Bog-Myrtle and Peat. Tales, chiefly of Galloway, gathered from the years 1889 to 1895

Front matter

TALES CHIEFLY OF G A LLO WAY GATHERED FROM THE YEARS 1889 TO 1895, BY S. R. CROCKETT LONDON BLISS, SANDS AND FOSTER 15 CRAVEN STREET, STRAND MDCCCXCV Inscribed with the Name of George Milner of Manchester, a Man most Generous, Brave, True, to whom, because he freely gave tne That of His which I the most desired — /, having Nothing worthier to give, Give This. KENMURE 1715 " The heather 's in a blaze, Willie, The White Rose decks the tree, The Fiery-Cross is on the braes, And the King is on the sea. " Remember great Montrose, Willie, Remember fair Dundee, And strike one stroke at the foreign foes Of the King that 's on the sea. " There 's Gordons in the North, Willie. Are rising frank and free, Shall a Kenmure Gordon not go forth For the King that 's on the sea ? " A trusty sword to draw, Willie, A comely weird to dree, For the royal Rose that 's like the snaw, And the King that 's on the sea !

" He cast ae look upon his lands, Looked over loch and lea, He took his fortune in his hands, For the King was on the sea. KENMURE Kenmures have sought in Galloway For Kirk and Presbyt'rie, This Kenmure faced his dying day, For King James across the sea. It little skills what faith men vaunt, If loyal men they be To Christ's ain Kirk and Covenant, Or the King that 's o'er the sea. Andrew Lang CONTENTS BOOK FIRST. ADVENTURES PAGE I. THE MINISTER OF DOUR . . . . 1 7 II. A CRY ACROSS THE BLACK WATER ... 27 III. SAINT LUCY OF THE EYES ..... 47 IV. UNDER THE RED TERROR . . . . 1 25 V. THE CASE OF JOHN ARNISTOn's CONSCIENCE . . I4I VI. THE GLISTERING BEACHES . . . . 1 53 BOOK SECOND. INTIMACIES I. THE LAST ANDERSON OF DEESIDE . . . 1 69 II. A SCOTTISH SABBATH DAY ... 1 83 III. THE COURTSHIP OF TAMMOCK THAKANRAIP, AYRSHIRE MAN ........

I99 IV. THE OLD TORY . . . . . .211 V. THE GREAT RIGHT-OF-WAY CASE . . . 21 7 VI. DOMINIE GRIER ....... 225 VII. THE PRODIGAL DAUGHTER . . . .235 BOOK THIRD. HISTORIES I. FENWICK MAJOR'S LITTLE 'uN .... 245 II. MAC'S ENTERIC FEVER ...... 255 III. THE COLLEGING OF SIMEON GLEG .... 263 IV. KIT KENNEDY, Ne'eR-DO-WELL .... 273 V. THE BACK 0' BEYONT ...... 287 VI. NORTH TO THE ARCTIC ..... CONTENTS 10 BOOK FOURTH. IDYLLS PAGE I. ACROSS THE MARCH DYKE • • 311 II. A FINISHED YOUNG LADY . • 33 ' III. THE LITTLE LAME ANGEL ■ • 339 BOOK FIFTH. TALES OF THE KIRK I. THE MINISTER-EMERITUS ..... 349 II. A MINISTER'S DAY . . . • -359 III. THE MINISTER'S LOON ..... 373 IV. THE BIOGRAPHY OF AN INEFFICIENT . . • 381 v. john 393 VI. EUROCLYDON OF THE RED HEAD . 399 VII. THE CAIRN EDWARD KIRK MILITANT . . 4O7

Epilogue

: IN PRAISE OF GALLOWAY NIGHT IN THE GALLOWAY WOODS . . . 4. 1 5 BIRDS AT NIGHT ....... 416 THE COMING OF THE DAWN ..... 417 FLOOD-TIDE OF NIGHT . . . . 417 WAY FOR THE SUN . . . . 418 THE EARLY BIRD ....... 419 FULL CHORUS . . . . 42 1 THE BUTCHER'S BOY OF THE WOODS . . 42 1 THE DUST OF BATTLE ....... 422 COMES THE DAY ... ...

