CHAPTER VIII.

"O thou, my elder brother in misfortune, By far my elder brother in the muses, With tears I pity thy unhappy fate!"--BURNS.

The asylum in which my unfortunate friend was confined, at this time the only one in Edinburgh, was situated in an angle of the city wall. It was a dismal-looking mansion, shut in on every side, by the neighbouring houses, from the view of the surrounding country; and so effectually covered up from the nearer street, by a large building in front, that it seemed possible enough to pass a lifetime in Edinburgh without coming to the knowledge of its existence. I shuddered as I looked up to its blackened walls, thinly sprinkled with miserable-looking windows, barred with iron, and thought of it as a sort of burial-place of dead minds. But it was a Golgotha, which, with more than the horrors of the grave, had neither its rest nor its silence. I was startled, as I entered the cell of the hapless poet, by a shout of laughter from a neighbouring room, which was answered from a dark recess behind me, by a fearfully prolonged shriek, and the clanking of chains. The mother and sister of Ferguson were sitting beside his pallet, on a sort of stone settle which stood out from the wall; and the poet himself, weak and exhausted, and worn to a shadow, but apparently in his right mind, lay extended on the straw. He made an attempt to rise as I entered; but the effort was above his strength, and, again lying down, he extended his hand.

"This is kind, Mr. Lindsay," he said; "it is ill for me to be alone in these days; and yet I have few visitors, save my poor old mother and Margaret. But who cares for the unhappy?"

I sat down on the settle beside him, still retaining his hand. "I have been at sea, and in foreign countries," I said, "since I last saw you, Mr. Ferguson, and it was only this morning I returned; but believe me there are many, many of your countrymen who sympathize sincerely in your affliction, and take a warm interest in your recovery."

He sighed deeply. "Ah," he replied, "I know too well the nature of that sympathy. You never find it at the bedside of the sufferer--it evaporates in a few barren expressions of idle pity; and yet, after all, it is but a paying the poet in kind. He calls so often on the world to sympathize over fictitious misfortune, that the feeling wears out, and becomes a mere mood of the imagination; and, with this light, attenuated pity of his own weaving, it regards his own real sorrows. Dearest mother, the evening is damp and chill--do gather the bedclothes round me, and sit on my feet; they are so very cold and so dead, that they cannot be colder a week hence."

"O Robert, why do you speak so?" said the poor woman, as she gathered the clothes round him, and sat on his feet. "You know you are coming home to-morrow."

"To-morrow!" he said--"if I see to-morrow, I shall have completed my twenty-fourth year--a small part, surely, of the threescore and ten; but what matters it when 'tis past?"

"You were ever, my friend, of a melancholy temperament," I said, "and too little disposed to hope. Indulge in brighter views of the future, and all shall yet be well."

"I can now hope that it shall," he said. "Yes, all shall be well with me--and that very soon. But, oh, how this nature of ours shrinks from dissolution!--yes, and all the lower natures too. You remember, mother, the poor starling that was killed in the room beside us? Oh, how it struggled with its ruthless enemy, and filled the whole place with its shrieks of terror and agony. And yet, poor little thing! it had been true, all life long, to the laws of its nature, and had no sins to account for, and no judge to meet. There is a shrinking of heart as I look before me, and yet I can hope that all shall yet be well with me--and that very soon. Would that I had been wise in time! Would that I had thought more and earlier of the things which pertain to my eternal peace! more of a living soul, and less of a dying name! But, oh, 'tis a glorious provision, through which a way of return is opened up even at the eleventh hour!"

We sat round him in silence; an indescribable feeling of awe pervaded my whole mind, and his sister was affected to tears.

"Margaret," he said, in a feeble voice--"Margaret, you will find my Bible in yonder little recess; 'tis all I have to leave you; but keep it, dearest sister, and use it, and, in times of sorrow and suffering that come to all, you will know how to prize the legacy of your poor brother. Many, many books do well enough for life; but there is only one of any value when we come to die.

