Part 5 (1/2)

Finlay ay; my friend of the Doocot Cave ay; my other co hood of e; and I foundface to face with a life of labour and restraint

The prospect appeared dreary in the extreht, and from one week's end to another, and all for a little coarse food and homely raiment, seemed to be a dire one; and fain would I have avoided it But there was no escape; and so I deter winter holidays, and how delightfully he ee's profession, I trusted to find, like hie compensation, in the amusements of one-half the year, for the toils of the other half Labour shall not wield over me, I said, a rod entirely black, but a rod like one of Jacob's peeled wands, chequered white and black alternately

I however, did look, even at this ti the antecedents of a sadly her thanto believe that literature, and, mayhap, natural science, were, after all, my proper vocations, I resolved that iven to careful observation, and the study of our best English authors Both my uncles, especially James, were sorely vexed by my deter in so to be a mere operative mechanic, like one of theed that, instead of entering as a mason's apprentice, I should devote h the labour of their hands foretting through college; nay, if I preferred it, I ht meanwhile come and live with theive myself as sedulously toa ive myself to my trade I de for college had an eye, I said, to so theer part, were studying for the Church; whereas I had no wish, and no peculiar fitness to be either lawyer or doctor; and as for the Church, that was too serious a direction to look in for one's bread, unless one could honestly regard one's-self as _called_ to the Church's proper work; and I could not

There, said ht: better be a poorhonest, however hu the hold taken of the mind in some cases by hereditary convictions of which the ordinary conduct shows little apparent trace! I had for the last few years been a wild boy--not without ion, but possessed of none of Donald's seriousness; and yet here was his belief in this special ly entrenched in the recesses of my mind, that no consideration whatever could have inducedh, mayhap, overstrained in many of its older forms, I fain wish the conviction, in at least soht be well for all the Protestant Churches practically to hold, with Uncles James and Sandy, that true ministers cannot be manufactured out of ordinary iven number of years, and then passed by the imposition of hands into the sacred office; but that, on the contrary, race of God I may add, that in a belief of this kind, deeply ith of our recent Church controversy th consented that I should make trial of a life of manual labour The husband of one offor jobs on a small scale, usually kept an apprentice or two, and ereed to serve for the ter moleskin clothes, and a pair of heavy hob-nailed shoes, I waited only for the breaking up of the winter frosts, to begin work in the Crothe profession of the quarrier with that of the ment froes in the dream of a hermit life--quiet, meditative, solitary, spent far away in deep woods, or amid wide-spread wastes, where the very sounds that arose would be but the faint echoes of a loneliness in which man was not--a ”voice of the desert, never dumb”

The dream is that of a certain brief period of life between boyhood and comparatively mature youth; and we find more traces of it in the poetry of Kirke White than in that of ale in which it is natural to indulge in it, and because, being less an iave it as portion of the internal experience fro poets: the ignorant, half-grown lad, who learns, for the first tientleman who advertises for a hermit,” and wishes that he had but the necessary qualification of beard to offer hies in it also; and I, too, in this transition stage, cherished it with all the strength of a passion It see out of a latent tirappling with the stern realities of life, amid the crowd and press of the busy world, and o'ershaded by the forle I have still before e in some vast wilderness” to which I could have fain retired, to lead all alone a life quieter, but quite as wild, as ness and co sousty ould be howling around the roof, and the rain beating on the casement, but when, in the callance bright on rafter and wall, still impress me as if the recollection were in reality that of a scene witnessed, not of a mere vision conjured up by the fancy But it was all the idle dream of a truant lad, ould fain now, as on for to school--that best and noblest of all schools, save the Christian one, in which honest Labour is the teacher--in which the ability of being useful is imparted, and the spirit of independence co effort acquired; and which is ht, and greatly more happy than the schools which profess to teach only the art of enjoy Toil! Who that knows thy solid worth and value would be ashamed of thy hard hands, and thy soiled veste, and hard couch, and homely fare! Save for thee and thy lessons, man in society would everywhere sink into a sad compound of the fiend and the wild beast; and this fallen world would be as certainly a ht of the excellence of thy character and of thy teachings, when, with a heavy heart, I set out about this ti, to take my first lesson from thee in a sandstone quarry

