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Book One – Chapter Five.
The Story that the Swallow Told
That garden and that bungalow was a continual source of delight to young Harry. All the improvements which he was constantly carrying out inside the room itself, he planned and executed without assistance, but Andrew the joiner used to come up of an evening pretty frequently, and give him advice about the garden. So it flourished, and was very beautiful.
Andrew was often out and about the country doing odd jobs at the residences of the gentry, and whenever he could beg a root of some rare plant or flower he did so, and brought it straight home to the young laird, as he called Harry.
And Harry would give him snuff.
Not, mind you, that it was for sake of the snuff that Andrew did these little kindnesses to Harry. Truth is he dearly loved the boy.
A harum-scarum sort of a young man was Andrew, and there were people in the parish who said he was only half-witted, but this was all nonsense. Andrew came out with droll sayings at times – he was an original, and that is next door to a genius; but the truth is he had more wit and a deal more brains than many, or most of his detractors.
Andrew was tall and lank, and not an over-graceful walker, but he had a kind face of his own and black beads of eyes, round which smiles were nearly always dancing, and it did not take much to make Andrew laugh right out. A right merry guffaw it was too. Sometimes it made the dogs bark, and the cocks all crow, and the peacock scream like a thousand cats all knocked into one. That is the kind of young man Andrew was. He came from the low country, and spoke a trifle broad. But that did not matter, his heart was as good as any Highlander’s.
Harry and his friend frequently went to the forest together, but never again near Towsie’s gate, because the boy had promised not to tease the bull any more. A promise is a sacred thing, and Harry knew this. The boy had a hundred friends in the forest. Yes, and far more.
For he loved nature.
And there was not a bush or tree he did not know all about: when they budded, when they broke into leaf, and even when those leaves would fade and fall and die.
There was not a flower he did not know, nor a bird he could not recognise by name, by note or song, by its nest or by its eggs.
He was no wanton nest-robber, though; a boy who is so has no manliness or fairness or gentlemanly feeling about him. Harry never robbed a nest, but more than once he pitched into other boys for doing so, and fought sturdy battles in the forest in defence of his friends the birds.
Did you ever notice, dear reader, what a sweet sweet song that of the house-martin is? With its coat of dusky black, the little crimson blush on its breast, and its graceful form, the martin is a charming bird altogether. But its song is to my ears ineffably sweet.
It is not a loud song, and the bird always sits down to sing. It is not loud for this reason: away in the wilds of Africa, where this birdie frequently goes, there are so many enemies about that to sing very loudly would lead to the discovery of its whereabouts, and it would probably be killed and devoured.
For this very reason many of the birds in Africa sing not at all. Gay and lovely are they even as the flowers, the glorious flowers that adorn the hillside and forest and plain, but silently they flit from bough to bough.
One evening Harry was seated on his sofa, or rather he was half reclining thereon, reading a volume of his favourite poet – Campbell, I think. It was very still and quiet. His little window, round which the roses and the clematis clung, was open, and the sweet breath of flowers floated in with the gentle breeze.
It was so still and silent that Harry could hear the soft foot-fall of Eily the collie, as she came along the gravelled path towards the bungalow door.
“Come, in Eily,” he said, “and lie down, I’m reading.”
“Oh?” he added, as he looked up, “what have you in your mouth? A bone?”
Eily advanced, and put her chin ever so gently on, her young master’s knee.
No, it was not a bone, but a bird, a lovely martin.
Not a tooth had Eily put in it, not a feather had she ruffled, and hardly had she wetted its plumage.
Harry took it tenderly in his hand.
“Where did you get it, Eily? In the loft?”
Eily wagged her tail.
Swift as lightning though they may fly out of doors, no bird is more easily captured inside than the house-martin. If found in a loft they appear to lose presence of mind at once, and after flying about for a short time usually alight against the glass. When one is taken its little heart may be felt beating against the hand, as if it verily would break.
And no wonder.
Fancy, reader, how you should feel were you captured by some great ogre, taller than a steeple, and carried away, expecting death every minute.
“Give it to me, Eily. Give it quick. I hope you haven’t draggled its plumage very much. Now shut the door.”
Eily went and did as she was told. (It is very seldom a dog is taught this trick, but it is a very handy one. – G.S.)
