Chapter 31

But, alas! for the Odontist! He, the "_Deliciæ generis Humani_," is dead. The best of all the Bishops of Bristol is no more. Mansel had not a tithe of his wit--nor Kaye a tithe of his wisdom. And can it be that we have not yet edited "His Remains!" "Alas! poor Yorick!" If Hamlet could smile even with the skull of the Jester in his hands, whom when a princely boy he had loved, hanging on his neck many a thousand times, why may not we, in our mind's eye seeing that mirthful face "quite chap-fallen," and hearing as if dismally deadened by the dust, the voice that "so often set our table on a roar!" Dr Parr's wig, too, is all out of frizzle; a heavier shot has dishevelled its horsehair than ever was sent from the Shepherd's gun; no more shall it be mistaken for owl a-blink on the mid-day bough, or ptarmigan basking in the sun high up among the regions of the snow. It has vanished, with other lost things, to the Moon; and its image alone remains for the next edition of the celebrated treatise "_De Rebus Deperditis_," a suitable and a welcome frontispiece, transferred thither by the engraver's cunning from the first of those Eight Tomes that might make the Trone tremble, laid on the shoulders of Atlas who threatens to put down the Globe, by the least judicious and the most unmerciful of editors that ever imposed upon the light living the heavy dead--John Johnson, late of Birmingham, Fellow of the Royal Society, and of the Royal College of Physicians, whose practice is duller than that of all Death's doctors, and his prescriptions in that preface unchristianly severe. ODoherty, likewise, has been gathered to his fathers. The Standard-bearer has lowered his colours before the foe who alone is invincible. The Ensign, let us not fear, has been advanced to a company without purchase, in the Celestials; the Adjutant has got a Staff appointment. Tims was lately rumoured to be in a galloping consumption; but the very terms of the report, about one so sedentary, were sufficient to give it the lie. Though puny, he is far from being unwell; and still engaged in polishing tea-spoons and other plated articles, at a rate cheaper than travelling gypsies do horn. Prince Leopold is now King of the Belgians--but we must put an end in the Tent to that portentous snore.

"Arise, awake, or be for ever fallen!"

Ho--ho! gentlemen--so you have had the precaution to sleep in your clothes. The sun, like Maga, is mounting higher and higher in heaven; so let us, we beseech you, to breakfast, and then off to the Moors.

"Substantial breakfast!" by Dugald Dhu, and by Donald Roy, and by Hamish Bhan--heaped up like icebergs round the pole. How nobly stands in the centre that ten-gallon Cask of Glenlivet! Proud is that Round to court his shade. That twenty-pound Salmon lies beneath it even as yesterday he lay beneath the cliff, while a column of light falls from him on that Grouse-Pie. Is not that Ham beautiful in the calm consciousness of his protection? That Tongue mutely eloquent in his praise? Tap him with your knuckles, tenderly as if you loved him--and that with all your heart and soul you do--and is not the response firm as from the trunk of the gnarled oak? He is yet "Virgin of Proserpina"--"by Jove" he is; no wanton lip has ever touched his mouth so chaste; so knock out the bung, and let us hear him gurgle. With diviner music does he fill the pitcher, and with a diviner liquidity of light than did ever Naiad from fount of Helicon or Castaly, pour into classic urn gracefully uplifted by Grecian damsel to her graceful head, and borne away, with a thanksgiving hymn, to her bower in the olive-grove.

All eggs are good eating; and 'tis a vulgar heresy which holds that those laid by sea-fowl have a fishy taste. The egg of the Sew-mew is exceeding sweet; so is that of the Gull. Pleasant is even the yolk of the Cormorant--in the north of England ycleped the Scarth, and in the Lowlands of Scotland the Black Byuter. Try a Black Byuter's egg, my dear boy; for though not newly laid, it has since May been preserved in butter, and is as fresh as a daisy after a shower. Do not be afraid of stumbling on a brace of embryo Black Byuters in the interior of the globe, for by its weight we pronounce it an egg in no peril of parturition. You may now smack your lips, loud as if you were smacking your palms, for that yellow morsel was unknown to Vitellius. Don't crush the shell, but throw it into the Etive, that the Fairies may find it at night, and go dancing in the fragile but buoyant canoe, in fits of small shrill laughter, along with the foam-bells over the ebb-tide Rapids above Connal's raging Ferry.

The salmon is in shivers, and the grouse-pie has vanished like a dream.

"So fades, so languishes, grows dim, and dies, All that this world is proud of!"

Only a goose remains! and would that he too were gone to return no more; for he makes us an old man. No tradition survives in the Glen of the era at which he first flourished. He seems to have belonged to some tribe of the Anseres now extinct; and as for his own single individual self, our senses tell us, in a language not to be misinterpreted, that he must have become defunct in the darkness of antiquity. But nothing can be too old for a devil--so at supper let us rectify him in Cayenne.

