Chapter 43

Away he flies, and he is humming a tune. But what's this? A merry-making in the moor? Ay, merry-making; but were you to take part in it, you would find it about the hardest work that ever tried the strength of your spine. 'Tis a party of divot-flaughters. The people in the parish are now digging their peats, and here is a whole household, provident of winter, borrowing fuel from the moss. They are far from coals, and wood is intended by nature for other uses; but fire in peat she dedicated to the hearth, and there it burns all over Scotland, Highland and Lowland, far and near, at many a holy altar. 'Tis the mid-day hour of rest. Some are half asleep, some yet eating, some making a sort of under-voiced, under-hand love. "Mr North! Mr North! Mr North!" is the joyful cry--horny-fists first--downy-fists next--and after heartiest greeting, Master Kitty is installed, enthroned on a knowe, Master of the Ceremonies--and in good time gives them a song. Then "galliards cry a hall, a hall," and hark and lo! preluded by six smacks--three foursome reels! "Sic hirdum-dirdum and sic din," on the sward, to a strathspey frae the fiddle o' auld blin' Hugh Lyndsay, the itinerant musicianer, who was noways particular about the number of his strings, and when one, or even two snapped, used to play away at pretty much of the same tune with redoubled energy and variations. He had the true old Niel-Gow yell, and had he played on for ever, folk would have danced on for ever till they had all, one after the other, dropped down dead. What steps!

"Who will try me," cries Kit, "at loup-the-barrows?" "I will," quoth Souple Tam. The barrows are laid--how many side by side we fear to say--for we have become sensitive on our veracity--on a beautiful piece of springy turf, an inclined plane with length sufficient for a run; and while old and young line both sides of the lane near the loup, stript to the sark and the breeks, Souple Tam, as he fondly thinks, shows the way to win, and clears them all like a frog or a roebuck. "Clear the way, clear the way for the callant, Kit's comin!" cries Ebenezer Brackenrigg, the Elder, a douce man now, but a deevil in his youth, and like "a waff o' lichtnin'" past their een, Kit clears the barrows a foot beyond Souple Tam, and at the first fly is declared victor by acclamation. Oh, our unprophetic soul, did the day indeed dawn--many long years after this our earliest great conquest yet traditional in the parish--that ere nightfall witnessed our defeat by--a tailor! The Flying Tailor of Ettrick--the Lying Shepherd thereof--would they had never been born--the one to triumph and the other to record that triumph;--yet let us be just to the powers of our rival--for though all the world knows we were lame when we leapt him, long past our prime, had been wading all day in the Yarrow with some stones-weight in our creel, and allowed him a yard,

"Great must I call him, for he vanquish'd ME."

What a place at night was that Moor! At night! That is a most indeterminate mode of expression, for there are nights of all sorts and sizes, and what kind of a night do we mean? Not a mirk night, for no man ever walked that moor on a mirk night, except one, and he, though blind-fou, was drowned. But a night may be dark without being mirk, with or without stars; and on many such a night have we, but not always alone--who was with us you shall never know--threaded our way with no other clue than that of evolving recollections, originally notices, across that wilderness of labyrinths, fearlessly, yet at times with a beating heart. Our companion had her clue too, one in her pocket, of blue worsted, with which she kept in repair all the stockings belonging to the family, and one in her memory, of green ethereal silk, which, finer far than any spider's web, she let out as she tript along the moor, and on her homeward way she felt, by some spiritual touch, the invisible lines, along which she retript as safely as if they had been moonbeams. During such journeyings we never saw the moor, how then can you expect us to describe it?

