Part 10

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to a milestone on a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under trees; and off goes the knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink into yourself, and the birds come round and look at you, and your smoke dissipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil conscience. You may dally as long as you like by the roadside. It is almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long is a summer's day, that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an end only when you are drowsy. I know a village where there are hardly any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week than by a sort of instinct for the _fÍte_ on Sundays, and where only one person can tell you the day of the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people were aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede out of London, Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than the other, as though they were all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims would each bring his own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be noticed, there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted days before the flood. It follows, of course, there were no appointments, and punctuality was not yet thought upon. "Though ye take from a covetous man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give him the elixir of life--he has still a flaw at heart, he still has his business habits. Now, there is no time when business habits are more mitigated than on a walking tour. And so during these halts, as I say, you will feel almost free.

But it is at night, and after dinner, that the best hour comes. There are no such pipes to be smoked as those that follow a good day's march; the flavour of the tobacco is a thing to be remembered, it is so dry and aromatic, so full and so fine. If you wind up the evening with grog, you will own there was never such grog; at every sip a jocund tranquillity spreads about your limbs, and sits easily in your heart. If you read a book--and you will never do so save by fits and starts--you find the language strangely racy and harmonious; words take a new meaning; single sentences possess the ear for half an hour together; and the writer endears himself to you, at every page, by the nicest coincidence of sentiment. It seems as if it were a book you had written yourself in a dream. To all we have read on such occasions we look back with special favour. "It was on the 10th of April 1798," says Hazlitt, with amorous precision, "that I sat down to a volume of the new _HeloÔse_, at the Inn at Llangollen, over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken." I should wish to quote more, for though we are mighty fine fellows nowadays, we cannot write like Hazlitt. And, talking of that, a volume of Hazlitt's essays would be a capital pocket-book on such a journey; so would a volume of Heine's songs; and for _Tristram Shandy_ I can pledge a fair experience.

If the evening be fine and warm, there is nothing better in life than to lounge before the inn door in the sunset, or lean over the parapet of the bridge, to watch the weeds and the quick fishes. It is then, if ever, that you taste joviality to the full significance of that audacious word. Your muscles are so agreeably slack, you feel so clean and so strong and so idle, that whether you move or sit still, whatever you do is done with pride and a kingly sort of pleasure. You fall in talk with any one, wise or foolish, drunk or sober. And it seems as if a hot walk purged you, more than of anything else, of all narrowness and pride, and left curiosity to play its part freely, as in a child or a man of science. You lay aside all your own hobbies, to watch provincial humours develop themselves before you, now as a laughable farce, and now grave and beautiful like an old tale.

Or perhaps you are left to your own company for the night, and surly weather imprisons you by the fire. You may remember how Burns, numbering past pleasures, dwells upon the hours when he has been "happy thinking." It is a phrase that may well perplex a poor modern girt about on every side by clocks and chimes, and haunted, even at night, by flaming dial-plates. For we are all so busy, and have so many far-off projects to realise, and castles in the fire to turn into solid, habitable mansions on a gravel soil, that we can find no time for pleasure trips into the Land of Thought and among the Hills of Vanity. Changed times, indeed, when we must sit all night, beside the fire, with folded hands; and a changed world for most of us, when we find we can pass the hours without discontent, and be happy thinking. We are in such haste to be doing, to be writing, to be gathering gear, to make our voice audible a moment in the derisive silence of eternity, that we forget that one thing, of which these are but the parts--namely, to live. We fall in love, we drink hard, we run to and fro upon the earth like frightened sheep. And now you are to ask yourself if, when all is done, you would not have been better to sit by the fire at home, and be happy thinking. To sit still and contemplate,--to remember the faces of women without desire, to be pleased by the great deeds of men without envy, to be everything and everywhere in sympathy, and yet content to remain where and what you are--is not this to know both wisdom and virtue, and to dwell with happiness? After all, it is not they who carry flags, but they who look upon it from a private chamber, who have the fun of the procession. And once you are at that, you are in the very humour of all social heresy. It is no time for shuffling, or for big empty words. If you ask yourself what you mean by fame, riches, or learning, the answer is far to seek; and you go back into that kingdom of light imaginations, which seem so vain in the eyes of Philistines perspiring after wealth, and so momentous to those who are stricken with the disproportions of the world, and, in the face of the gigantic stars, cannot stop to split differences between two degrees of the infinitesimally small, such as a tobacco pipe or the Roman Empire, a million of money or a fiddlestick's end.

