Читать книгу My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education - Hugh Miller - Страница 10

"Three stormy nights and stormy days

We tossed upon the raging main;

And long we strove our barque to save,

But all our striving was in vain."—Lowe.

I was born, the first child of this marriage, on the 10th day of October 1802, in the low, long house built by my great-grandfather the buccaneer. My memory awoke early. I have recollections which date several months ere the completion of my third year; but, like those of the golden age of the world, they are chiefly of a mythologic character. I remember, for instance, getting out unobserved one day to my father's little garden, and seeing there a minute duckling covered with soft yellow hair, growing out of the soil by its feet, and beside it a plant that bore as its flowers a crop of little mussel shells of a deep red colour. I know not what prodigy of the vegetable kingdom produced the little duckling; but the plant with the shells must, I think, have been a scarlet runner, and the shells themselves the papilionaceous blossoms. I have a distinct recollection, too—but it belongs to a later period—of seeing my ancestor, old John Feddes the buccaneer, though he must have been dead at the time considerably more than half a century. I had learned to take an interest in his story, as preserved and told in the antique dwelling which he had built more than a hundred years before. To forget a love disappointment, he had set out early in life for the Spanish Main, where, after giving and receiving some hard blows, he succeeded in filling a little bag with dollars and doubloons; and then coming home, he found his old sweetheart a widow, and so much inclined to listen to reason, that she ultimately became his wife. There were some little circumstances in his history which must have laid hold of my imagination; for I used over and over to demand its repetition; and one of my first attempts at a work of art was to scrabble his initials with my fingers, in red paint, on the house-door. One day, when playing all alone at the stair-foot—for the inmates of the house had gone out—something extraordinary had caught my eye on the landing-place above; and looking up, there stood John Feddes—for I somehow instinctively divined that it was none other than he—in the form of a large, tall, very old man, attired in a light-blue greatcoat He seemed to be steadfastly regarding me with apparent complacency; but I was sadly frightened; and for years after, when passing through the dingy, ill-lighted room out of which I inferred he had come, I used to feel not at all sure that I might not tilt against old John in the dark.

I retain vivid recollections of the joy which used to light up the household on my father's arrival; and I remember that I learned to distinguish for myself his sloop when in the offing, by the two slim stripes of white which ran along her sides, and her two square topsails. I have my golden memories, too, of splendid toys that he used to bring home with him—among the rest, of a magnificent four-wheeled waggon of painted tin, drawn by four wooden horses and a string; and of getting it into a quiet corner, immediately on its being delivered over to me, and there breaking up every wheel and horse, and the vehicle itself, into their original bits, until not two of the pieces were left sticking together. Further, I still remember my disappointment at not finding something curious within at least the horses and the wheels; and as unquestionably the main enjoyment derivable from such things is to be had in the breaking of them, I sometimes wonder that our ingenious toymen do not fall upon the way of at once extending their trade, and adding to its philosophy, by putting some of their most brilliant things where nature puts the nut-kernel—inside. I shall advert to but one other recollection of this period. I have a dreamlike memory of a busy time, when men with gold lace on their breasts, and at least one gentleman with golden epaulets on his shoulders, used to call at my father's house, and fill my newly acquired pockets with coppers; and how they wanted, it was said, to bring my father along with them, to help them to sail their great vessel; but he preferred remaining, it was added, with his own little one. A ship of war, under the guidance of an unskilful pilot, had run aground on a shallow flat on the opposite side of the Firth, known as the Inches; and as the flood of a stream tide was at its height at the time, and straightway began to fall off, it was found, after lightening her of her guns and the greater part of her stores, that she still stuck fast. My father, whose sloop had been pressed into the service, and was loaded to the gunwale with the ordnance, had betrayed an unexpected knowledge of the points of a large war-vessel; and the commander, entering into conversation with him, was so impressed by his skill, that he placed his ship under his charge, and had his confidence repaid by seeing her hauled off into deep water in a single tide. Knowing the nature of the bottom—a soft arenaceous mud, which if beat for some time by the foot or hand, resolved itself into a sort of quicksand, half-sludge, half-water, which, when covered by a competent depth of sea, could offer no effectual resistance to a ship's keel—the master had set half the crew to run in a body from side to side, till, by the motion generated in this way, the portion of the bank immediately beneath was beaten soft; and then the other moiety of the men, tugging hard on kedge and haulser, drew the vessel off a few feet at a time, till at length, after not a few repetitions of the process, she floated free. Of course, on a harder bottom the expedient would not have availed; but so struck was the commander by its efficacy and originality, and by the extent of the master's professional resources, that he strongly recommended him to part with his sloop, and enter the navy, where he thought he had influence enough, he said, to get him placed in a proper position. But as the master's previous experience of the service had been of a very disagreeable kind, and as his position, as at once master and owner of the vessel he sailed, was at least an independent one, he declined acting on the advice.

