dressed by the officers of the Blossom. The little colony had now increased to about sixty-six, including an English sailor of the name of John Buffet, who, at his own earnest desire, had been left by a whaler. In this man the society luckily found an able and willing schoolmaster. He instructed the children in reading, writing, and arithmetic, and devoutly co-operated with old Adams in affording religious instruction to the community. The officers of the Blossom went ashore, and were entertained with a sumptuous repast at young Christian's, the table being spread with plates, knives, and forks. Buffet said grace in an emphatic manner; and so strict were they in this respect, that it was not deemed proper to touch a morsel of bread without saying grace both before and after it. The officers slept in the house all night, their bedclothing and sheets consisting of the native cloth made of the native mulberry-tree. The only interruption to their repose was the melody of the evening hymn, which was chanted together by the whole family after the lights were put out; and they were awakened at early dawn by the same devotional ceremony. On Sabbath the utmost decorum was attended to, and the day was passed in regular religious observances.

In consequence of a representation made by Captain Beechey, the British government sent out Captain Waldegrave in 1830, in the Seringapatam, with a supply of sailors' blue jackets and trousers, flannels, stockings and shoes, women's dresses, spades, mattocks, shovels, pickaxes, trowels, rakes, &c. He found their community increased to about seventy-nine, all exhibiting the same unsophisticated and amiable characteristics as we have before described. Other two Englishmen had settled amongst them; one of them, called Nobbs, a low-bred, illiterate man, a self-constituted missionary, who was endeavouring to supersede Buffet in his office of religious instructor. The patriarch Adams, it was found, had died in March 1829, aged sixty-five. While on his deathbed, he had called the heads of families together, and urged upon them to elect a chief; which, however, they had not yet done; but the greatest harmony still prevailed amongst them, notwithstanding Nobbs' exertions to form a party of his own. Captain Waldegrave thought that the island, which is about four miles square, might be able to support a thousand persons, upon reaching which number they would naturally emigrate to other islands.

Such is the account of this most singular colony, originating in crime and bloodshed. Of all the repentant criminals on record, the most interesting perhaps is John Adams; nor do we know where to find a more beautiful example of the value of early instruction than in the history of this man, who, having run the full career of nearly all kinds of vice, was checked by an interval of leisurely reflection, and the sense of new duties awakened by the power of natural affections.

THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD.

AMES HOGG, more familiarly known as the ETTRICK SHEPHERD, was born on the 25th of January 1772, in a cottage on the banks of the small river Ettrick, a tributary of the Tweed, in Selkirkshire, one of the most mountainous and picturesque districts in the south of Scotland. He was the descendant of a race long settled as shepherds in the same region. Robert Hogg and Margaret Laidlaw, his parents, had four sons, of whom James was the second, and all of whom were trained to the pastoral life;

the father having been elevated above the condition of a shepherd only for a short time, to return to it with the loss of all his earnings. This unfortunate event happened when James Hogg was but in his sixth year, and, accordingly, all his authentic recollections of early life have reference to the sheiling on the farm of Ettrick House, where his father settled after his misfortunes, having received the charge of a flock of sheep from the tenant of that farm, Mr Brydon of Crosslee.

Like many other men who have signalised themselves, Hogg appears to have been more indebted to his mother than his father for the fosterage, if not possession, of those talents which he displayed. "His mother, Margaret Laidlaw," says a memoir of him in the Edinburgh Magazine, "was a self-taught genius. Her mother had died while she was yet young; but being the eldest of several children, and her father far from wealthy, she was kept at home to superintend the household affairs, and assist in bringing up her younger brothers and sisters during those years when the children of the Scottish peasantry, even the poorest, are sent to school; and they at the proper age enjoyed the usual advantages. About the age of twelve or thirteen, she began to feel her inferiority to them; and on the Sabbath, her only day of rest, she used to wander out alone to a solitary hill side, with a Bible under her arm, and, humbled by a sense of her ignorance, to throw herself down on the heath, and water the page with bitter tears. By the ardour of her zeal she soon accomplished the object of her dearest wishes, and supplied the

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deficiencies of her education. The race of wandering minstrels was not then extinct in her native glens; and from the recitations of one of them, an old man of ninety, she stored her memory with many thousand lines of the old Border ballad, which he alone knew. To his knowledge she succeeded; and there is reason to fear that much of it died with her.

"This woman, herself of an imaginative and enthusiastic mind, soon discovered in her son James a kindred spirit, and laboured in its cultivation with an earnestness greatly honourable to her, and to which, perhaps, the world is indebted for the Queen's Wake.' In the remote and solitary glens of these mountain districts, the cottages of the shepherds are often situated at great distances from other dwellings, and their tenants pass the winter months with no other society than that of their own family. Nothing can be conceived humbler in the way of human habitations than these cottages then were; yet they were frequently lighted by a brilliancy of imagination, and cheered by a gentleness of affection, and an enthusiasm of feeling, that Grecian sofas and gilded canopies cannot confer. In a sequestered mode of life, where the affections are limited in their range, they acquire a strength greater in proportion as the sphere of their action is narrowed; and imagination is most vigorous when it has to work on a small number of simple ideas. Never was a family more closely linked together than the children of this admirable woman; and never was a mind of great original power more strenuously exerted in the formation of the heart and the development of the understanding. She was in the daily habit of reading to them from the sacred volume such passages as she thought most likely to interest their minds and improve their moral feelings; and this she diversified by animated recitations from the Border ballad, something between chant and song, bringing also tales of superstition to her aid; or thrilling their hearts with the account of the death of some young shepherd who had perished not far from his own dwelling amid the mountain snows."

