My Schools and Schoolmasters

Chapter 15

His neckcloth well puffed.

Which six handkerchiefs stuffed, And in colour with snow might have vied, Was put on with great care, As a bait for the fair, And the ends in a love-knot were tied," &c. &c.

I greatly enjoyed my visits to this genial-hearted and accomplished lady. No chilling condescensions on her part measured out to me my distance: Miss Dunbar took at once the common ground of literary tastes and pursuits; and if I did not feel my inferiority there, she took care that I should feel it nowhere else. There was but one point on which we differed. While hospitably extending to me every facility for visiting the objects of scientific interest in her neighbourhood--such as those sand-wastes of Culbin in which an ancient barony finds burial, and the geologic sections presented by the banks of the Findhorn--she was yet desirous to fix me down to literature as my proper walk; and I, on the other hand, was equally desirous of escaping into science.

FOOTNOTES:

[13] I am reminded by the editor of the _Courier_, in a very kind critique on the present volume, of a pa.s.sage in the history of my little work which had escaped my memory. "It had come," he states, "to the knowledge of Sir Walter Scott, who endeavoured to procure a copy after the limited impression was exhausted."

[14] The following are the opening stanzas of the piece--quite as obnoxious to criticism, I fear, as those selected by Walsh:--

"Have ye not seen, on winter"s eve, When snow-rack dimm"d the welkin"s face.

Borne wave-like, by the fitful breeze.

The snow-wreath shifting place?

Silent and slow as drifting wreath.

Ere day, the clans from Preston Hill Moved downward to the vale beneath:-- Dark was the scene and still!

In stormy autumn day, when sad The boding peasant frets forlorn, Have ye not seen the mountain stream Bear down the standing corn?

At dawn, when Preston bog was cross"d, Like mountain stream that bursts its banks.

Charged wild those Celtic hearts of fire.

On Cope"s devoted ranks.

Have ye not seen, from lonesome waste, The smoke-tower rising tall and slow, O"erlooking, like a stately tree, The russet plain below?

And have ye mark"d that pillar"d wreath, When sudden struck by northern blast, Amid the low and stunted heath, In broken volumes cast?

At sunrise, as by northern blast The pillar"d smoke is roll"d away.

Fled all that cloud of Saxon war.

In headlong disarray."

CHAPTER XXI.

"He who, with pocket hammer, smites the edge Of luckless rock or prominent stone, disguised In weather stains, or crusted o"er by nature With her first growths--detaching by the stroke A chip or splinter, to resolve his doubts; And, with that ready answer satisfied, The substance cla.s.ses by some barbarous name.

And hurries on."--WORDSWORTH.

In the course of my two visits to Miss Dunbar, I had several opportunities of examining the sand-wastes of Culbin, and of registering some of the peculiarities which distinguish the arenaceous sub-aerial formation from the arenaceous sub-aqueous one. Of the present surface of the earth, considerably more than six millions of square miles are occupied in Africa and Asia alone by sandy deserts. With but the interruption of the narrow valley of the Nile, an enormous zone of arid sand, full nine hundred miles across, stretches from the eastern coast of Africa to within a few days" journey of the Chinese frontier: it is a belt that girdles nearly half the globe;--a vast "ocean," according to the Moors, "without water." The sandy deserts of the rainless districts of Chili are also of great extent: and there are few countries in even the higher lat.i.tudes that have not their tracts of arenaceous waste.

These sandy tracts, so common in the present scene of things, could not, I argued, be restricted to the recent geologic periods. They must have existed, like all the commoner phenomena of nature, under every succeeding system in which the sun shone, and the winds blew, and ocean-beds were upheaved to the air and the light, and the waves threw upon the sh.o.r.e, from arenaceous sea-bottoms, their acc.u.mulations of light sand. And I was now employed in acquainting myself with the marks by which I might be able to distinguish sub-aerial from sub-aqueous formations, among the ever-recurring sandstone beds of the geologic deposits. I have spent, when thus engaged, very delightful hours amid the waste. In pursuing one"s education, it is always very pleasant to get into those _forms_ that are not yet introduced into any school.

One of the peculiarities of the sub-aerial formation which I at this time detected struck me as curious. On approaching, among the sand-hills, an open level s.p.a.ce, covered thickly over with water-rolled pebbles and gravel, I was surprised to see that, dry and hot as the day was elsewhere, the little open s.p.a.ce seemed to have been subjected to a weighty dew or smart shower. The pebbles glistened bright in the sun, and bore the darkened hue of recent wet. On examination, however, I found that the rays were reflected, not from wetted, but from polished surfaces. The light grains of sand, dashed against the pebbles by the winds during a long series of years--grain after grain repeating its minute blow, where, mayhap, millions of grains had struck before--had at length given a resinous-looking, uneven polish to all their exposed portions, while the portions covered up retained the dull unglossy coat given them of old by the agencies of friction and water. I have not heard the peculiarity described as a characteristic of the arenaceous deserts; but though it seems to have escaped notice, it will, I doubt not, be found to obtain wherever there are sands for the winds to waft along, and hard pebbles against which the grains may be propelled. In examining, many years after, a few specimens of silicified wood brought from the Egyptian desert, I at once recognised on their flinty surfaces the resinous-like gloss of the pebbles of Culbin; nor can I doubt that, if geology has its sub-aerial formations of consolidated sand, they will be found characterized by their polished pebbles. I marked several other peculiarities of the formation. In some of the abrupter sections laid open by the winds, tufts of the bent-gra.s.s (_Arundo arenaria_--common here, as in all sandy wastes) that had been buried up where they grew, might be distinctly traced, each upright in itself, but rising tuft above tuft in the steep angle of the hillock which they had originally covered. And though, from their dark colour, relieved against the lighter hue of the sand, they reminded me of the carbonaceous markings of sandstone of the Coal Measures, I recognised at least _their arrangement_ as unique. It seems to be such an arrangement--sloping in the general line, but upright in each of the tufts--as could take place in only a sub-aerial formation. I observed further, that in frequent instances there occurred on the surface of the sand, around decaying tufts of the bent-gra.s.s, deeply-marked circles, as if drawn by a pair of compa.s.ses or a trainer--effects apparently of eddy winds whirling round, as on a pivot, the decayed plants; and yet further, that footprints, especially those of rabbits and birds, were not unfrequent in the waste.

And as lines of stratification were, I found, distinctly preserved in the formation, I deemed it not improbable that, in cases in which high winds had arisen immediately after tracts of wet weather, and covered with sand, rapidly dried on the heights, the damp beds in the hollows, both the circular markings and the footprints might remain fixed in the strata, to tell of their origin. I found in several places, in chasms scooped out by a recent gale, pieces of the ancient soil laid bare, which had been covered up by the sand-flood nearly two centuries before.