Such are some of my earlier recollections. But there was a time of sterner memories at hand. The kelp trade had not yet attained to the importance which it afterwards acquired, ere it fell before the first approaches of Free Trade; and my father, in collecting a supply for the Leith Glass Works, for which he occasionally acted both as agent and shipmaster, used sometimes to spend whole months amid the Hebrides, sailing from station to station, and purchasing here a few tons and there a few hundredweights, until he had completed his cargo. In his last kelp voyage he had been detained in this way from the close of August till the end of October; and at length, deeply laden, he had threaded his way round Cape Wrath, and through the Pentland and across the Moray Firths, when a severe gale compelled him to seek shelter in the harbour of Peterhead. From that port, on the 9th of November 1807, he wrote my mother the last letter she ever received from him; for on the day after he sailed from it there arose a terrible tempest, in which many seamen perished, and he and his crew were never more heard of. His sloop was last seen by a brother townsman and shipmaster, who, ere the storm came on, had been fortunate enough to secure an asylum for his barque in an English harbour on an exposed portion of the coast. Vessel after vessel had been coming ashore during the day; and the beach was strewed with wrecks and dead bodies; but he had marked his townsman's sloop in the offing from mid-day till near evening, exhausting every nautical shift and expedient to keep aloof from the shore; and at length, as the night was falling, the skill and perseverance exerted seemed successful; for, clearing a formidable headland that had lain on the lee for hours, and was mottled with broken ships and drowned men, the sloop was seen stretching out in a long tack into the open sea. "Miller's seamanship has saved him once more!" said Matheson, the Cromarty skipper, as, quitting his place of outlook, he returned to his cabin; but the night fell tempestuous and wild, and no vestige of the hapless sloop was ever after seen. It was supposed that, heavy laden, and labouring in a mountainous sea, she must have started a plank and foundered. And thus perished—to borrow from the simple eulogium of his seafaring friends, whom I heard long after condoling with my mother—"one of the best sailors that ever sailed the Moray Firth."

The fatal tempest, as it had prevailed chiefly on the eastern coasts of England and the south of Scotland, was represented in the north by but a few bleak, sullen days, in which, with little wind, a heavy ground-swell came rolling in coastwards from the cast, and sent up its surf high against the precipices of the Northern Sutor. There were no forebodings in the master's dwelling; for his Peterhead letter—a brief but hopeful missive—had been just received; and my mother was sitting, on the evening after, beside the household fire, plying the cheerful needle, when the house door, which had been left unfastened, fell open, and I was despatched from her side to shut it. What follows must be regarded as simply the recollection, though a very vivid one, of a boy who had completed his fifth year only a mouth before. Day had not wholly disappeared, but it was fast posting on to night, and a grey haze spread a neutral tint of dimness over every more distant object, but left the nearer ones comparatively distinct, when I saw at the open door, within less than a yard of my breast, as plainly as ever I saw anything, a dissevered hand and arm stretched towards me. Hand and arm were apparently those of a female: they bore a livid and sodden appearance; and directly fronting me, where the body ought to have been, there was only blank, transparent space, through which I could see the dim forms of the objects beyond. I was fearfully startled, and ran shrieking to my mother, telling what I had seen; and the house-girl whom she next sent to shut the door, apparently affected by my terror, also returned frightened, and said that she too had seen the woman's hand; which, however, did not seem to be the case. And finally, my mother going to the door, saw nothing, though she appeared much impressed by the extremeness of my terror and the minuteness of my description. I communicate the story, as it lies fixed in my memory, without attempting to explain it. The supposed apparition may have been merely a momentary affection of the eye, of the nature described by Sir Walter Scott in his "Demonology," and Sir David Brewster in his "Natural Magic." But if so, the affection was one of which I experienced no after-return; and its coincidence, in the case, with the probable time of my father's death, seems at least curious.

