Part 9

I wonder why Americans, as soon as they borrow the Englishman's clothes, must add his worst traits to their own faults. "That kind of American," a Londoner on board said to us, "has all the arrogance and insolence of a lord combined with the ignorance and snobbishness of a cad." He was right. Of all the men who rent the great deer forests of Scotland, none are such tyrants as the American millionaires who come over, as Mr. Macdonell probably will next summer, for the shooting. More than one Scotchman we met told us so plainly. There is a famous case where the cruelty of an American sportsman, who plays the laird in the Highlands, so far outdid that of the real laird that the latter came forward to defend his people against it! Now that the war of emancipation is being fought from one end of Great Britain to the other, it is to our shame that there are Americans who uphold the oppressors. One might think we struggled for freedom at home only to strive against it abroad. Mrs. Stowe could write "Uncle Tom's Cabin" on behalf of slaves in the United States; in Great Britain she saw only the nobility and benevolence of the slave-driver. From the plantations of the South there never rose such a cry of sorrow and despair as that which rang through the glens and straths of Sutherland when men were driven to the sea to make room for sheep. And yet to Mrs. Stowe this inhuman chase was but a sublime instance of the benevolent employment of superior wealth and power in shortening the struggle of advancing civilization, and elevating in a few years a whole community to a point of education and material prosperity which, unassisted, they might never have attained. You might as well call the slavery of negroes a sublime instance of the power of traders to shorten the natural course of human development, since if left to themselves the blacks could not have advanced beyond the savage state in which they were found. I fear the American love for a lord is not exaggerated, if even Mrs. Stowe could be blinded by it.

There was little to break the monotony of the journey except the Macdonells. "If the sun only shone," Mrs. Macdonell explained, "there would be the lights and shadows." As it was, however, water and sky and shores were of uniform grayness. Now and then we passed the ruins of an old castle. At a place whose name I have forgotten the boat stopped that everybody might walk a mile or more to see a water-fall. It may have been our loss that we did not go with the rest; certainly a party of Frenchmen on their return declared it _une cascade vraiment charmante_. At Fort Augustus the boat was three-quarters of an hour getting through the locks, and in the mean time enterprising tourists climbed the tower of the new Benedictine monastery, which stands where was once the old fort. We went instead to the telegraph office, and secured a room in Inverness, and gave the landlord an order for the letters we hoped were waiting for us at the bank. Young Benedictines in black gowns, like students of the Propaganda on the Pincian, were walking out two by two.

These were the day's excitements.

As we neared Inverness, Mr. Macdonell was again on deck. "I always go to the Caledonian Hotel in Inverness," he told us. "What I like is to stay at the best hotels, where I meet the society of England and Scotland--the real society. There's the Royal Hotel in Edinburgh; it suits me because you are sure to find it full of good English and Scotch society. I must always have the best society. Besides, they're very good hotels, both of them. In our country we boast of the products of the Chesapeake; but we have nothing so delicious, nothing so delicate, as the fresh herring they will serve you for breakfast at the Caledonian."

As we drove from the boat to

INVERNESS,

we passed the stage of the Caledonian Hotel. In it sat the Macdonell with a family of Jews, and an Englishman and his daughter who, throughout the journey, had shown themselves so superior, we should not wonder some day to find them behind the counter of an Oxford Street store. They were all on their way to mingle with the real society of England and Scotland.

It probably was a pleasure to Mr. Macdonell to find that the tobacconist next to the hotel, and the dry goods merchant but a few doors off, were his fellow-clansmen. In fact, every other banner--I mean sign--flung out on the outward walls of Inverness bore his name.

Our social pretensions were more modest. We went to the Station Hotel for comfort, and trusted to luck for society. In the great hall of the hotel we first realized the full extent of our shabbiness. Our knapsacks shrank out of sight of porters and maids. The proprietor was too busy distributing rooms to decently dressed travellers--the most gorgeous of whom gloried in his allegiance to the _Police Gazette_ of New York--to notice us. But as he paused for a moment, J---- asked if there were any letters for Mr. Pennell. "Where is Mr. Pennell?" asked the proprietor, with interest. When he heard where he was, then came the transformation scene. Two gentlemen in dress-coats, each carrying a diminutive knapsack preceded us up the stairs; two gentlemen in dress-coats, each carrying a huge bundle of letters, the accumulation of weeks, followed us. We felt like a lord mayor's procession, but we did not look it. We were led into the best bedroom, but before the door was closed we thought we saw disappointment in the eyes of the proprietor. We at once consulted the tariff on the wall to learn what it cost to send a telegram in Scotland. We can only say that it did not prove very expensive, that the hotel was very good, that everybody was very attentive, and that the society may have been the best for all we knew.

