Part 3

The early historians differ as to details. Eachin MacIan, the young chief who loses heart, owes a good deal to Scott’s dramatic instinct; but Goethe was not well posted in the facts, when to Eckermann he extolled the novelist’s “art” in “contriving” to make one man fail on the day of combat that his place may be taken by the hero, Smith: “there is finish! there is a hand!” One story makes the fugitive escape by swimming before the fight. Several mention a man as missing from the Clan Quhele ranks, to fill whose place a sturdy Perth craftsman volunteered on promise of reward. More than one Perthshire family has been proud to claim descent from this bandy-legged champion. If it be true, as somewhere stated, that his posterity, the Gows, were recognised as a shoot of Clan Chattan, it may be that Harry Smith was the real Conachar, apprenticed at Perth to a trade which Highland chiefs might well see cause to patronise. Scott, however, seems romancing in putting the combatants into shirts of mail. All the accounts agree as to two bands of next to naked Highlandmen hacking and hewing each other with swords, axes, and dirks, till of one side only ten or eleven were left sorely wounded, and of the other, one escaped or was taken prisoner, his fate being variously stated as pardon and hanging. No doubt the show furnished as much satisfaction to its public as when, sixty years ago, the German traveller, J. G. Kohl, found the Inch again covered with people eager to see a circus clown give bold advertisement to his company by crossing the Tay in a washing-tub drawn by four geese. It has been supposed, by the way, that the combat of Highlanders may have been arranged partly for the amusement of a body of French knights then visiting the Scottish court, and no doubt finding it dull as well as rude.

Since that slaughterous day, some real fights and many sham ones have been enacted on the Inch of Perth. Of one I may say, _pars magna fui_, and though my militation was without glory it did not want an accursed bard who, in the columns of the _Perthshire Constitutional_, sang, a long way after Tennyson, how “some one had blundered.” These were the early days of the Volunteer movement, inspired by more zeal than knowledge, when, in my teens, I served as sole officer to a company of the Perthshire Volunteers, after some slight apprenticeship in a school cadet corps, equipped with discarded carbines. One of my first appearances in efficient arms was at the head of a column that marched on to the lower end of the Inch before more spectators than would be gathered about the arena of that clan-combat. The foe here coming into view, it behoved my company to extend in skirmishing order, covering the deployment of our column into line. So much I could do; and we found ourselves exposed in the van facing a hostile line of Dundee Highlanders who held the centre of the Inch. But the report of what then befell is so little to our credit that I throw it into shamefaced small print.

We advanced boldly, blazing away our blank cartridges as fast as we could load and fire; while the enemy’s skirmishers, as arranged in the programme, fell back before us. My men were delighted with this movement, which gave the effect of our winning the battle by our special prowess; and not knowing better, we went on fighting for our own hand, till we had nearly run out of ammunition. Meanwhile from our side rang out imperious bugle-calls, which made me none the wiser. At last, when the enemy’s thin red line could no longer be seen for the cloud of smoke, I bethought myself to look round, and observe how my devoted band was spread out half-way between the two armies, exposed on either side to an exterminating fire of cannon and rifles. There seemed something wrong here; but before I could consider what to do about it, an aide-de-camp galloped up, shepherding us with objurgations: “What on earth are you about, sir! Get out of the way! Close and retire!” There was stronger language that did not help to enlighten me. In my confusion, I closed to the left, whereas our place was by this time on the right of the line, the result being that we had to run the gauntlet of our own army’s fire, then to turn and double up behind it to gain our vacant post. That was not the worst of it. The drill of those days made an important point of a company being pivoted on its right or left flank; I forget the principle, but this I remember too well that, whereas we ought to have come up “right in front” or “left in front,” we had got the wrong way on, and reached our place in the line with our rear turned to the enemy. My military science was at a loss how to remedy this mistake; but I modestly ventured on the order “right counter-march,” the effect of which was marred by the right-hand man--who indeed as a haunter of the Barracks knew more about soldiering than myself--_sotto voce_ giving the word and example, “left counter-march.” How at last we got ourselves straight and in face of the foe, I can hardly tell, but I, for one, was ready to imitate poor Conachar by plunging into the Tay, covered not with wounds but with blushes.

