|
THE broad, straight road from
East Linton to Haddington pursues an undulating course along the high ground
above the Tyne valley. Though one runs out here of the Dunbar red land into
soils of more ordinary quality, there is nothing but the colour to suggest
the fact ; for the high standard of East Lothian agriculture practically
obliterates to the eye all such natural inequalities, and the difference
would be found, speaking broadly, in a four as opposed to a three pound
rent. There are pleasant outlooks across the broad, shallow valley of the
Tyne, and beyond it, over rich fields and woods, to the Lammermoors. But I
may admit at once that this is not a route I would take the responsibility
of recommending to the average pilgrim in search of the picturesque. It
looks very emphatically its part, which is that of a great main highway,
forging straight ahead with one object only in view, and affording for that
end every facility of rapid travel, whether for the coach of old or the
motor and cycle of to-day. To me, however, it still seems eloquent of
another period, that long interlude between the two, when the chariot wheels
of agriculture, from the one-horse cart—for waggons and teams are unknown in
Scotland—with the sample sacks of grain, to the smart dogcart, or more staid
waggonette of the farmer hound for Haddington market, rolled along it in the
heyday of its pride. But enough of this. There is nothing on this road to
give pause to us here at any rate. A little off it, however, to the right,
the red-tiled roofs of Athelstaneford crown a long low ridge, conspicuous
from the inner country as from the distant seashore, a ridge which to the
westward rises gradually into the bold upstanding block of the Garleton
Hills that are such a conspicuous feature in the heart of East Lothian.
Athelstaneford is as devoid
of aesthetie attraction as any average Lowland village. But for an otherwise
insignificant place it has a good deal of personal association besides its
sounding name. This last was not derived, however, from the famous Saxon
king, but from some more or less contemporary namesake of humbler rank and
shadowy memory. But the original church was built by the mother of William
the Lion, and many centuries later John Home, the author of the tragedy of
Douglas, was its minister. This play made a great sensation in its day, and
a good deal of controversy has since raged concerning the exalted position
which was assigned to it. Be that as it may, however, it is a Scottish
classic. In another sense, too, it is worth an allusion here, as the
spectacle of a Scottish minister writing a play and enhancing the crime by
going to see it acted, was in the eighteenth century accounted a fearful and
grievous one. So the Presbytery of Edinburgh wrote to the Presbytery of
Haddington, notifying them that one of their number had attended a profane
play in Edinburgh called Douglas, of which he was the reputed author. Before
the local body could reply, the unrepentant cleric was actually off to
London to see it staged there. It is needless to relate that his manse was
vacated at an early date. His Reverence doesn't seem, however, to have
troubled the manse very much at any time, but to have taken his ease, mainly
in the neighbouring country houses, where he was a very welcome guest, being
exceedingly fond of gay company. [Home had Jacobite sympathies in early
life, and wrote the history of the "'forty-five." He was prominent in
Edinburgh literary circles, and later on in London under the patronage of
Lord Bute.] The play was made the occasion of tremendous fulminations on the
part of the Edinburgh divines, and other Presbyterians, against the drama in
general. Every minister caught in the nefarious act of watching a play was
to be punished by temporary suspension, and an Act of Exhortation was read
from all the pulpits, which included the statement that the Christian Church
in all ages had condemned dramatic representations, the authority for which,
I take it, was hatched in Edinburgh. All this was in 176. A predecessor of
Home at Athelstaneford, of gloomy temperament, Dr. Blair, wrote a poem
called The Grove, which, as a kind of antidote, saved the reputation of the
parish, and secured the admiration of the critical among the cloth. Such, at
least, was the point of view taken by a little chronicle of the parish that
I once read, and which struck me as rather whirnsical. [Dr. Carlyle, in his
inimitable autobiography, speaks of avoiding Athelstaneford manse while
paying clerical visits in East Lothian, on account of the dismal personality
of this same Blair.] But that is not all. For, as if to round off the
parochial roll of honour, we have on it a marshal of France and a Scottish
painter of distinction. Now one of the Hepburns was chief landowner in
Athelstaneford when General Leslie encamped in the neighbourhood, just
before the battle of Philiphaugh, and the old gentleman paid a visit of
respect or curiosity to that commander, taking with him his five sons. One
of these found such favour' in Leslie's eves that he offered him a
commission on the spot, the beginning of a military career which led
afterwards to the command of the Scottish Brigade under Gustavus of Sweden,
and ultimately to the French service and its highest honours, as indicated
above. Archibald Skirving was a native and resident of the parish, and is
buried in the churchyard with his ancestors. He was a portrait painter of
some renown, who might, it is said, have amassed a fortune. He was paid a
hundred guineas each for his pictures, but seems to have cherished the
spirit, rather than the gains of his art, to have taken immense pains with
his work, and been content with sufficient reward to keel) him in comfort,
amid the quiet pleasures of country life, and mount him on a good horse. He
left, however, considerable property at the close of a long life, and the
family name has since been an honoured one in the van of Lothian
agriculture.
A far more circuitous, but
much more picturesque, and, to most people, no doubt more interesting route
from Dunbar to Haddington, would be that one which bends round near the foot
of the Lammermoors, and passes by Belton, Biel, Stenton, and Whittinghame,
and could be extended to take in Garvald and Gifford. Whatever might be
thought of the main road between the two chief towns of the county by
pilgrims with nothing of the Arthur Young, the Pennant, or the Cobbett in
their composition, there can be little doubt but that the other would
commend itself to any one. For leaving the main road west of Dunbar, it
follows the ridgy country above the Biel burn, through all the places
watered by that lively stream, till it issues from the Lammermoors. Belton,
the first in order, is the ancient seat of one branch of the Hays, who have
abounded always in East Lothian. A scion of the Belton house, [William Hay
of Spott, near by, A.D.C. to Lord Dalhousie in the Peninsula, eventually
Commissioner of London Police.] who fought as subaltern and captain in the
Peninsula and Waterloo with much dash and credit, has left the best picture
of those stirring events from the personal point of view that I have ever
read. Biel is a vast mansion entrenched within noble woods, and enlarged
about a hundred years ago from the original house; while the river leaps in
a series of cascades beneath the lawns, which slope down to it in a
succession of terraces.
It belonged of old to the
Lords of Belhaven, who lie buried just beyond in Stenton churchyard, a
picturesque roof of stone covering their mausoleum, and though the change of
name in ownership has been frequent, the blood is, I think, maintained. The
Lord Belhaven who figured so conspicuously when the last Scottish Parliament
debated the Treaty of Union, and, in fiery oratory at any rate, led the
party which denounced it, has slept here amid the silence of this peaceful
country churchyard just two hundred years. His melodramatic language on that
critical occasion, and his fantastic gestures, even to falling upon his
knees in the House, were long remembered. Beside the Belhaven tomb there
rises the tower of the old church with a saddleback roof, an architectural
feature I do not remember to have seen elsewhere in this country, though so
few old church towers remain intact, that this may not count for much. The
present parish church is about a century old, and of red sandstone, with an
imposing tower and a fine east window by Kemp. Not far away is an old holy
well of very fine water, walled over and associated with a legend that the
tenure of the Biel estate depends upon the preservation of its covering. In
the woody lap of the Lammermoors, which rise in the immediate background, is
the beautiful loch of Pressmennan, about a mile long, and contrived by a
former laird of Biel. The little village of Stenton, lying at the gates of
its church, and the pleasant grounds of its substantial red sandstone manse,
rises as regards cheerfulness of mien above the average of its neighbours.
