it was while we continued to sojourn in edinburgh for the protection of the convention that first i began to turn my mind to the stated ministry of the kirk, for i saw well that this soldiering work must ere long come to an end. and yet all my heart went out towards something better than the hewing of peats upon the moor and the foddering of oxen in stall.
yet for long i could not see how the matter was to be accomplished, for the cameronian hill-folk had never had a minister since james renwick bade his farewell to sun and moon and desirable general meetings down in the edinburgh grassmarket. there was no authority in scotland capable of ordaining a cameronian minister. i knew how impossible it was that i could go to holland, as renwick and linning and shields had done, at the expense of the societies—for the way of some of these men had even{94} now begun to sour and disgust the elders of the hill folk.
so since no better might be i turned my mind to the ministry of the reformed kirk as it had been established by law, and resolved to spend my needful seasons as a student of the theologies in the town of edinburgh. i spoke to my father of my decision, and he was willing that i should try the work.
“i will gladly be at your college charges, quintin,” he said; “but mind, lad, it will depend how i sell my sheep, whether ye get muckle to put in your belly. yet, perchance, as the auld saw hath it, ‘hungry dogs hunt best,’ so mayhap that may likewise hold true of the getting of learning.”
so in the autumn of that year of the convention, and some months after our return, i made me ready to go to college, and to my infinite surprise hob, my brother, declared that he would come also.
“for,” said he, “my father does not need me now at home, at least, not till the spring and the lambing time.”
my father demurred a little. but hob got his way because he had, as i well saw, my mother behind him. now hob was (and is) the{95} best of brothers—slow, placid, self-contained, with little humour in him, but filled with a great, quiet faithfulness. and he has abode with me through many tears and stern trials.
so in due time to edinburgh we twain went, and while i trudged it back and forth to the college hob bought with his savings a pedlar’s pack, and travelled town and country with swatches of cloth, taches for the hair, pins for the dresses of women-folk, and for the men chap-books and testaments. but the strange thing is that, slow and silent as our hob is at most times, he could make his way with the good wives of the lothians as none of those bred to the trade could do. they tell me he was mightily successful.
i only know that many a day we two might have gone hungry to bed had it not been for what hob brought home, instead of, as it was, having our kites panged full with good meat, like tod lowrie when the lambs are young on the hill.[6]
and often when my heart was done with the dull and dowie days, the hardness of my heart, and the wryness of learning, hob would{96} come in with a lightsome quirk on his queer face, or a jest on his tongue, picked up in some of the outlying villages, so that i could not help but smile at him, which made the learning all the easier afterward.
yet the hardest part of my sore toil at college was the thought that the more i travailed at the theologies, the less of living religion was in my soul. indeed, it was not till i had been back some time among the common folk who sin and die and are buried, that i began again to taste the savour of vital religion as of old. for to my thinking there is no more godless class than just the young collegers in divinity. nor is this only a mock, as hob would have made of it, saying with his queer smile, “quintin, what think ye o’ a mission to the heathen divinity lads—to set the fire o’ hell to their tails, even as peden the prophet bade richie cameron do to the border thieves o’ annandale?”
connect and addition to chapter xi. made in after years by me, hob macclellan.
it is well seen from the foregoing that quintin, my brother, had no easy time of it while he was at the college, where they called him “separator,” “hill whig,” “young drumclog,” and{97} other nicknames, some of which grieved the lad sore.
now they were mostly leather-jawed, slack-twisted geordies from the hieland border that so troubled our quintin—who, though he was not averse to the sword or the pistol in a good cause, yet would not even be persuaded to lift his fist to one of these rascals, lest it should cause religion to be spoken against. but i was held by none of these scruples.
so it chanced that one night as we came out of the college wynd in the early falling winter gloaming, one of these bothy-men from the north called out an ill name after us—“porridge-fed galloway pigs,” or something of the kind. whereat very gladly i dealt him so sound a buffet on the angle of his jaw that his head was not set on straight again all the winter.
after this we adjourned to settle our differences at the corner of the plainstones; but quintin and the other theologians who had characters to lose took their way home, grieved in spirit. or so at least i think he pretended to himself.
for when i came in to our lodging an hour after his first words were: “did ye give him his licks, hob?” and that question, to which{98} i answered simply that i had and soundly, did not argue that the ancient adam had been fully exorcised from our quintin.
all the same the highlandman was none so easy to handle, being a red-headed grant from speyside, and more inclined to come at you with his thick skull, like a charging boar of rothiemurchus, than decently to stand up with the brave bare knuckles, as we are wont to do in the south.
a turn or two at kelton hill fair would have done him no harm and taught him that he must not fight with such an ungodly battering-ram as his head. i know lads there who would have met him on the crown with the toe of their brogans.
but this i scorned, judging it feater to deal him a round-arm blow behind the ear and leap aside. the first of these discouraged the grant; the second dropped him on the causeway dumb and limp.
“well done, galloway!” cried a voice above; “but ye shall answer for this the morn, every man o’ ye!”
“run, lads, run! ’tis the regent!” came the answering cry from the collegers.
and with that every remaining student lad ran his best in the direction of his own lodging.{99}
“well, sir, have ye killed the speyside hielandman?” said the doctor from his window, when i remained alone by the fallen chieftain. the regent came from the west himself, and, they say, bore the grants no love, for all that he was so holy a man.
