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BUT in spite of these
miserable and depressing external conditions under which he lived in this
otherwise pleasant village, his inner life of growing intelligence and
thirst for knowledge—which, innate as it was, had been nurtured by the
seashore—rapidly progressed, and became the talk of the place. From the very
first, he was seen to be a quiet, retiring, harmless being, not given to
gossiping or to making many friends, pleased rather with the joy of his own
thoughts. He sought the seclusion of a solitary walk, when time was allowed
him, and never frequented the open street, with its many groups of aproned
workmen. He was then a short, lank lad, having much more bone than muscle,
and so near-sighted that he required to examine all he looked at with a
smile-provoking closeness. He had an absurdly shy and backward manner, and
his home treatment induced a half-furtive look, as of a hunted hare; and he
Vas dressed in poverty-stricken clothes. Altogether, he was a
peculiar-looking young man, generally viewed as a "queer sort of creature."
Gradually, however, he won the growing regard of all, as they witnessed his
life and perceived his studious habits, and this was greatly increased by
the natural pity his persecution excited.
Soon after coming to
Drumlithie, impelled by his rising intellectual energy and stimulated by
Mrs. Pixie's influence, he set himself, with the quiet determination that
characterized him through life, to learn to read. Happily, in the village
there were more than one willing hand to help him up the steep stair that
conducts to the temple of knowledge. The good genius to whom the merit seems
to belong of having first taught him the letters, those magical wards in the
key that alone unlocks the temple gate, was a woman called Mary Garvie,
whose name he preserved with childlike simplicity and deep gratitude to the
last, mentioning it to me a few months before his death, more than seventy
years after. She lived in the cottage to the end of which the workshop was
attached in which John was employed. She was the wife of a weaver and
crofter, Robert Clark; but, according to the homely intimacy of Scottish
village life, she always received her maiden name from her neighbours, and
she never was designated by the more formal title of Mrs. Clark till,
inheriting a legacy, she removed to a larger and finer house. She was a
woman in many respects resembling her good neighbour, Mrs. Pixie, being
better educated than usual, intelligent, kindly, and pious, though without
her literary tastes and accomplishments. Being next door to the workshop,
her house was one of John's few haunts, into which he used to steal when he
could. To her he seems to have naturally first confided his utter want of
scholastic learning, rather than to his mistress, from native pride and
shyness and the disturbing influences in her home.
John now first learnt the A B
C, in his sixteenth year, under Mary Garvie's tuition, at her pleasant
fireside, naming the letters in the old-fashioned Scotch style, "Ah, Bay,
Say," and concluding with "Ized and Eppercy And " —the last a curious
remnant of old school Latinity, which being interpreted is, in the Roman
tongue, "et per se, and," and, in the vulgar speech, "& by itself, and."
[The so-called letter "&" is merely a short monographic form of the Latin
et, the letters of which can easily be detected in it, and which is so
pronounced in "&c."] Having conquered these pregnant hieroglyphics and their
first syllabic combinations, his future progress was now greatly, if not
wholly, in his own hands; for, like Edmund Stone, the self-taught
mathematician, John Duncan was the very man to believe that "to know the
twenty-six letters was quite sufficient to enable a man to learn anything
that he wished."
But he had another tutor, who
used to help him after he could read with a little fluency. This was Mary
Brand, a girl of twelve when he came to the village, the daughter of a
weaver, John Brand, who resided in a cottage next to Pine's. She was then at
school, or had just left it, and used to come into the weaving shop, when
Johnnie had any leisure, to hear him read his lesson, correcting inevitable
mistakes and helping him over difficulties. There the two would sit together
on the loom, John with the book close to his eyes, laboriously and earnestly
groping his way through the page under her bright guidance; while many a
merry laugh rang through the room at the errors made by the slow, sober,
diligent, and short-sighted scholar. The two formed a striking picture for a
character painter, as they sat there at this employment unwonted in a
weaving shop, behind the countless threads and beams of the loom, with the
light streaming in upon them through the near window, under the thatched
roof open to the rigging, which was hung with the cobwebs and the
accumulated stour and dust of years. Speaking on the subject to her brother,
a communicative old man who still survives in his eighty-second year, bent
with cruel rheumatism, I asked if there was anything of the tender passion
involved in the arrangement, for it was an unusual thing for a young girl to
do. He replied that "they were only bairns thegither readin' a lesson;" and
rightly remarked that had love been in their hearts, there would have been
precious little thought of learning in their heads.
The eager student was also
abundantly assisted by his good mistress in this scholastic work, as we have
seen, while the passages read were illuminated by her intelligent commentary
and abundant memory stores. Under this gentle tuition, John made rapid
progress, for, as David Brand says, "he was terrible anxious aboot learnin'."
