A trade that touches nature, one that lies at the foundations of 
life, in which we have all had ancestors employed, so that on a 
hint of it ancestral memories revive, lends itself to literary use, 
vocal or written.  The fortune of a tale lies not alone in the 
skill of him that writes, but as much, perhaps, in the inherited 
experience of him who reads; and when I hear with a particular 
thrill of things that I have never done or seen, it is one of that 
innumerable army of my ancestors rejoicing in past deeds.  Thus 
novels begin to touch not the fine DILETTANTI but the gross mass of 
mankind, when they leave off to speak of parlours and shades of 
manner and still-born niceties of motive, and begin to deal with 
fighting, sailoring, adventure, death or childbirth; and thus 
ancient outdoor crafts and occupations, whether Mr. Hardy wields 
the shepherd's crook or Count Tolstoi swings the scythe, lift 
romance into a near neighbourhood with epic.  These aged things 
have on them the dew of man's morning; they lie near, not so much 
to us, the semi-artificial flowerets, as to the trunk and 
aboriginal taproot of the race.  A thousand interests spring up in 
the process of the ages, and a thousand perish; that is now an 
eccentricity or a lost art which was once the fashion of an empire; 
and those only are perennial matters that rouse us to-day, and that 
roused men in all epochs of the past.  There is a certain critic, 
not indeed of execution but of matter, whom I dare be known to set 
before the best: a certain low-browed, hairy gentleman, at first a 
percher in the fork of trees, next (as they relate) a dweller in 
caves, and whom I think I see squatting in cave-mouths, of a 
pleasant afternoon, to munch his berries - his wife, that 
accomplished lady, squatting by his side: his name I never heard, 
but he is often described as Probably Arboreal, which may serve for 
recognition.  Each has his own tree of ancestors, but at the top of 
all sits Probably Arboreal; in all our veins there run some minims 
of his old, wild, tree-top blood; our civilised nerves still tingle 
with his rude terrors and pleasures; and to that which would have 
moved our common ancestor, all must obediently thrill.

We have not so far to climb to come to shepherds; and it may be I 
had one for an ascendant who has largely moulded me.  But yet I 
think I owe my taste for that hillside business rather to the art 
and interest of John Todd.  He it was that made it live for me, as 
the artist can make all things live.  It was through him the simple 
strategy of massing sheep upon a snowy evening, with its attendant 
scampering of earnest, shaggy aides-de-champ, was an affair that I 
never wearied of seeing, and that I never weary of recalling to 
mind: the shadow of the night darkening on the hills, inscrutable 
black blots of snow shower moving here and there like night already 
come, huddles of yellow sheep and dartings of black dogs upon the 
snow, a bitter air that took you by the throat, unearthly harpings 
of the wind along the moors; and for centre piece to all these 
features and influences, John winding up the brae, keeping his 
captain's eye upon all sides, and breaking, ever and again, into a 
spasm of bellowing that seemed to make the evening bleaker.  It is 
thus that I still see him in my mind's eye, perched on a hump of 
the declivity not far from Halkerside, his staff in airy flourish, 
his great voice taking hold upon the hills and echoing terror to 
the lowlands; I, meanwhile, standing somewhat back, until the fit 
should be over, and, with a pinch of snuff, my friend relapse into 
his easy, even conversation.




CHAPTER VII. THE MANSE


I HAVE named, among many rivers that make music in my memory, that 
dirty Water of Leith.  Often and often I desire to look upon it 
again; and the choice of a point of view is easy to me.  It should 
be at a certain water-door, embowered in shrubbery.  The river is 
there dammed back for the service of the flour-mill just below, so 
that it lies deep and darkling, and the sand slopes into brown 
obscurity with a glint of gold; and it has but newly been recruited 
by the borrowings of the snuff-mill just above, and these, tumbling 
merrily in, shake the pool to its black heart, fill it with drowsy 
eddies, and set the curded froth of many other mills solemnly 
steering to and fro upon the surface.  Or so it was when I was 
young; for change, and the masons, and the pruning-knife, have been 
busy; and if I could hope to repeat a cherished experience, it must 
be on many and impossible conditions.  I must choose, as well as 
the point of view, a certain moment in my growth, so that the scale 
may be exaggerated, and the trees on the steep opposite side may 
seem to climb to heaven, and the sand by the water-door, where I am 
standing, seem as low as Styx.  And I must choose the season also, 
so that the valley may be brimmed like a cup with sunshine and the 
songs of birds; - and the year of grace, so that when I turn to 
leave the riverside I may find the old manse and its inhabitants 
unchanged.

It was a place in that time like no other: the garden cut into 
provinces by a great hedge of beech, and over-looked by the church 
and the terrace of the churchyard, where the tombstones were thick, 
and after nightfall "spunkies" might be seen to dance at least by 
children; flower-plots lying warm in sunshine; laurels and the 
great yew making elsewhere a pleasing horror of shade; the smell of 
water rising from all round, with an added tang of paper-mills; the 
sound of water everywhere, and the sound of mills - the wheel and 
the dam singing their alternate strain; the birds on every bush and 
from every corner of the overhanging woods pealing out their notes 
until the air throbbed with them; and in the midst of this, the 
manse.  I see it, by the standard of my childish stature, as a 
great and roomy house.  In truth, it was not so large as I 
supposed, nor yet so convenient, and, standing where it did, it is 
difficult to suppose that it was healthful.  Yet a large family of 
stalwart sons and tall daughters were housed and reared, and came 
to man and womanhood in that nest of little chambers; so that the 
face of the earth was peppered with the children of the manse, and 
letters with outlandish stamps became familiar to the local 
postman, and the walls of the little chambers brightened with the 
wonders of the East.  The dullest could see this was a house that 
had a pair of hands in divers foreign places: a well-beloved house 
- its image fondly dwelt on by many travellers.