In one of the openings the marks of the ancient furrows were still discernible; in another, the thin stratum of ferruginous soil had apparently never been brought under the plough; and I found it charged with roots of the common brake (_Pteris aquilina_), in a perfect state of keeping, but black and brittle as coal. Beneath this layer of soil lay a thin deposit of the stratified gravel of what is now known as the later glacial period--the age of _osars_ and moraines; and beneath all--for the underlying Old Red Sandstone of the district is not exposed amid the level wastes of Culbin--rested the boulder clay, the memorial of a time of submergence, when Scotland sat low in the sea as a wintry archipelago of islands, brushed by frequent icebergs, and when sub-arctic molluscs lived in her sounds and bays. A section of a few feet in vertical extent presented me with four distinct periods. There was, first, the period of the sand-flood, represented by the bar of pale-sand; then, secondly, the period of cultivation and human occupancy, represented by the dark plough-furrowed belt of hardened soil; thirdly, there was the gravel; and, fourthly, the clay. And that shallow section exhausted the historic ages, and more; for the double band of gravel and clay belonged palpably to the geologic ages, ere man had appeared on our planet. There had been found in the locality, only a few years previous to this time, a considerable number of stone arrow-heads--some of them only partially finished, and some of them marred in the making, as if some fletcher of the stone age had carried on his work on the spot; and all these memorials of a time long anterior to the first beginnings of history in the island were restricted to the stratum of hardened mould.

I carried on my researches in this--what I may term the chronological--direction, in connexion with the old-coast line, which, as I have already said, is finely developed in the neighbourhood of Cromarty on both sides of the Firth, and represented along the precipices of the Sutors by its line of deep caves, into which the sea never now enters. And it, too, pressed upon me the fact of the amazing antiquity of the globe. I found that the caves hollowed by the surf--when the sea stood from fifteen to five-and-twenty feet above its present level, or, as I should perhaps rather say, when the land sat that much lower--were deeper, on the average, by about one-third, than those caves of the present coast-line that are still in the course of being hollowed by the waves. And yet the waves have been breaking against the present coast-line during the whole of the historic period.

The ancient wall of Antoninus, which stretched between the Firths of Forth and Clyde, was built at its terminations with reference to the existing levels; and ere Caesar landed in Britain, St. Michael"s Mount was connected with the mainland, as now, by a narrow neck of beach laid bare by the ebb, across which, according to Diodorus Siculus, the Cornish miners used to drive, at low water, their carts laden with tin.

If the sea has stood for two thousand six hundred years against the present coast-line--and no geologist would fix his estimate of the term lower--then must it have stood against the old line, ere it could have excavated caves one-third deeper than the modern ones, three thousand nine hundred years. And both sums united more than exhaust the Hebrew chronology. Yet what a mere beginning of geologic history does not the epoch of the old coast-line form! It is but a starting-point from the recent period. Not a single sh.e.l.l seems to have become extinct during the last six thousand years. The organisms which I found deeply embedded in the soil beneath the old coast-line were exactly those which still live in our seas; and I have been since told by Mr. Smith of Jordanhill, one of our highest authorities on the subject, that he detected only three sh.e.l.ls of the period with which he was not familiar as existing forms, and that he subsequently met with all three, in his dredging expeditions, still alive. The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is pa.s.sing over us: they do not extend into the _yesterday_ of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond. Dr. Chalmers had taught, more than a quarter of a century previous to this time, that the Scriptures do not fix the antiquity of the earth. "If they fix anything," he said, "it is only the antiquity of the human species." The Doctor, though not practically a geologist at the time, had shrewdly weighed both the evidence adduced and the scientific character of the men who adduced it, and arrived at a conclusion, in consequence, which may now be safely regarded as the final one. I, on the other hand, who knew comparatively little about the standing of the geologists, or the weight which ought to attach to their testimony, based my findings regarding the vast antiquity of the earth on exactly the data on which they had founded theirs; and the more my acquaintance with the geologic deposits has since extended, the firmer have my convictions on the subject become, and the more pressing and inevitable have I felt the ever-growing demand for longer and yet longer periods for their formation. As certainly as the sun is the centre of our system, must our earth have revolved around it for millions of years. An American theologian, the author of a little book ent.i.tled the "Epoch of Creation," in doing me the honour of referring to my convictions on this subject, states, that I "betray indubitable tokens of being spell-bound to the extent of infatuation, by the foregone conclusion of" my "theory concerning the high antiquity of the earth, and the succession of animal and vegetable creations." He adds further, in an eloquent sentence, a page and a half long, that had I first studied and credited my Bible, I would have failed to believe in successive creations and the geologic chronology. I trust, however, I may say I did first study and believe my Bible. But such is the structure of the human mind, that, save when blinded by pa.s.sion or warped by prejudice, it must yield an involuntary consent to the force of evidence; and I can now no more refuse believing, in opposition to respectable theologians such as Mr. Granville Penn, Professor Moses Stuart, and Mr. Eleazar Lord, that the earth is of an antiquity incalculably vast, than I can refuse believing, in opposition to still more respectable theologians, such as St. Augustine, Lactantius, and Turretine, that it has antipodes, and moves round the sun. And further, of this, men such as the Messrs. Penn, Stuart, and Lord may rest a.s.sured, that what I believe in this matter now, all theologians, even the weakest, will be content to believe fifty years hence.

Sometimes a chance incident taught me an interesting geological lesson.

At the close of the year 1830, a tremendous hurricane from the south and west, unequalled in the north of Scotland, from at least the time of the great hurricane of Christmas 1806, blew down in a single hour four thousand full-grown trees on the Hill of Cromarty. The vast gaps and avenues which it opened in the wood above could be seen from the town; and no sooner had it begun to take off than I set out for the scene of its ravages. I had previously witnessed, from a sheltered hollow of the old coast-line, the extraordinary appearance of the sea. It would seem as if the very violence of the wind had kept down the waves. It brushed off their tops as they were rising, and swept along the spray in one dense cloud, white as driving snow, that rose high into the air as it receded from the sh.o.r.e, and blotted out along the horizon the line between sky and water. As I approached the wood, I met two poor little girls of from eight to ten years, coming running and crying along the road in a paroxysm of consternation; but, gathering heart on seeing me, they stood to tell that when the storm was at its worst they were in the midst of the falling trees. Setting out for the Hill on the first rising of the wind, in the expectation of a rich harvest of withered boughs, they had reached one of its most exposed ridges just as the gale had attained to its extreme height, and the trees began to crash down around them. Their little tear-bestained countenances still continued to show how extreme the agony of their terror had been. They would run, they said, for a few paces in one direction, until some huge pine would come roaring down, and block up their path; when, turning with a shriek, they would run for a few paces in another; and then, terrified by a similar interruption, again strike off in a third. At length, after pa.s.sing nearly an hour in the extremest peril, and in at least all the fear which the circ.u.mstances justified, they succeeded in making their way unhurt to the outer skirts of the wood. Bewick would have found in the incident the subject of a vignette that would have told its own story.