There followed a dreary season, on which I still look back in memory, as on a prospect which, sunshiny and sparkling for a time, has become suddenly enveloped in cloud and storm. I remember my mother's long fits of weeping, and the general gloom of the widowed household; and how, after she had sent my two little sisters to bed—for such had been the increase of the family—and her hands were set free for the evening, she used to sit up late at night engaged as a seamstress, in making pieces of dress for such of the neighbours as chose to employ her. My father's new house lay untenanted at the time; and though his sloop had been partially insured, the broker with whom he dealt was, it would seem, on the verge of insolvency, and having raised objections to paying the money, it was long ere any part of it could be realized. And so, with all my mother's industry, the household would have fared out ill, had it not been for the assistance lent her by her two brothers, industrious, hard-working men, who lived with their aged parents, and an unmarried sister, about a bow-shot away, and now not only advanced her money as she needed it, but also took her second child, the elder of my two sisters, a docile little girl of three years, to live with them. I remember I used to go wandering disconsolately about the harbour at this season, to examine the vessels which had come in during the night; and that I oftener than once set my mother a-crying, by asking her why the shipmasters who, when my father was alive, used to stroke my head and slip halfpence into my pockets, never now took any notice of me, or gave me anything? She well knew that the shipmasters—not an ungenerous class of men—had simply failed to recognise their old comrade's child; but the question was only too suggestive, notwithstanding, of both her own loss and mine. I used, too, to climb, day after day, a grassy protuberance of the old coast-line immediately behind my mother's house, that commands a wide reach of the Moray Firth, and to look wistfully out, long after every one else had ceased to hope, for the sloop with the two stripes of white and the two square topsails. But months and years passed by, and the white stripes and the square topsails I never saw.

The antecedents of my father's life impressed me more powerfully during my boyhood than at least aught I acquired at school; and I have submitted them to the reader at considerable length, as not only curious in themselves, but as forming a first chapter in the story of my education. And the following stanzas, written at a time when, in opening manhood, I was sowing my wild oats in verse, may serve to show that they continued to stand out in bold relief on my memory, even after I had grown up:—

"Round Albyn's western shores, a lonely skiff

Is coasting slow:—the adverse winds detain:

And now she rounds secure the dreaded cliff,[1]

Whose horrid ridge beats back the northern main;

And now the whirling Pentland roars in rain

Her stern beneath, for favouring breezes rise;

The green isles fade, whitens the watery plain.

O'er the vexed waves with meteor speed she flies.

Till Moray's distant hills o'er the blue waves arise.

Who guides that vessel's wanderings o'er the wave;

A patient, hardy man, of thoughtful brow;

Serene and warm of heart, and wisely brave,

And sagely skill'd, when gurly breezes blow,

To press through angry waves the adventurous prow.

Age hath not quell'd his strength, nor quench'd desire

Of generous deed, nor chill'd his bosom's glow;

Yet to a better world his hopes aspire.

Ah! this must sure be thee! All hail, my honoured Sire!

Alas! thy latest voyage draws near a close,

For Death broods voiceless in the darkening sky;

Subsides the breeze; the untroubled waves repose;

The scene is peaceful all. Can Death be nigh,

When thus, mute and unarm'd, his vassals lie?

