Page:Traditional Tales of the English and Scottish Peasantry - 1887.djvu/213

Rh my fears could fix, I remember that a kind of haze or exhalation, resembling the thin shooting of a distant light, floated through the air at our side, which I could not long endure to look upon. The old lord still preserved his position on the tower, and sat gazing towards us, as still and motionless as a marble statue, and with an intensity of gaze like one who is watching the coming of destiny.

"The acclamations which greeted our departure from Cumberland were exceeded by those which welcomed us to the Scottish shore. The romantic and mountainous coast of Colvend and Siddick was crowded with shepherd and matron and maid, who stood as motionless as their native rocks, and as silent too till we approached within reach of their voices, and then such a shout arose as startled the gulls and cormorants from rock and cavern for a full mile. The Scotch are a demure, a careful, and a singular people; and, amid much homeliness of manner, have something of a poetical way of displaying their affections, which they treasure, too, for great occasions, or, as they say, 'daimen times.' There are certain of their rustics much given to the composition of song and of ballad, in which a natural elegance occasionally glimmers among their antique and liquid dialect. I have been told the Lowland language of Scotland is more soft and persuasive than even that of England; and assuredly there was Martin Robson, a mariner of mine in the Mermaid, whose wily Scotch tongue made the hearts of half the damsels of Cumberland dance to their lips. But many of their ballads are of a barbarous jingle, and can only be admired because the names of those whom their authors love and hate, and the names of hill and dale and coast and stream, are interwoven with a ready ease unknown among the rustic rhymes of any other people.

"Preston Hall—the plough has long since passed over its foundation-stones!—was long the residence of a branch of the powerful and ancient name of Maxwell; and such was its fame for generosity that the beggar or pilgrim who went in at the eastern gate empty always came out at the western gate full, and blessing the bounty of the proprietor. It stood at the bottom of a deep and beautiful bay, at the entrance of which two knolls, slow in their swell from the land and abrupt in their rise from the sea, seemed almost to shut out all approach. In former times they had been crowned with slight towers of defence. It was a fairy nook for beauty;