saw a queerer, or, perhaps, a more disgusting sight than that of this old fuddled wheelwright trying to sit upright on his plank bed, half covered with its canvas sheets, and with all the strange collection of articles hanging on hooks and in chains around him, and mumbling now to himself and now to me, "D-d ugly face-hic-ic; what's 't white for? 'orribl' !—hic-ic—white! Take yer 'orribl' faceface-white-hic-ic-face away, d-n you." I took him by the shoulders and pinned him down till he was fast asleep. I was afraid to leave him, so I made a night of it in the dismal kitchen, keeping solitary guard. Before daybreak Matt awoke a sobered man. He remembered little of what had happened, and he had small excuse to offer. "He did it but once in t' year; 'pon 'is soul he was a calf for port wine." So I hurried home to bed.

As

I had now seen Matt in an entirely new character, and though he was quite as interesting, he seemed less strong and original, though perhaps more human. One evening I was passing his cottage, and I saw a dirty black strip of alpaca hanging from the window. Matt did things so much by clockwork-so mathematically regularand this was a new sight, I was eager to know what it signified. So I entered. (He had long ago begged me to dispense with the "senseless custom o' tappin' an' rappin' at t' door.") Matt was at first disinclined to give any explanation of his strip of alpaca. was a bit o' mournin'," that was all I could extract from him. Seeing at length, however, that I was not to be put off, he told me everything. It appeared that Matt was a married man, but his wife had jilted him—that is to say, she had run away with another man. It was years ago, and had happened in Australia. Matt had thus some cause to hate the sex, and he did hate them with a deep-settled, sour hatred. One of the points on which he would have tackled the Great Engineer-one of the points upon which, perchance, he has since tackled Him-for, in the quaint old language, Matt is now with God-was this question of sex. It seemed illogical of the Great Engineer, after having turned out a fairly workable and reliable machine in the person of man, to construct an unworkable and unreliable one in the person of woman. The rag at any rate was a weed of mourning. No one but myself had known it as such a thing; but to Matt that mattered not. He lived alone in this dust-heap of a world waiting for a word with its Maker, and meanwhile this was an annual symbol of sorrow between himself and the invisible Engineer. Two things at least Matt did yearly. He got drunk upon port wine, and he hung out this rag in silent denunciation of

the sex.

Matt took little interest in politics. This followed almost as a necessary result of his creed. So long as men walked in the night of ignorance, shut off from Him who causes the apple to grow and who made the world, there could be little use in troubling about that monstrous organism, Society, or its government. It was seething in the great maelstrom, and there it might seethe till the better day dawned. Matt, like others, looked far for his millennium; but yet he had some interest in political movements. Two things especially he talked about, viz. trades unions and monarchical government. He resented the intrusion and dictation of the former-"Good Lor' ! they smother an' throttle ye!" Matt did not see why the individual workman, at any rate why he, who called his soul his own, should be coerced or dictated to, or prevented in the slightest degree from going his own way. Matt was a rebel against law and human control, a sort of anarchist, and he bowed alone to the Great Engineer. He paid the Queen and her government scant respect. There was a certain weekly newspaper which in those days was rabidly republican (it may be so still), and this was the only paper that Matt took in. He gloated over its denunciation of things royal. It was no use reasoning with Matt; his mind had been made up, and the fierce hatred was a settled thing. In this Matt reminded me of a very different character, of whom I have elsewhere written as a "light o' Carglen." "P. W.," otherwise Peter Wilkins Grant, was a staunch and orthodox Free Kirk man, who accepted nearly all that Matt rejected, but in politics they were one, and the light that lightened both was this abusive rag of a paper.

Matt was a vegetarian in diet, at least when he provided food for himself. If he dined or supped at my expense, I found he could eat anything. But his chief home-made dish was compounded of a curious mixture of flour, onions, and potatoes. It was fairly palatable, but it tasted very substantial. Matt made many a meal upon bread and cheese and a mug of thick ale. He was never "a calf for ale " as for port, but he often declared that the Great Engineer had made cheese for beer and beer for cheese, for they went famously together. They were a sort of man and wife.

Matt is dead now. He never got away out of England to sunnier lands across the sea, as he greatly desired, and his bones rest in Denhilton churchyard, under the shadow of the parish church. Standing by his grave you can listen to the parson's voice on a Sunday as he declaims from the pulpit, and fancy pictures that if the dead man could hear he would arise and beg "jest t' have a word wi' ye; jest a word o' explanation." Matt died as he had lived, believing VOL. CCLXXIII. NO. 1941.