The next morning we started on foot, all our baggage on our backs, to the disgust of the gentlemen in dress-coats. We walked at a good pace out of the town, and on the broad, smooth road that leads to Culloden. The country was quiet and pastoral, and the way, in places, pleasant and shady. It was a striking contrast to the western wilderness from which we had just come.

But twenty miles lay between us and Nairn; like Dr. Johnson, we were going out of our way to see Culloden Moor and Cawdor Castle. The road was too good. It set us thinking again of a tricycle on which we could travel at stimulating speed over country monotonous in its prosperous prettiness. Walking meant steady trudging all day, and a hasty glance at castle and moor when we came to them.

It was unbearable. Weeks of experience had taught us all the drudgery of tramping, none of its supposed delights. We asked people we met if there was a cycle agent in Inverness. No one knew. Then the trees by the road-side gave place to open country with waving wheat-fields; and oh, how hot it grew! Peddlers whom we had passed--the only people, besides ourselves, we saw tramping in Scotland--overtook and passed us. Two men went by on bicycles. How cool and comfortable they looked! How hot and dirty and dusty and miserable we felt! This was too much.

"Confound this walking! If ever I walk again!" said J----; and, almost within sight of Culloden, he turned. After looking over to where I knew the moor must be, I meekly followed him, and in silence we went back to Inverness.

The roads about here being particularly good, there was not a cycle agent in the town. There was no getting a machine for love or money. It was now too late to attempt to walk to Nairn. There was nothing to do but to train it. In the interval of waiting we saw Inverness. It is a pretty city, with a wide river flowing through it, many bridges--one with a great stone archway--a new cathedral, and a battlemented, turreted castle high above the river. Clothes dry on the green bank that slopes down to the water's edge, women in white caps go and come through the streets, which, with their gabled houses, show that curious French feeling found all over the East of Scotland, and even the costumes of the women help to carry it out.

In Inverness, and in fact all the way to Fraserburgh, J---- made many notes and sketches, the best, he says, of our journey. All but a few have been lost, and so the world will never enjoy them. This is sad, but true. If any one should happen to find the sketch-book he need not return it in hopes of a reward. J---- has no use for it at this moment. In fact, the finder had better keep it; it may be valuable some day.

When the train reached

NAIRN,

"Well," said J----, in triumph, "we've got through a day's work in half an hour;" and we dropped our knapsacks at the hotel and set out for Cawdor, which is five miles from the town.

The day so far had been fine. Once we were on the road again the sun went behind the clouds, mist fell over the country before us. A lady in a dog-cart warned us of rain, and offered us a lift. To make up for the morning's weakness, we refused heroically. There was nothing by the way but broad fields of grain, which seemed broader after the wretched little patches of Skye and Harris, and large farm-houses, larger by comparison with Hebridean hovels. When the roofs and gables of the castle came in sight, had we had our Macbeth at our fingers' ends, I have no doubt we might have made an appropriate quotation. A long fence separated two fields; on each post sat a solemn rook, and hundreds more made black the near grass. But we did not call them birds of ill-omen and speak of the past as we should have done; J---- only said it was right to find so many cawing things at the gate of Cawdor Castle.

I wish that we had found nothing worse. Just as we reached it the mist turned to heavy rain. This is the depressing side of sight-seeing in Scotland; you must take your holidays in water-proofs. J---- made several sketches, for the rain poured in such torrents our stay was long. We stood under the old gate-way and at the window of the porter's lodge. The sketches were very charming, very beautiful, but they are lost! We walked about in the rain and looked at the castle from every side. But as everybody who has travelled in Scotland has described Cawdor, there is no special reason why I should do it again. The sketches would have been original.

The most provoking part of it was that we had scarce left the castle a mile behind when the rain became mist again; at the third mile-stone we were once more in a dry world.

Boswell called Nairn "a miserable place." Dr. Johnson said next to nothing about it. Perhaps the people laughed at them as they did at us. We thought their manners miserable, though their town now is decent enough. It is long and narrow, stretching from the railway-station to the sea. After the hotels and shops, we came to the fishermen's quarter. The houses were mostly new; a few turned old gables and chimneys to the street. Women in white caps, with great baskets on their backs, strode homeward in the twilight. Everywhere brown nets were spread out to dry, boats lay along the sands, beyond was the sea, and the smell of the fish was over it all.

The next morning we learned from the maid that Macbeth's blasted heath was but a few miles from Nairn; all the theatricals went there, she said. We made a brave start; but bravery gave out with the first mile. Walking was even more unbearable than it had been the day before. There could be nothing more depressing than to walk on a public highway through a well-cultivated country under a hot sun. Already, when we came to the near village of Auldearn, we had outwalked interest in everything but our journey's end. We would not go an extra step for the monuments the guide-book directs the tourist to see, though the graveyard was within sight of the road.

