NETHER LOCHABER.
WEASEL KILLING A HARE.—(Page 63.)
NETHER LOCHABER:
THE NATURAL HISTORY, LEGENDS, AND FOLK-LORE OF THE WEST HIGHLANDS.
BY
The Rev. ALEXANDER STEWART, F.S.A. Scot.;
MINISTER OF THE PARISH OF BALLACHULISH AND ARDGOUR.
EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM PATERSON.
MDCCCLXXXIII.
EDINBURGH: BURNESS AND COMPANY, PRINTERS TO HER MAJESTY.
TO
DONALD CAMPBELL, Esq., M.D.,
OF
CRAIGRANNOCH, BALLACHULISH,
IN PLEASANT RECOLLECTION OF HAPPY HOURS AT ONICH AND CRAIGRANNOCH,
AND
OF MANY A DELIGHTFUL MIDSUMMER RAMBLE,
THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED
WITH MUCH AFFECTIONATE REGARD BY HIS FRIEND
THE AUTHOR.
PREFATORY NOTE.
The contents of this volume made their first appearance in the shape of a series of papers from “Nether Lochaber” in the Inverness Courier, a well-known Northern Journal, long and ably conducted by the late Dr. Robert Carruthers. They are now presented to the public in book form, in the hope that they may meet with a friendly welcome from a still larger constituency than gave them kindly greeting in their original shape, as from fortnight to fortnight they appeared.
At one time it was the Author’s intention to rewrite and rearrange all, or almost all, these papers, adding, altering, or expunging as might be considered best. On second thoughts, however—second thoughts, besides, approved of by many literary and scientific friends, in whose judgment and good taste the Author has the utmost confidence—it was resolved to let them retain very much the form in which they first attracted attention, in the belief that any good that could result from a rewriting and reconstructing of them would be dearly purchased if it interfered, as it was almost certain to interfere, with their prima cura directness of phrase and freshness of local colouring.
In a volume dealing so largely with the Folk-Lore of the West Highlands and Hebrides, there are necessarily many Gaelic rhymes and phrases which at the first blink may tend to startle and repel the southern reader. These Gaelic quotations, however, the Author has taken care to translate into fairly equivalent English, so that even in this regard it is to be hoped the volume may prove equally acceptable to the Saxon, who is ignorant of the language of the mountains, as to the Celt, who knows and loves it as his mother tongue.
Nether Lochaber,
CONTENTS.
[CHAPTER I.] PAGE
Primroses and Daisies in early March—“The Posie”—Burns—“The Ancient Mariner”—William Tennant, Author of “Anster Fair”—Hebridean Epithalamium—A Bard’s Blessing—A Translation—Macleod of Berneray, 1
Autumnal Tints—Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—Sortes Sacræ—Sortes Virgilianæ—Charles the First and Lord Falkland—Virgilius the Magician—Thomas of Ercildoune, 8
An old Gaelic MS.—“The Bewitched Bachelor Unbewitched”—Fairy Lore—Lacteal Libations on Fairy Knowes, 18
Transit of Mercury—Improperly called an “Eclipse” of—November Meteors—Mr. Huggins—Spectrum Analyses of Cometary Light—Translation of a St. Kilda Song, 23
Bird Music—The Skylark’s Song—Imitation of, by a French Poet—Alasdair Macdonald—Scott, 29
Severe Drought—The Drive by Coach from Fort-William to Kingussie—Breakfast at Moy—Where did Scott find Dominie Sampson’s “Pro-di-gi-ous!”?—Professor Blackie’s Poem on Glencoe, 33
O the Barren, Barren Shore—Brilliant Auroral Display—Intense Cold—Birds—Glanders—Scribblings on the Back of One Pound Notes, 39
A Wet February—A Good Time coming—Sir Walter Scott—Mr Gladstone—Death of Sir David Brewster, 44
Long-Line Fishing—Scarcity of Fish—Their Fecundity—Large Specimen of the Raia Chagrinea—The Wolf Fish—The Devil Fish, 50
Birds—Contest between a Heron and an Eel, 54
Sea-Fishing—Loch and Stream Fishing—“Brindled Worms”—Rush-Lights—Buckie-Shell Lamps—The Weasel killing a Hare—Killing a Fallow Deer Fawn, 58
Extraordinary aspect of the Sun—Sunset from Rokeby—Mr. Glaisher—“Demoiselle” or Numidian Crane at Deerness—The Snowy Owl in Sutherlandshire—Does the Fieldfare breed in Scotland?—The Woodcock, 66
Extraordinary Heat and Drought—Plentifulness of Fungi—Cows fond of Mushrooms—Shoals of Whales—A rippling breeze, and a Sail on Loch Leven, 70
Herrings—Chimæra Monstrosa—Cure for Ringworm—Cold Tea Leaves for inflamed and blood-shot Eyes—An old Incantation for the cure of Sore Eyes—A curious Dirk Sheath—A Tannery of Human Skins, 73
The Ring-Dove—A Pet Ring-Dove—Its Death—Shenstone—The Belone Vulgaris or Gar-Fish—A Rat and a Kilmarnock Night-cap—Extraordinary Roebuck’s Head at Ardgour, 79
The “Annus Mirabilis” of Dryden—1870 a more wonderful Year in its way than 1666—Winter—Number of Killed and Wounded in the Franco-Prussian War—Battles of Langside, Tippermuir, Cappel—Carrier Pigeons—The Velocity with which Birds fly, 86
Signs of a severe Winter—The Little Auk or Auklet—The Gadwall—Falcons being trained by the Prussians to intercept the Paris Carrier Pigeons—Ballooning—The King of Prussia’s Piety—John Forster—Solar Eclipse of 22d December 1870—The Government and the Eclipse—Large Solar Spots—Visible to the naked eye—Rev. Dr. Cumming—November Meteors, 94
November Rains: 1500 tons per Imperial Acre!—Rainfall in Skye—An old Gaelic Apologue—The Drover and his Minister—Grand Stag’s Head—Scott as a Poet—Mr. Gladstone and Scott—An old Lullaby from the Gaelic, 99
Winter—Auroral Displays in the West Highlands always indicative of a coming Storm—Corvus Corax—Wonderful Ravens—Edgar Allan Poe, 106
Along the Shore after Birds—An Otter in pursuit of a Fish—Tame Otter at Bridge of Tilt: Employed in Fishing—His hatred of all sorts of Birds—“The Otter and Fox,” a translation from the Gaelic, 114
Storms—An “inch” of Rain—Atherina Presbyter—Lophius Piscatorius—Mr. Mortimer Collins’ misquotation from the Times, 121
Aurora Borealis—Unfavourable weather for Birds about St. Valentine’s Day—The Water-Vole in the Rhi—In the Eden in Fifeshire—In the Black Water, Kinloch Leven—Does it feed on Salmon Fry and Ova?—The Kingfisher—Character of the Water-Vole—Note about the Hedgehog, 127
March—The Story of a Spanish Dollar—The Spanish Armada—The “Florida”—Faire-Chlaidh, or Watching of the Graveyard—Molehill Earth for Flowers, 133
The Beauty of the West Highland Seaboard—Dr. Aiton of Dolphinton—Dr. Norman Macleod—Specimen of Turtle-Dove (Columba Turtur) shot in Ardgour—The belief on the Continent of its value as a Household Pet—Bechstein—Male Birds dropping Eggs in confinement, 140
Thunderstorm—Potato Field in Bloom—The Hazel Tree—Hazel Nuts—Potato Shaws for Cattle—Ferns for Bedding Cattle—Marmion—Scott, 144
Harvest—Scythe and Sickle v. Reaping Machines—Potatoes—Garibaldi and Potatoes at Caprera—Fishing—Platessa Gemmatus, or Diamond Plaice—Mushrooms—The Poetry of Fairy Rings—Harvest-Home, 150
The disappearance of the glories of Autumn, and the advent of Winter—Innovations and Innovators—New Version of the Scriptures—The Milkmaid and her Fairy Lover, translated from the Gaelic, 159
Wild Birds’ Nests in early April—Rook stealing Eggs frightened and almost captured—The Domestic Cock—What he was, and what he is—Sadly demoralised by intermixture with “Cochin-Chinas” and “Bramahpootras,” 165
The Vernal Equinox—Beauty of Loch Leven—Astronomical Notes—How an old Woman supposed to possess the Evil Eye escaped a cruel death, 172
Midges and other Bloodsuckers—The Tsetse of South Africa—The Abyssinian Zimb—Livingstone—Adders and Grass Snakes—Lucan’s Pharsalia—Celsus—Legend of St. John ante Portam Latinam, 178
The Leafing of the Oak and Ash—Splendid Stags’ Heads—Edmund Waller—Old Silver-Plate buried for preservation in the ’45—Mimicry in Birds—An accomplished Goldfinch, 185
Potato Culture—Sensibility of the Potato Shaw to Weather changes—The Carline Thistle—Burns—The true Carduus Scotticus—The old Dog-Rhyme, 192
A non-“Laughing” Summer—Rheumatic Pains—Old Gaelic Incantation for Cattle Ailments, 199
Early sowing recommended—Vitality of Superstitions—Capnomancy—Hazel Nuts: Frequent References to in Gaelic Poetry—How best to get at the full flavour of a ripe Hazel Nut, 204
Strength of Insects—Necrophorus Vespillo, or Burying-Beetle—Fœtid smell of—How Willie Grimmond earned an Honest Penny in Glencoe, 210
Seaweed as a Fertiliser—Homer, Horace, Virgil—November Meteors—Gaelic Folk-Lore—A Curfew Prayer—A Bed Blessing—A Cattle Blessing—Rhyme to be said in driving Cattle to Pasture—“Luath,” Cuchullin’s Dog—Notes from the Outer Hebrides, 217
The Delights of Beltane Tide—Bishop Gawin Douglas—His Translation of the Æneid—The Fat of Deer—“Light and Shade” from the Gaelic—Mackworth Praed—Discovery of an old Flint Manufactory in the Moss of Ballachulish, 225
Warm showery Summer disagreeable for the Tourist, but pastorally and agriculturally favourable—Xiphias Gladius, or Sword-Fish, cast ashore during a Mid-summer Gale—Garibaldi dining on Potatoes and Sword-Fish steaks at Caprera—The General’s Drink—Medicinal virtues of an Onion—Nettle Broth—Translation of a New Zealand Maori Song, 233
Mountains—The Lochaber Axe, Ancient and Modern, 238
Sea-Fowl—Weather Prognostics—Goosander (Mergus Merganser, Linn.)—Gales of Wind—January Primroses—Lachlan Gorach, the Mull “Natural”—A Dancing Rhyme, 244
Plague of Thistles in Australia and New Zealand—How to deal with them—Cnicus Acaulis, Great Milk Thistle, or Stemless Thistle—Fierce Fight between two Seals, “Nelson” and “Villeneuve,” 250
Wounds from Stags’ Antlers exceedingly dangerous—The old Fingalian Ballads—Number of Dogs kept for the Chase—Dr. Smith’s “Ancient Lays” of modern manufacture—The Spotted Crake (Crex Prozana) at Inverness—Its Habits, 258
Whelks and Periwinkles—An Ossianic Reading—The Sea-shore after a Storm—The Rejectamenta of the deep—An amusing Story of a Shore-Searcher—Severity of Winter—Wild-Birds’ Levee—Woodcock—Snipe—Blue Jay, 264
A “Blessed Thaw” after a Severe Frost—Longevity in Lochaber—A ready “Saline draught”—A probatum est Recipe for Catarrh and Colds—Egg-shell Superstition—Curious old Gaelic Poem, 272
“Albert,” a famous Labrador Dog—As a Water Dog—His intelligence—Takes to Sheep-Stealing—Death! 278
An old Fingalian Hero—His keenness of Sight and sharpness of Ear—Foresters and Keepers—Foxhunters—Donald MacDonald—His Dogs—Sandy MacArthur the Mole-catcher, 286
Autumnal Night—Meteors—The Spanish Mackerel—Professor Blackie’s Translations from the Gaelic—The “Translations” of the Gaelic Society of Inverness, 293
Crops—Potato Slug—Fern Slug—Brackens: How thoroughly to extirpate them—The Merlin, Falcon, and Tringa, 299
The Hedgehog an Egg and Bird Eater?—Bird-catching—“Old Cowie”—Mackenzie—Lanius Excubitor—The Butcher-Bird or Shrike—Tea-Drinking and Sobriety, 305
Superstition amongst the People—Difficulty of dealing with it—Examples of Superstitions still prevalent in the Highlands—Cock-crowing at untimely hours—Itching of the Nose—Ringing in the Ears—The “Dead-Bell”—Sir Walter Scott—Hogg—Mickle, 313
Welcome Rain in May—Plague of Mice in Upper Teviotdale—Arvicola Agrestis—Field-Mice in Ardgour—How exterminated—A Singing Mouse—Farmers’ Mistakes—Mackenzie the Bird-catcher, 319
Tourist Grumblers; how to deal with them—Sea Fishing—Superstition about a Gull—Josephus—Story of Mosollam and the Augur, 327
Heat in Mid-August—Early Planting and Sowing—Over-ripening of Crops—Medusæ—Stinging Jelly-Fish—The amount of solid matter in Jelly-Fish, 334
Approach of Winter—Contentedness of the People—Poets and Wild-Bird Song—Differences in the Colouring and Markings of Birds’ Eggs—Late Nest-building—Anecdote of Provost Robertson of Dingwall, Mr. Gladstone’s Grandfather, 341
Spring—Hood’s Parody of Thomson’s Invocation—The excellence of Nettle-Top Soup—Cock-crowing—Birds’-nesting—Professor Geikie—Curious Story of an old Pipe-Tune, 348
Rain in Lochaber—An Apple Tree in bloom by Candle-light—Mackenzie the Bird-catcher—A Badenoch “Wise Woman” spitting in a Child’s Face to preserve it from the Fairies, 355
Caught in a Squall on Loch Leven—Potatoes and Herrings: How to cook them—A day in Glen Nevis—A visit to Uaimh Shomhairle, or Samuel’s Cave—The Cave-Men, 361
Showers in Harvest Time—Magnificent Sunset—Night sometimes seeming not to descend but to ascend—Death of M. Leverrier—The Discovery of Neptune—Pigeon cooing at Midnight—The Owl at Noon—Cage-Birds singing at Night, 370
October Storms—Cablegram Predictions—Indications of coming Storms—Geordie Braid, the St. Andrews and Newport Coach-driver—The Naturalist in Winter—Drowned Hedgehogs: Spines become soft and gelatinous—Lophius Piscatorius—Disproportion between head and body in the Devil-Fish a puzzle—An Itinerant Fiddler, 379
A Trip to Glasgow—Kelvin Grove Museum—Highland Association—A run to Rothesay—Rothesay Aquarium, 387
Overland from Ballachulish to Oban on a “Pet Day” in February—Story of Clach Ruric—Castle Stalker: an old Stronghold of the Stewarts of Appin—James IV.—Charles II.—Magpies—Dun-Mac-Uisneachan, 394
Nest-building—Cunningham’s objection to Burns’ Song, “O were my Love yon Lilac fair”—Birds and the Lilac Tree—Rivalries of Birds—Birds and the Poets—The Nightingale, 402
March Dust—Moons of Mars—Planetoids—Occultation of Alpha Leonis—Zodiacal Light—Snow Bunting—Old Gaelic Ballad of “Deirdri:” Its Topography, 410
NETHER LOCHABER.
CHAPTER I.
Primroses and Daisies in early March—“The Posie”—Burns—“The Ancient Mariner”—William Tennant, Author of Anster Fair—Hebridean Epithalamium—A Bard’s Blessing—A Translation—Macleod of Berneray.
The weather [March 1868] with us here still continues wonderfully genial and mild: taken all in all, the season may be noted as in this respect perhaps without precedent in our meteorological annals. The sun, with nearly eight degrees of southern declination, is not yet half-way through Pisces; we are still three weeks from the vernal equinox, and yet on our table before us, as we write these lines, there is as pretty a posy of wild-flowers as you could wish to see, consisting of daisies, primroses, and other modest beauties, the “firstlings of the year,” culled from bank and brae at a date when in ordinary seasons the country, snow-covered or ice-bound, is but a bleak and barren waste. Older and wiser people than ourselves confidently predict “a winter in mid-spring” as yet in store for us; but meliora speramus, we had rather believe that to one of the mildest winters on record will succeed a genial spring, a splendid summer, and an abundant harvest. In any case, as somebody said of Scaliger and Clavius, Mallem cum Scaligero errare quam cum Clavio rectè sapere: I had rather, that is, be a partaker in the errors of Scaliger, than a sharer in all the wisdom of Clavius. Even so, we had rather err with the optimists than be ranked with the pessimists, even when their predictions turn out the truest. In our forenoon ramble on Friday last did we not find a merle’s nest in the close and well-guarded embrace of an old thorn root, with its pretty treasure of four brown-spotted, greyish-green eggs? and with our wild-flower bouquet before us, are we not better employed in crooning one of Burns’ sweetest lyrics than in predicting evil, even if we were certain that our prediction should become true?—said lyric being that entitled The Posie, which, dear reader, if you do not know it already, you should incontinently get by heart. Here is a verse or two:—
“Oh, luve will venture in where it daurna weel be seen;
Oh, luve will venture in, where wisdom ance has been;
But I will down yon river rove, amang the wood sae green—
And a’ to pu’ a posie to my ain dear May.
“The primrose I will pu’, the firstling o’ the year,
And I will pu’ the pink, the emblem o’ my dear;
For she’s the pink o’ womankind, and blooms without a peer—
And a’ to be a posie to my ain dear May.
“The lily it is pure, and the lily it is fair,
And in her lovely bosom I’ll place the lily there;
The daisy’s for simplicity and unaffected air—
And a’ to be a posie to my ain dear May.
“The hawthorn I will pu’, wi’ its locks o’ siller grey,
Where, like an aged man, it stands at break o’ day;
But the songster’s nest within the bush I winna tak away—
And a’ to be a posie to my ain dear May.”
Mark that line in italics, and ponder its exquisite tenderness. How it must have irradiated, like a sudden flood of sunshine over a mountain landscape, the poet’s heart as he penned it! Here you have the germ of the doctrine afterwards more broadly taught by Coleridge in the well-known lines of the Ancient Mariner:—
“Farewell, farewell, but this I tell
To thee, thou Wedding Guest,
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man, and bird, and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things, both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”
We love The Posie of Burns for its own sake, but we love it all the more, perhaps, because our attention was first directed to its sweet simplicity and tender beauty by one of our earliest and kindest friends, himself a poet of no mean order, the late Professor William Tennant, author of Anster Fair, in all its fantastical gaiety and homely mirth the most original poem, perhaps, to be found in the literature of our country.
A gentleman who resides at present in Cheltenham, a cadet of one of the oldest and most respectable families on the West Coast, and himself the head of a house not unknown in Highland story, has been so good as to send us a short Gaelic poem in manuscript, with a request that we should give an English version of it. With this request we very readily comply, such a task being to us a labour of love; the poem itself, besides, being very beautiful, and the history of its composition extremely interesting, as throwing some light on the manners and customs of the olden times. The following prefatory note from the MS. itself sufficiently explains the origin of this quaint and curious Hebridean Epithalamium:—“It was the custom in the West Highlands of Scotland in the olden time to meet the bride coming forth from her chamber with her maidens on the morning after her marriage, and to salute her with a poetical blessing called Beannachadh Bàird. On the occasion of the marriage of the Rev. Donald Macleod of Durinish, in the Isle of Skye, this practice having then got very much into desuetude, and none being found prepared to salute his bride agreeably to it, he himself came forward and received her with the following beautiful address.” We present our readers with the original lines verbatim et literatim, precisely as they stand in the MS., only omitting two lines that are partly illegible from their falling into the sharp foldings of the sheet. The sense and tenor of these lines, however, we have ventured to guess at and to incorporate with our English version:—
Beannachadh Bàird.
Mìle fàilte dhuit le ’d bhrèid,
Fad’ a rè gu’n robh thu slàn,
Moran laithean dhuit as sìth,
Le d’ mhaitheas as le d’ nì ’bhith fàs.
A chulaidh cheiteas a chaidh suas.
’S tric a thairin buaidh air mnaoi—
Bithse gu suilceach, ceiteach,
O thionnseain thu fhein ’san treubh.
An tùs do choiruith ’s tu òg,
An tùs gach lò iarr Righ nan Dùl;
Cha’n’ eagal nach dean e gu ceart
Gach dearbh-bheachd a bhios ’nad rùn,
Bithsa fialuidh—ach bith glic.
Bith misneachail—ach bith stolt.
Na bith brith’nach, ’s na bith balbh,
Na bith mear na marbh ’s tu òg;
Bith gleidhteach air do dhea ainm,
Ach na bith duinte ’s na bith fuar;
Na labhair fòs air neach gu olc,
’S ged labhras ort, na taisbean fuath.
Na bith gearannach fo chrois,
Falbh socair le cupan làn;
Chaoidh dh’ an olc na tabhair spèis—
As le ’d bhrèid ort, mìle fàilt!
Whether with the sense of the above we have succeeded in catching anything of its quaint beauty and tenderness in the following lines, is for the reader to judge:—
A Bard’s Blessing.
Comely and kerchief’d, blooming, fresh and fair,
All hail and welcome! joy and peace be thine;
Of happiness and health a bounteous share
Be shower’d upon thee from the hand divine.
Wearing the matron’s coif, thou seem’st to be
Even lovelier now than erst, when fancy-free,
Thou in thy beauty’s strength did’st steal my heart from me.
Though young in years thou ‘rt now a wedded wife;
O seek His guidance who can guide aright.
With aid from Him, the rugged path of life
May still be trod with pleasure and delight;
For He who made us bids us not forego
A single, sinless pleasure in this world of woe.
Be open-hearted, but be eident too,
Be strong and full of courage, but be staid;
Aught like unseemly folly still eschew—
Be faultless wife as thou wast faultless maid!
Guard against hasty speech and temper violent,
And knowing when to speak, know also to be silent.
Guard thy good name and mine from smallest stain;
In manner still be kindly, frank, and free;
If thou ‘rt reviled, revile not thou again;
In hour of trial calm and patient be;
And when thy cup is full, walk humbly still,
A careless, proud, rash step the blissful cup may spill!
With this bard’s blessing on thy wedded morn,
All at thy bridal chamber-door we greet thee;
May every joy of truth and goodness born
Through all thy life-long journey crowd to meet thee;
And may the God of Peace now richly shed
A blessing on thy kerchief-cinctured head!
The word breid in the original, which we have rendered kerchief and coif, was in the olden times the peculiar head-dress of married females, while virgins wore their braided locks uncovered, a simple ribbon to bind the hair, and occasionally a sprig of heather or modest flower by way of ornament, being the only head-dress that could with propriety be worn by a maiden in the good old anti-chignon days of our grandmothers. The Highland maiden’s narrow ribbon for binding the hair was in the south of Scotland called a snood, probably from the old English snod—“neat, handsome”—a word still in use in the English border counties. In the south, even more pointedly than in the north, the emblematical character of the maiden ribbon or snood was recognised. It was only when a maiden became an honest, lawful wife that the coif—also called curch and toy—could be worn with propriety. If a damsel was so unfortunate as to lose pretentions to the name of maiden, without acquiring a right to that of matron, she was neither permitted to wear that emblem of virgin purity, the snood, nor advanced to the graver dignity of the coif or curch. In old Scottish songs there occur many sly allusions to such misfortunes, as in the original words of the popular tune of “Ower the muir amang the heather”—
“Down amang the broom, the broom,
Down among the broom, my dearie,
The lassie lost her silken snood,
That gart her greet till she was wearie.”
And in a verse of a curious old ballad that we took down some years ago from the recitation of a grey-headed Paisley weaver—
“And did ye say ye lo’ed me weel?
Then, kind sir, ye maun marrie me;
For that I maunna wear my snood
Aft brings the saut tear to my ee.”
The reverend author of the above lines was probably born about the year 1700, or perhaps ten or twenty years earlier, for we find that he died a man well advanced in years in 1760. In the Scots Magazine of that year there is the following notice of Mr Macleod’s death:—“Jan. 12th.—At Durinish, in the Isle of Skye, the Rev. Donald Macleod, minister of that parish, a gentleman, says our correspondent, who adorned his profession, not so much by a literary merit, of which he possessed a considerable share, as by a consistent practice of the most useful and excellent virtues. To do good was the ruling passion of his heart; in composing differences, in diffusing the spirit of peace and friendship, in relieving the distressed, in promoting the happiness of the widow and orphan, his zeal was almost unexampled, his activity unmeasured, his success remarkable. It is almost unnecessary to add that he lived with a most amiable character, and died universally regretted.”
A somewhat curious circumstance is the following:—One of the Rev. Mr. Macleod’s daughters was married to Macleod of Berneray, she being that gentleman’s third wife. Berneray was at the date of this third marriage seventy-five years of age, notwithstanding which he became by this lady the father of nine children. He lived a hale and hearty old man till he was upwards of ninety. He was reckoned in his day a splendid specimen of the stalwart, sterling, straight-forward, and chivalrous Highland gentleman, “all of the olden time.”
CHAPTER II.
Autumnal Tints—Solomon and the Queen of Sheba—Sortes Sacræ—Sortes Virgilianæ—Charles the First and Lord Falkland—Virgilius the Magician—Thomas of Ercildoune.
With occasional gales of wind and blustering showers [October 1868], that, from their chilliness and snellness, you suspect to be sleet, although you don’t like as yet exactly to say so—meteorological phenomena, however, in no way strange or unusual on the back of the autumnal equinox—the weather with us here continues delightfully bright and breezy, and the country looks beautiful. Field and upland are still as freshly green as at midsummer, while the deep, rich russet hues and golden tints of the declining year, gleaming in the fitful sunlight, and intermingling their glories with the still beautifully fresh and unspotted foliage of our hardier trees and shrubs; with the ripe, ruddy bloom of the heather empurpling the moorland and the hill, and a perfect sea of “brackens brown” mantling the mountain side, and fringing, in loving companionship with the birch, the alder, and the hazel, the torrent’s brink, as it leaps in foam from rock to rock and dashes downwards with its wild music to the sea,—all this, with a thousand indescribable accessories, scarcely perceptible indeed in the general effect, but all bearing their fitting part in the delightful whole, presents at this season, and never more markedly than this year, a scene that you never tire of gazing at, and declaring again and again, and with all your heart, to be “beautiful exceedingly.” As you gaze on such a scene as this, you feel that no painter could paint it; that there is a something in it all too subtile and spiritual to be transferred to canvas by any art whatever. An imitation, indeed, of all that is palpable and tangible about it you may get, and it may be very beautiful perhaps, and a triumph of art in a way; but, even as you gaze in admiration, ready to grant the artist all the praise that is his due, are you not apt, remembering the scene as nature has it, to
“Start, for soul is wanting there?”
But we must not be misunderstood. Painters and painting we love, and have always loved, and should be sorry, indeed, to be considered as in any way dead or indifferent to the power and beauty of the art. Painting, after all, however, and especially landscape painting, is but an imitative art, and the longer we live, and the more we are brought face to face with nature, the more shall we feel that there is a charm, an attractiveness, and a loveliness about her all her own—a something that you feel but cannot describe, that the artist as he gazes feels too, and strives to grasp and instil into his picture, but cannot charm into interminglement with his colours, “charm he never so wisely.” Viewed æsthetically, nature in sooth consists not of matter only, but of matter and spirit, and therein is the secret of her surpassing power over us. You may subtly imitate and reproduce exact representations of her more prominent features and general outlines, and the painter, according as he is more or less gifted with the poetic mens divina, may infuse a moral meaning into his work, and a subtile beauty entirely independent of the mere manipulation of his subject—be it landscape, seascape, or cloudscape—and his work may impart instruction as well as pleasure and delight; but, granting all this, there shall still be something awanting even in the finest pictures, that something which we have ventured to call spirit—the spirit that pervades and permeates nature in all her works, that is her life, that may be “spiritually discerned” in her, but cannot be transferred to canvas.
In the collection of Jewish traditions known as the Talmud there is a very pretty story of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, that will serve to illustrate our meaning better than the longest dissertation could be. It is to the following effect:—Attracted by his wealth, and wisdom, and power—the fame whereof had gone forth into all lands—the Queen of Sheba, the Beautiful, paid a visit to Solomon, the Wise, at his own court, that she might there admire the splendour of his throne and be instructed of his wisdom. Charmed with the courtesy and gallantry of the accomplished King, delighted with the magnificence and splendour of his court, and amazed at his surpassing wisdom, which, indeed, exceeded all that she had heard reported of it, the Queen still thought that Solomon could be outwitted, and she resolved to have the glory of puzzling and outwitting one so wise. To this end she one day presented herself before the King, bearing in one of her hands a wreath of natural flowers, the most beautiful she could gather, and in the other a similar wreath of artificial flowers, the most beautiful and like unto natural flowers that the cunning of herself and her handmaidens could fashion. Of the two wreaths the hues were of the brightest, and the flowers of the one wreath were as if they had been pulled off the same stalks that bore the flowers of the other. “Tell me now, O King,” said the Queen as she stood at some distance from the throne whereon the monarch sate, “Tell me now, O King, which of these wreaths I hold in my hands is fashioned of artificial flowers, for one of them is so fashioned; and which of them of natural flowers, that grew from out the earth, and imbibed their beauty and their brightness from the sun, for of such of a truth is one of them formed?” And, lo, the King was perplexed and sorely troubled, for he wist not what answer to make, seeing that the two wreaths were as like one to another as twin sisters at their mother’s breast, or twin lilies on the same stalk. And the courtiers of the King, and his princes, and his servants, were sorely grieved that the sagacity of the King should be at fault, and his superhuman wisdom at last fail. But, lo, the spirit of wisdom came upon the King in his perplexity. Observing some bees clustering outside, he ordered the window to be opened, and soon the bees came swarming into the court, and after hovering for a moment about the one wreath, they straightway left it and settled upon the other, which observing, “That,” said the King, “that, and not the other, is the wreath of the flowers that grew from out the earth and in the sun, and were not fashioned with hands.” And the Queen was mightily surprised at the exceeding wisdom of the King, and did obeisance unto Solomon, laying the wreaths of flowers upon the steps of the ivory throne that was overlaid with gold, and of which there was not the like made in any kingdom. And the courtiers, and the princes, and the servants of the King clapped their hands and cried, “O King! live for ever.” If we are wise and judge aright, we shall always, like the bees of Solomon, be attracted by nature rather than by art, however beautiful. Our doctrine was never, perhaps, so briefly and pithily enforced as by the Macedonian conqueror on a certain occasion. A courtier one day asked him to listen to him how well he could, whistling, imitate the notes of the nightingale. Alexander declined the proffered musical entertainment with the contemptuous remark, “I have heard the nightingale herself.” No wonder that the would-be melodist slunk away abashed; and such be the fate of all mere echoers and imitators when at any time they claim more than is their due, or would have us appraise their pinchbeck at the value of sterling gold. There is an amount of truth, and a hidden meaning and beauty, in Byron’s lines, that he was himself perhaps unconscious of in the ribald mood of the moment, when, alluding to the statuary’s art, he exclaimed—
“I’ve seen much finer women, ripe and real,
Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal.”
