Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 15, No. 85, January, 1875

In Great Britain the rifle, ancient or modern, like, indeed, any other firearm, has yet to establish itself as a democratic "institution." Her forests are not forests in our sense, and her mountain-dwellers know little of the rifle. In the duke of Athol's seventy-mile forest, with scarce a tree save planted larches, the stag roams by thousands, but of course the game-laws interpose, as they did eight hundred years ago, between him and the (biped) hind. He is still the reserved luxury of the Norman. So with the leagues of upland where His Grace of Sutherland has made the Highlander give place to the hart, the "lassie wi' the lint-white locks" to the Cheviot ewe—where, in short, the white Celt has been improved out of existence as remorselessly as the red man in America, and that in favor not of a superior race of men, but of feræ naturæ. Into these and similar districts, at stated seasons, sundry squads of gentlemen are turned loose. They either "pay their shot," as Punch has it, in the shape of rent, or are the guests of the noble proprietors. Their devices for circumventing the antlered monarch of the waste are amply detailed by Scrope, Hawker, Herbert and also by the late Edwin Landseer doing the pictorial department with a success attributable chiefly to his management of landscape effect, for his dogs, deer and other animals from his Æsop's fable-like groups to his four duplicated lions in Trafalgar Square, belong—heretic that we are to say it!—properly to still life, their want of action and verve placing them beneath comparison with the works of either one of a score of Flemish and French painters, from Rubens and Snyders down to Bonheur and Vernet. That his unsold pictures have brought, since his death, something like half a million proves nothing. Time was when the worthless canvases of West and Morland were equally transmutable into gold.

Like other forms of British field-sports, deer-stalking is sufficiently intricate and artificial. It is obviously the occupation of men whose primary object is more to kill time than to kill deer. According to print, from type and plate, the stag, a reduced edition of the American wapiti, is, in the heart of a little kingdom of some hundreds of souls to the square mile, as little accustomed to the sight of man and as hard to approach as he would be on the head-waters of the Yellowstone. If five or six hours' worming, ventre à terre, up the bed of a mountain-torrent, with not even a rowan-bush to aid concealment, succeed in bringing the sports-man within two hundred yards of his unconscious game, it is a good day's performance. How, the dun deer's hide once perforated, the "tail" of game-keepers, beaters and volunteer hangers-on is gathered up, the comforting toothfu' of usquebaugh absorbed by the toilers of the brae, the victim "gralloched" and suspended across the inevitable gray Highland pony that makes such a capital "first light" for the foreground, and the line of triumphant march taken up for hunting-box, clachan or castle, have we not been told to repletion? The tool used on these occasions is up to the latest requirements of modern science. Whitworth and Lancaster, thanks to their projectile's being wedged in so tight as to cause an occasional misunderstanding it and the breech-plug as to which was expected to move, have grown unpopular. The style and the patentee vary every year or two or oftener, breech-loading and the elongated bullet being the only persistent features.

Among the commonalty of Britain, within a very few years past, rifle-clubs and matches have been brought greatly into vogue under government encouragement. Austria, tu infelix this time, having served unwillingly as an experimental target, with the most distinguished and gratifying success to the experimenters, at Solferino and Sadowa, gave a new impetus to the rifle movement in England, as France, a trifle later, did to the Battle-of-Dorking school of prophetic literature. Thus it happens that the rifle is taking its place gradually by the side of fat Durhams, gooseberries, lop eared rabbits and the Derby as a popular sensation. Johnny sends over a "team," evidently in his judgment a whole one, to "shoot the American continent." His next deputation ought to be sent, after vanquishing the "blarsted" Gothamites, to the recesses of the Alleghany, and pitted there against the woodsman with his ancient weapon carrying a round ball of seventy-five to the pound, five feet long and decorated with tin sights, double trigger and mayhap flint-lock. The adventurers would beat in the long run, but they would go home not wholly unlearned. Should they stay to a turkey-shoot, they would see in it the Occidental analogue of their own public matches—more picturesque, if not quite so prim and scientific. Strictly, it presupposes conditions non-existent in England—a community, for instance, first of hunters, and second of hunters with the rifle.