Another disgrace had nearly stained my company’s name, when we served as guard of honour for Queen Victoria, on the inauguration of Prince Albert’s statue at the foot of the North Inch. For once Her Majesty came late--I forget through what delay--and we had to stand expectant for hours under a hot sun, kept on the alert by a constant passing of dignitaries, and pressed upon by a crowd that tried to break through our ranks as often as a stately equipage drove up to excite the cry, “That’s her, that’s her!” In vain I demanded the experienced help of police; on us raw warriors fell the whole work of keeping the way clear, a very fidgety task for a short-sighted young officer, who had not seen his sovereign since he was young enough to be disappointed that she wore a straw bonnet instead of a golden crown. When at last she came, it was without observation, the crowd having given her up; then I shall always be thankful that my lucky star showed me a carriage filled with ladies in black, to which I was able to present arms just in the nick of time--a moment more and the Queen would have been let go by in silence without any salutation even from her heedless guard!

And already I had made a blunder of etiquette. A considerable force of regulars were present, while we, as a local body, held the place of honour. During the hours of uncertainty officers of rank kept galloping to and fro, to whom I was uncertain whether or no I should pay military compliments. I asked my colonel, who was as much at a loss as myself. Then I consulted the staff-sergeant on whom I depended as my coach, and his advice struck me as full of wisdom: “I don’t know what the practice is, sir, but it would be safer to do it too much than too little.” So I began presenting arms to every cocked hat that came by, and as I could never be quite sure whether this or that one had been already saluted, our rifles were going up and down all morning like the keys of a piano. Afterwards I learned that the Sovereign’s guard should ignore any other personage.

I could tell other tales of the Perthshire Volunteers in their early days, but all I will say here is that if the Territorials who have taken our place are more smart and efficient, they cannot surpass us in good-will to serve our country. Some of us can remember an older and perhaps less serviceable force, the tottering Pensioners who turned out at least once a year upon the Inch to fire a _feu de joie_ for the Queen’s birthday. I rather think I knew that Peninsular lieutenant of whom Sir Evelyn Wood tells a touching tale--though here I am a little confused between two bearded veterans that gave kindly words to a boy--how he had lived obscurely at Perth, unnoted by two generations, till Major Wood took a public occasion of pointing him out to his fellow-citizens as one of the heroes of Albuera; then the old man in a back seat bowed his head in tears of pride and joy--“_Let me greet!_”--overcome to hear that fiery day not forgotten by soldiers of another age. To a veteran of a former generation quartered at Perth was born a son, afterwards well-known as Charles Mackay, editor and poet, and as stepfather of one of the most popular novelists of our day, whose modestly retiring disposition is so notorious that I do not mention her name.

In my youth the neighbourhood of Perth was strongly garrisoned by retired officers, some of whom belonged to the Sandemanian congregation here, an exclusive body that, like the Plymouth Brethren in England, had a curious attraction for old Indian soldiers. The sons usually went with their fathers, while in some cases the mothers and daughters attended the Episcopal “Chapel,” where my _Wenigkeit_, as son of an Englishwoman, escaped the long sermons and Shorter Catechism of Presbyterian boyhood. The Anglican form of worship has in the last generation made great way among townsmen, but it then was apt to mark either English associations or hereditary Toryism. Perth had a Cathedral, looked on askance in those days as “Puseyite,” so that even the bishop for a time held aloof from it; at all events he preached regularly in our smaller church, his lawn sleeves attracting youthful reverence beside the black-gowned pastor of those Protestant days. Now, so strongly has turned the tide of ecclesiastical fashion, it is the Cathedral at whose door a string of equipages may be seen standing of a Sunday morning, and three or four English prelates officiating at the altar in the shooting season. But half a century ago, and later, the “Chapel,” as we called it, as yet ignorant that we were “the Church in Scotland,” made the more genteel place of worship, with peers, baronets, and lairds as thick as blackberries in the congregation, their carriages breaking the Sabbath quiet of the street. The English soldiers were marched to it from the other end of the town, though that empty Cathedral stood neighbour to their barracks; and thereby hangs a tale to be caught at in my reminiscent mood.

One warm summer forenoon, some of the congregation may have been finding the sermon too long, when it was broken on by a stirring incident. A whispered message came to the officer of the military party. The men abruptly rose to clatter out, heedless of the pulpit. Presently the captain sent back for his sword, and his wife turned pale before the surmising eyes of the congregation. What could be the matter? Had the French landed? Neither preacher nor people could give all their minds to the conclusion of the service. As we streamed forth, all agog with curiosity, the street showed the unusual Sabbath sight of cabs full of policemen dashing up towards what was then the General Prison for Scotland, beyond the South Inch. Report soon spread that the inmates of this Penitentiary, hundreds strong, had broken out and might be expected to scatter over the country like ravening wolves, after an alarming

example familiar to me from the pages of--was it not?--_Midshipman Easy._

The excitement that followed seemed a godsend to youngsters, and perhaps to older captives of the dull Sabbath. But, as usual, rumour exaggerated. There had been a conspiracy to break prison, which, in the case of the men, proved a fiasco; while the women, after throwing their Bibles at the chaplain as signal of revolt, got loose into a yard, but failed either to make their escape from the walls or to release the men, as had been plotted. These incidents I state with reserve, after the example of the Father of History in dealing with facts beyond his own observation. The story that passed current was that our gallant centurion reached the scene of action in hot haste, but on beholding the enemy he marched off in high dudgeon, flatly refusing to lead his company against a mob of women. In the end, we understood, those Bacchanals were quelled by the artillery of the Fire Brigade.