Mark ye that cloud! There toils the imprisoned gale;

E'en now it comes, with voice uplifted high;

Resound the shores, harsh screams the rending sail,

And roars th' amazed wave, and bursts the thunder peal!

Three days the tempest raged; on Scotia's shore

Wreck piled on wreck, and corse o'er corse was thrown;

Her rugged cliffs were red with clotted gore;

Her dark caves echoed back th' expiring moan;

And luckless maidens mourned their lovers gone,

And friendless orphans cried in vain for bread;

And widow'd mothers wandered forth alone;—

Restore, O wave, they cried—restore our dead!

And then the breast they bared, and beat th' unsheltered head.

Of thee, my Sire, what mortal tongue can tell!

No friendly bay thy shattered barque received;

Ev'n when thy dust reposed in ocean cell,

Strange baseless tales of hope thy friends deceived

Which oft they doubted sad, or gay believed.

At length, when deeper, darker, wax'd the gloom,

Hopeless they grieved; but 'twas in vain they grieved:

If God be truth, 'tis sure no voice of doom,

That bids the accepted soul its robes of joy assume."

I had been sent, previous to my father's death, to a dame's school, where I was taught to pronounce my letters to such effect in the old Scottish mode, that still, when I attempt spelling a word aloud, which is not often—for I find the process a perilous one—the aa's and ee's, and uh's and vaus, return upon me and I have to translate them with no little hesitation as I go along, into the more modish sounds. A knowledge of the letters themselves I had already acquired by studying the signposts of the place—rare works of art, that excited my utmost admiration, with jugs, and glasses, and bottles, and ships, and loaves of bread upon them; all of which could, as the artists had intended, be actually recognised. During my sixth year I spelt my way, under the dame, through the Shorter Catechism, the Proverbs, and the New Testament, and then entered upon her highest form, as a member of the Bible class; but all the while the process of acquiring learning had been a dark one, which I slowly mastered, in humble confidence in the awful wisdom of the schoolmistress, not knowing whither it tended, when at once my mind awoke to the meaning of that most delightful of all narratives—the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made before! I actually found out for myself, that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books, and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements. I began by getting into a corner at the dismissal of the school, and there conning over to myself the new-found story of Joseph; nor did one perusal serve; the other Scripture stories followed—in especial, the story of Samson and the Philistines, of David and Goliath, of the prophets Elijah and Elisha; and after these came the New Testament stories and parables. Assisted by my uncles, I began to collect a library in a box of birch-bark about nine inches square, which I found quite large enough to contain a great many immortal works—Jack the Giant-Killer, and Jack and the Bean-Stalk, and the Yellow Dwarf, and Blue Beard, and Sinbad the Sailor, and Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, with several others of resembling character. Those intolerable nuisances the useful-knowledge books had not yet arisen, like tenebrious stars, on the educational horizon, to darken the world, and shed their blighting influence on the opening intellect of the "youth-hood;" and so, from my rudimental books—books that made themselves truly such by their thorough assimilation with the rudimental mind—I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children's books as any of the others. Old Homer wrote admirably for little folk, especially in the Odyssey; a copy of which—in the only true translation extant—for, judging from its surpassing interest, and the wrath of critics, such I hold that of Pope to be—I found in the house of a neighbour. Next came the Iliad; not, however, in a complete copy, but represented by four of the six volumes of Bernard Lintot. With what power, and at how early an age, true genius impresses! I saw, even at this immature period, that no other writer could cast a javelin with half the force of Homer. The missiles went whizzing athwart his pages; and I could see the momentary gleam of the steel, ere it buried itself deep in brass and bull-hide. I next succeeded in discovering for myself a child's book, of not less interest than even the Iliad, which might, I was told, be read on Sabbaths, in a magnificent old edition of the "Pilgrim's Progress," printed on coarse whity-brown paper, and charged with numerous woodcuts, each of which occupied an entire page, that, on principles of economy, bore letter-press on the other side. And such delightful prints as these were! It must have been some such volume that sat for its portrait to Wordsworth, and which he so exquisitely describes as

"Profuse in garniture of wooden cuts,

Strange and uncouth; dire faces, figures dire,

Sharp-knee'd, sharp elbow'd, and lean-ankled too,

With long and ghastly shanks—forms which, once seen,

Could never be forgotten."

