Cameronians

“ Garth, who deemed herself quite as much a part of the Cameronians as the adjutant or the big-drum, and who had been vibrating, bubbling, and brimming over with pleasure all night, now felt her satisfaction culminate when the aged Sir Piers, with the courtly gallantry of the old school, led her forth as his partner, and looked round in vain for Hew and Mary, as a vis-à-vis, whose place was speedily supplied by Dick Freeport and a young lady whose interest he was exciting on the subject of his ring with the blue stone. ”

“ In his latter years Sir Piers had not been with the Cameronians, but had seen a deal of service in India as a general officer, and, while slowly creeping up the list of his rank, had been appointed, in the usual courtesy of the army, full colonel of the old regiment in which he had been a subaltern and field-officer. ”

“ CAMERONIANS, a party in Scotland, who took their denomination from Richard Cameron, a famous field preacher, who refused to accept the indulgence to tender consciences granted by Charles II. as such an acceptance seemed an acknowledgement of the king's supremacy, and that he had before a right to silence them. Cameron made a separation from his Presbyterian brethren, in 1666, and afterwards headed a rebellion, in which he was killed. His party were never entirely reduced till the revolution, when they, voluntarily submitted to King William. ”

“ Most—if not all—of the Cameronians were as good performers on a well-waxed floor as at anything else that is manly, and, as we have already hinted, the floor of the Edinburgh Assembly-room is simply the perfection of what that for a ball should be.
'What a cub that fellow Hew is!' said Fotheringhame to Cecil in passing, with Annabelle on his arm, her pale blue costume becoming her light blonde beauty well. ”

“ From his infancy young Piers had been petted in every way, and was in some respects the spoiled child of the household. He grew up a bright and handsome lad, full of intelligence and enthusiasm for music and painting; but to dabble in these, even as an amateur, Sir Piers deemed unworthy of his family, so in due time he had his son gazetted to the Cameronians, then in garrison at Gibraltar. ”

“ Pretty circumstantial that!'
'Extraordinary!'
'Not at all; there is nothing extraordinary in this world. Thus I should not wonder if the fellow once figured before the footlights! Gad, if the Cameronians only knew of this, they'd put him in Coventry—force him to quit!'
'Then how the devil does this band-master come to know, if they don't?' said Sir Piers, pacing the room in great annoyance of spirit. 'I don't understand all this! Was he not a Sandhurst cadet?'
'I don't know, and don't care,' responded Hew, with an access of sullenness. ”

“ Local tradition is always apt to trace foreign events to the domestic causes, which are more immediately in the narrator's view. There is said to be another song upon this battle, once very popular, but I have not been able to recover it. This copy is given from recitation.
[A]
There is some reason to conjecture, that the revenge of the Cameronians, if successful, would have been little less sanguinary than that of the royalists. ”

“ The religious sect called Hill-men, or Cameronians, was at that time much noted for austerity and devotion, in imitation of Cameron, their founder, of whose tenets Old Mortality became a most strenuous supporter. He made frequent journeys into Galloway to attend their conventicles, and occasionally carried with him gravestones from his quarry at Gatelowbrigg, to keep in remembrance the righteous whose dust had been gathered to their fathers. ”

“ A proportion of pikemen and halberdiers were in every company, and the bayonets were still cross-hilted daggers, till the socket-bayonet, first adopted by the 25th, or Edinburgh Regiment, was introduced by its colonel, Maxwell, in Flanders.
The Cameronians fought with valour and distinction in the wars of William and Anne; James, Earl of Stair, commanded them in the year of the union, and 1720 saw them at Minorca, under Philip Anstruther of that Ilk, three of whose family have been at their head. ”

“ Cecil Falconer, for the volunteer was he, though in that blood-stained foreign uniform few would have recognised the once fashionable Cameronian officer, was sorely changed in aspect. He was browner visaged, bearded to the eyes, yet his face was worn and lined, and his eyes seemed sunk and keen, with the wolfish expression worn by those of men who are daily facing peril and death. ”