It is astonishing how difficult of thorough eradication are certain superstitions, if once established amongst a people. Once let the popular mind become inoculated with error in this shape, and although times may change and the manners of the people may alter, though a new tongue even shall have succeeded the language in which the error was imbibed, and knowledge have spread and civilisation have steadily progressed, yet there the superstition still lurks, frightened it may be at the outward light, and, owl-like, ashamed to appear in the brightness of the blessed sunshine of unclouded truth, but ever ready, nevertheless, under favourable circumstances, to manifest itself, and assert its sway over its votaries, like certain fabled mediæval philters and potions that when administered are said to have lurked for years and years in the human system, till, under certain conditions, their subtle properties were called into active operation, and the desired effect was produced. A short time ago we spent an evening in the company of a gentleman from the south of Scotland, a distinguished antiquary and archæologist, and of wonderful skill in everything connected with the folk-lore of Scotland, whether of the past or present. In the course of conversation, “over the walnuts and the wine,” our friend surprised us not a little by informing us that even at this day, in certain parts of the south-western districts of Scotland, the Sortes Sacræ are frequently resorted to by the people when they are in doubt or perplexity about anything of sufficient importance in their opinion to warrant their having recourse to this ancient mode of divination. The Sortes Sacræ are founded upon the more ancient Sortes Virgilianæ—Virgilian Lots, a method of divination which had at least the merit of being extremely simple, and not necessarily occupying much of the votary’s time. What may be called the literary oracle, as distinguished from vocal oracles, was consulted in this wise: The operator having before him a copy of Virgil—the sortes were generally confined to the Æneid—opened the volume ad aperturam libri, anywhere, at random, when the first passage that accidentally struck the eye was carefully read and pondered with as little reference as possible to its immediate context, and a meaning extracted from it which was supposed to indicate the issue of the event in hand, and which was to be considered inevitable and irrevocable as the fates had so decreed. A man with the knowledge thus obtained could not by any precaution or change of conduct avert the impending doom, good or evil; he could only put his house in order, and so arrange matters the best way he could; that if evil came it might be borne with dignity and patience; if good, that it might be enjoyed with moderation and devout gratitude to the gods. It is said that at the outbreak of the troubles that culminated in the Commonwealth, Charles I. and Lord Falkland found themselves on a certain day in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, when the latter jocularly proposed that they should inform themselves of their future fortunes by means of the Sortes Virgiliæ; and certainly, read by the light of after events, it must be confessed that the passages stumbled upon seem singularly ominous of the fate that overtook both. The passage read by the Martyr King was from the fourth book of the Æneid, and is as follows:—
“At bello audacis populi vexatus et armis,
Finibus extorris, complexu avulsus Iuli,
Auxilium imploret, videatque, indigna suorum
Funera: nec, cum se sub leges pacis iniquæ
Tradiderit, regno aut optata luce fruatur,
Sed cadat ante diem, mediaque inhumatus arena.”
Which Dryden, if with rather too much amplification, still very beautifully translates thus:—
“Yet let a race untamed and haughty foes
His peaceful entrance with dire arms oppose,
Oppress’d with numbers in th’ unequal field,
His men discouraged and himself expell’d:
Let him for succour sue from place to place,
Torn from his subjects and his son’s embrace.
First let him see his friends in battle slain,
And their untimely fate lament in vain;
And when at length the cruel wars shall cease,
On hard conditions may he buy his peace.
Nor let him then enjoy supreme command,
But fall untimely by some hostile hand,
And lie unburied on the barren sand.”
Lord Falkland’s eye fell on the following lines in the eleventh book:—
“Non hæc, O Palla, dederas promissa parenti.
Cautius ut sævo velles te credere Marti!
Haud ignarus eram, quantum nova gloria in armis,
Et predulce decus primo certamine posset.
Primitiæ juvenis miseræ! bellique propinqui
Dura rudimenta! et nulli exaudita Deorum
Vota, precesque meæ!”
—which the same translator has rendered as follows:—
“O Pallas, thou hast failed thy plighted word,
To fight with caution, not to tempt the sword;
I warn’d thee, but in vain, for well I knew
What perils youthful ardour would pursue;
That boiling blood would carry thee too far,
Young as thou wert to dangers, raw to war;
O curs’d essay of arms, disastrous doom,
Prelude of bloody fields and fights to come,
Hard elements of unauspicious war,
Vain vows to heaven and unavailing care.”
How the most pious man of his age, and one of the best kings that ever adorned a throne, suffered death at the hands of his rebellious subjects is well known. Poor Lord Falkland—a young nobleman of the most estimable character; a poet and man of letters, so fond of books that he used to say that “he pitied unlearned gentlemen in a rainy day”—fell gallantly fighting for the royal cause in the battle of Newbury, before he had yet completed his thirty-fourth year. It is curious to find the eminent poet Abraham Cowley, a good man too—of whom at his death Charles II. was heard to say that “Mr. Cowley had not left a better man behind in England,”—it is curious, we say, to find him on a certain occasion seriously referring to the Virgilian Lots, and, what is more, avowing his firm belief in them! During the Commonwealth, Cowley was in Paris, where he acted as secretary to the Earl of St. Albans (then Lord Jermyn), and had a good deal to do with the negotiations that eventually led to the Restoration. In one of his letters, speaking of the Scotch treaty then in agitation, he says—seriously, observe, and in an official document—“The Scotch treaty is the only thing now in which we are vitally concerned. I am one of the last hopers, and yet cannot now abstain from believing that an agreement will be made; all people upon the place incline to that union. The Scotch will moderate something of the rigour of their demands; the mutual necessity of an accord is visible, the king is persuaded of it. And, to tell you the truth (which I take to be an argument above all the rest), Virgil has told the same thing to that purpose.” He had evidently consulted the Virgilian Lots, and a passage presenting itself that could somehow be twisted so as to point to a favourable issue to the Scotch business in hand, he accepts the oracle, and in all seriousness announces his belief in it! When we find a man of refinement and culture and high moral character like Cowley crediting such nonsense, can we much wonder at the lengths to which fanaticism and superstition carried people in those unhappy times? To understand why Virgil, of all the ancient poets, Roman or Greek, was selected as the oracle in this mode of divination, we must remember that the Mantuan bard had the credit amongst his countrymen of having been a sorcerer or necromancer and prophet as well as a poet, something like the British Merlin, or our own Thomas the Rhymer and Michael Scott, only more famous, perhaps. “Would the reader suppose, for example, that the theory of volcanic action is all a myth, and that it is to the magic of Virgil, and to nothing else, that the south of Italy is indebted for all the earthquakes and subterranean convulsions that have afflicted it for centuries? Yet so it is, if we are to credit all the stories of “Virgilius the Magician” that were current during the Middle Ages. The celebrated Benedictine monk, Bernard de Montfaucon, author of Antiquité Expliquée one of the most learned and curious works in existence, repeats the story as it was told and credited in the Dark Ages. The following is from an old translation, quoted by Scott in his notes to the Lay of the Last Minstrel, in illustration of the magical spells attributed to the Ladye of Branksome Tower. Virgil it seems, among other things, was famous for his gallantries. On one occasion he fell in love with and carried away the daughter of a certain “Soldan,” and the story proceeds:—“Than he thoughte in his mynde how he myghte marye hyr, and thoughte in his mynde to founde in the middes of the see a fayer towne, with great landes belongynge to it; and so he did by his cunnynge, and called it Napells (Naples). And the foundacyon of it was of egges, and in that town of Napells he made a tower with iiii. corners, and in the toppe he set an apell upon an yron yarde, and no man culde pull away that apell without he brake it; and thoroughe that yren set he a bolte, and in that bolte set he an egge, and he henge the apell by the stauke upon a cheyne, and so hangeth it still. And when the egge styrreth so should the town of Napells quake; and when the egge brake, then shulde the town sinke. When he made an ende, he lette calls it Napells.” Thomas of “Ercildoune,” and he of “Balivearie,” and the two Merlins,—for there were two of them, the Merlin of the Arthurian legends, and Merdwynn Wylet, or Merlin the Wild, who seems to have been a Scotchman, and whose grave is still pointed out beneath an aged thorn-tree at Drumelzier in Tweeddale,—these were accounted great magicians and “pretty fellows in their day;” but what were they to Virgilius the earthquaker, who at least attained to such an enviable state of independence, that he is represented as frequently playing at pitch and toss with the “devyl,” and cheating and outwitting that crafty potentate as if he were the veriest greenhorn! The Sortes Sacræ were just the Sortes Virgilianæ, with this difference, that in the former case, instead of a copy of Virgil, the New Testament was used in the process of divination. The oracle is consulted in this case, according to our information, by the introduction at random of the wards end of a key (some allusion probably to the Apostolic keys) between the leaves of the closed volume, which is then opened at that place, and from the first verse that arrests the eye the desired knowledge is extracted. On inquiry, we find that this superstition was still occasionally practised in the Highlands of Scotland some fifty years ago, though we would fain hope and believe that it is now unknown. It is curious that it should still be frequently resorted to in the south-western districts. It seems to have been a very general as well as a very ancient mode of divination. Hoffman, in his Lexicon Universale, &c., informs us that it was practised by the Jewish Rabbins with their sacred books, as well as by the Pagans from very early times, and was common amongst the Christians of the Middle Ages. We are informed by a gentleman, who spent many years in the East, that the Mahometans frequently resort to this method of divination, taking the Koran as their oracle.
CHAPTER III.
An old Gaelic MS.—“The Bewitched Bachelor Unbewitched”—Fairy Lore—Lacteal Libations on Fairy Knowes.
In looking over some old papers the other day [October 1868] we stumbled on some sheets of Gaelic MS. that had lain neglected for years, and every existence of which, indeed, we had well-nigh forgotten. One of these sheets contained the original of the following lines. It is in many respects a curious composition, written in a sort of rhythmical alliterative prose rather than in verse, somewhat in the manner of the conversational parts of the Gaelic Sgeulachdan or fireside tales of the olden time. Its tone throughout is gay and lively, with an occasional admixture of humour and double entendre that is very amusing, while its allusions to the manners and customs and superstitious observances of a past age render it, to our thinking, extremely interesting. The sheet in our possession is only a copy, the original, taken down from oral recitation, we believe, being in a MS. collection of Gaelic poems and tales by Rev. Mr. M’Donald, at one time minister of the parish of Fortingall, in Perthshire. Having only internal evidence to judge from, it is impossible with any confidence to assign even an approximate date to such a production as this, but we are probably not far wrong in placing it as early at least as the middle or close of the last century. It bears no title in the original; we may call it—
The Bewitched Bachelor Unbewitched.
The gudeman mumbled and grumbled full sore
Over the butter-kits, all through the dairy:
Over cheese, over butter, and milk-pails, he swore
“’Tis the work, I’ll be bound, of some foul witch or fairy.
How can I ever be happy or rich,
If robbed and tormented by fairy and witch,”
Quoth he; and lo, with a sudden turn
He stumbled and spilt the cream-full churn!
He went to his mother (she dwelt in the cot
Amid the hazels down by the linn:
Full well the wild birds loved that spot,
And taught its echoes their merry din)—
He went to his mother, that Bachelor gruff:
He was mild with her, though with others rough.
“Mother,” quoth he, “I have not now
One-half the butter or cheese, I trow,
That loaded my dairy shelves when you
Had charge of my household and dairy too:
Tell me mother, what shall I do?
I vow and declare that some fairy or witch
Is robbing me still and doing me ill—I shall never be rich.”
“My son,” the mother mild replied,
“See that you pay the fairies their due;
A tribute due should ne’er be denied—
Others don’t grudge it, and why should you?
Nor thrive their flocks nor kine, I ween,
Who scorn or neglect the shian green.”
“But, mother, the witch that lives down i’ the glen?”
“A widow, my son, with a fatherless oe,
Who has seen much sorrow and years of woe;
Give her as heretofore, my son,
Of your curds and whey, and let her alone.
And oh, my son, if you would be rich,
And free from dread of fairy and witch.
And happy and well-to-do through life—
Go get thee, my son, a winsome wife!”
The bachelor hied him home full soon—
He sent to the widow, far down in the glen,
A kebbuck of cheese as round as the moon,
Of oaten cakes he sent her ten,
With a kindly message, “Come when you may
For curds and whey in the good old way.”
He sent her withal, ’tis right you should know,
A braw new kilt for her fatherless oe.
And ever he saw that his maidens paid
To the fairies their due on the Fairy Knowe,
Till the emerald sward was under the tread
As velvet soft, and all aglow
With wild flowers, such as fairies cull,
Weaving their garlands and wreaths for the dance when the moon is full!
And lo! at last he took him a wife,
A comely and winsome dame, I trow,
Who shed a sunshine over his life,
And silvered the wrinkles upon his brow.
’Twas well with the kine, and well with the dairy,
Nor dreaded he ought from witch or fairy;
(He had one of his own—she was hight Wee Mary!)
And often they went to the cot by the linn,
Where mavis and merle made merry din.
The English reader will probably require to be informed that oe—the Gaelic ogha—signifies a grandchild, while shian (Gaelic sithean) is a fairy knoll. To show what a power fairies were at one time in the land, and how wide-spread was the belief in them, we have only to consider that there is perhaps not a hamlet or township in the Highlands or Hebrides without its shian or green fairy knoll so called. Within half a mile of our own residence, for example, there is a Sithean Beag and a Sithean Mor, a Greater and Lesser Fairy Knoll; there is, besides, a Glacan-t’ Shithein, the Fairy Knoll Glade, Tobar-an-t’ Shithein, the Fairy Knoll Well; and a deep chasm, through which a mountain torrent plunges darkling, called Leum-an-t’ Shithiche, the Fairy’s Leap, with which there is probably connected some very wonderful story, although we have been unsuccessful hitherto in meeting with any one able or willing to repeat it. The truth is, that a belief in fairies and fairyland, or faery—faint, no doubt, and ill-defined now-a-days—still lingers ghost-like, the shadow of its more substantial former living self, in our straths and glens; and, in accordance with the old superstition, it is considered that the “good people” should only be spoken of on rare and unavoidable occasions, and then only in serious and respectable terms. Hence it is that you always find old people reluctant to impart such fairy lore as may be known to them, though garrulous enough on all other subjects; and hence, also, it happens that in our old Sgeulachdan—the Arabian Nights Entertainments of our Celtic forefathers—although you find giants, and dwarfs, and misbegotten beings of every imaginable shape and size; animals, too, that can speak and reason and lend their superhuman aid to prince and peasant in extremity, as well as genii, kelpies, and spirits of flood and fell, you rarely if ever meet with one of the “good folks,” or fairies proper, introduced upon the scene. The people thoroughly believed in them, believed that they had a veritable existence, and although invisible to mortal eye, that they might be at your elbow at any moment; that they disliked being spoken of at all as a rule, and that a disrespectful word about them especially would inevitably be followed by some signal punishment, or “mischance,” as it was more cautiously termed in the South—all this they believed, and therefore they held it wisest to speak of fairies, good folks though they were, as seldom as possible. The allusion to paying—
“The fairies their due on the fairy knowe,”
has reference to the custom, common enough on the western mainland and in some of the Hebrides some fifty years ago, and not altogether unknown perhaps even at the present day, of each maiden’s pouring from her cumanbleoghain, or milking-pail, evening and morning, on the fairy knowe a little of the new-drawn milk from the cow, by way of propitiating the favour of the good people, and as a tribute the wisest, it was deemed, and most acceptable that could be rendered, and sooner or later sure to be repaid a thousand-fold. The consequence was that these fairy knolls were clothed with a richer and more beautiful verdure than any other spot, howe or knowe, in the country, and the lacteal riches imbibed by the soil through this custom is even now visible in the vivid emerald green of a shian or fairy knoll whenever it is pointed out to you. This custom of pouring lacteal libations to the fairies on a particular spot deemed sacred to them, was known and practised at some of the summer shielings in Lochaber within the memory of the people now living.
CHAPTER IV.
Transit of Mercury—Improperly called an “Eclipse” of—November Meteors—Mr. Huggins—Spectrum Analyses of Cometary Light—Translation of a St. Kilda Song.
We were early astir on the morning of the 5th November [1868]; with little thought, be sure, of Guy Fawkes or the Gunpowder Plot, intent only on witnessing, if we might be so fortunate, the transit of Mercury over the solar disc. The phenomenon in question we have seen referred to as an “eclipse” of Mercury, which it certainly was not. A celestial body is properly said to be eclipsed when, by the interposition of another and a nearer orb, it is temporarily hid from view. A star or planet so hidden by the body of the moon, for instance, is said to be “occulted.” The sun is truly said to be eclipsed when the new moon at a particular conjunction steps in between us and him, and temporarily intercepts his beams. What again, for convenience sake, is called an eclipse of the moon, is really not an eclipse at all, so far at least as the terrestrial spectator is concerned; it would be more strictly correct to call it simply a lunar obscuration. The temporary appearance of Venus and Mercury as circular and sharply defined black spots on the solar disc, has hitherto always, and very properly, been called in the language of astronomers a “transit” of the particular planet by name, such as the “transit of Venus,” or the “transit of Mercury;” and there is no reason to change the term, for it is expressive and true, which the word eclipse, applied to such a conjunction, certainly is not.
Be it called what it may, however—eclipse or transit—we were disappointed in not getting a glimpse of the phenomenon in question on the present occasion. Although duly at our post from before sunrise till the minute calculated for the last contact of the planet with the solar disc, we were unable to obtain anything more than the most momentary blink even of the larger orb, and, of course, the detection of the black button-like disc of the planet itself, in such circumstances, was altogether out of the question. The disappointment, however, was less annoying to us in this instance from the fact that we had already been privileged to witness all the phases of a similar conjunction from first to last on the 12th November 1861. The next visible transit of Mercury does not take place till the 6th of May 1878—ten years hence. There are several other transits during the present century, invisible in our country, however, and on the continent of Europe; but which will probably afford much delight to many an eager watcher over the length and breadth of the South American continent, and generally over the islands of the Pacific Ocean.
Nor, with us here at least, was the night of the 13–14th instant any way more favourable for observation than the dull beclouded morning of the 5th itself. The night was calm and rainless, to be sure, but a heavy impenetrable mass of dark grey clouds, so low as to envelop all the mountain summits around, obscured the vault from horizon to horizon, from sunset to sunrise, so that not a single meteor could be seen by the keenest eye, even if above that pall of cloud the display had been the most brilliant and splendid conceivable. From the fact, however, that in several places widely distant from each other, from which we have had communications on the subject, and where the sky was abundantly clear and unclouded throughout, no unusual display of meteors was seen, the probability is that we have on this occasion missed them in our country, either because they came into contact with our atmosphere in the daytime, when, of course, they would be invisible, or more likely because our contact this year with the meteorolithic annulus was of the slightest, and at a segment thereof where the meteoric bodies are least numerous, and thus we must patiently wait till we again dash through it at its densest before we can hope for such a magnificent meteor shower as astonished and delighted us all in 1866. Only at Oxford, as far as our country is concerned, was there anything like a meteor shower on the present occasion, and even there the display seems to have been too faint and uninteresting to have attracted much attention. Intelligence has reached our country from New York, however, that over that city, and over the States generally, the meteoric display of the morning of the 14th was very splendid indeed, though, owing to the morning being further advanced before it commenced, less of it was seen by the people at large than on some previous occasions. The weather with our Transatlantic cousins seems to have been all that could be desired, as it is stated that “astronomers and others were able to make very complete observations.” The worst thing about our insular position with respect to matters astronomical is the extreme uncertainty with which anything like continuous observation can be conducted. The chances always are twenty to one that in Great Britain, at any given hour in any given place, the weather should be such as to render an observation of a celestial phenomenon impossible, or at the least partial and unsatisfactory. One thing, at least, is now pretty certain—that annually, and at a date that falls somewhere between sunset of the 13th and sunrise of the 14th November, we may confidently look for greater or less displays of these meteoric bodies, the only thing likely to interfere with the interesting pyrotechnic exhibition being an unfavourable state of the weather at a moment when we are most concerned that the sky shall be clear and cloudless.
Mr. Huggins, whose researches with the spectroscope have already made his name famous, has recently communicated a most interesting paper to the Royal Society, giving an account of the spectrum analyses of one of the smaller and commoner class of comets that was visible for a short time in the month of June last. Avoiding technical details, which might be uninteresting to some of our readers, we may simply mention that on testing the nucleus of this comet with the spectroscope, Mr. Huggins found that it was resolved into three broad “bands,” precisely similar to the results obtained on examining with the same wonderful instrument such carbon as follows the transmission of electric sparks through olefiant gas. The conclusion arrived at by Mr. Huggins is, that the nucleus of the comet in question consisted solely of volatilised carbon. This paper of Mr. Huggins is altogether a most interesting one, and we may have something more to say about it on a future occasion.
The following is a translation—somewhat freely rendered—of an old Irst or St. Kilda song, the solitary island home of a score or two of hardy inhabitants, and by all accounts a happy and hospitable race too, who cling with an unquenchable love to their lonely rock, as if it were a perfect paradise, ocean-girt and storm-beaten though it be—
“Placed far amid the melancholy main.”
Except another specimen given in a small collection of Gaelic songs, edited by the late Rev. Mr. M’Callum of Arisaig, the original of the following is the only St. Kilda song that we have met with. Our copy was procured in this way: Some years ago we were dining on board H.M. Revenue cruiser “Harriet,” Captain M’Allister. Going ashore on a fine moonlight night, one of the seamen who rowed our boat sang the song, which we had no hesitation in at once declaring to be of St. Kilda origin, which the man admitted was the case, he having picked it up many years before from an old woman who had spent some time on the island. Of the air, we can only remember that it was a wild, irregular sort of chant, very different from the soft low airs to which our mainland songs are for the most part sung, with the refrain or burden (represented by our Alexandrines in each stanza) given in a shrill falsetto that was somewhat disagreeable to the ear, although abundantly appropriate, probably, in the circumstances in which the song was composed, and when sung amid all the surroundings of the scene depicted.
The St. Kilda Maid’s Song.
Over the rocks, steadily, steadily;
Down to the clefts with a shout and a shove, O;
Warily tend the rope, shifting it readily,
Eagerly, actively, watch from above, O.
Brave, O brave, my lover true, he’s worth a maiden’s love:
(And the sea below is still as deep as the sky is high above!)
Sweet ’tis to sleep on a well feathered pillow,
Sweet from the embers the fulmar’s red egg, O;
Bounteous our store from the rock and the billow;
Fish and birds in good store, we need never to beg, O;
Brave, O brave, my lover true, he’s worth a maiden’s love:
(And the sea below is still as deep as the sky is high above!)
Hark to the fulmar and guillemot screaming:
Hark to the kittiwake, puffin, and gull, O:
See the white wings of solan goose gleaming;
Steadily, men! on the rope gently pull, O.
Brave, O brave, my lover true, he’s worth a maiden’s love:
(And the sea below is still as deep as the sky is high above!)
Deftly my love can hook ling and conger,
The grey-fish and hake, with the net and the creel, O;
Far from our island be plague and be hunger;
And sweet our last sleep in the quiet of the Kiel, O.
Brave, O brave, my lover true, he’s worth a maiden’s love:
(And the sea below is still as deep as the sky is high above!)
Pull on the rope, men, pull it up steadily:
(There’s a storm on the deep, see the scart claps his wings, O);
Cunningly guide the rope, shifting it readily;
Welcome my true love, and all that he brings, O!
Now God be praised, my lover’s safe, he’s worth a maiden’s love:
(And the sea below is still as deep as the sky is high above!)
Our song needs but little elucidation. The reader who knows that the wealth of the St. Kildians mainly consists of the feathers and eggs of wild-fowl, to procure which they are obliged to hang suspended from ropes over the most dreadful precipices, in the clefts and along the otherwise inaccessible ledges of which the sea-fowl breed, will have no difficulty in understanding the general drift of the island maid’s very spirited and very earnest song. It is, perhaps, unnecessary to say that as ling, conger, hake, and grey-fish are certain kinds of sea fish, so fulmar, guillemot, kittiwake, puffin, and scart are certain kinds of web-footed sea-fowl.
CHAPTER V.
Bird Music—The Skylark’s Song—Imitation of, by a French Poet—Alasdair Macdonald—Scott.
Conscious at last that pouting and inordinate weeping became him not, and that, being constantly on the “rampage,” like Mrs. Joe Gargery, was hardly consistent with his place in the calendar, April [1869] betimes resolved to “tak a thocht and mend,” and now, like Richard, is himself again—all sunshine and smiles. The rain-gauge, to be sure, with stern impartiality, will still show an occasional “inch,” or parts of an inch, if you are very particular in your inquiries, when examined of a morning, but its readings now at least are in no way appalling, for they represent the warm and genial rainfall of April showers, that, after all, are as necessary on the west coast at this moment, and as refreshing to the soil, as the orthodox cup of mulled port of an evening was believed to be to the weary traveller in the good old days of stage-coaches and post-chaises. The country, at all events, is looking very beautiful just now, everything so green and glad, so fresh and fair, and full of promise of a yet gladder, and gayer, and brighter day at hand, when the swallow, twittering, shall dart, a glossy meteor, in the sunlight, and the cuckoo shall challenge the truant schoolboy to repeat its well-known notes, correctly if he can. Now is the time to hear our native song-birds at their best, warbling their sweetest strains, and to decide, once for all, if it be possible, which you like best; the loud, clear, silvery tinkle of the seed-shelling finch’s rich and rapid song; the liquid and mellifluous warblings of the soft-billed tribes; or the soul-entrancing, round, rich, flute-like piping of the throstle, song-thrush, and merle. How it may fare with the reader who tries to decide the point we cannot say. For our own part, no decision that we could ever arrive at could keep its legs for two days together. No sooner did we decide that the skylark and its congeners had the best of it, than the goldfinch, with a score of lively cousins to aid and abet, challenged the verdict, and forced us to acknowledge his exquisite mastery in song—an admission made, however, only to be retracted again almost as soon as made, for in our walk on the evening of that self-same day did we not stand, and for the life of us couldn’t help standing—breathless, and hushed, and still—to listen to the merle and song-thrush from the neighbouring copse pouring forth the indescribable riches of their God-taught vespers as the sun went down; and did we not, then and there, vow, in utter forgetfulness of finch and skylark, that no music of earth could for a moment compare, in execution and compass, in distinctness, and cheeriness, and purity of note, with these matchless twilight strains? The truth is that no music is equal to bird-music—wild-bird music, that is—in its season, and amid all its natural surroundings; and the probability is that we shall give the preference at any time to the melody of one bird over that of another, not on any well-defined principles of choice or selection in the matter, but simply in accordance with our own prevailing mood and temperament of the moment. Such, at least, has been our own experience; but the reader has every opportunity at this season of studying the question for himself and deciding. Except that of the nightingale, perhaps the music of no bird has attracted so much attention by its beauty and suggestiveness as the merry trill of the skylark’s ascending song. The poets of every country in which it is to be found have vied with each other in their praises of the only bird that sings as he soars, and soars as he sings, scaling on quivering pinions the aerial terraces of heaven, until he can scarcely be discerned, a music-showering speck against the background of the blue profound! The other day we fell in with some curious verses by the French poet Du Bartas, in which he strives, and not altogether unsuccessfully, to imitate the merry trill and rhythm of the skylark’s song:—
“La gentille aloüette, avec son tire-lire,
Tire-lire, à lire, et tire-liran tire;
Vers la voute du ciel, puis son vol vers ce lieu,
Vire et desire dire adieu Dieu, adieu Dieu!”
The last line, if rapidly repeated with the proper beat and intonation, will be found a really very successful imitation of the concluding notes of the lark’s well-known song. Many of our readers will remember that the North Uist bard, Ian Mac Codrum, in his Smeorach Chlann-Domhnuill, manages very happily to imitate the smeorach or song-thrush’s notes in the burden or chorus; while Alexander Macdonald—Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair—very naturally falls, like the French poet, into an imitation of the wild-bird music of the woods and groves in a stanza that may be quoted not inappropriately at this season:—
“Cha bhi crèutair fo chupan nan spèur
’N sin nach tiunndaidh ri’n speuràd ’s ri’n dreach,
’S gun toir Phoebus le buadhan a bhlàis
Anam-fas daibh a’s caileachdan ceart,
Ni iad ais-eiridh choitcheann on uaigh
Far na mhiotaich am fuachd iad a steach,
’S their iad—guileag-doro-hidola-hann
Dh-fhalbh an geamhra’s tha’n samhradh air teachd!”
The lines of Du Bartas have little meaning in themselves, and are untranslatable, being simply an attempt on the poet’s part, in some odd moment of hilarity and abandon, to embody the notes of the skylark’s song in something like articulate verse. The general sense of Macdonald’s lines describing the irrepressible inclination of all living creatures to be jubilant and joyous at the return of spring, cannot better be rendered than in the first part of Scott’s introductory stanza to the second canto of the Lady of the Lake, only that the return of spring in the one case, instead of the return of morn in the other, prompts to the outburst of gladness and song:—
“At morn the black-cock trims his jetty wing,
’Tis morning prompts the linnet’s blithest lay,
All Nature’s children feel the matin spring
Of life reviving, with reviving day;
And while yon little bark glides down the bay,
Wafting the stranger on his way again,
Morn’s genial influence roused a minstrel grey,
And sweetly o’er the lake was heard thy strain,
Mixed with the sounding harp, O white-hair’d Allan-bane!”
CHAPTER VI.
Severe Drought—The Drive by Coach from Fort-William to Kingussie—Breakfast at Moy—Where did Scott find Dominie Sampson’s “Pro-di-gi-ous!”?—Professor Blackie’s Poem on Glencoe.
That the people of Lochaber and the Western Isles should be rejoicing in the advent of heavy rains [August 1869], and seriously glad at the reappearance of clouds in the heavens and mists upon the mountain tops, may seem odd enough to those who know anything of our usual meteorological characteristics; yet true it is, and of a verity that so it is, for here, as elsewhere, the heat was for many consecutive weeks intense, and the parching drought and fierce glare of a summer’s sun from a constantly unclouded sky well nigh unbearable by man or beast, whether in the sheltered valley, where for days and days no breath of air shook the tiniest leaflet or ruffled the surface of the sullen tarn, or on the upland moor, where, if breath of air there was, it was hot and stifling as the breath of a furnace. Were it not for the occasional sea breezes, that sometimes of an evening swept over the almost pulseless deep, and copious falls of blessed night-dews, we should have been badly off indeed. But, as matters have turned out, we have much reason to be thankful, for if our crops are not quite so heavy as in average years, they are at least of excellent quality, and being ripe sooner than usual, we have a chance of getting them secured in a condition that will add immensely to their value. So thorough and persistent was the drought even with us, that springs failed that never before were known to refuse their waters to the thirsty; and water-courses that heretofore, even in the driest years, still presented shady pools connected by purling rivulets, were for weeks together arid and waterless as the course of an ancient lava stream. As you wandered among the hills you could set your fusee alight on a stone in a torrent bed over which in ordinary summers rolls a volume of foaming waters. The demand for beer wherever you went was in these circumstances something wonderful; and at times, on the arrival of coach or steamer with its load of panting tourists, the bawling from husky throats for a supply—an instant and copious supply—of the delicious liquid was sufficiently amusing. One of the happiest illustrations of the proverbial close treading of the ridiculous on the heels of the sublime, and the wafer-like thinness of the partition that divides the sentimental from the absurd, was Dr. Johnson’s celebrated parody on the quasi-sentimental style of poetry so much in vogue in his latter years—and sooth to say too much in vogue in our day as well—a style as unlike the school of Pope as you can well imagine, and the very antipodes of the sturdily masculine and didactic strains which Johnson, an intellectual giant—for there were giants in these days—alone accounted true poetry:—
“Hermit hoar, in solemn cell,
Wearing out life’s evening grey,
Smite thy bosom, sage, and tell
What is bliss? and which the way?