In getting into the thick of the trees, I was struck by the extraordinary character of the scene presented. In some places, greatly more than half their number lay stretched upon the ground. On the more exposed prominences of the Hill, scarce a tree was left standing for acres together: they covered the slopes; tree stretched over tree like tiles on a roof, with here and there some shattered trunk whose top had been blown off, and carried by the hurricane some fifteen or twenty yards away, leaning in sad ruin over its fallen comrades. What, however, formed the most striking, because less expected, parts of the scene, were the tall walls of turf that stood up everywhere among the fallen trees, like the ruins of dismantled cottages. The granitic gneiss of the Hill is covered by a thick deposit of the red boulder clay of the district, and the clay, in turn, by a thin layer of vegetable mould, interlaced in every direction by the tree roots, which, arrested in their downward progress by the stiff clay, are restricted to the upper layer. And, save where here and there I found some tree snapped across in the midst, or divested of its top, all the others had yielded at the line between the boulder clay and the soil, and had torn up, as they fell, vast walls of the felted turf, from fifteen to twenty feet in length, by from ten to twelve feet in height. There were quite enough of these walls standing up among the prostrate trees, to have formed a score of the eastern Sultan"s ruined villages; and they imparted to the scene one of its strangest features. I have mentioned in an early chapter, that the Hill had its dense thickets, which, from the gloom that brooded in their recesses even at mid-day, were known to the boys of the neighbouring town as the "dungeons." They had now fared, however, in this terrible overturn, like dungeons elsewhere in times of revolution, and were all swept away; and piles of prostrate trees--in some instances ten or twelve in a single heap marked where they had stood. In several localities, where they fell over swampy hollows, or where deep-seated springs came gushing to the light, I found the water partially dammed up, and saw that, were they to be left to c.u.mber the ground as the debris of forests destroyed by hurricanes in the earlier ages of Scottish history would certainly have been left, the deep shade and the moisture could not have failed to induce a total change in the vegetation. I marked, too, the fallen trees all lying one way, in the direction of the wind; and the thought at once struck me, that in this recent scene of devastation I had the origin of full one-half of our Scottish mosses exemplified. Some of the mosses of the south date from the times of Roman invasion. Their lower tiers of trunks bear the mark of the Roman axe; and in some instances, the sorely wasted axe itself--a narrow, oblong tool, somewhat resembling that of the American backwoodsman--has been found sticking in the buried stump Some of our other mosses are of still more modern origin: there exist Scottish mosses that seem to have been formed when Robert the Bruce felled the woods and wasted the country of John of Lorn. But of the others, not a few have palpably owed their origin to violent hurricanes, such as the one which on this occasion ravaged the Hill of Cromarty. The trees which form their lower stratum are broken across, or torn up by the roots, _and their trunks all lie one way_. Much of the interest of a science such as geology must consist in the ability of making dead deposits represent living scenes; and from this hurricane I was enabled to conceive, pictorially, if I may so express myself, of the origin of those comparatively recent deposits of Scotland which, formed almost exclusively of vegetable matter, contain, with rude works of art, and occasionally remains of the early human inhabitants of the country, skeletons of the wolf, the bear, and the beaver, with horns of the _bos primigenius_ and _bos longifrons_, and of a gigantic variety of red deer, unequalled in size by animals of the same species in these latter ages. Occasionally I was enabled to vivify in this way even the ancient deposits of the Lias, with their vast abundance of cephalopodous mollusca--belemnites, ammonites, and nautili. My friend of the Cave had become parish schoolmaster of Nigg; and his hospitable dwelling furnished me with an excellent centre for exploring the geology of the parish, especially its Lia.s.sic deposits at Shandwick, with their huge gryphites and their numerous belemnites, of at least two species, comparatively rare at Eathie--the _belemnite abreviatus_ and _belemnite elongatus_. I had learned that these curious sh.e.l.ls once formed part of the internal framework of a mollusc more nearly akin to the cuttle-fishes of the present day than aught else that now exists; and the cuttle-fishes--not rare in at least one of their species (_loligo vulgare_) in the Firth of Cromarty--I embraced every opportunity of examining. I have seen from eighteen to twenty individuals of this species enclosed at once in the inner chamber of one of our salmon-wears. The greater number of these shoals I have ordinarily found dead, and tinged with various shades of green, blue, and yellow--for it is one of the characteristics of the creature to a.s.sume, when pa.s.sing into a state of decomposition, a succession of brilliant colours; but I have seen from six to eight individuals of their number still alive in a little pool beside the nets, and still retaining their original pink tint, freckled with red. And these I have observed, as my shadow fell across their little patch of water, darting from side to side in panic terror within the narrow confines, emitting ink at almost every dart, until the whole pool had become a deep solution of sepia. Some of my most interesting recollections of the cuttle-fish are a.s.sociated, however, with the capture and dissection of a single specimen. The creature, in swimming, darts through the water much in the manner that a boy slides down an ice-crusted declivity, feet foremost;--the lower or nether extremities go first, and the head behind: it follows its tail, instead of being followed by it; and this curious peculiarity in its mode of progression, though, of course, on the whole, the mode best adapted to its conformation and instincts, sometimes proves fatal to it in calm weather, when not a ripple breaks upon the pebbles, to warn that the sh.o.r.e is near. An enemy appears: the creature ejects its cloud of ink, like a sharp-shooter discharging his rifle ere he retreats; and then, darting away, tail foremost, under cover of the cloud, it grounds itself high upon the beach, and perishes there. I was walking, one very calm day, along the Cromarty sh.o.r.e, a little to the west of the town, when I heard a peculiar sound--a _squelch_, if I may employ such a word--and saw that a large loligo, fully a foot and a half in length, had thrown itself high and dry upon the beach. I laid hold of it by its sheath or sack; and the loligo, in turn, laid hold of the pebbles, apparently to render its abduction as difficult as possible, just as I have seen a boy, when borne off against his will by a stronger than himself, grasping fast to door-posts and furniture. The pebbles were hard and smooth, but the creature raised them very readily with his suckers. I subjected one of my hands to its grasp, and it seized fast hold; but though the suckers were still employed, it made use of them on a different principle. Around the circular rim of each there is a fringe of minute thorns, hooked somewhat like those of the wild rose. In clinging to the hard polished pebbles, these were overlapped by a fleshy membrane, much in the manner that the cushions of a cat"s paw overlap its claws when the animal is in a state of tranquillity; and by means of the projecting membrane, the hollow interior was rendered air-tight, and the vacuum completed: but in dealing with the hand--a soft substance--the thorns were laid bare, like the claws of a cat when stretched out in anger, and at least a thousand minute p.r.i.c.kles were fixed in the skin at once. They failed to penetrate it, for they were short, and individually not strong; but, acting together by hundreds, they took at least a very firm hold.

