Chapter 5

RANDOM MEMORIES

I. - THE COAST OF FIFE

MANY writers have vigorously described the pains of the first day
or the first night at school; to a boy of any enterprise, I
believe, they are more often agreeably exciting. Misery - or at
least misery unrelieved - is confined to another period, to the
days of suspense and the "dreadful looking-for" of departure; when
the old life is running to an end, and the new life, with its new
interests, not yet begun: and to the pain of an imminent parting,
there is added the unrest of a state of conscious pre-existence.
The area railings, the beloved shop-window, the smell of semi-
suburban tanpits, the song of the church bells upon a Sunday, the
thin, high voices of compatriot children in a playing-field - what
a sudden, what an overpowering pathos breathes to him from each
familiar circumstance! The assaults of sorrow come not from
within, as it seems to him, but from without. I was proud and glad
to go to school; had I been let alone, I could have borne up like
any hero; but there was around me, in all my native town, a
conspiracy of lamentation: "Poor little boy, he is going away -
unkind little boy, he is going to leave us"; so the unspoken
burthen followed me as I went, with yearning and reproach. And at
length, one melancholy afternoon in the early autumn, and at a
place where it seems to me, looking back, it must be always autumn
and generally Sunday, there came suddenly upon the face of all I
saw - the long empty road, the lines of the tall houses, the church
upon the hill, the woody hillside garden - a look of such a
piercing sadness that my heart died; and seating myself on a door-
step, I shed tears of miserable sympathy. A benevolent cat
cumbered me the while with consolations - we two were alone in all
that was visible of the London Road: two poor waifs who had each
tasted sorrow - and she fawned upon the weeper, and gambolled for
his entertainment, watching the effect it seemed, with motherly
eyes.

For the sake of the cat, God bless her! I confessed at home the
story of my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain
journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the
London Road. It was judged, if I had thus brimmed over on the
public highway, some change of scene was (in the medical sense)
indicated; my father at the time was visiting the harbour lights of
Scotland; and it was decided he should take me along with him
around a portion of the shores of Fife; my first professional tour,
my first journey in the complete character of man, without the help
of petticoats.

The Kingdom of Fife (that royal province) may be observed by the
curious on the map, occupying a tongue of land