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“Why don’t you play with your cousins, dear?” his mother would ask.
“Oh, mamma!” Harry would reply, “what are they to me? I have books, a gun, and a fishing-rod, and I have Eily; what more should I want?”
The name of Hermit followed him to the parish school. Our tale dates back to the days before School Boards were thought of.
Harry was eleven now, and therefore somewhat too old for a governess. So Miss Campbell had gone. I’m afraid that Harry had already forgotten his promise to marry her when he “grew a great big man.” At all events he did not repeat it even when he kissed her good-bye.
What a long, long walk Harry had to that parish school! How would the average English boy like to trudge o’er hill and dale, through moor and moss and forest, four long miles every morning? But that is precisely what Harry had to do, carrying with him, too, a pile of books one foot high, including a large Latin dictionary.
Harry thought it delightful in summer; he used to start very early so as to be able to study nature by the way, study birds and their nests, study trees and shrubs and ferns and flowers.
Scottish schoolboy fashion, he took his dinner with him. A meagre meal enough, only some bread-and-butter in a little bag, and a tin of sweet milk which he carried in his hand.
Eily always went along with him, but she waited at a neighbouring farm until school came out in the forenoon, when she had part of Harry’s dinner; then she was invariably at the gate at four o’clock, and wild with joy when the homeward journey commenced.
Several other boys went Harry’s road for more than two miles, but it was the custom of the “Hermit” to start off at a race with his dog as soon as he got out, and never halt until he put a good half-mile betwixt himself and the lads, who would gladly have borne him company.
No wonder he was called “Harry the Hermit!”
Dominie Roberts, the parish schoolmaster, was a pedagogue of the old school. And there exist many such in Scotland still.
He would no more think of teaching a class without the tawse in his hand, than a huntsman would of entering the kennels without his whip. As my English readers may not know what a “tawse” is, I herewith give them a recipe for making one.
Take, then, a piece of leather two feet long, and one inch and a half wide. The leather ought to be the thickest a shoemaker can give you, of the same sort as he makes the uppers of a navvy’s boots with. Now at one end make a slit or buttonhole to pass two fingers through, and cut up the other into three tags of equal breadth and about three inches long.
Then your tawse is complete, or will be so as soon as you have heated the ends for a short time in the fire to harden them.
It is a fearful instrument of torture, as my experience can testify. It is not quite so much used in schools now, however, as it was thirty years ago, when the writer was a boy. But it is still used. Such a thing as hoisting and flogging, I do not believe, was ever known in a Scottish school. It would result in mutiny.
You have to hold out your hand. The teacher says “Pande” (in Latin). Then he lets you have it again and again, sometimes till he is out of breath, and your hands and wrists are all blistered.
I remember receiving six-and-thirty “pandeys,” because I had smashed a tyrant boy who had bullied me for months. It was a cruel injustice; for the bully got no punishment except that which I had given him.
Dominie Roberts was a pedagogue, then, of this class.
All the boys were afraid of him. Harry was not. Though only eleven years of age, Harry was nearly as tall as the dominie.
There was a consultation one day as to who should steal the tawse.
No boy would venture, but at length —
“I will,” said Harry.
“Hurrah! for the Hermit!” was the shout.
The dominie went out of the schoolroom every forenoon for half an hour to smoke. A pretty hubbub and din there was then, you may be sure.
The day after the theft of the tawse was determined on, as soon as the pedagogue had stumped out of the school – he wore a wooden leg from the knee – Harry went boldly up to the desk and seized the tawse.
“What shall I do with it?” he asked a schoolboy.
“Pitch it out of the window.”
“No,” cried another, “he would get it again. Put it in the fire.”
Harry did so, and covered it up with burning coals.
By and by back stumped the dominie. He held his nose in the air and sniffed. There was a shocking smell of burning leather.
The dominie went straight to the fire, and with the poker discovered the almost shapeless cinders of his pet tawse!
He grew red and white, time about, with rage.
“Who has done this thing?” he thundered.