So anxious was he, as he himself used to tell, that he also carried on his
studies in church—for his poor attire did not keep him from public worship,
though submitting him to public remark, and "claes werena just sac dandy in
thae days," as observed by one of his friends. When the minister gave out
the psalm to be sung and the chapter to be read, John got the place turned
up by one of his kindly neighbours, and followed the reading as far as he
was able, and with increasing facility; and when the text was selected, he
laboriously conquered it in the book during intervals in the discourse.
After he returned home, he was never satisfied till lie had read the whole
chapter for himself. By such praiseworthy assiduity, he gradually became a
tolerable reader.
Yet, though he read so much
during his lifetime, he never was able to read with great fluency, having to
the last to spell his way over a new or long word, and doing so aloud, even
when reading in public, to the amusement of his auditors, his own dead
earnestness in the process preventing any confusion on his part or
perception of surrounding smiles. What the Rev. Walter C. Smith makes dowie
"Dorts the Mason" say of himself, was greatly true of John Duncan:
"Ye had rare schooling, I had
almost none,
But gnawed a book as dogs will gnaw a bone."
But John gnawed the bone to
some purpose, and always got at its marrow. This imperfection was no doubt
due, in great measure, to his extreme and permanent short-sightedness, but
may also have arisen from his late acquirement of the art; just as he never
became a good speller, even of common words, though seeing them so often.
Writing he does not seem to
have begun for several years after this, being for the time satisfied with
the attainment and exercise of the new and glorious accomplishment already
gained, which opened to him the very gates of paradise. He was long content
to revel in the blissfulness of mental acquisition; the need for written
expression would come by-and-by, and set him to achieve its instrument. Thus
we have no evidence of his learning to write till almost twenty years after
he came to Drumlithie, in 1828, when we find him, in his thirty-fourth year,
laboriously working at a copy-book!
It was an unusual but happy
coincidence that just when our neglected scholar required assistance, there
should have been thus closely associated with him those possessing the
requisite education, intelligence, and kindliness, to give the needed aid,
with that womanly intuitive tact and perception that saw more than appeared
on the surface, in the outwardly unattractive and absurdly shy young weaver.
From these good women, he got help in more than the mere elements. From Mrs.
Pirie, with whom he spent so much time, he gained stores of information and
an insight into poetry, with an access to books, that must have broadened
and strengthened his growing intellect. From Mrs. Clark, he obtained
important religious instruction, for she was devoted to such subjects; while
the motherly sympathy and high character of both women would develop his
better nature, and greatly soothe him under other hardships. Their whole
relations to the lad afford a beautiful glimpse of the genuine helpfulness
and kindliness that not seldom characterize the social life of our common
people, a fact which will be abundantly illustrated in the progress of our
story. All these good women have long since passed away, but "this that they
have done shall be told as a memorial of them."
After Mrs. Pirie died, and
Mrs. Clark removed to her grander house, John attended a night-school for
five or six weeks, to improve his scholastic attainments, now at a stage for
him to profit by a schoolmaster. This was Robert Lindsay, a man in feeble
health, who had a small day side school in the village, and eked out his
living by teaching in the evenings. He had some reputation as an instructor,
especially in arithmetic, in which he was said to be able to put a boy
through "the Gray," an old treatise on arithmetic, in a single winter. These
few evening hours were all that the school ever did for John Duncan.
Becoming gradually more independent of external assistance in his literary
studies, he used to retire to the garret in which he slept, to pursue them
undisturbed; and many an hour was spent by the ardent scholar deciphering
the typographical maze with his short-sighted eyes. He did so aloud in a
kind of humming tune, and every page was read and read again till fully
conquered in word and thought—a peculiar thoroughness remarked by all that
knew him. His progress was rapid; as one of his old friends said, "he
learned himself a great heap." His strong memory, which was one of the
faculties characterizing him throughout life, was specially noted, and he
used to surprise his friends in Drumlithie by reciting verbatim, on his
return home, great portions of the sermon he had heard.
His study of external nature
began now to be more actively and extensively pursued. One of his friends,
James Sinclair, now an intelligent old man of eighty, residing at the
Kirktown of Fetteresso—who is emphatic as to John's excellent character and
disposition, and the high estimation in which he was held in the
village—tells how he sometimes accompanied John in the rambles that his
close confinement allowed him, especially in the Den of Kinmonth, close by
the church of Glenbervie, a short distance from the village, where runs the
Drumlithie Burn. In these journeys, he said, there was scarcely anything
they saw which John did not seem to be familiar with, and to be able to say
something about.
