Niger

and friendship, without receiving a decent and
friendly answer. If I was hungry or thirsty, wet or
sick, they did not hesitate, like the men, to perform
a generous action. In so free and so kind a manner
did they contribute to my relief, that if I was dry I
drank the sweetest draught, and if hungry I ate the
coarsest morsel with a double relish.’
For he had taken up the writing of his Travels in
earnest now. Rising early in the morning, he sat
and moiled in the little-anticipated agonies of
authorship. Unlike those facile letters invoking
the Almighty to genteel miracle, which in his early
youth he had found a positive pleasure in compiling,
the account of route and road, king and camel, came
slowly and haltingly from his pen. He would lift
his eyes from the scrawled sheet and stare through
his cold composed mask at the summer waning
from Fowlshiels, then shake himself impatiently,
and bend to his allotted task again till Mistress
Park would open the door and call him through
to a meal in the kitchen. A braw son, hers, though
he wasted his time with his writings and rubbish.
After dinner he bent to the Travels again ; but
evenings brought escape either to Ailie or long
solitary strolls down Yarrow or up into the fast¬
nesses of the hills, where only the peewits cried and
now in the autumn the purple of the heather
shimmered to its queer beauty of blue in the half¬
twilight. Here, with a book of ballads, the stuff
that had made and amazed his youth, he could
find peace and great delight till the dark came down.
257 *
a.N.