What follows may be deemed barbarous; but the men who gulp down at a sitting half-a-hundred live oysters to gratify their taste, may surely forgive me the destruction of a single mollusc to gratify my curiosity!

I cut open the sack of the creature with a sharp penknife, and laid bare the viscera. What a sight for Harvey, when prosecuting, in the earlier stages, his grand discovery of the circulation! _There_, in the centre, was the yellow muscular heart, propelling into the transparent, tubular arteries, the _yellow_ blood. Beat--beat--beat:--I could see the whole as in a gla.s.s model; and all I lacked were powers of vision nice enough to enable me to detect the fluid pa.s.sing through the minuter arterial branches, and then returning by the veins to the _two_ other hearts of the creature; for, strange to say, it is furnished with three. There in the midst I saw the yellow heart, and, lying altogether detached from it, two other deep-coloured hearts at the sides. I cut a little deeper.

_There_ was the gizzard-like stomach, filled with fragments of minute mussel and crab sh.e.l.ls; and _there_, inserted in the spongy, conical, yellowish-coloured liver, and somewhat resembling in form a Florence flask, was the ink-bag distended, with its deep dark sepia--the identical pigment sold under that name in our colour shops, and so extensively used in landscape drawing by the limner. I then dissected and laid open the circular or ring-like brain that surrounds the creature"s parrot-like beak, as if its _thinking_ part had no other vocation than simply to take care of the mouth and its pertinents--almost the sole employment, however, of not a few brains of a considerably higher order. I next laid open the huge eyes. They were curious organs, more simple in their structure than those of the true fishes, but admirably adapted, I doubt not, for the purposes of seeing.

A camera obscura may be described as consisting of two parts--a lens in front, and a darkened chamber behind; but in the eyes of fishes, as in the brute and human eye, we find a third part added: there is a lens in the middle, a darkened chamber behind, and a lighted chamber, or rather vestibule, in front. Now, this lighted vestibule--the cornea--is wanting in the eye of the cuttle-fish. The lens is placed in front, and the darkened chamber behind. The construction of the organ is that of a common camera obscura. I found something worthy of remark, too, on the peculiar style in which the chamber is darkened. In the higher animals it may be described as a chamber hung with black velvet--the _pigmentum nigrum_ which covers it is of the deepest black; but in the cuttle-fish it is a chamber hung with velvet, not of a black, but of a dark purple hue--the _pigmentum nigrum_ is of a purplish red colour. There is something interesting in marking this first departure from an invariable condition of eyes of the more perfect structure, and in then tracing the peculiarity downwards through almost every shade of colour, to the emerald-like eye-specks of the pecten, and the still more rudimentary red eye-specks of the star-fish. After examining the eyes, I next laid open, in all its length, from the neck to the point of the sack, the dorsal bone of the creature--its internal sh.e.l.l, I should rather say, for bone it has none. The form of the sh.e.l.l in this species is that of a feather, equally developed in the web on both sides. It gives rigidity to the body, and furnishes the muscles with a fulcrum; and we find it composed, like all other _sh.e.l.ls_, of a mixture of animal matter and carbonate of lime. Such was the lesson taught me in a single walk; and I have recorded it at some length. The subject of it, the loligo, has been described by some of our more distinguished naturalists, such as Kirby in his Bridgewater Treatise, as "one of the most wonderful works of the Creator;" and the reader will perhaps remember how fraught with importance to natural science an incident similar to the one related proved in the life of the youthful Cuvier. It was when pa.s.sing his twenty-second year on the sea-coast, near Fiquainville, that this greatest of modern naturalists was led, by finding a cuttle-fish stranded on the beach, which he afterwards dissected, to study the anatomy and character of the mollusca. To me, however, the lesson served merely to vivify the dead deposits of the Oolitic system, as represented by the Lias of Cromarty and Ross. The middle and later ages of the great secondary division were peculiarly ages of the cephalopodous molluscs: their belemnites, ammonites, nautili, baculites, hamites, turrilites, and scaphites, belonged to the great natural cla.s.s--singularly rich in its extinct orders and genera, though comparatively poor in its existing ones--which we find represented by the cuttle-fish; and when engaged in disinterring the remains of the earlier-born members of the family--ammonites, belemnites, and nautili--from amid the shales of Eathie or the mud-stones of Shandwick, the incident of the loligo has enabled me to conceive of them, not as mere dead remains, but as the living inhabitants of primaeval seas, stirred by the diurnal tides, and lighted up by the sun.

When pursuing my researches amid the deposits of the Lias, I was conducted to an interesting discovery. There are two great systems of hills in the north of Scotland--an older and a newer--that bisect each other like the furrows of a field that had first been ploughed across and then diagonally. The diagonal furrows, as the last drawn, are still very entire. The great Caledonian Valley, open from sea to sea, is the most remarkable of these; but the parallel valleys of the Nairn, of the Findhorn, and of the Spey, are all well-defined furrows; nor are the mountain ridges which separate them less definitely ranged in continuous lines. The ridges and furrows of the earlier ploughing are, on the contrary, as might be antic.i.p.ated, broken and interrupted: the effacing plough has pa.s.sed over them: and yet there are certain localities in which we find the fragments of this earlier system sufficiently entire to form one of the main features of the landscape. In pa.s.sing through the upper reaches of the Moray Firth, and along the Caledonian Valley, the cross furrows may be seen branching off to the west, and existing as the valleys of Loch Fleet, of the Dornoch Firth, of the Firth of Cromarty, of the Bay of Munlochy, of the Firth of Beauty, and, as we enter the Highlands proper, as Glen Urquhart, Glen Morrison, Glen Garry, Loch Arkaig, and Loch Eil. The diagonal system--represented by the great valley itself, and known as the system of Ben Nevis and the Ord of Caithness in our own country, and, according to De Beaumont, as that of Mount Pilate and Cote d"Or on the Continent--was upheaved after the close of the Oolitic ages. It was not until at least the period of the Weald that its "hills had been formed and its mountains brought forth;"

and in the line of the Moray Firth the Lias and Oolite lie uptilted, at steep angles, against the sides of its long ranges of precipice. It is not so easy determining the age of the older system. No formation occurs in the north of Scotland between the Lias and the Old Red Sandstone: the vast Carboniferous, Permian, and Tria.s.sic deposits are represented by a wide gap; and all that can be said regarding the older hills is, that they disturbed and bore up with them the Old Red Sandstone; but that as there lay at their bases, at the time of their upheaval, no more modern rock to be disturbed, it seems impossible definitely to fix their era.

