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As we
climbed the hill-side, and the Shinar-like tower before us rose higher
over the horizon at each step we took, till it seemed pointing at the
middle sky, we could mark peculiarities in its structure which escape
notice in the distance. We found it composed of various beds, each of
which would make a Giant’s Causeway entire, piled over each other like
storeys in a building, and divided into columns, vertical, or nearly so,
in every instance except in one bed near the base, in which the pillars
incline to a side, as if losing footing under the superincumbent weight.
Innumerable polygonal fragments, - single stones of the building, - lie
scattered over the slope, composed, like almost all the rest of the Scuir,
of a peculiar and very beautiful stone, unlike any other in Scotland, -a
dark pitchstone-porphyry, which inclosing crystals of glassy feldspar,
resembles in the hand-specimen a mass of black sealing-wax, with numerous
pieces of white bugle stuck into it. Some of the detached polygons are of
considerable size; few of them larger and bulkier, however, than a piece
of column of this characteristic porphyry, about ten feet in length by two
feet in diameter, which lies a full mile away from any of the others, in
the line of the old burying-ground, and distant from it only a few hundred
yards. It seems to have been carried there by man:we find its bearing
from the Scuir lying nearly at right angles with the direction of the
drift-boulders of the western coast, which are, besides, of rare
occurrence in the Hebrides: nor has it a single neighbour; and it seems
not improbable, as a traditon of the island testifies, that it was removed
thus far for the purpose of marking some place of sepulture, and that the
catastrophe of the cave arrested its progress after by far the longer and
rougher portion of the way had been passed. The dry arm-bones of the
charnel house in the rock may have been tugging around it when the galleys
of the M’Leod hove in sight. The traditional history of Eigg, said my
friend the minister, compared with that of some of the neighbouring
islands, presents a decapitated aspect: the M’Leods cut it off by the
neck. Most of the present inhabitants can tell which of their ancestors,
grandfather or great-grandfather, or great-great-grandfather, first
settled in the place, and where they came from; and, with the exception of
a few vague legends about St. Donan and his grave, which were preserved
apparently among the people of the other Small Isles, the island has no
early traditional history.
We
had now reached the Scuir. There occur, intercalated with the columnar
beds, a few bands of a buff-coloured non-columnar trap, described by
M’Culloch as of a texture intermediate between a greenstone and a basalt,
and which, while the pitchstone around it seems nearly indestructible, has
weathered so freely as to form horizontal grooves along the face of the
rock from two to five yards in depth. One of these runs for several
hundred feet along the base of the Scuir, just at the top of the talus,
and greatly resembles a piazza lacking the outer pillars. It is from ten
to twelve feet in height, by from fifteen to twenty in depth; the columns
of the pitchstone-bed immediately above it seem perilously hanging in mid
air; and along their sides there trickles, in even the driest summer
weather,-for the Scuir is a condenser on an immense scale,-minute runnels
of water, that patter ceaselessly in front of the long deep hollow, like
rain from the eaves of a cottage during a thunder-shower. Inside, however,
all is dry, and the floor is covered to the depth of several inches with
the dung of sheep and cattle, that find, in this singular mountain-piazza,
a place of shelter. We had brought a pickaxe with us ; and the dry and
dusty floor, composed mainly of a gritty conglomerate, formed the scene of
our labours. It is richly fossiliferous, though the organisms have no
specific variety; and never certainly have I found the remains of former
creations in a scene in which they more powerfully addressed themselves to
the imagination. A stratum of peat-moss, mixed with fresh-water shells,
and resting on a layer of vegetable mould, from which the stumps and roots
of trees still protruded, as once found in Italy buried beneath an ancient
tesselated pavement; and the whole gave curious evidence of a kind fitted
to picture to the imagination a back-ground vista of antiquity, all the
more remotely ancient in aspect from the venerable age of the object in
front. Dry ground covered by wood, a lake, a morass, and then dry ground
again, had all taken precedence, on the site of the tesselated pavement,
in this instance, of an old Roman villa. But what was antiquity in
connection with a Roman villa, to antiquity in connection with the Scuir
of Eigg? Under the old foundations of this huge wall we find the remains
of a pine-forest, that, long ere a single bed of the porphyry had burst
from beneath, had sprung up and decayed on hill and beside stream in some
nameless land,- had then been swept to the sea, - had been entombed deep
at the bottom in a grit of the Oolite, - had been heaved up to the
surface, and high over it, by volcanic agencies working from beneath, -
and had finally been built upon, as moles are built upon piles, by the
architect that had laid down the masonry of the gigantic Scuir in one
fiery layer after another. The mountain wall of Eigg with its dizzy
elevation of four hundred and seventy-feet, is a wall founded on piles of
pine laid crossways; and, strange as the fact may seem, one has but to dig
into the floor of this deep-hewn piazza, to be convinced that at least it is a fact. Just at this interesting stage, however, our
explorations bade fair to be interrupted. Our man who carried the
pick-axe had lingered behind us for a few hundred yards, in earnest
conversation with an islander; and he now came up, breathless and in hot
haste, to say that the islander, a Roman Catholic tacksman in the
neighbourhood, had peremptorily warned him that the Scuir of Eigg was the
property of Dr. M’Pherson of Aberdeen, not ours, and the Doctor would be
very angry at any man who meddled with it.