Here lived an ancestor of mine, who was a herd of men.  I read him, 
judging with older criticism the report of childish observation, as 
a man of singular simplicity of nature; unemotional, and hating the 
display of what he felt; standing contented on the old ways; a 
lover of his life and innocent habits to the end.  We children 
admired him: partly for his beautiful face and silver hair, for 
none more than children are concerned for beauty and, above all, 
for beauty in the old; partly for the solemn light in which we 
beheld him once a week, the observed of all observers, in the 
pulpit.  But his strictness and distance, the effect, I now fancy, 
of old age, slow blood, and settled habit, oppressed us with a kind 
of terror.  When not abroad, he sat much alone, writing sermons or 
letters to his scattered family in a dark and cold room with a 
library of bloodless books - or so they seemed in those days, 
although I have some of them now on my own shelves and like well 
enough to read them; and these lonely hours wrapped him in the 
greater gloom for our imaginations.  But the study had a redeeming 
grace in many Indian pictures, gaudily coloured and dear to young 
eyes.  I cannot depict (for I have no such passions now) the greed 
with which I beheld them; and when I was once sent in to say a 
psalm to my grandfather, I went, quaking indeed with fear, but at 
the same time glowing with hope that, if I said it well, he might 
reward me with an Indian picture.

"Thy foot He'll not let slide, nor will
He slumber that thee keeps,"

it ran: a strange conglomerate of the unpronounceable, a sad model 
to set in childhood before one who was himself to be a versifier, 
and a task in recitation that really merited reward.  And I must 
suppose the old man thought so too, and was either touched or 
amused by the performance; for he took me in his arms with most 
unwonted tenderness, and kissed me, and gave me a little kindly 
sermon for my psalm; so that, for that day, we were clerk and 
parson.  I was struck by this reception into so tender a surprise 
that I forgot my disappointment.  And indeed the hope was one of 
those that childhood forges for a pastime, and with no design upon 
reality.  Nothing was more unlikely than that my grandfather should 
strip himself of one of those pictures, love-gifts and reminders of 
his absent sons; nothing more unlikely than that he should bestow 
it upon me.  He had no idea of spoiling children, leaving all that 
to my aunt; he had fared hard himself, and blubbered under the rod 
in the last century; and his ways were still Spartan for the young.  
The last word I heard upon his lips was in this Spartan key.  He 
had over-walked in the teeth of an east wind, and was now near the 
end of his many days.  He sat by the dining-room fire, with his 
white hair, pale face and bloodshot eyes, a somewhat awful figure; 
and my aunt had given him a dose of our good old Scotch medicine, 
Dr. Gregory's powder.  Now that remedy, as the work of a near 
kinsman of Rob Roy himself, may have a savour of romance for the 
imagination; but it comes uncouthly to the palate.  The old 
gentleman had taken it with a wry face; and that being 
accomplished, sat with perfect simplicity, like a child's, munching 
a "barley-sugar kiss."  But when my aunt, having the canister open 
in her hands, proposed to let me share in the sweets, he interfered 
at once.  I had had no Gregory; then I should have no barley-sugar 
kiss: so he decided with a touch of irritation.  And just then the 
phaeton coming opportunely to the kitchen door - for such was our 
unlordly fashion - I was taken for the last time from the presence 
of my grandfather.

Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister.  I 
must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so 
am I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to 
hear them.  He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and 
I have sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept 
it, I am still on the quest.  He was a great lover of Shakespeare, 
whom he read aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my 
Shakespeare also, and am persuaded I can read him well, though I 
own I never have been told so.  He made embroidery, designing his 
own patterns; and in that kind of work I never made anything but a 
kettle-holder in Berlin wool, and an odd garter of knitting, which 
was as black as the chimney before I had done with it.  He loved 
port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, but they agreed better 
with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach of contract.  He 
had chalk-stones in his fingers; and these, in good time, I may 
possibly inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble 
presence.  Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the 
reverend doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write 
the phrase, he moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and 
sits efficient in the very knot and centre of my being.  In his 
garden, as I played there, I learned the love of mills - or had I 
an ancestor a miller? - and a kindness for the neighbourhood of 
graves, as homely things not without their poetry - or had I an 
ancestor a sexton?  But what of the garden where he played himself? 
- for that, too, was a scene of my education.  Some part of me 
played there in the eighteenth century, and ran races under the 
green avenue at Pilrig; some part of me trudged up Leith Walk, 
which was still a country place, and sat on the High School 
benches, and was thrashed, perhaps, by Dr. Adam.  The house where I 
spent my youth was not yet thought upon; but we made holiday 
parties among the cornfields on its site, and ate strawberries and 
cream near by at a gardener's.  All this I had forgotten; only my 
grandfather remembered and once reminded me.  I have forgotten, 
too, how we grew up, and took orders, and went to our first 
Ayrshire parish, and fell in love with and married a daughter of 
Burns's Dr. Smith - "Smith opens out his cauld harangues."  I have 
forgotten, but I was there all the same, and heard stories of Burns 
at first hand.

