Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry/Honest Man John Ochiltree
HONEST MAN JOHN OCHILTREE.
A gay young lad frae Locherben
Came galloping late to our gate en;
He doft his hat, and came bouncing ben,
Saying, Maiden, I come to wooe.
His brow was brent, his glance was gleg,
A snaw-white skin an' a wanton leg;
A gallant young lad, quo' I, by my feg,
He's welcome here to wooe.
Aboon the fire upon the bink,
He had bread to eat an' wine to drink,
But ne'er a blithe styme wad he blink
Till he was warm and fou;
Syne by the hand I have him ta'en,
Ye coldrife lover now get ye gane,
I'd liefer lie a year my lane
Than lie an hour wi' you.
"I was not always an old man, with a lank leg and a grey head; there was a time before I began the pleasant trade of cheering the dames and maidens with my merry tales. I was then young, my leg was firm and shapely, my locks were bushy and black; and I could have pitched the bar, or played a fiddle, with the youth of seven parishes. But a sad cough, which I caught among the damp broom on Quarrelwood Hill hearkening a sectarian sermon, plucked strength and spirit down, and drove me to win the bread by my wit, which more favoured men purchase by the sweat of their brow. But the world is an altered world to me since I commenced my calling; it is a white half-crown, a week the worse for the wear; people are grown too wise to be delighted—they laugh not at my wittiest story, nor shed one tear at my saddest. I have seen when ye might have tied seven strong men with a straw, as they shouted and laughed, and lay down and laughed at my narratives: a smile is as hard to earn as a sixpence now, and tears are dried up on the earth. My saddest story would bring red wine out of a rock, or strong drink from a log of Memel fir, sooner than extract one tear from the brightest eye of the present generation.
"But I scatter none of those antique pearls—those tender and touching narratives, before the eyes of the self-sufficient husbandman and the critical mechanic. I steep not my story now in the dark and fathomless stream of superstition: I have seen the time when tales and ballads of fairies and elves, and witches and warlocks, and elve candles and water spunkies, and wraiths and ghosts, and goblins and foul fiends, horned or cloven-footed, would have been to one as food and raiment and white money. But the wisdom of man so much abounds that he is pleased with nought; he laughs at ancient beliefs, and calls for ocular proof, and testimony on oath, and the assurance of many witnesses, for all oral or recorded things. The poetry has departed from story-telling, conjured away by the wand of that sorcerer, education. Not that I mean to aver that all else is as husks and bran, compared to the white and the purified grain. I have had curious adventures of my own, in which the most querulous matter-of-fact man could detect neither superstition nor poetry. These, falling from the lips of one blessed with a natural grace of utterance, might go far to move men to mirth; but I can hope for no such consummation."
The old man adjusted his mantle, stood perpendicularly up, and, combing his white locks with his fingers, commenced his narrative with something of a look and tone at once grave and shrewd.
"The adventures I shall relate commenced with my seventeenth year. I had learned to sing, and also to dance; but Nature, which lavishes so many notable gifts, denied me that ready and familiar grace of address which wins its way to woman's regard. I conversed with the maids whom the music of the fiddle surrendered to my company with such manifest confusion, and even alarm, that they soon reckoned me a creature equally uncouth and ungracious; and I was subjected to abundance of scorn and caprice and wit, when I endeavoured at gallantry. When I led them to the floor, they would examine me from head to foot, with an eye sparkling in malicious wit; and even their grandmothers regarded me with a glance of the most mortifying compassion. It was sometimes a matter of rivalry among the girls to obtain my hand: to dance with such a cutter of uncouth capers, such a marvellous piece of human imperfection as me, was made a matter of boast and a subject for laughter; and any expressions of respect or love which I hazarded were parodied and distorted into all that was absurd and ridiculous by these capricious spirits. They all seemed to possess, for my mortification and sorrow, a talent for humour and ridicule, which broke out on every occasion. I became the most exalted personage in the parish, if my merit might be estimated by the notice I received; and to this 'bad eminence' I was raised by the wit and the fun and folly of women.
"To one of those meetings at the conclusion of harvest, which, taking farewell of autumn, welcome the winter with drinking and dancing and all sorts of rustic festivity, I was about this time invited. I dressed myself out for the occasion in my newest dress, and in the vanity of my heart I counted myself captivating. My aunt assisted me much in this; she possessed an antique taste, and so far back did her intelligence in apparel reach, that she sought to revive, and that on my person, the motley dress of the minstrels at the ancient border tournaments. One mistake was that I had no turn for poetry, so I was soon doomed to endure the malice of verse without the power of inflicting it on others; and another was, that I had nothing of a romantic turn about me, so that the dress sat on me with an evil grace. To the dance, however, I went, waving my right arm gallantly as I marched along, and looking oftentimes back at my shadow in the moonlight; the luminary I could not help thinking neglected to do justice to my form, but that planet is certainly the most capricious of all the lesser lights. I was received with a general stare; and then with a burst of universal and spontaneous mirth. The old men surveyed me with looks in which compassion struggled with curiosity; but the maidens gathered about me, commended the head that imagined my dress, and the hand that fashioned it: the young men joined in this praise with a gravity which I mistook for envy, and the roof rocked and rang to another peal of laughter.
