least wise of a class of creatures exceedingly foolish at best, and
that to escape from evil needed much wisdom. She was, therefore earnest
in her prayers to the Great Spirit who was so kind to her--and to even
those feeble animals who, though they enjoy no boon of after life, have
a wisdom to provide for the winter, and to dig their houses in the
rocks--that in this world He would direct her walk agreeably to His own
will, and render her wiser in the world to come. Socrates could have
taught all this to Xenophon and Plato, but God only could have taught
it to Hanah. The people of the place, with dispositions like those
of the great bulk of people in every place, were much more disposed
to laugh at the poor thing for what she wanted, than to form right
estimates of the value of what she had. Not so Lady Ardoch;--Hanah
was one of her friends. The lady’s house was a place where, in the
language of Scripture, “prayer was wont to be made;” and no one was
a more regular attendant on the meetings held for this purpose, than
her friend the half-witted girl. The poor thing always sat at her
feet, and was termed by her, her own Hanah. Years, however, began to
weigh down the frame of the good lady; and after passing through all
the gradations of bodily decay, with a mind which seemed to brighten
and grow stronger as it neared to eternity, she at length slept with
her fathers. Hanah betrayed no emotion of grief; she spoke to no one
of the friend whom she had lost; but she moped and pined away, and
became indifferent to everything; and a few months after, when on her
deathbed, she told a friend of the deceased who had come to visit her,
that she was going to the country of Lady Ardoch.

CHAPTER XXX.

    “Rise, honest muse, and sing the man of Ross.”--POPE.

[Sidenote: GEORGE ROSS, THE SCOTCH AGENT.]

In the letter in which Junius accuses the Duke of Grafton of having
sold a patent place in the collection of customs to one Mr. Hine, he
informs the reader that the person employed by his Grace in negotiating
the business, was “George Ross, the Scotch Agent and worthy confidant
of Lord Mansfield. And no sale by the candle,” he adds, “was ever
conducted with greater formality.” Now, slight as this notice is, there
is something in it sufficiently tangible for the imagination to lay
hold of. If the reader thinks of the Scotch Agent at all, he probably
thinks of him as one of those convenient creatures so necessary to the
practical statesman, whose merit does not consist more in their being
ingenious in a great degree, than in their being honest in a small
one. So mixed a thing is poor human nature, however, that though the
statement of Junius has never been fairly controverted, no possible
estimate of character could be more unjust. The Scotch Agent, whatever
may have been the nature of his services to the Duke of Grafton, was
in reality a high-minded, and, what is more, a truly patriotic man;
so good a person indeed, that, in a period of political heats and
animosities like the present, his story, fairly told, may teach us a
lesson of charity and moderation. I wish I could transport the reader
to where his portrait hangs, side by side with that of his friend the
Lord Chief-Justice, in the drawing-room of Cromarty House. The air of
dignified benevolence impressed on the features of the handsome old
man, with his grey hair curling round his temples, would secure a fair
hearing for him from even the sturdiest of the class who hate their
neighbours for the good of their country. Besides, the very presence
of the noble-looking lawyer, so much more like the Murray eulogized by
Pope and Lyttelton, than the Mansfield denounced by Junius, would of
itself serve as a sort of guarantee for the honour of his friend.

George Ross was the son of a petty proprietor of Easter-Ross, and
succeeded, on the death of his father, to the few barren acres on
which, for a century or two before, the family had been ingenious
enough to live. But he possessed besides what was more valuable than
twenty such patrimonies--an untiring energy of disposition, based on a
substratum of sound good sense; and, what was scarcely less important
than either, ambition enough to turn his capacity of employment to the
best account. Ross-shire, a century ago, was no place for such a man;
and as the only road to preferment at this period was the road that
led south, George Ross left, when very young, his mother’s cottage
for England, where he spent nearly fifty years amongst statesmen
and courtiers, and in the enjoyment of the friendship of such men
as President Forbes and Lord Mansfield. At length he returned, when
an old greyheaded man, to rank amongst the greatest capitalists and
proprietors of the county; and purchased, with other lesser properties
in the neighbourhood, the whole estate of Cromarty. Perhaps he had
come to rest him ere he died; but there seems to be no such thing
as changing one’s natural bent when confirmed by the habits of half
a lifetime; and the energies of the Scotch Agent, now that they had
gained him fortune and influence, were as little disposed to fall
asleep as they had been forty years before. As it was no longer
necessary, however, that they should be employed on his own account, he
gave them full scope in behalf of his poorer neighbours. The country
around him lay dead. There were no manufactories, no knowledge of
agriculture, no consciousness that matters were ill, and consequently
no desire of making them better; and the herculean task imposed upon
himself by the Scotch Agent, now considerably turned of sixty, was to
animate and revolutionize the whole. And such was his statesmanlike
sagacity in developing the hitherto undiscovered resources of the
country, joined to a high-minded zeal that could sow liberally, in the
hope of a late harvest for others to reap, that he fully succeeded.

He first established in the town an extensive manufactory of hempen
cloth, which has ever since employed about two hundred persons within
its walls, and fully twice that number without. He next built an ale
brewery, which, at the time of its erection, was by far the largest in
the north of Scotland. He then furnished the town at a great expense
with an excellent harbour, and set on foot a trade in pork, which,
for the last thirty years, has been carried on by the people of the
place to an extent of from about fifteen to twenty thousand pounds
annually. He set himself, too, to initiate his tenantry in the art of
rearing wheat; and finding them wofully unwilling to become wiser on
the subject, he tried the force of example, by taking an extensive
farm under his own management, and conducting it on the most approved
principles of modern agriculture. He established a nail and spade
manufactory; brought women from England to instruct the young girls in
the art of working lace; provided houses for the poor; presented the
town with a neat substantial building, the upper part of which still
serves for a council-room and court-house, and the lower as a prison;
and built for the accommodation of the poor Highlanders, who came
thronging into the town to work on his lands and his manufactories, a
handsome Gaelic chapel. He built for his own residence an elegant house
of hewn stone; surrounded it with pleasure-grounds designed in the best
style of the art; planted many hundred acres of the less improvable
parts of his property, and laid open the hitherto scarcely accessible
beauties of the hill of Cromarty, by crossing and recrossing it with
well-nigh as many walks as there are veins in the human body. He was
proud of his exquisite landscapes, and of his own skill in heightening
their beauty, and fully determined, he said, if he but lived long
enough, to make Cromarty worth an Englishman’s while coming all the way
from London to see.

When Oscar fell asleep, says the old Irish bard, it was impossible to
awaken him before his time except by cutting off one of his fingers,
or flinging a rock at his head; and wo to the poor man who disturbed
him! The Agent found it every whit as difficult to awaken a sleeping
country, and in some respects almost as unsafe. I am afraid human
nature is nearly the same thing in the people that it is in their
rulers, and that both are alike disposed to prefer the man who flatters
them to the man who merely does them good. George Ross was by no means
the most popular of proprietors--he disturbed old prejudices, and
unfixed old habits. The farmers thought it hard that they should have
to break up their irregular maplike patches of land, divided from each
other by little strips and corners not yet reclaimed from the waste,
into awkward-looking rectangular fields; and that they durst no longer
fasten their horses to the plough by the tail--a piece of natural
harness evidently formed for the purpose. The town’s-people deemed the
hempen manufactory unwholesome, and found that the English lacewomen,
who to a certainty were tea-drinkers, and even not very hostile, it was
said, to gin, were in a fair way of teaching their pupils something
more than the mere weaving of lace. What could be more heathenish, too,
than the little temple covered with cockle-shells which the laird had
just reared on a solitary corner of the hill; but the temple they soon
sent spinning over the cliff into the sea, a downward journey of a
hundred yards. And then his odious pork trade! There was no prevailing
on the people to rear pigs for him, and so he had to build a range of
offices in an out-of-the-way nook of his lands, which he stocked with
hordes of these animals, that he might rear them for himself. The
herds increased in size and number, and, voracious beyond calculation,
almost occasioned a famine. Even the great wealth of the speculatist
proved insufficient to supply them with the necessary food, and the
very keepers were in danger of being eaten alive. The poor animals
seemed departing from their very nature, for they became long, and
lank, and bony as the griffins of heraldry, until they looked more like
race-horses than pigs; and as they descended with every ebb in huge
droves to browse on the sea-weed, or delve for shell-fish among the
pebbles, there was no lack of music befitting their condition, when the
large rock-crab revenged with his nippers on their lips the injuries
inflicted on him by their teeth. Now, all this formed a fine subject
for joking to people who indulged in a half-Jewish dislike of the pig,
and who could not guess that the pork trade was one day to pay the
rents of half the widows’ cottages in the country. But no one could lie
more open than George Ross to that species of ridicule which the men
who see further than their neighbours, and look more to the advantage
of others than to their own, cannot fail to encounter. He was a worker
in the dark, and that at no slight expense; for though all his many
projects were ultimately found to be benefits conferred on his country,
not one of them proved remunerative to himself. But he seems to have
known mankind too well to have expected a very great deal from their
gratitude; though, on one occasion at least, his patience gave way.