The typical cottage of the country, as mentioned on a former page, is a low
one-storeyed building of thick red sandstone walls covered with a red tile
roof. This is very well. They are in themselves, as may be fancied, not
unpicturesque, and when embellished with flowers and well kept up, are
distinctly attractive. But the old Scottish habit, such as even I myself can
remember perfectly, and one by no means extinct, of entire indifference to
externals, made the very worst of the situation, and neutralised what is
really an admirable foundation for the cheerful and the picturesque. More
generally, too, these cottages stand flush with the road, and are rarely
withdrawn within hedges and gardens, as is so often the case with the
peasant dwellings of rural England. This spells monotony in a village street
of uniform buildings, and in the absence of what may be called external
house pride, something approaching to squalor. As to this, however, there
appears to have been a prodigious change for the better, and a very general
tendency to soften the rather severe fronts of the lowland cottage with
flowers or creepers. The constant shifting of the workpeople nowadays must
mitigate to some extent against these brightening influences, though such
changes are by no means always capricious on their part. A growing-up
family, for instance, may require a wider sphere for combined labour than
the present situation offers. But that mere love of change without financial
or other betterment, which seems to captivate the half-educated, whether the
field labourer or the domestic servant, all over the country, is surely a
stumbling-block in their path! It would be well to bear in mind, too, that
eighty years ago nearly every parish minister in this wealthy county
reported with strong protests a one-roomed cottage to be still the rule,
accounting it a scandal to the landlords of that day.
A great outcry has recently
arisen over the last Scottish census and the small increase therein
displayed. Why this congested little island, with its perilously artificial
and dependent existence, should bewail a slight check in that increase of
population which is its main difficulty, I do not pretend to understand. If,
too, in the course of a decade, by operations that would considerably
dislocate the rural economy of the whole country, the increase of a single
year were put back upon the land, it might or might not prove successful,
but it would be a mere fleabite. It is tolerably certain that the food
products of East Lothian, at any rate, would decline in bulk and value if
comparatively impecunious small men of very mixed capacity were in part
substituted for the skill and capital that makes the country an
object-lesson for any one who has eyes to see. Land tinkering in a country
like Britain, the mass of whose people of all classes must be entirely
without any practical experience of the soil, is an irresistible temptation
to vote-catching by politicians of both sides. Outsiders do not think they
know more about ships or engines or medicine than sailors, engineers, and
doctors, but they are at all times ready to instruct the farmer, and, worse
still, to deal themselves with his raw material, the land, so pregnant as it
is with undreamed-of revelations to the unsophisticated. The worst of it all
is, that land and its treatment does look so simple. There is a horribly
grim humour about old mother earth, in the way she entices both the wise and
the foolish, unacquainted with her secrets, to her embraces, and then by
slow degrees, too slow for salvation by retreat, reveals to them the depth
of their innocence, and the costliness of her methods of enlightenment. When
the punishment falls on the individual, it does not much matter: it is his
own lookout. But when his schemes involve other and wider interests, it may
be much more serious; and the cruel part of land is that it takes years to
reveal itself, and, in the meantime, the mischief is done. What can be said
of the intelligence in these matters of a country where large audiences can
be told in good faith, and swallow the fallacy without hesitation, that the
conversion of fine old
fattening pastures into
indifferent arable land would be conducive to the economic welfare of the
nation? Such an attitude is past praying for, but it may prove extremely
dangerous. The East Lothian labourer earns, all told, from 22s. to 24s. a
week. His wife or daughter frequently earns 12s. more. This, in the country,
is comfort, yet his sons persist in going to Canada. Of course they do. They
would in most cases be fools if they didn't. Hundreds of the young men of
other types who go there every year really are fools to do so, but not the
young Scotch labourer. There are no hardships out there nowadays for such as
he, even if that much mattered to him, and his future is a practical
certainty. No scheme of independence on Scottish soil, granted that it be
practical, could possibly offer him an equivalent. Such a dream is only
possible to men who do not understand or who ignore the actualities of
colonial Iife and the record of the Scottish emigrant. Moreover, what are
colonies for?
Eighty years ago nearly every
parish in the Lowlands officially reported a decrease, or its equivalent,
owing to emigration to Canada, but the intelligence was then communicated
almost without a note of regret. Wages, then paid mainly in kind, only
amounted to about 9s. a week. Parish ministers should certainly be kindly
and well-informed, and upon the whole impartial judges of the material
well-being of their flocks. With practical unanimity every minister in East
Lothian and Berwickshire speaks of the comfort in which the labouring people
live on what seems to us now a miserable pittance. I mention this without
comment, save for the reminder that those were the days of oatmeal porridge,
and the keep of a cow. Labour, too, was more abundant. They went to Canada
then, and, as previously mentioned, I have myself seen what they made of it.
There can be no question,
however, that through a long period of increasing prosperity to landlord and
farmer, the British labourer was kept out of his fair share of it. Yet in
spite of the present high wages, the young men still go to Canada, and with
even a better chance. For in the old days they had to hew their farms out of
the bush. Now they put their ploughs straight into prairie land, an
incalculable advantage.
It is assuredly regrettable that the cream of the youth should leave the
parishes. You and I, dear reader, may or may not have such an attachment to
our native soil that we would forego a good deal to remain on it. But our
point of view is from circumstances very different from that of the Lothian
hind or his son, and we are apt to forget this. We should all like to keep
this admirable people in the country for material, and, unconsciously
perhaps, for sentimental reasons of our own. We easily persuade ourselves
that it would be much nicer for the young labourer himself if we could keep
him here, and weave schemes which even on paper offer no equivalent to that
other prospect open to him. He himself doesn't care a button about
sentimental considerations. The British youth of no class is much afflicted
with nostalgia, much less a sturdy prosaic Lothian hind. It is idle for the
townsman with idealist views of Arcady prescribing for an ailment that has
no appreciable existence—among the strong at any rate. Such, at least, is my
experience, and I have seen two .generations of emigrants of all sorts
proceed to North America, and seen their doings there.
Whittinghame (pronounced
Whittinjam, with a soft as is usual in the Saxon country on both sides of
the Border) follows almost immediately upon Stenton, and wide-spreading
woodlands of nearly a century's growth enclose a delightful glen, where,
immediately beneath the house, the Biel burn, as it is called, courses down
between narrow meads. The name of Whittinghame is familiar hearing to the
present generation of Britons. It was purchased by the ex-Premier's
grandfather, second son of John Balfour of Balbirnie, in 1817, who built the
present mansion and planted the woods. The charms which it owes to a happy
combination of nature and art and a commanding position are increased by the
near presence of the wild hills of Lammermoor, rising almost immediately in
the rear in significant contrast. Set amid sylvan scenes of great luxuriance
watered by living streams, resting on the fringe of East Lothian fatness and
the romantic wilds of Lammermoor, Whittinghame would seem to want nothing of
all that makes for an ideal country seat. And if the house itself lacks
antiquity, an old tower in fairly good preservation still stands in the
garden, and represents the ancient owners of the property, who were for the
most part conspicuous people. If the oaks of Whittinghame have been
listening to secrets of State for the last quarter of a century or more, the
ruins of the ancient tower heard enough of them and to spare in the days
when Scottish State secrets were of a less beneficent kind, and mainly
concerned with battle, murder, and sudden death.
