him to postpone operations until the spring. Instead of returning to Dundee, he decided to bring his family to Russia to spend the winter. Thus my mother, with her step-mother, Mrs. Bridie, went to Narva and joined her father. During the winter they posted, or went in their own carriage, from Narva first to St. Petersburg and afterwards to Moscow. The railway between the two capitals was not opened until the following year. Through this journey of my mother as a girl, and through her accounts of it to me as a child, I became more interested in Russia than in any other foreign country. On my mother's side I am thus of seafaring folk.1 My mother's mother, Ann Taylor, of Forfarshire farming stock, had died in my mother's infancy. Her step-mother, Mrs. Isabella Bridie, was the only mother she knew. Throughout her life, Mrs. Bridie remained a valued member of our family circle. Her maiden name was Barland. On her father's side she was of Dutch extraction. Her paternal grandfather had been a member of the Incorporation of Glovers at Perth. His father or grandfather had migrated from Holland about the end of the seventeenth century. Mrs. Bridie was born in 1805. Her father was a farmer at the farm of Orwell, near Errol in Perthshire. "The dear years" (1802-3) during the Peace of Amiens were past just before she was born; but in her childhood the recollection of these years remained, and prices were still high. Her family was relatively well off, but frugality was necessary. The high duty on salt and its scarcity made carefulness advisable even in so wholesome an article. On being asked for salt, Mrs. Barland (1809 or 1810) answered, "Salt tae yer parritch! Na! Na! I'll learn ye nae sic extravagant habits." Politics were keen in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The farmers in the valley of the Tay were in general Radicals, while of course the landed proprietors were Tories. Barland of Orwell was involved in an election exploit (about 1819) which throws some light on electioneering practice at that time. During a hotly-contested election, it came to be known that the Tory agent intended to drive out from the county town to the country with a considerable sum of 'The seafaring strain came out more in my brothers than myself. In their youth one of these became an officer in the Chilian Navy, another for a short time an officer in the Japanese Navy, another, who ran away to sea, took a voyage before the mast to Rangoon, while another went round the world in a sailing ship as supercargo. I edited some of her papers and gave a sketch of her life in Mrs. Bridie, Edinburgh, 1889. I knew Mrs. Barland more than fifty years later, and sixty years ago, as a kindly old lady with great determination of character. money in gold (to the best of my recollection, the amount was several thousand pounds) for the purpose of purchasing votes. Barland and some of his friends waylaid the agent, took his money from him, and sent him on his way lamenting. After the election they returned the bags of gold intact to the agent. In her early youth Mrs. Bridie had often seen long lines of horses in single file coming from the river into the country with hampers laden with schnapps and brandy smuggled from the Continent. I remember that she told me of having seen Charles X. in Edinburgh in 1830, while he was living in Holyrood Palace. She accompanied her husband to the China Seas about 1835. I gathered from Mrs. Bridie, that although the outlook upon life in her circle in the thirties was influenced largely by contemporary ecclesiastical controversies (her people were "Auld Licht AntiBurghers"), the poet most popular among them next to Burns was Byron rather than Scott. This was natural in a community that had set its face against the Tory party and had little sympathy with what it looked upon as an attempt by Scott to embellish Toryism with a halo of romance. They might well have accepted both Scott and Byron on literary grounds, although these sturdy Radicals may be forgiven, for they were impatient with Young, whose Night Thoughts afforded a poetic standard for no inconsiderable number of other Scots people of that day. In the thirties, Constable's Miscellany was to be found in many of the farm-houses as well as in the houses of the common people in the east of Scotland. The Tories had the Edinburgh Review and the Radicals Tait's Edinburgh Magazine, while from London there came into Scotland at this time Murray's Family Library and Knight's Penny Magazine. I mention these because I have seen them in my own youth on the shelves of farmers and of artisans in towns as possessions of their parents. I recall visiting a slater who had worked at his trade over a large part of Europe between 1830 and 1840. He had saved money enough to be independent, and when I saw him about 1870 he was occupying his leisure in reading through Constable's Miscellany. At that moment he was deep in a history of Persia. He was doing what those who remained at home did thirty years earlier. The daily newspaper was a slender affair in the thirties, and those who read, read on the whole good if somewhat heavy literature. Perhaps easy availability and cheapness accounted