Chapter VIII: Introduction (7)

While Boswell mentions the mean kirk, with his indifference to natural objects he passes over in silence the celebrated Falls of Fiers or Foyers. He does not even mention the bridge over the river, or the rocks which on three sides of it rise to a great height. Here Johnson’s imagination was deeply impressed, for he describes them as “exhibiting a kind of dreadful magnificence; standing like the barriers of nature placed to keep different orders of being in perpetual separation.” Dismounting from their horses, “we clambered,” he writes, “over very rugged crags, till we came at last to a place where we could overlook the river, and saw a channel torn, as it seems, through black piles of stone, by which the stream is obstructed and broken, till it comes to a very steep descent, of such dreadful depth, that we were naturally inclined to turn aside our eyes. But we visited the place at an unseasonable time, and found it divested of its dignity and terror. Nature never gives everything at once. A long continuance of dry weather, which made the rest of the way easy and delightful, deprived us of the pleasure expected from the Falls of Fiers.” This same month Mason, the poet, was complaining that the cascades at Lodore had been “reduced by the dry season to a scanty rill, which took away more than half the beauties of the scene.”[594]

[Sidenote: FORT AUGUSTUS.]

It was dark when our travellers reached “the wretched inn” at Fort Augustus. Happily it was not in it that they were to lodge, for the governor invited them to sleep in his house. Of the fort, the rebels had made a bonfire on April 15, 1746, the day before Culloden, “to celebrate the Duke of Cumberland’s birthday.”[595] It had since been rebuilt and greatly strengthened, “being surrounded by two trenches filled with water, and having draw-bridges, strong walls, and bastions.”[596] Nothing is left of it. Where rough soldiers once carried things with a high hand, now smooth priests rule. On the site of the old fortifications which bore the second name of the butcher duke has been raised a college and monastery dedicated to St. Benedict. Johnson long remembered the rest which he enjoyed in the governor’s hospitable home. Nearly four years later he recorded in his diary: “I passed the night in such sweet uninterrupted sleep as I have not known since I slept at Fort Augustus.” The following year, writing to Boswell, he said, “The best night that I have had these twenty years was at Fort Augustus.” From this spot to the sea-shore opposite Skye they had about forty-four miles of highland paths to traverse. This part of their journey they were forced to divide very unequally, as Anoch, the only place where they could find entertainment, was scarcely a third of the way. [Sidenote: GLENMORISON.] Crossing the mountains by a road which had been made “with labour that might have broken the perseverance of a Roman legion,” early in the afternoon they came “through a wild country” to Glenmorison.[597] They did not, as the guide-book says, follow the course of the river Moriston from Invermoriston, but joined it some miles higher up, above the fine scenery and the wild tumble of water which are shown in the accompanying sketch. This fact I did not discover till too late. Anoch Johnson describes as “standing in a glen or valley pleasantly watered by a winding river. It consists of three huts, one of which is distinguished by a chimney.” It was in the house thus distinguished that they lodged. When I visited this spot last summer, we halted at a farmhouse hard by to rest our horses and take some lunch. We sat on the bank of a dried-up brook, beneath a row of witch-elms. A cuckoo was flying about, resting now and then on the garden wall. “Its two-fold shout” it scarcely uttered, thinking, perhaps, that as it was the month of June, it would be “heard, not regarded.” The wind rustled in the leaves, the river, blue beneath a blue sky, ran swiftly by, now under a shady bank, and now round a stony foreland, till it lost itself at last from our sight behind a bend. To the west rose lofty mountains; on the other side of the valley were sloping hills. We lunched on frothing milk, oat-cakes, scones, and butter; the sheep dogs playing around us, and with wistful gaze asking for their share of the feast. We lay on the ground and looked across the little ravine at an old hut that was “distinguished by a chimney.” This we all voted, and very likely with truth on our side, was the very place where our travellers had lodged. Talking of “far-off things,” of Johnson and the copy of Cocker’s Arithmetic which he gave to his landlord’s “gentle and pleasing daughter,” of her father’s library of odd volumes, and of the old hut and the old life, an hour slipped quickly and pleasantly by.