To pass over the earlier
owners in the days of Queen Mary, the barony of Whittinghame, with its
castle, was the property of no less a person than the Earl of Morton. After
his expatriation in England, for his share in the assassination of Rizzio,
the other and more memorable crime, the murder of Darnley, is said to have
been concerted at Whittinghame in the presence of its owner, together with
Bothwell, Archibald Douglas, and Maitland of Lethington, at the close of
1566. After Morton's death for his share in the extinction of, it must be
admitted, that utterly impossible king consort, James VI. restored the
forfeited estates to that branch of the Douglases whose heiress eventually
carried it to a Hay—a family which, like the Hepburns, may be said to have
had immemorial association with this whole northern fringe of the
Lammermoors, From their descendants the present owners came into it by
purchase.
In many of my former
wanderings in Wales and England I have been tempted, and with, I think, no
cause for regret, into many odds and ends of family history. In these two
Scottish counties, I have felt more diffidence on the subject, partly, I
trust, from such share of modesty as becomes a southerner, and a reluctance
to encroach on what is obviously a Scotsman's preserve. It is not to the
point that the native chronicler in any popular sense has been singularly
indifferent to this rural portion of the heart of Scotland—for the heart of
Scotland did not beat, for luminous reasons, where anatomy or geography
would place that organ. But no doubt these arrears will be made up in the
fulness of time, and it is no disparagement of their importance to hazard an
opinion that they will be more interesting to the Scottish than to the
general reader. Not merely because the latter's` personal acquaintance with
the sister kingdom is - generally confined to its comparatively unpeopled,
and comparatively unhistoric portions, but on account of the intricacies
which arise when a mere handful of families, or clans (to borrow a term), in
their various ramifications dominate the situation. The subtle distinctions
and significance of the various branches of the same name, as severally
indicated by their respective possessions, are more or less understood by
Scotsmen, but bewildering to the average southerner, who, furthermore, is
almost sure to know nothing at all of Scottish history, the only clue to it.
It is both easy and
profitable to make a slight detour from Whittinghame, to skirt the
Lammermoors at close quarters and follow twisting, narrow, and lonely roads,
through a foothill country where the pastoral life of the hills merges in
snug woody valleys that baffle with their broken surface all the efforts of
even a
Lothian plough to wipe out
the charm of nature's irregularities. In doing so we should pass hard by the
solitary tower of Stonypath, a second place of ancient defence on the old
Whittinghame barony, but in either case are soon confronted with the
hillfoot village of Garvald, the woodlands of Nunraw, and its winding glen,
mounting towards the Lammermoors. We stood in fancy upon their brink just
above here, it will I trust be remembered, in a previous chapter, and
discussed its claims to be the scene of Scott's immortal tragedy. In this
long, red-roofed village beside the tumbling burn and beneath the leafy
hill, time has of a truth stood still. The natives, though in less idiomatic
terms, declare it has done worse than stand still. The only sign of changed
times were a few picture post-cards of local scenery in the window of the
village post-office, which gave me something of a shock. For everything
else, to the smallest detail, was that of a day when such a thing would have
been utterly inconceivable, and the post-cards looked almost uncanny. I
hunted about for some antediluvian, with whom to crack concerning those same
old days. But the village wise men, and others who had probably no claim to
that distinction, all shook their heads. Forty years went behind the
naturalisation of most, and the memories of the rest, for the latter-day
shifting about of the Lothian peasantry seems to have been remarkable. The
estate had been sold—not a very common occurrence, strange to relate, in
this country—and the laird moved away long ago. I strolled up to the
farmhouse on the hill above, of intimate memory through a gorgeous
springtime and summer, when the days were long in every sense, though the
passing of each was grudged. The thousand acres of broad fields pertaining
to it waved up in billowy green folds—for the pastoral interest is strong up
here—to the silent steeps of the Lammermoors. An afternoon sun amid a
showery August lit up at this moment of revisitation the fresh green
pastures, and the white fleeces of the Cheviot sheep sprinkled over them,
warmed up the red roofs of the village in the glen below, glowed upon the
mantling woodlands above, and fired the purple slppes and crests of the
overhanging moors. The old occupant, like the owner of all this sequestered
Arcady, and like everybody else, so far as I could gather, had disappeared.,
Perhaps some veteran shepherd still trod the hills who took part in the
sheep-shearing at yonder upland steading, when even blackface wool was at a
fancy figure, and a new bonnet, if I remember rightly, was the traditional
reward of the swiftest shearer. But the bonnet and the plaid have both
disappeared, like oatmeal and milk and many other serviceable things, and
pease-bannocks, which were probably not so serviceable. The remote
successors of these same sheep were feeding on the same fields, the Cheviots
below, and the blackfaces specking here and there the heights beyond. The
peewits, as of old, filled the silent air with their complaining cries, the
Garvald water made music between its red banks in the bare glen, amid the
sweeping fields, and only the woodlands of Nunraw stifled the lustier music
of its tributary burn, where, as I have already admitted, it pleased me
infinitely, and comforts me still, to imagine that Edgar and Lucy plighted
their troth.
Now we know the end of our
friends, and are generally in a position to know the end of our dogs, and
can mourn them at least without remorse. But what about that other friend,
servant, and companion —the horse, whether trapper, hunter, or hack. Its
security for such a reasonably respected old age as mere equity demands for
its faithful service is pitiably uncertain. It seems in this respect to
stand forlorn, alone among living creatures—for mere death and the butcher's
knife is, of course, nothing to an animal. And no other, certainly none that
has ministered in any way to our wants • or our pleasures, is handed over to
struggle against waining powers, and possibly on half rations, and under
galling stripes to its grave. Inevitable, alas! no doubt; but the man or
woman must be of flint indeed, who has not suffered some pangs on this
account, though his mere conscience may not be involved. These . harrowing
reflections, which have had cause to slumber for many a long year, were now
reawakened by tender memories of a beautiful little grey mare which, having
laid me, her master for a too brief period, under vast obligations in these
moors and plains, vanished out of sight under the auctioneer's hammer in
Edinburgh, a commonplace tale enough ! The door of the stable in the
unchanged and temporarily deserted farmyard lay drowsily open, and its
occupants were on duty or at pasture. I walked in and stood in the empty
stall—the one nearest the wall—which-she always occupied, for the excellent
reasons that she let fly with her little high-bred heels at everybody who
came within reach, except her closest intimates—and sometimes at them too.