This recreation, primarily belonging to localities where large game, such as deer and wild-turkeys, is found, has spread down to the cities, where it breaks out in a sporadic form about Christmas. But the hills are its home—the foot-hills, notably, of the Appalachian range, the domestic turkey not being very common higher up, nor its wild original ("original," we insist, pace the Agricultural Report ornithologist, who finds an ineffaceable distinction in the fact that the tail-ring of the one is sometimes, and that of the other never, white!) lower down.

We mind us of an ancient town in the Valley of Virginia, settled nearly a century and a half ago by riflemen, sheltered by them through a stormy infancy, and still steeped in the traditions of the implement in question. Spitted by the railway, the hub of many turnpikes, and surrounded by a thickly-peopled country, it is yet near enough to the mountains to receive from them each winter quite a delegation of their inhabitants. Last year wild-turkeys were shot within the corporate limits, a deer was chased within half a mile of them, and a fine specimen of Felis Canadensis was killed in an orchard still nearer.

Four miles west of the town the fertile limestone carse swells into the shady hills, clad largely with pine, that form the long glacis of the Alleghanies. These hills are peopled principally by a hardy race not unlike the German woodsmen, whose blood, indeed, a great many of them share, as their surnames, though sadly thinned down into English spelling and pronunciation, denote. They inherit, likewise, their fancy for the rifle. Allied with the axe, which, like Talleyrand's supposititious frontiersman, they have not forgotten, it supplies them materially with sport and subsistence. Their land, where arable at all, being unproductive as a rule, wood-chopping is their most profitable branch of farming. A score or two of them drive into town daily, each with his four-, three- or two-horse cargo of wood. The pile is frequently topped off with a brace or two of ruffed grouse, there called pheasant, or a wild-turkey, less often a deer, and more often hares; which last multiply along the narrow intervales in extraordinary numbers. We have seen three sledge-loads of hares—say two thousand in all—on the street of a winter's day.

This sappy and sapid contribution to its comfort and luxury the town often repays with a jug of whisky as an addendum to the cash receipts; although it must not be inferred from this that the hillmen are noted for a weakness in that direction. Generally, they are as sober as they are hard-working, independent and honest. The few who do take kindly to strong waters are so hardened by a life of toil and exposure that the enemy is a lifetime in bringing them down.. One little old hook-nosed fellow was an every-day feature of the road for fifteen or twenty years. In that entire period he was rarely, if once, seen to go out sober. He drove but two horses, which were apparently coeval with himself. Long practice had taught them perfectly how to accommodate themselves to their master's failing. The saddle-horse adapted his movements with vigilant dexterity to the rolling and pitching aloft. On more than one occasion the woodman was found lying in the road by the side or under the feet of his faithful and motionless team. Poor old Jack! thou hast "gone under," deeper than that, at last, leaving behind thee the savor of an honest name, slightly modified by that of corn whisky.

The Hayfield Inn, a little hostelrie on the Northern "pike," is the scene of many a turkey-shoot. Between the hill and the road, at the foot of a ravine that runs down at right angles, room enough has been scooped out, partly by the rains and partly by the pick, for the house, offices and microscopic yard decorated with hollyhocks and larkspurs. Across the highway stands a capacious barn, with open space for wagons, and between it and the brook beyond stretches a narrow meadow, whence a vivid imagination has extracted the name of the caravanserai. The open space flanking the house and road is the rifle-course, so to speak. When occupied of a mellow October afternoon by a party of the autochthones, in their pea-jackets of blue or hickory homespun, it presents a gay and cheery spectacle. Festooning fence and tree around them, the Virginia creeper, or Ampelopsis, shames vermilion against the mass of pines that glooms skyward beyond. Other tints of vegetable decay fringe the brook where it winds from side to side of the long strip of grass, green from the autumnal rain. Little reck the assembled marksmen of Nature's stage-decorations. One group will be mentally weighing the turkeys, another discussing the distance—too long or too short for the peculiar powers of this or the other individual or his weapon. Around the rude target kneel two or three, scoring on it each man his "centre," above or below, to the right or left, of the true centre, to counteract the ascertained obliquity of his eye or his gun. Here a six-foot Stoic, the Nestor of the glen, is very formally going through the ceremony of loading. Another is slowly, and with the precision of an astronomer, adjusting the tin slides which protect his barrel from the glitter of the sun. The chatter of a bevy of country maidens ripples from over the way. The horses whinny under their square-skirted saddles, or stand "hard by their chariots champing golden corn," like the horses of Nestor, Agamemnon, Homer and Gladstone before Dr. Schliemann's Troy; the yearlings in the meadow alternately gaze and graze; the guinea-fowl now and then honors the shout over a good shot with its harsh but well-meant rattle; the rifle speaks at measured intervals; the prizes thin off to the remainder gobbler; and so, with the quiet characteristic of rifle-matches, the evening draws toward the dew. The smoke-whitened guns are carefully swabbed with tow and prepared for their rest as tenderly as infants. Dobbin is rescued from the (fence) stake to hie hill-ward with his master, cantering exultant or jogging grumly according to the result of the "event;" and the metropolis of Petticoat Gap—for such, in the vernacular and on the maps, is its unfortunate designation—relapses into virtuous repose.

