III


One such face I now remember; one such blank some half-a-dozen of 
us labour to dissemble.  In his youth he was most beautiful in 
person, most serene and genial by disposition; full of racy words 
and quaint thoughts.  Laughter attended on his coming.  He had the 
air of a great gentleman, jovial and royal with his equals, and to 
the poorest student gentle and attentive.  Power seemed to reside 
in him exhaustless; we saw him stoop to play with us, but held him 
marked for higher destinies; we loved his notice; and I have rarely 
had my pride more gratified than when he sat at my father's table, 
my acknowledged friend.  So he walked among us, both hands full of 
gifts, carrying with nonchalance the seeds of a most influential 
life.

The powers and the ground of friendship is a mystery; but, looking 
back, I can discern that, in part, we loved the thing he was, for 
some shadow of what he was to be.  For with all his beauty, power, 
breeding, urbanity and mirth, there was in those days something 
soulless in our friend.  He would astonish us by sallies, witty, 
innocent and inhumane; and by a misapplied Johnsonian pleasantry, 
demolish honest sentiment.  I can still see and hear him, as he 
went his way along the lamplit streets, LA CI DAREM LA MANO on his 
lips, a noble figure of a youth, but following vanity and 
incredulous of good; and sure enough, somewhere on the high seas of 
life, with his health, his hopes, his patrimony and his self-
respect, miserably went down.

From this disaster, like a spent swimmer, he came desperately 
ashore, bankrupt of money and consideration; creeping to the family 
he had deserted; with broken wing, never more to rise.  But in his 
face there was a light of knowledge that was new to it.  Of the 
wounds of his body he was never healed; died of them gradually, 
with clear-eyed resignation; of his wounded pride, we knew only 
from his silence.  He returned to that city where he had lorded it 
in his ambitious youth; lived there alone, seeing few; striving to 
retrieve the irretrievable; at times still grappling with that 
mortal frailty that had brought him down; still joying in his 
friend's successes; his laugh still ready but with kindlier music; 
and over all his thoughts the shadow of that unalterable law which 
he had disavowed and which had brought him low.  Lastly, when his 
bodily evils had quite disabled him, he lay a great while dying, 
still without complaint, still finding interests; to his last step 
gentle, urbane and with the will to smile.

The tale of this great failure is, to those who remained true to 
him, the tale of a success.  In his youth he took thought for no 
one but himself; when he came ashore again, his whole armada lost, 
he seemed to think of none but others.  Such was his tenderness for 
others, such his instinct of fine courtesy and pride, that of that 
impure passion of remorse he never breathed a syllable; even regret 
was rare with him, and pointed with a jest.  You would not have 
dreamed, if you had known him then, that this was that great 
failure, that beacon to young men, over whose fall a whole society 
had hissed and pointed fingers.  Often have we gone to him, red-hot 
with our own hopeful sorrows, railing on the rose-leaves in our 
princely bed of life, and he would patiently give ear and wisely 
counsel; and it was only upon some return of our own thoughts that 
we were reminded what manner of man this was to whom we 
disembosomed: a man, by his own fault, ruined; shut out of the 
garden of his gifts; his whole city of hope both ploughed and 
salted; silently awaiting the deliverer.  Then something took us by 
the throat; and to see him there, so gentle, patient, brave and 
pious, oppressed but not cast down, sorrow was so swallowed up in 
admiration that we could not dare to pity him.  Even if the old 
fault flashed out again, it but awoke our wonder that, in that lost 
battle, he should have still the energy to fight.  He had gone to 
ruin with a kind of kingly ABANDON, like one who condescended; but 
once ruined, with the lights all out, he fought as for a kingdom.  
Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, 
rail the louder against God or destiny.  Most men, when they 
repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that 
repentance.  But he had held an inquest and passed sentence: MENE, 
MENE; and condemned himself to smiling silence.  He had given 
trouble enough; had earned misfortune amply, and foregone the right 
to murmur.

Thus was our old comrade, like Samson, careless in his days of 
strength; but on the coming of adversity, and when that strength 
was gone that had betrayed him - "for our strength is weakness" - 
he began to blossom and bring forth.  Well, now, he is out of the 
fight: the burden that he bore thrown down before the great 
deliverer.  We

"In the vast cathedral leave him;
God accept him,
Christ receive him!"


IV


If we go now and look on these innumerable epitaphs, the pathos and 
the irony are strangely fled.  They do not stand merely to the 
dead, these foolish monuments; they are pillars and legends set up 
to glorify the difficult but not desperate life of man.  This 
ground is hallowed by the heroes of defeat.