Neither does there appear among their estuaries or valleys any trace of the Oolitic deposits. Existing, in all probability, during even the times of the Lias, as the sub-aerial framework of Oolitic Scotland--as the framework on which the Oolitic vegetables grew--no deposit of the system could of course have taken place over them. I had not yet, however, formed any very definite idea regarding the two systems, or ascertained that they belonged apparently to a different time; and finding the Lias upheaved against the steeper sides of the Moray Firth--one of the huge furrows of the more modern system--I repeatedly sought to find it uptilted also against the sh.o.r.es of the Cromarty Firth--one of the furrows of the greatly more ancient one. I had, however, prosecuted the search in a somewhat desultory manner; and as in the autumn of 1830 a pause of a few days took place in my professional labours between the completing of one piece of work and the commencement of another, I resolved on devoting the time to a thorough survey of the Cromarty Firth, in the hope of detecting the Lias. I began my search at the granitic gneiss of the Hill, and, proceeding westwards, pa.s.sed in succession, in the ascending order, over the uptilted beds of the lower Old Red Sandstone, from the Great Conglomerate base of the system, till I reached the middle member of the deposit, which consists, in this locality, of alternate beds of limestone, sandstone, and stratified clay, and which we find represented in Caithness by the extensively developed flag-stones. And then, the rock disappearing, I pa.s.sed over a pebbly beach mottled with boulders; and in a little bay not half a mile distant from the town, I again found the rock laid bare.

I had long before observed that the rock rose to the surface in this little bay; I had even employed, when a boy, pieces of its stratified clay as slate-pencil; but I had yet failed minutely to examine it. I was now, however, struck by its resemblance, in all save colour, to the Lias. The strata lay at a low angle: they were composed of an argillaceous shale, and abounded in limestone nodules; and, save that both shale and nodules bore, instead of the deep Lia.s.sic grey, an olivaceous tint, I might have almost supposed I had fallen on a continuation of some of the Eathie beds. I laid open a nodule with a blow of the hammer, and my heart leaped up when I saw that it enclosed an organism. A dark, ill-defined, bituminous ma.s.s occupied the centre; but I could distinguish what seemed to be spines and small ichthyic bones projecting from its edges; and when I subjected them to the scrutiny of the gla.s.s, unlike those mere chance resemblances which sometimes deceive for a moment the eye, the more distinct and unequivocal did their forms become. I laid open a second nodule. It contained a group of glittering rhomboidal scales, with a few cerebral plates, and a jaw bristling with teeth. A third nodule also supplied its organism, in a well-defined ichthyolite, covered with minute, finely-striated scales, and furnished with a sharp spine in the anterior edge of every fin. I eagerly wrought on, and disinterred, in the course of a single tide, specimens enough to cover a museum table; and it was with intense delight that, as the ripple of the advancing tide was rising against the pebbles, and covering up the ichthyolitic beds, I carried them to the higher slopes of the beach, and, seated on a boulder, began carefully to examine them in detail with a common botanist"s microscope. But not a plate, spine, or scale, could I detect among their organisms, identical with the ichthyic remains of the Lias.

I had got amid the remains of an entirely different and incalculably more ancient creation. My new-found organisms represented, not the first, but merely the second age of vertebrate existence on our planet; but as the remains of the earlier age exist as the mere detached teeth and spines of placoids, which, though they give full evidence of the _existence_ of the fishes to which they belong, throw scarce any light on their structure, it is from the ganoids of this second age that the palaeontologist can with certainty know under what peculiarities of form, and a.s.sociated with what varieties of mechanism, vertebral life existed in the earlier ages of the world. In my new-found deposit--to which I soon added, however, within the limits of the parish, some six or eight deposits more, all charged with the same ichthyic remains--I found I had work enough before me for the patient study of years.

CHAPTER XXII.

"They lay aside their private cares, To mend the Kirk and State affairs; They"ll talk o" patronage and priests, Wi" kindling fury in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s; Or tell what new taxation "s comin", An" ferlie at the folk in _Lon"on_."--BURNS.

We had, as I have already stated, no Dissenters in the parish of Cromarty. What were known as the Haldanes" people, had tried to effect a lodgment among us in the town, but without success: in the course of several years they failed to acquire more than six or eight members; and these were not of the more solid people, but marked as an eccentric cla.s.s, fond of argument, and possessed by a rage for the novel and the extreme. The leading teachers of the party were a retired English merchant and an ex-blacksmith, who, quitting the forge in middle life, had pursued the ordinary studies to no very great effect, and become a preacher. And both were, I believe, good men, but by no means prudent missionaries. They said very strong things against the Church of Scotland, in a place where the Church of Scotland was much respected; and it was observed, that while they did not do a great deal to convert the irreligious to Christianity, they were exceedingly zealous in their endeavours to make the religious Baptists. Much to my annoyance in my younger days, they used to waylay Uncle Sandy on his return from the Hill, on evenings when I had gone to get some lessons from him regarding sand-worms, or razor-fish, or the sea-hare, and engage him in long controversies about infant baptism and Church Establishments. The matters which they discussed were greatly too high for me, nor was I by any means an attentive listener; but I picked up enough to know that Uncle Sandy, though a man of slow speech, held stiffly to the Establishment scheme of Knox, and the defence of Presbyterianism; and it did not require any particularly nice perceptive powers to observe that both his antagonists and himself used at times to get pretty warm, and to talk tolerably loud--louder, at least, than was at all necessary in the quiet evening woods. I remember, too, that in urging him to quit the National Church for theirs, they usually employed language borrowed from the Revelations; and that, calling his Church _Babylon_, they bade him come out of her, that he might not be a partaker of her plagues. Uncle Sandy had seen too much of the world, and read and heard too much of controversy, to be out of measure shocked by the phrase; but with a decent farmer of the parish the hard words of the proselytizers did them a mischief. The retired merchant had urged him to quit the Establishment; and the farmer had replied by asking, in his simplicity, whether he thought he ought to leave his Church to sink in that way?