Harry admired it for a little while. Then he gently kissed its brow. Its wee beak was half upturned, and its black beads of eyes appeared to look appealingly at him.
“What are you going to do with me?” it seemed to ask. “Are you going to kill me, or swallow me alive as we martins do the flies?”
“I’m not going to harm you a bit,” said Harry.
“I’m only going to hold you in my hand for a short time to admire you. How soft and warm you feel, and what a pretty dusky red patch you have on your breast! I’ve often listened to your song as you sat on the apple tree. But why do you sing so soft and low?”
“Because,” replied the bird, talking with its eyes – at least Harry thought he could read the answer there – “because in our country if we sang too loudly our enemies would hear us and come and kill us.”
“And who are your enemies?”
“Big birds with terrible claws and beaks, that want to fly at us and devour us. And terrible snakes that glide silently up the branches on which we are perched, and sometimes strike us dead, as quick as a lightning’s flash.”
“And I suppose you must sing?”
“Oh yes, we must sing, because we are so very happy, and we love each other so.”
“And why are your wings and back so dusky and dark?”
“That our enemies may not see us.”
“But I’ve read,” said Harry, “that many tropical birds were all bright and gay with colours of every hue.”
“Oh yes, so they are, but then these live all their lives among flowers as gorgeous in colour as they themselves are, and so their enemies mistake them for the flowers among which they dwell.”
“Do you come from a very far-off land?”
“Yes, a very very far-off land.”
“And is it very beautiful there?”
“Very very beautiful.”
“I would like to go to that far-off beautiful land. How do you get there?”
“We fly.”
“Yes, I know, but I can’t, though I once tried I made a pair of wings out of an old umbrella; they were so awkward, though, and would not work.
“But I meant,” continued Harry, “which way do you go?”
“Southward and southward and southward, and westward and westward and southward again.”
“What a funny road! I should get dead tired before I was halfway.”
“So do we: then we look about for a ship or a rock, if at sea, and alight to rest.”
“And aren’t you afraid the sailors may shoot you?”
“Oh no; for sailors do so love to see us on the yards. (How true! G.S.) They dearly love us. We remind them of England and their cottage homes and their wives and little ones, and of apple orchards and flowery meadows and crimson poppies in the fields of green waving corn, and all kinds of beautiful things.”
“No wonder they love you!”
“Yes; they do so love us; I’ve seen the tears start to the eyes of little sailor lads as they gazed at us. And I know the men tread more lightly on the deck for fear of scaring us away.”
“And when rested you just go on again?”
“Yes, on and on and on.”
“I should lose my head.”
“We don’t – something seems to guide us onward.”
“I suppose you see some terrible sights? Have you seen a shipwreck? I should like to.”
“Oh no, no, you would not. If you once saw a shipwreck, or a ship foundering at sea, you would never never forget it.”
“Tell me.”
“I cannot. No one could. But somehow it is usually at night we witness these awful scenes. I have seen a ship sailing silently over the moonlit water, the yellow light streaming from her ports, and I have heard the sounds of music and laughter, and the voices of glad children at play. And I have seen the same vessel, but a short hour after, drifting on in the darkness to the pitiless rocks before a white squall. Ah! white was the squall, white were the waves, but not more white than the scared, dazed faces of those poor shrinking, moaning beings who rushed on deck when she struck.”
“What did you do?”
“Flew away. Just flew away.”
“Tell me more.”
“What shall I tell you of?”
“About your own bright home in the far-off land.”
“Shall I speak to you of the coralline sea that laves the tree-fringed shores of Africa?”
“Yes, yes, tell me of that.”
“Rippling up through the snakey roots of the mangrove trees, bathing the green branches that stoop down to kiss them – oh! ’tis a lovely sea, when the great sun shines, and the cyclone and squall are far away, calm and soft and blue. Yet not all blue, for on the coral flats it is a tender green, and grey where the cloud shadows fall on it. But all placid, all warm and dreamy as if fairies dwelt in caves beneath. Then the little green islands seem to float above the sea as if only just let down from heaven.
“Sometimes great sharks float upwards from the dark depths beneath, and bask on the surface with their fins above the water, and white sea-gulls come and perch upon them just as starlings do on sheep at home.”
“How strange! Don’t the sharks try to kill the birds?”
“No, they like it, and I think the birds sing to them and lull them to sleep, or that they tell them tales of far-off lands as I am speaking now to you.
