Wilson’s
Tales of the Borders
AND OF SCOTLAND.

CONTENTS.

WILSON’S

TALES OF THE BORDERS,

AND OF SCOTLAND.

THE DOMESTIC GRIEFS OF GUSTAVUS M’IVER.

CHAPTER I.
GUSTAVUS’S ANTECEDENTS.

In a little house in the Canongate of Edinburgh, there lived, not very long ago, Mr Gustavus M’Iver—(for he never would allow himself to be called Ensign M’Iver, though that was his proper professional designation),—as good a man as ever God put breath in, and as faithful a soldier as ever Lord Wellington commanded in the Peninsula. That is, doubtless, no small praise to one conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity; and heaven knows if it were not as true as Jove’s oath, it would never have been awarded by us. But he was remarkable in other respects than being honest; for he was six feet five without the aid of sock or buskin; and, if any man were to say that he was not four feet from acromion to acromion, he would assuredly be a big liar. But it is the head and face of a man that we like to look at; for, after all, what signifies (except in a warlike view, and ours is a peaceable one) a cart-load of mere bone and muscle, bound together with thick whangs of gristle, and yielding nothing but brute force, if it be not surmounted by a good microcosm of a head, with a good dial-plate to let a man know what is going on within. Do we not see every day great clocks put on the tops of big steeples, and yet, though they are nearer the sun than the little time-piece with the deuce a body at all, they go like an intermitting fever, telling us at one time that we are hurrying to the grave, and at another, that time has nothing to do with us at all. So is it with men; and, for our part, we could never discover any proper legitimate sympathetic accordance between the trunk and cranium of mortals, any more than if (like pins) they had been made in pieces and one head clapped on a body just as the occipital condyles suited the straps to which they are attached.

The opinion now expressed is well justified by the example of the subject of our story; for, while the big limbs of him seemed to set at defiance all regular laws of motion, either horizontal or perpendicular, going, as one might say without a paradox, wherever and however they choose, his head was as methodical as that of a drill sergeant, and the like of him for regularity might not be seen from Lerwick to Berwick. Nor was his face ever known to be at fault as a faithful indicator; and verily there was no great wonder in that, for nothing short of the pulleys he carried in his brain could ever have moved a single hair-breadth up or down, to the right or to the left, the big jaw-bone which he seldom condescended to impart any living motion to, except at meal times, or when (and that occurred very seldom) he had an idea to express sufficient in size and importance to warrant such an excess of labour.

We have