Chapter IV (2)

After sugar cane and doora, the chief product of the steaming, prolific Nile valley is the Fellaheen, who are not the descendants of the ancient Egyptians, a lineage justly claimed by the Copts, but who are the Egyptian people of to-day. The Fellah is the absolute creature of his environment, an offspring of Nile mud, and when he is working on his field, in the garments nature gave him, can hardly be distinguished from the soil. He is brown, well-built, enduring, with perfect teeth and excellent health. His home is a mud hut, with one room where he and his family eat, and another where they sleep, and a courtyard inhabited by the livestock of goats, donkeys, cocks and hens, pigeons, and a dog. It is thatched with palm branches or doora straw, and on the roof the dog will promenade in the daytime with great dignity, and from the roof, when the moon is shining, and thoughts occur to his mind, he will express himself to the other seventy-six dogs of the village who are on their roofs, and are also moved to speech, with the result that no European can sleep in the vicinity. Add a few vessels and mats by way of furniture to the inside of the hut, and build a mud jar on the top of the courtyard wall where the baby of the family can be put in safety, and the household equipment of the Fellah is complete. He is very ignorant, is not very keen about his religion, has no principles, except a habit of industry and a keen sense of property, and he has not one comfort or luxury of civilization, and not one political or national ambition. But he has all the clothes he needs, which certainly is not very much; he has plenty to eat, and for drink the endlessly delightful Nile water; he is very seldom cold, and he has sunshine from January to December, and from morning to night. Thanks to England, he is no longer dragged away to work upon canals and public enterprises without wages and without food, and to perish through toil and disease as his father did, but is now paid and cared for when working for the community. He is no longer in terror of the lash, and he is not robbed by his rulers; he gets justice at the courts, and is now being delivered from the hands of the money-lender, that terror of the East, by the excellent national bank which has been recently established, and which advances him money on reasonable terms. We pity him as we pass, toiling at his shadoof, or coming like a rabbit out of his burrow, because he works so hard and lives so plainly, and has no books and no vote, and no glass in his windows, and no cheap trips. But perhaps we had better reserve our pity for the home land. One does not see in the Arab village the ignoble squalor of a town slum, nor the dreary, hopeless poverty, nor the evil look of degraded people, nor the miserable intemperance. The Fellah does not stand very high in the evolution of society, and neither his wife nor his child is particularly fortunate; one would not wish to be a Fellah, but, at any rate, he does not know the pinch of want, he is on good terms with everybody, he has a ready joke, which perhaps it is better you do not understand, and a quick smile; he is a well-fed and contented animal.

The Fellah can be studied near at hand in your donkey boy, who is simply a Nile peasant quickened by contact with Europeans. Within five minutes he sizes you up with unerring judgment, and knows whether he can get baksheesh from you by annoyance, or will fare better by leaving you in peace; whether he can do as he pleases with you in the matter of speed, or whether it will be better to do as you tell him. Once you are on good terms with him--have learned the name of the donkey, approved the donkey's excellence and his own, and settled whether you are going to race or not--he settles down to make the journey agreeable both for himself and you. He will make jests about every little incident, join in the chorus of English songs, give information, such as he can, on antiquities, and delight to teach you Arabic. Suppose you have a long wait somewhere, and time is dragging, two of the junior donkey boys will improvise a play. They will get up a fight, and after cuffing one another in a way that would almost deceive you into the belief that they were serious, one will knock the other down, and the fallen hero will look as dead as Rames es the Great. A crowd will gather round him, lifting a leg or an arm, which falls heavily to the ground, raising his head, which rolls helplessly to the side. Horrified, they will then look at one another, and shake their heads; they will cover the dead man's face, and proceed to carry him home. By-and-by they will have a funeral, and convey the corpse to the cemetery with wailing and weeping, and after it has been solemnly laid to rest there will be a rapid and delightful resurrection. The mourners will turn a set of somersaults with extraordinary rapidity, the murderer and his victim will give a gymnastic exhibition, and then the whole company, having raised an enthusiastic hip, hip, hurrah! in applause for their own drama and as a genial tribute to the Anglo-Saxon race, will stand opposite you in a body with the most solemn countenance and demand baksheesh.