“But on the coral reefs, where the sea, at a distance, looks so sweetly green, if you were there in a boat and looked away down to the bottom, oh! what a sight would be spread out before you! A garden of shrubs and waving flowers more lovely than anything ever seen on land.”
“How I should like to go there! But the interior of Africa is very gorgeous too, is it not?”
“Yes, to us who can fly quickly from place to place, through flowery groves, where birds and blossoms vie with each other in the beauty of their colours, where the butterflies are like fans, of crimson and green where the very lizards and every creeping thing, are adorned with rainbow tints and ever-changing bright metallic sheen.”
“There are dark corners, though, in this strange land of yours, are there not?”
“Yes, dark, dark corners; but I must not tell you of these, of the deep gloomy forest, where the gorilla howls, and wretched dwarfs have their abode, or of the great swamp lands in which the dreadful crocodile and a thousand other slimy creatures dwell, and where, in patches of forest, the mighty anacondas sleep. Nor of the wondrous deserts of sand, nor of the storms that rise sometimes and bury caravans of camels and men alive. No, we swallows think only of the beauty of our African home, of its roaring cataracts, its wooded hills, its peaceful lakes and broad shining rivers, and of the glorious sunshine that gladdens all.
“But now I must go. Pray let me free. I have much to do before the summer is over, and that kind something beckons me back again – back to the land of the sun.”
“Go, birdie, go, and some day I too will take my flight to the Land of the Sun.”
Book One – Chapter Six.
Harry’s School-Days – Lost in a Snowstorm
Harry Milvaine had aunts and uncles in abundance, and about as many cousins as there are gooseberries on an ordinary-sized bush; for he had first cousins and second and third cousins, and on and on to, I verily believe, forty-second cousins. They count kinship a long way off in the Scottish Highlands.
And they used all to visit occasionally at Beaufort Hall. They did not all come at once, to be sure, else, if they had, there would have been no beds to hold them. They would have had to sleep in barns and byres, under the hayricks and out on the heather.
Oh, it was no uncommon thing now for Harry to sleep on the heather. On summer nights he would often steal out through the casement window of his bedroom, which opened on to the lawn, and go quietly away to a healthy hill not far off. Here he would pull a bundle of heather for a pillow, and lie down rolled in his plaid with Eily in his arms and a book in his hand. As long as there was light he would read. When it grew semi-dark he would sleep, and awake in the morning as fresh as a blackbird.
Once only he had what some boys would consider an ugly adventure. On awaking one morning he felt something damp and cold touch his knee – he wore the kilt. He quickly threw off the plaid, and there, close by him, was an immense green-yellow snake. The creature was coiled up somewhat in the form of the letter W. It was fully as thick as the neck part of an ordinary violin, and it glittered all over as if varnished. A wholesome, healthy snake, I assure you. He raised his head and hissed at Harry. That snake would have fain got away. Very likely he had said to himself the night before:
“I’ll creep in here for warmth and get away again in the morning, before the human being is awake.”
But the snake had overslept himself and was caught napping.
Now there are two animals that do not like to turn tail when fairly faced – a cat and a snake. Both feel they are at a disadvantage when running away.
I have often proved this with snakes. Give them a fair offing, and they will glide quickly off; but catch them unawares, and get close up to them, and they will face you and fight.
Harry knew this and lay perfectly still. Granting that these great green-yellow Highland snakes are not poisonous, they bite, and it is not nice to be bitten by a snake of any kind.
Just at that moment, however, Eily returned from the woods where she had been hunting on her own account. She took in the situation at a glance. Next moment she had whirled the snake round her head and dashed it yards away, where it lay writhing with a broken back. Many dogs are clever at killing snakes. Then she came and licked her master’s hand.
Every time any of Harry’s aunts came they made this remark:
“How the boy does grow, to be sure!” Every time one of Harry’s uncles came he made some such remark as this:
“He’ll be as big a man as his father. He is a true Highlander and a true Milvaine.”
Harry liked his uncles and aunts very well after a fashion, but he cared little or nothing for his cousins. Some of them called him the hermit. Harry did not mind. But he would coolly lock his garden gate and sit down to read or to write, or begin working at his lathe, while his cousins would be playing cricket in the paddock; then perhaps he would come out, look for a moment, with an air of indifference, at the game, then whistle on Eily and go off to the woods or the river. This was exceedingly inhospitable of Harry, I must confess, only I must paint my hero in his true colours.