In process of time I had devoured, besides these genial works Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Ambrose on Angels, the "judgment chapter" in Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the Adventures of Philip Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. It was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir. Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's Voyages, all the volumes were now absent save the first; and a very tantalizing romance, in four volumes—Mrs. Ratcliff's "Mysteries of Udolpho," was represented by only the earlier two. Small as the collection was, it contained some rare books—among the rest, a curious little volume, entitled "The Miracles of Nature and Art," to which we find Dr. Johnson referring, in one of the dialogues chronicled by Boswell, as scarce even in his day, and which had been published, he said, some time in the seventeenth century by a bookseller whose shop hung perched on Old London Bridge, between sky and water. It contained, too, the only copy I ever saw of the "Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion,"—a work interesting from the circumstance that—though it bore another name on its title-page—it had been translated from the French for a few guineas by poor Goldsmith, in his days of obscure literary drudgery, and exhibited the peculiar excellencies of his style. The collection boasted, besides, of a curious old book, illustrated by very uncouth plates, that detailed the perils and sufferings of an English sailor who had spent his best years of life as a slave in Morocco. It had its volumes of sound theology, too, and of stiff controversy—Flavel's Works, and Henry's Commentary, and Hutchinson on the Lesser Prophets, and a very old treatise on the Revelation, with the title-page away, and blind Jameson's volume on the Hierarchy, with first editions of Naphthali, the Cloud of Witnesses, and the Hind let Loose. But with these solid authors I did not venture to grapple until long after this time. Of the works of fact and incident which it contained, those of the voyagers were my especial favourites. I perused with avidity the voyages of Anson, Drake, Raleigh, Dampier, and Captain Woods Rogers; and my mind became so filled with conceptions of what was to be seen and done in foreign parts, that I wished myself big enough to be a sailor, that I might go and see coral islands and burning mountains, and hunt wild beasts and fight battles. I have already made mention of my two maternal uncles; and referred, at least incidentally, to their mother, as the friend and relative of my fathers aged cousin, and, like her, a great-grand-child of the last curate of Nigg. The curate's youngest daughter had been courted and married by a somewhat wild young farmer, of the clan Ross, but who was known, like the celebrated Highland outlaw, from the colour of his hair, as Roy, or the Red. Donald Roy was the best club-player in the district; and as King James's "Book of Sports" was not deemed a very bad one in the semi-Celtic parish of Nigg, the games in which Donald took part were usually played on the Sabbath. About the time of the Revolution, however, he was laid hold of by strong religious convictions, heralded, say the traditions of the district, by events that approximated in character to the supernatural; and Donald became the subject of a mighty change. There is a phase of the religious character, which in the south of Scotland belongs to the first two ages of Presbytery, but which disappeared ere its third establishment under William of Nassau, that we find strikingly exemplified in the Welches, Pedens, and Cargills of the times of the persecution, and in which a sort of wild machinery of the supernatural was added to the commoner aspects of a living Christianity. The men in whom it was exhibited were seers of visions and dreamers of dreams; and, standing on the very verge of the natural world, they looked far into the world of spirits, and had at times their strange glimpses of the distant and the future. To the north of the Grampians, as if born out of due season, these seers pertain to a later age. They flourished chiefly in the early part of the last century; for it is a not uninstructive fact, that in the religious history of Scotland, the eighteenth century of the Highland and semi-Highland districts of the north corresponded in many of its traits to the seventeenth century of the Saxon-peopled districts of the south; and Donald Roy was one of the most notable of the class. The anecdotes regarding him which still float among the old recollections of Ross-shire, if transferred to Peden or Welch, would be found entirely in character with the strange stories that inlay the biographies of these devoted men, and live so enduringly in the memory of the Scottish people. Living, too, in an age in which, like the Covenanters of a former century, the Highlander still retained his weapons, and knew how to use them, Donald had, like the Patons, Hackstons, and Balfours of the south, his dash of the warlike spirit; and after assisting his minister, previous to the rebellion of 1745, in what was known as the great religious revival of Nigg, he had to assist him, shortly after, in pursuing a band of armed Caterans, that, descending from the hills, swept the parish of its cattle. And coming up with the outlaws in the gorge of a wild Highland glen, no man of his party was more active in the fray that followed than old Donald, or exerted himself to better effect in re-capturing the cattle. I need scarce add, that he was an attached member of the Church of Scotland: but he was not destined to die in her communion.