And there is a thing stranger than all that; for this HOMUNCULUS or 
part-man of mine that walked about the eighteenth century with Dr. 
Balfour in his youth, was in the way of meeting other HOMUNCULOS or 
part-men, in the persons of my other ancestors.  These were of a 
lower order, and doubtless we looked down upon them duly.  But as I 
went to college with Dr. Balfour, I may have seen the lamp and oil 
man taking down the shutters from his shop beside the Tron; - we 
may have had a rabbit-hutch or a bookshelf made for us by a certain 
carpenter in I know not what wynd of the old, smoky city; or, upon 
some holiday excursion, we may have looked into the windows of a 
cottage in a flower-garden and seen a certain weaver plying his 
shuttle.  And these were all kinsmen of mine upon the other side; 
and from the eyes of the lamp and oil man one-half of my unborn 
father, and one-quarter of myself, looked out upon us as we went by 
to college.  Nothing of all this would cross the mind of the young 
student, as he posted up the Bridges with trim, stockinged legs, in 
that city of cocked hats and good Scotch still unadulterated.  It 
would not cross his mind that he should have a daughter; and the 
lamp and oil man, just then beginning, by a not unnatural 
metastasis, to bloom into a lighthouse-engineer, should have a 
grandson; and that these two, in the fulness of time, should wed; 
and some portion of that student himself should survive yet a year 
or two longer in the person of their child.

But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic of 
fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long pedigrees, that 
we can follow backward the careers of our HOMUNCULOS and be 
reminded of our antenatal lives.  Our conscious years are but a 
moment in the history of the elements that build us.  Are you a 
bank-clerk, and do you live at Peckham?  It was not always so.  And 
though to-day I am only a man of letters, either tradition errs or 
I was present when there landed at St. Andrews a French barber-
surgeon, to tend the health and the beard of the great Cardinal 
Beaton; I have shaken a spear in the Debateable Land and shouted 
the slogan of the Elliots; I was present when a skipper, plying 
from Dundee, smuggled Jacobites to France after the '15; I was in a 
West India merchant's office, perhaps next door to Bailie Nicol 
Jarvie's, and managed the business of a plantation in St. Kitt's; I 
was with my engineer-grandfather (the son-in-law of the lamp and 
oil man) when he sailed north about Scotland on the famous cruise 
that gave us the PIRATE and the LORD OF THE ISLES; I was with him, 
too, on the Bell Rock, in the fog, when the SMEATON had drifted 
from her moorings, and the Aberdeen men, pick in hand, had seized 
upon the only boats, and he must stoop and lap sea-water before his 
tongue could utter audible words; and once more with him when the 
Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into the 
tower, then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved reading in his 
Bible - or affecting to read - till one after another slunk back 
with confusion of countenance to their engineer.  Yes, parts of me 
have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well.  
And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up 
can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of 
ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly 
preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the 
legions of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on 
Chaldaean plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that 
fancy can see peering through the disparted branches?  What sleeper 
in green tree-tops, what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree?  
Probably arboreal in his habits. . . .

And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about 
with me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as 
he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman, 
there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his; 
tree-top memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his 
mind; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down; and Probably 
Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and 
chattered in the brain of the old divine.




CHAPTER VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET


THOSE who try to be artists use, time after time, the matter of 
their recollections, setting and resetting little coloured memories 
of men and scenes, rigging up (it may be) some especial friend in 
the attire of a buccaneer, and decreeing armies to manoeuvre, or 
murder to be done, on the playground of their youth.  But the 
memories are a fairy gift which cannot be worn out in using.  After 
a dozen services in various tales, the little sunbright pictures of 
the past still shine in the mind's eye with not a lineament 
defaced, not a tint impaired.  GLUCK UND UNGLUCK WIRD GESANG, if 
Goethe pleases; yet only by endless avatars, the original re-
embodying after each.  So that a writer, in time, begins to wonder 
at the perdurable life of these impressions; begins, perhaps, to 
fancy that he wrongs them when he weaves them in with fiction; and 
looking back on them with ever-growing kindness, puts them at last, 
substantive jewels, in a setting of their own.

One or two of these pleasant spectres I think I have laid.  I used 
one but the other day: a little eyot of dense, freshwater sand, 
where I once waded deep in butterburrs, delighting to hear the song 
of the river on both sides, and to tell myself that I was indeed 
and at last upon an island.  Two of my puppets lay there a summer's 
day, hearkening to the shearers at work in riverside fields and to 
the drums of the gray old garrison upon the neighbouring hill.  And 
this was, I think, done rightly: the place was rightly peopled - 
and now belongs not to me but to my puppets - for a time at least.  
In time, perhaps, the puppets will grow faint; the original memory 
swim up instant as ever; and I shall once more lie in bed, and see 
the little sandy isle in Allan Water as it is in nature, and the 
child (that once was me) wading there in butterburrs; and wonder at 
the instancy and virgin freshness of that memory; and be pricked 
again, in season and out of season, by the desire to weave it into 
art.