“That
message,” said my friend, laughing, but looking just a little sad through
the laugh, “would scarce have been sent us when I was minister of the
Establishment here; but it seems allowable in the case of a poor
Dissenter, and is no bad specimen of the thousand little ways in which the
Roman Catholic populationof the island try to annoy me, now that they see
my back to the wall.” I was tickled with the idea of a fossil preserve,
which coupled itself in my mind, through a trick of the associative
faculty, with the idea of a great fossil act for the British empire,
framed on the principles of the game-laws; and, just wondering what sort
of disreputable vagabonds geological poachers would become under its
deteriorating influence, I laid hold of the pickaxe, and broke into the
stonefast floor. And thenceI succeeded in abstracting,-feloniously, I
dare say, though the crime has not yet got in the statute-book,-some six
or eight pieces of the Pinites eiggensis, amounting in all to about
half a cubic foot of that very ancient wood-value unknown. I trust,
should the case come to a serious bearing, the members of the London
Geological Society will generously subscribe half-a-crown a-piece to
assist me in feeing counsel. There are more interests than mine at stake
in the affair. If I cast and committed,-I, who have poached over only a
few miserable districts in Scotland,- pray, what will become of some of
them, - the Lyells, Bucklands, Murchisons, and Sedgwicks, - who have
poached over whole continents?
We
were successful in procuring several good specimens of the Eigg pine, at a
depth, in the conglomerate, of from eight to eighteen inches. Some of the
upper pieces we found in contact with the decomposing trap out of which
the hollow piazza above had been scooped; but the greater number, as my
set of specimens abundantly testify, lay imbedded in the original Oolitic
grit in which they had been locked up, in, I doubt not, their present
fossil state, ere their upheaval, through Plutonic agency, from their
deep-sea bottom. The annual rings of the wood, which are quite as small
as in a slow-growing Baltic pine, are distinctly visible in all the
better pieces I this day transferred to my bag. In one fragment I reckon
sixteen rings in half an inch, and fifteen in the same space in another.
The trees to which they belonged seem to have grown on some exposed
hill-side, where, in the course of half a century, little more than from
two to three inches were added to their diameter. The Pinites
Eiggensis, or Eigg pine, was first introduced to the notice of the
scientific world by the late M. Witham, in whose interesting work on “The
Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables” the reader may find it figured
and described. The specimen in which he studied its peculiarities “was
found,” he says, “at the base of the magnificent mural escarpment named
the Scuir of Eigg, not, however, in situ, but among fragments of
rocks of the Oolitic series.” The authors of the “Fossil Flora,” where it
is also figured, describe it as differing very considerably in structure
from any of the coniferae of the Coal Measures.: “Its medullary rays,”
say Messrs Lindley and Hutton, “appear to be more numerous, and frequently
are not continued through one zone of wood to another,but more generally
terminate at the concentric circles. It abounds also in turpentine
vessels, or lacunae, of various sizes, the sides of which are distinctly
defined.” Viewed through the microscope, in transparent slips,
longitudinal and transverse, it presents, within the space of a few lines,
objects fitted to fill the mind with wonder. We find the minutest cells,
glands, fibres, of the original wood preserved uninjured. There
still are those medullary rays entire that communicated between the pith
and the outside,-there still the ring of thickened cells that
indicated the yearly check which the growth received when winter came on,-there
the polygonal reticulations of the cross section, without a single broken
mesh,-there,too, the elongated cells in the longitudinal one, each
filled with minute glands that take the form of double circles,-there
also, of larger size and less regular form, the lacunae in which the
turpentine lay: every nicely organized speck, invisible to the naked eye,
we find in as perfect a state of keeping in the incalculably ancient
pile-work on which the gigantic Scuir is founded, as in the living pines
that flourish green on our hill-sides. A net-work, compared with which
that of the finest lace ever worn by the fair reader would seem a net-work
of cable, has preserved entire, for untold ages, the most delicate
peculiarities of its pattern. There is not a mesh broken, nor a circular
dot away!