"You have been a voyager of late, Mr. Lindsay," he continued, "and I have been a voyager too. I have been journeying in darkness and discomfort, amid strange unearthly shapes of dread and horror, with no reason to direct and no will to govern. Oh, the unspeakable unhappiness of these wanderings!--these dreams of suspicion, and fear, and hatred, in which shadow and substance, the true and the false, were so wrought up and mingled together, that they formed but one fantastic and miserable whole. And, oh! the unutterable horror of every momentary return to a recollection of what I had been once, and a sense of what I had become! Oh, when I awoke amid the terrors of the night--when I turned me on the rustling straw, and heard the wild wail and yet wilder laugh--when I heard and shuddered, and then felt the demon in all his might coming over me, till I laughed and wailed with the others--oh the misery! the utter misery!--But 'tis over, my friend--'tis all over; a few, few tedious days, a few, few weary nights, and all my sufferings shall be over."

I had covered my face with my hands, but the tears came bursting through my fingers; the mother and sister of the poet sobbed aloud.

"Why sorrow for me, sirs?" he said; "why grieve for me? I am well, quite well, and want for nothing. But 'tis cold; oh, 'tis very cold, and the blood seems freezing at my heart. Ah, but there is neither pain nor cold where I am going, and I trust it shall be well with my soul. Dearest, dearest mother, I always told you it would come to this at last."

The keeper had entered to intimate to us that the hour for locking up the cells was already past, and we now rose to leave the place. I stretched out my hand to my unfortunate friend; he took it in silence, and his thin attenuated fingers felt cold within my grasp, like those of a corpse. His mother stooped down to embrace him.

"Oh, do not go yet, mother," he said--"do not go yet--do not leave me; but it must be so, and I only distress you. Pray for me, dearest mother, and, oh, forgive me; I have been a grief and a burden to you all life-long; but I ever loved you, mother; and, oh, you have been kind, kind and forgiving--and now your task is over. May God bless and reward you! Margaret, dearest Margaret, farewell!"

We parted, and, as it proved, for ever. Robert Ferguson expired during the night; and when the keeper entered the cell next morning, to prepare him for quitting the asylum, all that remained of this most hapless of the children of genius, was a pallid and wasted corpse, that lay stiffening on the straw. I am now a very old man, and the feelings wear out; but I find that my heart is even yet susceptible of emotion, and that the source of tears is not yet dried up.

THE DISASTERS OF JOHNNY ARMSTRONG.

Johnny Armstrong, the hero of our tale, was, and, for aught we know to the contrary, still is, an inhabitant of the town of Carlisle. He was a stout, thickset, little man, with a round, good-humoured, ruddy countenance, and somewhere about fifty years of age at the period to which our story refers. Although possessed of a good deal of natural shrewdness, Johnny was, on the whole, rather a simple sort of person. His character, in short, was that of an honest, well-meaning, inoffensive man, but with parts that certainly did not shine with a very dazzling lustre. Johnny was, to business, an ironmonger, and had, by patient industry and upright dealing, acquired a small independency. He had stuck to the counter of his little dingy shop for upwards of twenty years, and used to boast that, during all that time, he had opened and shut his shop with his own hands every day, not even excepting one. The result of this steadiness and attention to business was, as has been already said, a competency.