Like other folk, the donkey boys have their own trials, and I am still sorry for Hassan, who attended me for four days at Luxor, and with whom I became very friendly. His donkey was called Telephone, and was very strong, handsome, and well caparisoned, and had, indeed, only one vice, and that was that he would not go slowly, although the thermometer stood at 130 degrees in the sun, but insisted on leading the procession. Hassan had just married, and was never weary of describing the beauty and goodness of his sixteen-year-old bride, and he was greatly lifted when I sent home to her by his own hand a present of a silk headdress--I think at least that was what the silk would be used for--such as I was assured by a native friend the young women of that ilk greatly loved. Hassan parted with me in high spirits when I went up the river, and I promised that, on my third visit to Egypt, which will likely never take place, I would ride no other donkey but “Telephone,” and have no other footman but Hassan. And then tidings reached me at Assouan that the poor bridegroom had been drawn for the army. For thirteen years he would have to serve, partly in the regular forces, partly in the police, and for half the time he would be entirely separated from his wife, and perhaps for it all, and at the thought thereof and the terror of the army, and the unknown places and duties before him, there was great lamentation in Hassan's little home. So Hassan is by this time being drilled at Cairo, and soon will be a smart soldier in the Egyptian army; but up at Luxor his young wife will be mourning for him, and, alas! for an Eastern woman, she will be aged before Hassan returns. This is the shadow which hangs over the life of a Fellah.

XI.--THE RESTLESS AMERICAN

MANY Americans were good enough to call upon me before I had the pleasure of visiting their country, and many Americans have called since, and no American ever does me this honour without charging the very atmosphere of my study with oxygen, and leaving an impression of activity which quickens my slow pulses and almost reduces me to despair.

It is now several years ago that a tall, thin, alert man followed his card into my study with such rapidity that I had barely time to read it before my visitor was in the room.

“My name is Elijah K. Higgins, and I am a busy man. You are also busy and have no time to fool away. Four days is all I can give to the United Kingdom, and I wished to shake hands with you. Good-bye, I am off to Drumtochty.”

I calculate that Mr. Higgins spent thirty seconds in my study, and left the room so swiftly that I overtook him only at the front door. When I asked him if he knew where Drumtochty was, “Guess I do!” he said. “Got the route in my pocket, north-west from Perth, N.B.,” and in two seconds more he was whirling away in a fast hansom. As I returned to my study and imagined my visitor compassing Great Britain (I think he excluded Ireland, but I am not certain) in four days, I was for a moment roused from the state of comparative lethargy which we, in England, call work, and added six more engagements to my afternoon's programme. For days afterwards, and as often as I was tempted to rest in my chair, the remembrance of that whirlwind gave me a shock of new vigour. Sometimes a reaction would follow, and I humbly thanked Providence, although that was to write myself a weakling and a sluggard, that I was not bom in the country where Mr. Higgins lived and was at home.

Such lively experiences, which I often recall in jaded moments, prepare one for a visit or a re-visit to America, as a tonic gives a sluggish person an appetite for dinner, and it is bare justice to say that one's expectations of American energy in its own home have not been disappointed. If Americans, depressed by our heavy climate and our leisurely life, could yet maintain such a level of thought and motion, what might not be possible to them in their own country, where the atmosphere is charged with electricity, and every second man is a “hustler from way-back.” The stir of the New World affects the visitor and quickens his pulses as he goes up the Hudson and gets his first glimpse of New York. Your steamer had waited four hours at Queenstown for the mails, but the same mails were transferred to the United States tender as the steamer steams up the bay. Little tugs dart about on all sides with feverish speed, and larger steamers pass with their upper machinery indecently exposed, as if there had not been time, or it had not been worth while, to cover it. Buildings of incredible height line the shores, and suggest that the American nation, besides utilizing the ground, proposes also to employ the heavens for commercial purposes. It was, I think, a Texas paper which translated the austere saying, “_Per aspera ad astra_,” into “the hustler gets to heaven,” and certain New York builders seem now to be on the way. Whetted by this overture on the river, one is ready for the full music of the city; and I wish to pay the compliment with all honesty that New York, with the possible exception of Chicago, is the activest and noisiest place I have ever seen, or expect to see, in this present world. While an English merchant saunters down to his office between nine and ten, a New York man rises at half-past six in his suburb and is busy at work at eight o'clock. The Englishman takes off an hour during the day for luncheon at his club, while the American eats his meal in fifteen minutes. The Englishman spends more than another hour at afternoon tea, and gossip with friends, and sauntering about between his club and his office, while the American packs every minute with work. The very walk of an English merchant, slow, dignified, self-satisfied, and that of the American, rapid, eager, anxious--the one looking as if time were of no importance nor circumstances, and the other as if the loss of a minute might mean ruin--are the visible indices to the character of the nations. It is only yesterday that elevators were introduced into English city buildings, and there are many London offices to which you still have to make an Alpine ascent of four stairs; but a New Yorker regards a stair as a survival of barbarism, and hardly knows how to use it. The higher buildings have several sets of elevators, like the four tracks which railways lay down to work the swift and slow traffic.

“Don't go in there,” my friend said, with whom I was going to lunch at a club on the top floor of a many-storied New York building. “That's an accommodation elevator; stops, you know, at every station. This is the express for the top floor.”

