Niger

But as the warmth of June came in he could
abide London no longer. Like many another who
had lived in a tropical land, he found the English
summer of overwhelming heat and distress. The
Yarrow, turbulent with waters, haunted him like a
passion—the first of the two rivers that haunted his
life. In June he hastily packed his belongings, and
set out for Scotland.
So, after long wanderings, he came down the
Selkirk road to Fowlshiels when the hills were green
and glowing, and the Yarrow banks bright with
heather. And along the road glimmered the
whinstone walls of Fowlshiels, with his mother and
a brother awaiting him.
The elder Mungo was dead, the rest of the family
scattered. His mother greeted him with sardonic
affection—that eternal refuge of the sentimental
Scot. He sat a long first evening with her, mostly
in silence, says one chronicler, his hand on a Bible,
the other on her knee. As the day waned and drew
the splendours of summer from the Scots earth and
flung them, palely colourful, into a Scots sky, he
found perhaps the first true peace from himself in a
stretch of twenty years.
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