This manse of Anstruther Easter has another and a more cheerful 
association.  It was early in the morning, about a century before 
the days of Mr. Thomson, that his predecessor was called out of bed 
to welcome a Grandee of Spain, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, just 
landed in the harbour underneath.  But sure there was never seen a 
more decayed grandee; sure there was never a duke welcomed from a 
stranger place of exile.  Half-way between Orkney and Shetland, 
there lies a certain isle; on the one hand the Atlantic, on the 
other the North Sea, bombard its pillared cliffs; sore-eyed, short-
living, inbred fishers and their families herd in its few huts; in 
the graveyard pieces of wreck-wood stand for monuments; there is 
nowhere a more inhospitable spot.  BELLE-ISLE-EN-MER - Fair-Isle-
at-Sea - that is a name that has always rung in my mind's ear like 
music; but the only "Fair Isle" on which I ever set my foot, was 
this unhomely, rugged turret-top of submarine sierras.  Here, when 
his ship was broken, my lord Duke joyfully got ashore; here for 
long months he and certain of his men were harboured; and it was 
from this durance that he landed at last to be welcomed (as well as 
such a papist deserved, no doubt) by the godly incumbent of 
Anstruther Easter; and after the Fair Isle, what a fine city must 
that have appeared! and after the island diet, what a hospitable 
spot the minister's table!  And yet he must have lived on friendly 
terms with his outlandish hosts.  For to this day there still 
survives a relic of the long winter evenings when the sailors of 
the great Armada crouched about the hearths of the Fair-Islanders, 
the planks of their own lost galleon perhaps lighting up the scene, 
and the gale and the surf that beat about the coast contributing 
their melancholy voices.  All the folk of the north isles are great 
artificers of knitting:  the Fair-Islanders alone dye their fabrics 
in the Spanish manner.  To this day, gloves and nightcaps, 
innocently decorated, may be seen for sale in the Shetland 
warehouse at Edinburgh, or on the Fair Isle itself in the 
catechist's house; and to this day, they tell the story of the Duke 
of Medina Sidonia's adventure.

It would seem as if the Fair Isle had some attraction for "persons 
of quality."  When I landed there myself, an elderly gentleman, 
unshaved, poorly attired, his shoulders wrapped in a plaid, was 
seen walking to and fro, with a book in his hand, upon the beach.  
He paid no heed to our arrival, which we thought a strange thing in 
itself; but when one of the officers of the PHAROS, passing 
narrowly by him, observed his book to be a Greek Testament, our 
wonder and interest took a higher flight.  The catechist was cross-
examined; he said the gentleman had been put across some time 
before in Mr. Bruce of Sumburgh's schooner, the only link between 
the Fair Isle and the rest of the world; and that he held services 
and was doing "good."  So much came glibly enough; but when pressed 
a little farther, the catechist displayed embarrassment.  A 
singular diffidence appeared upon his face:  "They tell me," said 
he, in low tones, "that he's a lord."  And a lord he was; a peer of 
the realm pacing that inhospitable beach with his Greek Testament, 
and his plaid about his shoulders, set upon doing good, as he 
understood it, worthy man!  And his grandson, a good-looking little 
boy, much better dressed than the lordly evangelist, and speaking 
with a silken English accent very foreign to the scene, accompanied 
me for a while in my exploration of the island.  I suppose this 
little fellow is now my lord, and wonder how much he remembers of 
the Fair Isle.  Perhaps not much; for he seemed to accept very 
quietly his savage situation; and under such guidance, it is like 
that this was not his first nor yet his last adventure.



CHAPTER VI - RANDOM MEMORIES



II. - THE EDUCATION OF AN ENGINEER


ANSTRUTHER is a place sacred to the Muse; she inspired (really to a 
considerable extent) Tennant's vernacular poem ANST'ER FAIR; and I 
have there waited upon her myself with much devotion.  This was 
when I came as a young man to glean engineering experience from the 
building of the breakwater.  What I gleaned, I am sure I do not 
know; but indeed I had already my own private determination to be 
an author; I loved the art of words and the appearances of life; 
and TRAVELLERS, and HEADERS, and RUBBLE, and POLISHED ASHLAR, and 
PIERRES PERDUES, and even the thrilling question of the STRING-
COURSE, interested me only (if they interested me at all) as 
properties for some possible romance or as words to add to my 
vocabulary.  To grow a little catholic is the compensation of 
years; youth is one-eyed; and in those days, though I haunted the 
breakwater by day, and even loved the place for the sake of the 
sunshine, the thrilling seaside air, the wash of waves on the sea-
face, the green glimmer of the divers' helmets far below, and the 
musical chinking of the masons, my one genuine preoccupation lay 
elsewhere, and my only industry was in the hours when I was not on 
duty.  I lodged with a certain Bailie Brown, a carpenter by trade; 
and there, as soon as dinner was despatched, in a chamber scented 
with dry rose-leaves, drew in my chair to the table and proceeded 
to pour forth literature, at such a speed, and with such 
intimations of early death and immortality, as I now look back upon 
with wonder.  Then it was that I wrote VOCES FIDELIUM, a series of 
dramatic monologues in verse; then that I indited the bulk of a 
covenanting novel - like so many others, never finished.  Late I 
sat into the night, toiling (as I thought) under the very dart of 
death, toiling to leave a memory behind me.  I feel moved to thrust 
aside the curtain of the years, to hail that poor feverish idiot, 
to bid him go to bed and clap VOCES FIDELIUM on the fire before he 
goes; so clear does he appear before me, sitting there between his 
candles in the rose-scented room and the late night; so ridiculous 
a picture (to my elderly wisdom) does the fool present!  But he was 
driven to his bed at last without miraculous intervention; and the 
manner of his driving sets the last touch upon this eminently 
youthful business.  The weather was then so warm that I must keep 
the windows open; the night without was populous with moths.  As 
the late darkness deepened, my literary tapers beaconed forth more 
brightly; thicker and thicker came the dusty night-fliers, to 
gyrate for one brilliant instant round the flame and fall in 
agonies upon my paper.  Flesh and blood could not endure the 
spectacle; to capture immortality was doubtless a noble enterprise, 
but not to capture it at such a cost of suffering; and out would go 
the candles, and off would I go to bed in the darkness raging to 
think that the blow might fall on the morrow, and there was VOCES 
FIDELIUM still incomplete.  Well, the moths are - all gone, and 
VOCES FIDELIUM along with them; only the fool is still on hand and 
practises new follies.

