The Pirate
shelties, geese, swine, goats, sheep, and little Zetland cows, are
turned out promiscuously, and often in numbers which can obtain but
precarious subsistence from the niggard vegetation. There is, indeed, a
right of individual property in all these animals, which are branded or
tattooed by each owner with his own peculiar mark; but when any
passenger has occasional use for a pony, he never scruples to lay hold
of the first which he can catch, puts on a halter, and, having rode him
as far as he finds convenient, turns the animal loose to find his way
back again as he best can--a matter in which the ponies are sufficiently
sagacious.
Although this general exercise of property was one of the enormities
which in due time the factor intended to abolish, yet, like a wise man,
he scrupled not, in the meantime, to avail himself of so general a
practice, which, he condescended to allow, was particularly convenient
for those who (as chanced to be his own present case) had no ponies of
their own on which their neighbours could retaliate. Three shelties,
therefore, were procured from the hill--little shagged animals, more
resembling wild bears than any thing of the horse tribe, yet possessed
of no small degree of strength and spirit, and able to endure as much
fatigue and indifferent usage as any creatures in the world.
Two of these horses were already provided and fully accoutred for the
journey. One of them, destined to bear the fair person of Mistress Baby,
was decorated with a huge side-saddle of venerable antiquity--a mass, as
it were, of cushion and padding, from which depended, on all sides, a
housing of ancient tapestry, which, having been originally intended for
a horse of ordinary size, covered up the diminutive palfrey over which
it was spread, from the ears to the tail, and from the shoulder to the
fetlock, leaving nothing visible but its head, which looked fiercely out
from these enfoldments, like the heraldic representation of a lion
looking out of a bush. Mordaunt gallantly lifted up the fair Mistress
Yellowley, and at the expense of very slight exertion, placed her upon
the summit of her mountainous saddle. It is probable, that, on feeling
herself thus squired and attended upon, and experiencing the long
unwonted consciousness that she was attired in her best array, some
thoughts dawned upon Mistress Baby's mind, which checkered, for an
instant, those habitual ideas about thrift, that formed the daily and
all-engrossing occupation of her soul. She glanced her eye upon her
faded joseph, and on the long housings of her saddle, as she observed,
with a smile, to Mordaunt, that "travelling was a pleasant thing in fine
weather and agreeable company, if," she added, glancing a look at a
place where the embroidery was somewhat frayed and tattered, "it was not
sae wasteful to ane's horse-furniture."
Meanwhile, her brother stepped stoutly to his steed; and as he chose,
notwithstanding the serenity of the weather, to throw a long red cloak
over his other garments, his pony was even more completely enveloped in
drapery than that of his sister. It happened, moreover, to be an animal
of an high and contumacious spirit, bouncing and curvetting occasionally
under the weight of Triptolemus, with a vivacity which, notwithstanding
his Yorkshire descent, rather deranged him in the saddle; gambols which,
as the palfrey itself was not visible, except upon the strictest
inspection, had, at a little distance, an effect as if they were the
voluntary movements of the cloaked cavalier, without the assistance of
any other legs than those with which nature had provided him; and, to
any who had viewed Triptolemus under such a persuasion, the gravity, and
even distress, announced in his countenance, must have made a ridiculous
contrast to the vivacious caprioles with which he piaffed along the
moor.
Mordaunt kept up with this worthy couple, mounted, according to the
simplicity of the time and country, on the first and readiest pony which
they had been able to press into the service, with no other accoutrement
of any kind than the halter which served to guide him; while Mr.
Yellowley, seeing with pleasure his guide thus readily provided with a
steed, privately resolved, that this rude custom of helping travellers
to horses, without leave of the proprietor, should not be abated in
Zetland, until he came to possess a herd of ponies belonging in property
to himself, and exposed to suffer in the way of retaliation.
But to other uses or abuses of the country, Triptolemus Yellowley showed
himself less tolerant. Long and wearisome were the discourses he held
with Mordaunt, or (to speak much more correctly) the harangues which he
inflicted upon him, concerning the changes which his own advent in these
isles was about to occasion. Unskilled as he was in the modern arts by
which an estate may be improved to such a high degree that it shall
altogether slip through the proprietor's fingers, Triptolemus had at
least the zeal, if not the knowledge, of a whole agricultural society in
his own person; nor was he surpassed by any who has followed him, in
that noble spirit which scorns to balance profit against outlay, but
holds the glory of effecting a great change on the face of the land, to
be, like virtue, in a great degree its own reward.
No part of the wild and mountainous region over which Mordaunt guided
him, but what suggested to his active imagination some scheme of
improvement and alteration. He would make a road through yon scarce
passable glen, where at present nothing but the sure-footed creatures on
which they were mounted could tread with any safety. He would substitute
better houses for the skeoes, or sheds built of dry stones, in which the
inhabitants cured or manufactured their fish--they should brew good ale
instead of bland--they should plant forests where tree never grew, and
find mines of treasure where a Danish skilling was accounted a coin of a
most respectable denomination. All these mutations, with many others,
did the worthy factor resolve upon, speaking at the same time with the
utmost confidence of the countenance and assistance which he was to
receive from the higher classes, and especially from Magnus Troil.
