Читать книгу My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education - Hugh Miller - Страница 13

"The verdant rising of the Gallow-hill."

And so I thought a very great deal of his poem, and what I thought I said; and he, on the other hand, evidently regarded me as a lad of extraordinary taste and discernment for my years. There was another mechanic in the neighbourhood—a house-carpenter, who, though not a poet, was deeply read in books of all kinds, from the plays of Farquhar to the sermons of Flavel; and as both his father and grandfather—the latter, by the way, a Porteous-mob man, and the former a personal friend of poor Fergusson the poet—had also been readers and collectors of books, he possessed a whole pressful of tattered, hard-working volumes, some of them very curious ones; and to me he liberally extended, what literary men always value, "the full freedom of the press." But of all my occasional benefactors in this way, by far the greatest was poor old Francie, the retired clerk and supercargo.

Francie was naturally a man of fair talent and active curiosity. Nor was he by any means deficient in acquirement. He wrote and figured well, and knew a good deal about at least the theory of business; and when articled in early life to a Cromarty merchant and shopkeeper, it was with tolerably fair prospects of getting on in the world. He had, however, a certain infirmity of brain, which rendered both talent and acquirement of but little avail, and that began to manifest itself very early. While yet an apprentice, on ascertaining that the way was clear, he used, though grown a tall lad, to bolt out from behind the counter into the middle of a green directly opposite, and there, joining in the sports of some group of youngsters, which the place rarely wanted, he would play out half a game at marbles, or honey-pots, or hy-spy, and, when he saw his master or a customer approaching, bolt back again The thing was not deemed seemly; but Francie, when spoken to on the subject, could speak as sensibly as any young person of his years. He needed relaxation, he used to say, though he never suffered it to interfere with his proper business; and where was there safer relaxation to be found than among innocent children? This, of course, was eminently rational, and even virtuous. And so, when his term of apprenticeship had expired, Francie was despatched, not without hope of success, to Newfoundland—where he had relations extensively engaged in the fishing trade—to serve as one of their clerks. He was found to be a competent clerk; but unluckily there was but little known of the interior of the island at the time; and some of the places most distant from St. John's, such as the Bay and River of Exploits, bore tempting names; and so, after Francie had made many inquiries at the older inhabitants regarding what was to be seen amid the scraggy brushwood and broken rocks of the inner country, a morning came in which he was reported missing at the office; and little else could be learned respecting him, than that at early dawn he had been seen setting out for the woods, provided with staff and knapsack. He returned in about a week, worn out and half-starved. He had not been so successful as he had anticipated, he said, in providing himself by the way with food, and so he had to turn back ere he could reach the point on which he had previously determined; but he was sure he would be happier in his next journey. It was palpably unsafe to suffer him to remain exposed to the temptation of an unexplored country; and as his friends and superiors at St. John's had just laden a vessel with fish for the Italian market during Lent, Francie was despatched with her as supercargo, to look after the sales, in a land of which every footbreadth had been familiar to men for thousands of years, and in which it was supposed he would have no inducement to wander. Francie, however, had read much about Italy; and finding, on landing at Leghorn, that he was within a short distance of Pisa, he left ship and cargo to take care of themselves, and set out on foot to see the famous hanging tower, and the great marble cathedral. And tower and cathedral he did see: but it was meanwhile found that he was not quite suited for a supercargo; and he had shortly after to return to Scotland, where his friends succeeded in establishing him in the capacity of clerk and overseer upon a small property in Forfarshire, which was farmed by the proprietor on what was then the newly introduced modern system. He was acquainted, however, with the classical description of Glammis Castle, in the letters of the poet Gray; and after visiting the castle, he set out to examine the ancient encampment at Ardoch—the Lindum of the Romans. Finally, all hopes of getting him settled at a distance being given up by his friends, he had to fall back upon Cromarty, where he was yet once more appointed to a clerkship. The establishment with which he was now connected was a large hempen manufactory; and it was his chief employment to register the quantities of hemp given out to the spinners, and the number of hanks of yarn into which they had converted it, when given in. He soon, however, began to take long walks; and the old women, with their yarn, would be often found accumulated, ere his return, by tens and dozens at his office-door. At length, after taking a very long walk indeed, for it stretched from near the opening to the head of the Cromarty Firth, a distance of about twenty miles, and included in its survey the antique tower of Kinkell and the old Castle of Craighouse, he was relieved from the duties of his clerkship, and left to pursue his researches undisturbed, on a small annuity, the gift of his friends. He was considerably advanced in life ere I knew him, profoundly grave, and very taciturn, and, though he never discussed politics, a mighty reader of the newspapers. "Oh! this is terrible," I have heard him exclaim, when on one occasion a snow storm had blocked up both the coast and the Highland roads for a week together, and arrested the northward course of the mails—"It is terrible to be left in utter ignorance of the public business of the country!"