“i think not,” i answered doubtfully, “but i’ll take him round to the infirmary and see!”
and with that i hoisted up the red grant on my shoulders, carried him down the infirmary close, and hammered on the door till the young chirurgeon who kept the place, thinking me to be drunk, came to threaten me with the watch.
then, the bolts being drawn, i backed the highlandman into the crack of the door and discharged him upon the floor.
“there’s a heap of good college divinity,” i said. “the regent sent me to bid ye find out if he be dead or alive.”
so with no more said we got him on a board, and at the first jag of the lancet my grant lad sat him up on end with a loup like a jack-in-the-box. but when he saw where he was, and the poor bits of dead folk that the surgeon laddies had been learning on that day, he fetched a yell{100} up from the soles of his highland shoon, and bounced off the board, crying, “ye’ll no cut me up as lang as donald grant’s a leeving man, whatever ye may do when he’s dead!”
and so he took through the door as if the dogs had been after him.
then the blood-letting man was for charging me with the cost of his time, but i bade him apply to regent campbell over at the college, telling him that it was he who had sent me. but whether ever he did so or not i never heard.
now the rarest jest of the whole matter was on the morrow, when quintin went to attend his prelection in hall. the lesson, so he told me, was in the latin of essenius, his compend, and quintin was called up. after he had answered upon his portion, and well, as i presume, for quintin was no dullard at his books, dr. campbell looked down a little queerly at him.
“can you tell me which is the sixth commandment?” says he.
“thou shalt not kill!” answers quintin, as simple as supping brose.
“then, are you a murderer or no—this morning?”
quintin, thinking that, after the fashion of the time, the regent meant some divinity quirk{101} or puzzle, laid his brains asteep, and answered that as he had certainly “hated his brother,” in that sense he was doubtless, like all the rest of the human race, technically and theologically a murderer.
“but,” said the professor, “what of the highland grant lad that ye felled like a bullock yestreen under my window?”
now it had never struck me that i was like my brother quintin in outward appearance, save in the way that all we black macclellans are like one another—long in the nose, bushy in the eyebrows, which mostly reach over to meet one another. and i grant it that quintin was ever better mettle for a lass’s eye than i—though not worth a pail of calf’s feed in the matter of making love as love ought to be made, which counts more with women than all fine appearings.
but for the nonce let that fly stick to the wall; at any rate, sure it is that the professor loon had taken me for quintin.
now it will greatly help those who read this chronicle to remember what quintin did on this occasion. i would not have cared a doit if he had said, in the plain hearing of the class, that it was his brother hob the lothian packman who had felled the red grant.{102}
but would the lad betray his brother? no! he rather hung his head, and said no more than that he heard the red grant was not seriously hurt. for as he said afterwards, “i did not know what such a tribe of angry, dirked highlandmen might have done to you, hob, if they had so much as guessed it was no colleger’s fist which had taken donald an inch beneath the ear.
“then,” said the regent to quintin, “my warrior of wild whigdom, you may set to the learning of thirty psalms by heart in the original hebrew. and after you have said them without the book i will consider of your letters of certification from this class.”
to which task my brother owes that familiarity with the psalms of david which has often served him to such noble purpose—both when, like boanerges, he thundered in the open fields to the listening peoples, and when at closer range he spoke with his enemies in the gate. for thirty would not suit this hungrisome quintin of ours. he must needs learn the whole hundred and fifty (is it not?) by rote before he went back to the regent.
“which thirty psalms are ye prepared to recite?{103}” queried the professor under the bush of his eyebrows.
“any thirty!” answered brave quintin, unabashed, yet noways uplifted.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
now the rest of my brother’s college life may be told in a word. i know that he had written many chapters upon his struggles and heart-questionings as to duty and guidance at that time. but whether he destroyed them himself, or whether they exist in some undiscovered repository, certain it is that the next portion of his autobiography which has come into my hands deals with the time of his settlement in the parish of balmaghie, where he was to endure so many strange things.
it is enough to say that year after year quintin and i returned to the college with the fall of the leaf, i with my pack upon my back, ever gaining ready hospitality because of the songs and merry tales in my wallet. when we journeyed to and fro quintin abode mostly at the road-ends and loaning-foots while i went up to chaffer with the good-wives in the hallans and ben-rooms of the farmhouses. then, in the same manner as at first, we fought our way through the dull, iron-grey months of winter in{104} auld reekie. each spring, as the willow buds furred and yellowed, saw us returning to the hill-farm again with our books and packs. and all the while i kept quintin cheerful company, looking to his clothes and mending at his stockings and body-gear as he sat over his books. mainly it was a happy time, for i knew that the lad would do us credit. and as my mother said many and many a time, “our quintin has wealth o’ lear and wealth o’ grace, but he hasna as muckle common-sense as wad seriously blind a midge.”
so partly because my mother put me through a searching catechism on my return, and also because i greatly loved the lad, i watched him night and day, laid his clothes out, dried his rig-and-fur hose, greased his shoon of home-tanned leather to keep out the searching snow-brew of the edinburgh streets. for, save when the frost grips it, sharp and snell, ’tis a terrible place to live in, that town of edinburgh in the winter season.
here begins again the narrative of quintin my
brother.{105}