If all tales be true, this is not the most ignominious retreat forced upon our gallant soldiers at the hands of Scotswomen. In Penny’s _Traditions of Perth_ it is told how, in the old martinet days, half a dozen soldiers were flogged in public on the North Inch. Mobs of that century seem rather to have enjoyed such spectacles, as a rule; but pressed enlistments had made military discipline a sore point in Scotland; and now the poor fellows’ cries excited angry pity among the lookers-on. When it came to the turn of a married man, sentenced to five hundred lashes for stealing a few potatoes to feed his family, their feelings boiled over. His own wife was present, who, as he screamed under the lash, rushed in to hold the drummer’s arm; then other women began to pelt the executioners with stones. Led by these pitying Amazons, the crowd broke through the ranks to rescue the sufferer, and his fellow-soldiers apparently made no stout resistance. The officers were set to flight, the unfortunate adjutant being captured, whom the women are said to have stripped and whipped on the spot as a lesson in humanity. That made the last flogging on the North Inch.

Perth has had the soldiers of many armies quartered upon it, including Cromwell’s troopers, and the Hessians encamped for long on the Inch after the Rebellion of ’45. At that time barracks were so deficient that Cumberland’s men had to be lodged in the parish church and meetinghouses, turned into dormitories by deal boards laid across the pews. Later on, soldiers would be billeted upon the townsfolk, as the militiamen were in my recollection; and their pay was so poor that, like that culprit already mentioned, they did not always prove honest guests. Gowrie House, presented by the loyal townsfolk to the victor of Culloden, was made into an Artillery Barrack, but afterwards given back to the town to serve as its jail and county buildings in exchange for ground above the South Inch, where the General Prison came to be built. This was originally a depôt for French prisoners of war, the first batch of whom, confined in a church on their way from Dundee, stole all the brass nails, green baize, and other fittings they could lay hands on. The prisoners became increased to thousands, who on the whole must have behaved better, for they are said to have been missed at the peace, having, indeed, spent in the city a good deal of money which they earned in part by ingenious industries. These foreigners appear as the unexpected means of importing cricket into Scotland, first played on the Inches of Perth by the English regiments sent to guard the depôt.

English soldiers, one supposes, are not now needed to guard Perth, its ordinary garrison a small body of the Black Watch or other local regiment. Gone, too, are the militia whom I once came upon drawn up at the top of the “Whins” without a stitch of uniform on, stripped to bathe by word of command. Military displays on the Inch will be less common than games of golf, cricket, and football, the last in its more unsophisticated forms, since this public space does not lend itself to the collection of gate-money; but the barefoot laddies who here kick about the “leather” for their own divert, are the buds of those professionals that bloom out to such applause in English enclosures. And the rules of football have changed even since my youth, when a band of youngsters from various public schools, gathered on the Inch for a Christmas game, found themselves all at loggerheads in an anarchy not yet divided into the kingdoms of “Rugger” and “Soccer.” Still more has the game been refined since a day when country folk coming down to market, about two miles out of Perth, met a man charging along the Crieff road, chased by a party of the Forty-Second with their kilts streaming in the wind; at first sight the fugitive was taken for a deserter, and the farmers drew aside to give him a fair chance, but it was only a Methven lad carrying off the ball from a match on the North Inch, nor could he be tackled till it was goaled in his house, half a dozen miles from the field. Scone had once a name for rough matches, at which limbs were often broken, but, as the proverb went, “A’s fair at the ba’ of Scone.”

The example of that hero warns me not to linger on the Perth Inch, but to be off up the Tay, keeping as near it as one can for parks, and for the jealously guarded banks of valuable salmon fisheries. For the first two miles there is a public walk up the right bank to the Almond mouth. On the opposite side, hidden in lordly foliage, lies Scone Palace and the site of the old Pictish capital. The Scot is so notoriously modest that English example has often led him to mishandle his own names: before Scone gets corrupted, then, let me insist that it is pronounced _Scoon_, as the eatable _scone_, so mumbled in Cockney mouths, should rhyme with _on_, and not be treated as their _own_.