“Would it have made much difference?” I said.

“Very nearly a minute,” as if the loss of the minute would have thrown us back for the rest of the day.

No man goes slow if he has the chance of going fast, no man stops to talk if he can talk walking, no man walks if he can ride in a trolley car, no one goes in a trolley car if he can get a convenient railway, and by-and-by no one will go by railway car if he can be shot through a pneumatic tube. No one writes with his own hand if he can dictate to a stenographer, no one dictates if he can telegraph, no one telegraphs if he can telephone, and by-and-by, when the spirit of American invention has brought wireless telegraphy into thorough condition, a man will simply sit with his mouth at one hole and his ear at another, and do business with the ends of the earth in a few seconds, which the same machine will copy and preserve in letter books and ledgers. It is the American's regret that at present he can do nothing with his feet while he is listening at the telephone, but doubtless some employment will be found for them in the coming age.

If a slow-witted and slow-moving Englishman desires a liberal education, let him take a journey of a month on the steam cars in the United States. No train in Europe travels as fast as certain American expresses, and if other trains go slower it is a matter of thankfulness, because they are less likely to kill passengers on level crossings, or in the main streets of the city along which they take their way, and cattle have more time to get off the unprotected tracks. As trains have also a trick of jumping the rails, either through the rails spreading or the eccentricity of the engine, both being instances of exuberant national vitality, it is just as well that every express does not go at the rate of the Empire State Express on the New York Central. Nowhere in Europe can a traveller find stronger or handsomer cars, and they are marvels of adaptability and convenience. There is a dining car, in order that you may not lose time at a station, and also, which is not unimportant, in order that you may be able to occupy your time with something practical on the train. Of course, there is a smoking compartment, where men can compare notes upon politics and business, and be able to escape from idleness and themselves. The best expresses have a reading car, where the American can pick up such morsels of information from the magazines as he can contain between the interstices of business. There is a desk where he can read his letters, and a typewriter to answer them, for this train is the American's sleep-ing-place and dining-place, and his home and his office. One thing only he regrets; the train, as it flies along, is not connected with the telegraph and the telephone, so that, as an idea occurs to him or he obtains a hint from a man in the smoking car, he might be able to do business with his correspondents in Chicago or San Francisco. While an Englishman on a railway journey is generally dressed in roughly and loosely fitting tweeds, suggestive of a country life and of sport, the coat of his American cousin is of dark material and has not a superfluous inch of cloth. From his collar to his neat little boot the American is prim, spick-and-span, and looks as if he had come out of a band-box and were ready to appear in the principal room of any office. He is dressed in fact for business, and looks like business from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet, while an Englishman's appearance suggests that he is going to see a cricket match or that he has retired to live upon a farm.

My countryman arrives at the station with two and a half minutes to spare, and laden with small baggage. A porter carries his rug and an ulster, very likely also a hat-box and a bag with books, papers, and such like in it, to say nothing of an umbrella and a mackintosh, and he secures his seat at the last moment. He fastens his hat above his head, puts on a travelling cap, changes into an ulster, if it be winter time, and throws a rug over his knee; he puts on travelling gloves, and gets out the Times, and he will sit without budging and read his _Times_ without intermission for fifty minutes. Besides these trifles with him in the carriage, he has a portmanteau in the van, which he hopes has been addressed, and which the porter promised to see put in, and he will scramble for it at his terminus along with a hundred other passengers, who are all trying to identify and extricate their luggage from a huge heap on the platform.

The American reaches the dépôt by a trolley car ten minutes at least before the hour of departure, having sent his heavy luggage, if he has any--which is not likely--by baggage express. His only personal equipment is a slim and compact valise, which, in regard to opening and shutting, is a marvel of convenience. This he carries in his hand, and places beneath or beside the seat which he has secured two days before. He does not carry a rug because the cars are heated, nor an umbrella because it is not the rainy season. His top coat he hangs up beside his seat, as if he were in his own house; and his hat if he so please. He does not wear a travelling-cap any more than in his own drawing-room, nor gloves in the train any more than in his own office. Should his hands be soiled, he goes to the lavatory where there are large basins and an ample supply of water, and if his coat be dusty, there is a negro porter in every car to brush it. The immense repose of the English traveller is quite impossible for this mercurial man, whose blood and whose brain are ever on a stir. Very rarely will you see him reading a book, because he is not accustomed to read, and the demands of a book would lessen his time for business meditation. Boys with newspapers circulate through the cars, and he buys each new paper as it appears at the different towns. Whether it be Republican, or Democratic, or a family paper or a yellow journal, does not matter to him; he glances at the startling headings, takes an accident or a political scandal at a mouthful, skims over the business news, sees whether anything has happened at the Philippines, notes that the canard of the morning has been contradicted in the afternoon, and flings paper after paper on the floor. Three minutes or, in cases of extreme interest, five minutes suffice for each paper, and by-and-by this omnivorous reader, who consumes a paper even more quickly than his food, is knee deep in printed information or sensation. For two minutes he is almost quiet, and seems to be digesting some piece of commercial information. He then rises hurriedly, as if he had been called on the telephone, and makes for the smoking-car, where he will discuss “Expansion” with vivid, picturesque speech, and get through a cigar with incredible celerity. Within fifteen minutes he is in his place again; and, a little afterwards, wearying of idleness, he is chewing the end of a cigar, which is a substitute for smoking and saves him from being wearied with his own company. Half an hour before the train is due at his station, he is being brushed, and getting ready to alight. Before the train has reached the outskirts of the town, he has secured his place in a procession which stands in single file in the narrow exit passage from the Pullman. Each man is ready dressed for business and has his valise in his hand; he is counting the minutes before he can alight, and is envying the man at the head of the procession, who will have a start of about two seconds. This will give him a great advantage in business, and he may never be overtaken by his competitors till evening.