The implement employed at these rural reunions is rarely the breech-loader, or even the short gun. It promises to hold its ground for years yet, gradually yielding to the little modern tool. The essential characteristics of this we have described as they exist and will probably remain. Variations in the rifling and—where muzzle-loading is abandoned—in the appliances of the chamber will continue to be made, as they have heretofore been made without number numberless. The patterns now fashionable will give place to others, in their turn to be dropped like a last year's coat. Remington, Winchester and the rest will retire in favor of new contrivers, devoted, like them, to the simple task of facilitating the flight of the leaden arrow with its grooved feather in steel or iron. With them will rise and fall a parallel series of names on a broader and more sonorous field—the field of heavy artillery, the ponderous Wiard being full brother to the liliputian Sharpe. Rifled cannon certainly present problems far more complicated than the small-arm. They can by no means be considered, as yet, so near perfection. It is boldly maintained by many experts, both here and in England, that the "smashing" power at point-blank range of such smooth-bores as the Rodman 12-inch and 15-inch is greater than that of the rifle of the same weight. The question is so closely involved with that of armor-plates for ships and ports, and that with buoyancy and other naval requirements, and economy and stability on land, that a long period must elapse ere the reaching of fixed conclusions. Within the present generation wooden line-of-battle ships, with sails alone, have ruled the wave. These have given place to the steam-liners that began and closed their brief career at Sebastopol and Bomarsund; and the prize-belt is now borne, among the bruisers of the main, by the mob of iron-clads, infinitely diverse of aspect and some of them shapeless, like the geologic monsters that weltered in the primal deep. Which of these is to triumph ultimately and devour its misshapen kindred, or whether they are not all to go down before the torpedo, that carries no gun and fires no shot, is a "survival-of-the-fittest" question to be solved by Darwins yet to come. But it is tolerably safe to say that where the best shooting is to be done it will continue to be done with the conico-cylindrical missile, spirally revolving around the line of flight; that is, with the arrow-rifle.

EDWARD C. BRUCE.

TWO MIRRORS

My love but breathed upon the glass,And, lo! upon the crystal sheenA tender mist did straightway pass,And raised its jealous veil between.But quick, as when Aurora's faceIs hid behind some transient shroud,The sun strikes through with golden grace,And she emerges from the cloud;So from her eyes celestial lightShines on the mirror's cloudy plain,And swift the envious mist takes flight,And shows her lovely face again.When o'er the mirror of my heart,Wherein her image true endures,Some misty doubt doth sudden start,And all the sweet reflex obscures,There beams such glow from her clear eyesThat swift the rising mists are laid;And, fixed again, her image lies,All lovelier for the passing shade.F.A. HILLARD.

MALCOLM

BY GEORGE MACDONALD, AUTHOR OF "ANNALS OF A QUIET NEIGHBORHOOD," "ROBERT FALCONER," ETC

CHAPTER LXIV.