To modern Scone we could come on that side by a tramway which is turning this goodly village into a suburb of Perth. Even when we get into the Highlands we shall find how the squalid “Tullyveolans” and “Glenburnies” have been improved away generations ago. At the gates of great proprietors, at all events, a Scottish village usually compares well with an English one in point of comfort if not of picturesqueness. The former commonly wears an air of stiff neatness and coldness toned by its grey stone walls and slated roofs; the hand of the laird and factor is seen over it all, and only here and there are left such wigwam makeshifts as might still move Waverley’s disgust in the poverty-stricken Hebrides. The Southern village, even if a model one, is apt to be more taking to the eye, with its show of warm brick scattered among the green, its unstudied variety of thatched and lichened roofs, of gabled, plastered, and half-timbered walls, where paddocks and gardens divide an age-mellowed block of farm buildings from a row of picturesquely decayed hovels; and over all rises the tower or spire of some much-patched church, neighboured by a smug chapel that throws the ancient fane into striking relief. The churches of Scotland make no such points of dignity, as a rule; but their old austerity now often becomes relaxed by more ambitious architecture of Anglican-aping days; and here and there has been spared some stout hull that weathered the Reformation storms.

One feature of a northern parish seems past praying for. The churchyard, if not miserably neglected, is apt to look grim, dismal, forbidding, in contrast with those flowery God’s acres of a less stern faith, that sometimes tempt poor human nature to be half in love with death. As a child I remember my nurse, and she was an Englishwoman, pointing out to me for reprobation what seemed the Popish sacrilege of a wreath laid upon a grave. Such Protestant superstition has been broken down in the last half-century. Large towns, even so long ago, had more or less ornamentally laid-out cemeteries, which were allowed to be the goal of a Sabbath walk. But still, in out-of-the-way parts, the disposition is not to mantle the king of terrors in any sentimental disguise; and weeds may be more common than flowers about tombstones that give lessons of warning rather than of consolation. The memorials of the dead are oftenest plain and practical, like the homes of the living, whose very gardens run rather to kail and berries than to flowers. Yet where a Scotsman’s time is less taken up by wringing a bare subsistence from his poor soil, he can treat himself to the luxury of bloom; his grey walls are more and more lit by hardy creepers; and on heathery slopes you may see cottages covered with gay tropæolum, which I cannot coax to flourish on a London balcony.

But Scone, in its semi-urbanity, is no fair specimen of a Scottish village, nor are we yet in the Highlands, though hints of them peep to view as we pass up towards the blue Grampian barrier. We soon come, indeed, to a manufacturing nook, a “white country” of Perthshire, where the river, swollen by several streams uniting as the Luncarty Burn, washes the bleach-fields of that ilk and the cotton mills of Stanley. But these meads of Luncarty were once dyed red rather than white, when the Danes had almost overcome a Scottish king, till a peasant named Hay, with his two sons, held a narrow pass so well with his ploughshare that the Vikings in turn were put to flight by those rustic champions, claimed as ancestors for the House of Errol. Be this a fable or no, when the bleach-field came to be laid out, several tumuli were opened containing skeletons and weapons.

The whole country on both sides of the river is studded with Druidical stones, with camps and gravemounds, and with sites of old tradition, such as that ascribed to Macbeth’s castle, where the Sidlaw Hills swell up behind the left bank of the Tay, winding round them under the wooded cliffs of Kinnoull, making such a bend that a house I have reason to know stands equidistant between two reaches, which are nearly a score of miles apart by the bank. Should I be spared another score of years or so, I could tell some queer tales about more than one late laird in this nook, whose memory at present must rest in the truce _de mortuis_. As for Macbeth’s memory, I have already shown some hint of materials for whitewashing it. Why was not Shakespeare told of this Thane being an elder in the Wee Free Church, when King Duncan must needs send his loons south, one to Oxford and one to Cambridge, who came back dropping their _h_’s, whustling on the Sabbath, and such-like; then what for no should an outraged patriot but yoke with the sword of Gideon on the whole Erastian hypothec? As for Lady Macbeth, does not Shakespeare himself admit evidence to justify a soft-hearted verdict of temporary insanity?

Above the mills of Stanley we come to Campsie Linn, the first romantic scene of the Tay, on which is set the last tableau in _The Fair Maid of Perth_. Such a picturesque nook tempted the monks of Cupar to build a retreat on the precipitous rock above its cataract; and here was the country seat of the Mercers, that mediæval trading family of Perth, already mentioned as growing into nobility. But the great name hereabouts in the old days was the Drummonds, lords of Stobhall on the Tay, their principal residence till they built a more lordly one in Strathearn.