“Thus I spoke; and speaking sighed;
Scarce repressed the starting tear;
When the smiling sage replied,—
‘Come, my lad, and drink some beer!’ ”
And very well hit off, you will confess; an arrow shot from an Ulysses’ bow at the puling whimperers of a namby-pamby sentimentalism that they miscalled poetry; but if we dared for the nonce to take these lines in a more serious and literal sense than their author intended, we should say that in such hot and parching weather as we have recently had, and are still having, there is more “bliss” in a good draught of “Allsopp” or “Bass” than is dreamt of in the philosophy of the sentimentalists, and thousands upon thousands of this season’s tourists are ready, we’ll be bound, to homologate this statement.
It was Dr. Johnson, too, if we remember well, who spoke loudly and dogmatically, as was his wont, of the delightful feeling that one has in being rapidly whirled along a good road in a post-chaise; and remembering the unsteadiness of the “Rambler” on his pins, and his unwieldy corporation, one can readily understand that he found the means of locomotion referred to the easiest and most enjoyable possible. Our own experience of post-chaises has, sooth to say, been somewhat of the slightest, but in lieu thereof we would recommend a well-appointed public coach, with sound, well-cared-for horses, a steady and obliging driver and guard, good roads under foot, and a bright sky above all; and such a conveyance we on a recent occasion found the mail-coach between Fort-William and Kingussie to be; and such a driver and guard, the two in one, is the renowned “Davie Jack,” who knows his work, and does it too, in a style that reminds one of the old “Defiance” in its palmiest days; while the weather, if anything, was too fine, too bright and cloudless—the best fault it could have, however, since it is impossible that the weather on any particular day should be faultless, any more than that any human being should be perfect. Nothing, indeed, can be finer than the drive through Lochaber and Badenoch to Kingussie, except perhaps the drive back again. With mountain scenery on all hands, unsurpassed even in the Highlands for wild, and savage, and solitary grandeur; with foaming torrents dashing down the steeps, torrents that at a distance and at this season look like so many threads of purest silver constantly being absorbed and inwefted with the river, that, with a voice more hushed, and a quieter, kindlier step, still gladdens and fertilises the valley as it seeks the sea; with loch and river scenery the most attractive and lovely; and all, in short, that you can reasonably look for of the grand or beautiful from the sea coast to the central Highlands. With all this, and the redoubted “Davie” to handle the ribbons, as only “Davie” can handle them—said “Davie” the while as full of anecdote, and joke, and local tradition as an egg is full of meat—with all this we say, and much more that might be mentioned, the man who cannot enjoy such a journey at this season is little to be envied; for, be his other qualities and qualifications what they may, his non-enjoyment of such a drive clearly proves one of two things,—either he is physically unwell, and out of sorts, and had better stay at home; or, æsthetically, he has no eye for, and no appreciation of, some of the most splendid scenery in the Highlands, and in that case is less to be blamed than pitied. Even in winter we should say that this was the readiest, as well as the most pleasant, line of intercommunication between the north-western Highlands and the south. It were, finally, unpardonable in us, who enjoyed it so much, not to mention the very excellent breakfast on the up-journey, and the equally excellent and substantial “tea,” or tea-dinner rather, on returning, to be had in the shepherd’s house at Moy. It may seem unromantic and prosaic to say so, but it is a fact nevertheless, that one’s appreciation of the sublime and beautiful—let Mr. Edmund Burke say what he likes—is not a little enhanced by a due supply of creature comforts pari passû. If one cannot carry the comforts of home about with him, any more than honest Bailie Nicol Jarvie could carry about with him the comforts of the “Sautmarket,” it is no small matter to meet with good cheer off a snow-white cloth, with the attentions of a smart, intelligent serving girl, in odd and out-of-the-way places, where you least expect it. Altogether, a trip by the Fort-William and Kingussie mail-coach during the present fine weather is very enjoyable indeed—superior, upon the whole, we should say, to the “Rambler’s” post-chaise, not forgetting that the latter is a solitary and somewhat surly sort of business, whereas in the former you have the chance of pleasant and agreeable companionship, in addition to its other attractions.
For one to make a discovery, and to think that oneself has made a discovery, are two widely different things. We readily acknowledge the distinction. That we have made a discovery we shall not venture to affirm, but we think we have. Our discovery, if discovery it be, is this, that Sir Walter Scott is indebted for Dominie Sampson’s “prodigious!” to Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Who can think of the worthy, kind-hearted, most unsophisticated, and withal most learned, albeit life-long kirkless parson, without instantly recalling his favourite exclamation of “Pro-di-gi-ous?” We stumbled on our discovery in this wise:—A few evenings ago we were reading the third volume of a very fine edition of Boswell’s “Johnson,” kindly placed at our disposal by Lady Riddell of Strontian—and a good edition of a good book is no small matter to one so far removed from libraries as we are—when we came to a page that described Johnson’s meeting with a gentleman who had been his companion at Pembroke College, Oxford, some fifty years previously. Mr. Edwards, for that was the gentleman’s name, and Boswell accompanied Johnson home, where, in course of conversation, Mr. Edwards said, addressing Johnson, “Sir, I remember you would not let us say prodigious at college. For even then, sir (turning to Boswell), he was delicate in language, and we all feared him.” Now, can any one doubt that it was having his attention particularly called to the word in this passage that made Scott first ponder the absurdity of using a word of such volume and import on every trifling occasion, and caused him, possibly at a long subsequent date (for Scott’s memory, as we know, was prodigiously retentive—there the word, you will observe, is pat and appropriate enough—prodigiously retentive, we say, of words, phrases, and odd turns of expression)—to put it so frequently as an exclamation of unspeakable, indescribable import into the mouth of honest Sampson, whom you can no more help laughing at, at times, than you can loving him with all your heart always? The matter, after all, may seem a trifle, and it is a trifle, but such trifles are dear to the lovers of literature. Were Boswell in the flesh subsequent to the publication of Guy Mannering, and had his attention drawn to such a matter, slight as it seems, what a delightful chapter of gossip he could write about it, with fresh reminiscences of his long and intimate intercourse with his “illustrious friend,” for whom till his dying day he cherished so much veneration and awe, ever-more mingled with most pardonable pride that he knew him as no one else knew him, and loved him as no one else loved him, or perhaps could love him.
We have just been reading our friend Professor Blackie’s poem on “Glencoe.” The manner in which he “goes at” his subject, to use a sporting phrase, the life, and vigour, and swing, and fervour of the whole, is most refreshing in these days of poetical (save the mark!) namby-pambyisms, and eminently characteristic of the learned Professor when at his best. Here you have him, like a knight of the Middle Ages, high in his stirrups, with lance in rest, “Dh’aindeoin co theireadh e!” blazing on his shield, and who shall dare to stop his fierce career against the perpetrators of the foulest deed on record? Less polished and less artistic than Aytoun’s “Widow of Glencoe,” it is, nevertheless, the better poem, on such a subject, of the two. Its very ruggedness and stern headlong force are its chief charm, they best befit the theme. Blackie is terribly in earnest; with Aytoun you cannot help feeling it was a mere matter of sentiment and no more.
CHAPTER VII.
O the Barren, Barren Shore—Brilliant Auroral Display—Intense Cold—Birds—Glanders—Scribblings on the Back of One Pound Notes.
During a week’s pleasant and gentle thaw [February 1870], we had hoped that the worst of winter was come and gone; but to our no small disappointment the genial interregnum has been followed by another heavy fall of snow, and a wonderfully keen and biting frost, which, borne on the wings of a surly nor’easter, has again bound up the earth as if with fetters of iron. Under such circumstances the sea-coast, we take it, presents the most dreary and desolate-looking winter picture imaginable; far more so, to our thinking, than either moss, or moorland, or mountain range. There is a something inexpressibly dismal and dowie in the black crape-like belt of sea beach which divides a landscape deeply clad with snow and frost-bound, from the dull and leaden coloured deep beyond; the dashing of the waves of said deep upon the shore, uttering the while a sadly funereal and dirge-like moan. If our inland friends, in view of the wintry waste around them, take up the cry of “O the dreary, dreary moorland”—we, dwellers by the sea coast, have the best possible right to finish the Tennysonian line by exclaiming “O the barren, barren shore.” It must, by the way, have been on some fair summer eve that the Crown officials first thought of depriving landowners of the sea-shore privileges hitherto enjoyed by them; had it been in winter, the idea, it strikes us, would have withered in the bud; they would have fled the very sight of the dark and dreary “foreshore,” and wisely confined themselves to the shelter of their Woods and Forests!
It is worthy of record that the present severe snow-storm was ushered in by a very splendid and in many respects peculiar auroral display. Shortly after dark on Friday evening, a faint auroral film, over which an occasional streamer flashed impetuously, over-spread the northern heavens. All this, however, soon died away, and the north assumed a cold, clear, frosty aspect. Between seven and eight o’clock many meteors, some of them of great brilliancy and beauty, were observed to cross and recross the zenith and its neighbourhood in all directions. Towards the latter hour, however, these ceased, and all of a sudden, in a very few seconds at most, the whole celestial hemisphere from E.N.E. to W.S.W.—from horizon to horizon—appeared completely spanned by a magnificent auroral arch, eight degrees in breadth; like a glorious bridge of a single semi-circular span, with its edges or parapets of a deep blood-red colour, and its centre part or roadway of frosted silver; the rest of the heavens, in all directions, being the while of an inky blue, and cold and cloudless, without the slightest appearance of anything like streamers to be seen anywhere. Some idea of the brilliancy of this auroral arch may be formed from the fact that such bright stars as Arcturus, Castor and Pollux, Aldebaran, Mars, and others, which lay along its path, became quite dim, and when located near the centre and brightest part of the stream, almost invisible. Even Venus, which once or twice was overlapped for a few minutes by the arch’s margin only, lost all its lustre and sheen, and had a burdened anxious aspect, as if the forehead and “face divine” of a mighty intelligence laboured under the shade of deep and profound thought. For upwards of an hour did this splendid auroral arch continue to span the heavens from horizon to horizon, and undergoing little or no change, until its final disappearance, by what seemed a process of gradual contraction into itself and towards its terminus in the east-north-east, whence it started. Such was the very singular meteoric phenomena by which a severe snow-storm and an amount of cold almost unparalleled in its intensity was ushered in on the western sea-board of Scotland in February of the year of grace 1870.
And how fares it with our feathered favourites, the wild birds, in these hard times? Fertile as they are in resources, and indefatigable in providing for the wants of the passing hour, all their little shifts must frequently prove inadequate to the supply of their daily wants in such trying times as these. St. Valentine’s day has come and gone, but neither in copse, nor hedgerow, nor ivy-mantled wall, find we as yet any traces of nidification, nor has the love-prompted warble, in past years so loud and incessant at this season, been yet heard around us. The robin only cheeps; the sparrow simply chirps; the linnet merely twitters; and even the “gay chaffinch” can only give us a disconsolate “fink, fink,” in place of his well-known glad burst of choicest and cheeriest song. The mellow chaunt of the merle and song-thrush delights not yet the ear from copse or brake at early morn or evening-tide. The intense and piercing cold, which, on the wings of the northern blast, sweeps over the land as we write, and as it moans, and sighs, and wildly shrieks by starts in its progress over the deep, causes the lone sea-bird to utter its eeriest and wildest cry, has succeeded in freezing, not only the rivulet and the pool, but has actually bound up the voice of gladness and every source of joyful utterance in all our feathered friends as well. But “nil desperandum,” better times are coming. Fields will yet be green, trees will yet be leafy, rivers unbound from icy fetters will yet dance merrily in the sun, and laugh with all their ripples, as they hasten seawards; and then “again shall flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds shall have come, and the voice of the turtle be heard in our land.”
Are glanders incurable? is a very ugly, but doubtless a very important question, which is being at present keenly discussed in the columns of several metropolitan journals. By glanders is meant, not the equine disease in the equine subject properly so called, and which comes so frequently under the treatment of the veterinary surgeon, but the same frightful disease when introduced either by accident or design into the human system. Is it curable? This is the question, and the general impression seems to be, that when it once fairly lays hold of the human system, it is, like hydrophobia, quite and utterly incurable. We do not pretend to know anything of the subject, and we allude to it merely to say that we well recollect of hearing, on undoubted authority, of a patient who was actually cured of glanders, caught, if we remember rightly, from eating some beans found in a manger in which a horse having the disease had recently been feeding. All the circumstances connected with the case and cure were related in our hearing by the late Dr. John Reid, Professor of Anatomy in the University of St. Andrews, one evening that we dined at his house during our attendance at the University. It is now some eighteen or twenty years ago, and we were then too young and thoughtless to give that attention to the subject which it deserved. We recollect, however, that the case was said to have occurred in Edinburgh, and to have been treated in the infirmary of that city, and that the patient, on his recovery, having been found shrewd, intelligent, and steady, was afterwards appointed one of the janitors of that institution. There must be some medical gentleman still in Edinburgh able to speak to a case of such importance; and amongst others present on the occasion that we heard Professor Reid refer to it, were, if we rightly remember, Principal Sir David Brewster and Professor Martin, now of Aberdeen, and at that time Mathematical Master in the Madras College of St. Andrews.
The other evening a one pound note, which a lady friend of ours had just received by post, was handed to us, with a request that we should try and decipher some writing which was observed on the back of it. After some little trouble, we were a good deal amused to find that the writing in question really consisted of the following lines:—
“I am a note of the British Linen;
I’ve long been kept by L. Mackinnon;
Where’er you go you’ll find them willing
To give for me just twenty shilling.—L. M’K.”
We have no idea who this poetical L. Mackinnon is or was, but it is pretty evident, we think, that both he and the British Linen Company’s Bank note had very excellent opinions of themselves. It was Lady Louisa Stewart, if we rightly recollect, who sent Sir Walter Scott a copy of the following lines, which she discovered on the back of a battered bank note which had come into her possession. It will be observed that they are in all respects immeasurably superior to Mr. L. Mackinnon’s:—
“Farewell, my note, and wheresoe’er ye wend,
Shun gaudy scenes, and be the poor man’s friend;
You’ve left a poor one; go to one as poor,
And drive despair and hunger from his door.”
Let cynics growl and snarl as they list, some people HAVE hearts, and the author of the above lines, be sure, had a right warm and kindly one.
CHAPTER VIII.
A Wet February—A Good Time Coming—Sir Walter Scott—Mr. Gladstone—Death of Sir David Brewster.
One swallow doesn’t make a summer, says the proverb, and unless one fine day (the 19th) makes a spring, we haven’t for the last six weeks [February 1870] and more had a single hour of a character to be disassociated from one of the wettest and wildest winters on record. No sooner has one storm died away, less from any voluntary cessation on its part than from sheer exhaustion of its forces, than, after a slushy, sludgy interregnum of brief duration, it has been succeeded in every instance by another and another still of equal or greater violence and fury, so that of quiet or calm we have known little, and of sun or moon or stars we have seen hardly the briefest glimpse since Old New Year’s Day. When Foote, the incomparable comedian (Johnson said of him that “the dog was irresistible”), after acquiring and dissipating several fortunes, was at last lucky enough to be able to set up his carriage in a more dashing style than ever, he selected as his motto, and emblematical of his career, the words Iterum, Iterum, Iterumque! (Again, and Again, and Again!) It has struck us that if the Meteorological Society were to apply to the Herald’s College for a crest and armorial bearings to be displayed on the title-page of their volume of “Transactions” for the first quarter of the current year, we, should they do us the honour to consult us, would suggest a cloud-cumulus, rain-surcharged, proper on the shield, with Aquarius and the “watery” Hyades as supporters; Eolus ordering “a fresh hand to the bellows” as a crest, and the Iterum, Iterum, Iterumque of Foote’s chariot as a motto of singular appropriateness and meaning. How delighted, by the way, must our amphibious friend Mr. Symons be in the midst of all this rainfall! His crest again should be a man’s head on a fish’s body in an overflowed meadow, natant, and his supporters an anemometer and rain-gauge proper! It is needless to say that anything like spring work is with us not only in a very backward state, but has hardly been commenced. Before the end of February we had our own corn seed and potatoes in the ground last year. If we get them down this year any time during the next month, it will be earlier than the weather at the date of the present writing promises. Our ornithological studies extend over a greater number of years than we care at this moment very accurately to count; but never have we known our wild-birds so listless and loveless on Shrovetide Eve as they are this season. Except an occasional carol from the wren, who has a soul as big as that of his namesake Sir Christopher, who built the dome of St. Paul’s (the wren also, by the way, is a dome-builder), and an irregular strophe at rare intervals from the redbreast, our woods are songless, and of nidification there is not a sign. Meliora sperāre, nevertheless, is sound philosophy. Let us hope for better things: He is faithful that promised that while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease. Scott has few finer passages than the following, which we are fond of repeating in such a season as this. It occurs in his epistle to William Stewart Rose, introductory to the first canto of Marmion, and, though very beautiful, is seldom quoted:—
“No longer Autumn’s glowing red
Upon our Forest hills is shed;
No more, beneath the evening beam,
Fair Tweed reflects their purple gleam;
Away hath passed the heather bell
That bloomed so rich on Needpath fell;
Sallow his brow, and russet bare
Are now the sister-heights of Yair.
The sheep, before the pinching heaven,
To sheltered dale and down are driven,
Where yet some faded herbage pines
And yet a watery sunbeam shines:
In meek despondency they eye
The wither’d sward and wintry sky,
And far beneath their summer hill
Stray sadly by Glenkinnon’s rill:
The shepherd shifts his mantle’s fold,
And wraps him closer from the cold;
His dogs no merry circles wheel,
But, shivering, follow at his heel;
A cowering glance they often cast,
As deeper moans the gathering blast.
“My imps, though hardy, bold, and wild,
As best befits the mountain child,
Feel the sad influence of the hour,
And wail the daisy’s vanished flower;
Their summer gambols tell, and mourn,
And anxious ask—Will spring return,
And birds and lambs again be gay,
And blossoms clothe the hawthorn spray?
“Yes, prattlers, yes. The daisy’s flower
Again shall paint your summer bower;
Again the hawthorn shall supply
The garlands you delight to tie;
The lambs upon the lea shall bound,
The wild birds carol to the round;
And while you frolic light as they,
Too short shall seem the summer day.”
On her rich roll of worthies, Scotland has but few names of whom she has more reason to be proud than that of Walter Scott. If we had even said not one, an objector might perhaps find the assertion more difficult to disprove than he wots of. Nor has the star of his marvellous power and influence for good set or been extinguished; it has only been clouded for a season by the intervention of exhalations of the “earth, earthy”—exhalations that the growth of a healthier and holier taste is already dissipating, and the Wizard’s star shall reappear in undiminished lustre, and young and old will clap their hands and rejoice in its purity and power. Some years ago arose a school of poetry that flared and flickered for a season, and found admirers on the same mysterious principle, we suppose, that Antoinetta Bourignon and Joanna Southcott found followers. It was happily styled the “spasmodic” school; and it died and disappeared—the best thing it could do. A new school has succeeded, that may be called the sensuous, and, we had almost said, the lascivious, and with a strong tendency to the reproduction in modern guise of all that was worst and best in the ancient Greek drama. Of this school, Mr. Swinburne is, facile princeps, the chief. It also will last but for a season, and will die and disappear ignominiously, as did its predecessor. There is yet another school, that has existed for some time longer—full of missyism, sentimentalism, and languid goodyism—“too good for banning, too bad for a blessing.” It also is slowly dwindling, and dwining, and dying, and must soon expire, leaving people hardly any better or worse than it found them. And so with the novels of the day, with their “sensations,” their seductions, murders, and unspeakable horrors, worse than were mingled in the bubbling cauldron of the witches in Macbeth: their day is doomed; for purer taste, banished but for a moment, must reappear—is already reappearing—and people, awakening as if from a dream, will once again consent to quench their thirst at healthier fountains, and to wander in less questionable bye-paths. The poetry and novels of Scott will then resume their attraction and reassert their influence and power; and whithersoever he leads, no parent need be ashamed to follow, or feel obliged in the interests of morality to forbid and forego the companionship of wife or children through scenes where there is everything to delight and nothing to offend. It is well that in the world of poetry and fiction, as in social and political affairs, the maxim holds true that—
“Res nolunt diu male administrari.”
Of Mr. Gladstone, the politician, there are many more enthusiastic admirers than ourselves, though we would not willingly be supposed to yield to any one in our ardent admiration of his ripe scholarship and unrivalled eloquence; but we shall think better of him while we live, and have a kindlier and warmer interest in all he says and does, on account of his recent eulogium on the character and writings of Sir Walter Scott.
And who can speak of Scott, or think of Abbotsford and Melrose and the classic Tweed at the present moment, without also thinking of Allerly and Sir David Brewster, one of the greatest men of science that Scotland has ever produced; and greater far, as sometimes happens in such cases, out of it than in it, for during full forty years, wherever, throughout the habitable parts of the earth, science had lit her lamp and could count her votaries, however humble, there the name of David Brewster was familiar as a household word, and his discoveries known and applauded. He was the first really distinguished man of letters and science we ever knew, and it was while writing one of the earlier chapters of this work, on a subject in which he felt the keenest interest, and in connection with which we had occasion to mention his name, that the grand old man, venerable in honours and in years, was breathing his last, with a Christian resignation to the Divine will, and a Christian’s joyful faith in the Divine mercy and goodness. Passing through the valley of death, he feared no evil, for his Lord and Saviour sustained his steps. Through the first Lady Brewster (née Macpherson), to whom we had the honour of being known before we had yet seen her distinguished husband, we were fortunate enough to be admitted, at the very beginning of our curriculum at college, to a degree of familiarity with the Principal of our University, that our relative positions would not otherwise have warranted, and which we have the satisfaction to remember we had sense enough to value highly and to be proud of even at that early age. It was by his practised hand that the instrument was adjusted through which we had our first view of two of the most beautiful sights that the telescope reveals to us—Jupiter with his belts and retinue of attendant moons, and Saturn with his rings; and very patient and good-natured and kindly were his replies to our eager questionings with regard to the nature of the wonders then first opened to our gaze. Sir David, if forced into it, could fight, and never turned his back on an assailant. If you hit him, he hit again, and he always hit severely; but he was, notwithstanding, a man of kindest heart and most amiable disposition, and it would be difficult to meet with any one more cheerful or courteous or pleasant within the circle of his own family and in his daily intercourse with his acquaintances and friends. Requiescat in pace: he was in truth a great man. Not often does it happen that in the same country, and within so short a time of each other, two such stars so large and lustrous as Faraday and Brewster have disappeared from the firmament of science. A century may elapse ere the thrones they have left vacant shall again be adequately filled. There is something extremely beautiful and affecting in one of Sir David Brewster’s last utterances upon earth. On the morning of his death, Sir James Simpson, standing by his bedside, remarked that it had been given to him to show forth much of God’s great and marvellous works; and the dying philosopher solemnly and quietly replied, “Yes, I have found them to be great and marvellous, and I have found and felt them to be His.”
CHAPTER IX.
Long-Line Fishing—Scarcity of Fish—Their Fecundity—Large Specimen of the Raia Chagrinea—The Wolf-Fish—The Devil-Fish.
For several years past [March 1870] the spring fishing with “long lines” in our western lochs has been so unsuccessful as to be hardly worth the while engaging in it. At our very doors, where with the hand-line during the summer and autumn months, some ten or twelve years ago, we could almost always depend on a large basketful of the finest rock cod, gurnard, haddock, and flounder, as the result of a couple of hours fishing, more recently very few, and sometimes none at all, could be caught, with the cunningest exercise of all the patience and piscatorial skill at our command, while in winter and spring the long-line fishing of grey cod, skate, and ling, and eel has been equally disappointing. Why it should be so no one would venture to say; the utmost you could get out of the oldest fisherman on the coast was an admission of the fact, with a shake of the head and a shrug of the shoulders, that if so disposed you could very readily interpret into the line, albeit unknown to him, that—
“’Twas true ’twas pity, pity ’twas ’twas true,”
a cautious reticence on the point that was altogether praiseworthy, for really and truly nobody did know or could say anything satisfactory in explanation of the mystery. Was it owing to the multiplication of the number of steamers, screw and paddle, constantly coming and going, and like Tennyson’s “years” at their unamiable meeting, “roaring and blowing,” keeping the waters in perpetual turmoil, and scaring the fish from their usual haunts? Such an hypothesis could be seriously entertained for a moment only to be rejected. Could it be owing to any cyclical meteorological changes, or to anything anomalous in the order of the seasons? Admitting that something of this kind has been going on for some time, and is still going on, it was readily seen, nevertheless, that it was all too inappreciable and remote to have had the result complained of—to cause that in the waters of “the great deep” which it had failed to effect in any noticeable way on the dry land. Or, was it that the fish themselves, by reason of their numberless enemies, afloat and ashore, were actually diminishing in numbers, and so necessarily becoming scarcer from year to year? No one, however, knowing anything of the economy of the fish in question, could for a moment entertain such an idea. The fecundity of these fish is something incredible. We once had the roe of a female cod, that weighed (the fish) six lbs., first boiled hard, and then divided with tolerable exactness into so many ounces, and counting the number of eggs in one ounce, and multiplying by the number of ounces in the entire roe, we found, at a rough calculation, that in that single fish, of no great size, there were upwards of a million and a half of eggs—each egg destined to become a fish, and, barring accidents, to attain to the average age and size of its kind. But however we may try to account for the scarcity of these fish in our lochs for several years back, it is an agreeable duty to have to record that during the past winter and spring there has been a marked improvement alike in the quantity and quality of the fish caught all along the western seaboard. Not only have the common fish of our own coasts been taken in considerable numbers, but several kinds of fish formerly known only as occasional visitors to our shores have this season been plentiful in all our lochs, and have well repaid the diligence of their captors. The long-nosed skate, for example, formerly a rare fish with us, has this season been common. It is known to ichthyologists as the Raia chagrinea, and is not only excellent eating, but from its enormous liver supplies a large quantity of very fine oil, that burns with a clearer and steadier light than that of any other fish with which we are acquainted. We are convinced, by the way, that, used medicinally, it would be found equally efficacious with cod liver oil in all cases where the latter is recommended, whilst its rather agreeable taste and flavour would render it a tolerably palatable dose in its purest and strongest state, which cod oil never becomes, manufacture, and decoct, and clarify it as you may. A very fine specimen of the Chagrinea was caught here about ten days ago. It was cut up and disembowelled before we saw it, but we should guess that its weight when taken off the hook could not have been less than 70 lbs. All the skates are ugly brutes, and the long-nosed Chagrinea is at once perhaps the ugliest and the best of its tribe. Some people don’t eat skate, nor can we say that we are partial to it ourselves, though we once heard a noted gourmand declare that the “wing of a skate was equal to a shoulder of a salmon.” We should, for our own part, rather have the salmon. While in Oban about a month ago, an extremely fierce-looking and ugly fish, the name and character whereof not a little puzzled its captors, was brought for our inspection. Luckily for our credit as a naturalist, we had previously seen more than one specimen of the same fish with the St. Andrews fishermen, it being by no means a rare visitor to the eastern and north-eastern shores of Scotland. It was the wolf or cat-fish, closely related to the family of the Gobies (Gobioidæ), the Anarrhicas lupus of ichthyologists. The head of this curious and most repulsive-looking fish has some peculiar markings, which, with the fierce glaring eyes and their position in the face, and the formidable array of long, sharp-pointed, recurved teeth, give it much of the expression of an enraged cat, and hence doubtless its common name. For the same reasons, and on account probably of its character as a fierce, relentless tyrant among more amiable and less powerful fish, it is known among the Channel Islands and along the coasts of England as the wolf-fish. The only fish at all approaching it in ugliness and repulsiveness of features is the better-known angler or fishing-frog (Lophius piscatorius), which also, by the way, is not so common of late years on our western coasts as it used to be.
CHAPTER X.
Birds—Contest between a Heron and an Eel.
With the exception of a slight drizzle on Saturday the last ten days have been wonderfully fine for the season [February 1870]. Seldom, indeed, have we been so near realising the “ethereal mildness” of Thomson’s “Spring” so early in the year. And, in sooth, it was high time that some such pleasant change in the weather should take place, for no living wight can remember anything so incessant and persistent as were the rain and the storm of the previous six weeks.
“When frost and snow come both together,
Then sit by the fire and save shoe leather,”
quoth Jonathan Swift, the honest Dean of St. Patrick’s, being evidently no curler, and more given to satire than to snow-balling; but really for the six weeks above specified nothing less than the direst necessity could tempt one to any other pastime than the prudential and prosaic one recommended in the couplet. Grant him but license to grumble, however, and man can endure, and that scathlessly, much more than he wots of. And how easily is he after all restored to equanimity and even cheerfulness! Here we are already, placid and pleased, enjoying the fine weather; the cold and the wet and the boisterous gales of January and December altogether forgotten, or, if remembered, remembered only to give zest to the bright and sunshiny present. And never, we believe, were song-birds in such free and full song on St. Valentine’s day. Morning and evening (the interval, you must know, dear reader, is as yet passed in tender dalliance and nest-building), from copse and woodland, ring out the richest strains of our native warblers, thrush, redbreast, blackbird, throstle, white-throat, wren (whom the Germans, on account of his indomitable pluck and pre-eminence as a songster, term the kingbird), and a score of other “musical celebrities,” vie with each other in the richness and the melody of their incomparable song. Within a month, should the weather continue favourable as at present, most of our wild-birds will have finished their nests, and commenced the labours of incubation. We trust that our readers will do all they can this season to prevent children and others from what is called “birds’-nesting,” one of the most cruel pastimes to which any one could turn himself. All good men, and most great ones, have been remarkable for their attachment to animals, both domesticated and wild, and particularly to song-birds. Listen to Virgil’s passing allusion to the subject in his Georgics, a magnificent poem, of itself sufficient to immortalise the name of any one man:—
“Qualis populea mœrens Philomela, sub umbra,” &c.,
thus rendered into English:—
“Lo, Philomela from the umbrageous wood,
In strains melodious mourns her tender brood,
Snatch’d from the nest by some rude ploughman’s hand,
On some lone bough the warbler takes her stand;
The live-long night she mourns the cruel wrong,
And hill and dale resound the plaintive song.”
And hear our own matchless “ploughman bard,” in one of his sweetest lyrics, The Posie:—
“The hawthorn I will pu’, wi’ its locks o’ siller grey,
Where, like an aged man, it stands at break o’ day,
But the songster’s nest within the bush I winna tak away—
And a’ to be a posie to my ain dear May.”
Verily, dear reader, he who wrote that verse, despite the pious murmurings of the rigidly righteous, and the cold shudderings of religious fanaticism at his shortcomings, must have been a man of largest heart and widest sympathies; and, properly understood, there is much truth, and no irreverence, in his own finding, that even
“The light which led astray
Was light from heaven.”