I see the indifferent pass before my friend's last resting-place; 
pause, with a shrug of pity, marvelling that so rich an argosy had 
sunk.  A pity, now that he is done with suffering, a pity most 
uncalled for, and an ignorant wonder.  Before those who loved him, 
his memory shines like a reproach; they honour him for silent 
lessons; they cherish his example; and in what remains before them 
of their toil, fear to be unworthy of the dead.  For this proud man 
was one of those who prospered in the valley of humiliation; - of 
whom Bunyan wrote that, "Though Christian had the hard hap to meet 
in the valley with Apollyon, yet I must tell you, that in former 
times men have met with angels here; have found pearls here; and 
have in this place found the words of life."




CHAPTER IV. A COLLEGE MAGAZINE


I


ALL through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for 
the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own 
private end, which was to learn to write.  I kept always two books 
in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.  As I walked, my mind 
was busy fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by 
the roadside, I would either read, or a pencil and a penny version-
book would be in my hand, to note down the features of the scene or 
commemorate some halting stanzas.  Thus I lived with words.  And 
what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it was written 
consciously for practice.  It was not so much that I wished to be 
an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I 
would learn to write.  That was a proficiency that tempted me; and 
I practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with 
myself.  Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to 
any one with senses there is always something worth describing, and 
town and country are but one continuous subject.  But I worked in 
other ways also; often accompanied my walks with dramatic 
dialogues, in which I played many parts; and often exercised myself 
in writing down conversations from memory.

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes 
tried to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them 
a school of posturing and melancholy self-deception.  And yet this 
was not the most efficient part of my training.  Good though it 
was, it only taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the 
lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the 
essential note and the right word: things that to a happier 
constitution had perhaps come by nature.  And regarded as training, 
it had one grave defect; for it set me no standard of achievement.  
So that there was perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more 
effort, in my secret labours at home.  Whenever I read a book or a 
passage that particularly pleased me, in which a thing was said or 
an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was either some 
conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I must 
sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality.  I was 
unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again 
unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain 
bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction 
and the co-ordination of parts.  I have thus played the sedulous 
ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to 
Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Obermann.  
I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called THE VANITY 
OF MORALS: it was to have had a second part, THE VANITY OF 
KNOWLEDGE; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the names 
were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first 
part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghost-like, 
from its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of 
Hazlitt, second in the manner of Ruskin, who had cast on me a 
passing spell, and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas 
Browne.  So with my other works: CAIN, an epic, was (save the 
mark!) an imitation of SORDELLO: ROBIN HOOD, a tale in verse, took 
an eclectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and 
Morris: in MONMOUTH, a tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. 
Swinburne; in my innumerable gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many 
masters; in the first draft of THE KING'S PARDON, a tragedy, I was 
on the trail of no lesser man than John Webster; in the second 
draft of the same piece, with staggering versatility, I had shifted 
my allegiance to Congreve, and of course conceived my fable in a 
less serious vein - for it was not Congreve's verse, it was his 
exquisite prose, that I admired and sought to copy.  Even at the 
age of thirteen I had tried to do justice to the inhabitants of the 
famous city of Peebles in the style of the BOOK OF SNOBS.  So I 
might go on for ever, through all my abortive novels, and down to 
my later plays, of which I think more tenderly, for they were not 
only conceived at first under the bracing influence of old Dumas, 
but have met with resurrection: one, strangely bettered by another 
hand, came on the stage itself and was played by bodily actors; the 
other, originally known as SEMIRAMIS: A TRAGEDY, I have observed on 
bookstalls under the ALIAS of Prince Otto.  But enough has been 
said to show by what arts of impersonation, and in what purely 
ventriloquial efforts I first saw my words on paper.

That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write whether I have 
profited or not, that is the way.  It was so Keats learned, and 
there was never a finer temperament for literature than Keats's; it 
was so, if we could trace it out, that all men have learned; and 
that is why a revival of letters is always accompanied or heralded 
by a cast back to earlier and fresher models.  Perhaps I hear some 
one cry out: But this is not the way to be original!  It is not; 
nor is there any way but to be born so.  Nor yet, if you are born 
original, is there anything in this training that shall clip the 
wings of your originality.  There can be none more original than 
Montaigne, neither could any be more unlike Cicero; yet no 
craftsman can fail to see how much the one must have tried in his 
time to imitate the other.  Burns is the very type of a prime force 
in letters: he was of all men the most imitative.  Shakespeare 
himself, the imperial, proceeds directly from a school.  It is only 
from a school that we can expect to have good writers; it is almost 
invariably from a school that great writers, these lawless 
exceptions, issue.  Nor is there anything here that should astonish 
the considerate.  Before he can tell what cadences he truly 
prefers, the student should have tried all that are possible; 
before he can choose and preserve a fitting key of words, he should 
long have practised the literary scales; and it is only after years 
of such gymnastic that he can sit down at last, legions of words 
swarming to his call, dozens of turns of phrase simultaneously 
bidding for his choice, and he himself knowing what he wants to do 
and (within the narrow limit of a man's ability) able to do it.