Only one thing in connection with the harbour tempted me, and that 
was the diving, an experience I burned to taste of.  But this was 
not to be, at least in Anstruther; and the subject involves a 
change of scene to the sub-arctic town of Wick.  You can never have 
dwelt in a country more unsightly than that part of Caithness, the 
land faintly swelling, faintly falling, not a tree, not a hedgerow, 
the fields divided by single slate stones set upon their edge, the 
wind always singing in your ears and (down the long road that led 
nowhere) thrumming in the telegraph wires.  Only as you approached 
the coast was there anything to stir the heart.  The plateau broke 
down to the North Sea in formidable cliffs, the tall out-stacks 
rose like pillars ringed about with surf, the coves were over-
brimmed with clamorous froth, the sea-birds screamed, the wind sang 
in the thyme on the cliff's edge; here and there, small ancient 
castles toppled on the brim; here and there, it was possible to dip 
into a dell of shelter, where you might lie and tell yourself you 
were a little warm, and hear (near at hand) the whin-pods bursting 
in the afternoon sun, and (farther off) the rumour of the turbulent 
sea.  As for Wick itself, it is one of the meanest of man's towns, 
and situate certainly on the baldest of God's bays.  It lives for 
herring, and a strange sight it is to see (of an afternoon) the 
heights of Pulteney blackened by seaward-looking fishers, as when a 
city crowds to a review - or, as when bees have swarmed, the ground 
is horrible with lumps and clusters; and a strange sight, and a 
beautiful, to see the fleet put silently out against a rising moon, 
the sea-line rough as a wood with sails, and ever and again and one 
after another, a boat flitting swiftly by the silver disk.  This 
mass of fishers, this great fleet of boats, is out of all 
proportion to the town itself; and the oars are manned and the nets 
hauled by immigrants from the Long Island (as we call the outer 
Hebrides), who come for that season only, and depart again, if "the 
take" be poor, leaving debts behind them.  In a bad year, the end 
of the herring fishery is therefore an exciting time; fights are 
common, riots often possible; an apple knocked from a child's hand 
was once the signal for something like a war; and even when I was 
there, a gunboat lay in the bay to assist the authorities.  To 
contrary interests, it should be observed, the curse of Babel is 
here added; the Lews men are Gaelic speakers.  Caithness has 
adopted English; an odd circumstance, if you reflect that both must 
be largely Norsemen by descent.  I remember seeing one of the 
strongest instances of this division:  a thing like a Punch-and-
Judy box erected on the flat grave-stones of the churchyard; from 
the hutch or proscenium - I know not what to call it - an eldritch-
looking preacher laying down the law in Gaelic about some one of 
the name of POWL, whom I at last divined to be the apostle to the 
Gentiles; a large congregation of the Lews men very devoutly 
listening; and on the outskirts of the crowd, some of the town's 
children (to whom the whole affair was Greek and Hebrew) profanely 
playing tigg.  The same descent, the same country, the same narrow 
sect of the same religion, and all these bonds made very largely 
nugatory by an accidental difference of dialect!

Into the bay of Wick stretched the dark length of the unfinished 
breakwater, in its cage of open staging; the travellers (like 
frames of churches) over-plumbing all; and away at the extreme end, 
the divers toiling unseen on the foundation.  On a platform of 
loose planks, the assistants turned their air-mills; a stone might 
be swinging between wind and water; underneath the swell ran gaily; 
and from time to time, a mailed dragon with a window-glass snout 
came dripping up the ladder.  Youth is a blessed season after all; 
my stay at Wick was in the year of VOCES FIDELIUM and the rose-leaf 
room at Bailie Brown's; and already I did not care two straws for 
literary glory.  Posthumous ambition perhaps requires an atmosphere 
of roses; and the more rugged excitant of Wick east winds had made 
another boy of me.  To go down in the diving-dress, that was my 
absorbing fancy; and with the countenance of a certain handsome 
scamp of a diver, Bob Bain by name, I gratified the whim.