"The fiddler, wholly blind, and seated apart from this scene of merriment and mortification, seemed incensed to think that any one should be the cause of mirth but himself. He stayed his hand, laid down his instrument, and, while he rosined his bow, inquired what all this laughter meant. 'Thy curiosity shall be gratified,' said a wicked young girl; and, taking my unreluctant hand, she led me up to this producer of sounds, and guided his hand to my person. He felt my dress from head to heel, vowed by his bow he had never touched a garment of such rich device as my coat, swore by his fiddle my bonnet was worth all the money his instrument had ever earned, and hoped I would leave the land before I mined the mystery of thairms, for there was no need of instrumental mirth where I came. And dismissing me with a suppressed laugh, for open merriment might have diminished his evening's gain, he recommenced his music, and the discontinued dance began.
"My torment now commenced: the lasses danced round me in a ring. I had the misfortune to be so much in request that I was never off the floor: though I danced six-and-thirty reels without let or pause, and though the drops fell from my brows like rain, I saw no end to such perpetual capering. This ridiculous exertion is still remembered among the dames of Annandale; and I lately heard a girl reproach her lover with his listlessness for mirth, saying, 'When will ye dance six-and-thirty reels like daft John Ochiltree?' I grew an inch taller with this proof of my fame. All this was to come to an end. The blind fiddler had been smit in his youth with the disease of tune-making: he had mingled the notes of half a dozen tunes together, from which he extracted a kind of musical square root, and this singular progeny he was desirous of baptizing: much, it seems, depends on having a fine sounding name. At present he was hesitating between 'Prince Charles's Delight' or 'Duke William's Welcome,' when a peasant demanded the tune: 'the new tune, the plague on't—the tune without a name.' 'A tune without a name,' said a girl, 'cannot ye christen it, man? Here, fiddler, play up "Honest Man John Ochiltree."' A shout of laughter succeeded. 'A name, by my faith,' exclaimed many voices at once; and the new name was shouted by a hundred tongues, to the infinite mortification of the fiddler and me: our vanity was wounded. The name of the tune was fixed as unalterably as the laws of the Medes, and from that hour forward it haunted me through life; while the popularity of the air was increased by the noises which a rustic minstrel soon caused to jingle in rude chorus to the air. Thus I got the name of 'Honest Man John Ochiltree,' and the story was a winter's laugh to the parish.
"But there is no sour without its sweet: all this had been witnessed by a farmer's daughter, whom the pursuit of many lovers had not rendered capricious, and who thought she perceived in the patience with which I endured all this musical persecution the materials for making a quiet and tractable husband. She trod on my foot returning from a hill-preaching, and apologized with so much grace that I thought her the fairest maiden of the whole valley; and after touching on the sermon, and quoting the Song of Solomon, we parted with a mutual promise of meeting in her father's barn at midnight. I was punctual to my tryste, and so accurate was the devout maiden that the clock struck twelve as she turned the key in the granary-door. She opened a little wicket, and let in the summer moonlight; and seating ourselves on two inverted bushels, we sat in collateral splendour, side by side, amid the silent light of the luminary.
"I looked at the maiden, who kept looking on the opposite wall with an aspect of demure but arch composure, and seemed to count the stones of which it was built. Had I been afflicted with the cureless evil of verse-making, I had now a matchless opportunity of displaying my gift. The silence of the place—the glow of the moon—the beauty of the maiden, Mary Anderson by name—her white hands, clasped over a whiter bosom—her locks, a glistering and a golden brown, escaping from the comb, descending in ringlets down her left cheek and shoulder, and taking a silvery or a golden hue as they moved to her breath amid the pure moonlight! This was my first attempt at courtship. I trembled much, and the words of love, too, trembled on my tongue. Let no man sit many minutes silent in the presence of his mistress; he will be forgiven for folly, for more serious offences, but never for silence. Had I made my débût in darkness, I think I should have spoken, and spoken, too, with much tenderness and true love. But the fault lay with the moon—plague on the capricious planet! I never see her fickle light glimmering through the chink of a barn wall but I think on the time when I lost my first love through her influence. We sat mute for the space of a quarter of an hour; and I had nearly vanquished my aversion to the moon's presence, when an owl rested from her flight on the roof above us for a moment, and, just as the words had assembled on my lips, uttered a long and melancholy 'whoop hoo.' I wished not to pitch the tone of courtship by a sound so ominous, and remained mute. I mustered my resolution again, and the first word (I would give the world to remember what word it was) was actually escaping from my lips, when a sucking calf lowed, perhaps for its dam, in a stall near us, and the voices of the four- and the two-footed animals were blended so curiously in utterance, that a judge of natural music would have found difficulty in awarding to each their own proper notes. This was a sound much more mischievous than the voice of the owl: the maiden, devout as she was, could not suppress a smile, and rising said, 'I think we know enough of one another's minds for one night,' and vanished from my side. So I closed my first night's wooing. I once had the courage to propose to her the endurance of another vigil; she set her hands to her mouth, and 'whooted out whoots three.' We never met again.