“ D. in Canada, Sept., 1845.
193 92nd REGIMENT OF FOOT (GORDON HIGHLANDERS) .
1. The heroic Fassifern, great-grandson of John Cameron, 18th of Lochiel, and one of the six children of Ewen Cameron of Inverscadale, on Loch Linnhe, by his first wife, Lucy Campbell, of Balmadine. In early life was articled to a Writer to the Signet at Edinburgh; but when war broke out, in 1793, his military tastes inclined him to forsake the pen for a sword. Obtained a commission in the 26th Cameronians in 1793. His chief services were in the Pa. ”

“ THE LAY OF THE BRAVE CAMERON. JOHN STUART BLACKIE. At Quatre Bras, when the fight ran high,
Stout Cameron stood with wakeful eye,
Eager to leap as a mettlesome hound,
Into the fray with a plunge and a bound,
But Wellington, lord of the cool command,
Held the reins with a steady hand,
Saying, "Cameron, wait, you'll soon have enough.
Give the Frenchmen a taste of your stuff,
When the Cameron men are wanted."
Now hotter and hotter the battle grew,
With tramp and rattle, and wild halloo,
And the Frenchmen poured, like a fiery flood,
Right on the ditch where Cameron stood. ”

“ Cameron—he is rarely called General now that he is Minister of War—was to ask him to give me authority to draw rations at cost price, in case the army took the field before I could make arrangements, and he seemed very well disposed to accede; “but I must think about it, for I shall have all our papers down upon me if I grant you any facility which they do not get themselves.” After I left the War Department, I took a walk to Mr. Seward’s, who was out. ”

“ Lest there should be any want of belief on the part of the colonists, he caused his credentials to be tacked up on the gateway of Fort Gibraltar. There, in legible scrawl, was an order appointing him as captain and Alexander Macdonell as lieutenant in the Voyageur Corps. The sight of a soldier sent a thrill through the breasts of the Highlanders and the fight-loving Irish. Cameron had in fact once belonged to the Voyageurs, and no one at Colony Gardens yet knew that the corps had been disbanded the year before. ”

“ And now he sleeps (for they bore him home,
When the war was done across the foam) ,
Beneath the shadow of Nevis Ben,
With his sires, the pride of the Cameron men.
Three thousand Highlandmen stood round,
As they laid him to rest in his native ground;
The Cameron brave, whose eye never quailed,
Whose heart never sank, and whose hand never failed,
Where a Cameron man was wanted.
A SONG FOR STOUT WORKERS. BY JOHN STUART BLACKIE. Onward, brave men, onward go,
Place is none for rest below;
He who laggeth faints and fails.
He who presses on prevails! ”

“ Mr Cameron seemed much amused at the question.
“What are the excellences we have?” said he; “or, what are those on which we pride ourselves? They are often not the same. And—notice it, young ladies, as you go through life—the virtue on which a man plumes himself the most highly is very frequently one which he possesses in small measure. (I do not say, in no measure.) Well, I suppose the qualities on which we English—”
“We are not English!” cried Angus, hotly.
“For this purpose we are,” was Mr Cameron’s answer. “As I observed before, the Lowland Scots and the northern English are one tribe. ”

“ Cameron was an enthusiast in his profession, and with outwardly the air of a well-bred man of the world, and thoroughly so that of a young Line officer, he had in his nature a deep sentiment of nationality, of clanship, and Highland romance, with an intense pride in his regiment. He had entertained Eveline often with sketches, anecdotes, and traditions of the Black Watch, but of himself and his V.C., of course, he never spoke. ”

“ Refreshed by six months' rest in winter quarters at Banos, in a beautiful valley of Leon, overshadowed by high mountains, Cameron, after commanding the 1st brigade during General Foy's attack on Bejar, marched [Pg 66] with his Highlanders, when the whole army advanced to turn the famous positions of Jourdan on the Ebro and Douro, and to meet him on the green plains of Vittoria, where, on the 21st of June, 1813, he again commanded the 1st brigade of Hill's division, and carried the heights of La Peubla, when the gallant Cadogan fell amid heaps, literally heaps, of his brave Highlanders. ”

“ Swift as a lightning flash the Sarcee sprang at Cameron, knife in hand, crying in the Blackfeet tongue that terrible cry so long dreaded by settlers in the Western States of America, “Death to the white man!” Without apparently moving a muscle, still holding by the mane of his horse, Cameron met the attack with a swift and well-placed kick which caught the Indian's right wrist and flung his knife high in the air. ”