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON. IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]

[Sidenote: ENGLISH SOLDIERS.]

As our travellers “passed on through the dreariness of solitude” on their way hither, they had come upon a party of soldiers working on the road, to whom they gave a couple of shillings to spend in drink. “With the true military impatience of coin in their pockets,” these men had followed them to the inn, “having marched at least six miles to find the first place where liquor could be bought.” There they made merry in the barn. “We went and paid them a visit,” writes Boswell; “Dr. Johnson saying, ‘Come, let’s go and give ’em another shilling a-piece.’ We did so, and he was saluted ‘My Lord’ by all of them.” Johnson avows that one cause of his generosity was regard to his and Boswell’s safety. “Having never been before in a place so wild and unfrequented, I was glad of their arrival, because I knew that we had made them friends; and to gain still more of their good-will, we went to them when they were carousing in the barn, and added something to our former gift.” The money was ill-bestowed. “The poor soldiers got too much liquor. Some of them fought and left blood upon the spot, and cursed whisky next morning.” Perhaps Johnson had them in his mind when, a few years later, he said, “Why, sir, a common soldier is usually a very gross man.” To the degradation of one of the English regiments which had been stationed in the Highlands, testimony is borne by Wolfe, who on his return from Scotland in 1753, wrote: “If I stay much longer with the regiment I shall be perfectly corrupt; the officers are loose and profligate, and the soldiers are very devils.”[598] Johnson soon found that he had no need of a guard. His host had indeed fought in the Highland army at Culloden, but he was a quiet honest fellow. The account which he gave of the campaign moved Boswell to tears. If he told them the following story which I have found in Henderson’s _History of the Rebellion_, he would have moved also Johnson to anger. [Sidenote: THE GRANTS OF GLENMORISON.] A party of the Grants of Glenmorison had joined the Pretender’s army at Edinburgh. The laird, who had remained loyal, came, after the battle of Culloden, “with about five hundred of his vassals to Inverness, whence they were sent into the country of the Macintoshes. Hereupon the Grants in the rebellion begged his intercession. He repaired to the Duke of Cumberland, and said, ‘Here are a number of men come in with their arms, who would have submitted to none in Britain but to me.’ ‘No!’ answered the duke; ‘I’ll let them know that they are my father’s subjects, and must likewise submit to me.’ So he gave orders to embark them with the other prisoners, and they were shipped off to Tilbury Fort.”[599] Smollett tells how great numbers of the miserable captives who were sent to London by sea, being crowded in the holds of the vessels, “perished in the most deplorable manner for want of necessaries, air, and exercise.”[600] If the Grants escaped this fate, very likely they were transported to America.

ANOCH TO GLENELG (SEPTEMBER 1).

It was a long and heavy journey that this day lay before our travellers, so that they rose in good time and started about eight o’clock. Boswell, who had awakened very early, had been a little scared by the thought that “their landlord, being about to emigrate, might murder them to get their money, and lay it upon the soldiers in the barn.” “When I got up,” he adds, “I found Dr. Johnson asleep in his miserable stye, as I may call it, with a coloured handkerchief round his head. With difficulty could I awaken him.” So miserable had their beds looked that “we had some difficulty,” writes Johnson, “in persuading ourselves to lie down in them. At last we ventured, and I slept very soundly in the vale of Glenmorison amidst the rocks and mountains.” The road which they were to follow is but little traversed at the present day, for tourists either keep to the south by the Caledonian Canal, or to the north by the railway to Strome Ferry. [Sidenote: THE HAPPY VALLEY.] They thereby miss, to use Boswell’s words, “a scene of as wild nature as one could see.” To this part of my tour I had long looked forward. It is many a year since I first formed the wish to visit that “narrow valley not very flowery, but sufficiently verdant,” where Johnson planned the history of his tour.

“I sat down on a bank (he says) such as a writer of romance
might have delighted to feign. I had indeed no trees to whisper
over my head, but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day
was calm, the air was soft, and all was rudeness, silence, and
solitude. Before me and on either side were high hills, which
by hindering the eye from ranging, forced the mind to find
entertainment for itself. Whether I spent the hour well I know
not, for here I first conceived the thought of this narration.”