for this, but some importance must, I think, be attached to reaction against the rubbish which poured from the press in the English magazines of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Writing intended for popular consumption had probably never sunk to so low an ebb as is to be found, for example, in the Town and Country Magazine. The change for the better made its appearance about the close of the eighteenth century, when the Monthly Magazine or British Register (1791) and the Scottish Register (1794) were the forerunners of still better journals. During visits to Dundee in the early sixties I used to stay at Broughty Ferry. From the high ridge upon which our relatives lived, I watched the ships coming in with the tide-whalers in whose blunt bows and weatherbeaten aspect were the evidences of successful struggles against ice and wind, and smart ghost-like clippers painted white from stem to stern, in whose graceful lines there lay indications of tremendous speed. The whalers were clumsy enough, although they gave an impression of obstinacy and power; but the East Indiamen, as they shortened sail on entering the estuary of the Tay, were the things of beauty described by John Masefield in the motto of this chapter. His river was the Mersey and his city Liverpool; but his description applies as vividly to the River Tay and the city of Dundee; and I can say as truthfully as he can, speaking of the ships of other days in whose sailing my own folk played their part for several generations: Yet though their splendour may have ceased to be, For the great queenliness of all those ships. The Lass of Lochroyan, Old Scots Ballad. STRANRAER is situated at the head of Loch Ryan. From an architectural point of view, it is a commonplace town; but the isthmus which separates the loch from Solway Firth and the peninsula known to us as the Mull of Galloway, and to the ancients as the Novantian Chersonesus, are both very beautiful, and are, moreover, full of archæological interest. Stranraer is said to have been known to the Romans and to the Novantes, the inhabitants of the region in Roman times, as Rerigoneum1 or Retigonium; but there is uncertainty about the precise locality to which this name was attached. In the map in Chalmers' Caledonia the site of Rerigoneum is placed, not at the head Richard of Cirencester mentions another Rerigoneum which has been identified with Ribchester on the River Ribble in Lancashire. Bohn's edition (London, 1848), PP. 448 and 488. M'Kerlie in his Lands and their Owners in Galloway identifies the village of Innermessan, about two miles from Stranraer, as the site of Rerigoneum (i. p. 185, and ii. p. 207). 'Chalmers, George, F.R.S. and S.A., Caledonia, or an Account Historical and Topographical of Great Britain . . . (London, 1807), vol. i. of the loch, but at or near the village of Cairn Ryan, directly opposite Corsewall Point. Roman remains have been found in the immediate neighbourhood of Stranraer, and there are many other antiquities at no great distance. In the parish of Stoneykirk, for example, on Luce Bay in the Solway Firth, there are at Kirkmadrine what the antiquaries regard as the oldest Christian sculptured monuments in Scotland. One of these stones contains the following inscription: HIC IACENT SCI ET PRAECIPUI SACERDOTES ID EST VIVENTIUS It has been conjectured that these are names of two of the masons or architect monks who, according to Ailred of Rievaux in his Life of S. Ninian, were brought by that saint from Tours to Scotland to build a church for him.2 That one of these names bears a close resemblance to my own is a matter of curious interest to me. Much more important, from an archæological point of view, than these monuments, which are not earlier than the fifth century, are the remains of what appear to be dwellings of men of the Stone Age, discovered in the same parish of Stoneykirk after laborious and skilful research by my friend Ludovic Mann. Although he has given an account of the nature of his discoveries, he has with great modesty not indicated the process by means of which he was led to the locality in which his researches were made. I may therefore be allowed to mention at least the character of this process. It should be premised that Mr. Mann had no connection with the district. Proceeding upon the hypothesis that the earliest colonists of North Britain must have made their landfall at some place on the coast, and desiring to find this place, Mr. Mann made a careful survey of the coast-line of Scotland from this point of view. He eventually decided upon Luce Bay as being for many reasons a highly probable spot. It is not a little remarkable that, according to some writers, the Novantian Chersonesus was regarded as the most northerly part of Great Britain.3 Thus for a time it may have been looked upon as Ultima Thule, and therefore the destination of very early explorers. Having decided upon the spot, Mr. Mann began a series of systematic probings of the soil by means of steel rods about thirty feet long. His industry and skill were rewarded by the discovery at a depth of thirty feet below the surface of a number of 1 Stuart, Sculptured Stones of Scotland. |