The town in the course of years had so entirely marched to the west,
that, as I have already had occasion to remark, the town’s cross came
at length to be fairly left behind, with a hawthorn hedge on the one
side and a garden fence on the other; and when the Agent had completed
the house which was to serve as council-room and prison to the place,
the cross was taken down from its stand of more than two centuries,
and placed in front of the new building. That people might the better
remember the circumstance, there was a showy procession got up;
healths were drunk beside the cross in the Agent’s best wine, and not
a little of his crystal broken against it; and the evening terminated
in a ball. It so happened, however, through some cross chance, that,
though all the gentility of the place were to be invited, three young
men, who deemed themselves as genteel as the best of their neighbours,
were passed over--the foreman of the hemp manufactory had received no
invitation, nor the clever superintendent of the nail-work, nor yet
the spruce clerk of the brewery; and as they were all men of spirit,
it so happened that, during the very next night, the cross was taken
down from its new pedestal, broken into three pieces, and carried
still further to the west, to an open space where four lanes met; and
there it was found in the morning--the pieces piled over each other,
and surrounded by a profusion of broken ale-bottles. The Agent was
amazingly angry--angrier, indeed, than even those who best knew him had
deemed him capable of becoming; and in the course of the day the town’s
crier went through the streets proclaiming a reward of ten pounds in
hand, and a free room in Mr. Ross’s new buildings for life, to any one
who would give such information as might lead to the conviction of the
offenders.

In one of his walks a few days after, the Agent met with a poor
miserable-looking Highland woman, who had been picking a few withered
sticks out of one of his hedges, and whose hands and clothes seemed
torn by the thorns. “Poor old creature!” he said, as she dropped her
courtesy in passing; “you must go to my manager and tell him I have
ordered you a barrel of coals. And stay--you are hungry; call at my
house in passing, and the servants will find you something to take home
with you.” The poor woman blessed him, and looked up hesitatingly in
his face. She had never betrayed any one, she said; but his honour was
so good a gentleman--so very good a gentleman; and so she thought she
had best tell him all she knew about the breaking of the cross. She
lived in a little garret over the room of Jamie Banks the nailer; and
having slept scarcely any all the night in which the cross was taken
down, for the weather was bitterly cold, and her bedclothes very thin,
she could hear weighty footsteps traversing the streets till near
morning, when the house-door opened and in came Jamie with a tottering
unequal step, and disturbed the whole family by stumbling over a stool
into his wife’s washing tub. Besides, she had next day overheard his
wife rating him for staying out to so _untimeous_ an hour, and his
remark in reply, that she would do well to keep quiet unless she wished
to see him hanged. This was the sort of clue the affair required, and
in following it up, the unlucky nailer was apprehended and examined;
but it was found, that, through a singular lapse of memory, he had
forgotten every circumstance connected with the night in question,
except that he had been in the very best company, and one of the
happiest men in the world.

Jamie Banks was decidedly the most eccentric man of his day in at
least one parish; full of small wit and little conceits, and famous
for a faculty of invention fertile enough to have served a poet. On
one occasion when the gill of whisky had risen to three-halfpence
in Cromarty, and could still be bought for a penny in Avoch, he had
prevailed on a party of his acquaintance to accompany him to the latter
place, that they might drink themselves rich on the strength of the old
proverb; and as they actually effected a saving of two shillings in
spending six, it was clear, he said, that had not their money failed
them, they would have made fortunes apiece. Alas for the littleness
of that great passion, the love of fame! I have observed that the
tradespeople among whom one meets with most instances of eccentricity,
are those whose shops, being places of general resort, furnish them
with space enough on which to achieve a humble notoriety, by rendering
themselves unlike everybody else. To secure to Jamie Banks due leisure
for recollection, he was committed to jail.

He was sitting one evening beside the prison fire with one of his
neighbours and the jailer, and had risen to exclude the chill night air
by drawing a curtain over the open barred window of the apartment, when
a man suddenly started from behind the wall outside, and discharged
a large stone with tremendous force at his head. The missile almost
brushed his ear as it sung past, and, rebounding from the opposite
wall, rolled along the floor. “That maun be Rob Williamson!” exclaimed
Jamie, “wanting to keep _me_ quiet; out, neebour Jonathan, an’ after
him.” Neebour Jonathan, an active young fellow, sprang to the door,
caught the sounds of retreating footsteps as he turned the gate,
and dashing after like a greyhound, succeeded in laying hold of the
coat-skirts of Rob Williamson, as he strained onwards through the gate
of the hemp manufactory. He was immediately secured and lodged in
another apartment of the prison; and in the morning Jamie Banks was
found to have recovered his memory.

He had finished working, he said, on the evening after the ball, and
was just putting on his coat preparatory to leaving the shop, when
the superintendent called him into his writing-room, where he found
three persons sitting at a table half covered with bottles. Rob
Williamson, the weaver, was one of them; the other two were the clerk
of the brewery and the foreman of the hemp manufactory; and they were
all arguing together on some point of divinity. The superintendent
cleared a seat for him beside himself, and filled his glass thrice in
succession, by way of making up for the time he had lost--nothing could
be more untrue than that the superintendent was proud! They then all
began to speak about morals and Mr. Ross; the clerk was certain that,
what with his harbour and his piggery, and his heathen temples and his
lacewomen, he would not leave a rag of morality in the place; and Rob
was quite as sure he was no friend to the gospel. He a builder of
Gaelic kirks, forsooth! had he not, yesterday, put up a Popish Dagon of
a cross, and made the silly mason bodies worship it for the sake o’ a
dram? And then, how common ale-drinking had become in the place since
he had built his brewery--in his young days they drank naething but
gin;--and what would their grandfathers have said to a _whigmaleerie_
of a ball! “I sipped and listened,” continued Jamie, “and thought the
time couldna have been better spent at an elder’s meeting in the kirk;
and as the night wore later, the conversation became more edifying
still, until at length all the bottles were emptied, when we sallied
out in a body, to imitate the old reformers by breaking the cross. ‘We
may suffer, Jamie, for what we have done,’ said Rob to me, as we parted
for the night; ‘but remember it was duty, Jamie--it was duty. We have
been testifying wi’ our hands, an’ when the hour o’ trial comes, we
mauna be slow in testifying wi’ our tongues too.’ He wasna slack, the
deceitfu’ bodie!” concluded Jamie, “in trying to stop mine.” And thus
closed the evidence. The Agent was no vindictive man; he dismissed
his two superintendents and the clerk, to find for themselves a more
indulgent master; but the services of Jamie Banks he still retained,
and the first employment which he found for him after his release, was
the fashioning of four iron bars for the repair of the cross.

The Agent, in the closing scene of his life, was destined to experience
the unhappiness of blighted hope. He had an only son, a weak and very
obstinate young man, who, without intellect enough to appreciate his
well-calculated schemes, and yet conceit enough to sit in judgment
on them, was ever showing his spirit by opposing a sort of selfish
nonsense, that aped the semblance of common sense, to the expansive and
benevolent philosophy of his father. But the old man bore patiently
with his conceit and folly. Like the great bulk of the class who attain
to wealth and influence through their own exertions, he was anxiously
ambitious to live in his posterity, and be the founder of a family; and
he knew it was quite as much according to the nature of things, that a
fool might be the father, as that he should be the son, of a wise man.
He secured, therefore, his lands to his posterity by the law of entail;
did all that education and example could do for the young man; and
succeeded in getting him married to a sweet amiable Englishwoman, the
daughter of a bishop. But, alas! his precautions and the hopes in which
he indulged, proved equally vain. The young man, only a few months
after his marriage, was piqued when at table by some remark of his
father regarding his mode of carving--some slight allusion, it is said,
to the maxim, that little men cannot afford to neglect little matters;
and rising with much apparent coolness from beside his wife, he stepped
into an adjoining room, and there blew out his brains with a pistol.
The stain of his blood may still be seen in two large brownish-coloured
blotches on the floor.