It was while in Drumlithie
that he began the first form of his botanical studies, that of Medical
Botany, which he carried on with increasing ardour and extending knowledge
all his life.
Plants, in this practical
botany, were known as "herbs," students of the subject as "herbalists," and
professors of it as "herb-doctors." The art of healing by these natural
simples was then greatly in vogue amongst weavers and shoemakers, many of
whom were really skilful and successful in their more or less empiric
treatment. It was at that time a very popular form of medicine, in which,
amidst much error, there was more virtue than is now generally conceded; and
it was a decided gain to our rural communities, when medical men were
comparatively few and expensive, and greatly confined to the larger towns.
It was natural, therefore, that John's interest in plants, created around
the old cliffs, should take this special practical shape, familiar as it was
rendered to him by general belief and practice. Indeed, no more scientific
form of botanical study was then available to him. Few, if any, scientific
treatises on Botany then existed, certainly none in a popular form, for many
years after he left Drumlithie. Then, Medical Botany was at that time
greatly a formulated study, possessing text-books to be had at no great
cost. Culpepper was the great authority, and his illustrated "British
Herbal" was in common use. By getting a loan of Culpepper from some of the
local herbalists of the village, John was able, during his apprenticeship,
to make a beginning of the study of plants, which he learnt to discover and
name with the help of the plates that accompanied the work. This was his
first introduction to the technical study which was in time to become the
enthusiasm of his life.
Though the lad was naturally
so very retiring and bashful, which his harsh treatment had increased, and
liked to spend his leisure in solitary walks ; and though he visited very
few houses in the village, he had some good friends with whom he
occasionally associated, in addition to those already mentioned. Next door
to John's weaving shop lived a shoemaker, called Dallas. His house, which
looked right out on the shop, was a daily haunt of the apprentice weaver,
into which he used to steal, to chat for a little with the intelligent "sooter,"
and at times confide the grievances received from his bullying master. The
shoemaker had a son, a lad of seven when John first came to the village,
called Alexander, or, in daily speech, "Sandy." Knowing few of his own age,
John became attached to the little boy, who used to run in and out of the
shop, and who was delighted to carry his "pirns," the reels containing the
thread for the shuttle. Amongst other things, to please the boy, John put up
a swing between the two looms that stood end to end in the shop, the rope
being fastened to the great beams that formed their framework. There Sandy
used to swing in jubilant glee, after he came home from school—for his
parents gave him what was then a fair education—while John sat busily plying
his shuttle. During dinner hour, and at other times when his taskmaster was
from home, the young weaver took a swing himself, by way of change from his
over-sedentary work; and not unfrequently the two might be seen on the swing
together, standing, as is the custom in such an exercise, face to face, the
one alternately propelling the other, amidst the ringing laughter of both
—forbidden sounds when Pirie was present. John's youthful associate is still
alive in the village in which they had these merry bouts, a hale, genial,
intelligent old man of eighty-one, inspector of poor of his native parish,
and to him I am indebted for vivid glimpses of the village life of the time
and John's sojourn there.
After Mrs. Pine's sudden
death, Duncan's life became gradually more miserable, both from his master's
fists and from the want of household comforts when his fireside good genius
had fled. In the end, so intolerable did it become that he ran away at last
for good and all, in 1814, when his apprenticeship was about finished, never
more to return.
When the quiet young man of
twenty looked back from the road to Johnshaven, a fishing village five miles
off, and saw Drumlithie asleep in the hollow, in the dim morning light, he
felt exultant, like an Israelite of old escaping from "the house of
bondage." His cruel Pharaoh, however, survived for more than thirty years
after, till 1847.
The village since then has
passed through not a few changes. When "white weaving," or the trade in
bleached linen, was introduced, it reached its acme of prosperity, and could
boast of more than a hundred active weavers and a flourishing trade. It now
possesses but one. The busy workshops have all been swept away; the commonty
is no longer theirs; the peat moss beyond has been drained, and coal is
universal; the toot of the cowherd, and the merry blast of the stage-coach,
as it swept through the streets like a bright vision of the busy outer
world, have been replaced by the scream of the locomotive and the heavy roll
of his chariot wheels, with all the concurrent remorseless innovations on
old rural village life.
That very year, 1814, there
appeared in Edinburgh the now world-famous anonymous tale called "Waverley,"
the first of that wonderful series, inspired by genius almost Shakespearian,
which inaugurated a new era in novel-writing and modern literature. But it
took long till the springtide of interest and admiration reached our rural
towns and villages. To such literary achievements, unhappily, John never was
introduced, the prejudices of the time in such regions, and the rigid
religious influences under which he afterwards came, effectually shutting
him out all his life from their broadening and enlightening pages. |