Oh! for David Wilkie, or William Simpson (while we send Gibb to bring away yonder Shieling and its cliff), to paint a picture--coloured, if possible, from the life--of the Interior of our airy Pyramid. Door open, and perpendicular canvass walls folded up--that settled but cloudy sky, with here its broad blue fields, and there its broad blue glimpsing glades--this greensward mound in the midst of a wilderness of rock-strewn heather--as much of that one mountain, and as many of those others, as it can be made to hold--that bright bend of the river--a silver bow--and that white-sanded, shelly, shingly shore at Loch-Etive Head, on which a troop of Tritons are "charging with all their chivalry," still driven back and still returning, to the sound of trumpets, of "flutes and soft recorders," from the sea. On the table, all strewn and scattered "in confusion worse confounded," round the Cask, which

--"dilated stands Like Teneriffe or Atlas _unremoved_,"

what "buttery touches" might be given to the

--"reliquias Danaum atque inmitis Achillei!"

Then the camp-beds tidily covered and arranged along their own department of the circle--quaint dresses hanging from loops, all the various apparelling of hunter, shooter, fisher, and forester--rods, baskets, and nets occupying their picturesque division--fowling-pieces, double and single, rejoicing through the oil-smooth brownness of their barrels in the exquisite workmanship of a Manton and a Lancaster--American rifles, with their stocks more richly silver-chased than you could have thought within reach of the arts in that young and prosperous land--duck-guns, whose formidable and fatal length had in Lincolnshire often swept the fens--and on each side of the door, a brass carronade on idle hours to awaken the echoes--sitting erect on their hurdies, deer-hound, greyhound, lurcher, pointer, setter, spaniel, varmint, and though last, not least, O'Bronte watching Christopher with his steadfast eyes, slightly raised his large hanging triangular ears, his Thessalian bull dewlaps betokening keen anxiety to be off and away to the mountain, and with a full view of the white star on his coal-black breast;--

"Plaided and plumed in their tartan array"

our three chosen Highlanders, chosen for their strength and their fleetness from among the prime Children of the Mist--and Tickler the Tall, who keeps growing after threescore and ten like a stripling, and leaves his mark within a few inches of the top of the pole, arrayed in tights of Kendal green, bright from the skylight of the inimitable Vallance or the matchless Williams--green too his vest, and green also his tunic--while a green feather in a green bonnet dances in its airy splendour, and gold button-holes give at once lustre and relief to the glowing verdure (such was Little John, when arrayed in all his glory; to walk behind Robin Hood and Maid Marian, as they glided from tree to tree, in wait for the fallow-deer in merry Sherwood)--North in his Quaker garb--Quaker-like all but in cuffs and flaps, which, when he goes to the Forest, are not--North, with a figure combining in itself all the strength of a William Penn, _sans_ its corpulency, all the agility of a Jem Belcher with far more than a Jem Belcher's bottom--with a face exhibiting in rarest union all the philosophy of a Bacon, the benevolence of a Howard, the wisdom of a Wordsworth, the fire of a Byron, the gnosticity of a John Bee, and the up-to-trappishness combined not only with perfect honesty, but with honour bright, of the Sporting Editor of _Bell's Life in London_--and then, why if Wilkie or Simpson fail in making a GEM of all that, they are not the men of genius we took them for, that is all, and the art must be at a low ebb indeed in these kingdoms.

Well, our Tail has taken wings to itself and flown away with Dugald Dhu and Donald Roy; and we, with Hamish Bhan, with Ponto, Piro, Basta, and O'Bronte, are left by ourselves in the Tent. Before we proceed farther, it may not be much amiss to turn up our little fingers--yestreen we were all a leetle opstropelous--and spermaceti is not a more "sovereign remedy for an inward bruise," than is a hair from the dog's tail that bit you an antidote to any pus that produces rabies in the shape of hydrophobia. Fill up the quaich, Hamish! a caulker of Milbank can harm no man at any hour of the day--at least in the Highlands. Sma' Stell, Hamish--assuredly Sma' Stell!

