Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/138

134 which was worn by frequent use, stood within reach; while a new-drained cup lay at his head, with a crust of bread beside it. On the other side sat Mungo Macubin, on a seat covered with a sheepskin; and compared to his debased and brutish companions he seemed a spirit of light. In spite of his disordered locks, and the habitual intoxication in which his eyes swam, his look was inviting, and even commanding. Something of better days and brighter hopes appeared about him. But in his eye frequently glimmered that transient and equivocal light, suspicious and fierce, which, influenced by drink and inflamed by contradiction, rendered him an insecure companion. A sword lay on a shelf beside him, with several tattered books, a fish-spear, a fishing-rod, and a fowling-piece; and a fiddle, tuned perhaps during the delirium of drink, hung there with its disordered strings. I observed, too, the machinery of a wooden clock, the labour, I afterwards learned, of his knife; together with several spoons and cups of sycamore, which he wanted the patience rather than the skill to finish. The notice which I took of this part of the establishment seemed far from displeasing to the proprietor.

"Around the shealing stood kegs and vessels for containing liquor, all of portable dimensions, such as a man might readily carry; and I wanted not this to convince me that a whisky-still of considerable magnitude was busy in the bosom of this wilderness. In the middle of the floor stood a rude table, the top of which had belonged to some neighbouring orchard, and still threatened in large letters the penalties of traps and guns to nightly depredators. It was swimming with liquor, and strewn with broken cups; and in the midst of the whole lay several of those popular publications which preach up the equality of human intellect and estate, and recommend, along with a general division of worldly goods, a more tolerant system of intercourse between the sexes. No doubt the excellent authors of those works would regard this appearance of their labours amid the Caledonian desert as a certain proof of fame; they would seek more than ever to attract men's affections to a more flexible system of morality; to awaken a kind of devotion which affords more scope to the natural passions of the multitude, and to wean human regard from that austere doctrine which inculcates self-denial, and sundry other such unreasonable matters. On a paper which contained a printed