It was impossible that so sad an event should have occurred in this
part of the country fifty years ago, without exciting as marked an
interest in the supernatural world as in our own. For weeks before,
strange unearthly sounds had been heard after nightfall from among
the woods of the hill. The forester, when returning homewards in the
stillness of evening, had felt the blood curdling round his heart,
as low moans, and faint mutterings, and long hollow echoes, came
sounding along the pathways, which then winded through the thick wood
like vaulted passages through an Egyptian cemetery; and boys of the
town who had lingered among the thickets of the lower slopes until
after sunset, engaged in digging sweet-knots or pig-nuts, were set
a-scampering by harsh sudden screams and loud whistlings, continued in
one unvaried note for minutes together. On the evening that preceded
the commission of the rash act, a party of schoolboys had set out for
the hill to select from among the young firs some of the straightest
and most slender, for fishing-rods; and aware that the forester might
have serious objections to any such appropriation of his master’s
property, they lingered among the rocks below till the evening had set
in; when they stole up the hill-side, and applied themselves to the
work of choosing and cutting down, in a beautiful little avenue which
leads from the edge of the precipices into the recesses of the wood.
All at once there arose, as if from the rock-edge, a combination of
the most fearful sounds they had ever heard;--it seemed as if every
bull in the country had congregated in one little spot, and were
bellowing together in horrid concert. The little fellows looked at
one another, and then, as if moved by some general impulse--for they
were too panic-struck to speak--they darted off together like a shoal
of minnows startled from some river-side by a shadow on the bank. The
terrible sounds waxed louder and louder, like the sounds of the dread
horn which appalled Wallace at midnight in the deserted fortress, after
the death of Faudon; and, long ere they had reached the town, the
weaker members of the party began to fall behind. One little fellow,
on finding himself left alone, began to scream in utter terror, scarce
less loudly than the mysterious bellower in the wood; but he was waited
for by a bold, hardy boy--a grandchild and name-son of old Sandy Wright
the boatman--who had not even relinquished his rod, and who afterwards
did his country no dishonour when, in like fashion, he grasped his pike
at the landing in Egypt. To him I owe the story. He used to say, it
was not until he had reached with his companions the old chapel of St.
Regulus, a full mile from the avenue, that the sounds entirely ceased.
They were probably occasioned by some wandering bittern, of that
species whose cry is said by naturalists to resemble the interrupted
bellowings of a bull, but so much louder that it may be distinctly
heard at a mile’s distance.

George Ross survived his son for several years, and he continued,
though a sadder and graver man, to busy himself with all his various
speculations as before. It was observed, however, that he seemed to
care less than formerly for whatever was exclusively his own--for
his fine house and his beautiful lands--and that he chiefly employed
himself in maturing his several projects for the good of his
country-folk. Time at length began to set his seal on his labours, by
discovering their value; though not until death had first affixed _his_
to the character of the wise and benevolent projector. He died full of
years and honour, mourned by the poor, and regretted by every one; and
even those who had opposed his innovations with the warmest zeal, were
content to remember him, with all the others, as “the good laird.”

CHAPTER XXXI.

    “Friends, _No-man_ kills me; _No-man_ in the hour
    Of sleep oppresses me with fraudful power.

    If no man hurt thee, but the hand divine
    Inflict disease, it fits thee to resign.”--ODYSSEY.

[Sidenote: THE BURN OF EATHIE.]

Some of the wildest and finest pieces of scenery in the neighbourhood
of Cromarty, must be sought for in an upper corner of the parish, where
it abuts on the one hand on the parish of Rosemarkie, and on the other
on the Moray Firth. We may saunter in this direction over a lonely
shore, overhung by picturesque crags of yellow sandstone, and roughened
by so fantastic an arrangement of strata, that one might almost
imagine the riblike bands, which project from the beach, portions of
the skeleton of some huge antediluvian monster. No place can be more
solitary, but no solitude more cheerful. The natural rampart, that
rises more than a hundred yards over the shore, as if to shut us out
from the world, sweeps towards the uplands in long grassy slopes and
green mossy knolls;--or juts out into abrupt and weathered crags,
crusted with lichens and festooned with ivy;--or recedes into bosky
hollows, roughened by the sloethorn, the wild-rose, and the juniper.
On the one hand, there is a profusion of the loveliest light and
shadow--the softest colours and the most pleasing forms; on the other,
the wide extent of the Moray Firth stretches out to the dim horizon,
with all its veinlike currents and its undulating lines of coast;
while before us we see far in the distance the blue vista of the great
Caledonian valley, with its double wall of jagged and serrated hills;
and directly in the opening the grey diminished spires of Inverness.
We saunter onwards towards the west, over the pebbles and the shells,
till where a mossy streamlet comes brattling from the hill; and see,
on turning a sudden angle, the bank cleft to its base, as if to yield
the waters a passage. ’Tis the entrance to a deeply-secluded dell, of
exquisite though savage beauty; one of those hidden recesses of nature,
in which she gratefully reserves the choicest of her sweets for the
more zealous of her admirers; and mingles for them in her kindliest
mood all that expands and delights the heart in the contemplation of
the wild and beautiful, with all that gratifies it in the enjoyment of
a happy novelty, in which pleasure comes so unlooked for, that neither
hope nor imagination has had time to strip it of a single charm.

We enter this singular recess along the bed of the stream, and find
ourselves shut out, when we have advanced only a few paces, from
well-nigh the entire face of nature and the whole works of man. A line
of mural precipices rises on either hand--here advancing in gigantic
columns, like those of an Egyptian portico--there receding into deep
solitary recesses tapestried with ivy, and darkened by birch and
hazel. The cliffs vary their outline at every step, as if assuming in
succession all the various combinations of form which constitute the
wild and the picturesque; and the pale yellow hue of the stone seems,
when brightened by the sun, the very tint a painter would choose to
heighten the effect of his shades, or to contrast most delicately with
the luxuriant profusion of bushes and flowers that waves over every
shelve and cranny. A colony of swallows have built from time immemorial
in the hollows of one of the loftiest precipices; the fox and the
badger harbour in the clefts of the steeper and more inaccessible
banks. As we proceed, the dell becomes wilder and more deeply wooded,
the stream frets and toils at our feet--here leaping over an opposing
ridge, there struggling in a pool, yonder escaping to the light from
under some broken fragment of cliff--there is a richer profusion of
flowers; a thicker mantling of ivy and honeysuckle;--and, after passing
a semicircular inflection of the bank, which, waving from summit to
base with birch and hawthorn, seems suited to remind one of some vast
amphitheatre on the morning of a triumph, we find the passage shut up
by a perpendicular wall of rock about thirty feet in height, over which
the stream precipitates itself in a slender column of foam into a dark
mossy basin. The long arms of an intermingled clump of birches and
hazels stretch half-way across, trebling with their shade the apparent
depth of the pool, and heightening in an equal ratio the whole flicker
of the cascade, and the effect of the little bright patches of foam
which, flung from the rock, incessantly revolve on the eddy.

[Sidenote: DONALD CALDER.]

There is a natural connexion, it is said, between wild scenes and
wild legends; and some of the traditions connected with this romantic
and solitary dell illustrate the remark. Till a comparatively late
period, it was known at many a winter fireside as a favourite haunt
of the fairies, the most poetical of all our old tribes of spectres,
and at one time one of the most popular. I have conversed with an old
woman, one of the perished volumes of my library, who, when a very
little girl, had seen myriads of them dancing as the sun was setting
on the further edge of the dell; and with a still older man, who had
the temerity to offer one of them a pinch of snuff at the foot of the
cascade. Nearly a mile from where the ravine opens to the sea, it
assumes a gentler and more pastoral character; the sides, no longer
precipitous, descend towards the stream in green sloping banks; and
a beaten path, which runs between Cromarty and Rosemarkie, winds
down the one side and ascends the other. More than sixty years ago,
one Donald Calder, a shopkeeper of Cromarty, was journeying by this
path shortly after nightfall. The moon, at full, had just risen, but
there was a silvery mist sleeping on the lower grounds that obscured
the light, and the dell in all its extent was so overcharged by the
vapour, that it seemed an immense overflooded river winding through
the landscape. Donald had reached its further edge, and could hear the
rush of the stream from the deep obscurity of the abyss below, when
there rose from the opposite side a strain of the most delightful music
he had ever heard. He stood and listened: the words of a song of such
simple beauty, that they seemed, without effort on his part, to stamp
themselves on his memory, came wafted on the music, and the chorus, in
which a thousand tiny voices seemed to join, was a familiar address
to himself. “He! Donald Calder! ho! Donald Calder!” There are none of
my Navity acquaintance, thought Donald, who sing like that; “Wha can
it be?” He descended into the cloud; but in passing the little stream
the music ceased; and on reaching the spot on which the singers had
seemed stationed, he saw only a bare bank sinking into a solitary moor,
unvaried by either bush or hollow, or the slightest cover in which the
musician could have lain concealed. He had hardly time, however, to
estimate the marvels of the case when the music again struck up, but on
the opposite side of the dell, and apparently from the very knoll on
which he had so lately listened to it; the conviction that it could not
be other than supernatural overpowered him, and he hurried homewards
under the influence of a terror so extreme, that, unfortunately for our
knowledge of fairy literature, it had the effect of obliterating from
his memory every part of the song except the chorus. The sun rose as
he reached Cromarty; and he found that, instead of having lingered at
the edge of the dell for only a few minutes--and the time had seemed no
longer--he had spent beside it the greater part of the night.

[Sidenote: THE MEAL-MILL OF EATHIE.]