The
experiments of Mr. Witham on the Eigg fossil furnish an interesting
example of the light which a single, apparently simple, discovery may
throw on whole departments of fact. He sliced his specimen longitudinally
and across, fastened the slices on glass, ground them down till they
became semi-transparent, and then, examining them under reflected light by
the microscope, marked and recorded the specific peculiarities of their
structure. And we now know, in consequence, that the ancient Eigg pine,
to which the detached fragment picked up at the base of the Scuir
belonged,-a pine alike different from those of the earlier carboniferour
period and those which exist contemporary with ourselves,-was, some
three creations ago, an exceedingly common tree in the country now
called Scotland,-as much so, perhaps, as the Scotch fir is at the present
day. The fossil-trees found in such abundance in the neighbourhood of
Helmsdale that they are burnt for lime,-the fossil-wood of Eathie in
Cromartyshire, and that of Shandwick in Ross, - all belong to the
Pinites Eiggensis. It seems to have been a straight and stately tree,
in most instances, as in the Eigg specimens, of slow growth. One of the
trunks I saw near Navidale measured two feet in diameter, but a full
century had passed ere it attained to a bulk so considerable; and a
splendid specimen in my collection from the same locality, which measures
twenty-one inches, exhibits even more than a hundred annual rings.
In one of my specimens, and one only, the rings are of great breadth.
They differ from those of all the others in the proportion in which I have
seen the annual rings of a young vigorous fir that had sprung up in some
rich moist hollow, differ from the annual rings of trees of the same
species that had grown in the shallow hard soil of exposed hill-sides. And
this one specimen furnishes curious evidence that the often-marked but
little understood law, which gives us our better and worse seasons in
alternate groupes, various in number and uncertain in their time of
recurrence, obtained as early as the age of the Oolite. The rings follow
each other in groupes of lesser and larger breadth. One group of four
rings measures an inch and a quarter across, while an adjoining group of
five rings measures only five-eigth parts; and in a breadth of six inches
there occur five of these alternate groupes. For some four or five years
together, when this pine was a living tree, the springs were late and
cold, and the summer cloudy and chill, as in that group of seasons which
intervened between 1835 and 1841; and then for four or five years more
springs were early and summers genial, as in the after group of 1842,
1843, and 1844. An arrangement in nature, - first observed, as we learn
from Bacon, by the people of the low countries, and which has since formed
the basis of meteoric tables, and of predictions, and elaborate cycles of
the weather, - bound together the twelvemonths of the Oolitic period in
alternate bundles of better and worse: vegetation throve vigorously during
the summers of one group, and languished in those of another in a state of
partial development.
Sending away our man shipwards, laden with a bag of fossil-wood, we
ascended by a steep broken ravine to the top of the Scuir. The columns,
as we pass on towards the west, diminish in size, and assume in many of
the beds considerable variety of direction and form. In one bed they
belly over with a curve, like the ribs of some wrecked vessel from which
the planking has been torn away; in another they project in a straight
line,like muskets planted slantways on the ground to receive a charge of
cavalry; in others the inclination is inwards, like that of ranges of
stakes placed in front of a sea-dyke, to break the violence of the
waves;while in yet others they present, as in the eastern portion of the
Scuir, the common vertical direction. The ribbed appearance of every crag
and cliff imparts to the scene a peculiar character: every larger mass of
light and shadow is corded with minute stripes; and the feeling
experienced among the more shattered peaks, and in the more broken
recesses, seems nearer akin to that which it is the tendency of some
magnificent ruin to excite, than that which awakens amid the sublime of
nature. We feel as if the pillared rocks around us were like the Cyclopean
walls of Southern Italy, - the erections of some old gigantic race passed
from the earth for ever. The feeling must have been experienced on former
occasions amid the innumerable pillars of the Scuir; for we find M’Culloch,
in his description, ingeniously analyzing it. “The resemblance to
architecture here is much increased,” he says, “by the columnar structure,
which is sufficiently distinguishable even from a distance, and produces a
strong effect of artificial regularity when seen near at hand. To this
vague association in the mind of the efforts of art with the magnitude of
nature, is owing much of that sublimity of character which the Scuir
presents. The sense of power is a fertile source of the sublime; and as
the appearance of power exerted, no less than that of simplicity, is
necessary to confer this character on architecture, so the mind,
insensibly transferring the operations of nature to the efforts of art
where they approximate in character, becomes impressed with feeling rarely
excited by her more ordinary forms, where these are even more stupendous.”