Suppose he lands at 6 a.m., he will find breakfast ready in a hotel, and half a dozen men eating as if their lives depended upon finishing by 6.15 a.m. Before seven he will have disposed of a pile of letters, dictating answers to a typist attached to the hotel, he will have telegraphed in all directions, and made half a dozen appointments in the town by telephone. Within the forenoon he will finish his business and depart for some neighbouring town, lunching on the cars. The second town he will dispose of in the afternoon, and that evening go on board the sleeper to travel 400 miles to a third town, where he is going to negotiate a contract at 8 o'clock next morning. If you sympathize with him, and wonder how flesh and blood can stand the speed, he accepts your sympathy as a compliment, and assures you that he never sleeps so well as on the cars. He never seems to be out of sorts or out of temper: he is always thoroughly alive and quite good-natured. Sometimes he may seem for a moment annoyed, when he cannot telegraph as often as he wants along the line, or when the train is not on time, that he may make a connection. Nothing would wound him so deeply as to “get left,” and he can only affect to be unconscious when some one declares that he is “no slouch, and that there are no flies on him.” If he is obliged to spend two hours doing nothing in a hotel, when business is over, then he rocks himself and smokes, and it is a wonderful spectacle for an indolent Englishman to look down from the gallery that commands the hall of the hotel, and to see fifty able-bodied fellow-men who have worked already twelve hours, at least, and put eighteen hours' work into the time, all in motion. (One wonders why this motion is not utilized to drive something.) He discovers how unlike cousins may be, for an Englishman never moves unless he is obliged to or unless he wants to shoot something, and these remarkable men never rest unless when they are asleep. About that even, I am not sure, and I was often tempted to draw aside the curtain from a berth in a sleeping-car, and, had I done so, I should not have been at all surprised to find our friend wide awake with a cold cigar in his cheek, and rocking his knees for want of more extensive accommodation. He has always rebelled against the ancient custom of sleep, which he regards as a loss of time and an anachronism. All that he can do is to spend the night in a sleeping car, which, as he will tell you, annihilates time and space.

Foreigners travelling in the States in their innocence are amazed that a delicate-minded nation, like the Americans, should be willing to sleep after the fashion of the Pullman cars, and should not insist upon the Continental cabin-car. The reason for the Arcadian simplicity of the sections is not really economy, for no American would ever think twice of spending a dollar; it is simply their abounding and dominant energy. If you sleep in cabins at night, you must sit in cabins by day; and this would mean a seclusion and repose which are very distasteful to the high-strung American temperament. It would be like bottling up a volatile gas; and one imagines that it might lead to an explosion, which some day would break down the partitions and break up the car from end to end. The American must see everything in his car and hear everything, for which he depends upon the peculiar quality of the local voice; and he must be at liberty to prowl about his car, and to sit with his friends here and there. The car is his little world for the time, and he is not going to live in a backwater.

There seems no doubt that an American workman will do from twenty-five to thirty-three per cent, more than an Englishman in the same time, and that the higher wages of the American have their compensation for the capitalist in a workman's quickness of mind and sleight of hand. Everything goes at an accelerated speed, with wonderful inventions in labour-saving machinery and devices to economize time. If the great end of a nation be to do as much as possible in as short a time as possible, then the American climate has been practically arranged for that end. An Englishwoman living in the States becomes effervescent, and the native American is the brightest woman on the face of the earth. While the English atmosphere is heavy and soothing, and lends itself to thought and quietness, the American climate is exciting and exhilarating, and quickens both mind and body to the highest activity. It is an electric climate, and the electricity has passed into the people, who are simply vessels charged up to a certain number of volts. These vessels as sources of motive power can then be attached to pulpits, or offices, or workshops or politics. Of course, a day is apt to come when the vessels will have been completely discharged, and it arrives very frequently without warning. A little confusion in the head, and a slight numbness in the limbs, and the man has to go away a year to Colorado Springs or to Los Angeles. If he is fortunate, he can be recharged and run for another five or ten years; then nature does not give any warning, but simply stops the heart or darkens the brain, and you must get another man.