But oftener we were alone. Earthquakes abroad are dreadful occurrences, and blot out the obituary. But here they are so gentle that the heedless multitude never feel them, and on hearing you tell of them, they incredulously stare. That moor made no show of religion, but was a Quaker. We had but to stand still for five minutes or so, no easy matter then, for we were more restless than a wave, or to lie down with our ear to the ground, and the spirit was sure to move the old Quaker, who forthwith began to preach and pray and sing Psalms. How he moaned at times as if his heart were breaking! At times, as if some old forgotten sorrow were recalled, how he sighed! Then recovering his self-possession, as if to clear his voice, he gave a hem, and then a short nasty cough like a patient in a consumption. Now all was hush, and you might have supposed he had fallen asleep, for in that hush you heard what seemed an intermitting snore. When all at once, whew, whew, whew, as if he were whistling, accompanied with a strange rushing sound as of diving wings. That was in the air--but instantly after you heard something odder still in the bog. And while wondering, and of your wonder finding no end, the ground, which a moment before had felt firm as a road, began to shrink, and sink, and hesitate, and hurry, and crumble, and mumble all around you, and close up to your very feet--the quagmires gurgling as if choked--and a subterranean voice distinctly articulating Oh! Oh! Oh!

We have heard of people who pretend not to believe in ghosts--geologists who know how the world was created; but will they explain that moor? And how happened it that only by nights and dark nights it was so haunted? Beneath a wakeful moon and unwinking stars it was silent as a frozen sea. You listened then, and heard but the grass growing, and beautiful grass it was, though it was called coarse, and made the sweetest-scented hay. What crowds of bum-bees' bikes--foggies--did the scythe not reveal as it heaped up the heavy swathes--three hundred stone to the acre--by guess,--for there was neither weighing nor measuring there then-a-days, but all was in the lump--and there the rush-roped stacks stood all the winter through, that they might be near the "eerie outlan' cattle," on places where cart-wheel never circled, nor axle-tree creaked--nor ever car of antique make trailed its low load along--for the horse would have been laired. We knew not then at all--and now we but imperfectly know--the cause of the Beautiful. Then we believed the Beautiful to be wholly extern; something we had nothing to do with but to look at, and lo! it shone divinely there! Happy creed if false--for in it, with holiest reverence, we blamelessly adored the stars. There they were in millions as we thought--every one brighter than another, when by chance we happened to fix on any individual among them, that we might look through its face into its heart. All above gloriously glittering, all below a blank. Our body here, our spirit there--how mean our birthplace, our death-home how magnificent! "Fear God and keep his commandments," said a small still voice--and we felt that if He gave us strength to obey that law, we should live for ever beyond all those stars.

But were there no Lochs in our parish? Yea. Four. The Little Loch--the White Loch--the Black Loch--and the Brother Loch. Not a tree on the banks of any one of them--yet he had been a blockhead who called them bare. Had there been any need for trees, Nature would have sown them on hills she so dearly loved. Nor sheep nor cattle were ever heard to complain of those pastures. They bleated and they lowed as cheerily as the moorland birdies sang--and how cheerily that was nobody knew who had not often met the morning on the brae, and shaken hands with her the rosy-fingered like two familiar friends. No want of lown places there, in which the creatures could lie with wool or hair unruffled among surrounding storms. For the hills had been dropt from the hollow of His hand who "tempers the wind to the shorn lamb"--and even high up, where you might see tempest-stricken stones--some of them like pillars--but placed not there by human art--there were cosy bields in wildest weather, and some into which the snow was never known to drift, green all the winter through--perennial nests. Such was the nature of the region where lay our Four Lochs. They were some quarter of a mile--some half mile--and some whole mile--not more--asunder; but there was no great height--and we have a hundred times climbed the highest--from which they could be all seen at once--so cannily were they embosomed, so needed not to be embowered.

