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                                   Wilson's

                              Tales of the Borders

                                AND OF SCOTLAND.

                    HISTORICAL, TRADITIONARY, & IMAGINATIVE,

                               WITH A GLOSSARY.


                                 REVISED BY
                             ALEXANDER LEIGHTON,
                _One of the Original Editors and Contributors_.


                                  VOL. XIX.


                                  LONDON:
                    WALTER SCOTT, 14 PATERNOSTER SQUARE,
                          AND NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE.
                                   1884.




                                 CONTENTS.


                                                                     Page

  THE DOMESTIC GRIEFS OF GUSTAVUS M'IVER, (_Alexander Leighton_),       1

  THE FIRST AND SECOND MARRIAGE, (_John Mackay Wilson_),               35

  THE DISSOLVED PLEDGE, (_Oliver Richardson_),                         67

  THE HAWICK SPATE, (_Alexander Campbell_),                            99

  THE AVENGER; OR, THE LEGEND OF MARY LEE, (_Alexander Leighton_),    129

  THE LORD OF HERMITAGE, (_Alexander Campbell_),                      155

  GLEANINGS OF THE COVENANT, (_Professor Thomas Gillespie_)--

    XVIII. KINALDY,                                                   165

      XIX. THE TRIALS OF THE REV. SAMUEL AUSTIN,                      174

  THE CURSE OF SCOTLAND, (_Alexander Campbell_),                      196

  LEAVES FROM THE LIFE OF ALEXANDER HAMILTON, (_John M. Wilson_),     199

  THE SPORTSMAN OF OUTFIELDHAUGH, (_Alexander Leighton_),             232

  THE SEA FIGHT, (_Anon._),                                           265




WILSON'S

TALES OF THE BORDERS,

AND OF SCOTLAND.




THE DOMESTIC GRIEFS OF GUSTAVUS M'IVER.


CHAPTER I.

GUSTAVUS'S ANTECEDENTS.

In a little house in the Canongate of Edinburgh, there lived,
not very long ago, Mr Gustavus M'Iver--(for he never would allow
himself to be called Ensign M'Iver, though that was his proper
professional designation),--as good a man as ever God put breath
in, and as faithful a soldier as ever Lord Wellington commanded in
the Peninsula. That is, doubtless, no small praise to one conceived
in sin and brought forth in iniquity; and heaven knows if it were
not as true as Jove's oath, it would never have been awarded by
us. But he was remarkable in other respects than being honest;
for he was six feet five without the aid of sock or buskin; and,
if any man were to say that he was not four feet from acromion to
acromion, he would assuredly be a big liar. But it is the head
and face of a man that we like to look at; for, after all, what
signifies (except in a warlike view, and ours is a peaceable one) a
cart-load of mere bone and muscle, bound together with thick whangs
of gristle, and yielding nothing but brute force, if it be not
surmounted by a good microcosm of a head, with a good dial-plate
to let a man know what is going on within. Do we not see every day
great clocks put on the tops of big steeples, and yet, though they
are nearer the sun than the little time-piece with the deuce a
body at all, they go like an intermitting fever, telling us at one
time that we are hurrying to the grave, and at another, that time
has nothing to do with us at all. So is it with men; and, for our
part, we could never discover any proper legitimate sympathetic
accordance between the trunk and cranium of mortals, any more than
if (like pins) they had been made in pieces and one head clapped on
a body just as the occipital condyles suited the straps to which
they are attached.

The opinion now expressed is well justified by the example of the
subject of our story; for, while the big limbs of him seemed to
set at defiance all regular laws of motion, either horizontal or
perpendicular, going, as one might say without a paradox, wherever
and however they choose, his head was as methodical as that of a
drill sergeant, and the like of him for regularity might not be
seen from Lerwick to Berwick. Nor was his face ever known to be at
fault as a faithful indicator; and verily there was no great wonder
in that, for nothing short of the pulleys he carried in his brain
could ever have moved a single hair-breadth up or down, to the
right or to the left, the big jaw-bone which he seldom condescended
to impart any living motion to, except at meal times, or when (and
that occurred very seldom) he had an idea to express sufficient in
size and importance to warrant such an excess of labour.

We have said that Gustavus M'Iver had been in the Peninsula; and we
may be believed or not, just as suits the reader's credulity with
our credibility; but he was a luckless wight who dared to doubt
that fact in the personal presence of the hero himself; better by
far he had been at St Sebastian, for the never a one we ever heard
of, that had the temerity to express any scepticism on the point
that did not live to repent it. There can be no doubt, however,
on the subject; for Gustavus was not only in the Peninsula, but
he fought there very well; and no great thanks to him either, for
he had the entire charge of the mess--a post of honour he had
acquired from an indisputable superiority in culinary lore, and a
most indefatigable perseverance as well as an unexampled adroitness
in the art of carving both for himself and others. The praise he
got for fighting was, in so far as regarded the immense heaps of
hungry Frenchmen he hewed down with his falchion, true enough;
the bulletin writer recorded the fact just as it was reported to
him, that the great Goliath Gustavus did actually perform very
wonderful feats of sheer killing; and we cannot help thinking,
notwithstanding of the sneers of his brother officers, that it
would not have become the dignity of a despatch to have made any
allusion whatever to the manner in which he had kept up his body
and his courage.