No one, unless he leaves the country or becomes a crank, can escape from this despotism of activity; he is part of the regiment and must march with his fellows. The idea of making a competency and then retiring, say, into the country, never crosses a man's mind. When you urge economy upon a man for this end, you have injured your case, and are pleading on the other side. With such a prospect before him, he is more than ever resolved to be a spendthrift. To seclude an active American in an old-fashioned country house, with ivy climbing round its Tudor windows, even although there should be a library of black oak inside and a rose garden outside, would be cruelty; it would be to imprison a squirrel in a golden cage. What greatly impresses the traveller in the United States is that the rich men work as hard and as long as the poor, and that they cannot even give attention to the affairs of their country, but are willing to leave them to the very doubtful management of the “Boss,” because it would not pay them to leave their business and go into politics. If the end of life be riches, then the clever American is a successful man, for in no country does a respectable man become so very rich, or rich so soon, and if not respectable he still may do fairly well. You cannot have everything, however, and one notes that the average rich man has paid a price for his dollars. He has read very little--his wife reads for him; he has travelled very little--his daughters travel for him. He has no voice in the State--professional politicians speak for him; he has no amusements, unless you include speculation; and he has no pleasant periods of rest, unless you accept as an equivalent comparatively early and sudden death, which often arises from acute indigestion. He has not time to stop and realize himself, unless, but this is a large exception, when he has dyspepsia. One reason, perhaps, why Americans do not rest is that given to me by a bright woman: “We are all so tired,” and the American is the victim of his own qualities.

One, of course, acknowledges the advantages of this amazing energy, and there are times when a stolid Englishman grows envious. A university in America is created in ten years and endowed to the extent of millions sterling, and equipped with chairs of which a European never dreamt, and laboratories which border upon palaces. Libraries and picture galleries are rising in every city, for which the treasuries of Europe have been ransacked; and, were it not for the restriction of governments, the Old Masters would have to be sought, not in Italy and England, but in New York and Chicago. New towns are designed upon a scale of magnificence, as if each were to be the capital of an empire, and are at least outlined in building within a few years. Should it be necessary, an army can be created within a few months, and in a couple of years a new trade can be established which will kill its European rivals. An English farmer with fifteen hundred acres is a considerable man, but an American can have fifteen thousand acres and his different farm buildings will be connected by telephone. A self-made man in England marries his daughter to a baronet and is much lifted; but the daughter of a self-made man in America will marry an English duke, and consider she has conferred a benefit. When you go to a Western town, you may be taken to see a university; if not, you are taken to a dry-goods store; each, in its own way, is the largest of its kind. Certainly, there are stores in America which have no rival in the Old World, and which you are expected to visit with the same appreciation as the Duomo of Florence.

There is almost nothing that the United States does not possess, except political purity, and nothing which an American cannot do, except rest; and in the conflict with foreign competition, he has almost discounted victory. Whether he be able, that is, patient and thorough in the discovery of principles, may be a question; that he is clever, by which one means bright and ingenious in turning principles to account, is beyond all question. If America has not yet had time to produce a Lord Kelvin, it has given us telephones; and if Professor Dewar has astonished the world with his liquid air, an American trust is, it is said, being formed to handle it for commercial purposes. If we are thought to be dull and slow, as we travel among the most stimulating and hospitable people on the face of the earth, let some excuse be made for us and let our hosts share the blame. An Englishman in the United States is half dazed, like one moving amid the ceaseless din and whirling wheels of a huge manufactory, where the voice has to be raised to a shriek, and a sentence compressed into a single word. He goes home greatly humbled in his estimation of himself, and in low spirits about the commercial future of his country. He has no bitterness, however, within his heart, for are not these people of his own blood, and are not their triumphs his, even if they threaten to outrun his own nation in the race of productive commerce? And when he comes back to England, has he not his compensations, Stratford-on-Avon, and Westminster Abbey, and the greenery of the Home Counties, and the lights and shadows of the Scots Lochs, and the musical voices of the English women, and the quiet, contented, cultured English homes?

XII.--A SCOT INDEED

HE had demanded that afternoon to be told the truth, and the doctor, himself a young Scot, had told him plainly that he could not recover, and then he had asked, as one man speaking to another, both being brave and honest men, when he would die, and the doctor thought early next morning.

