Ch. 6 - Pastoral - Page 2

unseen through the moss; and yet for the
sake of auld lang syne, and the figure of a certain GENIUS LOCI, I
am condemned to linger awhile in fancy by its shores; and if the
nymph (who cannot be above a span in stature) will but inspire my
pen, I would gladly carry the reader along with me.

John Todd, when I knew him, was already "the oldest herd on the
Pentlands," and had been all his days faithful to that curlew-
scattering, sheep-collecting life. He remembered the droving days,
when the drove roads, that now lie green and solitary through the
heather, were thronged thoroughfares. He had himself often marched
flocks into England, sleeping on the hillsides with his caravan;
and by his account it was a rough business not without danger. The
drove roads lay apart from habitation; the drovers met in the
wilderness, as to-day the deep-sea fishers meet off the banks in
the solitude of the Atlantic; and in the one as in the other case
rough habits and fist-law were the rule. Crimes were committed,
sheep filched, and drovers robbed and beaten; most of which
offences had a moorland burial and were never heard of in the
courts of justice. John, in those days, was at least once
attacked, - by two men after his watch, - and at least once,
betrayed by his habitual anger, fell under the danger of the law
and was clapped into some rustic prison-house, the doors of which
he burst in the night and was no more heard of in that quarter.
When I knew him, his life had fallen in quieter places, and he had
no cares beyond the dulness of his dogs and the inroads of
pedestrians from town. But for a man of his propensity to wrath
these were enough; he knew neither rest nor peace, except by
snatches; in the gray of the summer morning, and already from far
up the hill, he would wake the "toun" with the sound of his
shoutings; and in the lambing time, his cries were not yet silenced
late at night. This wrathful voice of a man unseen might be said
to haunt that quarter of the Pentlands, an audible bogie; and no
doubt it added to the fear in which men stood of John a touch of
something legendary. For my own part, he was at first my enemy,
and I, in my character of a rambling boy, his natural abhorrence.
It was long before I saw him near at hand, knowing him only by some
sudden blast of bellowing from far above, bidding me "c'way oot
amang the sheep." The quietest recesses of the hill harboured this
ogre; I skulked in my favourite wilderness like a Cameronian of the
Killing Time, and John Todd was my Claverhouse, and his dogs my
questing dragoons. Little by little we dropped into civilities;
his hail at sight of me began to have less of the ring of a war-
slogan; soon, we never met but he