"Yes," exclaimed the merchant, with great emphasis; "leave her to sink to her place--the lowest h.e.l.l!" This was terrible: the decent farmer opened his huge eyes at hearing what he deemed a bold blasphemy. The Church of which the Baptist spoke was, in Cromarty at least, the Church of the _outed_ Mr. Hugh Anderson, who gave up his all in the time of the persecution, for conscience" sake; it was the Church of Mr. Gordon, whose ministry had been so signally countenanced during the period of the great revival; it was the Church of devout Mr. Monro, and of worthy Mr. Smith, and of many a G.o.dly elder and G.o.d-fearing member who had held by Christ the Head; and yet here was it denounced as a Church whose true place was h.e.l.l. The farmer turned away, sick of the controversy; and the imprudent speech of the retired merchant flew like wildfire over the parish. "Surely," says Bacon, "princes have need, in tender matters and ticklish times, to beware what they say, especially in those short speeches which fly about like darts, and are thought to be shot out of their secret intentions." Princes are, however, not the only men who would do well to beware of short speeches. The short speech of the merchant ruined the Baptist cause in Cromarty; and the two missionaries might, on its delivery, have just done, if they but knew the position to which it reduced them, what they were content to do a few years after--pack up their moveables and quit the place.

Having for years no antagonists to contend with outside the pale of the Establishment, it was of course natural that we should find opponents within. But during the inc.u.mbency of Mr. Smith--the minister of the parish for the first one-and-twenty years of my life--even these were wanting; and we pa.s.sed a very quiet time, undisturbed by controversy of any kind, political or ecclesiastical. Nor were the first few years of Mr. Stewart"s inc.u.mbency less quiet. The Catholic Relief Bill was a pebble cast into the pool, but a very minute one; and the ripple which it raised caused scarce any agitation. Mr. Stewart did not see his way clearly through all the difficulties of the measure; but, influenced in part by some of his brethren in the neighbourhood, he at length made up his mind to pet.i.tion against it; and to his pet.i.tion, praying that no concessions should be made to the Papists, greatly more than nineteen-twentieths of the male parishioners affixed their names. The few individuals who kept aloof were chiefly lads of an extra-liberal turn, devoid, like most extreme politicians, of the ordinary ecclesiastical sympathies of their countryfolk; and as I cultivated no acquaintance with them, and was more ecclesiastical than political in my leanings, I had the satisfaction of finding myself standing, in opposition to all my friends, on the Catholic Relief measure, in a respectable minority of one. Even Uncle Sandy, after some little demur, and an explosion against the Irish Establishment, set off and signed the pet.i.tion. I failed, however, to see that I was in the wrong. With the two great facts of the Irish Union and the Irish Church before me, I could not pet.i.tion against Roman Catholic Emanc.i.p.ation. I felt, too, that were I myself a Roman Catholic, I would listen to no Protestant argument until what I held to be justice had first been done me. I would have at once inferred that a religion a.s.sociated with what I deemed injustice was a false, not a true, religion; and, on the strength of the inference, would have rejected it without further inquiry; and could I fail to believe that what I myself would have done in the circ.u.mstances, many Roman Catholics were actually doing? And believing I could defend my position, which was certainly not an obtrusive one, and was at times a.s.sailed in conversation by my friends, in a way that showed, as I thought, they did not understand it, I sat down and wrote an elaborate letter on the subject, addressed to the editor of the _Inverness Courier_; in which, as I afterwards found, I was happy enough to antic.i.p.ate in some points the line taken up, in his famous emanc.i.p.ation speech, by a man whom I had early learned to recognise as the greatest and wisest of Scottish ministers--the late Dr. Chalmers. On glancing over my letter, however, and then looking round me on the good men among my townsfolk--including my uncle and my minister--with whom it would have the effect of placing me in more decided antagonism than any mere refusal to sign their pet.i.tion, I resolved, instead of dropping it into the post-office, to drop it into the fire, which I accordingly did; and so the matter took end; and what I had to say in my own defence, and in that of emanc.i.p.ation, was in consequence never said.

This, however, was but the mere shadow of a controversy; it was merely a possible controversy, strangled in the birth. But some three years after, the parish was agitated by a dire ecclesiastical dispute, which set us all together by the ears. The place had not only its parish church, but also its Gaelic chapel, which, though on the ordinary foundation of a chapel of ease, was endowed, and under the patronage of the crown. It had been built about sixty years previous, by a benevolent proprietor of the lands of Cromarty--"George Ross, the Scotch agent"--whom Junius ironically described as the "trusted friend and worthy confidant of Lord Mansfield;" and who, whatever the satirist may have thought of either, was in reality a man worthy the friendship of the accomplished and philosophic lawyer. Cromarty, originally a Lowland settlement, had had from the Reformation down till the latter quarter of the last century no Gaelic place of worship. On the breaking up of the feudal system, however, the Highlanders began to drop into the place in quest of employment; and George Ross, affected by their uncared-for religious condition, built for them, at his own expense, a chapel, and had influence enough to get an endowment for its minister from the Government. Government retained the patronage in its own hands; and as the Highlanders consisted of but labourers and farm servants, and the workers in a hempen manufactory, and had no manner of influence, their wishes were not always consulted in the choice of a minister. About the time of Mr. Stewart"s appointment, through the late Sir Robert Peel, who had courteously yielded to the wishes of the English congregation, the Gaelic people had got a minister presented to them whom they would scarcely have chosen for themselves, but who had, notwithstanding, popular points about him. Though not of high talent, he was frank and genial, and visited often, and conversed much; and at length the Highlanders came to regard him as the very _beau-ideal_ of a minister.

He and Mr. Stewart belonged to the antagonist parties in the Church. Mr.

Stewart took his place in the old Presbyterian section, under Chalmers and Thomson; while the Gaelic minister held by Drs. Inglis and Cook: and so thoroughly were their respective congregations influenced by their views, that at the Disruption in 1843, while considerably more than nine-tenths of the English-speaking parishioners closed their connexion with the State, and became Free Churchmen, at least an equal proportion of the chapel Highlanders clung to the Establishment. Curiously enough, however, there arose a controversy between the congregations at this time, in which each seemed, in relation to the general question at issue, to take the part proper to the other.