Preface

There is a certain book of mine which no publisher has paid royalty upon, which has never yet been confined in spidery lines upon any paper, a book that is nevertheless the Book of my Youth, of my Love, and of my Heart. There never was such a book, and in the chill of type certainly there never will be. It has, so far as I know, no title, this unpublished book of mine. For it would need the blood of rubies and the life of diamonds crusted on ivory to set the title of this book. Mostly I see it in the late night watches, when the twilight verges to the cock-crowing and the universe is silent, stirless, windless, for about the space of one hour. Then the pages of the book are opened a little ; and, as one that reads hungrily, hastily, at the bookstall of an impatient vendor a book he cannot buy, so I scan the idylls, the epics, the dramas of the life of man written in words which thrill me as I read.

Some are fiercely tender, some yearning and unsatisfying, some bitter in the mouth but afterward sweet in the belly. All are expressed in words so fit and chaste and noble, that each is an immortal poem which would give me deathless fame — could I, alas ! but remember. Then the morning comes, and with the first red I awake to a sense of utter loss and bottomless despair. Once more I have clutched and missed and forgotten. It is gone from me. The imagination of my heart is left unto me desolate. Sometimes indeed when a waking bird — by preference a mavis — sings outside my window, for a little while after I

PREFACE.

12 swim upward out of the ocean of sleep, it seems that I might possibly remember one stanza of the deathless words ; or even by chance recapture, like the brown speckled thrush, that "first fine careless rapture" of the adorable refrain. Even when I arise and walk out in the dawn, as is my custom winter and summer, still I have visions of this book of mine, of which I now remember that the mystic name is "The Book Sealed." Sometimes in these dreams of the morning, as I walk abroad, I find my hands upon the clasps. I touch the binding wax of the seals. When the first rosy fingers of the dawn point upward to the zenith with the sunlight behind them, sanguine like a maid's hand held before a lamp, I catch a farewell glimpse of the hidden pages. Tales, not poems, are written upon them now. I hear the voices of" Them Ones," as Irish folk impressively say of the Little People, telling me tales out of the Book Sealed, tales which in the very hearing make a man blush hotly and thrill with hopes mysterious.

Such stories as they are ! The romances of high young blood, of maidens' winsome purity and frank disdain, of strong men who take their lives in hand and hurl themselves upon the push of pikes. And though I cannot grasp more than a hint of the plot, yet as my feet swish through the dewy swathes of the hyacinths or crisp along the frost-bitten snow, a wild thought quickens within me into a belief, that one day I shall hear them all, and tell these tales for my very own so that the world must listen. But as the rosy fingers of the morn melt and the broad day fares forth, the vision fades, and I who saw and heard must go and sit down to my plain saltless tale. Once I wrote a book, every word of it, in the open air. It was full of the sweet things of the country, so at least as they seemed to me.

I saw the hens nestle sleepily in the holes of the bank-side where the dry dust is, and so I wrote it down. I heard the rain drum on the broad leaves over my head, A and I wrote that down also. Day after day I rose and wrote in the dawn, and sometimes I seemed to recapture a leaf or a passing glance of a chapter-heading out of the Book Sealed. It came back to me how the girls were kissed and love was made in the days when the Book Sealed was the Book Open, and when I cared not a jot for anything that was written therein. So as well as I could I wrote these things down in the red dawn. And so till the book was done. Then the day comes when the book is printed and bound, and when the critics write of it after their kind, things good and things evil. But I that have gathered the fairy gold dare not for my life look again within, lest it should be even as they say, and I should find but withered leaves therein.

