Hooks and Books
“ Wee dour-lookin’ huiks are the thing !' ”
(T. T. Stoddart’s Angling Songs.)
N INETY years ago the River Clyde above
Blantyre was a famous stream for the angler. Many a fine salmon lay sulking under its steep, overhanging banks, and there were plenty of game trout in the stickles. One fine summer evening, in the reign of King George the Fourth, two boys were trying their luck in the salmon pool above Bothwell Castle. They were typical Scots boys in face and dress, and were evidently making the most of a halfholiday. Both lads wore the ugly but useful dress of the Scottish schoolboy; the blue knitted bonnet, the cloth waistcoat with two rows of buttons — conveniently able to be buttoned on either side if the other were dirty! —the absurd little tailed jacket and wide trousers with a slit at the feet, and the heavily tacketed, clumsy shoes, made to be worn on
30 HOOKS AND BOOKS
either foot indiscriminately. The elder boy was a strong, dark, resolute-looking fellow, with keen blue eyes; and he threw as good a fly as any angler could wish to see. His hooks, like himself, were “ wee and dour.”
If Lord Douglas’ keeper had been there he would have recognised them for David and Charles Livingstone from Blantyre village, and would have kept a sharp eye upon them. Luckily for David no keeper was on his rounds that evening; for suddenly, as he cast a skilful line just below the swirl of the rapid water, his little trout-rod bent double, the line reeled out with a whish, and in another moment a fine grilse had leapt his full length out of the water. The next quarter of an hour was a time of anxious joy: it takes some management to subdue a ten-pounder with a light trout-rod. But at last David brought him to the shore, Charlie “ tailed ” him, and they had their trophy safe among the ferns. How to get him home was the next problem. It would never do to let the keeper catch them red-handed. But David at last stuffed his salmon up a leg of Charlie’s trousers, and the boys set off home in high feather.
Blantyre was a long, straggling village, and Charlie with his swollen leg was an object of some sympathy as he limped along; but they reached their house at last in safety. David and Charles lived in a tall, grey house on a hill
HOOKS AND BOOKS 31
overlooking the river. It stood in a little lane near the mill, and was closed in by thick trees and a tall paling. Opposite the door was a queer, white-washed doo-cote, round which circled a cloud of blue rock pigeons. But the boys’ home was merely one little flat of this great building. One reached it, in the old Scottish fashion, by a spiral stone staircase within a circular tower, built like a heavy txastion against the house. Their father, Neil Livingstone, lived there with his wife and children.
They were by no means well off, but had a great deal of Highland pride, and the boys were ready for every kind of adventure. The spirit of adventure was in the blood. Their old grandfather, who lived with them at Blantyre, and who in his younger days had spoken no language but Gaelic, told them many stirring tales of their fighting ancestors of Ulva, that little rocky island on the west coast of Scotland. His own father had fought for Prince Charlie and had fallen at Culloden, and the old man remembered the good old days before the clan system was broken up, after the final failure of the Jacobite cause. Their name in Gaelic was Mac an leigh—the son of the physician; and one of the race—so the story ran—was the hereditary guardian of a stone which had wonderful healing powers. The water in which the stone was dipped cured various diseases, and the
32 HOOKS AND BOOKS
Highlanders called it Clach Bheo—the Living Stone: hence the name which David, the most adventurous doctor of them all, was afterwards to make so famous.
There is another old story of the Livingstones which may or may not be true. The Isle of Lismore in the very old days was associated with the work of Saint Columba, and the crosier of the saint was for many generations guarded by the family of Livingstone. In fact the Livingstones were known, right down to modern times, as the Keepers of the Crosier. It was from Lismore that the Livingstones of Mull and of Ulva came; so it is quite probable that David Livingstone was a descendant of men who guarded the pastoral staff of the greatest of Scottish missionaries.
In 1813, when David was born, two of his father’s brothers were soldiers in Wellington’s army in the Pyrenees, and other Livingstones of the old clan were pioneering in more than one of our distant colonies. But the father of the Livingstone boys was a man of a different stamp altogether. He had stayed at home at Blantyre and had become a tea-dealer. No doubt there is a romantic side to tea-dealing it has, anyhow, a suggestion of ships and strange foreign ports. But in Neil Livingstone his friends and fellow-deacons saw an exceedingly strict, old-fashioned Presbyterian. The Gaelic books he read were not books about
Dr. Livingstone
Livingstone’s Birthplace at Blantyre
From a Sketch by the Author.
HOOKS AND BOOKS 33
battles or romance, but volumes of dogmatic theology. Perhaps in him it was the fighting instincts of the Livingstones taking an unexpected direction! A very good and kind man, he brought up his boys by iron rule. John, David and Charles knew that when dusk came and family prayers were over the door was locked for the night and the late-comer would have to stay outside. One evening David came back just after the bolts had been drawn and had to accept the situation like a philosopher. He got “ a piece ” from a neighbour, and sat down stolidly for the night upon the doorstep.