We were much amused the other day at seeing a heron, a long-necked, long-legged bird, doubtless familiar to the reader, for once in a “fix.” We say “for once,” for it is a most sagacious bird and thoroughly master of its own particular rôle, which, it is needless to say, is principally fish-catching. We were amusing ourselves on the sea-shore during low-water, watching the habits of periwinkles, hermit-crabs, star-fish, &c., when we observed a heron at some hundred yards distance, leaping about, wriggling its body, and performing other strange and unheron-like antics, as if it had suddenly gone mad. Knowing the staid and sober habits of the bird in general, we at once came to the conclusion that something extraordinary “was up,” and determined, if possible, to discover what it was. Making a slight détour to avoid alarming him—for it was a he, a very handsome, full-crested male—we easily managed to creep within fifty yards or so of him, and the cause of his excitement and unwonted posturings became at once apparent. He had caught an eel (a great dainty with the heron family) of about two feet in length, and of girth like a stout walking-stick, notwithstanding which, however, Mr. Heron would soon have satisfactorily dined upon it, had he not made a slight mistake in the mode of striking his prey. The eel was held in the heron’s bill at a point only some three or four inches from the extremity of its tail, the greater part of its body and its head being thus left at liberty to twist, and wriggle, and wallop about ad libitum. To swallow the eel in this position the heron knew was impossible, and to let it go, even for an instant, for the purpose of getting a better “grip” of his slippery customer was altogether out of the question. The heron was standing on the very margin of the sea, into which the eel, if for a moment at liberty, would have shot like an arrow. It was too large to be tossed into the air and recaught in its descent, as herons frequently do with other fish; and in short the heron was at his wit’s end, and wist not what to say or do. To make matters worse, the eel was wriggling and twisting about its captor’s legs, breechless and exposed legs be it observed, and might, for all we or the heron knew, take one of them at any time between its teeth, and sharp and cruel, as probably the heron knew, are an eel’s teeth when any part of an enemy has the misfortune to get between them. Apprehensive, doubtless, of some such danger, the heron danced and shuffled about, lifting now one leg and now another, as if he had been practising a new and somewhat complicated hornpipe. He would at one time leap a foot or two to one side, and immediately after spring into the air as many inches, attempting the while to strike his prey against the stones, but always failing in doing this effectually, owing to want of sufficient “purchase” and the insecurity of his hold. Having watched this novel combat for some time, we made a rush to the scene of action, hoping to succeed in surprising, perhaps, both the spoiler and his prey. We were disappointed. The heron instantly took wing, carrying the eel for some instance in his sharp-edged and powerful bill, but finally dropping it into the sea, doubtless confessing to himself, as he indignantly winged his flight to another fishing ground, that once in his life at least he had caught a Tartar.
CHAPTER XI.
Sea-Fishing—Loch and Stream Fishing—“Brindled Worms”—Rush-Lights—Buckie-Shell Lamps—The Weasel killing a Hare—Killing a Fallow Deer Fawn.
Though by no means everything that we could wish it, the weather of the last fortnight [July 1870] was a decided improvement on that of the preceding, and people have managed to get their hay secured in tolerably good condition after all. No appearance of the much-dreaded potato blight as yet; pity that it should show its unwished-for face this year at all, for a finer crop never lay ripening in the ground. Something has been done in herring fishing, and there is some prospect of our having enough for local consumption at all events, and perhaps a little over, which is no small matter in those dear times. Other kinds of fish are plentiful, and, with sufficient leisure for the pastime, there is hardly anything of the kind more enjoyable in fine weather than an afternoon’s or early morning’s fishing with rod or hand-line. You never, besides, see the country so well as on these occasions, or so thoroughly understand the full force of the poet’s beautiful line, that in such scenes
“’Tis distance lends enchantment to the view.”
Any number of trout, too—few of them, however, of any size—may be caught at present in our inland lochs and mountain streams, and a dish of these speckled beauties, fresh from the basket, is a very good thing indeed, though the grilse and salmon eater may turn up his nose in contempt and derision of such “small deer.” Let him; we shall be always prepared to take over his share along with our own! A curious request was made to us a short time ago by a well-known book “deliverer,” who frequently passes this way, one of the keenest and most successful fishers on lake or river we ever knew, and a very quiet decent man to boot. “Will you allow me, sir, to put down some worms in your place?” “To put down what?” we exclaimed in surprise. “Worms, sir, brindled worms for fishing with, when the rivers are swollen after heavy rains.” We begged to have a look at the worms, and they proved to be a variety of the common earthworm that we had never seen before, the difference consisting in their being rather smaller in size than the common earthworm, and prettily speckled and streaked all over their length, whence, doubtless, their name of brindled worms. A lot had been sent to him from Alyth, in Perthshire, very cunningly done up in a bunch of damp moss; and, having a few left over after a week’s most successful fishing, he wished to deposit them in this, a central part of his peregrinations, that they might multiply and be recoverable at any time he wanted them. Holding one by the middle, between index finger and thumb, in a manner that would have delighted the heart of old Izaak Walton, the worm wriggling and twisting the while with all the liveliness of an eel in similar circumstances, “There, sir,” he exclaimed, looking at the lively “brindled” as if he loved it, “there, sir, is a bonny ane! no troot that ever swam could resist having a dash at that in a brown and swollen stream.” In answer to our questions, he told us that the brindled colour of the worm had, he thought, a good deal to do with the trout’s liking for it, but, in his opinion, the brisk and lively motions of the worm upon the hook was the main attraction. The thing was so manifestly alive and active, and likely to escape, if not caught at once, that the trout made a rush at it, with his eyes shut, so to speak, and only discovered how thoroughly he had been done, when, hooked and landed, he lay flopping helplessly about on the green grass by the burn side. Getting piscator a spade, he searched about for a suitable spot, and buried his worms beneath the turf as tenderly as if he were laying babies asleep in their cradles. “There now, sir,” he remarked, as he finished his colonising, “they will breed fast, and soon be plentiful enough hereabouts, and they will destroy the common earthworm till not one can be found.” So that you see we had an interesting lesson on bait angling and the natural history of earthworms very unexpectedly from a very unexpected quarter. We still watch with interest if the assertion turns out to be true, that the brindled worm exterminates the common earthworm, notwithstanding their close relationship. Such a thing we know is quite possible, a notable case in point being the extermination of the old well-known black rat by the more modern coloniser, the brown.
The amount of viva você information that one can pick up, not by going actually to look for it, but in the most casual and incidental manner, from all sorts of people with whom one may be brought in contact, is simply extraordinary. Some, to be sure, will have nothing to tell; they are as Dead Sea fruit, full of mere ashes, that never had sap or substance for good to themselves or anybody else. Others, again, may know much, but they are cautious and reserved, and never venture beyond the most superficial and commonplace chit-chat; but the great mass of people, if you approach them courteously and frankly, will be found communicative enough, and if you go deftly about it, you seldom work long in such mines without bringing some ore to the surface. A day or two ago, for instance, we were sitting on a rock by the roadside on the opposite shore of Appin, having rowed ashore from our fishing ground to have a smoke and a drink of sparkling water from one of the many rivulets that, like so many silver threads in some rich embroidery, twist and twine with a glad music of their own adown the green slopes of Benavere. An old man passing along the way, with a bundle of rushes under his arm, saluted us with the quiet and undemonstrative courtesy so characteristic of his class all over the Highlands. We invited him to sit down beside us, and at once he sat down and entered into conversation with us about the weather, crops, fishing, and other such obvious matters as are seldom overlooked during the first five minutes of a roadside crack at this season. By-and-by we asked him about the bundle of rushes. There were too few of them to be of any use as thatch, and we observed that they were not of the kind generally used in basket-making—a common amusement for the idle hours of shepherds, herdboys, and others in the past generation, who made very pretty rush baskets for carrying eggs, butter, and other such light goods to the nearest shop, and bringing back the tea, sugar, &c., usually taken in exchange. What were his rushes for then? He gathered them, he told us, from time to time, always selecting the largest and best, for the sake of their pith, which served as wick for his lamp; and he showed us the process of extracting the pith on the spot. He first split the rush longitudinally, by running his thumb-nail along its length, and then pressing his thumb transversely against the pith, he ran it along until the whole beautifully soft and white substance was gathered into a bundle free of its skin, the pith still remaining unbroken by the deftness of the process, and easily extended at will to its original length. This pith is inserted in the same manner as wick in the lamp, and answers its purpose admirably. We recollect seeing the thing before, but it is many years since, and we had thought that cotton had everywhere, even in the remotest parts of the Highlands, long since superseded the primitive rush pith as wick for lamps. “All the people about me,” said the old man, “now use paraffin lamps and cotton wicks, but although perhaps I could afford these as well as they can, I prefer the good old rush-light of my boyhood. I remember,” he continued, “when all the people in our hamlet gave a day’s work to the tenant of the adjoining farm for leave to gather rushes for their lamps in the proper season. Fish oil of our own manufacture was always used, and you will perhaps be surprised to hear, sir, that the lamp was often a “buckie shell.” “A buckie shell!” we exclaimed, “how did you manage to fix it properly? You probably glued its keel to a piece of wood or something of that kind?” “No, sir,” was the response, “we did not fix it at all. It was suspended from a cromag or hook of wood or iron projecting from the wall near the fire-place by a string, one end of which was firmly tied round the hollow dividing the whorl at the smaller end of the shell, and the other round the furrow at its larger circumference near the lip. The loop of the string was then thrown over the hook, and thus suspended, the shell was filled with oil and a rush pith inserted as wick, and it made a very good lamp indeed, at once economical and serviceable. I recollect,” said the old man with a smile, “that my father, God rest him! who was a very economical man, and hated everything like extravagance or waste, allowed us just a shellful of oil for the winter’s night. When that much was spent, we had to tell our tales, sing our songs, and go on with the work we might have in hand by such light as was afforded by the blazing peat-fire, or let it alone till the next evening, just as we pleased.” Our friend concluded by declaring in very emphatic phrase that “the people now are less industrious than they were then; have more money in their hands, but use it less wisely; are less truthful, less honest, less to be depended upon in every way than were the people of his boyhood and their immediate predecessors.” “Laudator temporis acti,” but there is some truth in it. You should have heard how grandly and with what an air of dignity the old fellow spoke that concluding sentence in the most beautiful and rhythmical Gaelic. The buckie shell referred to above is the Buccinum undatum, or common whelk, constantly to be met with on almost every shore. It is to be understood, we suppose, that the larger specimens only would be used as lamps in the manner described by our venerable friend.
Of British quadrupeds—perhaps of all existing quadrupeds—the pluckiest, and, according to its size and weight, by far the strongest, is the common weasel (Mustela vulgaris). The other day a man in our neighbourhood brought us a common brown hare, large and in excellent condition, that had been hunted and killed by a weasel in a very extraordinary manner. In the evening the man was going up a green glade on the wooded hill-side in search of his cows, when he heard what he took to be the screaming of a child on the other side of a small hazel copse which he was passing at the moment. Supposing it to be a child searching for cows like himself, that had fallen and hurt itself, or that had perhaps been attacked by some stirk or quey, angry at being disturbed in a favourite bit of grazing ground, he ran forward, and hearing the screaming repeated, was astonished to find that it proceeded from a hare that toilsomely and with staggering steps was struggling up the steep. On closer inspection, about which there was no difficulty, for by this time the poor hare was, in race-course phrase, about “pumped out,” and could barely stagger along, he was more than astonished to observe that a weasel was extended couchant along the hare’s back, with his muzzle deeply sunk into the vertebræ of his victim’s neck, a position from which no exertion on the hare’s part could possibly dislodge him. Picking up a stone, the man rushed forward and threw it with all his might, not so much at the hare as at its lithe and blood-thirsty rider. The hare, however, was hit, and fell, and with a gasp or two was dead; less from the blow than from the terrible injuries inflicted by the weasel’s teeth, from which, under any circumstances, it was impossible that the poor animal could have recovered. Before the man and a dog which accompanied him could get at the wary weasel, it had with proverbial agility made good its escape. On examining the hare, we found that it was in truth dreadfully wounded, the ruthless Mustela having manifestly gone to work in a very scientific manner, the little red-eyed wretch’s motto being “Thorough!” Once fairly on the back of his victim, he anchored himself firmly by his teeth right in the centre of the nape of the neck, just where the head is articulated to the cervical vertebræ; and as no exertion of the hare could shake him off, he leisurely dug down, drinking the blood and eating as he dug, until the poor hare, faint and exhausted, could only stagger about in response to each cruel dig of the dental spurs of its terrible rider. That a creature so diminutive—weighing only about as many ounces as a hare weighs pounds—should be able thus to mount and master an animal so much bigger than itself, seems extraordinary, and is only to be accounted for by a lithe agility in the assailant, to be met with in no other creature perhaps, coupled with indomitable courage and instinctive blood-thirstiness. We recollect some years ago that an old man, a James Cameron, belonging to Achintore, near Fort-William, was savagely assaulted by a colony of weasels, and very severely wounded before he could get rid of his assailants. He was employed by a neighbour to remove a cairn of small stones from a grass field, in which it had long been an eyesore, from the centre of which cairn, when he had wheeled away several barrows-full, six or seven weasels rushed out and attacked him. So sudden and unexpected was the attack, that before he could do anything to defend himself, his hands and chin and cheeks—for they instinctively flew at his throat, which was luckily guarded by the thick folds of a homespun cravat—were severely bitten. One or two he killed by taking them in his hands, dashing them to the ground, and trampling them under his feet; but the others stuck to him with the pertinacity and viciousness of angry bees, and it was only by running into a house that was at hand, for aid and protection, that they ceased their attack and left him. Happening to be in Fort-William that day, we recollect examining the man’s wounds, and getting the story of the weasel assault from his own lips. We remember remarking how astonishingly deep and formidable were the wounds, to be made by the comparatively small teeth, short though sharp, of the weasel; and what was worse, they festered again and again, and gave the man much pain and trouble ere they fully healed up and disappeared. An old gamekeeper tells us that he once saw a fallow deer fawn, upwards of six weeks old, killed by a weasel in one of the Callart parks precisely as this hare was killed, and a fawn at that age will weigh three times as much as a brown hare in ordinary condition. In common with most people, we have rather a dislike to the weasel, though one cannot but view with respect the courage and pluck that carry him safely through such exploits as these.
CHAPTER XII.
Extraordinary aspect of the Sun—Sunset from Rokeby—Mr. Glaisher—“Demoiselle” or Numidian Crane at Deerness—The Snowy Owl in Sutherlandshire—Does the Fieldfare breed in Scotland?—The Woodcock.
We have just had a week of the finest weather imaginable, dry, bright and breezy, and with uninterrupted sunshine. The greater part of our hay crop has, in consequence, been secured in splendid condition, without a drop of rain, in fact—a piece of rare good fortune in Lochaber. We do not know if the extraordinary aspect of the sun at its rising and setting on Monday, the 13th instant [June 1870], was noticed elsewhere by any of our readers. On the morning of the day in question it presented a strangely mottled, yellowish copper-coloured disc, so singularly unusual as to induce an old seaman, nearly eighty years of age, in our neighbourhood, to call our attention to the circumstance. In the evening a little before its setting, it assumed a lurid blood-red colour, which was very remarkable, and forcibly reminded us at the moment of Scott’s lines in Rokeby—
“No pale gradations quench his ray,
No twilight dews his wrath allay;
With disc like battle-target red,
He rushes to his burning bed,
Dyes the wide wave with bloody light,
Then sinks at once—and all is night.”
We were unanimous in predicting an immediate and violent storm of wind and rain, but the next morning came in bright, breezy, and cloudless, and such it has continued ever since. Such phenomena, and the nature of the weather following them, are always worth recording. Virgil, in his first Georgic instructs the husbandman to confide in those indications of the weather afforded by the aspect of the sun, for the rather curious reason, however, that the obscuration of the solar orb gave faithful warning of the impending fate of Cæsar! A very striking instance of a form of sophism, well known to the logician, in which an accidental circumstance is assumed as sufficient to establish efficient connection. On the morning of Wednesday last we had a smart touch of frost here in exposed situations—a strange and anomalous phenomenon in the dog-days truly! But when we remember that Mr. Glaisher (who for purely scientific purposes has put his life into greater peril than any other living man), in his recent aerial ascent met with a regular snow-storm at the elevation of only about one mile above the earth’s surface, we shall not wonder so much, perhaps, that a frost current should, under certain circumstances, occasionally penetrate earthwards even in the dog-days. We should have stated above that on the 13th we carefully examined the solar disc with an excellent four-feet telescope belonging to Ardgour, when it presented only two “spots” or maculæ, and neither of these of remarkable size or form, situated close together on the orb’s south-western limb.
We are glad to observe that the “Demoiselle” or Numidian crane recently shot at Deerness has been preserved, and is to fall into careful keeping. Its feeding on oats, however, is very extraordinary, and only to be accounted for by the supposition that its natural food was so scarce, in a locality so unlike its own sunny clime, that it was fain to fill its crop with the readiest possible edible that presented itself. The snowy owl, a specimen of which is stated to have been recently shot in Sutherland, is by no means a rare visitor in Britain. A pair, male and female, in full plumage, were shot on the links of St. Andrews, by Captain Dempster, of the Indian Army, in the winter of 1847, and are now, we believe, to be seen in the University museum of that city. They have been known to breed in Shetland, but never, so far as we are aware, on the mainland, or anywhere, indeed, farther south than 59° or 60° of latitude. Is the specimen in Mr. M’Leay’s possession male or female? What is the colour of its plumage—pure white, or slightly barred and mottled with brown? These are important questions, and every account of such rare visitors should be as minute in such particulars as possible. The snowy owl, like the Arctic fox, hare, ermine, &c, is supposed to change its plumage with the season, the immaculate white of its winter dress being exchanged for a summer garb of mixed, spotted, and barred brown and white. It is highly important that such a point as this should be decided. The scientific name given it—Surna nyctea—is incorrect. It is probably a misprint for Strix nyctea, so styled by Linnæus, and after him continued as most appropriate by succeeding naturalists without exception. In Sweden, where it breeds and is very common, it is said to feed principally upon hares, hence Buffon calls it La Chouette Harfang, the latter word being the Swedish for the white or Alpine hare. It was the French naturalists, also, who first gave the name Demoiselle to the Numidian crane, its symmetry of form, tasteful disposition of plumage, and elegance of deportment, in their opinion, fully justifying the complimentary appellation. Its economy was first carefully studied, and a correct description of it given, about the beginning of the present century by the naturalists who accompanied the French expedition to Egypt under Napoleon, who, whatever his faults were, was at least neither indifferent to, nor neglectful of, the interests of the arts and sciences. Does the fieldfare breed in Scotland? We are afraid the reply must still be in the negative. We have little doubt that the bird seen by Mr. Fraser of Hamilton was the missel-thrush, and that the nest and egg in his possession belong to the same bird, that is, the Turdus vixivorus, and not to its congener the Turdus pilaris. We are led to this opinion by the fact that the female missel-thrush is very like the fieldfare in plumage, and not very noticeably different in size. The nest referred to by Mr. Fraser was, he says, situated in the fork of a tree, about fourteen feet from the ground, exactly about the height the throstle generally fixes upon for its nest, whereas, according to our best authorities, the fieldfare builds at the top, or very near “the top of the tallest pines.” We give but little weight to the shape and markings of the egg as described, for it frequently happens that the eggs of different birds, even of the same species, differ in a very remarkable manner. The hint, however, that the fieldfare may sometimes breed in Scotland is worth attending to, and we have marked it down for future inquiry and investigation. It was for long a question of fierce debate whether or not the well-known woodcock bred in this country. The matter has, however, been of late years completely set at rest by the researches of naturalists, clearly bringing out the fact that it not only breeds in Scotland, but that such an event, instead of being rare, is, on the contrary, of comparatively frequent occurrence. This very season, about the middle of May, one of Ardgour’s keepers brought us the wings of a young woodcock, with the quill feathers still pulpy and soft, which, of the original bird, was all he could secure from the clutches of a hawk that was breakfasting on the dainty morsel in the woods of Coirrechadrachan. We also understand that at least two woodcock’s nests, with eggs in them, were known to some parties in this neighbourhood at the beginning of the season. It is, therefore, possible that the fieldfare may yet be proved to breed in Scotland, but the evidence for the establishment of such a fact must be much stronger than that brought forward by Mr. Fraser.
CHAPTER XIII.
Extraordinary Heat and Drought—Plentifulness of Fungi—Cows fond of Mushrooms—Shoals of Whales—A rippling Breeze, and a Sail on Loch Leven.
If of late we had to admit—somewhat reluctantly be it confessed—that it was “wet, very wet,” even for Lochaber, we have it in our power now at length [1st August 1870] to strike a different key-note, and to say that it is dry, very dry; bright, very bright; hot, very hot,—so dry, bright, and hot, in fact, that one might as well be on the banks of the Nile or Niger as on the shores of Loch Leven, were it not for a delightful sea breeze that never fails to come to cheer and gladden us evening and morning; and then you may fancy—that is, if you can swim, dear reader—the unspeakable delight of a headlong plunge into the cool and sparkling waters of the advancing tide! The heat is in truth something extraordinary, and if it weren’t that you felt yourself fast retrograding into the same condition, it would be an amusing study to watch a certain class of people, generally the most staid and stiff and correct possible, who, as a rule, would rather die than violate the least of the proprieties, now going about in a semi-nude state, as if they had just escaped from a lunatic asylum, panting the while as if they were in the last stage of asthma, and streaming with perspiration as if they had resolutely made up their minds to melt away and dissolve like untimely snowballs.
Crops everywhere are splendid, and, after all the rain of the earlier part of the season, which gave them growth, this is just the weather that suits them in their present stage, strengthening and consolidating their tissues, and bringing them to a rapid and healthy maturity. The meadow hay crop is unusually heavy everywhere. We saw a field belonging to Mr. Maclean of Ardgour in the act of being cut the other day, and we never saw anything finer or heavier fall before a scythe. This is precisely the weather for securing such a heavy swathe in good order, although one cannot but feel for the poor scythesman, who, brown as an Indian and bathed in sweat, wields his glittering weapon under a burning, blazing sun, such as at a pinch might serve the turn of our cousins of Jamaica or Demerara. Some idea of the extraordinary heat and drought of the past week may be gathered from the fact that it was frequently found possible to stack or carry into the barn in one day the hay that had only been cut on the day previous—something hitherto unheard-of, we should say, in Lochaber, or, indeed, in any part of the Highlands.
We cannot recollect having ever before seen all kinds of fungi so plentiful as they are throughout Lochaber this season. You meet mushrooms of all sizes and of all shapes, both edible and poisonous; while fairy rings are so common that you may encounter one or more of them in every bit of old pasture and in every greenwood glade. One of these rings we had the curiosity to measure a few days ago, and we found its diameter to be precisely fifteen feet, giving it a circumference of upwards of fifty feet, as nearly as possible a a perfect circle, the emerald outline, studded with its peculiar pretty white, button-like Agaraci, amid the lighter green of the surrounding herbage, as distinct and easily traceable, even at several hundred yards distance, as ever was halo round the moon. We noticed that a cow, happening to come the way while we were examining another of these fairy rings, ate them all with evident relish, browsing so steadily along and around, that when she completed the circle she had not left a single one. We hope that they agreed with her, though we should not like to have joined in the repast, for we have a salutary horror of the whole mushroom tribe. The so-called edible mushroom is said to be delicious when properly cooked: should it ever in any form be a dish on a table at which we are seated, we promise to give our share of it, totus, teres atque rotundus, whole and unimpaired, to the first that will accept it. To the present intense heat, coming so suddenly on the back of long-continued rains, is probably due the extraordinary abundance of all kinds of fungi.
The shoal of whales at present disporting themselves in Lochiel, intending probably, tourist fashion, to visit Inverness by-and-by, via the Caledonian Canal, if they can only arrange it with the authorities, did us the honour to visit Loch Leven, spending an entire day with us, evidently very much to their own satisfaction, if one might judge from their lively somersaultings and incessant gambollings. These whales—a shoal of some five or six hundred, we should say—were a very interesting sight as they gambolled about within a hundred yards of us, blowing loudly the while and lashing the sea with foam, until you might have heard the hurly-burly from the top of the highest mountain in the neighbourhood. They were of all sizes, from full growth, and old age perhaps, down to veriest babyhood. In the shoal, two kinds of whale were mingled together in apparent amity and good-fellowship: the common bottlenose (Balœnoptera acuto-rostrata of La Cèpede—the highest authority on cetaceous animals), measuring some twenty or twenty-five feet in length, and the broad-nosed or rorqual whale (Balœna musculus, Linn.; B. rorqual, La Cèpede), from fifty to sixty feet in length, and appearing beside a bottlenose, as they came to the surface to breathe, like a Clydesdale horse beside a Shetland pony. It will be strange if our friends at Fort-William do not manage to bag some of them ere they repass the narrows at Corran Ferry.
The heat is oppressive within doors; but Loch Leven, we observe, is darkening under a rippling breeze from the south-east, and we are off for a sail in our tidy, little craft, that, with lugsail sheeted home, will go to windward of anything of equal size on the coast.
CHAPTER XIV.
Herrings—Chimæra Monstrosa—Cure for Ringworm—Cold Tea Leaves for inflamed and blood-shot Eyes—An old Incantation for the cure of Sore Eyes—A curious Dirk Sheath—A Tannery of Human Skins.
However unproductive the herring fishing season may be quoad herrings, and this has so far been the worst of a series of bad seasons [September 1870], it rarely fails to provide more or less grist for our mill in the shape of some rarity in marine life worth chronicling. A very ugly and repulsive-looking fish, extremely rare too, was sent us recently for identification. It was caught in Sallachan Bay, in our neighbourhood, having become entangled in the corner of a drift net which the fishermen were hauling into their boat in the grey morning, after a long, wearisome, and profitless night’s labours. We had seen the fish before, though not often, and had therefore no hesitation in recognising it as the Chimæra monstrosa—a scientific name, by the way in which its lack of beauty is plainly enough indicated—a cartilaginous fish, two feet in length, and of somewhat elongated and hake-like form. The general colour is a dull leaden white, mottled on the under parts with small spots of rusty brown. On examining the contents of the stomach, they were found to consist of some very small herring fry, along with partly digested fragments of the adult fish, whence it may be concluded that the Chimæra’s favourite prey, when they can be had, is herring; a conclusion at which we might also easily arrive from the fact that it is seldom or never met with on our shores, except when herring are more or less plentiful. At one time the Chimæra must have been a less rare fish than it is now, for it has a Gaelic name, “Buachaille-an-Sgadain,” the Herring Herd or Herdsman. It was probably comparatively common in the good old times, when even our more inland western lochs swarmed annually with herring shoals, and so large was the capture, that the salt to cure them, on which there was a considerable duty at the time, was frequently retailed over a vessel’s side at a shilling the lippy. The late Colonel Maclean of Ardgour, who attained a great age, with intellect clear and unimpaired, and who was most particular and exact in all his statistics, has repeatedly assured us that, in his younger days, say a hundred years ago, fifty thousand pounds worth of herring used to be captured annually in Lochiel alone. We don’t suppose that for many years past herring to the value of a tenth of that sum have been caught in all the lochs between the Mull of Cantyre and the Point of Ardnamurchan.
The reader probably knows what ringworm is—a fungoid eruption on the skin, not uncommon in the spring and early summer in children and young people of plethoric habits. There is a very wide-spread belief over the West Highlands and in the Hebrides that ringworm can be readily cured by rubbing it over and around once or twice with a gold-ring—a woman’s marriage ring, if it can be had, being always preferred. In our younger days we recollect seeing the cure applied on more than one occasion, whether with the desired result, or ineffectually, we do not know—we probably little thought in those days of kilts, cammanachd, and barley bannocks, of inquiring. For many years we had neither seen nor heard anything either of the disease or of its popular cure, until, by the merest accident, it came under our notice a few days ago. Riding home one evening last week, we observed two little girls and a sturdy long-legged haflin lad sitting patiently in front of a cottage, the door of which was shut and locked. The youngsters, rather better dressed than usual, had come from a considerable distance, and we wondered what they could be doing there. On mentioning the matter next day, we had the story in full as follows:—The three were suffering from ringworm. The owner of the cottage has a marriage ring of wonderful efficacy in curing this epidermic distemper. They had come from one of the inland glens to be operated upon, but the possessor of the ring was away in Glasgow, and only returned home by steamer late that evening. When she did arrive, the young people were duly manipulated and ring-rubbed secundum artem; and in four and twenty hours thereafter we were gravely assured they were quite healed. Any gold ring is usually employed, but the particular ring referred to in this case is much sought after on such occasions, because, as our informant said, it is of “guinea gold,” by which we suppose very pure gold, with the least possible alloy, is meant; and because it is the property of a widow who was married to one husband more than fifty years. A belief in the virtue of gold rings in cures of ringworm is, as we have said, very wide-spread and honestly held by many. Whether, in common phrase, there is “anything in it,” or the whole affair is sheer nonsense, we shall not take it upon us to decide. We merely submit a common and curious article of popular belief for the consideration of our grave and learned dermatologists and the faculty at large. One thing is certain,—the owner of the marvellous ring makes no vulgar profit by her frequent use of it in such cases. She is in comfortable circumstances, and the whole affair, as far as she is concerned, is a mere labour of love.
Another popular cure, which for the first time came under our notice recently, and which in many cases is really efficacious, as we have heard averred by those who have been benefited by its use, is the application of a poultice of cold tea leaves to an inflamed or blood-shot eye. A handful of the leaves is taken from the pot, and placed between two folds of thin cotton or muslin, and applied to the eye at bed-time, kept in its place, of course, by a handkerchief or other band tied round the head. In cases of weak or inflamed eyes from any cause, this is reckoned, in this and the surrounding districts, “the sovereignest thing on earth.” And one can quite understand how tea leaves, at once cooling and astringent, employed in this way, may benefit a hot and inflamed eye. It is a simple application at all events, and always at hand; and when more pretentious remedies are not readily attainable, one would be unwisely prejudiced, if not actually foolish, to suffer long without giving it a fair trial.
A less simple and less readily available cure for sore eyes is the following in old Gaelic verse:— Leigheas Sul.
Luidh Challum-Chille agus spèir,
Meannt agus tri-bhilead corr,
Bainne atharla nach do rug laodh;
Bruich iad a’s càirich air brèid,
S’cuir sid rid’ shùil aig tra-nèin,
Air an Athair, am Mac agus Spiorad nan gràs,
’S air Ostal na seirce; bi’dh do shùilean slàn
Mu’n eirich a gheallach ’s mu’n till an làn.
In English, literally—
(Take of) St. Columba’s wort and dandelion,
(Of) mint and a perfect plant of marsh trefoil,
(Take of) milk from the udder of a quey
(That is heavy with calf, but that has not actually calved),
Boil, and spread the mixture on a cloth;
Put it to your eyes at noon-tide,
In the name of Father, Son, and the Spirit of Grace,
And in the name of (John) the Apostle of Love, and your eyes shall be well
Before the next rising of the moon, before the turning of next flood-tide.
We were recently shown a great curiosity—a dirk sheath said to be made of human skin. Its history, as related to us by the owner, is as follows:—In the summer of 1746, about two months after the battle of Culloden, a detachment of Saighdearan Dearge, red (coated) soldiers, or Government troops, was passing through Lochaber and Appin on its way to Inveraray, the men amusing themselves, and enlivening the tedium of the march, by burning and plundering as they had opportunity. When passing through the Strath of Appin, a young woman was observed in a field, busily engaged in the evening milking her cow. A sergeant or corporal of the band leaped over the wall into the field, and putting his musket to his shoulder, shot the cow dead upon the spot; after which gallant exploit he began the most brutal ill-treatment of the woman. She, however, defended herself with great courage, and as she retreated towards the shore, she picked up a stone, which she hurled at her persecutor with such good aim that it struck him full on the forehead, stretching him for the moment senseless upon the grass. She then fled towards a boat that was afloat on the beach, and leaping in, rapidly rowed towards Eilean-bhaile-na-gobhar, an island at a considerable distance from the mainland, where she was safe from further annoyance. The tradition is so minute and precise that the heroine’s name is given as Silas-Nic-Cholla, or Julia MacColl; and our informant declared himself to be her great-grandson. The sergeant, stunned and bleeding, was picked up by his comrades, and carried to the place of halt for the night, near Tigh-an Ribbi, where, before morning, he died of his wound. His body was buried in the old churchyard of Airds, but was not allowed to rest there. On the disappearance of the soldiers from the district, the body was exhumed by the people, and cast into the sea; not, however, before a brother of Silas-Nic-Cholla flayed the right arm from the shoulder to the elbow, and of the skin thus flayed was made a dirk sheath, and this sheath we saw and handled with no little curiosity a week or two ago. The sheath is of a dark brown colour, limp and soft, with no ornament except a small virle of brass at the point, and a thin edging of the same metal round the orifice, on which is inscribed the date “1747,” and the initials “D. M. C.” There is no reason, we suppose, to doubt the genuineness of the article, though we hardly expected to find human skin—if it be human skin—of such thickness. It may, however, be partly the result of the tanning process which it probably underwent, and of time. In connection with this strange relic of a past age may be stated the extraordinary fact—incredible, indeed, if it were not thoroughly authenticated—that during the horrors of the French Revolution there was a tannery of human skins for many months in operation at Meudon. The raw material, so to speak, of this strange manufacture, was the skins of the scores and hundreds that were daily guillotined. It is asserted that “it made excellent wash-leather.” Montgaillard, a prominent character of the period, who had the curiosity to visit the works, and saw the tanning process in full operation, makes the following curious observation:—“The skin of the men was superior in toughness and quality to shamoy; that of the women good for almost nothing, so soft in texture, and easily torn, like rotten linen!” We have had some rebellious revolutions, civil wars, and all the rest of it in Great Britain and Ireland, with their attendant iniquities, bad enough in all conscience, but the French may fairly boast of having beat us; a tannery of human skins is a venture and enterprise that no one has been pushing and patriotic enough yet to undertake amongst us, even when axe and gallows wrought their hardest in days happily long since passed away.
