Kitabı oku: «Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, No. 688», sayfa 2

Well, here were the four boys met. There were but few words spoken. The business of the three auxiliaries was to do all in their power to enrage the bull by shaking handkerchiefs of different colours they had brought with them; and particularly when Rob was engaged with the animal, they were to run hither and thither, and by derisive shouts draw it away in any required direction. This and other measures being understood, the play commenced.

There was a united shout, the handkerchiefs were wildly waved. Next, a provoking cry of 'Bull, bull, bull!' assailed the object of attack. It was like a trumpet summons to battle.

The bull being unacquainted with the programme, was apparently unable to comprehend the meaning of the sudden uproar. Lifting his head inquiringly, he viewed the force which invited his attention. 'Only four boys; I shall soon settle them.' If the Eshiely bull had any mind at all, that is what he probably thought of them. They were only worthy of his contempt. Still there came the provoking cry of 'Bull, bull, bull!' uttered with offensive reiteration. The challenge was to the last degree insulting. There was an impertinence in it that was unendurable. Coming to this conclusion, up went the bull's tail, as if shaking out a banner of defiance, and with a mighty roar he moved at a trot which gradually increased in speed.

He was a grand sight. There he came frenziedly on with his surly white face, his generally dun colour, his black muzzle, and short pointed horns. Well shaped, he would have taken a prize at Islington, even in these days of advanced culture. At a bound he cleared a low dike near the river, to which he went as direct as an arrow, with a view to attack the foe on their own ground. What did he care for the Tweed. He had forded it dozens of times. He had stood in it up to the middle in hot days with all the cows about him, cooling their legs and whisking their tails to keep off the flies. He would at once cross the river.

In his eagerness to get at the enemy, the Eshiely bull with all his accomplishments failed to remember that at this point fording was impossible, and that he must inevitably take to swimming, which was not exactly within his experience. In his sober moments he might have thought of this. Now, his blood was up, and on he drove right into the pool.

Like a general at the head of an army, Rob steadily watched the motions of his antagonist as he came headlong on to the attack. His attitude was worthy of being pictured by an artist. With delight he saw the bull advance right onward, instead of making a circuit to a lower and shallower part of the river – in which case the game would have been up. When the monster, snorting and bellowing, with flashing eyes, and with his tail up, plunged into the pool, Rob's time was come. Now or never he must act.

It was a trying moment, but with teeth clenched, Rob never quailed. Like a good soldier going into action, he had but one feeling, and that was to do his duty. Now, then, for it. To throw off his clothes till he stood stark naked, was the work of an instant. Seizing the old oak stick and firmly attaching it by the cord to his wrist, he dashed down the bank into the water. He was a capital swimmer, could dive and turn with a sort of amphibious instinct, as most river-side boys can. Courageously he struck out, heading a little to get up stream and bear down on the enemy. About and about he swam, ever with the stick dangling from his wrist. The bull saw his approach, and with a fierce glare turned abruptly towards him. Rob eluded the encounter by diving out of sight. This sudden and strange disappearance considerably disconcerted the bull. He could not imagine what had become of Rob, and in his perplexity determined to proceed towards the bank, on which the boys kept shouting and defying him; so onward he went, more enraged than ever, but somewhat confused in mind from the novelty of the proceedings.

During this by-play Rob had, underneath the water, got skilfully to the rear of the bull. This is what he had all along wanted. He now felt that the day was his own. Approaching the bull stealthily, he got hold of his tail, which was floating conveniently in the water, and with a degree of dexterity worthy of an acrobat, he leaped at a bound upon his back. It was a singularly well-managed feat. A terrible fix this for the Eshiely bull. He never expected to have been made the victim of such a trick. The superior brain of a schoolboy had out-manœuvred him. When Rob got fairly astride on the bull, and loosening the cord, flourished the stick in his hand, his boy-companions, in their mirth, set up a roar of laughter. It was a pity there was not a larger body of spectators. The scene would have brought down the house at Astley's. The bull was of course prodigiously annoyed, besides being enraged to madness at finding a boy seated on his back, as if he had been a riding-horse let out for hire. No bull in the universe had ever been treated with such atrocious indignity. Moved by these heart-rending considerations, he wriggled, in the hope of getting Rob off his back. As jockeys would say, Rob was firm in the saddle. A horse may plunge and rear and throw his rider, but he does so by having good footing. The bull had no footing at all. He had no point d'appui. He was swimming for bare life, and had enough to do in keeping his head above water. He had no fins wherewith to propel himself in any required direction. No webbed feet. His cloven hoofs could make little way in the water. In short, do as he liked, he could not throw his rider. Rob had him at his mercy.