Francie, whom every one called Mr. ——to his face, and always Francie when his back was turned, chiefly because it was known he was punctilious on the point, and did not like the more familiar term, used in the winter evenings to be a regular member of the circle that met beside my Uncle James's work-table. And, chiefly through the influence, in the first instance, of my uncles, I was permitted to visit him in his own room—a privilege enjoyed by scarce any one else—and even invited to borrow his books. His room—a dark and melancholy chamber, grey with dust—always contained a number of curious but not very rare things, which he had picked up in his walks—prettily coloured fungi—vegetable monstrosities of the commoner kind, such as "fause craws' nests," and flattened twigs of pine—and with these, as the representatives of another department of natural science, fragments of semi-transparent quartz or of glittering feldspar, and sheets of mica a little above the ordinary size. But the charm of the apartment lay in its books. Francie was a book-fancier, and lacked only the necessary wealth to be in the possession of a very pretty collection. As it was, he had some curious volumes; among others, a first-edition copy of the "Nineteen Years' Travels of William Lithgow," with an ancient woodcut, representing the said William in the background, with his head brushing the skies, and, far in front, two of the tombs which covered the heroes of Ilium, barely tall enough to reach half-way to his knee, and of the length, in proportion to the size of the traveller, of ordinary octavo volumes. He had black-letter books, too, on astrology, and on the planetary properties of vegetables; and an ancient book on medicine, that recommended as a cure for the toothache a bit of the jaw of a suicide, well triturated; and, as an infallible remedy for the falling-sickness, an ounce or two of the brains of a young man, carefully dried over the fire. Better, however, than these, for at least my purpose, he had a tolerably complete collection of the British essayists, from Addison to Mackenzie, with the "Essays" and "Citizen of the World" of Goldsmith; several interesting works of travels and voyages, translated from the French; and translations from the German, of Lavater, Zimmerman, and Klopstock. He had a good many of the minor poets too; and I was enabled to cultivate, mainly from his collection, a tolerably adequate acquaintance with the wits of the reign of Queen Anne. Poor Francie was at bottom a kindly and honest man; but the more intimately one knew him, the more did the weakness and brokenness of his intellect appear. His mind was a labyrinth without a clue, in whose recesses there lay stored up a vast amount of book-knowledge, that could never be found when wanted, and was of no sort of use to himself, or any one else. I got sufficiently into his confidence to be informed, under the seal of strict secrecy, that he contemplated producing a great literary work, whose special character he had not quite determined, but which was to be begun a few years hence. And when death found him, at an age which did not fall far short of the allotted threescore and ten, the great unknown work was still an undefined idea, and had still to be begun.