You lean from the window, your last pipe reeking whitely into the darkness, your body full of delicious pains, your mind enthroned in the seventh circle of content; when suddenly the mood changes, the weathercock goes about, and you ask yourself one question more: whether, for the interval, you have been the wisest philosopher or the most egregious of donkeys? Human experience is not yet able to reply; but at least you have had a fine moment, and looked down upon all the kingdoms of the earth. And whether it was wise or foolish, to-morrow's travel will carry you, body and mind, into some different parish of the infinite.

_Robert Louis Stevenson._

Sylvanus Urban discovers a Good Brew

It must be nearly thirty years ago, long before the days of bicycles and motors, since Sylvanus Urban, then but a boy, passed over it. He had started from Chepstow on a solitary walking tour, and was soon caught in a rattling thunderstorm on the Wyndcliff. Tintern Abbey and Raglan Castle are fresh in his memory to-day. A mile or two out of Monmouth he came upon some excellent nutty-hearted ale, that George Borrow would have immortalised. As he pursued his way to Raglan Castle he pondered on the ale--"this way and that dividing the swift mind"--until at length, in despair of meeting an equal brew, he turned back again and had another tankard. Heavens, what days were those! In his pack he carried the _Essays of Elia_ and read them in an old inn at Llandovery, where the gracious hostess lighted in his honour tall wax candles fit to stand before an altar. After leaving Llandovery, he lost his way among the Caermarthenshire hills, and was in very poor plight with hunger and fatigue when he reached the white-washed walls of Tregaron. At Harlech he rested for a couple of days, and then covered the way to Beddgelert--twenty miles, if he remembers rightly--at a spanking pace; proceeding in the late afternoon to climb Snowdon, and arriving at Llanberis an hour or so before midnight. Back to London, every inch of the way, walked the young Sylvanus. He indulges the hope that he may yet shoulder his pack again.

_Gentleman's Magazine._

Minchmoor

Now that everybody is out of town, and every place in the guide-books is as well known as Princes Street or Pall-Mall, it is something to discover a hill everybody has not been to the top of, and which is not in _Black_. Such a hill is _Minchmoor_, nearly three times as high as Arthur's Seat, and lying between Tweed and Yarrow.

The best way to ascend it is from Traquair. You go up the wild old Selkirk road, which passes almost right over the summit, and by which Montrose and his cavaliers fled from Philiphaugh, where Sir Walter's mother remembered crossing, when a girl, in a coach-and-six, on her way to a ball at Peebles, several footmen marching on either side of the carriage to prop it up or drag it out of the moss _haggs_; and where, to our amazement, we learned that the Duchess of Buccleuch had lately driven her ponies. Before this we had passed the grey, old-world entrance to Traquair House, and looked down its grassy and untrod avenue to the pallid, forlorn mansion, stricken all o'er with eld, and noticed the wrought-iron gate embedded in a foot deep and more of soil, never having opened since the '45. There are the huge Bradwardine bears on each side--most grotesque supporters--with a superfluity of ferocity and canine teeth. The whole place, like the family whose it has been, seems dying out--everything subdued to settled desolation. The old race, the old religion, the gaunt old house, with its small, deep, comfortless windows, the decaying trees, the stillness about the doors, the grass overrunning everything, nature reinstating herself in her quiet way--all this makes the place look as strange and pitiful among its fellows in the vale as would the Earl who built it three hundred years ago if we met him tottering along our way in the faded dress of his youth; but it looks the Earl's house still, and has a dignity of its own.

We soon found the Minchmoor road, and took at once to the hill, the ascent being, as often is with other ascents in this world, steepest at first. Nothing could be more beautiful than the view as we ascended, and got a look of the "eye-sweet" Tweed hills, and their "silver stream." It was one of the five or six good days of this summer--in early morning, "soft" and doubtful; but the mists drawing up, and now the noble, tawny hills were dappled with gleams and shadows--

"Sunbeams upon distant hills gliding apace"--

the best sort of day for mountain scenery--that ripple of light and shadow brings out the forms and the depths of the hills far better than a cloudless sky; and the horizon is generally wider.

Before us and far away was the round flat head of Minchmoor, with a dark, rich bloom on it from the thick, short heather--the hills around being green. Near the top, on the Tweed side, its waters trotting away cheerily to the glen at Bold, is the famous _Cheese Well_--always full, never overflowing. Here every traveler--Duchess, shepherd, or houseless _mugger_--stops, rests, and is thankful; doubtless so did Montrose, poor fellow, and his young nobles and their jaded steeds, on their scurry from Lesly and his Dragoons. It is called the Cheese Well from those who rest there dropping in bits of their provisions, as votive offerings to the fairies whose especial haunt this mountain was. After our rest and drink, we left the road and made for the top. When there we were well rewarded. The great round-backed, kindly, solemn hills of Tweed, Yarrow, and Ettrick lay all about like sleeping mastiffs--too plain to be grand, too ample and beautiful to be commonplace.

