individual development seems nicely correspondent with an early
national one. In his depreciatory estimate of contemporary woman, the
boy is always a true savage. The old parish school of the place had been
nobly situated in a snug corner, between the parish churchyard and a
thick wood; and from the interesting centre which it formed, the boys,
when tired of making dragoon-horses of the erect head-stones, or of
leaping along the flat-laid memorials, from end to end of the
grave-yard, "without touching grass," could repair to the taller trees,
and rise in the world by climbing among them. As, however, they used to
encroach, on these latter occasions, upon the laird's pleasure-grounds,
the school had been removed ere my time to the sea-shore; where, though
there were neither tombstones nor trees, there were some balancing
advantages, of a kind which perhaps only boys of the old school could
have adequately appreciated. As the school-windows fronted the opening
of the Firth, not a vessel could enter the harbour that we did not see;
and, improving through our opportunities, there was perhaps no
educational institution in the kingdom in which all sorts of barques and
carvels, from the fishing yawl to the frigate, could be more correctly
drawn on the slate, or where any defect in hulk or rigging, in some
faulty delineation, was surer of being more justly and unsparingly
criticised. Further, the town, which drove a great trade in salted pork
at the time, had a killing-place not thirty yards from the school-door,
where from eighty to a hundred pigs used sometimes to die for the
general good in a single day; and it was a great matter to hear, at
occasional intervals, the roar of death outside rising high over the
general murmur within, or to be told by some comrade, returned from his
five minutes' leave of absence, that a hero of a pig had taken three
blows of the hatchet ere it fell, and that even after its subjection to
the sticking process, it had got hold of Jock Keddie's hand in its
mouth, and almost smashed his thumb. We learned, too, to know, from our
signal opportunities of observation, not only a good deal about
pig-anatomy,--especially about the detached edible parts of the animal,
such as the spleen and the pancreas, and at least one other very
palatable viscus besides,--but became knowing also about the _take_ and
curing of herrings. All the herring boats during the fishing season
passed our windows on their homeward