“Why don’t you play with your cousins, dear?” his mother would ask.
“Oh, mamma!” Harry would reply, “what are they to me? I have books, a gun, and a fishing-rod, and I have Eily; what more should I want?”
The name of Hermit followed him to the parish school. Our tale dates back to the days before School Boards were thought of.
Harry was eleven now, and therefore somewhat too old for a governess. So Miss Campbell had gone. I’m afraid that Harry had already forgotten his promise to marry her when he “grew a great big man.” At all events he did not repeat it even when he kissed her good-bye.
What a long, long walk Harry had to that parish school! How would the average English boy like to trudge o’er hill and dale, through moor and moss and forest, four long miles every morning? But that is precisely what Harry had to do, carrying with him, too, a pile of books one foot high, including a large Latin dictionary.
Harry thought it delightful in summer; he used to start very early so as to be able to study nature by the way, study birds and their nests, study trees and shrubs and ferns and flowers.
Scottish schoolboy fashion, he took his dinner with him. A meagre meal enough, only some bread-and-butter in a little bag, and a tin of sweet milk which he carried in his hand.
Eily always went along with him, but she waited at a neighbouring farm until school came out in the forenoon, when she had part of Harry’s dinner; then she was invariably at the gate at four o’clock, and wild with joy when the homeward journey commenced.
Several other boys went Harry’s road for more than two miles, but it was the custom of the “Hermit” to start off at a race with his dog as soon as he got out, and never halt until he put a good half-mile betwixt himself and the lads, who would gladly have borne him company.
No wonder he was called “Harry the Hermit!”
Dominie Roberts, the parish schoolmaster, was a pedagogue of the old school. And there exist many such in Scotland still.
He would no more think of teaching a class without the tawse in his hand, than a huntsman would of entering the kennels without his whip. As my English readers may not know what a “tawse” is, I herewith give them a recipe for making one.
Take, then, a piece of leather two feet long, and one inch and a half wide. The leather ought to be the thickest a shoemaker can give you, of the same sort as he makes the uppers of a navvy’s boots with. Now at one end make a slit or buttonhole to pass two fingers through, and cut up the other into three tags of equal breadth and about three inches long.
Then your tawse is complete, or will be so as soon as you have heated the ends for a short time in the fire to harden them.
It is a fearful instrument of torture, as my experience can testify. It is not quite so much used in schools now, however, as it was thirty years ago, when the writer was a boy. But it is still used. Such a thing as hoisting and flogging, I do not believe, was ever known in a Scottish school. It would result in mutiny.
You have to hold out your hand. The teacher says “Pande” (in Latin). Then he lets you have it again and again, sometimes till he is out of breath, and your hands and wrists are all blistered.
I remember receiving six-and-thirty “pandeys,” because I had smashed a tyrant boy who had bullied me for months. It was a cruel injustice; for the bully got no punishment except that which I had given him.
Dominie Roberts was a pedagogue, then, of this class.
All the boys were afraid of him. Harry was not. Though only eleven years of age, Harry was nearly as tall as the dominie.
There was a consultation one day as to who should steal the tawse.
No boy would venture, but at length —
“I will,” said Harry.
“Hurrah! for the Hermit!” was the shout.
The dominie went out of the schoolroom every forenoon for half an hour to smoke. A pretty hubbub and din there was then, you may be sure.
The day after the theft of the tawse was determined on, as soon as the pedagogue had stumped out of the school – he wore a wooden leg from the knee – Harry went boldly up to the desk and seized the tawse.
“What shall I do with it?” he asked a schoolboy.
“Pitch it out of the window.”
“No,” cried another, “he would get it again. Put it in the fire.”
Harry did so, and covered it up with burning coals.
By and by back stumped the dominie. He held his nose in the air and sniffed. There was a shocking smell of burning leather.
The dominie went straight to the fire, and with the poker discovered the almost shapeless cinders of his pet tawse!
He grew red and white, time about, with rage.
“Who has done this thing?” he thundered.
No reply, and the dominie thumped on the floor with his wooden leg, and repeated the question.
Still no answer.
