A Monk of Fife | Page 5

in romances. Being always, when I
might, in her company, I became a clerk insensibly, and without labour
I could early read and write, wherefore my father was minded to bring
me up for a churchman. For this cause, I was some deal despised by
others of my age, and, yet more, because from my mother I had caught
the Southron trick of the tongue. They called me "English Norman,"
and many a battle I have fought on that quarrel, for I am as true a Scot
as any, and I hated the English (my own mother's people though they
were) for taking and holding captive our King, James I. of worthy
memory. My fancy, like that of most boys, was all for the wars, and full
of dreams concerning knights and ladies, dragons and enchanters, about
which the other lads were fain enough to hear me tell what I had read in
romances, though they mocked at me for reading. Yet they oft came ill
speed with their jests, for my brother had taught me to use my hands:
and to hold a sword I was instructed by our smith, who had been
prentice to Harry Gow, the Burn-the-Wind of Perth, and the best man at
his weapon in broad Scotland. From him I got many a trick of fence
that served my turn later.
But now the evil time came when my dear mother sickened and died,
leaving to me her memory and her great chain of gold. A bitter sorrow
is her death to me still; but anon my father took to him another wife of
the Bethunes of Blebo. I blame myself, rather than this lady, that we
dwelt not happily in the same house. My father therefore, still minded
to make me a churchman, sent me to Robert of Montrose's new college
that stands in the South Street of St. Andrews, a city not far from our
house of Pitcullo. But there, like a wayward boy, I took more pleasure
in the battles of the "nations"- -as of Fife against Galloway and the
Lennox; or in games of catch- pull, football, wrestling, hurling the bar,
archery, and golf--than in divine learning--as of logic, and Aristotle his
analytics.
Yet I loved to be in the scriptorium of the Abbey, and to see the good
Father Peter limning the blessed saints in blue, and red, and gold, of

which art he taught me a little. Often I would help him to grind his
colours, and he instructed me in the laying of them on paper or vellum,
with white of egg, and in fixing and burnishing the gold, and in
drawing flowers, and figures, and strange beasts and devils, such as we
see grinning from the walls of the cathedral. In the French language,
too, he learned me, for he had been taught at the great University of
Paris; and in Avignon had seen the Pope himself, Benedict XIII., of
uncertain memory.
Much I loved to be with Father Peter, whose lessons did not irk me, but
jumped with my own desire to read romances in the French tongue,
whereof there are many. But never could I have dreamed that, in days
to come, this art of painting would win me my bread for a while, and
that a Leslie of Pitcullo should be driven by hunger to so base and
contemned a handiwork, unworthy, when practised for gain, of my
blood.
Yet it would have been well for me to follow even this craft more, and
my sports and pastimes less: Dickon Melville had then escaped a
broken head, and I, perchance, a broken heart. But youth is given over
to vanities that war against the soul, and, among others, to that wicked
game of the Golf, now justly cried down by our laws, {2} as the mother
of cursing and idleness, mischief and wastery, of which game, as I
verily believe, the devil himself is the father.
It chanced, on an October day of the year of grace Fourteen hundred
and twenty-eight, that I was playing myself at this accursed sport with
one Richard Melville, a student of like age with myself. We were
evenly matched, though Dickon was tall and weighty, being great of
growth for his age, whereas I was of but scant inches, slim, and, as men
said, of a girlish countenance. Yet I was well skilled in the game of the
Golf, and have driven a Holland ball the length of an arrow-flight, there
or thereby. But wherefore should my sinful soul be now in mind of
these old vanities, repented of, I trust, long ago?
As we twain, Dickon and I, were known for fell champions at this
unholy sport, many of the other scholars followed us, laying wagers on
our