Spare Hours Part 4

It was, as I said, a keen and bright morning, and the S. Q. N. feeling chilly, and the d.u.c.h.ess being away after a cat up a back entry, doing a chance stroke of business, and the mare looking only half breakfasted, I made them give her a full feed of meal and water, and stood by and enjoyed her enjoyment. It seemed too good to be true, and she looked up every now and then in the midst of her feast, with a mild wonder. Away she and I bowled down the sleeping village, all overrun with suns.h.i.+ne, the dumb idiot man and the birds alone up, for the ostler was off to his straw. There was the S. Q. N. and her small panting friend, who had lost the cat, but had got what philosophers say is better-the chase. "_Nous ne cherchons jamais les choses, mais la recherche des choses_," says Pascal. The d.u.c.h.ess would subst.i.tute for _les choses_-_les chats_.

Pursuit, not possession, was her pa.s.sion. We all got in, and off set the Maid, who was in excellent heart, quite gay, p.r.i.c.king her ears and casting up her head, and rattling away at a great pace.

We baited at St. Fillans, and again cheered the heart of the Maid with unaccustomed corn-the S. Q. N., Duchie, and myself, going up to the beautiful rising ground at the back of the inn, and lying on the fragrant heather looking at the Loch, with its mild gleams and shadows, and its second heaven looking out from its depths, the wild, rough mountains of Glenartney towering opposite. Duchie, I believe, was engaged in minor business close at hand, and caught and ate several large flies and a humble-bee; she was very fond of this small game.

There is not in all Scotland, or as far as I have seen in all else, a more exquisite twelve miles of scenery than that between Crieff and the head of Lochearn. Ochtertyre, and its woods; Benchonzie, the head-quarters of the earthquakes, only lower than Benvorlich; Strowan; Lawers, with its grand old Scotch pines; Comrie, with the wild Lednoch; Dunira; and St. Fillans, where we are now lying, and where the poor thoroughbred is tucking in her corn. We start after two hours of dreaming in the half sunlight, and rumble ever and anon over an earthquake, as the common folk call these same hollow, resounding rifts in the rock beneath, and arriving at the old inn at Lochearnhead, have a _tousie_ tea. In the evening, when the day was darkening into night, Duchie and I,-the S. Q. N. remaining to read and rest,-walked up Glen Ogle. It was then in its primeval state, the new road non-existent, and the old one staggering up and down and across that most original and Cyclopean valley, deep, threatening, savage, and yet beautiful-

"Where rocks were rudely heaped, and rent As by a spirit turbulent; Where sights were rough, and sounds were wild, And everything unreconciled;"

with flocks of mighty boulders, straying all over it. Some far up, and frightful to look at, others huddled down in the river, _immane pecus_, and one huge unloosened fellow, as big as a manse, up aloft watching them, like old Proteus with his calves, as if they had fled from the sea by stress of weather, and had been led by their ancient herd _altos visere montes_-a wilder, more "unreconciled" place I know not; and now that the darkness was being poured into it, those big fellows looked bigger, and hardly "canny."

Just as we were turning to come home-Duchie unwillingly, as she had much multifarious, and as usual fruitless hunting to do-she and I were startled by seeing a dog _in_ the side of the hill, where the soil had been broken. She barked and I stared; she trotted consequentially up and snuffed _more canino_, and I went nearer: it never moved, and on coming quite close I saw as it were the _image_ of a terrier, a something that made me think of an idea unrealized; the rough, short, scrubby heather and dead gra.s.s, made a color and a coat just like those of a good Highland terrier-a sort of pepper and salt this one was-and below, the broken soil, in which there was some iron and clay, with old gnarled roots, for all the world like its odd, bandy, and st.u.r.dy legs. Duchie seemed not so easily unbeguiled as I was, and kept staring, and snuffing, and growling, but did not touch it,-seemed afraid. I left and looked again, and certainly it was very odd the _growing_ resemblance to one of the indigenous, hairy, low-legged dogs, one sees all about the Highlands, terriers, or earthy ones.

We came home, and told the S. Q. N. our joke. I dreamt of that visionary terrier, that son of the soil, all night; and in the very early morning, leaving the S. Q. N. asleep, I walked up with the d.u.c.h.ess to the same spot. What a morning! it was before sunrise, at least before he had got above Benvorlich. The loch was lying in a faint mist, beautiful exceedingly, as if half veiled and asleep, the cataract of Edinample roaring less loudly than in the night, and the old castle of the Lords of Lochow, in the shadow of the hills, among its trees, might be seen

"Sole sitting by the sh.o.r.e of old romance."