Above the lower cascade the lofty precipitous banks of the dell recede
into a long elliptical hollow, which terminates at the upper extremity
in a perpendicular precipice, half cleft to its base by a narrow chasm,
out of which the little stream comes bounding in one adventurous
leap to the bottom. A few birch and hazel bushes have anchored in the
crannies of the rock, and darkened by their shade an immense rounded
block of granite many tons in weight, which lies in front of the
cascade. Immediately beside the huge mass, on a level grassy spot,
which occupies the space between the receding bank and the stream,
there stood about a century ago a meal-mill. It was a small and very
rude erection, with an old-fashioned horizontal water-wheel, such as
may still be met with in some places of the remote Highlands; and so
inconsiderable was the power of the machinery, that a burly farmer of
the parish, whose bonnet a waggish neighbour had thrown between the
stones, succeeded in arresting the whole with his shoulder until he
had rescued his Kilmarnock. But the mill of Eathie was a celebrated
mill notwithstanding. No one resided near it, nor were there many men
in the country who would venture to approach it an hour after sunset;
and there were nights when, though deserted by the miller, its wheels
would be heard revolving as busily as ever they had done by day, and
when one who had courage enough to reconnoitre it from the edge of the
dell, might see little twinkling lights crossing and recrossing the
windows in irregular but hasty succession, as if a busy multitude were
employed within. On one occasion the miller, who had remained in it
rather later than usual, was surprised to hear outside the neighing
and champing of horses and the rattling of carts, and on going to the
door he saw a long train of basket-woven vehicles laden with sacks,
and drawn by shaggy little ponies of every diversity of form and
colour. The attendants were slim unearthly-looking creatures, about
three feet in height, attired in grey, with red caps; and the whole
seemed to have come out of a square opening in the opposite precipice.
Strange to relate, the nearer figures seemed to be as much frightened
at seeing the miller as the miller was at seeing them; but, on one of
them uttering a shrill scream, the carts moved backwards into the
opening, which shut over them like the curtain of a theatre as the last
disappeared.

[Sidenote: THE STORY OF TAM M’KECHAN.]

There lived in the adjoining parish of Rosemarkie, when the fame of
the mill was at its highest, a wild unsettled fellow, named M’Kechan.
Had he been born among the aristocracy of the country, he might have
passed for nothing worse than a young man of spirit; and after sowing
his wild oats among gentlemen of the turf and of the fancy, he would
naturally have settled down into the shrewd political landlord, who,
if no builder of churches himself, would be willing enough to exert
the privilege of giving clergymen, exclusively of his own choosing,
to such churches as had been built already. As a poor man, however,
and the son of a poor man, Tam M’Kechan seemed to bid pretty fair for
the gallows; nor could he plead ignorance that such was the general
opinion. He had been told so when a herd-boy; for it was no unusual
matter for his master, a farmer of the parish, to find him stealing
pease in the corner of one field, when the whole of his charge were
ravaging the crops of another. He had been told so too when a sailor,
ere he had broken his indentures and run away, when once caught among
the casks and packages in the hold, ascertaining where the Geneva
and the sweetmeats were stowed. And now that he was a drover and a
horse-jockey, people, though they no longer told him so, for Tam had
become dangerous, seemed as certain of the fact as ever. With all his
roguery, however, when not much in liquor he was by no means a very
disagreeable companion; few could match him at a song or the bagpipe,
and though rather noisy in his cups, and somewhat quarrelsome, his
company was a good deal courted by the bolder spirits of the parish,
and among the rest by the miller. Tam had heard of the piebald horses
and their ghostly attendants; but without more knowledge than fell to
the share of his neighbours, he was a much greater sceptic, and after
rallying the miller on his ingenuity and the prettiness of his fancy,
he volunteered to spend a night at the mill, with no other companion
than his pipes.

Preparatory to the trial the miller invited one of his neighbours, the
young farmer of Eathie, that they might pass the early part of the
evening with Tam; but when, after an hour’s hard drinking, they rose
to leave the cottage, the farmer, a kind-hearted lad, who was besides
warmly attached to the jockey’s only sister, would fain have dissuaded
him from the undertaking. “I’ve been thinking, Tam,” he said, “that
flyte wi’ the miller as ye may, ye would better let the _good people_
alone;--or stay, sin’ ye are sae bent on playing the fule, I’ll e’en
play it wi’ you;--rax me my plaid; we’ll trim up the fire in the
killogie thegether; an’ you will keep me in music.” “Na, Jock Hossack,”
said Tam, “I maun keep my good music for the _good people_, it’s rather
late to flinch now; but come to the burn-edge wi’ me the night, an’ to
the mill as early in the morning as ye may; an’ hark ye, tak a double
caulker wi’ you.” He wrapt himself up closely in his plaid, took the
pipes under his arm, and, accompanied by Jock and the miller, set out
for the dell, into which, however, he insisted on descending alone.
Before leaving the bank, his companions could see that he had succeeded
in lighting up a fire in the mill, which gleamed through every bore and
opening, and could hear the shrill notes of a pibroch mingling with the
dash of the cascade.

The sun had risen high enough to look aslant into the dell, when Jock
and the miller descended to the mill, and found the door lying wide
open. All was silent within; the fire had sunk into a heap of white
ashes, though there was a bundle of fagots untouched beside it, and the
stool on which Tam had been seated lay overturned in front. But there
were no traces of Tam, except that the miller picked up, beside the
stool, a little flat-edged instrument, used by the unfortunate jockey
in concealing the age of his horses by effacing the marks on their
teeth, and that Jock Hossack found one of the drones of his pipes
among the extinguished embers. Weeks passed away and there was still
nothing heard of Tam; and as every one seemed to think it would be in
vain to seek for him anywhere but in the place where he had been lost,
Jock Hossack, whose marriage was vexatiously delayed in consequence of
his strange disappearance, came to the resolution of unravelling the
mystery, if possible, by passing a night in the mill.

For the first few hours he found the evening wear heavily away; the
only sounds that reached him were the loud monotonous dashing of
the cascade, and the duller rush of the stream as it swept past the
mill-wheel. He piled up fuel on the fire till the flames rose half-way
to the ceiling, and every beam and rafter stood out from the smoke as
clearly as by day; and then yawning, as he thought how companionable a
thing a good fire is, he longed for something to amuse him. A sudden
cry rose from the further gable, accompanied by a flutter of wings,
and one of the miller’s ducks, a fine plump bird came swooping down
among the live embers. “Poor bird!” said Jock, “from the fox to the
fire; I had almost forgotten that I wanted my supper.” He dashed the
duck against the floor--plucked and embowelled it--and then, suspending
the carcass by a string before the fire, began to twirl it round and
round to the heat. The strong odoriferous fume had begun to fill the
apartment, and the drippings to hiss and sputter among the embers, when
a burst of music rose so suddenly from the green without, that Jock,
who had been so engaged with the thoughts of his supper as almost to
have forgotten the fairies, started half a yard from his seat. “That
maun be Tam’s pipes,” he said; and giving a twirl to the duck he rose
to a window. The moon, only a few days in her wane, was looking aslant
into the dell, lighting the huge melancholy cliffs with their birches
and hazels, and the white flickering descent of the cascade. The little
level green on the margin of the stream lay more in the shade; but Jock
could see that it was crowded with figures marvellously diminutive in
stature, and that nearly one-half of them were engaged in dancing. It
was enough for him, however, that the music was none of Tam’s making;
and, leaving the little creatures to gambol undisturbed, he returned to
the fire.

He had hardly resumed his seat when a low tap was heard at the door,
and shortly after a second and a third. Jock sedulously turned his duck
to the heat, and sat still. He had no wish for visitors, and determined
on admitting none. The door, however, though firmly bolted, fell open
of itself, and there entered one of the strangest-looking creatures
he had ever seen. The figure was that of a man, but it was little
more than three feet in height; and though the face was as sallow and
wrinkled as that of a person of eighty, the eye had the roguish sparkle
and the limbs all the juvenile activity of fourteen. “What’s your name,
man?” said the little thing, coming up to Jock, and peering into his
face till its wild elfish features were within a few inches of his.
“What’s your name?” “_Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_,”--_i.e._, myself--said Jock,
with a policy similar to that resorted to by Ulysses in the cave of
the giant. “Ah, _Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_!” rejoined the creature; “_Mysel’
an’ Mysel’!_ and what’s that you have got there, _Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_?”
touching the duck as it spoke with the tip of its finger, and then
transferring part of the scalding gravy to the cheek of Jock. Rather
an unwarrantable liberty, thought the poor fellow, for so slight an
acquaintance; the creature reiterated the question, and dabbed Jock’s
other cheek with a larger and still more scalding application of the
gravy. “What is it?” he exclaimed, losing in his anger all thought of
consequences, and dashing the bird, with the full swing of his arm,
against the face of his visitor, “It’s that!” The little creature,
blinded and miserably burnt, screamed out in pain and terror till the
roof rung again; the music ceased in a moment, and Jock Hossack had
barely time to cover the fire with a fresh heap of fuel, which for a
few seconds reduced the apartment to total darkness, when the crowd
without came swarming like wasps to every door and window of the mill.
“Who did it, Sanachy--who did it?” was the query of a thousand voices
at once. “Oh, ’twas _Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_,” said the creature; “’twas
_Mysel’ an’ Mysel’_.” “And if it was yoursel’ and yoursel’, who, poor
Sanachy,” replied his companions, “can help that?” They still, however,
clustered round the mill; the flames began to rise in long pointed
columns through the smoke, and Jock Hossack had just given himself up
for lost, when a cock crew outside the building, and after a sudden
breeze had moaned for a few seconds among the cliffs and the bushes,
and then sunk in the lower recesses of the dell, he found himself
alone. He was married shortly after to the sister of the lost jockey,
and never again saw the _good people_, or, what he regretted nearly
as little, his unfortunate brother-in-law. There were some, however,
who affirmed, that the latter had returned from fairyland seven years
after his mysterious disappearance, and supported the assertion by the
fact, that there was one Thomas M’Kechan who suffered at Perth for
sheep-stealing a few months after the expiry of the seventh year.