Strict as it was, their home life was a very happy one. The boys adored their mother. She must have been a wonderful little woman to have managed so well and kept such a high, cheerful spirit on their very tiny income. Agnes Livingstone was always young with her boys and understood them thoroughly.
Sunday was apt to be rather a long day for David and his brothers and sisters at Blantyre. “ Between sermons ”—to use the old Scots term—they had to learn by heart long portions of Scripture, and country walks were not encouraged. At no time was any novel or story book allowed in the house by their father. David loved reading, but try as he might he could make little of the books his father gave the boys on Sunday. Boston’s Fourfold State and Wilberforce’s Practical Christianity were his
34 HOOKS AND BOOKS
especial bugbears. For rebelling against one of these uninviting volumes David got a thrashing from his father. In the “ twenties ” books were few and expensive, and the library of a family like the Livingstones would be a very small one. The Weekly Visitor bound, or The Teacher's Offering certainly do not sound very exciting, and yet David made the most of them. But one day David found the history of a missionary to China amongst his father’s books, and that made up for all the other wearisome theologians. His father was a great believer in Foreign Missions, and would have made a devoted missionary himself, though one of a very different type from his son David. The story of the China missionary stirred David’s imagination; he made up his mind that that must be the life for him—a life with any amount of practical hard work and plenty of stirring adventure.
In the meantime he and Charlie found lots of adventure round Blantyre. David was sturdy and tireless, with an insatiable desire to “ beat records ” and to go where no one had ventured before. One day Charlie watched him openmouthed as he climbed the highest point of the old ruins of Bothwell Castle and carved a “D. L.” upon the topmost stone. Wherever he went he carried a natural history book in his pocket. He was a born naturalist and knew the cry and the spoor of every bird and beast
HOOKS AND BOOKS 35
in the woods of Lanarkshire. He was also an enthusiastic collector of stones and plants, and scoured the country far and wide for specimens. Nowadays a boy like that would certainly meet with plenty of encouragement. He can join the Boy Scouts and learn how to use his eyes and be ready for anything. But when Livingstone was a boy there were none of these things. There was not even a field naturalists’ club that he could join. His father liked David to be keen about things, but he was more than half afraid of “ Science.” He thought a scientist was sure to begin criticising the Bible. There was no Charles Kingsley then to remind people that nature is God’s book, and that the more we try and understand things the more we shall be able to learn still higher lessons. David Livingstone wanted to understand things. He wanted to know the why and the how of everything he saw.
One day he and Charlie found a limestone quarry near Cambuslang, and David began to collect some shells which he found half buried in the carboniferous limestone. How on earth did these sea-shells come to be there? That was what he wanted to know. But the gravefaced quarryman whom he asked about it evidently thought David quite mad. “ How did the shells come there, laddie? When God made the rocks He made the shells in them! ” David’s father most probably gave much the
36 HOOKS AND BOOKS
same answer. Any talk about those strange seacreatures, the pteropods, which made the shells aeons ago, when the ocean covered old Scotland, would have seemed highly dangerous to him.
But holidays and expeditions became rarer and rarer as David and his brothers grew older. Their father’s tea-dealing was not prospering, and their mother was sometimes hard put to it to make both ends meet. There was nothing for it but to put the boys into some employment, and David became “ a piecer ” in the old red-brick cotton mill, whose tall furnace chimney could be seen through the trees from their house. There, from seven in the morning till eight at night, David had to watch “ a spinning jenny.” The cotton-spinning frame had big whirring reels of cotton, from which threads stretched and strained from one side of the machine to the other. When one of these threads snapped, “ the piecer ” had to catch the ends and tie them together. It was monotonous work, but David soon discovered that it left time for other things—for reading, for instance. He propped a book up on the spinning jenny and glanced at it for a quick moment every time he passed it during his work. He never had more than a single minute at a time to look at his book, but that made him all the quicker and more anxious to read it. The roar of machinery never stopped for an instant, but David found it helped him to “ concentrate.”
HOOKS AND BOOKS
The book propped up on the cotton machine was generally a Latin grammar. David had no intention of remaining a mill-boy a day longer than he need, and he knew that Latin was the only passport to freedom. It was no good thinking of the university until he had mastered Ruddiman’s Rudiments of Latin, so he bought “ Ruddiman ” with his first savings, and set to work at once. Probably his way of mastering it and other books was as good as anyone could find. A quick glance at a book, if one’s whole mind is given to it, is worth any number of sleepy hours of bored reading. When he got home from the mill David attended a night school; and after that was over he would take down his lexicon and work at it till late at night. His mother would come in at last and snatch his books away and pack him off to bed.