There was still gloom in Glen Ogle, though the beams of the morning were shooting up into the broad fields of the sky. I was looking back and down, when I heard the d.u.c.h.ess bark sharply, and then give a cry of fear, and on turning round, there was she with as much as she had of tail between her legs, where I never saw it before, and her small Grace, without noticing me or my cries, making down to the inn and her mistress, a hairy hurricane. I walked on to see what it was, and there in the same spot as last night, in the bank, was a real dog-no mistake; it was not, as the day before, a mere surface or _spectrum_, or ghost of a dog; it was plainly round and substantial; it was much developed since eight P.M. As I looked, it moved slightly, and as it were by a sort of s.h.i.+ver, as if an electric shock (and why not?) was being administered by a law of nature; it had then no tail, or rather had an odd amorphous look in that region; its eye, for it had one-it was seen in profile-looked to my profane vision like (why not actually?) a huge blaeberry (_vaccinium Myrtillus_, it is well to be scientific) black and full; and I thought,-but dare not be sure, and had no time or courage to be minute,-that where the nose should be, there was a small s.h.i.+ning black snail, probably the _Limax niger_ of M. de Ferussac, curled up, and if you look at any dog's nose you will be struck with the typical resemblance, in the corrugations and moistness and jetty blackness of the one to the other, and of the other to the one. He was a strongly-built, wiry, bandy, and short-legged dog. As I was staring upon him, a beam-Oh, first creative beam!-sent from the sun-

"Like as an arrow from a bow, Shot by an archer strong"-

as he looked over Benvorlich's shoulder, and piercing a cloudlet of mist which clung close to him, and filling it with whitest radiance, struck upon that eye or berry, and lit up that nose or snail: in an instant he sneezed (the _nisus (sneezus?) formativus_ of the ancients); that eye quivered and was quickened, and with a shudder-such as a horse executes with that curious muscle of the skin, of which we have a mere fragment in our neck, the _Platysma Myoides_, and which doubtless has been lessened as we lost our distance from the horse-type-which dislodged some dirt and stones and dead heather, and doubtless endless beetles, and, it may be, made some near weasel open his other eye, up went his tail, and out he came, lively, entire, consummate, _warm_, wagging his tail, I was going to say like a Christian, I mean like an ordinary dog.

Then flashed upon me the solution of the _Mystery of Black and Tan_ in all its varieties: the body, its upper part gray or black or yellow according to the upper soil and herbs, heather, bent, moss, &c.; the belly and feet, red or tan or light fawn, according to the nature of the deep soil, be it ochrey, ferruginous, light clay, or comminuted mica slate. And wonderfullest of all, the DOTS of TAN above the eyes-and who has not noticed and wondered as to the philosophy of them?-_I saw made_ by the two fore feet, wet and clayey, being put briskly up to his eyes as he sneezed that genetic, vivifying sneeze, and leaving their mark, forever.

He took to me quite pleasantly, by virtue of "natural selection," and has accompanied me thus far in our "struggle for life," and he, and the S. Q. N., and the d.u.c.h.ess, and the Maid, returned that day to Crieff, and were friends all our days. I was a little timid when he was crossing a burn lest he should wash away his feet, but he merely colored the water, and every day less and less, till in a fortnight I could wash him without fear of his becoming a _solution_, or fluid extract of dog, and thus resolving the mystery back into itself.

The mare's days were short. She won the Consolation Stakes at Stirling, and was found dead next morning in Gibb's stables. The d.u.c.h.ess died in a good old age, as may be seen in the history of "Our Dogs." The S. Q. N., and the parthenogenesic earth-born, the _Cespes Vivus_-whom we sometimes called Joshua, because he was the Son of None (Nun), and even Melchisedec has been whispered, but only that, and Fitz-Memnon, as being as it were a son of the Sun, sometimes the Autochthon a?t???????; (indeed, if the relation of the _coup de soleil_ and the blaeberry had not been plainly causal and effectual, I might have called him _Filius Gunni_, for at the very moment of that shudder, by which he leapt out of non-life into life, the Marquis's gamekeeper fired his rifle up the hill, and brought down a stray young stag,) these two are happily with me still, and at this moment she is out on the gra.s.s in a low easy-chair, reading Emilie Carlen's _Brilliant Marriage_, and d.i.c.k is lying at her feet, watching, with c.o.c.ked ears, some noise in the ripe wheat, possibly a chicken, for, poor fellow, he has a weakness for worrying hens, and such small deer, when there is a dearth of greater.

If any, as is not unreasonable, doubt me and my story, they may come and see d.i.c.k. I a.s.sure them he is well worth seeing.

_HER LAST HALF-CROWN._

_Once I had friends-though now by all forsaken; Once I had parents-they are now in heaven.