Donald's minister, John Balfour of Nigg—a man whose memory is still honoured in the north—died in middle life, and an unpopular presentee was obtruded on the people. The policy of Robertson prevailed at the time; Gillespie had been deposed only four years previous, for refusing to assist in the disputed settlement of Inverkeithing; and four of the Nigg Presbytery, overawed by the stringency of the precedent, repaired to the parish church to conduct the settlement of the obnoxious licentiate, and introduce him to the parishioners. They found, however, only an empty building; and, notwithstanding the ominous absence of the people, they were proceeding in shame and sorrow with their work, when a venerable man, far advanced in life, suddenly appeared before them, and, solemnly protesting against the utter mockery of such a proceeding, impressively declared, "that if they settled a man to the walls of that kirk, the blood of the parish of Nigg would be required at their hands." Both Dr. Hetherington and Dr. Merle d'Aubigné record the event; but neither of these accomplished historians seems to have been aware of the peculiar emphasis which a scene that would have been striking in any circumstances derived from the character of the protester—old Donald Roy. The Presbytery, appalled, stopt short in the middle of its work; nor was it resumed till an after day, when, at the command of the Moderate majority of the Church—a command not unaccompanied by significant reference to-the fate of Gillespie—the forced settlement was consummated. Donald, who carried the entire parish with him, continued to cling to the National Church for nearly ten years after, much befriended by one of the most eminent and influential divines of the north—Fraser of Alness—the author of a volume on Sanctification, still regarded as a standard work by Scottish theologians. But as neither the people nor their leader ever entered on any occasion the parish church, or heard the obnoxious presentee, the Presbytery at length refused to tolerate the irregularity by extending to them as before the ordinary Church privileges; and so they were lost to the Establishment, and became Seceders. And in the communion of that portion of the Secession known as the Burghers, Donald died several years after, at a patriarchal old age.

Among his other descendants, he had three grand-daughters, who were left orphans at an early age by the death of both their parents, and whom the old man, on their bereavement, had brought to his dwelling to live with him. They had small portions apiece, derived from his son-in-law, their father, which did not grow smaller under the care of Donald; and as each of the three was married in succession out of his family, he added to all his other kindnesses the gift of a gold ring. They had been brought up under his eye sound in the faith; and Donald's ring had, in each case, a mystic meaning;—they were to regard it, he told them, as the wedding ring of their other Husband, the Head of the Church, and to be faithful spouses to Him in their several households. Nor did the injunction, nor the significant symbol with which it was accompanied, prove idle in the end. They all brought the savour of sincere piety into their families. The grand-daughter with whom the writer was more directly connected, had been courted and married by an honest and industrious but somewhat gay young tradesman, but she proved, under God, the means of his conversion; and their children, of whom eight grew up to be men and women, were reared in decent frugality, and the exercise of honest principles carefully instilled. Her husband's family had, like that of my paternal ancestors, been a seafaring one. His father, after serving for many years on shipboard, passed the latter part of his life as one of the armed boatmen that, during the last century, guarded the coasts in behalf of the revenue; and his only brother, the boatman's son, an adventurous young sailor had engaged in Admiral Vernon's unfortunate expedition, and left his bones under the walls of Carthagena; but he himself pursued the peaceful occupation of a shoemaker, and, in carrying on his trade, usually employed a few journeymen, and kept a few apprentices. In course of time the elder daughters of the family married, and got households of their own; but the two sons, my uncles, remained under the roof of their parents, and at the time when my father perished, they were both in middle life. And, deeming themselves called on to take his place in the work of instruction and discipline, I owed to them much more of my real education than to any of the teachers whose schools I afterwards attended. They both bore a marked individuality of character, and were much the reverse of commonplace or vulgar men.