Fortunately for Johnny, this propensity to stick fast--which he did like a limpet--was natural to him. It was a part of his constitution. He had no desire whatever to travel, or, rather, he had a positive dislike to it--a dislike, indeed, which was so great that, for an entire quarter of a century, he had never been three miles out of Carlisle. But when Johnny had waxed pretty rich, somewhat corpulent, and rather oldish, he was suddenly struck, one fine summer afternoon, as he stood at the door of his shop with his hands in his breeches pockets, (a favourite attitude,) with an amiable and ardent desire to see certain of his relations who lived at Brechin, in the north of Scotland; and--there is no accounting for these things--on that afternoon Johnny came to the extraordinary resolution of paying them a visit--of performing a journey of upwards of a hundred miles, even as the crow flies. It was a strange and a desperate resolution for a man of Johnny's peculiar temperament and habits; but so it was. Travel he would, and travel he did. On the third day after the doughty determination just alluded to had been formed, Johnny, swathed in an ample brown greatcoat, with a red comforter about his neck, appeared in the stable yard of the inn where most of the stage coaches that passed through Carlisle put up. Of these there were three: one for Dumfries, one for Glasgow, and one for Edinburgh--the latter being Johnny's coach; for his route was by the metropolis. We had almost forgotten to say that Johnny, who was a widower, was accompanied on this occasion by his son, Johnny junior, an only child, whom it was his intention to take along with him. The boy was about fourteen years of age, and though, upon the whole, a shrewd enough lad for his time of life, did not promise to be a much brighter genius than his father. In fact he was rather lumpish.

On arriving at the inn yard--it was about eight o'clock at night, and pretty dark, being the latter end of September--Johnny Armstrong found the coach apparently about to start, the horses being all yoked; but the vehicle happened, at the moment he entered the yard, to be in charge of an ostler--not of either the guard or driver, who had both gone out of the way for an instant. Desirous of securing a good seat for his son, Johnny Armstrong opened the coach door, thrust the lad in, and was about to follow himself, when he discovered that he had forgotten his watch. On making this discovery, he banged too the coach door without saying a word, and hurried home as fast as his little, thick, short legs would allow him, to recover his time-piece. On his return, which was in less than five minutes, Johnny himself stepped into the vehicle, which was now crowded with passengers, and, in a few seconds, was rattling away at a rapid rate towards Edinburgh. The night was pitch dark, not a star twinkled; and it was not until Johnny arrived at his journey's end--that is, at Edinburgh--that he discovered his son was not in the coach, and had never been there at all. We will not attempt to describe Johnny's amazement and distress of mind on making this most extraordinary and most alarming discovery. They were dreadful. In great agitation, he inquired at every one of the passengers if they had not seen his son, and one and all denied they ever had. The thing was mysterious and perfectly inexplicable.

"I put the boy into the coach with my own hands," said Johnny Armstrong, in great perturbation, to the guard and half crying as he spoke.

"Very odd," said the guard.

"Very odd, indeed," said Johnny.

"Are you sure it was _our_ coach, Mr. Armstrong?" inquired the guard.

The emphasis on the word _our_ was startling. It evidently meant more than met the ear; and Johnny felt that it did so, and he was startled accordingly.

"_Your_ coach?" he replied, but now with some hesitation of manner. "It surely was. What other coach could it be?"

"Why, it may have been the Glasgow coach," said the guard; "and I rather think it _must_ have been. You have made a mistake, sir, be assured, and put the boy into the wrong coach. We start from the same place, and at the same hour, five minutes or so in or over."

The mention of this possibility, nay certainty--for Johnny had actually dispatched the boy to Glasgow--instantly struck him dumb. It relieved him, indeed, from the misery arising from a dread of some terrible accident having happened the lad, but threw him into great tribulation as to his fate in Glasgow, without money or friends. But this being, after all, comparatively but a small affair, Johnny was now, what he had not been before, able to pay attention to minor things.

"Be sae guid," said Johnny to the guard, who was on the top of the coach, busy unloosing packages, "as haun me doun my trunk."

"No trunk of yours here, sir," said the guard. "You'll have sent it away to Glasgow with the boy."

"No, no," replied Johnny, sadly perplexed by this new misfortune. "I sent it wi' the lass to the inn half an hour before I gaed mysel."

"Oh, then, in that case," said the guard, "ten to one it's away to Dumfries, and not to Glasgow."

