FOR GOD AND THE QUEEN.

Globe, Volume III, Issue 222, 24 February 1875, Page 4

FOR GOD AND THE QUEEN.

{From the World.") There is a beautiful glen in the Aberdeenshire Highlands which men, who are still but middle-aged, can remember primitive and unspoiled. In the autumn time a little flock of scenery-loving tourists came to it, abiding modestly in the inns of Ballater and Braemar, the villages at either extremity of the glen, and ranged among the beauties of the Garrawalt, the Lion's Face, and the banks of the brawling Dee, unchecked by fulminations against trespassers, padlocked gates, and surly guardians. The crofters and shepherds of the mixed blood of the clansmen and the douce Aberdeenshire lowlanders lived rugged, honest, self-respecting, God-fearing lives. On week-days they earned their porridge by the sweat of their brow, and on the Sabbath they gathered from haugh and glen to the squat little kirk on the knoll above a bend of the river, preeminently ugly, plain, uncompromisingly Preßbyterian, even among the barn-like structures in which, in country districts, the adherents of the Scottish Establishment follow the grim and sour faith of their fathers. The minister's modest manse nestled among the low trees by the river side, its inhabitant, a plain Scotch divine, who knew nothing of courtly ways—his heritors were for the most part absentees, and an invitation to dinner was an event—and his sole concern was with his humble flock. A bastard bairn was a lurid phenomenon in the sober-pulsed, clean-living unsophisticated community. The lasses saved their virtue against the day they married, and were set up in a fagot-gabled, butt-and-ben of their own. The lads helped their fathers on the crofts, or took honest independent service as farm-servants, shepherds, and gillies in the deer-forests of the Fife trustees or of Invercauld. A journey to Aberdeen was an epoch in the lives of the sequestered dwellers in this remote glen; that there was such institutions as a Queen and a Court, and such a place as London, they vaguely realised from an occasional perusal of the Aberdeen Journal. And for ought that any one could predicate, the glen might remain in its healthy primitive contentment till its young lads and lasses should grow old and withered, and, finally, be carried to the little kirkyard, where the dust of their forebears mingles with the earth of the hillock.

A mighty change has come over the face and the spirit of the glen. A huge, staring, rambling structure, with parasite buildings innumerable, has risen up on the level peninsula under the shadow of dark Lochnagar. Every hilltop far and near is disfigured by monumental excrescences devoted to the commemoration of one whose jesthetic taste such incongruous encroachments on nature would have outraged. About the environs of the Castle his counterfeit presentments abound, here in marble, there colossally in granite and a kilt, defying the elements from the summit of an artificial pile of jagged granite blocks. The grounds are "tiled" as jealously as a mason's lodge. In the old days the glen saw the Ballater policeman about once a month; now London " bobbies " of the A division challenge and divert the wanderer who would stray too near the sacred precincts. There is no more strolling now among the rocky forest glories of the Lion's Face. " The Queen's drive" now traverses its front, and the cottagers of Braemar are exiled from the once-familiar slopes. A turnpike road that passed along the right bank of the river has been closed by Act of Parliament, and, let who will suffer, the seclusion of the grounds is complete. Yet all of natural beauty is not lost to the outsider. The view from the road is open to him as he passes Crathie on the top of the coach—the railway that was designed to reach Braemar has stopped short at Ballater, in deference to an intimation from the Castle that a railway in the same valley would be too distasteful to be borne, no matter at what inconvenience to the -public. Aud the falls of the Garrawalt are still to be seen, although that they are so is by reason of a sturdy regard for selfinterest on the part of the innkeepers of Braemar and Ballater. (When the forest of Ballochbuie. in which these falls are situated, was leased from Invercauld by the proprietrix of the Castle under the sLadow of Lochnagar, access to the falls wab stopped. In vain the innkeepers, recognising the introduction of the thin end of the wedge, remonstrated strenuously, urging that if the beauties of the glen were thus tabooed their customers would cease to come, and their motives for keeping posthorses, which on occasions were of service to the denizens of the Castle, would cease to exist. They were curtly told that the keeping or not keeping of posthorses was their own affair, and the falls remained closed till the end of that season. Later came an order for twelve pairs of posthorses, to facilitate the denizens of the Castle in their migration to the South. But then the innkeepers had their revenge. They declined to give any post horses for such a purpose, and a compromise was the issue, the teams being forthcoming in exchange for a promise that their guests should thenceforth have access to the falls of Garrawalt.