CHAPTER XV.
The Ring-Dove—A Pet Ring-Dove—Its Death—Shenstone—The Belone Vulgaris or Gar-Fish—A Rat and a Kilmarnock Night-Cap—Extraordinary Roebuck’s Head at Ardgour.
The weather [October 1870] with us here on the West Coast continues wonderfully mild and open for the latter end of October. Were it not, indeed, for an occasional sprinkling of snow along the mountain summits of an early morning, and finding as you wander about the pathways everywhere bestrewn with fallen leaves, we might find some difficulty in persuading ourselves, in weather so bright and summer-like, that the season was at all so far advanced as it really is, that 1870, with its immediate predecessor—the anni mirabiles of the century—had already so nearly run its allotted course. A striking proof of the exceptional mildness of the weather since mid-August is the fact that a young wood-pigeon or ring-dove (Columba palumbus), not yet nearly full fledged, was brought to us a few days ago from a nest in the woods of Coirrechadrachan. We have kept it with the view of rearing it as a pet, though the chances are all against us, the produce of such late incubations having always less robustness and vitality about them than birds hatched in spring or early summer. There is a little difficulty, as a rule, in rearing the ring-dove, and getting it to become even troublesomely tame, until it purrs and kur-doo’s about your feet, and rubs himself against you with all the familiarity and empressement of a kitten begging for its morning allowance of milk. It is, however, exceedingly quarrelsome and pugnacious among other pets, and so jealous of any attention bestowed on any one but itself, that it will pout and sulk for half a day if it considers itself injured in this respect; and yet so little grateful is it for any amount of kindness you may show it, that when full-grown it will take the first opportunity that offers to escape into its native wild woods, never more to look near you. One that we reared from the nest several years ago had one very amusing habit. Every morning after being fed he would watch the nursery door, which opened off the kitchen, until he got it ajar, when he would leap upon the dressing-table and spend a couple of hours in admiring himself in the looking-glass, preening his feathers and strutting about and kur-dooing to his alter ego with the most beauish, self-satisfied air imaginable, the poor bird being evidently under the impression that his own reflection was a Mademoiselle Ring-dove of irresistible attractions, and whom he persuaded himself he was on these occasions busily courting in the manner most approved of amongst the most fashionable circles of ring-dovedom. His death was a singular one. A large Aylesbury duck, with whom he used to have constant quarrels, he being invariably in fault and always the aggressor, got a hold of him one day near her ducking pond, and in a scuffle, which the ring-dove himself had causelessly provoked, dragged him into the water, and beat him with her wings until he was, like Ophelia, “drown’d, drown’d.”
We never see these very handsome wild birds, or hear their soft melodious cooing of summer eve from the neighbouring woods, but we think of Shenstone’s beautiful lines—
“I have found out a gift for my fair:
I have found where the wood-pigeons breed;
But let me that plunder forbear,
She will say ‘twas a barbarous deed:
For he ne’er could be true, she averr’d,
Who could rob a poor bird of its young;
And I lov’d her the more when I heard
Such tenderness fall from her tongue.
“I have heard her with sweetness unfold
How that pity was due to a dove;
That it ever attended the bold,
And she called it the Sister of Love.
But her words such a pleasure convey,
So much I her accents adore,
Let her speak, and whatever she say,
Methinks I should love her the more.”
In the same poem—the Pastoral Ballad—occurs this exquisite verse:—
“When forced the fair nymph to forego,
What anguish I felt at my heart!
Yet I thought—but it might not be so—
’Twas with pain she saw me depart.
She gazed as I slowly withdrew;
My path I could hardly discern:
So sweetly she bade me adieu,
I thought that she bade me return.”
But alas, and woe the while! William Shenstone of the Leasowes, with his many tuneful contemporaries, are forgotten, or at least unread, by the present generation, and the poetasters of our day claim Parnassus, its Castalian spring and Temple of Apollo, for their own! All we can is that in rê poetica the taste of an age tolerant of such an usurpation is little to be commended.
A gentleman in the opposite district of Appin sent us a message a few days ago begging us to go and have a look at what he termed a rarissimus piscis, a most rare fish that had been caught in a scringe net along with a lot of sethe and mackerel. In complying with such messages we can seldom be charged with dilatoriness, as most of our friends will bear witness. Nor was it otherwise in this case; Cha be’n ruith ach an leùm, as the Highlanders say—it was not a run but a rush, with a leap and a bound—when they would emphatically characterise a person’s conduct in going about anything with extraordinary alacrity. The fish in question we found to be an old acquaintance of ours, though so rare on the west coast that we never saw or heard of it before during a twenty years’ residence in the country, and constantly, too, on the out-look for everything in the shape and semblance of a rara avis, whether encased in fur, feather, or scales. It was the gar-fish of British zoologists, known in ichthyological nomenclature as the Belone vulgaris of the family Scomberesocidæ, having the body, which is covered with minute scales, elongated to a degree almost conger-like. It is frequently captured on the east coast, sometimes intermingling with mackerel and haddock shoals in considerable numbers. We have seen it in the Perth, Dundee, and Edinburgh fish markets; never, as we have said, on the west coast. It is said to be excellent eating when in proper season, although there is a prejudice against its use amongst the fishermen themselves; and it is a remarkable fact, by the way, that some of the finest fish in the sea—most in esteem, at all events, with the fish-eating public—are frequently rejected by their professional captors for their own eating in favour of what we should call the coarser and inferior kinds. For a long time we thought this was entirely a matter of economy, those that brought the largest price in the market being sold, and the inferior sorts kept for their own consumption. Subsequently we had abundant opportunities of finding out that it was far otherwise. An east coast fisherman will give the preference at any time, for his own eating that is, to a flounder, however flabby and flaccid, over a whiting or plaice; he will eat the hake rather than the finest cod or haddock, and considers the wing of a skate, dried in the smoke until it is of the colour of the darkest mahogany, with a bouquet the very opposite, be sure, of the ottar of roses, a tit-bit with which, in his estimation, neither sea-trout, mackerel, nor turbot can for a moment bear comparison. Fishermen, too, we have observed with some surprise, seldom eat their fish fresh; they prefer it salted—salted, moreover, as a rule to a degree that to other people would render it almost uneatable. For the prejudice against the gar-fish there is, however, some excuse. In popular superstition, “lang-nebbed” things have always been in bad odour; and the gar-fish’s snout is greatly elongated, so much so that it bears no small resemblance to a curlew’s bill, giving it a wicked, vicious look, that its structure otherwise, however, belies; for it is altogether incapable of hurting anything bigger than the very small fry and marine insects on which it feeds. The prejudice against the gar-fish is no doubt to be accounted for in part by the curious fact that its bones are of a dirty green colour, strange and perhaps disagreeable to an eye accustomed to the ivory-like whiteness of the osseous structure of most other fishes that are brought to table. We have seen specimens of the gar-fish captured by the St. Andrews fishermen that exceeded three feet in length: the fish more immediately referred to only measured nineteen inches. Our friend has since written us a note to say that on being shown to a gentleman, “professing to know something of ichthyology,” he declared it to be a specimen of the pipe-fish, which is just about as correct as if a man said that a pelican was a parrot, or a pig was a giraffe.
In one particular, at least, we resemble Dr. Samuel Johnson. We have never during our whole lifetime once worn a nightcap. “I had the custom by chance,” replied the “Rambler,” with a growl at Boswell’s inquisitiveness on the subject, “and perhaps no man, sir, shall ever know whether it is best to sleep with or without a nightcap.” But if we don’t wear a nightcap, some of our neighbours do, and to one of these useful articles of nocturnal toilette befell the following adventure a short time ago. One of our neighbours, a fine old Highlander, still straight as a pine tree, and strong and stalwart withal, though already past the grand climacteric, having had occasion to be in the south in the early summer, bought himself a speck and span new nightcap, which, neatly folded up along with some braws for the gudewife, formed a parcel of which, you may be sure, he was exceedingly careful on the return journey, constantly “keeping his eye on it” all the way from the Broomielaw to Ballachulish Pier, and watching over its safety as anxiously as if it contained the wealth of the Rothschilds in Bank of England notes, or the title-deeds of an earldom. When at last produced at home, and displayed before the admiring gaze of a select few in every imaginable angle of light, it was really a very fine nightcap, a sort of ribbed magenta-coloured “Kilmarnock,” with a tassel at top, in which were intermingled all the hues of the rainbow, such a splendid tassel as was never before seen in Lochaber: Cardinal Antonelli might have been proud of it as a pendant to his hat. Having at last been sufficiently admired, the nightcap was duly put to its proper use, and was found to answer its purpose perfectly; but one night, while yet the gay Kilmarnock retained almost all its pristine bloom, lo! it was amissing at bedtime from its usual place of honour on the corner of its owner’s pillow, greatly to his annoyance you may believe, and not a little to the surprise and consternation of his amiable bedfellow. Then, and for weeks afterwards, all search for the missing nightcap was but so much fruitless labour; nothing could be seen or heard of it, and it was finally agreed on all hands that it must have been stolen by some person whose honesty became weak as water in view of the Kilmarnock’s rare magenta colour and gay pendulous tassel. And the nightcap in very truth was stolen, though the thief was probably actuated less by the brilliancy of its colours than the cozy feel of its soft and silken texture. Some time in mid-autumn the mystery was cleared up in this wise. The nightcap owner was one day engaged in redding up his barn preparatory to the ingathering of his crops, when a large rat bolted from between his feet, and, scuttling across the floor, disappeared, rat fashion, in a hole in the divot wall. A spade was instantly got, and the hole dug about until its innermost recess was reached, in which was found a gigantic dam rat with a litter of a dozen or more young ones. These were all of them of course straightway despatched, and the cozy nest of moss, dried grass, and nibbled straw scattered about, when lo! as its foundation appeared the long missing bonnet de nuit, the incomparable Kilmarnock, without a rent or tear, and its colours as bright almost, and its tassel bobbing as coquettishly as when first displayed on the points of the shopman’s distended fingers over the counter in the Cowcaddens. There was great rejoicing over the reappearance of the nightcap, which is now again prized as highly and watched over as carefully as if it were the nightcap of Fortunatus; and the owner, a wag and humorist in a quiet way, as are most of our old Highlanders, has composed a song on the subject (Oran do m’ Churrachd-oidhche), which, after some coaxing, we got him to repeat to us some days ago. It pleased us immensely, and made us laugh until our sides were sore. For the benefit of our readers we may dash off a translation of it some evening or other when we are “i’ the vein.”
Going to call at Ardgour House one day last week, and taking a short cut through the woods, we came across the keeper just as he had shot a roebuck, the largest we think we ever saw, and with the finest head. The horns were something extraordinary, both as to size and shape, so much so, indeed, that although we have in our day met with many fine ones, we never saw anything for a moment to be compared with these. We have, for instance, a roebuck’s head of our own, kindly given us some years ago by Lochiel, the horns on which are allowed to be uncommonly good ones; but we find that they are nearly two inches shorter in the beam, and less by nearly a whole inch in circumference of root of antler at its junction with the skull than those of the specimen shot in Ardgour on Tuesday.
CHAPTER XVI.
The “Annus Mirabilis” of Dryden—1870 a more wonderful Year in its way than 1666—Winter—Number of Killed and Wounded in the Franco-Prussian War—Battles of Langside, Tippermuir, Cappel—Carrier Pigeons—The Velocity with which Birds fly.
One of Dryden’s best poems, and in many respects one of the most curious poems in the language, is the Annus Mirabilis, an effusion of historical panegyric, which, after the lapse of two centuries, no one can read unmoved or undelighted, so beautifully is it written, so masterly is the versification, and so vividly are its events portrayed. The year commemorated is 1666, and the “wonders” that entitled it to such pre-eminence were the naval war with the Dutch and Danes and the great fire in London. If 1666, however, was an annus mirabilis, surely 1870 is an annus mirabilior, a more wonderful year still, nay, an annus mirabilissimus, if you like, for you shall go back in our annals very far indeed—much farther, if you try it, than at the outset you might think at all necessary—before you meet its match. Just consider, first of all, the great Franco-Prussian war, with its countless hosts of slain; with its sieges of Strasbourg, Metz, and Paris, not to mention strongholds of less importance; its capitulation of Sedan and captive Emperor; the Empire ruined, and a Republic in its place, with all that may yet happen ere peace is proclaimed and the Germans have recrossed the Rhine. Think, again, of the promulgation of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, so speedily, and let us say unexpectedly, followed by the capture of Rome and the dethronement of this very infallible Pope as a temporal Prince, by the Catholic (proh pudor!) King of Italy. At home, a daughter of the Queen, with the royal consent and concurrence, marries one of that Queen’s subjects, for we suppose we may regard the matter as a fait accompli, an event so unheard-of and unusual that we must go back for an exact parallel for more than two hundred years, when the Duke of York, afterwards James II., “a man of many woes,” married the Lady Anne Hyde, daughter of Lord Chancellor Clarendon, whose history of the Rebellion is one of the most interesting, and, on account of its inimitable portraiture, one of the most valuable works of its kind in the English language. If to all this be added such events as the loss of the “Captain,” built and armed on a principle, the ultimate adoption or rejection of which will so materially affect the navy of the future; the revision of the Authorised Version of the Scriptures; and many other matters, both at home and abroad, that will readily occur to the reader, this may be regarded as a very wonderful year indeed. Occupying the centre, as it were, of all these events, we are too near them at present to appraise either their magnitude or importance at their legitimate value. Not the man at the base of a lofty tower, but he who stands at some distance from it can take its proportions aright, and we may depend upon it that the reader of the history of our period a hundred years hence will turn to the page that records the events of 1870 as at once the most interesting and important in the annals of many centuries. Reverting for a moment to the Annus Mirabilis of Dryden, it is but fair to acknowledge that they seem to have had one wonder to boast of in 1666 that we cannot claim for 1870, to this date at least; the wonder in question being two blazing comets in the nocturnal sky. Describing the English fleet advancing to attack the enemy at night, the poet, with a boldness of hyperbole for which he is always remarkable, says—
“To see that fleet upon the ocean move,
Angels drew down the curtains of the skies;
And Heaven, as if there wanted lights above,
For tapers, made two glaring comets rise!”
But if we have no comets to boast of in 1870, let not the reader forget that the 14th November is nigh at hand, and that he who gets up betimes on the morning of that day, and watches till the daybreak, will assuredly witness a sight more startling, and grand and “glaring” than Dryden’s comets, wonderful and startling as they doubtless were. We must be permitted one other extract from this extraordinary poem. It describes the state of the contending fleets and the feelings of their respective crews on their withdrawing for a time from an engagement that resulted in something like what at the present day we should call a drawn battle:—
“The night comes on, we eager to pursue
The combat still, and they ashamed to leave
Till the last streaks of dying day withdrew,
And doubtful moonlight did our rage deceive.
“In th’ English fleet each ship resounds with joy,
And loud applause of their great leader’s fame;
In fiery dreams the Dutch they still destroy,
And, slumbering, smile at the imagin’d flame.
“Not so the Holland fleet, who, tired and done,
Stretch’d on their decks, like weary oxen lie;
Faint sweats all down their mighty members run
(Vast hulks which little souls but ill supply).
“In dreams they fearful precipices tread,
Or, shipwreck’d, labour to some distant shore;
Or in dark churches walk among the dead;
They wake with horror, and dare sleep no more.”
We do not know whether the reader will agree with us, but we look upon these verses as wonderfully fine, and upon the Annus Mirabilis as, of its class, amongst the finest, if not the very finest, poem in the language.
Even from a meteorological point of view, this year, in our part of the country at least, has had not a little of the mirabilis about it. Byron, we know, awoke one morning and found himself famous, and we awoke one morning last week and found ourselves in mid-winter, albeit the previous day had been mild, and calm, and sunny, and bright as if it were Whitsuntide, rather than the Eve of St. Luke the Evangelist. Since then we have had incessant storms, shifting about and sometimes blowing from every point of the compass within the four-and-twenty hours, with such deluges of rain as Lochaber alone can supply in season, or sometimes, entre nous, out of season as well. The mountain summits are, at the moment we write, covered with a lamb’s-wool-like coating of virgin snow, and the air has become so chill and raw that we were fain some days ago to don our winter habiliments for the season. We have no right or reason to complain, however; a finer summer and autumn were never known in the Highlands, and since winter must come some time or other, it is better that it should come in season. The fourth week of October is not a bit too early for snow, and sleet, and storms, so that when we hear the winds howling over ferry and firth, and the waves breaking with sullen roar upon the vexed strand, and listen to the rattle and the dash of rain and sleet upon the window panes, we shall, first taking care that the shutters are properly closed and the curtains drawn, just draw our arm-chair a little nearer the fire, which our “lassie,” you may be sure, has trimmed betimes, like Horace’s boy, large reponens peats and coals thereon, and then, with the Courier, Scotsman, or Standard on our knee, or a stray copy of the Saturday Review or Spectator, which some distant friend has kindly sent us, or some fresh volume from Ardgour’s library, the worst we shall say will be in the words of poor old Lear, “Blow wind, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!” blessing God the while that if our lot be a humbler one, it is also a happier one than the poor old king’s.
A good deal has been written about the enormous numbers of killed and wounded in the present Franco-Prussian war, the fact being nevertheless, as we learn on competent authority, that notwithstanding the improvements made of late years in arms of precision, there were, considering the numbers engaged, quite as many men disabled as in the good old days of “Brown Bess” in the wars of the first Napoleon and in our battles in India. Mr. Hill Burton, in one of his recently published volumes of the History of Scotland, and an admirable and very impartial history it is, tells us that in the battle of Langside, an historical combat on the issue of which so much in the after history of England and Scotland depended, 10,000 men were engaged for three-quarters of an hour, with a loss to the Queen’s party of 300 hors de combat, while the victors only lost one man! A very extraordinary fact certainly; but a more wonderful fact still, and neither Mr. Burton nor his reviewers seem to be aware of it, is that of the battle of Tippermuir, fought in 1644, between the Covenanters and the famous Marquis of Montrose, in which Montrose was victorious without the loss of a single man on his own side, although of the Covenanters between four and five hundred were killed in the battle and pursuit. Another curious thing connected with the battle of Tippermuir was this: a body of Highlanders, keen enough for the fray, were without arms of any kind, when Montrose, pointing to the stones that thickly strewed the field, advised them to try these to begin with, and they did, appropriating the arms of their enemies as they fell, and using them with such effect that the battle proper was over in less than half an hour. The only other battle that we can recollect in which such primitive weapons as stones were employed by the combatants was that of Cappel, fought in 1531, between the Protestants of Zurich and the Catholics of the neighbouring cantons. It was in this battle that the celebrated reformer Zwingle, or Zwinglius, met his death. He was first of all knocked down by a stone that, fiercely hurled, struck him on the head, and then, with the exclamation, “Die, obstinate heretic,” the sword of Fockinger of Unterwalden pierced his throat, and the reformer was no more.
The reader has, of course, seen in the papers how beleaguered Paris keeps up communication with Belgium and the provinces, by means of balloons and carrier pigeons. Of balloons and ballooning we have no practical experience; of carrier pigeons we do know something, the bird being as well-known to us as is a robin redbreast to a gardener. We kept them for some time, but were obliged to get quit of them on account of their ineradicable propensity to purloin our neighbours’ turnip seed from the drill immediately after being sown and before they got time to sprout. All pigeons have this habit, but the carrier worse and more persistently than any other. The speed and power of wing appertaining to the carrier pigeon is extraordinary, and if not well attested would be deemed incredible. We remember, for instance, that at the Christmas of 1845, when a student at the University of St. Andrews (best as well as oldest university in Scotland, gainsay it who may!) we spent our holidays at Kirkmichael, a pleasant little village in the Highlands of Perthshire. On leaving St. Andrews we took with us a carrier pigeon, a magnificent bird. On the 1st of January 1846, at the hour of noon precisely, we gave this bird, with a bit of narrow blue ribbon tied under his wing, his liberty on the bridge of Kirkmichael. When let out of his basket he instantly soared up in a sort of spiral flight, ascending and ascending cork-screw fashion until he seemed to the eye no bigger than a wren, then straight and swift as an arrow from a bow he urged his flight southwards, and became lost to view. On returning to St. Andrews, we found that our bird had reached his dovecot, eagerly watched and waited for by his owner, as the College bells were chiming one o’clock on the same day, so that it must have done the distance, about fifty-four miles as the crow flies, in about one hour, or very nearly at the rate of a mile a minute. Now, it must be remembered that this was the bird’s ordinary flight. He doubtless sought his distant home in what one might call a brisk and business-like manner, nor swerved, we may be sure, an inch from his course, nor loitered by the way. He was going well—very well, if you like—throughout, but not going his best. The probability is that under extraordinary pressure, with a falcon in chase, for instance, the same bird could and would have gone twice as fast, or at a rate of something more than a hundred miles an hour. If the reader likes to experiment in this direction, he can easily try it with the common domestic pigeon, as we have done more than once. Years ago we recollect a brother of ours taking, at our suggestion, a common black and white pigeon from the dovecot here to Oban, where, at a preconcerted hour on a day agreed upon, he set it at liberty. The bird took nearly two hours to do the distance, some twenty-three or twenty-four miles as the crow flies; but it probably lingered some time by the way to feed, as, instead of being well fed, which should always be strictly attended to, it received no food at all on the morning of its liberation at Oban. The house-pigeon, however, is useless except for comparatively short distances, and even then is never to be much depended upon. His extreme domesticity predisposes him to pay a visit to every dovecot on the route, and to fraternise with every flock of brother pigeons he may happen to fall in with. His peculiar mode of flight, besides, and his extreme timidity, mark him out as an easy and desirable prey for any keen-eyed hawk or falcon that may be at the moment impransus, as Johnson in his early days once signed a note in London—dinnerless. The common pigeon, too, wings his flight at a comparatively low altitude, and becomes an easy shot to any one with a gun ready to hand when it passes by. Not so the true carrier pigeon, which flies at a great height, far out of range of needle-gun or artillery—out of range of human sight, in fact; so that it is never in danger of being brought to grief, as was poor Gambetta in his balloon when passing above the Prussian lines the other day. The velocity with which some birds fly is almost incredible. A hungry falcon, with his blood up and in eager pursuit of his quarry, will fly at the rate of 150 miles an hour, and keep it up too until his object is attained; and the tremendous impetus of the bird at such a speed accounts for the dreadful wounds that a falcon inflicts when it strikes its prey, sometimes ripping up a grouse, or blackcock, or mallard, from vent to breastbone, as if it had been done by the keen edge of a butcher’s cleaver. A goshawk (Falco palumbarius) belonging to Henry of Navarre—the Henri Quatre of after days—having its royal owner’s name engraved on its golden varvels, made its escape from Fontainebleau in 1574, and was caught in Malta within four-and-twenty hours afterwards—a distance of 1400 miles, or at the rate of sixty miles an hour, supposing him to have been on the wing the whole time. But a hawk never flies by night, so that, on a fair computation, the bird’s speed in winging the enormous distance must have been at the rate of at least 100 miles an hour. We have calculated that a snipe, thoroughly alarmed, and going its best, can fly at the rate of a mile a minute, and there are other well-known birds equally fleet of wing. Nor must it be supposed that the velocity of birds is a mere “flash-in-the-pan,” so to speak—a “spurt,” as it were—which could not be kept up. The long-sustained flights of migratory birds proves the contrary—that birds are not only inconceivably fleet, but, to use a racing term, that they can stay as well. Of our more familiar birds, we should say that the common wild duck of our meres flies with greater velocity than any other bird with which the reader is likely to be well acquainted.
CHAPTER XVII.
Signs of a severe Winter—The Little Auk or Auklet—The Gadwall—Falcons being trained by the Prussians to intercept the Paris Carrier Pigeons—Ballooning—The King of Prussia’s Piety—John Forster—Solar Eclipse of 22d December 1870—The Government and the Eclipse—Large Solar Spots—Visible to the naked eye—Rev. Dr. Cumming—November Meteors.
It must have been in view of some such scene [November 1870] as the early morning presents to the eye at present that Horace began his celebrated ode to Augustus—
“Jam satis terris nivis, atque diræ
Grandinis misit Pater”—
Enough, enough of snow and direful hail! Or if you prefer the wintry scene in the ninth Ode—
“Vides, ut alta stet nive candidum
Soracte, nec jam sustineant onus
Sylvæ laborantes: gelûque
Flumina constiterint acuto?”
Which our countryman Theodore Martin thus renders—
“Look out, my Thaliarchus, round!
Soracte’s crest is white with snow,
The drooping branches sweep the ground,
And, fast in icy fetters bound,
The streams have ceased to flow.”
The snow-clad Soracte itself could not wear a colder or wintrier aspect than does our own Ben Nevis at this moment. We have, in truth, had a great deal of sleet and snow and rattling hail showers of late, with bitterly cold winds and frost enough to induce one to don his warmest habiliments when venturing abroad, and thoroughly to appreciate the comforts of a bright and blazing fire within doors. Winter, in short, has fairly set in; and we must just battle with its inclemencies as best we may until a more genial season has come round. And an unusually inclement and severe winter is this likely to prove. Our lochs and estuaries are swarming with Arctic sea-fowl, that already venture quite close to the shore, and seek their food in the most sheltered bays, a sure sign that much cold weather, with heavy gales from the north and north-west, cannot be far away. Among these web-footed visitors from the far north we have observed two that are extremely rare on our part of the west coast, even in the severest winters. One of these is the ratch or auklet (Alca alle, Linn.), a very pretty little black and white diver, the smallest bird of the genus with which we are acquainted, a little more rotund in form and of a robuster frame than the well-known dipper of our streams, but otherwise very like it. Another is the gadwall (Anas strepera), a species of duck very rare in our north-western waters—a very pretty little duck, with a remarkably loud and harsh voice, so loud that on a calm frosty day it reaches you over a sea surface distance of several miles. We have only identified the latter at a distance by the aid of a powerful binocular. It is not a difficult bird to recognise, however, on account of its distinct markings, and we are as confident that we have repeatedly seen it during the present month as if we had it in our cabinet. And talking of birds, what does the reader think the Prussians are up to now? Annoyed at the ballooning and pigeon-carrying by means of which beleaguered Paris manages to keep up communication with the outer world, the Germans are training falcons to be employed in coursing and capturing such carrier pigeons as may be observed passing over their outposts and siege works. Such at least is one item in the last batch of news notes from Versailles. If the Prussians really mean this, all we can say is that it is “a fine idea, but impracticable,” as Hannibal said of Maharbal’s suggestion to push on to the capture of the Capitol after the battle of Cannæ. In the first place it is allowed on all hands that a few months at most, probably a few weeks, must decide the fate of Paris one way or other, while a hawk, to be employed as proposed, requires years of carefullest training ere it can be depended upon as an aerial cruiser in any way subject to human control, nor, even if it were otherwise, could a sufficient number of falcons for the purpose be procured in Europe or elsewhere. Such an attempt at an aerial blockade must prove a failure. Even from a well-trained hawk, under the most favourable circumstances, a carrier pigeon ought to be able in nine cases out of ten to make good its escape by reason of the velocity and altitude of its flight. Depend upon it that in all time to come ballooning and pigeon carrying will be employed by a besieged city, as Paris employs them now; and while gas can be had to inflate a balloon, and a carrier-pigeon is available, there is nothing that a besieging force can do to prevent the constant voyaging of such aerial messengers. One result of this war will be that carrier pigeons will be bred in larger numbers, and more highly valued than ever—carrier pigeon dovecots in each city at the public expense—while aerial navigation by means of balloons, having lost much of its terrors, will more and more become a common and every-day mode of locomotion. There is an “Aeronautical Society” in England, which boasts the names of many distinguished men on its roll of members, but which, nevertheless, couldn’t in twenty years have done so much for aerial navigation as the Franco-Prussian war has done in little more than a month. Most people, by the way, have been disgusted with the King of Prussia’s repeated appeals for Divine aid and pretended recognition of Divine guidance, while wading at the head of his forces knee-deep in a mare magnum of bloodshed and carnage from the Rhine to the Seine. One anecdote, apropos of a king’s pretended piety and close alliance with the Divine powers in all his undertakings, we have not seen quoted. It is this: some person once calling on John Forster, took occasion to remark that the Emperor Alexander (of Russia) was a very pious man. “Very pious, indeed,” observed Forster, with tremendous sarcasm, “Very pious, indeed; I am credibly informed that he said grace ere he swallowed Poland!”
Preparations on a large scale are being made on the Continent and in America for observing the great solar eclipse of the 22d December, with a care and precision never known in the examination of a similar phenomenon. Never before, indeed, could a solar eclipse be observed and analysed in its every phase as this one will be. Aided by the spectroscope, polariscope, photometer, and photograph, with the most powerful telescopes, and meteorological and magnetic instruments of the utmost delicacy and exactness, it will be strange, indeed, if our knowledge of the chemistry and constitution of the great central orb is not very largely increased on this occasion. In our country the eclipse will be a partial one only. At the moment of maximum obscuration, supposing the sun to consist of twelve digits, about nine digits, or three-fourths of the disc, will be occulted. According to Edinburgh mean time the eclipse will begin at 10 h. 54 m. morning; maximum observation, 0 h. 8 m. afternoon; and of eclipse, 1 h. 22 m. afternoon. A glass of very moderate powers is sufficient for observing such partial eclipses. Partial though this eclipse is, however, no phenomenon of the kind of equal magnitude will be seen again in our country till August 1887, when the eclipse will be very nearly, though not quite, total.
Never, perhaps, has the solar disc been so constantly and so largely crowded with maculæ, or “spots,” as during the present year. Some of these spots have recently been very large. On the 9th of the present month, for instance, there was an immense circular spot as nearly as possible on the centre of the solar disc, like a bull’s-eye in a bright target of living light, which a little before sunset was plainly visible to the naked eye. It was the evening of the Fort-William market day, and we drew the attention of several people returning from the fair to the unusual phenomenon. One jolly old fellow, who had probably been largely patronising the “tents” on the market stance throughout the day, would insist upon it that he saw, not one big spot on the sun, but two or more—and perhaps he did. A few days previously a perfect stream of maculæ of all sizes might easily be observed along the solar equator, looking for all the world as if a flock of ravens were at the moment passing, in struggling order within the telescope’s field of view, between us and the sun. At the moment we write these lines, there is a very large spot half-way between the solar centre and its western limb, that towards sunset, if the sky is clear, might, we think, be discerned by the unaided eye. Auroral displays, too, still continue to render our nights, though at present moonless, and frequently cloudy withal, bright and cheerful by their broad and mysterious effulgence.