The LITTLE LOCH was the rushiest and reediest little rascal that ever rustled, and he was on the very edge of the Moor. That he had fish we all persisted in believing, in spite of all the successless angling of all kinds that from time immemorial had assailed his sullen depths;--but what a place for pow-heads! One continued bank of them--while yet they were but eyes in the spawn--encircled it instead of water-lilies; and at "the season of the year," by throwing in a few stones, you awoke a croaking that would have silenced a rookery. In the early part of the century a pike had been seen basking in the shallows, by eye-measurement about ten feet long--but fortunately he had never been hooked, or the consequences would have been fatal. We have seen the Little Loch alive with wild-ducks; but it was almost impossible by position to get a shot at them--and quite impossible, if you did, to get hold of the slain. Fro himself--the best dog that ever dived--was baffled by the multiplicity of impediments and obstructions--and at last refused to take the water--sat down and howled in spiteful rage. Yet Imagination loved the Little Loch, and so did Hope. We have conquered it in sleep both with rod and gun--the weight of bag and basket has wakened us out of dreams of murder that never were realised--yet once, and once only, in it we caught an eel, which we skinned, and wore the shrivel for many a day round our ankle--nor is it a vain superstition--to preserve it from sprains. We are willing the Little Loch should be drained; but you would have to dig a fearsome trench, for it used to have no bottom. A party of us--six--ascertained that fact, by heaving into it a stone which six-and-thirty schoolboys of this degenerate age could not have lifted from its moss-bed--and though we watched for an hour, not a bubble rose to the surface. It used sometimes to boil like a pot on breathless days, for events happening in foreign countries disturbed the spring, and the torments it suffered thousands of fathoms below, were manifested above in turbulence that would have drowned a school-boy's skiff.

The WHITE LOCH--so called from the silver sand of its shores--had likewise its rushy and reedy bogs; but access to every part of the main body was unimpeded, and you waded into it, gradually deeper and deeper, with such a delightful descent, that up to the arm-pits and then to the chin, you could keep touching the sand with your big-toe, till you floated away off at the nail, out of your depth, without for a little while discovering that it was incumbent on you, for sake of your personal safety, to take to regular swimming--and then how buoyant was the milk-warm water, without a wave but of your own creating, as the ripples went circling away before your breast or your breath! It was absolutely too clear--for without knitting your brows you could not see it on bright airless days--and wondered what had become of it--when all at once, as if it had been that very moment created out of nothing, there it was! endued with some novel beauty--for of all the lochs we ever knew--and to be so simple too--the White Loch had surely the greatest variety of expression,--but all within the cheerful--for sadness was alien altogether from its spirit, and the gentle Mere for ever wore a smile. Swans--but that was but once--our own eyes had seen on it--and were they wild or were they tame swans, certain it is they were great and glorious and lovely creatures, and whiter than any snow. No house was within sight, and they had nothing to fear--nor did they look afraid--sailing in the centre of the loch--nor did we see them fly away--for we lay still on the hill-side till in the twilight we should not have known what they were, and we left them there among the shadows seemingly asleep. In the morning they were gone, and perhaps making love in some foreign land.

The BLACK LOCH was a strange misnomer for one so fair--for black we never saw him, except it might be for an hour or so before thunder. If he really was a loch of colour the original taint had been washed out of him, and he might have shown his face among the purest waters of Europe. But then he was deep; and knowing that, the natives had named him, in no unnatural confusion of ideas, the Black Loch. We have seen wild-duck eggs five fathoms down so distinctly that we could count them--and though that is not a bad dive, we have brought them up, one in our mouth and one in each hand, the tenants of course dead--nor can we now conjecture what sank them there; but ornithologists see unaccountable sights, and they only who are not ornithologists disbelieve Audubon and Wilson. Two features had the Black Loch which gave it to our eyes a pre-eminence in beauty over the other three--a tongue of land that half-divided it, and never on hot days was without some cattle grouped on its very point, and in among the water--and a cliff on which, though it was not very lofty, a pair of falcons had their nest. Yet in misty weather, when its head was hidden, the shrill cry seemed to come from a great height. There were some ruins too--tradition said of some church or chapel--that had been ruins long before the establishment of the Protestant faith. But they were somewhat remote, and likewise somewhat imaginary, for stones are found lying strangely distributed, and those looked to our eyes not like such as builders use, but to have been dropped there most probably from the moon.