I do not think the English congregation were in any degree jealous of the Gaelic one. The English contained the _elite_ of the place--all its men of property and influence, from its merchants and heritors, down to the humblest of the cla.s.s that afterwards became its ten-pound franchise-holders; whereas the Gaelic people were, as I have said, simply poor labourers and weavers: and if the sense of superiority did at times show itself on the more potent side, it was only among the lowlier people of the English congregation. When, on a certain occasion, a stranger fell asleep in the middle of one of Mr. Stewart"s best sermons, and snored louder than was seemly, an individual beside him was heard muttering, in a low whisper, that the man ought to be sent up to "_the Gaelic_," for he was not fit to be among them; and there might be a few other similar manifestations; but the parties were not on a sufficiently equal level to enact the part of those rival congregations that are for ever bemoaning the shortcomings each of the other, and that in their days of fasting and humiliation have the sins of their neighbours at least as strongly before them as their own. But if the English congregation were not jealous of the Gaelic one, the Gaelic one, as was perhaps natural in their circ.u.mstances, were, I am afraid, jealous of the English: they were poor people, they used sometimes to say, but their souls were as precious as those of richer folk, and they were surely as well ent.i.tled to have their just rights as the English people--axioms which, I believe, no one in the other congregation disputed, or even canva.s.sed at all. We were, however, all roused one morning to consider the case, by learning that on the previous day the minister of the Gaelic chapel had pet.i.tioned the Presbytery of the district, either to be a.s.signed a parish within the bounds of the parish of Cromarty, or to have the charge erected into a collegiate one, and his half of it, of course, rendered coordinate with Mr. Stewart"s.

The English people were at once very angry, and very much alarmed. As the two congregations were scattered all over the same piece of territory, it would be impossible to cut it up into two parishes, without separating between a portion of Mr. Stewart"s people and their minister, and making them the parishioners of a man whom they had not yet learned to like; and, on the other hand, by erecting the charge into a collegiate one, the minister whom they had not yet learned to like would acquire as real a jurisdiction over them as that possessed by the minister of their choice. Or--as the case was somewhat quaintly stated by one of themselves--by the one alternative "the Gaelic man would become whole minister to the half of them, and by the other, half minister to the whole of them." And so they determined on making a vigorous resistance. Mr. Stewart himself, too, liked the move of his neighbour the Gaelic minister exceedingly ill. He was not desirous, he said, to have a colleague thrust upon him in his charge, to keep him right on Moderate principles--a benefit for which he had not bargained when he accepted the presentation; nor yet, as the other alternative, did he wish to see his living child, the parish, divided into two, and the half of it given to the strange claimant that was not its parent.

There was another account, too, on which he disliked the movement: the two great parties in the Church were equally represented at this time in the Presbytery;--they had their three members apiece; and he, of course, saw that the introduction of the Gaelic minister into it would have the effect of casting the balance in favour of Moderatism. And so, as both minister and people were equally in earnest, counter pet.i.tions were soon got up, praying the Presbytery, as a first step in the process, that copies of the Gaelic minister"s doc.u.ment should be served upon them. The Presbytery decided, in terms of their prayer, that copies should be served; and the Gaelic minister, on the somewhat extreme ground that the people had no right to appear in the business at all, appealed to the General a.s.sembly. And so the people had next to pet.i.tion that venerable court in behalf of what they deemed their imperilled rights; while the Gaelic congregation, under the full impression that their overbearing English neighbours were treating them "as if they had no souls," got up a counter pet.i.tion, virtually to the effect that the parish might be either cut in two, and the half of it given to their minister, or that he might be at least made second minister to every man in it. The minister, however, finding at the General a.s.sembly that the ecclesiastical party on whose support he had relied were opposed _in toto_ to the erection of chapels of ease into regular charges, and that the peculiarities of the case were such as to cut off all chance of his being supported by their opponents, fell from his appeal, and the case was never called in Court. Some of our Cromarty fisher-folk, who were staunch on the English side, though they could not quite see the merits, had rather a different version of the business. "The Gaelic man had no sooner entered the Kirk o" the General a.s.sembly," they said, "than the maister of the a.s.sembly rose, and, speaking very rough, said, "Ye contrarious rascal, what tak"s you here? What are ye aye troubling that decent lad Mr. Stewart for? I"m sure he"s no meddling wi" you! Get about your business, ye contrarious rascal!""

I took an active part in this controversy; wrote pet.i.tions and statements for my brother parishioners, with paragraphs for the local newspapers, and a long letter for the _Caledonian Mercury_, in reply to a tissue of misrepresentation which appeared in that print, from the pen of one of the Gaelic minister"s legal agents; and, finally, I replied to a pamphlet by the same hand, which, though miserable as a piece of writing--for it resembled no other composition ever produced, save, mayhap, a very badly-written law paper--contained statements which I deemed it necessary to meet. And such were my first attempts in the rough field of ecclesiastical controversy--a field into which inclination would never have led me, but which has certainly lain very much in my way, and in which I have spent many a laborious hour. My first pieces were rather stiffly written, somewhat on the perilous model of Junius; but as it was hardly possible to write so ill as my opponent, I could appeal to even his friends whether it was quite right of him to call me illiterate and untaught, in prose so much worse than my own.

Chiefly by getting the laughers now and then on my side, I succeeded in making him angry; and he replied to my jokes by _calling names_--a phrase, by the way, which, forgetting his Watts" Hymns, and failing to consult his Johnson, he characterized as not English. I was, he said, a "shallow, pretending ninny;" an "impudent illiterate lad;" "a fanatic"

and a "frantic person;" the "low underling of a faction," and "Peter the Hermit;" and, finally, as the sum-total of the whole he a.s.sured me that I stood in _his_ "estimation the most ign.o.ble and despised in the whole range of the human species." This was frightful! but I not only outlived it all, but learned, I fear, after in this way first tasting blood, to experience a rather too keen delight in the anger of an antagonist. I may add, that when, some two or three years after the period of this controversy, the General a.s.sembly admitted what were known as the Parliamentary ministers, and the ministers of chapels of ease, to a seat in the church courts, neither my townsmen nor myself saw aught to challenge in the arrangement. It contained none of the elements which had provoked our hostility in the Cromarty chapel case: it did not make over the people of one minister to the charge of another, whom they would never have chosen for themselves; but, without encroaching on popular rights, equalized, on the Presbyterian scheme, the standing of ministers and the claims of congregations.

The next matter which engaged my townsfolk was a considerably more serious one. When, in 1831, cholera first threatened the sh.o.r.es of Britain, the Bay of Cromarty was appointed by Government one of the quarantine ports; and we became familiar with the sight, at first deemed sufficiently startling, of fleets of vessels lying in the upper roadstead, with the yellow flag waving from their mast-tops. The disease, however, failed to find its way ash.o.r.e; and, when, in the summer of the following year, it was introduced into the north of Scotland, it went stalking around the town and parish for several months, without visiting either. It greatly more than decimated the villages of Portmahomak and Inver, and bore heavily on the parishes of Nigg and Urquhart, with the towns of Inverness, Nairn, Avoch, Dingwall, and Rosemarkie; in fine, the quarantine seaport town that seemed at first to be most in danger from the disease, appeared latterly to be almost the only place of any size in the locality exempted from its ravages. It approached, however, alarmingly near. The opening of the Cromarty Firth is little more than a mile across; a gla.s.s of the ordinary power enables one to count every pane in the windows of the dwellings that mottle its northern sh.o.r.e, and to distinguish their inhabitants; and yet among these dwellings cholera was raging; and we could see, in at least one instance, a dead body borne forth by two persons on a hand-barrow, and buried in a neighbouring sand-bank.