When the war was done, he came home filled with glory; and as,
when the world speaks of a man, it is unnecessary for him to speak
of himself, he seldom (for he was a sensible man) ever thought of
speaking either of himself or any other person or thing. Conceit
is the foundation of speech; where a man is filled to the very
throat with glory, there is little occasion for him ever opening
his mouth; and therefore it was that Gustavus, in addition to his
other peculiarities, seldom deigned to hold converse with the
creatures of the earth, unless it were in his capacity of paymaster
of pensions (an office his prowess had secured to him), when he was
compelled to speak, to make others hold their tongues--an operation
in which he succeeded to a miracle, from the accumulated load of
authority he derived from his silence.


CHAPTER II.

GUSTAVUS FALLS IN LOVE.

Now, it happened that this same Gustavus, after almost all the sap
of his body had been eliminated by fighting, and there seemed to
be scarcely enough left to lubricate the muscles that stretched
from promontory to point of his big bones, like tough hausers,
took it into his head to wish for a wife. We doubt if all the
physiologists or psychologists that ever hunted for traces of the
spirit among the white guts of the head could tell how such an
idea came into such an extraordinary place; and if his heart was
as dry as the voluntary muscles of his body, nothing short of a
dislocation of Cupid's right arm could ever have sent into such a
leathery organ the tickling shaft. True, however, it is as death,
that Gustavus did actually fall in love, and the symptoms were just
as extraordinary as the passion itself; for there never was heard
in any man's lungs before, such a rattle of sighs; and as for the
length of his jaws, the never a rough wood-cut of John Bunyan's
hero in the Slough of Despond could come within many degrees of
their lugubrious longitude. It is even true that the power of the
tender passion reached to his stomach--a place of all others that
might _a priori_ have been considered perfectly independent of all
moral impulses whatsomever. Nothing before, except hunger itself,
had ever affected that organ; and, indeed, ensconced behind and
between, and beneath such ribs, nothing short of death itself might
have been supposed capable of reaching it, or subduing its tough
hide, its viscous linings, and its gastric juice, stronger than the
best gin that ever was made at Schiedam.

Now the _petit bel chose_ that had thus produced such an effect
upon the moral and physical economy of this big son of Mars, was
no other than a mere toy of a thing--a little milliner called
Julia Briggs--scarcely so big, when divested of the padding and
stuffing with which her art enabled her to supply her deficiency of
natural size, as one of his huge limbs. But this may be no manner
of marvel to those who are versant in the mysteries of love, who,
being himself a small creature, seems to delight in throwing into
the smallest of his victims the greatest portion of his power.
It is difficult to see philosophically any final cause in the
curious fact in nature; but surely, the never a man, who has any
observation in him, will deny, that pigmy beauties and colossal
swains (and _vice versa_) have a singular power of producing in
each other the tender passion. It may be owing to nature's love
of the _juste milieu_, that thus induces her to take this mode
of keeping up a reasonable _mean size_ among human creatures,
or it may be any one of a thousand other speculations; but what
care we for such theories, when we have the fact to state as an
undoubted truth, that Gustavus fell in love with Julia Briggs, as
standing like a mighty Anak, in the Canongate of Edinburgh, he saw
the little creature skipping along, twisting her little limbs as
if she would have dislocated her joints in her efforts to appear
graceful, in the eyes of mankind generally, and in those of the
gigantic Gustavus, whom she had often seen looking after her, in
particular! Successful beyond any prior example of her wriggling
evolution of her graces, the little baggage--as quick in her eye
as ever were Pip, Trip, or Skip, the maids of honour (according
to Drayton) of Queen Mab--saw at once that she had hit the proper
twirl and twinkle, at last, that would subdue the involuntary
muscle that had so long been useless beneath the ribs of the great
Gustavus. The moment the effect was produced, the sinews of his
body began to move, and away he stalked after her, with strides as
long as the whole height _a capite ad calcem_ of the quarry upon
which he intended to pounce. It spoke well of the power of "her
harness of gossamer," that it stood the tug of so huge a victim;
and, as she turned her twinkling eye to observe the triumph of her
power, she did not fail to rivet the chains by some higher displays
of graceful contortion, that made his eyeballs roll in the large
sockets, as if he had seen a hobgoblin, in place of Julia Briggs,
the _petite marchande de modes_.