The November meteors of the present year seem to have made little or no display anywhere. Here it was wet and cloudy, so that we could not have seen them even if the sky was ablaze with them.
CHAPTER XVIII.
November Rains: 1500 tons per Imperial Acre!—Rainfall in Skye—An old Gaelic Apologue—The Drover and his Minister—Grand Stag’s Head—Scott as a Poet—Mr. Gladstone and Scott—An old Lullaby from the Gaelic.
With the exception of two, or at most three, tolerably fine days at the beginning of the month, December [1870] has been hardly less rainy and generally disagreeable than November itself, and this, although in November a fall of 18 inches—1500 tons of rain water to the imperial acre—was duly registered. A recent communication from Skye went to show that in the matter of rainfall that island is far ahead, not only of Lochaber, but of every other station in the kingdom—a pluvial pre-eminence which we had really thought belonged to ourselves, but which, claimed for Skye on the impartial authority of the rain-gauge, we give up ungrudgingly, simply exclaiming with Melibœus in the Virgilian eclogue—
“Non equidem invideo, miror magis.”
(In sooth I feel not envy, but surprise.)
“With such a rainfall as is claimed for Skye, one only wonders how it is that the inhabitants of the island seem not to suffer a whit because of it. As a rule, they are a robust and remarkably long-lived people; and, what is even more surprising, they are exceedingly good-humoured and cheerful—the pleasantest people in the world to meet with, whether at home or abroad. There is an old Gaelic apologue current in Lochaber, which may perhaps have some bearing on the point:—“It was long, long ago that, in the grey dawn of an intensely cold January morning, after a wild night of drift and snow, the heathcock of Ben Nevis clapped his wings, and, in a loud, prolonged, interrogative crow, addressed his first cousin by the father’s side, the heathcock of Ben Cruachan—‘How do you feel yourself this morning, dear heathcock of Cruachan?’ ‘So, so,’ with a feeble attempt at wing-clapping, responded the heathcock of Cruachan; ‘So, so; miserable enough, believe me, after such a night as last night was. And if I am thus miserable down here, it only puzzles me to understand how you can at all endure it, and live up there on Ben Nevis.’ ‘Thanks, my dear fellow,’ with a second vigorous clapping of his wings, quoth the Ben Nevis bird; ‘Thanks, my dear fellow, for your kind and cousinly solicitude for my welfare. Know this, however, that, bad as it doubtless is up here on Ben Nevis, I am made to it.’ ” We can only suppose that our friends in Skye bear this prodigious rainfall with such philosophic equanimity and impunity because, like the heathcock of Ben Nevis, they are “made to it.” The first time we heard this apologue was many years ago, in the cabin of one of the Messrs. Hutcheson’s steamers. A rubicund visaged drover—a fine-looking man, of burly frame and Atlantean shoulders—had just swallowed quite half-a-tumblerful of potent and unadulterated “Talisker” at a gulp rather than a draught, when his parish clergyman, who happened to be reclining on a sofa at the opposite side of the cabin, got up and expostulated with his parishioner for drinking ardent spirits in such a way as that; prophesying that unless he stopped it very quickly it would kill him, and only wondering that it had not killed him long ago. The drover, who was not aware until then that his minister was on board, and a witness to his potations, respectfully took off his broad bonnet, and, with a bow, begged to repeat the apologue, which he did, ore rotundo, in the most beautiful Gaelic; the application being so manifestly apt and pertinent to his particular case that we all burst out a laughing, the venerable clergyman—now, alas, no more!—enjoying it as much as any one that the tables had been so cleverly turned upon him. Fables apart, however, the fact of the matter seems to be simply this, that the humidity of the climate along our western sea-board, and amongst the Hebrides, is in nowise inimical to robust health or longevity. It is of course disagreeable enough at times, and frequently a sad drawback on our agricultural prosperity; but a minute examination of the vital statistics of the Western Highlands and Islands would probably go far to show that our superabundance of rain is rather favourable to health and long life than otherwise. Ach bi’dh sin mar a chithear da, a beautiful Gaelic phrase literally. But be that particular matter as it may seem to it,—what would most please us at this moment would be a month or more of the good old-fashioned winters of our boyhood, when everything was blanketed for weeks together in soft and virgin snow, and the earth was at times so braced and bound with frost that under the rapid tread and multitudinous rush of all the village schoolboys at play, it rang again like a hollow globe of iron! It is now, alas, dribble and drip, and splash, slop, and slush from year’s end to year’s end.
We are indebted to our excellent friend Mr. Snowie, of Inverness, for a very curious and valuable stag’s head, admirably stuffed, which reached us the other day by steamer. It is a splendid trophy, a veritable Cabar-Féidh, which the Chief of the Mackenzies himself, when the clan was at its proudest, might be glad to have to adorn the entrance-hall of Brahan Castle. The antlers are of immense girth and spread; one, except for the brow tine, what is called a cabar-slat; the other with two tines, each of them almost big enough for an antler of itself. We have seen many grand and curious heads in our day, both cabar-slats and multicornute; but this, which is properly neither the one nor the other, is, from its size and peculiar style of antlers, a trophy to be singled out and admired in a collection of the best heads of the kingdom. It faces us as we write from the opposite wall of our study, and constantly reminds us of Scott’s magnificent description of the stag that led Fitzjames and his attendants such a merry dance in the Lady of the Lake. We must be pardoned for quoting a passage with which every one is familiar:—
“As Chief, who hears his warder call,
‘To arms! the foemen storm the wall,’
The antler’d monarch of the waste
Sprang from his heathery couch in haste.
But, ere his fleet career he took,
The dew-drops from his flanks he shook;
Like crested leader proud and high,
Toss’d his beam’d frontlet to the sky;
A moment gazed adown the dale,
A moment snuff’d the tainted gale,
A moment listened to the cry,
That thicken’d as the chase drew nigh;
Then, as the foremost foes appeared,
With one brave bound the copse he clear’d
And, stretching forward free and far,
Sought the wild heaths of Uam-Var.”
And yet some stupid people will ask if Scott was a poet! Even Landseer never painted anything finer or truer to the life than that word-painting of Scott’s. Every one admits that Homer was a poet: well, then, search the Iliad, point out anything better, or anything, entre nous, quite as good, and when you have found it, please let us know, and we promise to reperuse the passage, with every attention and care, in the original of Homer himself, as well as in the translations of Pope, Cowper, and Blackie; and if you are right and we are wrong, we shall not hesitate to confess it, and humbly cry peccavi. Meantime we shall continue steadfast in our belief that Scott is a poet, and not only a poet, but a poet of the highest order; more “Homeric,” too, than any other poet you can name, either of the present or past century; and that Mr. Gladstone has had the good sense and penetration to discover this, and the courage to avow it, is one, and not the least, of many things which make us have a liking for that distinguished statesman and scholar.
A lady, to whom we are indebted for numberless obligations of a like nature, has sent us a copy of an old Gaelic lullaby or baby-song, the composition of which must clearly be referred to the days when cattle-lifting forays and spuilzies of every description were in high fashion and favour with the gentlemen of the north—
“When tooming faulds, or sweeping of a glen,
Had still been held the deed of gallant men.”
It is in many respects so curious that we venture on a translation of it. Attached to it is a very pretty air, low and soft and subdued as a lullaby air should be, though consisting but of a single part, as was always the case with such compositions, unlike ordinary songs, which generally had two parts, and admitted of endless variations, according to the taste and vocal capabilities of the singer. It is proper to state that our version is not intended to be sung to the original air, for which the measure we have selected is unsuitable. Our only object has been to convey to the English reader the general sense, with something of the spirit and manner, of the original.
A Lullaby.
“Hush thee, my baby-boy, hush thee to sleep,
Soft in my bosom laid, why should’st thou weep;
Hush thee, my pretty babe, why should’st thou fear,
Well can thy father wield broadsword and spear.
“Lullaby, lullaby, hush thee to rest,
Snug in my arms as a bird in its nest;
Sweet be thy slumbers, boy, dreaming the while
A dream that shall dimple thy cheek with a smile.
“Helpless and weak as thou ’rt now on my knee,
My eaglet shall yet spread his wings and be free—
Free on the mountain side, free in the glen,
Strong-handed, swift-footed, a man among men!
“Then shall my dalt’ bring his muim’ a good store
Of game from the mountain and fish from the shore;
Cattle, and sheep, and goats—graze where they may—
My dalta will find ere the dawn of the day.
“Thy father and uncles, with target and sword,
Will back each bold venture by ferry and ford;
From thy hand I shall yet drain a beaker of wine,
And the toast shall be—Health and the lowing of kine!
“Then rest thee, my foster-son, sleep and be still,
The first star of night twinkles bright on the hill;
My brave boy is sleeping—kind angels watch o’er him,
And safe to the light of the morning restore him.
Lullaby, lullaby, what should he fear,
Well can his father wield broadsword and spear!”
To the proper understanding of this curious composition, a few words of comment and elucidation may be necessary. The lullaby must be understood as sung by a foster-mother to her foster-son, the Gaelic words from which the exigencies of verse oblige us to retain in our paraphrase. In lulling her charge to sleep, the foster-mother fondly anticipates the time when the boy on her knee shall have become a full-grown and perfect man; her beau-ideal of a perfect man, observe, being that, like the heroes of ancient song, he should be brawny limbed, strong of hand, and swift of foot, able and willing at all risks to seize and appropriate his neighbour’s goods, especially his cattle, whenever necessity—an empty larder—or honour urged him to the adventure. The coolness with which the old lady commits her foster-son to the immediate care and guardianship of the heavenly powers, in the self-same breath in which she hopes and believes that he will, when he becomes a man, prove an active and expert thief—a stealer of beeves from the pastures of neighbouring tribes, in utter defiance of the decalogue—is ludicrous in the extreme. To understand it aright, we must recollect that in former times it was accounted not only lawful but honourable among hostile tribes to commit depredations on one another; and as hostility among the clans was the rule rather than the exception, every species of depredation was practised,—cattle-lifting raids, however, being accounted the most honourable of all, and in the conduct of which the best gentlemen of the clan might without a blush take an active part. The “lowing of kine,” geùmnaich bhà, occurring in this lullaby, was an old toast of the cattle-lifting times, that the late Dr. Macfarlane of Arrochar told us, he himself had often heard when a young man at baptismal feasts and bridals on Loch Lomond side. The secret of it is this: The geùmnaich, or “lowing,” implied that the cattle were strangers to the glen, whilst those that belonged to the glen itself, and were the bona fide property of the clan, if such there were, were quiet and staid and well-behaved, as decent cattle should be. The cattle “stolen or strayed,” as the advertisements have it, “lowed,” and were troublesome; while those born and bred in the glen were content to graze in peace, and to “low” only when they deemed it absolutely necessary. “The lowing of kine,” therefore, was a toast that meant neither more nor less than success to the cattle-lifting trade! As ancient Pistol says—
“ ‘Convey,’ the wise it call. ‘Steal!’ foh, a fico for the phrase.”
CHAPTER XIX.
Winter—Auroral Displays in the West Highlands always indicative of a coming Storm—Corvus Corax—Wonderful Ravens—Edgar Allan Poe.
Snow continues to accumulate on the mountain summits [December 1870], which all around, from Ben Nevis to Ben Cruachan, and from the peaks of Glen-Arkaig to Benmore in Mull, now present so many Sierra Nevadas, while you are conscious at last, and to an extent that admits of no possible mistake on the subject, that the wind, which, whether it blows adown the glen or across the sea, has a chill and penetrating edge to it, is neither the breeze of autumn nor the zephyr of summer, but the breath of winter itself—the hoary-headed and icicle-bearded season, that, with all its drawbacks, has its uses in the general economy as well as its gentler confrères in the annual. With the exception of one or two pet days, the weather of the past fortnight has been stormy and wild, with heavy falls of rain on the lowlands, and sleet and snow among the mountains. In no one season since we first became a student of the heavens, now more than a quarter of a century ago, have we had so many splendid exhibitions of aurora borealis as the last three weeks have presented us with in a series of tableaux vivants, which, while they charmed and delighted the intelligent observer, made the vulgar gape in astonishment and alarm. In every instance these auroral displays have invariably been followed within twelve hours by heavy gales of wind and much rain, and so constantly have we noticed this sequence throughout the observations of many years, that there is perhaps no meteorological prediction on which we should be disposed to venture with so much confidence and boldness as that within twelve or fifteen hours of a bright auroral display there shall be a storm, and that that storm shall be of heavy rain or sleet, as well as of high wind. We speak principally of the West Highlands, but we have no doubt that observation would prove the phenomena to be the same throughout the kingdom. If we were in command of a ship at sea, we should consider ourselves quite as justified in making all necessary preparations for a coming storm on the back of a brilliant aurora, as we should on observing a sudden fall in the barometer, the only difference being that the “merry dancers” give you longer notice of the approaching gale than does the mercury. The latter exclaims, “Look out!” and if you don’t look out, and that instantly, calling all hands and making everything snug, you come to grief, while time enough generally elapses after the auroral warning, to enable you to prepare at leisure for the coming storm, and, if it catch you napping, the fault is all your own. The recent auroral displays seem to have been very general over the whole of Europe, and are said to have been unusually brilliant in Canada and the Northern States of America. A more than ordinarily severe and protracted winter may be expected after all these aerial perturbations, which, when a French savant remarked the other day to a compatriot, “Tant pis,” replied the chassepot-bearing mobile, with the invariable shoulder shrug and grin, “Tant pis pour Messieurs les Prussiens!”—thinking, no doubt, of the disastrous retreat from Moscow, and hoping to see it repeated in a different direction at no distant day. Except the wren and redbreast, whose pluck is indomitable, and who are never altogether out of voice, our singing birds are now songless and silent, or if they do utter a note, it is but a cheep and a chirp, not a song, another sign that our winter is to be regarded as having fairly set in. We notice, besides, that some of our winter visitors from Arctic seas have made their appearance along our shores, while we observe that the rook and grey crow have already begun to frequent the beach at low water in search of what may be picked up in the way of a meal, a sure sign that they also look upon it as already come, and that their food in more inland parts has disappeared until a kindlier season has come round.
A very large raven (Corvus corax), the biggest specimen of this bird we have ever seen, was trapped at the head of Glencreran a few days ago by a bird-catcher that annually pays the West Highlands a visit at this season. It was a female, as fat and plump as a Michaelmas goose, and weighed within an ounce or two of four pounds. The plumage, as might be expected in a bird of such high condition, was perfect, with the exception of two of the upper alar feathers, which were perfectly white, an abnormality, however, that only rendered the specimen all the more interesting. The raven is the craftiest and shyest of birds, never venturing within shot of fowling-piece or rifle, and more difficult than any other bird, perhaps, to be outwitted or circumvented in any way. With all his craft and caution, however, the raven is, when occasion calls, one of the most courageous and boldest of birds. At the time of nidification, for instance, the male will fearlessly attack the largest falcon and drive him from what he considers his own proper territory, nor will he shun the combat, as we have often observed, even with the osprey or bald buzzard when they met in mid-air on their predatory excursions, and a sufficient casus belli has been found or feigned by either belligerent. We remember seeing an encounter of this kind several years ago, which continued nearly an hour, and was a very pretty and interesting sight, the combatants performing the most beautiful aerial evolutions as they charged, and parried, and soared, and swooped in fierce and determined conflict. We noticed that the raven frequently uttered his hoarse and threatening croak, as if to intimidate his opponent, while the osprey fought in perfect silence. The combat finally resulted in a drawn battle, the belligerents separating as if by mutual consent, and slowly winging their flight in opposite directions. The probability is that the raven’s pugnacity was excited on this occasion (March 1863) by the osprey’s cruising about, however unwittingly, in the vicinity of the precipice in a cleft of which the female raven was at the time brooding on her nest. At such a time the raven will boldly attack the passing eagle, and harass and annoy it until the eagle, pestered and teased by the assault, rather than in any way alarmed, with great good nature evacuates the territory which the raven claims as its own. The raven has from the earliest ages been accounted a bird of evil omen, and an object of superstitious dread and awe, and allusions to the bird in this connection are to be met with in the literature of most countries, the raven being as cosmopolitan as man himself. Its croak, so disagreeable, and dismal, and hoarse, and startling; its colour, a funereal black; its habitat, the lonely and demon-haunted mountain peaks, giddy precipices, and dreary solitudes; its lamb-slaying and carrion-eating propensities; its shy and suspicious manner, as if he knew that he had done evil and was apprehensive of well-merited punishment—all combine to render him in the first instance a noticeable and remarkable bird, and one sure to be selected for frequent reference in the days of bird divination, a superstition of which traces may probably be found in the early history of every country, and thus it would readily be raised to the “bad eminence” of a bird of evilest omen—
“The hateful messenger of heavy things,
Of death and dolour telling.”
The Moor of Venice says—
“It comes o’er my memory,
As doth the raven o’er the infected house,
Boding to all.”
And you remember Macbeth, and cannot fail to catch the allusion—
“The raven himself is hoarse,
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements.”
During his tour in the Highlands with Dr. Johnson, Boswell writes a highly characteristic letter to David Garrick, and, describing their visit to Macbeth’s Castle, says—“The situation of the old castle corresponds exactly to Shakspeare’s description. While we were there to-day, it happened oddly that a raven perched upon one of the chimney tops and croaked. Then I, in my turn, repeated ‘The raven himself,’ &c.” Now, if a raven in truth did so perch, all we can say is that it was a very curious place for a raven to be, or ravens, within a hundred years, must have very much changed their habits and nature. The explanation probably is that it was a tame raven, or a rook perhaps, or, likeliest of all, that it was a common jackdaw (Corvus monedula), a pert, impudent, and garrulous little gentleman in black—no bigger than a dovecot pigeon—that Mr. Boswell mistook (proh pudor!) for the grave, stately, and sagacious raven, who is as much bigger, and weightier, and wiser than his loquacious cousin the daw, as Samuel Johnson was bigger, and weightier, and wiser than his travelling companion, James Boswell. It is curious to meet with the following on the authority of no less renowned a personage than the valorous and puissant knight Don Quixote de la Mancha, the flower of chivalry. “Have you not read, sir,” proceeds the knight, “the annals and histories of England, wherein are recorded the famous exploits of King Arthur, whom in our Castilian tongue we perpetually called King Artus, of whom there exists an ancient tradition, universally received over the whole kingdom of Great Britain, that he did not die, but that by magic art he was transformed into a raven, for which reason it cannot be proved that from that time to this any Englishman hath killed a raven.”
We have just called the raven our “friend,” nor are we at all ashamed so to designate a bird whom we have known long, and regarding whom, if other people speak nothing but evil, we at least can speak a great deal that is good. There is a well-known proverb to the effect that a certain potentate of sable hue is not so black as he is painted, nor is the raven. First of all, he is an apt scholar, and a bird generally of much sagacity, of long memory, and ready wit. It is on record that on one occasion when the Emperor Augustus was returning victorious from a battlefield, a tame raven that had received his lesson, and remembered it to the letter, alighted on the conqueror’s chariot, and saluted him in these words—Ave Cæsar, Victor, Imperator! The Emperor was pleased, as he well might be, and ordered the raven a handsome pension for life. Bechstein, who probably knew more about the habits and economy of ravens, especially in their tame state, than any other ornithologist before his day or since, vouches for the facility with which they may be taught to speak, and for their sagacity and docility generally. He tells the following amusing story:—“A very clever raven was kept at a nobleman’s residence in the district of Mannsfeldt. Among other things he could say, ‘Well, who are you?’ very strongly and distinctly. One day, as he was walking about among the grass in the garden, he observed a setter dog which remained near him, and kept constantly walking after him. Not liking to be thus watched and followed, the raven turned rapidly round and sternly exclaimed, ‘Well, who are you?’ The dog was alarmed at this, hung his tail, and ran hastily away, and not until he had gained a considerable distance did he turn round and howl.” The raven, besides, is a thorough anti-Mormonite, and wouldn’t live in Utah for the world. If he visits the polygamist colony at all, it is always under protest against the institutions of that delectable land, and to be ready to pick the bones of the first many-wived “elder” he may catch in articulo mortis. Rather should the raven be elected to a seat upon the bench of bishops, for he is ever careful to fulfil the apostolic injunction to be the husband but of one wife; and until accident or old age deprives him of her, he is the model and pattern of faithful and affectionate husbands, never violating his conjugal vows, not even to the extent of the most innocent of flirtations or the most Platonic of intimacies with a neighbouring raveness, even though she should be younger, and sleeker, and glossier than his own. The raven, in short, when he pairs, which he does at the earliest moment permitted by the laws of ravendom, pairs for life, and while his first choice is spared to him he will no more think of paying court to another, be her charms what they may, than he will of dying of hunger while there is a bone to pick, a tender lamb, or braxied sheep within a circuit of a hundred miles of his eyrie, in the most inaccessible cleft of yonder beetling precipice. We might now say something if we liked of the raven’s usefulness in the general economy as a hard-working and indefatigable inspector of nuisances, and how putrid animal matter of every description disappears, as if by magic, wherever he is known and appreciated; but this is a utilitarian age, and as we hate utilitarianism, we are content merely to hint that the raven deserves special regard as a sanitary reformer. We prefer insisting on the fact that the raven is a gentleman of very ancient descent, being able, in the clearest manner, to trace his pedigree in unbroken line up to the days of “Captain” Noah himself, as Byron irreverently styles the patriarch. When any one in our day becomes distinguished and attracts our special regard, we instantly set to work to trace his descent, and although he himself can hardly tell who was his grandfather, we are never satisfied until we have, by hook and by crook, traced his ancestry to the Ragman Roll or the Norman Conquest, and, having thus ennobled him to our own entire satisfaction, we cease not to pet and praise him until he is dead, and then the newspapers swarm with obituary notices of the distinguished man who has just departed, and a monument, erected by public subscription, concludes the farce. The raven’s ancestor was unquestionably with Noah in the ark, and although he has incurred some odium in connection with the assuaging of the waters, we confess we cannot well tell why, for all that the ancient, and beautiful, and simple narrative says of him is this: “And he sent forth a raven, which went forth to and fro, until the waters were dried up from off the earth.” On the point of ancestry, in short, there is no bird that has a better right to hold up his head than the raven. And just consider: wasn’t Dickens’ stuffed raven “Grip” sold the other day for a hundred and twenty guineas! although if his portrait in the Graphic is to be depended on, he never was a handsome specimen of the family, or if he was, then the man who stuffed and “set him up” should have received a flogging for his pains. Should the reader wish to know more about our friend Corvus corax, we can confidently recommend him to make the acquaintance, the intimate acquaintance if he can, of “The Raven” to be met with in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, the most weird and wonderful raven that has ever yet appeared in song or story.
CHAPTER XX.
Along the Shore after Birds—An Otter in pursuit of a Fish—Tame Otter at Bridge of Tilt: Employed in Fishing—His hatred of all sorts of Birds—“The Otter and Fox,” a translation from the Gaelic.
November closed with a week of the most delightful weather one could wish for at this season [December 1870], cold, but crisp and clear; nor has December thus far shown any tendency to exceptional “rampaging” either, though come it must, if we are not much mistaken, and in a style we fear that will cause it to be remembered. Woodcocks, fieldfares, redwing thrushes, snow buntings, and starlings are at this moment more plentiful than we ever saw them before; while Arctic sea-fowl in great numbers crowd our creeks and bays, and immense flocks of grallatores, curlews, gedwits, purrs, dunlins, and oyster-catchers, may be seen all along our shores diligently attending the sea margin as the tide recedes, or with weird and wild scream urging their eccentric flights from an exhausted sandbank in indefatigable search of “fresh fields and pastures new.” Creeping among the rocks on the back of Cuilchenna Point, a quiet, sequestered shore, seldom visited by anybody but ourselves at this season, one evening last week, watching a pair of web-feet that we finally decided to be smews, a species of merganser, we were unexpectedly treated to an exhibition of aquatic feats that we had never before seen equalled, and that we thought no animal, biped or quadruped, could accomplish in an element not properly its own. Squatted on the beach behind two huge boulders, a narrow opening between which enabled us to look seawards, and to see without being seen, we were watching the elegant smews as they preened themselves, floating gracefully the while, without the movement of a web, on the calm surface of the cold, clear sea, when right before us, and within less than a dozen fathoms of the shore, a dark object suddenly dashed to the surface with a flop and a splash, and as suddenly disappeared. We took it to be a seal in pursuit of some fish, as is his wont; but on its reappearance a minute or so afterwards, we were delighted to see that it was not a seal, but a large otter hard at work in chase of some favourite fish for supper; and small blame to him for that same, for if one might judge from his exertions in the pursuit, he was dreadfully hungry and thoroughly in earnest, not yet having dined, perhaps, nor even broken his fast since the preceding evening, for your otter (Lutra vulgaris) is for the most part an evening and nocturnal feeder. Nothing could exceed the elegance and ease with which the otter performed the most extraordinary and complicated evolutions in pursuit of his prey, his long, lithe body, pliant and supple as an eel’s, twisting and twining in every direction as the fish darted hither and thither, or swept in rapid circles in its efforts to escape. Its tail, we noticed, seemed to act not merely as a rudder in aid of its owner’s incessant perisaltations, but to be in constant motion like a propeller, as if to assist the broad and muscular web feet in every act of natation. For ten minutes or more, perhaps, did the chase continue, the fish, that seemed to be either a haddock or sea-trout of some three or four pounds weight, occasionally leaping bodily out of the water in its efforts to escape from the unfriendly attentions of its stern pursuer, the said pursuer, like a staunch hound, doubling as the fish doubled, circling as it circled, and diving as it dived, with a persistency and perseverance that it was impossible to elude, until at last, fairly beaten in his own element, the fish was captured in a pool of shallow water, whither it had darted in its terror and bewilderment, the otter instantly pouncing upon it and seizing it in his mouth, as you have seen a terrier deal with a rat. At this moment we rushed from our concealment with a shout, hoping to frighten the otter and get hold of the fish, but Monsieur Lutra was too quick for us. With the fish in his mouth he plunged into the sea, and in a second had disappeared among some boulders that would probably have afforded him a secure asylum, even if we had a pack of otter hounds to aid in our attempt at the dislodgment of a gentleman so cunning.
With the common otter of our inland rivers and lakes we have been more or less familiar since our school-boy days; but we cannot recollect having ever seen a marine otter until this occasion. Our naturalists seem to be very generally agreed that the sea otter and that of our rivers and fresh-water lakes are one and the same animal,—an opinion from which we are not at this moment prepared to dissent, though the animal referred to above seemed to us to be larger in size, blacker in colour, with more prominent ears, and a bigger, bushier tail than any specimen, living or dead, that had hitherto come under our notice. Certain peculiarities, however, of form and colouring in the individual are frequently attributable to accidental circumstances. We remember seeing a very fine dog otter many years ago, that its owner had succeeded in rendering comparatively tame, and of some use in the capture of fish for its master’s table, as well as for its own sustenance. The animal belonged to the innkeeper at Bridge of Tilt, in Athole, and was usually kept chained in an empty stall in the stable. It was very good-natured and docile, and evinced its satisfaction on being stroked with the hand and patted by a curious purring, sort of half whine half bark, altogether unlike the utterance of any other animal with which we are acquainted. We saw it presented with a dish of milk, which it readily lapped up, using its tongue by way of spoon, as a dog does under similar circumstances. With a collar round its neck, to which a long rope was attached, it was frequently taken to the river, where it never failed to catch fish, first driving them, after the manner of a collie with a flock of sheep, into the nearest pool in which there was a considerable depth of water, when he pounced upon them with the agility of a wild cat, and seldom failed to secure two or three of the best and biggest fish in the shoal ere they could manage to escape. We were assured, however, that the best place to see the otter at work was not the river, but one of the moorland lochs, in the depths of which he was perfectly at home. Here he exhibited the most astonishing feats of agility in pursuit of his prey; his activity and matchless swimming powers being backed by a pertinacity and cunning that left neither trout nor pike much chance of escape. Having marked out and selected the fish to be captured, it was observed that he stuck to it with the staunchness of a well-trained hound through all its doublings and windings, as if for the moment the loch contained none but it, until he had fairly run it down; the capture generally taking place among the reeds that bordered the margin of the mere, into which the fish always rushed on becoming sensible that its adversary was not to be eluded in open water. If left to himself, it was remarked that the otter was somewhat dainty and fastidious of taste, rarely eating more of a captured fish than a little at the back of the head and about the pectoral fins, when, after a short rest, he was ready to start in pursuit of another. If this be the habit of otters in their wild state—as there is reason to believe it is—one can fancy how terribly destructive to fish they must be, killing ten times more than they actually eat, and these, too, the best and biggest fish they can meet with in their depredations. Even a single pair of otters, with a family to rear, must be a terrible scourge on any river they may select to honour with their attentions for a season; nor is the marine otter, we may be sure—such as we saw the other day—less destructive when he takes up his residence in the vicinity of salmon fishings. Whatever the price of salmon in the market, depend upon it that the otter’s larder is always well supplied.
The semi-domesticated otter above referred to, after leading a not unuseful life for a year or two under the careful and always kindly superintendence of its intelligent owner, managed at last somehow to break its chain and escape, and was never more seen or heard of. The only other curious thing about this animal that we can recollect was his deadly aversion to every feathered creature that came near him. Whether goose or duck, barn-door fowl or pigeon, he seemed to detest them all, and would readily, and with every sign of anger, kill such as he could get hold of, not to eat them, observe, for that he was never known to do, but just because he disliked them. To all other animals he could be easily reconciled, and was on good and even friendly terms with all the dogs, cats, and pigs about the place, particularly manifesting his love for his stable companions, the horses, by whining in his strange fashion and straining on his chain to the utmost, as if he would fain welcome them with a caress, when after a day’s work in the fields they returned to the stable of an evening. We are not aware that, except milk, which it would readily lap and seemed to enjoy, this otter was ever known to touch anything in the shape of food except its natural fish diet. In the old Sgeulachdan, or fireside tales of the ancient Highlanders, we frequently meet with the “dun otter” or dobhran donn, as one of the dramatis personæ. He is generally introduced to us under an amiable character, rescuing neglected merit from obscurity, relieving distressed damsels, or succouring the widow and orphans with bountiful supplies of silvery fish from the tarn amongst the mountains, or the eddying pool beneath the cascade in the glen. The amiable and friendly otter sometimes turns out to be an enchanted prince, who, timeously released from the spell that has doomed him to amphibious habits and quadrupedal form, assumes his proper shape, and marries the always virtuous and beautiful, though frequently humble, heroine of the tale. In the Hebrides to this day the otter is looked upon with some degree of superstitious reverence, and a bit of otter skin worn by way of charm is regarded as an antidote against infection in fever and small-pox, a preservative from death by drowning, and of singular efficacy in bringing the labours of parturition to a happy issue. A mole on a person’s skin, whatever its place or proportions, is in the Hebrides never reckoned a deformity. It is regarded rather as a “beauty spot” than otherwise, and believed to betoken a long life and good luck to the fortunate possessor. In the West Highlands and Hebrides such a mark on the skin is called a ball-dobhrain, an otter mark or otter spot, and is no more accounted a blemish or deformity than was the mole on the right lip of Dulcinea del Toboso by Don Quixote, though it looked “like a whisker, and had seven or eight red hairs in it above a span long!” In some places a piece of otter skin placed on the head under a woman’s coif, and worn inside a man’s blue bonnet, is supposed to relieve the headache and prevent baldness, while gentle friction along the affected part with the furry side of a bit of otter skin is esteemed of sovereign efficacy in erysipelas or “rose.” The following is a somewhat free rendering from the Gaelic of a fable occurring in an old Sgeulachd, with which many of our west coast readers at least must be acquainted. The moral is obvious.