And it is the great point of these imitations that there still 
shines beyond the student's reach his inimitable model.  Let him 
try as he please, he is still sure of failure; and it is a very old 
and a very true saying that failure is the only highroad to 
success.  I must have had some disposition to learn; for I clear-
sightedly condemned my own performances.  I liked doing them 
indeed; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish.  In 
consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends; and such 
friends as I chose to be my confidants I must have chosen well, for 
they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me, "Padding," 
said one.  Another wrote: "I cannot understand why you do lyrics so 
badly."  No more could I!  Thrice I put myself in the way of a more 
authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine.  These were 
returned; and I was not surprised nor even pained.  If they had not 
been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case, 
there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been 
looked at - well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must 
keep on learning and living.  Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune 
which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see 
my literature in print, and to measure experimentally how far I 
stood from the favour of the public.


II


The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has 
counted among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, 
Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local 
celebrity besides.  By an accident, variously explained, it has its 
rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh: a hall, 
Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up at 
night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room; a 
passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages; and a 
corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous 
members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary.  
Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in defiance 
of Senatus-consults, he can smoke.  The Senatus looks askance at 
these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect on the 
whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned 
mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this 
haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the professorate.

I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a 
very humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much 
credit for; yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; 
proud of the pipe I was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and in 
particular, proud of being in the next room to three very 
distinguished students, who were then conversing beside the 
corridor fire.  One of these has now his name on the back of 
several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential in the law 
courts.  Of the death of the second, you have just been reading 
what I had to say.

And the third also has escaped out of that battle of in which he 
fought so hard, it may be so unwisely.  They were all three, as I 
have said, notable students; but this was the most conspicuous.  
Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of 
Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to one of 
Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill 
fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the COMEDIE 
HUMAINE.  He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the 
time of which I write, he made a showy speech at a political 
dinner, was cried up to heaven next day in the COURANT, and the day 
after was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism in 
the SCOTSMAN.  Report would have it (I daresay, very wrongly) that 
he was betrayed by one in whom he particularly trusted, and that 
the author of the charge had learned its truth from his own lips.  
Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and envied 
by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly 
disgraced.  The blow would have broken a less finely tempered 
spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took 
flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk 
of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter.  For 
years thereafter he lived I know not how; always well dressed, 
always in good hotels and good society, always with empty pockets.  
The charm of his manner may have stood him in good stead; but 
though my own manners are very agreeable, I have never found in 
them a source of livelihood; and to explain the miracle of his 
continued existence, I must fall back upon the theory of the 
philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same kind, "there 
was a suffering relative in the background."  From this genteel 
eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out 
in the character of a generous editor.  It is in this part that I 
best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop; 
looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane 
adventurer; smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one 
peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and 
sweet and thick, with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with 
singular deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent effect.  
After all these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the rich 
student that he was of yore, to breathe of money; seemed still 
perfectly sure of himself and certain of his end.  Yet he was then 
upon the brink of his last overthrow.  He had set himself to found 
the strangest thing in our society: one of those periodical sheets 
from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions; in which young 
gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line, 
to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private 
individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a 
man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of 
demigod; and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth, 
as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on 
railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger; 
and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me.  
Our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, would 
sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite slave into the 
foundations of their palace.  It was with his own life that my 
companion disarmed the envy of the gods.  He fought his paper 
single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up 
early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear-
wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation.  In 
that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of 
courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and 
doubtless ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love 
also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he 
succeeded.  But he died, and his paper died after him; and of all 
this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes 
as if there had come literally nothing.

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under 
the mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former 
secretary.  We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial and 
thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and have no 
more behind one than Macbean.  And yet of these three, two are gone 
and have left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and 
foxy, and some one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and 
glances through it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech, 
and perhaps for the love of ALMA MATER (which may be still extant 
and flourishing) buys it, not without haggling, for some pence - 
this book may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and 
Robert Glasgow Brown.

Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they 
were all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to 
them, and made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken 
with pride and hope.  We were to found a University magazine.  A 
pair of little, active brothers - Livingstone by name, great 
skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-
shop over against the University building - had been debauched to 
play the part of publishers.  We four were to be conjunct editors 
and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own 
works; while, by every rule of arithmetic - that flatterer of 
credulity - the adventure must succeed and bring great profit.  
Well, well: it was a bright vision.  I went home that morning 
walking upon air.  To have been chosen by these three distinguished 
students was to me the most unspeakable advance; it was my first 
draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my 
fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I 
could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly.  Yet, in the 
bottom of my heart, I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I 
knew it would not be worth reading; I knew, even if it were, that 
nobody would read it; and I kept wondering how I should be able, 
upon my compact income of twelve pounds per annum, payable monthly, 
to meet my share in the expense.  It was a comfortable thought to 
me that I had a father.

