28.12.06
Crocodile Dundee, John L and a Sad Ending
(So, Hugh Miller’s spent the day in Stratford upon Avon and now makes his way to Olney, to spend the night there. But when he gets there, the innkeeper informs him that there will be a bare-knuckle boxing championship tomorrow and there is no room for him. He advises him to try the next village of Newport Pagnell. As he leaves Olney, he meets the policeman who warns him that the 4 mile walk to Newport, although very peaceful, is dangerous, since many robberies have already taken place on the road that same evening. Our intrepid Black-Isler won’t be disuaded and begins his trek. And now comes Miller-time…)
”The way was quite lonely enought; nor were the few straggling travellers whom I met of a kind suited to render its solitariness more cheerful. About half-way on, where the road runs between tall hedges, two fellows started out towards me one from each side of the way. “Is this the road”, asked one “to Newport Pagnell?” “Quite a stranger here,” I replied, without slackening my pace; “don’t belong to the kingdom even”. “No!” said the same fellow, increasing his speed, as if to overtake me; “to what kingdom then?” “Scotland,” I said, turning suddenly round, somewhat afraid of being taken from behind by a bludgeon. The two fellows sheered of in double quick time, the one who had already addressed me, muttering, “More like an Irishman, I think;” and I saw no more of them.
(And now the Miller moment) “I had luckily a brace of loaded pistols about me (as you do), and had at the moment a trigger under each fore-finger; and though the ruffians - for such I doubt not they were - could scarcely have been cognizant of the fact, they seemed to have made at least a shrewd approximation towards it. In the autumn of 1842, during the great depression of trade, when the entire country seemed in a state of disorganization, and the law in some of the mining districts failed to protect the lieges, I was engaged in following out a course of geologic exploration in our Lothian Coal Field; and, unwilling to suspend my labours, had got the pistols, to do for myself, if necessary, what the authorities at the time could not do for me … In crossing the Borders I have resolved to leave them behind me, They gave confidence, however, in unknown neighbourhoods or when travelling alone in the night-time; and so I had brought them with me into England, to support, if necessary, the majesty of the law and the rights of the liege subject, and certainly did not regret this evening that I had.
“On the following morning I walked on to Olney. It was with some little degree of solicitude that, in a quiet corner by the way, remote from cottages, I tried my pistols to ascetain what sort of a defence I would have made had the worst come to the worst in the encounter of the previous evening. Pop, pop! - they went off beautifully, and sent their bullets through an inch board; and so in all probability I should have succeeded in astonishing the “fancy men”. (there is such a deja-vu tone to this paragraph because less than a decade later, our intrepid traveller, driven insane by mental and physical pain, ‘pops’ himself with one of these same pistols.)
(So the moral of the story is: When, in College, we were studying the Old Testament Kings of Israel, John L used to ask us the trump card question of a Israelite King “Would you like to meet him in a dark alley?” Would you have liked to have met a Free Church founding father in a dark alley?)