In a letter to Mrs. Thrale he describes the same scene, but makes no mention of the book which he had in mind.

“I sat down to take notes on a green bank, with a small stream
running at my feet, in the midst of savage solitude, with
mountains before me, and on either hand covered with heath. I
looked around me, and wondered that I was not more affected,
but the mind is not at all times equally ready to be put in
motion. If my mistress and master, and Queeney[601] had been
there, we should have produced some reflections among us either
poetical or philosophical, for though solitude be the nurse
of woe,[602] conversation is often the parent of remarks and
discoveries.”

My hopes of finding this classical rivulet were great. A kind correspondent, the Rev. Alexander Matheson, minister of Glen Shiel, had been told by some old people of the neighbourhood that they knew by tradition the exact spot. Though he had nearly twenty miles to come, he undertook to show me it. I arrived at the little inn at Clunie earlier than he had expected, and there meeting him found to my disappointment that I had passed the spot some six or seven miles. Both horses and travellers were too weary to retrace their steps. The tradition of the old people had on further investigation proved to be worthless. Like myself he had been at first misled by Boswell’s narrative, which places this happy valley at the western end of Glen Shiel. But on looking at Johnson’s account, aided too by his own knowledge of the locality, he had detected the error. The rivulet by which they had made their noonday halt must have been in Glen Clunie, near the eastern end of the loch, for Johnson describes how after their rest “they continued their journey along the side of a loch which at last ended in a river broad and shallow. Beyond it is a valley called Glen Shiel.” For my disappointment there was some consolation to be found. The long drought of nearly two months which had preceded my tour had dried up those rivulets which Johnson crossed, running, as he describes them, “with a clear, shallow stream over a hard, pebbly bottom.” The main river had still water in it; but we saw few indeed of “the streams rushing down the steep” which fed it. In that part of the narrow valley where he reposed we should have had only a choice of dried-up watercourses, had we tried to select the bank on which he sat. [Sidenote: YARROW UNVISITED.] For me Yarrow still remains unvisited. I have still to see

“Its silvery current flow
With uncontrolled meanderings.”

Passing through Glen Clunie, which now boasts of a little inn where the traveller can find clean, if homely lodgings, they reached Glen Shiel. It is worth notice that though the word _Glen_ is in Johnson’s Dictionary, so unfamiliar was it at this time to English ears, that using it in the letter in which he describes this day’s journey, he adds, “so they call a valley.” In Glen Shiel, writes Boswell, they saw “where the battle was fought in 1719.” It was in the second and last of the Spanish invasions of our island that this fight took place. An armament of ten ships of war and transports, having on board 6,000 regular troops with arms for 12,000 men, had sailed from Cadiz under the command of the Duke of Ormond, in the hope of restoring the Stuarts to that throne which they had forfeited by their tyranny and their folly. The winds and waves fought for us, as they had fought long before in the time of the Great Armada. Two ships only succeeded in reaching the coast of Scotland. [Sidenote: EILAN DONAN CASTLE.] They landed their troops near Eilan Donan Castle on Loch Duich, the seat of the chief of the Mackenzies. Four years earlier the fighting men of this clan had gone off to join the forces of the Earl of Mar, and had taken part in the battle of Sheriffmuir. The grandfather of the present minister of the parish in which Eilan Donan stands, had known an aged parishioner, who had seen the clansmen dance on the leads of the castle the evening before they started on their expedition. There were among them four chieftains, each bearing the name of John, and known as “the four Johns of Scotland.” They all danced at Eilan Donan, and all fell at Sheriffmuir. [Sidenote: BATTLE OF GLEN SHIEL.] I was told also of a tradition which still exists among the people, that at Glen Shiel the clansmen had sent their women and children to wave flags on the hills as if they were a fresh body of men. Deceived by this appearance, the regular troops had at first retreated. The battle with the Spaniards was fought at a spot, where on both sides the mountains draw close, and the valley narrows to a ravine through which the river when swollen by the rains rushes foaming along in fine cascades. Along the right bank the rocks were so steep that till the present road was cut no passage was possible; on the left bank there was a narrow opening beneath a precipitous crag. A little above the uppermost of the waterfalls the country folks still point out “the black colonel’s grave”—some swarthy Spaniard, perhaps, who fell that day far from the cork-groves of Southern Spain. They tell too how the Spanish soldiers who surrendered themselves as prisoners of war first cast their arms into the deep pool below. A dreadful story has been recorded by an Englishman who lived for many years at Inverness. “He had been assured,” he writes, “by several officers who were in the battle, that some of the English soldiers who were dangerously wounded were left behind for three or four hours. When parties were sent to them with hurdles made to serve as litters, they were all found stabbed with dirks in twenty places.”[603] The story may not be true. If it is, the clansmen were as savage after Glen Shiel, as were the regular troops twenty-seven years later after Culloden.