Getting up to her head for
saddling or other purposes never ceased to be a rather critical operation
even with her friends, while the inn ostlers at Haddington and Dunbar almost
came to refuse her hospitality. This, no doubt, according to a common law of
adjustment, was why she was such a superb light-weight saddle horse. Once
out of the stable she was as good as gold, and wouldn't have touched a hair
of your head. She was a great deal more than this, for she gave of her best,
whatever you asked her for, every minute of every hour you were on her back,
and her best was perfection in both ease and speed. A devil in the stable to
all seeming, though only the hysterical victim probably of some fool of a
groom, she was a lamb outside, with perfect manners, a perfect mouth, and a
willingness that never flagged. A touch of whip or spur would have been an
insult, word was enough and away she went, from her free, sprightly walk,
with as little thought of bolting, or in any way playing the fool, as she
had of relaxing her best efforts for a moment till a touch stopped her. She
was a fascinating witch, this little grey mare of the Lammermoors, with a
dual personality, if ever horse had one. To behave like an angel on wings
all day, and in every detail of deportment entirely captivate your
affections, and then to try and kill you at night, or morning either for
that matter, when you took her a feed of oats, was uncanny, even with all
allowance for the inscrutable vagaries of the horse tribe.
I looked up to the red streak
which represents the perpendicular rough road that, bound for the Verse,
here climbs the steep face of the Lammermoors, and recalled the manner in
which she used to come down it; for I don't think a false step was in her
composition on highway, byway, or moorland road, or at any pace. I may be
forgiven, I trust, for this little ebullition of sentiment in the dark
corner of a farm stable, where stolid Clydesdales, healthy, unemotional
brutes, the happiest of their kind, I think, if the truth were known, would
soon be champing their liberal portions with the unfailing appetite that
comes of sufficient, but neither spasmodic, nor over-wrought toil. They too,
poor devils, have often enough their sad old age, which seems at odds
somehow with the philanthropic spirit of a generation which would be
horrified to thus treat its dog. In the next generation there will probably
be no horses, except for hunting and polo, and they will be shot when they
are done with, which is all right, and the problem will be solved.
On returning to the village,
I was put on the trail of an old gentleman who, though laid on the shelf,
was undoubtedly in a position to discuss the ancient history with which I
had perplexed all the recognised fountains of authority who were still at
large. So with a depressed mental sense of belonging somehow to a
prehistoric age that had no corresponding physical sensations, I sought him
out in his inner chamber, and I think I may safely say that the crack we had
was equal to two doctor's visits. But its purport is of less than no
consequence here, though it is needless perhaps to remark that the glorious
past, with in this case some justification, was a prominent note.
Though Garvald is one of the
most sequestered villages in East Lothian, it is actually but some six miles
from Haddington, and that too when you have once climbed through the narrow
lanes out of its valley by an admirable road. But the wanderer might well
leave this, as the base of a triangle proceeding through scenes of almost
purely agricultural interest, and take a wider cast round the other two
sides. For at the apex lies the village of Gifford and Yester, the ancient
scat of the Marquis of Tweeddale, the head of the hay clan, altogether a
spot of much more note than this secluded and decadent village of Garvald.
The way thither, too, is little travelled, and lies pleasantly along the
base of the Lammermoors. Gifford is undeniably picturesque, merely as a
village—and it is a considerable one—due in part no doubt to the beneficent
propinquity of a great house. But then a village street, of which one side
consists of a wide mountain stream overhung by woods, has only to avoid the
garish, and observe a decent appearance of age and solidity to sustain the
required part. There is a spaciousness, too, about. Gifford generally, a
hospitable and prosperous-looking inn, and one or two of those public
buildings that suggest a cared-for or a self-respecting place. It stands at
the very portals of the demesne of Yester, with its woods and finely
timbered park lands and tortuous deans, through which the Lammermoor streams
urge their riotous currents by miles of leafy and enchanting ways.
All this is, of course,
classic soil—assuredly so in Scottish history, but that is too long a tale.
It is classic in a more popular sense by virtue of the magic pen of Scott. I
will say nothing more of the Bride of Lammermoor, though it is obviously—to
any one who knows the country and will take the trouble to read the
particular chapter of that book previously cited—the other alternative to
Nunraw as the chief seat of the tragedy. To the general public it would
probably most commend itself on another account altogether. Now Scott, as we
before agreed, had almost certainly no intention of precision in the novel.
In Marmion, however, from first to last there is no such ambiguity. For I
trust the reader will not need reminding how the pride of that gorgeously
arrogant soul was for once humbled in his lone midnight encounter with the
supposititious elfin warrior which Gifford cherished in its woods from
immemorial times. Marmion and his suite, it will be remembered, unwelcome
for national reasons at Yester House, were reduced to the lowly hospitality
of the village inn. It will be further remembered how the recital of the
weird local legend by the landlord stirred the sleepless fevered brain of
the moody, half conscience-smitten, half-superstitious egotist. How he
sallied forth alone and fully armed on his feverish quest to meet the mystic
foe, whose last opponent had been Alexander III. of Scotland centuries
before, and in what different fashion he returned at a mad gallop to his
bewildered and faithful squire, to whose hand in silence
"The rein he
threw,
And spoke no word as he withdrew,
And yet the moonlight did betray
The falcon crest was soiled with clay,
And plainly might Fitz Eustace see
The stains upon the charger's knee."
All this and how the gloomy
friar of their company, the disguised de Wilton, had stealthily accoutred
himself for battle, and followed his deadly foe out of Gifford and
personated the local goblin, has thrilled the youth of most of us. It is not
quite easy to conjure it up afresh in the village hostelry to-day, with its
cheerful appeal to the outside world, which now, I fancy, patronises Gifford
not a little in the summer months.
At a more ingenuous period,
when the stanzas of Marmion still rang clear in one's ears, it was for every
reason much easier. It was enterprising to cross half the county and spend a
February night, I am quite sure very much to the landlord's surprise, for
the sole purpose of visiting the goblin tower and paying a humble tribute to
the genius loci, or rather to its great interpreter. It was an uncomfortable
or rather an unequipped little house in those dim days. The landlord seemed
a dour individual, and assuredly incapable of entertaining us, as his remote
predecessor had entertained his glittering company, in either prose or
verse. I think he was upset at so unexpected a demand as bed and board, and
held us but daft lads, running after vain and foolish things, and rather a
nuisance than otherwise. At any rate, we found our way to the tower through
the labyrinth of these leafless glens, an achievement I ignominiously failed
in at this last visitation, following up the wrong glen on a wet day beyond
hope of recovery under such conditions.
Yester House, the seat of the
Marquis of Tweeddale, is of late Jacobean or early Queen Anne date and
style, and contains not only a great many fine paintings, but owing to the
prominent services to the State of so many past members of this
distinguished house, is full of historic treasures and memorials of great
men, and great events in Europe and Asia. The record of the house of Hay,
even this important branch of it in brief outline, is not for us here. It is
enough that Yester was one of the baronies of the great Anglo-Norman house
of Gifford, and that in 1418 one of its daughters carried Yester to the
ancestor of the present family, a member of whom some two hundred years ago
thus becomingly expressed his sense of the situation: "Aulam Alii jactent,
felix domus Yestria nube, nanc quae sors aliis dat Venus alma tibi." As
Lords hay of Yester for the earlier part of this period, an earldom and a
marquisate followed in the seventeenth century. Yester, a corruption of the
old Cambrian "yStrad," otherwise Strath, is the name of the parish, the
village retaining that of the old Anglo-Norman owners. In pre-Reformation
times it was known as St. Bathans, or Bothans, though apparently unconnected
with Abbey St. Bathans across the hills, whose seclusion we recently
invaded. The ancient church dedicated to that saint stands in the grounds of
Yester House, and is of red sandstone, and for the most part about three
hundred years old. It is now the family mausoleum, the present parish church
being at Gifford.