"I will impart some of my ideas to the poor man," he said, "before we
are both many hours older; and you will mark how grateful he will be to
the instructor who brings him knowledge, which is better than wealth."
"I would not have you build too strongly on that," said Mordaunt, by way
of caution; "Magnus Troil's boat is kittle to trim--he likes his own
ways, and his country-ways, and you will as soon teach your sheltie to
dive like a sealgh, as bring Magnus to take a Scottish fashion in the
place of a Norse one; and yet, if he is steady to his old customs, he
may perhaps be as changeable as another in his old friendships."
"_Heus, tu inepte!_" said the scholar of Saint Andrews, "steady or
unsteady, what can it matter?--am not I here in point of trust, and in
point of power? and shall a Fowd, by which barbarous appellative this
Magnus Troil still calls himself, presume to measure judgment and weigh
reasons with me, who represent the full dignity of the Chamberlain of
the islands of Orkney and Zetland?"
"Still," said Mordaunt, "I would advise you not to advance too rashly
upon his prejudices. Magnus Troil, from the hour of his birth to this
day, never saw a greater man than himself, and it is difficult to bridle
an old horse for the first time. Besides, he has at no time in his life
been a patient listener to long explanations, so it is possible that he
may quarrel with your purposed reformation, before you can convince him
of its advantages."
"How mean you, young man?" said the factor. "Is there one who dwells in
these islands, who is so wretchedly blind as not to be sensible of their
deplorable defects? Can a man," he added, rising into enthusiasm as he
spoke, "or even a beast, look at that thing there, which they have the
impudence to call a corn-mill,[38] without trembling to think that corn
should be intrusted to such a miserable molendinary? The wretches are
obliged to have at least fifty in each parish, each trundling away upon
its paltry mill-stone, under the thatch of a roof no bigger than a
bee-skep, instead of a noble and seemly baron's mill, of which you would
hear the clack through the haill country, and that casts the meal
through the mill-eye by forpits at a time!"
"Ay, ay, brother," said his sister, "that's spoken like your wise sell.
The mair cost the mair honour--that's your word ever mair. Can it no
creep into your wise head, man, that ilka body grinds their ain nievefu'
of meal in this country, without plaguing themsells about barons' mills,
and thirls, and sucken, and the like trade? How mony a time have I
heard you bell-the-cat with auld Edie Netherstane, the miller at
Grindleburn, and wi' his very knave too, about in-town and out-town
multures--lock, gowpen, and knaveship,(_i_) and a' the lave o't; and now
naething less will serve you than to bring in the very same fashery on a
wheen puir bodies, that big ilk ane a mill for themselves, sic as it
is?"
"Dinna tell me of gowpen and knaveship!" exclaimed the indignant
agriculturist; "better pay the half of the grist to the miller, to have
the rest grund in a Christian manner, than put good grain into a bairn's
whirligig. Look at it for a moment, Baby--Bide still, ye cursed imp!"
This interjection was applied to his pony, which began to be extremely
impatient, while its rider interrupted his journey, to point out
all the weak points of the Zetland mill--"Look at it, I say--it's
just one degree better than a hand-quern--it has neither wheel nor
trindle--neither cog nor happer--Bide still, there's a canny
beast--it canna grind a bickerfu' of meal in a quarter of an hour,
and that will be mair like a mash for horse than a meltith for man's
use--Wherefore--Bide still, I say--wherefore--wherefore--The deil's in
the beast, and nae good, I think!"
As he uttered the last words, the shelty, which had pranced and
curvetted for some time with much impatience, at length got its head
betwixt its legs, and at once canted its rider into the little rivulet,
which served to drive the depreciated engine he was surveying; then
emancipating itself from the folds of the cloak, fled back towards its
own wilderness, neighing in scorn, and flinging out its heels at every
five yards.
Laughing heartily at his disaster, Mordaunt helped the old man to arise;
while his sister sarcastically congratulated him on having fallen rather
into the shallows of a Zetland rivulet than the depths of a Scottish
mill-pond. Disdaining to reply to this sarcasm, Triptolemus, so soon as
he had recovered his legs, shaken his ears, and found that the folds of
his cloak had saved him from being much wet in the scanty streamlet,
exclaimed aloud, "I will have cussers from Lanarkshire--brood mares from
Ayrshire--I will not have one of these cursed abortions left on the
islands, to break honest folk's necks--I say, Baby, I will rid the land
of them."
"Ye had better wring your ain cloak, Triptolemus," answered Baby.
Mordaunt meanwhile was employed in catching another pony, from a herd
which strayed at some distance; and, having made a halter out of twisted
rushes, he seated the dismayed agriculturist in safety upon a more
quiet, though less active steed, than that which he had at first
bestrode.
But Mr. Yellowley's fall had operated as a considerable sedative upon
his spirits, and, for the full space of five miles' travel, he said
scarce a word, leaving full course to the melancholy aspirations and
lamentations which his sister Baby bestowed on the old bridle, which the
pony had carried off in its flight, and which, she observed, after