black cloak and soft black felt hat, who went about alone and rarely spoke to anyone. The other son, of whose personality I have no recollection, was a marine engineer. Like many Scotsmen of the same profession, he was engineer of a steamer trading on the China coast. The vessel, with a cargo of coolies, was caught in one of those typhoons so much dreaded in the China seas. The only safe course for a vessel in such a hurricane is to put out to sea, and avoid if possible being driven upon the rocky coast stretching northwards from Swatow to Fuchow. For some reason the vessel was unable to put out to sea, or having put out was driven back by the irresistible force of the wind. In order to give as many coolies as possible a chance to save their lives, it was necessary to hold the bow of the ship against the rocks by keeping full steam ahead. Bruce did so, and with great gallantry sacrificed himself. He was drowned in his engine-room. The elder Bruce, the smith, was reputed to be well off and stingy. He had been a widower for years, and had been attended by a man who was his factotum. One night during a heavy rainstorm the man went to his master's bedroom and complained that water was coming in through a hole in the roof and that his bed was unendurably moist. "Strike a light, John," said his master. John struck a light and found that his master was lying in bed under an umbrella upon which rain was falling through a hole in his roof. Bruce (calmly). "Dinna ye think, John, ye'd better do as Aw do?" I was told this story in the village shortly after the incident, and years afterwards someone told me of having heard the story told at a camp fire on the veldt in South Africa. Neither name nor place was mentioned by the story-teller; but some listener remarked, “I knew the man, his name was Bruce." Among my friends as a boy was Mrs. Craik of the Mill Farm, a pleasantly-situated house between the village and the old church of Aberdour. I often enjoyed her hospitable board and excellent cellar and listened to her quaint wisdom. She was a very handsome old lady with precise manners and a pretty wit. She had not travelled much since travelling became easy. In earlier years she had gone more or less frequently to Aberdeen-driving all the way (forty miles) in her own "gig." Shortly after the railway came within about fourteen miles of her farm she decided to make an excursion upon it to Aberdeen. When she arrived at the railway station of Strichen she found that she had forgotten her purse, a convenience which under the conditions of her usual life she had no need to carry. Much to her surprise, the stationmaster, who was a new-comer in the district and was therefore not acquainted with her, said he was not accustomed to give tickets on credit. She told me that she thought the arrangement very stupid and a decided defect in railway administration. Her daughter Jemima was a well-educated young lady, very sprightly, and a fearless rider. I used sometimes to ride with her in my boyhood, not without apprehension, for she was in the habit of riding along the top of the cliffs, frequently in dangerous proximity to the edge. She used occasionally to visit us in the south in the winter. Samuel Craik, the only son of the family, went to Australia in 1849, during the gold excitement. I think he became a farmer rather than a miner; but to the village folk, everyone who went to Australia went for gold. One day there arrived at the village, for Mrs. Craik, a heavy box from Australia. Immediately the rumour ran that Samuel had sent a box of gold to his mother. Samuel's filial devotion was applauded; and perhaps visions of a generous distribution began to be entertained. When the box was opened it was found to contain a cheese. By far the most interesting inhabitant of the village was Peter Walker, dyer. He occupied an old cottage on the Broad Shore, mentioned above as a probable survival of the ancient village. Peter's house was built on the edge of the shingle only a few yards above high-water mark. I once saw Peter bending over his dye-tub or cleansing some dyed stuff in the little stream that ran past his door; but his dyeing days must have been over. When I came upon the scene he already lived in honourable retirement. His house was quite unlike any other in the region. I do not remember to have seen anywhere any precisely like it, although in one feature it resembled the castle of the early Middle Ages, and more recent houses which I have seen in Iceland. This feature was the absence of a chimney. In Peter's house there was a kind of domestic altar-a structure of stone, formed of small boulders rudely squared-about three feet in height and about the same in width. A peat fire was made upon this altar, and the smoke found its way through an irregular hole in the thatched roof in the manner most convenient to itself. The house consisted of two very small rooms; one contained Peter's dye-tubs and I suppose his bed, the other, approached by a passage alongside the first, was his study, his sitting-room and the salon where he received his friends. This room was lighted partly through the hole in the roof above the altar, and partly by means of a window. The window was exceedingly small-only a foot square in total area—and the light it might have afforded was restricted by the continuous absence of glass in one of the four divisions and by the presence of a bundle of rags filling the space. A great pile of well-worn and much-smoked books lay in a heap in one corner. A small table beside the window and three chairs constituted the furniture. Peter received at any time. He never seemed to have anything to do more urgent than to engage in conversation; but he was fastidious about those upon whom he bestowed his time, and still more about those whom he admitted to his sanctum. My father and I used often to visit him together; sometimes I went alone. His invariable practice, no matter at what hour of the day we made our visit, was to go into his other chamber and shortly to emerge with a bottle of old port and glasses which veracity compels me to admit might with advantage have been immersed occasionally in the limpid stream that ran by Peter's door. The port was always good. How much Peter had in his cellar I never knew, probably he reserved his wine exclusively for his particular friends; but each year over a period of at least fifteen years, with the same formality, he