table
globe. The Highlands of Scotland is but a small region, nor is its
interior by any means so remote as the interior of Africa. Yet 'tis
remote. The life of that very blind veteran might, in better hands than
ours, make an interesting history. In his youth he had been a
shepherd--a herdsman--a hunter--something even of a poet. For thirty
years he had been a soldier--in many climates and many conflicts. Since
first he bloodied his bayonet, how many of his comrades had been buried
in heaps! Flung into trenches dug on the field of battle! How many
famous captains had shone in the blaze of their fame--faded into the
light of common day--died in obscurity, and been utterly forgotten! What
fierce passions must have agitated the frame of that now calm old man!
On what dreadful scenes, when forts and towns were taken by storm, must
those eyes, now withered into nothing, have glared with all the fury of
man's most wrathful soul! Now peace is with him for evermore. Nothing to
speak of the din of battle, but his own pipes wailing or raging among
the hollow of the mountains. In relation to his campaigning career, his
present life is as the life of another state. The pageantry of war has
all rolled off and away for ever; all its actions but phantoms now of a
dimly-remembered dream. He thinks of his former self, as sergeant in the
Black Watch, and almost imagines he beholds another man. In his long,
long blindness, he has created another world to himself out of new
voices--the voices of new generations, and of torrents thundering all
year long round about his hut. Almost all the savage has been tamed
within him, and an awful religion falls deeper and deeper upon him, as
he knows how he is nearing the grave. Often his whole mind is dim, for
he is exceedingly old, and then he sees only fragments of his youthful
life--the last forty years are as if they had never been--and he hears
shouts and huzzas, that half a century ago rent the air with victory. He
can still chant, in a hoarse broken voice, battle-hymns and dirges; and
thus, strangely forgetful and strangely tenacious of the past, linked to
this life by ties that only the mountaineer can know, and yet feeling
himself on the brink of the next, Old Blind Donald Roy, the Giant of the
Hut of the Three Torrents, will not scruple to quaff the "strong
waters," till his mind is awakened--brightened--dimmed--darkened--and
seemingly extinguished--till the sunrise again smites him, as he li