[Sidenote: THE MOUNTAIN LIKE A CONE.]

In the warm sunshine of a day in June we sat on a bank above the dark pool beneath whose eddying waters some of the arms perhaps still lie. There was a gentle breeze, the larks were singing over our heads, the water was sparkling and splashing, the sides of the torrent were overhung with the mountain ash and were green with ferns, but below us and in front lay a scene of wild desolation. Far off to the west was the mountain which Boswell had pointed out to Johnson as being like a cone. “No, Sir,” said Johnson. “It would be called so in a book, and when a man comes to look at it, he sees it is not so. It is indeed pointed at the top; but one side of it is larger than the other.” Its Gaelic name, _Faochag_, which signifies _whelk_, shows that though Johnson’s objection may have been a proof of his “perceptive quickness,” yet Boswell’s description was quite accurate enough for two men out on a tour. We tried in vain to distinguish which among the mountains was “the considerable protuberance.” Perhaps the Johnson Club may not disdain to appoint a committee who shall be instructed to bid farewell for a time to the delights of Fleet Street and visit Glen Shiel, with full powers to come to a final decision in this important matter. A long drive down the steep pass brought us to the place which Boswell said was “a rich green valley, comparatively speaking.” [Sidenote: AUCHNASHEAL.] A little way beyond it lay the twenty huts which formed the village of Auchnasheal. “One of them,” says Johnson, “was built of loose stones, piled up with great thickness into a strong, though not solid wall. From this house we obtained some great pails of milk, and having brought bread with us were very liberally regaled.” The curious scene which they witnessed here is thus described by Boswell:—

“We sat down on a green turf-seat at the end of a house;
they brought us out two wooden dishes of milk,[604] which we
tasted. One of them was frothed like a syllabub. I saw a woman
preparing it with such a stick as is used for chocolate, and in
the same manner. We had a considerable circle about us, men,
women, and children, all M’Craas, Lord Seaforth’s people. Not
one of them could speak English. I observed to Dr. Johnson, it
was much the same as being with a tribe of Indians. Johnson:
‘Yes, sir, but not so terrifying.’ I gave all who chose it
snuff and tobacco. Governor Trapaud had made us buy a quantity
at Fort Augustus, and put them up in small parcels. I also
gave each person a piece of wheat bread, which they had never
tasted before. I then gave a penny apiece to each child. I
told Dr. Johnson of this: upon which he called to Joseph and
our guides, for change for a shilling, and declared that he
would distribute among the children. Upon this being announced
in Erse, there was a great stir: not only did some children
come running down from neighbouring huts, but I observed one
black-haired man, who had been with us all along, had gone off,
and returned, bringing a very young child. My fellow-traveller
then ordered the children to be drawn up in a row, and he dealt
about his copper, and made them and their parents all happy.”