The era of honest, simple, laborious independence has passed away from the glen, and the crofters and shepherds are now toadies and parasites, on the chronic cadge for gifts and pickings. They eat dirt continually for the sake of the scraps of meat that are in the dish along with the dirt. They walk in ridiculous processions about the grounds carrying torches, and walloping in al-fresco reels under royal eyes, that they may entitle themselves to the bread and cheese and drams which reward the exertions of the free-born Britons. Their wives intrigue for a visit from the great lady, that, as the guerdon for innumerable curtsies, a wellswept hearth, and the proffer of a cup of tea, flannels and winseys may find their way to the cottage. The young men carney for admission to the stalwart brotherhood of gillies, and once within the pale, display a surprising alacrity in that sycophancy to their owners, in conjunction with insolence to the rest of the world, which is to be expected as characteristics of heather-bred yokels suddenly admitted to familiarity with the greatest in the land. Courts have ever been, and no doubt it is their essence to be, foci and hotbeds of intrigue and caballing. But as there are courts and courts, so there are intriguers and intriguers. If, when Elizabeth of happy memory ruled in the land, Leicester and Essex, Raleigh and Walsingham, schemed and plotted for the royal favour and their own advancement, they were nobles who planned the coups, they were gentlemen who used the back-stairs. lt Our courtiers then," to alter two words iu the quotation, 'were still, at least, our gentlemen." But a court in the servants'.

hall, a court the Lord Chamberlain of which, so to speak, is a sturdy gillie, as rough as one of the stots he tended before " he went to Court," and the courtiers whereof are his brothers and kinsmen, even unto the ultimate far-stretching margin of Scotch cousinhood ; a Court, the great pastime of which is a ball, "to which only the Royal servants are invited;" a Court the Royal head of which, while a sister Empress and her imperial son are " finding themselves" in her capital, occupies her afternoon in visiting " Willie Blair, the famous Royal fiddler, and Mrs Farquharson, widow of the late Peter Farquharson, gamekeeper;" a Court the carnival of which is the marriage of a strapping gillie with a buxom servant wench —well, such a Court has become the absorbing central feature of the once primitive glen. The plain little kirk on the other side of the river has, like its surroundings, deteriorated in the vicinity of a Court. Its structure remains unaltered, it is true, but its minister now is a prize parson of surpassing eloquence and interesting aspect, the selected flower of Scotia's clerical garden. But he, if the expression is allowable, is the stock company, and only preaches when a star parson does not take his place. The parishioners of Crathie ought by this time to be connoisseurs in preaching, they have a wonderful variety of pulpit oratory. If the performance pleases, the performer has his reward in a dinner at the Royal table, and his bed at the Castle.