[Sidenote: FAUSE JAMIE.]

One other tradition of the burn of Eathie, and I have done. But I need
run no risk of marring it in the telling. More fortunate than most of
its contemporaries, it has been preserved by the muse of one of those
forgotten poets of our country, who, thinking more of their subjects
than of themselves, “saved others’ names and left their own unsung.”
And I have but to avail myself of his ballad.

FAUSE JAMIE.

PART FIRST.

    “Whar hae ye been, my dochter deir,
      I’ the cauld an’ the plashy weet?
    There’s snaw i’ the faulds o’ your silken hair,
      An’ bluid on your bonny feet.

    There’s grief and fright, my dochter deir,
      I’ the wand’rin’ blink o’ your ee;
    An’ ye’ve stayed arout i’ the sleet an’ the cauld
      The livelang nicht frae me.”

    “O mither deir! mak’ ye my bed,
      For my heart it’s flichtin’ sair;
    An’ oh! gin I’ve vexed ye, mither deir,
      I’ll never vex ye mair.

    I’ve stayed arout the lang mirk nicht,
      I’ the sleet an’ the plashy rain;
    But, mither deir, mak’ ye my bed,
      An’ I’ll ne’er gang out again.

    An’ oh, put by that maiden snood,
      Whar nane may evir see;
    For Jamie’s ta’en a richer joe,
      An’ left but shame to me.”

    An’ she has made her dochter’s bed,
      An’ her auld heart it was wae;
    For as the lang mirk hours gaed by,
      Her lassie wore away.

    The dead wirk i’ her bonny hause
      Was wirkin’ a’ that day an’ nicht;
    An’ or the morning she was gane,
      Wi’ the babe that nevir saw the licht.

    The mither grat by her dochter’s bed,
      An’ she has cursed curses three:
    That he wha wrocht her deidly ill
      Ane happy man mocht never be.

FAUSE JAMIE.

PART SECOND.

    There was licht i’ the widow’s lonesome shiel.
      An’ licht i’ the farmer’s ha’;
    For the widow was sewin’ her dochter’s shroud,
      An’ the bride’s folk dancin’ a’.

    But aye or the tither reel was danced out,
      The wae bridegroom begoud to tire;
    An’ a spale on the candil turn’d to the bride,
      An’ a coffin loup’d frae the fire.

    An’ whan to the kirkin’ the twasome went
      Sae trig, i’ the burrow’s toune below,
    Their first feet as they left the kirk
      Was the burial o’ Jamie’s joe.

    Jamie he labourt air an’ late,
      An’ mickle carit for pleugh an’ kye;
    But laigher aye he sank i’ the warl’
      As the weary years gaed by.

    His puir gudewife was dowie an’ wae;
      His threesome bairns a grief to see--
    The tane it was deaf, the tither blin’,
      The third a lamiter like to be.

    The burns were rinnin’ big wi’ spate,
      Lentron win’s blew gurly and snell;
    Whan Jamie cam to Cromartie town
      Wi’ a cart o’ bear to sell.

    “O why do ye daidle so late i’ the toune,
      Jamie, it’s time ye were boune to ride?”
    “It’s because that I dinna like to gang,
      An’ I kenna how to bide.

    Pic-mirk nicht it’s settin’ in,
      The wife at hame sits dowie and wae;
    An’, Elder, I maunna bide i’ the toune,
      An’ I kenna how to gae.

    _It_ saw’d on my rigs or the drouchts cam on,
      _It_ milk’d i’ my byre or my kye did dee;
    _It_ follows me aye wharevir I gang,
      An’ I see _it_ now though ye canna see.”

    “Gin it follows ye aye wharevir ye gang,
      There’s anither Jamie that follows ye too;
    An’ gin that ye nevir wrangit the dead,
      The dead will nevir be mastir o’ you.”

    Jamie he gripit the elder’s han’,
      An’ syne he slackit the branks to ride,
    An’ doun he gied to the Eathie burn;
      But he nevir cam up on the ither side.

    There’s a maisterless colly at Jamie’s door,
      Eerie it manes to the wife arin,
    There’s a gled an’ a craw on the Eathie crag,
      And a broken corp at the fit o’ the linn.

CHAPTER XXXII.

    “----He heard amazed, on every side
    His church insulted, and her priests belied,
    The laws reviled, the ruling powers abused,
    The land derided, and her foes excused,
    He heard and ponder’d. What to men so vile
    Should be his language? For his threatening style
    They were too many. If his speech were meek,
    They would despise such vain attempts to speak:
    ----These were reformers of each different sort.”--CRABBE.

[Sidenote: OUR TOWN POLITICS.]

In former times people knocked one another on the head for the sake
of their masters--fellows whom they had made too great to care at
all about them; in the present age they have become so much wiser,
that they quarrel on their own behalf alone. An entire people might
be regarded in the past as an immense engine, with perhaps a single
mind for its moving power; we may now compare every petty district
to a magazine, stored like the warehouse of a watchmaker with little
detached machines, each one furnished with a moving power of its own.
But though politics and party spirit change almost every ten years,
human nature is always the same;--aspects vary, and circumstances
alter, but the active principle, through all its windings and amid all
its disguises, is ever consistent with itself.

The people of Cromarty who lived ninety years ago were quite as
unskilled in politics as their neighbours, and thought as little
for themselves. They were but the wheels and pinions of an immense
engine; and regarding their governors as men sent into the world to
rule--themselves, as men born to obey--they troubled their heads no
more about the matter. Even the two Rebellions had failed of converting
them into politicians; for, viewing these in only their connexion
with religion, they exulted in the successes of Hanover as those of
Protestantism, and identified the cause of the Stuarts with Popery and
persecution. Their Whiggism was a Whiggism of the future world only;
and the liberty of preparing themselves for heaven was the only liberty
they deemed worth fighting for.

Principles such as these, and the dominancy of the Protestant
interest, rendered the people of Cromarty, for two whole reigns, as
quiet subjects as any in the kingdom. In latter times, too, there
was a circumstance which thoroughly attached them to the Government,
by shutting out from among them the Radicalism of modern times for
well-nigh a whole age. The Scotch, early in the reign of George
III., had risen high at court;--Earl Bute had become Premier, and
Mansfield Lord Chief-Justice; and the English, who would as lief have
witnessed the return of William and his Normans, grumbled exceedingly.
The Premier managed his business like most other premiers;--the
Chief-Justice conducted _his_ rather better than most other
chief-justices; but both gentlemen, says Smollett, “had the misfortune
of being born natives of North Britain; and this circumstance was,
in the opinion of the people, more than sufficient to counterbalance
all the good qualities which human nature could possess.” Junius,
and Wilkes, and Churchhill, and hundreds more, who, with as much
ill-nature, but less wit, were forgotten as soon as the public ceased
to be satisfied with ill-nature alone, opened in full cry against the
King, the Ministry, and the Scotch. The hollo reached Cromarty, and
the town’s-folk were told, with all the rest of their countrymen, that
they were proud, and poor, and dirty, and not very honest, and that
they had sold their King; all this, too, as if they hadn’t known the
whole of it before. Now it so happened, naturally enough I suppose,
that they could bear to be dirty, but not to be told of it, and poor,
but not to be twitted with their poverty, and that they could be quite
as angry as either Junius or Churchhill, though they could not write
letters like the one, nor make verses like the other. And angry they
were--desperately angry at Whiggism and the English, and devotedly
attached to the King, poor man, who was suffering so much for his
attachment to the Scotch. Nothing could come amiss to them from so
thorough a friend of their country; and when, on any occasion, they
could not wholly defend his measures, they contented themselves with
calling him an honest man.

