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For a haar had come up from the sea, as is common on the east coast, and the cold and dripping mist blotted out the seascape; it hid the town of Dundee, which lay below Dudhope, and enveloped the castle in its cold garments, like a shroud, and chilled Graham and his wife to the very bone. "Ye will acknowledge, John, that I have never hindered you when the call came."
There was an easterly haar driving in from the Baie des Chaleurs and the darkness was so saturated with chilly moisture that an honest downpour of rain would have been a relief. Two or three depressed and somnolent travellers yawned in the waiting-room, which smelled horribly of smoky lamps.
In the gloaming, when trees stand out in the semblance of highway robbers, and a Liddesdale drow meets a North Sea haar, his sorrowful spirit was wont to be seen by the lonely traveller, making moan, seeking rest. Far and near, through all that part of the Border that he had so faithfully "kept," the spirit wandered.
"Das Haar trennt." German Proverb. We three were not able to be present at Alfonso's wedding, for the very good reason that we were no longer in British Guiana. But the day we sailed for Halifax, Alfonso and his Georgiana came down to see us on the stelling. "Georgiana" was as black as a coal, but Alfonso had not boasted without reason of the cut of her clothes.
Old Stoner wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, bit into a twist of tobacco, spat derisively, and said: "This pup Beacraft swares he'll lift my haar 'fore he gits through with me! Threatened men live long. Kindly tell him me an' my sons is to hum. Sir George." The big, lank boys laughed, and winked at me as I passed. "Good trail an' many skelps to ye!" said old Stoner.
When I came to myself she was singing 'The Land o' the Leal, the Scotch 'Jerusalem the Golden, immortal, perfect. It needed experience of the hunger-haunted Cowgate closes, chill with the black mist of an eastern haar, to feel the full bliss of the vision in the words 'There's nae sorrow there, Jean, There's neither cauld nor care, Jean, The day is aye fair in The Land o' the Leal.
Then we made a list of Scottish idols, pet words, national institutions, stock phrases, beloved objects, convinced if we could weave them in we should attain 'atmosphere. Here is the first list; it lengthened speedily: thistle, tartan, haar, haggis, kirk, claymore, parritch, broom, whin, sporran, whaup, plaid, scone, collops, whisky, mutch, cairngorm, oatmeal, brae, kilt, brose, heather.
The collops an' the cairngorms, The haggis an' the whin, The 'Staiblished, Free, an' U.P. kirks, The hairt convinced o' sin, The parritch an' the heather-bell, The snawdrap on the shaw, The bit lam's bleatin' on the braes, How can I leave them a'? How can I leave the marmalade An' bonnets o' Dundee? The haar, the haddies, an' the brose, The East win' blawin' free?
I confessed at home the story of my weakness; and so it comes about that I owed a certain journey, and the reader owes the present paper, to a cat in the London Road. It is of the coast I speak: the interior may be the garden of Eden. History broods over that part of the world like the easterly haar. Even on the map, its long row of Gaelic place-names bear testimony to an old and settled race.
All Edinburgh and the Pentland Hills glinted above me in a kind of smuisty brightness, now and again overcome with blots of cloud; of Leith there was no more than the tops of chimneys visible, and on the face of the water, where the haar lay, nothing at all.
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