"But I was an inextinguishable lover. I disciplined my mind, pampered up my courage, and having, as I hoped, inured myself to the sharp encounter of female wit, boldly resolved to go in quest of an adventure. I have travelled much in the world; but all parts of the earth are surpassed by Scotland in the amorous spirit of its peasantry: there a maiden has many lovers, and a peasant many mistresses; adventures equalling those of romance are encountered; and the effusion of men's blood, as well as maiden's tears, not unfrequently follows those nocturnal excursions. I walked resolutely abroad, and hoped the achievement of some notable adventure. For some time I was without success; but at last a long stream of light from a farmer's window led me up to the casement, within which I observed his eldest daughter, a gay damsel of eighteen, couched on the watch, and waiting the approach of some happy wooer. She opened the window when I appeared, but, seeing a form she had not hoped for, stood holding the sash in her hand, pondering whether she should take the earliest blessing which heaven had sent in human shape.
"At this moment her expected lover appeared, a spruce youth from the neighbouring city, pruned and landered, and scenting the way with musk and frankincense. The maiden wrung her hands with vexation: her wit could not deal with more than one at a time; and as I was never of a quarrelsome nature, and had an aversion to intrude upon true love, I turned suddenly to retreat. The young man started off too; and, as my road lay the very way he ran, he imagined I pursued him with some sinister intention, so he augmented his speed. I still gained on him. A lake was in the way: I have ever had an affection for running water since it received my rival in its bosom, plump over head and ears, with a dash that startled the wild ducks for a mile round. He swam through like an evil spirit, while I returned to his mistress, and found her holding the casement open, perhaps for the successful lover; so I leaped gaily into the chamber, and, seated by the maiden's side, began to hope I was conquering my fate.
"The night, gloomy before, became tenfold darker now; the wind, accompanied by heavy gushes of rain, shook window and door, and raised in the chimney-top that long and melancholy whine which so many of the peasants reckon ominous. The night waxed wilder and wilder; and, to augment the tempest, the fires flashed and the thunder roared in such rapid succession that the walls of the chamber appeared in continual flame, and the furniture shook and clattered. Now I have heard of lovers who considered a stormy tryste night as a kind gift of fortune, and who could enlist the tempest which 'roared and rustled' around them into the service of love, and compel it to make a pathetic supplication in their behalf to an unmerciful mistress. I never liked these cloudy influences, and instead of making a vassal of elemental commotion, it always made a servant of me; a high wind and a storm, accompanied by thunder and fire, made me quiver and quake. I gave ample proof on this unfortunate night of my submission to the genius of the blast: the maid laid her white arm round my neck, and when she was soothing my terrors with soft words, the door of the chamber opened, and in glided her mother, saying, 'Lassie, are ye waking?' To find a lover in her daughter's chamber was, perhaps, neither uncommon nor unexpected; but to find a new face, to find me, 'Honest Man John Ochiltree,' whose name was doomed to descend to posterity at the top of a ridiculous reel tune, the disclosure was to be dreaded; so the subtle maiden, unloosing a comb from a thick fleece of long auburn hair, threw such a profusion of ringlets over my face as nearly suffocated me, waving her hand at the same time for her mother to retire.