There is another isle in my collection, the memory of which 
besieges me.  I put a whole family there, in one of my tales; and 
later on, threw upon its shores, and condemned to several days of 
rain and shellfish on its tumbled boulders, the hero of another.  
The ink is not yet faded; the sound of the sentences is still in my 
mind's ear; and I am under a spell to write of that island again.


I


The little isle of Earraid lies close in to the south-west corner 
of the Ross of Mull: the sound of Iona on one side, across which 
you may see the isle and church of Columba; the open sea to the 
other, where you shall be able to mark, on a clear, surfy day, the 
breakers running white on many sunken rocks.  I first saw it, or 
first remembered seeing it, framed in the round bull's-eye of a 
cabin port, the sea lying smooth along its shores like the waters 
of a lake, the colourless clear light of the early morning making 
plain its heathery and rocky hummocks.  There stood upon it, in 
these days, a single rude house of uncemented stones, approached by 
a pier of wreckwood.  It must have been very early, for it was then 
summer, and in summer, in that latitude, day scarcely withdraws; 
but even at that hour the house was making a sweet smoke of peats 
which came to me over the bay, and the bare-legged daughters of the 
cotter were wading by the pier.  The same day we visited the shores 
of the isle in the ship's boats; rowed deep into Fiddler's Hole, 
sounding as we went; and having taken stock of all possible 
accommodation, pitched on the northern inlet as the scene of 
operations.  For it was no accident that had brought the lighthouse 
steamer to anchor in the Bay of Earraid.  Fifteen miles away to 
seaward, a certain black rock stood environed by the Atlantic 
rollers, the outpost of the Torran reefs.  Here was a tower to be 
built, and a star lighted, for the conduct of seamen.  But as the 
rock was small, and hard of access, and far from land, the work 
would be one of years; and my father was now looking for a shore 
station, where the stones might be quarried and dressed, the men 
live, and the tender, with some degree of safety, lie at anchor.

I saw Earraid next from the stern thwart of an Iona lugger, Sam 
Bough and I sitting there cheek by jowl, with our feet upon our 
baggage, in a beautiful, clear, northern summer eve.  And behold! 
there was now a pier of stone, there were rows of sheds, railways, 
travelling-cranes, a street of cottages, an iron house for the 
resident engineer, wooden bothies for the men, a stage where the 
courses of the tower were put together experimentally, and behind 
the settlement a great gash in the hillside where granite was 
quarried.  In the bay, the steamer lay at her moorings.  All day 
long there hung about the place the music of chinking tools; and 
even in the dead of night, the watchman carried his lantern to and 
fro in the dark settlement and could light the pipe of any midnight 
muser.  It was, above all, strange to see Earraid on the Sunday, 
when the sound of the tools ceased and there fell a crystal quiet.  
All about the green compound men would be sauntering in their 
Sunday's best, walking with those lax joints of the reposing 
toiler, thoughtfully smoking, talking small, as if in honour of the 
stillness, or hearkening to the wailing of the gulls.  And it was 
strange to see our Sabbath services, held, as they were, in one of 
the bothies, with Mr. Brebner reading at a table, and the 
congregation perched about in the double tier of sleeping bunks; 
and to hear the singing of the psalms, "the chapters," the 
inevitable Spurgeon's sermon, and the old, eloquent lighthouse 
prayer.

In fine weather, when by the spy-glass on the hill the sea was 
observed to run low upon the reef, there would be a sound of 
preparation in the very early morning; and before the sun had risen 
from behind Ben More, the tender would steam out of the bay.  Over 
fifteen sea-miles of the great blue Atlantic rollers she ploughed 
her way, trailing at her tail a brace of wallowing stone-lighters.  
The open ocean widened upon either board, and the hills of the 
mainland began to go down on the horizon, before she came to her 
unhomely destination, and lay-to at last where the rock clapped its 
black head above the swell, with the tall iron barrack on its 
spider legs, and the truncated tower, and the cranes waving their 
arms, and the smoke of the engine-fire rising in the mid-sea.  An 
ugly reef is this of the Dhu Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of 
shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for 
a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the 
Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled 
with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a 
dingy insect between a slater and a bug.  No other life was there 
but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a 
mill-race, and growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and 
again, in the calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock 
itself.  Times were different upon Dhu-Heartach when it blew, and 
the night fell dark, and the neighbour lights of Skerryvore and 
Rhu-val were quenched in fog, and the men sat prisoned high up in 
their iron drum, that then resounded with the lashing of the 
sprays.  Fear sat with them in their sea-beleaguered dwelling; and 
the colour changed in anxious faces when some greater billow struck 
the barrack, and its pillars quivered and sprang under the blow.  
It was then that the foreman builder, Mr. Goodwillie, whom I see 
before me still in his rock-habit of undecipherable rags, would get 
his fiddle down and strike up human minstrelsy amid the music of 
the storm.  But it was in sunshine only that I saw Dhu-Heartach; 
and it was in sunshine, or the yet lovelier summer afterglow, that 
the steamer would return to Earraid, ploughing an enchanted sea; 
the obedient lighters, relieved of their deck cargo, riding in her 
wake more quietly; and the steersman upon each, as she rose on the 
long swell, standing tall and dark against the shining west.