There, to the north-east, is the place--_Williamhope_ ridge--where Sir Walter Scott bade farewell to his heroic friend Mungo Park. They had come up from _Ashestiel_, where Scott then lived, and where _Marmion_ was written and its delightful epistles inspired--where he passed the happiest part of his life--leaving it, as Hogg said, "for gude an' a'"; for his fatal "dreams about his cottage" were now begun. He was to have "a hundred acres, two spare bed-rooms, with dressing rooms, each of which will on a pinch have a couch-bed." We all know what the dream, and the cottage, and the hundred acres came to--the ugly Abbotsford; the over-burdened, shattered brain driven wild, and the end, death, and madness. Well, it was on the ridge that the two friends--each romantic, but in such different ways--parted never to meet again. There is the ditch Park's horse stumbled over and all but fell. "I am afraid, Mungo, that's a bad omen," said the Sheriff; to which he answered, with a bright smile on his handsome, fearless face--"_Freits_ (omens) follow those who look to them." With this expression, he struck the spurs into his horse, and Scott never saw him again. He had not long been married to a lovely and much-loved woman, and had been speaking to Scott about his new African scheme, and how he meant to tell his family he had some business in Edinburgh--send them his blessing, and be off--alas! never to return! Scott used to say, when speaking of this parting, "I stood and looked back, but he did not." A more memorable place for two such men to part in would not easily be found.

Where we are standing is the spot Scott speaks of when writing to Joanna Baillie about her new tragedies--"Were it possible for me to hasten the treat I expect in such a composition with you, I would promise to read the volume _at the silence of noonday upon the top of Minchmoor_. The hour is allowed, by those skilful in demonology, _to be as full of witching_ as midnight itself; and I assure you I have felt really oppressed with a sort of fearful loneliness when looking around the naked towering ridges of desolate barrenness, which is all the eye takes in from the top of such a mountain, the patches of cultivation being hidden in the little glens, or only appearing to make one feel how feeble and ineffectual man has been to contend with the genius of the soil. It is in such a scene that the unknown and gifted author of _Albania_ places the superstition which consists in hearing the noise of a chase, the baying of the hounds, the throttling sobs of the deer, the wild hollos of the huntsmen, and the 'hoof thick beating on the hollow hill.' I have often repeated his verses with some sensations of awe, in this place." The lines--and they are noble, and must have sounded wonderful with his voice and look--are as follows. Can no one tell us anything more of their author?--

"There oft is heard, at midnight, or at noon, Beginning faint, but rising still more loud, And nearer, voice of hunters, and of hounds; And horns, hoarse-winded, blowing far and keen! Forthwith the hubbub multiplies; the gale Labours with wilder shrieks, and rifer din Of hot pursuit; the broken cry of deer Mangled by throttling dogs; the shouts of men, And hoofs thick beating on the hollow hill. Sudden the grazing heifer in the vale Starts at the noise, and both the herdman's ears Tingle with inward dread--aghast he eyes The mountain's height, and all the ridges round, Yet not one trace of living wight discerns, Nor knows, o'erawed and trembling as he stands, To what or whom he owes his idle fear-- To ghost, to witch, to fairy, or to fiend; But wonders, and no end of wondering finds."

We listened for the hunt, but could only hear the wind sobbing from the blind "_Hopes_."[3]

The view from the top reaches from the huge _Harestane Broadlaw_--nearly as high as Ben Lomond--whose top is as flat as a table, and would make a race-course of two miles, and where the clouds are still brooding, to the _Cheviot_; and from the _Maiden Paps_ in Liddesdale, and that wild huddle of hills at _Moss Paul_, to _Dunse Law_, and the weird _Lammermoors_. There is _Ruberslaw_, always surly and dark. The _Dunion_, beyond which lies Jedburgh. There are the _Eildons_, with their triple heights; and you can get a glimpse of the upper woods of Abbotsford, and the top of the hill above Cauldshiels Loch, that very spot where the "wondrous potentate,"--when suffering from languor and pain, and beginning to break down under his prodigious fertility,--composed those touching lines:--

"The sun upon the Weirdlaw Hill In Ettrick's vale is sinking sweet; The westland wind is hushed and still; The lake lies sleeping at my feet. Yet not the landscape to mine eye Bears those bright hues that once it bore, Though evening, with her richest dye, Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore.