Lammer Law rears its
seventeen hundred feet, crowned with its purple cap to great effect, above
the woody ridges of Yester. And all about the base of the Lammermoors just
here are charming combes and glades, some wild in heather, birch, and
bracken, or, as at Hopes, a shooting lodge, thrust deep into the glen of
that pellucid stream, filled with woods of sycamore and beech now in the
full dignity and beauty of a century's growth. A rough, rarely travelled
hill-road crosses the Lammermoors from Yester to Longformacus, while a
bridle-track mounting almost to the summit of Lammer Law provides a
delightful ten-mile walk over the moors to the head of Lauderdale, of which
anon.
Most Lowland villages have
produced some worthy who has made a name in his day, either at home or
abroad, more particularly perhaps the latter. For the Scot was, of course,
conspicuous as a soldier of fortune long before he became an East or West
Indian nabob, and still longer before he was associated with any particular
success as a North American colonist. As he was far inferior to the
Englishman in agricultural methods, knowledge, and enterprise, till near the
end of the eighteenth century, this is not surprising, though the cause, I
am sure, will surprise many. But in scholarship and theology, as well as in
arms, Scotsmen, as every one knows, were very much to the fore. To say that
Dr. Witherspoon was a son of the manse at Gifford will almost certainly
convey nothing whatever to the reader's mind. But that able scholar and
divine, when already of some repute in the Scottish Church, left Edinburgh
to become the first head of what is now Princeton University in New Jersey,
an institution which aspires to rivalry with Harvard and Yale. He was
invited thither, no doubt, by the Scotch-Irish, otherwise the
Ulster-Presbyterian element, which was very strong in New Jersey and
Pennsylvania, thanks to the utterly fatuous policy of both the Dublin and
British Parliaments of that day, towards their surest source of support in
Ireland. Unlike the Highland emigrants of the same century, the
Scotch-Irish, which is not surprising, took the popular side to a man
against the Crown in the American Revolution. Witherspoon was such an able
and influential partisan in the same cause, that he was selected to
represent New Jersey in the famous American Congress of 1776, and was one of
the signers of the "Declaration of Independence." He was the chief moving
power, too, in the American Presbyterian connection, most of its leading
ministers having been his pupils, while no less than thirty members of
subsequent Congresses had also sat at his feet. his descendants maintained
the family tradition for scholarship and theology, and possibly a former
personal acquaintance with some of them may have unconsciously provoked inc
to doing honour here to a Gifford worthy that has probably none whatever in
his native village.
Fired peradventure by the
success of his contemporary and playfellow, the son of the schoolmaster in
the same village, who was minister of Montrose and a man of learning,
accepted the call to the Presidency of another embryo college in the United
States, The love of high-sounding titles had already seized the American
democracy, as Dr. Nisbet discovered to his cost. For as the "President" of
an undeveloped backwcods academy, he soon realised that he had dropped back
to a position no better than that of his own father, from which modest
status he had so successfully raised himself. his sense of humour does not
seem to have evaporated with his disappointments, for he wrote home to his
friends that America was certainly a land of promise—in fact that it was all
promise, and no fulfilment. In such contrast were the fortunes and
consequent points of view of two schoolfellows from the same Scotch village!
The five miles of road from Gifford to Haddington leaves behind it all the
picturesque irregularities of the wandering byways of the Lammermoor fringe,
and descends with broad immaculate surface and gentle gradients through
stately timber and ornate prolific fields to the once greatest corn market
in Scotland. Lennoxlove, one of the most ancient and interesting houses in
this country of great seats, lies by the way—better known to fame as the
Lethington of that remarkable race of Maitlands, whose cool political heads,
general originality, and turn for literature . stood out conspicuously in
the turbulent Scotland of the sixteenth century. We shall come across them
again in Lauderdale, whence they took their titles, and were and still are
large landowners.
The two members of the family
most associated in popular memory with Lethington are Queen Mary's brilliant
secretary, chancellor, and friend, and his father, old Sir Richard, also
politically prominent in his day, but more remembered in this last one
perhaps for his poems, which have both merit and piquancy. We may perhaps be
allowed also to pay tribute to a Scotsman of mark, who could see practically
the whole of the turbulent sixteenth century through, and die quietly in his
bed at ninety ! The family were here from the fourteenth to the eighteenth
century, and are still, as related, in Lauderdale, where they have been
seated as long. Prolific above the common in notabilities though they have
been, Queen Mary's Maitland, more particularly known as "Lethington," would
for every reason leap first to the mind as Lennoxlove came into view, though
his younger brother became Lord High Chancellor of Scotland and Lord
Maitland of Thirlestaine. Five "Maitlands at least were poets. The highest
rank and the greatest power acquired by any of the family, however, was by
that unworthy member of it, the notorious Duke of Lauderdale. He was born at
Lethington, and when in due course its owner, he enclosed a square mile with
a wall twelve feet high, in a fit of pique, it is said, because the Duke of
York had sarcastically hinted that there wasn't a park in Scotland. The
property changed hands, however, about this time, being purchased by Lord
Blantyre, whose descendants still own it, and this mention of the transfer
seems incumbent, as it accounts for the change also of the ancient name, a
proceeding which does not say much for the taste or historic sense of the
purchaser. It seems that most of the money which facilitated the transaction
was a legacy or present from his Lordship's relative, that Duchess of Lennox
and Richmond so greatly admired by Charles II. Gratitude inspired an
innovation, which must surely at the time have provoked the gibes--how well
one can fancy them—of the countryside. Time, however, has long obliterated
all sense of novelty, and given on the contrary a pleasant, mellifluous, and
even historic flavour to the name of Lennoxlove.
Haddington lies to great
advantage in the rich-tinted valley through which the Tyne murmurs for so
many long miles with gentle voice. The long, undulating slant down to it
from the Lammermoors leaves in the retrospect an interval country of woods
and universal opulence, that form a pleasing foreground to the rolling line
of moors still near enough to make their presence felt. Immediately north of
the town, too, the Garleton hills, a sharp ridge of down rather than of
moorland, here reach their highest point, about 500 feet, of their brief but
conspicuous career. Looking down from any part of them, or from the road
which toils seaward laboriously over their shoulder, the prospect rewards
the effort; the gleam of the Tyne showing here and there as it urges its
Ieafy course from one seat of ancient fame to another, with the great abbey
church, the "Lamp of Lothian," raising its massive red tower and
half-ruinous walls by the river's bank at the fringe of the little town.