No reply, and the dominie thumped on the floor with his wooden leg, and repeated the question.
Still no answer.
“I shall punish the entire school,” cried Dominie Roberts.
He stumped out again, and many of the boys grew pale with fear, and the smaller ones began to cry.
Presently the dominie returned. In his hand he bore a long piece of a bridle rein, and this he fashioned into a tawse in sight of the whole school. Then he called the biggest class, and once more demanded the name of the culprit.
No reply, but every lad in the class began to wet his hands and pull down his sleeves.
“All hands up,” was the terrible command.
The punishment was about to commence when forth stepped Harry the Hermit into the middle of the circle.
“Stay a moment, if you please, sir,” said Harry.
“You know, then, who committed the crime?” asked the dominie, sternly.
“I do; it was myself.”
“And why?”
“Because the other boys wanted to, but were afraid.”
“Which other boys? Name them.”
“I will not.”
“Pande, sir, Pande.”
Five minutes afterwards Harry staggered back to his seat, pale-faced and sick.
He sat down beside his class-mate, and was soon so far recovered as to be able to whisper —
“How many did I have?”
“Two-and-twenty,” was the reply. “I counted.”
“And that new tawse is a tickler, I can tell you,” said Harry.
He did not climb any trees that day going home. He could not have held on. Nor was he able to eat much supper, but he did not tell the reason why.
But, apart from his fondness for corporal or palmar punishment, Dominie Roberts was a clever teacher, and Harry made excellent progress.
Autumn came round, and stormy wet days, and many a cold drenching our hero got, both coming to and going from school. But he did not mind them. They only seemed to render him hardier and sturdier, and make his cheeks the ruddier.
Then winter arrived “on his snow-white car,” as poets say, and often such storms blew that even grown-up people feared to face them. But Harry would not give in. On evenings like these John would be dispatched to meet Harry, and many an anxious glance from the dining-room window would his mother cast, until she saw them coming up the long avenue, Eily always first, feathering through the snow, and barking for very joy as she neared the house.
Sometimes the roads would be so blocked with snow, that Harry found it far more convenient to walk along on the top of the stone fences, often missing his feet, and getting plunged nearly over his head in a snow-bank.
In the early part of January, 186-, I forget the exact day and date, one of the most fierce and terrible snowstorms that old men ever remembered, swept over the northern shires of Scotland.
When Harry left for school that morning there seemed little cause for alarm. There was no sunshine however, and the whole sky was covered by an unbroken wall of blue-grey cloud. Towards the forenoon snow began to fall – a kind of soft hail like millet seeds. The ground was hard and dry to receive it, so it did not melt.
The schoolboys tried to mould it into snowballs, but it would not “make,” it would not stick together – evidence in itself that the frost was intense.
Gradually this soft, fine hail changed to big, dry flakes. Then the wind began to rise, and moan around the chimneys, and go shrieking through the leafless boughs of the ash trees and elms. The snowfall increased in density every minute. Looking up through the falling flakes, you could not have seen three yards.
Dominie Roberts at two o’clock began to get uneasy, and gave many an anxious glance towards the windows, now getting quickly snowed up. So great, too, was the frost that, though a roaring fire of wood and peats burned on the hearth, the panes were flowered and frozen.
At half-past two it began to get rapidly dark, so the dominie dismissed his class with earnest injunctions to those boys who had far to go, not to delay on the road, but to hurry home at once.
It might have been thought that on an evening like this, Harry would have been glad of companionship on the road. Not he. He went off like a young colt, with Eily galloping round him, as soon as ever he got outside the gate.
The wind blew right in his face, however, and the drift was whirling like smoke right over every fence. The roads were also barricaded every few yards with high wreaths of snow, blown off the fields and hills.
The wind blew wilder, and every minute the cold seemed to grow more and more intense.
Harry’s face and hands were blue and benumbed before he had gone a mile and a half, Eily’s coat was white and frozen hard; but on went the pair of them, battling with the storm, Harry holding his head well down, and keeping his plaid up over his nostrils.