It was gray, harsh, easterly weather, the swell ran pretty high, 
and out in the open there were "skipper's daughters," when I found 
myself at last on the diver's platform, twenty pounds of lead upon 
each foot and my whole person swollen with ply and ply of woollen 
underclothing.  One moment, the salt wind was whistling round my 
night-capped head; the next, I was crushed almost double under the 
weight of the helmet.  As that intolerable burthern was laid upon 
me, I could have found it in my heart (only for shame's sake) to 
cry off from the whole enterprise.  But it was too late.  The 
attendants began to turn the hurdy-gurdy, and the air to whistle 
through the tube; some one screwed in the barred window of the 
vizor; and I was cut off in a moment from my fellow-men; standing 
there in their midst, but quite divorced from intercourse:  a 
creature deaf and dumb, pathetically looking forth upon them from a 
climate of his own.  Except that I could move and feel, I was like 
a man fallen in a catalepsy.  But time was scarce given me to 
realise my isolation; the weights were hung upon my back and 
breast, the signal rope was thrust into my unresisting hand; and 
setting a twenty-pound foot upon the ladder, I began ponderously to 
descend.

Some twenty rounds below the platform, twilight fell.  Looking up, 
I saw a low green heaven mottled with vanishing bells of white; 
looking around, except for the weedy spokes and shafts of the 
ladder, nothing but a green gloaming, somewhat opaque but very 
restful and delicious.  Thirty rounds lower, I stepped off on the 
PIERRES PERDUES of the foundation; a dumb helmeted figure took me 
by the hand, and made a gesture (as I read it) of encouragement; 
and looking in at the creature's window, I beheld the face of Bain.  
There we were, hand to hand and (when it pleased us) eye to eye; 
and either might have burst himself with shouting, and not a 
whisper come to his companion's hearing.  Each, in his own little 
world of air, stood incommunicably separate.

Bob had told me ere this a little tale, a five minutes' drama at 
the bottom of the sea, which at that moment possibly shot across my 
mind.  He was down with another, settling a stone of the sea-wall.  
They had it well adjusted, Bob gave the signal, the scissors were 
slipped, the stone set home; and it was time to turn to something 
else.  But still his companion remained bowed over the block like a 
mourner on a tomb, or only raised himself to make absurd 
contortions and mysterious signs unknown to the vocabulary of the 
diver.  There, then, these two stood for awhile, like the dead and 
the living; till there flashed a fortunate thought into Bob's mind, 
and he stooped, peered through the window of that other world, and 
beheld the face of its inhabitant wet with streaming tears.  Ah! 
the man was in pain!  And Bob, glancing downward, saw what was the 
trouble:  the block had been lowered on the foot of that 
unfortunate - he was caught alive at the bottom of the sea under 
fifteen tons of rock.

That two men should handle a stone so heavy, even swinging in the 
scissors, may appear strange to the inexpert.  These must bear in 
mind the great density of the water of the sea, and the surprising 
results of transplantation to that medium.  To understand a little 
what these are, and how a man's weight, so far from being an 
encumbrance, is the very ground of his agility, was the chief 
lesson of my submarine experience.  The knowledge came upon me by 
degrees.  As I began to go forward with the hand of my estranged 
companion, a world of tumbled stones was visible, pillared with the 
weedy uprights of the staging:  overhead, a flat roof of green:  a 
little in front, the sea-wall, like an unfinished rampart.  And 
presently in our upward progress, Bob motioned me to leap upon a 
stone; I looked to see if he were possibly in earnest, and he only 
signed to me the more imperiously.  Now the block stood six feet 
high; it would have been quite a leap to me unencumbered; with the 
breast and back weights, and the twenty pounds upon each foot, and 
the staggering load of the helmet, the thing was out of reason.  I 
laughed aloud in my tomb; and to prove to Bob how far he was 
astray, I gave a little impulse from my toes.  Up I soared like a 
bird, my companion soaring at my side.  As high as to the stone, 
and then higher, I pursued my impotent and empty flight.  Even when 
the strong arm of Bob had checked my shoulders, my heels continued 
their ascent; so that I blew out sideways like an autumn leaf, and 
must be hauled in, hand over hand, as sailors haul in the slack of 
a sail, and propped upon my feet again like an intoxicated sparrow.  
Yet a little higher on the foundation, and we began to be affected 
by the bottom of the swell, running there like a strong breeze of 
wind.  Or so I must suppose; for, safe in my cushion of air, I was 
conscious of no impact; only swayed idly like a weed, and was now 
borne helplessly abroad, and now swiftly - and yet with dream-like 
gentleness - impelled against my guide.  So does a child's balloon 
divagate upon the currents of the air, and touch, and slide off 
again from every obstacle.  So must have ineffectually swung, so 
resented their inefficiency, those light crowds that followed the 
Star of Hades, and uttered exiguous voices in the land beyond 
Cocytus.