But it was in Earraid itself that I delighted chiefly.  The 
lighthouse settlement scarce encroached beyond its fences; over the 
top of the first brae the ground was all virgin, the world all shut 
out, the face of things unchanged by any of man's doings.  Here was 
no living presence, save for the limpets on the rocks, for some 
old, gray, rain-beaten ram that I might rouse out of a ferny den 
betwixt two boulders, or for the haunting and the piping of the 
gulls.  It was older than man; it was found so by incoming Celts, 
and seafaring Norsemen, and Columba's priests.  The earthy savour 
of the bog-plants, the rude disorder of the boulders, the 
inimitable seaside brightness of the air, the brine and the iodine, 
the lap of the billows among the weedy reefs, the sudden springing 
up of a great run of dashing surf along the sea-front of the isle, 
all that I saw and felt my predecessors must have seen and felt 
with scarce a difference.  I steeped myself in open air and in past 
ages.

"Delightful would it be to me to be in UCHD AILIUN
On the pinnacle of a rock,
That I might often see
The face of the ocean;
That I might hear the song of the wonderful birds,
Source of happiness;
That I might hear the thunder of the crowding waves
Upon the rocks:
At times at work without compulsion -
This would be delightful;
At times plucking dulse from the rocks
At times at fishing."

So, about the next island of Iona, sang Columba himself twelve 
hundred years before.  And so might I have sung of Earraid.

And all the while I was aware that this life of sea-bathing and 
sun-burning was for me but a holiday.  In that year cannon were 
roaring for days together on French battlefields; and I would sit 
in my isle (I call it mine, after the use of lovers) and think upon 
the war, and the loudness of these far-away battles, and the pain 
of the men's wounds, and the weariness of their marching.  And I 
would think too of that other war which is as old as mankind, and 
is indeed the life of man: the unsparing war, the grinding slavery 
of competition; the toil of seventy years, dear-bought bread, 
precarious honour, the perils and pitfalls, and the poor rewards.  
It was a long look forward; the future summoned me as with trumpet 
calls, it warned me back as with a voice of weeping and beseeching; 
and I thrilled and trembled on the brink of life, like a childish 
bather on the beach.

There was another young man on Earraid in these days, and we were 
much together, bathing, clambering on the boulders, trying to sail 
a boat and spinning round instead in the oily whirlpools of the 
roost.  But the most part of the time we spoke of the great 
uncharted desert of our futures; wondering together what should 
there befall us; hearing with surprise the sound of our own voices 
in the empty vestibule of youth.  As far, and as hard, as it seemed 
then to look forward to the grave, so far it seems now to look 
backward upon these emotions; so hard to recall justly that loath 
submission, as of the sacrificial bull, with which we stooped our 
necks under the yoke of destiny.  I met my old companion but the 
other day; I cannot tell of course what he was thinking; but, upon 
my part, I was wondering to see us both so much at home, and so 
composed and sedentary in the world; and how much we had gained, 
and how much we had lost, to attain to that composure; and which 
had been upon the whole our best estate: when we sat there prating 
sensibly like men of some experience, or when we shared our 
timorous and hopeful counsels in a western islet.




CHAPTER IX. THOMAS STEVENSON - CIVIL ENGINEER


THE death of Thomas Stevenson will mean not very much to the 
general reader.  His service to mankind took on forms of which the 
public knows little and understands less.  He came seldom to 
London, and then only as a task, remaining always a stranger and a 
convinced provincial; putting up for years at the same hotel where 
his father had gone before him; faithful for long to the same 
restaurant, the same church, and the same theatre, chosen simply 
for propinquity; steadfastly refusing to dine out.  He had a circle 
of his own, indeed, at home; few men were more beloved in 
Edinburgh, where he breathed an air that pleased him; and wherever 
he went, in railway carriages or hotel smoking-rooms, his strange, 
humorous vein of talk, and his transparent honesty, raised him up 
friends and admirers.  But to the general public and the world of 
London, except about the parliamentary committee-rooms, he remained 
unknown.  All the time, his lights were in every part of the world, 
guiding the mariner; his firm were consulting engineers to the 
Indian, the New Zealand, and the Japanese Lighthouse Boards, so 
that Edinburgh was a world centre for that branch of applied 
science; in Germany, he had been called "the Nestor of lighthouse 
illumination"; even in France, where his claims were long denied, 
he was at last, on the occasion of the late Exposition, recognised 
and medalled.  And to show by one instance the inverted nature of 
his reputation, comparatively small at home, yet filling the world, 
a friend of mine was this winter on a visit to the Spanish main, 
and was asked by a Peruvian if he "knew Mr. Stevenson the author, 
because his works were much esteemed in Peru?"  My friend supposed 
the reference was to the writer of tales; but the Peruvian had 
never heard of DR. JEKYLL; what he had in his eye, what was 
esteemed in Peru, where the volumes of the engineer.

Thomas Stevenson was born at Edinburgh in the year 1818, the 
grandson of Thomas Smith, first engineer to the Board of Northern 
Lights, son of Robert Stevenson, brother of Alan and David; so that 
his nephew, David Alan Stevenson, joined with him at the time of 
his death in the engineership, is the sixth of the family who has 
held, successively or conjointly, that office.  The Bell Rock, his 
father's great triumph, was finished before he was born; but he 
served under his brother Alan in the building of Skerryvore, the 
noblest of all extant deep-sea lights; and, in conjunction with his 
brother David, he added two - the Chickens and Dhu Heartach - to 
that small number of man's extreme outposts in the ocean.  Of shore 
lights, the two brothers last named erected no fewer than twenty-
seven; of beacons, (4) about twenty-five.  Many harbours were 
successfully carried out: one, the harbour of Wick, the chief 
disaster of my father's life, was a failure; the sea proved too 
strong for man's arts; and after expedients hitherto unthought of, 
and on a scale hyper-cyclopean, the work must be deserted, and now 
stands a ruin in that bleak, God-forsaken bay, ten miles from John-
o'-Groat's.  In the improvement of rivers the brothers were 
likewise in a large way of practice over both England and Scotland, 
nor had any British engineer anything approaching their experience.