"The prudent mother, however, advanced, saying, 'Bless me, lassie, this is a fearful night to have love-trystes and wooester-daffin in. I have trysted on mony a queer night myself, but on none that equalled this; yet I think nae the waur of the lad who keeps his faith on a night that makes the wide world tremble.' The daughter still waved her hand, but the dame was not to be daunted; and thus she persisted: 'But Jenny, my bonny bairn, when will ye put an end to these dallyings; no that I would have ye to make your election rashly, in the calf-love, as the rude proverb says, for ye're young and no at the end of your teens till the bud be on the bush; but when will ye quit these dallyings, I say, and single out a discreet husband and a devout? Ye have rich lovers, more than one or two, yet set not thy heart on the siller, lass, though I would hardly counsel ye to wed without it. A loving lad in lily-white linen looks weel enough in a fule sang, but give me the lad with bills and bonds, and good set siller, who can fill and fetch mair. Yet make not gowd a god in the choice of thy heart; though to give ye mair for a bridal-tocher than three hundred pounds, and put ye into a fu' farm, is what I wadnae counsel thy father to do.' The daughter still waved her mother to be gone; but the covering of my face excited the good dame's suspicions, and she resolved to see me face to face, though it might diminish the amount of Jenny's admirers.
"No resolution was ever carried more quickly into execution. 'But Jenny, woman, what ails the lad that he hides his face? If he has nae a face worth looking at, he's no a lad for thee. And I ken not a lad in the parish who might wish to hide his head, except that daft chield, Jock Ochiltree; Jock Gomeral would suit him better. His grand-dame was burnt for a witch at the West-bow port of Edinburgh, and if the grandson was burnt for a fool there would be no waste of fuel on the family.' And, removing a handful of her daughter's hair as she spoke, she saw me, and shouted, till her voice fairly exceeded the tempest that still raged without: 'Nay, but the Lord preserve me! His presence be near! Here's that gaping goose, Jock Gowk himself; for my lips I wadnae defile with his name, much less my arms with his person. Oh, to think that ever thy mother's daughter thought of lending credit to such a race, or bearing a bonnie bairntime to a born gomeral. Out of my house, I say, out of my house; start, else I shall write the notes of thy ain tune on thy face, seven crotchets to the bar.'
"'O mother,' said the submissive daughter, 'turn not the poor lad out on such a night as this: the thunder and fire, the flash and the din, will kill him; for he shakes at every clap like the leaf o' the linn.'
"'Na, worse than all,' shouted the dame, in a tone where scorn was blended with anger; 'na, worse than all. To be but a fool is no such a failing—there's Captain what's his name, whose whole wit lies in feeding capons, and who is hardly fit for watching the worms from the kale, yet he's made a justice o' the peace—but what can one do with a coward? I'm wasting words; I'm whistling a reel tune to a mile-stone: out of my house, I say—I will not defile both window and door with thee, so leap and vanish.' And holding up the casement, I leaped gladly out, happy at escaping from the wicked wagging of her tongue into the more endurable evil of wind and rain and fire.
"This unlucky repulse, with many a mischievous embellishment, flew over the parish; but I was not to be daunted. On the third evening after this mixed adventure of good and evil, I made an excursion beyond the limits of my parish, and entered upon the wild moorlands, where the dwellings are few and far between. A young man finds ready access among marriageable maidens, so I soon found myself seated at a sheep farmer's fire, in company of the good man's only daughter, a maid both ripe and rosy, with her father and mother, and some fifteen sheep dogs, as auditors of our conversation. At first, our talk was of that kind which newspapers call desultory; the weather, with all its variations; the fruits in their season, and the cattle after their kind; and, contracting the circle of our scrutiny as we proceeded, we at last settled upon the cares of a pasture farm. We talked of sheep after their sorts, the Cheviot breed, the auld stock of Tinwald, the lang sheep and the short mug ewes, gimmers, crocks, and dinmans; nor did we fail to discuss the diseases which preyed on this patriarchal wealth—mawks and moorill, rot and leaping-illness; and so extensive was my knowledge in all this, and also on the more mysterious mischief of evil e'en, elf-arrows, and witchcraft, that the old dame grew astonished, and whispered to her husband: 'This lad's words are worth drops of gold; speak him cannilie, Sandie, speak him cannilie.' Her daughter, too, had her own thoughts: she appeared to employ herself with the intricacies of a skein of thread; but contrived at every motion of her hand to steal a glance at me from beneath a thick mass of natural curls which rivalled in density, and nearly in colour, the fairest fleece of any of her father's flock. Her hand, too, unwittingly paused in its work, and shed back the curls from her ears that she might hear more accurately my ideas of fireside economy and joy. The old man alone seemed slow in entering into the prospect of wedding his daughter's visible wealth to one whose chief substance was speculative. He sat solacing his thoughts with a scheme which had no connection with my happiness. I saw something sinister in his looks; I heard him utter many a dry and dubious cough as his wife urged his admission of me as a suitor, and perceived, like the half hope of bliss held out by the Puritans, that I might be elected, but should never be chosen.