This was just as good a beginning as ever a sly man-catcher
essayed in the world of love, since the days of Helen; and the
arch kidnapper knew very well how to follow up her wile; for,
after displaying, by a proper caper, as much of her ancle as
would do the business, she skipped away, as nimbly as Nymphidia
in the service of Oberon's queen, and was not again seen till she
opened the window of her mother's house, and displayed herself,
capless and coifless, to her staring admirer. The capture was now
completed. Jove himself was never more completely entoiled by the
chains of the little baggage Iynge; and, during the whole of that
day, Gustavus strode along the pavement, opposite the window of
his charmer, as if he had been on duty before a besieged city. He
had just as little power to walk away as he had to circumscribe
his step to the ordinary measure of God's creatures; every stride
occupying, at least, four feet of pavement, and being executed
so regularly and methodically, that one step did not differ from
another by a single inch. But it is a mere bagatelle to describe
these pendulous movements, produced, for the first time, by the
spirit of love; while, to execute with truth a faithful picture
of the painful contortions of a countenance originally formed a
wood-cut of extraordinary dimensions, and now under the soft,
melting influence of the tenderest of passions, would require a
goose-quill, owning no less an influence than the spirit of an
immortal genius. As the loves of some of the inferior animals are
expressed by sounds and signs that seem to indicate nothing but
fierce war, so might the demonstrations of this extraordinary
affair of the heart, exhibited through the grotesque motions of
muscles that had been as rigid as dried leather for twenty years,
be looked upon as anything rather than signs of the languishing
passion which, as Augustin says, will make a musician out of
an ass. Yet, doubtless, there was, both in his goggle-eyes and
lengthened face, an expression that was intended for softness and
languishment; and it is not impossible, that, if one had been
apprized _a priori_ of the intention, he might have discovered
in the ludicrous gesticulations some resemblance to at least a
burlesque of what is only a very ridiculous exhibition at the very
best.

Love that is long a-coming, comes at last with a terrible
onset--overturning all sense and prudence, kicking up the heels
of all forms of etiquette, and removing every impediment to its
progress. It is but a very small matter to say, that Gustavus could
not sleep under the hug or embrace of the new customer that had
taken such a violent hold of his heart, though we do not deem it an
equally insignificant announcement, that a man who could swallow
a couple of pounds of flesh at a down-sitting, should lose his
gustative and digestive powers to such an extent that the knocking
of his heart sounded audibly through his empty stomach, as if it
had been a whispering gallery. But love is a leveller in more
senses than the vulgar one; and the only circumstance about the
matter of this particular case at all remarkable, was, that such
effects, upon a body iron-bound as it was, and of such gigantic
proportions, should have been produced by an agent of such truly
insignificant dimensions. A resolute disciplinarian, however, at
all points, without a single qualm of fear or doubt, and accustomed
to attack a city or a haunch of beef with equal _sang froid_, the
love-smitten victim, on the third day after his seizure, drew up
his huge limbs to their full extent, till he seemed like the
Colossus of Rhodes, and settled the whole affair by one resolute
gnash of his under maxillary bone. Two strides took him to the
door, one or two more brought him down stairs to the street, and
the never a man that stalked off ground that was to be his own,
went along with such strides as he used in making his way to the
house of Julia Briggs. With one solitary idea in his head, and one
word on his tongue--though there was room for a thousand--he went
direct up to the door, knocked, like one of Froissard's warriors
at the barricades, was admitted, turned off the momentous question
of marriage by one heavy lurch of his jaw, and settled a matter
that danglers take years about in the space of time that a thirsty
Bacchanalian would occupy in taking a long pull of jolly good ale.


CHAPTER III.

GUSTAVUS IS MARRIED.

In the week afterwards, the couple were united in the holy bands of
matrimony; and, surely, to say that there was any ceremony about
such a union, would be a burlesque of the mysteries of Hymen. Yet,
rapid as were the movements, and wholesale the conclusion, no man
ever put his neck in the noose with such imperturbable gravity,
for, during the whole period occupied by the feast, which was in
the form of a supper, no man could have observed in his gaunt
face any one of the three laughs, Ionic, Megaric, or Sardonic,
with which the face is usually convulsed; the only indication
approaching to a cachination in the midst of the whoops and yells
of the feasters, being a grin in the shape of a _risus Ajacis_,
that defied all power of analysis. But even this caricature of a
display of good humour, insignificant as it may seem, shewed to
those who knew the man that he was labouring under the influence
of some extraordinary emotion, as nothing of the kind had ever
been seen in his countenance since the day on which he hewed down
so unmercifully the French at St Sebastian. Nor, on the following
day, when he had fairly entered upon the supreme happiness of
the married state, was there seen any palpable sign of the joy
that, of course, penetrated through all his well-mailed thoracic
viscera--unless it were, perhaps, that his face had even increased
in length, and the leathery aspect of all the "celestial index" of
the soul was, if possible, more grim than ever.

The getting of a wife is, after all, but a very small matter in
comparison of the ruling of her; and sure, if ever there was a man
in the world, since the days of the grim Hercules, who bungled the
matter out and out, that had any chance of subjecting his wife
to the requisite thraldom and subordination, Gustavus was that
man; for a look of him