The magazine appeared, in a yellow cover, which was the best part 
of it, for at least it was unassuming; it ran four months in 
undisturbed obscurity, and died without a gasp.  The first number 
was edited by all four of us with prodigious bustle; the second 
fell principally into the hands of Ferrier and me; the third I 
edited alone; and it has long been a solemn question who it was 
that edited the fourth.  It would perhaps be still more difficult 
to say who read it.  Poor yellow sheet, that looked so hopefully 
Livingtones' window!  Poor, harmless paper, that might have gone to 
print a SHAKESPEARE on, and was instead so clumsily defaced with 
nonsense; And, shall I say, Poor Editors?  I cannot pity myself, to 
whom it was all pure gain.  It was no news to me, but only the 
wholesome confirmation of my judgment, when the magazine struggled 
into half-birth, and instantly sickened and subsided into night.  I 
had sent a copy to the lady with whom my heart was at that time 
somewhat engaged, and who did all that in her lay to break it; and 
she, with some tact, passed over the gift and my cherished 
contributions in silence.  I will not say that I was pleased at 
this; but I will tell her now, if by any chance she takes up the 
work of her former servant, that I thought the better of her taste.  
I cleared the decks after this lost engagement; had the necessary 
interview with my father, which passed off not amiss; paid over my 
share of the expense to the two little, active brothers, who rubbed 
their hands as much, but methought skipped rather less than 
formerly, having perhaps, these two also, embarked upon the 
enterprise with some graceful illusions; and then, reviewing the 
whole episode, I told myself that the time was not yet ripe, nor 
the man ready; and to work I went again with my penny version-
books, having fallen back in one day from the printed author to the 
manuscript student.


III


From this defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own 
papers.  The poor little piece is all tail-foremost.  I have done 
my best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and 
it remains invertebrate and wordy.  No self-respecting magazine 
would print the thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, 
not for any worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it 
purports dimly to represent and some of whose sayings it preserves; 
so that in this volume of Memories and Portraits, Robert Young, the 
Swanston gardener, may stand alongside of John Todd, the Swanston 
shepherd.  Not that John and Robert drew very close together in 
their lives; for John was rough, he smelt of the windy brae; and 
Robert was gentle, and smacked of the garden in the hollow.  
Perhaps it is to my shame that I liked John the better of the two; 
he had grit and dash, and that salt of the Old Adam that pleases 
men with any savage inheritance of blood; and he was a way-farer 
besides, and took my gipsy fancy.  But however that may be, and 
however Robert's profile may be blurred in the boyish sketch that 
follows, he was a man of a most quaint and beautiful nature, whom, 
if it were possible to recast a piece of work so old, I should like 
well to draw again with a maturer touch.  And as I think of him and 
of John, I wonder in what other country two such men would be found 
dwelling together, in a hamlet of some twenty cottages, in the 
woody fold of a green hill.




CHAPTER V. AN OLD SCOTCH GARDENER


I THINK I might almost have said the last: somewhere, indeed, in 
the uttermost glens of the Lammermuir or among the southwestern 
hills there may yet linger a decrepid representative of this bygone 
good fellowship; but as far as actual experience goes, I have only 
met one man in my life who might fitly be quoted in the same breath 
with Andrew Fairservice, - though without his vices.  He was a man 
whose very presence could impart a savour of quaint antiquity to 
the baldest and most modern flower-plots.  There was a dignity 
about his tall stooping form, and an earnestness in his wrinkled 
face that recalled Don Quixote; but a Don Quixote who had come 
through the training of the Covenant, and been nourished in his 
youth on WALKER'S LIVES and THE HIND LET LOOSE.

Now, as I could not bear to let such a man pass away with no sketch 
preserved of his old-fashioned virtues, I hope the reader will take 
this as an excuse for the present paper, and judge as kindly as he 
can the infirmities of my description.  To me, who find it so 
difficult to tell the little that I know, he stands essentially as 
a GENIUS LOCI.  It is impossible to separate his spare form and old 
straw hat from the garden in the lap of the hill, with its rocks 
overgrown with clematis, its shadowy walks, and the splendid 
breadth of champaign that one saw from the north-west corner.  The 
garden and gardener seem part and parcel of each other.  When I 
take him from his right surroundings and try to make him appear for 
me on paper, he looks unreal and phantasmal: the best that I can 
say may convey some notion to those that never saw him, but to me 
it will be ever impotent.

