Niger

But that unseldom, for it would have been gyped
foolishness, and folk must work, and get on with
their work, and see to the making of silver, and that
all the bairns are well-rigged when they gang to the
kirk of a Sabbath. Of unnecessary affection, none.
So young Mungo grew out of swaddling clothes
into a thickly-breeched childhood. Because second-
sight in the Scots was a fiction not yet invented in
the fertile shallow brain of that other Scot born in
the same year as Mungo, the parents of the young
Park neglected to foresee the curiosity of later
generations in the acts and actions of their third son.
But letters and biographies march the same phrases
meticulously across his early childhood as across his
later years. He was quiet, restrained, grave of de¬
meanour, proper and shy—a fit subject, in fact, for
the psycho-analysts as yet inapparent upon that un¬
happy era. No child should be any of these things :
they were made up of his world of multitudinous
sense-impressions superimposed with the most
narrow and Spartan code of conduct ever invented
outside Laconia.
On the unimaginative this code of suppression, of
non-joy in the Sabbath, of the hearty eating of tire¬
some food, of conventionality of expression and
demand, sat lightly enough : probably most of
Mungo’s brothers and sisters accepted it cheerfully
and grew up and slipped it aside—on to the
shoulders of their own children. But on Mungo, as
on many another imaginative child, it fell like a
stifling black blanket. He invented the proper re-
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