tongue could utter audible words; and once more with him when the
Bell Rock beacon took a "thrawe," and his workmen fled into the
tower, then nearly finished, and he sat unmoved reading in his
Bible - or affecting to read - till one after another slunk back
with confusion of countenance to their engineer. Yes, parts of me
have seen life, and met adventures, and sometimes met them well.
And away in the still cloudier past, the threads that make me up
can be traced by fancy into the bosoms of thousands and millions of
ascendants: Picts who rallied round Macbeth and the old (and highly
preferable) system of descent by females, fleers from before the
legions of Agricola, marchers in Pannonian morasses, star-gazers on
Chaldaean plateaus; and, furthest of all, what face is this that
fancy can see peering through the disparted branches? What sleeper
in green tree-tops, what muncher of nuts, concludes my pedigree?
Probably arboreal in his habits. . . .

And I know not which is the more strange, that I should carry about
with me some fibres of my minister-grandfather; or that in him, as
he sat in his cool study, grave, reverend, contented gentleman,
there was an aboriginal frisking of the blood that was not his;
tree-top memories, like undeveloped negatives, lay dormant in his
mind; tree-top instincts awoke and were trod down; and Probably
Arboreal (scarce to be distinguished from a monkey) gambolled and
chattered in the brain of the old divine.




CHAPTER VIII. MEMOIRS OF AN ISLET