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Chapter V.
The Bothie.

When the winter, with its school privileges, was past, Donald's father, desirous of securing for him a knowledge of colloquial English—or, rather, the English spoken in the Perthshire Lowlands—persuaded a Strathearn farmer, with whom he was acquainted, to take his boy into his service as herd on his led farm—that is, a farm conducted on the bothie principle. Besides the herd there were two men employed, one of whom was an experienced ploughman (a single man), and a halflin (that is, a man engaged to do the orra work of a farm, such as driving manure to the fields, hoeing turnips, and labour of that kind). The boy had not only the young cattle and the milk cow under his charge; it was also his duty to boil the brose water three times a day for the staple diet of the men.

The bothie was godless, loveless, and unclean, and left a painful impression on his mind, which, to the end, was never effaced. The ploughman had a kindly heart, but knew nothing of the gracious influence and power of Divine truth; and the halflin was a local tyrant, selfish and cruel, who exacted immediate and unquestioning obedience from the boy, whom he punished spitefully for any disclosure which he made of the iron despotism which he exercised page 32over him. The three occupied one bed, and (to use the Doctor's own expression in relation to the incident) "the herd laddie came off third best." His father visited him towards the end of June, taking with him, as a treat for his boy, two smoke-dried mutton hams, but the halflin appropriated them both, and pitilessly left him without a share of the gift that his mother's love had sent to him from home.

In the afternoon it was his custom to herd the cattle in a field across the Earn. On one occasion the river came down so rapidly that in crossing the cattle escaped with difficulty, some reaching the home side with ease, while others were carried down the stream a long distance before they could make the bank. The old horse on which Donald rode drifted over a mile before he could secure a footing. With a wild gleefulness the boy was swept past the familiar landmarks all unconscious of any danger, and, at length, greatly elated with his adventure, arrived in safety at the further bank.

It was here that he learned to speak the local English; and the hard and distasteful life of the bothie, instead of quenching his intellectual tastes seems rather to have stimulated him to cast about on all sides for the means of gratifying them, and, in one way or another, he succeeded in borrowing books of songs and rhymes which he eagerly conned, as opportunity offered, with the result that he became familiar with the best thoughts and expressions of the local poets of Strathearn.

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But the morally indurating influences of his surroundings told disastrously upon his higher life. The keenness of his relish for Bible-reading lost its edge, and his delight in communion with God perceptibly waned. Though it continued to be his custom to repeat his lesson in the Shorter Catechism on the Sabbath day, and to read double portions in some book of Scripture, yet the godlessness of the bothie life effectually dwarfed all spiritual growth. "I lost in blessedness," he said, in pathetic reference to those dark days, "in force, and in conscious joy. I did not turn to God as I used to turn to the rainbow, and have arguments with Him, and anticipate the time when I would be numbered among His subjects, servants, and adoring children. But the dim light of a vain hope trembled in my heart that the old home where I was due in November would restore the balance and fill my heart once more with a joyous trust in His Father love."

Mr and Mrs Martin, whom he used to visit weekly with the eggs which it was his duty to collect, rewarded him with words of encouragement and cheer which fell like sunlight on his heart; and they put into his hand a hunk of bread and cheese, the lion's share of which the halflin always claimed, but the boy was young and robust, and coarse fare and coarser surroundings failed to extinguish in him the joy which his vigorous health inspired. He knew that in November his engagement would close, and the bright thought that time was on the wing nerved him to tide over the intervening days. In due course his father came, and, by making an early start on the following page 34p>morning, they accomplished, by sunset, the journey of thirty miles; and he felt the radiant joy of a mother's welcome back to home.

"I had thus obtained," the Doctor wrote, "a painful experience of the hateful bothie system, which enabled me, in 1843, to let sunlight in upon it, and convince good men that its hoar frost was laden with death to every plant of heaven. I had other means of learning how deadly was the blight with which it smote the young men and women who helped to reap the harvest of the Lowlands. Its loose ways, its undue freedom, and its coarse songs never reconciled me to a modus vivendi, which had not the breath of heaven in any part of it. I felt I was somebody when I was permitted to cheer its exposure by Wm. Burns, and by Drs Begg and Guthrie. To this day I cannot understand how a tree so laden with moral poison could grow and flourish beside the churches which set forth the Gospel in some of its aspects, in the eloquent periods of Blair and Robertson. But it was in time found that the Gospel, with its atonement, and righteousness, and judgment, is ever the death of evils, social and spiritual.

"The bothie system in the army, in the factory, and the farm, has fallen, never to rise again before the Gospel of the New Testament and its life of holiness. Lord, continue to the Church, whether in the factory, the farm, or the barracks, men of the spirit of Shaftesbury, Fox-Maule, William Burns, preacher and missionary, and the fearless and daring and eloquent Guthrie and Begg!"