On came the ill-fated, ill-advised American War, and found the
people of Cromarty as loyal as ever. Washington, they said, was a
rascal; Franklin, an ill-bred mechanic; and the people of the United
States, rebels to a man. There was a ballad, the composition of some
provincial poet of this period, which narrated, in very rude verse, the
tragical death of two brothers, natives of Ross-shire, who were killed
unwittingly by their father, a soldier of the Republic; and this simple
ballad did more for the cause of the King among the people of Cromarty,
than all the arguments in Locke could have done for that of the
Americans; there was not an old woman in either town or parish who did
not thoroughly understand it. The unfortunate father, Donald Munro, had
emigrated to America, says the ballad, many years before; leaving his
two infant sons with his brother, a farmer of Ross-shire. The children
had shot up into active young men, when the war broke out; and, unable
to pay for their passage, had enlisted into a regiment destined for
the colonies, in the hope of meeting with their father. They landed in
America; and finding themselves one evening, after a long and harassing
march, within a few miles of the place where he resided, they set out
together to pay him a visit; but in passing through a wood on their
way, they were shot at from among the trees, and with so fatal an
aim that the one was killed, and the other mortally wounded. A stout
elderly man, armed with a double-barrelled rifle, came pressing
towards them through the bushes, as a fowler would to the game he had
just knocked down. It was their father, Donald Munro; and the ballad
concludes with the ravings of his horror and despair on ascertaining
the nature of his connexion with his victims, blent with the wild
expressions of his grief and remorse for having joined in so unnatural
a rebellion.

[Sidenote: THE FIRST WHIG.]

Even in this age, however, as if to show that there can be nothing
completely perfect that has human nature in it, Cromarty had its one
Whig;--a person who affirmed that Franklin was a philosopher, and
Washington a good man, and that the Americans were very much in the
right. Could anything be more preposterous? The town’s-folk lacked
patience to reason with a fellow so amazingly absurd. He was a slater,
and his name was John Holm;--a name which became so proverbial in the
place for folly, that, when any one talked very great nonsense, it was
said of him that he talked like John Holm. The very children, who had
carried the phrase with them to the playground and the school, used to
cut short the fudge of a comrade, or, at times, even some unpopular
remark of the master, with a “Ho! ho! John Holm!” John, however, held
stiffly to his opinions, and the defence of Washington; and some of the
graver town’s-men, chafed by his pertinacity, were ill-natured enough
to say that he was little better than Washington himself. Curious as it
may appear, he was, notwithstanding the modern tone of his politics,
a rare and singular piece of antiquity;--one of that extinct class of
mechanics described by Coleridge, “to whom every trade was an allegory,
and had its own guardian saint.” He was a connecting link between two
different worlds--the worlds of popular opinion and of popular mystery;
and, strange as it may seem, both a herald of the Reform Bill, and a
last relic of the age “in which” (to use the language of the writer
just quoted) “the detail of each art was ennobled in the eyes of its
professors, by being spiritually improved into symbols and mementos
of all doctrines and all duties.” John had, besides, a strong turn for
military architecture, and used to draw plans and construct models. He
was one evening descanting to an old campaigner on the admirable works
at Fort George (a very recent erection at that time), and illustrating
his descriptions with his stick on a hearth-stone strewed over with
ashes, when by came the cat, and with one sweep of her tail demolished
the entire plan. “Och, Donald!” said John, “it’s all in vain;” a remark
which, simple as it may seem, passed into a proverb. When an adventure
proved unsuccessful, or an effort unavailing, it was said to be “All
in vain, like John Holm’s plan of the fort.” But John’s day was at
hand.--We, the people, are excellent fellows in our way, but I must
confess not very consistent. I have seen the principles which we would
hang a man for entertaining at the beginning of one year, becoming
quite our own before the end of the next.

[Sidenote: THE REVOLUTION.]

The American War was followed by the French Revolution, and the crash
of a falling throne awakened opinion all over Europe. The young
inquired whether men are not born equal; the old shook their heads,
and asked what was to come next? There were gentlemen of the place who
began to remark that the tradesfolk no longer doffed to them their
bonnets, and tradesfolk that the gentlemen no longer sent them their
newspapers. But the people got newspapers for themselves;--these,
too, of a very different stamp from the ones they had been accustomed
to; and a crop of young Whigs began to shoot up all over the place,
like nettles in spring. They could not break into the meanings of
all the new, hard-shelled words they were meeting with--words ending
in _acy_ and _archy_; but no people could understand better that a
king is only a kind of justice of the peace, who may be cashiered for
misconduct just like any other magistrate; that all men are naturally
equal; and that one whose grandfather had mended shoes, was every
whit as well-born as one whose grandfather was the bastard of an
emperor. And seldom were there people more zealous or less selfish in
their devotion than the new-made politicians of Cromarty. Their own
concerns gave place, as they ought, to the more important business of
the state; and they actually hurt their own heads, and sometimes, when
the ale was bad, their own bellies, in drinking healths to the French.
Light after light gleamed upon them, like star after star in a frosty
evening. First of all, Paine’s Rights of Man shone upon them through
the medium of the newspapers, with the glitter of fifty constellations;
then the Resolutions of the Liberty and Equality clubs of the south
looked down upon them with the effulgence of fifty more; at length,
up rose the scheme for the division of property, like the moon at
full, and, flaring with portentous splendour, cast all the others into
comparative obscurity. The people looked round them at the parks which
the modern scheme of agriculture had so conveniently fenced in with
dikes and hedges; and spoke of the high price of potato-land and the
coming Revolution.--A countryman went into one of the shops about this
time, craving change for a pound-note. “A pound-note!” exclaimed the
shopkeeper, snapping his fingers;--“a pound-note!--Man, I widna gie you
tippence for’t.”

[Sidenote: THE DEMOCRACY.]

There was a young man of the place, the son of a shopkeeper, who
had been marked from his earliest boyhood by a smart precocity of
intellect, and the boldness of his opinions; his name (for I must not
forget that, to borrow one of Johnson’s figures, I am walking over
ashes the fires of which are not yet extinguished) I shall conceal. He
was one of those persons who, like the stormy petrel of the tropics,
come abroad when the seas begin to rise, and the heavens to darken;
and who find their proper element in a wild mixture of all the four
elements jumbled into one. He read the newspapers, and, it was said,
wrote for them; he corresponded, too, with the Jacobin clubs of the
south, and strove to form similar clubs at home; but the people were
not yet sufficiently ripe. No one could say that he was disobliging or
ill-tempered; on the contrary, he was a favourite with, at least, his
humbler town’s-men for being much the reverse of both; but he was poor
and clever, and alike impatient of poverty, and of seeing the wealth
of the country in the hands of duller men than himself; and so the
man who was unfortunate enough to be born to a thousand pounds a year
had little chance of finding him either well-tempered or obliging. He
had stept into the ferry-boat one morning, and the ferrymen had set
themselves to their oars, when a neighbouring proprietor came down to
the beach, and called on them to return and take him aboard. “Get on!”
shouted the Democrat, “and let the fellow wait;--’tis I who have hired
you this time.” “O Sir! it’s a shentleman,” said one of the ferrymen,
propelling the boat sternwards, as he spoke, by a back stroke of the
oar. “Gentleman!” exclaimed the Democrat, seizing the boat-hook and
pushing lustily in a contrary direction--“Gentleman truly!--we are all
gentlemen, or shall be so very soon.” The proprietor, meanwhile, made
a dash at the rudder, and held fast, but with such good-will did the
other ply the boat-hook, that ere he had made good a lodgment he was
drenched to the armpits. “Nothing like being accustomed to hardship in
time,” muttered the Democrat, as, glancing his eye contemptuously on
the dripping vestments of the proprietor, he laid down the pole and
quietly resumed his seat.

[Sidenote: THE PROCESSION.]

There were about a dozen young men in the place who were so excited by
the newspaper accounts of the superb processions of their south-country
friends, that they resolved on having a procession of their own.
They procured a long pole with a Kilmarnock cap fixed to the one end
of it, which they termed the cap of liberty, and a large square of
cotton, striped blue, white, and red, which they called the tricolor of
independence. In the middle stripe there were inscribed in huge Roman
capitals, the words Liberty and Equality; and a stuffed cormorant,
intended to represent an eagle, was perched on the top of the staff.
They got a shipmaster of the place prevailed on to join with them. He
was a frank, hearty sailor, who saw nothing unfair in the anticipated
division of property, and hated a pressgang as he hated the devil. “But
how,” said he, “will we manage, after all hands have been served out,
should a few of us take a _bouse_ and melt our portions? just divide
again, I suppose?” “Highly probable,” replied the revolutionists; “but
we have not yet fully determined on that.” “I see, I see,” rejoined
the sailor; “everything can’t be done at once.” On the day of the
procession he brought with him his crew attired in their best, and
with all the ship flags mounted on poles. The revolutionists demurred.
“To be sure,” they said, “nothing could be finer; but then the flags
were British flags.” “And ---- it,” said the master, “would you have
me bring French flags?” It was no time, however, to dispute the point;
and the procession moved on, followed by all the children of the
place. It reached an eminence directly above the links; and drawing
up beside an immense pile of brushwood, and a few empty tar-barrels,
its leader planted the tree of liberty amid shouts, and music, and
the shooting of muskets, on the very spot on which the town gallows
had been planted about two centuries before. No one, however, so
much as thought of the circumstance; for people were too thoroughly
excited to employ themselves with anything but the future; besides,
a very little ingenuity could have made it serve the purpose of
either party. After planting the tree, the brushwood was fired, and a
cask of whisky produced, out of which the republicans drank healths
to liberty and the French. “The French! the French!” exclaimed the
shipmaster. “Well, ---- them, I don’t care though I do; here’s health
to the French; may they and I live long enough to speak to one another
through twelve-pounders!” All the boys and all the sailors huzza’d; the
republicans said nothing, but thought they had got rather a queer ally.
The evening, however, passed off in capital style; and, ere the crowd
dispersed, they had burnt two fishing-boats, a salmon coble, and almost
all the paling of the neighbouring fields and gardens.

