I know better, of course. I know that unconventional characters—fantastic, whimsical, bombastic, awkward, crazed—will come to the surface there and elsewhere as constant as the bracken comes upon the braes in spring.
But age, undoubtedly, whether it matures an oddity or not, endears him to you if yours be the proper sympathetic soul for such caprices of the stars. What in a droll “going-about body” of thirty seems a rogue’s impertinence will appear to some one else, thirty years after this, or even to yourself perhaps, a quaint wit, and his sayings and doings will be the cause of merriment over all the countryside. So it is that even I am sometimes constrained to think the old characters dead and gone will never have such brilliant successors.
I had that thought yesterday as I walked past Copenhagen’s school. Alas! not Copenhagen’s school, for Copenhagen wields no earthly ferrule, and lies with many of his pupils under grass in Kilmailie, and the little thatched academy, where we drowsed in summer, and choked in winter in the smoke of our own individual peats, is but a huddle of stones, hidden by nettles, humbled in the shade of the birch-tree from which old Copenhagen culled the pliant and sibilant switch for our more noisy than unpleasant castigation. But there, persistent as are the roads old hunters made upon the hills of long ago, as are the ways our fathers went to market through glens for years untenanted, was the path we youngsters made between the highway and old Copenhagen’s school!
Is it conceivable, I ask my old companions of that hillside seminary, that Copenhagen should be dead? That a time should come when his thin, long, bent figure, carried on one of his own legs and one (as went our tradition) cut from an ash in the wood of Achnatra, should dart about the little school no more, and his tales of Nelson and the sea be all concluded?
He had been twenty years in the Navy, and had seen but a single engagement—the one that gave him his byname, and cost him his leg. He came home with a pension, and settled in his native parish. He was elderly; he was—as we should think it now—ill-educated; he was without wife or child of his own; he had at times the habit of ran-dan, as we call a convivial rollicking. Heaven plainly meant him for a Highland school, and so he opened one—this same, so lowly to-day among the nettles. Of the various things he taught, the most I can remember (besides reading, which came, I fear, more by nature than by Copenhagen’s teaching) was the geography of the Baltic, the graphic fact that Horatio Nelson nearly always wore a grey surtout, three ways of tying knots, and a song of epic character called “The Plains of Waterloo.” What would perhaps be called a “special subject” nowadays was the art he taught us of keeping birds from cherry-trees. The cherry-trees grew up the front of Copenhagen’s bachelor dwelling-house, half a mile from the school. When the fruit reddened, every scholar in the school (we numbered twelve or fourteen) rose at dawn for days and sat below the cherry-trees chanting a Gaelic incantation that never failed to keep away the predatory thrush. The odd thing was that Copenhagen, in spite of these precautions, never got a single cherry, and did not seem to care. We ate the cherries as they ripened, relieving each other alternately of the incantation; he came out to praise us for our industry, and never cast a glance aloft.