“Aboot daybreak,” said the Scot, with much satisfaction, as if, on the whole, he were content to die, and much pleased it would be at the rising of the sun. He was a characteristic type of his nation, rugged in face and dry of manner, an old man, who had drifted somehow to this English city and was living there alone, and now he was about to die alone, without friends and in a strange land. The nurse was very kind to him, and her heart went out to the quiet, self-contained man. She asked him whether he would like to see a clergyman, and explained that the chaplain of the infirmary was a good man.

“A've nae doubt he is,” said the Scot, “and that his meenistrations would be verra acceptable to English fouk, but a've never had ony dealin's wi' Episcopalians. He micht want to read a prayer, and I couldna abide that, and mebbe I couldna follow the texts in his English tongue.”

The nurse still lingered by his bed. He looked up to her and assured her he was in no need of consolation. “Saxty year ago my mither made me learn the wale (choice portions) o' the Bible, and they're cornin' up ane by ane to my memory, but I thank ye kindly.”

As the nurse went back and forward on her duties she heard her patient saying at intervals to himself, “I know whom I have believed.”

“I am persuaded that neither life nor death.” Once again she heard him, “Although the mountains depart and the hills be removed,” but the rest she did not catch.

During the afternoon a lady came into the ward whose service to the Lord was the visitation of the sick, a woman after the type of Barnabas and Mary of Bethany. When she heard of the old man's illness and his loneliness, whom no friend came to see or comfort, she went to his bedside. “You are very ill,” she said, “my friend.”

“A'm deein',” he replied, with the exactness of his nation, which somewhat fails to understand the use of graceful circumlocution and gentle phrases.

“Is there anything I can do for you? Would you wish me to sing a few verses of a hymn? Some sick people feel much comforted and soothed by singing; you would like, I think, to hear 'Rock of Ages,'” and she sat down by his bedside and opened her book, while a patient beyond, who had caught what she said, raised his head to enjoy the singing.

“Ye're verra kind, mem, and a'm muckle obleeged to ye, but a'm a Scot and ye're English, and ye dinna understand. A' my days have I been protestin' against the use o' human hymns in the praise o' God; a've left three kirks on that account, and raised my testimony in public places, and noo would ye send me into eternity wi' the sough of a hymn in my ears?”

For a moment the visitor had no reply, for in the course of all her experiences, during which she had come across many kinds of men and women, she had never yet chanced upon this kind of Scot. The patients in the infirmary were not distinguished by their religious scruples, and if they had scruples of such a kind they turned on large and full-blooded distinctions between Protestant and Catholic, and never entered into subtleties of doctrine.

“You'll excuse me, mem, for a'm no ungratefu',” he continued, “and I would like to meet yir wishes when ye've been so kind to me. The doctor says I canna live long, and it's possible that my strength may sune give way, but a'll tell ye what a'm willin' to do.”

The visitor waited anxiously to know what service he was going to render her and what comfort she might offer to him, but both were beyond her guessing.

“Sae lang as a've got strength and my reason continues clear, a'm prepared to argue with you concerning the lawfulness of using onything except the Psalms of David in the praise of God either in public or in private.”

Dear old Scot, the heir of many a covenanting tradition and the worthy son of covenanting martyrs, it was a strange subject of discussion for a man's last hour, but the man who could be true to the jots and tittles of his faith in pain of body and in face of death was the stuff out of which heroes and saints are made. He belonged to a nation who might sometimes be narrow and over-concerned with scruples, but which knew that a stand must be taken somewhere, and where it took a stand was prepared to die.

The visitor was a wise as well as gracious woman, and grasped the heart of the situation. “No, no,” she said, “we will not speak about the things wherein we differ, and I did not know the feeling of the Scots about the singing of the hymns. But I can understand how you love the Psalms and how dear to you is your metrical version. Do you know I have been in the Highlands of Scotland and have heard the Psalms sung, and the tears came into my eyes at the sound of the grave, sweet melody, for it was the music of a strong and pious people.”

As she spoke the hard old Scot's face began to soften, and one hand which was lying outside the bedclothes repeated the time of a Scots Psalm tune. He was again in the country church of his boyhood, and saw his father and mother going into the table seats, and heard them singing:

“O thou, my soul, bless God the Lord,
And all that in me is
Be stirred up His holy name
To magnify and bless.”

“More than that, I know some of your psalm tunes, and I have the words in my hymn book; perhaps I have one of the Psalms which you would like to hear.”

“Div ye think that ye could sing the Twenty-third Psalm--

'The Lord's my Shepherd, I'll not want'?

for I would count it verra comfortin'.”