“I shall punish the entire school,” cried Dominie Roberts.
He stumped out again, and many of the boys grew pale with fear, and the smaller ones began to cry.
Presently the dominie returned. In his hand he bore a long piece of a bridle rein, and this he fashioned into a tawse in sight of the whole school. Then he called the biggest class, and once more demanded the name of the culprit.
No reply, but every lad in the class began to wet his hands and pull down his sleeves.
“All hands up,” was the terrible command.
The punishment was about to commence when forth stepped Harry the Hermit into the middle of the circle.
“Stay a moment, if you please, sir,” said Harry.
“You know, then, who committed the crime?” asked the dominie, sternly.
“I do; it was myself.”
“And why?”
“Because the other boys wanted to, but were afraid.”
“Which other boys? Name them.”
“I will not.”
“Pande, sir, Pande.”
Five minutes afterwards Harry staggered back to his seat, pale-faced and sick.
He sat down beside his class-mate, and was soon so far recovered as to be able to whisper —
“How many did I have?”
“Two-and-twenty,” was the reply. “I counted.”
“And that new tawse is a tickler, I can tell you,” said Harry.
He did not climb any trees that day going home. He could not have held on. Nor was he able to eat much supper, but he did not tell the reason why.
But, apart from his fondness for corporal or palmar punishment, Dominie Roberts was a clever teacher, and Harry made excellent progress.
Autumn came round, and stormy wet days, and many a cold drenching our hero got, both coming to and going from school. But he did not mind them. They only seemed to render him hardier and sturdier, and make his cheeks the ruddier.
Then winter arrived “on his snow-white car,” as poets say, and often such storms blew that even grown-up people feared to face them. But Harry would not give in. On evenings like these John would be dispatched to meet Harry, and many an anxious glance from the dining-room window would his mother cast, until she saw them coming up the long avenue, Eily always first, feathering through the snow, and barking for very joy as she neared the house.
Sometimes the roads would be so blocked with snow, that Harry found it far more convenient to walk along on the top of the stone fences, often missing his feet, and getting plunged nearly over his head in a snow-bank.
In the early part of January, 186-, I forget the exact day and date, one of the most fierce and terrible snowstorms that old men ever remembered, swept over the northern shires of Scotland.
When Harry left for school that morning there seemed little cause for alarm. There was no sunshine however, and the whole sky was covered by an unbroken wall of blue-grey cloud. Towards the forenoon snow began to fall – a kind of soft hail like millet seeds. The ground was hard and dry to receive it, so it did not melt.
The schoolboys tried to mould it into snowballs, but it would not “make,” it would not stick together – evidence in itself that the frost was intense.
Gradually this soft, fine hail changed to big, dry flakes. Then the wind began to rise, and moan around the chimneys, and go shrieking through the leafless boughs of the ash trees and elms. The snowfall increased in density every minute. Looking up through the falling flakes, you could not have seen three yards.
Dominie Roberts at two o’clock began to get uneasy, and gave many an anxious glance towards the windows, now getting quickly snowed up. So great, too, was the frost that, though a roaring fire of wood and peats burned on the hearth, the panes were flowered and frozen.
At half-past two it began to get rapidly dark, so the dominie dismissed his class with earnest injunctions to those boys who had far to go, not to delay on the road, but to hurry home at once.
It might have been thought that on an evening like this, Harry would have been glad of companionship on the road. Not he. He went off like a young colt, with Eily galloping round him, as soon as ever he got outside the gate.
The wind blew right in his face, however, and the drift was whirling like smoke right over every fence. The roads were also barricaded every few yards with high wreaths of snow, blown off the fields and hills.
The wind blew wilder, and every minute the cold seemed to grow more and more intense.
Harry’s face and hands were blue and benumbed before he had gone a mile and a half, Eily’s coat was white and frozen hard; but on went the pair of them, battling with the storm, Harry holding his head well down, and keeping his plaid up over his nostrils.
Often he had to turn round and walk backwards by way of resting himself.
The snow-wreaths were most difficult to get through, the smoking drift cutting his breath and nearly suffocating him.
So ere long his strength began to fail. Hardy though he was, Highlander though he was, bred and born among the wild, bleak mountains, and reared in the forests, his powers of endurance gave out.
He crouched down and took the half-frozen dog in his arms. He talked to her as if she had been a human being, and the probability is that she did know what he said.