From here Haddington suggests
its picturesque, romantic, and historic side. Down in the wide-cobbled High
Street, between its austere and rather prosaic buildings you might well
think of its famous son, John Knox, but to me on revisiting it historical
interests of .every kind were for the moment in abeyance. It had apparently
altered nothing in the quarters that mattered. It looked, and I daresay is,
as prosperous nowadays as any ordinary county town. Market towns are of no
account in themselves, save as a gathering-place for their county or
district, by which they stand or fall. And in spite of motors and bicycles,
and some new villas on the outskirts, and a thoroughly sound and secure
appearance, I seemed to see a town from which the glory had departed. A town
no longer of more or less account or reputation than a hundred other such
scattered over the face of Scotland and England, with an excellent market,
no doubt, and assuredly a "good neighbourhood," if its occupants remain at
home! But all that is nothing for a town that was once the first grain
market in Scotland, in days when grain filled a much larger place actually
and proportionately in the national economy than to-day. Such a distinction
does not build up a town, which is only of commercial consequence as
reflecting the condition of its tributary country, and there is no reason
why Haddington should reflect in its face, any more than the fields of East
Lothian, the enormous changes it has seen since those days ; changes in men,
and manners, and fortunes, and the outlook on life, the shifting of centres
of influence, and the general disturbance of the whole balance of things.
Veterans in the 'seventies could look around them at Haddington market, and
tell with truth of great changes they had seen. They could revert, for
instance, to the period before the Reform Bill, when Scotland, far more than
England, was in the hands of the landowning classes, and its electorate of
still more microscopic dimensions. They could talk of the coming of train
and steamship and telegraphy, but none of these things had so far done
anything save enhance the pride and prosperity of rural life. Rent-rolls
were at their highest; farmers were comfortable and confident, with a vast
amount of capital in the soil, and quite prepared to meet all the normal
risks hitherto associated with agriculture. Labourers, with the value of
about thirteen shillings a week, were just beginning to discover that they
had not, perhaps, had their fair share of the increment—but that is a detail
always within the scope of the trade. The atmosphere, however, which these
sombre, unaltered streets emitted when I had last walked them was utterly
different from that which with their unaltered
exterior they breathe to-day.
It was then still the old regime, which meant everything, no matter what the
changes and improvements it had witnessed. A young man of to-day dropped
into the Haddington of the 'seventies would on the surface see nothing much
to surprise him—nothing to speak of, even in dress. But his equivalent of
the 'seventies precipitated with like magic and despatch into the middle of
the 'thirties would have felt, on first looking round, far more out of it.
Yet he was really living in the same epoch, only a more developed period of
it, whereas the modern is separated from both by a revolution. It would be
quite impossible that he could see country life in its economic bearings, as
they and all the generations before, according to periods, saw it. tie has
been brought up to think of farming land as the most precarious of all
regular investments, to see it the most habitually compassionated of all the
great interests, yet with apparent paradox the most heavily burdened
whenever the nation is short of money, and, furthermore, to be made the
subject of schemes innumerable, in all of which the necessary factor to
success, the British working-class, is almost an untried and inexperienced
factor. He has been fed a good deal on literature and journalism, which,
outside the technical publications, sedulously spreads an impression that
the British farmer is a sort of failure, an impression that will be
strengthened by the casual opinions of most people he comes in contact
with—lawyers, stockbrokers, manufacturers, bootmakers and mechanics, retired
officers and gentlemen of leisure, i1I.P.'s and other of the great host of
amateurs to whom the secrets of the soil have never been divulged. He is
quite accustomed to hearing the agriculture of foreign countries held up as
an example, and to think of Great Britain agriculturally as in a bad way.
But the rights or wrongs of
all these things were not pertinent to the sensations awakened within me, as
I trod the streets of old Haddington once again. They spoke of a time when
such questions, or, to be more direct, the causes that provoke them, would
have been simply incredible; of those secure and halcyon days, when the one
thing upon earth that was immutable, socially and commercially, and beyond
the reach of the sordid fluctuations of trade and commerce and of anything
but a national catastrophe like the French Revolution, was British land. And
if a county town in Britain was calculated, not of course for itself, but
for its associations, to recall the "then" and the "now" of the situation,
it was Haddington. I may be misunderstood in this, for in mere rents and
readiness to pay them, formidable as they would seem to a southern ear, the
county has come back nearer to the old standard than almost any other. But
this is in a sense reconstruction. The old tenantry, as I remarked before,
have mostly gone. Above all, and far more significant, the atmosphere in
which they lived and moved has absolutely vanished. They were formerly an
almost uniform type, professional farmers by inheritance, who had grown to
prosperity with the increased fertility of the acres they and their fathers
had handled with such skill and enterprise. Very few of the old stock, as I
have said, are left. The present occupants, admirably as they appear to
maintain in most respects the traditions of tillage, are a new and a mixed
lot, as in Berwickshire—men of more varied class and origin, from practical
working men, who have acquired the credit or money to enter on good farms,
to the sons of outside capitalists, who have taken up farming as a
profession.
The old George Hotel looks
solemnly down the High Street, unchanged, so far as I can recall it, in any
detail. Those prolonged feasts at the farmers' ordinaries, as elsewhere, are
practically no more. Many a speech was made on those occasions by great
landowners bearing on the relations of landlord and tenant that found their
echoes in the London press, when East Lothian was, in a manner, the apex of
all that was perfect in a system that was then held as the earth's
perfection for all time. Foreign competition, the direful phrase which sums
up the whole situation, was not even dreamed of. Farmers now, as everywhere
else in Britain, get away home, as a rule, when their business is
transacted, or may even be seen on occasions in tea-shops, lunching off a
scone and butter—not from motives of thrift in this country of large
operation but because they have fallen under twentieth century influences.
This would have been a parlous spectacle indeed, in days I wot of. I
couldn't resist a passing glance into a large upper chamber in one of the
two or three well-known houses of entertainment in these old-time market
days, silent enough on this occasion but for the tick of a clock which had
obviously struck the passing hours of many generations and seemed
sympathetic. The empty chamber seemed again thick with tobacco smoke, from a
score or two of pipes, and noisy with a babel of broad hearty voices, and
the chink of many glasses, and the carrying to and fro of trays, laden with
gills of whisky, in regulation cut-glass circular measures that seem to have
disappeared with the rest of all these sad rollicking ways.
There was nothing
reprehensible about these mid-day symposiums, at any rate from the then
current point of view, and the whisky in those days was, of course, above
reproach. They were merely in the ordinary way of business and social
intercourse, while in and out of the corn exchange or cattle market. But the
old clock in the corner ticked out unmistakably that it had seen these times
; and perhaps it held reactionary views upon the subject, and, for aught I
know, regretted the disappearance, not merely of the normal consumer, but
even of the twelve-tumbler man, whom it had so often warned to go home. A
monograph recently written on the life and wide operations of a well-known
Border farmer by his son concludes a quite illuminating little work with the
ingenuous tribute that its subject "may fairly have been regarded as a
temperate man, considering the number of twelve-tumbler men among whom he
frequently moved." Scotland as a country, read by statistics, which we all
know may be made to prove anything, is still, I believe, the despair of the
temperance reformer. I don't know anything about the North and `West or the
regions, roughly speaking, which draw their supplies from Glasgow. But the
rural South-East is now the pink of propriety. The guileless,
matter-of-course conviviality of former days—to say nothing of the
twelve-tumbler man—has practically gone. Even if it hadn't, the present
generation would assuredly not get the good stuff their fathers drank ;
while, as for the ordinary hotels, you are as likely to be served with
poison as in similar places south of the Tweed.
