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Ebook has 2308 lines and 129723 words, and 47 pages

CHAP.

OLIVER ELLIS.

BOYHOOD.

"When is a man the arbiter of his own destiny? for he is like the leaf which is torn from a tree, and which the wind of heaven blows about."

Love of country, a noble sentiment, is ever strong in the heart of a true soldier. When the 67th, or South Hampshire regiment, commanded by Callender of Craigforth, landed at Portsmouth in 1772, after a long career of dangerous foreign service, with one accord and impulse the whole of the men threw themselves on the beach and kissed the pebbles.

I was born in the camp of Burgoyne's army when it was on the borders of Lake Champlain: thus, the first sounds to which my infant ears became accustomed were the rattle of the drum, the notes of the Kentish bugle, the tread of marching feet, and the thoughtless hilarity of my father's comrades.

I remember myself first as a little boy, the pet and plaything of the soldiers, who made bats and balls, tops and toys for me; who allowed me to ride on their backs, and to hold on by their queues, whenever I had a mind to do so; who told me old stories of Wolfe's days, of the siege of Belleisle, and of wild adventures in West Florida. I remember of marches from town to town, from camp to barrack, and from fort to fort--all of which seem like dreams to me now; while the troops trod on, through clouds of summer dust or the deep snows of an American winter, and I with other regimental imps, sat merrily and cosily perched on the summit of a baggage-waggon, among trunks, arm-chests, knapsacks, pots, kettles, and soldiers' wives, who smoked, sung, and swore occasionally, and bantered the escort who marched on each side, with bayonets fixed. A thousand childish incidents of the soldiers' kindness to me when a boy , are lingering in my memory, while many a more important event of the days and years between that time and this, is forgotten for ever.

After this bereavement, my mother returned home with her two children , and, renting a small cottage, about a mile from her native town, lived the quiet and secluded life that the scanty pension of a captain's widow allotted her.

I was two years older than dear little Lotty, who was a pretty black-eyed girl, with a fair skin, and great masses of dark-brown hair.

The pretty village in which we resided lay at the bottom of a dell, which, in shape, resembled a great natural basin. Its sloping sides were clothed with luxuriant wood. Above the ancient trees, the old grey belfry of the village church--a church in which Knox had preached and the Covenant was signed--peeped forth from a mass of ivy that clambered to its weathercock. Through the dell brawled a rapid stream, which came foaming down from the mountains, and turned the great mossy wheel of an ancient mill, which, with the blue-slated manse, the quaint old kirk, and the ruined fragment of a haunted tower, wherein, as legends averred, a spectre wandered and treasure was buried, formed the four principal features in the valley.

The stream where the spotted trout lurked in the deeper holes, or shot to and fro in the sunbeams, was crossed by a little bridge, which, in my boyhood, I considered a great work of art, though, in after-years, I was astonished to find it so diminutive. The rush of the mill-race, as it poured in white foam over a wooden duct; the voices of the children that played on the green before the village school; the ceaseless clink of the hammer in the forge, which formed the rendezvous of all the male gossips; the occasional note of a blackbird or a cushat dove from the coppice,--were the only sounds that were heard in our valley, save when the tolling of the church bell announced the Sunday, when the air was hushed and still, "and even the forest leaves seemed stirred with prayer."

Though little more than a mile from a large and populous city, our hamlet was as secluded as if it had been twenty leagues distant. No thought had we then of railroads, electric wires, or Atlantic cables; and even the stage-coach passed far from our wooded locality.

Our cottage was neat and small: it was situated on a slope of the dell which faced the south, and was buried among the woodbine, clematis, and sweetbrier, which covered all its rustic porch, grew around the windows, and clambered over the chimney-tops.

I can yet, in memory, see the little parlour in which we used to sit in the long nights of winter, by the cheerful fire, above which hung my father's sword and old gilt gorget, with two engravings of General Wolfe and the Marquis of Cornwallis in full uniform, with white breeches and kevenhuller hats; and where we spent the calm evenings of summer, when the light lingered long in the blushing west, and the perfume of the sweetbrier, the wild roses, the ripening fields, and of the fragrant earth, on which the dew was descending, were borne through the open windows; while my mother--her grey hair smoothly banded under a spotless white cap, her black dress and meek sweet face making her look so like a picture, her work-basket and knitting apparatus at hand--read to Lotty and me, or spoke of scenes and adventures she had seen when far away from our present quiet locality, as she had an excellent memory for anecdotes and a refined literary taste. Thus she became our sole preceptress.