Macbeth seems to have shared the fate of prophets in their own country. We asked a man passing with a goat the distance to Macbeth's Hill, as it is called on the map. He didna know, he answered. But presently he ran after us. Was the gentleman we spoke of a farmer? Another man, however, knew all about it. He had never been to the top of the hill; he had been told there were trees up there, and that it wasn't different from the other hills around. And yet he had heard people came great distances to see it. He supposed we had travelled far just to go up the hill. He knew from our talk, many words of which he couldna understand, that we were no from this part of the country. But then sometimes he couldna understand the broad Scotch of the people in Aberdeenshire. There were some people hereabouts who could talk only Gaelic. They had been turned off the Western Islands, and had settled here years ago, but they still talked only the Gaelic.

He went our way for half a mile or less, and he walked with us. His clothes were ragged, his feet bare, and over his shoulders was slung a small bundle done up in a red handkerchief. In the last three years, he said, he had had but two or three days' work. Work was hard to get. Here rents were high, farmers complained, and this year the crops were ruined because of the long drought. He did think at times of going to America. He had a sister who had gone to live in Pittsburg. It might be a good thing. There are Scotchmen who have done well in Pittsburg. He left us with minute directions. The hill, though not far from the road, which now went between pine woods and heather, could not be seen from it. We came to the point at which we should have turned to the blasted heath.

"It's a blasted nuisance," J---- said, and we kept straight on to the nearest railway-station.

This was Brodie. The porters told us there was a fine castle within a ten minutes' walk, and a train for Elgin in fifteen minutes. We waited for the train.

We were so tired, so disgusted, that everything put us out of patience. Even a small boy who had walked with us earlier in the morning to show us the way, simply by stopping when we stopped and starting when we started, had driven us almost frantic. I mention this to show how utterly wearisome a walking tour through beautiful country can be.

At the town of

ELGIN

we were in the humor to moralize on modern degeneracy among the ruins. A distillery is now the near neighbor of the cathedral. Below the broken walls, still rich with beautiful carving, new and old gravestones, as at Iona, stand side by side. In nave and transepts knights lie on old tombstones, under canopies carved with leaves and flowers; here and there in the graveyard without are moss-grown slabs with the death's-head and graceful lettering of the seventeenth century; near by are ugly blocks from the modern stone-mason. The guide-book quotes some of the old inscriptions; but it omits one of late date, which should, however, receive the greatest honor--that of the man who cared for the ruins with reverence and love until the Government took them in charge. These ruins are very beautiful. Indeed, nowhere does the religious vandalism of the past seem more monstrous than in Scotland. The Government official asked us to write our names in the Visitors' Book; he made it seem a compliment by saying that it was not everybody's name he wanted. We thought him a man of much greater intelligence than the Glasgow verger. He could see, he said, that J---- knew something about cathedrals and architecture.

We found nothing else of interest in Elgin. It had a prosperous look, and we saw not a trace of the old timbered houses with projecting upper stories of which Dr. Johnson writes. The remainder of our stay we spent in a restaurant near the station, where we talked politics with a farmer. He lectured us on free-trade. Scotch farmers cry for protection, he said, but they don't know what it means. Free-trade is good for the bulk of the people, and what would protection do for the farmer? Nothing! If he got higher prices, the landlord would say, Now you can afford to pay me higher rent, and he would pocket the few shillings' difference.

We talked with many other farmers in the east of Scotland. Sometimes we journeyed with them in railway-carriages; sometimes we breakfasted and dined with them in hotels. They all had much to say about protection and free-trade, and we found that Henry George had been among them. Their ideas of his doctrine of the nationalization of the land were at times curious and original. I remember a farmer from Aberdeenshire who told us that he believed in it thoroughly, and then explained that it would give each man permission, if he had money enough, to buy out his landlord.

After our lunch at Elgin we again got through a day's work in less than an hour. We went by train to

BUCKIE,

a place of which we had never heard before that afternoon. How J---- happened to buy tickets for it I cannot explain, since he never made it quite clear to me. We found it a large and apparently thriving fishing town, with one long line of houses low on the shore, another above on the hill, and a very good hotel, the name of which I am not sure we knew at the time; certainly we do not remember it now.

It was at Buckie that J---- made several of the best sketches in the lost sketch-book in the evening as we watched the boats sail silently out from the harbor. The sun had just set. The red light of the after-glow shone upon the water. Against it, here and there, the brown sails stood out in strong relief. Other boats lay at anchor in the cool gray of the harbor.