Ere we start, Hamish, play us a Gathering--and then a Pibroch. "The Campbells are coming" is like a storm from the mountain sweeping Glen-More, that roars beneath the hastening hurricane with all its woods. No earthquake like that which accompanies the trampling of ten thousand men. So, round that shoulder, Hamish--and away for a mile up the Glen--then, turning on your heel, blow till proud might be the mother that bore you; and from the Tent-mouth Christopher will keep smart fire from his Pattereroes, answered by all the echoes. Hamish--indeed

"The dun-deer's hide On swifter foot was never tied--"

for even now as that cloud--rather thunderous in his aspect--settles himself over the Tent--ere five minutes have elapsed--a mile off is the sullen sound of the bagpipe!--music which, if it rouse you not when heard among the mountains, may you henceforth confine yourself to the Jew's harp. Ay, here's a claymore--let us fling away the scabbard--and in upon the front rank of the bayoneted muskets, till the Saxon array reels, or falls just where it has been standing, like a swathe of grass. So swept of old the Highlanders--shepherds and herdsmen--down the wooded cliffs of the pass of Killiecrankie, till Mackay's red-coats lay redder in blood among the heather, or passed away like the lurid fragments of a cloud. "The Campbells are coming"--and we will charge with the heroes in the van. The whole clan is maddening along the Moor--and Maccallum More himself is at their head. But we beseech you, O'Bronte! not to look so like a lion--and to hush in your throat and breast that truly Leonine growl--for after all, 'tis but a bagpipe with ribands

"Streaming like meteors to the troubled air,"

and all our martial enthusiasm has evaporated in--wind.

But let us inspect Brown Bess. Till sixty, we used a single barrel. At seventy we took to a double;--but dang detonators--we stick to the flint. "Flint," says Colonel Hawker, "shoots strongest into the bird." A percussion-gun is quicker, but flint is fast enough; and it does, indeed, argue rather a confusion than a rapidity of ideas, to find fault with lightning for being too slow. With respect to the flash in the pan, it is but a fair warning to ducks, for example, to dive if they can, and get out of the way of mischief. It is giving birds a chance for their lives, and is it not ungenerous to grudge it? When our gun goes to our shoulder, that chance is but small; for with double-barrel Brown Bess, it is but a word and a blow,--the blow first, and long before you could say Jack Robinson, the gorcock plays thud on the heather. But we beg leave to set the question at rest for ever by one single clencher. We have killed fifty birds--grouse--at fifty successive shots--one bird only to the shot. And mind, not mere pouts--cheepers--for we are no chicken-butchers--but all thumpers--cocks and hens as big as their parents, and the parents themselves likewise; not one of which fell _out of bounds_ (to borrow a phrase from the somewhat silly though skilful pastime of pigeon-shooting), except one that suddenly soared half-way up to the moon, and then

"Into such strange vagaries fell As he would dance,"

and tumbled down stone-dead into a loch. Now, what more could have done a detonator in the hands of the devil himself? Satan might have shot as well, perhaps, as Christopher North--better we defy him; and we cannot doubt that his detonator--given to him in a present, we believe, by Joe Manton--is a prime article--one of the best ever manufactured on the percussion system. But what more could he have done? When we had killed our fiftieth bird in style, we put it to the Christian reader, would not the odds have been six to four on the flint? And would not Satan, at the close of the match, ten birds behind perhaps, and with a bag shamefully rich in poor pouts, that would have fallen to the ground had he but thrown salt on their tails, have looked excessively sheepish? True, that in rain or snow the percussion-lock will act, from its detonating power, more correctly than the common flint-lock, which, begging its pardon, will then often not act at all; but that is its only advantage, and we confess a great one, especially in Scotland, where it is a libel on the country to say that it always rains, for it almost as often snows. However, spite of wind and weather, we are faithful to flint; nor shall any newfangled invention, howsoever ingenious, wean us from our First Love.

Let not youthful or middle-aged sportsmen--in whose veins the blood yet gallops, canters, or trots--despise us, Monsieur Vieillard, in whose veins the blood creeps like a wearied pedestrian at twilight hardly able to hobble into the wayside inn--for thus so long preferring the steel pen to the steel barrel (the style of both is equally polished)--our Bramah to our Manton. Those two wild young fellows, Tickler and the Admiral, whose united ages amount to little more than a century and a half, are already slaughtering their way along the mountain-side, the one on Buachaille Etive, and the other on the Black Mount. But we love not to commit murder long before meridian--"gentle lover of Nature" as we are; so, in spite of the scorn of the more passionate sportsman, we shall continue for an hour or two longer inditing, ever and anon lifting our eyes from whitey-brown paper to whitey-blue sky, from memorandum-book to mountain, from ink-bottle to loch, and delight ourselves, and perchance a few thousand others, by a waking-dream description of Glen-Etive.