“Yes,” she said, “I can, and it will please me very much to sing it, for I think I love that psalm more than any hymn.”

“It never runs dry,” murmured the Scot.

So she sang it from beginning to end in a low, sweet voice, slowly and reverently, as she had heard it sung in Scotland. He joined in no word, but ever he kept time with his hand and with his heart, while his eyes looked into the things which were far away.

After she ceased he repeated to himself the last two lines:

“And in God's house for evermore
My dwelling place shall be.”

“Thank ye, thank ye,” he said, after a little pause, and then both were silent for a few minutes, because she saw that he was in his own country, and did not wish to bring him back by her foreign accent.

“Mem, ye've dune me the greatest kindness ony Christian could do for anither as he stands on the banks of the Jordan.”

For a minute he was silent again, and then he said: “A'm gaein' to tell ye somethin', and I think ye'll understand. My wife and me wes married thirty-five years, and ilka nicht of oor married life we sang a psalm afore we gaed to rest. She took the air and I took the bass, and we sang the Psalms through frae beginning to end twal times. She was taken frae me ten year ago, and the nicht afore she dee'd we sang the Twenty-third Psalm. A've never sung the psalm since, and I didna join wi' ye when ye sang it, for a'm waitin' to sing it wi' her new in oor Father's hoose the momin's momin', where there'll be nae nicht nor partin' evermore.”

And this is how one Englishwoman found out that the Scot is at once the dourest and the tenderest of men.

XIII.--HIS CROWNING DAY

WE will leave the main road which runs through the Glen between oak trees which were planted fifty years ago, but are only now beginning to join their branches, and take our way up the hillside till we come to the purple sea of heather whose billows rise and fall, broken only here and there by an oasis of green or a running burm. Our goal is this little cottage which is so low that its roof merges into the hill behind, and upon whose thatch the wild flowers have encroached. Stoop, if you please, for it is not wise to have high doorways where the winter storm beats so fiercely, and being respectable people, we shall be taken into the inner room, where strangers of high degree are received and the treasures of the family are kept. It will not take long to give an inventory of the furniture, and the value will not run to two figures. A box bed, a small table, four ancient chairs, what they called a chest of drawers, and on the mantelpiece some peacocks' feathers by way of decoration, and certain china ornaments representing animals which never have been seen in this creation, and are never likely to emerge in any process of evolution. Were this all, I should not have troubled you to climb so far, or to leave even for five minutes the glory of the open moor. There is something else in the lowly room which you might well take a journey to see, for it is a rare sight in shepherds' cottages. Here is a bookshelf, and on it, I declare, some dozen volumes bound in full calf, and bearing on one side the arms of a University. You must revise your judgment of this house, and find another measure than the height of the walls and the cubic space in the rooms. It matters not although a house have thirty chambers, with lofty ceilings and soft carpets and carved furniture; if there be no books which belong to literature within its walls it is a poor and narrow home, and the souls therein are apt to be mean and earthly.

While you are looking at the books the shepherd's wife is looking at you. From the moment you crossed the threshold she has been thinking of that bookshelf, and hoping you would take notice thereof, but not for the world would she have mentioned it by word or sign. We had our own code of manners in the Glen, and one of our cardinal sins was “blowing,” by which we meant boasting; and while a man though perhaps not a woman, could be forgiven for “tasting,” there was no mercy shown to the person who allowed himself to brag. When, for instance, old David Ross's son became a professor, his father and mother simply allowed the glorious fact to ooze out through Domsie, who certainly had no scruple in making the most of it, and neither the father nor mother ever said Professor in public, although we believe they called their son nothing else between themselves; but the Glen made up for their reticence by decorating every second sentence about him with the word. All the same, Mistress McPherson is watching us keenly, and she would be utterly disappointed if we had overlooked the shelf; and now, in answer to our inquiry, she will take us into the kitchen and place us by the fireside, that we may hear the story of her scholar son, which, indeed, is the one romance in the history of this humble family.

One morning John left the cottage to go to school, a shepherd's boy, and likely, as it appeared, to herd sheep and live in the Glen all the days of his life as his father had done before him. In the evening the schoolmaster, who is the judge of letters in the Glen, with the minister as a court of confirmation, came up and told the father and mother that in the purposes of the Eternal their son was evidently destined to be a scholar, and that upon them lay the duty of seeing that John made his calling and election sure. Had tidings come to those two people, whose wage in money would not amount to ten shillings a week, that they were heirs to a fortune, it would not have brought such pleasure to their souls as the good hope that their lowly stock would once at least in a generation produce the white flower of a scholar's life. The whole family, father and mother, with their grown-up sons and daughters in service, will now unite in one labour--to save and to sacrifice, that by hook or crook their brother may reach a university, and be sustained in his study there till he has reached its reward. Four years from that evening, had you been standing under the great arch by which students enter the quadrangle of Edinburgh University, you had seen the shepherd's son pass in, plainly dressed and shy in manner, but strong of body and brave in soul, and charged with all the knowledge that his schoolmaster and his minister could impart by patient, ungrudging labour. The lad before him is a noble's son, and the one following is a merchant's, and so sons of the rich and of the poor, of the high and of the low, they go together, into the one Republic on the face of the earth, the Republic of Letters, where money does not count, nor rank, nor influence, nor intrigue, but where every man stands equal and the best man wins.