It was about this nucleus of his professional labours that all my 
father's scientific inquiries and inventions centred; these 
proceeded from, and acted back upon, his daily business.  Thus it 
was as a harbour engineer that he became interested in the 
propagation and reduction of waves; a difficult subject in regard 
to which he has left behind him much suggestive matter and some 
valuable approximate results.  Storms were his sworn adversaries, 
and it was through the study of storms that he approached that of 
meteorology at large.  Many who knew him not otherwise, knew - 
perhaps have in their gardens - his louvre-boarded screen for 
instruments.  But the great achievement of his life was, of course, 
in optics as applied to lighthouse illumination.  Fresnel had done 
much; Fresnel had settled the fixed light apparatus on a principle 
that still seems unimprovable; and when Thomas Stevenson stepped in 
and brought to a comparable perfection the revolving light, a not 
unnatural jealousy and much painful controversy rose in France.  It 
had its hour; and, as I have told already, even in France it has 
blown by.  Had it not, it would have mattered the less, since all 
through his life my father continued to justify his claim by fresh 
advances.  New apparatus for lights in new situations was 
continually being designed with the same unwearied search after 
perfection, the same nice ingenuity of means; and though the 
holophotal revolving light perhaps still remains his most elegant 
contrivance, it is difficult to give it the palm over the much 
later condensing system, with its thousand possible modifications.  
The number and the value of these improvements entitle their author 
to the name of one of mankind's benefactors.  In all parts of the 
world a safer landfall awaits the mariner.  Two things must be 
said: and, first, that Thomas Stevenson was no mathematician.  
Natural shrewdness, a sentiment of optical laws, and a great 
intensity of consideration led him to just conclusions; but to 
calculate the necessary formulae for the instruments he had 
conceived was often beyond him, and he must fall back on the help 
of others, notably on that of his cousin and lifelong intimate 
friend, EMERITUS Professor Swan, of St. Andrews, and his later 
friend, Professor P. G. Tait.  It is a curious enough circumstance, 
and a great encouragement to others, that a man so ill equipped 
should have succeeded in one of the most abstract and arduous walks 
of applied science.  The second remark is one that applies to the 
whole family, and only particularly to Thomas Stevenson from the 
great number and importance of his inventions: holding as the 
Stevensons did a Government appointment they regarded their 
original work as something due already to the nation, and none of 
them has ever taken out a patent.  It is another cause of the 
comparative obscurity of the name: for a patent not only brings in 
money, it infallibly spreads reputation; and my father's 
instruments enter anonymously into a hundred light-rooms, and are 
passed anonymously over in a hundred reports, where the least 
considerable patent would stand out and tell its author's story.

But the life-work of Thomas Stevenson remains; what we have lost, 
what we now rather try to recall, is the friend and companion.  He 
was a man of a somewhat antique strain: with a blended sternness 
and softness that was wholly Scottish and at first somewhat 
bewildering; with a profound essential melancholy of disposition 
and (what often accompanies it) the most humorous geniality in 
company; shrewd and childish; passionately attached, passionately 
prejudiced; a man of many extremes, many faults of temper, and no 
very stable foothold for himself among life's troubles.  Yet he was 
a wise adviser; many men, and these not inconsiderable, took 
counsel with him habitually.  "I sat at his feet," writes one of 
these, "when I asked his advice, and when the broad brow was set in 
thought and the firm mouth said his say, I always knew that no man 
could add to the worth of the conclusion."  He had excellent taste, 
though whimsical and partial; collected old furniture and delighted 
specially in sunflowers long before the days of Mr. Wilde; took a 
lasting pleasure in prints and pictures; was a devout admirer of 
Thomson of Duddingston at a time when few shared the taste; and 
though he read little, was constant to his favourite books.  He had 
never any Greek; Latin he happily re-taught himself after he had 
left school, where he was a mere consistent idler: happily, I say, 
for Lactantius, Vossius, and Cardinal Bona were his chief authors.  
The first he must have read for twenty years uninterruptedly, 
keeping it near him in his study, and carrying it in his bag on 
journeys.  Another old theologian, Brown of Wamphray, was often in 
his hands.  When he was indisposed, he had two books, GUY MANNERING 
and THE PARENT'S ASSISTANT, of which he never wearied.  He was a 
strong Conservative, or, as he preferred to call himself, a Tory; 
except in so far as his views were modified by a hot-headed 
chivalrous sentiment for women.  He was actually in favour of a 
marriage law under which any woman might have a divorce for the 
asking, and no man on any ground whatever; and the same sentiment 
found another expression in a Magdalen Mission in Edinburgh, 
founded and largely supported by himself.  This was but one of the 
many channels of his public generosity; his private was equally 
unstrained.  The Church of Scotland, of which he held the doctrines 
(though in a sense of his own) and to which he bore a clansman's 
loyalty, profited often by his time and money; and though, from a 
morbid sense of his own unworthiness, he would never consent to be 
an office-bearer, his advice was often sought, and he served the 
Church on many committees.  What he perhaps valued highest in his 
work were his contributions to the defence of Christianity; one of 
which, in particular, was praised by Hutchinson Stirling and 
reprinted at the request of Professor Crawford.