I had a home once--_

_Worn out with anguish, sin, and cold, and hunger, Down sunk the outcast, death had seized her senses.

There did the stranger find her in the morning- G.o.d had released her._

SOUTHEY.

Hugh Miller, the geologist, journalist, and man of genius, was sitting in his newspaper office late one dreary winter night. The clerks had all left and he was preparing to go, when a quick rap came to the door. He said "Come in," and, looking towards the entrance, saw a little ragged child all wet with sleet. "Are ye Hugh Miller?" "Yes." "Mary Duff wants ye." "What does she want?" "She's deein." Some misty recollection of the name made him at once set out, and with his well-known plaid and stick, he was soon striding after the child, who trotted through the now deserted High Street, into the Canongate. By the time he got to the Old Playhouse Close, Hugh had revived his memory of Mary Duff: a lively girl who had been bred up beside him in Cromarty. The last time he had seen her was at a brother mason's marriage, where Mary was "best maid," and he "best man." He seemed still to see her bright young careless face, her tidy short gown, and her dark eyes, and to hear her bantering, merry tongue.

Down the close went the ragged little woman, and up an outside stair, Hugh keeping near her with difficulty; in the pa.s.sage she held out her hand and touched him; taking it in his great palm, he felt that she wanted a thumb. Finding her way like a cat through the darkness, she opened a door, and saying "That's her!" vanished. By the light of a dying fire he saw lying in the corner of the large empty room something like a woman's clothes, and on drawing nearer became aware of a thin pale face and two dark eyes looking keenly but helplessly up at him. The eyes were plainly Mary Duff's, though he could recognize no other feature. She wept silently, gazing steadily at him. "Are you Mary Duff?"

"It's a' that's o' me, Hugh." She then tried to speak to him, something plainly of great urgency, but she couldn't, and seeing that she was very ill, and was making herself worse, he put half-a-crown into her feverish hand, and said he would call again in the morning. He could get no information about her from the neighbors; they were surly or asleep.

When he returned next morning, the little girl met him at the stair-head, and said, "She's deid." He went in, and found that it was true; there she lay, the fire out, her face placid, and the likeness to her maiden self restored. Hugh thought he would have known her now, even with those bright black eyes closed as they were, _in aeternum_.

Seeking out a neighbor, he said he would like to bury Mary Duff, and arranged for the funeral with an undertaker in the close. Little seemed to be known of the poor outcast, except that she was a "licht," or, as Solomon would have said, a "strange woman." "Did she drink?" "Whiles."

On the day of the funeral one or two residents in the close accompanied him to the Canongate Churchyard. He observed a decent looking little old woman watching them, and following at a distance, though the day was wet and bitter. After the grave was filled, and he had taken off his hat, as the men finished their business by putting on and slapping the sod, he saw this old woman remaining. She came up and, courtesying, said, "Ye wad ken that la.s.s, sir?" "Yes; I knew her when she was young." The woman then burst into tears, and told Hugh that she "keepit a bit shop at the Closemooth, and Mary dealt wi' me, and aye paid reglar, and I was feared she was dead, for she had been a month awin' me half-a-crown:" and then with a look and voice of awe, she told him how on the night he was sent for, and immediately after he had left, she had been awakened by some one in her room; and by her bright fire-for she was a _bein_, well-to-do body-she had seen the wasted dying creature, who came forward and said, "Wasn't it half-a-crown?" "Yes." "There it is," and putting it under the bolster, vanished!

Alas for Mary Duff! her career had been a sad one since the day when she had stood side by side with Hugh at the wedding of their friends. Her father died not long after, and her mother supplanted her in the affections of the man to whom she had given her heart. The shock was overwhelming, and made home intolerable. Mary fled from it blighted and embittered, and after a life of shame and sorrow, crept into the corner of her wretched garret, to die deserted and alone; giving evidence in her latest act that honesty had survived amid the wreck of nearly every other virtue.

"My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts."

_OUR DOGS._

"_The misery of keeping a dog, is his dying so soon; but to be sure, if he lived for fifty years, and then died, what would become of me?_"-SIR WALTER SCOTT.

"_There is in every animal's eye a dim image and gleam of humanity, a flash of strange light through which their life looks out and up to our great mystery of command over them, and claims the fellows.h.i.+p of the creature if not of the soul._"-RUSKIN.

_To Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan's glum and faithful_ "PETER,"

_with much regard_.

