Ch. 6 - Pastoral

TO leave home in early life is to be stunned and quickened with
novelties; but when years have come, it only casts a more endearing
light upon the past. As in those composite photographs of Mr.
Galton's, the image of each new sitter brings out but the more
clearly the central features of the race; when once youth has
flown, each new impression only deepens the sense of nationality
and the desire of native places. So may some cadet of Royal
Ecossais or the Albany Regiment, as he mounted guard about French
citadels, so may some officer marching his company of the Scots-
Dutch among the polders, have felt the soft rains of the Hebrides
upon his brow, or started in the ranks at the remembered aroma of
peat-smoke. And the rivers of home are dear in particular to all
men. This is as old as Naaman, who was jealous for Abana and
Pharpar; it is confined to no race nor country, for I know one of
Scottish blood but a child of Suffolk, whose fancy still lingers
about the lilied lowland waters of that shire. But the streams of
Scotland are incomparable in themselves - or I am only the more
Scottish to suppose so - and their sound and colour dwell for ever
in the memory. How often and willingly do I not look again in
fancy on Tummel, or Manor, or the talking Airdle, or Dee swirling
in its Lynn; on the bright burn of Kinnaird, or the golden burn
that pours and sulks in the den behind Kingussie! I think shame to
leave out one of these enchantresses, but the list would grow too
long if I remembered all; only I may not forget Allan Water, nor
birch-wetting Rogie, nor yet Almond; nor, for all its pollutions,
that Water of Leith of the many and well-named mills - Bell's
Mills, and Canon Mills, and Silver Mills; nor Redford Burn of
pleasant memories; nor yet, for all its smallness, that nameless
trickle that springs in the green bosom of Allermuir, and is fed
from Halkerside with a perennial teacupful, and threads the moss
under the Shearer's Knowe, and makes one pool there, overhung by a
rock, where I loved to sit and make bad verses, and is then
kidnapped in its infancy by subterranean pipes for the service of
the sea-beholding city in the plain. From many points in the moss
you may see at one glance its whole course and that of all its
tributaries; the geographer of this Lilliput may visit all its
corners without sitting down, and not yet begin to be breathed;
Shearer's Knowe and Halkerside are but names of adjacent cantons on
a single shoulder of a hill, as names are squandered (it would seem
to the in-expert, in superfluity) upon these upland sheepwalks; a
bucket would receive the whole discharge of the toy river; it would
take it an appreciable time to fill your morning bath; for the most
part, besides, it soaks