“ Cameron had received no university training, but, having a gift of natural and persuasive eloquence, he was considered by John Welsh, Gabriel Semple, and other leading field preachers to have a call to the office of preacher, and was licensed by them accordingly. In Annandale and Clydesdale hundreds and thousands hung upon his lips, and, moved by his tender and melting appeals, ‘fell into a great weeping.’ In 1678 he went to Holland, where many like-minded men were in banishment, and in his absence a new indulgence was proclaimed which many accepted. ”

“ It goes to his head mighty fast," remarked Cameron. "What were you saying about your hard luck?" and he turned to the northern winterer again.
"Call that hard luck?" broke in a mountaineer, laughing as if he considered hardships a joke. "We lived a month last winter on two meals a day; soup, out of snow-shoe thongs, first course; fried skins, second go; teaspoonful shredded fish, by way of an entrée!"
The man wore a beaded buckskin suit, and his mellow intonation of words in the manner of the Indian tongue showed that he had almost lost English speech along with English customs. ”

“ That momentary weakness of Cameron's like a subtle poison runs through the Scottish line; and like fluid lightning through the Welsh. It is the touch upon the trembling balance. With cries exultant with triumph, the Welsh forwards fling themselves upon the steady Scots now fighting for life rather than for victory. And under their captain's directions these fierce, victory-sniffing Welsh are delivering their attack upon the spot where he fancies he has found a yielding. In vain Cameron rallies his powers; his nerve is failing him, his strength is done. ”

“ Sacred to the memory of Colonel John Cameron, eldest son of Ewen Cameron of Fassifern, Bart., whose mortal remains, transported from the field of glory where he died, rest here with those of his forefathers. During twenty years of active military service, with a spirit which knew no fear, and shunned no danger, he accompanied or led, in marches, sieges, and battles, the 92nd Regiment of Scottish Highlanders, always to honour and always to victory ”

“ On the Cameron side there were millionaires, merchant princes, bankers and stockholders, professors and scholars, while on hers, the Rossiter side, there were LL.D.'s and D.D.'s, lawyers and clergymen, authors and artists, beauties and belles, the whole forming an illustrious line of ancestry, admirably represented and sustained by the present family of Camerons, occupying the brownstone front, corner of —— Street and Fifth Avenue, where the handsome carriage stopped and a tall figure ran quickly up the marble steps. ”

“ Almost immediately, it seemed to Cameron, there came into the light another man who proved to be an Indian, short, heavily built, with a face hideously ugly and rendered more repulsive by the small, red-rimmed, blood-shot eyes that seemed to Cameron to peer like gimlets into his very soul. ”

“ In the French chronicles of the time we read of Cameron attending the ‘young chevalier’ on his visit to Versailles as his ‘master of the horse.’ His father died at Nieuport in Flanders, after a long exile of thirty-three years, in 1748. In the same year Cameron died. By his wife, Anne, daughter of Sir James Campbell, fifth baron Auchinbreck, he had three sons and four daughters: John, who succeeded to his father's Albany regiment, and was afterwards captain of Royal Scots in the French service, died 1762 ”

“ Through the trader Isaac Thomas it soon became known to the settlers that Cameron, the British agent, was among the Cherokees, endeavoring to incite them to hostilities against the Americans. At first the Indians resisted the enticements—the hopes of spoil and plunder and the recovery of their hunting-grounds—which Cameron held out to them. They could not understand how men of the same race and language could be at war with one another. ”

“ Cameron presiding over all with lady-like decorum, her soft glossy silk of brown, with her rich lace and diamond pin in perfect keeping with herself and her surroundings. And opposite to her Wilford sat, a tall, dark, handsome man, of thirty or thereabouts—a man, whose polished manners betokened at once a perfect knowledge of the world, and whose face, to a close observer, indicated how little satisfaction he had as yet found in the world. ”

“ You want one too, Lorna? Hooray! We'll make a Colony of Camellia Buds on the little island and spend the summer here. We may be globe-trotters and all the rest of it, but I vote we get up a good old Anglo-Saxon League and stick together for better or for worse. I'll buy a Union Jack to-day if the Cameron Clan will promise to wave the Stars and Stripes, and sing 'Yankee Doodle' with 'Auld Lang Syne.'"
"We've welded America already into the clan, dear bairn," smiled Mrs. Cameron. "No other visitor keeps us alive like you do." ”