Afternoon tea is a subtle but
efficacious ally of the temperance advocate. One need not be a Methuselah to
remember its introduction into polite circles in the South, and it need
hardly be said it long ago took its place as a function in the higher class
farmhouses in Scotland. The sinful who are not wholly converted, now appear
to quench their well-regulated thirst in a whisky and soda, like any
ordinary southerner, which is very prosaic. As to the agricultural labourer,
he was a temperate man in my day compared to his south-country equivalent,
and going from one to the other the contrast was great. He was paid a good
deal in kind for one thing, and had very little cash. Whisky, compared to
ale, which was scarcely then used or obtainable, was dear; while the village
pot-house with its sociable evenings in the southern sense, and its
oratorical orgies, had and has practically no existence for the Scottish
hind. To turn again to their employers, and the changes that have taken
place. In one large and important country parish, well known to me in former
days, where the wiping out of old stocks has been tolerably complete, I was
told when recently there, that most of the sitting tenants were dissenters,
whereas a former generation had been mainly supporters of the parish church,
a fact that has no bearing at all on the condition of the Establishment,
which throughout Scotland is, I believe, stronger than formerly, but merely
indicates the change of men. The same authority, who ought to know,
supplemented this statement by a further one that they were mostly total
abstainers—a following which, I do not think, has any particular
denominational significance in Scotland. For if the West retains its
fondness for the bottle with greater tenacity than the East, it is there, at
any rate, that secession always found its greatest strength.
The Canadian churches, like
those of the United States, cannot understand even the temperate use of
alcohol, an attitude mainly due to the fact that outside a small class of
more cosmopolitan habit, the native of those countries is incapable of
consuming it, either in the Christian manner or with the moderation of a
civilised man in Europe. He uses it, with slight regard to quality, as a
mere means of getting drunk and staving drunk for a prolonged period, after
which he gets upon his feet, washes and shaves himself, and returns to
respectability and cold water till the fit seizes him again. I happened to
be staying in Canada some winters ago when a team of Scottish curlers were
touring the Dominion. One or two ministers—on their sporting merits, not as
shepherds—were among the visitors, and some of the more serious papers
expressed a pious horror that the reverend exponents of the roaring game not
merely countenanced, but actually shared in the harmless convivialities,
which it would be almost an outrage on tradition for a company of Scottish
curlers to omit. The more frivolous journals, in the meantime, made great
sport of their censorious contemporaries. When the parting hour came, and
the final "send off" from, I think, Montreal, was celebrated, the defiant
and unrepentant nature of the ' Scotch divines was illustrated for them by a
sympathetic local band, who played them off to the immortal strains of
"We're nae that fou, we're nae that fou." Upon the whole, the censors had
the worst of the encounter, which, at least, caused some merriment at a
great many breakfast tables—it certainly did at ours ! Times have changed,
of a truth, in Scotland, as everywhere else, since the days when law lords
had their trays and bottles on the bench, and, if history speaks truly,
administered justice, and possibly even-handed justice, in a state of
chronic elevation. "Good God! my lord," said one of these illuminati to the
other after listening to a truculent performance on the part of a prisoner
whose excuse was inebriety, "if the fellow could make such a blackguard of
himself when he was drunk, what would he not do when he was sober."
But the East Lothian folk
were temperance men compared to the big-stock farmers of Aberdeenshire in
those days, the Polled Angus breeders, who had already established a
reputation in two continents for their black cattle. I don't know what they
did in summer, but in winter they drank whisky like milk, or water at any
rate, at all times, and were not often apparently much the worse for it. Nor
quite obviously did they die young, as they ought to have done, if medical
science has even a basis of truth. On the contrary, they appeared to
flourish on it like green bay trees. Perhaps the expert in these matters
makes a mental reservation as regards Scotsmen, or they may be outside his
experience. These analytical indictments of the pernicious thing do not seem
to emanate from Edinburgh or Glasgow, renowned as those two cities are for
light and learning. It would not be safe, I take it. The unaccountable is,
or was too much in evidence.
I remember a few years ago,
in a country town in the Canadian North-West, meeting an individual who had
been quite a popular character in East Lothian, till well on in middle age.
I remembered him vaguely, as the embodiment of tolerably consistent, but
quite respectable conviviality, and in a prospering condition. Like most
Scotsmen, his feelings were very warm towards his old environment, but,
unlike most, he had not succeeded—too old, no doubt, for transportation—and
he deeply felt his exile, which was due to the punishing years of the
'eighties. He daily frequented my hotel, and having met nobody, apparently
for years, who could exchange at least familiar names, and listen with some
knowledgeable sympathy to his reminiscences, he fell, so to speak, into my
arms, with almost pathetic fervour. The people in the hotel said he was too
honest a man to get on in that country, which was more complimentary to him
than to their own neighbourhood, though they didn't look at it that way.
However, he was still decently convivial, under conditions infinitely less
innocuous than the same degree would have implied in the Scotland of his
day. But though at least seventy, he was apparently as strong as a horse.
This is almost immoral; but as it is not likely to be perused by the young,
anxious to emulate the feats of the ancients, it doesn't matter. Even the
Aberdeenshire grazier is, I daresay, now converted to the teapot.
One more East Lothian
notability, or, at least, familiar figure of the 'seventies, who sought the
North-West, and parted, or rather flinched, from the reality of its
elementary terrors, comes back to me, with a flavour of humour in this case
rather than of pathos. Estimable and popular, he was agriculturally
something of a black sheep. The beautiful uniformity of appearanee with
which the weedless parallelograms of grain and roots, of beans and seeds,
succeeded each other over the summer landscape of East Lothian, faded
perceptibly over the square half-mile, more or less, occupied by the future
pioneer. Unfortunately, too, it adjoined a farm of high renown in those
days, whose veteran - bailiff, incomparable among his kind, used to look
over the boundary fence, shaking his head, and muttering more in sorrow than
in anger, for he was prodigiously original, " Puir Maistcr D., puir Maister
D.," as I have heard him apostrophise his master's neighbour many a time.
And many a time I have also heard him in his emphatic archaic Doric, with
unforgettable variations all his own, use much stronger language. "A maist
heinous mon who makes me purely seek" (sick), was his favourite denunciation
of this otherwise exemplary person, whose farming would have, perhaps, been
thought admirable in Suffolk, but was not of a kind to pay a rent of seventy
shillings, and leave a profit.