The first time that I saw him, I fancy Robert was pretty old 
already: he had certainly begun to use his years as a stalking 
horse.  Latterly he was beyond all the impudencies of logic, 
considering a reference to the parish register worth all the 
reasons in the world, "I AM OLD AND WELL STRICKEN IN YEARS," he was 
wont to say; and I never found any one bold enough to answer the 
argument.  Apart from this vantage that he kept over all who were 
not yet octogenarian, he had some other drawbacks as a gardener.  
He shrank the very place he cultivated.  The dignity and reduced 
gentility of his appearance made the small garden cut a sorry 
figure.  He was full of tales of greater situations in his younger 
days.  He spoke of castles and parks with a humbling familiarity.  
He told of places where under-gardeners had trembled at his looks, 
where there were meres and swanneries, labyrinths of walk and 
wildernesses of sad shrubbery in his control, till you could not 
help feeling that it was condescension on his part to dress your 
humbler garden plots.  You were thrown at once into an invidious 
position.  You felt that you were profiting by the needs of 
dignity, and that his poverty and not his will consented to your 
vulgar rule.  Involuntarily you compared yourself with the 
swineherd that made Alfred watch his cakes, or some bloated citizen 
who may have given his sons and his condescension to the fallen 
Dionysius.  Nor were the disagreeables purely fanciful and 
metaphysical, for the sway that he exercised over your feelings he 
extended to your garden, and, through the garden, to your diet.  He 
would trim a hedge, throw away a favourite plant, or fill the most 
favoured and fertile section of the garden with a vegetable that 
none of us could eat, in supreme contempt for our opinion.  If you 
asked him to send you in one of your own artichokes, "THAT I WULL, 
MEM," he would say, "WITH PLEASURE, FOR IT IS MAIR BLESSED TO GIVE 
THAN TO RECEIVE."  Ay, and even when, by extra twisting of the 
screw, we prevailed on him to prefer our commands to his own 
inclination, and he went away, stately and sad, professing that 
"OUR WULL WAS HIS PLEASURE," but yet reminding us that he would do 
it "WITH FEELIN'S," - even then, I say, the triumphant master felt 
humbled in his triumph, felt that he ruled on sufferance only, that 
he was taking a mean advantage of the other's low estate, and that 
the whole scene had been one of those "slights that patient merit 
of the unworthy takes."

In flowers his taste was old-fashioned and catholic; affecting 
sunflowers and dahlias, wallflowers and roses and holding in 
supreme aversion whatsoever was fantastic, new-fashioned or wild.  
There was one exception to this sweeping ban.  Foxgloves, though 
undoubtedly guilty on the last count, he not only spared, but 
loved; and when the shrubbery was being thinned, he stayed his hand 
and dexterously manipulated his bill in order to save every stately 
stem.  In boyhood, as he told me once, speaking in that tone that 
only actors and the old-fashioned common folk can use nowadays, his 
heart grew "PROUD" within him when he came on a burn-course among 
the braes of Manor that shone purple with their graceful trophies; 
and not all his apprenticeship and practice for so many years of 
precise gardening had banished these boyish recollections from his 
heart.  Indeed, he was a man keenly alive to the beauty of all that 
was bygone.  He abounded in old stories of his boyhood, and kept 
pious account of all his former pleasures; and when he went (on a 
holiday) to visit one of the fabled great places of the earth where 
he had served before, he came back full of little pre-Raphaelite 
reminiscences that showed real passion for the past, such as might 
have shaken hands with Hazlitt or Jean-Jacques.

But however his sympathy with his old feelings might affect his 
liking for the foxgloves, the very truth was that he scorned all 
flowers together.  They were but garnishings, childish toys, 
trifling ornaments for ladies' chimney-shelves.  It was towards his 
cauliflowers and peas and cabbage that his heart grew warm.  His 
preference for the more useful growths was such that cabbages were 
found invading the flower-pots, and an outpost of savoys was once 
discovered in the centre of the lawn.  He would prelect over some 
thriving plant with wonderful enthusiasm, piling reminiscence on 
reminiscence of former and perhaps yet finer specimens.  Yet even 
then he did not let the credit leave himself.  He had, indeed, 
raised "FINER O' THEM;" but it seemed that no one else had been 
favoured with a like success.  All other gardeners, in fact, were 
mere foils to his own superior attainments; and he would recount, 
with perfect soberness of voice and visage, how so and so had 
wondered, and such another could scarcely give credit to his eyes.  
Nor was it with his rivals only that he parted praise and blame.  
If you remarked how well a plant was looking, he would gravely 
touch his hat and thank you with solemn unction; all credit in the 
matter falling to him.  If, on the other hand, you called his 
attention to some back-going vegetable, he would quote Scripture: 
"PAUL MAY PLANT AND APOLLOS MAY WATER;" all blame being left to 
Providence, on the score of deficient rain or untimely frosts.