The
top of the Scuir, more especially towards its eastern termination,
resembles that of some vast mole not ye levelled over by the workmen; the
pavement has not yet been laid down; and there are deep gaps in the
masonry, that run transversely from side to side, still to fill up. Along
one of these ditch-like gaps, which serves to insulate the eastern and
highest portion the Scuir from all its other portions, we find fragments
of a rude wall of uncemented stones, the remains af an ancient hill-fort;
which, with its natural rampart of rock on three of its four sides, more
than a hundred yards in sheer descent,and with its deep ditch and rude
wall on the fourth, must have formed one of the most inaccessible in the
kingdom. The masses of pitchstone atop, though so intensely black within,
are weathered on the surface into almost a pure white; and we found lying
detached among them, fragments of common amygdaloid and basalt, and minute
slaty pieces of chalcedony that had formed apparently in fissures of the
trap. We would have scrutinized more narrowly at the time had we expected
to find anything more rare; but I did not know, until full four months
after, that aught more rare was to be found. Had we examined somewhat more
carefully, we might possibly have done what Mr. Woronzow Greig did on the
Scuir about eighteen years previous, - picked up on it a piece of bona
fide Scotch pumice. This gentleman, well known through his exertions
in statistical science, and for his love of science in general , and whose
tastes and acquirements are not unworthy the son of Mrs.
Somerville, has kindly informed me by letter regarding his curious
discovery. “I visited the island of Eigg,” he says, “in 1825 or 1826, for
the purpose of shooting, and remained in it several days; and as there was
a great scarcity of game, I amused myself in my wanderings by looking
about for natual curiosities. I knew little about Geology at the time ,
but, collecting whatever struck my eye as uncommon, I picked up from the
sides of the Scuir, among various other things , a bit of fossil-wood,
and, nearly at the summit of the eminence, a piece of pumice of a deep
brownish-black colour, and very porous, the pores being large and round,
and the substance which them of a uniform thickness. This last specimen I
gave to Mr. Lyell, who said that it could not originally have belonged to
Eigg, though it migh possibly have been washed there by the sea, -
suggestion, however, with which its place on the top of the Scuir seems
ill to accord. I may add, that I have since procured a larger specimen
from the same place”. This seems a curious fact, when we take into
account the identity,in their mineral components, of the pumice and
obsidian of the recent volcanoes; and that pitch-stone, the obsidian of
the trap-rocks, is resolvable into a pumice by the art of the chemist. If
pumice was to be found anywhere in Scotland, we might a priori
expect to find it in connection with by far the largest mass of pitchstone
in the kingdom. It is just possible, however, that Mr. Greig’s two
specimens may not date farther back, in at least their existing state,
than the days of the hill-fort. Powerful fires would have been required
to render the exposed summit of the Scuir at all comfortable; there is a
deep peat-mosss in its immediatae neighbourhood, that would have furnished
the necessary fuel; the wind must have often been sufficiently high on the
summit to fan the embers into an intense white heat; and if it was heat
but half as intense as that which was employed infusing into one mass the
thick vitrified ramparts of Craig Phadrig and Knock Ferril, on the east
coast, it could scarce have failed to anticipate the experiment of the
Hon. Mr. Knox of Dublin, by converting some of the numerous pitchstone
fragments that lie scattered about, “into a light substance in every
respect resembling pumice.”