[Sidenote: HOSSACK’S PLEDGE.]

The day of the procession was also that of a Redcastle market; at
that time one of the chief cattle fairs of the north. It was largely
attended on this occasion by Highlanders from the neighbouring straths,
many of whom had fought for the Prince, and remembered the atrocities
of Cumberland; it was attended, too, by parties of drovers from
England and the southern counties of Scotland, all of them brimful of
the modern doctrines, and scarcely more loyal than the Highlanders
themselves; it was attended, besides, by a Cromarty salmon-fisher,
George Hossack, a man of immense personal strength and high spirit,
now a little past his prime perhaps, but so much a politician of the
old school, that he would have willingly fought for his namesake the
King with any two men at the fair. But he was no match for everybody,
and everybody to-day seemed to hold but one opinion. “Awfu’ expensive
government this of ours,” said an East-Lothian drover; “we maun just
try whether we canna manage it mair cheaply for ourselves.” “Ay, and
what a blockhead of a king have we got!” said an Englishman; “not
fit, as Tom Paine says, for a country constable; but, poor wretch, we
must turn him about his business, and see whether he can’t work like
ourselves.” “Och, but he’s a limmer anyhow, and a creat plack whig!”
remarked an old Highlander, “and has nae right till ta crown. Na,
na, Charlie my king!” Poor George was almost broken-hearted by the
abuse poured out against his sovereign on every side of him; but what
could he do? He would look first at one speaker, then at another, and
repress his rising wrath by the consideration, that there was little
wit in being angry with about three thousand people at once. He had
driven a bargain with two Englishmen, and on going in to drink with
them, according to custom, was shown into a room which chanced at
the time, unlike every other room in the house, to be unoccupied. The
Englishmen seated themselves at the table; George cautiously fastened
the door, and took his place fronting them. “Now, gentlemen,” said
he, filling the glasses, “permit me to propose a toast:--Health and
prosperity to George the Third.” He drank off his glass, and set it
down before him. One of the Englishmen, a bit of a wag in his way,
looked at him with a droll, quizzical expression, and took up his.
“Health and prosperity,” he said, “to George the _herd_.”--“Well, young
man,” remarked George, “he is, as you say, a herd, and a very excellent
one;--allow me, however, to wish him a less unruly charge.” “Health
and prosperity,” shouted out the other, “to George the ----.” This was
unbearable: George sprang from his seat, and repaid the insult with a
blow on the ear, which drove both man and glass to the floor. Up rose
the other Englishman--up rose, too, the fallen one, and fell together
upon George; but the cause of the king was never yet better supported.
Down they both went, the one over the other, and down they went a
second, and a third, and a fourth time; till at length, convinced that
nothing could be more imprudent than their attempts to rise, they lay
just where they fell. George departed, after discharging the reckoning,
leaving them to congratulate one another on their liberalism and their
wit; and reached Cromarty as the last gleam of the Jacobin bonfire was
dancing on the chimney-tops, to learn that there was scarcely more
loyalty among his town’s-men than at the market, and that his favourite
salmon-coble had perished among the flames about two hours before. I
remember George--a shrewd, clear-headed man of eighty-two, full of
anecdote and remark; and I have derived not a few of my best traditions
from him. But he is gone, and well-nigh forgotten; and when the sexton
of some future age shall shovel up his huge bones, the men who come to
gaze on them may descant, as they turn them over, on modern degeneracy
and the might of their fathers, but who among them all will know that
they belonged to the last of the loyalists!

[Sidenote: THE COUNTY MEETING.]

The day after the procession came on, pregnant with mystery and
conjecture. Rider after rider entered the town, and assembled in front
of the council-house;--the town’s officer was sent for, together with
the sergeant of a small recruiting party that barracked in one of the
neighbouring lanes; they then entered the hall, and made fast the
doors. The country gentlemen, it was said, had come in to put down the
revolutionists. Shortly after, two of the soldiers and a constable
glided into the house of the young democrat, and producing a warrant
for his apprehension, and the seizure of all his papers, hurried him
away to the hall--the soldiers, with their bayonets fixed, guarding him
on either side, and the constable, laden with a hamper of books and
papers, bringing up the rear. In they all went, and the door closed as
before. The curiosity of the town’s-people was now awakened in right
earnest, and an immense crowd gathered in front of the council-house;
but they could see or hear nothing. At length the door opened, and the
sergeant came out; he looked round about him, and beckoned on George
Hossack. “George,” he said, “one of the London smacks has just entered
the bay; you must board her and seize on all the parcels addressed to
* * * * the Jacobin merchant; there is an information lodged that he
is getting a supply of pikes from London for arming the town’s-people.
Take the custom-house boatmen with you; and bring whatever you find
to the hall. And, hark ye, we must see and get up an effigy of the
blackguard Tom Paine;--try and procure some oakum and train-oil, and
I’ll furnish powder enough to blow him to Paris.” Away went George,
delighted with the commission, and returned in about an hour after,
accompanied by some boatmen bearing two boxes large enough to contain
pistols and pike-heads for all the men of the place. They were admitted
into the hall, where they found the bench occupied by the town and
county gentlemen--the soldiers ranged in the area in front, and the
Republican, nothing abashed, standing at the bar. He had baffled all
his judges, and had given them so much more wit and argument than they
wanted, that they had ceased questioning him, and were now employed
in turning over his papers. A letter written in cipher had been found
on his person, and a gentleman, somewhat skilled in such matters, was
examining it with much interest, while his more immediate neighbours
were looking over his shoulders. “Bring forward the boxes, George,”
said one of the gentlemen. George placed them both on the large table
fronting the bench, and proceeded to uncord them. The first he opened
was filled with gingerbread, the other with girls’ dolls and boys’
whistles, and an endless variety of trinkets and toys of a similar
class. Some of the elderly gentlemen took snuff and looked at one
another;--the younger laughed outright. “Have you deciphered that
scrawl, Pointzfield?” inquired one of the more serious, with a view
of restoring the court to its gravity. “Yes,” said Pointzfield dryly
enough, “I rather think I have.”--“Treasonable of course,” remarked the
other. “No, not quite that now,” rejoined the other, “whatever it might
have been fifty years ago. It is merely a copy in shorthand of the old
Jacobitical ballad, the Sow’s Tail to Geordie.” A titter ran along the
bench as before, and the court broke up after determining that the
Democrat should be sent to the jail of Tain to abide further trial,
and that Paine should be burnt in effigy at the expense of the county.
Paine was accordingly burnt; and all the children were gratified with
a second procession and a second bonfire, quite as showy in their way
as those of the preceding evening. The prisoner was escorted to Tain
by a party of soldiers; and on his release, which took place shortly
after, he quitted the country for London, where he became the editor
of a newspaper on the popular side, which he conducted for many years
with much spirit and some ability. Meanwhile the revolutionary cause
languished for lack of a leader; and, on the declaration of war with
France, sunk entirely amid the stormy ebullitions of a feeling still
more popular than the Republican one.

[Sidenote: THE FRENCH WAR.]

There are some passions and employments of the human mind which give
it a sceptical bias, and others, apparently of a very similar nature,
which incline it to credulity. So long as the revolutionary spirit
stalked abroad, it seemed as if every other spirit stayed at home. The
spectre slept quietly in its churchyard, and the wraith in its pool;
the dead-light was hooded by an extinguisher, and the witch minded
her own business without interfering with that of her neighbours. On
the breaking out of the war, however, there came on a season of omens
and prodigies, and the whole supernatural world seemed starting into
as full activity as the fears and hopes of the community. Armies were
seen fighting in the air, amid the waving of banners and the frequent
flashing of cannon; and the whole northern sky appeared for three
nights together as if deluged with blood. In the vicinity of Inverness,
shadowy bands of armed men were descried at twilight marching across
the fields--at times half enveloped in smoke, at times levelling their
arms as if for the charge. There was an ominously warlike spirit, too,
among the children, which the elderly people did not at all like;--they
went about, just as before the American war, with their mimic drums and
fifes, and their muskets and halberts of elder, disturbing the whole
country with uncouth music, and their zeal against the French. Then
came the tug of war; trade sank; and many of the mechanics of the place
flung aside their tools and entered either the army or navy. Party
spirit died; the Whigs forgot everything but that they were Britons;
and when orders came that such of the males of the place as volunteered
their services should be embodied into a kind of domestic militia, old
men of seventy and upwards, some of whom had fought at Culloden, and
striplings of fifteen, who had not yet left school, came to the house
of their future colonel, begging to be enrolled and furnished with
arms. In less than two days every man in the town and parish was a
soldier. Then came the stories of our great sea victories: the glare of
illuminations and bonfires; the general anxiety when the intelligence
first arrived that a battle had been fought, and the general sadness
when it was ascertained that a town’s-man had fallen. When the news of
Duncan’s victory came to the town, a little girl, who had a brother a
sailor, ran more than three miles into the country, to a field in which
her mother was employed in digging potatoes, and falling down at her
feet, had just breath enough left to say, “Mither, mither, the Dutch
are beaten, and Sandy’s safe.” The report of a threatened invasion
knit the people still more firmly together, and they began to hate
the French, not merely as national, but also as personal enemies. And
thus they continued to feel, till at length the battle of Waterloo,
by terminating the war, reduced them to the necessity of seeking, as
before, their enemies at home.