There was one thing in the garden that shared his preference with 
his favourite cabbages and rhubarb, and that other was the beehive.  
Their sound, their industry, perhaps their sweet product also, had 
taken hold of his imagination and heart, whether by way of memory 
or no I cannot say, although perhaps the bees too were linked to 
him by some recollection of Manor braes and his country childhood.  
Nevertheless, he was too chary of his personal safety or (let me 
rather say) his personal dignity to mingle in any active office 
towards them.  But he could stand by while one of the contemned 
rivals did the work for him, and protest that it was quite safe in 
spite of his own considerate distance and the cries of the 
distressed assistant.  In regard to bees, he was rather a man of 
word than deed, and some of his most striking sentences had the 
bees for text.  "THEY ARE INDEED WONDERFUL CREATURES, MEM," he said 
once.  "THEY JUST MIND ME O' WHAT THE QUEEN OF SHEBA SAID TO 
SOLOMON - AND I THINK SHE SAID IT WI' A SIGH, - 'THE HALF OF IT 
HATH NOT BEEN TOLD UNTO ME.'"

As far as the Bible goes, he was deeply read.  Like the old 
Covenanters, of whom he was the worthy representative, his mouth 
was full of sacred quotations; it was the book that he had studied 
most and thought upon most deeply.  To many people in his station 
the Bible, and perhaps Burns, are the only books of any vital 
literary merit that they read, feeding themselves, for the rest, on 
the draff of country newspapers, and the very instructive but not 
very palatable pabulum of some cheap educational series.  This was 
Robert's position.  All day long he had dreamed of the Hebrew 
stories, and his head had been full of Hebrew poetry and Gospel 
ethics; until they had struck deep root into his heart, and the 
very expressions had become a part of him; so that he rarely spoke 
without some antique idiom or Scripture mannerism that gave a 
raciness to the merest trivialities of talk.  But the influence of 
the Bible did not stop here.  There was more in Robert than quaint 
phrase and ready store of reference.  He was imbued with a spirit 
of peace and love: he interposed between man and wife: he threw 
himself between the angry, touching his hat the while with all the 
ceremony of an usher: he protected the birds from everybody but 
himself, seeing, I suppose, a great difference between official 
execution and wanton sport.  His mistress telling him one day to 
put some ferns into his master's particular corner, and adding, 
"Though, indeed, Robert, he doesn't deserve them, for he wouldn't 
help me to gather them," "EH, MEM," replies Robert, "BUT I WOULDNAE 
SAY THAT, FOR I THINK HE'S JUST A MOST DESERVIN' GENTLEMAN."  
Again, two of our friends, who were on intimate terms, and 
accustomed to use language to each other, somewhat without the 
bounds of the parliamentary, happened to differ about the position 
of a seat in the garden.  The discussion, as was usual when these 
two were at it, soon waxed tolerably insulting on both sides.  
Every one accustomed to such controversies several times a day was 
quietly enjoying this prize-fight of somewhat abusive wit - every 
one but Robert, to whom the perfect good faith of the whole quarrel 
seemed unquestionable, and who, after having waited till his 
conscience would suffer him to wait no more, and till he expected 
every moment that the disputants would fall to blows, cut suddenly 
in with tones of almost tearful entreaty: "EH, BUT, GENTLEMEN, I 
WAD HAE NAE MAIR WORDS ABOUT IT!"  One thing was noticeable about 
Robert's religion: it was neither dogmatic nor sectarian.  He never 
expatiated (at least, in my hearing) on the doctrines of his creed, 
and he never condemned anybody else.  I have no doubt that he held 
all Roman Catholics, Atheists, and Mahometans as considerably out 
of it; I don't believe he had any sympathy for Prelacy; and the 
natural feelings of man must have made him a little sore about 
Free-Churchism; but at least, he never talked about these views, 
never grew controversially noisy, and never openly aspersed the 
belief or practice of anybody.  Now all this is not generally 
characteristic of Scotch piety; Scotch sects being churches 
militant with a vengeance, and Scotch believers perpetual crusaders 
the one against the other, and missionaries the one to the other.  
Perhaps Robert's originally tender heart was what made the 
difference; or, perhaps, his solitary and pleasant labour among 
fruits and flowers had taught him a more sunshiny creed than those 
whose work is among the tares of fallen humanity; and the soft 
influences of the garden had entered deep into his spirit,

"Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade."