With listless look along the plain I see Tweed's silver current glide, And coldly mark the holy fane Of Melrose rise in ruined pride. The quiet lake, and balmy air, The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree, Are they still such as once they were, Or is the dreary change in me?

Alas! the warped and broken board, How can it bear the painter's dye! The harp of strained and tuneless chord, How to the minstrel's skill reply! To aching eyes each landscape lowers, To feverish pulse each gale blows chill; And Araby or Eden's bowers Were barren as this moorland hill."

There, too, is _Minto Hill_, as modest and shapely and smooth as Clytie's shoulders, and _Earlston Black Hill_, with Cowdenknowes at its foot; and there, standing stark and upright as a warder, is the stout old _Smailholme Tower_, seen and seeing all around. It is quite curious how unmistakable and important it looks at what must be twenty and more miles. It is now ninety years since that "lonely infant," who has sung its awful joys, was found in a thunderstorm, as we all know, lying on the soft grass at the foot of the grey old Strength, clapping his hands at each flash, and shouting, "Bonny! bonny!"

We now descended into Yarrow, and forgathered with a shepherd who was taking his lambs over to the great Melrose fair. He was a fine specimen of a border herd--young, tall, sagacious, self-contained, and free in speech and air. We got his heart by praising his dog _Jed_, a very fine collie, black and comely, gentle and keen--"Ay, she's a fell yin; she can do a' but speak." On asking him if the sheep dogs needed much teaching--"Whyles ay and whyles no; her kind (Jed's) needs nane. She sooks't in wi' her mither's milk." On asking him if the dogs were ever sold, he said--"Never, but at an orra time. Naebody wad sell a gude dowg, and naebody wad buy an ill ane." He told us with great feeling, of the death of one of his best dogs by poison. It was plainly still a grief to him. "What was he poisoned with?" "Strychnia," he said, as decidedly as might Dr Christison. "How do you know?" "I opened him, puir fallow, and got him analeezed!"

Now we are on Birkindale Brae, and are looking down on the same scene as did

"James Boyd (the Earle of Arran, his brother was he),"

when he crossed Minchmoor on his way to deliver James the Fifth's message to

"Yon outlaw Murray, Surely whaur bauldly bideth he."

"Down Birkindale Brae when that he cam He saw the feir Foreste wi' his ee."

How James Boyd fared, and what the outlaw said, and what James and his nobles said and did, and how the outlaw at last made peace with his King, and rose up "Sheriffe of Ettricke Foreste," and how the bold ruffian boasted,

"Fair Philiphaugh is mine by right, And Lewinshope still mine shall be; Newark, Foulshiels, and Tinnies baith My bow and arrow purchased me.

And I have native steads to me The Newark Lee o' Hangingshaw. I have many steads in the Forest schaw, But them by name I dinna knaw."

And how King James snubbed

"The kene Laird of Buckscleuth, A stalwart man and stern was he."

When the Laird hinted that,

"For a king to gang an outlaw till Is beneath his state and dignitie. The man that wins yon forest intill He lives by reif and felony."

"Then out and spak the nobil King, And round him cast a wilie ee.

'Now haud thy tongue, Sir Walter Scott, Nor speak o' reif or felonie-- _For, had every honest man his awin kye,_ _A richt puir clan thy name wud be_!'"

(by-the-bye, why did Professor Aytoun leave out this excellent hit in his edition?)--all this and much more may you see if you take up _The Border Minstrelsy_, and read "The Song of the Outlaw Murray," with the incomparable notes of Scott. But we are now well down the hill. There to the left, in the hollow, is _Permanscore_, where the King and the outlaw met:--

"Bid him mete me at Permanscore, And bring four in his companie; Five Erles sall cum wi' mysel', Gude reason I sud honoured be."

And there goes our Shepherd with his long swinging stride. As different from his dark, wily companion, the Badenoch drover, as was Harry Wakefield from Robin Oig; or as the big, sunny Cheviot is from the lowering Ruberslaw; and there is _Jed_ trotting meekly behind him--may she escape strychnia, and, dying at the fireside among the children, be laid like

"Paddy Tims--whose soul at aise is-- With the point of his nose And the tips of his toes Turn'd up to the roots of the daisies"--

_unanaleezed_, save by the slow cunning of the grave. And may her master get the top price for his lambs!