For the sake of the vision of the breaking day and the incommunicable hope, I shall look no more upon it. But ever with the eternal human expectation, I rise and wait the morning and the final opening of the "Book Sealed." S. R. CROCKETT. NOTE. I am deeply in the debt of my friend, Mr. Andrew Lang, for the ballad of ' Kcnmure ' which he has -written to grace my bare boards and spice the plain fare here set out in honour of the ancient Free Province. BOOK FIRST ADVENTURES Loy in the dance the winedrenched coronal From shoulder 'white and golden hair doth fall I A-nigh his breast each youth doth hold an head. Twin flushing cheeks and locks unflleted ; Swifter and swifter doth the revel move Athwart the dim recesses of the grove . , Where Aphrodite reigneth in her primet And laughter ringeth all the summer time.

There hemlock branches make a languorous gloom, And heavy-headed poppies drip perfume In secret arbours set in garden close ; And all the air, one glorious breath of rose ■, Shakes not a dainty petal from the trees. Nor stirs a ripple on the Cyprian seas. " The Choice of Herakles" I THE MINISTER OF DOUR This window looketh towards the 'west, And o'er the meadows grey Glimmer the snows that coldly crest The hills of Galloway. The winter broods on all between — In every furrow lies ,■ Nor is there aught of summer green. Nor blue of summer skies. Athwart the dark grey rain-clouds flash The seabird^s sweeping wings, And through the stark and ghostly ash The wind of winter sings. The purple 'woods are dim 'with rain, The corns elds dank and bare ; And eyes that look for golden grain Find only stubble there.

And while I write, behold the night Comes slowly blotting all, And o'er grey 'waste and meadow bright The gloaming shadows fall. " From Two Windows" The wide frith lay under the manse windows of the parish of Dour. The village of Dour straggled, a score of white-washed cottages, along four hundred yards of rocky shore. There was a little port, to attempt which in a south-west wind was to risk an abrupt change of condition. This was what made half of the men in the parish of Dour God-fearing men. The other half feared the minister. Abraham Ligartwood was the minister. He also feared God exceedingly, but he made up for it by not regarding man in the slightest. The manse of Dour was conspicuously set like a watch-tower on a hill — or like a baron's castle above the huts of his retainers. The fisher men out on the water made it their lighthouse.

The lamp burned in the minister's study half the night, and was alight long ere the winter sun had reached the horizon. Abraham Ligartwood would have been a better man had he been less painfully good. When he came to the parish of Dour he found that he had to succeed a man who had allowed his people to run wild. Dour was a garden filled with the degenerate fruit of a strange vine. The minister said so in the pulpit. Dour smiled complacently, and considered that its hoary wickednesses would beat the minister in the long-run. But Dour did not at that time know the minister. It was the day of the free-traders. The traffic with the Isle of Man, whence the hardy fishermen ran their cargoes of Holland gin and ankers of French brandy, put good gear on the back of many a burgher's wife, and porridge into the belly of many a fisherman's bairn.

The new minister found all this out when he came. He did not greatly object. It was, he said, no part of his business to collect King George's dues. But he did object when the running of a vessel's cargo became the signal for half his parishioners settling themselves to a fortnight of black, solemn, evil-hearted drinking. He said that he would break up these colloguings. He would not have half the wives in the parish coming to his kirk with black eyes upon the Lord's Sabbath day. The parish of Dour laughed. But the parish of Dour was to get news of the minister, for Abraham Ligart wood was not a man to trifle with. One night there was a fine cargo cleanly run at Port Saint Johnston, the village next to Dour. It was got as safely off. The "lingtowmen" went out, and there was the jangling of hooked chains along all the shores ; then the troll of the smugglers' song as the cavalcade struck inwards through the low shore-hills for the main free trade route to Edinburgh and Glasgow.

The king's preventive men had notice, and came down as usual three hours late. Then they seized ten casks of the best Bordeaux, which had been left for the purpose on the sand. They were able and intelligent officers — in especial the latter. And they had an acute perception of the fact that if their bread was to be buttered on both sides, it were indeed well not to let it fall. This cargo-running and seizures were all according to rule, and the minister of Dour had nothing to say. But at night seventeen of his kirk members in good standing and fourteen adherents met at the Back Spital of Port Dour to drink prosperity to the cargo which had been safely run. There was an elder in the chair, and six unbroached casks on a board in the corner. There was among those who assembled some word of scoffing merriment at the expense of the minister.