But the best beloved, if not the most beautiful, of them all was the BROTHER LOCH. It mattered not what was his disposition or genius, every one of us boys, however different might be our other tastes, preferred it far beyond the rest, and for once that we visited any of them we visited it twenty times, nor ever once left it with disappointed hopes of enjoyment. It was the nearest, and therefore most within our power, so that we could gallop to it on shank's naigie, well on in the afternoon, and enjoy what seemed a long day of delight, swift as flew the hours, before evening prayers. Yet was it remote enough to make us always feel that our race thither was not for every day--and we seldom returned home without an adventure. It was the largest too by far of the Four--and indeed its area would have held the waters of all the rest. Then there was a charm to our heart as well as our imagination in its name--for tradition assigned it on account of three brothers that perished in its waters--and the same name for the same reason belongs to many another loch--and to one pool on almost every river. But above all it was the Loch for angling, and we long kept to perch. What schools! Not that they were of a very large size--though pretty well--but hundreds all nearly the same size gladdened our hearts as they lay, at the close of our sport, in separate heaps on the greensward shore, more beautiful out of all sight than your silver or golden fishes in a glass-vase, where one appears to be twenty, and the delusive voracity is all for a single crumb. No bait so killing as cowshairn-mauks, fresh from their native bed, scooped out with the thumb. He must have been a dear friend to whom in a scarcity, by the water-side, when the corks were dipping, we would have given a mauk. No pike. Therefore the trout were allowed to gain their natural size--and that seemed to be about five pounds--adolescents not unfrequent swam two or three--and you seldom or never saw the smaller fry. But few were the days "good for the Brother Loch." Perch rarely failed you, for by perseverance you were sure to fall in with one circumnatatory school or other, and to do murderous work among them with the mauk, from the schoolmaster himself inclusive down to the little booby of the lowest form. Not so with Trout. We have angled ten hours a-day for half a-week (during the vacance), without ever getting a single rise, nor could even that be called bad sport, for we lived in momentary expectation, mingled with fear, of a monster. Better far from sunrise to sunset never to move a fin, than oh! me miserable! to hook a huge hero with shoulders like a hog--play him till he comes floating side up close to the shore, and then to feel the feckless fly leave his lip and begin gamboling in the air, while he wallops away back into his native element, and sinks utterly and for evermore into the dark profound. Life loses at such a moment all that makes life desirable--yet strange! the wretch lives on--and has not the heart to drown himself, as he wrings his hands and curses his lot and the day he was born. But, thank Heaven, that ghastly fit of fancy is gone by, and we imagine one of those dark, scowling, gusty, almost tempestuous days, "prime for the Brother Loch." No glare or glitter on the water, no reflection of fleecy clouds, but a black-blue undulating swell, at times turbulent--with now and then a breaking wave,--that was the weather in which the giants fed, showing their backs like dolphins within a fathom of the shore, and sucking in the red heckle among your very feet. Not an insect in the air, yet then the fly was all the rage. This is a mystery, for you could do nothing with the worm. Oh! that we had then known the science of the spinning minnow! But we were then but an apprentice--who are now Emeritus Grand Master. Yet at this distance of time--half a century and more--it is impious to repine. Gut was not always to be got; and on such days a three-haired snood did the business--for they were bold as lions, and rashly rushed on death. The gleam of the yellow-worsted body with star-y-pointed tail maddened them with desire--no dallying with the gay deceiver--they licked him in--they gorged him--and while satiating their passion got involved in inextricable fate. You have seen a single strong horse ploughing up-hill. How he sets his brisket to it--and snooves along--as the furrows fall in beautiful regularity from the gliding share. So snooved along the Monarch of the Mere--or the heir-apparent--or heir-presumptive--or some other branch of the royal family--while our line kept steadily cutting the waves, and our rod enclosing some new segment of the sky.