Another four years and John has obtained his degree, a double first, and he writes to the cottage on the side of the hill that the two old people must come up to see him crowned. For six weeks before the day his mother has just one consuming anxiety, and that is what she should wear on the occasion, and it is only after fifteen long deliberations with her gossips in the Glen that the great affair is settled, while the father's mind is wholly taken up on Sundays with the effort to look as if he were not the father of a graduate.

When the shepherd and his wife enter the gates of the University, they are not to be thought of as two illiterate peasants who cannot distinguish between a University and a dry-goods store. Although they had never themselves expected to see so high a place, and had only cherished it as a secret hope that perhaps one of their boys might attain so far, they have learned by the tradition of their nation, and by the speech of Domsie in the kirk-yard on Sabbath, to enter into the greatness of a university. It is to them the home of the highest knowledge, and a sacred place to which reverend people might well go up as a pious Moslem to Mecca or a Jew to Jerusalem. As they cross the quadrangle, the shepherd touches his wife, and points to an elderly gentleman in the distance. They follow him with respectful attention as he shambles along, half a dozen books under his arm, his shabby cloak held by a single button, a hat as old as Jamie Soutar's resting on the back of his head.

“Keep's a', Jeems,” whispers Janet respectfully “Div ye really think that he's a professor?”

“We canna be sure, woman; he micht juist be a scholar, but I am judgin' that he's a professor--he hes a' the appearance.”

And the two old people stand still in the bit till he disappears, and then they go on their way much lifted. Outside religion there is no word in Scots speech so sacred as “professor.” It means a semi-heavenly body charged with Latin and Greek philosophy and mathematics. It was something to see such a man, and to be in his company was living in an atmosphere where you might catch the infection of his learning. When a glensman, to whom Domsie had spoken of professors with bated breath for more than a generation, learned that in southern parts the title was assumed by hairdressers and ventriloquists, and that they were not sent to gaol for profanity, then Drumtochty discovered another argument for its favourite doctrine of original sin.

As the two go down the half-lit passage to the hall of graduation, they are met by a majestic figure--a young man in evening dress, and over it the gown of an M.A., with its white silk hood, and on his head the Master's cap.

“Are you coming, may I ask,” said he, with quite a nice English accent, to the graduation ceremony, “and can I be of any service?”

“We are, sir; and as we are strangers frae the country, we would be muckle obleeged if ye could shew us the door. We dinna want to go where the gentry are sittin', but if ye would juist tak' us where we could see, we'd be content and terrible pleased. There's a... friend to get his degree to-day, and my man and me would like to see him.”

“Mither,” said the figure, “and ye dinna ken yir ain son,” for he had taken them in well, and played his little trick with much success. They had never seen him in evening dress, nor in his Master's robe, and the light was as darkness; besides, he had dropped the accent of the Glen. The father and the son laughed together joyfully at Janet, but she declared that she had known him all the time, and put it to them if a mother could be mistaken about her son. But she didn't know him all the same, and as long as she lived it was a pleasant jest between them when he came north to visit them, and she met him at the garden gate. “Well, mither,” he would say, “div ye ken yir son the day?”

Janet was well pleased that one should tease her in after times about this ploy of John's, for it always gave her an opportunity of describing how handsome he looked in his black and white silk, and of stating that she. Mistress McPherson, wife of James McPherson, shepherd at Camashach, considered the dress of a Master of Arts the handsomest that a man could wear.

John took his father and mother into the hall, and placed them in the seats reserved for the friends of graduates, and while a man has various moments of pure joy in his life, there is none sweeter than when he brings his mother to see him crowned at the close of his university career. For in this matter he owes everything to two people--the schoolmaster who taught him and the mother who inspired him.

“Now, mither, you watch that door yonder, for through it the procession will come; and when ye see the men wi' the white silk hoods, ye'll ken that I'm there, and ye'll surely no mistake me again.”

He was so provoking, and he looked so handsome with the flush of the day upon his cheek, that, as he stooped over her, she was about to give him a little shove and tell him not to give “any more impi-dence to his auld mither,” when she remembered where she was sitting, and the grand folk round her, and so she only answered with a demure nod of intelligence.