“It was the best day the McCraas declared they had seen since the time of the old laird of Macleod.” He, no doubt, had made a halt in their valley on his way to or from Skye. The snuff and tobacco must have won their hearts more even than the money. “Nothing,” Johnson was told, “gratified the Highlanders so much.” Knox recorded a few years later that “any stranger who cannot take a pinch of snuff or give one is looked upon with an evil eye.”[605] So uncommon was wheaten bread even a quarter of a century later, that Dr. Garnett, after leaving Inverary, tasted none till he reached Inverness.[606] At present it can be had in most places, being brought by the steamers in large boxes from Glasgow, and transported inland in the country carts. The way in which the villagers had gathered round the travellers had startled even Johnson, stout-hearted though he was. “I believe,” he says, “they were without any evil intention, but they had a very savage wildness of aspect and manner.” My friend, the minister of Glen Shiel, pointed out to me that it was no doubt mere curiosity which brought them round him. Johnson was as strange a sight to them as they were to Johnson. An earlier traveller in the Hebrides has expressed this very well. “Every man and thing I met with,” he writes, “seemed a novelty. I thought myself entering upon a new scene of nature, but nature rough and unpolished. Men, manners, habits, buildings, everything different from our own; and if we thought them rude and barbarous, no doubt the people had the same opinion of what belonged to us, and the wonder was mutual.”[607]

[Sidenote: SHEEP INSTEAD OF MEN.]

Auchnasheal has been swept away; nothing of it is left but a few banks of earth and the foundations of the one stone house. The same fate has befallen it which befell that other village near Fort Augustus where Coleridge heard a Highland widow mourn over the desolation of the land:

“‘Within this space,’ she said, ‘how short a time back!—there
lived a hundred and seventy-three persons, and now there is
only a shepherd and an underling or two. Yes, Sir! One hundred
and seventy-three Christian souls, man, woman, boy, girl, and
babe, and in almost every home an old man by the fire-side,
who would tell you of the troubles before our roads were made;
and many a brave youth among them who loved the birthplace of
his forefathers, yet would swing about his broad-sword, and
want but a word to march off to the battles over sea; aye,
Sir, and many a good lass who had a respect for herself. Well,
but they are gone, and with them the bristled bear [barley]
and the pink haver [oats], and the potato plot that looked as
gay as any flower-garden with its blossoms! I sometimes fancy
that the very birds are gone—all but the crows and the gleads
[kites]. Well, and what then? Instead of us all, there is one
shepherd man, and it may be a pair of small lads—and a many,
many sheep! And do you think, Sir, that God allows of such
proceedings?’”[608]

The desolation had already begun even at the time of our travellers’ visit. Their host of the evening before was following seventy of the dalesmen to America, whither they had been driven by a rack-renting landlord. “I asked him,” writes Johnson, “whether they would stay at home if they were well-treated. He answered with indignation, that no man willingly left his native country.”

Taking leave of these inoffensive, if wild-looking people, our travellers rode on, much refreshed by their repast. They had, as Johnson complained, “very little entertainment, as they travelled either for the eye or ear. There are, I fancy,” he adds, “no singing birds in the Highlands.” It is odd that he should have looked for singing-birds on the 1st of September. Had it been earlier in the summer he would have found melody enough. Nowhere have I heard the thrushes sing more sweetly than at Glenelg. Wesley, visiting Inverness on an early day of May, “heard abundance of birds welcoming the return of spring.”[609] If so late in the summer there was no music for the ear, the eye surely should have been something more than entertained, when in the evening light the first sight was caught of Loch Duich and the waters of the Atlantic, and the barrier of mountains which so nobly encloses them. Yet they are passed over in silence by both our travellers. So fine is the scenery here that I longed to make a stay in the comfortable inn at Shiel, near the head of the loch. [Sidenote: SHEEP-SHEARING IN SHIEL.] But we were forced to press on, having first witnessed, however, sheep-shearing on a large scale on a farm close by. In front of a storing-house for wool fifteen men were seated all hard at work with their shears, their dogs lying at their feet. They wore coloured jerseys in which the shades of blue and green were all the pleasanter to the eye because they were somewhat faded. Young lads were bringing up the sheep from the fold. The forelegs of each animal were tied, it was then lifted on to a narrow bank of turf which had been raised in front of each shepherd, thrown on its back, and in a moment the busy shears were at work. In the long summer day a quick hand could finish eighty, we were told. As soon as the fleece fell loose, an old woman came forward, folded it up tight, and carried it into the store-house; while a boy, dipping the branding-iron into boiling pitch, scored the side of each sheep with a deep black mark. From time to time the farmer went round with a bottle and a small glass, and gave each man a dram of pure whisky. Not far from here on the banks of the loch was an old house where it was said that Johnson made a halt. It is so pleasant a place, with its grove of trees and its garden of roses, and so kindly was I welcomed, that I would willingly believe the tradition. I could wish, however, that he and Boswell had not treated it with the same neglect as they did the view. Had their reception been as kind as mine they would certainly have expressed their gratitude. [Sidenote: MAM RATTAKIN.] It was here that I was told of the address which he made to the mountain at the foot of which the house stands, and up which he was now to climb, “Good-bye, Mam Rattakin, I hope never to see your face again.”[610] They did not reach it till late in the afternoon. Both Johnson and the horses were weary, and they had “a terrible steep to climb.” Going down was almost worse than going up, for his horse now and then stumbled beneath his great weight. On the edge of one of the precipices he was, he thought, in real danger. He grew fretful with fatigue, and was not comforted by the absurd attempt made by his guide to amuse him.

