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DONAL GRANT.
Hungering minds come of peasant people as often as of any, and have
appeared in Scotland as often, I fancy, as in any nation; not every
Scotsman, therefore, who may not himself have known one like Donal,
will refuse to believe in such a herd-laddie. Besides, there are
still those in Scotland, as well as in other nations, to whom the
simple and noble, not the commonplace and selfish, is the true type
of humanity. Of such as Donal, whether English or Scotch, is the
class coming up to preserve the honour and truth of our Britain, to
be the oil of the lamp of her life, when those who place her glory
in knowledge, or in riches, shall have passed from her history as
the smoke from her chimneys.
Cheap as education then was in Scotland, the parents of Donal Grant
had never dreamed of sending a son to college. It was difficult for
them to save even the few quarterly shillings that paid the fees of
the parish schoolmaster: for Donal, indeed, they would have failed
even in this, but for the help his brothers and sisters afforded.
After he left school, however, and got a place as herd, he fared
better than any of the rest, for at the Mains he found a friend and
helper in Fergus Duff, his master's second son, who was then at home
from college, which he had now attended two winters. Partly that he
was delicate in health, partly that he was something of a fine
gentleman, he took no share with his father and elder brother in the
work of the farm, although he was at the Mains from the beginning of
April to the end of October. He was a human kind of soul
notwithstanding, and would have been much more of a man if he had
thought less of being a gentleman. He had taken a liking to Donal,
and having found in him a strong desire after every kind of
knowledge of which he himself had any share, had sought to enliven
the tedium of an existence rendered not a little flabby from want of
sufficient work, by imparting to him of the treasures he had
gathered. They were not great, and he could never have carried him
far, for he was himself only a respectable student, not a little
lacking in perseverance, and given to dreaming dreams of which he
was himself the hero. Happily, however, Donal was of another sort,
and from the first needed but to have the outermost shell of a thing
broken for him, and that Fergus could do: by and by Donal would
break a shell for himself.
But perhaps the best thing Fergus did for him was the lending him
books. Donal had an altogether unappeasable hunger after every form
of literature with which he had as yet made acquaintance, and this
hunger Fergus fed with the books of the house, and many besides of
such as he purchased or borrowed for his own reading -- these last
chiefly poetry. But Fergus Duff, while he revelled in the writings
of certain of the poets of the age, was incapable of finding poetry
for himself in the things around him: Donal Grant, on the other
hand, while he seized on the poems Fergus lent him, with an avidity
even greater than his, received from the nature around him
influences similar to those which exhaled from the words of the
poet. In some sense, then, Donal was original; that is, he received
at first hand what Fergus required to have "put on" him, to quote
Celia, in As you like it, "as pigeons feed their young." Therefore,
fiercely as it would have harrowed the pride of Fergus to be
informed of the fact, he was in the kingdom of art only as one who
ate of what fell from the table, while his father's herd-boy was one
of the family. This was as far from Donal's thought, however, as
from that of Fergus; the condescension, therefore, of the latter did
not impair the gratitude for which the former had such large reason;
and Donal looked up to Fergus as to one of the lords of the world.
To find himself now in the reversed relation of superior and teacher
to the little outcast, whose whole worldly having might be summed in
the statement that he was not absolutely naked, woke in Donal an
altogether new and strange feeling; yet gratitude to his master had
but turned itself round, and become tenderness to his pupil.
After Donal left him in the field, and while he was ministering,
first to his beasts and then to himself, Gibbie lay on the grass, as
happy as child could well be. A loving hand laid on his feet or
legs would have found them like ice; but where was the matter so
long as he never thought of them? He could have supped a huge
bicker of sowens, and eaten a dozen potatoes; but of what mighty
consequence is hunger, so long as it neither absorbs the thought,
nor causes faintness? The sun, however, was going down behind a
great mountain, and its huge shadow, made of darkness, and haunted
with cold, came sliding across the river, and over valley and field,
nothing staying its silent wave, until it covered Gibbie with the
blanket of the dark, under which he could not long forget that he
was in a body to which cold is unfriendly. At the first breath of
the night-wind that came after the shadow, he shivered, and starting
to his feet, began to trot, increasing his speed until he was
scudding up and down the field like a wild thing of the night, whose
time was at hand, waiting until the world should lie open to him.
Suddenly he perceived that the daisies, which all day long had been
full-facing the sun, like true souls confessing to the father of
them, had folded their petals together to points, and held them like
spear-heads tipped with threatening crimson, against the onset of
the night and her shadows, while within its white cone each folded
in the golden heart of its life, until the great father should
return, and, shaking the wicked out of the folds of the night,
render the world once more safe with another glorious day. Gibbie
gazed and wondered; and while he gazed -- slowly, glidingly, back to
his mind came the ghost-mother of the ballad, and in every daisy he
saw her folding her neglected orphans to her bosom, while the
darkness and the misery rolled by defeated. He wished he knew a
ghost that would put her arms round him. He must have had a mother
once, he supposed, but he could not remember her, and of course she
must have forgotten him. He did not know that about him were folded
the everlasting arms of the great, the one Ghost, which is the Death
of death -- the life and soul of all things and all thoughts. The
Presence, indeed, was with him, and he felt it, but he knew it only
as the wind and shadow, the sky and closed daisies: in all these
things and the rest it took shape that it might come near him. Yea,
the Presence was in his very soul, else he could never have rejoiced
in friend, or desired ghost to mother him: still he knew not the
Presence. But it was drawing nearer and nearer to his
knowledge -- even in sun and air and night and cloud, in beast and
flower and herd-boy, until at last it would reveal itself to him, in
him, as Life Himself. Then the man would know that in which the
child had rejoiced. The stars came out, to Gibbie the heavenly
herd, feeding at night, and gathering gold in the blue pastures. He
saw them, looking up from the grass where he had thrown himself to
gaze more closely at the daisies; and the sleep that pressed down
his eyelids seemed to descend from the spaces between the stars.
But it was too cold that night to sleep in the fields, when he knew
where to find warmth. Like a fox into his hole, the child would
creep into the corner where God had stored sleep for him: back he
went to the barn, gently trotting, and wormed himself through the
cat-hole.
The straw was gone! But he remembered the hay. And happily, for he
was tired, there stood the ladder against the loft. Up he went, nor
turned aside to the cheese; but sleep was common property still. He
groped his way forward through the dark loft until he found the hay,
when at once he burrowed into it like a sand-fish into the wet sand.
All night the white horse, a glory vanished in the dark, would be
close to him, behind the thin partition of boards. He could hear
his very breath as he slept, and to the music of it, audible sign of
companionship, he fell fast asleep, and slept until the waking
horses woke him.
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