[Sidenote: WHIGGISM OF THE PEOPLE.]

For more than twenty years the words Whig and Tory had well-nigh gone
out; and the younger town’s-men were for some time rather doubtful
about their meaning. At length, however, they learned that _the Whigs_
meant the people, and _the Tories_ those who wished to live by them,
and yet call them names. The town’s-people, therefore, became Whigs
to a man, execrated the Holy Alliance and the massacre at Manchester,
drank healths to Queen Caroline and Henry Brougham; and though they
petitioned against Catholic emancipation--for, like most Scotch folks,
they had too thorough a respect for their grandfathers to be wholly
consistent--they were yet shrewd enough to inquire whether any one had
ever boasted of his country because the great statesmen opposed to that
measure were his countrymen. The Reform Bill, however, set them all
right again, by turning them full in the wake of their old leaders; and
yet, no sooner was Whiggism intrusted with the keys of office, than
they began to make discoveries which had the effect of considerably
modifying the tone of their politics. They began to discover--will it
be believed?--that all men are not born equal, and that there exists an
aristocracy in the very economy of nature. It was not merely the choice
of his countrymen that made Washington a great general, or Franklin
a profound statesman. They have also begun to discover, that a good
Whig may be a bad man; nay, that one may be at once Whig and Tory--a
Tory to his servants and dependants, a Whig to his superiors and his
country. For my own part, I am a Whig--a born Whig; but no similarity
of political principle will ever lead me to put any confidence in
the man to whom I could not intrust my private concerns; and as for
the Whiggism that horsewhipped the poor woman who was picking a few
withered sticks out of its hedge, it may wear the laurel leaf and the
blue ribbon in any way it pleases, but I assure it--it won’t be of my
party.

_Sanson & Co., Printers, Edinburgh._

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Chiefly between the years 1829 and 1832, inclusive. A few of the
paragraphs were, however, introduced at a later time.

[2] _Cromba_, _i.e._, crooked bay.

[3] Two ancient farms in the neighbourhood bear the names of Meikle and
Little _Farness_, and a third that of _Eathie_.

[4] Since, however, blown down during a storm, and broken into three
pieces.

[5] See Burns’s Halloween.

[6] The resemblance between the inventions of Sir Thomas as described
in the _Jewel_, and of the Marquis as intimated in the _Century_, is
singularly close. The following passages, selected chiefly for their
brevity as specimens, may serve to show how very much the minds that
produced them must have been of a piece.

    FROM THE JEWEL.                       FROM THE CENTURY.

    “In the denominations of the          “To write
    fixed stars, the Universal            by a knotted silk string, so
    Language affordeth the most           that every knot shall signify
    significant way imaginary; for        any letter, with a comma,
    by the single word alone which        full point, or interrogation,
    represents the star you shall         and as legible as with pen
    know the magnitude, together with     and ink upon white paper. The
    the longitude and latitude, both      like by the smell, by the
    in degrees and minutes, of the        taste, by the touch, by these
    star that is expressed by it.         three senses, as perfectly,
                                          distinctly, and unconfusedly,
                                          yea, as readily as by the
    “Such as will hearken to my           sight.
    instructions, if some strange
    word be proposed to them, whereof     “How to compose
    there are many thousands of           an universal character,
    millions devisable by the wit         methodical, and easy to be
    of man, which never hitherto by       written, yet intelligible
    any breathing have been uttered,      in any language; so that
    shall be able, although they know     if an Englishman write it
    not the ultimate signification        in English, a Frenchman,
    thereof, to declare what part         Italian, Spaniard, Irish,
    of speech it is; or if a noun,        Welch, being scholars, yea,
    to what predicament or class it       Grecian or Hebritan, shall
    is to be reduced; whether it be       as perfectly understand
    the sign of a real or natural         it in their own tongue,
    thing, or somewhat concerning         distinguishing the verbs
    mechanic trades in their tools        from the nouns, the numbers,
    or terms; or if real, whether         tenses, and cases, as
    natural or artificial, complete       properly expressed in their
    or incomplete.”                       own language as it was in
                                          English.”

[7]

    For why? because the good old rule
      Sufficeth them, the simple plan,
    That they should take who have the power,
      And they should keep who can.

[8] Sea-nettle.

[9] Cowper has said quite as much, and rather more, in his “TRUTH.”

    “Let heathen worthies, whose exalted mind
    Left sensuality and dross behind,
    Possess for me their undisputed lot,
    And take unenvied the reward they sought.”

[10] It was abolished by the late Rev. Mr. Stewart, in the second year
of his incumbency (1826.)

[11] These fine couplets were written, I have since learned, by
Henry Mackenzie, “The Man of Feeling,” an attached friend of the
deceased. Mackenzie has also dedicated to his memory one of his most
characteristic _Mirrors_--the ninetieth. After making a few well-turned
remarks on the unhappiness of living too long, “I have been led to
these reflections,” we find him saying, “by a loss I lately sustained
in the sudden and unlooked-for death of a friend, to whom, from my
earliest youth, I have been attached by every tie of the most tender
affection. Such was the confidence that subsisted between us, that in
his bosom I was wont to repose every thought of my mind, and every
weakness of my heart. In framing him, nature seemed to have thrown
together a variety of opposite qualities, which, happily tempering
each other, formed one of the most engaging characters I have ever
known;--an elevation of mind, a manly firmness, a Castilian sense of
honour, accompanied with a bewitching sweetness, proceeding from the
most delicate attention to the feelings of others. In his manners,
simple and unassuming; in the company of strangers, modest to a degree
of bashfulness; yet possessing a fund of knowledge and an extent of
ability, which might have adorned the most exalted station. But it was
in the small circle of his friends that he appeared to the highest
advantage; there the native benignity of his soul diffused, as it were,
a kindly influence on all around him, while his conversation never
failed at once to amuse and instruct.

“Not many months ago, I paid him a visit at his seat in a remote part
of the kingdom. I found him engaged in embellishing a place, of which
I had often heard him talk with rapture, and the beauties of which
I found his partiality had not exaggerated. He showed me all the
improvements he had made, and pointed out those he had meant to make.
He told me all his schemes and all his projects. And while I live I
must ever retain a warm remembrance of the pleasure I then enjoyed in
his society.

“The day I meant to set out on my return he was seized with a slight
indisposition, which he seemed to think somewhat serious; and indeed,
if he had a weakness, it consisted in rather too great anxiety with
regard to his health. I remained with him till he thought himself
almost perfectly recovered; and, in order to avoid the unpleasant
ceremony of taking leave, I resolved to steal away early in the
morning, before any of the family should be astir. About daybreak I got
up and let myself out. At the door I found an old and favourite dog of
my friend’s, who immediately came and fawned upon me. He walked with
me through the park. At the gate he stopped and looked up wistfully
in my face; and though I do not well know how to account for it, I
felt at that moment, when I parted with the faithful animal, a degree
of tenderness, joined with a melancholy so pleasing, that I had no
inclination to check it. In that frame of mind I walked on (for I
had ordered my horses to wait me at the first stage) till I reached
the summit of a hill, which I knew commanded the last view I should
have of the habitation of my friend. I turned to look back on the
delightful scene. As I looked, the idea of the owner came full into
my mind; and while I contemplated his many virtues, and numberless
amiable qualities, the suggestion arose, if he should be cut off, what
an irreparable loss it would be to his family, to his friends, and to
society. In vain I endeavoured to combat this melancholy foreboding by
reflecting on the uncommon vigour of his constitution, and the fair
prospect it afforded of his enjoying many days. The impression still
recurred, and it was some considerable time before I had strength of
mind sufficient to conquer it.

“I had not been long at home, when I received accounts of his being
attacked by a violent distemper; and, in a few days after, I learned it
had put an end to his life.”

Transcriber’s Notes

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected. Variations
in hyphenation and accents have been standardised but all other
spelling and punctuation remains unchanged.

Italics are represented thus _italic_, bold thus =bold=, and
superscripts thus y^{n}.