But many another pastime we pursued upon those pastoral hills, for even angling has its due measure, and unless that be preserved, the passion wastes itself into lassitude, or waxes into disease. "I would not angle alway," thinks the wise boy--"off to some other game we altogether flew." Never were there such hills for hare and hounds. There couched many a pussy--and there Bob Howie's famous Tickler--the Grew of all Grews--first stained his flews in the blood of the Fur. But there is no coursing between April and October--and during the intervening months we used to have many a hunt on foot, without dogs, after the leverets. We all belonged to the High School indeed, and here was its playground. Cricket we had then never heard of; but there was ample room and verge enough for football. Our prime delight, however, was the chase. We were all in perpetual training, and in such wind that there were no bellows to mend after a flight of miles. We circled the Lochs. Plashing through the marishes we strained winding up the hill-sides, till on the cairn called a beacon that crowned the loftiest summit of the range, we stood and waved defiance to our pursuers scattered wide and far below, for 'twas a Deer Hunt. Then we became cavaliers. We caught the long-maned and long-tailed colts, and mounting bare-backed, with rush helmets and segg sabres charged the nowte till the stirks were scattered, and the lowing lord of herds himself taken captive, as he stood pawing in a nook with his nose to the ground and eyes of fire. That was the riding-school in which we learned to witch the world with noble horsemanship. We thus got confirmed in that fine, easy, unconstrained, natural seat, which we carried with us into the saddle when we were required to handle the bridle instead of the mane. 'Tis right to hold on by the knees, but equally so to hold on by the calves of the legs and the heels. The modern system of turning out the toes, and sticking out the legs as if they were cork or timber, is at once dangerous and ridiculous; hence in our cavalry the men got unhorsed in every charge. On pony-back we used to make the soles of our feet smack together below the belly, for quadruped and biped were both unshod, and hoof needed no iron on that stoneless sward. But the biggest fun of all was to "grup the auld mare," and ride her sextuple, the tallest boy sitting on the neck, and the shortest on the rump with his face to the tail, and holding on by that fundamental feature by which the urchin tooled her along as by a tiller. How the silly foal whinnied, as with light-gathered steps he accompanied in circles his populous parent, and seemed almost to doubt her identity, till one by one we slipped off over her hurdies, and let him take a suck! But what comet is yon in the sky--"with fear of change perplexing mallards?" A Flying Dragon. Of many degrees is his tail, with a tuft like that of Taurus terrified by the sudden entrance of the Sun into his sign. Up goes Sandy Donald's rusty and rimless beaver as a messenger to the Celestial. He obeys, and stooping his head, descends with many diverse divings, and buries his beak in the earth. The feather kite quails and is cowed by him of paper, and there is a scampering of cattle on a hundred hills.

The Brother Loch saw annually another sight, when on the Green-Brae was pitched a Tent--a snow-white Pyramid, gathering to itself all the sunshine. There lords and ladies, and knights and squires, celebrated Old May-day, and half the parish flocked to the Festival. The Earl of Eglintoun, and Sir Michael Shaw Stewart, and old Sir John of Polloc, and Pollock of that Ilk, and other heads of illustrious houses, with their wives and daughters, a beautiful show, did not disdain them of low degree, but kept open table in the moor; and would you believe it, high-born youths and maidens ministered at the board to cottage lads and lasses, whose sunburnt faces hardly dared to smile, under awe of that courtesy--yet whenever they looked up there was happiness in their eyes. The young ladies were all arrayed in green; and after the feast, they took bows and arrows in their lily hands, and shot at a target in a style that would have gladdened the heart of Maid Marian--nay, of Robin himself;--and one surpassing bright--the Star of Ayr--she held a hawk on her wrist--a tercel gentle--after the fashion of the olden time; and ever as she moved her arm you heard the chiming of silver bells. And her brother--gay and gallant as Sir Tristrem--he blew his tasseled bugle--so sweet, so pure, so wild the music, that when he ceased to breathe, the far-off repeated echoes, faint and dim, you thought died away in heaven like an angel's voice.