“Having heard him, in the forenoon, express a pastoral pleasure
on seeing the goats browsing, just when the doctor was uttering
his displeasure, the fellow cried, with a very Highland accent,
‘See, such pretty goats!’ Then he whistled _whu!_ and made
them jump. Little did he conceive what Dr. Johnson was. Here
now was a common ignorant Highland clown imagining that he
could divert, as one does a child, _Dr. Samuel Johnson!_ The
ludicrousness, absurdity, and extraordinary contrast between
what the fellow fancied, and the reality, was truly comic.”

At the bottom of the mountain a dreary ride of six or seven long miles through a flat and uninteresting country still awaited them. They were too tired even for talk. Boswell urged on his horse so that some preparation might be made for the great man at the inn at Glenelg.

“He called me back,” he writes, “with a tremendous shout, and
was really in a passion with me for leaving him. I told him my
intentions, but he was not satisfied, and said, ‘Do you know, I
should as soon have thought of picking a pocket, as doing so.’
BOSWELL. ‘I am diverted with you, Sir.’ JOHNSON. ‘Sir, I could
never be diverted with incivility. Doing such a thing makes one
lose confidence in him who has done it, as one cannot tell what
he may do next.’”

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON. IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]

Even after he had reached the inn his violence continued. “Sir,” he said, “had you gone on, I was thinking that I should have returned with you to Edinburgh, and then have parted from you, and never spoken to you more.” The next morning “he owned that he had spoken in passion; that he would not have done what he threatened; and that if he had, he should have been ten times worse than I; and he added, ‘Let’s think no more on’t.’” As we drove down the mountain on a summer afternoon the peacefulness of the pastoral scene, the sheep dotted about quietly nibbling the grass, with their lambs by their side, the hazy air on the hills, all seemed to contrast strangely with the violence of his passion. To an old man, however, tired with a long day’s ride over rough ways, and in want of his dinner, something must be forgiven. He is not the only tourist who, in his need of rest and food, has relieved his feelings by quarrelling with his companion.

[Sidenote: BERNERA BARRACKS.]

When they were not far from the end of their ride they passed the barracks at Bernera. “I looked at them wistfully,” writes Boswell; “as soldiers have always everything in the best order; but there was only a sergeant and a few men there.” Pennant, who had visited them a year earlier, describes them as “handsome and capacious, designed to hold two hundred men; at present occupied only by a corporal and six soldiers. The country lament this neglect. They are now quite sensible of the good effects of the military, by introducing peace and security; they fear lest the evil days should return, and the ancient thefts be renewed as soon as the banditti find this protection of the people removed.”[611] The banditti were the Highlanders of this district in general. Less than thirty years earlier “the whole country between Loch Ness and the sea to the west had been,” he says, “a den of thieves. The constant petition at grace of the old Highland chieftains was delivered with great fervour in these terms: ‘Lord, turn the world upside down, that Christians may make bread out of it.’”[612]

The country had to lament a loss of trade as well as of security. The cottagers who had been drawn together to supply the wants of the soldiers are described by Knox, a few years later, as being in the utmost poverty. The barracks had fallen into so ruinous a state, that it justified the report that the building of them had been “a notorious job.” Even the sergeant and his six soldiers had been removed. “I was entertained,” says Knox, “by the commanding officer and his whole garrison. The former was an old corporal, and the latter was the corporal’s wife: the entertainment snuff and whisky.”[613]

[Sidenote: THE INN AT GLENELG.]