My elder uncle, James, added to a clear head and much native sagacity, a singularly retentive memory, and great thirst of information. He was a harness-maker, and wrought for the farmers of an extensive district of country; and as he never engaged either journeyman or apprentice, but executed all his work with his own hands, his hours of labour, save that he indulged in a brief pause as the twilight came on, and took a mile's walk or so, were usually protracted from six o'clock in the morning till ten at night. Such incessant occupation left him little time for reading; but he often found some one to read beside him during the day; and in the winter evenings his portable bench used to be brought from his shop at the other end of the dwelling, into the family sitting-room, and placed beside the circle round the hearth, where his brother Alexander, my younger uncle, whose occupation left his evenings free, would read aloud from some interesting volume for the general benefit—placing himself always at the opposite side of the bench, so as to share in the light of the worker. Occasionally the family circle would be widened by the accession of from two to three intelligent neighbours, who would drop in to listen; and then the book, after a space, would be laid aside, in order that its contents might be discussed in conversation. In the summer months Uncle James always spent some time in the country, in looking after and keeping in repair the harness of the farmers for whom he wrought; and during his journeys and twilight walks on these occasions there was not an old castle, or hill-fort, or ancient encampment, or antique ecclesiastical edifice, within twenty miles of the town, which he had not visited and examined over and over again. He was a keen local antiquary; knew a good deal about the architectural styles of the various ages, at a time when these subjects were little studied or known; and possessed more traditionary lore, picked up chiefly in his country journeys, than any man I ever knew. What he once heard he never forgot; and the knowledge which he had acquired he could communicate pleasingly and succinctly, in a style which, had he been a writer of books, instead of merely a reader of them, would have had the merit of being clear and terse, and more laden with meaning than words. From his reputation for sagacity, his advice used to be much sought after by the neighbours in every little difficulty that came their way; and the counsel given was always shrewd and honest. I never knew a man more entirely just in his dealings than Uncle James, or who regarded every species of meanness with a more thorough contempt. I soon learned to bring my story-books to his workshop, and became, in a small way, one of his readers—greatly more, however, as may be supposed, on my own account than his. My books were not yet of the kind which he would have chosen for himself; but he took an interest in my interest; and his explanations of all the hard words saved me the trouble of turning over a dictionary. And when tired of reading, I never failed to find rare delight in his anecdotes and old-world stories, many of which were not to be found in books, and all of which, without apparent effort on his own part, he could render singularly amusing. Of these narratives, the larger part died with him; but a portion of them I succeeded in preserving in a little traditionary work published a few years after his death. I was much a favourite with Uncle James—even more, I am disposed to think, on my father's account than on that of his sister, my mother. My father and he had been close friends for years; and in the vigorous and energetic sailor he had found his beau-idéalof a man.