And truly such was the fact. The girl, a fresh-caught country lass, had thrown it on the first coach she found, saying her master would immediately follow--and that happened to be the Dumfries one. Here, then, was Johnny safely arrived himself, indeed, at Edinburgh; but his son was gone to Glasgow, and his trunk to Dumfries--all with the greatest precision imaginable. Next day, Johnny Armstrong, being extremely uneasy about his boy, started for Glasgow on board of one of the canal passage boats; while the lad, being equally uneasy about his father, and, moreover, ill at ease on sundry other accounts, did precisely the same thing with the difference of direction--that is, he started for Edinburgh by a similar conveyance; and so well timed had each of their respective departures been, that, without knowing it, they passed each other exactly halfway between the two cities. On arriving at Glasgow, Johnny Armstrong could not, for a long while, discover any trace of his son; but at length succeeded in tracking him to the canal boat--which led him rightly to conclude that he had proceeded to Edinburgh. On coming to this conclusion, Johnny again started for the metropolis, where he safely arrived about two hours after his son had left it for home, whither, finding no trace of his father in Edinburgh, he had wisely directed his steps. Johnny Armstrong, now greatly distressed about the object of his paternal solicitude, whom he vainly sought up and down the city, at last also bent his way homewards, thinking, what was true, that the boy might have gone home; and there indeed he found him. Thus nearly a week had been spent, and that in almost constant travel, and Johnny found himself precisely at the point from which he had set out. However, in three days, after having, in the meantime, recovered his trunk, he again set out on his travels to Brechin; for his courage was not in the least abated by what had happened; but on this occasion unaccompanied by his son, as he would not again run the risk of losing him, or of exposing himself to that distress of mind on his account, of which he had been before a victim. In the case of Johnny's second progress, there was "no mistake" whatever, of any kind--at least at starting. Both himself and his trunk arrived in perfect safety, and in due time, at Edinburgh.

Johnny's next route was to steam it to Kirkaldy from Newhaven. The boat started at six a.m.; and, having informed himself of this particular, he determined to be at the point of embarkation in good time. But he was rather late, and, on finding this, he ran every foot of the way from Edinburgh to the steam-boat, and was in a dreadful state of exhaustion when he reached it; but, by his exertions, he saved his distance, thereby exhibiting another proof that all is not lost that's in danger. An instant longer, however, and he would have been too late, for the vessel was just on the eve of starting. Johnny leapt on board, or rather was bundled on board; for Johnny, as already hinted, was in what is called good bodily condition--rather extra, indeed--and was, moreover, waxing a little stiff about the joints; so that he could not get over the side of the boat so cleverly as he would have done some twenty years before. Over and above all this, he was quite exhausted with the race against time which he had just run. Seeing his distressed condition, and that the boat was on the point of sailing, two of the hands leapt on the pier, when the one seizing him by the waistband of the breeches, and the other by the breast, they fairly pitched him into the vessel, throwing his trunk after him. As it was pouring rain, Johnny, on recovering his perpendicular, immediately descended into the cabin, and, in the next instant, the boat was ploughing her way through the deep. For two hours after he had embarked, it continued to rain without intermission; and for these two hours he remained snug below without stirring. At the end of this period, however, it cleared up a little, and, in a short while thereafter, became perfectly fair. Having discovered this he ascended to the deck, to see what was going on. The captain of the vessel was himself at the helm; he, therefore, sidled towards him, and, after making some remarks on the weather and the scenery, asked the captain, in the blandest and civilest tones imaginable, when he expected they would be at Kirkaldy. The man stared at Johnny with a look of astonishment, not unmingled with displeasure; but at length said--

"Kirkaldy, sir! What do you mean by asking me that question? I don't know when _you_ expect to be at Kirkaldy, but _I_ don't expect to be there for a twelvemonth at least."

"No!--od, that's queer!" quoth Johnny, amazed in his turn; but thinking, after a moment, that the captain meant to be facetious, he merely added--"I wad think, captain, that we wad be there much about the same time."

"Ay, ay, may be; but, I say, none of your gammon, friend," said the latter, gruffly, and now getting really angry at what he conceived to be some attempt to play upon him, though he could not see the drift of the joke. "Mind your own business, friend, and I'll mind mine."

This he said with an air that conveyed very plainly a hint that Johnny should take himself off, which, without saying any more, he accordingly