'Tis a vast Glen. Not one single human dwelling anywhere speck-like on the river-winding plain--or nest-like among the brushwood knolls--or rock-like among the fractured cliffs far up on the mountain region do our eyes behold, eager as they are to discover some symptom of life. Two houses we know to be in the solitude--ay, two--one of them near the head of the Loch, and the other near the head of the Glen--but both distant from this our Tent, which is pitched between, in the very heart of the Moor. We were mistaken in saying that Dalness is invisible--for yonder it looms in a sullen light, and before we have finished the sentence, may have again sunk into the moor. Ay, it is gone--for lights and shadows coming and going, we know not whence nor whither, here travel all day long--the sole tenants--very ghostlike--and seemingly in their shiftings imbued with a sort of dim uncertain life. How far off from our Tent may be the Loch? Miles--and silently as snow are seen to break the waves along the shore, while beyond them hangs an aerial haze, the great blue water. How far off from our Tent may be the mountains at the head of the Glen? Miles--for though that speck in the sky into which they upheave their mighty altitudes, be doubtless an eagle, we cannot hear its cry. What giants are these right opposite our Pyramid?--Co--grim chieftain--and his Tail. What an assemblage of thunder-riven cliffs! This is what may be well called--Nature on a grand scale. And then, how simple! We begin to feel ourselves--in spite of all we can do to support our dignity by our pride--a mighty small and insignificant personage. We are about six feet high--and everybody around us about four thousand. Yes, that is the Four Thousand Feet Club! We had no idea that in any situation we could be such dwindled dwarfs, such perfect pigmies. Our Tent is about as big as a fir-cone--and Christopher North an insect!

What a wild world of clouds all over that vast central wilderness of Northern Argyllshire lying between Cruachan and Melnatorran--Corryfinuarach and Ben Slarive, a prodigious land! defying description, and in memory resembling not realities, but like fragments of tremendous dreams. Is it a sterile region? Very. In places nothing but stones. Not a blade of grass--not a bent of heather--not even moss. And so they go shouldering up into the sky--enormous masses--huger than churches or ships. And sometimes not unlike such and other structures--all huddled together--yet never jostling, so far as we have seen; and though often overhanging, as if the wind might blow them over with a puff, steadfast in the storm that seems rather to be an earthquake, and moving not an hair's-breadth, while all the shingly sides of the mountains--you know shingle--with an inconstant clatter--hurry-skurry--seem to be breaking up into debris.

Is that the character of the whole region? No, you darling; it has vales on vales of emerald, and mountains on mountains of amethyst, and streams on streams of silver; and, so help us Heaven!--for with these eyes we have seen them, a thousand and a thousand times--at sunrise and sunset, rivers on rivers of gold. What kind of climate? All kinds, and all kinds at once--not merely during the same season, but the same hour. Suppose it three o'clock of a summer afternoon--you have but to choose your weather. Do you desire a close sultry breathless gloom? You have it in the stifling dens of Ben-An[=e]a, where lions might breed. A breezy coolness, with a sprinkling of rain? Then open your vest to the green light in the dewy vales of Benl[=u]ra. Lochs look lovely in mist, and so thinks the rainbow--then away with you ere the rainbow fade--away, we beseech you, to the wild shores of Lochan-a-L[=u]rich. But you would rather see a storm, and hear some Highland thunder? There is one at this moment on Unimore, and Cruachl[=i]a growls to Meallanuir, till the cataracts of Glashgour are dumb as the dry rocks of Craig-te[=o]nan.

In those regions we were, when a boy, initiated into the highest mysteries of the Highlands. No guide dogged our steps--as well might a red-deer have asked a cur to show him the Forest of Braemar, or Beniglo--an eagle where best to build his eyrie have advised with the Glasgow Gander. O heavens! how we were bewildered among the vast objects that fed that delirium of our boyhood! We dimly recognised faces of cliffs wearing dreadful frowns; blind though they looked, they seemed sensible of our approach; and we heard one horrid monster mutter, "What brings thee here, infatuated Pech?--begone!" At his impotent malice we could not choose but smile, and shook our staff at the blockhead, as since at many a greater blockhead even than he have we shook--and more than shook our Crutch. But as through "pastures green and quiet waters by," we pursued, from sunrise to sunset, our uncompanioned way, some sweet spot, surrounded by heather, and shaded by fern, would woo us to lie down on its bosom, and enjoy a visionary sleep! Then it was that the mountains confidentially told us their names--and we got them all by heart; for each name characterised its owner by some of his peculiar and prominent qualities--as if they had been one and all christened by poets baptising them from a font

"Translucent, pure, With touch ethereal of heaven's fiery rod."

O! happy pastor of a peaceful flock! Thou hast long gone to thy reward! One--two--three--four successors hast thou had in that manse--(now it too has been taken down and the plough gone over it)--and they all did their duty; yet still is thy memory fragrant in the glen; for deeds like thine "smell sweet, and blossom in the dust!" Under heaven, we owed our life to thy care of us in a brain fever. Sometimes thy face would grow grave, never angry, at our sallies--follies--call them what you will, but not sins. And methinks we hear the mild old man somewhat mournfully saying, "Mad boy! out of gladness often cometh grief--out of mirth misery; but our prayers, when thou leavest us, shall be, that never, never may such be thy fate!" Were those prayers heard in heaven and granted on earth? We ask our heart in awe, but its depths are silent, and make no response.