The "maist heinous mon,"
however, then in middle life, decided to go to Manitoba, probably the first
of his type who had braved the then unknown and but little suspected terrors
of the pre-railroad North-Vest. Possibly a farmer from East Lothian, with
its cheerful social atmosphere, its golf, its curling, and its whist and
other games, above all, its expansive scientific methods, was as likely to
founder in that then scantily peopled solitude of the earliest 'eighties as
any one; certainly, to be more unhappy, even though a Scotsman, than a
younger son or a light-hearted subaltern with soul unvexed by the subtleties
of high-class British farming. The "maist heinous mon," however, launched
his bark for that then far country, loaded with his household and his
household gods, with sanguine expectations, taking dim shape, no doubt, as
an illimitable East Lothian. There was a tremendous farewell dinner at a
popular hostelry, a fact I remember, because some one sent me the local
paper, as I had seen the promised land, a comparatively uncommon experience
in those days. There were toasts galore, and two or three columns of
speech-makings calculated to make a reader familiar at once with the
promised land and with East Lothian cynical or sad. The new country, if I
remember rightly, was to surpass its own reputed virgin abundance, under the
inspiring touch of East Lothian science—and the glasses clinked. Alas for
the seeming paradoxes of agriculture. The "maist heinous mon," bag and
baggage, was back again among these sorrowing friends within the year, not
because he was a failure, or, so far as I know, faint-hearted, but because
he was a person of discernment, though more tolerant than his East Lothian
neighbours of the stray thistle or the insidious couch grass. For on being
confronted with the stern realities of the North-West, he saw a country for
the East Lothian hind, perhaps—but not yet for the East Lothian farmer good
or bad. It was better to make the brief sport of a day among his neighbours
at home, and live happily, if modestly among them ever after, than make a
middle-aged fight with hardships and difficulties, that promised but
doubtful and inadequate compensation to his type. Many a good man and good
woman not middle-aged lived joylessly and died prematurely under the earlier
struggle with North-Western Canada. And what is the use of a boom in land
when your health is broken, or five years after you are dead? And this is
exactly what would have happened to the "maist heinous rnon," who went up in
my estimation, when I heard of his volte face. From a dim figure associated
with thistles—unthinkable spectre in East Lothian !—and boisterous on the
curling rink, he stood out as a man of courage and of sense. He was a man of
parts outside agriculture, and either with or without their aid lived, I
believe, serenely, and died in peace upon good Scottish soil.
Long before that great
life-adventure, however, of the "maist heinous mon," his whilom critic over
the fence had preceded him across the Atlantic, and astonished the natives
in and around a prosperous Ontario country town with his trenchant
denunciations of their slipshod agriculture, in a Doric almost too fragrant
for the understanding of a semi-Scottish population. These Canadians, sons
themselves, many of them, of Scottish hinds, immigrants of the 'thirties,
would not have stood it from anybody else, and I am not sure if they would
have stood it even from this grand old man had they comprehended it all. He
was rather a privileged person, however, for his sons had gone out in youth
and acquired in trade money and position; and to their neighbourhood, with a
fifty-acre farm to play with, he retired to spend the evening of a life
hitherto devoted with unswerving ardour and fidelity to a single master and
a famous Lothian farm. It was my privilege to know him well, and yet more,
to see him afterwards in his new sphere, and occasionally to hear him
holding forth in his forceful and inimitable style to wondering Canadian
farmers on the street, and telling them his candid opinion of their
agricultural deficiencies in terms which, as I have said, they haply could
seldom grasp. If he had been young, with his way to make, no doubt he would
have held his tongue, Iike most young Scotsmen, to their great advantage,
till experience made it safe to loosen it. But his way was made, and he was
near the end of it, so he let fly. His ancient and "maist heinous "
neighbour, as I have shown, proved wise in his generation in a negative way.
But this really great East Lothian agriculturist was transplanted too late
to avoid the pitfaIIs with which a strange country invariably confounds the
over-wise. In such time as there was left him, he proceeded to show his new
neighbours how to farm, as it so happened, at the very entrance to the town.
By the time he had rolled all the rocks off his fifty acres of rather poor
land, combed it and groomed it, and reduced its primitive irregularities to
a condition amenable to East Lothian treatment, and when the first crops
suggested no similarity to a Lothian harvest field, the old gentleman began
to quieten down and to learn something, and to his surprise no doubt. He no
longer harangued the farmers from his gate as they drove to market, on the
error of their ways, and if he hadn't been a little deaf he would have heard
enough and to spare of passing criticism on "the pile of money sunk in them
poor fields." They were covered with villas the last time I saw them, and
the grass had been growing for thirty years on the grave of this once
notable East Lothian worthy, comparatively humble in station though he was.
Born on a famous farm in a hind's cottage, he rose to be something more than
bailiff on it for half his life. His standard of duty and conduct as regards
himself and others may have been irksome, but I am inclined to think it
communicated itself somehow to the three score or so of men and women under
him. Awe was certainly an element in his authority. He had a voice that
would carry nearly all over the six hundred acres, and a whistle hanging to
his waistcoat that would carry even further than his voice, and there was
not a tree or a bush on the whole place to break the force of either. When
he appeared at the gate of a thirty-acre field, the subdued cackle of the
bondagers ceased abruptly with a "Whisht, yon's Hugh," and twenty poke
bonnets bent over their Dutch hoes, as they pushed them with renewed zeal
along the wheat drills. The ploughman halting for a moment on the headrigg,
started and swung his pair of horses round and gee-hawed away for his life,
when he heard that voice two fields away. Its forms of admonition took
almost terrifically allegorical form at times. "Mon, d'ye no ken ye're a
thief," he would shout to some hind caught loitering unawares. The
slow-moving mind had no time for asking an explanation before it came—"Y're
takin' yer maister's siIler an' stealin' his time." But this was not
truculency; and no one took it as such. He believed it thoroughly, and
applied it to himself with absolute rigidity. His moral code was austere.
More than one married couple on the farm, it was credibly said, had found
themselves man and wife owing to his prompt action, whether they liked it or
not, and with surprising celerity. And with all this he was the kindliest of
men. His grey eyes twinkled with fun beneath their bushy brows as he
launched his jokes with no particular respect of persons, but with never the
faintest flavour of coarseness. He had travelled a little, apart from the
agricultural shows, which were, of course, a joy and delight, though seldom
indulged in. Men who had known and appreciated him, or, I might say, had sat
under him, and had come to farm farms or own estates, used to ask him to
visit them on those rare occasions when he permitted himself a holiday. His
reminiscences of these jaunts were of undying interest to himself, and an
infinite treat to his hearers. Still greater treat it must have been to
tramp over Lincolnshire fields or Irish pastures with him in the flesh, and
hear his comments, for he had a general contempt, with reservations, for all
agricultural ways south of the Tweed. On Sunday mornings he repaired with
his wife and family to the U.P. church, four miles away, taking dinner along
and eating it between services on the seashore. After that he brought the
minister back with him, and spiritual exercises filled their evening.
Theology, however, was abandoned on Monday morning, and the results of a
strenuous Sabbath showed themselves in the best and most practical shape
throughout the week. His very intelligence, and his little travels, and a
certain intercourse with persons of another world, had tended to confuse his
phraseology when he wished to be impressive. It would be ill taste to quote
the sentence with which this really superb man invariably concluded his long
grace before meat, but no living soul was ever known to grasp its meaning.
Upon the whole, he was an individual whose daily example tended to one's
self-abasement. |