His sense of his own unworthiness I have called morbid; morbid, 
too, were his sense of the fleetingness of life and his concern for 
death.  He had never accepted the conditions of man's life or his 
own character; and his inmost thoughts were ever tinged with the 
Celtic melancholy.  Cases of conscience were sometimes grievous to 
him, and that delicate employment of a scientific witness cost him 
many qualms.  But he found respite from these troublesome humours 
in his work, in his lifelong study of natural science, in the 
society of those he loved, and in his daily walks, which now would 
carry him far into the country with some congenial friend, and now 
keep him dangling about the town from one old book-shop to another, 
and scraping romantic acquaintance with every dog that passed.  His 
talk, compounded of so much sterling sense and so much freakish 
humour, and clothed in language so apt, droll, and emphatic, was a 
perpetual delight to all who knew him before the clouds began to 
settle on his mind.  His use of language was both just and 
picturesque; and when at the beginning of his illness he began to 
feel the ebbing of this power, it was strange and painful to hear 
him reject one word after another as inadequate, and at length 
desist from the search and leave his phrase unfinished rather than 
finish it without propriety.  It was perhaps another Celtic trait 
that his affections and emotions, passionate as these were, and 
liable to passionate ups and downs, found the most eloquent 
expression both in words and gestures.  Love, anger, and 
indignation shone through him and broke forth in imagery, like what 
we read of Southern races.  For all these emotional extremes, and 
in spite of the melancholy ground of his character, he had upon the 
whole a happy life; nor was he less fortunate in his death, which 
at the last came to him unaware.




CHAPTER X. TALK AND TALKERS


Sir, we had a good talk. - JOHNSON.

As we must account for every idle word, so we must for every idle 
silence. - FRANKLIN.


THERE can be no fairer ambition than to excel in talk; to be 
affable, gay, ready, clear and welcome; to have a fact, a thought, 
or an illustration, pat to every subject; and not only to cheer the 
flight of time among our intimates, but bear our part in that great 
international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are 
first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of 
public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right.  
No measure comes before Parliament but it has been long ago 
prepared by the grand jury of the talkers; no book is written that 
has not been largely composed by their assistance.  Literature in 
many of its branches is no other than the shadow of good talk; but 
the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and 
effect.  There are always two to a talk, giving and taking, 
comparing experience and according conclusions.  Talk is fluid, 
tentative, continually "in further search and progress"; while 
written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found 
wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber 
of the truth.  Last and chief, while literature, gagged with 
linsey-woolsey, can only deal with a fraction of the life of man, 
talk goes fancy free and may call a spade a spade.  Talk has none 
of the freezing immunities of the pulpit.  It cannot, even if it 
would, become merely aesthetic or merely classical like literature.  
A jest intervenes, the solemn humbug is dissolved in laughter, and 
speech runs forth out of the contemporary groove into the open 
fields of nature, cheery and cheering, like schoolboys out of 
school.  And it is in talk alone that we can learn our period and 
ourselves.  In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is 
his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious 
speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures.  
It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our 
education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed 
at any age and in almost any state of health.

The spice of life is battle; the friendliest relations are still a 
kind of contest; and if we would not forego all that is valuable in 
our lot, we must continually face some other person, eye to eye, 
and wrestle a fall whether in love or enmity.  It is still by force 
of body, or power of character or intellect, that we attain to 
worthy pleasures.  Men and women contend for each other in the 
lists of love, like rival mesmerists; the active and adroit decide 
their challenges in the sports of the body; and the sedentary sit 
down to chess or conversation.  All sluggish and pacific pleasures 
are, to the same degree, solitary and selfish; and every durable 
band between human beings is founded in or heightened by some 
element of competition.  Now, the relation that has the least root 
in matter is undoubtedly that airy one of friendship; and hence, I 
suppose, it is that good talk most commonly arises among friends.  
Talk is, indeed, both the scene and instrument of friendship.  It 
is in talk alone that the friends can measure strength, and enjoy 
that amicable counter-assertion of personality which is the gauge 
of relations and the sport of life.