Abraham Ligartwood had preached a sermon on the Sabbath before, which each man, as the custom was, took home and applied to his neighbour. " Ay man, Mains, did ye hear what the minister said aboot ye ? O man, he was sair on ye ! " " Hoot na, Portmark, it was yersel' he was hittin' at, and the black e'e ye gied Kirsty six weeks syne." But when the first keg was on the table, and the men, each with his pint-stoup before him, had seated them selves round, there came a knocking at the door — loud, insistent, imperious. Each man ran his hand down his side to the loaded whip or jockteleg (the smuggler's sheath-knife) which he carried with him. But no man was in haste to open the door. The red coats of King George's troopers might be on the other side. For no mere gauger or preventive man would have the assurance to come chapping on Portmark's door in that fashion.

" Open the door in the name of Most High God ! " cried a loud, solemn voice they all knew. The seventeen men and an elder quaked through all their inches ; but none moved. Writs from the authority mentioned did not run in the parish of Dour. The fourteen adherents fled underneath the table like chickens in a storm. "Then will I open it in my own name!" Whereon followed a crash, and the two halves of the kitchen door sprang asunder with great and sudden noise. Abraham Ligartwood came in. The men sat awed, each man wishful to creep behind his neighbour. The minister's breadth of shoulder filled up the door way completely, so that there was not room for a child to pass. He carried a mighty staff in his hand, and his dark hair shone through the powder which was upon it. His glance swept the gathering.

His eye glowed with a sparkle of such fiery wrath that not a man of all the seventeen and an elder, was unafraid. Yet not of his violence, but rather of the lightnings of his words. And above all, of his power to loose and to bind. It is a mistaken belief that priestdom died when they spelled it Presbytery. The comprehensive nature of the anathema that followed — spoken from the advantage of the doorway, with personal applications to the seventeen individuals and the elder — cannot now be recalled ; but scraps of that address are circulated to this day, mostly spoken under the breath of the narrator. " And you, Portmark," the minister is reported to have said, " with your face like the moon in harvest and your girth like a tun of Rhenish, gin ye turn not from your evil ways, within four year ye shall sup with the devil whom ye serve.

Have ye never a word to say, ye scorners of the halesome word, ye blaspheming despisers of doctrine ? Your children shall yet stand and rebuke you in the gate. Heard ye not my word on the Sabbath in the kirk ? Dumb dogs are ye every one ! Have ye not a word to say ? There was a brave gabble of tongues enough when I came in. Are ye silent before a man ? How, then, shall ye stand in That Day ? " The minister paused for a reply. But no answer came. " And you, Alexander Kippen, puir windlestrae, the Lord shall thresh ye like ill-grown corn in the day of His wrath. Ye are hardly worth the word of rebuke ; but for mine office I wad let ye slip quick to hell ! The devil takes no care of you, for he is sure of ye ! " The minister advanced, and with the iron-pointed shod of his staff drove in the bung of the first keg.

Then there arose a groan from the seventeen men who sat about. Some of them stood up on their feet. But the minister turned on them with such fearsome words, laying the ban of anathema on them, that their hearts became as water and they sat down. The good spirit gurgled and ran, and deep within them the seventeen men groaned for the pity of it. Thus the minister broke up the black drinkings. And the opinion of the parish was with him in all, except as to the spilling of the liquor. Rebuke and threatening were within his right, but to pour out the spirit was a waste even in a minister. " It is the destruction of God's good creature ! " said the parish of Dour. But the minister held on his way. The communion followed after, and Abraham Ligartwood had, as was usual, three days of humiliation and prayer beforehand.

Then he set himself to " fence the tables." He stated clearly who had a right to come forward to the table of the Lord, and who were to be debarred. He explained personally and exactly why it was that each defaulter had no right there. As he went on, the congregation, one after another, rose astonished and terrified and went out, till Abraham Ligartwood was left alone with the elements of communion. Every elder and member had left the building, so effective had been the minister's rebuke. At this the parish of Dour seethed with rebellion. Secret cabals in corners arose, to be scattered like smoke drift by the whisper that the minister was coming. Deputations were chosen, and started for the manse full of courage and hardihood. Portmark, as the man who smarted sorest, generally headed them ; and by the aid of square wide-mouthed bottles of Hollands, it was possible to get the members as far as the foot of the manse loaning.