But I could go on for ever chronicling his golden sayings or 
telling of his innocent and living piety.  I had meant to tell of 
his cottage, with the German pipe hung reverently above the fire, 
and the shell box that he had made for his son, and of which he 
would say pathetically:  "HE WAS REAL PLEASED WI' IT AT FIRST, BUT 
I THINK HE'S GOT A KIND O' TIRED O' IT NOW" - the son being then a 
man of about forty.  But I will let all these pass.  "'Tis more 
significant: he's dead."  The earth, that he had digged so much in 
his life, was dug out by another for himself; and the flowers that 
he had tended drew their life still from him, but in a new and 
nearer way.  A bird flew about the open grave, as if it too wished 
to honour the obsequies of one who had so often quoted Scripture in 
favour of its kind.  "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing, 
and yet not one of them falleth to the ground."

Yes, he is dead.  But the kings did not rise in the place of death 
to greet him "with taunting proverbs" as they rose to greet the 
haughty Babylonian; for in his life he was lowly, and a peacemaker 
and a servant of God.




CHAPTER VI. PASTORAL


TO leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with 
novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing 
light upon the past.  As in those composite photographs of Mr. 
Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more 
clearly the central features of the race; when once youth has 
flown, each new impression only deepens the sense of nationality 
and the desire of native places.  So may some cadet of Royal 
Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard about French 
citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the Scots-
Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides 
upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of 
peat-smoke.  And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all 
men.  This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and 
Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of 
Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers 
about the lilied lowland waters of that shire.  But the streams of 
Scotland are incomparable in themselves - or I am only the more 
Scottish to suppose so - and their sound and colour dwell for ever 
in the memory.  How often and willingly do I not look again in 
fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling 
in its Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn 
that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie!  I think shame to 
leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too 
long if I remembered all; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor 
birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions, 
that Water of Leith of the many and well-named mills - Bell's 
Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn of 
pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless 
trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed 
from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss 
under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a 
rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then 
kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of 
the sea-beholding city in the plain.  From many points in the moss 
you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its 
tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its 
corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be breathed; 
Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on 
a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem 
to the in-expert, in superfluity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a 
bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river; it would 
take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath; for the most 
part, besides, it soaks unseen through the moss; and yet for the 
sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain GENIUS LOCI, I 
am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the 
nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my 
pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me.

John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the 
Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-
scattering, sheep-collecting life.  He remembered the droving days, 
when the drove roads, that now lie green and solitary through the 
heather, were thronged thoroughfares.  He had himself often marched 
flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan; 
and by his account it was a rough business not without danger.  The 
drove roads lay apart from habitation; the drovers met in the 
wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea fishers meet off the banks in 
the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the one as in the other case 
rough habits and fist-law were the rule.  Crimes were committed, 
sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of which 
offences had a moorland burial and were never heard of in the 
courts of justice.  John, in those days, was at least once 
attacked, - by two men after his watch, - and at least once, 
betrayed by his habitual anger, fell under the danger of the law 
and was clapped into some rustic prison-house, the doors of which 
he burst in the night and was no more heard of in that quarter.  
When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter places, and he had 
no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the inroads of 
pedestrians from town.  But for a man of his propensity to wrath 
these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by 
snatches; in the gray of the summer morning, and already from far 
up the hill, he would wake the "toun" with the sound of his 
shoutings; and in the lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced 
late at night.  This wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said 
to haunt that quarter of the Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no 
doubt it added to the fear in which men stood of John a touch of 
something legendary.  For my own part, he was at first my enemy, 
and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural abhorrence.  
It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only by some 
sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot 
amang the sheep."  The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this 
ogre; I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the 
Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my 
questing dragoons.  Little by little we dropped into civilities; 
his hail at sight of me began to have less of the ring of a war-
slogan; soon, we never met but he produced his snuff-box, which was 
with him, like the calumet with the Red Indian, a part of the 
heraldry of peace; and at length, in the ripeness of time, we grew 
to be a pair of friends, and when I lived alone in these parts in 
the winter, it was a settled thing for John to "give me a cry" over 
the garden wall as he set forth upon his evening round, and for me 
to overtake and bear him company.