"At this moment the latch of the door was lifted, and a human figure tottered in, leaning twofold over a staff polished like glass with long use. It was a neighbouring moorland farmer, and a suitor to the maiden. He was dressed, or rather encumbered with clothes, which, in the shape of two coats, a large one and a less, showed the antique skill of cloth-cutting at the time of the Scottish persecution. Over all these a large plaid extended, and a bonnet that nearly overshaded the plaid crowned the whole. He removed this last-mentioned article, and displayed a face as sharp and biting as a northern frost, and a couple of small, keen, and inquisitive grey eyes, which seemed only acquainted with arithmetical calculation. He smoothed back his locks, which seemed to have long rebelled against the comb, and, casting his eyes over us, said with a prefatory cough:
"'Hale be thy heart, goodman, and happy be thine, goodwife, and merry may thine be, Penney, my winsome quean, mair by token I have sold seven score of dinmans, every cloot, and all to buy thee a bridal garment, lass, and a horse to ride on to the kirking, the fellow of whilk ye'll no find from Annan to Nith. But who, in the name of all that's holy, can this strange tyke be?' said this venerable gallant, casting a look of no great delight on me; 'his dress would scare the sheep, so he can be no shepherd; and he seems to lack wit to watch the hooded crows from his flock, so he cannot be wealthy;' and with this unceremonious notice of me, he drew in a chair by the side of the maiden, and stroked down her innumerable curls with his hand, which smelled of tar equal to the suffocation of any town damsel. She smiled, for the smell was frankincense to her; the ancient suitor smiled also—a smile rivalling that of a death's-head on a grave-stone—and said, 'Well may ye laugh, lassie; that's the right hand that lays on the tar with mair skill than the proudest man in Tiviotdale, and has more flocks to lay tar on, lassie—seventy score of brood ewes; but why need I brag? A man may ride a summer-day on my farm and no get far over the boundary.'
"I sat confounded at this display of opulence, which I saw had a strong influence on the maiden's heart; while her father, drawing near her, whispered 'Take him, Penney, take him—he's a rich man and well arrayed—he has two tap-coats and a plaid on.'
"The shepherd maiden looked on this antiquated suitor, and she looked on me; but the glow which unrequited love spread over a face of eighteen barely balanced the matter against territorial wealth and its grey-bearded owner. I had no resource save in youth and health; but my adversary came armed in the charms and might of property, and my more modern looks made but a poor battle against the appeal which riches made to maiden vanity. 'Foolish lassie,' said my rival, in a tone which sounded like the first shovelful of churchyard earth thrown on the lid of a coffin—'foolish lassie, why makest thou thy bright een glance from side to side on this stripling and me, as if thou wouldst weigh us in a balance? Who is this raw youth, thinkest thou? The owner of his own proper person, the laird of no-town-brae, as the proverb says, and lord of windy-wa's, as singeth the auld sang. He may wooe you with fine words, but will he drop a bonnet piece of beaten gold in thy lap for every sigh he gives? He may please thee with his face, and, bating that he looks like a fool, his looks are well enough; but can he cast cantraips over ye as I can do? Can he scatter golden spells and paper charms in thy lap, and make ye lady of as mickle land as a hooded crow will fly over when he seeks to prey on the earliest lamb of spring?'
"And as the old man spoke, he produced from the nook-pouch of his plaid a kind of wallet of rough calf-skin, secured with many a strap and string, which he unloosed with a kind of prolonged delight, and then, diving into the bosom of this mouldy sanctuary of Mammon, fished up the remains of an old stocking. 'Haud thy lap, Penney, my woman,' said the owner; and he emptied with a clang into the maiden's lap upwards of a hundred antique pieces of Scottish gold, which avarice had arrested in their circulation before the accession of the house of Stuart. 'There's as mickle as will array thee for the bridal, and here's documents for property which I will give thee the moment the kirk buckles us.' An old piece of leather, which the diligence of the owner had fashioned from a saddle-lap into a pocketbook, supplied him with sundry papers, which he described as he submitted them to her examination. 'That's a haud fast bond on the lands of the laird of Sloken-drouth for seven hundred pounds Scots, a' sure siller; that's the rights of the lands of Knockhoolie, thirty-five pounds yearly, and ye'll be called the dame of Knockhoolie, a bonnie title and weel sounding.'
"But why should I prolong a story of which all who hearken must know the up-shot? I saw the wicked speed that Mammon made in the maiden's affections, and sat dumbfounded and despairing. Her look, which was one of grave consideration at first, gradually brightened and expanded; she looked at the riches and she looked at him, and said, 'But I'm to have the cheese-siller, and the siller for the udder-locks; a riding habit, brown or blue, or one of both; a grey horse and a side saddle. I am to gang to the two fairs of Dumfries, the St. James's fair of Lanark, to the Cameronian sacrament, and to have a dance twice a year—once at Beltane, and once at Hallowmass.'