I have elsewhere recorded the history of my few first days of toil; but it is possible for two histories, of the same period and individual, to be at once true to fact, and unlike each other in the scenes which they describe, and the events which they record The quarry in which I commenced my life of labour was, as I have said, a sandstone one, and exhibited in the section of the furze-covered bank which it presented, a bar of deep red stone beneath, and a bar of pale red clay above Both deposits belonged to forist The deep-red stone formed part of an upper member of the Lower Old Red Sandstone; the pale red clay, which was hened by rounded pebbles, and much cracked and fissured by the recent frosts, was a bed of the boulder clay Save for the wholesome restraint that confined me for day after day to this spot, I should perhaps have paid little attention to either Mineralogy, in its first rudiments, had early awakened e rocks, of which tools may be htly in, whether sandstone or clay, I could take no interest; just as infant societies take no interest in such y; and it was not until I had learned to detect a the ancient sandstone strata of this quarry exactly the same phenomena as those which I used to witness in my walks with Uncle Sandy in the ebb, that I was fairly excited to examine and inquire It was the necessity which ist Further, I soon found that there was much to be enjoyed in a life of labour A taste for the beauties of natural scenery is of itself a never-failing spring of delight; and there was scarce a day in which I wrought in the open air, during this period, in which I did not experience its soothing and exhilarating influence Well has it been said by the poet Keats, that ”a thing of beauty is a joy for ever” I owed much to the upper reaches of the Cromarty Firth, as seen, e sat down to our e of the quarry, with their nu currents, that, in the calh a es that brightened in the sunshi+ne; while, pale in the background, the h over bay and pronity and power to the scene

Still, however, with all my enjoyments, I had to suffer soh now seventeen, I was still seven inches short of my ultimate stature; and my frame, cast more at the time in the mould of my mother than in that of the robust sailor, whose ”back,”

according to the description of one of his coround,” was sli pains in the joints, and an oppressive feeling about the chest, as if crushed by soht I became subject, too, to frequent fits of extreme depression of spirits, which took al sleep--results, I believe, of excessive fatigue--and during which my absence ofainst accident, in cases the most simple and ordinary Besides other injuries, I lost at different ti the first few months of my apprenticeshi+p, when in these fits of partial soathered strength, my spirits became more equable; and not until many years after, when my health failed for a time under over-exertion of another kind, had I any renewed experience of the fits of walking sleep

My master, an elderly man at the time--for, as he used not unfrequently to tell his apprentices, he had been born on the sae the Fourth, and so we could celebrate, if we pleased, both birthdays together--was a person of plodding, persevering industry, rought rather longer hours than was quite agreeable to one ished to have soood master As a builder, he made conscience of every stone he laid It was remarked in the place, that the walls built by Uncle David never bulged or fell; and no apprentice or journeyht wark” Though by norossed in his eer than almost any other individual I ever knew On one occasion, when an overloaded boat, in which he was carrying stones fro toas overtaken by a series of rippling seas, and suddenly sank, leaving hied to the throat, hehis favourite snuff- past, ”Od, Andro man, just rax out your han' and tak' in edown upon us in the quarry with such momentum, that it bent awheelbarrow, Uncle David, who, older and less active than any of the others, had been entangled in the for, as we rushed back, expecting to find him crushed as flat as a botanical preparation, ”Od, I draid, Andro ood barrow” He was at first of opinion that I would do hih as ier; and I laboured under the further disadvantage of knowing a little, as an a, fros of my schoolboy days involved, as they sometimes did, the erection of a house, I used always to be selected as the mason of the party And all that I had learned on these occasions I had now to unlearn In the course of a fewin less than a fortnight a very considerable mastery over the mallet--for mine was one of the not unfrequent cases in which the mechanical knock seeht up at once--I astonished Uncle David onenearly two feet of pavement for his one And on this occasion er to his previous complaints, was inforrand workman after all”

