Page:Footsteps of Dr. Johnson.djvu/243

Rh tained that "a green-house is a childish thing." What a change has come since the clay when he wrote that "the country about Dunvegan is rough and barren. There are no trees except in the orchard, which is a low, sheltered spot, surrounded with a wall." The rough old fellow passed over the land with his strong common sense and his vigorous reproofs, and the rudeness of nature has been tamed, and its barrenness changed into luxuriance. He deserved better of mankind even than he "who made two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before;" for he made trees and flowers to grow where before there had been none. He did that which a king of Scotland had tried to do and failed. James the Fifth's command that round every house plantations should be made had resulted, I was told, in the few trees which Johnson saw. But where the king's could be almost counted on the fingers of the two hands, Johnson's cover whole hill-sides. I was informed by Miss Macleod, of Macleod, for whose kindness I am most grateful, that she had no doubt that it was his reproaches which stirred up her grandfather to plant so widely. How luxuriantly nature can deck the ground when she is aided by art, was seen in the strange variety of flowers which we noticed in the grounds. Two seasons seemed to be mingled into one, for we found at the same time wild roses, the hawthorn, blue bells, cuckoo flowers, heather, lupins, laburnums, and rhododendrons.

In ancient days the only access to the castle, says Sir Walter Scott, was "from the sea by a subterranean staircase, partly arched, partly cut in the rock, which winding up through the cliff opened into the court." These steps Johnson oddly describes as "a pair of stairs," just as if they were in an Oxford college or the Temple. When the tide was up access was cut off, so that a visitor who had arrived by land must at the very end of his journey have taken boat in order to gain the entrance. A little above the lower gate, on the side of the passage, there was an old well, with uncovered mouth. At the christening of the present laird, one of the guests who had drunk too freely, going down the steps to his boat, fell in and was drowned. The well was at once enclosed, and has never been used since. Even in Johnson's time its water, though not brackish in spite of its being so near to the sea, was not much used. The stream which formed Rorie More's Cascade was thought to