When at length our travellers, “weary and disgusted,” reached Glenelg, “our humour,” writes Johnson, “was not much mended by our inn, which, though it was built of lime and slate, the Highlander’s description of a house which he thinks magnificent, had neither wine, bread, eggs, nor anything that we could eat or drink. When we were taken upstairs a dirty fellow bounced out of the bed where one of us was to lie. Boswell blustered, but nothing could be got. At last a gentleman in the neighbourhood, who heard of our arrival, sent us rum and white sugar. Boswell was now provided for in part, and the landlord prepared some mutton chops which we could not eat, and killed two hens, of which Boswell made his servant broil a limb, with what effect I know not. We had a lemon and a piece of bread, which supplied me with my supper.” Boswell’s account of the place is no less dismal. “There was no provender for our horses; so they were sent to grass with a man to watch them. A maid showed us upstairs into a room damp and dirty, with bare walls, a variety of bad smells, a coarse black greasy fir table, and forms of the same kind; and out of a wretched bed started a fellow from his sleep, like Edgar in _King Lear_, ‘Poor Tom’s a cold.’” Johnson slept in his clothes and great coat, on a bed of hay; “Boswell laid sheets upon his bed which he had brought from home, and reposed in linen like a gentleman.”

Here, again, was I struck by the contrast between the past and the present. Of the old inn, with all its magnificence of lime and slate, not even the site is known. In its place stands a roomy and comfortable hotel. It was on the 21st of June when we visited it, and we found it half-asleep and almost empty, for the season had not yet begun. At the most delightful time of the year, when the days were at their longest and no candles were burnt, there was scarcely a single stranger to enjoy the quiet and the beauty. There were woods and flowering shrubs, rhododendrons and the Portugal laurel, and close to the water’s edge the laburnum in full bloom. There were all the sights of peaceful country life—the cocks crowing, the sheep answering with their bleats their bleating lambs, the cows with their calves in the noonday heat seeking the shade of the tall and wide-spreading trees. The waves lapped gently on the shore, and in the distance, below the rocky coast of Skye, the waters were whitened by the countless sea-birds. We drove up a beautiful valley to the Pictish forts, and saw an eagle hovering high above us.

CORRICHATACHIN (SEPTEMBER 6-8; 25-28).

[Sidenote: LANDING ON SKYE.]

On the morning of Thursday, September 2, our travellers took boat at Glenelg, “and launched into one of the straits of the Atlantic Ocean.” Rowing along the Sound of Slate towards the south-west, they reached the shore of Armidale in Skye early in the afternoon. They had intended to visit in his castle the owner of half the island, Sir Alexander Macdonald. But, wrote Johnson, “he had come from his seat in the middle of the island to a small house on the shore, as we believe, that he might with less reproach entertain us meanly.” Boswell was so much disgusted with this chieftain’s parsimony, that he “meditated an escape from his house the very next day; but Dr. Johnson resolved that we should weather it out till Monday.” [Sidenote: CORRICHATACHIN.] When the day of escape at length came, they started on horseback in a north-westerly direction for Corrichatachin, a farm-house near Broadford,[614] belonging to Sir A. Macdonald, but tenanted by a Mackinnon, a clan to which all this district had formerly belonged. “Here they were entertained better than at the landlord’s;” here “they enjoyed the comfort of a table plentifully furnished, and here for the first time they had a specimen of the joyous social manners of the inhabitants of the Highlands.” Books, too, were not wanting, both Latin and English; among them was a copy of the abridgment of Johnson’s Dictionary. He might have said here, as four years later with some eagerness he said at Lord Scarsdale’s, when he discovered the same book in his lordship’s dressing-room, “Quæ regio in terris nostri non plena laboris?” Here, too, he wrote that Latin Ode to Mrs. Thrale, which so caught Sir Walter Scott’s imagination, that when he first set foot on Skye, it was the thing which first came into his thoughts. And here on their return after a lapse of nearly three weeks, Boswell got so tipsy and so piously penitent next day. He had not gone to bed till nearly five o’clock on a Sunday morning, by which time four bowls of punch had been finished.