As has been said, Rob had no wish to kill the bull, nor did he wish to maim or seriously injure him. As he used to avow, he wanted to give him 'a drilling.' He now began operations. With a swing of the arm, he brought down the knob of the cudgel with a smart blow on the head of the animal, saying at the same time: 'Tak' that for frightening our Jenny.' And so on he went, raining down blows on the head and shoulders, always repeating: 'Tak' that, and that, for frightening our Jenny. I'll learn you no to be sae ready crossing the river and running after people.' The bull perhaps did not understand the full force of Rob's meaning; but he knew he was overpowered in a way to bring down his pride.

'Hit him on the horns, Rob,' cried Sandy Clapperton. 'He'll no like that.'

Rob was not a cruel boy. He had true courage and generosity, and would not take a mean advantage of his enemy. He accordingly did not feel inclined to strike the bull on the horns, for he might have broken or dislodged one of these appendages, and damaged the beast past recovery. So he continued to beat him in a manner to be painful and mortifying without being absolutely injurious. It was amazing how this untutored country lad knew the exact length he might reasonably go. There was in it no small degree of intuitive common-sense. Swimming about in a lumbering way, the Eshiely bull was for the first time made amenable to discipline. By the persuasive agency of the walking-stick, he was constrained to swim in a kind of circle, as if performing in a piece of horsemanship at a circus. It was important never to let him get so near the land on either side as to find a footing. He was kept as nearly as possible in the middle of the pool, round about and round about, beaten with the oak stick all the way, and told by Rob that he was punished as a mean-spirited wretch for running after and frightening little girls.

The whole thing was a pretty piece of rude play. Rob was a moral disciplinarian. Out of his own conceptions of rectitude, he did that which the public at large ought long since to have done in a regular and legal manner. The Eshiely bull ought to have been suppressed as being a nuisance, almost as dangerous to the community as a wild beast. Nobody interfered to any good effect. The proprietor of the animal was one of those miserably selfish individuals who, minding only their own interest, are indifferent to the rights of others. He had been frequently told of the alarm caused in the neighbourhood by the bull, but treated the matter as of small consequence. If the bull annoyed or killed anybody, what did he care? People should keep out of its way. As a self-constituted minister of justice, Rob Graham, after a droll fashion, settled the business. By dint of his grandfather's stick he brought the bull to its senses, forced it to see the error of its ways.

The play lasted about half-an-hour. During that time, in its gyrations in the water, Rob gave the bull what he considered a proper chastisement. Reduced to extremity, it had no heart to prosecute the war. It was fain to get back to its own side of the water. Rob indulged it in this laudable desire, for he thought he had humiliated it sufficiently. He let it make for the north side of the river. Just as its fore-feet touched the ground, he gave it a parting thwack which it was likely to remember. And dropping off at the tail, he bade the bull good-morning. The beast staggered away in an exhausted and dazed condition to whence it came, with its tail between its legs, and cowed in a way that never bull was before. Having done his duty, Rob swam across to the southern bank, with his grandfather's stick in his teeth, and was congratulated on his gallantry by his juvenile companions, as also by the miller in his dusty garments, and two or three other spectators who had collected at the spot.

From that day forward the Eshiely bull never crossed the river, nor did he run impetuously to attack strangers passing on the highway. The nonsense was taken out of him. As the Peebles folk said, in their old-fashioned vernacular, he had got 'a staw' – meaning an effectual surfeit. The proprietor of the bull affected to be angry at the way the animal had been treated; but was only laughed at. The thing was too ludicrous to be taken up seriously.

Were this a romance, we should describe Rob Graham as going abroad, and like another Clive, distinguishing himself in the public service. But all we have to relate is a simple country story, as events are recalled by memory. Rob's extraordinary feat in taming the Eshiely bull, and adroitly suppressing a gross local evil, met with no public acknowledgment. He moved in too obscure a sphere to be complimented. Rob, however, never boasted of his exploit, nor did he care for its being mentioned. The incident is long since forgotten; perhaps not remembered by a single person alive but the present narrator. As far as we have heard, Rob Graham, who might be designated the 'gallant Graham,' dropped into the position of a ploughman, from which he rose by his industry and intelligence, to be a grieve or land-steward in the neighbourhood. Unlearned, yet sagacious; valiant, yet docile; humble, yet manly and independent, Rob might be accepted as a specimen of those 'hardy sons of toil' spoken of feelingly by Burns in melodious verse, and of whom the poet himself is recognised as having been an illustrious example.

'Bonny Jenny Graham,' Rob's sister, is said to have been married to a farmer in the west country, and this is all we can tell of the gem of the old burgh school, the 'Flower of Kailzie.'