"'All shall be as thou sayest, Penney, my princess,' said her lover, interrupting, probably, a long list of expected luxuries; 'so name the bridal-day.'
"My vexation now exceeded all bounds of decorum, and I spoke: 'I would counsel ye to name the day soon, for the bridegroom has not an hour to lose; the bridal cups will barely be dry before they're lacked for his lyke wake; he has little time to spare.'
"The bride, as I may safely call her, laughed till her eyes were wet, and said: 'Well spoken, young man; that's the most sensible thing ye have said this blessed night; and so, as there is no time to be lost, ye say, let us be married on Saturday; let the fault fall on the lag end of the week.' For this mention of early joy the bridegroom endeavoured to inflict the penance of a kiss on the lips which uttered it. 'Haud off,' said the damsel, 'filthy body, ye stink of tar. Bide off till the blessing's said, till the meat be consecrated; go home, and nurse your breath, for it's wondrous feeble.'
"I now rose to depart; the bride conducted me to the door, and endeavoured to console me in a departing whisper: 'This is Monday—I'm to be wed on Saturday. Let me see—my father and mother will be frae hame on Thursday, so come owre here in the braw moonlight, and let us have an hour's running round the haystacks, and daffin in the darksome nooks. Auld Worldsworm—Auld Simon Setsiller—him there with the twa tap-coats and the plaid on, wha has not as much breath as would bless his breakfast, he'll ne'er be the wiser on't: what he disnae ken will give him no manner of trouble.' We parted, but we met no more.
"After this unsuccessful inroad on the moorlands, I resolved to push my fortune no farther without some more sensible assurance of success. I was, therefore, on the look out for the young and the handsome: I frequented fairs with the fidelity of a horse dealer, attended all the merry-makings round with the punctuality of a fiddler, and went devoutly to the kirk with the regularity of an ancient maiden whose thoughts had been weaned, by the counsel of aching bones and the eloquence of wrinkles, from free love to religion. But I was doomed to every species of mortification and repulse, and had actually in despair procured a copy of the register of maidens' baptisms in the parish, with the serious resolution of courting them regularly forward according to their seniority of claim, when the wheel of fortune turned up one of her brightest spokes.
"As I sat pondering on my luckless lot, a slender fair-haired girl of fourteen, the daughter of a respectable and opulent farmer, came gliding like a sylph to my side, and, with a manner conscious and sly, said that her father and her mother were gone to a bridal, and that her elder sister, Bess, desired my company to curds and cream, and to help her to while away the fore-night. Now her sister was one of the merriest and rosiest girls in the district; had a dancing foot and a fine ankle, and a voice which lent a grace to old songs which the best of your theatrical quaverers fail to impart. I need not say that her invitation charmed me: I lavished ribands, as well as thanks, on the bearer of this pleasing news, and passed my hand over her long and curling hair, saying, 'An' thou be spared, some lad will sigh at his supper for thee yet.' She set out a fair chin and a white bosom to the motion of my hand, and seemed perfectly aware, though young now, that she would be older in summer. She tripped to the door, and looking back with an archness of manner, and a roguish glance of her eye, said, 'Ye might have done waur than given me a kiss to carry to my sister, and ane to myself for carrying it;' and, uttering a loud laugh as she saw me rise to follow, away she bounded as light and graceful as a woodland fairy. An old beggar woman looked after her as she fled, and shook her crutch at her: 'Ah, thou young wanton, I heard thy words: they who learn young learn fair, and it's worse to keep the kitten frae the kirn than the auld cat; but see what it all comes to—a lamiter's crutch and an awmous-powk: nought will be a warning!' And the old woman groaned bitterly as she halted along at the memory of merrier days.
"I was true to tryste, and turned my steps to the farmer's residence a little after twilight; the windows were gleaming with light, and the din of merriment resounded far and wide. My fairy messenger met me at the door, and, standing on tiptoe, whispered in my ear: 'Come away, ye have been lang looked for: there's naebody here but Jock Gordon of Goosedub, Rab Robson of Rowantree Burn, and Davie Wilson of Ballacraig: ye ken all the rest except the young laird of Moorbirn and his cousin, whom men call Daunering John.' I entered, and found my knowledge was much more limited than the girl imagined; the farmer's hall was filled with strange faces, for three parishes round had each sent its contribution of youthful flesh and blood.
'Ten came east, and ten came west,
And ten came rowing o'er the water;
Twa came down the long dike side,
There's twa-and-thirty wooing at her.'