On a Sunday, when the flag is flying from the tower of the Castle, in the bend of the river, this homely little church at Crathie become a raree show. The big hotels at Braemar and Ballater are full of tourists, among whom there is a large infusion of the Cockney and the American element, and who arrivs late in the week that they may be "on hand" for the enterprise of the Sunday. Omnibuses, postchaises, and wagonettes are put on the road, and the sightseers, whose motto for the day is the title of this article, with the first proper noun written very small and the second very large, set forth hilariously with well-charged sherry and sandwich flasks. The arrivals at the church door are timed early, as the entrepreneurs of the excursions are conversant with the etiquette established. The natives whose church undergoes these excursions have to get into their places still earlier, as they are supposed to be seated before the rush of the aliens comes. That rush is always severe, often frantic. The little place, primitive as in the old days, has sittings for about two hundred, and there are sometimes more than that number of visitors. But there are portions of the building from which indeed the sermon might be heard, if that were the aim, but which are quite ineligible for the visitors, who don't care for the sermon, and who have come to have a good long stare at the lady who sits in the front seat of the gallery opposite the pulpit. Obviously it is of no use to be under this gallery, and in fact barely one half of the area is eligible for the specific purpose. Policemen guard the door, and stand aside when the time has come to allow the entrance of the aliens. Then, on a full Sunday, the rush is only to be compared with that up Drurylane gallery stairs on Boxing night. One day this autumn two females were knocked down and trodden on, and had to be rescued by the police. On another occasion an impetuous and peremptory gentleman engaged in single combat with a policeman in the passage leading to the pulpit stairs. Another enterprising individual disregarded the prohibition against making " My house a temple of money changers" by having a deal with a native in the eyes of the congregation, resulting in the pocketing by the latter of half a sovereign, and suddenly remembering that he had peremptory business! elsewhere. Often there is only standing room; the passage whence an eligible view can be obtained being thronged while in other parts of the area there are empty seats. The etiquette is, that before the arrival of the cortege from the Castle all shall be inside, and the environs of the church cleared of all prying humanity; and the policemen are to be seen, like dogs outside a sheepfold, chevying the would be lingerers into the sacred edifice. The bellman having rang his statutory quarter of an hour, stops, but presently gives two or three more significant tolls. These he delivers just as the Castle cortege drives up, and they are the appointed signal to the clergyman, whose duty it is, by the regulations made and appointed, to be in the pulpit awaiting the royal arrival before he comes into aetion. It is the bedral's duty to inculcate this enactment on the officiating clergyman, and it is on record that, doing so once with too much haste, the flurried man of God rushed into the pulpit pantingly with his hat on, and when he did remove that article of attire sat down upon it in his confusion. A staircase, at the top of which is a door opening outward, conducts to the centre gallery. Once an enterprising gentleman secreted himself behind this door, that his view of what he had come to see might be closer in passing, and having accomplished his purpose departed whistling triumphantly, He bragged of his exploit, and had an imitator next Sunday; but the tale had reached the ears of the burly Mr John Brown, who, watching his opportunity, dextrously flattened the second aspirant between the door and the wall. The Queen sits in the front seat of the gallery directly opposite the preacher ; the ladies-in-waiting sit there with her. It is a touching evidence of the enthusiastic loyalty of the visitors to Deeside that the cushion [on which—to put it without periphrase—her Majesty sat was wont to be surreptitiously chopped up and carried away in fragments, and that souvenirs were even cut out of the wooden bench below. If this was sacrilege of a kind—and how amiable and beautiful even if so !—it is no longer possible. The bench is now bound with an uncompromising strip of iron, and the cushion, looked up on week days with the communion plate, is placed in loco only a short time before the service begins. During its progress a steady and universal stare converges on the gallery. Binoculars are freely used, and it is traditioned that a shortsighted American once resorted to a telescope. Just as some people finish their dinners sooner than others, some can stare their fill more speedily than other members of their race. Nothing is more common than for a party who have satiated themselves in this particular to take their departure without ceremony in the middle of the service, and they are to be observed partaking afterwards of a modest refection on a tomb stone, and then essaying a fresh point of view through one of the windows. The house thins with great rapidity should there be a disappointment as to the spectacle. As soon as it is apparent that the front seat of the gallery is not to be occupied, there is a general rush to the door. Those who come to s'are, do not remain to praj, They prefer, some of them

at least, to sit on the window-ledges and drink bumpers of sherry effusively, apparently to the health of the congregation inside. But although much cannot be said in favor of the decorum of the casual worshippers at the dual shrine in Crathie church, it must be allowed that for the most part they pay their footing with alacrity and liberality at collection time, and we have it on high authority that charity covereth a multitude of sins.