poured for us the same wine, each year more matured, into the same glasses, each year more encrusted. Peter had enjoyed a long life of unimpugnable sobriety so far as anyone knew, and his experience led him to avoid alike excess and asceticism. In general, he was a disciple of "the doctrine of the mean"; yet he had his aversions. It is a singular fact that in Scotland at this time men who practised any of the textile industries were almost invariably infected with heresy both in religion and politics. Why weavers, dyers and tailors should be agnostics or atheists and radicals, I cannot tell; nor can I why carpenters and shoemakers should be generally devout and conservative, and butchers and bakers indifferent alike in religion and in politics. Peter was not at all shy in expressing his opinions about religion to those to whom he desired to confide his opinions upon any subject. He simply would have none of it. The village, as we have seen, was quite otherwise minded; but that did not influence him in the least. He never engaged in propaganda; and he declined to permit anyone to practise propaganda upon him. He admitted that the establishment of religion had social value. It helped to keep people in order, and in so doing saved the expense and inconvenience of police, therefore Peter went to the parish church once every Sunday and put one halfpenny in the plate. Having done so, he felt himself absolved from further interest in ecclesiastical or religious affairs. His belief, whatever it was, was his own, and no one else had anything to do with it. On one occasion two evangelical ladies who were visiting the village learned about the state of Peter's mind, and with the best intention and the least wisdom called upon him to remonstrate. They were not admitted to his house, and the interview was not prolonged. What Peter said he, being a gentleman, never told; nor did the ladies in detail, but it came to be known that they beat a hasty retreat. They made no further efforts to evangelise in that quarter. Peter's figure was tall with a slight stoop. His body was well-knit, lithe and sinewy. His keen grey eyes shone from sharp intellectual features. In his youth Peter had been a powerful swimmer; and when he had passed his sixtieth year he was able to swim every day through the surf of the Broad Shore, where indeed no one else customarily swam, to a rock distant a hundred yards or more according to the state of the tide. We knew this as Peter's Rock, for when he reached it, his tall figure surmounted it for a short time. I often lay on the promontory above, after I had had my own more modest dip in the quieter waters of the Boat Shore, and watched Peter having his morning swim. No one knew who Peter's relatives were, nor did anyone know his early history. Nothing ever transpired to show that there was any reason for reticence excepting that this accorded with Peter's temperament. When he died he was found to have left some money, and heirs made their appearance. Although Peter had, so far as I know, no special knowledge of science, as Edwards, the naturalist, and Dick, the geologist, had,1 he was a man of similar type-an intellectual peasant who had shrewd and penetrative views of life and independence as thorough-going as his frugality. He showed always a stately courtesy and occasionally something of the grand manner. Of women of the village, other than those I have already mentioned, two were remarkable for different reasons. One was an old woman who had been in the habit in her earlier years of walking to Aberdeen fish market from the village-forty miles on one day with a "creel" of fish on her back and out again the next day, and of doing this twice a week. The other was a "witch." The "witch" was shunned by everyone; she had the "evil eye." In her youth she had been brought before the Kirk Session, charged with a lapse from virtue. The "ruling elder," a well-to-do farmer, admonished her more sharply than she relished, and she told him that one day he would suffer for his severity. Thereafter, every night, so the story went, she pronounced upon the head of this farmer one of the imprecatory psalms. Within a year and a half an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease struck the 1 Smiles wrote the life of Edwards, and Wm. Jolly that of Dick. district, the polled Angus herd of the farmer was stricken, and he was ruined. Everyone believed that the witch had brought her curse to bear upon him. Intelligent the people were in many ways, as I have endeavoured to make plain, yet in general they entertained some primitive superstitions. My aunts Elspeth and Mary, who were by no means wanting either in acuteness of mind or in education, have been known to have their churn carried across a running stream so that their butter might be freed from witchcraft. Such harmless gaucheries are by no means the last, and may well be considered as the least, of the evidences of superstition.1 My visits to the village were frequent during more than twenty years, and I never heard of a crime being committed in it or in the district round it during that period, nor did I ever see a policeman. There was a coastguard station and men of the "preventive service" watched the coast, for smuggling had been carried on in its unfrequented bays; but so far as I know, no one living in the district was ever implicated in smuggling adventures. The villagers occupied themselves wholly with their land and their handicrafts; they did not engage in the business of fishing. The nearest fishing places were the small town of Rosehearty to the east and the village of Pennan to the west; the fishermen there were not farmers. The shrewd Aberdonians avoided the amphibious life of the West Highlanders and the people of the west of Ireland, who fish and farm and do neither with skill or success. Within a small area many picturesque features are concentrated. At the head of the village near the parish church there is the "Knowe," a hill of fifty or sixty feet above the surrounding level and about three hundred above the sea, covered to the top with yellow broom. From this eminence may be seen the Moray Firth stretching north and west. Immediately to the west of the village is the Den or ravine in the valley of the Dour-the stream which gives the village its name. 1O l'heureux qui celui de ces fables Des bons demons, des esprits familiers, On a banni les demons et les fées; |