A life of toil has, however, its peculiar teht, and in ard the ardent spirits of the dray to both body and looh was siill The drinking usages of the profession in which I laboured were at this time many: when a foundation was laid, the workmen were treated to drink; they were treated to drink when the walls were levelled for laying the joists; they were treated to drink when the building was finished; they were treated to drink when an apprentice joined the squad; treated to drink when his ”apron ashed;” treated to drink when ”his time was out;” and occasionally they learned to treat one another to drink In laying down the foundation-stone of one of the larger houses built this year by Uncle David and his partner, the worklasses of the whisky caill of usquebaugh an overdose, but it was considerably too ot hoes of a favourite author, the letters dancing before er master the sense I have the volume at present before ood deal worn at the corners by the friction of the pocket; for of Bacon I never tired The condition into which I had brought radation I had sunk, by ence than that on which it was h the state could have been no very favourable one for for a resolution, I in that hour deterain sacrifice e; and, with God's help, I was enabled to hold by the deterht as an operative ether, in which I did not consulasses of ardent spirits, or partake of half-a-dozen draughts of fer back on this erous point, at which, in the atteue, the craving appetite of the confirht have been forht quarries ofthe southern shores of the Croanisms The beds occasionally display their water-rippled surfaces, and occasionally their areas of ancient desiccation, in which the polygonal partings still rees before But the rock contains neither fish nor shell; and the h they served to raise strange questions in anisms of other creations would have done We soon quitted these quarries, however, as they provedat this time, for a quarry situated on the northern shore of the Moray Firth, which had been recently opened in an inferior member of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and which, as I subsequently ascertained, does in some of its beds contain fossils It was, however, not to the quarry itself that ed There lies in the Firth beyond, an outlier of the Lias, which, like the Marcus' Cave one referred to in a preceding chapter, strews the beach with its fragments after every storrey limestone derived from this subaqueous bed I laid open raceful in its curves as those of the Ionic volute, and greatly ht cream-coloured tint, diinal pearl, contrasted exquisitely with the dark grey of the matrix which enclosed it I broke open htful quarry, and there were few of theanisroups of shells, bits of decayed wood, and fragments of fern At the dinner hour I used to show h they always took the trouble of looking at theot into the stones,” they seeard theht a after, but which were rather below the notice of grown-up people like thes of a kind I had not yet found--genuine thunderbolts--which in his father's tiht for the cure of bewitched cattle--were to be found in tolerable abundance on a reach of the beach about twothe quarry for the piece of work on which ere to be next engaged, Uncle David gave us all a half-holiday, Ithe tract of shore indicated by the workneiss and hornblend slate of the Hill of Eathie, I found a Liassic deposit, aanisms--not buried under the waves, as at Marcus' shore, or as opposite our new quarry, but at one part underlying a little grass-covered plain, and at another exposed for several hundred yards together along the shore Never yet did e field; and memorable in s that I have spent in exploring it

The Hill of Eathie, like the Cros, as I have already had occasion to mention, to what De Beaumont would term the Ben Nevis system of hills--that latest of our Scottishfroreat Caledonian valley, and in that of the valleys of the Nairn, Findhorn, and Spey, uptilted in its course, when it arose, the Oolites of Sutherland, and the Lias of Cromarty and Ross The deposit which the Hill of Eathie disturbed is exclusively a Liassic one The upturned base of the forainst the Hill; and webeds for several hundred feet outwards, until, apparently near the top of the deposit, we lose them in the sea The various beds--all save the lowest, which consists of a blue adhesive clay--are co of easily-separable laminae, thin as sheets of pasteboard; and they are curiously divided from each other by bands of fossiliferous limestone of but from one to two feet thick These Liassic beds, with their separating bands, are a sort of boarded books; for as a series of voluic library of nature, I used to find pleasure in regarding thenite, ichthyolite, and shell, for; the pasteboard-like laminae between--tens and hundreds of thousands in number in even the slimmer volumes--compose the closely-written leaves I say closely written; for never yet did signs or characters lie closer on page or scroll than do the organisms of the Lias on the surface of these leaf-like laminae I can scarce hope to communicate to the reader, after the lapse of soof wonder which the marvels of this deposit excited in my mind, wholly new as they were to me at the time Even the fairy lore of my first-formed library--that of the birchen box--had i of these written leaves, though di

The ground is invariably of a deep neutral grey, verging on black; while the flattened organisree of relief as one sees in the figures of an embossed card, contrast with it in tints that vary from opaque to silvery white, and from pale yellow to an umbry or chestnut brown Groups of ammonites appear as if drawn in white chalk; clusters of a minute undescribed bivalve are still plated with thin films of the silvery nacre; the mytilaceae usually bear a warm tint of yellowish brown, and ryphites and oysters are always of a dark grey, and plagiostomae ordinarily of a bluish or neutral tint On some of the leaves curious pieces of incident seem recorded We see fleets of minute terebratulae, that appear to have been covered up by so at their anchors; and whole argosies of ammonites, that seemed to have been wrecked at once by some untoward accident, and sent crushed and dead to the bottoht black plates, that shi+ne like pieces of japan work, with nu with nail-like points, indicate where soroups of bele-pikes thrown carelessly on a vessel's deck on the surrender of the crew, tell where _skulls_ of cuttle-fishes of the ancient type had ceased to trouble the waters I need scarce add, that these spear-like bele athwart soely inscribed we occasionally find, like the dark hawthorn leaf in Bewick's well-known vignette, slim-shaped leaves coloured in deep uely-fashi+oned ferns, fore, for tens and hundreds of feet together, repeat the sareat Alexandrian library, with its toes, was but a re collection--not less puny in bulk than recent in date--compared with this marvellous library of the Scotch Lias