In the morning we made a new start on foot. Now and then, for a short distance, the road went inland across treeless, cultivated country; but the greater part of the time it lay near the sea, and kept wandering in and out of little fishing villages, in each of which the lost sketch-book came into play. They were all much alike; there was usually the harbor, where the fishing-boats were moored, some with brown sails hung out to dry and flapping slowly in the breeze; others with long lines of floats stretched from mast to mast; and as it was not only low tide but near the end of the fishing season, all were drawn up in picturesque masses in the foreground, the light of sea and sky bright and glittering behind them. Carts full of nets, men and women with huge bundles of them on their backs, were always on their way either up or down the hill at whose foot the village nestled; or on the level at its top the nets were spread like great snares, not for birds, but for any one who tried to walk across them. Boxes and barrels of salted fish were piled along the street. In the air was the strong smell of herrings. In every village new houses were being or had just been built, but the soft gray smoke hovering above the roofs toned down their aggressive newness. In their midst was the plain white kirk.

There were so many villages that we could not complain of monotony; and then sometimes, on the stretch of beach beyond, dismantled boats in various stages of decline were pulled up out of reach of the tide. Sometimes on the near links men were playing golf. Once we passed three, each putting his little white ball on a bit of turf. They were very serious about it. "Now to business," we heard one say as we went by. But it grew very hot towards noon, and in the heat our first enthusiasm melted. When Cullen came in sight we were again declaring that nothing would induce us to walk another step.

However, a hearty lunch changed our minds. The truth is, we hated to give in. Though we were quite certain we would never tramp again, we were unwilling to confess our one walk a failure. At the hotel we were told that the road to Banff, our next stopping-place, kept inland, but the landlady thought that to the nearest village at least there was a path by the shore. A man on the outskirts of the town tried to dissuade us from going that way; there was such a brae to be climbed, he said. But there seemed no doubt about the path. When we persisted, he walked back with us to direct us the better, J---- talking to him about the brae as if he had never heard of a hill in his life, the man describing the difficulties before us as if ours was an Alpine expedition. The hill was steep enough. At the top there was no path, but instead a field of tall prickly furze, through which we waded. Oh, the misery of that five minutes' walk! At every step we were stung and pricked by hundreds of points sharper than needles. And after that we skirted wheat and turnip fields, because when we tried to cross them, as we were not sportsmen, there was some one near at hand to stop us. We went up and down ravines, and picked our way through tall grass at the very edge of sheer cliffs. The afternoon was hotter than the morning had been. A warm haze hung over the level stretch of country and the distant hills. The sky seemed to have fallen down upon the sea; there was not a line to mark where it met the water. The few brown-sailed boats looked as if they were forcing their way between, holding up the heavens on their masts.

In one place, on a high rock jutting out into the sea, was a low broken wall of rough masonry, all that is left of Findlater Castle.

There was no use in trying to keep up any longer. Our backs ached, our shoulders were cut; we were hot, dusty, exhausted, and, in a word, at the end of our physical and moral forces. This scramble on the cliffs ended our walking tour.

At Sandend we took the train for Banff; but first we went down to the shore; for Sandend was a picturesque little village, with all its gables turned towards the sea, big black boats on the beach, rocks beyond, and a pretty blue bay of its own. Three artists had left their easels to eat buns out of a brown-paper bag and drink beer out of bottles, under the shade of one of the boats. J----, having already learned the exclusiveness of British artists, took out his sketch-book at a safe distance. He only spoke to them to ask the way to the station. He did not dare to talk about work.

A little farther on we again asked the way, this time of a girl hanging up clothes. J----'s questions and her answers were typical of many conversations, bad for one's temper, that we held on the east coast.

"Where is the railway-station?"

"What station?"

"Where the train comes in."

"There;" and she pointed to a house beyond the village.

"How do you get there?"

"By the road."

"Can you go up by the hill?"

"Yes."

"Which is better?"

"I don't know."

"Which is shorter?"

"Up the hill."

We started up the hill, but there was no path. "There is no path," we said to her.

"No, there's no path."

We came to

BANFF

late in the afternoon, just as the fishing-boats were putting out to sea, one beyond another on the gray water, the farthest but faint specks on the horizon. The best thing about Banff is that in fifteen or twenty minutes you can be out of it and in Macduff. The shore here makes a great curve. On one point is Banff, on the other Macduff; half-way between, a many-arched bridge spans the river Deveron, and close by the big house of the Earl of Fife shows through the trees of his park. High on the hill of Macduff stands the white kirk; it overlooks the town, with its many rows of fishermen's houses, and the harbor, where the black masts rise far above the gray walls, and the fishermen spread out their nets to dry, and the dark-sailed boats are always coming and going, and boys paddle in the twilight. And if you go to the far end of the harbor, where the light-house is, you look to the spires and chimneys and roofs of Banff climbing up their hill-side, and beyond to a shadowy point of land like a pale gray cloud-bank on the water.