A good talk is not to be had for the asking.  Humours must first be 
accorded in a kind of overture or prologue; hour, company and 
circumstance be suited; and then, at a fit juncture, the subject, 
the quarry of two heated minds, spring up like a deer out of the 
wood.  Not that the talker has any of the hunter's pride, though he 
has all and more than all his ardour.  The genuine artist follows 
the stream of conversation as an angler follows the windings of a 
brook, not dallying where he fails to "kill."  He trusts implicitly 
to hazard; and he is rewarded by continual variety, continual 
pleasure, and those changing prospects of the truth that are the 
best of education.  There is nothing in a subject, so called, that 
we should regard it as an idol, or follow it beyond the promptings 
of desire.  Indeed, there are few subjects; and so far as they are 
truly talkable, more than the half of them may be reduced to three: 
that I am I, that you are you, and that there are other people 
dimly understood to be not quite the same as either.  Wherever talk 
may range, it still runs half the time on these eternal lines.  The 
theme being set, each plays on himself as on an instrument; asserts 
and justifies himself; ransacks his brain for instances and 
opinions, and brings them forth new-minted, to his own surprise and 
the admiration of his adversary.  All natural talk is a festival of 
ostentation; and by the laws of the game each accepts and fans the 
vanity of the other.  It is from that reason that we venture to lay 
ourselves so open, that we dare to be so warmly eloquent, and that 
we swell in each other's eyes to such a vast proportion.  For 
talkers, once launched, begin to overflow the limits of their 
ordinary selves, tower up to the height of their secret 
pretensions, and give themselves out for the heroes, brave, pious, 
musical and wise, that in their most shining moments they aspire to 
be.  So they weave for themselves with words and for a while 
inhabit a palace of delights, temple at once and theatre, where 
they fill the round of the world's dignities, and feast with the 
gods, exulting in Kudos.  And when the talk is over, each goes his 
way, still flushed with vanity and admiration, still trailing 
clouds of glory; each declines from the height of his ideal orgie, 
not in a moment, but by slow declension.  I remember, in the 
ENTR'ACTE of an afternoon performance, coming forth into the 
sunshine, in a beautiful green, gardened corner of a romantic city; 
and as I sat and smoked, the music moving in my blood, I seemed to 
sit there and evaporate THE FLYING DUTCHMAN (for it was that I had 
been hearing) with a wonderful sense of life, warmth, well-being 
and pride; and the noises of the city, voices, bells and marching 
feet, fell together in my ears like a symphonious orchestra.  In 
the same way, the excitement of a good talk lives for a long while 
after in the blood, the heart still hot within you, the brain still 
simmering, and the physical earth swimming around you with the 
colours of the sunset.

Natural talk, like ploughing, should turn up a large surface of 
life, rather than dig mines into geological strata.  Masses of 
experience, anecdote, incident, cross-lights, quotation, historical 
instances, the whole flotsam and jetsam of two minds forced in and 
in upon the matter in hand from every point of the compass, and 
from every degree of mental elevation and abasement - these are the 
material with which talk is fortified, the food on which the 
talkers thrive.  Such argument as is proper to the exercise should 
still be brief and seizing.  Talk should proceed by instances; by 
the apposite, not the expository.  It should keep close along the 
lines of humanity, near the bosoms and businesses of men, at the 
level where history, fiction and experience intersect and 
illuminate each other.  I am I, and You are You, with all my heart; 
but conceive how these lean propositions change and brighten when, 
instead of words, the actual you and I sit cheek by jowl, the 
spirit housed in the live body, and the very clothes uttering 
voices to corroborate the story in the face.  Not less surprising 
is the change when we leave off to speak of generalities - the bad, 
the good, the miser, and all the characters of Theophrastus - and 
call up other men, by anecdote or instance, in their very trick and 
feature; or trading on a common knowledge, toss each other famous 
names, still glowing with the hues of life.  Communication is no 
longer by words, but by the instancing of whole biographies, epics, 
systems of philosophy, and epochs of history, in bulk.  That which 
is understood excels that which is spoken in quantity and quality 
alike; ideas thus figured and personified, change hands, as we may 
say, like coin; and the speakers imply without effort the most 
obscure and intricate thoughts.  Strangers who have a large common 
ground of reading will, for this reason, come the sooner to the 
grapple of genuine converse.  If they know Othello and Napoleon, 
Consuelo and Clarissa Harlowe, Vautrin and Steenie Steenson, they 
can leave generalities and begin at once to speak by figures.

Conduct and art are the two subjects that arise most frequently and 
that embrace the widest range of facts.  A few pleasures bear 
discussion for their own sake, but only those which are most social 
or most radically human; and even these can only be discussed among 
their devotees.  A technicality is always welcome to the expert, 
whether in athletics, art or law; I have heard the best kind of 
talk on technicalities from such rare and happy persons as both 
know and love their business.  No human being ever spoke of scenery 
for above two minutes at a time, which makes me suspect we hear too 
much of it in literature.  The weather is regarded as the very 
nadir and scoff of conversational topics.  And yet the weather, the 
dramatic element in scenery, is far more tractable in language, and 
far more human both in import and suggestion than the stable 
features of the landscape.  Sailors and shepherds, and the people 
generally of coast and mountain, talk well of it; and it is often 
excitingly presented in literature.  But the tendency of all living 
talk draws it back and back into the common focus of humanity.  
Talk is a creature of the street and market-place, feeding on 
gossip; and its last resort is still in a discussion on morals.  
That is the heroic form of gossip; heroic in virtue of its high 
pretensions; but still gossip, because it turns on personalities.  
You can keep no men long, nor Scotchmen at all, off moral or 
theological discussion.  These are to all the world what law is to 
lawyers; they are everybody's technicalities; the medium through 
which all consider life, and the dialect in which they express 
their judgments.  I knew three young men who walked together daily 
for some two months in a solemn and beautiful forest and in 
cloudless summer weather; daily they talked with unabated zest, and 
yet scarce wandered that whole time beyond two subjects - theology 
and love.  And perhaps neither a court of love nor an assembly of 
divines would have granted their premisses or welcomed their 
conclusions.