“I awaked at noon,” he records, “with a severe headache. I
was much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot,
and afraid of a reproof from Dr. Johnson. I thought it very
inconsistent with that conduct which I ought to maintain, while
the companion of the _Rambler_. About one he came into my room,
and accosted me, ‘What, drunk yet?’ His tone of voice was not
that of severe upbraiding; so I was relieved a little. ‘Sir,’
said I, ‘they kept me up.’ He answered, ‘No, you kept them
up, you drunken dog.’ This he said with good-humoured English
pleasantry. Soon afterwards, Corrichatachin, Col, and other
friends, assembled round my bed. Corri had a brandy-bottle and
glass with him, and insisted I should take a dram. ‘Ay,’ said
Dr. Johnson, ‘fill him drunk again. Do it in the morning, that
we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor thing for a fellow
to get drunk at night, and sculk to bed, and let his friends
have no sport.’ Finding him thus jocular, I became quite easy;
and when I offered to get up, he very good-naturedly said,
‘You need be in no such hurry now.’ I took my host’s advice,
and drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my
headache. When I rose, I went into Dr. Johnson’s room, and
taking up Mrs. M’Kinnon’s Prayer-book, I opened it at the
Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, in the epistle for which I
read, ‘And be not drunk with wine, wherein there is excess.’
Some would have taken this as a divine interposition.”

Before the afternoon was over, by the help of good cheer and good society, he felt himself comfortable enough, and his piety was drowned in philosophy.

“I then thought,” he says, “that my last night’s riot was no
more than such a social excess as may happen without much moral
blame; and recollected that some physicians maintained, that a
fever produced by it was, upon the whole, good for health.”

SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE & RIVINGTON, LTD, PUBLISHERS, LONDON. IMP. & HÉLIOG. LEMERCIER & C^{IE.} PARIS.]

The Highlanders were more seasoned drinkers than he was, for the following night they had another drinking-bout.

“They kept a smart lad lying on a table in the corner of the
room, ready to spring up and bring the kettle whenever it was
wanted. They continued drinking, and singing Erse songs,
till near five in the morning, when they all came into my
room, where some of them had beds. Unluckily for me, they
found a bottle of punch in a corner, which they drank; and
Corrichatachin went for another, which they also drank. They
made many apologies for disturbing me. I told them, that,
having been kept awake by their mirth, I had once thoughts of
getting up and joining them again. Honest Corrichatachin said,
‘To have had you done so, I would have given a cow.’”

Johnson was better lodged than Boswell, for he had a room to himself at night, though in the day it was the place where the servants took their meals. Yet he was pleased with the kindness shown him, and discovered no deficiencies. “Our entertainment,” he wrote, “was not only hospitable but elegant.” The company he describes as being “more numerous and elegant than it could have been supposed easy to collect.” He gave as much pleasure as he received, and when he left, “the Scottish phrase of _honest man_, which is an expression of kindness and regard, was again and again applied to him.”

The house he describes as “very pleasantly situated between two brooks, with one of the highest hills of the island behind it.” Boswell with good reason remarks on the entire absence of a garden. “Corrichatachin,” he writes, “has not even a turnip, a carrot, or a cabbage.” Where these were wanting, there would be no roses clustering on the porch, no flower-beds before the door. This scene of hospitality and jovial riot is now a ruin. We walked to it from Broadford across a moorland, the curlews flying round us with their melancholy cry. The two brooks were shrunk with the long drought, and flowed in very quiet streams. Yet one of them, I was told, in a time of flood once broke into Mackinnon’s house. We crossed it on a bridge formed of two trees, with a long piece of iron wire for a railing. There we rested awhile, now looking down at the sunlight dancing in the shallows, and now gazing at the ruined farm and the mountain rising behind in steep crags of barren rock. Far up the valley to the west a flock of sheep was coming white from the shearing, bleating as they spread out along the hill-side. Another flock the dogs were gathering into what had been the yard of the old house. It had been solidly built, two stories high, about thirty-six feet long by fifteen broad in the inside measurements. On the outside, over the door, was carved:—