Save old Dr. Twaddel, the minister, and the village doctor, we had no neighbours, and consequently few visitors.

My mother spoke seldom of our father; but we could see by the current of her thoughts that they rarely ran on aught else than his memory. Hopes she had none, save those that were centred on us.

So, for seven years, the blameless tenor of our even life rolled on.

My mother's quiet gentleness and soft ladylike manner, together with her kindness to the poor of the village, the sick and dying, among whom she shared her widow's mite--the mite that in heaven shall become a talent of price,--caused her to be tenderly loved by all; and I repent me now, even after the long lapse of many stirring years, that in her latter days, the tears that rolled over her pale and fast-furrowing cheeks were caused by my errors, and it may be, my selfish and resentful pride.

THE MINISTER.

Time sped the faster that it sped unmarked; and now I had reached that most important and unpleasant period of a boy's life, when the necessity for increased action arrives; and a period it too generally proves to all the delusions, the dreams, and the charms of childhood--I mean the time when grave old gentlemen begin to question us categorically, and, as it often seems, somewhat intrusively, upon our future plans, and to impress upon us the necessity of "doing something for ourselves."

My mother, who had frequently spoken with me on this subject, and seen with regret how my thoughts turned towards the army, of which she had now a terror, as being the too probable means of separating us for ever, resolved to consult Dr. Twaddel, the minister, on the subject; and in Scotland, "the minister" is always esteemed the second person in the parish; so to this consultation I consented, with some outward reluctance and considerable mental repugnance.

Our minister was a good kind of man in his own quiet way, though his excessive views of uprightness and propriety, together with certain severe lectures he had read me for making midnight raids into his orchard, for shooting one of his hens with a penny cannon on the King's birthday , and for burning "Johnnie Wilkes" in effigy in the churchyard, had made him somewhat of a bugbear to me. He made indifferent sermons, but capital whisky negus, and could take a comfortable share thereof, though eschewing all hearty mirth or levity, and adopting in his deportment that somewhat too solemn gravity and cold, hard external rigidity, with which the mass of the Scottish Lowlanders are tinged, and which makes their most sunny summer Sunday a day of gloom and silence. Like the majority of the northern clergy, he was a humble, meek, and well-meaning man, who, though he preached incessantly against the nothingness of this world and the good things thereof, had taken especial care to provide himself with a remarkably well-dowered helpmate. Without brilliance of talent, he possessed just heart enough to find favour with the poor of his flock; and head enough to accomplish his Sunday task, by emitting a hazy sermon on some old scriptural text, which no one cared a jot about. Yet he was a good man withal, our old parish minister.

I remember, on one occasion, while he was commencing his sermon in the gloomy little village church, an old man propping himself on a staff entered the aisle, and being a stranger, he looked wearily and wistfully round for a seat. Being clad in rather dilapidated garments, and having a canvas wallet for alms, such as meal and broken bread, no attention was paid to him, either by the pew-openers or the congregation. The old man tottered along the aisle, and was about to seat himself humbly on the lower step of the pulpit stair, when the portly minister, with a glance of honest indignation on all around him, descended from the pulpit, and taking the aged mendicant by the hand, led him to his own pew, and placed him on a well-cushioned seat, beside his wife and family, to the no small discomfiture of the Misses Twaddel.

This silent rebuke was worth a thousand homilies; it powerfully affected the whole congregation; and from that moment, the minister, though usually cold and reserved, completely won the esteem of my mother. To consult him on my affairs, we repaired to the manse, which was a handsome and comfortable modern villa, separated from the village church by an orchard and the humble burying-ground, in which "the rude forefathers of the hamlet slept." We were speedily ushered into his presence in a snugly-curtained, richly-carpeted, and fashionably-furnished room, which was so large, that our little cottage might have stood within it altogether. He received us rather kindly than politely, as he had a great esteem for my mother, though, since the advent of the felonious appropriation of a dozen of golden pippins and the slaughter of his best-laying hen, none whatever for me; and while he reclined in an easy-chair and played with a large bunch of gold seals in one hand, or polished his bald head impatiently with the other, my mother, in a voice that was rendered tremulous by her maternal love and anxiety, briefly stated her wishes "concerning her boy Oliver."

