FullReads

R. C.”

This poor, vindictive, solitary, and powerful creature, was a philocalist: he had a singular love of flowers and of beautiful women. He was a sort of Paris, to whom the blushing Aphrodites of the glen used to come, and his judgment is said to have been as good, as the world generally thinks that of Oenone’s handsome and faithless mate. His garden was full of the finest flowers, and it was his pleasure, when the young beauties

“Who bore the blue sky intermixed with flame
In their fair eyes,”

came to him for their competitive examination, to scan them well, and then, without one word, present each with a flower, which was of a certain fixed and well-known value in Davie’s standard calimeter.

I have heard that there was one kind of rose, his {kallisteion}, which he was known to have given only to three, and I remember seeing one of the three, when she was past seventy. Margaret Murray, or Morra, was her maiden name, and this fine old lady, whom an Oxonian would call a Double First, grave and silent, and bent with “the pains,” when asked by us children, would, with some reluctance, and a curious grave smile, produce out of her Bible, Bowed Davie’s withered and flattened rose; and from her looks, even then, I was inclined to affirm the decision of the connoisseur of Manor Water. One can fancy the scene in that sweet solitary valley, informed like its sister Yarrow with pastoral melancholy, with a young May, bashful and eager, presenting herself for honors, encountering from under that penthouse of eyebrows the steady gaze of the strange eldritch creature; and then his making up his mind, and proceeding to pluck his award and present it to her, “herself a fairer flower,” and then turning with a scowl, crossed with a look of tenderness, crawl into his den. Poor “gloomy Dis,” slinking in alone.

They say, that when the candidate came, he surveyed her from his window, his eyes gleaming out of the darkness, and if he liked her not he disappeared; if he would entertain her, he beckoned her into the garden.

I have often thought that the Brownie, of whom the south country legends are so full, must have been some such misshapen creature, strong, willing, and forlorn, conscious of his hideous forbidding looks, and ready to purchase affection at any cost of labor, with a kindly heart, and a longing for human sympathy and intercourse. Such a being looks like the prototype of the Aiken-Drum of our infancy, and of that “drudging goblin,” of whom we all know how he

“… Sweat
To earn his cream-bowl daily set,
When in one night, ere glimpse of morn,
His shadowy flail hath thresh’d the corn,
That ten day lab’rers could not end;
Then lies him down, the lubber[1] fiend,
And stretch’d out all the chimney’s length,
Basks at the fire his hairy strength,
And cropful out of doors he flings,
Ere the first cock his matin rings.”

[Footnote 1: Lob-lye-by-the-fire.]

My readers will, I am sure, more than pardon me for giving them the following poem on Aiken-Drum, for the pleasure of first reading which, many years ago, I am indebted to Mr. R. Chambers’s Popular Rhymes of Scotland, where its “extraordinary merit” is generously acknowledged.

THE BROWNIE OF BLEDNOCH.

There cam’ a strange wicht to our town-en’,
An’ the fient a body did him ken;
He tirl’d na lang, but he glided ben
Wi’ a dreary, dreary hum.

His face did glow like the glow o’ the west,
When the drumlie cloud has it half o’ercast;
Or the struggling moon when she’s sair distrest,
O sirs! ’twas Aiken-drum.

I trow the bauldest stood aback,
Wi’ a gape an’ a glow’r till their lugs did crack,
As the shapeless phantom mum’ling spak,
Hae ye wark for Aiken-drum!