There were several other branches of my education going on at this time outside the pale of the school, in which, though I succeeded in amusing myself, I was no trifler. The shores of Cromarty are strewed over with water-rolled fragments of the primary rocks, derived chiefly from the west during the ages of the boulder clay; and I soon learned to take a deep interest in sauntering over the various pebble-beds when shaken up by recent storms, and in learning to distinguish their numerous components. But I was sadly in want of a vocabulary; and as, according to Cowper, "the growth of what is excellent is slow," it was not until long after that I bethought me of the obvious enough expedient of representing the various species of simple rocks, by certain numerals, and the compound ones by the numerals representative of each separate component, ranged, as in vulgar fractions, along a medial line, with the figures representative of the prevailing materials of the mass above, and those representative of the materials in less proportions below. Though, however, wholly deficient in the signs proper to represent what I knew, I soon acquired a considerable quickness of eye in distinguishing the various kinds of rock, and tolerably definite conceptions of the generic character of the porphyries, granites, gneisses, quartz-rocks, clay-slates, and mica-schists, which everywhere strewed the beach. In the rocks of mechanical origin I was at this time much less interested; but in individual, as in general history, mineralogy almost always precedes geology. I was fortunate enough to discover, one happy morning, among the lumber and debris of old John Feddes's dark room, an antique-fashioned hammer, which had belonged, my mother told me, to old John himself more than a hundred years before. It was an uncouth sort of implement, with a handle of strong black oak, and a short, compact head, square on the one face and oblong on the other. And though it dealt rather an obtuse blow, the temper was excellent, and the haft firmly set; and I went about with it, breaking into all manner of stones, with great perseverance and success. I found, in a large-grained granite, a few sheets of beautiful black mica, that, when split exceedingly thin, and pasted between slips of mica of the ordinary kind, made admirably-coloured eye-glasses, that converted the landscapes around into richly-toned drawings in sepia; and numerous crystals of garnet embedded in mica-schist, that were, I was sure, identical with the stones set in a little gold brooch, the property of my mother. To this last surmise, however, some of the neighbours to whom I showed my prize demurred. The stones in my mother's brooch were precious stones, they said; whereas what I had found was merely a "stone upon the shore." My friend the cabinet-maker went so far as to say that the specimen was but a mass of plum-pudding stone, and its dark-coloured enclosures simply the currants; but then, on the other hand, Uncle Sandy took my view of the matter: the stone was not plum-pudding stone, he said: he had often seen plum-pudding stone in England, and knew it to be a sort of rough conglomerate of various components; whereas my stone was composed of a finely-grained silvery substance, and the crystals which it contained were, he was sure, gems like those in the brooch, and, so far as he could judge, real garnets. This was a great decision; and, much encouraged in consequence, I soon ascertained that garnets are by no means rare among the pebbles of the Cromarty shore. Nay, so mixed up are they with its sands even—a consequence of the abundance of the mineral among the primary rocks of Ross—that after a heavy surf has beaten the exposed beach of the neighbouring hill, there may be found on it patches of comminuted garnet, from one to three square yards in extent, that resemble, at a little distance, pieces of crimson carpeting, and nearer at hand, sheets of crimson bead-work, and of which almost every point and particle is a gem. From some unexplained circumstance, connected apparently with the specific gravity of the substance, it separates in this style from the general mass, on coasts much beaten by the waves; but the garnets of these curious pavements, though so exceedingly abundant, are in every instance exceedingly minute. I never detected in them a fragment greatly larger than a pin-head; but it was always with much delight that I used to fling myself down on the shore beside some newly-discovered patch, and bethink me, as I passed my fingers along the larger grains, of the heaps of gems in Aladdin's cavern, or of Sinbad's valley of diamonds.