It
was now evening, and rarely have I witnessed a finer. The sun had declined
half-way adown the western sky, and for many yards the shadow of the
gigantic Scuir lay dark beneath us along the descending slope. All the
rest of the island, spread out at our feet as in a map, was basking in
yellow sunshine; and with its one dark shadow thrown from its one
mountain-elevated wall of rock, it seemed some immense fantastical dial,
with its gnomon rising tall in the midst. Far below, perched on the apex
of the shadow, and half lost in the line of the penumbra, we could see two
indisticnct specks of black, with a dim halo around each, - specks that
elongated as we arose, and contracted as we sat, and went gliding along
the line as we walked. The shadows of two gnats disporting on the edge of
an ordinary gnomon would have seemed vastly more important, in proportion,
on the figured plane of the dial, than these, our ghostly representatives,
did here. The sea, spangled in the wake of the sun with quick glancing
light, stretched out its blue plain around us; and we could see included
in the wide prospect, on the one hand, at once the hill-chains of Morven
and Kintail, with the many intervening lochs and bold juttng headlands
that give variety to the mainland; and, on the other, the
variously-complexioned Hebrides, from the Isle of Skye to Uist and Barra,
and from Uist and Barra to Tiree and Mull. The contiguous Small Isles,
Muck and Rum, lay moored immediately beside us, like vessels of the same
convoy that in some secure roadstead drop anchor within hail of each
other. I could willingly have lingered on the top of the Scuir until
after sunset; but the minister, who ever and anon, during the day, had
been conning over some notes jotted on a paper of wonderfully scant
dimenstions, reminded me that this was the evening of his week-day
discourse, and that we were more than a particularly rough mile from the
place of meeting, and within half an hour of the time.I took one last look
of the scene ere we commenced our descent. There, - in the middle of the
ample parish glebe, that looked richer and greener in the light of the
declining sun than at any former period during the day, - rose the snug
parish manse; and yonder, - in an open island channel, with a strip of
dark rocks fringing the land within, and another dark strip fringing the
barren Eilean Chaisteil outside, -lay the Betsey, looking wonderfully
diminutive, but evidently a little thing of high spirit, tant-masted, with
a smart rake aft, and a spruce outrigger astern, and flaunting her
triangular flag of blue in the sun. I pointed first to the manse, and
then to the yacht. The minister shook his head.
“Tis
a time of strange changes,” he said: “I thought to have lived and died in
that house, and found a quiet grave the burying-ground yonder beside the
ruin; but my path was a clear though a rugged one; and from almost the
moment that it opened up to me, I saw what I had to expect. It has been
said that I might have lain by here in this out-of-the-way corner, and
suffered the Church question to run its course, without quitting my hold
of the Establishment. And so I perhaps might. It is easy securing one’s
own safety, in even the worst of times, if one look no higher; and I, as I
had no opportunity of mixing in the contest, or of declaring my views
respecting it, might be regarded as an unpledged man. But the principles
of the Evangelical party were my principles; and it would have been
consistent with neither honour nor religion to have hung back in the day
of battle, and suffered the men with whom in heart I was at one to pay the
whole forfeit of our common quarrel. So I attended the Convocation, and
pledged myself to stand or fall with my brethren. On my return I called
my people together, and told them how the case stood, and that in May next
I bade fair to be a dependent for a home on the proprietor of Eigg. And
so they petitioned the proprietor that he might give me leave to build a
house among them, - exactly the same sort of favour granted to the Roman
Catholics of the island. But month after month passed, and they got no
reply to their petition; and I was left in suspense, not knowing whether I
was to have a home among them or no. I did feel the case a somewhat hard
one. The father of Dr. M’Pherson of Eigg had been, like myself, a humble
Scotch minister; and the Doctor, however indifferent to his people’s
wishes in such a matter, might have just thought that a man in his
father’s station in life, with a wife and family dependent on him, was
placed by his silence in cruel circumstances of uncertainty. Ere the
Disruption took place, however, I came to know pretty conclusively what I
had to expect. The Doctor’s factor came to Eigg, and, as I was informed,
told the islanders that it was not likely the Doctor would permit a
third place of worship on the island: the Roman Catholics had one, and
the Establishment had a kind of one, and there was to be no more. The
factor, an active messenger-at-arms, useful in raising rents in these
parts, has always been understood to speak the mind of his master; but the
congregation took heart in the emergency, and sent off a second petition
to Dr. M’Pherson, a week or so previous to the Disruption. Ere it
received an answer, the Disruption took place; and, laying the whole
circumstances before my brethren in Edinburgh, who, like myself,
interpreted the silence of the Doctor into a refusal, I suggested to them
the scheme of the Betsey, as the only scheme through which I could keep up
unbroken my connection with my people. So the trial is now over; and here
we are, and yonder is the Betsey.”