My Uncle Alexander was of a different cast from his brother both in intellect and temperament; but he was characterized by the same strict integrity; and his religious feelings, though quiet and unobtrusive, were perhaps more deep. James was somewhat of a humorist, and fond of a good joke. Alexander was grave and serious; and never, save on one solitary occasion, did I know him even attempt a jest. On hearing an intelligent but somewhat eccentric neighbour observe, that "all flesh is grass," in a strictly physical sense, seeing that all the flesh of the herbivorous animals is elaborated from vegetation, and all the flesh of the carnivorous animals from that of the herbivorous ones, Uncle Sandy remarked that, knowing, as he did, the piscivorous habits of the Cromarty folk, he should surely make an exception in his generalization, by admitting that in at least one village "all flesh is fish." My uncle had acquired the trade of the cartwright, and was employed in a workshop at Glasgow at the time the first war of the French Revolution broke out; when, moved by some such spirit as possessed his uncle—the victim of Admiral Vernon's unlucky expedition—or Old Donald Roy, when he buckled himself to his Highland broadsword, and set out in pursuit of the Caterans—he entered the navy. And during the eventful period which intervened between the commencement of the war and the peace of 1802, there was little either suffered or achieved by his countrymen in which he had not a share. He sailed with Nelson; witnessed the mutiny at the Nore; fought under Admiral Duncan at Camperdown, and under Sir John Borlase Warren at Loch Swilly; assisted in capturing the Généroux and Guillaume Tell, two French ships of the line; was one of the seamen who, in the Egyptian expedition, were drafted out of Lord Keith's fleet to supply the lack of artillerymen in the army of Sir Ralph Abercromby; had a share in the danger and glory of the landing in Egypt; and fought in the battle of 13th March, and in that which deprived our country of one of her most popular generals. He served, too, at the siege of Alexandria. And then, as he succeeded in procuring his discharge during the short peace of 1802, he returned home with a small sum of hardly-earned prize-money, heartily sick of war and bloodshed. I was asked not long ago by one of his few surviving comrades, whether my uncle had ever told me that their gun was the first landed in Egypt, and the first dragged up the sand-bank immediately over the beach, and how hot it grew under their hands, as, with a rapidity unsurpassed along the line, they poured out in thick succession its iron discharges upon the enemy. I had to reply in the negative. All my uncle's narratives were narratives of what he had seen—not of what he had done; and when, perusing, late in life, one of his favourite works—Dr. Keith's "Signs of the Times"—he came to the chapter in which that excellent writer describes the time of hot naval warfare which immediately followed the breaking out of war, as the period in which the second vial was poured out on the sea, and in which the waters "became as the blood of a dead man, so that every living soul died in the sea," I saw him bend his head in reverence as he remarked, "Prophecy, I find, gives to all our glories but a single verse, and it is a verse of judgment." Uncle Sandy, however, did not urge the peace principles which he had acquired amid scenes of death and carnage, into any extravagant consequences; and on the breaking out, in 1803, of the second war of the Revolution, when Napoleon threatened invasion from Brest and Boulogne, he at once shouldered his musket as a volunteer. He had not his brother's fluency of speech; but his narratives of what he had seen were singularly truthful and graphic; and his descriptions of foreign plants and animals, and of the aspect of the distant regions which he had visited, had all the careful minuteness of those of a Dampier. He had a decided turn for natural history. My collection contains a murex, not unfrequent in the Mediterranean, which he found time enough to transfer, during the heat of the landing in Egypt, from the beach to his pocket; and the first ammonite I ever saw was a specimen, which I still retain, that he brought home with him from one of the Liassic deposits of England.

Early on the Sabbath evenings I used regularly to attend at my uncle's with two of my maternal cousins, boys of about my own age, and latterly with my two sisters, to be catechized, first on the Shorter Catechism, and then on the Mother's Catechism of Willison. On Willison my uncles always cross-examined us, to make sure that we understood the short and simple questions; but, apparently regarding the questions of the Shorter Catechism as seed sown for a future day, they were content with having them well fixed in our memories. There was a Sabbath class taught in the parish church at the time by one of the elders; but Sabbath-schools my uncles regarded as merely compensatory institutions, highly creditable to the teachers, but very discreditable indeed to the parents and relatives of the taught; and so they of course never thought of sending us there. Later in the evening, after a short twilight walk, for which the sedentary occupation of my Uncle James formed an apology, but in which my Uncle Alexander always shared, and which usually led them into solitary woods, or along an unfrequented sea-shore, some of the old divines were read; and I used to take my place in the circle, though, I am afraid, not to much advantage. I occasionally caught a fact, or had my attention arrested for a moment by a simile or metaphor; but the trains of close argument, and the passages of dreary "application," were always lost.