“Oh, Eily,” he said, “I do feel tired.”
The kindly collie licked his face.
“But come on,” he cried, starting up again; “we must not give in. We have only about a mile and a half to go if we cross through the wood. We’ll soon get home. Come on, Eily, come on.”
In a short time he had reached the wood. It was mostly spruce and fir, and the branches were borne half to the ground with the weight of snow at one side, while the other was bare, and the wind tearing through them.
He leaped the “dyke,” (a stone fence) and was glad he had done so. There was far more shelter here, and the blasts were less fierce and cutting. He walked faster now. The wood was about half a mile wide. Arrived at the other side, a path by a stone fence led all the way down to his own home in the glen beneath.
He hurried on. How strange the wood looked under its mantle of snow! But he could not see any distance ahead owing to the drift. Sometimes the wind would catch a tree and roar through it, and for the moment he would be almost suffocated with the smother of falling snow.
He had gone on quite a long way, when he suddenly came to a clearing. He had never seen it before; never been here before. Then the awful truth flashed at once across the boy’s mind —he was lost!
How long he wandered in the wood before he sank exhausted beside a tree he never could tell.
Night and darkness came on, the storm roared through the wood with ever-increasing force, but Harry knew nothing of it. He slept – slept that sleep that seldom knows a waking in this world.
And the drift banked up – the cruel drift – up around him. It hid his legs, his arms, his shoulders, and at last his head itself.
Still the snow fell and the wind blew. It blew with a moaning, whistling sound through the tall pine-trees, as it does through rigging and cordage of a ship in a gale. It blew with a rushing noise through the closer-branched spruce trees, and ever in a momentary lull you might have heard the frozen tips of the branches knocking together as if glass rattled.
It was a terrible night.
As usual on stormy evenings, stalwart John had gone to meet young Harry; but he kept the road. It never struck him that the boy would have ventured through the wood in such a night.
Harry’s parents were sitting in the parlour anxious beyond all expression, when suddenly the quick, sharp, impatient bark of the collie rang out high above the howling wind.
In she rushed whining when the door was opened. But out she flew again.
“Oh, come quickly,” she seemed to say, “and save poor young master!”
Mr Milvaine well knew what it meant. Five minutes after, with lanterns and poles, he and two trusty servants were following close at the honest dog’s heels.
Up the hill by the fence side, up and up and into the wood, and never did the faithful animal halt until she led them to the tree where she had left the boy.
For a moment or two now she seemed lost. She went galloping round and round the tree; while with their lanterns Mr Milvaine and his servants looked in vain for poor Harry.
But back Eily came, and at once began to scrape in the snow. Then something dark appeared, and Eily barked for joy.
Her master was found.
Was he dead? They thought so at first. But the covering of snow had saved him.
They poured a little brandy over his throat, wrapped him tenderly in a Highland plaid, and bore him home. Yet it was days before he spoke.
Dear reader, did ever you consider what a blessing our loving Father has given us in a faithful dog? How kind we ought to be, and how considerate for the comfort of such a noble animal! And ever as they get older our thoughtfulness for their welfare and care of them ought to increase. Mind, too, that most good thinking men believe that dogs have a hereafter.
“I canna but believe,” says the Ettrick shepherd, in his broad Doric, “that dowgs hae souls.”
My friend, the Rev. J.G. Wood, in his book called “Man and Beast,” has proved beyond dispute that there is nothing in Scripture against the theory that the lower animals will have a hereafter.
And note how the goodly poet Tupper writes about his dear dog Sandy:
“Shall noble fidelity, courage and love,
Obedience and conscience – all rot in the ground?
No room be found for them beneath or above,
Nor anywhere in all the universe round?
Can Fatherhood cease? or the Judge be unjust?
Or changefulness mark any counsel of God?
Shall a butterfly’s beauty be lost in the dust?
Or the skill of a spider be crushed as a clod?
“I cannot believe it: Creation still lives;
The Maker of all things made nothing in vain:
The Spirit His gracious ubiquity gives,
Though seeming to die, ever lives on again.
We ‘rise with our bodies,’ and reason may hope
That truth, highest truth, may sink humbly to this,
That ‘Lo, the poor Indian’ was wiser than Pope
When he longed for his dog to be with him in bliss!”