THE LAIRD AND HIS MOTHER

When Malcolm and Joseph set out from Duff Harbor to find the laird, they could hardly be said to have gone in search of him: all in their power was to seek the parts where he was occasionally seen, in the hope of chancing upon him; and they wandered in vain about the woods of Fife House all that week, returning disconsolate every evening to the little inn on the banks of the Wan Water. Sunday came and went without yielding a trace of him; and, almost in despair, they resolved, if unsuccessful the next day, to get assistance and organize a search for him. Monday passed like the days that had preceded it, and they were returning dejectedly down the left bank of the Wan Water in the gloaming, and nearing a part where it is hemmed in by precipitous rocks and is very narrow and deep, crawling slow and black under the lofty arch of an ancient bridge that spans it at one leap, when suddenly they caught sight of a head peering at them over the parapet. They dared not run for fear of terrifying him if it should be the laird, and hurried quietly to the spot. But when they reached the end of the bridge its round back was bare from end to end. On the other side of the river the trees came close up, and pursuit was hopeless in the gathering darkness.

"Laird, laird! they've ta'en awa' Phemy, an' we dinna ken whaur to luik for her," cried the poor father aloud.

Almost the same instant, and as if he had issued from the ground, the laird stood before them. The men started back with astonishment—soon changed into pity, for there was light enough to see how miserable the poor fellow looked. Neither exposure nor privation had thus weighed upon him: he was simply dying of fear. Having greeted Joseph with embarrassment, he kept glancing doubtfully at Malcolm, as if ready to run on his least movement. In few words Joseph explained their quest—with trembling voice and tears that would not be denied enforcing the tale. Ere he had done the laird's jaw had fallen and further speech was impossible to him. But by gestures sad and plain enough he indicated that he knew nothing of her, and had supposed her safe at home with her parents. In vain they tried to persuade him to go back with them, promising every protection: for sole answer he shook his head mournfully.

There came a sudden gust of wind among the branches. Joseph, little used to trees and their ways with the wind, turned toward the sound, and Malcolm unconsciously followed his movement. When they turned again the laird had vanished, and they took their way homeward in sadness.

What passed next with the laird can be but conjectured. It came to be well enough known afterward where he had been hiding; and had it not been dusk as they came down the river-bank the two men might, looking up to the bridge from below, have had it suggested to them. For in the half-spandrel wall between the first arch and the bank they might have spied a small window looking down on the sullen, silent gloom, foam-flecked with past commotion, that crept languidly away from beneath. It belonged to a little vaulted chamber in the bridge, devised by some vanished lord as a kind of summer-house—long neglected, but having in it yet a mouldering table, a broken chair or two and a rough bench. A little path led steep from the end of the parapet down to its hidden door. It was now used only by the game-keepers for traps and fishing-gear and odds and ends of things, and was generally supposed to be locked up. The laird had, however, found it open, and his refuge in it had been connived at by one of the men, who, as they heard afterward, had given him the key and assisted him in carrying out a plan he had devised for barricading the door. It was from this place he had so suddenly risen at the call of Blue Peter, and to it he had as suddenly withdrawn again—to pass in silence and loneliness through his last purgatorial pain.2

Mrs. Stewart was sitting in her drawing-room alone: she seldom had visitors at Kirkbyres—not that she liked being alone, or indeed being there at all, for she would have lived on the Continent, but that her son's trustees, partly to indulge their own aversion to her, taking upon them a larger discretionary power than rightly belonged to them, kept her too straitened, which no doubt in the recoil had its share in poor Stephen's misery. It was only after scraping for a whole year that she could escape to Paris or Homburg, where she was at home. There her sojourn was determined by her good or ill fortune at faro.

What she meditated over her knitting by the firelight—she had put out her candles—it would be hard to say, perhaps unwholesome to think: there are souls to look into which is, to our dim eyes, like gazing down from the verge of one of the Swedenborgian pits.

But much of the evil done by human beings is as the evil of evil beasts: they know not what they do—an excuse which, except in regard to the past, no man can make for himself, seeing the very making of it must testify its falsehood.

She looked up, gave a cry and started to her feet: Stephen stood before her, halfway between her and the door. Revealed in a flicker of flame from the fire, he vanished in the following shade, and for a moment she stood in doubt of her seeing sense. But when the coal flashed again there was her son, regarding her out of great eyes that looked as if they had seen death. A ghastly air hung about him, as if he had just come back from Hades, but in his silent bearing there was a sanity, even dignity, which strangely impressed her. He came forward a pace or two, stopped, and said, "Dinna be frichtit, mem. I'm come. Sen' the lassie hame an' du wi' me as ye like. I canna haud aff o' me. But I think I'm deein', an' ye needna misguide me."