That dread voice of his that shook the hills when he was angry, 
fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of 
honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently 
Scottish.  He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a 
sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from 
a rock.  His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff 
with weathering; more like a picture than a face; yet with a 
certain strain and a threat of latent anger in the expression, like 
that of a man trained too fine and harassed with perpetual 
vigilance.  He spoke in the richest dialect of Scotch I ever heard; 
the words in themselves were a pleasure and often a surprise to me, 
so that I often came back from one of our patrols with new 
acquisitions; and this vocabulary he would handle like a master, 
stalking a little before me, "beard on shoulder," the plaid hanging 
loosely about him, the yellow staff clapped under his arm, and 
guiding me uphill by that devious, tactical ascent which seems 
peculiar to men of his trade.  I might count him with the best 
talkers; only that talking Scotch and talking English seem 
incomparable acts.  He touched on nothing at least, but he adorned 
it; when he narrated, the scene was before you; when he spoke (as 
he did mostly) of his own antique business, the thing took on a 
colour of romance and curiosity that was surprising.  The clans of 
sheep with their particular territories on the hill, and how, in 
the yearly killings and purchases, each must be proportionally 
thinned and strengthened; the midnight busyness of animals, the 
signs of the weather, the cares of the snowy season, the exquisite 
stupidity of sheep, the exquisite cunning of dogs: all these he 
could present so humanly, and with so much old experience and 
living gusto, that weariness was excluded.  And in the midst he 
would suddenly straighten his bowed back, the stick would fly 
abroad in demonstration, and the sharp thunder of his voice roll 
out a long itinerary for the dogs, so that you saw at last the use 
of that great wealth of names for every knowe and howe upon the 
hillside; and the dogs, having hearkened with lowered tails and 
raised faces, would run up their flags again to the masthead and 
spread themselves upon the indicated circuit.  It used to fill me 
with wonder how they could follow and retain so long a story.  But 
John denied these creatures all intelligence; they were the 
constant butt of his passion and contempt; it was just possible to 
work with the like of them, he said, - not more than possible.  And 
then he would expand upon the subject of the really good dogs that 
he had known, and the one really good dog that he had himself 
possessed.  He had been offered forty pounds for it; but a good 
collie was worth more than that, more than anything, to a "herd;" 
he did the herd's work for him.  "As for the like of them!" he 
would cry, and scornfully indicate the scouring tails of his 
assistants.

Once - I translate John's Lallan, for I cannot do it justice, being 
born BRITANNIS IN MONTIBUS, indeed, but alas! INERUDITO SAECULO - 
once, in the days of his good dog, he had bought some sheep in 
Edinburgh, and on the way out, the road being crowded, two were 
lost.  This was a reproach to John, and a slur upon the dog; and 
both were alive to their misfortune.  Word came, after some days, 
that a farmer about Braid had found a pair of sheep; and thither 
went John and the dog to ask for restitution.  But the farmer was a 
hard man and stood upon his rights.  "How were they marked?" he 
asked; and since John had bought right and left from many sellers 
and had no notion of the marks - "Very well," said the farmer, 
"then it's only right that I should keep them." - "Well," said 
John, "it's a fact that I cannae tell the sheep; but if my dog can, 
will ye let me have them?"  The farmer was honest as well as hard, 
and besides I daresay he had little fear of the ordeal; so he had 
all the sheep upon his farm into one large park, and turned John's 
dog into their midst.  That hairy man of business knew his errand 
well; he knew that John and he had bought two sheep and (to their 
shame) lost them about Boroughmuirhead; he knew besides (the lord 
knows how, unless by listening) that they were come to Braid for 
their recovery; and without pause or blunder singled out, first one 
and then another, the two waifs.  It was that afternoon the forty 
pounds were offered and refused.  And the shepherd and his dog - 
what do I say? the true shepherd and his man - set off together by 
Fairmilehead in jocund humour, and "smiled to ither" all the way 
home, with the two recovered ones before them.  So far, so good; 
but intelligence may be abused.  The dog, as he is by little man's 
inferior in mind, is only by little his superior in virtue; and 
John had another collie tale of quite a different complexion.  At 
the foot of the moss behind Kirk Yetton (Caer Ketton, wise men say) 
there is a scrog of low wood and a pool with a dam for washing 
sheep.  John was one day lying under a bush in the scrog, when he 
was aware of a collie on the far hillside skulking down through the 
deepest of the heather with obtrusive stealth.  He knew the dog; 
knew him for a clever, rising practitioner from quite a distant 
farm; one whom perhaps he had coveted as he saw him masterfully 
steering flocks to market.  But what did the practitioner so far 
from home? and why this guilty and secret manoeuvring towards the 
pool? - for it was towards the pool that he was heading.  John lay 
the closer under his bush, and presently saw the dog come forth 
upon the margin, look all about him to see if he were anywhere 
observed, plunge in and repeatedly wash himself over head and ears, 
and then (but now openly and with tail in air) strike homeward over 
the hills.  That same night word was sent his master, and the 
rising practitioner, shaken up from where he lay, all innocence, 
before the fire, was had out to a dykeside and promptly shot; for 
alas! he was that foulest of criminals under trust, a sheep-eater; 
and it was from the maculation of sheep's blood that he had come so 
far to cleanse himself in the pool behind Kirk Yetton.