The Hill of Cromarty formed at this time at once my true school and favourite play-ground; and if my master did wink at times harder than master ought, when I was playing truant among its woods or on its shores, it was, I believe, whether he thought so or no, all for the best. My uncle Sandy had, as I have already said, been bred a cartwright; but finding, on his return, after his seven years' service on board a man-of-war, that the place had cartwrights enough for all the employment, he applied himself to the humble but not unremunerative profession of a sawyer, and used often to pitch his saw-pit, in the more genial seasons of the year, among the woods of the hill. I remember, he never failed setting it down in some pretty spot, sheltered from the prevailing winds under the lee of some fern-covered rising ground or some bosky thicket, and always in the near neighbourhood of a spring; and it used to be one of my most delightful exercises to find out for myself among the thick woods, in some holiday journey of exploration, the place of a newly-formed pit. With the saw-pit as my baseline of operations, and secure always of a share in Uncle Sandy's dinner, I used to make excursions of discovery on every side—now among the thicker tracts of wood, which bore among the town-boys, from the twilight gloom that ever rested in their recesses, the name of "the dungeons;" and anon to the precipitous sea-shore, with its wild cliffs and caverns. The Hill of Cromarty is one of a chain belonging to the great Ben Nevis line of elevation; and, though it occurs in a sandstone district, is itself a huge primary mass, upheaved of old from the abyss, and composed chiefly of granitic gneiss and a red splintery horn-stone. It contains also numerous veins and beds of hornblend rock and chlorite-schist, and of a peculiar-looking granite, of which the quartz is white as milk, and the feldspar red as blood. When still wet by the receding tide, these veins and beds seem as if highly polished, and present a beautiful aspect; and it was always with great delight that I used to pick my way among them, hammer in hand, and fill my pockets with specimens.

There was one locality which I in especial loved. No path runs the way. On the one side, an abrupt iron-tinged promontory, so remarkable for its human-like profile, that it seems part of a half-buried sphinx, protrudes into the deep green water. On the other—less prominent, for even at full tide the traveller can wind between its base and the sea—there rises a shattered and ruined precipice, seamed with blood-red ironstone, that retains on its surface the bright metallic gleam, and amid whose piles of loose and fractured rock one may still detect fragments of stalactite. The stalactite is all that remains of a spacious cavern, which once hollowed the precipice, but which, more than a hundred years before, had tumbled down during a thunder-storm, when filled with a flock of sheep, and penned up the poor creatures for ever. The space between these headlands forms an irregular crescent of great height, covered with wood a-top, and amid whose lichened crags, and on whose steep slopes, the hawthorn, and bramble, and wild rasp, and rock strawberry, take root, with many a scraggy shrub and sweet wild flower besides; while along its base lie huge blocks of green hornblend, on a rude pavement of granitic gneiss, traversed at one point, for many yards, by a broad vein of milk-white quartz. The quartz vein formed my central point of attraction in this wild paradise. The white stone, thickly traversed by threads of purple and red, is a beautiful though unworkable rock; and I soon ascertained that it is flanked by a vein of feldspar broader than itself, of a brick-red tint, and the red stone flanked, in turn, by a drab-coloured vein of the same mineral, in which there occur in great abundance masses of a homogeneous mica—mica not existing in lamina, but, if I may use the term, as a sort of micaceous felt. It would almost seem as if some gigantic experimenter of the old world had set himself to separate into their simple mineral components the granitic rocks of the hill, and that the three parallel veins were the results of his labour. Such, however, was not the sort of idea which they at this time suggested to me. I had read in Sir Walter Raleigh's voyage to Guiana, the poetic description of that upper country in which the knight's exploration of the river Corale terminated, and where, amid lovely prospects of rich valleys, and wooded hills, and winding waters, almost every rock bore on its surface the yellow gleam of gold. True, according to the voyager, the precious metal was itself absent. But Sir Walter, on afterwards showing "some of the stones to a Spaniard of the Caraccas, was told by him they were la madre de oro, that is, the mother of gold, and that the mine itself was further in the ground." And though the quartz vein of the Cromarty Hill contained no metal more precious than iron, and but little even of that, it was, I felt sure, the "mother" of something very fine. As for silver, I was pretty certain I had found the "mother" of it, if not, indeed, the precious metal itself, in a cherty boulder, enclosing numerous cubes of rich galena; and occasional masses of iron pyrites gave, as I thought, large promise of gold. But though sometimes asked in humble irony, by the farm-servants who came to load their carts with sea-weed along the Cromarty beach, whether I was "getting siller in the stanes," I was so unlucky as never to be able to answer their question in the affirmative.