Niger

graphers, ‘ Ay, you, or somebody else, will one day
be sweeping up my book-leaves and saying they’re
only old Mungo Park’s.5
One would like to know if he really meant that,
or if he glanced virtuously at his mother as he said
it. His mother’s comment was more than charac¬
teristic, it was national : ‘You poor useless thing,
do you think that you will ever write books ? ’
Mungo’s retort is not recorded. Doubtless he
remained grave and taciturn, at least until he left
the room and was out through the smells and
cluttered action of the farmyard down to the drum¬
ming Yarrow banks, still happily unsung by Words¬
worth. There, and to the surrounding hills, he
went often, ‘ to read poetry ’. This was mostly
collections of songs and sagas of the Scottish Border,
meaty dour stuff, filled with tales of raids and riots,
border flights and border fights, Childe Rolands and
Dark Towers. Plus these were the lesser gods of the
Scots pantheon, witches and wizards and kelpies
and the like, unchancy infernal fauna, all sung in
laggard anapaests. On Yarrow Mungo devoured
much of this stuff, and no doubt made of himself a
knight, a crusader, a wandering minstrel. He also
read novels—they do not tell us what novels. No
doubt they were those oddly constipated pseudo¬
religious tracts beloved of his time.
He had been sent to the Grammar School at
Selkirk. To and fro he tramped every day, a
distance of several miles, and is reported as cold and
taciturn at school as at home. He was probably
!5