The Otter and Fox.
The otter had caught in the pool below
A silvery salmon so full of roe,
And clambering bore it over the rocks,
When who should he meet but his cousin the fox.
“Friend,” quoth the wily fox, “pray go
And bring me a fish from the pool below—
I’ve not tasted fish for a year or mo’.
Leave here thy salmon; go, haste thee back,
We’ll dine together and have our crack;
Believe me, dear otter, that over one’s food
The face of a friend is always good.”
The otter tumbled into the stream
Where the floating foam was white as cream;
He sought and searched in each cranny and hole,
But not a fish could he find in the pool.
“Well,” quoth the otter, “I’ll hasten back
To my cousin the fox, and we’ll have our crack
Over the salmon I left above;
One fish will go far that is eaten in love;
’Tis large, and fat, and full of roe,
And, fairly divided, will serve for two.”
Clambering over the rocks in haste
The otter returned to join his guest;
But guess his surprise when he reached the spot;
Where the fox had been—the fox was not,
And nought of the salmon that could be seen
But some silvery scales where the salmon had been!
The otter but said, “’Tis my belief
My cousin the fox should be hanged for a thief;
He’ll never again make me his tool,
For myself alone I’ll haunt the pool.”
CHAPTER XXI.
Storms—An “inch” of Rain—Atherina Presbyter—Lophius Piscatorius—Mr. Mortimer Collins’ misquotation from the Times.
A finer winter [January 1871] never was known all over the West Highlands and Hebrides. Some tempestuousness is to be looked for at this season, and some tempestuousness we have had, but of actual winter rigour and cold we have hardly had a trace. Only twice during the winter have we had any frost, and even then it was but slight and of short duration. On several occasions, however, we have had such terrible rainfalls as are only known perhaps within sight of the mountain peaks of Jura and Mull and Morven. On the 19th of January, and again on the 23d, the rainfall within a given time was heavier than anything known even with us for many years past. In about sixteen hours on the 19th, 4·19 inches fell, and quite as much, if not more, on the 23d. Now, does the reader know what an inch of rain means? It means a gallon of water spread evenly over a surface of something like two square feet, or, to put it in a more striking and intelligible form, it means a fall of a hundred tons upon an acre of land; so that in sixteen hours on the 19th upwards of four hundred tons of rain fell on every acre of land for miles and miles around us. It will be confessed that thus the country was for once at least well soaked and saturated. All our rivers and mountain torrents were, of course, in full flood, and throughout the night, when it had calmed down a little, the “noise of many waters,” as you lay awake on your pillow and listened, made wild and eerie music enough, to which the fitting bass was the boom of the storm-driven rollers as they broke in sullen thunder along the shore. We had occasion to be across Corran Ferry on the wettest of these days, bad as it was, and, in spite of waterproofs and haps of most approved texture and form, we returned in the evening so soaked and drenched and droukit, to use an expressive Scotticism, that we might as well have been for half an hour up to our chin, over head and ears for that matter of it, in the deepest pool of the Rhi. When changing our clothes in our own room after getting home, we managed to raise a quiet laugh with ourselves over it all, by the recollection of the music and words of a favourite Scotch reel not altogether inapplicable to our then condition. The reel in question is a well-known one, though we forget at present its proper distinctive name. It is, we think, one of Neil Gow’s. A gudewife, presumably of Amazonian heart, and also of Amazonian proportions, makes her husband wince and quail, and conduct himself with becoming amiability and decorum, as she sings—
“Mur ’bi’dh agam ach trudair bodaich,
Bhogain anns an allt e;
Mur ’bi’dh agam ach trudair bodaich,
Bhogain anns an allt e;
Bhogain agus bhogain agus bhogain th’ar a cheann e,
’S mur ’bi’dh a glan ’nuair bhidh e tioram,
Bhogain ’rithisd ann e!”
Not very easily turned into English, but this is something like it—
“If my gudeman were cross and dour,
I’d dip him in the burn, O!
If my gudeman were cross and sour,
I’d dip him in the burn, O;
I’d dip the dear o’er head and ears until he’d grane and girn, O,
And till he promised better things, he’d get the tother turn, O.”
While stripping, it struck us that we were quite as wet on the occasion in question, as if for our sins we had undergone all the “dipping” threatened by the gudewife in the old reel; and the idea put us into good humour until tea and other fireside comforts made us forget all the pelting of the pitiless storm. How the remainder of winter and early spring may turn out meteorologically, it is impossible to forecast with any confidence, but meantime our old people, in their own opinion, at least, weatherwise and shrewd quoad hoc, are gravely shaking their heads over what they deem an unusual dearth of frost and snow in mid-winter.
Our West Coast storms, if in one sense sometimes disagreeable enough, rarely fail, however, to bring us a good thing in the shape of hundreds of tons of drift-ware, which, gathered and spread on the land, is found to be a valuable fertiliser. It is a labour, besides, which falls to be done in a season when there is little else to occupy the people’s time, and saves an immense deal of trouble when the spring comes round, for the land is ready for the plough and the immediate reception of the seed, whatever the crop—thus saving at once the manure heap for purposes in which farmyard manure is indispensable, and all the trouble of long cartage afield. In collecting his share of a huge swathe of this drift-ware the other day, one of our neighbours found a dead fish, quite fresh and unmutilated, which being new to him, though a fisherman and sea-shore man all his life, he thought might be interesting to us. He accordingly brought it to us, and to us also it was new, and as such, of course, exceedingly interesting. We puzzled long over it ere we satisfied ourselves that we had determined its identity. It was a small fish, some six inches in length, and of smelt-like shape and form and colouring, but it was not a smelt. After some little trouble, we finally decided that it was a species of atherine (Atherina) belonging to the Mugilidæ or mullet family. Our particular specimen was the Atherina presbyter, a not uncommon visitor on some of the south of England shores, but so rare in our seas that, as we have already said, we never saw a specimen before. We are told that the atherine is very good eating, and we can quite believe it, for it is a pretty, delicate-looking little fish, that, nicely fried until properly crimp and brown, ought to taste well. A much commoner fish, but interesting in this instance for the great size of the specimen, was an angler, fishing-frog, or sea-devil (Lophius piscatorius), which was cast ashore near Corran Ferry last week. This was the largest individual of the species—the ugliest, perhaps, of all fishes—that we ever saw. It measured five feet seven inches from snout to tip of tail, and weighed fifty-three pounds. It was poor and fleshless, and had died seemingly of sheer inanition or atrophy; had it been in full condition, it would have weighed a third more. Its terrible mouth, with its formidable array of sharp recurved teeth, was enough to scare a friend that accompanied us to a distance, though we assured him that the brute was dead and harmless. On opening out its jaws to a fair extent—that is, as far as we thought the animal itself would open them easily if need were, we placed a large turnip from a pit that was conveniently at hand, a turnip nearly as large as a man’s head, easily within the horrid cavern. We would willingly have taken this specimen home with us, for the purpose of preserving the skeleton, but we had no conveyance with us, and any idea of carrying it was out of the question. It had, besides, evidently lain some time on the beach, and its odour on moving it in the least was, the reader may believe, the very antipodes of Eau de Cologne or ottar of roses. We contented ourselves therefore with slitting open its stomach with our pocket-knife, and found it, as we expected, perfectly empty, containing nothing in the shape of food, except the tips of two claws and small bits of the carapace of a not uncommon species of crab, the velvet fiddler (Portunas puber). The Highlanders of the west coast and Hebrides call the angler Mac Làmhaich, properly Mac Làthaich—the son (that is, inhabitant) of the mud or ooze; a very expressive and appropriate name for it, for it is essentially a mud fish, in which, half buried and perdu, it hides and watches, tiger-like, for its prey. The naturalist meets with many things to puzzle him, and it has always puzzled us to account for the large size of this animal’s head and mouth, altogether disproportioned to the size of the rest of the body. No matter how insatiable the cravings of the brute’s maw—to use a Miltonic word—no matter how gluttonous soever of appetite, the head and mouth, and number and size of teeth, do seem unnecessarily formidable, monstrous indeed, for any conceivable work that they can be called upon to perform; and yet there is unquestionably good reason for it all, if we could only find it out. It may interest some of our readers to know that the sea-devil belongs, ichthyologically, to the Acanthopterygious family of fishes. Acanthopterygious! what a staggerer to any one except a learned ichthyologist at a Spelling Bee.
Mr. Mortimer Collins and others are recently down, somewhat hypercritically we can’t help thinking, on Mr. Tennyson’s occasional natural history references throughout his poems. The fun is that in almost every instance in which fault is found with him, Mr. Tennyson is right and his critics wrong! Here is one example of this hypercriticism in which Mr. Mortimer Collins is fairly hoist with his own petard. Mr. Tennyson writes—
“In spring a fuller crimson comes upon the robin’s breast.”
Upon which Mr. Collins comments—“As a fact, that fuller crimson comes in autumn, as all know who watch the half-shy, half-familiar bird—
“That ever in the haunch of winter sings.”
Here Mr. Mortimer Collins is partly right and largely wrong, while Mr. Tennyson is altogether right. It is true that our native song-birds, moulting in autumn or early winter, assume at this season a thicker, warmer, fresher plumage after all the wear and tear consequent on the labours of nidification, incubation, and love-making throughout the spring and summer; but it is equally true that it is only in spring, as Mr. Tennyson correctly asserts, that our wild birds assume their gaudiest and gayest attire, every colour and shade of colour in the individual bird’s feathering there and then only being at its best and brightest. And when we remember that spring is the season of love and incipient song, we should be very much surprised, and with good reason, if the fact were otherwise. So far as our recollection serves us, Mr. Mortimer Collins, or any one else, will find it rather difficult to catch Mr. Tennyson tripping in the direction indicated. We should say that the Poet Laureate was rather remarkable than otherwise for his fidelity to nature and truth in all his local colouring.
Some time ago, by the way, we had occasion to call attention to the exceeding frequency of misquotation in our current literature, and in quarters, too, where one would least expect it. Here is a curious and very unpardonable instance, all things considered. In a review of the South Kensington Handbooks, in the Times of the 18th January, a sentence opens thus—“It is well-known that weary lies the head that wears a crown.” Every one will see that the manifest intention here is to quote from the monologue of the poor harassed and sleepless King in Shakespeare’s Henry IV. (part second), one of the finest things that even Shakespeare ever wrote, and we had thought too well-known by every one with any pretensions to literature to be misquoted. The concluding lines are these:—
“Can’st thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose
To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then, happy, low, lie down:
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”
CHAPTER XXII.
Aurora Borealis—Unfavourable weather for Birds about St. Valentine’s Day—The Water-Vole in the Rhi—In the Eden in Fifeshire—In the Black Water, Kinloch Leven—Does it feed on Salmon Fry and Ova?—The Kingfisher—Character of the Water-Vole—Note about the Hedgehog.
A brilliant display of aurora borealis on the early morning of the 8th [February 1871] led us to conclude that a change of weather was not far distant; and before sunset of that same day the wind had gone round from east by south to south-west, and a drizzling rain, with a very much milder temperature than we had known for three months, told us that, for the present at least, King Frost had agreed to suspension of hostilities. Since then it has been mostly wet, with occasional hailstone showers, and turbulent withal, if not actually stormy. The revictualling of Paris under the terms of the capitulation and armistice was not a more sensible relief to the starving inhabitants than was the recent thaw to our wild birds on sea and shore. The moment they became convinced that it was no sham, but a real, veritable thaw, they revived amazingly. Shaking off the torpidity in which cold and want had so pitilessly bound them, they took heart, and bustled about in search of such food as might now be procured by diligent seeking in copse and hedgerow, by pool and stream. An occasional strophe, sadly inconsecutive and discordant, may now again be heard when the sun shines out and the storm has lulled, from some of our hardier warblers, and we have observed that in some instances rooks have begun to pair; but our bird-world, upon the whole, is far from what it should be at this date; more taken up, like vanquished France, with the thought of the mere necessities of life and the reestablishment of their exhausted energies, than with love or music, or the gaiety and abandon so characteristic in ordinary seasons of our feathered friends on the back of St. Valentine’s Day. The meridian sun, however, is now steadily climbing zenithwards, and the day perceptibly lengthening apace, so that our wild birds, rapidly gathering strength, and daily improving in tone and tune, may, after all, arrive at their day of jollity and joyousness sooner than we anticipated. We captured a beautiful Scarlet Emperor butterfly a few days ago, as brisk and lively as possible, on a window pane in Ardvulin Cottage, Ardgour. How beautiful, by the way, and how suggestive of spring and vernal delights in a land of plenitude and peace, is the following from the Song of Solomon:—“For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grapes give a good smell.”
Another animal besides the hedgehog has of recent years made its appearance in Lochaber, though previously unknown, so far as we are aware, anywhere in the West Highlands. The animal in question is the water-rat, water-vole, or British beaver. The last is, perhaps, its most appropriate name, for the animal is neither kith nor kin to the rat, while very much in its economy and habits, as well as in its corporeal structure, particularly its dentition, allies it not remotely to the beaver tribe. In size, the water-vole is more robust in body and larger in every way than the common rat, with a more silken pile, and a bigger and brighter eye. It frequents the banks of streams and ponds, feeding on the more delicate aquatic plants, and on the bark and tender shoots of the willow, alder, and such other shrubs as love to grow
“The quiet waters by.”
That such an animal inhabited Lochaber was accidentally revealed to us two years ago, and so unmistakeably that there was no room for doubt or hesitation in the matter. We were returning from Fort-William on a beautiful summer afternoon, walking by the hill route through Lundavra, when having already accomplished more than half the distance at our best pace, we sat down to rest and solace ourselves with a pipe—not the Arcadian musical instrument, observe, but the more prosaic article anathematised in the royal Counterblast—by the side of a canal-like reach in the River Rhi, as it slowly winds through Glenshelloch, when our attention was drawn to a splash in the water at a short distance above us, to which, however, we gave but little heed, taking it for the lively flop of a half-pound trout engaged in fly-catching for supper. Another and a louder splash, however, aroused our curiosity, and induced us to creep cautiously in the direction whence the sound proceeded, and there, sure enough, disporting themselves round a gnarled alder stump that projected into the stream from the water-line on the opposite bank, were a pair of water-voles, full-grown, and brisk and lively as ever we had seen them in our younger days in the upper reaches of the beautiful Eden in Fifeshire, a favourite habitat. After watching their gambols for some time, we threw a pebble into the pool, when they instantly dived and disappeared, only to emerge in a few seconds near a large boulder further up the stream, behind which, and cunningly concealed beneath the overhanging bank, was their hole, into which they popped as readily as does an alarmed mouse into a wall crevice. As they dived and pursued their subaqueous flight in the direction of their hole, the eye could follow their every movement, for the water was as clear as crystal. Keeping very near the bottom, it seemed as if they progressed partly by swimming and partly by running along the gravel, at any rate with amazing celerity and ease. We noticed that about their necks and shoulders their pile appeared as if adorned with numberless tiny pearls—air bubbles, in fact—that adhered to their fur, and that, frequently shifting the position like quicksilver drops, as the animals moved, had a very pretty effect. Since that time the water-vole has been repeatedly seen about the lower reaches of the same river, between the Inchree Falls and the highway. It has also been seen in some parts of the Blackwater above Kinlochleven. Ardent disciples of Izaak Walton and others interested in the preservation of trout and salmon hold the water-vole in great dislike, under the belief that it feeds largely on fry and ova. The accusation we believe to be unfounded, as much so as the egg-eating charge against the hedgehog. We shall not attempt to prove a negative, the onus probandi of their averments logically resting with the accusers; but we will say that we have known the water-vole for many years, and at one time had every opportunity of studying its habits, and we never had cause to entertain the slightest suspicion that it was anything else than a vegetable feeder. We recollect once questioning old John Robertson of Perth, than whom a better fisher, whether on lake or stream, never cast a fly or impaled a worm, about the water-vole’s alleged liking for fish-spawn and fry. His reply was in these words, “I dinna believe it, sir; I have fished in maist feck o’ the rivers, burns, and lochs in Perth, Fife, and Kinross, and other counties forbye, and the fish were just as plentiful where the splash o’ the gleb (a local name for the water-vole) was heard a’maist at every cast o’ the line, as where none could be seen for days together.” We know, besides, that the late Professor John Reid of St. Andrews, one of the most distinguished comparative anatomists of his day, and who had dissected many of them, was of opinion that the water-vole was a vegetable feeder and nothing else, he having never been able to detect anything to lead him to the conclusion that it fed on fish or their spawn. Suspicion of the water-vole’s being addicted to the malpractices in question was first of all grounded on the fact that fish-bones were frequently found along the banks of the streams he inhabited, and sometimes about the entrance of, and even in, the hole which was his habitat and home; and on this evidence alone the water-vole soon got into very bad repute indeed. As to the finding occasionally of fish bones along a water-vole inhabited stream, although the fact is indisputable, it really goes for nothing, suspicious as it looks, for similar relics of defunct trouts and troutlets may be seen any day on the margin of streams where a water-vole was never yet known to exist. The real culprits in such cases are the otter, the common rat (a great fish-eater in shallow streams and almost as expert a swimmer as the vole itself, only that it cannot dive so well), the heron, king-fisher, and grey crow, all of whom are fond of fish, either as an article of constant diet, or as an occasional make-shift in default of more legitimate fare. As to the fish bones to be sometimes met with in the water-vole’s holes, the dusky-coated and white-vested dipper and the beautiful plumaged king-fisher are alone to blame. The castings, indeed, of a single pair of king-fishers would of itself suffice to account for all the fish bones one meets with by the banks of ponds and streams, for the beautiful Alcedo is a voracious fish-devourer, and his hole going backwards and upwards some three or four feet into the bank, invariably a perfect charnel-house of bleached fish bones of minnows and troutlets. The number of small fish that a pair of king-fishers, with their young, dispose of in a single season must amount to many thousands, and as the larger bones at least are always cast or regurgitated, their presence may always be taken as a sure indication that the spot has recently been the haunt of the most beautifully coloured of British birds. When the bones of larger fish, however, are met with, the blame, if blame there be, must be shifted from the king-fisher to the shoulders of one or other or all of the animals above mentioned. It is only fair that the spirit of our laws, which accounts a man innocent until he is proved guilty, should be extended to beasts and birds as well. In this view of the matter the water-vole has good reason of complaint that it has been over hastily and unwarrantably condemned on insufficient evidence, without even the form of a fair and impartial trial. Unlike Ritson, the antiquary and balladist, who, although he was a strict vegetarian in diet, holding all manner of animal food in utter abhorrence, and writing a volume on the subject, was yet as cross-grained and as irascible as a wasp, the water-vole, like a true vegetarian, is quiet and unobtrusive even to timidity, leading an inoffensive life, and in his play hours, which—in proof of his good sense, let us remark—are very numerous, as frolicsome and sportive as a kitten. He will show fight, it is true, if attacked in his hole or otherwise brought to bay, and his bite, whether on the nose of an over-venturesome terrier, or the hand that would rashly seize him, is very severe and difficult to heal; but it is only doing him the merest justice that those who know him should bear witness that in general character and disposition he is the most peaceable and harmless of animals.
CHAPTER XXIII.
March—The Story of a Spanish Dollar—The Spanish Armada—The “Florida”—Faire-Chlaidh, or Watching of the Graveyard—Molehill Earth for Flowers.
A fall of snow on Monday, followed by keen frost during three consecutive nights, rendered the past week [March 1871], as to mere cold at least, the most wintry of the season; but with a bright sun circling at mid-March altitude, the frost had no time to penetrate the soil to any depth, and spring work has been steadily pushed on, with hardly any retardation. In the upland glens, however, the frost was for some days intense, and had it continued much longer, weakly sheep must have suffered severely. But solvitur hiems, the frost is gone; the weather is now again open, and mild and spring-like, and our wild birds—scores of them within a stone’s cast of our window as we write—only seem all the more jubilant because of the past week’s temporary dip of temperature to the freezing-point. “Speed the plough”—one of our very best Scotch reels, by the way—should now be the cry, at once earnest and cheery, of every one connected with arable land, for what says the old Gaelic proverb—
“Am fear nach cuir ’sa Mhàrt,
’Sanmoch a bhuaineas e.”
He that sows not in March shall have a late ingathering.
A coin was sent us for identification a few days ago, the history of which strikes us as interesting. We had no difficulty in determining it to be a silver Spanish dollar of the time of Philip II. It is much corroded and worn, but the following letters of the original inscription are distinctly legible:—Ph. II., D.G. Hisp: et Ind: Rex. 1585. On the reverse disc is what seems to have been intended for the prow of a ship between two palm trees. The owner of this coin tells us that it came into his possession in the following manner:—A brother of his, who owned and commanded a coasting schooner about fifty years ago, chancing to be becalmed while passing through the Sound of Mull, thought it best to come to anchor for the night. Next morning, when getting under weigh, the anchor, as it came to the bows, was found to have brought up a large mass of tangle. While clearing this away, the edge of the coin was observed sticking out from among a lot of sand and shingle attached to the tangle roots, and having been secured and handed to the Captain, he ever after kept it in his purse as a “luckpenny,” on which he set a high value, and all the more so, perhaps, that it happened to be found on the morning of Easter Sunday, a fact that to him, as a good Catholic, had a significance and meaning that the rest of the crew took no account of. Be this as it may, he was from that day an exceedingly prosperous and lucky man in all his undertakings, and till the day of his death he carried the coin about him wherever he went, as a “luckpenny” and talisman of extraordinary virtue. The present owner, too, sets a very high value on this numismatic talisman, which, he declares, hardly anything would induce him to part with. During the ten years that it has been in his possession, he assures us that he has been prosperous and successful as he never was before, with never a moment’s illness; and although too sensible and shrewd a man actually to assert that the coin has anything to do with it, it is a fact that he very seriously looks upon his Spanish dollar as a sort of “lee-penny,” giving its possessor a fair chance of an amount of health and wealth, that without it he might struggle for in vain. This nonsense apart, however, the question remains, What business had a Spanish dollar in the bottom of the Sound of Mull? How came it there? Our theory is that the coin originally belonged to some one connected with the great “Invincible Armada” of 1588. It is a well-known historical fact that, after the defeat of the Armada, the already shattered and discomfited fleet, in attempting to return to Spain by sailing round Scotland and Ireland, was overtaken by a dreadful storm, in which many of the ships were wrecked. One ship, named the “Florida,” ran for shelter into the Sound of Mull, and while at anchor off Tobermory harbour, was captured and destroyed by a body of Mull and Morvern men, under the command of Maclean of Duart. This fact is sufficiently attested by a remission, under the Privy Seal, to that chief for his share in the somewhat questionable transaction, bearing date the 20th March 1589. The “Florida” was destroyed by being blown up, with all her armament and stores, and many of her crew—a treacherous and cruel act, for Scotland at least was then at peace with Spain—and it is probable that the Spanish dollar so recently examined by us reached the bottom of the Sound on that occasion, and there remained till fished up in the curious manner above related, upwards of two centuries afterwards. Some of the timbers of the submerged “Florida” have from time to time been brought to the surface, and a casket formed out of part of her windlass was presented by Sir Walter Scott to George IV., during his visit to Scotland in 1822.
An unsuccessful attempt, by means of divers, was made in 1740 to recover some of a large amount of treasure said to have been sunk in her; but some very beautiful brass guns were brought up, one of which is still to be seen at the Castle of Dunstaffnage, near Oban, and another, we believe, at Inveraray. These were last made to speak loud and lustily, not against a Queen of England, as was their original errand to our shores, but in honour of the marriage of the daughter of a Queen of Great Britain with the son of a Scottish Duke, who now owns the lands which belonged to the Macleans, by whom the “Florida,” carrying those very guns, was destroyed. Thus does “the whirligig of time bring about its revenges.” Some years ago we were shown by a gentleman in Glasgow a large ebony-stocked pistol, beautifully carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver, which was said to have been secured from the wreck of the “Florida.” We recollect that the corroded state of the barrel and lock abundantly satisfied us at the time that, whether it had belonged to the “Florida” or not, it had at all events long lain in water, and more probably, from the peculiar form of corrosion, in salt water than in fresh. As to the dollar, we have only further to state that its owner now thinks more of it than ever: our suggestion as to its very probable connection with the Spanish Armada having largely enhanced its value in his estimation. Its mere intrinsic value as a bit of silver would, we think, be fully and fairly appraised at something like twenty pence sterling.
We were the other day accidentally brought into contact with a curious superstition, which, although not peculiar to this district, but common, we believe, over all the Highlands, was yet quite new to us. We were sailing past the beautiful island of St. Mungo, in Loch Leven, the burial-place for many centuries of the people of Nether Lochaber and Glencoe, when the following conversation took place between ourselves and an old man who managed the sails while we steered. It was all in Gaelic, of course, but we give the substance in English:—“You were at the funeral on the island the other day, sir?” interrogatively observed our companion. “I was, indeed,” we replied. “John ——,” he continued, naming the deceased, “was a very decent man.” “He was a fine old Highlander, shrewd and intelligent,” we replied, “and, what is more, I believe a very good man.” “Donald ——,” naming a person we both knew, “is very ill, and not likely to last long.” “I saw him to-day,” we observed, “and I fear that what you say is true: he cannot last long.” “Well, sir, it will be a good thing for John —— (the person recently buried); his term of watching will be a short one.” “I do not understand what you mean,” we observed, with some curiosity. “The man is dead and buried; what watching should he have to do?” “Why, sir, don’t you know that the spirit of the last person buried in the island has to keep watch and ward over the graves till the spirit of the next person buried takes his place?” “I really did not know that,” we replied. “Is it a common opinion that such is the case, and do you believe it yourself?” “Well, sir, it is generally believed by the people; and having always heard that it was so, I cannot well help believing it too. The spirit whose watch it is, is present there day and night. Some people have seen them: my mother, God rest her! once pointed out to me, when I was a little boy, an appearance, as of a flame of light on the island, slowly moving backwards and forwards, and she assured me it was the watching spirit going his rounds.” “What particular object has the spirit in watching?” we asked. “Well, I don’t exactly know,” was the answer. “He just takes a sort of general charge of the Island of the Dead, until his successor arrives.” We have since found that a belief in this superstition is common among the old people. The spirit or ghost is supposed to be to a certain extent unhappy, and impatient of relief while in the discharge of this office, and thus, it is considered, that the sooner after a funeral there is occasion again for the opening of a grave, the better it is for the spirit of the last person interred, who then, and not till then, passes finally and fully to his rest.
We have to warn such of our readers as dwell by the sea, and all “who go down to the sea in ships, and see His wonders in the deep,” that unusually high tides may be expected in connection with the new moon of the 18th. The highest tide, however, is not likely to be exactly coincident with the change of the moon, but at the time of the second or third flood thereafter. Along our Scottish coasts the tidal wave will probably be highest on the morning of the 20th, so that this notice may yet be sufficiently timeous. Much, however, will depend on the state of wind and weather, as to the height the tide may attain at any particular place. In any case, it can do no harm to be prepared.
To such of our readers as may be engaged in the rearing and tending of flowers at this season we very willingly communicate a hint that may be found useful. And it is this. In filling flower-pots or window-sill boxes, there is frequently considerable difficulty in procuring soil that will be at once sufficiently rich, free of weed seeds, and finely pulverised. The despised and sadly persecuted mole provides the very thing wanted, and in little round heaps, waiting only to be gathered, commonly called molehills. For flowers, whether in pots or borders, there is nothing so good as molehill earth. The rationale of the thing is, as is well-known to every one in the least acquainted with the natural history of the interesting velvet-coated subterranean tunnelists, that they live on worms and insect larvæ. These are always found in the best soil, which is hurled to the surface in round heaps by the industrious little animal while in pursuit of his prey, and in so pulverised a state, and so free of weed seeds, as to be above all others the soil most suitable for all manner of ordinary floriculture. With such soil we have grown the purest dahlias and wallflowers we ever saw anywhere. The old Royalist toast, “To the little gentleman in the black velvet coat!” was in sly allusion to the death of a high personage from injuries received by his horse stumbling over an insignificant molehill, and whose name by the way is disagreeably connected with a dark deed done heretofore in Glencoe, whose wild gorge and frowning precipices are in view as we write. But if any of our readers will feel cause of gratitude to the mole on the hint above given, as they bend over a moss rose or dahlia which has grown in soil so procured, why, we shall be glad for all our sakes. For our reader’s, in that he or she has been gratified in such a delightful and holy taste as flower culture; for our own, that the secret was ours to divulge; and for the mole’s sake, poor persecuted fellow, for he sadly needs a friend.
CHAPTER XXIV.
The Beauty of the West Highland Seaboard—Dr. Aiton of Dolphinton—Dr. Norman Macleod—Specimen of Turtle-Dove (Columba Turtur) shot in Ardgour—The belief on the Continent of its value as a Household Pet—Bechstein—Male Birds dropping Eggs in confinement.
If somewhat over-showery for the comfort of tourists, whose season [June 1871] may now be said to have fairly commenced, the weather with us on the west coast is at least all that the agriculturist and sheepowner could wish it to be, for pasture everywhere is rich and abundant to a degree that has rarely been known even here, while crops of all kinds never perhaps presented a healthier or more luxuriant growth. The truth is that a certain amount of rainfall, and that amount a large one, is absolutely necessary for the wellbeing of our crops in the West Highlands, and the longer we live the more do we feel the truth and force of the saying of a shrewd old gentleman, at his own dinner table many years ago, to the effect that he had always observed that the season in which there was some difficulty in getting peats secured in good condition was invariably the best for Lochaber and the neighbouring districts from a pastoral and agricultural point of view. This is particularly observable this year, for while you cannot as yet see a stack of this season’s peats anywhere, the country is clothed in richer, greener verdure, the woods are leaner, and crops of every description more luxuriant than we can recollect to have been the case for at least a dozen years past. If anybody wishes to see the West Highlands in all their magnificence and beauty, now is the season, for, go where you may, turn whithersoever you will, wander forth at any hour and in any direction, you cannot fail to be charmed with the infinite variety of pictures that present themselves for your admiration, pictures which, while they only charm and enchant the ordinary beholder, delight at once and distress the artist—delight him by their marvellous beauties, but distress him not the less, because he cannot with all his cunning transfer these beauties in their entirety to canvas. An American gentleman whom we met the other day candidly confessed that, although he had gone over most of his native land, and made the tour of Continental Europe and the East, he had not in all his travels seen anything more beautiful than the shores of Loch Linnhe, Loch Leven, and Lochiel at sunset on a fine evening in June. The late Dr. Aiton of Dolphinton told us on his return from Palestine that he had seen nothing at all to equal Loch Linnhe on a summer’s evening. In all the breadth of his native Doric, which he always employed in familiar conversation, he declared there was “naething in a’ the Archipelago till touch’t,” and we have heard Dr. Norman Macleod on his return from India express himself very much to the same effect. The Queen says in her Journal that “the scenery in Loch Linnhe is magnificent—such beautiful mountains.”