There was something strangely exasperating, as well as strangely 
wearying, in these uncommanded evolutions.  It is bitter to return 
to infancy, to be supported, and directed, and perpetually set upon 
your feet, by the hand of some one else.  The air besides, as it is 
supplied to you by the busy millers on the platform, closes the 
eustachian tubes and keeps the neophyte perpetually swallowing, 
till his throat is grown so dry that he can swallow no longer.  And 
for all these reasons-although I had a fine, dizzy, muddle-headed 
joy in my surroundings, and longed, and tried, and always failed, 
to lay hands on the fish that darted here and there about me, swift 
as humming-birds - yet I fancy I was rather relieved than otherwise 
when Bain brought me back to the ladder and signed to me to mount.  
And there was one more experience before me even then.  Of a 
sudden, my ascending head passed into the trough of a swell.  Out 
of the green, I shot at once into a glory of rosy, almost of 
sanguine light - the multitudinous seas incarnadined, the heaven 
above a vault of crimson.  And then the glory faded into the hard, 
ugly daylight of a Caithness autumn, with a low sky, a gray sea, 
and a whistling wind.

Bob Bain had five shillings for his trouble, and I had done what I 
desired.  It was one of the best things I got from my education as 
an engineer:  of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak 
with sympathy.  It takes a man into the open air; it keeps him 
hanging about harbour-sides, which is the richest form of idling; 
it carries him to wild islands; it gives him a taste of the genial 
dangers of the sea; it supplies him with dexterities to exercise; 
it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go far to cure him of 
any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life of cities.  
And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him in an 
office!  From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing 
boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of 
ships, and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining pharos, he 
must apply his long-sighted eyes to the petty niceties of drawing, 
or measure his inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive 
figures.  He is a wise youth, to be sure, who can balance one part 
of genuine life against two parts of drudgery between four walls, 
and for the sake of the one, manfully accept the other.

Wick was scarce an eligible place of stay.  But how much better it 
was to hang in the cold wind upon the pier, to go down with Bob 
Bain among the roots of the staging, to be all day in a boat 
coiling a wet rope and shouting orders - not always very wise - 
than to be warm and dry, and dull, and dead-alive, in the most 
comfortable office.  And Wick itself had in those days a note of 
originality.  It may have still, but I misdoubt it much.  The old 
minister of Keiss would not preach, in these degenerate times, for 
an hour and a half upon the clock.  The gipsies must be gone from 
their cavern; where you might see, from the mouth, the women 
tending their fire, like Meg Merrilies, and the men sleeping off 
their coarse potations; and where, in winter gales, the surf would 
beleaguer them closely, bursting in their very door.  A traveller 
to-day upon the Thurso coach would scarce observe a little cloud of 
smoke among the moorlands, and be told, quite openly, it marked a 
private still.  He would not indeed make that journey, for there is 
now no Thurso coach.  And even if he could, one little thing that 
happened to me could never happen to him, or not with the same 
trenchancy of contrast.

We had been upon the road all evening; the coach-top was crowded 
with Lews fishers going home, scarce anything but Gaelic had 
sounded in my ears; and our way had lain throughout over a moorish 
country very northern to behold.  Latish at night, though it was 
still broad day in our subarctic latitude, we came down upon the 
shores of the roaring Pentland Firth, that grave of mariners; on 
one hand, the cliffs of Dunnet Head ran seaward; in front was the 
little bare, white town of Castleton, its streets full of blowing 
sand; nothing beyond, but the North Islands, the great deep, and 
the perennial ice-fields of the Pole.  And here, in the last 
imaginable place, there sprang up young outlandish voices and a 
chatter of some foreign speech; and I saw, pursuing the coach with 
its load of Hebridean fishers - as they had pursued VETTURINI up 
the passes of the Apennines or perhaps along the grotto under 
Virgil's tomb - two little dark-eyed, white-toothed Italian 
vagabonds, of twelve to fourteen years of age, one with a hurdy-
gurdy, the other with a cage of white mice.  The coach passed on, 
and their small Italian chatter died in the distance; and I was 
left to marvel how they had wandered into that country, and how 
they fared in it, and what they thought of it, and when (if ever) 
they should see again the silver wind-breaks run among the olives, 
and the stone-pine stand guard upon Etruscan sepulchres.

Upon any American, the strangeness of this incident is somewhat 
lost.  For as far back as he goes in his own land, he will find 
some alien camping there; the Cornish miner, the French or Mexican 
half-blood, the negro in the South, these are deep in the woods and 
far among the mountains.  But in an old, cold, and rugged country 
such as mine, the days of immigration are long at an end; and away 
up there, which was at that time far beyond the northernmost 
extreme of railways, hard upon the shore of that ill-omened strait 
of whirlpools, in a land of moors where no stranger came, unless it 
should be a sportsman to shoot grouse or an antiquary to decipher 
runes, the presence of these small pedestrians struck the mind as 
though a bird-of-paradise had risen from the heather or an 
albatross come fishing in the bay of Wick.  They were as strange to 
their surroundings as my lordly evangelist or the old Spanish 
grandee on the Fair Isle.