I was bitten severely by a little dog when with my mother at Moffat Wells, being then three years of age, and I have remained "bitten" ever since in the matter of dogs. I remember that little dog, and can at this moment not only recall my pain and terror-I have no doubt I was to blame-but also her face; and were I allowed to search among the shades in the cynic Elysian fields, I could pick her out still. All my life I have been familiar with these faithful creatures, making friends of them, and speaking to them; and the only time I ever addressed the public, about a year after being bitten, was at the farm of Kirklaw Hill, near Biggar, when the text, given out from an empty cart in which the ploughmen had placed me, was "Jacob's dog," and my entire sermon was as follows:-"Some say that Jacob had a black dog (the _o_ very long), and some say that Jacob had a white dog, but _I_ (imagine the presumption of four years!) say Jacob had a brown dog, and a brown dog it shall be."

I had many intimacies from this time onwards-Bawtie, of the inn; Keeper, the carrier's bull-terrier; Tiger, a huge tawny mastiff from Edinburgh, which I think must have been an uncle of Rab's; all the sheep dogs at Callands-Spring, Mavis, Yarrow, Swallow, Cheviot, etc.; but it was not till I was at college, and my brother at the High School, that we possessed a dog.

TOBY

Was the most utterly shabby, vulgar, mean-looking cur I ever beheld: in one word, _a tyke_. He had not one good feature except his teeth and eyes, and his bark, if that can be called a feature. He was not ugly enough to be interesting; his color black and white, his shape leggy and clumsy; altogether what Sydney Smith would have called an extraordinarily ordinary dog; and, as I have said, not even greatly ugly, or, as the Aberdonians have it, _bonnie wi' ill-fauredness_. My brother William found him the centre of attraction to a mult.i.tude of small blackguards who were drowning him slowly in Lochend Loch, doing their best to lengthen out the process, and secure the greatest amount of fun with the nearest approach to death. Even then Toby showed his great intellect by pretending to be dead, and thus gaining time and an inspiration. William bought him for twopence, and as he had it not, the boys accompanied him to Pilrig Street, when I happened to meet him, and giving the twopence to the biggest boy, had the satisfaction of seeing a general engagement of much severity, during which the twopence disappeared; one penny going off with a very small and swift boy, and the other vanis.h.i.+ng hopelessly into the grating of a drain.

Toby was for weeks in the house unbeknown to any one but ourselves two and the cook, and from my grandmother's love of tidiness and hatred of dogs and of dirt, I believe she would have expelled "him whom we saved from drowning," had not he, in his straightforward way, walked into my father's bedroom one night when he was bathing his feet, and introduced himself with a wag of his tail, intimating a general willingness to be happy. My father laughed most heartily, and at last Toby, having got his way to his bare feet, and having begun to lick his soles and between his toes with his small rough tongue, my father gave such an unwonted shout of laughter, that we-grandmother, sisters, and all of us-went in.

Grandmother might argue with all her energy and skill, but as surely as the pressure of Tom Jones' infantile fist upon Mr. Allworthy's forefinger undid all the arguments of his sister, so did Toby's tongue and fun prove too many for grandmother's eloquence. I somehow think Toby must have been up to all this, for I think he had a peculiar love for my father ever after, and regarded grandmother from that hour with a careful and cool eye.

Toby, when full grown, was a strong, coa.r.s.e dog; coa.r.s.e in shape, in countenance, in hair, and in manner. I used to think that, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, he must have been, or been going to be a Gilmerton carter. He was of the bull-terrier variety, coa.r.s.ened through much mongrelism and a dubious and varied ancestry. His teeth were good, and he had a large skull, and a rich bark as of a dog three times his size, and a tail which I never saw equalled-indeed it was a tail _per se_; it was of immense girth and not short, equal throughout like a policeman's baton; the machinery for working it was of great power, and acted in a way, as far as I have been able to discover, quite original.

We called it his ruler.

When he wished to get into the house, he first whined gently, then growled, then gave a sharp bark, and then came a resounding, mighty stroke which shook the house; this, after much study and watching, we found was done by his bringing the entire length of his solid tail flat upon the door, with a sudden and vigorous stroke; it was quite a _tour de force_ or a _coup de queue_, and he was perfect in it at once, his first _bang_ authoritative, having been as masterly and telling as his last.

With all this inbred vulgar air, he was a dog of great moral excellence-affectionate, faithful, honest up to his light, with an odd humor as peculiar and as strong as his tail. My father, in his reserved way, was very fond of him, and there must have been very funny scenes with them, for we heard bursts of laughter issuing from his study when they two were by themselves; there was something in him that took that grave, beautiful, melancholy face. One can fancy him in the midst of his books, and sacred work and thoughts, pausing and looking at the secular Toby, who was looking out for a smile to begin his rough fun, and about to end by coursing and _gurrin'_ round the room, upsetting my father's books, laid out on the floor for consultation, and himself nearly at times, as he stood watching him-and off his guard and shaking with laughter. Toby had always a great desire to accompany my father up to town; this my father's good taste and sense of dignity, besides his fear of losing his friend (a vain fear!), forbade, and as the decision of character of each was great and nearly equal, it was often a drawn game.