Stories, too, of the sad fate of individuals with whom the townsfolk were acquainted, and who had resided in well-known localities, told among them with powerful effect. Such was the general panic in the infected places, that the bodies of the dead were no longer carried to the churchyard, but huddled up in solitary holes and corners; and the pictures suggested to the fancy, of familiar faces lying uncoffined in the ground beside some lonely wood, or in some dark mora.s.s or heathy moor, were fraught to many with a terror stronger than that of death. We knew that the corpse of a young robust fisherman, who used occasionally to act as one of the Cromarty ferrymen, and with whose appearance, in consequence, every one was familiar, lay festering in a sand-bank; that the iron frame of a brawny blacksmith was decomposing in a mossy hole beside a thorn-bush; that half the inhabitants of the little fishing village of Inver were strewn in shallow furrows along the arid waste which surrounded their dwellings; that houses divested of their tenants, and become foul dens of contagion, had been set on fire and burnt to the ground; and that around the infected fishing-hamlets of Hilton and Balintore the country-people had drawn a sort of _barriere sanitaire_, and cooped up within the limits of their respective villages the wretched inhabitants. And in the general consternation--a consternation much more extreme than that evinced when the disease actually visited the place--it was asked by the townsfolk whether _they_ ought not so long as the place remained uninfected, to draw a similar _cordon_ round themselves. A public meeting was accordingly held, to deliberate on the best means of shutting themselves in; and at the meeting almost all the adult male inhabitants attended, with the exception of the gentlemen in the commission of the peace, and the town officials, who, though quite prepared to wink hard at our irregularities, failed to see that, on any grounds tenable in the eye of the law, they themselves could take a share in them.

Our meeting at first threatened to be stormy. The extra Liberals, who, in the previous ecclesiastical struggle, had taken part to a man with the Gaelic people, as they did, in the subsequent church controversy, with the Court of Session, began by an attack on the Town Justices. We might all see now, said a Liberal writer lad who addressed us, how little these people were our friends. Now when the place was threatened by the pestilence, they would do nothing for us; they would not even so much as countenance our meeting; we saw there was not one of them present: in short, they cared nothing at all about us, or whether we died or lived. But he and his friends would stand by us to the last; nay, while the magistrates were evidently afraid, with all their wealth, to move in the matter, terrified, no doubt, by the prosecutions for damages which might be inst.i.tuted against them were they to stop the highways, and turn back travellers, he himself, though far from rich, would be our security against all legal processes whatever. This, of course, was very n.o.ble; all the more n.o.ble from the circ.u.mstance that the speaker could not, as the _Gazette_ informed us, meet his own actual liabilities at the time, and was yet fully prepared, notwithstanding, to meet all our possible ones. Up started, however, almost ere he had done speaking, a friend of the Justices, and made so angry a speech in their defence, that the meeting threatened to fall into two parties, and explode in a squabble. I rose in the extremity, and, though unhappily no orator, addressed my townsfolk in a few homely sentences. Cholera, I reminded them, was too evidently of neither party; and the magistrates were, I was sure, nearly as much frightened as we were. But they really could do nothing for us. In matters of life and death, however, when laws and magistrates failed to protect quiet people, the people were justified in a.s.serting the natural right to protect themselves; and, whatever laws and lawyers might urge to the contrary, that right was now ours. In a neighbouring county, the inhabitants of certain infected villages were already fairly shut up amid their dwellings by the countryfolk around, who could themselves show a clean bill of health; and we, if in the circ.u.mstances of these villagers, would very possibly be treated after the same manner. And what remained to us in our actual circ.u.mstances was just to antic.i.p.ate the process of being ourselves bottled in, by bottling the country out. The town, situated on a promontory, and approachable at only a few points, could easily be guarded; and instead of squabbling about the merits of Justices of the Peace--very likely somewhat Conservative in their leanings--or of spirited Reformers who would like very well to be Justices of the Peace also, and would doubtless make very excellent ones, I thought it would be far better for us immediately to form ourselves into a Defence a.s.sociation, and proceed to regulate our watches and set our guards. My short speech was remarkably well received. There was a poor man immediately beside me, who was in great dread of cholera, and who actually proved one of its first victims in the place--for in little more than a week after he was in his grave--who backed me by an especially vigorous Hear, hear!--and the answering Hear, hears, of the meeting bore down all reply. We accordingly at once formed our Defence a.s.sociation; and ere midnight our rounds and stations were marked out, and our watches set. All power pa.s.sed at once out of the hands of the magistrates; but the worthy men themselves said very little about it; and we had the satisfaction of knowing that their families--especially their wives and daughters--were very friendly indeed both to the a.s.sociation and the temporary suspension of the law, and that, on both their own account and ours, they wished us all manner of success.

We kept guard for several days. All vagabonds and trampers were turned back without remorse; but there was a respectable cla.s.s of travellers from whom there was less danger to be apprehended; and with these we found it somewhat difficult to deal. I would have admitted them at once; but the majority of the a.s.sociation demurred;--to do that would be, according to Corporal Trim, to "set one man greatly over the head of another;" and it was ultimately agreed that, instead of at once admitting them, they should be first brought into a wooden building fitted up for the purpose, and thoroughly fumigated with sulphur and chloride of lime. I know not with whom the expedient first originated: it was said to have been suggested by some medical man who knew a great deal about cholera. And though, for my own part, I could not see how the demon of the disease was to be expelled by the steam of a little sulphur and chloride, as the evil spirit in Tobit was expelled by the smoke of the fish"s liver, it seemed to satisfy the a.s.sociation wonderfully well; and a stranger well smoked came to be regarded as safe. There was a day at hand which promised an unusual amount of smoking. The agitation of the Reform Bill had commenced;--a great court of appeal was on that day to hold at Cromarty; and it was known that both a Whig and Tory party from Inverness, in which cholera was raging at the time, would to a certainty attend it. What, it was asked, were we to do with the politicians--the formidable bankers, factors, and lawyers--who would form, we knew, the Inverness cavalcade? Individually, the question seemed to be asked under a sort of foreboding terror, that calculated consequences; but when the a.s.sociation came to ask it collectively, and to answer it in a body, it was in a bold tone, that set fear at defiance. And so it was resolved, _nem. con._, that the Inverness politicians should be smoked like the
Prev List Next