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that in spirit, if not in body, he would stand before the Great Engineer and get light upon all that puzzled him on earth. He would never touch the money, "the blood money," as he called it. But he said, "If ye ever hear o' my wife, gie't t' her wi' my forgiveness." As we never heard of the wife, nor were likely to hear, it was handed over to a Home for Cripples, and some of earth's maimed ones had cause to bless the name of the queer wheelwright.

ALEXANDER GORDON.

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was

THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD.

CCORDING to an old Border character who knew him in the

flesh, James Hogg had no right to the title of Shepherd at all. 'Though kind o' clever," says this worthy, "he was nae shepherd, for the useless body let a' his sheep get scabbed, and though he had his farm free from the Duke o' Buccleuch, he made naething o't, but was aye lettin' his bills be overdue." The old worthy is probably right, but we shall e'en let the title pass without question. It is something to have the admission that, though he was no shepherd, Hogg "kind o' clever," and that he wrote "several fine songs," which his countrymen have placed on a level with the best lyrics of Burns himself. His cleverness was, indeed, of a kind that is very rarely met with, even in the case of men of the highest genius. He was entirely an untutored singer, an uncultivated child of Nature, who certainly owed as much to his own industry and indomitable perseverance as to the inborn talent which he undoubtedly possessed. Six months at school, a little reading, hardly any writing, and no arithmetic-who that ever attained the reputation that Hogg now enjoys ever started with so poor an outfit for a literary career? Even as late as his eighteenth year he read with some difficulty; and, when verging on the twenties he began to turn his thoughts into verses, the writing of them out, as he sat on the hillside surrounded by his flock, was a herculean and painful process, for which he made special preparation by taking off both coat and vest! Perhaps he was all the better for these early struggles. A poet is not made in the schoolroom or by book-lore, and Hogg, escaping the pedantry of the dominie, was allowed to develop freely under the blue sky, with no other teaching than that of sunshine and storm. In that circumstance lies a great part of the charm of life; a great part even of the charm of his verse. In both poetry and art, the nearer we get to Nature the better, and it is just because there is in the productions of James Hogg so much of the scent of the heather and the wild thyme, and so little of the perfumes of the hothouse, that they have been so widely appreciated by his countrymen. It is true cf him as of few other singers of his race, that "he taught the wandering winds to sing."

Hogg's works are still read, his songs are still sung, but somehow or other the man has of late faded out of that generous recollection to which he is so justly entitled. Yet his life, mixed up as it is with reminiscences of the romantic Borderland, with memories of Scott and the old Blackwood "set," with the most entertaining anecdote of the period, can surely be made interesting, even to those who know nothing of the Shepherd's literary legacy to his country. It is hardly necessary to say that he came of poor parents, for most of Scotland's sons who have done anything worth remembering have first shaken their tiny fists in the thatch-roofed cottage of the peasant. As Mr. Gladstone is understood to claim several places as the scene of his birth, so James Hogg was, according to himself and the biographers, honoured by having more than the one natal day common to the ordinary run of men. His own statement was that he came

into the world on the 25th January (1772), but some unkind people have said that he fixed on this date because a greater than he-even Burns, whom he first worshipped as a poet-had proclaimed it as his birthday in a stirring song. It is a matter of no great moment; but if the Shepherd really desired to be even with Burns in the matter of a birthday, he should have seen that the inconvenient record in the parish register of Ettrick, to the effect that the little Hogg was baptized on the 9th day of December, was expunged, as well as the entry on the fly-leaf of the family Bible.

Hogg's father was originally a shepherd, but his ambition whispered to him that he might hold the plough as well as "wear the crook and plaid," and so he took a farm. It was an unlucky venture, as his son's enterprises in the same direction were to turn out in after years. Very soon every penny the sheep had enabled him to save was gone, and with the pence went also the "goods and chattels " to satisfy the claims of a numerous body of creditors. No doubt it was this unfortunate change in the family's position that led to James Hogg being allowed to grow up almost entirely uneducated. It is evident, at any rate, that the poet owed very little-unless it were his improvidence and his bad luck—to his father. It was altogether different in the case of his mother. Margaret Laidlaw-she was of the same family as Scott's "Willie Laidlaw"-was not exactly a remarkable woman, but she had a memory stored with the best of the old songs and ballads of the Border, with tales of frays and forays and all that was wild and weird in legendary lore, and from this wellhead her son drew that inspiration which in after-life was to make him, what he delighted to call himself, the poetical King of Fairyland and Romance. The Scottish boys of Hogg's time used to have their