CHAPTER VII - THE LANTERN-BEARERS



I


THESE boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly 
fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of 
existence.  The place was created seemingly on purpose for the 
diversion of young gentlemen.  A street or two of houses, mostly 
red and many of, them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about 
the manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a 
shady alley; many little gardens more than usually bright with 
flowers; nets a-drying, and fisher-wives scolding in the backward 
parts; a smell of fish, a genial smell of seaweed; whiffs of 
blowing sand at the street-corners; shops with golf-balls and 
bottled lollipops; another shop with penny pickwicks (that 
remarkable cigar) and the LONDON JOURNAL, dear to me for its 
startling pictures, and a few novels, dear for their suggestive 
names:  such, as well as memory serves me, were the ingredients of 
the town.  These, you are to conceive posted on a spit between two 
sandy bays, and sparsely flanked with villas enough for the boys to 
lodge in with their subsidiary parents, not enough (not yet enough) 
to cocknify the scene:  a haven in the rocks in front:  in front of 
that, a file of gray islets:  to the left, endless links and sand 
wreaths, a wilderness of hiding-holes, alive with popping rabbits 
and soaring gulls:  to the right, a range of seaward crags, one 
rugged brow beyond another; the ruins of a mighty and ancient 
fortress on the brink of one; coves between - now charmed into 
sunshine quiet, now whistling with wind and clamorous with bursting 
surges; the dens and sheltered hollows redolent of thyme and 
southernwood, the air at the cliff's edge brisk and clean and 
pungent of the sea - in front of all, the Bass Rock, tilted seaward 
like a doubtful bather, the surf ringing it with white, the solan-
geese hanging round its summit like a great and glittering smoke.  
This choice piece of seaboard was sacred, besides, to the wrecker; 
and the Bass, in the eye of fancy, still flew the colours of King 
James; and in the ear of fancy the arches of Tantallon still rang 
with horse-shoe iron, and echoed to the commands of Bell-the-Cat.

There was nothing to mar your days, if you were a boy summering in 
that part, but the embarrassment of pleasure.  You might golf if 
you wanted; but I seem to have been better employed.  You might 
secrete yourself in the Lady's Walk, a certain sunless dingle of 
elders, all mossed over by the damp as green as grass, and dotted 
here and there by the stream-side with roofless walls, the cold 
homes of anchorites.  To fit themselves for life, and with a 
special eye to acquire the art of smoking, it was even common for 
the boys to harbour there; and you might have seen a single penny 
pickwick, honestly shared in lengths with a blunt knife, bestrew 
the glen with these apprentices.  Again, you might join our fishing 
parties, where we sat perched as thick as solan-geese, a covey of 
little anglers, boy and girl, angling over each other's heads, to 
the to the much entanglement of lines and loss of podleys and 
consequent shrill recrimination - shrill as the geese themselves.  
Indeed, had that been all, you might have done this often; but 
though fishing be a fine pastime, the podley is scarce to be 
regarded as a dainty for the table; and it was a point of honour 
that a boy should eat all that he had taken.  Or again, you might 
climb the Law, where the whale's jawbone stood landmark in the 
buzzing wind, and behold the face of many counties, and the smoke 
and spires of many towns, and the sails of distant ships.  You 
might bathe, now in the flaws of fine weather, that we pathetically 
call our summer, now in a gale of wind, with the sand scourging 
your bare hide, your clothes thrashing abroad from underneath their 
guardian stone, the froth of the great breakers casting you 
headlong ere it had drowned your knees.  Or you might explore the 
tidal rocks, above all in the ebb of springs, when the very roots 
of the hills were for the nonce discovered; following my leader 
from one group to another, groping in slippery tangle for the wreck 
of ships, wading in pools after the abominable creatures of the 
sea, and ever with an eye cast backward on the march off the tide 
and the menaced line of your retreat.  And then you might go 
Crusoeing, a word that covers all extempore eating in the open air:  
digging perhaps a house under the margin of the links, kindling a 
fire of the sea-ware, and cooking apples there - if they were truly 
apples, for I sometimes suppose the merchant must have played us 
off with some inferior and quite local fruit capable of resolving, 
in the neighbourhood of fire, into mere sand and smoke and iodine; 
or perhaps pushing to Tantallon, you might lunch on sandwiches and 
visions in the grassy court, while the wind hummed in the crumbling 
turrets; or clambering along the coast, eat geans (the worst, I 
must suppose, in Christendom) from an adventurous gean tree that 
had taken root under a cliff, where it was shaken with an ague of 
east wind, and silvered after gales with salt, and grew so foreign 
among its bleak surroundings that to eat of its produce was an 
adventure in itself.

There are mingled some dismal memories with so many that were 
joyous.  Of the fisher-wife, for instance, who had cut her throat 
at Canty Bay; and of how I ran with the other children to the top 
of the Quadrant, and beheld a posse of silent people escorting a 
cart, and on the cart, bound in a chair, her throat bandaged, and 
the bandage all bloody - horror! - the fisher-wife herself, who 
continued thenceforth to hag-ride my thoughts, and even to-day (as 
I recall the scene) darkens daylight.  She was lodged in the little 
old jail in the chief street; but whether or no she died there, 
with a wise terror of the worst, I never inquired.  She had been 
tippling; it was but a dingy tragedy; and it seems strange and hard 
that, after all these years, the poor crazy sinner should be still 
pilloried on her cart in the scrap-book of my memory.  Nor shall I 
readily forget a certain house in the Quadrant where a visitor 
died, and a dark old woman continued to dwell alone with the dead 
body; nor how this old woman conceived a hatred to myself and one 
of my cousins, and in the dread hour of the dusk, as we were 
clambering on the garden-walls, opened a window in that house of 
mortality and cursed us in a shrill voice and with a marrowy choice 
of language.  It was a pair of very colourless urchins that fled 
down the lane from this remarkable experience!  But I recall with a 
more doubtful sentiment, compounded out of fear and exultation, the 
coil of equinoctial tempests; trumpeting squalls, scouring flaws of 
rain; the boats with their reefed lugsails scudding for the harbour 
mouth, where danger lay, for it was hard to make when the wind had 
any east in it; the wives clustered with blowing shawls at the 
pier-head, where (if fate was against them) they might see boat and 
husband and sons - their whole wealth and their whole family - 
engulfed under their eyes; and (what I saw but once) a troop of 
neighbours forcing such an unfortunate homeward, and she squalling 
and battling in their midst, a figure scarcely human, a tragic 
Maenad.

