as they leaped, — stories, too, of skilful sportsmen, who, taking their stand in the thick wood beyond, had shot the rising animals, as one shoots a bird flying, — both my Cromarty cousin and my- self were extremely desirous to visit the scene of such feats and marvels ; and Cousin William obligingly agreed to' act as our guide and instructor by the way. He did look some- what askance at our naked feet ; and we heard him remark, in an under tone, to his mother, that when he and his brothers were boys, she never suffered them to visit her Cromarty rela- tions unshod ; but neither Cousin Walter nor myself had the magnanimity to say, that our mothers had also taken care to see us shod ; but that, deeming it lighter and cooler to walk barefoot, the good women had no sooner turned their backs than we both agreed to fling our shoes into a corner, and set out on our journey without them. The walk to the salmon- leap was a thoroughly delightful one. We passed through the woo^