Little Rivers [26]
few minutes afterwards I brought him within reach of the gaff, and
my first salmon was glittering on the grass beside me.
Then I remembered that William Black had described this very fish
in A Princess of Thule. I pulled the book from my pocket, and,
lighting a pipe, sat down to read that delightful chapter over
again. The breeze played softly down the valley. The warm
sunlight was filled with the musical hum of insects and the murmur
of falling waters. I thought how much pleasanter it would have
been to learn salmon-fishing, as Black's hero did, from the Maid of
Borva, than from a red-headed gillie. But, then, his salmon, after
leaping across the stream, got away; whereas mine was safe. A man
cannot have everything in this world. I picked a spray of rosy
bell-heather from the bank of the river, and pressed it between the
leaves of the book in memory of Sheila.
II.
COMMON HEATHER.
It is not half as far from Albany to Aberdeen as it is from New
York to London. In fact, I venture to say that an American on foot
will find himself less a foreigner in Scotland than in any other
country in the Old World. There is something warm and hospitable--
if he knew the language well enough he would call it couthy--in the
greeting that he gets from the shepherd on the moor, and the
conversation that he holds with the farmer's wife in the stone
cottage, where he stops to ask for a drink of milk and a bit of
oat-cake. He feels that there must be a drop of Scotch somewhere
in his mingled blood, or at least that the texture of his thought
and feelings has been partly woven on a Scottish loom--perhaps the
Shorter Catechism, or Robert Burns's poems, or the romances of Sir
Walter Scott. At all events, he is among a kindred and
comprehending people. They do not speak English in the same way
that he does--through the nose---but they think very much more in
his mental dialect than the English do. They are independent and
wide awake, curious and full of personal interest. The wayside
mind in Inverness or Perth runs more to muscle and less to fat, has
more active vanity and less passive pride, is more inquisitive and
excitable and sympathetic--in short, to use a symbolist's
description, it is more apt to be red-headed--than in Surrey or
Somerset. Scotchmen ask more questions about America, but fewer
foolish ones. You will never hear them inquiring whether there is
any good bear-hunting in the neighbourhood of Boston, or whether
Shakespeare is much read in the States. They have a healthy
respect for our institutions, and have quite forgiven (if, indeed,
they ever resented) that little affair in 1776. They are all born
Liberals. When a Scotchman says he is a Conservative, it only
means that he is a Liberal with hesitations.
And yet in North Britain the American pedestrian will not find that
amused and somewhat condescending toleration for his peculiarities,
that placid willingness to make the best of all his vagaries of
speech and conduct, that he finds in South Britain. In an English
town you may do pretty much what you like on a Sunday, even to the
extent of wearing a billycock hat to church, and people will put up
with it from a countryman of Buffalo Bill and the Wild West Show.
But in a Scotch village, if you whistle in the street on a Lord's
Day, though it be a Moody and Sankey tune, you will be likely to
get, as I did, an admonition from some long-legged, grizzled elder:
"Young man, do ye no ken it's the Sawbath Day?"
I recognised the reproof of the righteous, an excellent oil which
doth not break the head, and took it gratefully at the old man's
hands. For did it not prove that he regarded me as a man and a
brother, a creature capable of being civilised and saved?
It was in the gray town of Dingwall that I had this bit of pleasant
correction, as I was on the way to a fishing tramp through
Sutherlandshire.