But beyond that they would not follow Port mark's leading, nor indeed that of any man. The footfall of the minister of Dour as he paced alone in his study chilled them to the bone. They told one another on the way home how Ganger Patie, of the black blood of the gypsy Marshalls, finding his occupation gone, cursed the minister on Glen Morrison brae ; but broke neck-bone by the sudden fright of his horse and his own drunkenness at the foot of the same brae on his home-coming. They said that the minister had prophesied that in the spot where Ganger Patie had cursed the messenger of God, even there God would enter into judgment with him. And they told how the fair whitethorn hedge was blasted for ten yards about the spot where the Death Angel had waited for the blas phemer. There were four men who were willing to give warrandice that their horses had turned with them and refused to pass the place.

So the parish was exceedingly careful of its words to the minister. It left him severely alone. He even made his own porridge in the wide-sounding kitchen of the gabled manse, on the hill above the harbour. He rang with his own hands the kirk-bell on the Sabbath morn. But none came near the preachings. There was no child baptized in the parish of Dour ; and no wholesome diets of catechising, where old and young might learn the Way more perfectly. Mr. Ligartwood's brethren spoke to him and pled with him to use milder courses ; but all in vain. In those days the Pope was not so autocratic in Rome as a minister in his own parish. " They left me of their own accord, and of their own accord shall they return," said Abraham Ligartwood. But in the fall of the year the White Death came to Dour. They say that it came from the blasted town of Kirk Oswald, where the plague had been all the summer.

The men of the landward parishes set a watch on all that came out of the accursed streets. But in the night-time men with laden horses ran the blockade, for the prices to be obtained within were like those in a besieged city. Some said that it was the farmer of Portmark who had done this thing once too often. At least it is sure that it was to his house that the Death first came in the parish of Dour At the sound of the shrill crying, of which they every one knew the meaning, men dropped their tools in the field and fled to the hills. It was like the Day of Judgment. The household servants disappeared. Hired men and field-workers dispersed like the wave from a stone in a pool, carrying infection with them. Men fell over at their own doors with the rattle in their throats, and there lay, none daring to touch them.

In Kirk Oswald town the grass grew in the vennels and along the High Street. In Dour the horses starved in the stables, the cattle in the byres. Then came Abraham Ligartwood out of the manse of Dour. He went down to the farm towns and into the village huts and lifted the dead. He harnessed the horse in the cart, and swathed the body in sheets. He dug the graves, and laid the corpse in the kindly soil. He nursed the sick. He organised help everywhere. He went from house to stricken house with the high assured words of a messenger fresh from God. He let out the horses to the pasture. He milked the kine, that bellowed after him with the plague of theii milk. He had thought and hands for all. His courage shamed the cowards. He quickened the laggards. He stilled the agony of fear that killed three for every one who died of the White Death.

For the first time since the minister came to Dour, the kirk-bell did not ring on Sabbath, for the minister was at the other end of the parish setting a house in order whence three children had been carried. In the kirk yard there was the dull rattle of sods. The burying-party consisted of the roughest rogues in the parish, whom the minister had fetched from their hiding-holes in the hills. Up the long roads that led to the kirk on its windy height the scanty funerals wended their way. For three weeks they say that in the kirkyard, from dawn to dusk, there was always a grave uncovered or a funeral in sight. There was no burial service in the kirkyard save the rattle of the clods ; for now the minister had set the carpenters to work and coffins were being made. But the minister had prayer in all the houses ere the dead was lifted.