"But if the heroine of Tintock Top rivalled bonnie Bess in the amount of her wooers, I question if she excelled her in the native tact and good management with which she kept in subordination so many fiery and intractable dispositions. We were all seated round a large table, at the head of which the maiden herself presided, distributing her glances among her admirers with an equal and a judicious diligence. Curds and cream, and tea, were in succession handed round—she partook of both, uniting in her own person the pastoral taste of the mountains with the refinement of the vales; songs were sung—she assisted in the strain, and her voice was sweet and delightful; and thus the evening hours flew by. But amid all this show of harmony and good-fellowship, an experienced eye might observe, by the clouding brow and restrained joy of many, that the breeze of love which blew so soft and so balmy would soon burst out into tempest and storm. It is certainly a hazardous policy in such matters to collect a number of admirers face to face: in the silent darkness of a solitary tryste, the lover imagines himself the sole, or at least the favoured, admirer; and after breathing a brief vow, and tasting the joy of a half-yielded kiss, he returns home, leaving his mistress to the nocturnal hardihood and superior address of a more artful lover. But seated with your rivals at your side, your jealousy of affection rises in arms against your peace, and you begin to sum up the hours you have been blessed in her company, and to multiply them by the number of her admirers, conceding in despair a fractional part of affection to yourself, while it is plain your rivals have revelled in round numbers. There is no temper can long endure this; and it seemed plain that my fellow-suitors regarded our meeting as a general field-day—a numbering of the people, that she might wonder over the amount of her admirers and the force of her own charms.
"Conversation began at last to flag, and silence ensued. 'For my own part,' said an upland shepherd, 'I came here for an hour of quiet joy in a dark nook, the darker the better; but here's nought but an assembly of fools from the four winds of heaven, bending their darkening brows at one another, and a young lass sitting to count the strokes they strike, and to reckon every bruised brow a sure sign of her influence among men. Deil have me if I like it; so let short peace and long strife be among ye; and for you, my bonnie dame, the less ye make sport of honest hearts the less sport will evil hearts make of you, and so I leave you.' And away he strode, whistling manfully the tune of the gallant Graemes, in token of defiance. 'Let him go, the rough-footed moorcock, that can clap his wings, but never crow,' said a ploughman from the vale of Ae; 'the smell of tar and tainted mutton is diminished since his departure.' This was touching on a perilous theme—the old feud which exists between the pastoral and agricultural districts. 'I would advise ye lads,' said a youth of moorland descent, 'to eat well of wether mutton and moorcocks afore ye speak lightly of aught that's bred among mosses; ye may need all your strength to maintain unguarded words. Lord, if my cousin of Blackhagg were here, he would make ye eat your own words, though every one were as ill to swallow as a pound of hiplock wool.' The incensed tiller of the holms of Ae started to his feet, his utterance nearly choked with rage: 'Rise, ye moorland coof, ye two-footed tender of four-footed brutes, lacking as much in sense as ye lack in number of limbs; rise this precious moment, else I'll give ye the blow where ye sit.' The man of the moors was not slow in attempting to rise; the brawny arm of a brother shepherd, which clutched his gorget with a grasp equal to the tethering of a bull, alone retarded his rising. 'Let him alone, I say, Sandie; just let him alone,' said the shepherd; 'be civil at a douce man's hearth before his weelfaured daughter: ye ken the auld say, "Be the saint in the hall, and the devil on the greensward"—meaning, nae doubt, that we should carry our mischief out of doors. I'll stretch him as straight as one of his own furrows before an hour blow by, and on the same place too, the lily lea.' The wrath of the husbandman was turned on this doughty auxiliary, and, having a divided aim, it burnt fiercely between them, without harming either. Meantime, other tongues took part in the commotion: parochial nicknames, and family failings, and personal defects were bandied from side to side, with all the keenness of rustic wit and the malice of rivalry; while, on the whole, the maiden sat and looked as one would on a fire burning too fiercely to be quenched.
"It was not my wish to distinguish myself in this strife of tongues, and therefore I sat still, maintaining an expression of face which I hoped would carry me quietly through this stormy tide of contention. I was only deceiving myself.
"'And ye'll sit mute and motionless there, and hear the bonnie green hills of Annandale turned, by the malice of man's wit, into moudie-tammocks,' said a shepherd to me; 'up and speak, for I have spoken till I'm as hoarse as a raven; or rise and fight; if ye have not a tongue in your head, ye may have a soul in your body.'
"All turned their eyes on me at this address, and the uproar subsided for a time to hear my answer to this singular appeal.
"'A soul in his body,' shouted a rustic, in a tone which implied something like a suspicion of my right to the spark immortal, 'have ye not heard the scoffing sang that's ringing from side to side of the country? I wonder the subject of such verses presumed to show his face among sponsible folk!'