We
descended the Scuir together for the place of meeting, and entered, by the
way, the cottage of a worthy islander, much attached to his minister. “We
are both very hungry,” said my friend: “we have been out among the rocks
since breakfast time, and are wonderfully disposed to eat. Do not put
yourself about, but give us anything you have at hand.” There was a bowl
of rich milk brought us, and a splendid platter of mashed potatoes, and we
dined like princes. I observed for the first time in the interiourof this
cottage, what I had frequent occasion to remark afterwards, that much of
the wood used in buildings in the smaller and outer islands of the
Hebrides must have drifted across the Atlantic, borne eastwards and
northwards by the great gulf-stream. Many of the beams and boards, sorely
drilled by the Teredo navalis, are of American timber, that from
time to time has been cast upon the shore, - a portion of it apparently
from timber-laden vessels unfortunate in their voyage, but a portion of it
also, with root and branch still attached, bearing mark of having been
swept to the sea by Transatlantic rivers. Nuts and seeds of tropical
plants are occasionally picked up onthe beach. My friend gave me a bean
or nut of the Dolichos urens, or cow-itch shrub of the West Indies,
which an islander had found on the shore some time in the previous
year,and given to one of the manse children as a toy; and I attach some
little interest to it, as a curiosity of the same class with the large
canes and the fragment of carved wood found floating near the shores of
Madeira by the brother-in-law of Columbus, and which, among other similar
pieces of circumstantial evidence, led the great navigator to infer the
existence of a western continent. Curiosities of this kind seem still more
common in the northern than in the western islands of Scotland. “Large
exotic nuts or seeds,” says Dr. Patrick Neill, in his interesting “Tour,”
quoted in a former chapter, “which in Orkney are known by the name of
Molucca beans, are occasionally found among the rejectamenta of the sea,
especially after westerly winds. There are two kinds commonly found: the
larger (of which the fishermen very generally make snuff-boxes) seem to be
seeds from the great pod of the Mimosa scandens of the West Indies;
the smaller seeds, from the pod of the Dolichos urens, also a
native of the same region. It is probable that the currents of the ocean,
and particularly that great current which issues from the Gulf of Florida,
and is hence denominated the Gulf Stream, aid very much in transporting
across the mighty Atlantic these American products.. They are generally
quite fresh and entire, and afford an additional proof how impervious to
moisture, and how imperishable, nuts and seeds generally are.”
The
evening was fast falling ere the minister closed his discourse; and we had
but just light enough left, on reaching the Betsey,to show us that there
lay a dead sheep on the deck. It had been sent aboard to be killed by the
minister’s factotum, John Stewart; but John was at the evening preaching
at the time and the poor sheep, in its attempts to set itself free, had
got itself involved among the cords, and strangled itself. “Alas, alas!”
exclaimed the minister, “thus ends our hope of fresh mutton for the
present, and my hapless speculation as a sheep-farmer for ever more.” I
learned from him afterwards, over our tea, that shortly previous to the
Convocation he had got his glebe, - one of the largest in Scotland, -well
stocked with sheep and cattle, which he had to sell, immediately on the
Disruption, in miserably bad condition, at a loss of nearly fifty per
cent. He had a few sheep, however, that would not sell at all, and that
remained on the glebe in consequence, until his successor entered into
possession. And he, honest man, straightway impounded them, and got them
incarcerated in a dark, dirty hole, somewhat in the way Giant Despair
incarcerated the pilgrims, - a thing he had quite a legal right to do,
seeing that the mile-long glebe, with its many acres of luxuriant pasture,
was now as much his property as it had been Mr. Swanson’s a few months
before, and seeing Mr. Swanson’s few sheep had no right to crop his
grass. But a worthy neighbour interfered, - Mr. M’Donald of Keil, the
principal tenant of the island. Mr. M’Donald, - a practical commentator
on the law of kindness, - was sorely scandalized by what he deemed the new
minister’s gratuitous unkindness to a brother in calamity; and, relieving
the sheep, he brought them to his own farm, where he found board and
lodging on my friend’s behalf, till they could be used up at leisure. And
it was one of the last of this unfortunate lot that now contrived to
escape from us by anticipating John Stewart. “A black begining makes a
black ending,” said Gouffing Jock, an ancient border shepherd, when his
only sheep, a black ewe, the sole survivor of a flock smothered in a
snow-storm, was worried to death by his dogs. Then, taking down his broad
sword, he added, “Come awa, my auld friend; thou and I maun e’en stock
Bowerhope-Law ance mair!” Less warlike than Gouffing Jock, we were
content to repeat over the dead, on this occasion, simply the first
portion os his speech; and then, betaking ourselves to our cabin, we
forgot all our sorrows over our tea.
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