Then he went off to lay hot stones to the feet of an other, and to get a nurse for yet another. For twenty days he never slept and seldom ate, till the plague was stayed. The last case was on the 27th of September. Then Abraham Ligartwood himself was stricken in one of the village hovels, and fell forward across a sick man's bed. They carried him to the manse of Dour, and wept as they went. The next day all the men that were alive in the parish of Dour stood about the minister's grave in the kirkyard on the hill. There was none there that could pray. But as they were about to separate, some one, it was never known who, raised the tune of the first Psalm. And the wind wafted to the weeping wives in the cottages of the stricken parish of Dour the sound of the hoarse and broken singing of men.

In three weeks the minister had brought the evil parish of Dour into the presence of God. And these were the words of their singing, while the gravediggers stood with the red earth ready on their spades, but before a clod fell on the minister's grave : — " That man hath perfect blessedness Who walketh not astray In counsel of ungodly men, Nor stands in sinners' way, Nor sitteth in the scorner's chair: But placeth his delight Upon God's law, and meditates On his law day and night." The new minister who succeeded had an easy time and a willing people. But he can never be to them what Abraham Ligartwood was. They graved on his tomb, and that with good cause, the words, " Here lyes a Man who never feared the face of Man." The lovers are 'whispering under thy shade. Grey Tower of Dalmeny I I leave them and wander alone in the glade Beneath thee, Dalmeny.

Their thoughts are of all the bright years coming on, But mine are of days and of dreams that are gene ; They see the fair flowers Spring has thrown on the grass, tAnd the clouds in the blue light their eyes as they pass ; But my feet are deep down in a drift of dead leaves, *And I hear what they hear not — a lene bird that grieves. What matter f the end is not far for us all. tAnd spring, through the summer , to winter must fall, *And the lovers' light hearts, e'en as mine, "will be laid, tAt last, and for ever, low under thy shade, Grey Tower of Dalmeny, George Milner. A CRY ACROSS THE BLACK WATER With Rosemary for remembrance, And Rue, sweet Rue, for you. It was at the waterfoot of the Ken, and the time of the year was June. " Boat ahoy ! " The loud, bold cry carried far through the still morn ing air.

The rain had washed down all that was in the sky during the night, so that the hail echoed through a world blue and empty. Gregory Jeffray, a noble figure of a youth, stood lean ing on the arch of his mare's neck, quieting the nervous tremors of Eulalie, that very dainty lady. His tall, alert figure, tight-reined and manly, was brought out by his riding-dress. His pose against the neck of the beautiful beast, from which a moment before he had swung himself, was that of Hadrian's young Antinous. " Boat ahoy ! " Gregory Jeffray, growing a little impatient, made a trumpet of his hands, and sent the powerful voice, with which one day he meant to thrill listening senates, sound ing athwart the dancing ripples of the loch. On the farther shore was a flat white ferry-boat, looking, as it lay motionless in the river, like a white table chained in the water with its legs in the air.

The chain along which it moved plunged into the shallows beside him, and he could see it descending till he lost it in the dusky pool across which the ferry plied. To the north, Loch Ken ran in glistening levels and island studded reaches to the base of Cairnsmuir. " Boat ahoy ! " A figure, like a white mark of exclamation moving over green paper, came out of the little low white washed cottage opposite, and stood a moment looking across the ferry, with one hand resting on its side and the other held level with the eyes. Then the observer disappeared behind a hedge, to be seen immediately coming down the narrow, deep-rutted lane towards the ferry-boat. When the figure came again in sight of Gregory Jeffray, he had no difficulty in distinguishing a slim girl, clad in white, who came sedately towards him.

When she arrived at the white boat which floated so stilly on the morning glitter of the water, only just stirred by a breeze from the south, she stepped at once on board. Gregory could see her as she took from the corner of the flat, where it stood erect along with other boating gear, something which looked like a short iron hoe. With this she walked to the end of the boat nearest him. She laid the hoe end of the instrument against a chain that ran breast-high along one side of the boat and at the stern plunged diagonally into the water. His mare lifted her feet impatiently, as though the shore ward end of the chain had brought a thrill across the loch from the moving ferry-boat. Turning her back to him, the girl bent her slim young body without an effort ; and, as though by the gentlest magic, the ferry-boat drew nearer to him.