Toby ultimately, by making it his entire object, triumphed. He usually was nowhere to be seen on my father leaving; he however saw him, and lay in wait at the head of the street, and up Leith Walk he kept him in view from the opposite side like a detective, and then, when he knew it was hopeless to hound him home, he crossed unblus.h.i.+ngly over, and joined company, excessively rejoiced of course.

One Sunday he had gone with him to church, and left him at the vestry door. The second psalm was given out, and my father was sitting back in the pulpit, when the door at its back, up which he came from the vestry, was seen to move, and gently open, then, after a long pause, a black s.h.i.+ning snout pushed its way steadily into the congregation, and was followed by Toby's entire body. He looked somewhat abashed, but snuffing his friend, he advanced as if on thin ice, and not seeing him, put his forelegs on the pulpit, and behold there he was, his own familiar chum.

I watched all this, and anything more beautiful than his look of happiness, of comfort, of entire ease when he beheld his friend,-the smoothing down of the anxious ears, the swing of gladness of that mighty tail,-I don't expect soon to see. My father quietly opened the door, and Toby was at his feet and invisible to all but himself; had he sent old George Peaston, the "minister's man," to put him out, Toby would probably have shown his teeth, and astonished George. He slunk home as soon as he could, and never repeated that exploit.

I never saw in any other dog the sudden transition from discretion, not to say abject cowardice, to blazing and permanent valor. From his earliest years he showed a general meanness of blood, inherited from many generations of starved, bekicked, and down-trodden forefathers and mothers, resulting in a condition of intense abjectness in all matters of personal fear; anybody, even a beggar, by a _gowl_ and a threat of eye, could send him off howling by antic.i.p.ation, with that mighty tail between his legs. But it was not always so to be, and I had the privilege of seeing courage, reasonable, absolute, and for life, spring up in Toby at once, as did Athene from the skull of Jove. It happened thus:-

Toby was in the way of hiding his culinary bones in the small gardens before his own and the neighboring doors. Mr. Scrymgeour, two doors off, a bulky, choleric, red-haired, red-faced man-_torvo vultu_-was, by the law of contrast, a great cultivator of flowers, and he had often scowled Toby into all but non-existence by a stamp of his foot and a glare of his eye. One day his gate being open, in walks Toby with a huge bone, and making a hole where Scrymgeour had two minutes before been planting some precious slip, the name of which on paper and on a stick Toby made very light of, subst.i.tuted his bone, and was engaged covering it, or thinking he was covering it up with his shovelling nose (a very odd relic of paradise in the dog), when S. spied him through the inner gla.s.s door, and was out upon him like the a.s.syrian, with a terrible _gowl_. I watched them. Instantly Toby made straight at him with a roar too, and an eye more torve than Scrymgeour's, who, retreating without reserve, fell prostrate, there is reason to believe, in his own lobby. Toby contented himself with proclaiming his victory at the door, and returning finished his bone-planting at his leisure; the enemy, who had scuttled behind the gla.s.s-door, glaring at him.

From this moment Toby was an altered dog. Pluck at first sight was lord of all; from that time dated his first tremendous deliverance of tail against the door, which we called "come listen to my tail." That very evening he paid a visit to Leo, next door's dog, a big, tyrannical bully and coward, which its master thought a Newfoundland, but whose pedigree we knew better; this brute continued the same system of chronic extermination which was interrupted at Lochend,-having Toby down among his feet, and threatening him with instant death two or three times a day. To him Toby paid a visit that very evening, down into his den, and walked about, as much as to say "Come on, Macduff!" but Macduff did not come on, and henceforward there was an armed neutrality, and they merely stiffened up and made their backs rigid, pretended each not to see the other, walking solemnly round, as is the manner of dogs. Toby worked his new-found faculty thoroughly, but with discretion. He killed cats, astonished beggars, kept his own in his own garden against all comers, and came off victorious in several well-fought battles; but he was not quarrelsome or foolhardy. It was very odd how his carriage changed, holding his head up, and how much pleasanter he was at home. To my father, next to William, who was his Humane Society man, he remained stanch. And what of his end? for the misery of dogs is that they die so soon, or as Sir Walter says, it is well they do; for if they lived as long as a Christian, and we liked them in proportion, and they then died, he said that was a thing he could not stand.