After letting her relate her own story unaided, he rather sharply asked me what views I had for myself.

I glanced timidly at my mother; for although now nearly sixteen, I felt like a child in her presence; and at that moment, the influences of her faded cheek, her widow's cap, with its modest crimping, and her sweet sad face, were not lost upon me, though my proud spirit writhed under the humiliation of consulting even such a parish potentate as the minister, concerning me or my affairs.

"What views have you for yourself, sir?" reiterated the minister.

"What, sir--speak out!" continued the divine, authoritatively.

"Well, then, I wish to be a soldier."

"A soldier--whew!" he reiterated, with a tinge of surprise and contempt in his tone.

"Like my father before me."

"And leave your poor mother alone in her old age, you ungrateful loon! you should add that," he added, bending his stern grey eyes angrily upon me.

I shrunk at these words, and was silent, for they found an accusing echo in my heart.

"Could you endure his absence, Mrs. Ellis?"

"Alas!" said my poor mother, with her eyes full of tears, "adversity has taught me to endure all things patiently--a bitter art to cultivate; but such a separation would be the hardest of all."

"Then we must put him to some respectable business, where hard work and long hours will knock all silly notions out of his head. What kind of business would you like, young man?"

"I do not know, sir."

"Then who should know, sir? But no doubt you despise all manner of business."

I was silent, and my mother gave me an imploring glance to remain so.

"You are a boy--a mere bairn yet," resumed the minister, in that contemptuous manner often adopted by testy old gentlemen to their juniors; "but the trials of life will teach you the hollowness of those romantic fancies which are fostered by novels, playbooks, and such-like literary trash, of which, I doubt not, you have devoured over many already. You wish to be happy?"

"Of course, sir," said I, with a sigh of impatience; for all this sounded uncomfortably like a lecture, or a scrap of the doctor's sermons.

"Then you will find that it most truly consists in bestowing happiness on others."

I pondered over this remark, for I was too young to understand the application of it.

"Do you know the origin of happiness?" continued the minister.

I could have said, Plenty of money and fun--a fine house, a fine horse, and so forth; but I was silent, or merely said, "No."

"Then hark you, Master Oliver Ellis--the origin of happiness is contentment, and the resources of a mind humbled by the trials with which it pleaseth God to inflict us."

This cruel insinuation, so coldly uttered, cut me to the heart, and my mother's sad eyes involuntarily sought mine. She had often--too often in her sad and lonely hours--thought of the separation death might one day make between her penniless children and herself; but to hear it thus roughly alluded to, was too much for her, and the poor woman wept aloud.

The minister tried to console her by some hackneyed scriptural text: that man was made to mourn,--that he was sent into this world to be miserable, and had no business to be anything else; but this burst of emotion on her part stifled every secret aspiration and every strong wish in me, and I assented to any plan his reverence had to propose, resolving to leave to him the onerous office of opening up the path that was to lead me to fortune and to fame.

Hence, in one week after our visit to the manse, I found myself in Edinburgh, and perched on the leathern summit of a high three-legged stool, in the office of Messrs. Harpy, Quirky, and Macfarisee, solicitors, eminent alike for their "sharp practice" and acute manner of handling all troublesome or cloudy cases of insolvency.

MESSRS. HARPY, QUIRKY, AND MACFARISEE.

From the earliest period of which I can remember, I had fixed upon pursuing the career of a soldier. Notwithstanding the grim specimens I had seen of it, during my father's service in the States, I deemed it a life of glitter, change, and jollity--a chain of pleasures--a long and romantic panorama. I saw only scarlet and feathers, gold lace, the glitter of epaulettes and the flash of steel, with music and sunshine; and from amid this chaos came forth those airy castles and brilliant visions, which the mind of every imaginative and impulsive boy can fashion so readily--and too readily at times for his own peace; as such fragile creations are but ill calculated to stand the rough shock of awakening, or the stern realities of every-day life.

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