His voice, although it trembled a little, was clear and unimpeded, and, though weak in its modulation, manly.

Something in the woman's heart responded. Was it motherhood or the deeper godhead? Was it pity for the dignity housed in the crumbling clay, or repentance for the son of her womb? Or was it that sickness gave hope, and she could afford to be kind?

"I don't know what you mean, Stephen," she said, more gently than he had ever heard her speak.

Was it an agony of mind or of body, or was it but a flickering of the shadows upon his face? A moment, and he gave a half-choked shriek and fell on the floor. His mother turned from him with disgust and rang the bell. "Send Tom here," she said.

An elderly, hard-featured man came.

"Stephen is in one of his fits," she said.

The man looked about him: he could see no one in the room but his mistress.

"There he is," she continued, pointing to the floor. "Take him away. Get him up to the loft and lay him in the hay."

The man lifted his master like an unwieldy log and carried him, convulsed, from the room.

Stephen's mother sat down again by the fire and resumed her knitting.

CHAPTER LXV.

THE LAIRD'S VISION

Malcolm had just seen his master set out for his solitary ride when one of the maids informed him that a man from Kirkbyres wanted him. Hiding his reluctance, he went with her and found Tom, who was Mrs. Stewart's grieve and had been about the place all his days.

"Mr. Stephen's come hame, sir," he said, touching his bonnet, a civility for which Malcolm was not grateful.

"It's no possible," returned Malcolm. "I saw him last nicht."

"He cam aboot ten o'clock, sir, an' hed a turn o' the fa'in' sickness o' the spot. He's verra ill the noo, an' the mistress sent me ower to speir gien ye wad obleege her by gaein' to see him."

"Has he ta'en till's bed?" asked Malcolm.

"We pat him infill 't, sir. He's ravin' mad, an' I'm thinkin' he's no far frae his hin'er en'."

"I'll gang wi' ye direckly," said Malcolm.

In a few minutes they were riding fast along the road to Kirkbyres, neither with much to say to the other, for Malcolm distrusted every one about the place, and Tom was by nature taciturn.

"What garred them sen' for me, div ye ken?" asked Malcolm at length when they had gone about halfway.

"He cried oot upo' ye i' the nicht," answered Tom.

When they arrived Malcolm was shown into the drawing-room, where Mrs. Stewart met him with red eyes. "Will you come and see my poor boy?" she said.

"I wull du that, mem. Is he verra ill?"

"Very. I'm afraid he is in a bad way."

She led him to a dark, old-fashioned chamber, rich and gloomy. There, sunk in the down of a huge bed with carved ebony posts, lay the laird, far too ill to be incommoded by the luxury to which he was unaccustomed. His head kept tossing from side to side and his eyes seemed searching in vacancy.

"Has the doctor been to see 'im, mem?" asked Malcolm.

"Yes, but he says he can't do anything for him."

"Wha waits upon 'im, mem?"

"One of the maids and myself."

"I'll jist bide wi' 'im."

"That will be very kind of you."

"I s' bide wi' 'im till I see 'im oot o' this, ae w'y or ither,", added Malcolm, and sat down by the bedside of his poor distrustful friend. There Mrs. Stewart left him.

The laird was wandering in the thorny thickets and slimy marshes which, haunted by the thousand misshapen horrors of delirium, beset the gates of life. That one so near the light and slowly drifting into it should lie tossing in hopeless darkness! Is it that the delirium falls, a veil of love, to hide other and more real terrors?

His eyes would now and then meet those of Malcolm as they gazed tenderly upon him, but the living thing that looked out of the windows was darkened and saw him not. Occasionally a word would fall from him, or a murmur of half-articulation float up like the sound of a river of souls; but whether Malcolm heard, or only seemed to hear, something like this, he could not tell, for he could not be certain that he had not himself shaped the words by receiving the babble into the moulds of the laird's customary thought and speech: "I dinna ken whaur I cam frae—I kenna whaur I'm gaein' till.—Eh, gien He wad but come oot an' shaw Himsel'!—O Lord! tak the deevil aff o' my puir back.—O Father o' lichts! gar him tak the hump wi' him. I hae no fawvor for't, though it's been my constant compainion this mony a lang."