University of Virginia Library

It is so rare a thing now-a-days to see flax grown in any quantity, that my English readers will not feel the full force of the above little poem. The English cottager has not often ground which he can use for this purpose; and, besides, he can purchase calico for the wear of his family at a much cheaper cost than he could grow flax. Nor is the English woman “handy” at such matters. She would think it a great hardship to till, perhaps, the very ground upon which it was grown; to pull it with the help of her children only, and, to her other household cares and occupations, to add those of preparing, spinning, and, it might be, to help even to weave it into good homespun cloth. Seventy or eighty years ago, however, this was not uncommon in England; and it is still common, and in some districts even general in Scotland. Burns alludes to the growth of flax in many of his poems; and, in the “Cottar's Saturday Night,” the mother reckons the age of the cheese from the time of the flax flowering.

The household interest which is taken in the flax-field presented itself strongly to us in many a wild glen, and in many a desolate mountain-side in the Highlands of Scotland, in the summer of

1836. You came, in the midst of those stony and heathy wildernesses, upon a few turf-erections, without windows and without chimneys; the wild grasses of the moor and the heath itself grew often upon the roof, for all had originally been cut from the mountain-side; and, but for the smoke which issued from the door, or the children that played about it, you might have doubted of its being a human dwelling. Miserable, however, as such homes may appear at first sight, they are, as it were, the natural growth of the mountain-moorland, and the eye soon finds in them much that is picturesque and characteristic.

About such places as these are frequently, too, patches of cultivated ground; the one of potatoes, and perhaps oats or barley, the other of flax. Thus grow, at the very door of this humble human tenement, the food and clothing of the family. How essential this growth is to them, may be seen from the nature of the ground. It is frequently the most difficult that can be conceived to bring into cultivation; one mass, as it seems, of stones, with the scantiest intermixture of soil. These stones, many of which are of immense size,

are with infinite toil and patience gathered from the earth, and piled into walls round the little fields, otherwise the mountain sheep, and perhaps the wild roes, would soon lay the whole waste. Here the mother, as well as the father, labours, and indeed the flax seems especially to belong to her, for she must spin it before she can convert it into family use.

In the same way is the household provided with woollen garments; they are all home-spun and home-made, even to many a goodly tartan. The “tarry woo” of Scotland, like the “lint-flower,” is a national thing; the affections, as well as the fire-side-interests of that country are connected with them.