These are things that I recall with interest; but what my memory 
dwells upon the most, I have been all this while withholding.  It 
was a sport peculiar to the place, and indeed to a week or so of 
our two months' holiday there.  Maybe it still flourishes in its 
native spot; for boys and their pastimes are swayed by periodic 
forces inscrutable to man; so that tops and marbles reappear in 
their due season, regular like the sun and moon; and the harmless 
art of knucklebones has seen the fall of the Roman empire and the 
rise of the United States.  It may still flourish in its native 
spot, but nowhere else, I am persuaded; for I tried myself to 
introduce it on Tweedside, and was defeated lamentably; its charm 
being quite local, like a country wine that cannot be exported.

The idle manner of it was this:-

Toward the end of September, when school-time was drawing near and 
the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our-
respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern.  
The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce 
of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to 
garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary.  We 
wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, 
such was the rigour of the game, a buttoned top-coat.  They smelled 
noisomely of blistered tin; they never burned aright, though they 
would always burn our fingers; their use was naught; the pleasure 
of them merely fanciful; and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his 
top-coat asked for nothing more.  The fishermen used lanterns about 
their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the 
hint; but theirs were not bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at 
being fishermen.  The police carried them at their belts, and we 
had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be 
policemen.  Burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting 
thoughts of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns 
were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found 
them to figure very largely.  But take it for all in all, the 
pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a 
bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.

When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious "Have you 
got your lantern?" and a gratified "Yes!" That was the shibboleth, 
and very needful too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory 
contained, none could recognise a lantern-bearer, unless (like the 
polecat) by the smell.  Four or five would sometimes climb into the 
belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them 
- for the cabin was usually locked, or choose out some hollow of 
the links where the wind might whistle overhead.  There the coats 
would be unbuttoned and the bull's-eyes discovered; and in the 
chequering glimmer, under the huge windy hall of the night, and 
cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young 
gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links or on 
the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight themselves with 
inappropriate talk.  Woe is me that I may not give some specimens - 
some of their foresights of life, or deep inquiries into the 
rudiments of man and nature, these were so fiery and so innocent, 
they were so richly silly, so romantically young.  But the talk, at 
any rate, was but a condiment; and these gatherings themselves only 
accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer.  The essence of this 
bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night; the slide shut, 
the top-coat buttoned; not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your 
footsteps or to make your glory public:  a mere pillar of darkness 
in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your 
fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to 
exult and sing over the knowledge.


II


It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most 
stolid.  It may be contended, rather, that this (somewhat minor) 
bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his 
possessor.  Justice is not done to the versatility and the 
unplumbed childishness of man's imagination.  His life from without 
may seem but a rude mound of mud; there will be some golden chamber 
at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark 
as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of a 
bull's-eye at his belt.

It would be hard to pick out a career more cheerless than that of 
Dancer, the miser, as he figures in the "Old Bailey Reports," a 
prey to the most sordid persecutions, the butt of his 
neighbourhood, betrayed by his hired man, his house beleaguered by 
the impish schoolboy, and he himself grinding and fuming and 
impotently fleeing to the law against these pin-pricks.  You marvel 
at first that any one should willingly prolong a life so destitute 
of charm and dignity; and then you call to memory that had he 
chosen, had he ceased to be a miser, he could have been freed at 
once from these trials, and might have built himself a castle and 
gone escorted by a squadron.  For the love of more recondite joys, 
which we cannot estimate, which, it may be, we should envy, the man 
had willingly forgone both comfort and consideration.  "His mind to 
him a kingdom was"; and sure enough, digging into that mind, which 
seems at first a dust-heap, we unearth some priceless jewels.  For 
Dancer must have had the love of power and the disdain of using it, 
a noble character in itself; disdain of many pleasures, a chief 
part of what is commonly called wisdom; disdain of the inevitable 
end, that finest trait of mankind; scorn of men's opinions, another 
element of virtue; and at the back of all, a conscience just like 
yours and mine, whining like a cur, swindling like a thimble-
rigger, but still pointing (there or there-about) to some 
conventional standard.  Here were a cabinet portrait to which 
Hawthorne perhaps had done justice; and yet not Hawthorne either, 
for he was mildly minded, and it lay not in him to create for us 
that throb of the miser's pulse, his fretful energy of gusto, his 
vast arms of ambition clutching in he knows not what:  insatiable, 
insane, a god with a muck-rake.  Thus, at least, looking in the 
bosom of the miser, consideration detects the poet in the full tide 
of life, with more, indeed, of the poetic fire than usually goes to 
epics; and tracing that mean man about his cold hearth, and to and 
fro in his discomfortable house, spies within him a blazing bonfire 
of delight.  And so with others, who do not live by bread alone, 
but by some cherished and perhaps fantastic pleasure; who are meat 
salesmen to the external eye, and possibly to themselves are 
Shakespeares, Napoleons, or Beethovens; who have not one virtue to 
rub against another in the field of active life, and yet perhaps, 
in the life of contemplation, sit with the saints.  We see them on 
the street, and we can count their buttons; but heaven knows in 
what they pride themselves! heaven knows where they have set their 
treasure!