A specimen of a very rare bird, shot by the keeper in Ardgour Garden a few days ago, has been kindly sent to us by Mr. Maclean. It turns out to be a male in beautiful plumage of the turtle-dove (Columba turtur, Linn.; La tourterelle of Buffon), a bird rarely seen anywhere in Scotland, and which, except in this instance, has never, so far as we are aware, been met with in the West Highlands. We remember seeing a young bird, a female in immature plumage, that was said to have been shot somewhere near Falkland Palace in the summer of 1847, from which it was reasonably concluded that a pair of these beautiful birds had in that year at least nidified and reared their young somewhere in the Howe of Fife. Except in the case of the specimen now before us, we are not aware that it has ever been met with anywhere in the north or north-western counties. The turtle is, as we have said, an exceedingly beautiful and handsome bird, the breast of a delicate vinaceous tint, and a black patch on either side of the neck, each feather of which is tipped with a crescent of pure white, giving it a very elegant and striking appearance. It is less bulky and less rotund in form than the common dove, its shape more nearly resembling that of the blue jay or throstle cock, which latter it also about equals in size. We have never seen this bird in confinement, but it is said to exhibit a remarkable degree of tenderness and sagacity, whether as a cage or chamber bird. On the Continent it is kept not only for its tameness and beauty, but because it is a common belief among the people that it attracts to itself bad humours, and is to a family in the matter of diseases what a lightning-rod is to a building in a thunderstorm. Bechstein, a shrewd and intelligent man, seems to think that the belief in question, absurd as it may appear to us, is not so ill-founded after all, for he says quietly, “Thus much at least is certain, that during the illness of men it readily becomes sickly.” The explanation probably is that, being a tender and delicate bird, the odour and effluvia attendant on certain human ailments affects it as described. Other birds are occasionally similarly affected; thus, when our own children were laid up with a very bad kind of scarlatina, our cage-birds, gold and green finches, were out of sorts for some time, drooping and dejected and unable to sing as usual, though the month was April, when they should have been in all respects at their best and in full and free song. You may be sure, by the way, that we were not a little pleased with a paragraph which appeared the other day about the male cockatoo that dropped the egg, very much, no doubt, to the astonishment of his amiable mistress. When some years ago we ventured to assert that males of various birds, notably the common domestic cock, sometimes dropped an egg, the thing was scouted as ridiculous, and from Dan to Beersheba, from London to John O’Groat’s, the cry was that it couldn’t be, that it was impossible; one writer going so far in his scepticism as plainly to declare that “he would as soon believe that a bull had given birth to a calf.” Much was the chaffing that we had to endure in connection with the subject, and our most intimate friends could hardly believe that we were serious in it at all. And yet we were perfectly in earnest; we had known the thing happen repeatedly, and since then a very fine cock goldfinch of our own, one of the best singers, too, we have ever heard, laid an egg in his cage which is still in our possession, and several of our correspondents having had their attention directed to the subject, have assured themselves that, not only is the thing possible, but in the case of the domestic cock at least, and of many cage-birds, of rather common occurrence. It is a very odd and curious thing, no doubt, and difficult of explanation, but there are thousands of undisputed facts in natural history in the same category, the existence of which is beyond all question, though the how, and why, and wherefore is a mystery.
From our window, as we write these lines, we can see quite a fleet of herring boats sailing up Loch Linnhe on their return from the fishing stations at Barra, Lochmaddy, and the Lewis—a very pretty sight—not less than two hundred or more boats under full sail, stretching in one long line from Corran Ferry to the Sound of Mull, looking at this distance for all the world like the notes in a line of complicated printed music.
CHAPTER XXV.
Thunderstorm—Potato Field in Bloom—The Hazel Tree—Hazel Nuts—Potato Shaws for Cattle—Ferns for Bedding Cattle—Marmion—Scott.
With an occasional fine day [August 1871], the past fortnight must, we fear, be characterised as having been upon the whole wet—very wet, a stranger would say—and not a little stormy withal. We had a tremendous thunderstorm early on Sunday morning, with the most magnificent display of forked lightning that we have ever seen, while the very earth seemed to quake and tremble under the crash of peal upon peal of thunder, so near and loud at times as to be absolutely terrible. It is no wonder that the soundest sleepers were awakened from their midnight slumbers by the hurly-burly. We ourselves got up for a time, and sat at our window, watching the lightning that darted incessantly among the mountain summits with startling vividness, revealing their serrated peaks at times through the very heart of the thunder-cloud as distinctly as if it were clearest noonday. Rain, too, fell the while in torrents, that instantly filled river and mountain stream to overflowing; and as the storm passed away, and we retired to rest in the grey, uncertain twilight of the early dawn, we were lulled into a sleep, that lasted well nigh until noon, by the weird and wild music of “the noise of many waters.” We thought, as we sat alone in the midst of that magnificent storm, of him (was it John Foster?) who, on a similar occasion, turned round to his companion and remarked, in a tone of deep solemnity, “It is a fine night; the Lord is abroad!” Crops, though generally further from maturity than is usual at this date, continue to grow rapidly, and everywhere present a strong and healthy appearance,—“a guarantee,” as newspaper editors say, “of their good faith” and honest intentions in the direction of a bounteous yield when cometh the season of ingathering. Potatoes are now in full flower; and a very pretty sight, if you deign to look at it with an unprejudiced eye, is a potato field in blossom at this season. If the incomparable esculent were not cultivated for its utility and value as an article of food, it would still deserve a place in our gardens for its elegance and beauty simply as a flower. Nothing but its commonness causes its beauty as a flowering plant to be so constantly overlooked. We are in the midst of our hay season, and we are only anxious about good weather for securing it in tolerable order. Eight consecutive days of dry, breezy weather would be of incalculable value to us at this moment. Anything will grow, and grow luxuriantly, on the West Coast: our difficulties only begin with the season of ripening and after preservation. If there be any truth in the old Scottish saying, that “a year of nuts will also be a year of corn,” then may the grain-growers of the West Highlands at least already congratulate themselves, for we have seldom seen the hazel boughs so laden with nut clusters; and a prettier sight than a hazel wood so laden, either now or when decked in its autumnal robes, it would be difficult to conceive. It is, besides, a fragrant, cleanly wood, through which you can at any time dash fearlessly and at will, all the better of your contact with the leaves, branches, and nut clusters, when you have reached the open beyond. There is not a leaf in the woods so thoroughly clean, so fragrant when you have crushed it in your hand, so soft and pleasant to the touch in its every stage, as the leaf fresh plucked from the hazel bough. And apropos of hazel nuts, a gentlemen from the south of England, at present resident in our neighbourhood, told us something the other day that we did not know before. “In our part of England,” observed our friend, “the hazel is common, and grows to a larger size, has more pretentions to the name of tree, in fact, than here with you; and our nuts, I should say, must be larger, juicier, and in all respects better than yours.” (A “soft impeachment,” at which, for the honour of Nether Lochaber, we took the liberty of gravely shaking our head in token of dissent). “We seldom, however,” he went on, “can get a ripe hazel nut in autumn, the reason being that in many places they are gathered while yet in a half-formed and green state. You look surprised, but the reason is this: the husk of the green, unripe hazel nut is rich, as you must be aware, in a bitterly sharp and astringent acid, that must have often made your teeth water when you have essayed to crack a nut in a state of immaturity. This acid, then, you must know, is valuable as a mordant (a technical term) in the printing and dyeing of cotton and other fabrics, and it commands a high price in the market accordingly. It is a maxim in commerce that demand creates supply; and the consequence is, that every year in the month of July, when the nuts are at their greenest, and the acid in their husks at its acridest, women and children plunder the woods of their hazel nut clusters, which are sold to the manufacturers, who, by a process of crushing by machinery, and washing and maceration, extract all the acid, to be employed, as I have already mentioned, in cotton printing and dye works.” So far in substance, if not in ipsissimis verbis, our friend. All we could reply was that we should be sorry indeed to see our own bonny hazel woods similarly despoiled. Another thing told us by this friend somewhat surprised us. He observed our servant girl carrying a bundle of potato “shaws” into the byre, and asked us what they were for. On our replying that these were the shaws of the potatoes taken up for dinner, and that they were thrown before the cows, and devoured by them with avidity on their return from their hill pasture in the evening, he earnestly advised us never to do so again; that in England it was never done, because it was found that potato shaws given to milch cows not only lessened the quantity of milk yielded, but actually vitiated the milk itself, giving it a disagreeable taste, and making it decidedly unwholesome. All we could answer was that we had known potato shaws given to milch cows all over the Highlands since ever we could remember, and that we had never known or heard any of the evils stated to result from the use of them. What says the reader? It is true, no doubt, that the potato belongs botanically to a family of plants many of whom are highly poisonous—such as the common deadly nightshade of our lanes and roadsides, for example—and it is averred that, although the tuber of the potato is healthy and nutritious when cooked, it is a poison in its raw state, and that its stem, leaves, flower, and “apple” are all more or less poisonous; and yet we have known boys, while the blight was yet unheard of, and when potatoes were more prolific of apples or plums than they have ever been since, eat the large, soft, full, ripe apples with relish, and they never suffered the slightest inconvenience in consequence that ever we heard of. As a boy we have often ate them ourselves, and very saccharine, juicy, and pleasant flavoured we recollect they were, not at all unlike the purple plum of our gardens in taste and flavour, and hardly inferior to it as a pleasant succulent bonne bouche. Cattle, as we know, will greedily eat the fresh shaws, as they will a decidedly poisonous plant, the hemlock (Celticè, Iteotha); and it is a well-known fact that in severe cases of scurvy on board ships that have to go long voyages a feast of raw potatoes is an immediate and certain cure; so that after all it would seem that if the potato is originally a poisonous plant, cultivation has eradicated all, or almost all, traces of the evil. As to the deleterious effects of the shaws on the milk of cattle we have our doubts, our amiable and learned friend above mentioned to the contrary notwithstanding. And while on such subjects let us record a piece of information received from an old woman in our neighbourhood a few days ago. We were cutting some green ferns on the hillside, when the old lady in question, who happened to pass the way at the time, stood to have a crack with us about the weather and crops and things in general, said crack concluding somewhat as follows:—“You are cutting ferns, sir,” said the old lady, “what are you to make of them if you please, sir?” “They are for bedding,” we replied, “bedding for the cows and pony.” “Well, sir,” she rejoined, “there is no harm in bedding the pony with them; they will do him no evil; but take an old woman’s advice, and don’t put them under your cows.” “Why so,” we asked in astonishment. “What can be cleaner, fresher, fragranter for bedding, whether for horse or cow, than these nice green ferns? Just look how beautiful and soft they are.” “Still, sir,” she persisted, “you must not place them under your cows, particularly your milch cows; if you do, their udders will assuredly fester, and they will go wrong in their milk. I have known it happen often, and no sensible person in the country ever does such a thing now-a-days. Ferns cut in autumn when brown and ripe make excellent bedding for milch cows as for all other cattle, but July cut ferns, green, juicy, and unripe, should never be used for bedding milch cows. I do not pretend to tell you why they should produce the evils I have mentioned, but I do know that if I had fifty cows I had rather have them without bedding at all than put such green, fresh ferns as those under them.” We stood for the moment aghast at this piece of information, which was perfectly new to us, and from the positive and decided tone of the old lady, a shrewd intelligent woman of her class, we felt that there must be something in it. On inquiry we have since found that the old lady’s belief in the evil of ferns—green, unripe ferns, that is—as bedding for milch cows, is common among the people of this part of the West Highlands. Whether the whole affair is a mere superstition, the fern having always been accounted a sacred plant in the Highlands, or whether there is really some foundation in fact for the belief that a bedding of green ferns causes the udders of cows to swell and fester as is alleged, we are not at this moment prepared to say; perhaps some of our readers may be able to throw light on the subject. It is just possible that green-cut ferns, when pressed by the recumbent animal, may exude an acrid juice that, coming in contact with the tender udder, may be absorbed with the effects alleged. Meantime we doubt it. One thing we know is this, that cattle are fond of lying down among growing ferns in their every stage, and that both roe and red deer frequently make their lair among growing ferns at this season. Do you remember, by the way, Scott’s magnificent description in Marmion of a fern-couched deer roused from his midnight lair by the awful tolling of the passing-bell over the living entombment of poor Constance in the monastery of Lindisfarne?—
“Slow o’er the midnight wave it swung,
Northumbrian rocks in answer rung;
To Warkworth cell the echoes roll’d,
His beads the wakeful hermit told.
The Bamborough peasant raised his head,
But slept ere half a prayer he said;
So far was heard the mighty knell,
The stag sprung up on Cheviot Fell,
Spread his broad nostril to the wind,
Listed before, aside, behind,
Then couch’d him down beside the hind,
And quaked among the mountain fern,
To hear that sound so dull and stern.”
Than the whole of the trial and doom of poor Constance, who “loved not wisely but too well,” in the second canto of Marmion, even Scott never wrote anything more solemn or terrible.
CHAPTER XXVI.
Harvest—Scythe and Sickle v. Reaping Machines—Potatoes—Garibaldi and Potatoes at Caprera—Fishing—Platessa Gemmatus, or Diamond Plaice—Mushrooms—The Poetry of Fairy Rings—Harvest-Home.
With such fine weather as we enjoy at present, September [1871] is one of the pleasantest months of the year. Harvest operations are now in full swing, and the redbreast—having moulted, and proudly conscious of the splendour of his scarlet vest—has already begun his autumnal song—more delectable now and more appreciated, because now, with the exception of an occasional voluntary from the wren, he only sings, whereas his vernal strains are lost in their amalgamation with the full chorus of a thousand performers. It is pleasant now, as you saunter or ride along, to listen to the merry laughter of the reapers afield, and to their song, as, morê majorum, it floats in chorus on the gale: pleasant, too, to us at least, and far from unmusical, the frequent sound of the whetting of scythe and sickle in every direction—the bloodless weapons—as they are deftly handled in the process, glancing brightly in the sunlight! Reaping “machines” and “steam” ploughs may be very good things in their way, but we are not ashamed to confess that we are glad that, as yet at least, we know nothing of them in the West Highlands. The utilitarian must be content if we admit all their value and importance from his point of view, while at the same time we yet assert that wherever they appear all the poetry of agriculture incontinently becomes plain prose—Sic transit gloria Cereris. Very excellent, at all events, are our crops this season, and very excellently are they being harvested. A good deal has already been secured in barn and stackyard, and in such condition, too, as is but rarely possible under the weeping skies of the west coast. The weather is still so favourable that our people are working with a will, and making every exertion to have their harvesting concluded while it lasts. Potatoes still continue sound and untainted, although an occasional spottiness of the leaf in some fields shows that our old enemy the “blight” has not yet forgot the time of his coming. The crop is now, however, about ripe, and may be considered very much out of danger for the season. In our last, we had a good deal to say about this invaluable root, and how it should be brought to table; and to show that such a subject-matter is not quite so infra dig. as some of our readers might suppose, listen to what the Times says of Garibaldi’s doings at Caprera. After recounting the General’s failures in connection with his orchard, the acclimation of the silk-worm, &c., the Times proceeds:—“Garibaldi, however, points with exultation to his potato fields. No species of the favourite root is neglected, and there is no treat he so heartily enjoys as a dish of his own potatoes, baked with his own hand under embers, in the open air—a treat which calls up reminiscences of his camp life on the Tonale or the Stelvis, or of his pioneer’s experience in the backwoods of the Mississippi or the Plate.” We wonder if this “hero in an unheroic age,” who yet disdains not to exult in his potato fields, or to cook his delicious “earth apples,” as the French so happily term them, in the embers with his own hand—we wonder if he eats his fish with his fingers? We could lay a wager that he does; that in eating his ember-roasted potatoes in the open air, with some broiled tunny, let us suppose, as a fitting accompaniment—(the Thynnus vulgaris, in highest esteem with the ancients as with the moderns, abundant about Caprera and all the shores of Provençe, Sardinia, and Sicily, and than which, indeed, there is hardly any better fish)—we could lay a wager, we say, that in eating his potatoes and fish al fresco he discards the use of knife and fork utterly, eating his fish with his fingers, and using the running brook beside him as a convenient finger-glass.
There is a lull at present in our herring fishing, rather because, however, of the paramount claims of harvest operations on the attention of our people just now, than from any dearth of the fish in our lochs. In a week or ten days, when all or most of the corn has been cut, the fishing will be resumed, and it is hoped with success. In an old Fingalian tale it is very beautifully said—“Rejoice, O my son, in the gifts of the sea; for they enrich you without making any one else the poorer.” A rather rare fish in our western waters was caught a few days ago by our excellent neighbour, J. P. Grant, Esq., who occupies Cuilchenna House this season. Mr. Grant was good enough to send this odd fish for our inspection, and we determined it to be a species of plaice (Platessa)—and the handsomest of the family—the Platessa gemmatus of ichthyologists, commonly called the diamond or diamond-spotted plaice. This very handsome fish is quite as good on the table as it is beautiful when fresh from its native element. Another fish, rare on the west coast, was captured by ourselves with the rod while mackerel fishing last week. It was a specimen of the sapphirine gurnard (Trigla hirundo), one of the family of “hard-cheeked” fishes, of which the common red or cuckoo gurnard (Trigla cuculus) is a familiar example. A peculiarity in all the family is the abnormal development of the pectoral fins, so large in one species as to enable it to fly bird-like for short distances in the air. All our readers must have heard and read of the flying-fish (Trigla volitans), even if they have never seen it. It is of the gurnard family—a very near relation, indeed, of our common gurnard. All the “hard-cheeked” fishes, without exception, are excellent eating. Our sapphirine gurnard was delicious.
We do not know whether any of our readers has observed it to be the case elsewhere, but in this and the neighbouring districts we have again and again remarked how very plentiful all kinds of mushrooms—the whole family of Agarici—are this season. Never have we seen so many beautiful “fairy rings,” many of them almost mathematically perfect circles. Although they are always interesting and beautiful, you cannot help being a little startled, and feeling a shade of awe mingling with your curiosity and admiration, as you suddenly come upon one of these emerald rings in burnside meadow or upland glade, and contrast the vivid green and well-defined periphery of the charmed circle with the general every-day colour of the surrounding verdure. We are not surprised—on the contrary, we can perfectly understand—how in the good old times, ere yet the schoolmaster was abroad, or science had become a popular plaything, people—and, doubtless, very honest, decent people too—attributed those inexplicable emerald circles to supernatural agency; if, indeed, anything connected with the “good folks” or “men of peace” could properly be called super-natural in times when a belief in fairies, and every sort of fairy freak and frolic, was deemed the most correct and natural thing in the world. Didn’t these circles, it was argued, appear in the course of a single night? In the sequestered woodland glade, nor herd nor milkmaid could see anything odd or unusual as the sun went down, and, lo! next morning, as they drove their flocks afield, there was the mysterious circle, round as the halo about the wintry moon. Was not the colour, too, of these circles green, and not only green, but a deeper, richer, and more vivid green than natural verdure is ever seen to be? and whose work, therefore, could it be but that of the fairies, whose own favourite, peculiar colour was green, that no mere mortal durst wear but at his peril, and who, it was well known, delighted to dance hand-in-hand in merry circles round, footing it featly, as the owl flittered ghost-like by the scene, all by the silvery light of the moon, until the dawn of day. As Tom D’Urfey has it—
“O how they skipped it,
Capered and tripped it,
Under the greenwood tree!”
The popular belief in the origin of these bright green circles, that they were caused by fairy feet in many a midnight merry-go-round, is frequently alluded to in the poetry alike of Celt and Saxon. Thus a fairy song of the time of Charles the First begins—
“We dance on hills above the wind,
And leave our footsteps there behind,
Which shall to after ages last,
When all our dancing days are past.”
The reader will probably remember Queen Mab’s very quaint and beautiful song in Percy’s Reliques of English Poetry:—
“Come, follow, follow me,
You fairy elves that be:
Which circle on the green,
Come follow Mab your queen.
Hand in hand let’s dance around,
For this place is fairy ground.
“Upon a mushroom’s head
Our table-cloth we spread;
A grain of rye or wheat,
Is manchet which we eat:
Pearly drops of dew we drink,
In acorn cups fill’d to the brink.
“The grasshopper, gnat, and fly,
Serve for our minstrelsy:
Grace said, we dance a while,
And so the time beguile;
And if the moon doth hide her head,
The glow-worm lights us home to bed.
“On tops of dewy grass
So nimbly do we pass,
The young and tender stalk
Ne’er bends when we do walk;
Yet in the morning may be seen
Where we the night before have been.”
Another poet says—
“O’er the dewy green,
By the glow-worm’s light,
Dance the elves of night,
Unheard, unseen.
Yet where their midnight pranks have been,
The circled turf will betray to-morrow.”
Nor was the superstition unknown to Shakspeare; was there anything unknown to him? Listen:—
“And nightly meadow-fairies, look you sing,
Like to the Garter’s compass, in a ring;
The expressure that it bears, green let it be,
More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;
And, Honi soit qui mal y pense, write
In emerald tufts, flowers, purple, blue, and white:
Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,
Buckled below fair knighthood’s bending knee!
Fairies use flowers for their charactery.”
And if we know better now-a-days than to believe these green circles to be fairy rings, we also know better than to give the slightest credence to certain authors of our own day who have gravely asserted that they are caused by electricity. We prefer the fairy agency theory, as the more poetical and picturesque of the two, for, as to the truth of either, why, the one is every whit as true as the other. Fairy rings, as we continue for convenience sake to call them, are, in truth, caused by a species of mushroom (Agaricus pratensis), the sporule dust or seed of which, having fallen on a spot suitable for its growth, instantly germinates, and constantly propagating itself by sending out a net-work of innumerable filaments and threads, forms the rich green rings so common everywhere this season. On the outer edge of this ring, and sometimes also, though more rarely, on the inner edge, grows the perfect plant, the fruit, the mushroom proper itself; and if some of our modern wiseacres had only had half an eye in their heads and the least particle of gumption, they could easily have gone to the fields and seen all this for themselves, instead of lazily theorising on the origin of the apparent mystery in their dressing-gowns and slippers by the fireside, and sagely ascribing the whole to the agency of electricity! There was a time, you may remember, when it was the fashion to ascribe everything that people didn’t readily understand to electricity—very convenient certainly, but if you pushed these savans a little, and asked them what this electricity itself was, they were incontinently dumb, or, if they talked, they were bound to talk nonsense. We can forgive, and even admire, the fairy dance theory, for it is full of poetry and beauty, and in an age when people seldom troubled themselves to trace natural phenomena to their source, it was, upon the whole, a rather happy conjecture; if it was not the actual vrai, it had of vraisemblance about it enough to recommend it to the acceptance of the multitude. Grant but the existence of fairies, and the rest was easy of belief. The “electricity” theory, on the contrary, was unpardonable: it was not only false in fact, but it had nothing whatever about it to recommend it either to one’s faith or fancy. Hardly more excusable than the electricity theorists themselves are those authors who tell us that the West received the first hint of the existence of fairies from the East at the time of the Crusades, and that almost all our fairy lore is traceable to the same source; the fact being, nevertheless, that Celt and Saxon, Scandinavian and Goth, Lap and Fin, had their “duergar,” their “elfen,” without number, such as dun-elfen, berg-elfen, munt-elfen, feld-elfen, wudu-elfen, sae-elfen, and waeter-elfen—elves, or spirits, of downs, hills, and mountains, of the fields, of the woods, of the sea, and of the rivers, streams, and solitary pools—fairies, in short, and a complete fairy mythology, long centuries before Peter the Hermit was born, or Frank and Moslem dreamt of making the Holy Sepulchre a casus belli. It is a curious fact in connection with fairy lore, and we have not seen it noticed elsewhere, that although these anomalous beings are always credited with much capriciousness, and are constantly described as sensitive in the extreme to anything like slight or insult, keenly vindictive in their dispositions and easily irritated, they are never represented as encompassing the death of human beings. They tease, terrify, and torment in a thousand ways where they take a dislike, but they never kill. Their power is described as great, but it is also limited—the issues of life and death are beyond their reach. In the fairy song (temp. Charles I.) first quoted, there are two amusing verses indicating such pranks as fairies could play on mortals, if mortals offended them. Thus concludes Queen Mab her song:—
“Next turned to mites in cheese, forsooth,
We get into some hollow tooth;
Wherein, as in a Christmas hall,
We frisk and dance, the devil and all!
“Then we change our wily features,
Into yet far smaller creatures,
And dance in joints of gouty toes,
To painful tunes of groans and woes.”—
A pathology of toothache and gout that we recommend to the attention of the faculty. The fairy ring agaric is one of the British species of mushroom that may be eaten with safety. For our own part we abominate the whole tribe. Our table may be scantier at times than we could wish, but it will be scantier far than a kind Providence has ever yet permitted it to be before we shall think of dining or supping on funguses. Chacun à son goût, however, and if anybody wants mushrooms in abundance, now is the time, and Nether Lochaber is the place for them.
The new moon that comes in this morning (the 6th) will be the harvest moon of the year. It is full on the 20th, and for a few evenings before and after will be very beautiful, and well worth attention. If you can command telescopic aid on the occasion, so much the better, but even without it, it were strange if we could not view with admiration and delight the silver orb that probably at some such conjunction as that of the 20th, when walking in her brightness and her beauty, tempted the patriarch of old to kiss his hand in acknowledgment of her excellency, and bow before her in adoration.
CHAPTER XXVII.
The disappearance of the glories of Autumn, and the advent of Winter—Innovations and Innovators—New Version of the Scriptures—The Milkmaid and her Fairy Lover, translated from the Gaelic.
Ichabod! the glory is departed [November 1871]. The gorgeous autumnal hues, which were so beautiful when we penned our last, have already passed away. In the first fierce breath of winter the trees have shed their golden glories, while the few remaining leaves that still cling trembling to branch and bough, shrivelled up and blackened at their edges, present only that pallid, corpse-like hue that betokens approaching dissolution, making you sad and thoughtful as you gaze, and reminding you that everywhere, on all hands, last while it may, the end of all life is death. It is a sad lesson for the moment, doubtless, but a useful one; and even at its worst, when the thought bears heaviest upon us, the cloud presents its silver lining, and a gleam of gladness bursts upon the soul, in the recollection that as sure as all things are subject to decay and death, so sure are decay and death themselves but the vassals of a brighter life and more excellent glory. In one of our Scripture Paraphrases there is a very beautiful reference to the decay of nature at this season, and to the hope that gladdens us amidst all the desolation of the scene:—
“All nature dies, and lives again:
The flow’r that paints the field,
The trees that crown the mountain’s brow,
And boughs and blossoms yield,
“Resign the honours of their form
At Winter’s stormy blast,
And leave the naked leafless plain
A desolated waste.
“Yet soon reviving plants and flow’rs
Anew shall deck the plain;
The woods shall hear the voice of Spring,
And flourish green again!”
We have no patience with your innovators, whether in matters of Church or State. We do not deny, indeed, that certain innovations may be sometimes permissible, even if not absolutely necessary, that by their adoption things may be done more decently and in order; nor do we object even to a radical change in a given direction, when such a change has by common consent become imperative. We believe, in fact, in development and progress; only let that progress and development be slow and sure, that they may be lasting; gradual, that they may be graceful, and fall easily into their place, without unnecessary jostling or disturbance of the established order of things. Festina lente—hasten slowly—was the motto of the learned Erasmus, and quoad hoc it is ours also; and, if you care to know it, is our creed in affairs political and ecclesiastical. Some people, however, seem born to be innovators and nothing else, and the innovator, pure et simple, is surely a pest. He seems to have been born never to know peace himself, and never, as much as in him lies, to permit others a moment’s rest or peace, or quiet either. Your thoroughbred, full-blooded innovator always reminds us of our first housekeeper—a very good woman in her way, too, but who had a perfect craze for shifting and reshifting, adjusting and readjusting, as well as dusting and redusting every article of furniture throughout the house, at all sorts of unseasonable hours, and when to ordinary mortals such labour seemed utterly uncalled for. When we were at home she went “at it” in out-of-the-way closets and bedrooms as much and as often as the immediate calls of the moment permitted. But when she got us away from home for a day or two, how she did enjoy it! How she did luxuriate in the power to innovate “at her own sweet will”—the quotation, by the way, is rather inapt, for her temper was somewhat of the sourest. Sometimes when we came back after a day or two’s absence, we could hardly believe it to be the same house, so great was the change in the place and position of everything. At last the thing became unbearable. One evening, on our return from a walk, we found our writing-table, at which we had been employed during the day, carefully placed in the darkest corner of the room, with its drawers, containing letters, paper, pens, &c., jammed up hard and fast against the wall, while books and manuscripts were most artistically arranged in pyramidal form, the ink-bottle representing the graceful entablature on the top of a book-case, where it must have cost her no small pains, and a great deal of stretching on tip-toe, even with the aid of a chair, to place them. The thing was too absurd for any one to be really angry; but we pretended to be so, and at last peace was proclaimed, under a sort of compromise that she should arrange and readjust all the rest of the house at her pleasure, as often and as radically as she chose, but that that particular room, having been put to rights to our mutual satisfaction once for all, must in all time coming be let alone. This treaty being duly ratified, was upon the whole faithfully observed by the contracting parties. The mischief, however, with your thoroughbred innovator is that you can never completely satisfy him, his appetite for change is insatiable, he will make no compromise with you. Grant him all he asks to-day, and as sure as to-morrow comes, he is at it anew. If you gave him the whole world, and his own way everywhere and in everything, he would be in worse plight than the conqueror who wept because there were no more worlds to subdue, and fret himself to death that there were no more changes for him to effect. The probability is that, rather than be idle, he would, in hunting phrase, “hark back” upon his old track, and diligently undo all he had spent his life in doing, and without much regard to the consequences.
We have been led into these remarks by the recollection, when quoting the above verses of the Eighth Paraphrase, that there are at this moment some people busily bestirring themselves in the matter of a new translation of the Scriptures, to supersede the authorised version now in use. Now, we most solemnly protest against all this, as a most rash proposal, ill-advised, and utterly uncalled for. At present we object very much on the same principle that we should object to a painting by one of the old masters being cleansed and retouched by a modern R.A., however eminent in his own person, or on the same principle that we should feel tempted to kick the ladder from under the feet of a man we should detect white-washing a stately pile of the olden time, under the plea, forsooth, that in obliterating weather stains, and freely applying putty and paint, he was thereby improving, renovating, and beautifying the whole fabric. That there are verbal inaccuracies in our authorised version of the Scriptures is on all hands admitted; let these be rectified, if people please, and let the corrections so made, under adequate authority, appear in the form of marginal notes opposite the passage amended, but let the body of The Book stand as it is—intact. The edifice, as it exists, is too grand, and stately, and beautiful, and hallowed, not to suffer under the proposed remodelling, even in the most competent hands.
But to turn to a different theme. The following is a translation from the Gaelic, as literal as we could make it, with anything like due regard to the spirit and manner of the original. It is a fairy song, if song it can be called, from the manuscript volume referred to in a former communication. Fairy tales, both in prose and verse, were common with our Celtic forefathers, and, if we only examine them with sufficient care, we shall find that, underlying all their quaintness, there is always to be found a substratum of sound and healthy moral. It bears no title in the original, but we may call it—
The Milkmaid and her Fairy Lover.
Gaily the milkmaid came tripping along;
The echoes so loved her, they joined in her song;
The hare and the wild-roe that browsed in the glade,
The bird on the bough swinging high over-head—
They saw and they heard, but they feared not—they KNEW the milkmaid.
Abundant her tresses, bright golden their hue;
And soft as a dove’s was her eye in its blue;
Elastic her footstep, and lightsome and free
As a fawn’s when in gladness it skips o’er the lea—
Of the old and the young the delight, and the pride of Glentallon was she.
In secret she met with the Hunter in Green,
Beside the lone fountain of Coirre-na-Sheen;
A gallant more gay ne’er did maiden behold,
His manner so gentle, his bearing so bold;
By his side freely dangled, and well could he wind it, a bugle of gold!
Full fondly he kissed her—she thought it no sin,
Though she knew not his name, nor his kith, nor his kin;
They plighted their troth by the fount’s bubbling stream,
Where oft, it is said, when frail mortals but dream,
The fairies hold revel, and trippingly dance in the moon’s mellow beam.
On the Eve of St. Agnes the maiden confessed,
As was proper she should, all her sins to the priest;
When she left him, the blush in her check mantled high;
There was care in her step, and a tear in her eye.