Who, after once spending even a few hours in such a school, could avoid being a geologist? I had for rocks and in caves; but it was the wonders of the Eathie Lias that first gave direction and aiht a over the _pictures_ of the stony volume of nature, I henceforth beca it as a book The extreme beauty, however, of the Liassic fossils made me pass over at this time, as of little interest, a discovery which, if duly followed up, would have probably landed me full in the midst of the Old Red Sandstone ichthyolites fully ten years ere I learned to know the a temporary harbour, at which we boated the stones we had been quarrying, I struck my pick into a slaty sandstone bed, thickly s

They consisted, I saw, of thin rectilinear ste, that at once suggested to me layers of comminuted _Zostera marina_, such as I had often seen on the Cromarty beach thrown up from the subnificent anites, to be had in abundance at Eathie just for the laying open and the picking up, how could I think of giving ments of _Zostera_? Within, however, a few feet of these carbonaceous s there occurred one of those platforms of violent death for which the Old Red Sandstone is so remarkable--a platforanoids of creation, many of which still bore in their contorted outlines evidence of sudden dissolution and the dying pang

During the winter of this year--for winter at length came, and, my labours over, three happy , deep in a wild Highland glen, the remains of one of our old Scotch forests of the native pine My cousin George, finding his pretty Highland cottage on the birch-covered tomhan situated too far from his ordinary scenes of employment, had removed to Cromarty; and when his work had this year come to a close for the season, hehis father-in-law, an aged shepherd who resided in the upper recesses of Strathcarron He had invited ladly availed myself We struck across the tract of wild hills which intervenes between the Cromarty and Dornoch Firths, a few ordon; and after spending several hours in toiling across dreary moors, unopened at the time by any public road, we took our noon-day refreshe walls, with a few furrowed patches stretching out around us, green amid the waste One of the best swordsmen in Ross had once lived there; but both he and his race had been lost to Scotland in consequence of the co the last two ages; and Cousin George caht had fallen on the dark hills and alder-skirted river of Strathcarron, as, turning fro the Kyle of Dornoch, we entered its bleak gorge; and as the shepherd's dwelling lay high up the valley, where the lofty sides approach so near, and rise so abruptly, that for the whole winter quarter the sun never falls on the stream beloe had still some ten or twelve miles of broken road before us The e of the hills, dih outline; while in a recess of the stream, far beneath, we could see the torch of so red on rock and water, now suddenly disappearing, eclipsed by the overhanging brushwood It was late ere we reached the shepherd's cottage--a dark-raftered, dihted erection of turf and stone The weather for several weeks before had been rainy and close, and the flocks of the ine of the sheep-fary farms The bealed overhead to catch the conservative influences of the smoke; and on a rude plank-table below, there rose two tall pyramids of braxy-hlander of large proportions, but hard, and thin, and worn by the cares and toils of at least sixty winters--sat moodily beside the fire The state of his flocks was not cheering; and, besides, he had seen a vision of late, he said, that filled his htfall on the previous evening to a dank hollow, in which many of his flock had died

The rain had ceased a few hours before, and a smart frost had set in, and filled the whole valley with a wreath of silvery vapour, di on the hill-top The wreath stretched out its grey folds beneath him--for he had cliure of a ure of what seeht to a red heat in a furnace--sprang up out of the darkness; and, after stalking over the surface of the fog for a few brief seconds, during which, however, it had traversed the greater part of the valley, it as suddenly disappeared, leaving an evanescent trail of flame behind it There could be little doubt that the old shepherd had hts that in ht traveller; but the apparition now filled his whole mind, as one vouchsafed frohtful portent:--

”A ht of distant years, That flashed unnoticed, save by wrinkled eld, Musing at reater part of the following day with e herds of red deer on the hills The forest was but a shred of its former self; but the venerable trees still rose thick and tall in so to mark, where they encroached furthest on the open waste, how thoroughly they lost the ordinary character of the Scotch fir, and how, sending out fronarled boles immense branches, some two or three feet over the soil, they somewhat resembled in their squat, dense proportions, and rounded contours, gigantic bee-hives It was of itself worth while undertaking a journey to the Highlands, to witness these last remains of that arboreous condition of our country to which the youngest of our geological fornificant witness; and which still, largely existing as the condition of the northern countries of continental Europe, ”remains to attest,” as Humboldt well remarks, ”more than even the records of history, the youthfulness of our civilisation”