There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life:  the 
fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break 
into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself on his 
return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent 
fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to 
recognise him.  It is not only in the woods that this enchanter 
carols, though perhaps he is native there.  He sings in the most 
doleful places.  The miser hears him and chuckles, and the days are 
moments.  With no more apparatus than an ill-smelling lantern I 
have evoked him on the naked links.  All life that is not merely 
mechanical is spun out of two strands:  seeking for that bird and 
hearing him.  And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, 
and the delight of each so incommunicable.  And just a knowledge of 
this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird 
has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn the 
pages of the realist.  There, to be sure, we find a picture of life 
in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and 
cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which 
we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-
devouring nightingale we hear no news.

The case of these writers of romance is most obscure.  They have 
been boys and youths; they have lingered outside the window of the 
beloved, who was then most probably writing to some one else; they 
have sat before a sheet of paper, and felt themselves mere 
continents of congested poetry, not one line of which would flow; 
they have walked alone in the woods, they have walked in cities 
under the countless lamps; they have been to sea, they have hated, 
they have feared, they have longed to knife a man, and maybe done 
it; the wild taste of life has stung their palate.  Or, if you deny 
them all the rest, one pleasure at least they have tasted to the 
full - their books are there to prove it - the keen pleasure of 
successful literary composition.  And yet they fill the globe with 
volumes, whose cleverness inspires me with despairing admiration, 
and whose consistent falsity to all I care to call existence, with 
despairing wrath.  If I had no better hope than to continue to 
revolve among the dreary and petty businesses, and to be moved by 
the paltry hopes and fears with which they surround and animate 
their heroes, I declare I would die now.  But there has never an 
hour of mine gone quite so dully yet; if it were spent waiting at a 
railway junction, I would have some scattering thoughts, I could 
count some grains of memory, compared to which the whole of one of 
these romances seems but dross.

These writers would retort (if I take them properly) that this was 
very true; that it was the same with themselves and other persons 
of (what they call) the artistic temperament; that in this we were 
exceptional, and should apparently be ashamed of ourselves; but 
that our works must deal exclusively with (what they call) the 
average man, who was a prodigious dull fellow, and quite dead to 
all but the paltriest considerations.  I accept the issue.  We can 
only know others by ourselves.  The artistic temperament (a plague 
on the expression!) does not make us different from our fellowmen, 
or it would make us incapable of writing novels; and the average 
man (a murrain on the word!) is just like you and me, or he would 
not be average.  It was Whitman who stamped a kind of Birmingham 
sacredness upon the latter phrase; but Whitman knew very well, and 
showed very nobly, that the average man was full of joys and full 
of a poetry of his own.  And this harping on life's dulness and 
man's meanness is a loud profession of incompetence; it is one of 
two things:  the cry of the blind eye, I CANNOT SEE, or the 
complaint of the dumb tongue, I CANNOT UTTER.  To draw a life 
without delights is to prove I have not realised it.  To picture a 
man without some sort of poetry - well, it goes near to prove my 
case, for it shows an author may have little enough.  To see Dancer 
only as a dirty, old, small-minded, impotently fuming man, in a 
dirty house, besieged by Harrow boys, and probably beset by small 
attorneys, is to show myself as keen an observer as . . . the 
Harrow boys.  But these young gentlemen (with a more becoming 
modesty) were content to pluck Dancer by the coat-tails; they did 
not suppose they had surprised his secret or could put him living 
in a book:  and it is there my error would have lain.  Or say that 
in the same romance - I continue to call these books romances, in 
the hope of giving pain - say that in the same romance, which now 
begins really to take shape, I should leave to speak of Dancer, and 
follow instead the Harrow boys; and say that I came on some such 
business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links; and described 
the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily 
surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and 
indecent, which it certainly was.  I might upon these lines, and 
had I Zola's genius, turn out, in a page or so, a gem of literary 
art, render the lantern-light with the touches of a master, and lay 
on the indecency with the ungrudging hand of love; and when all was 
done, what a triumph would my picture be of shallowness and 
dulness! how it would have missed the point! how it would have 
belied the boys!  To the ear of the stenographer, the talk is 
merely silly and indecent; but ask the boys themselves, and they 
are discussing (as it is highly proper they should) the 
possibilities of existence.  To the eye of the observer they are 
wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they 
are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is 
an ill-smelling lantern.