After a brief attendance at school, James was, at seven years of age, sent into the world to earn his own livelihood in the humble capacity of attendant on a few cows. The farmer who hired him for this employment gave him, in requital for his services, besides food and lodging, a ewe lamb and a pair of new shoes. Fluttering in rags, he returned to the parental hearth in the ensuing winter, and again received a little instruction in reading; he also tried writing, but did not get beyond scrawling in a large text hand. This terminated his school education, the whole having not extended over six months, or cost more than two or three shillings. On the return of spring, he was sent away to his former occupation of herding cows; and in this he was engaged for several years under various masters, till at length he rose to the more honourable one of keeping sheep.

The profession of a shepherd among the mountains of Selkirk

and Peebles shires, also in parts of the adjoining counties of Roxburgh and Dumfries, is one of considerable trust and responsi bility. The shepherd has placed under his care large flocks of sheep, which feed over wide tracts of country, at the distance of many miles from the house of their proprietor, and during winter their shelter from snow storms requires more than usual diligence and labour. In order to insure fidelity in the discharge of his onerous duties, the shepherd is rewarded in a peculiar manner. Besides some distinct wages in money and kind, a certain number of sheep of his own are entitled to mingle and feed with the sheep of his master; and of these animals he has the wool and the natural increase, the sale of the whole being negotiated for him at the ordinary markets. Thus interested in the business of his employer, with whom he may be said to have a small risk and partnership, the shepherd enjoys a position superior to that of hired servants generally; and with time and inclination for study, and a mind deeply imbued with religious knowledge, he offers, in point of fact, one of the most favourable specimens of that remarkable class of men-the Scottish peasantry. A member of this highly-intelligent body James Hogg, like his forefathers, was now about to become. Having struggled through a desultory species of apprenticeship in the way of herding cows, he now, as he tells us, was promoted to the rank of a shepherd; still, however, occupying the situation of an assistant, and only looking forward to a place of trust as years crowned his endeavours. At fourteen years of age he was able to save five shillings of his wages, "with which," says he, "I bought an old violin. This occupied all my leisure hours, and has been my favourite amusement ever since. I had commonly no spare time from labour during the day; but when I was not over-fatigued, I generally spent an hour or two every night in sawing over my favourite old Scottish tunes; and my bed being always in stables and cow-houses, I disturbed nobody but myself and my associate quadrupeds, whom I believed to be greatly delighted with my strains. At all events they never complained, which the biped part of my neighbours did frequently, to my pity and utter indignation."

This taste for playing the violin, as well as for reading, is far from uncommon in the district; and at dances and other merrymakings, some rural Orpheus is usually found to keep the party in amusement. But besides this love for the fiddle, Hogg seems almost, from infancy, to have possessed that vividness of fancy which prompts to versification. The fond and discerning eye of a mother early marked his talent in this respect, and she used to say to him, "Jamie, my man, gang ben the house, and mak me a sang," while she proposed a subject for his muse. How he succeeded in these boyish efforts is not stated in his memoirs; yet the effects of such a training on such a mind may easily be conceived. It contributed to fan the spark of poetry which nature had implanted in his bosom into a flame that poverty,

nor misfortune, nor neglect, nor even the sneer of the polished critic, could ever extinguish or diminish. It cannot be doubted that the nature of the scenery amidst which he was placed also helped to foster and inspire his genius. "The glens and the mountains of Ettrick and Yarrow combine almost all the soft beauty and wild sublimity that Highland scenery exhibits. In the lower district of Yarrow, that lovely stream winds among hills of no great height, gently swelling, and green to the summits; in some places finely wooded, but generally naked, and well suited to the pasture of flocks. This is their common character; but some miles from the mouth of the valley, dark, heathy mountains are seen towering to a considerable height above the surrounding hills, and give an interesting variety to the scene. Towards the head the glen widens, and embosoms St Mary's Loch and the loch of the Lowes; and above these sweet lakes terminates in a wild mountain-pass, that divides it from Moffatdale. In the loftiest and most rugged regions of this pass, the Gray-Mare's Tail, a waterfall of three hundred feet in perpendicular height, dashes and foams over stupendous rocks. This celebrated fall is formed by a stream that flows from Loch Skene, a dark mountain lake about a mile above it, surrounded by inaccessible heights on all sides save one, and that is strewed by a thousand black heathery hillocks of the most grotesque and irregular forms. This place is so solitary, that the eagle has built her nest in an islet of the lake for ages, and is overhung by the highest mountains in the south of Scotland. The character of Ettrick is similar to that of Yarrow, except, perhaps, that its tints are softer and more mellow, and it is destitute of lakes. These valleys, so celebrated in Border legend and song, are skirted by hills extending many miles on both sides; and as there is no great road through them, the people have long lived shut out from the rest of mankind, in a state of pastoral simplicity and virtuous seclusion, alike remote from the vices of boorish rusticity and fawning servility. Among the wild mountains at the head of Ettrick and Yarrow, the sturdy champions of the Covenant found an asylum when they were chased, like wild beasts, by a relentless persecution from every other part of the country. Their preachers held their conventicles in the most sequestered glens, and made many converts, from whom a number of the present race are descended; but while they cherish the memory of these glorious men, and, as well they may, retain all the noble-mindedness that arises from the consciousness of an illustrious ancestry, their moral features have lost much of the sternness of their fathers, and are softened down into the gentler virtues of more peaceful times; yet if we were asked what people of Britain had suffered least from the evil consequences of excessive refinement, we should answer, without hesi tation, the inhabitants of Ettrick and Yarrow. In these interesting valleys there is hardly a cottage that has not its legend,

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