Part 21 (2/2)

And because of David Balfour I walked a little way into Mull, which still must look as he saw it, for except for the roadway it looked as though I were the first who had ever ventured that way since time and these rough granite heaps began.

”Sing me a song of a lad that is gone, Say, could that lad be I?

Merry of soul he sailed on a day Over the sea to Skye.

”Mull was astern, Rum on the port, Egg on the starboard bow; Glory of youth glowed in his soul: Where is that glory now?

”Give me again all that was there, Give me the sun that shone!

Give me the eyes, give me the soul, Give me the lad that's gone!”

CHAPTER X

THE LAKES

All the world goes to the Trossachs. Yet there are only two kinds of people who should go, and they are as widely separated as the poles; those who are content and able to take the Trossachs as a beautiful bit of the world, like any lake or mountain country which is unsung, and then they will not take it but merely look at it; and those who know the Trossachs as theirs, The Trossachs, who can repeat it all from--

”The stag at eve had drunk his fill Where danced the moon on Monan's rill, And deep his midnight lair had made In lone Glenartney's hazel shade.

On to

”The chain of gold the king unstrung The links o'er Malcolm's neck he flung Then gently drew the golden band And laid the clasp in Ellen's hand.”

Half knowledge is exasperating to those who have whole knowledge; and half love--half love is maddening, should lead to ma.s.sacre by those whose love is all in all.

I cannot remember when I did not know ”The Lady of the Lake”--which, of course, is the Trossachs. It is as though I knew it when I first knew speech, lisped in numbers and the numbers came. It was the first grown-up book I ever owned, and I own the copy yet. It is not a first edition, this my first and only edition. I presume that in those far away days when it was given to me, ”a Christmas gift”--I always chose to receive it from my Scottish grandmother, though she had been dead thirty years before I came--I might have had a first edition for a song; but the preciousness of first editions had not yet become a fetich. Since then I have looked with respect and affection on that impress of ”1810.”

I have never looked on it with longing. So much better, that first edition of mine, an ordinary sage-green cloth-bound book, with ornamental black and gold t.i.tle, such as the inartistic Eighties sent forth; I do like to note that the year of its imprint is the year of my possession. It has not even a gilt edge, I am pleased to state. The paper is creamy, the ink is not always clear. And because it went through one fire and flood, the pages have little brown ripples, magic marginal notes. There is not a penciled margin in the whole volume.

That, in a book owned by one who always reads with a pencil in hand, is beyond understanding! And yet it was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea. Memory was tremendously active then, not quite the memory of a Macaulay, but still one reading, or at least one and a half, was sufficient to thrust the rimes of these two-edged couplets into unsurrendering possession. Criticism was in abeyance; there is not even a mark among the notes. I cannot be certain that I read them. Who reads notes at the age of eight?

I remember how my acquaintance began with ”The Lady of the Lake,” even before I read it. In those days there was little literature for children, and there was prejudice against that which was provided. There was especial prejudice in my own household. I think my teacher in school may have shared it. If he were an adult he would read, ostensibly to us, but for himself, something he could tolerate. Yes, it was he; an exception in those days, for in the public schools men seldom taught in ”the grades.”

He must have been a young man, not more than nineteen or twenty, waiting to mature in his profession. And Scotch, as I think it now; not only because his name was Kennedy, but because of his Highland dark eyes and hair, and because of certain uncanny skill in mathematics--as I thought who had not even a moiety--and because, oh, very much because, of the splendid tussle he had--tulzie! that's the word--a very battle royal to my small terrified fascinated vision, there on the school-room floor, with the two Dempsey boys, who were much older than the rest of us; they must have been as old as fourteen! One merited the punishment and was getting it. The other, with clan loyalty, came to his rescue. And the Highlander, white to the lips, and eyes black-and-fire, handled them both.

Oh, it was royal understudy to the combat at Coilantogle ford--

”Ill fared it then with Roderick Dhu When on the field his targe he threw.”

_The Trossachs_

To write a guide to the Trossachs--that has been done and done more than once; done with much minutiae, with mathematics, with measurement; to-day it is possible to follow the stag at eve, and all the rest of it, in all its footsteps; to follow much more accurately than did even Sir Walter; to follow vastly more accurately than did James Fitz James.

For, in the first place, the world is not so stupendous a place as it was in the days of Fitz James, or of Sir Walter. The Rockies and the Andes have been sighted, if not charted, and beside them the Grampians look low enough. Yet, fortunately, the situation can never be ”beside them.” The most remembering traveler has crossed the seas and buried his megalomanian American memories, let it be hoped, in the depths of the Atlantic. Neither Rockies nor Andes carry so far or so rich memories.

Sir Walter has never projected an imaginary Roderick Dhu or a King errant into any of the majesty or loveliness of those empty lakes and mountains. I can imagine in what spirit the Pennells came to Loch Lomond and declared that it ”looked like any other lake.” Dr. Johnson was quite right, sir. ”Water is the same everywhere,” to those who think water is water.

Of course the traveler should not come upon the land by way of Lomond.

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