III


For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit.  It 
may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may 
reside, like Dancer's, in the mysterious inwards of psychology.  It 
may consist with perpetual failure, and find exercise in the 
continued chase.  It has so little bond with externals (such as the 
observer scribbles in his note-book) that it may even touch them 
not; and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie 
altogether in the field of fancy.  The clergyman, in his spare 
hours, may be winning battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker 
reaping triumph in the arts:  all leading another life, plying 
another trade from that they chose; like the poet's housebuilder, 
who, after all, is cased in stone,

"By his fireside, as impotent fancy prompts.
Rebuilds it to his liking."

In such a case the poetry runs underground.  The observer (poor 
soul, with his documents!) is all abroad.  For to look at the man 
is but to court deception.  We shall see the trunk from which he 
draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the 
green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by 
nightingales.  And the true realism were that of the poets, to 
climb up after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the 
heaven for which he lives.

And, the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets:  
to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond 
singing.

For to miss the joy is to miss all.  In the joy of the actors lies 
the sense of any action.  That is the explanation, that the excuse.  
To one who has not the secret of the lanterns, the scene upon the 
links is meaningless.  And hence the haunting and truly spectral 
unreality of realistic books.  Hence, when we read the English 
realists, the incredulous wonder with which we observe the hero's 
constancy under the submerging tide of dulness, and how he bears up 
with his jibbing sweetheart, and endures the chatter of idiot 
girls, and stands by his whole unfeatured wilderness of an 
existence, instead of seeking relief in drink or foreign travel.  
Hence in the French, in that meat-market of middle-aged sensuality, 
the disgusted surprise with which we see the hero drift sidelong, 
and practically quite untempted, into every description of 
misconduct and dishonour.  In each, we miss the personal poetry, 
the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes 
what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life 
falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into 
the colours of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no 
man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids, but in the 
warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows 
and the storied walls.

Of this falsity we have had a recent example from a man who knows 
far better - Tolstoi's POWERS OF DARKNESS.  Here is a piece full of 
force and truth, yet quite untrue.  For before Mikita was led into 
so dire a situation he was tempted, and temptations are beautiful 
at least in part; and a work which dwells on the ugliness of crime 
and gives no hint of any loveliness in the temptation, sins against 
the modesty of life, and even when a Tolstoi writes it, sinks to 
melodrama.  The peasants are not understood; they saw their life in 
fairer colours; even the deaf girl was clothed in poetry for 
Mikita, or he had never fallen.  And so, once again, even an Old 
Bailey melodrama, without some brightness of poetry and lustre of 
existence, falls into the inconceivable and ranks with fairy tales.


IV


In nobler books we are moved with something like the emotions of 
life; and this emotion is very variously provoked.  We are so moved 
when Levine labours in the field, when Andre sinks beyond emotion, 
when Richard Feverel and Lucy Desborough meet beside the river, 
when Antony, "not cowardly, puts off his helmet," when Kent has 
infinite pity on the dying Lear, when, in Dostoieffky's DESPISED 
AND REJECTED, the uncomplaining hero drains his cup of suffering 
and virtue.  These are notes that please the great heart of man.  
Not only love, and the fields, and the bright face of danger, but 
sacrifice and death and unmerited suffering humbly supported, touch 
in us the vein of the poetic.  We love to think of them, we long to 
try them, we are humbly hopeful that we may prove heroes also.

We have heard, perhaps, too much of lesser matters.  Here is the 
door, here is the open air.  ITUR IN ANTIQUAM SILVAM.



CHAPTER VIII - A CHAPTER ON DREAMS



THE past is all of one texture - whether feigned or suffered - 
whether acted out in three dimensions, or only witnessed in that 
small theatre of the brain which we keep brightly lighted all night 
long, after the jets are down, and darkness and sleep reign 
undisturbed in the remainder of the body.  There is no distinction 
on the face of our experiences; one is vivid indeed, and one dull, 
and one pleasant, and another agonising to remember; but which of 
them is what we call true, and which a dream, there is not one hair 
to prove.  The past stands on a precarious footing; another straw 
split in the field of metaphysic, and behold us robbed of it.  
There is scarce a family that can count four generations but lays a 
claim to some dormant title or some castle and estate:  a claim not 
prosecutable in any court of law, but flattering to the fancy and a 
great alleviation of idle hours.  A man's claim to his own past is 
yet less valid.  A paper might turn up (in proper story-book 
fashion) in the secret drawer of an old ebony secretary, and 
restore your family to its ancient honours, and reinstate mine in a 
certain West Indian islet (not far from St. Kitt's, as beloved 
tradition hummed in my young ears) which was once ours, and is now 
unjustly some one else's, and for that matter (in the state of the 
sugar trade) is not worth anything to anybody.  I do not say that 
these revolutions are likely; only no man can deny that they are 
possible; and the past, on the other baud, is, lost for ever:  our 
old days and deeds, our old selves, too, and the very world in 
which these scenes were acted, all brought down to the same faint 
residuum as a last night's dream, to some incontinuous images, and 
an echo in the chambers of the brain.  Not an hour, not a mood, not 
a glance of the eye, can we revoke; it is all gone, past conjuring.  
And yet conceive us robbed of it, conceive that little thread of 
memory that we trail behind us broken at the pocket's edge; and in 
what naked nullity should we be left! for we only guide ourselves, 
and only know ourselves, by these air-painted pictures of the past.