"And, to my utter shame and confusion of face, he proceeded to chant the following rude verse, looking all the while on me with an eye sparkling with scorn and derision:
'Oh, have ye not heard of John Ochiltree?
That dainty chield John Ochiltree?
The owl has a voice, and the cat an ee,
And so has sonsie John Ochiltree.
An ancient woman wonned in Colean,
She had never a tooth 'tween her lips but ane,
She mumbled her meat with a horn spoon,
Yet she fell in love with a bonnie new tune;
She bobbed on her crutches so frank and so free,
To the dainty tune of John Ochiltree.'
"As the verse ended, a laugh burst out which made the roof shake over our heads, to show how fickle men's passions are and the mortification I was doomed to endure. To be the subject of ludicrous rhymes is to have an infection about one equal to the plague. My fellow- suitors shunned me, and the capricious maiden herself assumed an air so haughty and decided that I saw my cause was cureless. All this was witnessed by one who sympathized in my sufferings, and whose ready wit suggested an instant remedy. The milkiness of my nature had already given way to the accumulating reproach; I had started to my feet, and taken one stride towards my rhyming persecutor with a clenched fist, and a face burning in anger, when the young girl who brought me the invitation to this unlucky tryste uttered a scream, and, holding up her hand, laid her ear to the floor like one listening intensely. We all stood mute and motionless: she darted to the door with the rapidity of light, returned in a moment half-breathless, and exclaimed in a voice of seeming despair, 'Oh! Bess, Bess, what will become of ye? Here's Hazelbank—here's our ain father coming up the road. If he sees what I see, he'll burn Solway, be it for him or against him.'
"Like a brood of chickens when the hawk descends, so started, so fluttered, and so flew in all directions this meeting of rivals; the door seemed far too narrow for escape. Seven bounded over the stackyard dike, and three leaped over a quickset hedge six feet high; two ran down the middle of a cornfield, with half the dogs of the place pursuing them; and two, who were strangers, in the haste of escape, fairly leaped into a pond, or small lake, and made good their retreat by swimming to the opposite side. In one minute the clamorous hall of Hazelbank was as mute as a kirk at midnight. As I hastened to retreat with the others, a white hand twitched me cunningly by the sleeve, and pulled me aside into a little closet, where two very warm and ripe lips whispered close in my ear, 'Let the gowks flee, they know not the goose's quack from the eagle's cry; my father's far from home.' And, shutting the chamber-door as she spoke, my bonnie and discreet messenger added, 'My sister Bess is in her grand moods this night; she carries her head o'er high, and winna speak to ye, for the foolery of that silly sang. A pretty thing, to lose a weelfaured lad for the sake of an idle rhyme: sae bide with me; I am almost as tall as Bess is, and I'll be fifteen at midsummer.'
"And now," said this representative of the rustic name of Ochiltree, "I shall stay my narrative; feeling something of the distress of a traveller who comes to the shedlands of sundry roads, and knows not which one to elect; for the adventures which befell me were manifold, and seem in my sight all alike curious and important. But I cannot expect douce grey-headed folk will listen to the idle tales of youthful times. I might have made far more imposing stories of my misadventures among the maidens, for they are not unsusceptible of poetical embellishment; but I despise fictions, and laugh at 'the idly feigned poetic pains' of metre ballad-makers; I abide by the old proverb, 'truth tells aye best.'"
"Truth tells aye best indeed," re-echoed an ancient dame, as she sat by the hall fire, "and yet idle fictions and the embellishments—I think that's the word ye used—of a poetic fancy seem to flow off as glibly as the current of truth itself. Ah! thou auld-farrand ane, dost thou think to pass off the pleasant inventions of thy own fertile brain for the well-known tales of thy early courtship? Ah, my lad"—and she eyed him with a look where humour and seriousness seemed striving for mastery—"ye are kenned where ye least hope it; far kenned and noted is thy name, as the rhyme-maker said of Satan. And so ye say you are John Ochiltree, and suffered in your youth from maiden's scorn and minstrel's sang? A bonnie tale, indeed! D'ye think I don't know the merry goodman of Dootagen, Simon Rodan by name, whom I have known since he was the height of a pint-stoup. More by token, he plundered my plum-trees when he was a boy, and climbed in at my chamber windows afore the beard was on his chin, and all to woo three of my servant maidens, and my own cousin, bonnie Jeanie Carruthers. Scorned by the lasses, indeed! Mickle scorn have they endured for thee. Ah! thou flatterer and bonnie tale-teller. Many a good advice hast thou received from the parish minister and elders, in full session assembled. A lad the like of Simon Rodan, with all the failings he had, was not to be seen in seven hours' riding. A straighter or a more taper leg never set its foot in a black leather shoe; and it's not much the worse o' the wear yet."