PHOTOGRAPHIC PROGRESS

It is doubtful whether any industrial art has made such rapid strides within the last thirty years as that of Photography. Founded upon the simple discovery that a certain chemical salt – the chloride of silver – becomes blackened upon exposure to light, the art has grown step by step into an important national industry. It would be next to impossible to estimate the number of persons who, directly and indirectly, owe their daily bread to King Sol in his character of Artist. A glance at the advertisement columns of one of the journals devoted to this interest will give us some idea of the busy number of camp-followers running in the wake of the huge army of photographic artists of Great Britain alone. Opticians, paper-makers, chemical manufacturers, glass-makers, cabinet-makers, besides a host of others who supply the et-cæteras of the business, vie with each other in the adaptability of their goods. Other countries can no doubt shew a similar list – notably France, whose paper is used by photographers throughout the world.

Although the peculiar affinity of silver chloride for light was discovered by Scheele just one hundred years ago, its application to art was not recognised until the year 1839, when Daguerre in France and Talbot in England almost simultaneously hit upon the method of rendering permanent the pictures which had been before obtained, but which had faded away into darkness as quickly as the daylight which had given them birth. This discovery of fixing the image, as it is technically called, was really the starting-point of an art, samples of which, good, bad, and indifferent, are now to be found in every homestead in the kingdom. The mysterious power which could seize almost instantaneously the fleeting appearances of moving life, could not fail to take a strong hold on the public attention. Other art-pursuits had of course previously had numerous aspirants, but they came and went as fashions do, without leaving any permanent good behind them. Not so photography, which is perhaps unique in owing its present state of perfection to the exertions and patient investigations of mere amateurs. The reason of this unusual state of things is probably due to the fact that photography has required a large expenditure of both time and money to bring it to maturity; both which commodities are more plentiful with those who have not to work for daily bread. The earliest sun-pictures, as produced by Daguerre, and named after him, were formed on silver plates treated with iodine. After exposure in the camera, they were developed by the action of mercury vapour, which attached itself to those portions of the plate which had received the greatest amount of light. Such pictures were necessarily difficult of multiplication, each impression requiring a separate exposure and development. Examples of this early method of photography may still be seen in many houses, where they have been carefully treasured as mementoes of friends who have passed away. These pictures are by no means of a permanent nature, the action of the air contributing with other causes to tarnish the silver plate, and so gradually to destroy the image thereon.

The discovery of the collodion process by Archer in 1851, quite supplanted the previous method, and gave photography an impetus which has carried it rapidly forward to the present date. Numerous substances have been tried at different times to support mechanically the delicate sun-printed image, but nothing has as yet been found to equal collodion upon glass. Photographic art has now become such a thing of our every-day life, that perhaps there is scarcely an intelligent person who does not know the difference between a negative and a positive. Every one nowadays has his or her portrait taken at least once, and can well remember the nervousness incidental to a first visit to the photographic studio. Usually the photographer is kind enough to allow his anxious client a glimpse of the picture in its earliest stage, when the lights are where the shades ought to be, and vice versâ. Such is the negative, from which any number of positives may be printed by the action of sunlight on prepared paper placed underneath it. These silver prints (for although the silver plate is banished with the old method, chloride of silver contained in the pores of the paper still holds its own) have unfortunately the character of not being as permanent as they might be. This fault is commonly attributed to carelessness in not thoroughly eliminating the salt used in fixing the pictures; so that, by a strange anomaly, the discovery which claimed to make our photographs permanent is now charged with the sin of causing their ultimate deterioration. Photographers complain that the great competition, which has led to the adoption of low-priced work, will not permit them to give to the washing of the prints the time and attention which permanence demands. There are no doubt other causes at work in our heavily charged town atmospheres which have a destructive effect on our photographs. At anyrate, be the cause what it may, it is the rule and not the exception to find a paper print of, say ten years old, sadly faded and generally disfigured. Such a great disadvantage as this has met with an antidote in the shape of a discovery which has to a certain extent superseded the practice of silver printing. We allude to the carbon process, which is dependent upon the curious fact that bichromatised gelatine, after exposure to light, becomes insoluble. That is to say, a mixture of gelatine with the bichromate of an alkali – such as the bichromate of potash – will remain soluble so long as it is excluded from light. Carbon in the form of lampblack, or indeed any pigment, is mixed with this bichromatised gelatine, and paper coated therewith is exposed under a negative in the same way as in the case of a silver print, warm water being afterwards used to wash out those portions of the prepared surface which the sunlight has not rendered immovable.

Such, briefly, is the mode of producing the so-called carbon pictures, which without doubt are, as they claim to be, as lasting as the paper on which they are printed. They are not equal, in point of brilliancy, to the better known silver pictures, but this disadvantage is more than counterbalanced by their good keeping qualities. The word carbon as here used is a misnomer, for as we have already indicated, other pigments, most of which have a metallic origin, may be used in the process.