V. — THE MEN OF THE UPLANDS

THE VALE OF THE UPPER Tweed is distinct from the neighbouring dales of Clyde and Annan, and no less from the rich strath into which the Border river enters in its maturer course, in a way which may seem strange to one superficially aware of their proximity. You pass almost at a bound from the fat lands of Dumfries, or the wooded holms of Melrose, to a country of miniature and yet greater beauties. There you have wide vistas and broad streams; here we have vistas, waters, hills, woods, an epitome of landscape, small in the acreage of the surveyor, but large by that curious measurement which is the prerogative of the mind of man. It is indubitably a country of surprises, a dapper arrangement of landscapes which charm by their contrast. The cottar’s garden, gay with all seasons’ flowers, runs into the heather; reapers ply their trade within hearing of the thrush and the curlew; a meadow of hay is own neighbour to a grim pine- forest; and a sullen stream in one field may be an eddying torrent in the next. The art of the epigrammatist would be expended in vain in searching for the applicable word. One might call it austere, but for the grace of the woods; barren, but for the fresh green meadows and fruitful gardens; homely, were it not for some great blue shoulder of hill which bars the sky and gives solemnity to the little ridges. It is a country of contradiction, blended into harmony by that subtle Border charm which relates the crags of Moffatdale to the lowlands of Berwick.

The people of this Arcady are in certain ways akin to their country-side. They, too, are full of surprises. Harshness and gentleness, worldly prudence and the most insane recklessness, humour and a crass stupidity, unite in varying degrees in their composition. In these narrow valleys tragedy and comedy dwell side by side in a confusion as grotesque as any Wonderland, and to the seeing eye there are plays enough acted every day of the year. To the casual traveller there is incongruity, to the man who has long known them there is none; for he feels each whimsicality ofcharacter to be the artistic companion of the variant landscape.

Celtic and Saxon meet here, but Saxon has the predominance. Apart from such far-away histories there is one near and living fact of their genealogy. Their forefathers were those gallant gentlemen or disreputable ruffians (call them what you please) who played fine havoc with well-stocked Northumbrian pastures; who—and here is the sad part of the tale—so far forgot themselves as now and then to plunder their Scots brethren. Days and nights of riding, when a false step may be death, make a man’s senses wonderfully acute. He learns to use his wits, which is well-nigh a lost art among us; he becomes versed in the lore of woodcraft and hill-craft; he can mark a glimmer of spears six miles away, and the saddle is more easy to him than his bed. Such a trade is not over- good for morality, save for the virtue of courage, which it undeniably tends to foster; but it is the very finest school in the world for the natural man. The folk of Tweedside to-day are sprung of this fighting stock. The fathers had little time to settle on their lees and sink into the country lout; and the children in consequence are of keener temper and finer spirit than the ordinary rustic. The difference is vividly seen when one looks at the Westland folk who have come from the remoter lands of Ayr and Lanark to settle by the Tweed. Honest and worthy, courageous and kindly, they lack few of the sterling virtues of life; they manage their farms with commendable industry; they fear God and do good in their several ways. But to set them on a level with the true-born Uplander is to rate butter-milk as high as Burgundy. It is conceivable that at certain times the former may be the more salutary diet, but this cheap quality of wholesomeness does not make the estimate any the more true. To this day you may find a certain enmity between the two strains, dislike on the one hand and distaste on the other.

To the chance traveller in their midst that which appears the most prominent quality of the people is their singular acuteness of mind. To call them cultured or learned would be to brand them with an undeserved reproach. They have indeed something of a contempt for book-learning; the Scots phenomenon known as a “dungeon of wit” meets with less respect among them than elsewhere. The Book of Life is a volume which makes all printed matter of small significance. But in native shrewdness I should venture to set one of them against any other average inhabitant of the globe. Two well-known Scots philosophers, both sprung from humble origin, hailed from this place; but they are types and not exceptions. You may see any day, behind the plough or on the shearing-stool, men with faces as ponderously thoughtful as an Aquinas. This may seem an exaggerated picture, but I fancy it is not far from the truth. To be sure, this intellectuality of countenance is often deceptive, and its possessor may have no thought above whisky or mole-catching; but again it is not unfrequently only the index of the sagacity and gravity within.

It is curious to note the floating fragments of learning which perambulate the countryside, stories derived, I know not whence, often strangely marred in the telling, but hinting at some share of the humanities (to use the fine Scots word) which was the possession of some prior generation. One old woman of my knowledge had a distant acquaintance with some of the tales in the “Odyssey.” She surprised me on one occasion by declaring that her son’s socks were no better than Penelope’s web (she did not sound the last letter of the virtuous queens name), for what she mended in the morning was a hole again at night. She had never heard of Homer; the story was just an “owercome” which she had got from her mother. Still stranger was the tale which another was wont to tell as a warning to those who take pride in ugliness, dirt, and poverty. There were once two men, she would say, a farmer and a ploughman, the one rich and the other poor, the one humble and the other proud as Satan. One day the ploughman came to the farmer’s home in his muddy boots, and was taken to the best room, where there was a very fine carpet. He had no sooner entered than he stamped his clogs upon the floor with every circumstance of scorn. “There,” said he, “I trample on the pride of Platto"—Platto was the farmer’s name. “Ay,” says the other, “but with still greater pride.” This is no less than the story of Diogenes and Plato, but the teller had no inkling of its source. “Did you ever hear of any one whose name was Platto?” I asked. “No,” she said, “but, well there’s folk called Latto, and Platto will just be an auld way of writing it.”

Dr. Penicuik of Romano, who wrote a book on Tweeddale in the beginning of last century, did full justice to the good qualities of the folk, but added that there was one curious defect in all—a total lack of music; “for,” he says, “music is so great a stranger to their temper that you will hardly light upon one amongst six that can distinguish one tune from another.” I combat the assertion root and branch, and cannot help suspecting that the worthy doctor had no very shrewd ear for music himself. No people who had not a true love and gift for melody could have produced so many fine airs, and their written songs, though few in number, are yet choice of their kind. To cite one instance, there is that excellent drinking song, “Come sit ye doon, my cronies,” which I would willingly set down were not my memory so feeble.

But to pass to graver themes: there is one side of Scots life which no man can afford to neglect, though of late years it has rather been thrust down our throats. I mean the religious. It is a fine thing to say of any folk that their religion fills a large place in the world of their thoughts. But in the Border country I venture to think that it is weighted with a healthy worldliness, so much so that frequently it disappears from the surface altogether. For, say what we may, the Men of the Uplands are on the whole a worldly people. Explain it as you like, by their descent or by their countryside, the fact remains. They are not the stuff of which fanatics are made; the temporal and the tangible are too much before their eyes. For this very reason, in the days of the Covenanters and the persecution, the Peeblesshire men did not rise like the Westland Whigs. The fugitives in the Tweedside hills were mostly men from Annandale or gaunt-faced wanderers from the moors of Clyde. To be sure there were Habb Dab and David Din, who “dang the Deil ower Dobsons linn,” who might have been expected to save the reputation of the place. These two worthies, hiding in a cave at the head of Moffat Water, were assailed by Satan in the guise of a pack of dried hides, and being strong in the faith, they promptly kicked him over the waterfall. As the song has it:

Like a pack of barkit skins,

Doon fell Satan ower the Linns.

But from the very fact of their supernatural intercourse it is to be inferred that these were the exceptions, and that the zeal of the arch-enemy to convert them may be attributed to a laudable desire on his part to keep the countryside consistent. It would be a hard task to rouse the people over any mere matter of scrupulousness, any nicety of ceremonial or refinement of Church government. We have in our midst a sprinkling of earnest...