Often he had to turn round and walk backwards by way of resting himself.
The snow-wreaths were most difficult to get through, the smoking drift cutting his breath and nearly suffocating him.
So ere long his strength began to fail. Hardy though he was, Highlander though he was, bred and born among the wild, bleak mountains, and reared in the forests, his powers of endurance gave out.
He crouched down and took the half-frozen dog in his arms. He talked to her as if she had been a human being, and the probability is that she did know what he said.
“Oh, Eily,” he said, “I do feel tired.”
The kindly collie licked his face.
“But come on,” he cried, starting up again; “we must not give in. We have only about a mile and a half to go if we cross through the wood. We’ll soon get home. Come on, Eily, come on.”
In a short time he had reached the wood. It was mostly spruce and fir, and the branches were borne half to the ground with the weight of snow at one side, while the other was bare, and the wind tearing through them.
He leaped the “dyke,” (a stone fence) and was glad he had done so. There was far more shelter here, and the blasts were less fierce and cutting. He walked faster now. The wood was about half a mile wide. Arrived at the other side, a path by a stone fence led all the way down to his own home in the glen beneath.
He hurried on. How strange the wood looked under its mantle of snow! But he could not see any distance ahead owing to the drift. Sometimes the wind would catch a tree and roar through it, and for the moment he would be almost suffocated with the smother of falling snow.
He had gone on quite a long way, when he suddenly came to a clearing. He had never seen it before; never been here before. Then the awful truth flashed at once across the boy’s mind —he was lost!
How long he wandered in the wood before he sank exhausted beside a tree he never could tell.
Night and darkness came on, the storm roared through the wood with ever-increasing force, but Harry knew nothing of it. He slept – slept that sleep that seldom knows a waking in this world.
And the drift banked up – the cruel drift – up around him. It hid his legs, his arms, his shoulders, and at last his head itself.
Still the snow fell and the wind blew. It blew with a moaning, whistling sound through the tall pine-trees, as it does through rigging and cordage of a ship in a gale. It blew with a rushing noise through the closer-branched spruce trees, and ever in a momentary lull you might have heard the frozen tips of the branches knocking together as if glass rattled.
It was a terrible night.
As usual on stormy evenings, stalwart John had gone to meet young Harry; but he kept the road. It never struck him that the boy would have ventured through the wood in such a night.
Harry’s parents were sitting in the parlour anxious beyond all expression, when suddenly the quick, sharp, impatient bark of the collie rang out high above the howling wind.
In she rushed whining when the door was opened. But out she flew again.
“Oh, come quickly,” she seemed to say, “and save poor young master!”
Mr Milvaine well knew what it meant. Five minutes after, with lanterns and poles, he and two trusty servants were following close at the honest dog’s heels.
Up the hill by the fence side, up and up and into the wood, and never did the faithful animal halt until she led them to the tree where she had left the boy.
For a moment or two now she seemed lost. She went galloping round and round the tree; while with their lanterns Mr Milvaine and his servants looked in vain for poor Harry.
But back Eily came, and at once began to scrape in the snow. Then something dark appeared, and Eily barked for joy.
Her master was found.
Was he dead? They thought so at first. But the covering of snow had saved him.
They poured a little brandy over his throat, wrapped him tenderly in a Highland plaid, and bore him home. Yet it was days before he spoke.
Dear reader, did ever you consider what a blessing our loving Father has given us in a faithful dog? How kind we ought to be, and how considerate for the comfort of such a noble animal! And ever as they get older our thoughtfulness for their welfare and care of them ought to increase. Mind, too, that most good thinking men believe that dogs have a hereafter.
“I canna but believe,” says the Ettrick shepherd, in his broad Doric, “that dowgs hae souls.”
My friend, the Rev. J.G. Wood, in his book called “Man and Beast,” has proved beyond dispute that there is nothing in Scripture against the theory that the lower animals will have a hereafter.
And note how the goodly poet Tupper writes about his dear dog Sandy:
